Sailing True North

by James Stavridis

  The oceans show us this day after day. As a captain on the bridge, you can be driving the ship on a perfectly sunny day, the seas calm, standing a relaxed bridge watch and contemplating a good dinner in the wardroom. Suddenly, the boatswain mate will say, “Sir, the quartermaster says the barometer is falling,” and the intercom from the combat information center will pipe up with the unwelcome news that a squall is directly ahead. There is no time to turn the ship, the storm breaks hard on the bow, lines are snapping and two sailors are blown over the side. You are uncertain of the ability of the deck division to get a boat in the water, and afraid it might be lost if you get it there. Should you launch the ship’s helicopter? Are you on the right course to make that a safe operation? A thousand things flow through your mind in that moment, from deep concern over the lost sailors to real fear that you will make the wrong decisions. And whatever happens—whichever way you turn the ship, how fast you get a boat in the water, if you decide to take extra time to launch the ship’s helicopter—the decision is yours, and yours alone. Fighting your way through those moments requires real resiliency. And whether you are applying it in a tactical moment or in the long throw of your career like Michelle Howard or in responding to a life-threatening personal medical crisis like Bill McRaven, how you respond is a measure of your inner resilience.

  Part of resilience is inherent in your character, shaped by your upbringing and the examples your parents and others have put before you, which you do not control. But a significant part of developing resilience is based on three key elements of your life that are in fact under your control. The first is the company you keep—the peers around whom you spend time. Seek out and bind yourself to those who both dare and succeed after failure. Too often, we undervalue the importance of our peers in setting examples of resilience for ourselves. Second are the books we read. There are so many powerful tales of resilience in literature, including The Odyssey of Homer, about the long voyage home by the wandering king of Ithaca; Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield about the doomed Spartans of Thermopylae; The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, set in the American Civil War; The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, about the small warship Compass Rose in the Second World War; or Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian masterpiece The Road. Find books that inspire that sense of resilience. And finally, in developing real resilience, it is important for all of us to have the inner conversation that says, “I refuse to be a victim. I will not blame others. I will prevail over the hardest of circumstances. And if I don’t succeed initially, I will try again and again and yet again.” Remembering the words of Churchill—never give in—is helpful. But this is a conversation that has to be part of our deepest sense of self. All of us fail—but we are so often given choices about how to respond. Be resilient.

  Conclusions

  I want to conclude with a few thoughts on my own sea story, which may provide a glimpse of one sailor’s experiences, both good and bad, in wrestling with the challenges of character. In the course of nearly four decades of life at sea, I learned that a handful of character traits were at the heart of both good character and effective leadership. I think they are echoed in the successes and failures of the ten admirals in this volume, and I offer them below, each with a brief vignette of my own.

  At the top of my list is creativity. Again and again in the stories of the ten admirals, we see the importance of a willingness to embrace the new, despite the difficulties and challenges of doing so. Especially in the cases of Admirals Fisher, Zumwalt, Mahan, and Hopper, we saw the challenge and the ultimate success of pursuing innovation—but not without costs. In my own case, I faced trying experiences several times as I endeavored to do so, especially during my days as the leader of US Southern Command in Miami, with responsibility for military operations south of the United States; and running Deep Blue, the innovative think tank put in place by the chief of naval operations in the terrible days immediately after 9/11, when the Navy needed to make the shift to a significant role in the Global War on Terror. One worked out well, the other not so much.

  Let’s start with Deep Blue. Before 9/11, the Navy was focused primarily on traditional global naval missions—sea control (ensuring we had maritime superiority on the deep ocean), power projection ashore (the ability to launch missile and aircraft strikes at targets on land), strategic deterrence (our ballistic missile submarines), and global sealift (moving supplies, US Marines, and other military cargo). We had no idea how to apply maritime power to the post-9/11 world. Chief of Naval Operations Vern Clark grasped this immediately and created a small cell called Deep Blue (a play both on the ocean and on the IBM chess-playing computer) that could think coherently about the new role the Navy needed to undertake. I was chosen to head Deep Blue because throughout my career, my reputation as an innovator, a challenger of orthodoxy, and a publisher of controversial articles was well known. I often consider that if 9/11 had not demanded that kind of thinking, I might have retired as a one-star officer. I was lucky that my overriding character trait—a hunger to innovate—met a situation that demanded it.

  Clark allowed me to handpick a dozen of the smartest thinkers, writers, and briefers in the Navy. I grabbed the top people from each of the warfare communities and committed to briefing the chief of naval operations with at least two or three innovative ideas weekly. We worked unbelievable hours, tapped into the entire Navy’s intellectual backbone via the War College, Naval Academy, and various training commands, and created a suite of new ideas. Some were terrific and are in place today; others fizzled. Such is the nature of innovation. What I discovered is that when there is a shared sense of mission, a modest application of high-quality resources (especially people), strong leadership at the top (we reported directly to the CNO), and a determination to take risk, mountains can move. The methods of implementing innovation that I experienced and learned at Deep Blue are the fundamental tools that I used for the final ten years of my career, and that I use today as well.

