Jackson Institute Senior Fellow Lecture Series with Stan McChrystal

okay my name is Jim Levinson I'd like to welcome everybody here we'll start on time I guess general McChrystal's reputation precedes him for those of you who have had him in class you know that you don't show up a minute late I think it was during shopping period his first year people came in its shopping period it's like teaching school on a school bus people are coming and going and I neglected to tell general McChrystal that people might be coming and going someone walked in general McChrystal looked at him and said son you're not gonna be here on time you just keep walking that's not how shopping period works but but it did in that class so the last time I had the pleasure of introducing general McChrystal he had recently arrived on campus and the title of his talk then if memory serves was plywood leadership and that was a bit over two years ago and I'll admit I wasn't too sure how this was all gonna work out okay he probably knew it would be great but but I'll confess I wasn't I wasn't sure at the time I am pretty sure that it was probably the first time in the 300 plus year history of Yale that an officer of general McChrystal's rank moved within a matter of weeks from commanding a war in the battlefield to the classroom and the rest as they say is history what is that history well general McChrystal teaches a seminar on leadership that's probably one of the most popular courses here on campus we get hundreds of enquiries for the some 20 some slots a very keen I will notice on the sidelines of football games now general McChrystal is there hopefully not calling the play providing inspiration perhaps he's been instrumental in bringing other key people here to Yale some of whom in fact are here in the room and he's offered career advice and even jobs Sam I'm talking about you to a number of Yale students over the years again some of them are here today so for all of those things thank you we're deeply deeply grateful it's really neat this time to introduce stan mcchrystal really as a member of the Yale community the format that Jim was going to explain the format but there is no formal format so we can do whatever we want in here what I would like to do is thank you for coming here today there's some special friends old friends who've been here that I've spent a lot of time with it kind of in combat some friends I spent two years writing a book with there's one friend I spent 35 years married to special friends and and I just want to thank you because what I'm gonna do today is just throw out some thoughts and then at the end of it we can talk about whatever you want any any question is okay as is any answer that I might give so what I thought I'd do is I I thought we'd talk about history leadership and personal experience because everybody's had some but as you think about it you break those down those are sort of the three themes that I think about when I try to put my life in perspective and I think all of us go through a point when you put your life in your perspective and you decide what was important what wasn't important them what maybe did you learn along the way I start back this is the day I graduated from West Point West Point is about trying to take somebody and make them a better person it's about recruiting talent and making it better as you can see that day I recruited talent I don't know that I made it better but that was starting out of life I'd grown up in an army family my father was a soldier my father's father was a soldier my four brothers were all soldiers my sister married a soldier Annie's father was a career soldier her three brothers her soldiers her sisters the widow of a soldier so you kind of get it it was going into a family business that was very comfortable and it was my sense of trying to be like my father which drove me because he was the guy that I admired and I still admire him to this day but you know I entered the United States Military Academy in 1972 the military was going through a tough period as many of the people in this room remember we brag in the class of 76 when we graduated four years later that we entered in the easiest year in the Academy's history to be accepted into West Point because there just wasn't that much popularity to it and the army in fact was a shambles drug uses problem with integrity just staggering out of a war in Vietnam that not only tore the nation apart but it actually tore the American army apart the things which had marked the army before professionalism dedication to duty were all under question so the army that my peers and I entered in the summer of 1976 was one that was still badly damaged and had great self-doubt about itself and so much of my career entering this army was effected by watching it change watching it grow watching it heal and watching it move forward and become something very different if you look at this picture and you see in the top left hand corner this is when I was a young captain it was at Fort Stewart Georgia this is the early 1980s and the guy in the top left-hand picture our corner of the picture may be familiar to you his name was general Norman Schwarzkopf Stormin Norman and he could I was in meetings with him where he would erupt and of course everybody would head for the exits but he cared about soldiers one day there was the golf course was right near the parade field and there were some guys out playing golf and at the end of the day they started to play retreat and on a military base when retreat starts to play you come first to parade rest and then to attention as the flags being lowered and there were some guys who saw fit to keep playing golf bad plan but that was the kind of guy was but I show you this picture to tell you that my experience with leadership although I knew general Schwarzkopf as well as a captain knows a two-star general at the time was really the guy in the rain jacket in the center and his name was Pierce t grainy or tom grainy and he was my battalion commander might when I went to take I wanted to be an infantry company commander very very badly and I went up to run this 50-mile race that they do once a year near Harpers Ferry Virginia and so the day before I'm gonna go up and run this thing and I've been training with some other guys they've called me in and they said you're gonna go down next Monday and take command of a company and of course for a young infant room that's the goal and I said well I'm gonna run this thing on Sunday how about Tuesday and they said no problem so I show up Tuesday morning to this battalion to take command of a company and the battalion commander has been relieved his office is empty so I go look for this battalion sergeant major his office is empty the battalion adjutant the personnel officer his office is empty and it turns out four people had been relieved to include the company commander that I would have placed and so I take command in this battalion that was traumatized me walking in I'm traumatized just by that experience and three weeks later this guy Tom grainy shows up and I had grown up in a world of stereotyped military leaders guys who stood very tall and barked orders lived a certain almost two dimensional existence and in comes Tom grainy and he was a little bit punchy you really can't see this he didn't much like physical training he told us in a meeting one day because we did physical training at 6:30 he says I want every soldier in this battalion and PT formation at 6:30 every morning because when I go back to bed I want to know where you are he smoked like a chimney drank quite a lot and he led by sarcasm every time you thought you'd done something well instead of saying good job he would make some cutting sarcastic comment and so he sort of violated everything we think about his traditional leadership