This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue.

Of all the lessons he's learned in this war, the most important one to Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis is this: Winning this war is mostly about not losing friends along the way. In the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, General Mattis was charged with setting up an air base in Pakistan to make the movement of marines into the theater possible. To clear the way for the airstrip, he flew to Islamabad and sat down with the Pakistani joint headquarters staff, a meeting that was mostly taken up with a litany of offenses the Americans had committed against the Pakistanis. "It started with the shoot-down of Francis Gary Powers, who flew out of Peshawar, and goes on about how many times our country has screwed theirs," says Mattis.

"Finally, after three hours, I said, 'I surrender. I am going to Afghanistan. Now, are you going to help me or not?'

"I said, 'I want to bring the ships in next to the beach. I want to land stuff across the beach. I have an airstrip nearby where I can fly stuff in and out. I want an intermediate support base where I can put some fuel. And by the way, here is H-hour, D day, and my objective.' The Pakistanis knew it all three weeks in advance and never revealed one word."

But in Pakistan at the time, Osama bin Laden was polling much better than George W. Bush, and the Pakistanis had problems with Mattis's plan.

"They said, 'No, you don't get that place, but we will give you this one. If you can get ten miles over the sand dunes, you can use this civilian airstrip. You can hide your gear in the daytime. We will put troops around it and guard it.' They could not admit publicly that they were doing this. If we can't go in and not create repercussions, if we can't be sensitive to that, if we cannot tread lightly on our friends to reassure them, then there would have been secondary explosions."

U.S. troop members patrolling through the Restive Babil Province of Iraq. Getty Images

So the operation would have to be totally invisible, operating by moonlight. By day, a normal beach and a dinky desert airstrip. By night, the landing of a major invasion force and the beginning of Washington's global war on terrorism. Mattis's boss at the time, Navy Admiral William Moore, took the highly unusual step of giving the marine officer command of a naval task force—that is, a bunch of navy ships—and Mattis went to work: "We bring the ships in after dark. We land across the beaches, and when the sun came up, there was just the waves washing some tire tracks away. [The Pakistani government] even brought newsmen down who said they were helping us. They said, 'Look, there are no Americans on the beach.'

"At night I brought the ships back in, and night after night we hid the stuff in the sand dunes. And in would come KC-130's, Air Force C-17's, to pick us up and fly into Afghanistan. We just kept moving against the enemy, and it worked like a champ. You know, the Chinese say that if you drink the water, you ought to thank the guy who dug the well... If we had gone in there and screwed Pakistan, then we lose."

Presidents and secretaries of defense call the big shots, but it's the generals who turn the cranks—and suffer the consequences. If in this global war on terrorism the White House has been slow to learn lessons, reluctant to admit mistakes, and incompetent at adapting to changing realities, those prosecuting the war, those living and dying it, have no such luxury.

Now three years in Iraq, the commanders whose job it is to actually fight the "thinking enemy," ever-changing and increasingly sophisticated, have had to adapt on the ground to survive. What, exactly, have they learned?

Two very important lessons from which all other lessons flow, it seems. First, that the strategic concepts that have kept America safe no longer apply in this new war. In the Cold War, the United States had a strategic triad of nuclear missiles that could be delivered from the air, the ground, and the sea, and that threat to devastate the Soviet Union was how we deterred the East from ever launching war against the West.

But that security is gone in a global war on terrorism. What country would we blow up with nukes if Al Qaeda killed ten thousand people in the Mall of America next week? This profound realization meant that strategy for the basic defense of the country had to be reconceived.

What country would we blow up with nukes if Al Qaeda killed ten thousand people in the Mall of America next week?

Second, this is going to be a long war. In the two dozen interviews conducted with top American military officials for this article, the overwhelming consensus is that the boys are not coming home, that these conflicts will not be ending anytime soon. In fact, the generals have taken to calling Washington's war on terrorism the Long War.

This vision has huge implications for the U. S. military as a whole, but especially for the Army, which has long viewed war as an episodic, high-intensity event followed by a lengthy period of peace, during which the force can recover and regenerate its strength for the next fight. The Long War features no such downtime, nor opponents who array themselves as our Army has for the past century: frontline troops at the ready and reserve units at significantly lower states of readiness—especially in terms of equipment.

