My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  The Green troops looked sideways at one another, and one asked the boy whether he could recognize the important man in a photograph. Oh sure, he said. The operators brought in a big flip book, with rows of pictures but no names, and set it in front of him. After scanning it a few moments, the kid pointed to one of the mug shots. It was an old picture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

  “That’s him,” he said in Arabic. “I’m sure of it.”

  Although told in youthful tones, the young boy’s story conveyed a troubling truth that summer: Things were, indeed, going well for the network Wayne Barefoot had warned us about six months before. Even as Zarqawi sowed enmity among many of the Iraqis stuck in Fallujah, his international notoriety continued to grow and, in a phenomenon peculiar to our media age, it brought him recruits from around the world, in turn widening his influence within the local insurgency beyond his minority group of jihadist followers. Meanwhile, through his Jordanian tribal connections in Baghdad and Anbar and his history with Ansar al-Sunnah in the north, he was forging crucial alliances between traditionally antagonistic groups: deeply xenophobic Iraqi Sunnis, insular Kurds, and his foreign Arab fighters. As he became both transnational terrorist and insurgent leader, he positioned himself at the center of that insurgency’s constituencies.

  * * *

  While Al Qaeda’s leaders, with whom Zarqawi still had no official partnership, eyed his rise coolly from afar, our side experienced a turnover of leadership.

  The veteran diplomat John Negroponte, who had arrived in Iraq in June to be the new U.S. ambassador, became the top civilian when Bremer turned sovereignty over to Iraq and its new prime minister, Ayad Allawi, on June 28, 2004. On the military side, General George Casey, Jr., arrived to replace Ric Sanchez on July 1. George was the first four-star general to command the military coalition, now called Multi-National Force—Iraq. I was glad that I had known him for several years. Our fathers had been classmates at West Point, graduating in 1945, and I vividly remember my mother’s reaction when George’s father, then–Major General Casey, was killed in Vietnam. For my mom, who had stoically endured my father’s multiple combat tours, the death of a peer was a jolting reminder that not only young soldiers die.

  George, whom I’d worked with on the Joint Staff, was easy to underestimate. Like John Abizaid, he wasn’t physically imposing, and he shared John’s disarmingly casual demeanor. But while John bounced with a certain swagger and was endearingly sarcastic, George was quieter, more outwardly professional. Although stocky and square-jawed, he had a subdued manner closer to that of a high-school teacher. I wondered how that would play with the Iraqis, to whom he needed to be a symbol of American strength and competence. But I knew that as a captain, George had passed the grueling Green selection process, only to choose instead to remain in the conventional Army. In thirty years I had never heard of another person passing selection and opting not to join the unit. His self-confident decision impressed me.

  As these new leaders entered the scene, they came to find TF 714 assuming a larger role in the war. Beginning with the destruction of Big Ben, we were on the offensive against the Sunni insurgency across Iraq, periodically striking targets in Fallujah and tracking Zarqawi’s network around the yellow, dusty cinderblock cities of Anbar. This was the early part of what was to become a significant campaign.

  That summer, I tried to envision how that campaign would take shape. Strangely, the fight in arid Anbar Province made me think about a desperate sea battle between Admiral Horatio Nelson’s British navy and the allied French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar on October 21, 1805. Early in the famous battle, Nelson was incapacitated. One of the thousands of musket balls fired point-blank between the ships during the battle caught him in the shoulder, detoured through his lungs and ribs into his spine, and dropped him to the deck. Three hours and fifteen minutes later he was dead. But his force, outnumbered by thirty-three enemy ships of the line to his twenty-seven, fought on to a decisive victory.