  But when the character traits of innovation and creativity collide with established ideas, it doesn’t always work out well. A few years after Deep Blue, I was selected to a fourth star and headed to US Southern Command with a particular vision for the command that had evolved from a series of conversations I had had with then secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Both felt that the old paradigm for a combatant command—a massive, cumbersome organization organized strictly to conduct combat operations—was lacking in relevance in the twenty-first century. Both believed that for both Latin America and Africa, it was highly unlikely that we would be engaged in state-on-state combat operations. So the idea was to push the two combatant commands responsible for those regions to try to adapt with a vision that included combat readiness but with a very heavy dose of “soft power” capability—humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy, rule of law, personnel exchanges, counternarcotics, strategic communications, interagency cooperation, and so forth.

  Given this mandate, I plunged in with enthusiasm—perhaps too much enthusiasm. I underestimated the strong desire of many within the massive command to continue on its current, traditional war-fighting trajectory. When I completely reorganized the staff, getting rid of the Napoleonic traditional military staff system, it created real confusion and resentment. While most of the team went along, cooperation was grudging and halfhearted in many cases. While I continue to believe we had outlined the right mission for the command, I pushed too hard, creating antibodies, and the project crumbled after my departure—effectively negating three years of demanding work. The lesson I took away is that innovation matters deeply, but even if you have the right answer, you must be capable of bringing along the nonbelievers.

  So this is a tale of two expressions of the innovation character trait, with the same innovator driving them—one to success and the other a failure. I continue to believe that character drives innovation and, given the right circumstances, it can lead to the most positive an
d powerful outcomes.

  A second vital character quality is resilience. It is insufficient to be capable and good when things are going well, because sooner or later they will go badly. We see this in the cases of every one of the admirals, perhaps most vividly (and painfully) for the young Zheng He, undergoing castration as a young boy; or in the case of Nelson, who faced the most difficult of wounds in losing his right arm and an eye. While, thankfully, I’ve not faced those kinds of physical or medical challenges, I have known my share of career defeats, including at the most senior level. As I mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, I went through a very difficult inspector general investigation from 2011 to 2012 while Supreme Allied Commander at NATO—it fundamentally reshaped my career and life. But I learned from the experience, set new goals, achieved many of them, and sailed on. Generals Allen, McChrystal, and Petraeus—superbly talented leaders all—similarly suffered career reversals but have all rebounded and are leading spectacular second acts. Admiral Michelle Howard faced racial and gender barriers and fought through them, and Admiral Bill McRaven overcame life-threatening leukemia to succeed in command of the nation’s special forces. Resilience is a key element in human character, and near the top of the list for success.

  Third, we need to find our way to humility in the search for good character. Arrogance is a toxic quality in a leader, especially in today’s era of total transparency. But even 2,500 years ago, we see the perceived arrogance of Themistocles lead to his humiliation and exile. So often the evil doppelgänger of success is arrogance, and we need to strive against it on the voyage of character. In my own life, I have fallen short many times in this regard.

  Perhaps the most vivid example of this occurred in the mid-1990s when I was lucky enough to command a brand-new Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, USS Barry. I loved that ship, and it had a superstar crew. We won competition after competition on the waterfront in Norfolk, and many of us—especially this young captain—started to believe our own press. Big mistake. We were sent to sea one nice day to conduct a huge and important engineering inspection. All started well enough, and we headed out to sea very confident—arrogant—believing we’d be back in port with another smashing success. Instead, we had a terrible engineering casualty that was so bad we had to stop and lock our propeller shaft and be towed back into port. We were towed right down the waterfront past all the other ships. There is nothing more embarrassing for the commanding officer of a warship than to be towed home. We didn’t look so hot anymore.

  Eventually—with a lot of assistance from other ships, by the way—we fixed our problems and eventually passed the inspection with the lowest passing grade, a “satisfactory,” far short of the “excellent” or “outstanding” ratings we were expecting and had routinely delivered previously. My executive officer (second in command), who would go on to be a three-star admiral, called it “the best SATISFACTORY ever.” I tried to smile when he said that. What I learned was the importance of humility, of knowing that things will go wrong and that resilience matters. It is a lot easier to be resilient when you are humble to begin with.

  A fourth quality is the need to find balance in our lives. The ancient Greeks knew this, and carved two aphorisms on the temple at Delphi: “Know Thyself” and “All Things in Moderation.” In modern parlance, this can be translated as the need for balance between our natural ambitions and our drive to succeed as opposed to our love of family and time in contemplation. Most of the admirals in this book fail this test, driving themselves relentlessly forward throughout the long sail of their lives. This is certainly an area in which I have failed again and again.

