Stan McChrystal: Leadership for Non-Wimps

Want to know when there's a new episode of remarkable people? Simply text 831-609-0628 if you live in the US or Canada, don't miss upcoming shows. Take a moment to follow Remarkable People in your app or podcast player. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We are on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is the remarkable Stanley McChrystal. He is a retired four star U.S. army general who served for 34 years. He was the commander of the U.S. and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan. He also led the US's premier military counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and the Naval War College. Stan also achieved fellowships at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Council of foreign relations. In 2011, he founded the McChrystal Group. It is an advisory team that improves the performance of organizations and mentors the men and women who lead them. Stan is also a Senior Fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He sits on the boards of Navistar International Corporation, Siemens government technology, and JetBlue Airways. His latest book is called A User's Guide. It is the best book about leadership that I have ever read at my expense. I sent copies to the President of Sony Electronics, the CEO of Liquid Death, Steve Case, founder of aol, and Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon. In my humble opinion, the best part of this interview occurs in the last few minutes when Stan explains what I call the Granddaughters test. Be sure to listen to the very end. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Stanley McChrystal. Your story about Nixon asking the black person in Ghana after Ghana achieved independence, Nixon asking him how does it feel to be free and getting the answer. I wouldn't know. I'm from Alabama. I had to laugh out loud. I mean, that was. That's just one of the best stories that I have ever heard or read in a book. And the second thing I want to tell you is that I think this is the best book I have ever read about leadership. I don't know if you're a Peter Drucker fan, but I would rank your book right up there with Peter Drucker's the Effective Executive.

Well, you're very kind. And just to give you a little bit more background on the Nixon story, my family's from Alabama, my mother's side of the family. So when he describes that it's got A very personal side to it. If you remember the old movie Mississippi Burning with Gene Hackman about the killings down in Mississippi. It was filmed in our hometown in Alabama. So the little sense of. You understand that the reality of what Alabama in 1957 was, and to a disturbing degree still is.

I would be doing a service to managers all over the world if they read your book. Because let's face it, most of these business books are bullshit. Like, be open, be transparent, walk around the factory floor, like, duh.

It's funny because I hate business books. I've written two of them and I. I don't really read them. And I basically wrote this last one because there are so many scholarly books on risk, and yet we always get it wrong. And so my argument is, if we're so good at risk, tell me why we screw it up so much. And that was the. That was the journey we were on.

To copy one of the concepts that you used in your top 10 tips. I did a brief pre mortem of this interview and I thought, what could make it fail? And what would failure be? And the most dangerous failure, I think, is you just get pissed off with me and hang up. I just want to know if there's anything off limits. I know you ran the military action in Afghanistan, so you can handle anything, but I don't want you hanging up on me. So can I ask about Rolling Stone, resigning Camp Nama, Pat Tillman, or is anything off limits?

Nothing's off limits. But you'll find that my answers on some of them may not be what you expect or what you want to hear. I will be candid, but, yeah, anything is fair.

Well, hell, now I really want to ask about them.

Well, let's start with Camp Nama, because people get things and stories get a life of their own. And that was chronologically the earliest. Camp Nama was a. A name, a nickname. We never used it. That was given to a base that was next to Baghdad International Airport in Baghdad. And the Special Operations Task Force that I commanded had a base there. It was its main base in Iraq, although we had smaller teams out around the country and then other teams out around the entire region. Our mission was to go after Al Qaeda in Iraq. I took over in the fall of 2003. And you'll remember, timeline wise, the invasion of Iraq had occurred in the early spring of 2003, late winter, early spring. And initially, the idea that we would overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein was going to be pretty straightforward. There were some Americans who believed we'd drive in Overthrow that government, give the keys to a new government and drive out. And of course that was completely unrealistic. And within a few weeks it started to go very badly. First there was this xenophobic response to foreigners classified as occupiers. Then there were the rise of a number of terrorist group that coalesced rejection against foreigners. And by the fall of 2003, October, when I took command of the special Ops task force, it had started to get pretty ugly. And it got ugly in two ways. Sodom Hussein was still on the loose and his generals were out there. You might remember the old deck of cards. And we were. Our organization's mission was to try to capture those. And then there was the rise of this new entity under a guy named Abu Musab al Zarqawi. And that ultimately became known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. And we really couldn't put an absolute finger that he was in Iraq until later in 2003, right near the end of the year. But we were starting to see the reflections of a more professional terrorist effort inside Iraq. So you have first this cacophony of violence, a lot of it disorganized and whatnot. And then inside that you have almost like a cancer growing of a more dangerous foreign led, professional and well coordinated terrorist group. But you got these two big problems. I take over in October 2003. And the force had been there since the invasion, so about six months. And the Camp NAMA footprint by the airfield was to allow forces to go out by helicopter and sometimes vehicle to prosecute targets against HVTs to capture or kill high value targets. Leaders of those most important, in the early weeks when I took over, was going after Saddam Hussein and we got him in December, the Camp NAMA allegations or stories came out about treatment of detainees. And the reality is when the United States went into the war on terror, we didn't have a framework of what we were going to do with detainees. Think of previous wars. There were prisoners of war. And we saw this first in Afghanistan when what do you do when you capture a bunch of Taliban and potentially some Al Qaeda fighters? How do you treat them? Are they prisoners of war or are they something different? Are they terrorists? And so this started really a conundrum that the US still faces today because they eventually came up with Guantanamo Bay, the idea of taking them there. There was this question of do we try them as criminals? Do we treat them as prisoners of war, Release them when the war is over, how do we deal with this? And then there was this undercurrent that says we're in this new, very difficult war on terror. And that takes a different kind of effectiveness. It takes intelligence gathering, much of which is based on interrogation of captured people. It requires things that, to be honest, although theoretically they were in US Capabilities, we really didn't have that capability. We didn't have trained interrogators in any numbers. We didn't have people with language skills for the region. We didn't have people with cultural acuity. So I take over, and one of the first things I do in October is I tour the command, and I go into our detention facility right there at the Baghdad airport at that base. And it's rudimentary to the extreme. It's a series of single cells that have been put together. And it has some practices that I thought were absolutely unacceptable. There were some dogs brought in there on occasion. They weren't allowed to chew anybody, but it was the idea that this would be an intimidation. And I think there was one trained interrogator and a couple of interpreters who weren't trained interpreters for interrogation. And so it was a. To put a description on it, it was a pretty amateurish effort. It wasn't intentionally evil. Nobody was torturing prisoners or anything like that, but we didn't have a frame of reference or clear set of rules or how we're going to deal with this. So one of the first things I did when I took command is I told everybody, okay, we've got to clean this up, because we can't have an operation run like this because something bad's going to happen. We got to clean it up, and we got to figure out what the right way to do this kind of operation is, because there's every likelihood we're going to do it for a long time. And if you look historically at counterterrorist efforts, you have to have an effective way to take captured detainees, interrogate them, treat them the right way, keep them out of circulation, all the things that are necessary. And it takes a system to do that. And so we lacked that entirely. So the Camp Noma stories are, in my opinion, grossly overblown. But they're accurate to the point that the United States didn't know what it was doing, and it took us a long time to get our act together again. I didn't see evil people trying to do the wrong thing, but I saw people with no background or experience trying to do something they'd never done before.

