The Exchanges

Q a commander, you, you have to make decisions with maps, not physical maps, but sort of abstractions of reality that have been filtered through a lot of people before it gets to you. And the decisions you can make are only as good as the information that you get. How do you make sure you're dealing with reality on the ground to make sure that you're really understanding what's happening?

A Yeah, this is really important because, as you know, by the time it gets up to you, it's been sort of homogenized to the point where it looks neat and clean, and military units are Depicted as symbols on a map, and you move military units around, and the little symbol doesn't get tired, doesn't get frightened, you know, doesn't suffer casualties, but on the ground, it's very human and very different than that. There are several things. First is experience on the part of the commander, having been there, having looking at a movement Of an organization across the map and you go, wait a minute, I've made movements like that. I know what it does, how tiring it is or, or difficult. The second is staying in communication with people as much as you can listening. You know, there's a lot of, uh, text communication now, but there was incredible value in voice communication. You could talk to a subordinate and you could tell by the tone of their voice, how their morale was, Whether they were upset, whether they were shaky, and you could hopefully be a reassuring voice to them that's hard to do in a, in a printed thing. Finally, it's gotten trickier in recent years because we have the ability to get two-dimensional depictions of the battlefield specifically from unmanned aerial vehicles. In Iraq and Afghanistan, over every fight we could have at about 10,000 to 20,000 feet, full motion vi…

AI assessment note: “First is experience on the part of the commander... The second is staying in communication”

Q stress, why civilian leadership is harder than military leadership, developing mental toughness, the advantages of studying history, Teaching self-discipline, the impact of his famous once-a-day meal on the people he worked with, the greatest misperception other people have about him, and why we don't hold people that fail to make a decision to the same standard as the people that do. It's time to listen and learn. What is risk?

A I used to think of risk as something bad that could happen. And typically the intersection of probability and consequences. So what's the chances that something occurs? And if it does, how bad will that be? And, and that sort of becomes a risk and you buy insurance or you try to dodge it and whatnot. Now I think of it a little differently. Now I think of it as a mathematical equation. And this is the extent of my, my math expertise, but If you think of it as threats times vulnerabilities equals risk, then you suddenly realize that threats are things that are out there that are inevitably coming our way in most cases, and then our vulnerability to them. And so if we can drive threats down low or to zero in a perfect world, which we usually can't, then we'd have no risk. But if we can't control the threats that are out there, which we usually cannot, Then we've got to focus on our vulnerability to them. And we have some agency over that. Not perfect, but we can do something about that and that can decrease our risk. And so I think of risk as the result there and what we're trying to, to have some level of control over.

AI assessment note: “threats times vulnerabilities equals risk”

Q Is there an example sort of that comes to mind where the information you were given and then seeing up close, uh, the reality of the situation were just different?

A I mean, I can't tell you how many times I would do that. I, I once went, uh, out to this small area in Afghanistan. I say small, it was far away from Kabul. And we've given a strategy out to them that says, okay, this is how we're going to deal with the locals and whatnot. And I got an email from a young sergeant, a sergeant, a staff sergeant, a squad leader. And he sent me this email that says, sir, with all due respect, I don't think you understand what's going on out here. And of course, as a commander, my, my feelings are hurt and whatnot. And we got in a helicopter the next day and I said, we're going down there. We're going to see. So we went down to this area and it was outside of Kandahar and it was an area that was a pretty tough fight. And it was the damnedest thing I've ever seen. In Afghanistan, there's not a lot of wood to make trellises for grapes and things like that. So they do it using mud walls. And those mud walls are about six to seven feet high and they pack them together. And then the vines of the plant are inside the mud wall and the blossoms on the top. So what you've created is like suddenly being shrunk down and being into corduroy. And you are suddenly in this corduroy landscape for miles, literally square miles. Well, think about that in a combat sense. You can't see over the walls. You could probably raise yourself up, and then somebody would shoot …

AI assessment note: “I once went, uh, out to this small area in Afghanistan.”

Q the difference in timeline between parties. You can think of this as shareholders and CEOs, but you can also think of this as a mismatch between politicians and military leaders. As an outsider, it seems to me that politicians who operate on a four-year election cycle have different, more short-sighted timelines, and this drives behavior. To what extent Do you think that's true? And how do you think about that?

