Team of Teams

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for an Empowered World by Gen. Stanley McChrystal (US Army, Ret). With Tatum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell.  

Portfolio/Penguin, 2015.

An enjoyable, erudite read, Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal was written by a general for generals. McChrystal takes his time to make his points. He presents cogent evidence to support his assertions, but those would be easy enough to accept on the basis of his authority. His education and experience made him an expert.  From 2003-2008 he was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command that was responsible for defeating the insurgency of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and neutralizing its leadership, including the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In order to achieve that, McChrystal had to reconfigure the way the Army usually operated.

The transformation was radical for the military, but familiar to the private sector. Information could not be held in organizational “silos” on a need-to-know basis. The office layout, while allowing adequate personal space, had to be open so that people could talk across desks, across islands of information and authority. This was only way that the allied joint forces could defeat AQI, which was decentralized, resilient, adaptable, flexible, and driven by the media of information exchange from the cellphone to the international news website.

The coordinating theme is the balance and integration of shared consciousness and empowered execution. Shared consciousness includes the physical perceptions brought in from information assets, either directly from soldiers in the field or indirectly from informants or remote sensors. It also includes the philosophy of the mission, an agreement on doctrine and rules of engagement. Given that, empowered execution allows those closest to a problem – taking a house or killing an enemy leader—to solve it in real time.

Early on, McChrystal establishes a baseline that he returns to repeatedly throughout the book. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s efficient organization defined not just the methods of production or the layout of the office, but the fundamental doctrinal premise of a civilization for 100 years.  Taylorist thinking led to the impenetrable (but immovable) Maginot Line that aircraft flew over. The coalition forces defeated Saddam Hussein because both sides were fighting the previous war. The Iraqi insurgency demanded new habits from new learning. It was time to take everyone’s brains out of their footlockers and put them all to work thinking, discussing, planning, and criticizing.

Chapter 10 “Hands off” contrasts the experiences of Commodore Matthew Perry and Gen. Ulysses Grant. Perry was on his own, over 6,000 miles from home. He had total control and no oversight. On the other hand, Grant issued meticulously detailed orders to his generals. McChrystal’s world was a strange mix of the two. While he enjoyed complete information input from assets in the field, soldiers, helicopters, and drones, he also insisted on letting the leaders on the ground make their own decisions, knowing, of course, that they were not alone at all. 

MECE: Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive

McChrystal completed a master of science in International Relations from Salve Regina University. He has company. Maj. Gen. James W. Nuttall deputy director of the Army National Guard earned an MA at SRU. Gen. Peter Chiarelli completed an MA in national security strategy at SRU after earning an MPA from the University of Washington. After finishing a master's at Salve Regina, Gen. Anthony Zinni (USMC) earned another master's from Central Michigan University.

Perhaps making too much of his outside-the-box thinking, it is interesting to note that Gen. McChrystal recommended A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for Admiral Stavridis’s anthology, The Leader’s Bookshelf. Also, whether and to what extent such new age intuitions actually instantiated the doctrine of counter-insurgency outlined by David Galula may be putative. It may be that victory in Iraq such as it was came from doing what soldiers always do and that so-called “counter-insurgency” ultimately proved to be a failure because it could never have been a success. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Book Review - Counter-Insurgency by David Galula

Book Review - Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency by Colonel Gian Gentile

Book Review: The Fourth Star by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe 

The Leader’s Bookshelf by Admiral James Stavridis and R.Manning Ancell

Counter-Insurgency is a Wrong Turn

While I accept the thesis, I question its underlying assumptions. I take the wider view that war is crime, and therefore crime is war; and therefore, “counter-insurgency” is a response to crime. More deeply, it is only part of the same course of action that any emergency management program follows for any disaster: Response, Protection, Recovery, Mitigation, and Prevention.

Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace
of Counter-Insurgency
by Colonel Gian Gentile
(The New Press, 2013).

Col. Gentile’s thesis is there is no such thing as “counter-insurgency” as a separate kind of warfare.  In addition, the American mass media perpetuate a myth that the army was losing under old leadership with old ideas, but that a bold new leader brought innovative thinking that re-directed the efforts into productive and meaningful modes.  Col. Gentile maintains that (1) counter-insurgency is just the continued meeting of enemy forces; (2) American military actions were always generally successful with notable losses, failures, and errors (as is the nature of war), but no “outside the box” innovative tactics ever were called upon; (3) historically, since Alexander the Great (at least), every army has had to deal with civilian resistance, whether farmers with pruning hooks or doctors repurposing artillery ammunition into bombs under the roadway.  

Col. Gentile examines the classic cases of the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Viet Nam.  In every case, he shows that success came from continuing the offensive according to the same logic, passed from commander to commander through each rotation.  The American failure in Viet Nam was essentially sociological:

“But unless the United States was willing to stay in Vietnam for generations to do armed nation building, the collapse of South Vietnam was inevitable. In the end, firepower could not break the will of the North Vietnamese, the NLF, or the PLAF; nor could it correct the endemic problems of corruption within the South Vietnamese government and military. Moreover, it could not connect in a moral way the people of South Vietnam to the government and military. The United States and South Vietnam lost the war on all fronts.” (page 83)

 The book itself is short, 144 pages, but it is supported with 270 footnotes.  Col. Gentile has done his homework. It remains that he knew the point he wanted to make; and among the libraries and archives, he found the facts he needed.

His thesis is easy to agree with. He wrote for the narrow context of armed conflict, not the wider problem of why people harm each other, and what to do about it.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice 

Laissez-Faire Criminology  

Integrating Criminologies  

CERT: Community Emergency Response Team