Here are recent headlines about the military in Kansas:Challenging the generalsAn article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine discusses an apparent divide between the Army’s senior and mid-level officers over how to prosecute the war in Iraq.Along the way, it takes a look at Lt. Col. John Nagl, now stationed at Fort Riley – and casts an eye back at Wass de Czege, who after Vietnam helped revamp the Army from his perch at Fort Leavenworth.Of Nagl, writer Fred Kaplan says: _In October 2006, seven months before his essay on the failure of generalship appeared, Yingling and Lt. Col. John Nagl, another innovative officer, wrote an article for Armed Forces Journal called “New Rules for New Enemies,” in which they wrote: “The best way to change the organizational culture of the Army is to change the pathways for professional advancement within the officer corps. The Army will become more adaptive only when being adaptive offers the surest path to promotion.”__Nagl – the author of an acclaimed book about counterinsurgency (“Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife”), a former operations officer in Iraq and the subject of a New York Times Magazine article a few years ago – has since taken command of a unit at Fort Riley, Kan., that trains United States soldiers to be advisers to Iraqi security forces. Pentagon officials have said that these advisers are crucial to America’s future military policy. Yet Nagl has written that soldiers have been posted to this unit “on an ad hoc basis” and that few of the officers selected to train them have ever been advisers themselves._Following Vietnam, Kaplan writes, de Czege helped revitalize the Army — and sees hope for optimism in today’s officer corps:_ He was asked to create a one-year graduate program for the most promising young officers. Called the School of Advanced Military Studies, or SAMS, (based at Fort Leavenworth) it brought strategic thinking back into the Army – at least for a while.__In an essay for the July issue of Army magazine, Wass de Czege wrote that today’s junior officers “feel they have much relevant experience that] those senior to them lack,” yet the senior officers “have not listened to them.” These junior officers, he added, remind him of his own generation of captains, who held the same view during and just after Vietnam.__Speaking by phone from his home outside Fort Leavenworth, Wass de Czege emphasized that he was impressed with most of today’s senior officers. Compared with those of his time, they are more capable, open and intelligent (most officers today, junior and senior, have college degrees, for instance). “You’re not seeing any of the gross incompetence that was common in my day,” he said. He added, however, that today’s generals are still too slow to change. “The Army tends to be consensus-driven at the top,” he said. “There’s a good side to that. We’re steady as a rock. You call us to arms, we’ll be there. But when you roll a lot of changes at us, it takes awhile. The young guys have to drive us to it.”_Other recent Kansas military headlines:Fort Leavenworth[(Washington Post) A Potentially Winning Tactic, With a Warning: Fourteen months ago, a 300-page Defense Department-sponsored research paper titled “Iraq Tribal Study: Al-Anbar Governorate” was completed and delivered to the Pentagon. That report — put together by a distinguished group of retired military counterinsurgency specialists and academics, each with Iraq experience — was circulated in the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., at the time led by then-Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top U.S. commander in Iraq. The study proposed changing how the United States interacts with Sunni tribal leaders, eventually contributing to winning their support in fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq forces. … Today, the support of Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaeda in Iraq is hailed as one of the few successes from the U.S. troop increase this year. The Iraq Tribal Study provided a handbook on how to gain that support by covering the basics. One section, titled “How to Work With Tribesmen,” explains that “RESPECT ( Ihtiram in Arabic) is the key,” and also warns: “Do not assume that they want to be like you.”Fort Riley ¢ 1st Infantry Division(49abcnews.com) Fort Riley soldier killed in Humvee rollover: Another Fort Riley soldier has been killed in Afghanistan. Sergeant First Class Daniel E. Miller was from Ohio. He was a member of the First Brigade, First Infantry Division. Miller died when the Humvee he was in rolled over. He is the 122nd Fort Riley soldier to die in Iraq and Afghanistan.(AP) Army officer pushing creation of permanent adviser corps: A lieutenant colonel who’s considered an expert on fighting insurgents is working on a new idea that could change how the military does it, from his corner office on the east side of this post. John Nagl wrote a paper this summer calling for a permanent corps of combat advisers. The group would move from conflict to conflict, so the military wouldn’t have to train new advisers from scratch. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, previously picked Nagl to help write the Army-Marine playbook on fighting insurgents. A key part of the effort is training Iraqi forces to keep the peace, so American troops can get out of an unpopular war. Nagl (pronounced Noggle) thinks more about future conflicts than present ones, but military leaders have another incentive. Congress is watching.Kansas National Guard(LJWorld.com) National Guard unit returns: It was a mad dash to the cars and home Sunday afternoon in Topeka. The members of the 714th Security Forces unit of the Kansas National Guard arrived back in the United States and weren’t going to waste any time standing around feeling nostalgic for Iraq. Stacy Gonzales stood with nearly two dozen members of her family who came to Forbes Field to give her a big welcome home.