How about Pat Tillman?

Yeah, this one I get frustrated with, because I will tell you that from my perspective, the death of Pat Tillman is a tragedy. Good soldier, good Ranger, good person. And in my mind, his death has been taken out of context and harmed a number of very good people in the process. In the spring of 2004, there were a number of things going on. Iraq was literally melting down. There was the situation in Fallujah. So Iraq had exploded into a higher level of violence. We also had forces in Afghanistan. And on an operation down in southern Afghanistan, there was a firefight. And I got a call. I was down in gutter at the moment when the call came in. I was visiting the Central Command higher headquarters and I was told that we'd had a killed in action. And I was told that it was Corporal Pat Tillman, arranger. I didn't know him. I had not met him, but I knew of him because when he'd enlisted, that been a fairly high profile event. But I said, okay. The next day I was scheduled to go to Afghanistan anyway, and I did that. So I got to Afghanistan and I met with the task force. And when I met with the task force, they were of course, upset that they'd lost a Ranger and they'd been in a firefight. And I sat down with the commander and several things happened. First is they were doing all the right things to deal with the loss of someone. Going through the notification process. He's going through an investigation. And the commander came to me and said, sir, there's something you need to know. We've looked at this thing and we think that there is a probability that this was a friendly fire incident, that he, in fact, was killed by another member. Now, that's not unheard of in combat. It's certainly not something you want. Stonewall Jackson was killed in an friendly fire. Leslie J. McNair, during World War II, was killed in friendly fire. So it happens more than you want, but it's one of those things that obviously you try to. To go to school on and make sure it doesn't happen again and get clarity. He said there's a good chance that he was killed in a friendly fire incident while he was maneuvering on what he thought was an enemy position. And so he is maneuvering with what he thinks is an enemy position, and he's moving heroically to do that. And another American force, apparently trying to provide supporting fires, struck him and killed him. The reality was what Tillman did in the moment was courageous. He was doing the right thing. The fact that he's hit by friendly fire doesn't make any less courageous. So one of the things they said is we want to recommend him for award for valor. And I said, well, you know, given those things, do you feel that, that he earned it and that his actions in his mind met that? And they said, yeah. And so we went through. And so I concurred with that assessment and we passed that up simultaneously. I also wrote a message that went up my chain of command that said, this is a high profile incident, you need to know that there is, in our estimation, we're not sure yet because the investigation's not complete. We believe there's a good likelihood that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire. And I wrote that message and I sent it up the chain of command. Later, much was made of the fact that message was classified. Well, the reality was because of the nature of my command and my role, everything I sent was classified. I didn't have a way to send a non classified. So I sent it up the right chain of command. And I said, I want you to know this because as people deal with the family and they deal with other things, it's important to have that context that it's tragic we lost him and he's a hero regardless. But it might have been friendly fire. And so that went up the chain of command. Later there were accusations of people burning his clothes. Well, they did burn his uniform because it was covered with blood and it was a sanitary thing and it was just Rangers doing the right thing. There were multiple investigations of what happened and I'm convinced it was friendly fire and it was a mistake. But there became this idea that the military is doing a cover up. My response to that, I think there were six. And two years later they're still coming to me and asking questions. They're saying you covered it up. And I said no. I sent a message transmitting my assessment that it was likely the worst possible thing that it could be friendly fire. That's not a cover up. When you send it up to the chain of command and you say no, this is what we think happened, how can that possibly be a cover up? And so in notifying the family, which we were not involved in because we were the war fighting headquarters, there's an administrative headquarters, there were some issues in how they notified the family, but the reality is a number of people grabbed pieces of this. They spun a narrative that doesn't match the facts and they, they harmed the careers of some other military leaders that I know. And they did it unfairly and wrong. And there was a propagation of this idea of COVID up and negative things that tarnished a lot of really well intentioned, courageous people and I resent that. And it got political and whatnot. So when these things happen and we don't really get and publicize ground truth, I think it's unfair to all the participants. And I don't think it does Corporal Tillman's memory any honor either.

