3 Takeaways - Army General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal: "The Greatest Risk Is Us" - So What is the Solution? (#69)

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Former Commander of Afghanistan General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal shares lessons from Afghanistan, the impact of the withdrawal, what makes a great leader and what he is most proud of in his career. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described General McChrystal as, "Perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I have ever met." Learn what General McChrystal believes to be the biggest risk facing the U.S. and the solution.Gen. McChrystal rose to four-star general in the U.S. Army and Commander of both the International Security Assistance Force and Commander of the U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. He previously served as Director of the Joint Staff and as Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. He is the author of several books, including Leaders and Risk, and is currently a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and co-founder of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm delighted to be with General Stanley McChrystal. He was commander of the Joint Special Forces Command, that's Special Ops, and later commander in Afghanistan. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described General McChrystal as, quote, perhaps the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I have ever met, unquote. He's written two books, one on leadership and one on risk.

And I'm looking forward to learning how he leads and builds trust so strong that his men will risk their lives for each other. I'm also looking forward to learning what the lessons from Afghanistan are and how he sees the future of the military. Welcome, Stan, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Thanks for having me, Lynn. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Stan, you're reported to run seven or eight miles daily, eat one meal per day, and sleep four hours a night. Is that all true? The one meal a day part is still true. The running part has been modified since I had a series of back surgeries and back fusion. So I now walk long distance. So I guess I'm evolving into an old man. And then I sleep when I can. It's not as much as I'd like, but there's a certain rhythm to life that we all have. And that was just mine.

In 1950, General MacArthur took a huge strategic risk that changed the course of the Korean War when he landed Marines at Incheon in the rear of the North Korean soldiers and forced the North Korean soldiers to retreat. What do you view as your greatest strategic success? Certainly nothing approaching General MacArthur's landing at Inchon. But I think the biggest strategic success that I was a part of was changing United States Special Operations in the early 2000s from a very narrowly focused entity that did specific tasks into a integrated network that brought in not

just the Special Operations Forces, but other parts of the U.S. government and our allies, used information in a way we never had before, shared it, and achieved speed and precision at the same time on a level that we had not envisioned before. And I got to be part of that transformation, and I'm most proud of that. Why do you think former Defense Secretary Robert Gates called you the finest warrior and leader of men in combat I've ever met? What makes you stand out as a warrior

and leader of men in combat? Well, I think Secretary Gates is being overly generous. I'll say that up front because there are an awful lot of good people in combat. I will say what I think makes a good leader in combat, though. And there are several things. And I think the first starts with self-discipline. And it almost gets back to how a leader conducts themselves, because self-discipline isn't just whether you run a certain number of miles a day or sleep a number of hours or do things like that. It's how you treat people.

It's how you think about the people that you lead and the mission that you have. In the case of good combat commanders, I find they tend to be very focused on the mission that they have. They don't get distracted from that. That doesn't mean narrowly focused with blinders, but it means a relentless commitment to get to where the objective they've been assigned is. And then an understanding that you're not doing that alone. It's not about you. It's about this group of people, most of whom are much younger than you,

have a different perspective in life in many cases because they've had different life journeys. And so you're asking them to be a part of something that they come at from a different angle. And that's even more true for allies or members of other government agencies or where you're dealing with civilian entities. And the next is about having the empathy, not sympathy, but the empathy to be able to understand that other people have different

perspectives that are rational and that if you'd had their life journey, you'd have their perspective as well. And if a combat commander can understand that and then harness that, and when I say harness it, not in a negative way, but inspire that, cause people to believe that the shared objective for which we are going to risk much, in many cases, lives, is worth it. Then I think suddenly that leader becomes capable of generating the kind of energy and focus needed. And then the last thing I'd say is effective combat commanders can make decisions. And that seems simple. We all make thousands of decisions every day, what clothes to wear, what to eat, but we don't make thousands of decisions of huge import that sometimes affect the livelihood or the wellbeing of people.

And a combat commander has got to be able to deal with limited information. You can't mitigate risk to zero by getting perfect knowledge because it just it's impractical. And then you're going to make a certain number of decisions that don't work out. So a good decision maker, whether they're a combat commander or a leader of a university or a leader of a business, is going to make decisions that don't work out and they can't get upset and go in a fetal position and sob about it that didn't work out right. They've got to pick themselves up. They got to make another decision and keep going. And not everybody does that the same. And part of that, I think, is what things the person's born with.

