James C. Lawler, JD
Four Star General Shuttling Between Mindsets in A Combat Theatre
General Stanley McChrystal comes from a tradition of commitment; both his father and grandfather served in the U.S. military. Like his father before him, McChrystal graduated with a B.S. from West Point Academy in 1976, and in his long career of military service, became the general in command of the American and international forces in Afghanistan.
Rising through the ranks, McChrystal lived with military discipline and gained insight while serving around the world in high-stakes assignments. Like all successful military leaders, he learned to think systemically. However, he is also known for advancing more creative approaches to new forms of warfare in the later years of his career, especially as he gained experience and responsibility.
McChrystal was appointed to serve as Commanding General to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the military’s premier counterterrorism force, in September of 2003. When he took that job, the group was operating under traditional systems that were effective in quickly destroying hierarchical terrorist networks. But it was not as adaptable as the new insurgencies emerging in more local, loosely configured adhoc terror groups in the Middle East.
McChrystal could see that JSOC needed to change; instead of asking his soldiers to operate in carefully delineated silos, he began to integrate intelligence, combat, and strategy communications within the JSOC community. The new structure made his troops more agile and effective resulting in the high-profile capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In June of 2009, McChrystal was appointed to lead American troops in Afghanistan, and shortly thereafter assumed command of NATO operations. Again, he thought about the war in a new way. He was a leading proponent of the “surge” strategy in Iraq which would require additional troops be sent in to wipe out enemy combatants. More simply, the strategy was to add more troops with the goal of ending the conflict faster.
In 2010 though, after an off-the-record quote appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine which was critical of the administration, McChrystal began to think systemically again. The story appeared online at about 2 a.m. in Afghanistan. He remembers, “my military assistant woke me up and told me about it. I went down and read the article and said, ‘Okay, this is a nuclear bomb.’ I made some calls back, went out running right there in the compound at three in the morning, I thought I was dreaming and that I was going to wake up because this is just not possible.
This was not something I thought I could ever be accused of. Immediately you think, okay, I can connect the dots where this is going to end, not everybody could but I felt that I could then. I started to think about my son in college, my 86-year-old father, my wife and all this stuff takes place on the front page and on TV at every moment. First thing in the morning we’re working and that afternoon I’m told to fly back to the States to see the President.” A few days later, President Obama accepted McChrystal’s resignation.
McChrystal said he then had decided how to command the rest of his life. “I started making decisions sort of on an hourly, daily basis but they start to weave together as sort of a thesis for the rest my life. I think it probably took about a month where I made enough decisions that the direction I was going to take was clear.”
For example, he initially did not want an official Army Retirement Ceremony (commonly called a parade). He thought the pomp and circumstance would make him feel embarrassed by the circumstances of his retirement. But after an assistant suggested the parade was more for those who would be attending, he “started making those decisions and interestingly enough, the more you do that, and the more you take the high road, the more the high road becomes the only option.”
In line with this view, McChrystal has another take on the hero’s journey. In his mind, “there is this narrative construct on the hero’s journey where the hero has a big climax or crisis and then the hero wins in the end. There is always a danger for the kind of work that you’re doing when you end up talking to those kinds of people who have a happy ending. That’s skewed,” McChrystal said. “Not everybody has a happy ending because the crisis can end at different points. You can have the ability to rebound, you can have the time. My story to date, it’s not completely over, has been one that is pretty lucky.”
After retiring from the army, McChrystal founded a consulting firm to help guide companies through the kind of organizational transformation he led in the military. He published his autobiography, My Share of the Task, as well as Team of Teams and his latest book, Risk, A Users Guide. As someone with a Boundary Spanner perspective, McChrystal’s advice based on Risk, and how individuals and organizations fail to mitigate it. They focus more narrowly on the probability of it happenings versus a broader, systemic view of the varied visible and invisble control factors influencing the risk trajectory. He suggests looking at what he describes as a Risk Immune System that involves such control factors as timing, communication, diversity, and structure.
McChrystal’s work also navigates the contours of zealots, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and heroes like Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who ushered slaves to freedom on the underground railroad. Both leaders, he said, became larger in death than in life. McChrystal said viewing each of these individuals as humans and as leaders, helped his team to “reach a general thesis that leadership has never been what we thought it was. It’s never been the great person theory, list of traits, behaviors. In this complex interaction of factors, the leader is only one part.”