And the last topic is Rolling Stone article. You or your staff criticizing VP Biden and you get called back to Washington and you resign or get fired.

But here's what happened. The war in Afghanistan. I had been there for eight or nine months in command. In reality, the war wasn't very popular. It wasn't very popular in the United States at that point. It wasn't very popular in Europe. People had gotten tired of the war in Afghanistan. And so one of the requirements to build the confidence of the Afghan people and the confidence of our force was to do media. You have got to have an information component to your campaign. I don't like doing that. But as a consequence I did an awful lot of interviews in media. The interview with the Rolling Stone article, and he was a freelancer doing a project was one of a whole bunch of them. And this particular individual had gotten approval to spend some time with us in Afghanistan and then later when we had to go to Europe to do the same thing, build support for the war in Paris and a couple other places. He wasn't with us a long time. The idea that he was an embed is true, but he was an embed for two very short periods, two, three days and he'd go and then the time in Europe and he wrote an article. And if you had been around the author, he was a very ingratiating guy. He would, you know, just couldn't be more friendly, couldn't be better. But still we're adults and you know that anybody coming to do an article is going to write the best article for them that they can. And he has an opinion. He had an opinion on the war in Afghanistan. And I think part of what he was trying to do was write an article that supported his opinion of the war. Now he wrote an article that came out. Anybody's free to read it. And it depicts my command team as ill disciplined sort of locker room behavior. There are some dismissive comments about the Vice President and some others. There's not direct. Any single smoking gun. But it's, but it's a pretty unflattering picture. I think it's unfair. I think it's an unfair picture. I didn't. It's not the group I saw, but I've never contested it. And so that's his perspective, and he can write that. And I've never taken that on. When the article came out to give a bit of context, this is after some months of some lack of trust between we'll call it Department of Defense and the military and the new administration. Remember, President Obama had taken over in January, and he had immediately been hit with a request from the military for additional forces for Afghanistan. And he naturally was skeptical. He and his staff were skeptical. And so they went through a period where they negotiated over sending additional forces. They finally decided to send some. And then I was asked to go take command in late May and actually deployed in June. And at that point, there was a fair amount of concern politically in Washington over where Afghanistan is going. You'll remember that President Obama had campaigned against the war in Iraq, but he had described Afghanistan as the necessary war. And so when he actually was elected, he is on record as saying that we actually have to take Afghanistan more seriously. And, and yet the situation Afghanistan, by the fall of 2008, was deteriorating really badly. So he's, he's got the war in Iraq, which seems to be going in a better direction, but Afghanistan is now deteriorating significantly, and it's probably going to require some tough decisions. And so from day one in his presidency, he gets what I think no new president would ever want, is something that looks, feels, and smells like Vietnam. And so he's asked to send additional troops, which looks and feels and smells like William Westmoreland asked for additional troops in Vietnam. And so I take over in June, and I'm asked to do an assessment on what we have to do to accomplish our mission in Afghanistan. And of course, the first problem was, what's our mission? And it was described to me as protect enough of Afghan sovereignty that they can avoid being a sanctuary for Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups in the future. Which means they've got to be able to protect their own border, they've got to be able to control actions in their country to the extent that they can prevent that dynamic from occurring. Which means you've got to do a pretty significant military ability buildup of Afghan capability, development of governmental capacity, and provide foreign military support during that period. And so that's what I thought my mission was. That's what I described it back to the White House and we went forward. But the point is there's a certain amount of concern in D.C. and re examination in the early fall of 2009 about what are we doing in Afghanistan. Even though the President had said it's the essential war, there was a lot of people, Vice President Biden being the most notable, who really wanted us to relook our level of effort in Afghanistan and act accordingly. There was a decision making process and actions went forward. But that's all the background to give you the, the sense that there was a level of distance, I'll call it, and in some cases mistrust on individual levels between the administration and the military. Now there's been this picture painted later about this cabal of generals who get together and lock arms and want more troops. If there was one, I never saw it. I certainly wasn't part of it and I certainly think I would have been. Just didn't happen. That's just not true. Instead, the military is trying to do what they think is right. Now they see the problem from a different perspective than someone in D.C. might, but. But that causes the problem. Then you get into the Rolling Stone article. So now, some months into all of this, six months into President Obama's new administration, build up of a level of distrust and he gets this Rolling Stone article that says you've got the runaway general and this group of people around him who are dismissive and whatnot. Even disloyal would be one interpretation. That's absolutely not my experience. I didn't see that, I didn't feel that. But again, an author gathers a perspective he wants, he's got the right to do that. My relationship with President Obama up to that was good. And when I was asked to fly back to the United States, I carried my resignation and I went and met with President Obama and it was very professional. And then, and, and since he's been a real gentleman to me and he simply asked me what had happened and I said, well, I haven't had time to time to investigate it, but I will tell you that depiction doesn't reflect my team as I knew it. But here's the deal. And I had my resignation. I said, I brought my resignation, I'm prepared to resign and I have no hard feelings. If you want to accept that, that's great, whatever's best for the mission. If you want me to go back and continue commanding, I'll do that too. Whatever you think is best for the US Mission, Afghanistan, because I thought I owed that to it. And he was great about it and he says, I'm going to accept your resignation, but thanks for your service and whatnot. So I walked out of there. And here's probably the important part of this. At least for me, I'd been in the army at that point as a commissioned officer for more than 34 years. My wife had been with me for all of those years. She is a young military brat. We got married when I was still a second lieutenant, and I'd spent four years before that at West Point. And I actually was born in an army hospital. My father was a soldier. My father's father was a soldier. So all I'd ever identified with being was a soldier. And then now, 38 years into me wearing uniform, I never once thought I'd be accused of disloyalty. I mean, I thought I could be fired for being incompetent. I thought there was a good chance I'd get killed with some of the stuff we'd done. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things you sort of prepare for in a military career, but you don't prepare for having the thing which is most sacred to you challenged, but you can't do anything about it. And even worse, my father was a retired military, I think 86 at the time. And he's. He watches this on the tv. My son is in college and he's watching this on the ticker of the news. You know, disgrace General McChrystal. And I leave the Oval Office and I go across town to where my wife had been living while I was deployed. And I go in the. The room where I go into the entrance to the home, and she's standing there because I just flown home the night before and. And she's sort of okay. And I said, well, it's over. You know, our lives as soldiers are over. He accepted my resignation. And she looked at me and she goes, good. We've always been happy and we'll always be happy. We made a decision in that moment without shaking hands or hugging on it. We made a decision to live our life focusing forward. And what that meant was I wasn't going to spend any time re adjudicating it. I wasn't going to go out and write and argue and say I got screwed or whatever, because that's irrelevant. What matters is the people who believed in me before I wanted to conduct myself going forward so that what they saw for my conduct justified. Yeah, I believed him. And, and I was right to do that. The people that had trusted me could look at me and say, I trusted him and I was right to do that. And you can't spend a lot of time being bitter about things that you think may not have been fair. Because the end of the day, nobody cares. The only people really care are you. And so it's been the best decision of my life, assisted by my wife, to focus forward. And so it's 12 years ago. And in the 12 years, literally, we've had this unbroken string of lucky events in our lives and this set of friends. So I look at the Rolling Stone incident article. I wish it hadn't happened, but in many ways it unlocked things that would have never happened in my life if they hadn't. Huh. Wow. Wow.