And part of it is experience they've had and who's taught them to be a leader. Everybody's interested in inspiring people, building culture, building teamwork, but not many people succeed quite the way the military does. There aren't many people in the world today that we believe are heroes, but in the military, we see a disproportionate number of heroes, members of the military who risk their own lives to save and protect others. And when asked why they do it, what I've heard is that many say because they would have done it for me. And the military men and women seem to have an amazingly high level of trust in each other. Are these simply better human beings that go into the military? Or do you

build that in the military? And how do you build that? Yeah, Lynn, the military are actually better people than everyone else. No, no, it's the reality is the military is a subset of society. So at its best, the military should be a mirror of society. So when you look in the mirror mirror or you look at your military, you should see part of your society there. So the answer is they're no better and they're no worse than society. Now, the military has some advantages. When a military leader gets a mission, they can wrap themselves in the flag because it is a national mission. Typically, we are doing something for the defense of the nation and that sort of thing. Now, sometimes it's easier than others. When you fight foreign wars that aren't popular, it gets difficult because you start to have conflicted opinions from people in

different levels of support. But the reality is it's still the nation's business. And then the other part is the military culture supports the idea of heroes. You wear uniforms, you stand straight, you are asked to do things that are frightening, if not actually dangerous, and in many cases, very dangerous. So you get a chance to demonstrate courage on a constant basis. So a leader in the military has the opportunity to build the kind of credibility with the people that are younger and working for them that many civilian leaders do not get a chance to do. I mean, think about it. If you are the CEO of a bagel company and everybody likes bagels and that's a good thing and it gives people jobs. But at the end of the day, it's hard to stand up in front of everybody and say, if we make a better bagel, it will be a better world and we will all be safer and secure

and whatnot. The military has a slightly simple thing. And then there are a few other things that untalked about advantages. The one in the military is money. And you say, well, the military doesn't make money like civilian. That's exactly the advantage. In the military, everybody gets paid what the pay scale is. There are no bonuses. There are no raises. You can't pull somebody in and suddenly give more money. And they don't, in December, worry about whether their bonus is as big as a person two desks away. All that's taken off the table.

And you get enough money to live comfortably, but not enough money to be obsessed with it. And so it's never in the discussion. And so it sort of purifies everybody feels as though they are doing service to the nation, not in a huge sacrifice, but in a quiet way. And that makes it easier. And then finally, there are moments when leaders need to make very difficult decisions. And in the military, they are well known. We see movies about them. I've seen business and government leaders make morally courageous decisions that are extraordinarily hard, but they don't seem to crystallize as easily in the public imagination. It's harder for that person who takes a really difficult vote in the Senate to be portrayed

the same way as the sergeant who rises up and says, follow me, even though in some ways the same kind of courage is required. So it's not a bad thing that the military gets associated with heroes, although you got to dispel the idea that everyone in uniform is a hero. But the reality is we do bring forth values and ethos that are talked about and celebrated. And I think that's a positive aspect. And how do you lead in combat? Why do you think former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls you the finest leader of men in combat? I think that in the combat experience that I had, I went first to Afghanistan in 2002 and then came back. But then I led our counterterrorist forces for about five years and we were deployed the entire time in combat. So we fought every night, every single night. At one point, we were doing 300 raids a month in Iraq

alone. So 10 every night. And the pace of that required a few things. So I think one of the things that I saw in that force, the best commanders in that force, was this absolute focus on it. I stayed for five years. I went to the war and I stayed there. And so part of it was commitment. The force could see it, Secretary Gates could see it. And here is another one of the leaders of which I was not the only one by any means, was completely focused on getting this of which I was not the only one by any means was completely focused on getting this. And I was willing to sacrifice a big chunk of my life. And then the second was we were able to adapt. The military has doctrine and habits and they're like any other organization.

They were formed for logical reasons. And then as conditions change, at some point they become inappropriate, but it's hard to shift because inertial momentum says an object in motion stays in motion at the same direction and velocity unless changed. And that's really powerful. Think of the things in our lives that just keep doing the same way because we have. We changed special operations during that period. Fundamentally, we took a very proud, very, I don't want to overstate it, but almost arrogant force because we were so good at what we did, hostage rescue, counter hijacking, precision operations. You've seen them in the movies. We were so good at that, that changing the way we operated was difficult