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Bart Decker
First 9/11 Special Forces Horse Soldier Team in Afghanistan (Bart Decker Played By Himself in Hollywood’s Feature Film “12 Strong.”)
USAF Combat Controller as member of the first post 9/11 special forces horse soldiers attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In the movie “12 Strong,” Bart Decker as an Air Force Combat Controller and his Special Operations team were portrayed as some of the first men inserted into Afghanistan soon after 9/11.
They arrived by helicopter and then realized horseback was the only way to move to their target location since many of the ledges were 2′-3′ wide. These men were covert operators named Task Force Dagger that joined up with the Northern Alliance to defeat the Taliban. As a radicalized Islamic military movement, the Taliban ravaged the Afghanistan country-side beheading and torturing the locals into submission.
Decker’s team, the first American soldiers post 9/11, rode with the Northern Alliance on horseback to capture the Taliban-controlled military base at the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. The commandos’ horses were trained by the Northern Alliance warriors to run toward gunfire.
Charges pitting Alliance forces against the Taliban were much like those centuries ago, but the fighters used AK-47s instead of sabers.
After the successful advance at the Mazar-i-Sharif battle, the Taliban retreated, and his team were welcomed as liberators. Decker and his team are forever honored at One World Trade center with a 13’ bronze statue of an American Commando on a horse.
(Source: ThadForester.com and WeAreTheMighty.com)
Bart Decker was born and raised in a small community in Northern, Illinois and after high school he struggled to make ends meet and to find a definitive purpose moving forward. But at 22 he joined the U.S. Air Force and became a combat controller. He was among the first airmen to enter Afghanistan to fight the Taliban after the September 11 attacks.
At one point, Decker had to ride a horse, atop a wooden saddle that slipped from side to side, to join with friendly local forces in Northern Afghanistan. “Looking back on it in hindsight, it’s pretty remarkable when you get off a multi-million-dollar machine, a helicopter, and then jump on a horse back. You kind of go back in time,” Decker explained. “What wows me was just the whole battle plan. It was basically just special forces teams with our guys attached to the teams, joining up with a faction, the host nation faction. I guess you could call it that because the Taliban took over and ruled that country by iron fists, in fear, intimidation, and murder. That’s the remarkable thing when you look at that, moving in with indigenous forces.”
Decker and his eight-man special operations team rode in a long horse trail for 10 days, sometimes moving at night, sometimes in the day. “When we went into the unknown, our job was to hook up with the Northern Alliance. That was the fighting force, ten-man, twelve-man teams, hooking up with different factions to oppose the Taliban. So, when you’re with that group, that’s kind of an unknown. You have to trust them somewhat because you’re there and that’s your objective,” said Decker. “Once we got in the country, you know that the reason we are successful is because of the training that we did prior. When we got on the battlefield, to me, that just looked like the bombing range out in Arizona. It looked just like it except there were live targets out there. All of the procedures we were doing, were all based on what we trained with. You really saw it all come together. In the end, looking back, you go, ‘That’s why we did all those things. That’s why training was just as tough as going to war,’ it was identical.”
His path wasn’t always smooth. “I wasn’t really interested in college, plus I didn’t want to waste my parents’ money. I bopped around a little bit. I remember going to Houston with a buddy of mine and I was there for a total of about 13 months—twenty years old at the time. My parents had retired down to Florida and I went with them initially, before going onto Houston.
Decker said he was living paycheck to paycheck. “I was too proud at that time to call back home and ask for money. That was definitely a struggle. I guess I just had that realization. I saw where I wasn’t going and decided to make a change.” After some failed business ventures, Decker was stuck. He didn’t have the right clothes to land a job interview, he didn’t have his own car which kept him from getting a bartending position.
“My buddy got an apartment, and I needed to pay my share of the rent. So, at that point I realized that I had to do something to contribute so, I was working at a car wash for about six months. Another friend later moved in who was a cable tv guy and cable tv was really taking off at that time in 1981 and ‘82. So, I got on doing that and made more money. We moved to a nicer apartment, but in the end, I still did not have any of my own transportation
and I remember sitting in the parking lot eating a baloney sandwich and drinking a Lone Star beer and I just said to myself, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’”
He was a couple hundred dollars in debt when he called his father and said, “’Hey, I need to come home and reload.’ He never asked me or gave me the, ‘I told you so,’ or anything. It was like, ‘How much do you need?’ and ‘Obviously, come on back home.’ That was the kind of guy he was,” Decker said. “I came back, and I made the best choice of my life months later and I enlisted into the air force. It was a great run but living in Houston at the age of twenty-years-old, it makes you grow up fast when you are on your own. “
Moved back to Florida with his parents Decker was working in construction, primarily, masonry. “It is a young man’s job, no doubt. You’re hauling blocks across a concrete slab in 98 degrees heat every day. I was looking at being a mason because it is a next step up from the laborers. I was laboring half the day learning how to lay block and brick the second half of the day. But I looked at the masons and was like, ‘Wow, you guys look rough.’”