In the Long War, then, the Army faces a dramatically new requirement not unlike that long managed by the U. S. Navy—the ability to keep a significant portion of its force deployed overseas continuously (as opposed to simply garrisoned in places like South Korea or Germany).

So when the Army chief of staff, General Pete Schoomaker, put his service on the path of this Long War, it meant he suddenly had to bring the entire Army up to frontline status, addressing what were suddenly huge shortfalls in equipment. It also meant that he had to completely reconceive of the Army as a fighting force.

The Army's ten active-duty divisions have for a century been structured like mini-armies unto themselves, full of all sorts of particular combat and support brigades. The only way to send over competently arrayed troops was to deploy entire divisions at a time, and that simply won't work in a Long War.

So Schoomaker made a decision immediately after becoming Army chief of staff in the summer of 2003. Just as the invasion of Iraq was completed and the American occupation was beginning, he decided to reformat the entire U. S. Army and its reserve components over the next several years, turning divisions into mere command units and "modularizing" the entire force so that each brigade will soon be largely interchangeable with all others, allowing divisions to deploy overseas with mix-and-match brigades, all of which are self-sustaining combat teams containing all the same supporting units that previously were aggregated only at the division level.

Iraqi General Mohammed Latif , head of the Fallujah Brigade, with US Marines General James Mattis during a joint press conference in 2004 during which Latif said that the city of Fallujah is Getty Images

And as the war became the occupation, Schoomaker and others realized something else: The military processed its lessons learned from combat experience at an excessively leisurely pace, given the new global security environment. "Lessons learned" commands would become a top priority, and three generals, one Marine and two Army, would be brought back from Iraq to teach soldiers what they need to know to fight wars of the future. In the past, such lessons would prove valuable only to soldiers of the next war; this time, in this Long War, casualties could be great, so it would be the goal of these generals to learn these lessons and have them reflected in the training almost on a daily basis.

Each had already learned his own hard lessons in Iraq. William Wallace conquered Baghdad but likewise oversaw its disastrous looting. David Petraeus worked the sheikhs well enough but let a horrifically efficient insurgency build on his watch. James Mattis didn't lose a sailor or marine during his nation-building stint in the south, only to send a host of marines to their death in Falluja.

So all of these lessons would be born of failure. All cost blood.

All of these lessons would be born of failure. All cost blood.

In 1983, American ground forces invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, with pitiful results. The services of our mighty military machine didn't have the foggiest idea how to fight alongside one another, and if the Grenadans had offered any greater resistance than a few Cuban soldiers and the island's constabulary force, we might have lost. This embarrassment triggered the progressive integration of the four services' combat operations, or the concept now known as jointness.

The war in Iraq has been and will continue to be a similar cause for self-examination by the American military. As General Mattis says, "Success is a poor teacher."

The Teacher

In his office at Training and Doctrine Command along the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, General William "Scotty" Wallace looks like a figure in a historical diorama, his walls covered with large canvases depicting the history of the U. S. Cavalry. Wallace likes to describe himself as just an "old, dumb cavalry guy." But Wallace isn't dumb, and he doesn't ride a horse. Instead, he is famous within the ranks for two 21st Century accomplishments: commanding the first Army infantry division to go fully digital (the 4th ID), and then commanding that division in its first war as V Corps commander in Iraq, leading the "Thunder Run" to Baghdad early in the war. Just returned from Iraq in summer 2003, Wallace was placed in command of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he initiated widespread changes to how the battlefield experience directly influenced training, only to be elevated in 2005 from that three-star post to the top schoolhouse job in the Army, the four-star commander of Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

Wallace, fifty-nine, is a big guy who fills out his digitally designed desert camouflage, and he speaks slowly, like a field officer developing the situation upon contact with the enemy, describing carefully his view of a commander-centric Army that takes advantage of information networks while not becoming captive to them: "I think that for those of us that have been in the fight, we recognize that the technical solutions only enable the individual soldier and small unit to do his business a little bit better. But there aren't any precision-guided squads.

