Sea Control - Sea Control 367 - To Risk it All with Adm (ret) James Stavridis

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

Link1. To Risk It All, Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision, by Adm (ret) James Stavridis, Penguin Press, 2022. 

Hey, folks, it's Jared. Dual hosts today, Andrea Howard and Alexia Boulagi, are interviewing a little-known figure in the naval world. Admiral James Stavridis is here, and he's talking about his book, To Risk It All. Alexia also edited and produced this episode. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on the website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out.

Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Salve a tous, aloha shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, Andrea Howard and I are joined by Admiral Stavridis. Admiral Stavridis was a four-star admiral in the U.S. Navy and served four years as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

In his new book, called To Risk It All, he is tackling issues of decision-making under extreme pressure. Lieutenant Andrea Howard and I are very honored to receive today Admiral James Stavridis. His experience on command and distinguished leadership for more than 30 years in the U.S. Navy are a source of inspiration for all. In his new book, To Risk It All, Admiral James Stavridis presents nine pivotal moments in the history of the U.S. Navy. Admiral Stavridis, it is an honor to share some of your time. Welcome back to Sea Control, sir. Yeah, terrific to be back with this Navy team.

Absolutely. While we could spend the entirety of this podcast discussing the highlights of your career, instead, let's dive in with our first question. What experiences from your Naval career contributed to the genesis of To Risk It All, Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision? You know, how did you come up with this idea? Yeah, I'll give you three things very quickly. One is experiencing high levels of risk and decision making myself. And I think the first time that happened to me in a very significant way was in the 1980s in the Arabian Gulf. I was operations officer on Aegis Cruiser, brand new, imagine that, Valley Forge CG-50.

And we were doing earnest will operations, so escorting Kuwaiti tankers in and out of the Arabian Gulf. And the Iranians were constantly flying and threatening us. And I had my fingers as the tactical action officer on that firing key, thinking it was an Iranian jet approaching us. I thought it might've been one of our old F-14s. Its profile kind of fit that. And I almost launched a missile to take it out. It turns out it was an Iranian commercial aircraft, an Airbus. And some months later on cruiser Vincennes, a different tactical action officer closed that firing key and shot down an Iranian Airbus with 150 civilians in it.

So that moment when I was at risk, because I thought I was about to be attacked, and yet something said, don't do it. But I was putting myself and my crew in enormous risk. Turns out it was the right decision, but it started me thinking about this idea of risk. And of course, subsequently in my career, I faced risk many times. The second incident was in the Pentagon on 9-11 when I was on the side of the building that was struck by the aircraft. I was about 150 feet from impact point. I was a newly selected one-star admiral and the building effectively blew up in front of us. And we all did what we could to try and save those who were in the inferno of the portion that was under attack or had been struck and was on fire. And there was

nothing we could do. Everybody in the Navy is a trained firefighter. We did what we could. We had no tools. We had no ability to fight. We had to depart and go down to that grassy field outside where the real heroes of the day, the first responders, showed up. And again, the irony of that moment has stayed with me, that at the moment when I should have felt the safest, the least level of risk. I mean, here I am in the Pentagon, surrounded by massive concrete walls, guarded by the strongest military on earth, in the capital of the richest country on the planet. was I safe? No. And what I took away from that is this sense that risk is all around us and it can come when you least expect it. So that was kind of the second moment. And then thirdly, much,

much later, years later, after I'd gotten out of the Navy, I began to learn more about the Battle of Lady Gulf for another book I was writing. And I learned about the story in depth of USS Johnston a destroyer, a tin can in American vernacular, which charged a Japanese battleship and saved the landing fleet. And I began to think about that captain, Ernest Evans, first Native American, by the way, to command a warship, to win the Medal of Honor for this action, an extraordinary story. And that story of how he was able to take the ultimate risk, to risk it all, and he died. and his ship was sunk. And that story has stuck with me both for its courage, but also for the question for any commanding officer, would you have the courage to charge into almost certain

death? That's a hard question to answer. So I'd say there are three threads that kind of came together and are part of the genesis of the book, To Risk It All. Thanks a lot, Admiral. To Risk It outlines decision-making dilemmas for nine leadership figures over the historical course of the Navy. So I'd like to ask you that question. How did you make the choices of who to include? This is a great question because the easiest thing would have been to write a book entitled Nine Great Decisions and just profile nine instances where a naval figure had made a decision with some risk, and it just turned out perfectly. That's not this book. This book, I hope, is about very hard choices, some of which turn out well and some of which turn out

badly. And I think that reflects the reality. So the answer to the question is I flipped through my, if you will, mental Rolodex. I'm not sure people even know what a Rolodex is anymore, But I flipped through my mental catalog of naval figures and tried to simply pick out a handful that were both risky and dangerous, but also had some successes and some failures. So it's a very personal list. And I will say this, all of the people in the book I admire. Now, some of them made better choices than others, but all of them had my admiration. And last thing, why nine? Why nine stories?

