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McChrystal to help develop ideas to enable troopers on the ground to shift their primary mission from killing the enemy to protecting the population. Working out of the regional commands and circulating from combat base to combat base, CAAT members would gather periodically in Kabul and brief commanders, a practice that would be continued—and encouraged—by Petraeus, whose need for information never seemed to be satisfied.
    The CAAT is not to be confused with Petraeus’s Commander’s Initiatives Group (CIG). If the CAAT was an external brain trust, the CIG was an internal one, operating within Petraeus’s command headquarters as a team of trusted action officers, all with advanced degrees and most with time in Afghanistan, focused on issues of particular and immediate importance to the general—preparation of briefings for important visitors and for video teleconferences (VTC) with Washington and Brussels, provision of talking points for meetings with Karzai, help with issues at Central Command and the Pentagon and drafting responses to urgent requests for help from the regional commanders. What Petraeus prized in the CIG, and on the staff, was brains, judgment and a great work ethic. Rank was often immaterial. Petraeus also had a coterie of former subordinates and colleagues with whom he kept in touch via e-mail as part of a “virtual CIG.” He considered himself a “relentless” communicator, both for getting his message out and for vacuuming information up.
    Petraeus also depended on another group of “directed telescopes”—the academic experts, outside mentors and think-tankers he brought in to provide yet another set of eyes to help him sort out various issues. While Petraeus considered Lujan and other CAAT members to be important directed telescopes, he also asked former officers, such as his mentor, retired Army general Jack Keane, and defense intellectuals, such as Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and his wife, Kim, founder of the Institute for the Study of War, to travel the country and gather information and insights from the field. Though some in the field did not take kindly to their probing, the insights they brought back supplemented those provided by the normal chain of command and various staff officers and were crucial for Petraeus’s understanding of the effectiveness of the campaign in Afghanistan.
    Just as Lujan provided insights to Petraeus, he also counseled his former students by e-mail. “This is the land of old school, light infantry style, small unit patrolling—walking 5-10 km cross country in 110 degree heat,” he wrote to them. “The enemy is aggressive, and not afraid of direct, violent, short-range combat. . . . There are villages out here that are literally completely deserted, populated only by Taliban and foreign fighters, rigged with some of the most complex IED arrays ever witnessed in modern warfare. Leave them be. Focus your resources on places you can make a difference. Disrupt the enemy when required to support your campaign or to gain some space and time. Strike at his networks—but don’t fixate on him.”
    Just weeks before Obama nominated Petraeus to be his new commander in Afghanistan, the war there had become America’s longest. It had been eight years and nine months since fighting began in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Vietnam War had lasted eight years and eight months, from the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in Congress, on August 7, 1964, to the final withdrawal of American ground forces in March 1973. Almost nine years of fighting and more than one thousand dead in Afghanistan had produced little in the way of security. The fighting was fierce. In July 2010, more American service members were killed—fifty-eight—than in any other month of the war. By