McMaster gets his star

Petraeus shapes the force:

An Army board headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus has selected several combat-tested counterinsurgency experts for promotion to the rank of brigadier general, sifting through more than 1,000 colonels to identify a handful of innovative leaders who will shape the future Army, according to current and former senior Army officers.

They include Special Forces Col. Ken Tovo, a veteran of multiple Iraq tours who recently led a Special Operations task force there; Col. H.R. McMaster, a senior Petraeus adviser known for leading a successful counterinsurgency effort in the Iraqi city of Tall Afar, and Col. Sean MacFarland, who created a network of patrol bases in Ramadi that helped control violence in the capital of Anbar Province, according to the officers.

This – like the adoption of McMaster’s successful “Clear, hold and build” strategy across Iraq – unarguably took too long: It was the combat-decorated colonel’s third look for selection to the general officer ranks. But late or otherwise, it should help to send a signal to the “rest of the Army” that thinking outside the box and challenging orthodoxy (McMaster’s doctoral thesis was an unvarnished look at the political and military execution of the Vietnam war that later became a book entitled “Dereliction of Duty“) is now approved-think.

Good.