except two things he really knew his business he knew how to make an organization work and it cared and it was obvious and so he started this change in the organization and we were very mediocre talent of all the battalions in the division we probably were the most mediocre on average of any but he started making us good by making us work together and it was extraordinary he did some interesting things one day says we're not going to have lunch anymore what do you mean not lunch but his point was if we worked through the lunch period we could let the soldiers off earlier and they could go do all those things they wanted to do over the lunch hour earlier and they actually got more time off and it made a lot of sense but it was very non-standard right he got upset about it and then one day I was became his operations officer and he taught me something that was really important vehicles were coming back in from the field one of our companies were coming back in from fee like a column of armored vehicles and it had to stop to cross this road well you had a public highway to stop and check it out and so they called him for permission to cross the road and I'm in the back of his Jeep his operations officers are and they called him non-secure because we had the ability to secure our radios those days but it was very clunky system it was a thing called immense and you hooked it into your radio and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't and so they called him non-secure and they said you know we want to cross the road he said no call me secure and ask me and they said well you know our stuffs not working you know how this stuff is how about we just crossed it and we'll fix it when we get to garrison this is Friday afternoon and they wanted the weekend off and he said no call me secure we'll wait so here I am captain McChrystal sit in the back of his Jeep thinking we are going to be here til Sunday night this is going to be ugly and what happens is suddenly after about two more entreaties from them he they they suddenly start to scurry outside their armored vehicles and they start taking antennas off one vehicle going in and getting a cable off another pulling a Vincent device on another and they start all this activity and they're obviously taking pieces and cobbling together a working system and in about 20 minutes they call and they call secured and it was an interesting lesson for me because he said there you go and the lesson was what you demand the standard you demand is the standard you'll get and the standard you accept is the standard you'll get and it became an extraordinary lesson for me in a leader who doesn't necessarily look or feel exactly like you think a leader ought to but he was one of the best and had a bigger impact on me than probably anyone else in my development some years later I went to got older commanded a bunch of places up through the first Gulf War and whatnot and then I was put in command of an organization called Joint Special Operations Command and that is America's counter-terrorist forces you're aware of the components of most of those and we were fighting in a number of areas but the biggest fight we were in was in Iraq and Iraq was difficult as you know the initial invasion of Iraq looked pretty easy to people within a few months it looked like it was going to be very difficult and I took over this command in the fall of 2003 with the mission to fight against al-qaeda in Iraq which was led by a guy named Abu Musab al-zarqawi and so I take command of this organization in Iraq looks a little bit like this picture this is the golden Mosque that was blown up in 2006 by Sunnis to incite Shia outrage but really a lot of Iraq looked like a lot of this for a long time and yet here I am on 911 I'm a 46 year old brigadier general and the thing about being a 46 year old brigadier general is you don't want anything to change because you've been in the organization long enough to know where things are how things operate you've sort of mastered the system so if somebody changes the system your relative comfort level and your expertise is threatened and so suddenly we're in a fight and this is me I look like a soldier I act like a soldier I know my business I feel very comfortable about that I've got a certain amount of credibility and so this is the guy who doesn't want to change because why would I life's good and then this guy comes into my life born in October 1966 and he became known as Abu Musab al-zarqawi that was a cunha which means father of Musab from the village of Zarqa he was a young Jordanian who had grown up in a very lower middle class or upper lower class family as kind of a tough had troubles of his youth but wasn't terrible then got into drugs got into alcohol got into a number of scrapes with the law got himself thrown into prison and when he got thrown into prison he hooked up with a guy named Mike Deasy who was a cleric and he became much more ideologically focused he left prison went to Afghanistan where the tail end of the Mujahideen period was ongoing and he became allied or affiliated with al-qaeda and he started to grow into a serious leader so suddenly you've got Stan McChrystal leader military officer and Abu Saud al Zarqawi he's never been a military officer never held an official position but suddenly he's a leader and when you think of a terrorist you think of a guy who blows stuff up and causes things to happen which he did starting in the summer of 2003 in Iraq and then in early 2004 when we knew he had already started to create this Network and we had to destroy it we captured a video we'd had a young man missing who was an American named Nick Berg and Nick Berg was wandering around Iraq looking for work which wasn't a smart thing to do at the time but he'd gotten himself taken hostage and passed to al-qaeda we did quite an effort to try to find him but that was also the time when Fallujah in other areas were exploding and then we heard word that he'd been killed and very soon after that we intercepted a copy of a video and they brought it into my office to show it to me on a laptop computer and they said sir you need to see this and I stood there and they put the laptop and a friend of mine and there were six guys in black outfits with black hoods over their heads and a young man sitting cross-legged on in front of them in an orange jumpsuit which was similar to what we had detainees wearing in the larger prisons and whatnot detainee camps in Iraq and they talked for a while with him in front of him and then at a critical moment the individual right behind him pulled out of his cloak a large knife a huge bowie light knife and he cut Nick Berg's head off on the video and I remember standing there watching it and we'd been fighting I'd now been leading this force for about six months and it had been a difficult bloody fight already but I remember at the end of it I had to physically unclench my fists because I was that outraged and I was that angry but the temptation to make this guy a two-dimensional character is one you couldn't fall prey to because he wasn't a two-dimensional character instead of being central casting terrorists here was a guy who dressed the part and he liked to look that part as a fighter but he also went around and when he met with different parts of the organization he would come in and he'd sit down and he'd listened patiently he drink tea with him he would show deference to local parts of the insurgency because all insurgencies and terrorist networks are groupings of local entities then he would give out audio recordings and one night were sitting there listening to an audio recording and he's talking about to the brave lions of so-and-so to the stalwart heroes of so-and-so and basically what he was doing is going by Township and one of our officers goes Holy