Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

"You don't get 4 stars without being an ardent defender of classic 'big war' force structure."

Not necessarily. Chiarelli gets his fourth star: http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1265

SECDEF Gates:

I first met General Chiarelli when I was in Baghdad as part of the Iraq Study Group. He was in charge of briefing us on possible military options for the future – this in September 2006, when there seemed to be little cause for hope. I was very impressed by his depth of understanding – by his commanding knowledge of the battlefield, of tactics that had worked as well as those that had not.
Of course, giving presentations on the tenets of counterinsurgency is a long way from Pete’s roots in the military. He once told reporters that he had “dreamed of commanding ‘large mechanized formations across vast open deserts.’” Unfortunately, Pete was several wars too late to substitute for General Patton in North Africa. Still, Pete, a tanker by trade, spent four years in Germany in the late 1980s as part of the Third Armored Division – prepared to hold the line against a massive conventional offensive along the Fulda Gap.
Less than two weeks after he arrived in Baghdad as the commander of the First Cavalry Division, any notions about what kind of fight we were in were shattered. It was called “Black Sunday” – and eight soldiers were killed in Sadr City. Pete will never forget their names, and they are a stark reminder to him of the human costs of war and the gratitude and debt we owe all of our fighting men and women.
By early 2004, Pete had come to believe that only by simultaneously providing jobs, services, reconstruction, and security could we attain our strategic objectives in Iraq. He sent a picture to one of his mentors of a little Iraqi girl sitting in a sewer, a symbol of the mission to take care of and secure the Iraqi people. It was an example of the old Clausewitz maxim to understand the war you are in – and the implications that has for how you fight it.

In terms of real influence, Petraeus has 5 stars.