"The business we're doing—the really complex stuff that's going on on the battlefield today—requires the kid on the ground to know what his boss is thinking; it requires the boss to know what the kid is seeing; it requires those who have seen the same sort of situation in different parts of the world to share it with those who might be seeing it for the first time. And it requires that those who are being presented with it for the first time are presented with it at our training centers, as opposed to in contact with the enemy."

William S. Wallace (left) applauding David H. Petraeus (right) during a departure ceremony in held in Petraeus Getty Images

During the Cold War, the Army did not have operational experiences of the sort that could inform its preparation for major combat with the Soviet bloc, so the live-fire exercises at places like Fort Irwin, California, and Fort Polk, Louisiana, served as the major source for what you might reasonably describe as "hypothetical" lessons learned from battles that were never waged against an enemy that today no longer exists.

While at Leavenworth, within days of his return from Baghdad, Wallace set himself to a significant restructuring of the Combined Arms Center to systematize the process of feeding the Army's lessons learned from ongoing combat operations into its worldwide collection of training centers.

The Army's decision to reform its lessons-learned operations meant that the combat-training centers would immediately switch from war-gaming against a Soviet-style, tank-heavy "world-class opposition force" to something far more complex, or what the officers now call the Complex Operating Environment. Wallace wanted his training simulations to account for the local populations soldiers would encounter. Role players were added to the training centers by the hundreds. Now when you run a live-fire exercise at Fort Irwin, you have Iraqis yelling at you, you'll hear the call to prayer from mosques five times a day, you'll need to work your translators more than your trigger fingers. You'll face IEDs, not artillery, technicals, not tanks, massed crowds instead of massed troops, and you will be graded on it all, mister.

Army personnel train with virtual reality simulators in preparation for their upcoming deployment to Iraq. Getty Images

While commanding at Leavenworth, Wallace seized the available technology, married it to the wealth of information that was streaming in from the battlefield, and had his Combat Studies Institute create virtual battle theaters called Virtual Staff Rides, in which computer simulations allow students a you-are-there perspective of Iraq's many combat experiences.

It has long been the tradition of the Army to take young commanders out to historic battlefields like Shiloh or Gettysburg, narrate the battle, point out the movements of men and matériel, giving the students a chance to view the very terrain upon which the battles occurred and examine the decision-making of the commanders involved. These outings are called staff rides, and compared with Wallace's virtual staff rides, they are literally a walk in the park.

You'd expect the virtual staff ride recounting Wallace's thunder run to Baghdad. But Wallace also demanded a VSR that recounts the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. And the mistaken shooting of the Italian journalist's car as it approached a U. S. military checkpoint. And the Sadr City uprising. None of these offer the same grandeur of a lecture at Little Round Top in Gettysburg, but commanders need to learn from that entire "complex operating environment," not just the battles they'd prefer to remember. In this training, Wallace wants the Army to confront its ugliest recent failures, making it that much harder to repeat them.

The virtual staff ride that Wallace ordered up re-creating the push to Baghdad and the early occupation features twenty-four "stands," or terrain set pieces, that computer-simulation developers sought to capture in every possible detail, right down to how tall that tree was just to the left of the highway overpass or how much garbage was piled up along the road. One modeler bragged that his team had spent days getting the trash to look just right in one scene.

"Success is a poor teacher."

Once the Army's modelers achieve that sort of fidelity to the scene, students in a classroom setting can apply a God's-eye view to the entire proceedings, navigating around the virtual space much like any stick jockey moves around in a video game. It's the kind of rich, high-bandwidth simulation that younger officers will naturally expect, having been raised on a generation of elaborate and immersive games.

At Leavenworth, the experimental virtual-staff-ride course on Iraq is taught over ten weeks, and it's been described by students as one of the best predeployment tools offered there. The postwar phase is the one for which the Army has historically trained its commanders least, leaving far too many in the dark for what comes after the "kinetics" stop. A virtual staff ride on the horrible mistakes of Abu Ghraib helps your average commander to, in Wallace's words, "look beyond the end of the rifle."

