Well, thank you very much. Thanks for coming out. I think its a wonderful opportunity. The gentleman sitting next to me is kind of a big deal. Pays e who is attention to American Foreign policy and military affairs, you know that ever since the attacks on this country on 9 11, the United States has had to evolve militarily, in our intelligence community, and many ways to meet the challenge of this new enemy. And more than anyone that i can think of, general mcchrystal has been responsible for shaping that evolution and developing the what i call the targeting engine, which is what have i think adopted as our primary method of defending the country. So thank you for being here, general mcchrystal. Great to see you. Thanks, mark. Thanks for a too kind introduction. I always thought of you as a nonfiction writer but i know youre going into fiction now. Now, i know that, you know, our you were the commander of our special operations in iraq and afghanistan. There has been as i mentioned a rapid evolution. Im familiar from writing blackhawk down with the way things were in the early 1990s. Can you give us an idea of some of the overall strategy thats evolved and well get to the specifics maybe but also the tactics that youve developed . Well, not me. A group of people did. Thanks. Taking you back a little bit, at the end of the vietnam war as america has done at the end of other wars, the special operations units that are created essentially get gutted or they get disbanded entirely. There is a bias to do away with them. And in the late 1970s American Special operating forces when i first joined the green berets or special forces were in really pa thetic shape. They were barely a shadow of what they had been at the height of the vietnam war. In 1980 the Mission Eagle call was launched to try to conduct a rescue mission into tehran to rescue the american citizens held hostage in the embassy. It failed. It not only failed painfully, it failed for many reasons but one of which is our special operations capability while we still had people who were brave and strong and what not, they were not an integrated community capable of doing very complex things in deep. That was a very complex endeavor. And so it failed. And from the ashes of that, there was a report called the Holloway Commission and it recommended that we take a look at our capability to do this kind of operation and the structure to do it. I entered special operations a few years later as a young ranger officer, and i was able, and i try to tell this in great detail in the book, because when you start to build a special operations capability as we were redoing in the early 1980s, the first thing you do is go find stereotypical special operators. Typically guys with big shoulders, big knuckles, good shots, brave, and all that sort of thing. Thats important. You got to have that. But its really the easiest part of creating the organization. What you have to do if youre going to do complex operations, you have to have a huge intelligence capability, integrate it with operators, you have to have aviation ability to bring this all together and, most importantly, you have to have a culture and that culture has to be very mature. That is the word ive used very carefully. It is not a culture of stereotypical rambo kind of things. That is not the way special operations succeed. Thats how you lose. And so you have to build a culture that is evolved of problem solving and problem solving in which building teams does that. What happened is we went up through the first i was in the rangers and then joint special Operations Command through the first goal where we did scud hunting, hunting for iraqi missiles out in western iraq. We were Getting Better and better at what we did. We all paid huge attention to what mark wrote so brilliantly about in black hawk down the operation mowing mogg. We went to school on that experience aided by the document he had written on an operation that had gone very badly but then had been essentially dealt with by the force on the ground with extraordinary courage but a lot holes in what we could do came out. We came as a fairly brittle force. I. E. If everything went perfectly the way you planned it then youre in good shape. But when things start to go badly as they so often do how do you deal with it . Do you have the resilience to deal with it . We started to try to fix that and make it a more flexible and resilient force. We went up into 2001 after 9 11 and of course the First Operations in afghanistan toppling the afghan government, driving out al qaeda, were some brilliant, deep raids. And in iraq with the initial invasion same thing. Working against a nation state. But where we found ourselves in really late 2003, which was when i returned to special operations, is you remember in the spring of 2003 the invasion of iraq went sort of surprisingly well or deceptively well. And suddenly things in iraq started to go very badly in the late summer. We had a sense that if we could just arrest Saddam Hussein that that would potentially stop the problem. What happened was we did. The force found and arrested Saddam Hussein. What we found is what had grown sort of beneath the surface was a cancerlike network led by a guy who had created an al qaeda related organization. It wasnt technically al qaeda at that point but it was a combination of foreign leadership and then frustrated iraqi sunnies. They were a network and they were not a Small Organization trying to do one or two things. They were trying to run an insurgency using what we call terrorist tactics. So suddenly the force that had been beautifully designed and honed to a fine edge for very precise but very episodic occasional operations was unprepared and unable to do the wider problem. Its like having a swat team for your police force for all of philadelphia, but in reality if you cant cover the whole city and you cant do a lot of things, that one swat team can never be decisive. Thats where we found ourselves that began the significant evolution. Thats where we really began to change dramatically. Right. In somalia, i think Task