  Of all the times I remember the dichotomy between doing what I desperately wanted to in all my ambition and zeal to excel and feeling the need to care for a beautiful family, the most dramatic was in 1998. On August 7 of that year, Al Qaeda blew up US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224 people including 12 Americans, and injuring 4,000 others. For most of us it was the first time we had heard of Osama bin Laden. In retaliation, President Clinton approved a series of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes. As the commodore of Destroyer Squadron 21, I was forward deployed under the overall command of the head of the US Central Command, General Tony Zinni (who is one of my idols for his balance and character, by the way).

  My mission, executed on August 20, included launching missiles from four destroyers and one submarine under my command. I spent much of the day in the Tomahawk launch center, a long, long day of planning, spinning up the missiles, directing the launches, and evaluating the results. It was exhilarating and exhausting. When the day ended, I went to my small cabin in the carrier Lincoln and lay down on my bed. Something was nagging at me. Then it hit me: it was my daughter Christina’s twelfth birthday. I had spent it firing missiles. I looked at her picture, and my wife Laura’s, and thought to myself, What the hell am I doing with my life? I vowed to be a better husband and father—and came back to the Pentagon, made rear admiral, and promptly fell again into the trap of failing to balance my life.

  On that fateful date in August, we just missed killing bin Laden. He had departed just before our missiles landed in the training camp in Afghanistan we attacked. The missiles I ordered launched nearly killed him—and in an odd twist of fate, several years later, on September 11, 2001, he almost killed me. I was in the Pentagon on the side of the building hit by American Airlines Flight 77, perhaps 150 feet off the point of impact. I wonder what bin Laden was doing that day. I suspect neither of us were very good at finding balance in our lives, but I’m still here and trying. And let’s be honest—it is ambition that so often drives this lack of balance. Struggling with it is an act of character for us all.

  Fifth, a crucial element in the development of character is honesty—being truthful, no matter the cost. You learn that early at Annapolis, where the honor code of “a midshipman does not lie, cheat, or steal” is driven into the young eighteen-year-olds who show up on the Severn River campus every summer. We see failures in this regard repeatedly in our society at large, especially in the political realm, where lying seems to be an art form at times.

  As I mentioned earlier, on the wall in my office hangs an oil painting of USS Maine, the US Navy warship that exploded and sank in the harbor of Havana in mid-February 1898. Without knowing exactly what caused the explosion, the Navy seized on the idea that it was the result of “terrorists” under the command of Spain, which at the time was the colonial ruler of Cuba. Whipped to a frenzy by the yellow press—the fake news of the day—of William Randolph Hearst and others, we launched into a “splendid little war,” as a young Theodore Roosevelt called the Spanish-American War. He would earn the Medal of Honor at San Juan Hill, many people on both sides would die, and the United States entered the modern era and became a colonial power for the first time.

  One lesson of the Maine for me is that of resilience, as we discussed earlier. As a person of character, you simply must accept that your metaphorical ship could blow up at any moment, and be ready with a Plan B. Disbelief, whining, and weakness are unacceptable. Men and women of character display resilience in adversity. But there is another meaning to the painting for me, and it goes to the quality of honesty and respect for the truth.

  How does truth enter into it? When the Navy salvaged the ship decades later, we discovered that the explosion almost certainly was internal in character. There had been no mine attached to the hull by Spanish “terrorists.” Yet we launched heedlessly into a war and changed world history when the United States took over both Cuba and the Philippines. Even at the time, there was no real sense of certainty about what had caused the explosion, so both the government and the media filled in the blank space. It was a war built on a lie, and the result was bitter indeed. Truth matters for us all, but especially for leaders whose decisions shape the world. Character that is built around a respect, really a veneration, for the truth is the sort of character to have.

  And of course, we all fal
l short in this regard, in things both large and small. But truth becomes a habit, and it is a good one to cultivate.

  Sixth, empathy is a fundamental and powerful attribute of character. Most of us are terribly self-centered. The world wires us that way, and nothing that ever happens to us occurs without our presence at the center of the little drama of our lives. The best depiction of that trait of self-centeredness I know is in the brilliant and memorable graduation speech at Kenyon College by David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water.” He exhorts the young graduates to fight against the tendency to see everything in a deeply personal and self-important way, and to begin to develop a lifelong habit of trying to put themselves in the shoes of the other.

  At heart, this is a matter of character. A virtuous person begins every encounter with the world not from their own perspective alone, but rather by trying to understand the situation, mindset, and challenges that others are facing. There are both moral and pragmatic reasons for doing so. I learned this best toward the very end of my career when I became the Supreme Allied Commander of the NATO alliance. It was a job that demanded a deep well of appreciation for each of the other twenty-seven nations. I thought one of my predecessors, General Wes Clark, summed this up nicely when he was criticized by the then secretary of defense for not paying sufficient attention to the needs of the United States—his own nation. General Clark said, “Mr. Secretary, I am intently listening to you with one twentieth of my mind” (there being at that point twenty nations in the alliance). What he meant was that as the overall commander of NATO, he had to represent the interests of every one of the nations in the alliance.