David i dont consider myself a journalist. No one else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on being an interviewer, even though i had a day job. . How do you define leadership what is it that makes someone tick . David you served our country very honorably for quite a while. Now youre in something i consider a higher calling of mankind, private equity. How do you compare being in the military and leading troops to private equity . Feel honoredeus i to be in academia and speak in academia and speaking with startups and so forth. Hard to tops pretty the extraordinary privilege of serving on the country in uniform, particularly if you are marine our soldiers in and combat. David you are an avid exerciser. Youre living in new york, the run around central park . General petraeus do people recognize you. You can generally run unimpeded and unrecognized. If the veterans in this audience would please stand up so that we can recognize you and thank you for what you have done for our country in uniform. [applause] general praise i have often said that those that have served come all of them are volunteers and they raise the righthand at the time of war knowing they would likely be asked to deploy. I have often described them as americas new greatest generation. Tom brokawething shouted in my year after he saw our soldiers in the first year in basel. Everything from combat to helping rebuild cities that have been damaged during the war, looting, all of these different tasks. He said the world war ii crowd was the greatest generation, but surely the young men and women are the new greatest generation. I very much believe that. David lets talk about how you came into the military. Your mother and father met at a. Hurch service he stayed here during world war ii and became a commander of the it was. Marine ship david you grew up in new york city. General petraeus i can run home from west point to and from. David growing up, what was your. Ickname general i said peaches, that has stuck. There was a girl in the laundry who had been a High School Friend of mine doing that as a summer job added she would send me notes in the laundry every week. I open it up and it said dear peaches. David how to west point. You make an application. General petraeus you write the congressman and you get nominated. David u hadnt suppose you hadnt gotten in. Have you ever thought how your life would be different . Petraeus at the end of two years at west point, i was in Alaska Mountain climbing in a training course. This was our summer training. Then i went down to los angeles and a friend of mine who lived in the hills looking over los angeles had such an extraordinary experience, i decided should i really go back to west point or should i enjoy more of this. In the end, i went back, obviously. David at west point, judy play on the soccer team . General trays. I play on the soccer team. General petraeus. Trays at west point, i was in the premed program. I loved that particular body of academic inquiry. I think it was also that it was the highest academic peak all of the sudden i found the senior the program. Lot in i realized at that time that i wasnt absolutely certain that i truly wanted to be a dark i wanted to climb that mountain. I had a wonderful experience. You got married just a few weeks. Fter you graduated general petraeus it was a strange blind date. David it was nerveracking dating her . Jennifer trays we tried to do that clandestinely for a while. Classmates away from the crowd said my soninlaw my soninlaw. I took a little flat. Graduated and went into infantry. You were working your way up and there were two incidents that occurred where you almost lost her life, not in combat. General per trays it was a live fire drill. We were following a one star general. We were walking behind the soldiers and one of them knocked out a bunker and a spot of it and tripped and fell down. We think as he did, he probably an m16 round going to my chest. Luckily it went over the a in petraeus. David what happened . Mr. Petraeus obviously medics start working on you. Interestingly, shock sets in. I initially said, dont worry, just do a quick after action review to figure out what was wrong. They were rolling their eyes. They get an iv running. You get a medevac aircraft in. They pick me up. Keene went with me. We went into the hospital. It had picked an artery, but did not sever it. The doctor turned to me and said this was going to hurt. He took a scalpel and cut and ,sk in my side down to the ribs held it back, and shoved a plastic to into the lung. That is what saved my life. I was put in a helicopter and flown down to the medical center. Of all people, they called in the surgeon on call, dr. Bill frist. He came in later as the majority leader of the senate. Some people jokingly said, the the trias was dying to meet bill frist. He did thoracic surgery and i was out of the hospital in five or six days. David to get out of the hospital, you didnt want them they didnt they didnt want you to leave so you did pushups to show them you were ok. Mr. Petraeus the only time i ever stopped at 50. No. [laughter] david i have never gotten to 50. Mr. Petraeus i wanted to get out of there. Things were fine. There was no reason to keep hanging around. I was doing laps around the hospital. I will put all my tubes in a wheelchair and push it around. I think it was driving them crazy. David the other incident was you were skydiving. Your parachute did not quite work. You broke your pelvis. What is that like . General petraeus it was horrific. That was worse in terms of pain because it fractured front and rear. Your body is in two parts. Anything that touches, and i rode in an ambulance all the way in, and every single crack in the street was agony. David did you ever skydive after that . General petraeus i was told by the army, he said, dave, no more skydiving. I said, ok. You give me division command, and i will quit skydiving. David they gave you command. Mr. Petraeus i was very privileged. David you have had people working before for you in combat. General petraeus it is a chilling experience. When a soldier is killed, it takes the wind out of you. David you had a number of important jobs in the military and ultimately a decision was made