During the war in Iraq, young US Marine and Army captains have become viceroys, officers with large sectors to run and near-autonomy to do it. In Army parlance, they are the "ground-owners." In practice, they are power brokers.
"They give us a chunk of land and say, 'Fix it,'" said Captain Rich Thompson, 36, who controls an area east of Baghdad.
The Iraqis have learned that these captains, many still in their 20s, can call down devastating US firepower one day and approve multimillion-US dollar projects the next. Some have become celebrities in their sectors, leaders whose names are known even to children. Many believe that these captains are the linchpins in the Americans' strategy for success in Iraq, but as the war continues into its sixth year the Army has been losing them in large numbers - at a time when it says it needs thousands more.
Most of these captains have extensive combat experience and are regarded as the Army's future leaders. They're exactly the people the Army most wants. Unfortunately for the Army, corporate America wants them too. And the hardships of repeated tours are taking their toll, tilting them back toward civilian life and possibly complicating the future course of the war.
"I have served my time; I've done two tours in Iraq," said Captain Kirkner Bailey, 26, of the 3rd Armored Combat Regiment in Mosul.
"For the past three years of my life I have either been in Iraq or training to go to Iraq," he added. "I just know that there is more to life than this war, and my girlfriend Shannon and I are interested in finding out what that is."
"I can't speak to trends," he said. "But eight of my 10 friends who are captains are leaving the Army."
THE MANTLE OF POWER
It is hard to overstate the importance of these officers to the American war effort. Captain Brian Gilbert, 30, who controls a million-US dollar monthly Army budget for his sector of 200,000 residents here in Jisr Diala, a city east of Baghdad, has pulled together a group of tribal leaders as well as a local Iraqi security force, not to mention keeping a close eye on the elected city council.
On a recent afternoon, he ordered traffic control barriers installed to prevent car bombs, checked on refurbished water pumps for farmers and approved money to connect the pumping station to the Baghdad electricity grid. Then there were soccer uniforms to be dropped off for a community team, heated disputes to resolve, an influential sheik to visit.
"It is purely my fight in my area of operation," he said. "I decide the targets, I decide the development projects and I choose to partner with the Sons of Iraq," a reference to the local security group that he helped to set up.
"It is the captains who turn the 'big ideas' and broad guidance issued at high levels into specific actions geared to local circumstances," said General David Petraeus, the top US commander here. "Captains plan and execute the operations that often prove the most important, at ground level, where gains are truly achieved in this type of endeavor."
But as the war has lasted, the nature of that work has changed, many captains say. Petraeus' counterinsurgency doctrine is centered on relatively small groups of soldiers establishing outposts in communities and living among the Iraqis. The result is a war that has largely been transformed into a fight controlled by captains.
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