because you're asking people the equivalent of a Super Bowl winning football team to shift to basketball. And we did that in the middle of the war. And we did that. It was bigger than a 90 degree turn. It was almost 180 degree turn in how we operated culturally and procedurally. And I think that he saw that adaptation and that willingness to do it in combat under pressure as reflecting the kind of things that he needed for military forces. And so he gives me disproportionate credit, but I was part of a team that did something pretty amazing. Stan, you always use the word we, you never say I. You commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan and were responsible for the surge. The U.S. moved to a lighter footprint after your departure

with less than 3,000 troops. How do you see the surge in retrospect? Yeah, it's a great question, Lynn. I see the surge as necessary in retrospect. Now, I would, though, because I was the person who advocated for it. But let me explain to people why I did. We went to Afghanistan in 2001,

not at the invitation of the Afghan people, but because it was in our interest to go after a sanctuary that al-Qaeda had created. And we asked the Taliban government to give them up, and they wouldn't. And so we went in and toppled the Taliban government in the process of going after al-Qaeda. And then we're there. We the West, but the United States primarily. So we're there. And then you have this question. A lot of people say, why didn't we leave immediately? Well, because Afghanistan had been at war for two decades already, 10 years of which against the Soviets, they'd been a proxy for us in our Cold War struggle against the Soviets.

And that's the way the Afghans saw it. And they lost 1.2 million Afghans in that effort. And all we provided was money and weapons. So you get 2001, we've almost got a moral requirement. Afghanistan is absolutely in tatters. And we could have all walked away, but they needed help to try to build a nation again. And they wanted that. And so we made the decision. For the first about eight years, the West didn't do very much. This is a misperception. People think that we poured billions of dollars for 20 years. The reality is for about the first eight years, 2001 to about 2008, the level of effort was pretty modest. And because it was modest and to be honest,

it wasn't really well organized or focused. There were lots of flaws in how it went. By 2008, the Taliban had achieved significant momentum in coming back because they were able to point at weaknesses in the Afghan government, and they were able to go to the Afghan people and say, look, this thing's a loser. Plus, the West, they're occupiers. They're not going to stay. So the Taliban were making inroads. So then I took command in 2009. The situation was, as we used to say, circling the drain. The Afghan people had lost confidence. The Taliban had gained confidence. There was waning support in Europe and the United States for the war. And yet we thought that if we were

going to have an opportunity for Afghanistan to be able to be sovereign, to protect its own borders, you needed to give them a bridge. You need to create enough security for long enough for them to do that. So the purpose of the surge was to take American and allied forces up to the level where we could provide that bridge while we did a very focused, intensified effort to build Afghan security forces. And that's what we did then. And to this day, I think the two choices were either to pull out and give up then or to try to do that. And the security part, we actually made a lot of progress. Where we didn't make the progress that needed to be made was in governance. The government of Afghanistan just didn't get the kind of legitimacy and ability to produce for the Afghan people that it needed to. So from then on, from really 2010 or actually 11, when they started drawing down troops,

the idea was to continue to let the Afghan forces build up, which actually went. And it looked like it was going to be better than it turned out to be. And then it was always this struggle to make the government of Afghanistan more conducted and credible to the people. But during that period, we kept talking about leaving. For domestic political reasons, a succession of leaders in America said, we're going to get out as soon as we can. We're going to end this forever war. And the Afghans listened to that. And they got more and more insecure because they keep looking to the exit to see when the Americans are going to leave. And so the reality was we had an opportunity

there, but then we started to undercut the confidence of the Afghan people. I think what we could have done, and again, this would have been a tough domestic political sell, was to tell the Afghan people, we will stay here as long as you need a strategic partner, theoretically forever, but we'll stay in a very small number. We'll provide help. We will be above a gesture, but below any significant combat forces. But just the signal to the Afghan people that we're with you, to the Pakistanis that, hey, we're here, and to the Taliban that we are here. The final straw was the Doha Accords. And once we made the decision to agree to every American

soldier, the confidence in the Afghan people went out like air out of a balloon. And from then, they're just for the next 18 months, they know that all Americans are going to leave. And so it's a big question mark. Is this their government military up to it? And they finally concluded with a lot of help from information warfare on the part of the Taliban, pretty well conducted. They just concluded that it wasn't going to work. And so the Taliban didn't conquer Afghanistan. The government imploded and they occupied it. They didn't have to conquer it. They barely could drive fast enough to get to Kabul when the government actually all the confidence drained out. Why do you think that the U.S. failed in building an independent and strong Afghan army? Yeah, obviously, all of us who were involved in

that do a lot of soul searching for several reasons. The most fundamental is the Afghan state and the government just couldn't get credible enough, legitimate enough. A military doesn't exist in isolation. It's not a mercenary force. It exists based upon the commitment and the credibility of the government and the society. And I think that became a very weak foundation. And to be honest, it was even weaker than I thought or hoped it was. And I think a lot of people were disappointed just how weak it was.