Okay, you asked. So now that I know you won't hang up on me, I have to say that for many people listening to this, the military is kind of a black box. We really don't know how it works. And we get snippets of some retired Marine General on CNN, etc, etc. But can I ask you a series of questions about the military? The might educate people so we understand this better.

As long as up front I can say, remember, this is one guy's opinion and so everybody should discount it accordingly.

Okay, but what a guy going into your book. Tell me if I'm imagining this, but would you say that Putin is the modern day Edward Braddock?

Wow, that's a. That's a hurtful comparison. He's much more at a strategic level, but there are some real commonalities. Edward Braddock had an arrogance of being a British regular officer with a frame of reference that led him to draw a number of conclusions, that he would be able to march to Fort Duquesne and capture it. But if you step back and look at it, he had to go hundreds of miles through absolute wilderness, relying on logistics that were in many cases provided by colonial contractors, which weren't very reliable. And so there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, what he tried to do was unrealistic from the outset with the assets he had, and he was almost unwilling to think about the complexities that were going to cause him problems.

And didn't you just describe Putin to some extent?

I mean, that's exactly what Putin did. I think he had this absolute belief that he needed to bring Ukraine back into the fold. And so I think Braddock didn't have an overarching thing like that. He just had an order. But then when Putin allowed the military to construct a special operation that when you step back six months now and look at it, was unrealistic from start to finish. They just didn't have the level of competency, didn't have nearly enough forces, didn't have the other, other factors to give them a High probability of success.

While we're on the subject, do you care to opine about who's going to win the Ukraine war and why?

The answer is it depends. Where I think we are now is six months into it. Russia is certainly not going to get the kind of success that they would wanted to get at the beginning. They tried to begin the war with what we call a coup de main. And that means you take strategic points in the country, Kiev being one, and you cause the government to collapse, you cause the Zelensky regime to go away. And I think he thought he could paralyze Ukraine and then change their behavior through a new government, whatnot. They weren't able to do that. Now they've had to be pushed back to the east into the Donbass region and Crimea. Russia really has a very difficult time just mathematically now trying to capture more of Ukraine. Ukraine's a big place. It's angry, it's got a lot of people, and it's increasingly well armed. So the idea that they will grind out a conquest is very, very unlikely. On the other hand, the idea that Ukraine, if Russia decides not to give up and they sink their teeth into the Donbass harder into Crimea, getting them out of there is going to be extraordinarily difficult as well. And I won't say it's impossible, but it will take international effort much higher than we have done so far. And then the other option where Putin suddenly says, well, this was a big mistake, sorry, and we're pulling out, I just don't see a psychological pathway for him to do that.

Do you think that the world is retreating from globalization to nationalism and that's gonna create more of these situations?