Force Ranger had been there a month or two before the big battle that i wrote about. And during that period they launched six missions. So the path the pace was, intelligence gathering, finding targets, planning, and operations. Sometimes very quickly once that intelligence came together, and then launching a raid. Op tempo ow what means and exactly how it applied in iraq. Frpblt that is very interesting. There were a series of raids in mogadishu, all happened a number of days apart. You gather intel, get it together, make a decision. When you set yourself criteria to launch when those criteria come, you launch. But it is a pretty centralized, pretty deliberate process. When we got in iraq we were originally doing that. We would have this precise thing. What we found is we were having that effect but very narrow effect, very slow effect. When we would go on a target, for example, we would go to pick up an individual and there may or may not be a fight. If we captured him and his computer and his phone and documents and other things, wed capture all those things, but the force, one of our small forces around the country would do the operation. Then it might take a day or two for them to send the individual back to our headquarters where we could begin effective interrogation. And the stuff that was captured would typically go in a plastic garbage bag. And it would be written in arabic typically and then there would be a computer. And it would come back and it would be 48 hours old before it got to the main headquarters and then would sit there because we didnt have translators to do it. When i first took over i went in this room and there is a pile of this stuff that hadnt even been read or exploited as wed call it, digested for intelligence. Counterinsurgency or counterterrorism is all about intelligence. Whoever knows the most, wins. And so we had this incredible inability to digest information, process it, and then operate. We started to get where we could be a little bit faster but we developed a system called f 3 ea for find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze. That is a cycle you go through. You find somebody. You fix them in a location and a time now. You finish by capturing or killing. You exploit whatever you capture. You analyze that and you learn from it. Its basically a learning cycle, learning and then action. Woo he would do that and go through that process fwu would be painfully but it would be painfully slow because we were operating with different organizations not all organic to mind and different agencies, intelligence agencies and what not. And this may surprise you but not all parts of the u. S. Government Work Together seamlessly. [ laughter] so here we are as this cycle and we have these things, what we call blinks between the parts. And so one element would find a target but by the time the information got to the people who were going to fix it usually with a predator or Something Like that to make sure theyre there then, time would have passed and accuracy of information fidelity would have passed. Then it would be passed over to the raid force. Again, youd have a loss. Its like the game telephone where you whisper around the room and its unintelligible by about the fifth person. Were trying to do things in that. We say this is madness. And so we started. We went on a campaign to fix that process. Bringing in different parts of the organization, building our intelligence capacity, giving ourselves a mindset that was different from before. Before it was as if each element did its part of the process then they could take great pride. We succeeded and did what we were told. We wiped that clean and we said, nobody is successful unless the whole process works. The definition of winning is the same for all of us. Only if we win this fight. That was quite a bit different than what wed had. By the summer of things got really bad starting in late march of 2004 in iraq. Thats when the country basically melted down. And we started operating as hard as we could and the op tempo mark referred to is operational tempo. Its how fast you can operate. Nd we realized the size of abu zackways network that we were going to have to hit it a lot and not once a month. By august of 2004 we got up to 18 raids a month or about one every other night. And we thought we were moving at warp speed. Literally we thought this is the most amazing thing weve ever done. We are the most efficient Operations Task force on the face of the earth. We were but we were still losing. So we came to the conclusion that we have got to speed up more. There had been this fixation on just going after the Senior Leaders or high value targeting, decapitation. We came to the conclusion that wasnt going to work. It was sort of simple. We started the war with the idea if we got abu zakawri that the whole thing would fall apart but think of any organization youve ever been in. If the key person is taken out does it really get worse . I worked in the pentagon. It would have made it a lot better. So we realized you really got to go after the people who do the work, the people who do logistics, communications, pass information, build car bombs, communicate. You got to take those ute. We came up with a strategy. I used to tell people its like rocky bail boa and apollo creed. Well hit them in the mid section and hit them a lot. From august of 2004 when we did 18 raids two years later same month same force same fight we were doing 300 raids a month. Thats ten a month. If you stop and say ten a night, thats a lot. Thats impressive, that means every raid guy on the force is going on a raid at least one raid every night. Every pilot is flying one or two raids every night. And these raids are not patrols. These are going in the door somebody is getting shot. Extraordinary. And to do that, though, you cant use previous systems. One, youve got to be able to bring in this intelligence on an industrial scale. We got to the point where instead of the plastic bags of information on a target we would start to exploit their computers, their phones. We would take biometric data. It would