And the image in my mind was the cat of nine tails with which sailors are flogged or were flogged, fortunately. Back in the 17th and 18th century, it had nine tails on it that would lash somebody. And so in the back of my mind was this idea that decisions are hard. They're often painful. Sometimes you come through well and other times not so well. So that's why the number nine and that's how I came up with these nine people. Yes, sir.

Thanks for that explanation, Admiral. Let's talk about the first of those nine tales. You open your book with Commodore John Paul Jones, where you claim that a combination of emotion and calculation and the need to find the balance made the difference in the battle between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis on September 23rd, 1779. Balance becomes a theme for the leaders throughout the book. Placing aside the contextual differences, do the leaders you choose have more traits in common than differences? And what are they? I think that the leaders who make the best choices in these moments of extreme pressure have a package of qualities that I try and kind of pull out from the nine stories. And certainly John Paul Jones, the quality I pull out from his story is that of determination.

Certainly there's physical courage and there's calculation and there's a lot of different qualities go into it. But for him, it's this idea of determination. Now, you can flip forward into each of these nine case studies and pull out one or two ideas that I think are very salient. Let me just grab two others, because I think John Paul Jones is so obvious a case of someone in extreme pressure, his ship burning and blowing up literally underneath him, but who refuses to surrender, who says no. And that's the chapter title is The Power of No. It's really about determination. In today's world, he's like Zelensky, right? In Ukraine, he is just

utterly determined. He will never give in. That's a pretty straightforward one. That's why I wanted to kind of open the book with it. But let's jump to, I think, a very balanced one, if you will, that has competing pressures in it. And that is the story of David Farragut, who is in command of a group of small ships in the civil war, trying to capture the strategically vital port of Mobile Bay. Kind of frankly, like Odessa in the war in Ukraine. And we all should hope the Russians don't try and attack Odessa, which would be a mistake on their part and would create some very difficult dynamics on both sides. So Farragut in the 19th century is steaming in and his flagship, the ship in front of him in the van, he's actually in, of course, his flagship,

the ship in front of him literally blows up and sinks in front of him because it hits a mine in the water. At that moment, I think Commodore Jim Stavridis would have said, okay, let's drop the hook. Let's figure out what's going on here. Why did the ship ahead of us just blow up? I know there's mines in the water. I thought they wouldn't work. What does Farragut do? Farragut says, damn the torpedoes, the 19th century word for mine, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, effectively. Boy, that's a very striking decision. And so I tried to pull that apart from the historical record and to understand was that recklessness on his part? Was it pure physical courage? Was it determination? I think it's some of all of those things, but it was also

his meticulous study of these minds and understanding them and believing correctly, as it turns out, that the vast majority of them would have been corroded in the water by this time in the battle, and that the strike ahead of him was a one-off. Boy, I would have to take a very deep swallow before I went with that, but it's a combination of preparation, study, intuition. So Farragut's is a very complicated case study, I think, and a very good one to look at. And then third and finally, because those first two really went well, obviously, you have to look at the the terrible choices faced by Lieutenant Commander Lloyd Booker. And this is 1968. It's January. It's freezing cold. He's in international waters off the coast of North Korea. Shamefully, the U.S.

Navy has not provided air cover. There's no destroyer station nearby to protect his unarmed intelligence gathering ship. The North Korean sortie come around him. And the title of that chapter is no way out because that's the situation in which he finds himself. On one hand, the ethos of the Navy, the John Paul Jones theory of the case is, hey, you fight him with your bare hands if that's all you have left. He still had small arms. He could have sent someone up to the folks to try and unfreeze this 50 Cali head up there. It was going to end in the sinking of his ship and the killing of his entire crew. So door number one is don't give up the ship.