I do. I think that Covid helped it along. Because what Covid did was it showed the vulnerability of supply chains all around the world, not to politics in that particular case, but to other factors. And suddenly you find out that you are vulnerable economically to that. So that's one impetus. But the other impetus is it's now been almost 20 or so years we've been seeing this move away from democracy towards more authoritarian leaders and the ability to control. I would not have predicted that in 1989 or 1990, 1991, I felt we were actually going in a direction where liberal democracies had momentum that were unlikely to stop. And I thought things like the Internet and globalization would reinforce that, but it hasn't. In fact, what we found is things like social media and information technology and other things in many ways reinforce the ability to of instead of it shining light and transparency. What it's allowed to do is people to use disinformation and misinformation. So I think we're in for a period, we'll call it a decade more of actually a rising level of authoritarian government and more hyper nationalistic governments. And of course, historically, when we see that the chance of major wars goes up significantly because the players that are involved and the dynamics in those kinds of government, often they benefit from wars of adventure and whatnot. And so I think we enter an extraordinarily dangerous period for at least the next decade as this rises rather than has fallen. Up next on Remarkable People. But the reality is you're constantly building and I would argue that in many cases in the moment of crisis, the leader is not important. They've either done their job beforehand or they haven't.

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Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

Do you think that in the situation we're now in, it's like we're in a war without getting our hands dirty? All we have to do is send over missiles and just get Congress to approve more expenditures, but we're not risking any lives. Is that a fantasy kind of war? Is this not the ultimate beta test for all these new missiles and radars and all these things that now we can really see how it'll operate? I mean, to use the old breakfast analogy, are we just being the chicken and not the pig making this breakfast?

I'm going to answer in two ways. First, as a retired military guy, and then as just a an individual. As a retired military guy, you're exactly right. This is like Spain in the late 1930s before the second World War, when the various players that later fought in the Second World War, Soviet Union, Italy, Germany, all used it as a testing ground for equipment they developed and tactics and techniques and whatnot. So the answer is we can do that. And to be honest, we should do that. Were I in uniform now, I'd be advocating very strongly that we need to be pushing equipment there that we want to, as you say, beta test. We need to, to see how it works and what changes have got to be made. Now let me step just as a citizen, though. There is a danger whenever you think that you're in a war without Risk. For example, in the 1980s, we supported the mujahideen through Pakistan to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan for about a decade. And The Afghans lost 1.2 million Afghans fighting. We didn't lose people, but we just provided money and it felt like a sort of clean, nice win. We gave the Soviet Union their Vietnam and, and we didn't get our hands dirty, as you said. I think we need to be careful with that because if you went to Russia right now and you asked the average Russian, not just Vladimir Putin, but you have Chad for the Russian, are they at war with the United States? I think we'd be surprised what a large percentage would answer yes, because I think that they believe between sanctions and then the fact that we are very openly providing weapons that are killing Russian soldiers, they probably say, yes, we're absolutely at war with the United States. Now, it doesn't matter that you and I think that the Russians were wrong and we've got a reason to do that. What matters is in the minds of those Russians who believe that they're at war with the United States. And it's a very small step for that to become a shooting war. So I think that what the United States has got to do is first get very realistic about that. I personally believe we need to be robust in our support of Ukraine, but we need to be open eyed and our Western allies need to be open eyed. This is not a risk free activity we're doing. It's not a freebie. We don't get to just kill Russians through Ukrainians and, and get to watch from the sidelines. There's every likelihood that if it gets difficult enough for Vladimir Putin, he will take actions that raise the cost to us. He's done some actions with gas to Germany and whatnot, but he could employ tactical nuclear weapons and he could, he can employ a number of other things that would increase the risk of our activities there.

Lets say that Russia loses the war, but it has the humility to learn from the loss and the discipline to make corrections. Therefore, it becomes more dangerous. So Russia losing the war could be bad. And now we have the mother of all unintended consequences.

Yeah, I think that's not impossible because if they lost the war, they would go to school on those things that tactically and logistically were a problem for them. Certainly. Look at what they did in Chechnya. They went into Chechnya twice. The first time they went in Chechnya, they were humiliated. The second time they went in, they flattened the city of Grosni they learned now. They learned brutal lessons. But the reality is, I think that's what they learn. I think we're seeing them learn on the battlefield right now. I think the Russians are getting smarter every day, as both sides do. But the reality is, anytime someone fights for a while, they start to learn things. So that's very possible. Now, if you extrapolate beyond what happens on the battlefield, though, if we allow Russia to succeed in Ukraine, to keep a significant part of Ukraine, to make a somewhat believable argument that they were successful, they will also derive other lessons, and the other lessons will be that this kind of activity is. Is acceptable. It's within their reach. I think they're also starting to draw the conclusion that they can't let the southern nations, the Central Asian states, they can't let them make any moves toward the west or this will be viral. And so I think Russia is saying right now, we can't be weak at all. We can't give up our activity in Ukraine or it will cause us to lose even more of what is, in their minds, the Russian empire. So everybody learns lessons from these things, and in many cases, I think those lessons can be very, very dangerous. The lesson we should be learning is unity is key. Unity in the west is essential. And as soon as we don't have it, I think we will pay a huge price for it.

Do you think the future of warfare is more like a Russian state attack on solar winds, or is it more like rolling tanks into Ukraine?