  Nelson’s force was able to win without him in command because of what had happened long before the first shot was fired. In the years leading up of Trafalgar, Nelson cultivated traditional strengths inherent in the British navy by making technical mastery and a capacity for independence prerequisites for command. His command style then maximized these qualities: His famous instruction to his ship captains before the Battle of Trafalgar—which concluded, “No Captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an Enemy”—embodied the value he placed on his subordinate leaders’ taking initiative. He sent this guidance confident in their professional competence and in the entrepreneurial hunger he had stoked in them. Napoleon had done just the opposite, prohibiting his commanding admiral from sharing the larger strategy with the French captains.

  Nelson knew that while the plan mattered, ultimately the actions of the captains would determine the outcome. His genius was to organize the force into a lethal machine, bring the enemy to battle on his terms, and then unleash the apparatus on that enemy. Even as Nelson lay dying, his machine ground on to victory.

  Although Nelson had been dead for almost two hundred years, I found that we in TF 714 faced a similar challenge. And we began with similar fundamental advantages.

  To confront Zarqawi’s spreading network, TF 714 had to replicate its dispersion, flexibility, and speed. Over time, “It takes a network to defeat a network” became a mantra across the command and an eight-word summary of our core operational concept. But the network didn’t yet exist. Building it would prove to be one the largest challenges I faced in my career. It required turning a hierarchical force with stubborn habits of insularity into one whose success relied on reflexive sharing of information and a pace of operations that could feel more frenetic than deliberate.

  I knew I was no Lord Nelson, but thinking about what was demanded of him clarified how I could help build, shape, and lead this revamped TF 714.

  In command of a dispersed force facing a dispersed enemy, Nelson endowed his low-level leaders—talented, ardent men—with the freedom to maneuver, and the fleet was in turn propelled to success by their zeal. Likewise, our units’ strict meritocracy demanded professional expertise, and our highly competent members had the confidence and training to operate without detailed instructions or constant supervision. So I came to see my role as setting the conditions where these qualities were stoked and where initiative, creativity, and dedication to the mission were demanded and supported. Our strategy had to be sound, but success would hinge on how well every level in TF 714 executed it.

  I would demand commitment, and offer it myself, to a campaign that would at best be long and arduous. I felt that success against Zarqawi would require nightly raids into gritty neighborhoods to systematically dismantle his network and capture insurgents who hardly appeared to be high-value targets. To many in the elite units, and to some critics outside the command, these less glorious tasks were better left to police or conventional military forces. Inevitably, our campaign would lead to more graveside gatherings in Arlington. Preparing the force and seeking their devotion was ultimately my responsibility but would only be possible through the efforts of leaders across the command. Like Nelson’s officers, they would have to stand tall on the deck under fire, leading with competence but also with courage.

  And, although we rarely talked of it, we knew we could fail.

  * * *

  Early on, TF 714 lacked a clear mandate to either build a network or get other organizations to join it. Already critics in different parts of the U.S. government felt we were straying outside our traditional role—which we were. But I saw no other organization weaving the kind of web that was needed, and I received strong encouragement from leaders like John Abizaid.

  The network I sought to build needed not just physical breadth but also functional diversity. This required the participation of the U.S. government departments and agencies that were involved in counterter
rorism, like State, Treasury, the CIA, and the FBI. But we faced a circular dilemma: Because their participation was essentially voluntary, TF 714 needed to be more effective at targeting Al Qaeda for other agencies to want to join our project. But we often needed their support or compliance to be noticeably more effective. The solution, I realized, was to do what we could to improve TF 714 internally to make us more appealing to partners. We began by rewiring TF 714’s units into a network better connected to itself and more accommodating to those agencies we were courting.

  To do so, and to posture TF 714 for a more decisive role to defeat Zarqawi’s network, we needed a central hub with a clean deck. In July 2004, amid plans to give control of Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) back to the newly sovereign Iraq, we found that new hub at a former Iraqi air base in Balad, a rural area west of the Tigris, almost fifty miles north of Baghdad.