Door number two is live to fight another day. He picks door number two. He goes to a court of inquiry. It recommends a court martial. He and his crew are tortured for a year. Nothing good comes out of this decision other than he and his crew escape alive. So he makes a very hard, pragmatic decision

that I think different people will come down in different places on. At the end of the day, Lloyd Booker really had no way out. So Andrea, that's a long answer, but I think pulls in some of these different competing balancing acts that different commanders have to use when they face the moment where they risk it all. Admiral, I'd like to dig a bit on that and have your experience and insight about it. So on the converse side, what is a bad leader, if we can define it? How can the team compensate if it can, and especially in the military, where respect of the hierarchical authority is the backbone of the institution? First and foremost, no leader, almost no leader. You can pick some

historical leaders who are truly evil and terrible, and everything they do is wrong. And conversely, you can find a tiny handful of leaders who almost literally never get it wrong, who are so good in every attribute. Most of us, including me, are somewhere in the middle. And so first point is when you say a bad leader, let's put it in a context of a leader who is making significant mistakes. And here of the nine case studies, I think the most interesting one in this context is Admiral Bull Halsey, who by almost any measure is a very positive leader. His sailors love him. He is revered throughout the Navy. His public profile is immensely positive. He's winning many victories. On the other hand, if you really dig deep into a number of the battles under his overall command, but particularly the Battle of Lady Gulf, you have a commander who is, in the instance I describe, of sailing away to the north, reckless. He has put his ego

and his own intuition ahead of intelligence, hard facts, and any more balanced approach. He's not in any sense what we would say a toxic leader, but he is making leadership mistakes. So what you have to ask yourself is, what was the team around him doing at that moment? And I think they got caught up in Bull Halsey's ethos and ego, and were not willing to stand in front of the admiral and say, sir, this doesn't look like the right move. You have to look at the chief of staff, look at the operations officer on that staff, look at the flag captains. None of them would stand in front of Bull Halsey. So I think the lesson for all of us is, no matter how much we revere a leader, all of us who are supporting her need to stand up and say, no, I don't think

you had this one right, Captain. And boy, does that take a lot of moral courage. And so the answer to the question, what can we do about it, is have courage ourselves and deal with a leader first and foremost by using the chain of command, pointing out where things are not appropriate. Obviously, if something is being done that is immoral, illegal, violates regulation, that has to be reported immediately. We can't hide a leader. But above all, we have to bring our moral courage to the table to call what's right and to make our recommendations when a leader is standing into danger, as we would say in a Navy context. this mention of moral courage has inspired me to swap my questions one of the most important and modern draws of your book is that you address the case study of captain brett crozier who on a very personal and emotional note was the model for real-time decisions while my submarine and our crew became the first in the united states impacted by covet 19 we were right there with him

during that decision matrix you know i find it easy to draw parallels between cook third class Dory Miller and Captain Brett Crozier. For the former, you say the lesson is simple, to stand and deliver without any thought of personal gain. The relief, though, of Captain Brett Crozier on April 2nd, 2020, became one of the most divisive contemporary case studies on naval leadership. Did Captain Crozier do the right thing in attempting to uphold Dory Miller's ethos? Was he so different from, you know, just as you mentioned, the venerated, brash, and confident personality of Admiral William Bull Halsey? Let me first disclose that Brett Crozier worked for me when I was Supreme Allied Commander of

NATO and was a principal planner in the Libyan air campaign. So I come into this knowing Brett Crozier very well and having the deepest respect for his professional capabilities, which frankly, anyone who has worked with Captain Crozier over the years, I think would echo. He is a consummate professional in so many different dimensions. So with that disclosed, second point, this is going to be a controversial case study, I think, forever. I think it rises to the level of a case in which very reasonable, well-intentioned people will have very different opinions about the outcomes here. As you know, having read the book, I come down firmly on the side of Brett Crozier. And I had a couple of factors that I think are important to underline in that regard.

Number one, this is, as you said, Andrea, right at the start of COVID, no one knows how to deal with it. There are no vaccines, no boosters, no palliatives, no antivirals. We're still having an argument in the United States at this point about whether to wear a mask or not. We don't know enough. And the only thing that Brett is told is socially distance your crew. Now, as naval professionals, most of the people on this podcast will know that it's impossible. Picture a suburban in kitchen. Nine people live in the kitchen. You can't socially distance. So Crozier wants to, and I think it's the right call. He's not in wartime. He's not in combat. He's on a show the flag cruise around the Pacific. He wants to get into port and get his crew ashore so he can

socially distance and kind of stop the problem and figure out what's going on. He indicates this in a whole series of interactions with the strike group commander who's actually embarked in the ship with his chain of command. It's kind of very fumbled by the Navy in this period. And I'm sure you saw that as well in your situation. And at the end of the day, what does he do? And this is the essence of his either right decision or wrong decision. He writes an email, which sounds so innocuous, right? I mean, it's hardly John Paul Jones, you know, fire a broadside at the therapist. He sends an email. But the email, he makes it unclassified, mistake number one. He doesn't have the complete chain of command on the email, mistake number two. And then not his fault, but it leaks, mistake number three. So now you have this public, effectively, situation where the captain of a massive, powerful flagship named after one of our greatest presidents is saying to the Navy, hey, figure this out. Help me out. My crew is more important than a bunch of peacetime missions.