A I think it's very true. In my own experience, separate from politicians, you found different parts of the U S government. The central intelligence agency took a longer term view. They would operate in an area and they would build intelligence networks and capabilities because they were going to be there forever in some form or fashion. The military was typically there for much shorter periods in larger numbers, and so the military became convinced they had to do something in relatively short order. So we had to come in, and because we had masks and expenditure, we got to move fast, which could be weak, because the military could be looking at expedience over long term. And then the State Department had a different view as well, and often they had a view that said, we're not here to change reality, we're here to report it. And so, Those different timelines became at, at, uh, tension with each other. Now they could work together. They actually could be mutually supportive because they could help each other see a more complete view. Politicians are the same way. I had, uh, Mayor Mike Bloomberg one day tell me that he thought that only executives, meaning elected mayors, presidents, and whatnot, are likely to do long-term infrastructure things. At the time he was talking about a project to make New York City more resilient against things like Hurricane Sandy, which was a huge expen…

AI assessment note: “I think it's very true. In my own experience, separate from politicians, you found”

Q There are no easy decisions in battle. Troops are often put into moral dilemmas or situations where there is no right answer. There's something you can't be taught. Is there sort of an experience that comes to mind that you can think of? And, and how do you assess people's ability to handle that degree of, uh, or that type of dilemma?

A Surprisingly good chain. Um, particularly in professional military forces where people have a fair amount of experience because Most of them will know pretty quickly that there's not a good answer. We would do military operations where you were going to conduct it, particularly in the counter-terrorist world in Iraq during the height of the fight, 2005 and six. We were designed to fight at night, but at times the opportunity came during daylight, and the only time you could get at the enemy was when you could find him, and that was during daylight, which was when they wanted to fight. And so you have to make these decisions that say, okay, we are going to give away some of our advantage because we have to get them while we can. And we did some operations that were pretty difficult. We lost, I remember one instance when we lost, uh, a little bird pilot, actually two in a daylight firefight using a weapon system that was designed for night. And the father of one of the pilots who was lost had the, had the fair question afterwards. He said, what are you doing having that, my son flying that helicopter during daylight and its conditions? And our response was, that's the only time we could get at the enemy. We had to do that. And he accepted that, you know, which is tough because of the loss. But usually I found in the organization, if you communicate clearly that this is the ration…

AI assessment note: “I remember one instance when we lost, uh, a little bird pilot”

Q Uh, that's an interesting one. I hadn't really thought about that. How do we develop mental toughness? How would you teach somebody to develop mental toughness?

A I think it's in several things. I think one of the first things is that you've got to build a sense of who you are. And part of that is the organizational narrative. I am a member of this organization. I am proud to be that. That is important to me. I identify with that, and they identify with a set of values, some of which are associated with the organization. Some are my personal values. Those two things together give the person a sense of who they are. Admiral James Stockdale was captured and for seven years was held in captivity in Hanoi, Hilton. And he was tortured tremendously, and he wrote some interesting things afterward, and he won the Medal of Honor for his conduct there. And he wrote that the things which made him effective in his resistance to that pressure, because he couldn't stop the torture, he couldn't stop anything else, was his grounding in his faith and philosophy, the study he'd done in philosophy, because it gave him a sense of identity, and it gave him a sense of what's truly important in life, and was, was more important than his physical well-being at the moment, or his ability to control the environment, which he couldn't, But instead, it gave him this sense of confidence and purpose, I would say, as a foundation upon which he stood, and he found prisoners who didn't have that very, very vulnerable, and so I would say that When we talk about ourselves…

AI assessment note: “one of the first things is that you've got to build a sense of who you are”

Q I want to come to that later. Do you think we're getting better at sort of dealing with risk or are we getting more risk averse as a society writ large?

A That's a great question. I actually hadn't, haven't answered that one before. I think probably a little bit of both. We are probably getting better at our ability to share information. At least we have the ability to share information better. Technology allows that. Uh, we now have the help of augmented and artificial intelligence, which lets us see trends so we can see the effects of climate change. But then the counter argument is, okay, So what? If we don't do anything about it, are we really getting better? And so I would argue on the one hand, there is the ability to assess the risk with greater accuracy and more timeliness, but we have problems in our society and our organizations now where it's very hard to overcome inertia, either The inaction or the momentum we have in a certain direction because there are stakeholders, there are habits, there are fears, and so I would argue that we're probably not better, although we could be.

