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was writing primarily about twentieth-century insurgencies, anticolonial liberation movements or Communist insurrections, but his description seemed to neatly describe how so many nation-building tasks had fallen to the military in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army had published an interim counterinsurgency manual in October 2004, but the literature on the subject was still scarce. Many of the classic counterinsurgency texts were out of print. In the Pentagon library there had been a waiting list to check out the lone copy of Galula’s book.
    Fortunately, a boutique publisher in St. Petersburg, Florida, had stepped in to provide reprints of many of the classics. Hailer Publishing was founded by Jamie Hailer, a thirty-something devotee of military history and strategy who had a day job in the business planning department of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, an ammunition manufacturer. Hailer had done graduate work at Missouri State University, where he first read Galula, and he had first toyed with the idea of starting a publishing company when he tried to find a copy of From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow , a five-volume series on the history of the Royal Navy. When Hailer looked for a used set on the Internet, it priced out at $1,200.
    But Hailer’s decision to launch a publishing venture was sealed in late 2004, when he read an article in Inside the Pentagon , a defense trade paper published in Washington. The reporter, Elaine Grossman, described the reading list that Colonel H. R. McMaster had prepared in advance of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment’s deployment to Iraq. On the top of that list was Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 , but it was out of print.
    Grossman had surveyed top officers, retired intelligence officials, and strategists about what was on their essential reading list, and found that some of the most enthusiastic suggestions were for hard-to-find books like Galula’s. “May I suggest that you run—not walk—to the Pentagon library and get in line” for Galula’s book, a retired CIA officer with Vietnam experience told Grossman. The book should be read as “a primer for how to win in Iraq.” 2
    Hailer decided to reprint the Galula book, as it seemed to fill the most urgent need. “Guys came back [from Iraq] and said, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Hailer later told me. “That’s what frustrated me: We are fighting a unconventional war, and all these books are out of print. It’s like taking an economics course and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is out of print.”
    He found a copy in the University of South Florida library and tracked down the company that had acquired the book’s original publisher, and offered to pay royalties for reprint rights. The publisher agreed. Hailer then found a Florida firm that could make a high-quality scan of the original book and located a printer in Minnesota that could handle the job. By October 2005, the book had sold around twenty-four hundred copies. The Army’s Command and General Staff College had ordered fifteen hundred of them. 3 The books were a key addition to the Fort Leavenworth bookstore.
    Ricks later got a note from a friend at the Command and General Staff College who had asked a young officer he knew about Ricks’s talk. “Oh, that reporter?” the friend said. “He got up and mentioned some French guy and said we were stupid if we didn’t know who he was.”
    In early 2006, a quiet revolt was gathering momentum at Fort Leavenworth, home to the Army’s Command and General Staff College, the midcareer school for Army officers. Located on the west bank of the Missouri River, this historic Army outpost was once the jumping-off point for the settlers headed west on the Santa Fe and Oregon trails; the wide trail ruts left by the thousands of wagons are still visible from the commanding bluffs