The Nation Builder

Wallace's replacement at Leavenworth is arguably the Army general whose star is rising most rapidly on the basis of his performance in Iraq, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who led the 101st Airborne Division in northern and central Iraq during the first difficult postwar year and then assumed leadership of the coalition effort to rebuild Iraq's security forces. With his Princeton Ph.D. in international relations, Petraeus is the closest thing the Army has to its own Lawrence of Arabia, a comparison he does little to discourage, as he seems to identify with the British colonel's experiences in the region during the First World War and the enduring wisdom of his advice to those military officers caught in similarly trying circumstances (Lawrence's legendary book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom), which Petraeus appears to know by heart.

David Petraeus is sitting hunched over on a long leather couch directly beneath a towering portrait of Douglas MacArthur, military overlord of post-World War II Japan, and he's telling his one-thing-leads-to-another story of how he ended up being in charge of an astonishing amount of the postwar rebuilding of Iraq.

One of the first challenges Petraeus faced while occupying much of northern and central Iraq—including the huge Al Anbar province—with the 101st Airborne in the spring of 2003 was the small matter of there being no government there whatsoever. Sudden, unanticipated problem, usually not the preserve of generals: How to get the local government to continue paying its workers. The acting governor of Al Anbar pointed Petraeus in the direction of a central bank manager, who, it just so happened, had set aside a substantial sum of Iraqi currency for just such a post-invasion occasion. Problem was, this banker felt he had no authority in a post-Saddam environment, because his entire career he hadn't sneezed without first asking permission from Baghdad. So he said to Petraeus, "You have the authority." Petraeus thought about that and said, "You're right, I do!"

General Petraeus heading to attend a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron on October 14, 2010. Getty Images

"So I pull out a piece of two-star stationery—generic government—and he said, `Give me an order.' And I said, `Okay, I will.' To the bank manager: `You are to pay the salaries of government workers in the Al Anbar province.' I signed it and gave it to him, and he said, `Okay, I got it.' And then he said, `But no stamp.' But we had a notary seal because my lawyer was with me, and the next day the aide went out and he got this wonderful stamp with lots of stars and stuff, and we stamped everything."

But a problem solved on day one only generates a new problem for day two: "That night, in the middle of the night, I wake up. Oh, man! Economics 101: If you dump more money on a fixed amount of goods in a marketplace, all you do is produce inflation! So how do we get more goods into the marketplace?"

So back to the governor's office. Petraeus said, "Governor, you've got a problem." But the governor was smart enough to answer back, "General, we've got a problem." So Petraeus said, "Okay, good, let's work on it together."

So the two of them pulled out a map, "and we look at all the different trade routes, if you will. There's one from Turkey, but I know that crossing is jam-packed. Iran—the crossings are very rugged. So the eyes are on Syria."

The general worked with his lawyers, investigated the various UN sanctions, Googled this and that overnight, and by the next morning he had instructions ready to give the battalion commander who was working the border with Syria. This poor guy had to set up border guards, produce agreements with local leaders, whatever surviving government officials he could find, the head of this tribe, the sheikh of that region. Oh, and he had to hire a bunch of everybody's people to keep them all happy. Petraeus then gave his battalion commander a deadline for wrapping this whole package: three days. "Three days from then, I was going to fly out with the governor, and we were going to have a big feast and were going to sign this thing and reopen the border, so we had to deliver the bacon," he says.

Was it written down in any Phase IV plan that the 101st would get in the business of running government payroll or playing customs agent? Not exactly. But if you're an Army officer who's going to pass through Dave Petraeus's Command and General Staff College in the coming years, you will learn how to do all that and more. You will step into nation building like a twenty-first-century Douglas MacArthur.

You will step into nation building like a twenty-first-century Douglas MacArthur.

Petraeus doesn't resemble MacArthur in the slightest. In fact, he looks more like the real Colonel T. E. Lawrence, not the too-beautiful version played by Peter O'Toole in the movies. Like Lawrence, Petraeus is a little bit on the plain side, and he's short like Lawrence, with the slightly stooped posture of a hardcore long-distance runner who simply can't give it up despite his fifty-three years.

With a tour in Bosnia and then two and a half years in Iraq, the general has experience in nation building and post-conflict stabilization operations that is without peer in the U. S. military.

