Full transcript: Stanley McChrystal on London Real
5:38 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is General Stanley McChrystal, the former four-star general who served for 44 years in the US Army. In 2003, you were directly involved in the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 2006, your forces were responsible for the death of al-Qaeda leader Musab al-Zarqawi, and in 2009 you took command of all American coalition forces in Afghanistan.
5:59 Following your public retirement in 2010, you became a senior fellow at Yale University and co-founded the McChrystal Group, and your new book, Leaders: Myth and Reality, you explore what leadership really means, debunking the many myths. General, welcome to London Real.
6:14 Stanley McChrystal: Thanks for having me, Brian.
6:15 Brian Rose: What’s it like being in London from a military perspective? Because I’m sure I don’t see it, but it must be everywhere.
6:22 Stanley McChrystal: It is everywhere. I mean, you walk down the street and of course statues. There was an era when in Great Britain, age of Empire, the 19th century, first part of the 20th, where statues really represented everything, and for me that’s romantic, I can’t help but. I go through Admiralty Arch. I had been to some of these places in meetings when I was on active duty, and so you go by and there’s personal memories, but then there’s this just amazing amount of history, and you allow your mind to go back, even to 1940 and the Blitz and things like that, and so it, it feels almost like a military town even though it’s, it’s a city, it’s a capital city.
7:03 Brian Rose: Yeah, it is. Interesting, because it really is a lot of military here. Trafalgar Square, the HMS Belfast is parked right in the Thames. I mean, you know, you wouldn’t see that in DC or other places. I mean, I have a full-on warship there.
7:16 I mean, this country is steeped in it. You can still see the shrapnel scars down on the Thames of you know, some artifacts from Egypt that were there in the bombing in the 1940s. I mean, it really is a big part of this culture, isn’t it?
7:30 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, it is, and it’s its part not just of the legacy but about what makes Britain Britain and what makes British people feel so proud of their heritage.
7:39 Brian Rose: Right, and you’re kind of a Navy buff, even though you’re an Army guy, right?
7:44 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, that’s strange. The age of sailing ships particularly, the early 19th century, Horatio Nelson and Hornblower and all those stories, and I, I was just, found that really interesting from a leadership standpoint. Captain out on the sea and with a tremendous amount of autonomy, but also making a teamwork, because I think there were eight hundred and fifty sailors on Admiral Nelson’s ship, and this constantly changing thing with 26 miles of sails, or 26 acres of sails, trying to coordinate this thing and then get it into battle and fight.
8:19 Brian Rose: 100 ship, 100-gun ship, it’s extraordinary. 850 people on the same boat, right? So what a management nightmare. Think about it: multiple decks, different backgrounds, smoke, pitching seas, enemy fire coming in, and you’re trying to do all this. I want to get into this book, but I also still want to talk a little bit more about you.
8:38 You know, when you see Nelson on the top of that column and the guy with the one arm, and you know, there’s pictures of him dying on one side of Trafalgar Square, I mean, you must have thought about some of the things you talk about in your book, you know, the myths and the realities. I’m sure you must have looked into some of British naval history.
8:56 Stanley McChrystal: You can’t help it, because they’re iconic, and of course Nelson’s iconic here. He is, I think, five foot seven inches, he’d lost an eye, lost an arm, and yet he leads the nation, or the nation’s Navy, in this battle, particularly the pitched battle at Trafalgar, and of course romantically he’s killed during the battle, and then his force goes on to a huge triumph, so it’s almost the epitome of heroic leadership.
9:18 But when you peel back on it, he was a heroic guy, but there were many more sailors flogged as they left Trafalgar coming back to England in after the great victory than we want to admit. So I mean, it was also, there was a tough side to it, and he was a tremendous, I want to say, decentralized leader. He viewed his captains as entrepreneurs of battle. So what he did was he via these middle-class captains in the British Navy in those days, it was, it was different from the French or Spanish Navy where he intended to have people of more noble birth.
