Praise for My Share of the Task
“General McChrystal is a legendary warrior with a fine eye for enduring lessons about leadership, courage, and consequence. He took me inside the command bunker, on nighttime raids, and through the fog of war, political and military. My Share of the Task is an important, riveting, and instructive account of the triumphs and trials of America’s two longest wars.”
—Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation
“Written in the tradition of Ulysses S. Grant, My Share of the Task is a clear, compelling, self-critical, and utterly unpretentious memoir. I know of no better book on the nature of modern military command.”
—John Lewis Gaddis, author of George F. Kennan: An American Life
“Stanley McChrystal has written the finest military memoir of his generation. Lucid, thoughtful, and steeped in military and strategic history, My Share of the Task is not just the story of one man’s service; it is the story of the development of a new way of war. What Grant’s memoirs did for war in the age of railroads and the industrial revolution, McChrystal’s does for armed conflict in our age of information, high tech, and nonstate actors. This book is not just for aficionados of military history or for students of American foreign policy; it’s for anyone who wants to understand the challenges of leadership in America today.”
—Walter Russell Mead, author of Special Providence and God and Gold
“A remarkable memoir by one of the most exceptional and thoughtful leaders of his generation.”
—Rory Stewart, author of The Places in Between
PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN
MY SHARE OF THE TASK
Stanley McChrystal retired in July 2010 as a four-star general in the U.S. Army. His last assignment was as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force and as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He had previously served as the director of the Joint Staff and as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. He is currently a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the cofounder of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm. He and his wife of thirty-six years, Annie, live in Virginia.
My Share
of the Task
| A MEMOIR |
General Stanley McChrystal,
U.S. Army, Retired
Portfolio | Penguin
PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013
This paperback edition with a new preface published 2014
Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Stanley McChrystal
Maps copyright © by Gene Thorpe / Cartographic Concepts, Inc.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Photograph credits appear here.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
McChrystal, Stanley A.
My share of the task : a memoir / Stanley A. McChrystal.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-101-60142-6
1. McChrystal, Stanley A. 2. Generals—United States—Biography. 3. United States. Army—
Biography. 4. McChrystal, Stanley A.—Military leadership. 5. Afghan War, 2001– I. Title.
E897.4.M38A3 2012 355.0092—dc23
[B] 2012027306
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
Version_2
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.
Dedicated to those who kept the bridge—
and to those who made it possible.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Author’s Foreword
Part One
1. Ghosts of Christmas Past
2. Journey to the Plain
3. The Army in Which I Should Like to Fight
4. Renaissance
5. Preparation
6. The Fight Begins
Part Two
7. Through the Hourglass
8. The Enemy Emerges
9. Big Ben
10. Entrepreneurs of Battle
11. Out West
12. The Hunt
13. Hibhib
14. Networked
15. The Long War
Part Three
16. The Ticking Clock
17. Understand
18. Design
19. Decide
20. Execute
Epilogue
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Photo Credits
Preface to the Paperback Edition
All wars are different. And every soldier’s experience is unique. Or so we each believe.
But when I left the Army in the summer of 2010, more than thirty-eight years after I’d entered West Point, it was clear I’d been a part of something special. The roles and the experiences I’d had were different than those I’d expected. And the people I’d met, those I’d served with, and even those I’d fought bitterly against shaped what I did—and who I was—in surprising, even curious, ways.
Earlier in my life I’d thought that at some point I might write about leadership, because it has always fascinated me, but had never considered writing about my own. For that reason—and for many others—I’d kept no journal, notes, or files. My wife, Annie, produced boxes of my letters she’d kept from separations early in my career, but when I decided to write my own story I began with little beyond what was in my head and in my heart.
What I’d learned during my service—and what I felt about it all—wasn’t immediately clear to me. I was proud of what we’d done and knew that the experience of my career, particularly the final decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, had transformed me. But it was only after the laborious two-and-a-half-year process of researching, writing, editing, and reediting; months of media interviews and book talks; and ultimately reading and hearing the judgments of readers, reviewers, and comrades that it has all begun to come into r
eal focus. And I suspect that process will continue.