A Washington Post article in November 2005 described Petraeus's recall from Iraq as akin to Jefferson Davis deciding to pull General Robert E. Lee from the field of battle early in the Civil War, lest he suffer burnout. Senator John McCain was quoted in the article as calling the rotation of senior officers back from Iraq "deeply unwise." As he declared in a speech, "If these were the best men for the task, they should still be on the job."

But Petraeus thought his stateside reassignment made sense, and he now sees it as his job to replicate himself for the Long War. People burn out if you leave them out there too long. And, more important to realize, two to three years straight overseas on deployment is going to kill your officer corps. In World War II, very few American officers actually put in that length of time, except in the Pacific. And that was when the country was totally at war. Try that with an all-volunteer force and you'll start seeing some of your best officers retire before putting their families through that, something that Petraeus has already seen happen: "I was only home six or eight months during my son's four years of high school because I did a year in Bosnia prior to Iraq. I am not whining or anything—I got a wife who's an army brat. Her dad went off to Vietnam for two years. She's used to it, she can handle it, but you can't do this institutionally, because I don't think there are that many families who will stand for it. There are cases already, I think, of even senior leaders who are being told they're going back or being offered to go back, and they decide they don't want to do it. It's a combination of wife, little kids—it's a variety of things."

With Petraeus talking about families and little kids, it's possible to forget that he's also the commander who killed Uday and Qusay Hussein. And that here at Leavenworth, he presides over the Jedi Knights, which is the nickname given to the students of the college's elite School of Advanced Military Studies—sort of the Army's version of Top Gun. These are the guys whom the generals turn to when they want to take down some Death Star. It was the Jedi Knights who helped draw up General Norman Schwarzkopf's famous "left hook" into Iraq. In fact, the Jedi fraternity has had a planning cell in every major overseas operation since then.

But Petraeus's eyes burn brightest when he talks about building a new kind of commander, a man or woman who can handle the stresses and strains of Iraq and still have the presence of mind to find solutions other than the trigger.

A soldier guards a group of Iraqi role players during a house search in the mock town of Jabar Nahr as part of a Joint Readiness Training Center exercise. Getty Images

One of the training tools Petraeus is most proud of is his Combat Leader Environment, basically a PC-based version of a pop-up shooting-gallery drill in which commanders are presented with complex decision points in a postwar-stabilization operation, and they're forced to make impossible choices, which are then broken down for them by a senior officer who acts as mentor during the drill. The purpose, as Petraeus describes it, "is to get his blood pressure up and do it repeatedly—get those high-pressure moments so you get used to it, doing nonkinetic stuff, talking it out, working with the sheikhs, with political leaders, with Iraqi security forces, Afghan forces, and so on."

Petraeus is realistic about how hard it is to teach these sorts of command skills inside the Army. More than once in Iraq, he was confronted by subordinate officers who thought their job was "leading every raid every night, then sleeping until two, lifting weights, then doing it again." So Petraeus had to make it clear to these guys that if they wanted their careers to go anywhere, they needed to start producing broader results. "It's the hard work of drinking tea with the locals, delivering air conditioners to the mosques, meeting with the neighborhood clerics, getting to know the imams, and all the rest of that," he says. "You gotta build institutions, not just units."

And so Petraeus also has his own version of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which in his case number thirteen. It's a simple PowerPoint package of thirteen slides of lessons learned in the war. Number one is, Lawrence had it right. By this he means: It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them. Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh would readily recognize Petraeus's other pillars as eternal truths: Armies of liberation have half-lives. Money is ammunition. Intelligence is the key. Cultural awareness is a force multiplier. Success depends on local leaders.

That last one seems to be the most important to Petraeus. So when the Iraqi leaders of Mosul came to him as commander of the 101st Airborne in the first months of the postwar occupation asking for his help in getting the city's university back up and running, Petraeus didn't hesitate. He had helicopter assault troops available, so Petraeus told them, "Hey, you won the lottery. You're going to rebuild Mosul University." The place had been completely looted and was a shambles, but a month or so later, a Big Ten-sized university was holding classes in Mosul, finishing out the school year a little late, with American helo pilots filling in as college administrators.

That follows with the main lesson General Petraeus has learned from Iraq: "Everyone does nation building."

