(Image source: U.S. Department of Defense)

BY JENN LONG

General David Petraeus has formally hung up his army green.
After 37 years of service, the general is leaving the military to become the director of the CIA. At a ceremony to honor Petraeus, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn explains why he’s right for the job.

“General Petraeus has been both a combat leader and a leading strategist in this post 9/11 world. It is rare for a leader to have both the endurance and charisma to lead troops in war and the force of mind to shape the strategy for that war. But David Petraeus has distinguished himself at each.”

So why exactly is he retiring? Petraeus explains in an interview on the Pentagon Channel earlier in August.

“There are some concerns, I think some understandable concerns about militarization of the intelligence community. I have a certain profile in certain parts of the world and were I to travel there in uniform it might create some confusion frankly as to who is this guy, he’s still in uniform is he the director of the CIA or is he actually something else?”

And those concerns have been circulating around the media since President Barack Obama announced the appointment in April of this year.

The Washingtonian wrote in April that...

“As the CIA has gotten better at hunting down and killing people, it has come to look increasingly like a military outfit run by civilians. Petraeus’s ascendancy begins to make a lot more sense when you consider that the difference between CIA and military operations is getting less significant all the time.”

But an article in Wired sees it differently.

“Now that the CIA’s drone strikes are effectively the main U.S. counterterrorism effort, increasingly indistinct from a military operation, It’s perhaps natural that Mr. Petraeus will run the CIA. Out of uniform and in the shadows, he’ll still play a leading role shaping American strategy in a sprawling war that has defined him and which he himself has largely defined.”

Petraeus will be sworn in as the director of the CIA on September 6.