The military that we created, aspects of it were actually pretty good, but they've got a lot of weaknesses in the structure. First, we were starting from zero in 2002. When you're going to build a credible military, you have to build leaders. You have to build institutions for training, logistics, all of these things. But you have to build a culture. And it's a culture of service. It's a culture of values.

It's a culture of sacrifice that represents the entire country. And I saw it at times. I mean, I was on the battlefield and saw Afghan soldiers fight with effectiveness and courage. So to say that they were all screwed up was not my experience. But at the same time, it's undeniable that there were just systemic weaknesses, still corruption in the force, weaknesses in systems like logistics and maintenance and those things, and that critical lack of confidence. They didn't believe they were as good as they were capable of being. There were almost 300,000 of them. There were only 70,000 Taliban. In reality, the Afghan military

should have easily been able to at least contest that war indefinitely. But again, wars are won in the minds of people. They're not won in who's got the most bombs or guns. The military seems very good at projecting power, but less good at what comes after. Are we building one military but operating another? Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Very true. The military is largely designed for the first mission, to go in and win the fight. And then there's always this idea that some other element is going to take over all the other things after rebuilding governance, things that had to happen in Europe after World War Two and Japan

and things like that. But the US government doesn't really have the capacity in those other areas that are needed. And it's also not an absolute it's not truncated neatly. It's not war and then peace. There's always an overlap. There's a time when you still need a bunch of military doing security and whatnot, and you already need other capacity, diplomacy and build governance and those kinds of expertise. But the U.S. government is very heavily weighted military for a number of

reasons. One, there's constituency for it when people are voting money and whatnot. So we are heavily overbalanced on that. And also, that's where people perceive the risk. You can't afford to win the first one. And then the theory is we'll sort of figure out that second phase as we go along. And when we go to figure it out, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, we find out we're not very good at it. And we don't have the right people. In Iraq, when I was there, I got there in the fall of 2003, people were being sent from the State Department and other elements on 45 and 90

day tours. And they would be sent over there and they couldn't even figure out what day of the week it was before they're leaving. And we were rotating these people through to do very important things like stand up the Iraqi stock market again. I mean, really important things. And yet we were running a group of people through and many of which were not very well qualified. And so when you have amateur hour to do a very difficult task like that, you get a predictable outcome. And I don't criticize those people who volunteered to go over there for a period of time and risk themselves and take on hard work, but it's not the way to run a railroad. And we paid a big price for that. What are the lessons from Afghanistan in the last 20 years of war?

They're going to be in the eye of the beholder. If you simplify the lessons, I think it's going to be the blind men and the elephant. Everybody's going to see the part of the elephant that they touch. There's going to be a certain narrative that says we can't do things like that in that part of the world. We can't go get involved because it's too complicated. It's too difficult. It's too different culturally. So we will just have nothing to do with it. I don't buy into that, but that's going to be one of the lessons people are going to try to take away. Another is we can't nation build, that we shouldn't do counterinsurgency because that's considered a synonym for nation building. And so we shouldn't nation build. We should go in and bomb and do counterterrorist strikes. And we should do those kinetic things

that we're good at and then leave and let them sort it out for themselves. But I would argue to people, after World War II, we did counterinsurgency. We just did it after the war. We had to rebuild Europe because otherwise Europe would have slipped under Soviet Union domination just because of all the chaos and pain. So the Marshall Plan was part of counterinsurgency. That was the focus of it, to strengthen the society. So I think that there will be a temptation to say, let's focus on what we're good at, kinetic, short term, and go in and out and solve the problem. And I think that that's unrealistic as well. I think it briefs well, as we would say. I think some more appropriate lessons, in my opinion, is we will look for the big policy failure. We will look for the person who made the bad decision in 2002,

or in 2009, when we did a surge, or you pick one and you say, that was the moment we got it wrong. And I don't think that's accurate. What I saw was good people with good intentions working hard. And yet we got a bad outcome. Now, that ought to frighten us more. That ought to give us much more pause, because in the first case, if it was a bunch of idiots or bad people, you just say, well, we're not going to hire idiots next time or we're going to go fire them and move. Instead, sort of like David Halberstam, the best and the brightest with Vietnam, when you put the best and the brightest at something and it doesn't come out right, you better look at what happened. What was the process? What are the cultural things that limit the United States' ability to do extended things like that of a complex nature that are cultural, they're economic, they're all these things. What are the things that make us