9:55 British middle-class captains were steeped from the day they became a midshipman in how to save a ship, and so they were masters of their craft, but they also, how they made their retirement money was taking prizes, because they divided the prize money among the crew with the captain getting the biggest amount. So captains were entrepreneurs because they were Patriots and they were entrepreneurs because they wanted a good retirement, and Nelson understood the psyche of this, and so what he did was he gave very broad mission-type orders, and then the famous order before the Battle of Trafalgar that said no captain can do very wrong if he puts his ship alongside that of the enemy, and he’s basically saying you guys sort it out once he gets in the fight, right?
10:38 Brian Rose: So go for it.
10:39 Stanley McChrystal: Exactly what he told him. Exactly.
10:40 Brian Rose: And interesting, I didn’t realize there was kind of a capitalistic, you know, side of that too, so not only get the victory but you can get the bounty as well. Exactly.
10:48 Stanley McChrystal: What did capitalism, capitalism at its finest. And what they found is more noble or wealthy captains who were put by position in the French and Spanish Navy didn’t do as well because there wasn’t that same drive.
10:59 Brian Rose: Interesting. Wow. And so the whole point of this book, from I understand, is to try to debunk some of the mythology of these leaders so we all can, one, first of all, not ask our leaders to live up to be these mythology, mythological people and to accept them for their flaws and their attributes, and so we all can step up as well and become leaders.
11:17 Is that a reasonable summary?
11:19 Stanley McChrystal: It really is. If you think about the leaders that you’ve studied in history, superficially they are perfect: Julius Caesar, Robert E. Lee, George Washington, you pick one and they’re perfect, which almost discourages us from trying to be that, because you see this mythological person and you go, well that’s great, but I could never be that. When you get close to the reality of those leaders, in fact it’s much more approachable, it’s much more realistic.
11:44 They, they are flawed. Julius Caesar comes to the Rubicon River, and we think crossing the Rubicon into, into Rome, he takes the 13th Legion and we think he’s decisively crossing the Rubicon. Actually he stops on the near bank and frets over it, he hand-wrings, should I go, should I not go, and then when they cross the Rubicon it’s ankle-deep, so it’s not nearly as dramatic an event at the moment, nor is he as decisive a leader as we want to believe, but at the end of the day he makes the decisive move and he goes on, he becomes the dictator of Rome.
12:21 Right, so these people were capable, but history is written by the victors, and so we rewrite them to be even bigger than they are, and we rewrite it because we want them to be bigger than they are. Right, there’s a tradition in biography to treat the subject as the star of the play, so you put the spotlight on them and you follow them through their life. Well, with a spotlight on that central person, everything else is slightly in the shadows, and so the other people around them, the other factors get minimized, and that person becomes the central thing in each scene, and in reality that’s not how things work.
12:59 Brian Rose: Right. Tell me about your own leadership, because you said something really interesting, I think, on one of the interviews where you said, I don’t even remember events of my own leadership correctly, as in I thought that was this, but when I look back it was something else. That’s very honest, but what if you could expand on that?
13:17 Stanley McChrystal: Sure. You know, we all fall into this mythology of great leaders, and as I got more senior, more people start telling you, oh, you are a great leader, there’s a danger you start believing it.
13:28 Brian Rose: Why is that dangerous?
13:29 Stanley McChrystal: Well, because once you think you’ve got the right answer, you’ve figured it out, there’s a certain arrogance, it’s not intentional, a lack of humility, and humility keeps you listening, humility keeps you learning, humility keeps you sensitive to the things around you. I don’t want to say that it makes you paranoid, but humility makes you careful that you don’t already have the right answer. When I wrote my memoirs, what happened was I thought, okay, this won’t be hard, because I was there, right?
14:02 And so we did all these interviews to get more details on things that had happened, and what we found was most of my memories weren’t wrong, but they were totally incomplete, and so I would make a decision and then there’d be an outcome and I would get credit or blame, and I’d say okay, but then when we did the interviews, we found many, many other people did things, in many cases that actually had much more to do with the outcome than anything I did, and so as a consequence I started to say, well, I’m in the play but maybe I’m not the star.
14:34 Brian Rose: Okay, what was the biggest example of that?
14:37 Stanley McChrystal: Well, we went after one terrorist in Afghanistan, and I had given that the order to go after Abu Abdullah Mullah Dadullah Lang, and he was a one-legged Taliban leader, a really tough guy, and so we had to do this operation and I had basically given the order, get him and go after him.