Yeah, everybody's always trying to predict that. I think the one thing we need to understand about war is a thoughtful opponent will do what you're not good at, and so they will go to school on what you do. So if, for example, the west builds a ton of tanks and builds the Maginot Line back up again, or, you know, equivalent things like that, then they won't fight that kind of war. They will fight a war of attacks on solar winds and economic things and information warfare and weakness that way. If, however, we go too far the other way, and we say there'll be no more artillery wars, there'll be no more tanks on the battlefield, because we're now going to information and cyber and whatnot, they'll watch that, too. And they will. They will punch where we are not. So what does that mean? Do we have to be strong at everything and everywhere? And the answer is, you can't do that, so you have to be good enough. I personally think the future of war is going to be a smaller military component But a very lethal part of it, like we're starting to see with these very accurate high Mars missiles being used in Ukraine, unmanned aerial vehicles, things like that. So it will be very lethal on the battlefield and it will be very intel based. But really the war in Ukraine, if you want to go to school on it, this has been an information war because if you think about it, before the invasion go a year ago, most of us cared about Ukraine, but we didn't care very much. And if Russia had invaded suddenly and succeeded, there are a lot of people who said, would have said, you know, we don't like that. It's too late to do anything. It's just the way it is. That's what Russia can do. Instead what happened was because there was this buildup and then a delay for the Olympics, I believe, and, and Russians masked on the border for too long before they went in, the Biden administration was able to put out intelligence and say, look, they're going to invade. And so for a period of weeks they worked an information campaign against the Russians that said they're about to do something horrible and they made that the world take notice. And then the most effective information war campaign I've ever seen has been waged by President Zelensky and his team. And unless you are confused, we're the target. He is waging it on us, but we are actually happy about that. We've embraced Ukraine almost like the embattled defenders of the Alamo. President Zelensky has been the perfect role model, heroic leader. Look how he dresses, look how he meets foreign leaders, look at how he looks at the camera and he says direct, brave things. He's emboldened us. But he has, he has won so far the information war because outside of Russia, almost everyone thinks that the Ukrainians are the good guys and the Russians are the bad guys. And so to get to your point of the future of war, I think that's going to be a huge component of every war. It's always been part of it, but it will be more powerful than ever. And so I think that sides which leverage it thoughtfully and aggressively are going to be disproportionately successful.

I've wondered why every day we see a drone showing himars or something destroying Russian tanks and people. How come we never see the Russian drone destroying the Ukrainians? Do the Russians not have video cameras?

Well, it's partly our media has bought into it. See Russians destroying, but what do we see them destroying? Railroad stations and killing civilians? Markets. And so what Ukraine is putting out Is look at all these horrible things the Russians are doing with these high tech weapons, civilians. And what you're seeing on the other side is look at this US supplied weapon killing an evil Russian tank. Nobody likes a Russian tank. So it's, it's okay to kill them. Forget that there's a crew inside that's dying. And so it's part of that information warfare activity that's done really well. Now if you were in Russia, you'd be seeing something different. It's a different picture being painted.

Let's say that you're Secretary of Defense of Taiwan and you're watching this. Do you say to yourself, boy, tanks and aircraft carriers are no longer necessary. We just need a solar soldier with a hand carried missile or a mobile missile, high Mars and, and DJI drones. So are, are tanks and aircraft carriers obsolete at this point or they still serve a purpose.

They, they still serve a purpose and it will be for some time. Because tanks on the ground in Taiwan and then aircraft carriers in Overwatch, they raise the cost of a Chinese assault on Taiwan. They make it very, very costly. Now the other part of that though is the United States and our allies must be able to reach into mainland China. We must be able to reach him with missiles and air and information systems. Because you can't let China have a risk free assault of Taiwan. You can't let the only forces at risk be the ones that they actually use in the assault. You've got to keep mainland China at risk because again, that ratchets up the cost or the risk for them. And so if you can keep that cost high enough, President Xi Jinping will always have to go, wow, I'm just not sure that this is worth it. If we ever let that cost slip low enough then, and suddenly it's a completely different calculation. And he has said that he is committed to bringing Taiwan back into the fold.

But don't you think that so many political leaders have used the slippery slope theory to justify war that if Vietnam goes, then Asia goes and pretty soon Asia is all communist and next thing you know the world's all communists and so we got to go to war. Now is the slippery slope really as slippery as political leaders would like to make it?

Yeah, it's always in the eye of the beholder. And of course after the fact it looks different. Southeast Asia are now allies and the time in Vietnam, you look back and say, well, that was probably unnecessary. Now arguably it was not. You can make an argument that the effort in Korea and Vietnam both had an effect on the Soviet Union and China and whatnot. So, I mean, there's a counter argument, but you're right, the slippery slope. The, the problem is, how do you judge that if you allow, you know, in 1938, if we looked at the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler is starting to make moves. We could have stopped him in 36 in the Rhineland, we could have stopped him in 38, Czechoslovakia. There was a series of times when it is believed that resolve against him would have stopped him in his tracks, and of course, we didn't. Now you look at Ukraine and you say there's an argument that says, well, you know, Ukraine, some parts of its history, it's been part of Russia. Why don't we just let it be part of Russia? It's not worth it. Or Taiwan. So hard to decide where that point is that you have to be strong. I personally think Ukraine is a place where the west needs to be strong. Now, particularly because of Vladimir Putin and the nature of that leader, the question of Taiwan is a little murkier. And of course, what the argument they are trying to make is, hey, it's part of China. What are you worried about? Just let the natural thing happen. And yet when we look at what happened to Hong Kong after promises were given one way, it's been a pretty different outcome. And Taiwan arguably has never actually been a part of mainland China like they depict. I think the best thing for China now would be to have America start to have the question of is it really worth it? Maybe China's got a point. And once they can get that discussion to a tipping point, then I think Western resolve to defend Taiwan will likely erode pretty quickly.