To some, My Share of the Task will be a war story. After the first section in which I recount my formative early career, I seek to provide a detailed, often gritty account of the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq and of our effort to recover a faltering effort in Afghanistan. You are taken into the shadows of wars marked by their brutality and vexing complexity, and introduced to actual protagonists too often viewed as one-dimensional stereotypes. Yet they are real and all-too human.
At its heart, however, is a story of change. It tells of how America’s most elite special operations command, carefully constructed from the ashes of failure in the Iranian desert in 1980 into a force of stunning competence, had to transform itself in the midst of combat to avoid defeat. And it shows how I, after being molded by twenty-five years of military leadership, came face-to-face with a terrorist network whose ruthless leader leveraged tactics, technology, religion, and emotion to effectively change the rules of the game. Zarqawi’s challenge demanded that I change how I thought and how I led.
Change is disruptive and frightening. People and organizations develop habits and cultures based upon what has worked in the past. They cope with the environment around them and deal with challenges that over time can become familiar. They grow confident in proven solutions. What worked before becomes the default response. Seniority and experience start to become synonymous with wisdom. Process guarantees predictable competence—and it is comfortable.
As organizations grow this phenomenon is magnified. There seems to be safety in size, wealth, or technological superiority. Mass compensates for the loss of speed and agility. People judge little problems less as problems and more as small distractions. Big is reassuring. Even potentially mortal threats seem less daunting. Rome fell, to be sure, but it took quite a long time. Such thoughts are comforting to all but those around when things finally come crashing down.
I found that this was exactly what had happened to the special operations command when I took charge of it in 2003. We were great at what we did—indeed, unequalled—but we weren’t right for what needed to be done. We were losing to a side that lacked our resources and professionalism. But no one outside the force would dare tell us to change; it had to come from within.
Most of us knew that real magic resided in small teams: the basketball team, the assault team, or even the small group of roommates creating a start-up. From our own experience we knew that in small teams communication flowed effortlessly and we seemed to think and act as one. When part of such a team, we could analyze a situation, decide, and act as though it was a single, uninterrupted motion, like catching and throwing a baseball. Even a complicated double play required no meetings, e-mails, or orders. We instinctively knew what to do—or it least that’s how it felt.
The challenge, then, was to retain our inherent strengths of competence and precision, yet regain the innovation, adaptability, and focus of a small team. Unexpectedly, I found that the very tools that held the potential for our success were initially limiting our effectiveness by hampering the ability of small teams to act. Our ability to instantaneously communicate, to command and control our forces, and to collect an inexhaustible volume of intelligence was being applied to legacy processes that pulled information to the top and tended to centralize and slow decision making.
The counterintuitive solution came slowly, and the tuition for our education was paid in blood. We had to simultaneously leverage our ability to create a peerless network across which critical information could flow while using that shared consciousness of the environment and our enemy to unlock the magic that lay in the many teams across the command. We inverted a structure and processes designed to inform the commander who would then direct teams what to do, and reshaped them to instead inform the teams and thus empower them to decide without top-down direction. In time, I found that these teams no longer needed to be told what to do; they already knew.
The change was more cultural than structural. Leaders at every level had to redefine their roles—and that started with me. I had to forego the model of leadership I’d grown up learning to emulate—Wellington at Waterloo issuing timely orders on small sheets of paper kept handily rolled into the buttonholes of a waistcoat—and become a facilitator who kept the flow of information going, the culture innovative, and the organization focused on the mission. It was a change I found I could accept; losing was something I wouldn’t.
For a few, this story will be a disappointment. Readers who seek titillating insights on stories that briefly captured headlines or are hungry for character assassinations of newsworthy personalities must look elsewhere. Their exclusion was intentional. Instead I’ve concentrated on the issues and actions that actually dominated my thoughts and energy. As we gain the perspective that time offers, the truly significant questions and considerations will become clear. I’ve tried to highlight those I feel rise to that level.
