In December, the Army formally released its counterinsurgency manual, supervised by Gen. David Petraeus. The next month, Petraeus took control of American forces in Iraq — and promptly threw large chunks of the manual out the window. (More on that, in next month’s WIRED magazine.)

Fred Kaplan has perhaps the most vivid example yet of this defenestration: The uptick in American airstrikes, since Petraeus slid into the commander’s chair.

Here’s an recent one, from Karmah, Iraq…

According to the manual, "an air strike can cause collateral damage that turns people against the host-nation government and provides insurgents with a major propaganda victory. Even when justified under the law of war, bombings that result in civilian casualties can bring media coverage that works to the insurgents’ benefits… For these reasons, commanders should consider the use of air strikes carefully."

But, as Kaplan notes, from January to September of this year, according to unclassified data, U.S. Air Force pilots in Iraq have flown 996 sorties that involved dropping munitions. By comparison, in all of 2006, they flew just 229 such sorties—one-quarter as many. In 2005, they flew 404; in 2004, they flew 285."

In other words, in the first nine months of 2007, Air Force planes dropped munitions on targets in Iraq more often than in the previous three years combined… On Sunday, U.S. soldiers were searching for a leader of a kidnapping ring in Baghdad’s Sadr City. The soldiers came under fire from a building. Rather than engage in dangerous door-to-door conflict, they called in air support. Army helicopters flew overhead and simply destroyed the building, killing several of the fighters but also at least six innocent civilians. (The bad guy got away.) In other words, though the shift means greater safety for our ground troops, it also generates more local hostility. Striking urban targets from the air inevitably means killing more innocent bystanders. This makes some of the bystanders’ relatives yearn for vengeance. And it makes many Iraqis—relatives, neighbors, and others watching the news of the attack on television—less trusting of the American troops who are supposedly protecting them.

Now, as the cliche goes, no plan survives enemy contact. And there’s no reason that Petraeus should be held to following every letter of the manual. But it is interesting to note the disparity.

UPDATE : Colonel Steven Boylan, Petraeus’ public affairs officer, disagrees with just about every letter and punctuation mark in this post.

"To start, to say that Gen Petraeus has thrown out the book is false and totally mischaracterizes the facts. No other way about it," he e-mails DANGER ROOM. "If you go back to the COIN [counterinsurgency] manual, you will [n]ote that he states clearly that sometimes the best ammunition is in fact, ammunition. That does not contradict nor intimate that he has thrown away the manual. Just the opposite. It is following the manual as the manual allows for and includes the use of force at the appropriate time."