That's the essence of the situation. And of course, when the email leaks, it becomes highly politicized, up to and including the President of the United States at the time, making a snarky comment saying, who does this guy think he is, Ernest Hemingway, you know, writing this email. Um, the Navy ultimately says, okay, a lot of buffoonery going on here, but we're going to keep you in command. Then the political level kicks in, the acting secretary of the Navy flies out and in a wildly inappropriate speech over the one MC to the entire crew fires him. His crew, thousands of them stand and applaud him as he leaves the ship. I mean, it, it's a Greek drama. It's the ride of the Valkyries from a Wagnerian opera. And at the end of the day, people are going to disagree. And some of my closest friends and Andrea, including many retired nuclear submariners,

have said to me, oh, no, Crozier, no, made all of the wrong moves, not the right kind of thing. You know, he failed his crew. He failed the Navy. I completely see it on the other side of the coin. I respect that view up to a point. But again, as you say, it's going to continue to be highly controversial. It'll be studied. I don't think we're ever going to get to a meeting of the minds on that one. And again, I think because it was so much tierra incognito, unknown ground that

Brett had to deal with. So that's why I included it, so that there'd be controversy. And if you flip the book over on the back of it, you'll see nuclear submariner, former CNO, John Richardson, one of my closest friends, effectively saying, you know, these are really good case studies. I don't agree with how Admiral Stavridis comes out on all of these. And that's because he, for one, I think, did not agree with the Crozier case, along with many others. And again, maybe it's a nuke thing. But let's face it, Brett Crozier went through nuclear power training, just like everybody else in the nuclear navy yes sir before i hand it over to alexia i'll say that it has been incorporated as a case study at the department head level for submariners and very much so proved

to be divisive so alexia over to you so thank you i'd like to dig deeper on this imperative of courage so if the overarching message to take away from the quarter's life and service is the way he harnessed his daring and ambition to a genuine set of priorities and values. Do you believe that military leaders have the ability to exercise the same creativity and assertiveness in today's highly interconnected environment? And is Commodore's George Dewey's logistics and administration further more valued? I think you can do both. I think there are moments where a leader in a very risky situation has to grab that risk and execute the mission. I mean, back to the Brett Crozier case, I know Brett would have made very different decisions

if his carrier was on the line in combat operations. So when a leader is in a combat scenario, that's the moment when he or she has to step up, accept the risk, and move forward. And I think that is unchanged going back to John Paul Jones and unchanged going back to the ancient Greeks at the Battle of Salamis. That is a through line in our profession. On the other hand, in today's highly interactive world, we have so many advantages that most of the individuals in this case study don't enjoy. We have access to incredible intelligence.

We have the ability to effectively take counsel with our seniors, with our chain of command. I can't recall as a commander from the time I took command of Barry in 1993 until I gave up NATO in 2013. I can't remember a moment where if I wanted to or I needed to, I couldn't pick up a phone and call my boss and say, hey, boss, here's what I'm thinking. Does this make sense? And so that's actually a huge advantage. I think some would spin it as, oh, no, the Navy's lost its initiative. I don't think so. I think nine times out of 10, maybe 95 out of 100, when I did pick up the phone and call my boss, whether it was Secretary of Defense Bob Gates or the Secretary General of NATO, Or when I was a young commander picking up the phone and calling Commodore John Morgan, my four striper Desron commander, 95 out of 100, they're going to say, hey, Jim, you're on the scene. Make the decision. I'll back you up. And so I think it works. And in the five out of 100 where they said, yeah, I don't know, Stavridis, maybe you ought to stay out in international waters during this arms embargo off the coast of Serbia