unable to have a very long-term view, to have a strategic objective that's decades in the future and work patiently towards that? And our domestic politics make that difficult. If we really want to get at the lessons, I think we're going to find answers that say we have to be able to engage in the world. Sometimes we're going to have to engage in a problems that take generations, not just years. And so we're going to have to say, if we're going to build this, we're going to have to take a very, very patient approach to it, all of which are tough pills for us to swallow because they're not the easy, simple solution that we'd like to. And yet I think we need to go to school on this and we need to push back against people who oversimplify the conclusions from that experience. What do you see as the greatest

risks facing the U.S. right now? Well, without question, it's us. We are dysfunctional politically right now. And if you think about it, we have a very difficult time making basic political decisions on both sides. We've got a level of partisanship that has now turned into dysfunction in not just at the national level, but at local levels. We've got gerrymandered districts and we've got all kinds of things occurring in all three parts of government. The courts, the executive and the legislatures are all a bit guilty in this. And so the great problem is if you can't solve problems, then every problem becomes a big problem. Because whether it's climate change or whether it's you name it, if you just can't come together and do basic rational problem solving, then you're sort of sunk. And that is the essential threat. So it's

us. Now, there are a lot of causes to it. Part of it is disinformation. Part of it is a media that takes a pretty short-term view, all of them, because the profit and loss motive. But if we can't get back to figure out what model works for us, because we have basked in the satisfaction of being a functional working democracy. And we say, look at this. We've been a functional working democracy for more than two centuries, and the world should all want to be us. But in reality, in the recent past, the world is not moving towards us. The world is moving toward more autocratic leaders, presidents for

life, like Xi Jinping, focused authoritarian regimes. They don't wear swastikas and whatnot, but they've got a common DNA with some of those elements. And we've got to understand that in the short term, those kinds of regimes have advantages. In the long term, I would argue they don't. They've got brittleness and inherent problems. But the short term can matter an awful lot. And if you've got very focused foes who can make quick decisions and focus on things, then a democracy that is going through a period of dysfunction is extraordinarily vulnerable. Stan, before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already talked about?

Well, it would be sort of the second part of the biggest risk is us. The biggest opportunity is us. The great thing about knowing that we're the problem is we don't have to go out and find the problem and solve it. We can look in a mirror and solve it. So we are the greatest opportunity. So it goes back to self-discipline at the beginning of our conversation. A society like an individual leader needs to have self-discipline, needs to have the ability to understand that there are certain norms. There are things like property rights, the basic rights of fellow citizens, all of which have to be respected. Some of those norms need to be in place because if you can't have the discipline to follow certain norms, then there are no rules. If there's no rule of law, then you and I will both carry guns to the

grocery store because we'll have to fight our way back with our groceries because lawlessness. Now, that's a hyperbolic example, but the reality is we've got to have the disciplines of society to recognize and follow and enforce a number of those norms so that we can operate. Stan, I thought you were going to talk about cyber. So I'm so surprised to hear that you believe the greatest threat is us. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? Yeah, Lynn, they really go to what I said. And that is, the first is the greatest risk is us. So don't look around for another risk. Don't pawn it off on other people. Don't say it's

some other cause that's causing us. It is our weakness that makes things like COVID, cyber, and other threats so dangerous to us. The second takeaway is the greatest solution for that also is us, which means there's an opportunity. That means that we not only have the potential to solve our problems, we have the responsibility to solve our problems. We can't sit on the curb and wait for somebody else to come and do it. And the last takeaway is it's leaders. We had a period in history, not just in the United States, where we had the great woman and great man

theory of leadership. And the idea is you put them on a pedestal and every so often this person comes and they bend the arc of history, hopefully in a good way. And the rest of us just benefit from that. And so we wait around for those people to emerge where they ain't coming. It is us. And so what it really is going to require is leadership, sometimes of a modest nature, depending upon where you are. You don't necessarily get celebrity. You don't necessarily get wealth. You don't necessarily get thanked. But it requires leadership that often looks a lot like good citizenship. But it's really a little bit more than that, because it is actually influencing other people to be good citizens as well. And I think that's a third. The leadership has got to come from inside us.

And it has to start yesterday because we're behind. Stan, thank you so much. This has been terrific. My honor. Thank you, Lynn. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes,

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