14:54 Here, okay, and we went after him, when we got him. In reality what I’d given was completely wrong initially, and so more intelligence came in, people modified, they didn’t do it the way I had suggested that they do it, yet we got the outcome, so I sort of bask and, how smart am I? And in reality all I’d basically done is unleash them to do the right thing, and they made it happen, and for some reason, you know, in the march of war and things, I just never got the details in the moment, and so, but it’s helpful to get it later.
15:29 Brian Rose: Right, but it’s also your job to take ownership of the good and the bad, for whatever happens. I mean, that’s something that’s something that you’ve always done.
15:38 Stanley McChrystal: You have to, and people worry about it, they sometimes don’t want to delegate decisions because they’re afraid they’ll be responsible. They sometimes, some people, if something goes wrong they go, well actually my people below that did that. There’s no point in that.
15:52 I mean, you just have to accept responsibility because you are responsible. You certainly take the credit when it goes well, and so it keeps faith with the people below you just to say it goes with a position, I accept it.
16:07 Brian Rose: Okay, it’s life. I want to ask some leadership lessons at different points in your career. Take me back to the ’70s at West Point.
16:15 Yeah. First of all, what’s it like at West Point, and also what was it like back then? Because for civilians we probably have this version of what you guys do in there, but what is it really like? And I’m sure you learned a lot of these core lessons there.
16:29 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, I did, many of them sort of kicking and screaming.
16:32 I got to West Point in 1972, which was a pretty interesting time. It was the tail end of the Vietnam War, so the US Army was badly damaged, the superintendent was relieved of command right before we got there for cover-ups with the My Lai massacre, so there was a sort of pall over the officer corps in general, and the faculty then was all young officers, many just recently back from Southeast Asia, so they represented that, and so the military was lacking confidence, they were worried about integrity. We hadn’t done very well in some things in Vietnam, and so West Point was on the one hand steeped in long-term tradition, so there was a lot that just was continuing on, but it was trying to examine those lessons and try to be appropriate for the future, correct problems before they occur later.
17:32 So it was also a time when getting into West Point was a little bit easier because it wasn’t as popular, so I tell people all the time, I got in the Academy’s easiest year ever to be admitted, and here I am. But at the Academy there was an awful lot of tradition of do things the way they had been done under Sylvanus Thayer, who’s considered the father of the Academy, the beginning of the 19th century. Daily recitations, a lot of discipline, a fourth class or plebe system that involved hazing and that sort of thing.
18:07 Some of it was absurd, but the idea was you put people under pressure, both in that fourth class system and then the whole four years, pressure of time, pressure of performance, and you make a better officer. Someone that’s, correct, there’s an awful lot of that that’s absolutely correct, and things that I learned and qualities that I think were at least begun in me. Go back to that. Okay, and there were other parts of it that were not as well thought through.
18:37 In fact, hazing plebes and whatnot taught people some negative leadership lessons. You can’t haze soldiers in the Army, they won’t put up with it.
18:46 Brian Rose: Right, and so there’s not much point in learning how to haze plebes at West Point because you’re supposed to be preparing for the Army. And you’ll pay for it later as a leader anyway.
18:56 Stanley McChrystal: Absolutely.
18:57 Stanley McChrystal: Okay, so there was some positive and negatives, but for me it was very good from the standpoint of, it forces you to be organized, it forces you to get things done, it forces you to be on time, and those habits, I still fold the underwear in my drawer, my wife laughs at me, but I developed a lot of pretty helpful habits that have stuck with me, and I think there’s value in that.
19:21 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’ve had some great people in that chair and most of them have great daily habits. You know, I know you get up early and go for your run, and you know, I’d be really shocked if there was a great leader out there who didn’t have his own personal great habits.
19:38 Stanley McChrystal: You know, I think that’s crucial. I think you have to. It goes with self-discipline. When I look at what I consider really effective leaders, and there were some exceptions, they tend to be fairly organized in their lives. Now there may be parts of their lives they don’t consider important, so they don’t worry about, but the things that they say are important, maybe their health, maybe their reading, maybe their age, you know, that sort of thing, they tend to be intentional about it and they tend to be disciplined in its execution.