He met with and Air Force recruiter the following week. “I always aspired to be a cop. I thought I would go into the air force for four years, become a cop and then get out and try and do some law enforcement in the civilian sector,” said Decker. At the recruiter’s office he opened a copy of AIRMAN magazine. “There was an article about combat control—jumping, diving, rappelling, helicopters. I said, ‘That’s for me.’ I talked to the recruiter, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s a pretty difficult career, not a lot of people make it.’ I guess there is an 80% fail-out rate. I wanted to give it a shot and my recruiter was actually really good. He told me exactly what was going to happen, ‘On day four or five you will go down to career field day and pick out these careers, make sure you put that as number one.’ So, I did, I joined and went in late ’83 at 22 years old. It’s kind of weird, you look at a 22-year-old and an 18-year-old and it’s kind of a big maturity difference. You really see it when you’re in those environments like military training.”
Decker credited the military with turning his life around. “I joined the service and got married young at age 24,” he said. “When you’re 23 or 24 in the enlisted ranks back in the ‘80s, you’re not making a lot of money. We struggled a little bit financially, living paycheck to paycheck. We just kept at it and I made rank and the kids got older,” Decker continued. “You just keep trucking and working forward.”
He also had mentors along the way. Most notably, Mark Scholl. He was a staff sergeant and guided Decker through his earliest days in the Air Force. Decker described him as his “mentor before that word was even being used.” Decker said Scholl, “just seemed to have all the right answers. I could sum it up with him. He was the guy that on a Friday night he could be putting on an exhibition at the bar with the best of them. On Saturday morning, he would be walking into the mall with his kids. On Sunday morning, he would be in church with his family. On Monday morning, he is writing the entire aircraft movement plan on the ground for the invasion of Panama. That was the kind of guy this guy was. He could get under any hat and be that guy. He was probably one of the most beloved guys in the career field, definitely on our team.”
Scholl was killed in 1992 during a military exercise, but Decker remains humbled by the way Scholl approached his job. “He was the guy always leading the way. Like I said, he wasn’t the fastest runner, couldn’t do the most pull ups, but he would never quit in a situation. He was so good at everything and anything else. He was the guy that we looked up to.”
Decker, now retired from the military, lives a quiet life in northern Florida, with his wife of more than three decades. His experiences in the Air Force gave him the discipline for the next phase of his life when he entered the civilian workforce. “When you look in the civilian world, usually what is different is when you’re in the Department of Defense and you jump to a civilian job it’s for profit out there in the civilian world. It’s not-for-profit in the DOD world. Those type of roles and guidance kind of follow you, but you can definitely bring your skills in leadership from the military over,” said Decker. “I’m telling you that most of these companies like to hire former military, probably because of the discipline that was instilled in them when they were in the military. Most of the time, you’re going to get a guy on time that never shows up late, he’s going to be a hard worker, he’s going to see it through—those type of qualities.”
He found his purpose in the military, and Decker encourages young people who have a “love of country” to use that initiative for good. “Be a productive member of society and everything else will fall into place after that. That is number one,” he said. “You are already halfway there because you were fortunate enough to be born into this great country. Make a difference in a positive way.”
A key point in his life, Decker said, was when he knew he would have the support of his family after he decided he wasn’t getting anywhere in Texas and moved back in with them in Florida. “I just had that realization. I saw I wasn’t going anywhere and decided to make a change,” Decker said. “I just can’t pinpoint what made me make that phone call back home. But I knew that was my opportunity to reload and go back home to family. That might not mean that somebody can’t call and rely on a friend for something like that too, whatever situation it may be. Everybody might fall and stumble and all they need is that helping hand up. Not a handout, but a hand up. I’m a firm believer in that type of philosophy”
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