by president bush to invade iraq. You became a commander there and went over there as the first part of the military that went into that. It was supposed to be relatively quick. When did you realize this wasnt going to be as easy as we thought . Gen. Petraeus we did in a matter of weeks top of the regime. There was stiffer fighting along the way at various points. What was predicted by a variety of folks prior to the invasion, which was that iraq the units were all going to surrender and come over to our side and help us establish order did not prove out. There was tough fighting along the way. I had this sense fairly early on, certainly within the first week, once that dust storm blew through, and i had rick atkinson, the Washington Post reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner, ride in the back of my humvee, and i remember turning to him at one point and asking, tell me how this ends . Im not sure this is going to go according to script. The idea that we are going to topple saddam and his management and everybody else will stay in place and we will hand it over to them, obviously. David do you think it would have been different if we decided not to get rid of the entire saddam army . Gen. Petraeus these were huge mistakes. We used to have a question when i was division commander, it asked, will this Operation Take more bad guys off the street then it creates . The same is two and policies. The fact is that hiring the military without telling them what the future was, this means taking tens of thousands of able, and there is no reconciliation process agreed. You have created tens of thousands of people whose incentive is to oppose iraq. David you lead the effort to take control of mosul. General petraeus we were in baghdad, which is where we were told we were going to end up. We got this emergency order to go to mosul. It is out of control. There was a small u. S. Unit up there 17 civilians killed in response to a riot. Within about 36 hours or so we , did one of the biggest aerosols in history up to mosul. We immediately blanketed the city with soldiers. We literally pushed right into the city, calmed it down, and stop the looting and the rest of that, and gradually took control. We had an interim government out there within two weeks of arriving. David early on in the war, it was thought that shock and all awe would be all that was necessary. That concept doesnt really work. Gen. Petraeus that did not completely see. It did impose a little awe here and there. There were folks fighting, shooting at us. We had casualties. We lost heavy equipment and everything else. David when president bush decided to invade, in part it was because of the theory that they had weapons of mass destruction. Gen. Petraeus right. David that information came from the cia. When you became the head of the cia, did you ever dig into that . Gen. Petraeus i did not dig into that as much as i did several other issues, such as the use of enhanced interrogation, which i have personally opposed. One, i think it is wrong. I think it is beyond International Law and the geneva convention. I just dont think it is effective. As jim mattis colorfully said, give me a beer and a cigarette, and i will get more information than by waterboarding. Not quite that simple. To put it more simply, you want to become their best friend in detention. The interrogator does. I say this having been a commander who oversaw the holding of more detainees than anyone else. 27,000 of them. We have some experience with what works in detainees. Treating them humanely while still eliciting information from them is way to go about it. David you have never before had people working for you directly who were killed in combat. The command of people who were dying. Gen. Petraeus it is a chilling experience. I remember the radio call when our first soldier was killed. It takes the wind out of you. I remember hearing when the third infantry division, which really spearheaded the fight along with the Marine Division into baghdad, i was monitoring the radio because we were all fighting together, and they had a couple of heavy vehicles blown up. It is chilling. David you were there for how long . Gen. Petraeus that was about a yearlong deployment. I was back for a couple of months. I was asked to go back quickly to do an assessment for a couple of weeks or the secretary of defense of the Iraqi Security force effort. I came back and reported that to secretary rumsfeld. He said great report, go back and do what you have recommended. David did you think if you hadnt written such a good report, they would not send you back. Gen. Petraeus secretary rumsfeld had an interesting way of giving rewards. I remember in the final week or so, he came over, and he was literally patting me on the back. He said, on the way home i want you to come to afghanistan. I said, that is not exactly the direct line between two points. We did an assessment over there on the way home. David president obama calls you into the oval office and says i would like you to give up Central Command and be a military commander in afghanistan. What did you think about that . Gen. Petraeus if the president calls on you to do something, i think you do it. David you didnt say, let me think about it . Mr. Petraeus no. David youve finished your second tour of duty in iraq. You went back to the United States. Gen. Petraeus we had about 15 months at work leavenworth, kansas. There are a number of different hats and individual wears. You control the armys doctrine. It is quite an extraordinarily command. We really revamped the whole process of preparing units, soldiers, and their leaders to go to iraq and afghanistan. We did the counterinsurgency field manual. David you wrote a very good report. You oversaw the counterinsurgency manual. It was so good that people said maybe this person should be in charge of the current counterinsurgency efforts. You were asked by president bush to lead the socalled surge. To lead the socalled surge. When he said this, did you say, i have already served to two hours of duty, and i dont need to go back a third time . Gen. Petraeus no. You say it would be a privilege to do that. It is the same thing i said when president obama sat me down several years later with no