General Stanley McCrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (2013) — a Book Review

02 September 2015

A valuable book for future military leaders

I suspect that most memoirs are visibly products of preened egos. Stanley McChrystal’s My Share of the Task: A Memoir appears not to be.

He was likeably respect-worthy before this book and even more so after. McChrystal’s memoir is less about him than it is about his assigned missions and his efforts to carry them out with highly capable and integrated teams. There is not a trace of “I’m the greatest” anywhere in the memoir.

The negative — this is unavoidably not reliable history

General McChrystal had to get his memoir cleared by the national security establishment:

[I] submitted the entire manuscript to the Department of Defense for a lengthy security review. In the end, I accepted many suggested changes and redactions, some reluctantly, particularly where public knowledge of facts and events has outpaced existing security guidelines . . . .

I judged compliance with the security review to be essential for me to keep faith with the comrades I had served alongside, and the nation I had served. My goal was to ensure that the following chapters do not endanger our mission or our stalwart personnel in any way.

Those who generously participated with me in the research and writing process were assured the book would undergo a security review, and the professionals who provided their insights and perspectives on this unique time in history would not have done so otherwise.

With the onset of the Vietnam War and progressing rapidly after September 2001, the United States security establishment has wandered further and further from being concerned with maintaining even remote connections to publicly revealed truth.

Consequently, I took nothing about the operations described in McChrystal’s book at face value. And for his part, the General is careful not to discuss his personal thoughts regarding the geopolitical wisdom of any of his assigned missions. People expecting to gain insights into the political morasses that were (and continue to be) Iraq and Afghanistan may be disappointed. I was not. I read the book for General McCrystal’s slant on operational leadership.

Another unavoidable drawback — for some readers — dryness in many places

Much of this book goes roughly like this:

On xx July 20xx, I went here and did this — after talking to A, B and C —

and

Then, I went there and met with X and Z — who eventually approved the plan that we had discussed —

and

Afterward, I came back, and the team implemented what we had talked about.

Writing samples

Representative of the general literary flow:

About midday on December 13, 2003, I received a phone call while back at Fort Bragg. “Sir, we have intelligence. We think we know where Saddam Hussein is and we’re moving on him now.”

The voice on the other end of the secure phone was Rear Admiral Bill McRaven, one of TF 714’s two assistant commanding generals. Bill, then TF 714’s senior officer in Iraq, was a Navy SEAL I’d known off and on for many years. I had enjoyed the book he wrote, Spec Ops, and earlier that year I had attended his promotion ceremony at the White House, as he moved from working for Condoleezza Rice at the National Security Council to TF 714. Energetic and iconoclastic, he would be a passionate force in shaping the command.

Bill’s call was welcome news. When I took over TF 714 in October 2003, Saddam Hussein was still the biggest target in Iraq. We were not the only unit responsible for his capture — everyone was on the hunt — but the administration and the military looked to us as the premier element. While his role in the growing violence in Iraq was unclear, we knew we had to remove him from the equation.

After Bill’s call, I went immediately to TF 714’s Joint Operations Center at Bragg. The room, with rows of workstations manned by staff and unit operators facing a wall of video screens, was a buzz of controlled excitement.

Regarding the lack of command and ambassadorial continuity in Afghanistan:

[On 14 June 2009,] President Karzai was familiar with my background, and was clearly trying to determine what it meant for his country now that I would command. After five American ambassadors, eleven other ISAF commanders, and a number of other interlocutors since 9/11, Karzai found himself unsure how to deal with the United States.

On a leader’s necessary acceptance of the symbolism he and she represent:

I made the decision that whenever I left the headquarters to visit forces, or meet with Afghans in Kabul and beyond, I would not wear body armor. I also did not carry a weapon, or wear sunglasses.

For Afghans, as the commander of international troops, I was a symbol.

We needed to appear humble and aware of our status not as occupiers, but as guests. Moreover, we needed to project calm. For that reason, when I met with Afghans, were I to be half-hidden in body armor, a helmet, and a retinue of guards, it would make the whole Coalition look scared, even as we were trying to convince the Afghans the Taliban were not to be feared.

On leadership — both up and down — a glimpse into the psychic weight of what is always on the line:

At the end of February 2010[,] I received an e-mail from a staff sergeant serving in the valley. He led a squad in an infantry battalion task force in the Zhari district, west of Kandahar.

I don’t believe you fully understand the situation we face in this district, and I think you should come down and see it up close, Staff Sergeant Israel Arroyo wrote.

I told Charlie Flynn to arrange for us to go down the following day.

We flew by C-130 cargo aircraft to Kandahar airfield and transloaded to UH-60 helicopters for the flight to their battalion’s main base before driving the final miles in Strykers to a sandbagged outpost on a small rise that overlooked an expanse of farm fields.

Instead of using wooden trellises to support fruit vines, the local farmers used packed mud. In long lines, they build walls six feet tall, four to five feet apart at the tapered tops, and narrower at the ground where the supporting base was wider. For soldiers, it was like operating in a maze, each corridor of sun-caked mud perfectly designed to channel them into waiting IEDs or well-placed ambush positions.

[B]y late spring the corridors would become like tunnels under a canopy of foliage, any movement inside largely hidden from the air.

The corduroy terrain of Zhari was almost a metaphor for these infantrymen’s war. The[y] could see eighteen inches to their left and right, and rarely more than fifty feet to their front and rear. Above, only a slice of sky. Fighting was bloody, and unsatisfying. Rarely was there a hill to take, or a stalwart enemy to take it from. Any progress I could see from a wider view of Afghanistan was impossible to discern from their mud-walled world.

Like leaders before me, I was asking soldiers to believe in something their ground-level perspective denied them. I was asking them to believe in a strategy impossible to guarantee, and in progress that was hard to see, much less prove.

They were asked to risk themselves to bring improvements that might take years to arise.

As a commander, I was asking them to believe in me. Whether they did was often hard to judge.

A memorable quotation — in retrospect, essentially explaining why our strategy for Afghanistan appears to have failed:

The [strategic assessment] team then traveled across the country to speak with every regional command, several brigades and battalions, most Afghan ministries, and a variety of government officials and local Afghan elders.

Those Afghans’ decisions to side with either the government or the Taliban would determine our success, but many distrusted our efforts and those of the government.

“The government robs us, the Taliban beat us, and ISAF bombs us,” said one group of elders. “We do not support any side.”

The assessment team’s inputs and my own observations . . . convinced me that more than anything else, Afghanistan was gripped by fear. Lack of faith in their government, concern, bordering on paranoia, over Pakistani-supported Taliban expansion, and an almost primal fear of abandonment by the West . . . .

Perhaps the book’s most engaging sequence is . . .

General McChrystal’s detailed overview of the hunt for Al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, demonstrates the stress that goes with combining aerial surveillance with special operations — both performed under an umbrella of limited resources. This story alone is worth the price of the memoir.

Recommended — without reservation

A must read for future military leaders.

PeteFree.com

General Stanley McCrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (2013) — a Book Review