My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  In an effort to ensure that no targets went unserviced, strikes continued up until the Marines’ ground assault. That invasion began when Iraqi commandos and Marines seized the main hospital just before midnight on November 7. Air strikes continued throughout the following afternoon, the Marines cut the power at 6:00 P.M., and later that night they crossed the berms and railroad tracks at the city’s northern edge. Accompanying them were TF 16 operators.

  Zarqawi’s jihadists who fought in the streets during the battle were doing so under a different name. On October 17, three weeks before the Fallujah offensive began, Zarqawi’s group posted a message to its website declaring that Zarqawi pledged bay’ah—swore allegiance—to Osama bin Laden. The message hinted at Al Qaeda’s senior leaders’ unease with Zarqawi’s campaign design. After eight months of back-and-forth messages, Zarqawi’s group explained, “our most generous brothers in al Qaeda”—the upper echelon of leadership, mostly in Pakistan—“came to understand the strategy of the Tawhid wal-Jihad organization in Iraq, the land of the two rivers and of the Caliphs, and their hearts warmed to its methods and overall mission.” While tensions would remain, Al Qaeda blessed the decision on one of its websites a few days later. Zarqawi’s group now went by “Al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers” or “Al Qaeda in Iraq” (AQI), the latter being the name we had already called the group since Zarqawi first emerged into the fray the previous January.

  Less than a year after writing to bin Laden and Zawahiri for support, Zarqawi was quickly eclipsing Al Qaeda’s patriarchs as the most active, violent, energetic commander of jihad—especially for a younger generation of aspirants who were less theologically minded and more violent. The United States was partly at fault, as the constant chorus of blame assigned to Zarqawi in the press—much of it warranted, some of it misappropriated—had inadvertently inflated his stature. But the ruthlessness and ambition he would continue to display in the years ahead convinced me he would have grabbed the spotlight anyway.

  * * *

  That fall, as bin Laden accepted, however reluctantly, Zarqawi’s strategy, I was thinking hard about our own. Unless we developed a more effective Coalition program, working with credible Iraqi security forces, we would have limited options. I had already concluded that a strict decapitation strategy was unlikely to work. Top Al Qaeda leaders were well hidden, and their capture or death was rarely decisive. Moreover, a string of effective operations could give us a false sense that we could slowly grind Zarqawi’s network out of existence.

  I believed, however, that if we controlled the tempo, rather than merely eliminated personalities, we could halt Zarqawi’s momentum. Then, partnering with a more robust Coalition and Iraqi effort, we could ensure his defeat. Such a campaign design, however, confronted the reality that in irregular warfare, successful guerrillas won by controlling the speed of the war. They forced the incumbent to fight at their pace—slowing it when they were vulnerable by reducing their profile, quickening it when they sensed fatigue or weakness in their foe.

  Our campaign would flip this and seek to deny the insurgents this inherent advantage: If we could apply relentless body blows against AQI—a network that preferred spasms of violence followed by periods of calm in which it could marshal resources—then we could stunt its growth and maturation. Under enough pressure, AQI’s members would be consumed with staying alive and thus have no ability to recruit, raise funds, or strategize.

  Meanwhile, instead of trying solely to decapitate the top echelon of leaders, we would disembowel the organization by targeting its midlevel commanders. They ran AQI day to day and retained the institutional wisdom for operations. By hollowing out its midsection, we believed we could get the organization to collapse in on itself.

  To pursue this strategy, our force needed to operate at a rate that would exhaust our enemy but that we could maintain. Key to this was a regular TF 714-wide regimen, what the Army terms a battle rhythm. Disciplined routines get a bum rap in today’s world, where we celebrate spontaneity and often look for the game-changing sprint to the end zone. But this war was a marathon, and distance running had taught me the importance of pace. Moreover, it was my message to the force that we could not be rattled: In times of both quiet and chaos, we would maintain a calm, disciplined, even rhythm.

  This began on a personal level. I needed to have a regular, worthwhile presence as I commanded from the theater and moved locations every few days. When in Iraq, I retired at dawn, slept for several hours, then replied to the day’s first tranche of e-mails. During these quiet midmorning hours, I’d spend a few minutes in the Joint Operations Center, talking to the skeleton staff who planned for the evening’s actions or performed maintenance. Then, come noon, I ran for an hour parallel to the runways at Balad. During summer the pavement baked at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, but I tempered my pace and found every run a good diversion.

  During my run or while lifting weights, I listened to audiobooks. I’ve always loved to read a wide variety of books, and I found audiobooks offered the best way for me to digest them. After loading them onto my iPod, I listened through headphones while working out, then used small speakers to continue listening while I dressed. Annie checked out every good audiobook she could find in local libraries and bought me countless others she thought would interest me. My tastes remained eclectic—from Freakonomics to Don Quixote, Moscow 1941 to Intelligence in War—and they made me think more broadly than the constant staccato of e-mail or daily briefs.

  After my midday run, meetings began—the first of which became a hallmark of TF 714: Our operations and intelligence video teleconference or O&I. On the surface, the update—we aimed for ninety minutes, but it could run to two hours—looked like the kind of standard review of operations and intelligence that I’d attended in green canvas army tents and that other units held internally. But we created the O&I to tie together a geographically dispersed command, and it differed from other updates in three key respects: its regularity; the size, diversity, and dispersion of the forum; and (made possible by the first two) the richness of information discussed.

  As the core heartbeat of our battle rhythm and the nucleus of each day, the O&I ran six days a week and was never canceled. Our force, spread across time zones, operated uniformly on Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time), so the O&I began at noon Zulu time (4:00 P.M. inside our Balad hanger, 9:00 A.M. on the East Coast of the United States—by design at the start of the workday for the agencies in D.C. that we wanted to participate.

  The O&I audience began relatively small that winter of 2004, when we could connect a constellation of D.C. conference rooms, our bigger bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and teams in embassies across the region. But by the following summer, the video link was seamless and reached all the way to our austere forward operating bases in the Iraqi desert or Afghan hills. We developed prepackaged communications bundles that could connect from anywhere in the world. We installed secure communications in embassies to entice our partners to participate. Eventually, every member of TF 714 and partners in D.C. could view the meetings on their personal computers, listening through their headphones. Especially as TF 714’s battlefield success gained notice, by 2007 the O&I was a worldwide forum of thousands of people associated with our mission.

  The size of the forum invited an array of perspectives that built a collectively richer understanding of the topic at hand. So too did the depth of information we discussed and the regularity of our conversations. Few topics were off limits: Granular tactics were discussed alongside strategy, intelligence alongside operations, resourcing alongside values. The best moments came when a briefing sparked a conversation among multiple people at different agencies that disclosed information that was known but had not been shared across the community.

  I quickly saw, however, that beyond its value for the information shared, the O&I was the single most powerful tool I had at my disposal in leading a dispersed force. A video teleconference coul
dn’t replace a hand on a shoulder. But the O&I provided me nine hours a week during which I could seek to influence, inspire, and learn from those I led. I asked probing questions, but also ones I knew the answers to, in order to give them a moment to demonstrate their mastery in front of an audience of thousands of their peers. I would restate something I feared was unclear or provide my personal assessment of something I wanted to ensure was accurate, only to have the experts correct me. These exchanges were helpful in calibrating my thinking, but they also hopefully demonstrated to everyone that we were less a team led by me than we were a team leading one another. The regular briefings also reinforced the briefers: As Admiral Nelson knew, decentralizing did not mean disengaging, and those farthest out could not have any doubt that their work fit into a wider mission.

  Unless someone in my room was talking, one camera was on me the whole time. By nature an introvert, I found the requirement to be on camera for so long exhausting, but it forced me to be a better leader. My interactions with one person were amplified to the thousands—subordinates, peers, superiors—who were watching. If I probed until people were uncomfortable, I tried to resist chastising them in the open forum. I tried hard to address all the briefers by their first names, something that got easier the longer I was in command. I was glad one day to get a cheeky but well-meaning e-mail from a subordinate who had tried to calculate the number of times I said “thank you,” or some form of it, in the morning stand-up. He had lost count before it was over.

  Critically, the O&I fostered decentralized initiative and free thinking while maintaining control of the organization and keeping the energy at the lowest levels directed toward a common strategy. This was meant to liberate subordinates and remove unnecessary hesitation. When I told a major, for example, that he did not have to ask permission to do something, I simultaneously broadcast that directive to all of the other majors. They now didn’t have to waste time dialing up headquarters. Everyone left the O&I confident they knew the latest update of our organization’s intent, strategy, rules, and approvals. Our discipline of schedules, processes, and standards did not reduce adaptability or creativity. It was the foundation that allowed for it.

  In subtle and overt ways, the O&I helped us to animate Beltway conference rooms and cubicles with the “This is a war” ethos that filled our austere, dusty outstations downrange. By spanning time zones, we were gluing together groups of people with different levels of devotion. We relied on people in the States for whom this was a nine-to-five job, who picked up their kids from soccer practice after work. Even when their commitment was outsize for D.C., it often didn’t match the grueling pace maintained in three- and four-month spurts by people downrange. The O&I helped stoke further commitment. In most stateside locations, the military wore the dark green uniform or the blue blouse to the office. So after months and eventually years of appearing in the tan uniforms worn by those deployed, we built up moral suasion. The impact was more immediate when people outside the war zone watched the operators brief. They saw their days-old beards and the guns, helmets, and body armor hanging on the wall. They knew those men would in a few hours be out in dark, tight spaces. The stand-up reminded analysts that their work was not just paper traffic; it affected lives. Those who were frustrated by sending intelligence reports into the ether had the simultaneously sobering and exciting experience of hearing that their work did, or could, lead to a senior leader being captured or to a car-bomb factory being shut down.

  These moments were motivation enough for much of our force, so in concluding remarks, I would summarize some of what I had heard and try to connect it to our bigger goals. We didn’t have time to drive this with emotions, to huff and puff. We needed constant, demanding, driven vigilance and professionalism. I tried to build that up a few sentences at a time through forceful but even tones. Do your job. People’s lives are on the line. Thanks, as always, for all you are doing.

  * * *

  The O&I ended in the early evening, and preparations for battle filled the rest of the day. Although we conducted a few operations before sunset, as night fell, the operations centers hummed with serious, focused activity. Soon the rumble of helicopters and aircraft, some throaty, some a high whine, bounced across the darkened gravel and off the cement walls and barriers of our compound. The sound grew in layers, building like a chorus singing a round, as one set of rotors, propellers, or jet engines came alive, joined the cacophony, and then departed the airfield. Gradually, the chorus dissipated until silence returned to the darkened base. Elsewhere across Iraq and on bases in Afghanistan, smaller outbreaks of mechanical sound cut into the night.

  On some nights I walked to the dark tarmac, took a seat in a helicopter, and joined the raids. On other nights, I sat on the back bench of the operations center, watching the screens and listening to radio traffic and updates read aloud to the room from the operations log. After the initial assaults were called in, I often went to the gym for a second workout—exactly thirty-two minutes on the treadmill—and then returned to headquarters until light broke and the teams headed back from the targets.

  When the dry heat of a new day began to creep in, supplanting the relative cool of the desert night, I retired to my hooch. Propped in my bunk, I’d read for bit, often waking to find myself nodding over pages I couldn’t remember. Above my side table, Annie smiled at me from the photographs tacked to the wall. It had now been a year since I had taken command, deployed forward for most of it. As a captain in Korea, during our first long separation, I had ended each night by writing her a letter. Now I went to bed each night knowing that in the morning I would have an e-mail from Annie and a few minutes to reply before the day’s activities gained momentum.

  * * *

  These developments, during the second half of 2004, laid the essential framework for a machine that would become larger, better synchronized, and smarter in the years ahead.

  As we grew our network, solidified the relationships that bound it, and committed ourselves even more to the fight in Iraq, our enemy did the same. On December 16, Osama bin Laden issued a long audiotape, much of it a detailed screed against his homeland’s leaders. But in imploring action, he turned to the more vulnerable front next door, in Iraq. A year earlier, he had “urged” young Muslims to wage jihad there. He now took a direct, almost scolding tone: “Mujahideen . . . you scare the enemy but they do not scare you, and you are well aware that the burning issues of the umma today are the jihads in Palestine and in Iraq. So be very sure to help them, be sure to know that there is a rare and golden opportunity today to make Americans bleed in Iraq, in economic, human, and psychological terms. So don’t waste this opportunity and regret it afterwards.”

  Eleven days later, amid the Christmas news lull in America, Al Jazeera broadcast an abridgment of another audiotape. In addition to warning Iraqis not to participate in their forthcoming January parliamentary elections, bin Laden named Zarqawi the emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi’s men, he added, needed as much as two hundred thousand euros a week to maintain their good work.

  The year ended with the highest-profile terrorist leader doing more than channeling recruits and donations to that year’s most violent. By knighting Zarqawi and elevating his fight, bin Laden had tied his own fate, and his organization’s, to the success of Al Qaeda in Iraq, now the most crucial front in the global jihadist movement. Al Qaeda staked its vision—of American humiliation, jihadist victory, and a resuscitated caliphate—on that new front.

  Contesting that vision, and the men who flocked to Iraq to achieve it, would soon lead us to an arid stretch of western Iraq.

  | CHAPTER 11 |

  Out West

  November 2004–October 2005

  At lunchtime on December 21, 2004, five days after bin Laden urged young Muslims not to miss the “golden opportunity” in Iraq, a man dressed in an Iraqi security forces uniform walked to the middle of the football-field-size mess tent at Forward Operat
ing Base Marez in Mosul, northern Iraq. He wound his way through the long rows of white folding tables, covered with Tabasco bottles and napkin dispensers, where Iraqis and Americans sat eating. Some reports had him loitering by the sandwich bar. Others who survived saw him sitting and, at the last moment, bowing forward in silence. In either case, a few minutes past noon, he ignited. The BB pellets packed in a thick layer over the explosives of his vest cut through the packed mess hall in a metallic cloud. Unseen shock waves pulsed out, scattering tables and bodies. The glowing heat scalded the room and ripped open the tent ceiling. Beneath its charred tarp and in the bright, smoky column of sunlight coming through the gash, twenty-two people lay dead, including an operative from my task force.

  After the mess-hall attack, Ansar al-Sunnah, the group that had sheltered Zarqawi before we toppled Saddam and that maintained a close but rocky alliance with Al Qaeda, was quick to take credit. In its Internet boasts, Ansar claimed the attacker was an Iraqi, a hometown recruit from nearby Mosul. But intelligence instead indicated Ansar had dispatched a twenty-year-old Saudi medical student, one of the many foreigners imported for these martyrdom attacks.

  Contrary to Ansar and Al Qaeda propaganda efforts, Iraqis rarely volunteered for martyrdom operations at that stage of the war. These attacks were instead the hallmark of foreign volunteers, whose increasing infiltration into Iraq had been one of TF 714’s main concerns in the months leading up to this bombing. The operative we lost that day was part of a team we had dispatched to Mosul to help combat that flow.