America is on the precipice of a credibility crisis in public diplomacy. The world has little faith in our most important messenger, and the proliferation of social media use at all levels of government makes deliberate message management more difficult to execute than ever. Sienkiewicz’s ideas about the soft power value of reproducing American forms while ceding actual content creation to local producers serve as both a basis for policy innovation and a warning. Ultimately, Sienkiewicz’s ability to pack both granular history and broad theory into a concise package makes his book a rare treat among academic titles. The Other Air Force isn’t written with strategists in mind, but anyone with an interest in the future of soft power would do well to read it all the same.
Interviewing John Renehan, Author of The Valley
The Valley was named one of Wall Street Journal’s Best Books of 2015 and Military Times listed it among their Top 5 in a year of strong work from authors like Jesse Goolsby, Eliot Ackerman, and Seth Folsom. Tom Ricks compared its author to Jane Austen. The book, by former U.S. Army officer John Renehan, is a thrilling crime novel set in a deep valley of Afghanistan’s remote Nuristan province, and today he chats about The Valley and other things with Marc Milligan.
#Reviewing The Valley
The Valley ends as it begins, with the protagonist, Will Black, sitting in a rental car outside a place he is not expected and perhaps would be unwelcome were he to leave the vehicle and walk to the front door. In one instance, the reader knows exactly why he is there. In the other, like other questions raised in the course of this debut novel by former U.S. Army officer John Renehan, the reader may never find the answers. What the author has fit in between is a thrilling crime novel set in a deep valley of Afghanistan’s remote Nuristan province with an amateur gumshoe detective played by a disgruntled but capable Army lieutenant sent to conduct a by-the-books investigation at the remotest of combat outposts.
#Reviewing Retire the Colors
Retire the Colors is a reference to the command given at the end of a service or ceremony directing the color guard to retrieve the national and unit colors and remove them from the ceremony. Rendering honors and retiring the colors marks the official end of the ceremony, and frequently, the transition to the informal social activities afterward. The reference is appropriate for this anthology of stories dealing with transition between military service and the civilian world.
#Reviewing Citizen Soldier
Citizen Soldier's depiction of combat aims for a visceral reaction and challenges viewers to place soldiers’ sacrifices within the context of our ongoing wars. And it does an admirable job, leaving you tense and guessing about the outcome of the battles and ambushes the “Thunderbirds” fought their way through. The documentary’s focus on the trials of National Guard soldiers in our present conflicts, however, ignores the wider consequences of a repeatedly deployed and increasingly depended-on reserve echelon. The continued reliance upon and the “regularization” of the National Guard should force the Army, Congress, and American society to examine the role of the Guard in our current and future military operations, whether we want to watch it or not.
The Generals in Their Labyrinth: #Reviewing High Command
The fact that our most cherished ally is no longer able to analyze its own strategic situation, or participate fully in our strategic debates, should be distressing. Britain’s generals, brilliant as they may be, are trapped in a series of historical and organizational labyrinths. Needless to say, this situation may change, and Elliott is one of many voices calling out for reform. Until then, America must remain wary of allies who promise more than they can deliver.
#Reviewing All The Ways We Kill and Die
Castner has written a compelling account of how particular technologies put their stamp on a certain kind of war. In going far beyond that, to explore the human dimensions and costs of that war, and to point to the possibility of hope and resilience for its veterans, Castner’s achievement is as much literary as it is a technical. All The Ways We Kill and Die offers insight both into the ways that wars can be fought, and how they may be survived.
Where Youth and Laughter Go: An Interview with Seth Folsom
[Where Youth and Laughter Go] is worth revisiting. America faces weighty decisions in the years ahead, and Folsom’s experience is instructive. There are limits to what can be done. If you debated the strategy of the surge, or if you believe it didn’t last long enough, or if you believe we ought to go back again, you should read this book.