Smoke this guy is motivating each of these individual groups by mentioning them publicly just like a leader in a corporation or a political leader in America might do reaching down to their sense of worth to their ego to their commitment and creating commitment to something that we've considered absolutely evil but was extraordinarily powerful so through a combination of personal example a little bit of religion in there but in reality was much more political movement than anything religious and some basic leadership he pulled together a network that leveraged Sunni fear because at that point in Iraq the Sunnis were terrified of a post-saddam world in which a Shia plurality in fact would would dominate and he leveraged their fears and caused them to take part in terrorist activities that were extraordinarily bloody the number of people whose deaths he caused was staggering and when we hit the very difficult years 2006-2007 the numbers exploded even more we finally in the spring of 2006 were able to tighten the neuter noose around a boom Musab al-zarqawi we were able to capture a group of individuals of whom one turned out to be aware of who is per gentle spiritual advisor was so this individual after a number of weeks in confinement with us and no mistreatment just long conversations along patient conversations he finally said I can tell you who his spiritual advisor is and we were able from that then over several more weeks to track his spiritual adviser every day until finally we were able to follow him using a variety of assets follow him to Abu Musab markets our College location and we were able to strike and kill him but at that point he'd already lit the fuse his goal was to create a civil war in Iraq and essentially he'd done that that was June of 2006 this the destruction you saw earlier of the golden mosque happened earlier that spring and there was sectarian fighting that continued really for two more years you still see vestiges of it now the thing that changed so much for me though as you fight a guy who's that effective and I'm taking an organization that was insular I'd grown up with the special operations where where you took great pride in operational security you took great pride in being part of a special organization and this was an organization a little bit like a football team big shoulders big knuckles brave guys but people who didn't look like football players weren't necessarily invited into that culture and so as a consequence the organization I took had a little exclusivity that unfortunately excluded a lot of what we needed we excluded some of the talent and intelligence talent and communications talent and cultural acuity and we had to get over it and it took us a year or so to do that we had to lose the war for a while until people backed off and said we're not going to win unless we change and the first person who had to change was the guy on the left because remember I'm feeling good about myself but you don't feel good when you're leading a losing effort so really over 2004 and 2005 I had to go from a centralized organization where I was the man to pushing it down to decentralized where other people actually made the decisions I had to go from an organization where information would flow up to me and then as the font of all wisdom I would give guidance to or what I did was create an environment in which other people figured it out and did it you have to step away from your ego a little bit I did and it caused us to be go from being a more stove-piped organization to being a flattened organization where information flowed and I didn't direct things so much as I encouraged things and it was an amazing change because we started the war we had our heroes and everybody's a hero in the organization when we started and you just kind of wouldn't deal with people who weren't heroes like us to a year or two later and I'd go into a room and there'd be a plywood table and you'd see a big hook and look an operator II to have a beard and you know scars and I'll listen across the table there'd be a 90 pound young female Intel analyst and she'd have her finger like that telling him what the deal was and he's listening really big change and really important change because you started to be valued on your contribution to the overall effort not on your personal batting average or not on what you look like or what you thought of yourself biggest change in my career and yet it started late hard to accept when it first starts and then when you start to work than you I guess you get over it and you start to move my last assignment was Afghanistan I'd actually gone to Afghanistan in the spring of 2002 I'd gone right after ambassador Crocker had been there and Afghanistan was literally this is probably the best place in Afghanistan in that's a nicest place you got that this the country was physically torn to pieces even beyond that it was torn in ways that weren't obvious sort of like a collective abused abandoned child Afghanistan had been through about 23 years of war already when I arrived in 2002 and so the fabric of society had been ripped those people who had been traditional leaders in Afghanistan had lost their standing and those people who had fought as part of the Mujahideen or during the Civil War many cases had gathered for themselves political power economic power social power and suddenly you had these what we call non-standard leaders or warlords as dominant figures in the country it's sort of a post-apocalyptic place in which press a button that normally produces a certain outcome and you have no idea people would come and I'd say we don't understand Afghanistan and I'd say either do the Afghans the last time normal had been in Afghanistan was 1978 and earlier everything since then wasn't and so everybody was trying to navigate where it went and that was 2002 and I was there part of every year after that with special operating forces then I got there in the summer 2009 and now what had happened as we'd arrived in 2001 and Afghans had been very happy about that we pushed al-qaeda out we'd up into the Taliban government and they'd had great expectations for what the future was going to be finally America and the West was going to help them they were gonna have a better more stable future greater economic opportunity but a gap had come between what they expected or what they desired and what they got and that gap grew and as that gap grew cynicism grew the Taliban found an opportunity to start to come back in exploit some of the fissures we made a lot of mistakes because we didn't understand we didn't speak the language we didn't understand the culture we elide with some people we shouldn't have and so as a consequence when I got there in 2009 the situation was getting worse and confidence was the biggest problem people were always worried about the future no matter what progress you made they'd look onto the future they'd say yeah but you're about to leave and things are about to go bad and we were in a place where America was already tired of war and Afghans were tired of war and one of the things we had to deal with it damage like this could have been caused by an allied or American airstrike and we say well we'll fighting your enemy we're fighting to liberate you so we're going to do this airstrike and if we hit something like a house or something like that that happens but if you go back into the Afghan mindset in 2001 they saw us arrive with incredible precision in our intelligence and incredible precision and our strikes and we up into the Taliban in a matter of weeks helped them up into Taliban then after that whenever they saw something they would say ok wait a minute we say well we made a mistake we hit Afghan civilians sorry and they go wait a minute you are omniscient because you've got such great intelligence and you're