The Quick Thinker

Another disciple of Lawrence's is the articulate and casually profane Marine Lieutenant General James Mattis, combat commander in both Afghanistan and Iraq and arguably the only Marine general whose length and breadth of service in Southwest Asia rivals that of Petraeus. Mattis, who suffers the usual marine trait of speaking candidly in public settings, once confessed at a defense conference that "it's fun to shoot some people," referring to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But he is far more famous within the ranks as a warrior monk who assiduously studies both war and peace in all of their complexities and demands no less from his subordinates.

Mattis once confessed at a defense conference that "it's fun to shoot some people," referring to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Mattis, fifty-five, returned from Iraq in the summer of 2004 to take over the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Virginia, making him the Corps's point man in collaborating with Wallace and Petraeus in processing lessons learned from the global war on terrorism.

Mattis is an impatient man. Stuck in a classic desk job, he tackles it with gusto, poring over reports and reading every damn book that comes across his table. Still, he can't stand the routine: "All we do is read hundreds of e-mails every fucking day, and we go to meetings and spend six hours making no decisions, and we talk about jointness as if it's some church we must bow to, and then we walk out of there and we've done nothing."

It's not that Mattis doesn't value downtime, because he does, noting that T. E. Lawrence did his best thinking when he was incapacitated with illness. "We're all very vigorous," he says. "Oh, we're vigorous as hell. But our next original thought, in many cases, will be our first."

When Mattis got to Quantico in August 2004, he was unhappy with what he saw: "I went to the entry-level training of the Marine Corps, and I was not satisfied that a couple of years into this war we were adapting fast enough."

Marine Corps General James Mattis, commander of the US Central Command, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Capitol Hill in 2011. Getty Images

For Mattis, adapting faster includes de-briefing anyone who's seen action, sometimes catching them sucking air through a tube in an intensive-care unit. He pushed his lessons-learned guys to aggressively interview grievously wounded marines at Bethesda Naval Hospital, figuring they'd certainly not be shy about pointing out tactical failures that might have gotten them hurt.

One wounded officer quickly pointed out that the Marines needed to redesign their crowd-control training so that it focused more on letting Iraqi personnel engage in the usual "troop and stomp" tactics—i.e., lining up soldiers in various wedge formations and having them slowly "stomp" their way into unruly crowds—while the marines needed to hold back and provide tank support. Mattis, who controls Marine training, responded swiftly, directing the change at the Twentynine Palms combat-training center in California. "So based upon a lesson learned, in twenty-four hours the training was changed out there. We took the time and did more tank and infantry training. I want that kind of agility."

Quantico did have a center for lessons learned before Mattis arrived, but all the data flowed in and not much flowed out. Mattis wanted it flowing out like a river during flood season. If the Marine Corps Center for Lessons Learned learned it, the general wanted it on the unclassified, password-accessed Web site within hours. Now 85 percent of what the MCCLL reports out appears on the unclassified Web.

Mattis isn't interested in running some worldwide chat room for marines to trade war stories. Everything is moderated, cataloged, searchable. By starting relatively late down this pathway, the Marines have been able to cherry-pick from the other services' online knowledge systems, and it's clear that the Marines owe a lot to the Army Knowledge Online system that Wallace greatly expanded during his time at Leavenworth.

"We talk about jointness as if it's some church we must bow to, and then we walk out of there and we've done nothing."

Mattis served with Wallace, and he's had multiple career overlaps with Dave Petraeus, both in the Pentagon and in Iraq. These guys trade best practices and new technologies like next-door neighbors who've known one another for years, setting in motion a level of Army-Marine cooperation that is unprecedented, such as the upcoming publication of the Counterinsurgency Operations field manual that Leavenworth and Quantico will "dual-designate" as official for both services. The document draws the battle lines for the Long War, which it describes as "a protracted politico-military struggle" in which "political power is the central issue," not territorial conquest. Army and Marine officers will take pains to tell you that most of this fight is "nonkinetic," meaning that the new doctrine calls for a battle waged mostly by other means, such as political and economic development efforts designed to weaken the insurgency's claim that the government is illegitimate. In this view, the way to beat an insurgency is ultimately by creating "stakeholders" among the populace. The Counterinsurgency field manual is a Wallace-Mattis-Petraeus special that bonds the Army and Marines with Tampa's Special Operations Command in what General Pete Schoomaker calls America's twenty-first-century strategic triad.