when I was pressing to go into territorial waters. That was probably pretty good advice on the part of my boss. So the point is, you're going to have moments as a leader where, like George Dewey, you get crucial intelligence at the last minute that helps you. and you're going to have moments when you are on your own, but they're less and less in this modern world. And I think we're better for that. Absolutely, sir. Being cognizant of your schedule, are you able to squeeze in one last question? Of course. Roger that. So I liken this last one to asking a parent to pick their favorite child. So I apologize in advance, but if you were forced

to pick one of the case studies as the most critical to developing junior officers and junior sailors, which would you choose and why? You know, what is the importance as you're talking to women naval professionals, you know, what is the importance of specifically highlighting leaders of minority background like Admiral Michelle Howard? Actually, I've answered this question a number of times, and my favorite case study is in fact Michelle Howard, partly because she's someone I've mentored since she was a midshipman. I've watched her track along and just knock the ball out of the park again and again and again. She's a rare talent. She's also my height, five feet, five inches tall. In fact, I think I'm actually taller than Michelle Howard,

and I can't say that about many people. She's just got a high likability context about her. And I think there's a lesson there for all of us that even as you're breaking barriers and moving forward, do it without ego. Boy, is that Michelle Howard. And do it in a way that you leave friends as you move from a position to position. And I can assure you she does both those things very, very well. In terms of the actual incident, I also like it because it's well known, because a superb film was made about it. And this is, of course, the rescue of Captain Phillips. He was captain of the Maersk, Alabama. He's captured by Somali pirates.

He's held in the waters of East Africa. And Michel, at this point, is a brand new one star. And I know that sounds like a very high position, but let me tell you, every time you go into a new position, whether it's a division officer, a department head, an XO, a captain, all the way up to Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. When you're first in a new position, it's a new position. And you have to understand, you don't know everything. You don't know exactly what you're supposed to be doing. There are going to be unknowns, both known unknowns and unknown unknowns, as my old boss Don Rumsfeld would say. So Michelle is brand new in the saddle. She's

embarked in her flagship. She's got destroyers. This captain, American, gets captured and is held hostage. And here's what I really like about the story. Michelle is marshalling all these different elements of American power, our diplomacy, our intelligence services. She gets the National Mission Force called out. We've got SEALs flying in. She's got her big deck amphibs, she's got destroyers, and she's just smoothly integrating all this. And I think that's a very powerful lesson in risk management. You can reduce risk by managing all these elements, even in a moment of extreme crisis, because at any second, these Somali pirates could put a bullet in the captain's head. So there's a brutal time urgency to what's going on. And then secondly,

the risk is rising because the longer they hold him, the more likely it is to turn out badly because the pirates don't have food. They don't have water. They're in a tiny little lifeboat themselves. They're off the Maersk, Alabama at this point. And so it's very risky. And to take the shot to kill these pirates, which most commanders would want to take that shot, obviously. That is risky because it's going to be taken by SEAL snipers on a deck that's pitching. They're on the back of a destroyer shooting down into this lifeboat. Really hard shot. There's three of these hostages. So what I again like about the story at this point is having put all this together, Michelle correctly delegates the ability to take the shot to the on-scene commander,

the captain of the destroyer. I'll tell you, I can tell you that from personal experience, that is a very hard call to make. When I was commander of U.S. Southern Command, we had a hostage rescue potential situation to rescue three contractors who'd been trapped in the jungle by the Colombian terrorist organization known by its Spanish acronym, the FARC. And the FARC were holding these three contractors for years in the jungle. And my special forces were closing in on them. We had the National Mission Force involved at that point. They wanted to go in and take the shot. I held back. I did not delegate that. Had I done so, they might have gotten released a year early. Story kind of has a happy ending. The Colombians come up with a good plan. We support

them. The three Americans get out safely. But my point is, that is a very hard moment where you're taking all the risk for the life of the hostage. It's not personal risk to you physically, but you're taking all the risk on behalf of that hostage. That's a hard decision because you're thinking about their families. You're thinking about the nation, our reputation. There's a lot of factors. And I think Michelle handled that moment of risk as well as anybody in this book. And again, knowing her personally, I really commend that chapter to people. It's a very inspirational one. Thank you so much, Admiral, for these fascinating stories and insights. It was a very valuable discussion.

Merci bien pour votre assistance. C'est un grand plaisir de parler un peu de français avec vous. Oh, merci beaucoup, Admiral. C'est un honneur. Andrea, thank you very much. Wonderful to see you. And off you go to the New Jersey. Last word to you. Wonderful. Thank you, sir. Really appreciate your time. Thanks, everybody. ¶¶ © BF-WATCH TV 2021