omnipotent because you hit what you want to hit so one or two things is true either you tried to hit those civilians or you really don't care you're just careless and they started to draw conclusions that said when you come in to liberate us that's not the best outcome for us if we are killed in the process that's not better than being in a position under Taliban rule because an Afghan if you ask them a rural Afghanistan what they'd like and you said would you like us to win the government to win they go yeah that would be best but we're not sure you're gonna do it how would you like the Taliban to when they say well actually that'd be our second choice the choice we can't live with his war in the front yard we can't live with us being killed in the process of being liberated and so we had to make a change in the way we approach the war to convince the Afghan people that they were our reason for being there that protecting them was our responsibility our charge our passion and yet we're in America tired of war and so suddenly you've got this tension you got a certain part of America and remember inside the military you're created a fight so you kind of want to do that you're in this position where you've got to convince the force we can't do that what we've really got to do is accept greater risk to ourselves to try to reduce violence protect the Afghan people and win their support and you talk to a young sergeant who's got every right in the world he's just driven through a village where improvised explosive devices have gone off and the population obviously knew they were there and didn't tell him and you say he says you want me to protect these people but they're trying to kill me and the reality is yeah because that's the only road to success that's the only road to victory during the 1980s the Afghans lost 1.2 million people killed when the Soviet war was there you're not going to kill enough Afghans to win you're only going to win when the Afghans believe that their government is the best option for them so we had to try to change the mindset of our force and we had to build relationships with people you don't normally build relationships with or you're not comfortable I mean who do you hang out with when you have spare time who's a soldier feel comfortable hanging out with other soldiers you feel comfortable with people who look like you speak your language have your background and whatnot and you build relationships of trust and we talk about camaraderie Band of Brothers and whatnot but the brothers are all pretty damn similar but suddenly you're asking to go into a complex environment and you're betting that's me sort of in the center President Karzai slightly to the left in us down in Conda haar having one of these sure is and we had a whole bunch of these things and just trying to talk through what we're going to do he's trying to convince local leaders this would be the equivalent of President Obama coming to a any state getting local mayors and whatnot together and explaining to him what he's going to do in this case this is President Karzai saying he's gonna change the Second Amendment and take everybody's guns away it's about that popular and so he's sitting down trying to build relationships and that's what we had to do my comfort zone would be fighting but where you end up as a leader is somewhere different and if you look at it he's got me to his left which is a gutsy move because with me sitting so close to him we say well look you know America supported him and all this kind of stuff it's obvious he's trying to use it but that's for him that's politically difficult because it makes him - those people look like a potential puppet but he makes the call I'm gonna put him right there and I'm gonna take the heat for it and it's under it's important we understand that because it's a very different environment than we might think generally so I had to change here I had to build relationships with people that weren't the ones I would naturally build relationships with and yet if you don't build relationships you never accomplished anything okay this is one of the places I ended up in the last year of my career I don't think anybody starts your career thinking you're going to end up conversing with presidents or in the Oval Office or speaking to NATO headquarters or doing any of the things that many of us and many of you in this room have done or will do you just don't you're not wired to expect that that's going to happen in many cases when you go forward into these things it's the first time you've ever done it a lot of people in the room walk into there and they try to act nonchalant but in reality they have been in a meeting like that before and it's an extraordinary experience it's a great responsibility but it's an extraordinary experience because suddenly you're being what you read about suddenly you're taking part in events that are going to be written about but you really didn't have time to think about it they are suddenly upon you you're amongst these decisions and events and you're doing what feels right at the time and doing it with as much apparent self-confidence and comfort as you can and everybody in the rooms that way and that's of course a good thing to remember some people are better actors about it but everybody's then they're thinking holy I'm trying to be something that I really am not they're gonna figure me out and they're gonna toss me out of this room in a few minutes but that's the experience and when I talk to the young people in the room what I'd say is you're going to travel this and you're never gonna feel completely prepared you're never going to feel like you were raised to be King and suddenly you're King you're raised to be whatever it is you are but suddenly you're going to be there and what shouldn't desert you is what's inside what shouldn't desert you are your values that's the one thing that nobody can can push if you don't let them push that's your understanding of what you believe in and what's right and wrong it's the most important thing you walk out of a place like Yale with I'm gonna stop there and open it for any questions that you might have thank you all right I'm gonna bring the mic out and we can gentleman right here pray tell what is going to be our experience in the Middle East the whole area which seems to be coming apart you know so many different scenes you can hardly count them hey sorry his is America to be involved in all this yes sir and the question was what's going to be our experience in the Middle East it's been pretty hairy for the last 10 years and it's going to be more so and we are going to be involved whether we want to or not that is not a choice not just because of oil because increasingly America will be energy independent but the world won't and we're not going to be independent of the fact the world as a fabric knitted together now if you look at what's happening in the Mideast my view of it is we've gotten ourselves a little bit narrowly focused on certain events that happened what happened in Algeria last week what's happening in Mali what happened in Egypt a couple of years ago and continues to play out but I think there are several things that are occurring one is following the 1967 arab-israeli war pan Arab nationalism was discredited to a large degree an extremist Islam as one of the things that would occur got new power and then there were some autocratic regimes as you saw Colonel Qaddafi President Mubarak and others across the region sort of put a lid on a pressure cooker but the pressure continued to build starting with the the beginning of the Arab Spring in Tunisia you started in my view the movement of some tectonic plates and they are moving and nobody's quite sure where they're gonna go they are not gonna automatically go to Western democracy they're not