And you as a military person, when you see Pelosi and other congress men and women go to Taiwan, do you sit there and scratch your head and say, no, what the hell are they thinking? Why are they doing that? Or do you think that is affecting the Chinese perspective and saying, oh, God, Nancy Pelosi likes Taiwan, we really better not invade.

For my whole career, I've been watching Congress people do things and scratch my head and ask them why they're doing that. Yeah, I mean, I can't judge that because I don't know all what was behind it. I do think it's. It is requires thought. When our elected officials below the national level, forget the president, vice president went up, but elected officials, they go off and they start making foreign policy through their actions. And if it's not well coordinated, I think there's danger. And I think that happens on both sides of the political aisle. But I worry about that a bit. I always liked the idea that partisan politics should stop at the shores of the United States and what we do internationally should be pretty united around American policy. That's never been the complete truth, but I would like to see us be better on that.

This is a question that will just show my ignorance of how weapons work. But every day we read that the US or Germany or Poland or somebody is sending this kind of airplane or this kind of missile or this kind of radar system, and I just wonder. So you're telling me that like a boat arrives at Ukraine, the Himars come off and all the Ukrainian soldiers, they know how to fire the missile, maintain the missile, repair the missile? It's not like you ship the Macintosh from the Apple Store. You open the box and click and go, how does it work? When I don't know what a Ukraine first name is, he goes to the dock and there's a Himars missile system waiting for. For me, like, how does he know which button does what and all that stuff?

Well, they do what they call new equipment training teams and they send teams that typically they'll pull people out from Ukraine and they'll train them in a very intensive period on how to operate that piece of equipment. To my knowledge, we don't put American contractors or advisors on the ground. But you know, the Ukrainians are clever people. And when you're at war like this, you can learn these things pretty quickly. Plus, in the days of connection and YouTube, you know, how do you fix everything around your house? The way I do it is I.

Get on YouTube, I'm sure there's a TikTok video about how to repair himars. Yeah, I think I know the answer to this question. But in reality, what's harder, the war or the occupation?

It's not making one be different from the other. Because the reality is the initial war, as most people would define it, going in and overwhelming the enemy's forces on the ground, getting to their capital, or whatever your objective is, is, is hard, but it's not that hard. It's pretty straightforward. The occupation of a country that doesn't want to be occupied is hellishly different, difficult because you need a vast number of forces. A country the size of Ukraine, if it was going to be occupied, would take several million soldiers to occupy it. And in the today's high tech world, where every civilian or, or soldier can be pretty lethal, attacking the occupying forces, it's even harder than ever. So I think for Russia to occupy significant part of terrain where the people don't want them is really difficult.

And so what you just said, in hindsight, I think it was the acronym was coin. Do you think that was a flawed decision or it ended too fast or you know, what happened there?

Yeah, first off, it's really hard. I don't think it was a flawed decision because there's really not another option. If you've got an insurgency against a country, the only way to defeat that insurgency is to make the country, society and military strong enough with standing it. Think of an analogy of the human body. If your body's weak, you get sick and you're vulnerable. And so coin. But it's hard because it all the things about making the body of a nation healthy, particularly under pressure, is difficult. And so they're just not another way, in my view. But we can't underestimate what it takes.

You make the the point like an old cartoon, that we have met the enemy and he is us. So why do say that the greatest risk is usually internal?

Because I think that most of the risks we face in retrospect, in the moment, that may be very daunting, but in retrospect, we find that they're not 10ft tall and we can defeat them. We found with COVID 19 we could develop vaccines with extraordinary speed. We could produce them faster than ever, but then we couldn't get people to take them. It was extraordinary. And so if you look at any number of threats that come at our society, what we find is we don't communicate well between each other or we lack leadership. We don't have a clear narrative of what it is we're trying to do. There are just so many things where we find out that it's our missteps or our inherent weaknesses that turn out to be lethal to us. And this is where it comes back in many cases to some introspection and some leadership. Because if I want an organization to be less vulnerable to threats, the first thing people say is I got to go out and I got to find the threats and stomp on them or whatever. You actually don't, because that's impossible. You just can't know them. But what you can do is make the organization much more resilient, much just more basically strong. Just like a healthy person doesn't get sick to any number of ranges of things nearly as often as someone who is already compromised. And that's the whole idea, and I've become deeply convinced of it.

An extreme example, you would say that you can't go out and stomp Hurricane Katrina. But you can prepare New Orleans for something like Katrina, and that enemy is us not being prepared, not the hurricane.

That's exactly right. And you can't even just do physical things, increase the levees. You can do some of that. But what you've got to do is prepare New Orleans for all kinds of things. And it's got to be able to respond. It's got to be able to do rational actions in real time to unexpected threats.

Now, with that introduction, what exactly is good leadership?