#Reviewing A War
Ultimately, this film is about many things. Stale and hollow storytelling is not one of them. A War is ripe with the chaos that is war. Watching it, one is struck by courage, tragedy, death, grief, and the circumstantial bureaucracy of war. One has thrust upon them the impact of deployment on family, the demands of brotherhood, and its connections beyond the blurred lines of battle.
Pakistan Catch-22: The Trouble With Wars in Landlocked Countries
Lemar Farhad recently wrote on the relationship of the Pakistani government and the Taliban in “Why Peace with the Taliban Is a Bad Idea”. In it he highlighted specific reasons why Pakistan has been aiding the Taliban against the current U.S. and NATO backed government in Afghanistan. This duplicitous stance by the Pakistan government, which is also our ally in the Global War on Terror, makes the goal of actually defeating the Taliban likely unattainable.
The Roots of the Taliban
In a recent article for The Bridge, it was proposed that negotiating with the Taliban is not only morally reprehensible but also a fool’s errand as the movement is a proxy force of Pakistan. So long as Pakistan supports the Taliban, it was argued, a conclusion to the War in Afghanistan will remain elusive; the Taliban will be militarily neutralized only when Pakistan removes its support.
#Reviewing Where Youth and Laughter Go
Where Youth and Laughter Go is not the first Afghanistan memoir published, nor will it be the last. Yet this tome fills a critical gap in the existing literature by providing the voice of a battalion commander. Memoirs tend to either be written by generals defended by the bulwarks of politics and unnamed staff officers or by front-line soldiers with a powerful but narrow perspective. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Seth Folsom, a battalion commander who patrolled daily with his infantry squads, is uniquely placed to bridge this divide. At the battalion level he operated where ‘theory meets practice,’ an often thankless position with limited room to hide.
Warfare by Spoiler: #Reviewing “Team of Teams”
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Stanley McChrystal. Portfolio, 2015.
But this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.[1]
Something’s happening to power. Failure to take this pulse and your combat unit, government, or company starts to flail. Failure to check yourself and your organization, ask the tough questions about whether you are trying to preserve the static known at the expense of the agility you need to survive, and you probably won’t.
The pace of technological change and scale of information instantly available have fostered a world dis-order where chaos and disruption are force multipliers.
Iconoclasts in, old guard out.
Agents of change are no longer obviously the establishment elite, the uniformed combatant, or the most efficient system. Communication is reduced to acronyms and messages are sent in seconds by fleeting identities which are casually discarded. Celebrity requires no talent. Those days belong to the history books. Or rather history apps.
The new order is unafraid of change, constantly looking to replace in place, do more with less. Reaction is the new action. In politics there is a voter appetite for the anti-establishment outsider, throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa the majority population is no longer willing to endure decades-long authoritarian rule. It’s open season on commerce. In the disruptive “sharing economy” of Uber, Air BnB and where individual reviews can make or destroy a chef’s reputation overnight, the individual has never been so connected to so many. And it’s all remote control. Just as easily, he or she disappears. By going off the grid.
Welcome to the age of warfare by spoiler.
In combat too, the individual wields disproportionate power. It’s easy to disrupt, hard to build and sustain. But if the near goal is simply chaos and you have a means of rapid, widespread communication, you do not waste time or resources on painstaking recruitment and training. Just go start a fire and watch it burn. Or walk away. Welcome to the age of warfare by spoiler.
This is the operational environment and enemy General McChrystal and his team at the forward base of Joint Special Operations Command (or the Task Force) faced in Iraq in 2004 where the nascent origins of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) were gaining a foothold.
But this is not a war story as the introduction makes clear. Instead, the experience of war is the scene and the enemy is the instigation for a most unlikely case of organizational upheaval. What happens when the world’s most elite counterterrorist force finds it cannot keep up with a miscellaneous band of radical fighters? McChrystal and his team want to explain it to you and believe their experience on the cutting edge of counterinsurgency reveals not only what is changed about warfare but the world itself. They discovered a most uncomfortable truth: to succeed they had to get out of their own way.