automatically going to go to chaos they're not automatically going to go to the Muslim Brotherhood but they're moving and they will keep moving for a while and there going to be some things caught in between those and broken I think some of the big themes will be first the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood so goes Egypt goat so goes the popular opinion of much of the region and as Egypt has a Muslim Brotherhood leadership depending how they go I think it's very possible the Muslim Brotherhood Jordan and other areas will be increasingly influential they may not run the whole area but they will be in an influential part pressure that moves the other thing that that is absolute is the sunni-shia friction point and that's you're seeing that play out in Syria of course we seen it we saw it up close play out in Iraq and will continue to pull out and I think that's going to last for quite a while I think as the Sunni Gulf states particularly pump arms and other things into that fight as Iran supports the Shia side you're going to have this fault line that creates heat and friction and I think it's very likely that it areas like Lebanon of course Syria to me it's very very unclear where Syria goes and of course Israel's caught in the middle of all this without being the dominant player in the region by any means they're going to be in my mind affected by this more than they affected I would worry about the stability of some of the regimes even in the Gulf the ones we've taken for granted for several generations like Saudi Arabia but I have a certain humility Ryan what have I gotten wrong yeah ambassador Crocker who taught me a lot of the region I has much more background but we are not going to back away from it we are not going to turn our back and if we do it'll tap us on the shoulder and and jump on our heads questions from the bank general McChrystal what do you think of the Pentagon's decision today to open the front lines to woman yeah I mean they're already in the front lines they already fly combat aircraft they already your military police they're already in local firefights I think that is recognizing a reality that's been for a while now with opportunity comes responsibility because in so much as you offer the opportunity to be in direct combat to females you don't offer it to just those who feel like being in direct combat you really kind of open the door for any female now it can be put good needs of the army can be put in situations they may not I don't know exactly how the Army's going to handle that part but I think it's a significant change there going to be a few cultural things to get over but I think it's a natural evolution and what kind of see where it takes us I think if we if we don't admit that reality in the near term we're sort of kidding ourselves and the ones that I saw fight fight real well so no worrys questions from front thank you very much if this is a very from a very selfish point of view based on your personal experience not only me but a lot of people would like to see you have a broader role in the future so what are your plans my plan is to continue teaching at the Jackson Institute until Jim fires me yeah I I'm really passionate about leadership right now and there are several issues leadership in general national service sort of the latest drum I want to bang for a while is the idea of national service for every young American you notice all the old people clapping yeah I mean I'm old now so hey I'm all about that no I really believe that every young person needs to do a year or two of national service not just military but costs because two reasons one if you don't invest in something you don't value it the same as I tell people if I tell you to pick up trash or chopper Street every day you feel more about littering you feel more strongly about littering that's a bad analogy for a country but it is one the other thing is we've got parts of America that never meet other parts of America when we've got parts of our society that just don't interact with other parts of and that's a bad bad thing and I think national service could force that in ways that would be very valuable in the future and if everybody had to do it with zero exemptions then I think people wouldn't be too upset about it they just do it and move on with life if it was unfair it'd be a disaster so that that's what I wanted to sir thank you question from the back good afternoon general McChrystal's good to see you again last semester when I had you in class we were talking a lot about communication and its importance in leadership and you were also talking about how in your experience you never feel fully prepared but I'm sure that a lot of preparation goes into your communication when you're going to meet with a president or speak to those who your command and so I was wondering what process do you go through when you're preparing a presentation or I'm getting ready to meet with important officials that's actually a great question the first thing to understand is who you're communicating with and what you want to communicate and that sounds that sounds obvious but it's not always sometimes we we have this message that we want to put out and we're so interested in saying it the way we want to say it that we sort of can it that way and then we shoot it and in reality somebody's receiving it and the people who are receiving it you got to understand that we used to have prepare slides for the president when I was on the Joint Staff and you could only put I think three bullets on the slide no bullet could be more than a certain number of words we called it pota sizing the slides but the reason is here's a guy who's getting 8000 briefings a day from it's the most important issue to me may not be number one on the President's List so the first thing I got to understand is what am I trying to get him to walk away with and you can absolutely kill your message if you dilute it too much if you try to give more than they can take or if you get personal sort of emotion into it if you get in there and you're screaming and banging on stuff pretty soon people die it works like once and then everybody dials you out from there and then it does help to know what you're talking about you know that's not always good and you in the US government cuz what happens is somebody down low knows what they're talking about and they prepare a brief and they send it up or a position paper and it goes through eight levels and by the time it gets to someone senior who's going to go brief the great man or woman that person really doesn't know much so you got a conversation between two people who really don't know much and then once they get beyond the real superficial part it's hard for them to go further so I'm a great fan of taking the person who actually knows a lot and you may need to bring them along with you but say here's the dude actually knows what he's talking about what do you wanna know and and I find that that works plus it motivates junior people because they get to they get to give the information straight my son's in the Intel community now and he's down here and so he's the guy making the slide that gets corrected eight times before it goes up pretty interesting to get his perspective generally crystal you mentioned earlier that towards the end of our time in Afghanistan that America is a nation in many ways was tired of spending of spending in of war and so I wondered how reminiscent in your study of history was that of the Vietnam army and what do you think made our army successful in the end and what can we take from that and continue forward in their success yeah it's interesting because the comparison I'm talking about the army now in in marine cores while wrapped together in Vietnam and and compared to Afghanistan there's several things that were