20:06 Brian Rose: I think something you say in the book, it’s great to have a leader that spells out the mission and gets the team together and shows them the vision, but it’s the daily practice that the team and the troops watch, and they watch you like a hawk, and they watch to see what you do, and that’s where it’s all about [expletive], you know, congruent with what you say and what you do.
20:25 Stanley McChrystal: In the military particularly, but it’s true all elsewhere, people watch you on a daily basis. You’re always leading, so if you come out and you say, okay everybody, we are going to do this, we’re going to take the organization in different directions, some, they go back and they add in all their calculations from what they see and they decide, can they do it?
20:44 They look at Brian and they say, is he capable and willing and committed to taking us to this? And if they do, then you get a completely different level of commitment from them, and if they go, no, this is the fad of the week, or we started last time then Brian lost interest, or whatever, or Stan just didn’t have the courage to do it, they discounted.
21:04 Brian Rose: Right, which means it won’t get done. Exactly. Take me on to Special Forces.
21:08 You were attracted to this, you went on that journey. Why is that something that’s attractive to a young man, or did you want to push yourself, and what did you learn?
21:19 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, I think the first thing that’s attractive about anything that’s elite is you want to see if you can do it, plus you want to be one of the cool people, and so I had watched war movies and whatnot, and I had become very interested in trying to be Special Forces, a Green Beret, so when I was a first lieutenant, I’d been a parachute infantry in the 82nd first, and that was good, but it was the 1970s Army and it wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be, a lot of problems, but then I went to Special Forces.
21:51 Brian Rose: They’re not being congruent with what they’re saying and what they’re doing.
21:55 Stanley McChrystal: Exactly. You’re not buying in as much, and that’s a big problem, because if an organization says we are elite, we are the best at what we do, and then you get in that organization and you find that’s not true, there’s a tremendous disappointment, and it’s at what we call the say-do gap. There’s a difference between what we say and we do, and the cynicism from inside your organization comes from that.
22:16 Okay, and so I wanted to be in Special Forces, I, you know, watched Vietnam, you know, unfold and whatnot, so I went there in late ’78 as a first lieutenant and I was remarkably disappointed, because Special Forces at that point was out of Vietnam and it was really at the lowest point, it wasn’t very professional. I mean, there were some good people in it and we did some good things and I learned some good things, but the difference between what I had hoped it would be and what it was was just massive, and so I’d like doing it, but I, I realized this is not, this is a shadow of what I want to be, and yet I wanted to be in really good organizations. I wanted to find a place where I thought I was part of something that was truly special, world class, as professional as it could be.
23:10 I later found that in the Ranger Regiment, but it gets to the, to why people want to do it, and again I wanted to ensure that I could be the best, but I’ll be quite honest, I also wanted, when I walked around, I wanted people to look at me and think, he’s one of the best. Right, you know, I just, I wanted that aura to cover me as well.
23:31 Brian Rose: Right, that pride. Yeah, and then you know, deep down inside that we don’t cut corners, we really are the best inside. Exactly.
23:39 So were you an agent of change inside there, or you just, I’m going to the Rangers.
23:44 Stanley McChrystal: And when I was in Special Forces as a first lieutenant, I was on my team and I was, you know, trying to do things in, and I was happy with that, but the larger organization, I don’t think I was much of an agent of change. I just didn’t have a big enough vision. I was a smartass first lieutenant, you know. I once told my major, company commander, you know, just step back and let me run my team, and I got it, and he fired me.
24:08 It’s the only time in my life I’ve been actually fired. So he fires me, so I don’t know what you do when you’re fired, so I go back to my team room where my, my Special Forces team, 12 men, 18, and I tell my team, starting, I said, I got fired, which, relieved of command, and so I sat there and I was just kind of shocked, this and what do you do when you get relieved? To come in, and then my company commander came over about an hour later and he goes, I’m not firing you, but let me talk to you, young man, and he was really a wise old major, was a great guy, and you know, he kind of grabby by, you know, the collar and said, listen, here’s the thing, you don’t do that, and you don’t ever do that in front of people, because I could and should have crushed your career forever.
24:49 And he’s right. There’s one of those good life lessons. So I was kind of a smartass. Later when I went to the Rangers, it was an organization that was much closer to being what they said they were. They had this great reputation, they had these very high standards, and they actually lived them.