AI assessment note: “so I would argue that we're probably not better, although we could be.”

Q You mentioned, uh, Stockdale, you're an advocate of studying history. What are some of the important lessons that you've learned from studying history and how have you applied them?

A Yeah, there, there are a bunch of them. One is that leaders are important, but the sun doesn't rise and set on leaders. Great men are great women. You know, we had this tendency for many years to put our leaders on pedestals and those people we admired, we admired completely. You know, they were perfect in every way. And of course, none were. And so we're going through an age now where we find the fault in everyone, and we get very disappointed when we find out that George Washington owned slaves and didn't free his slaves when he died. We get very disappointed with other iconic leaders. Woodrow Wilson was a raging racist, and yet he did much good for the nation. And so I think one of the first things I've learned from leaders is don't expect perfection, expect humanity. Because if you expect perfection and you, you put your leaders on a pedestal, but you know you're not perfect, then that gives you an excuse for saying, well, I can't be Abraham Lincoln, so I'm just going to be lousy because it's unattainable for me to be a great leader, so I'm not going to bother. Well, in reality, nobody is 10 feet tall So that means that all of us can be taller than we are if we hold ourself to that standard. So that's sort of the first one. The second is you've got to commit yourself to something. And we talked about being more than values, but commit yourself to a cause or an organization …

AI assessment note: “one of the first things I've learned from leaders is don't expect perfection”

Q which is, I used to work in cybersecurity, and I always wondered why the budgets were so skewed towards physical weapons like ships and planes, when the next war is clearly likely to be a cyber war. There seems to be a structural allocation problem. What's going on behind the scenes here that keeps us anchored to the past, fighting the last war, and not moving forward into the future?

A Yeah, Shane, I think it's several things, and I agree with you. And in fact, the next war may well be won or lost before people actually realize it's on. Maybe so fast that that's occurred. I think first is there's a natural constituency for stuff. Aircraft carriers, tanks, planes, all those kinds of things. There's defense industries that make money doing it. There's a certain familiarity to it. If you don't have enough of these things, you worry that you don't have enough. And the people making most of the decisions are My generation generally. And so we didn't grow up with cyber. We're late comers to having any appreciation for it. So I think that there's that those habits that way. And then it's hard to get your mind around cyber because you can't touch it as easily. You can't count it. You don't, we keep so much of it secret. We don't know how strong the United States is with cyber or not because we can't define the next war clearly. It's hard to do war games or equivalent that show people what could or, or will happen. And so as a consequence, we under invest. And I think that we also under appreciate our vulnerability. We're the most connected society in the history of man. I joke, I bought a new refrigerator not long ago and it's connected to wifi.

AI assessment note: “first is there's a natural constituency for stuff. Aircraft carriers, tanks, planes”

Q Are those press tours though? Are those like real engagements?

A It ran the gamut. There were people who were battlefield tourists and they were there to check the block and, and tell people they'd been there. And there are other people who were literally When they got out there, they asked thoughtful questions. They focused on it. They tried to get as close as they could to the, uh, to the action and listen to, to junior soldiers. So they got a good view of it. It's hard to do usually in compressed trips. And when they fly over halfway around the world, they're exhausted when they get there. So there are challenges, but there were a lot who did it very well. And I, I really admired the effort they put in to try to To try to really understand, because, you know, the truth is, if you sit back in D.C. and you listen to what the military tells you, you know, the military, God bless us, will say what we want to be true. It's not that we're lying, but we've been given a mission and we desperately want it to be going well, and so there's a tendency to portray it that way. Go on the ground and feel it yourself.

AI assessment note: “It ran the gamut. There were people who were battlefield tourists and they were there”

Q Are there particular history books that have influenced you more than others?