  American forces had occupied the base since the invasion, but the temporary infrastructure reflected the initial Coalition mindset: Get in quickly; get out just as fast. When I visited our section—a dusty area in the northwest corner, crisscrossed by cement roads and runways—nothing usable remained. For security and secrecy, we walled off our plot with concrete blocks and rock-filled HESCO barriers. Across the airfield, on the other side of its two large runways, Coalition forces occupied tents and Saddam-era buildings. Over time, that area sprouted retail shops and several fast-food restaurants housed in small trailers. But our plot remained spartan—which I considered essential to our focus. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams, who commanded the British Special Air Service task force later in the war, captured the atmosphere inside our compound vividly: “We were there to fight, to do PT, to eat, to sleep, then to fight again. There was no big-screen TV or other diversion in the barracks. It was a world of concrete, plywood, and gun oil, and it was absolutely intoxicating in its intensity.”

  To build that world, we set about clearing and rebuilding, deliberately laying out our facilities and equipment to channel the sustained fight ahead. We put our hooches as close as possible to work areas, including the task force screening facility (which would hold new captures for initial interrogations before we transferred them to internment at Camp Bucca), so that TF 714’s leaders could frequently visit and observe, in the process reinforcing our mission and our values.

  We placed our headquarters and that of the Iraq-focused TF 16 inside one of the three hardened air shelters that sat within the TF 714 footprint. A big concrete dome the size of a circus tent, with beige reinforced walls several feet thick and bowed openings at each end, it resembled a giant caramel-colored turtle shell. Its vaulted interior was ideal: By this time, we were convinced the secretive and compartmentalized traditions of special operations forces, particularly TF 714, would doom us. The hard lessons from the previous months—of Big Ben and the unnerving speed of the enemy network—had chipped away at this dogma. But we knew to deliberately craft our work spaces to channel interaction, force collaboration, and ease the flow of people and information.

  Rather than divide the interior into a honeycomb of offices, we congregated all of TF 16 in the middle of the hangar and, in an unprecedented move, made the whole cavernous interior a top secret–secure facility: Everything could be discussed on the open floor, so secrecy was no excuse for not cooperating with the rest of the team. Facing a wall of screens displaying a ticker of updates and streaming real-time video of operations, the TF 16 commander and his key staff sat at a rectangular horseshoe table. Behind them were four rows of tables, divided like a theater. Although a few offices lined the perimeter, the sixty or so people who coordinated TF 16’s work—intelligence analysts, operations officers, military liaisons, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operators, airpower controllers, FBI agents, and medical planners—sat in these rows.

  My command-and-control headquarters, a few feet away through a plywood door, followed the same logic. Most of our quarter of the hangar comprised what we called the situational awareness room (SAR): I worked primarily at the head of a rectangular horseshoe table that faced a wall of screens. My intelligence director, operations director, and command sergeant major flanked me. Liaisons from more than half a dozen agencies eventually sat at the same U-shaped table, though in the summer of 2004 only the CIA seat was filled.

  The SAR reflected how my command style and command team were evolving. As I stressed transparency and inclusion, I shared everything with the team sitting around the horseshoe and beyond. E-mails that came in were sent back out with more people added to the “cc” line. We listened to phone calls on speakerphone. (Rare exceptions to this policy of transparency were sensitive personnel issues and cases when sharing would betray someone’s trust.) As a result, I increasingly found T.T. and other senior officers could frequently anticipate my position on an issue and make the decision themselves.

  While effective, this immersive command approach was also a bit like playing the run-and-gun style of basketball I’d preferred in my youth. It required almost nonstop focus. My command staff and I often discussed urgent decisions, all while keeping an eye on the screens depicting ongoing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It could also lead my full attention to snap to near-term issues—what we called “pop-up targets” after the silhouette figures on army marksmanship ranges. Aware of this pitfall, I tried to create venues for strategic thinking—frequently gathering members of my command group, subordinate task forces, and an intelligence analyst with in-depth knowledge so we could stew in a topic.

