Free The Fourth Star by Greg Jaffe

the battles there would be very similar to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt launched a surprise attack against Israeli positions in the Sinai, followed by Syrian assaults in the Golan Heights. Despite horrendous losses, Israel counterattacked, using its air force and American-designed tanks to knock out the Arabs’ air defense, then break through their ground formations and destroy them. This was the kind of war that Galvin’s division was preparing to fight.
    But in the desert of California Galvin’s troops were regularly outmaneuvered by the more experienced Soviet-style opposition force, played by American soldiers. For two weeks, he and Petraeus crisscrossed the battlefield in their jeep, studying the 24th Division as it fought. The situation got so bad that Galvin ordered his chief of staff, who had stayed home at Fort Stewart, to fly out to the desert so that he could see firsthand the drubbing they were taking. After returning home, Galvin ordered large tracts of forest cleared to replicate the conditions in the desert. Day after day, soldiers were in the field conducting maneuvers. Over the next year, units from the 24th returned to the California desert four more times, with better results each time. The same lessons were being learned all across the Army. Everywhere units were training for the big battles between armored formations that the Pentagon had decided were the future of warfare. The buildup was fueled by massive Reagan administration defense spending, which was buying thousands of new tanks, personnel carriers, and helicopters.
    But Petraeus’s career was taking a new direction. After his year at Command and General Staff College, he planned to attend graduate schoolat Princeton University and then return to West Point as an instructor. As Galvin had urged, he was beginning to think deeply about his profession and the wars to come. For the first time since he joined the service, the conclusions Petraeus came to would put him at odds with the prevailing view of warfare in the Army. Other young officers were reaching the same point, only by less conventional paths.

    Naqoura, Lebanon

Summer, 1985
    As Major John Abizaid had predicted when he left Jordan, war had brought him back to the Middle East. He had taken a yearlong assignment as a member of the United Nations observer force in southern Lebanon, where Israel was bogged down in a bloody hit-and-run conflict that looked nothing like the big tank battles that Petraeus and Galvin were preparing for in the Mojave Desert.
    He had been on the ground for a week when he saw the remains of his first suicide bomber. He and his partner, a Swedish officer, heard the boom and took off in their white jeep, zipping around dun-colored hills on serpentine roads until they reached the blast site, a smoking, black gash that cut through the middle of the road. Abizaid was surprised at how little of the bomber was left—a few shreds of clothing, a couple of body parts, and some blood. From the bits that remained, he guessed that the only casualty had been the bomber himself. He probably had been on his way to a nearby Israeli checkpoint when the explosives he was carrying detonated prematurely. Abizaid scribbled some notes and snapped a couple of photographs for his report on the incident, the first of dozens he would submit over the next year.
    The Israelis had portrayed their incursion into Lebanon three years earlier as a limited action aimed at driving out Palestinian Liberation Organization fighters, who for years had attacked northern Israel with rockets and terror attacks. Once across the border, the Israeli army drove north to Beirut, surrounding and laying siege to the city. The assault crippled the PLO and led to the departure of its leadership to Tunisia. But instead ofwithdrawing, the Israelis stayed. Like the United States two decades later in Iraq, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon were determined to install a friendly