A You know, it's interesting. I, I read A lot. And I read history almost exclusively. Only occasionally do I read, uh, fiction. I've just finished reading Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln. And it's funny, I've been teaching Abraham Lincoln in our course at Yale for 12 years. And I, I know a fair amount about Abraham Lincoln, like most people do. But I went back and read, and Carl Sandburg wrote in the 19 twenties, this monumental set going through Lincoln. And he wrote in a way that we wouldn't write today. He writes like a poet and he, he describes things and he describes Lincoln in a depth. And so what I'd say is when you get a chance to study somebody beyond the Wikipedia page, who, what, when, where, why? All right. That's, that's interesting. It doesn't tell you the person and often it's incorrect. And Sandberg may be obviously a little out of his time now. But it gives you a sense of the man in a way that I think most books can. And so I think sometimes going back to read those kinds of accounts or read what the person wrote themselves in their letters or diaries can give you a humanity that it's hard to catch otherwise. So I'm really into reading those. I'm not a big military historian. People expect me to. I like to read books about the building of the The Hoover Dam and stuff like that, because I like big projects that took a lot of people cooperating to get …

AI assessment note: “I've just finished reading Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln.”

Q Totally. How would you go about teaching somebody to make decisions under uncertainty? How do you teach soldiers to do that?

A First, teach them that certainty is an impossible goal. When I was a brand new lieutenant, I asked my father, how would I know if somebody that I worked for, worked for me, was going to be a good commander in combat? And I asked him, how would you tell him peacetime? And he says, you won't, you won't know because people have capabilities or, or coping mechanisms that in peacetime look fine that don't play well in war. But when you're in combat, then I, I asked him, okay, when you're in combat, how do you know? He said, some people keep asking for more information and what they're trying to do is drive uncertainty to zero so that there's really not a question on the right course of action because you know everything. But you can't do that. It's not achievable. And so they become hesitant. They become tentative, and they become focused on getting more and more information to, to ratchet the uncertainty out of the situation, and they don't act. And Good commanders know when they've got to take a risk. There's a certain amount of absolute due diligence you do to get information responsibly, but there's a moment in which you have to act, either take advantage of the opportunity or negate the risk, and part of that is learned, and I think part of that is a person's makeup. I think everyone has a relationship with risk, and it doesn't really change. You may get a little better with it…

AI assessment note: “First, teach them that certainty is an impossible goal.”

Q Are there practical things we can do to increase our ability as people to detect, respond, um, to these threats?

A Yeah, that's the good point. This is not just something you are born with, that you are more resilient than the next person or your organization automatically has. In reality, there are, we have enumerated 10 risk control factors that make up this system. We could have had 12, we could have had 15. It's, we tried to make it manageable as we We captured it, but really they go around things like communication, the ability to communicate inside the organization. Do we have a clear narrative and are we aligned on it? Do we have the ability to respond or act? Can we overcome the inertia of inaction or change our action if we're in the wrong direction? Can we get the timing right? Can we swing at the pitch at the appropriate moment? Can we adapt when conditions change and the requirement is there? Do we bring indicate all the different perspectives needed, meaning diversity? Can we overcome biases? Does leadership provide an umbrella or connection for all of this? Now, If we take each of those, they are a holistic system, but we can actually break out almost like the human body. We can exercise certain muscles. We can make them stronger. And then, of course, we can exercise the entire system so we're more resilient. And there are a number of things we can do really on a daily basis in our organizations to make ourselves ready for that next threat.

AI assessment note: “we have enumerated 10 risk control factors that make up this system”

Q It's interesting, especially in the context of this, and I don't know if there's a movement with Robert E. Lee, but there seems to be a lot of movements to erase people like this from history, where we rename the high school, we rename the streets, we want to forget that this happened. What do you see as the consequences to that?

A Yeah. I, I've got mixed feelings on it because on the one hand, I think the idea of Confederate statues around, because many of them were placed in a period in which the people who placed them were trying to make a statement about white supremacy in the South. There was a very clear lost cause narrative to them. And so at that point, I think many of the memories of people like Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders were being leveraged To make a different point on white supremacy, and I don't support that. I, I find that abhorrent. At the same time, I think that when we overreact, and we say that suddenly we go from this adoration of someone to this just hatred, blind hatred of them, we, we confuse ourselves. What we hate is slavery, and what we hate is the Confederacy Trying to destroy the United States of America, and we hate the idea and the acts surrounding that, and we should. And so, when I think of an African American in a small southern town having to walk by the statue of a Confederate soldier into the courthouse to seek some kind of legal address, it's a conflicted message. And for the many years in which we have, have allowed that to, to sort of send a message of, Hey, African-American, the whites are in charge here. That's completely wrong. At the same time, not every soldier who fought the Confederacy thought of themselves as a racist or own slaves. The vast m…

AI assessment note: “if we're unable to take a nuanced view of history, Then everything is binary.”