25:08 Now they didn’t live them quite as well as I had hoped that they would, so there I did become an agent of change, one of several who were pushing to make sure that what we said we were, we actually did.
25:20 Brian Rose: Okay, I want to fast forward to a few days. You just gave me your perspective on leadership lessons and what you remember from them. 2003, capture of Saddam Hussein. I still remember watching stuff on the news.
25:33 I just moved to London, and oh, I remember this statue falling. I mean, it’s a crazy time, it’s 15 years ago now. Yeah. What do you remember from that time? You’re elite, you’re a very senior leader now.
25:45 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, it was less than you’d imagine, because what had happened is this was seven, eight months after the invasion. Saddam Hussein had escaped, and then there was this rising popular insurgency, people shooting rocket-propelled grenades and putting out improvised explosive devices, so we were losing control of Iraq, but it looked not very organized, and we thought at first that it was these old Ba’ath generals who have brought former military together and Saddam Hussein is pulling the strings. Then the more we looked, it didn’t really feel like that, it felt like less controlled by that, and instead the rise of what became al-Qaeda in Iraq, but still we thought we had to get Saddam Hussein because he was a symbol and he was sort of unfinished business, so we worked really hard and captured him in December of 2003.
26:41 A detainee started to talk and then able to capture him, but as soon as we captured him there’s this moment of great maybe Iraq well, but inside the force we sort of knew intuitively he wasn’t really the problem at this point, the problem was now different, and so we asked for a short period of time in the glow of that. The president called me personally and said, thank the unit on through me, but we already saw al-Qaeda in Iraq as arising and said, we said the real problem is yet to come.
27:15 Brian Rose: Right, which is what you worked on for the next three years.
27:19 Stanley McChrystal: Exactly, with al-Zarqawi.
27:20 Brian Rose: Exactly, and hunting him, and things really changed. I mean, things got really hairy over there, and you’re in a real leadership position and you’re dealing, yeah, what’s it like when you’re getting phone calls from presidents and dealing with the CIA? And I mean, this is a whole new type of warfare we haven’t really seen before. That must be tricky to manage.
27:38 Stanley McChrystal: It is, and remember that all of us as we go up through our careers, there’s a first time for everything, and so I was a Major General when I took command of Joint Special Operations Command. I go over to Iraq in the fall of 2003 just when it’s starting to get really tricky. The first part, it looked like it was going to be straightforward, then it started to circle the drain, as we described it, and suddenly I’m dealing with the director of the CIA a lot.
28:03 I’m not talking to the president a lot, but I’m getting conversations with him. I’m talking to the Secretary of Defense a lot. I’d never played on that stage before, and so I personally am figuring out how do I fit here, how do I act, what do you do? You know, it’s all the little things. You always go into a meeting and everybody else looks really self-confident.
28:23 I joke about this, you go in the Oval Office and there everybody goes in and you expect them to put their feet up on the table because they’re trying to show, yeah, we hang out here all the time this way, what’s a Super Bowl, they feel the same way as you do, and I’m sitting there thinking, wow, what am I doing in the Oval Office? This is a mistake. So you’ve got to get over that. Sort of everyone’s projecting power because they all have an agenda, they want to get something done.
28:46 Brian Rose: And exactly, so it’s, it’s really at a poker table there.
28:49 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, you kind of got to get over that, and then you got to be, you know, act like you’ve been there before too, but suddenly you find yourself, and nobody else is going to do it, you have to sit at the table, you have to push things, you have to pull agencies. If you think somebody else is going to do it, it’s not going to get done. So really in the first part of 2004, I’d say if my personal growth became a period when, as JSOC started to get its legs under itself for the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq, I started to get my own confidence and what my role was going to be, and it was much more active than I had expected.
29:23 I expected to get orders and we would go do stuff. They didn’t get any orders, nobody above me was giving me anything other than try to beat those guys, and so that turned out to be great, but I had to build the confidence to say, okay, I’m going to get a hold of this, we’re going to do this, we’re going to change this, I’m not going to ask permission, we’re just going to do it, and the more you do it the more comfortable you feel doing that, but it’s a growth process.
29:50 Brian Rose: Right, and the whole command has to kind of grow with you.