pleasantries and no one else in the room except for a photographer, im asking you to go to afghanistan and take command. I think the only answer at a time like that can be. David what i didnt understand at the time is how many troops did we have in iraq at the time of the surge . Gen. Petraeus we had about 140,000 u. S. Soldiers. We are tens of thousands of additional. We added about 25,000 to 35,000 forces during the surge. I will just point out, and i am sure there are some surge veterans in here that will validate this, it was not a sur not the surge of forces, it was a change of strategy. It was a 180degree shift and getting out of the faces of the iraqi people and going back to living in the neighborhoods. That is the only way you can secure them. You cannot kill or capture your way out of an industrialstrength insurgency. From handing off to iraqi forces that could not handle the escalating violence to actually taking over, we created 77 additional locations just in the baghdad divisional area alone during the course of the surge. David had 140,000 american troops and we sent over an additional 25,000 to 35,000. That was enough given the techniques you used to bring it to a stable position. Gen. Petraeus dramatically reduced violence. It was during the course of an 18 month. Period. David the president asked you to head that. They are in charge of u. S. Military operations in the middle east. General petraeus. It is 20etraeus countries from egypt in the west to pakistan in the east, kazakhstan in the north, and somalia in the south. We were proud to have 90 of the worlds problem set the time. David if you have one of these commands, usually, not always, someone gets to rise up to be the army chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. You were rising up. One day, president obama calls you and says i would like you to give up the Central Command and go back and be a military commander in afghanistan. What do you think about that . Gen. Petraeus if the present asked you to do something, you do it. David you didnt say, let me think about it . Gen. Petraeus no. The only answer to a question like that can be yes. I would say in that case and prior, it was secretary gates who called me. I was on leave. It was the last time i saw my father before i went to the surge. I was on a freeway outside of l. A. Driving to where he lived in a retirement home, and i took the call from secretary gates. In each case, i wanted to have a little more conversation and say, i would like you to understand who you are getting as your commander. My advice when it comes to drawing forces down and so forth will be based on the facts on the ground with an understanding of the mission that you have assigned us, which we will have dialogue informed by an awareness of all these other issues which you have to deal with legitimately, congressional politics, coalition politics, budget deficits, you name it. Given by fax on the ground. That is important. What i am saying is im going to give it to you straight, not changing it based on issues you have to deal with. I will obviously support the decision you ultimately make. David you went to afghanistan. You spent 12 months. Gen. Petraeus a little over 12 months. David what did you conclude . Did we have an effort to successfully get rid of the taliban . Gen. Petraeus as i said in congress, we would not be able to flip afghanistan the way we flipped iraq. If you see what i mean. I really did believe we could do in iraq what we ultimately did. What was eating at me was whether we could do it fast enough, that you would have sufficient results to report six months into the surge. That was crucial. Congressional support was tenuous. We did. We reduced violence very dramatically. It continued to be reduced. It was sustained in a rock for three and a half years until tragically the Prime Minister undid it with highly sectarian actions. In the case of afghanistan, i was under no illusions that we would be able to replicate what we did in iraq. The circumstances are very different. I actually laid out for the secretary of defense that secretary rumsfeld asked me to do, the very first slide in that said afghanistan does not equal a rock. Iraq. There is not going to be a prospect of a dramatic improvement. What our mission was in that year and what we did accomplish was to halt the momentum of the taliban because they were on the and selectverse it afghan institutions so we could begin transition of some tasks, which we did, all while achieving the overarching goal, which is still a valid and Important Mission for the United States in afghanistan. That is to ensure that afghanistan is never again a sanctuary for transnational extremists the way it was when al qaeda planned the 9 11 attacks there and conducted them. David you briefed president bush 43 and president obama. If they were taking an sat test, who would do better . Gen. Petraeus i do not grade the president s with which i served. David who was the better athlete . Gen. Petraeus president bush. He could talk trash. He said, winky write a Mountain Bike with me . David while you were in afghanistan, the effort to capture Osama Bin Laden was going forward. Gen. Petraeus capture or kill. David capture or kill. How were you alerted to that, because you were not directly in the chain of command for that decision that night . Gen. Petraeus no one else in our headquarters knew at all. I got up myself, no aides, or anything else. We had a joint special Operations Command post at the nato headquarters in kabul where i was located. I went in there, sort of surprised them at 11 00 at night, they said, what are you doing in here . I asked everyone to leave except for one officer who i knew very, very well. We dialed up so we could monitor the operation. We had a lot of contingency plans. The forces they conducted some of those, at least in the headquarters, was working for me in normal times. But that night they were working for the cia. The cia, it was a covert action, which means the chain of command runs from the president to the director of the cia, and then, to admiral mcraven and the seal team 6 unit. David did you subsequently, the Afghan Military or their own service or intelligence versus knew that Osama Bin Laden was living there