done very differently one in the Vietnam War we made some personnel decisions which were disastrous one of them was we rotated individuals and so an individual goes and he stays 12 months or she stays 12 months and then they come home so the unit is always in constant turmoil we didn't change commanders every six or 12 months we changed him every six months so a commander comes in he takes over and in six months he's gone so you've got this turnstile effect and so what happened was in Vietnam we took the force and we didn't use the reserves which we considered doing instead we grounded so usually an army that's at war gains combat experience and you're on the one hand you're gaining experience on the other hand you're trading the force are wearing it down so the question is do they do they balance each other out in Vietnam we kill ourselves because we first did the individuals so we didn't keep building combat experience so we didn't get that benefit but we ground on the army to nothing so by 1969 the army was weaker and less professional than it had been in 1966 and yet you think in three years of war we should have been really good at it we were worse and we had less experience in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq we did a few things smart we rotated by units we prepared unit we rotated by unit they stayed together there was a sense of teamwork that's easier to maintain now we didn't have the same casualties level as they did in Afghanistan I mean in Vietnam so it wasn't quite the same but it was we hit we've had kids who've been at war in combat for five years six years and yet the military son together so we've done much better at our personnel management what worries me now is the military is too insulated from society in the Civil War one out of every 68 Americans was wounded in combat so that means now wounded not just served someone in your family or your town was wounded and you saw now it's one out of every seven thousand two hundred and ninety three most Americans never see a wounded soldier most don't really know a service member they may know a friend of a friend who's got a nephew who's a service member but you you were wonderful to them we thank them in airports we buy meals but we don't know him and so that connection is not as tight as I would like it to be so I think that's another thing that strengthens militaries - it's a sense that you are you are a connection with the populace if you think that people don't care about the war don't believe in the war it's a lot harder to fight the war particularly when people are saying it's an utter waste of time oh yeah thanks for your service Wow it's a tough thing and it's only the cohesion and forces I think that can help make up for that question in the front I can't help but ask you based on your insights into leadership in general what has happened to political leadership in the United States of America I thought you can ask me any economic questions to you I was all prepared to tell you about gross national whatever it is yeah I'm a great believer that people act rationally and it's very hard there were some who don't I know a few but most people act rationally and if we look at what's rewarded we'll see why they act that way and that's true of terrorists that's true of people in Afghanistan just figure it out what we have now is individual rationality and collective irrationality if we look at political leaders in America what are they rewarded for they are rewarded for holding to a position which typically is more extreme left or more extreme right then we might like because we gerrymandered so many congressional districts we've created so many things so if you stick to that you are rewarded if you move to the center and compromise you're punished individually you aren't reelected or you're punished in other ways so what happens is they're acting rationally because each of them is protecting their political position their political base and what not and yet collectively it's irrational because we're like lemmings going off this cliff and we haven't found a way to say wait a minute we're gonna hold it individuals responsible for this collective failure and the more you finger point and criticize the more credit you get there's a there was a interesting phenomenon they used to say that before the the last the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein used to get credit for what he said not just what he did so he'd stand up and in their culture he'd say the US was threatening me says I'm gonna kick their rear end and we considered that ridiculous he's making a fool of himself it wasn't completely viewed that way in his society they were going well he gets partial credit for saying he's gonna do it even if it never did never does it we kind of a back down to that in our political world you know if we criticize someone else somehow we get plus points and I think it's I think it's the the electorate's responsibility to fix it but we haven't yet figured out how to do that we we get so exercised over small issues that the big ones that mean are our kids going to get educated and they're going to have you know a secure country they can have a future we don't seem to put that as high on the the list as other things I'm that passionate I should shut up they're sarsti questions from the bank sir I'd like to thank you for personally inviting the Yale cadets this evening being a junior Yale cadet myself I'm going to graduate and commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force soon so my question is for those young officers out there what advice would you give them yeah it's great and thanks for doing that I think you're gonna really enjoy it and learn a lot I think the first thing is when you go out to be a junior leader the first thing you want to be is technically competent and powerful as a leader you want to walk in and you want to be the guy with the answer is you want to be the guy who can make decisions that's not really the most important thing when you first go out there if you go out there and you're willing to listen you're willing to empathize with your troops notice I didn't say sympathize I said try to understand them if you are willing to learn they'll do anything for you they will absolutely because they don't expect you to be an expert they expect you to be a mature guy who cares and learns quickly because they expect you to learn really Qwest be effective the most ineffective officers I've ever seen knew it all the day they walked in even if they didn't know a lot they were actually the most effective were the ones who came in and said okay help me figure this out then it becomes a team effort they are vested in your success they want you to succeed and they're going to make sure the LT is squared away and I learned that more and more throughout my career you know that the higher I got the more I did less and less because other people could and would do it for me it's kind of the tom sawyer theater or the theory of leadership but you know that's really what you want because it's not how powerful you are it's how effective the organization is that's your metric of success not your personal power and it just takes a little while for some people to sort of figure that one out good luck picking up on the idea of communication that's been talked about a little bit you mentioned in your talk about when you arrive in the Middle East and the military not knowing the language with communication and you talked about connecting with the populace as well I can't imagine a more important factor in going to another place whether it's the military going there or am I going there as a tourist of being able to communicate and connect with the populace how did that not knowing the language while you were there change if it did and where are we now