29:53 Brian Rose: It’s probably a bit like being an entrepreneur, like no one tells you how to do it, you can read all the books but you’ve got to kind of go in there and do it.
30:00 Stanley McChrystal: That’s right, and the more you do it, the more confident you become and the more credibility you have with other people. That’s right.
30:06 Brian Rose: And the CIA is technically doing what the president says, right? And so when they ask you to do something, it’s, I mean, that’s tricky cause you’re,
30:13 Stanley McChrystal: it’s very tricky, and they’ve got an agenda and they’ve got a culture and they want to do it.
30:17 They’re not bad people, but it’s not the same as DoD, right? So you get a hold of CIA and say, I want you to do this, and we got to do this together, and there’s this initial, you know, sort of hairy eyeball from each side and cautious stuff, and what we learned is you had to build personal relationships which you proved that there was integrity and credibility and reliability, and those become the sinew that connect the organizations, because organizations can have professional relationships, but it all has to be held by that personal part so that ultimately if Stan McChrystal asks them to do or asks somebody to do it, they’ll do it largely because of that, and vice versa. And so that was a real education for me.
31:05 I thought that process-wise organizations did that, and they don’t do it as much. And the same in the corporate world, very much the same, as you probably remember from banking and whatnot, it’s about people. Essentially you look across the table and you decide, do I believe that person, can I trust that person, and you do it.
31:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, I always just tell my juniors in banki and I said, you know, you sell yourself first, you know, don’t sell the product, you sell yourself.
31:33 People do business with people, they do business with you because I know you got my back, I can trust you, I can trust my business, you’re going to look out for me. They don’t do business with institutions.
31:44 Stanley McChrystal: It’s, you know, it’s funny, when you’re in the military as you become senior you get briefed all the time, so people are coming in to brief you and you can never master the subject because as you’re senior it gets too wide, too arcane, and so most guys who get effective at senior level don’t really look at the slides, they look at the briefer.
32:03 And it’s funny, and sometimes it’ll be disconcerting to the briefer, you know, okay sir, you know, analysis on this. I am, I can’t analyze that, I don’t have enough information, I’m analyzing you, I’m deciding if I think you’re credible, and if so, your analysis and your conclusions are something I’ll accept. And that can be, when you’re first young and people do it to you, you wonder, but as you get senior it’s by far the most effective technique.
32:29 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s powerful.
32:30 That’s a great lesson for anyone listening. Back, I interviewed someone last night and they come in and I just take the CV and I put it in the bin and I just ask him questions: tell me what have you been doing in the last two years, what do you think about this, and I just watch the way they answer me, right? And I get a good read on their character and are they blaming other people for things, are they taking responsibility, are they admitting to failures, are they showing lessons learned.
32:52 That tells me a ton about how they’ll behave in the field. How do you build relationships when you’re in Baghdad or wherever, in their own DC?
33:00 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, we did a lot of traveling. One, so when I would fly back to the States to my headquarters at Fort Bragg and I’d do that maybe once a quarter, and I’d spend a few days back, I’d go to DC and I’d go visit them and I’d go to their offices, I’d sit down and I try to, you don’t do corporate dinners, that’s not done in government, but you go to their offices, sit down, drink coffee, and you try to get eyeball to eyeball.
33:22 So that was sort of phase one, and okay, pretty obvious. The next was we used video teleconferences really effectively, so other than phone calls, like phone calls much, because I like to see the person, we did a lot of video teleconferences with people, and so you’re seeing their face you, you convey some level of rapport, and so you try to communicate with the person who you need a relationship with on a pretty regular basis, so that over time they start to think the relationship with you is of some value and importance. Then we did another thing that worked very well, we put liaison people with all the places that were important to us, which ended up being 76 different locations.
34:10 JSOC put out liaisons, and in some places we put three people to make one, so that’d be 24 hours a day, and the idea was we put great people out at a great cost to us. If you’re an ambassador somewhere or a head of an agency, our liaison to you would be there all the time, and if you wanted something from my organization, literally if you whispered it, that person would hear it and would act on it, and the design was to build trust vicariously, i.e. that person’s very responsive to you. If you said, well, what does McChrystal think about this, he comes and calls me directly and he has authority to do that, he goes back to you in half an hour and says, sir, General McChrystal thinks this, this, he’s willing to do this, and he kind of looks at the liaison, he goes, you call directly to your boss?