“We explore the unexpected revelation that our biggest challenges lay not in the enemy, but in the dizzyingly new environment in which we were operating, and within the carefully crafted attributes of our own organization.”[2]
With virtual and literal bookshelves crammed full of organizational transformational advice you could be forgiven for wondering why the experience of US special forces in a war which continues to pose more questions than answers has anything relevant for you or your organization. All the more so, for the daily headlines from a region which continues to hemorrhage from its injury in an evermore complex, compounding fracture.
You might forgive yourself a second time for wondering why the experience of the US military in Iraq holds relevant lessons learnt other than what not to do. That is one reason this book is not a war story but an examination of what happens when an organization faces an existential threat: the best resourced and trained military force on the planet found that wanting the enemy to be the one you trained for does not make it so and failure to get this right means the difference between mission success and failure.
The book is best read as a journey which allows the reader a front seat view of how the mighty were fallen.
While the title Team of Teams seems like a missed opportunity for something more descriptive this should not put you off the book. What its title lacks in imagination the book makes up for with the compelling witness from the frontlines of a complicated war declared on a tactic. The book is best read as a journey which allows the reader a front seat view of how the mighty were fallen. But this is no story of defeat. Rather, it is an insider look at how the Task Force learned from its enemy and adapted in order to defeat it.
Years later, something was missing from this experience, the journey somehow incomplete. General McChrystal now retired and several members of his team from Iraq set out to explore whether the experience of transforming an elite military organization was a one-off experience or if it might have broader application. They believed it did but the experience was organic, it happened in a specific time and place which could not be now replicated. So they set out to re-examine what had happened and build the theoretical underpinning as to why transformative change was possible. The results led to the conclusion and claim for a proven framework for organizational change.
While the book’s most immediate audience is the private sector companies the McChrystal Group aims to court, the underlying message is by no means limited by a single demographic. Initial results prove their assumption correct. In addition to private sector success, “Big Army” has paid attention. In a recent call for papers the Combined Arms Center has issued an invitation for responses on the topic of “Empowering to Win in a Complex World: Mission Command in the 21st Century.” The principles of mission command to be explored bear a remarkable resemblance to the principles McChrystal Group’s methodology for organizational transformation.
Premise — What if you get it?
The premise of Team of Teams is that we live in a dynamic and interdependent world characterized by upheaval and change. The old rules no longer apply and the organizational model that has dominated both military and commerce since the Industrial Revolution is outdated. When faced with a threat, as the Task Force did in Iraq, the traditional response of doubling down on efficiencies and just doing what you know but better is no longer sufficient. Instead, “adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.”[3]
If you accept this premise at the outset and your reason for reading the book is to understand the experience of the Task Force in Iraq, get ready to be patient. Interspersed between vignettes from Iraq are carefully researched sections on the nineteenth century origins of the efficiency model and how it evolved over time. The Iraq narrative is interrupted with examples on leadership from military history, team dynamics in a hospital emergency room and various industries from business to aviation. All of which are interesting and the content valuable but in places reads more like a textbook. The book’s structure reflects its four authors: Three with shared combat experience in Iraq and a fourth researcher.
Survival is Counterintuitive
To defeat an enemy you have to quantify them in order to allocate and prioritize resources. The challenge for the Task Force was that their enemy was literally their structural opposite:
“We were struggling to understand an enemy that had no fixed location, no uniforms, and identities as immaterial and immeasurable as the cyberspace within which they recruited and developed propaganda.”[4]
Despite this shape-shifter construct the narrative gives a face to the enemy in the form of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who emerged as the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). As the Iraq story unfolds, Zarqawi takes on a significance which is understandable given the need to quantify and demonstrate the value of their process of overhauling the Task Force. The narrative builds to the achievement of tracking down and killing Zarqawi which is at once impressive and convenient. The authors acknowledge the limits of this significant activity with humility and the illustration stands as a success.