whether it's connecting with a populist in the Middle East Africa Southeast Asia could you speak to that place yes sir I sure can let me first describe personal experience on that I would go on raids with my force and these are nighttime raids and you put on your battle dress uniform you put on body armor put on your helmet you carry a m4 assault carbine you got all this stuff on and you have protective glasses on you hit a target and typically you're going after a person but there may be families in there and of course you don't harm them but you go in this house people are upset imagine people who are more than six feet tall they look huge in all this equipment we look like space invaders and we're in their living room at 2:00 in the morning in a society that doesn't like invasions of privacy not that ours would either but you start there they're talking suddenly I can't understand a word it's white noise I'm talking to members of my force to them it's white noise we might have a translator with us or two typically a hired translator but every time you put something through a translator there's a filter and they can't be everyplace so as you're stand-in there you're moving to deal with people and you may be moving females here or talking to somebody you're this menacing thing that has no way to connect with them we went in with so little language skill it was terrible and I would tell you in my personal opinion we've still got so little language skill it's terrible and we have handicapped our performance dramatically because you know if you can talk to somebody at a certain while you realize they're not that bad but if you can't if you just see them from afar those guys it's half the problem we need you know I came to the conclusion I came to this conclusion after the fact that after 9/11 what I think we should have done is sent 10,000 young Americans to language school and then 10,000 the next year dari Pashto Arabic other language because not just military but others because if you can't you can't sort a problem out unless you can communicate and we are just terrible at it and the military is terrible at it now go on record it that we we are hesitant to put people in a long language school because it's a diversion from what they're doing it's a distraction I said nothing's gonna distract us like losing this war so you know yeah you hit you hit something that I think is utterly critical I don't think anybody should graduate from college without being fluent in at least one foreign language so anyway that's what I think question from the bank my good sir no Coast Guard questions general mcchrystal thank you for coming her for being here in the realm of national defense and international threats in the future how you see America balancing our projection power and overseas offenses with I guess increased measures of homeland security and a greater sense of domestic defence yeah really the question is how do you balance protecting the homeland and doing what you think you need to do forward some of which is defending for it I don't think you can defend America at the borders one it's imperfect it's too hard to do perfectly you can make it harder and one of the things we have to do is come to the realization there will be another attack like 9/11 and just decide right now we're not going to get freaked out by it we're gonna not overreact we're gonna move forward cuz somebody can do that it's just not that hard we're going to need to engage in the world though one of the things I used to tell people of Afghanistan you can't build enough walls around your compound you can't build an armored vehicle so strong and you can't wear enough body armor to protect you if the people want to kill you your security ultimately comes from the people in a local area has to they see things they know things they stop kids from joining they stop IEDs well it I think that's true around the world as well we look at what happened in Libya people had a lot of talk today but one of the realities is in every country we rely typically upon the government to provide local security for diplomats and whatnot we have to the Libyans wouldn't want us to put two battalions of Marines in to protect our consulate it's just not practical and it's not acceptable so you've got to build relationships and understandings to do that so I think the reality is we have to make America more secure but understand it's not going to be perfectly secure and we've got to make the world a place that we are comfortable navigating again we're not going to secure the world we're not going to make everybody do what we want but if we're not secure and navigating it and comfortable in doing that we're not going to see threats we're not going to be able to convince people to to deal with them as they grow and we're not going to be able to shape the future to reduce the number of threat so just two in a time when America I think a lot of us would kind of like to withdraw back into our borders fix our economy fix our schools let the world do what its gonna do I don't think we can do that I think it's short-sighted from how much room excuse me how much room in the military is therefore critical thought because a lot of what I think of the military is very top-down yes sir no sir how hi sir so how much room is there for junior officers especially to make changes it's even at like a local battalion level yeah you hit something really really important part of it is the truth and part of it is the reality and the to matter I mean the perception and reality because the military is a conservative organization that's hierarchical you can't get away from that you wear your rank overtly on your uniform people can see they can see how old you are they can see where you've been they can see how senior you are so there's a natural hesitation for people to talk up in quite as brutally and honest away as we need to senior leaders are the people who have to change that dynamic senior leaders have got to find a way to make people feel comfortable enough to talk up but not let it be chaos I mean you can't let everybody just you know act a fool so how do you how do you create that balance one of the things that I think and again it's always a challenge in the military because as leaders when you become senior you know when you're young you'd say I got to be able get the word up when you're my age and somebody young says you know Stan I think you're an idiot your first response is thanks for your feedback your first response is I'm going to kick his ass so you got to get over that and everybody's got to get out what we did in special ops was we try to create in the CT world a meritocracy where people could talk to regardless of your rank based on you sort of proving credibility over time but we were a limited community that got to know each other for a long time so it actually was much easier for us to do that in the wider military you're gonna have to create a help create an environment where people talk other militant some other militaries do it much better than us the British military actually if you go to a Staff College they'll have majors telling the visiting general hey general Stan I think I think you got it completely wrong you completely screwed that up and they'll do that and Americans are much more hesitant to do that and then their other militaries where they won't say anything just tighter that fair it's an absolute problem but it's not just a military it's a problem in a lot of organizations I don't think if you go on Wall Street and you go up and tell the CEO that he's an idiot that you're gonna be wildly successful question in the back any more questions I've got a couple right here thank you I thought it might be safe now to ask about the movies I just saw zero dark thirty last night and I noticed that you made a special