35:00 You know, you could talk. Says, yeah, yeah, we think our relationship with you is that important. Kind of like client stuff. And the reality is it started to build these trusted relationships, and we had liaisons who became literally indispensable to the organizations they were with, because we needed that relationship. The other thing it gave us was, with all these liaisons out, we had this incredible network of information gathering, so we knew things were happening faster and in greater depth than ever before, and a liaison would go, hey, the CIA is upset with us about this, we could start act on it just immediately and get it out.
35:39 I hadn’t anticipated that value, but it turned out to be really good to inform us with Intel but also formas with the less hard Intel, more attitude, kind of things that matter.
35:50 Brian Rose: Yeah, back to relationships. Yeah. And how do you manage all that? You can’t be getting calls from 76 people on a daily basis.
35:58 Stanley McChrystal: And you get calls from them whenever, because they go right to the top of the priority. Okay, because the relationship with me and the director of the CIA is crucial. Sheriff, so if the, I don’t know, from there he talks straight to me, now you don’t get him every day from him, then we have this big video daily video conference and the command that allows to press but that’s up, but at the top of the parties cuz key to my role became that.
36:22 Brian Rose: Which, interesting, you say okay, if you’re doing that so much, what are you not doing?
36:27 Stanley McChrystal: What I’m not doing is the operational direction of things that I used to do. Okay, I, I push that down, got a lot of people who actually are better doing that than I am, much more competent, much more effective, push that down, let the organization run what the organization does well, but there are certain things you, senior leader, can’t give away because the senior person at an embassy or an agency doesn’t want to deal with, yeah, they want to deal with the top and they deserve that respect.
36:59 Brian Rose: Did you miss not being involved in operations too?
37:02 Brian Rose: Yeah, be kind of a good leader putting something, delegating something they like doing but they know could be done better.
37:08 Stanley McChrystal: Well, that’s right, I mean, you grow up liking to do that and you feel like that’s your strength, so you say, well, that’s what I’m going to do, but that’s actually not what you need to do.
37:17 Brian Rose: Right, right. Tell me about those next three years. I mean, you were credited with making some major advancements against al-Qaeda.
37:23 The big thing was finally the killing of al-Zarqawi. What are your thoughts on that, what was that like?
37:30 Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, I was part of an organization that changed fundamentally, and that was, very few times in life do you get to be part of that, and I was part of the change, but I wasn’t the beginning, end, or all of the change at all, it was the organization. What we did is we came to a conclusion in early 2004 that we had to change completely, and we’re this very elite purpose-built counter-terrorist force, and we’d been for 22 years of our history we’d been very successful, so there’s great inertia and open resistance to changing, but here we are facing al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is fundamentally different, it’s powered by information technology, it’s got a different culture and DNA than anything we’d ever seen, in a greater scale.
38:16 So we start fighting it in our traditional way, and we’re doing well at the tactical things, but the scale of it and the speed of it means that the impact of what we were doing just was lost in all the other things that were happening. So we had to do more, we had to do it faster, we had to do it better, and we couldn’t change our traditional processes, our mechanical industrial-age processes wouldn’t do it, you just couldn’t speed them up that much because I was approving every operation, you know, and sort of our culture, so we changed that completely to push decision making way down. Pump information, instead of information going to the top for decisions, information went to everybody simultaneously, not through the normal chain of command, which was pretty upsetting to a lot of people initially.
39:03 So we did that and the organization started operating like a human brain or like a computer chip, a transistor, information’s flow, and really rapidly then we could operate those operations down. My role changed to be, instead of being a part of that process, I manage the ecosystem in which that process was occurring. Okay, and that was, that was important and valuable, and I wasn’t the only person manager, but it was the biggest thing I did, and the relationships out, and then it’s this little nuclear reactor goes faster and faster and more effective and more effective.
39:42 We pick up more skill, more knowledge, and more insights on how to keep changing, and the culture of the organization becomes whatever it, whatever works is what we do, and so whatever doesn’t work we stop doing, whatever works we do more of them, we just keep going, and when that stops we keep changing. So if it changed the coach from the organization, changed my role, and we went from doing four raids a month when I took over, one a week, to do in 300 and that was what was needed against that particular enemy. Wow.
