My Share of the Task

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.

Preface to the Paperback Edition

A
ll 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 real 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