The hardest part of making a case that the Task Force’s experience in Iraq applies to you and your organization is the unfortunate record of the US-led coalition in Iraq and subsequent events which have led to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Team of Teams understandably steers clear of the decision to invade Iraq and the role of the conventional forces. However, at no point in the fight against AQI was it separate from the US civilian leadership’s decision to alienate the most powerful, connected and well-trained Sunnis with the ban against former Baathist party members participating in the new government. Nor was their fight separate from the conduct of the far larger number of conventional forces that made up the coalition.
It was not just that the Task Force could not keep up with the enemy, it’s that the operational environment favored the tactics of the spoiler.
In AQI the Task Force faced less a hostile military organization, however decentralized, and rather a militant organism. They weren’t just fighting AQI, they were fighting in a vicious circle where the very footprints of coalition forces and reconstruction projects designed to win hearts and minds created endless targets of opportunity. The unexamined logic of the invasion and end-state of defeating the enemy was security. This fed perfectly into the emerging organism that was the counterinsurgency of which AQI was part.
A parasitic organism lives off of another organism (its host). It survives by deriving nutrients at its host’s expense. As the occupation wore on, AQI adopted the habits of a parasitic organism feeding off the very presence of its enemy.
It was not just that the Task Force could not keep up with the enemy, it’s that the operational environment favored the tactics of the spoiler. Put another way, its not just that AQI was an unconventional enemy, it was that all they had to do was disrupt to win the information war. 300 civilians killed by a vehicle that explodes in a crowded market place? Message: “The Americans failed to protect.” A suicide bomber attacks a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new factory funded by the US government and the Iraqi provincial governor gets killed. Message: “This is what happens if you collaborate with the Americans.”
Warfare by spoiler meant AQI did not have to recruit. The presence of a large, occupying force did that for them. AQI did not even have to know each of their footmen. Individuals could self-recruit in reaction to a particularly rough night raid or with a checkpoint within sniper range of a rooftop.
“It was soon apparent that their changes were not the outcome of deliberate decision making by seniors in the hierarchy; they were organic reactions by forces on the ground. Their strategy was likely unintentional, but they had leveraged the new environment with exquisite success.”[5]
There’s nothing new under the sun — Except generational awareness
In response to an asymmetric threat that was not a worthy counterpart but nonetheless lethal adversary, the Task Force cultivated the organizational requirements of trust across internal tribal affinities, facilitated a sense of common purpose resulting in a shared consciousness (get on the same page) and empowered (de-centralized) execution. These characteristics are not in themselves, original or new concepts in organizational management. What Team of Teams offers that is different and groundbreaking is a compelling case based on the legitimacy and sheer improbability of their own experience. They invite you to a process leading to individual and organizational self-awareness.
What sets McChrystal’s leadership and team apart was their capacity for self-examination and the ability to compel this mindset across the Task Force. McChrystal credits this possibility to the fact the country was at war. This is true in part. Equally wartime compounds the pressure on tactics, resources and organizational dynamics in ways no training environment can duplicate. Therefore it remains considerable that such profound change was possible for an organization with arguably the highest degree of discipline, training, and accomplishment. If ever there was reason for arrogant tribalism to hold sway it was in Iraq in 2004. Instead, the Task Force leadership was open to and recognized a process which painfully required antithetical qualities on the frontlines of war: vulnerability, humility and the risk of internal divide and conquer.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to read this book is the experience from war and specifically that the war in question is Iraq. The transformation of the Task Force is not only a model for military and private sector application but any organization and including government.
Just as the Task Force did not get to fight the enemy it had trained for, we need the self-awareness to understand our role in the world as we find it, not the world as we would have it.