40:18 Brian Rose: And the killing of al-Zarqawi, that was a big moment, that was a big success.
40:23 Stanley McChrystal: It was, and you know, you always put down and say it’s critical to kill this guy, and it was because he really was an effective leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. While it was necessary, it was insufficient, and so we knew that as we got him it wasn’t going to end the problem because there was too much resiliency inside al-Qaeda in Iraq. There was always this myth that if you capture Saddam Hussein, if you kill Zarqawi, if you kill Osama bin Laden, the problem will go away, but what that gets at is the leader is not the beginning and end of the organization.
40:57 The leader’s the figurehead sometimes, more than that, but sometimes they’re more symbolic than operational, and so we knew that we had to get Zarqawi because we had to prove we could. As long as he lived, he was both effective and he was a symbol of our ineffectiveness. So we had this break in intelligence where we had a set of detainees, 12 detainees, and as we went through them we knew we had 12 key leaders they captured all at one moment, and we identified several of them as likely important, and then we realized one of them definitely knew something, and for 50 days we interrogated him, and when you think interrogation, don’t think waterboard, we don’t do any of that.
41:45 What we do is you just talk to him every day, you put two interrogators with him and they build rapport. Whedon had movie night with a guy, he wanted to watch a movie, he got to watch his favorite movie, that we for some reason was The Exorcist, but anyway, so we build relationships with him.
41:59 Brian Rose: Interesting. And then just like leadership. Exactly.
42:02 Stanley McChrystal: And after 50 days he decides, okay, and he leads us to Zarqawi’s spiritual advisor. Three more weeks of trailing this guy using unmanned aerial vehicles and people on the ground, and he eventually leads us to Zarqawi, and we’re able to kill him, but even the day we killed him, we knew that that was going to be critical but it wasn’t going to be enough, and so we killed him in the afternoon and we did 17 more raids at night to try to keep up the momentum, and we had fought two and a half more years. Yeah.
42:33 Against his team, his organization.
42:35 Brian Rose: How do you explain to civilians the collateral damage, people that maybe don’t understand what’s going on there, because he had family around him and when you bombed al-Zarqawi, yeah, we, I mean, that’s a conversation you must have to have a lot of times.
42:49 Stanley McChrystal: You know, people, well, on the mechanical end there’s the collateral damage, everything you do, you calculate collateral damage beforehand. If you’re going to drop a bomb you do, there’s actually a computer program you run, collateral damage is not just structure, it’s obviously potentially innocent people, and so there was a set of rules of engagement that drove it, so we went to incredible efforts to try to minimize collateral damage whenever we could.
43:14 Sometimes you accept it, and you sometimes just say we’re going to do this and there’s either the possibility or high likelihood other people are going to get killed, and that becomes a value judgment that’s kind of hellish to make, but you do it. When we went after Zarqawi, I believed that his family, his wife and children, were in the house. I was confident of that, I couldn’t confirm it, but I was confident, so when we made the decision to bomb the house, I did that, you know, with that assumption.
43:45 I didn’t have, I don’t have sleepless nights over that. His effectiveness to the enemy and the horror that he brought in my mind clearly justified it. It’s just one of those things that you could never become cavalier about, you have to think about it, you have to think of them as human beings, not as numbers.
44:02 Brian Rose: Right, but it is the logical military decision and that’s what you got to move forward.
44:07 Stanley McChrystal: Absolutely, because you’re evaluating all the damage he’s doing to the civilians around him into your forces.
44:13 Brian Rose: Exactly. Okay, Abu Ghraib, you were quoted as saying that you met a lot of people in the insurgency that used that as a moment to kind of sign up, and I had actually a guy named Dr. Philip Zimbardo here who was involved in something called the Stanford experiment in the 1960s, where I read about it. Oh yeah. I had him here and it was fascinating because, you know, he kind of set up an Abu Ghraib psych situation where he took a group of Stanford students, split them into said one guards, one where students said do whatever you want to do, and it soon turned into this situation where they were kind of demeaning these people, and he talked about it and how all humans could kind of go there.
44:52 Your thoughts on what happened and how you could manage it and what you learned?