Finally, this is also a love story. I never set out to write one, and I only realized what I’d done when the book was complete. But by then it was clear to me: for over thirty-eight years in uniform I’d loved being a soldier. I felt deeply about the people I’d served alongside—those I’d sweated and laughed with, whose weddings I’d attended, and whose funerals Annie and I would painfully endure. I loved the humor, the occasional fear, the shared frustrations, and, while detesting the bloodshed, I’d loved the sense of mission we had borne in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When I left the service suddenly in 2010, uncertain from the sudden experience of controversy, Annie kept us firmly focused on the future. Memories, she believes, are to be valued and enjoyed, but life lies to our front. Annie lives as she drives: with little use for a rear-view mirror.
So, in the late summer of 2010, I started a business with a friend and colleague from Iraq and Afghanistan, former SEAL Dave Silverman. Our lofty goal was to make America better by helping companies navigate the same unsettling challenges we’d faced in the military. Operating entirely separate from the government or defense sectors that would have been familiar to us, we believe the challenges of leadership and changes we faced have universal relevance—and we have found that to be correct. We have learned that even out of uniform, we make a difference. What began modestly and operated from Annie’s kitchen table for the first nine months, McChrystal Group has grown to over fifty people and has become the new team and new mission central to my life.
But not the most important love of my life. Through it all, from the day we’d met at the very beginning, I’d loved Annie. From a young wife who’d wakened me suddenly by loudly crushing huge cockroaches with her then-fashionable wooden clogs on the fifty-year-old hardwood floors of our Army quarters we were sleeping on until our furniture arrived, Annie had grown into a thoughtful woman of extraordinary strength. Like the sturdy foundation upon which a house rests, Annie anchored me and gave meaning to it all. She still does.
Stan McChrystal
Alexandria, Virginia
August 2013
Author’s Foreword
In late 1963, when I was nine, I almost burned our house down.
I had draped my red Mario’s Pizza basketball team uniform over a lamp in the room my brother David and I shared because I liked the red glow it produced, and then went off somewhere. Some time later my father detected smoke, raced to my room, and found a melted nylon uniform and a growing fire on a wooden desk he’d built for us.
I was upset and, even more, embarrassed. So a day or so later he sat me down to talk about it. He’d just come home from work at the Pentagon, and I remember his green army major’s uniform seemingly covered with ribbons as he sat in my room and talked about how hard it was to take responsibility for mistakes. He used President Kennedy’s leadership and courage after the Bay of Pigs fiasco as an example. It had only been a few weeks since Kennedy had been assassinated, so it was a powerful weave of history, leadership, and life, ev
en for a nine-year-old.
If I have accomplished my intent, this book weaves two threads that have always fascinated me—history and leadership—around a third: my memoirs, the story of my life.
The framework is history, the forces, events, and personalities that shaped the extraordinary era in which I’ve lived. Because things have moved so quickly and changed so radically, it could almost be described as multiple eras. The Army I knew as a child, the one I experienced as a young officer, and the one I left in 2010 were as different as the times they resided in. The history I experienced was the backdrop to my life and largely defined, enabled, or limited all I did or did not do.
Leadership was always the objective. From my earliest memories, leadership was an overt, ever-present theme. The books my mother gave me to read as a boy—stories of Roland, William Tell, and Robert Bruce—were about leaders, courage, and service. In Stonewall Jackson Elementary School’s library I found youth-oriented biographies of John Paul Jones and Davy Crockett that I read surreptitiously in Mrs. Lynch’s second-grade classroom. In later life it was no less important. I came to judge myself, and others, more on their ability to lead than any other quality.
The core of the story is my life, from my birth in 1954 to Captain and Mrs. Herbert Joseph McChrystal, Jr., at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the present. Like all lives, mine has been a personal journey, enriched by experiences and people that have matured into memories and relationships of unexpected importance to me. If my appreciation for the constellation of family and friendships I’ve known comes through, I’ve succeeded.
More than I ever anticipated in the early years of my career, my story intersected with events of historical significance and, in the later years, with policy issues. I attempt to describe what I saw and evaluate its meaning, but I leave current policy prescription to others.
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