Persistent success in the modern world requires agility, the flexibility to anticipate disruption and the capacity to adapt and stay afloat. The problem is that the majority of people in power were not raised and socialized to function in an interdependent world and apace with the near-blinding rate of technological change. Like it or not, we are members of teams in our personal and professional lives. The instinct for tribalism, or retreating into what is familiar and known is a fundamental organizing principle which undergirds our society. Technological innovation and the unchecked exchange of information has catapulted our military, economy, and communities into the disruptive age and traditional authorities with clear lines of demarcation often no longer apply.
The reason to read Team of Teams is twofold: First, you cannot avoid the upheaval, whether as team leader or subordinate, company director or member of congress. Second, and not for the first time, the dynamic of war has fostered innovation that can illumine the shrouded pathway ahead for society writ large. The application of training, skill and resources applied to the high intensity stakes on the frontlines of combat has a way of concentrating the mind. Particularly when established knowledge says you should be winning, only you are aren’t.
Team of Teams proposes no single solution but a bespoke process leading to individual and organizational self-awareness. It is a powerful example and call for an honest examination starting with our assumptions and perceptions of ourselves. Just as the Task Force did not get to fight the enemy it had trained for, we need the self-awareness to understand our role in the world as we find it, not the world as we would have it. The stakes could not be higher. Failure to evolve from an outdated model of understanding to a dynamic, continually reviewed consciousness and we will fail to effectively engage our enemies and allies alike. So much of the past 14 years of war is a cautionary tale. The Task Force’s journey is proof that the greatest challenges hold the greatest opportunities.
Holly Hughson is a humanitarian aid worker with an extensive background in rapid assessment, program design, management and monitoring of operations in both humanitarian emergencies and post-conflict settings. Her experience includes work in Kosovo, Sudan, Iraq, Russian Federation and Afghanistan. Presently she is writing a personal history of war from the perspective of a Western female living and working in Muslim countries.
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Notes:
[1] Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners. London: Oxford University Press, 1951.
[2] McChrystal, Stanley, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell,Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015: 6.
[3] McChrystal, 20
[4] McChrystal, 21
[5] McChrystal, 224
Why Peace with the Taliban Is a Bad Idea & What Needs to Happen Instead
National Security, Pragmatism, and Human Rights
A variety of media sources have reported a practice in Afghanistan called bacha bazi. Bacha bazi consists of taking young boys from their families and forcing them to entertain men, a process that often includes their molestation. Some...claim that the kidnapping and rape of Afghan boys by the United States’ Afghan allies is insignificant compared to the accomplishment of national security goals, implying that stopping bacha bazi will interfere with the accomplishment of our mission. But failing to prevent our allies from recreationally kidnapping and raping Afghan boys will hinder the United States’ efforts in Afghanistan.
National Security Goals and the Dancing Boys of Afghanistan
America can’t save everyone. Unfortunately, as it has for generations, rape and child abuse will happen. The only difference is 50 years ago, we didn’t have the media to report about it and people didn’t care. Now they do. But while we can lament the plight of Afghanistan’s dancing boys, we still have to remember the mission.
What Would We Lose By Winning...The Mission vs. Morality
America does and should work very hard to maintain the moral high ground and encourage its allies and partners to do so as well. Sometimes it slips as it tries to strike a balance between security and what is morally right. Sometimes short term interests trump long term goals. But that does not make it right.
Green on Blue: An Interview with Elliot Ackerman
Green on Blue is the story of an Afghan child born to war, scarred by conflict, and driven by his enculturated need to respond to violence with violence. Aziz is his name. If you’ve served in Afghanistan and worked with the Afghan National Army, the National Police, or even if you’ve come across men who seem to live normal lives, you have probably met him; though it is unlikely that you understand what motivates him, what drives him to act, or what he fears.
Reflections on the Long War (Part One)
The Long War left me with a unique understanding of uncertainty. While fascinating, the military desires to reduce it through preparation and training, but when we miss cultural awareness, we limit ourselves. There is so much I could address about these topics, and I suppose I am not saying anything new. I have found, however, that the nature of war is complex and unforgiving. It should not be entered into lightly.
