Successes in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced directly to decisions made earlier in the decade to reshape the Army to a brigade-centric force, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. Central Command, said in a May 7 speech before members and guests of a Washington, D.C., think tank. The transition, which began in 2005, enabled the Army to deploy smaller, more flexible units into combat theaters, after undergoing more realistic pre-deployment training exercises at Army training centers, Petraeus said. Even though combat missions, particularly in Iraq, “got harder before [they] got easier,” Petraeus said, “This was the process that enabled the real surge in Iraq – the surge of ideas. Armed with and trained on these ideas, leaders and troopers who got it about counterinsurgency deployed … and enabled the progress we’ve seen over there in the past three years.”
