Last week I suffered the loss of a dear member of my family — my grandfather. While his accomplishments in life were not broadcast on the nightly news or printed in the daily papers, his life meant a lot to our family. He always had a sparkle in his eyes and always something quick witted (never mean spirited) to say to anyone who walked in the door. And while those memories are common across all members of the family, I also had my own special relationship with him that I will always cherish.

My grandfather grew up in a much different time. It was a time when this nation suffered in the grips of the Great Depression. That time, I think, shaped him to become very frugal with his money while always remembering that his first priority was to provide for his family. As a young lad he went to work anywhere he could to help his dad support the family at home. Sometimes they didn’t even have a roof over their heads, and when they did they shared their own roofs with others who were not so fortunate. He talked about this time with me and, in reflection now, no one else.

When the depression was over the nation was drawn into the second World War, and so into battle he went. He talked to me about the war more so than he did to other family members. He talked about his memories of fighting in Africa, of suffering from Malaria and of watching good friends not come home. He talked about watching one soldier die as he walked into the spinning propeller blades of an airplane, and of others who did not return from routine marches into combat.

Those events shaped his life, his values, and his personality. You never had to guess where his political views lied, not because he yelled it or ran around telling people, you just knew by his values that he was a Democrat.

The new U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is signalling a new approach to the conflict in Iraq by drafting a team of intellectual subject-matter experts to lead his efforts at “winning” the war. According to the Washington Post, Petraeus has solicited the help of a select group of military commanders with Ph.D’s in subjects like Islamic Anthropology, Economics, and War History.

As the U.S.-designed campaign to bring security to Baghdad unfolds, Petraeus’s chief economic adviser, Col. Michael J. Meese, will coordinate security and reconstruction efforts, trying to ensure that “build” follows the “clear” and “hold” phases of action. Meese also holds a PhD from Princeton, where he studied how the Army historically handled budget cuts. He is the son of former attorney general Edwin Meese III, who was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, whose December critique helped push the Bush administration to shift its approach in Baghdad.

Petraeus, who along with the group’s members declined to be interviewed for this article, has chosen as his chief adviser on counterinsurgency operations an outspoken officer in the Australian Army. Lt. Col. David Kilcullen holds a PhD in anthropology, for which he studied Islamic extremism in Indonesia.

While the solicitation of more brain power in fighting the war is not new to U.S. millitary strategies, it is something that we have not witnessed in this war. I applaued the General for taking a new approach in coaxing some type of settlement to the conflict, but it all begs some probing questions with one common answer:

Why have we not witnessed this in Iraq before now? If this brain power existed in the military at the start of the conflict why did the Bush administration fail to utilize them from the beginning? Why were political operatives used to build a pseudo-police force, a pathetic health care system, and left to exert little in the way of economic conditioning for Iraq? The answer is clear — the Bush administration, much like the Nixon administration, used its position and the war to reward those that had done so much to get Bush to the White House, ignoring the facts and rejecting logical approaches to securing Iraq from the start.

Petraeus may be the right man for the job, but unfortunately the job has morphed from a winnable war in 2003 to a complete disaster today, and despite his best efforts this strategy will have little to no effect on the overall outcome of this conflict. It is simply too little much too late.