Duty, Honor, Country

West Point Graduates Train For A Non-Traditional War On Terror

(CBS)  Another new reality: Arabic, a necessity in today’s war, and probably tomorrow’s war as well. And still there are other new subjects, like world religions, causes of terrorism and constitutional military law.

"What our cadets have done is become more focused. I mean, they know what they’re confronting," says Kaufman.

On this battlefield of suicide bombers and invisible enemies, tactics are often being dictated from the lieutenants and sergeants on up, not from the generals and colonels on down.

"It's definitely a platoon leader's war," says Lt. Andy Blickhan, 28, from West Point Class of 2002. He's now a battle-hardened veteran of two tours in Iraq, a prime example of the new West Point model. Ten months after graduating from West Point, he led a platoon in the invasion of Iraq. No one knows more about fighting this war than junior officers like him.

"You describe that situation you were in as fighting a war in a Walmart," says Safer.

"If you imagine walking through a Walmart and trying to conduct combat operations. Bullets fly through clothes racks. As you try to restock the shelf, people try to blow you up," says Blickhan.

"But those bombs don’t just hit the Americans. They hit everyone else who’s trying to shop there. The mixture of people that you deal with, the complexities of them going about their daily lives in the same places you’re conducting combat operations and the same place that there’s a population that wants to kill you and wants very much for you to leave. But all at the same time, we’ve got to make this thing function."

He’s just finished his second tour in Iraq, patrolling the streets of Baghdad and Mosul, and now he’s back at his alma mater, as the old man offering battlefield wisdom to the next generation of lieutenants.

It's War in Iraq 101. Blickhan, and other junior officers like him, may be the shock troops of change for West Point. The academy brings them back to offer firsthand experience of moving fresh from the parade ground to a world of complexity and unpredictability unimagined by previous generations.

He was mayor of a town in Iraq, and he says his job was to "resolve domestic disputes, keep the peace between farmers, unemployment. I had to try to find jobs for the folks. There was a lot of infrastructure work to be done. Roads, electric, phones, sewage."

Did he have time to fight the war? "Sometimes, you think they forgot to give us enough time to fight the war," says Blickhan.

"It's just amazing the responsibility we're putting on them. And it's beyond doctrine. It's beyond their training," says retired Col. Leonard Wong, a professor of military strategy at the Army War College and a West Point man.

The Pentagon asked Wong to study leadership among its junior officers. In Iraq, he discovered that those junior officers are already affecting the way the entire Army wages war, a discovery that has become part of the curriculum at West Point.

"In short, our recommendation was that we need to back off on our junior officers, to let them make decisions on their own, to take some risk and allow people to try, perhaps fail and then learn and try again," says Wong.

"We never taught them how to be a mayor of a small town. What they do is they fall back and they say, 'I remember when I was back at West Point that they gave me too much to do, with too little, and limited resources, and I still performed to a standard.'"

So just imagine Blickhan on his first assignment, two weeks into the invasion of Iraq: a green untested lieutenant assigned to take a platoon into combat in pitch dark. He can’t even see the faces of his men.

"And I hear some grumbling in the hallway. It's the platoon sergeant. He can't believe that he's got to take a new lieutenant," says Blickhan. "Because I'm a cherry lieutenant at this point. And there’s no assumption of competency."

They fought their way through the night, and when daylight came, the green lieutenant looked into the faces of his men, and confessed.

"I did mention, you know, 'Andy Blickhan, West Point graduate,'" says Blickhan. "And there was a moan of – an audible moan that came from the platoon. And I'm like, 'Oh great, what am I in for?'"

Both Blickhan and the men bit the bullet, and he took the 3rd platoon of B Company, 82nd Airborne, to the heart of Baghdad, followed by multi-tasking with the highest stakes, running a town while fighting a war.