  I lived in a plywood hooch about twenty meters from the entrance to the bunker. I shared it with my command sergeant major, Jody Nacy, and operations sergeant major John Van Cleave—both extraordinary soldiers and close friends. I slept on a cot-size, metal-framed bed that spanned the width of the room. On nails and screws I put into the plywood walls I hung backpacks and equipment and tacked up pictures of Annie. The room was spare but convenient. I believed it reinforced the message I preached about focused, unadorned commitment.

  Until we won, this was home.

  * * *

  As we were establishing our base in Iraq, so too were Al Qaeda’s top leaders. Sometime in the late summer of 2004, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, a Mosul-born Al Qaeda lieutenant working in Pakistan, reportedly made his fourth and final trip to Iraq as an emissary between bin Laden and Zarqawi. He arrived to mediate an agreement at what was a tense time between the two camps. Al Qaeda was increasingly hampered, while news-making Zarqawi was still not fighting under its formal banner.

  Since Zarqawi had sent his letter to bin Laden and Zawahiri the previous January, tentatively requesting their formal support, they likely were hung up on whether to endorse the most controversial pillar of Zarqawi’s Iraq strategy—the unrestrained targeting of Shia Muslims. The rogue Jordanian likely forced Al Qaeda’s hand, as the strategy was already going full bore. In their discussions, Al-Iraqi probably told Zarqawi he needed to curtail his “messaging”—the carnage and beheadings his group broadcast abroad—to avoid tarnishing the Al Qaeda brand. They likely haggled over whether Zarqawi needed permission to launch attacks outside Iraq. A red line was surely that Zarqawi could not publicly challenge Al Qaeda’s leadership. When al-Iraqi left Iraq and returned to Pakistan, he likely did so with an agreement from Zarqawi in hand, for soon Al Qaeda’s network would officially have a new franchise.

  Around this time, Bennet Sacolick, commanding Green, came into my office to brief the command. Tall, with long limbs, a thin face, and closely cut graying hair, Bennet looked more like a high-school basketball coach than a veteran commando. And he was different. Thoughtful, talented, and pleasingly iconoclastic, he could also be headstrong and slow to carry out changes with which he didn’t fully agree. I could live with that. This was a force of strong-willed professionals, and I had learned it worked best to harness, not constrain, their energy and ideas. He had the tricky responsibility of commanding Green as it moved fro
m what it was—an insular, powerful fiefdom—to what it would be—one of the most important nodes in an integrated network.

  Bennet put a single PowerPoint slide on the monitor, with five words in a line. Its simplicity belied how profoundly it would drive our mission to be a network:

  FIND—FIX—FINISH—EXPLOIT—ANALYZE

  The words represented our targeting cycle: A target was first identified and located (Find), then kept under continuous surveillance to ensure it hadn’t moved (Fix), while a raid force moved to capture or kill the targets (Finish). Material of intelligence value was deliberately secured and mined, while detainees were interrogated to find follow-on targets (Exploit); the information this exploitation yielded was then studied to better know our enemy and identify opportunities to further attack its network (Analyze).

  The military had used targeting cycles like this for a generation. But the task in Iraq—finding and stopping insurgents, not Soviet tank columns—demanded radically faster and often very precise execution. Innovative Green operators and commanders, including Scott Miller and Steve, the squadron commander from Big Ben, had outlined F3EA, as we called it, the previous January as they turned their attention from rounding up former Baathists to attacking Zarqawi’s emergent organization.

  Bennet’s brief captured an important and sometimes misunderstood layer of complexity—what he described as the “blink” problem. A blink was anything that slowed or degraded the process, which often involved a half dozen or more units or agencies working in as many locations. Between each step, information crossed organizational lines, cultural barriers, physical distance, and often time zones.

  “By the time we’re ready to go after another target,” he said, impassioned but focused, “it’s often days later, the situation has changed, and we’re essentially starting from square one.” The process felt slow at the time. In retrospect, it was glacial.