Good leadership, I've come to believe, is not that iconic. Edward Braddock on his horse, leading this army through the woods. And he's a very competent, in many ways, British general, and I'm sure he was a courageous guy, ultimately killed in the fight. But really, the good leader builds the organization. The good leader builds those capacities, starting with subordinate leaders, ensuring that there's clarity on what the organization is about. We'll call it narrative, but in many ways it's culture as well. Ensuring that the organization has the habit and the willingness to adapt when necessary. Ensuring that the organization can overcome inertia. Because I don't know how many times you're in an organization and everybody can sit there and agree, you know, we ought to do this, but we won't do this because it's just too hard, whatever, and nothing happens. And so the good leader actually is setting up those qualities in the organization that allow the organization to do that, which only the organization can ultimately do. And sometimes it's a very humble kind of leadership. Sometimes it takes a little bit of head wrapping to get people focused and in line. But the reality is you're constantly building. And I would argue that in many cases, in the moment of crisis, the leader is not important. They've either done their job beforehand or they haven't.

And does this differ for military versus private sector versus political?

Yeah, we pretend it does, but I think it's almost exactly the same. There are some different terms we use, and we expect the military leader to act a certain way, but the basic requirements are identical.

A lot of your discussion was about recognizing and reducing bias. And I want to know how we recognize and reduce bias.

I think the first part is much more doable. Recognizing bias, because reducing bias is something we will all work on, but it's challenging because we just have it. If you know you've got it, in some cases, you can step away from it. You know, biases come up because of your background, because of your experience, because of your race, because of any number of things you Just are going to see the world a certain way. And then as we outline in the book, sometimes you're going to see it in the way that it's in your interest. So for example, we talk about slavery in the pre Civil War American South. You know, slavery had been a point of argument for decades and there had been all these philosophical books written on it and arguments and I'm reading a long book on the struggle inside the US Congress in the 1830s over it. So people had a really clear idea of what the question was. But if you step back, it was in the interests of a significant part of the south to have slavery. It was in their economic interest and then it was in their political interest to have it. And it was absolutely not in their interest to do away with it. So they are going to believe in it. They almost have to believe in it because cognitive dissonance says you won't do something that you think is wrong for very long, you'll change what you think. And so as a consequence, you have a whole group of people who convinced themselves that slavery was in the best interest of the nation and of the slaves themselves. The argument that they'd be in the jungle and they, they wouldn't be able to take care of themselves. And so we step back now 160 years later and it looks ludicrous, but it's not ludicrous because take on some things in our own lives right now. There are certain things about the free market economy, about our ability to maybe to make choices where our children go to school, or any number of things that become pretty emotional and we feel very strongly about them because it's in our interest to have that belief because that particular outcome supports us. Whether it's we want low taxes because we got money and we don't want to pay a lot of taxes. It's pretty natural for people in that income bracket to think low taxes would be good. And people in a very low tax, low income level, they have a different view because they benefit from the opposite. So as long as we start by understanding we don't arrive at our opinions based upon deep thought and study, we get there. That's what it is.

I would say that the flip side of bias is rationalization. And you have a great discussion about rationalizing in particular when you're taking the easy way. So how do you know when you're rationalizing and taking the easy way or if the easy way is actually the right thing to do?

Wow. Well, that, I mean, that is such a tough question. I think the first thing is, again, recognizing your bias. Recognize that you are going to be inclined to support the easy way because it's easier. And so you are unlikely to give near as much weight to the other thing you should do simply because it's that way. And it takes an extraordinary person to be able to overcome that rationalization. I think this is where groups of people can do very well. I think discussions, a dialectic on something like that, where you start to bring in different views, it may not cause you to suddenly get up and go, yeah, we should take the hard way. But it will get people and groups into the position where they recognize there is another way, there is an argument for that other way. We should consider that. And sometimes just to be a member of the group, to show your willingness and the importance to you of being a member of the group, you will make better decisions, you will go along with better decisions when it would be less inconvenient not to.

So this is, I think, where you'd say you should throw the tabletop and the red team and the pre mortem at the problem.

That's exactly right. Those things which are actions which force you into thinking differently, the red team kind of thing, which forces a different look at what you're doing or the pre mortem or that sort of thing, those are critical because they get you out of your comfort zone.

So I'll leave you with one easy question. How does one develop moral courage?

Wow. I think that one is extraordinarily important. I think introspection, you have got to set yourself some test for those decisions. The test that I use for my decisions is my granddaughters. I've got three granddaughters. They live next door to me. I'm very close to them. And I want every decision I make when they see it or they read about it later, after I'm gone, and they judge it. I want it to be one that I think that they will be proud of me of. I think that if you have some forcing function to your moral courage, some kind of standard, that's the one I use. There are other things that I've been taught, but. But I would urge everyone. Some people use their religious background, they whatever, but you have to have a framework because if you don't, you make every decision entirely independent of that. It's awful hard to get to the right answers.

I hope you enjoyed this interview with General Stanley McChrystal. We learned about the future of war, the difficulty of occupying a country, how to control bias, and how to develop moral courage. I'm Guy Kawasaki this is Remarkable People. Special thanks to Gaultin Makunda. Quite frankly, I don't think I would have ever gotten to Stanley McChrystal without his help. My thanks to Jeff C, Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, and the Drop in Queen of Santa Cruz, Madison Nismer. We are the Remarkable People team on a mission to make you Remarkable. Mahalo and aloha. Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It's our pleasure and honor to make the show for you. Knowing that you like our podcast makes all the difference to us. Please follow the show in your favorite podcast app or find the latest episode every Wednesday@remarkable people.com this is remarkable People.