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Prison BreakMaybe the Army's not so hidebound after all.

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 6:07 PM ET

On April 23, I wrote a column that turns out to have been mistaken—that, I've since found out, underestimated the U.S. Army's capacity to reward its creative dissidents.

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The column praised two recent speeches by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, urging tomorrow's Army and Air Force officers to overhaul their bureaucratic cultures. "I encourage you to take on the mantle of fearless, thoughtful, but loyal dissent when the situation calls for it," Gates told an audience of cadets at West Point. "And … senior officers should embrace such dissent as a healthy dialogue and protect and advance those considerably more junior who are taking on that mantle."

Gates was referring implicitly to Paul Yingling, the Army lieutenant colonel who, a year earlier, had published an article in the Armed Forces Journal that accused the Army's general officer corps of lacking "professional character," "moral courage," and "creative intelligence." Yingling was a veteran of both Iraq wars, and, early in the present occupation, he was deputy commander of the 3^rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, the unit that brought order to the city of Tal Afar through counterinsurgency methods well before Gen. David Petraeus took charge of U.S. forces.

Yingling was put in command of the 1-21 Field Artillery Battalion—an assignment that had been in the works months before his article was published. In my April column, I went on:

The real story lay in what happened next. His battalion was assigned not, say, to fighting insurgents but rather to prison-guard detail. Yingling himself has just been redeployed to Iraq, where he will assist in rehabilitating Iraqi detainees. This could be an interesting, potentially important job, but it's hardly in the center of things, and it's the very opposite of a career-enhancer.

I concluded the column: "[A]s long as junior officers see (as Gates put it) 'principled, creative, reform-minded leaders' like Paul Yingling assigned to lowly positions, the military will not nourish many more."

It turns out that I was wrong on two points. First, contrary to my implication, Yingling's battalion was not sent to prison-guard duty as a punishment. There isn't much demand these days for artillery fire in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, artillery battalions have to do something. There is a shortage of units to guard prisons. So that is where the 1-21 was sent. The planning officers who make such decisions generally have no idea who commands a particular unit. Generals or their aides don't often reach down into the bowels of this network and redirect small-scale units, like battalions, out of spite. I am persuaded that, in any case, this is not why Yingling's unit got the assignment that it did.

More crucial (and here is where some good news enters the picture), "detainee operations" in Iraq have become a lot more important—and more innovative—than they used to be. With no fanfare, they have become a key element in the broader counterinsurgency campaign. If Yingling was singled out for his current job, it was in recognition—not in grudge-slinging defiance—of his talents. And, in fact, it seems that he was singled out.

This morning, I spoke with Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, commanding general of Task Force 134, which runs detainee operations in Iraq. On the speaker phone with him was his deputy commander, Paul Yingling.

About a year ago, Stone told me, he and Gen. David Petraeus realized that something had to be done about the detention centers in Iraq. There were two centers, holding a total of 26,000 detainees, and the few jihadists among them were indoctrinating a large share of the rest. "It was becoming Jihadi U. in there," Stone said.

Stone set out to apply counterinsurgency principles inside the centers' walls. Find the radicals, isolate them from the other detainees, and give the latter some hope for a life on the outside. In short, secure the population, marginalize the extremists, empower the moderates.