This level of close cooperation is cats-and-dogs-living-together weird. And it's only going to get weirder, because the soldiers and marines serving from here on out will have grown up entirely in a Web-based world, where no stone goes un-Googled. You provide them open-source environments to network their thinking or they'll create their own chat rooms, something plenty of young marines and Army officers did in Iraq, Companycommand.com and s3-xonet.army.mil being the most famous.

So what are the Army and Marines to do with this Nintendo generation? Mattis invites those electronic forums inside the wire, so to speak. He legitimizes them. And then he lets the students teach the instructors on counterinsurgency, because right now that's where the bulk of the experience lies—with the operating force. As Colonel Monte Dunard, director of the MCCLL, says, "We don't want to be making changes fifteen years down the road. We got guys dying today. We want them to be trained better—how do we get this information faster, quicker, more relevant?"

General John Allen (left), General David Petraeus (center), and General James N. Mattis (right) at a meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2011. Getty Images

The Marines are doing this on a daily basis: deciding on which semiautomatic sniper rifle works best, figuring out better ways to attach fuel hoses during dust storms, the latest tricks for dealing with IEDs and convoy attacks—an issue of greatest priority. When the Marines went into Iraq, no one foresaw that years into an occupation, so many ground troops would still be dying in insurgency attacks against convoys in what troops call "Injun Country." So convoy personnel are now trained in how to call in air support while on the move, how to shoot back while on the move, how to do a medical evacuation on the move, and how to handle a roadside bomb on the move. The MCCLL's software tracks all of this, zeroing in on the phrases "we need" and "the Marine Corps should" whenever and wherever they're uttered.

The Army and Marines can't be in the business right now of deducing from distant, abstract, future war scenarios what their troops need today in terms of equipment, training, or doctrine. They need to calculate those requirements from today's complex operating environment, and the flash-to-bang time needs to be as short as possible. Let the Navy and Air Force fantasize about war with the Chinese. "I find it intellectually embarrassing that people want to hug the Chinese," Mattis says. " 'Oh, thank God we have another peer competitor at last! Now we can go back to building the weapons that we always wanted to build.' That's so embarrassing."

Instead, Mattis's staff is full of officers just back from Iraq, and they're all eager to make the Marines the shortest flash-to-bang learning organization there is. "All I have to do is create the expectation that it will happen," he says. "It's commander's intent. They understand my intent is we don't sit here and admire this and say, `Let's hold our breath and get through this, then we get back to proper soldiering by planning for China twenty years from now.' Fuck that. If we fight China in the future, we will also find IEDs and people using the Internet. If we go to Pyongyang and we're fighting there six months from now against a mechanized unit, one hundred thousand Special Forces would be running around doing what they're doing to our rear area now. So guess what? This is the best training ground in the world. For the German troops it was Spain, right? Well, Iraq is ours."

So that's the intellectual struggle Mattis is now waging from his desk at Quantico, institutionalizing his flash-to-bang mentality, with this as his mantra: Anything our enemies can dream up, we can counter faster.

His mantra: Anything our enemies can dream up, we can counter faster.

To wit: While doing stability operations in the Shiite-heavy south immediately following Saddam's fall, Mattis was confronted with fiery Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's rapid trajectory toward insurgency kingpin. One day when al-Sadr was trying to pull together a mass meeting of his followers for another of his stem-winders, the kind that eventually launched his bloody uprising, Mattis cut him off at the pass, or, more specifically, at the bus station. Knowing that the cleric would use buses to bring followers into his urban stronghold from outside, Mattis hired as many buses in the region as he could get his hands on. "So when he went to contract his buses, they were gone," Mattis says. "Didn't have to shoot a single person. We sent the buses out for a trip—empty there, empty back. A waste of money? It was the best money I ever spent."

Contributing editor Thomas P. M. Barnett is a strategic consultant who served in the Office of Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2003; he is the author of Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating.