CHAPTER 2
Own It All, but Empower Others
Jocko Willink
FALLUJAH, IRAQ: 2003
There was blood all over the floor and smoke in the air. I heard shots fired outside, but I wasn’t quite sure who was shooting or what they were shooting at. I moved down the hallway, confirming that all the rooms had been cleared. I soon found the source of the blood: a wounded Iraqi civilian, on whom my SEAL hospital corpsman—a highly trained combat medic—was working to apply medical care.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He was by the door on the breach,” the SEAL corpsman answered. “He must have been close. Lost an eye and part of his hand. Hit an artery. That’s why there’s so much blood.”
The explosive breaching charge our SEAL platoon had used to enter was designed with enough power to open the door but minimize any potential collateral damage to civilians inside the house. This man was apparently just on the other side of the door and hit by shrapnel.
“Is he going to make it?” I asked.
“Yeah. I’ve got the bleeding stopped,” the corpsman answered. He motioned to a tourniquet he had on the Iraqi’s arm. He was now working on the man’s eye.
“Roger,” I said, and continued on. The hallway was a loop that circled the whole floor of the building. It ran back into itself near the stairwell that we had ascended to start the clearance. Checking the last room, I saw that it had been cleared.
I keyed up my radio and announced: “Target secure. Set security and start the search.”
It was the fall of 2003 and my SEAL platoon had launched on this operation to capture or kill a terrorist leader in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. It was one of the most dangerous areas in Iraq, with high probability of an enemy attack. I was the platoon commander, but my senior enlisted leaders knew what to do. They took charge, ensured security was set, and initiated the search of each room. We detained thirteen military-age males, any one of whom could have been the terrorist we were after. We zip-tied their hands, searched them, and prepared to walk them out of the building to our vehicles for transport from the target.
A voice crackled over the radio headset on my ear: “Might want to hurry up a little in there, Jocko. The natives are getting restless out here.”
It was my task unit commander on the radio. He was outside, controlling the Humvees1 and the dismounted SEALs on external security, as well as coordinating with the U.S. Army units in the area. As the ground force commander, he was in charge of the entire operation, including me and my assault force. My assault force had entered the building where the terrorist was believed to be located, cleared and secured it, and now it sounded as though we needed to hurry up our search.
“Roger that,” I replied.
There was some confusion on target for my assault force—even more than we might have expected. Clearing a building can be complicated, but the layout of this building was particularly unorthodox: lots of small, adjoining rooms and nooks to be cleared. To further complicate matters, the multiple explosive breaching charges and crash grenades2 we deployed left a cloud of thick smoke in the air that obscured our vision and added to the confusion. There were also a number of prisoners and the wounded Iraqi requiring medical attention, so it was no surprise: we were bogged down and had lost our momentum. It seemed no one was quite sure what the next step should be. I told a couple of my guys to start wrapping it up.
“We need to leave,” I said. They nodded their heads and kept doing what they were doing. No progress was made. On top of everything else, I had heard shots fired outside, which could have been anything from warning shots to an escalating firefight. The shots were what had prompted the warning from my task unit commander. I had to get the platoon moving.
“Listen up!” I yelled loudly. Suddenly, the whole building was quiet. “If you aren’t on rear security, start moving back here to me. Check out, grab a prisoner, and escort them out back to the Humvees. We are taking all military-age males. Go!”
Almost instantly, the platoon was back on track. Guys moved toward the exit, checked out with me, grabbed a prisoner, and took them down the stairs to the street. A minute later, my leading petty officer (LPO)—a key leader in the platoon—came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and reported that all prisoners had been escorted out. Only the two of us and the last two guys on rear security were still in the building.
“Alright then, let’s roll,” I said. The LPO told the rear security team to collapse—to move toward the exit—and once they reached us, we made our way out of the building. We waited at the doorway to the street, and when the rear security element reached us, we all moved to our assigned Humvees.
Once we were in, the lead navigator made the call: “Up count from the rear.”
The vehicle commanders in each Humvee sounded off.
“Six is up.”
“Five is up.”
“Four is up.”
“Three is up.”
“Two is up.”
“One is up—we’re rolling.”
And with that, the convoy moved out, down the darkened streets of Fallujah, guns pointed outward, eyes peering through our night-vision goggles, scanning for threats. Traveling at a fast pace and completely blacked out proved effective in avoiding an enemy ambush. Half an hour later, we were safe inside the perimeter of an Army forward operating base. We turned over our prisoners to the Army detention facility and the intelligence personnel with whom we had been working.
Once that turnover was complete, we got back on the main road that connected Fallujah and Baghdad. The roads in the vicinity of Fallujah were rough—damaged from continuous violence. But once outside of Fallujah, the road became a highway not unlike many found in America. An hour or so later, we were back at our base adjacent to Baghdad International Airport. A few short months earlier, before the war kicked off, the airport had been named Saddam Hussein International Airport.
Once on the base, we followed our standard operating procedures (SOPs). First, we refueled the Humvees in case we got another call to go out. We wanted to be ready. Next, we parked the Humvees, dismounted, and mustered in our platoon planning area to debrief the mission. Still wearing our op gear just in case we needed to relaunch on short notice, we went through each detail of the operation: where mistakes were made, what we could have done better, and what we did well. Once the debrief was complete, we went back to the vehicles to perform the maintenance of the platoon gear: in this case, the Humvees, heavy weapons, navigation systems, and communications gear. When that was complete, we moved to our weapons-cleaning area and cleaned our personal weapons. Only after the team and platoon gear had been taken care of did the SEALs clean and perform maintenance on their personal gear and then, finally, themselves—a shower and perhaps a quick bite to eat. As soon as that was complete, the assistant platoon commander and I began looking at possible operations for the next night, preparing approval documents to run up the chain of command, and building operations briefs to give to the platoon. By six or seven o’clock in the morning, we would go to sleep for a few hours and be up in time for lunch at eleven.
That quickly became the cycle for running these operations—conducting largely nighttime direct action raids targeting suspected terrorists or Saddam Hussein regime loyalists. It might seem hard to believe, but like most SEAL platoons at the time, we had no previous real combat experience. Everyone in my platoon had missed the first Gulf War, which had lasted only seventy-two hours with limited ground combat. We were too young to have fought in Grenada or Panama. SEALs who saw action in Somalia were few and far between, and there weren’t any with us. The closest most of us had come to combat before the Iraq War kicked off had been anti-smuggling operations in the Northern Arabian Gulf, enforcing UN sanctions against Saddam’s government. We boarded ships and smaller wooden vessels called dhows that were suspected of smuggling oil or other contraband out of Iraq. We shadowed the vessels from our small boats or by helicopter, and once we were confide
nt they had entered international waters, we boarded the vessels, quickly made our way to the bridge of the ship, and took control of the vessel and crew. Once we had them secured, we would call in a U.S. Navy or Coast Guard boarding team to take over for us.
While the anti-smuggling operations during the late 1990s and early 2000s were better than nothing, they were hardly challenging missions. I conducted a number of them while I was an assistant platoon commander, but we never fired a shot—and to be frank, there was never even a real, legitimate threat. But it was our mission and we did it professionally.
Those missions were a far cry from being on the ground in Iraq hunting down terrorists. In Iraq, the threat level was infinitely higher and the operations infinitely more aggressive. Because we were all so inexperienced in combat, I got down in the weeds on much of the planning and execution of the operations. With my first time in real combat, I subconsciously felt I had something to prove—to myself and to those around me. In order to ensure we did the best job possible, I got very granular in the entire mission process. As soon as we received a target from our intelligence group, I was all over it, looking at the routes into and out of the target, poring over the intel, helping plan the breach team sequence, task organizing the assault force, building the load-out plan for the Humvees, running rehearsals. In short, I owned everything in my world. All of it.
Of course, I wanted my junior personnel to step up, take ownership, and lead some of the missions themselves. But they didn’t. And this was a little surprising, because I had solid senior and junior enlisted personnel who I knew could handle much more. But they weren’t taking ownership the way I needed them to. So I continued to oversee everything in close detail. I micromanaged.
But there was only so much I could do—and so much I could own. Very quickly, our operational tempo picked up. On top of the direct action missions we conducted to capture or kill enemy insurgents, we began to conduct numerous additional operations, including airborne and vehicle-borne reconnaissance missions and other intelligence-gathering operations.
One morning we were tasked with multiple reconnaissance missions and we received information for two simultaneous potential direct action capture/kill missions that evening. I knew there was no way to own all of those operations myself. I assigned responsibility for each of the missions to four of my junior leaders and told them to come up with a plan, deconflict3 with each other for assets and personnel, and check in with me after they came up with their plans. Then I stood back and let them go.
The results were beyond anything I’d expected. They took ownership. Not only did they come up with solid, tactically sound plans, they also got creative and developed new and innovative ideas to make our execution of those plans more effective. Most important, they took full ownership of the operations and worked with all the confidence and aggressive leadership we needed to be successful in combat. It was everything I had wished for them to do from the start. Of course, I still took Extreme Ownership—this is the underlying philosophy that guides everything I did, and still do, as a leader. I was still 100 percent responsible for their operations, their plans, the manner they executed missions, and the success or failure of those missions. But my ownership had to be balanced with Decentralized Command; I needed to allow them to own the missions at their level so they were fully empowered and could execute with conviction and lead from their positions with certitude.
The more our operational tempo picked up, the less time I had to spend in the weeds and the more ownership they demonstrated. Soon, I was doing nothing more than a cursory check of their mission plans before sending them out to conduct operations on their own without me, my assistant platoon commander, or my platoon chief—in other words, without senior SEAL supervision.
Yet my junior leaders performed tremendously well. And I learned a valuable lesson: the reason they hadn’t stepped up prior to this was that I hadn’t allowed it. My attitude of taking Extreme Ownership of everything had left them with nothing to own. They didn’t realize it—nor did I—but my micromanagement was so controlling that they had shut down mentally. Not that they gave up or had a bad attitude; they didn’t at all. But as the leader, I had set the precedent that I would do everything myself. And when I ran everything, they just sat back and waited for me to dictate the plan and make the calls. As soon as I backed off and let them start to run things, they ran with everything and they ran hard. It was beautiful to behold. I watched them delve into their missions with total intensity and dedication.
The benefits to this approach were multifaceted. First, since I was no longer in the weeds, I saw much more of the big picture. I was able to start focusing on coordination with other elements in the area, gaining a better picture of the intelligence, and making sure I fully understood the terrain and the targets in the area.
Second, since I was not focused on one specific operation, I was able to see how the different operations might support or conflict with each other. From this perspective, I was able to better allocate resources to the right places and at the right times without burning out our people or equipment.
Finally, with my subordinate leadership running the tactical operations, I had the chance to look at operations at a little higher level. I could now piece together the intelligence picture and understand how we could capture or kill the most terrorists possible. It allowed me to start looking up and out at the next level instead of down and in at my own team.
While I had known that ownership—Extreme Ownership—was critical for a leader, this situation made me realize that I had taken it too far. True Extreme Ownership meant that all responsibility rested with me, as the leader. It didn’t mean that I, as the leader, personally did everything myself. My misunderstanding of Extreme Ownership had overrun the Decentralized Command that was integral for our platoon to execute most effectively. I had to find the right balance between taking all ownership myself and allowing my team to take ownership.
But there were other times when I hadn’t taken enough ownership—when I had let the dichotomy slide too far in the other direction and been too hands-off. Prior to arriving in Iraq, my platoon was preparing and rehearsing for an important and sensitive mission. It was a maritime operation that required us to create some new techniques for rendezvousing with a vessel at sea and then transferring people under extreme conditions.
As a leader trying to practice Decentralized Command, I strove to empower my subordinate leaders and let them lead, so I tasked one of my senior SEAL petty officers to lead the operation. This included creating the new techniques and running the training and rehearsals to ensure we were prepared to execute. He was an experienced, mature SEAL with a great operational reputation, and I trusted him and knew he would get the job done. The mission called for us to work closely with a Naval Special Warfare (NSW) boat unit, the crews who operated high-speed watercraft designed to support SEAL missions. We needed to collaborate with them to understand how to best utilize their assets. The senior petty officer set up some meetings with the boat unit, and we began initial pierside dry runs, where we practiced the techniques on land, and rehearsals at sea to develop and test the procedures we were going to use. The new procedures utilized gear and equipment we were already familiar with: maritime radios, night-vision goggles, radar, one-inch tubular nylon, and some other maritime rigging. Once we had the concept figured out, it was straightforward and relatively easy.
As we continued the meetings and pierside rehearsals, I noticed my senior SEAL petty officer was running things relatively loosely compared with the approach I would normally have taken. And because I wasn’t breathing down his neck, he didn’t provide much oversight on the rest of the platoon either. The more slack he gave the platoon, the more they took advantage of it.
When we met the boat crew at 0700,4 some of our guys would arrive at 0659. When the platoon had planned to do six rehearsals, we would only execute three rehearsals. Guys were showing up in incomplete uniforms, even mixing in some civilian clo
thes. They looked unprofessional. And while the platoon was rehearsing the mission the way they predicted it would happen, they weren’t rehearsing any unexpected contingencies.
This went on for a couple of weeks as we got closer and closer to executing the actual mission. I maintained my lofty attitude and allowed the senior petty officer to continue to lead with a relative amount of slack. I didn’t feel comfortable with it, but I wanted him to have ownership and know that I trusted him. My gut was telling me it had gone too far; I had allowed things to get too loose. But I never addressed it with my senior petty officer or the platoon. I figured that since I had put him in charge, he had to own it.
That changed the first day we were to rehearse at sea. We had an underway time of 0600—meaning the NSW boats would launch from the pier at 0600 sharp. I showed up, in uniform, prepared and ready to go at 0530, and boarded one of the two vessels to which I had been assigned. I checked and rechecked my gear and made sure I was ready to execute.
As 0600 approached, the rest of the platoon straggled in. Two or three guys at a time, in sloppy uniforms, rushing around, running late.
By 0600, two of our guys were still missing.
The special boat unit chief approached our senior petty officer and told him it was time to get under way. The senior petty officer explained that he had just talked to the last two guys and they were running a few minutes late and that we needed to wait for them.
They arrived and crossed the brow—the gangway from the pier—onto the boat at 0607.
Seven minutes late.
I was embarrassed. Embarrassed for myself, embarrassed for the platoon, and embarrassed for the SEAL Teams. Normally a Navy ship would leave stragglers behind—and those stragglers would “miss movement,” as it is called in the Navy, a substantial violation that incurs severe punishment. But since this mission revolved around our participation, the boat chief agreed we would wait for the two SEALs. But it was still inexcusable.
Finally, with all our platoon onboard, the two NSW boats got under way and moved out over the horizon, out of visibility of the shore. Once we were on station at sea in the area we had designated for rehearsal, the senior petty officer gave the order to commence. The platoon members moved into their positions and started to work, setting up rigging, breaking out our communications gear, and preparing to execute the actions at the objective. Since I was letting the senior petty officer run this mission, I carried out my assigned tasks as if I were one of the SEAL shooters—one of the frontline troopers.
The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win Page 5