point when you were talking about identifying your target in Iraq that you got your information from detainees through long conversations I'm not sure if I read too much into that but I assumed that might be a perspective that you have on the use of torture and how how successful that is gathering information so first of all I'd love to hear what you thought of the movie and second of all I'm curious about the detainee and the torture she's yeah I did see the movie and I didn't stir during the whole movie I didn't go get a glass water didn't move because if it's a very entertaining gripping movie no doubt about it a few points first on that the issue of torture I never saw waterboarding I can't judge whether it works or doesn't work I suspect that you can get information out of people if you're willing to torture them it may not be perfect information but I know if you tortured me I talk so you know I just start with that assumption the problem with torture is not that in my view whether it works or doesn't work the problem with torture is what it does to the torturer if you start to torture people you cross a line something in you changes and if you're the individual that does the torture you've created unintentionally to walk back up if you do it as an organizational position if you the French in Algeria found themselves this way they started to accept torture and what they found was it was eroding the professionalism and the the moral values of the force so what they found was they were in a different position as people and as an organisation than they wanted to be and they also of course lost credibility with their own public and with the people in the area the worst thing that ever happened and this was seared into my mind in April of oh four pictures of Abu Ghraib came out now I had never had direct dealings with a brute grave I was doing you know CT stuff at the time the pictures came out they were just unbelievable and they were put in the papers as America did this and we had a flood of foreign fighters young men from North Africa Syria Saudi Arabia come in as suicide bombers and foreign fighters completely motivated by the fact that they'd seen these photographs which were to them proof positive that that's American policy we had heard America does this here's the proof and they went and they they made the war much much harder so to me that was even though that wasn't technical you know that torture and we think it was mistreatment it had that effect so I think it's extraordinary that it to other parts of the movie I thought were really good was they showed it was a decade-long effort by a whole bunch of people it wasn't just one good-looking blonde lady that did it it was really this huge group of people who sacrificed and I was in Afghanistan where the suicide bomber blew up it down there host and those were pros trying to make it happen just desperately trying to perform for their nature and for their nation and they died and then finally the raid in my view was stunningly realistic I mean it felt like raids I'd been on I mean they didn't over dramatize that nobody dode through windows and threw a hand-grenade over their head it was methodical and that's the way it is and so I thought that part was really faithful in tone I don't know about to that perfect specific rate thank you sir I was just wondering if you could comment you know you mentioned during her time at JSOC you were bringing in other parties bringing an expertise from the Intel community from other communities once you have those other constituencies assembled you know they they don't automatically all function as one team so how do you make that final step of you know you've got all the parties together how do you make them act sort of together as one you know have those conversations where the Intel person is sort of telling someone else advice so through my class last spring most people did so don't worry about it here's what you get you asked when you're gonna form something for multi organizational entity a task force or Joint Task Force since we are creating you ask all the different Intel agencies and different military units to provide people and what happens is if their leadership isn't really focused what do you get you get the people that are expendable you know so-and-so is not working - you go over and join that task force because that's all right some organizations don't do that some organizations send superstars but you first deal with the fact you get really uneven Talent and then some of that talent comes with instructions from their headquarters don't cooperate they say be part of it but don't give away any of our organizational equities don't tell any of our secrets don't whatever so you got to first go up to the people they bring and you got to make them convinced that this is a very important incredible thing and you share information with everybody my organization we had a lot of good information that they didn't have and what we did was we shared it all we said here it is you you guys can have access to everything now share with us so that was part of it and that for about the first year day year-and-a-half you know we made progress slow and steady but for two years as we did our video teleconference we had one organization that every day their rep you'd go to them and you go what do you got and the guy would go nothing from here today two years now about a year later they started you know actually getting but it takes a long time the next thing we did was we went to their senior directors director of the different organizations head of the FBI had a and whatnot and I tried to establish personal relationships with them and treat them like stockholders or or board of directors for our task force and I talked about our task force which was seven one four and I said we're your task force we have a hundred and some people from the CIA we have 90 people from FBI we have this this this it's not my task force I'm in charge here but you all the owners of this thing and so every month we had a video teleconference with them and we reported back what was happening we said this is what your team is doing this is the credit you get we tried to spread credit as widely as we could because every organization wants credit particularly in the US government if there's an effort every organization wants to believe they did part of it and they did so what you do is you try to make sure that that that that goes and then you treat people you don't Astra sighs the people they send there's a cultural thing to it you go in the mess hall you go in you don't treat you don't have a tearing of classes just because the guy's a 22 year old Intel guy he's got piercings all over his face and all like that he's not less important than me or less important than a aviator or something like that he just brings different expertise and it takes a little bit to get over that because when you first start everybody's a little bit suspicious and everybody wants to kind of go into your culture culture is your problem and culture can be can become a strength if it comes a task force culture and that was what I mean I spent most of my time doing that I spent very little of my time deciding what targets to hit her things I spent my time making the coach for the team work because then the team would do all the work and that's you know that's sort of the biggest takeaway I I came with it thanks please join me in thanking general McChrystal

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 9,293

Rating: 4.6500001 out of 5

Keywords: General McChrystal, leadership, army, Yale University, military, US Military, marines, joint, leader, NATO, women in the military, intelligence, cooperation, US Army

Id: snUGTgLEC3c

Length: 69min 27sec (4167 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2013