be pumped back to West Virginia right from the target to see if wed ever had that person before. And if wed ever had any dealings with them. We would move the documents back, immediately scan them, send them back to multiple places in the u. S. And in theatre and everybody would be analyzing at the same time. And we would be trying to turn this to learn as quickly as we could. We got to the point where we could hit three targets a night from the initial intelligence. We would find joe smith at 9 00 at night because wed been looking for him. We would find out from what we got on that target about john doe. We might hit that at midnight. And wed hit another at 3 00 in the morning. The reason it was important to the networks ause repair themselves very quickly. If we were terrorists as soon as mark is captured, pretty soon im going to hear about it and the first thing i do is i move my location. I change my all those things, connections that i have. You call it cutouts. Because it moves to repair itself. You got to be quicker than they can repair themselves both the hit targets and also quicker than they can promote new people up, develop new leaders. Over time we started seeing the relative age of leaders of al qaeda in iraq go down and the relative effectiveness go down because of that. So the op tempo became the rocky balboa strategy of pummel as fast as you can so it cant breathe. And then over time had the decisive effect, which we actually did along with a number of other factors. One thing that i think is very interesting to me about that change and increasing the tempo is the role that technology played. I mean, obviously weve seen the development of drones. Weve seen the application of super computers. One of the things that you did was move Intelligence Analysts out into your base there, integrating everything up front. Can you talk about that a little bit, the role the technology played . Yeah. There are several things with technology that changed the fight. One is obvious. It was predators. It wasnt drone strikes. It was drone surveillance. Because you put a surveillance that gives you full motion video means that anywhere in our force to include the guys on the ground could watch what they, the predator is watching in fulltime video or realtime video. The real effect of that is several. One is where it used to take lets say 120 people when only 20 were going inside it takes a hundred to secure it outside to make sure you dont get people, reinforcement, what not. If you can do it from the air, you only send 20. Now the other hundred can hit five other targets. So we could hit six targets in the time were hitting one. And you know so much more. Also you can put drones over it and you can watch people all the time. If we decided to watch someone in this room all the time, pretty soon wed know what you call pattern of life. Wed know where you go, who you hang out with, what you do. Wed know how you walk, all those things. And whether youre good or bad or involved in the insurgency. And so you can build up this knowledge. Suddenly youre very precise, not going out and just picking up a bunch of people and trying to figure out who is good or bad. You start to know a lot. That is one technology that dramatically changed it. Another was night vision. We had night vision on all of our force, all of our helicopters, every one. What that meant was you could of course see in the dark but in fire fights youre absolutely dominant. We put laser ending sites on all our weapons. In a fight against the enemy at night theyre not as well trained as our guys but we have this incredible dominance. So fire fights our ratio was probably a thousand to one. In terms of people getting hit back. Now, the problem is, we dont have that many guys so the ones mount up and every time you lose a person its a huge cost because theyre so well trained and so valuable. But you still have dominance and you have the willingness to go places and do things that you wouldnt otherwise. The other one thats less obvious is just the ability to communicate. Video teleconferences and not so much radio, but video teleconferences, we did use radios. But, for example, we would take all of our radio nets that were happening on the ground. We would pick them up and we would put them into our classified Computer Network system. So every we had a technology that allowed you to sit at your lap top. Wherever you were in afghanistan, iraq, anywhere, you could watch from above whats happening and you could listen to their radio nets from our side down at the team level. Now you say, well then i could micro manage. We didnt. We never micro managed. But you could reach down and you had this Situational Awareness which allows you to know whats going. Something starts to go bad, you can move med evac, do a lot of things to help that force very quickly. E other thing, to be effective against an enemy network you have to be a Better Network than they are. Think what your network in life is. It may be the people in church, community group, where you work, family, a combination of things. And how you communicate with them determines often the strength of how you share information. You know people for 50 years. You know them pretty well. You dont need to communicate as often. We started every day with a 90minute video teleconference with the whole command. Thousands of people. We pumped information. We had a conversation about updates on intelligence. Updates, what happened. Updates in operation. Senior leaders. Every day im on it. With all the people. So everybody hears the Senior Leader every day and they hear the conversations plus they hear information go up and go down. We created what we called shared consciousness so the whole organization knows what we think the situation is, whats happening, where its going, which the effect is, it decentralizes decision making. If Everybody Knows what the corporate leadership is thinking, what were trying to do or explain it, they dont have to come up with decisions. They know what were trying to do. They just make them. We didnt ask them to come up for decisions. I didnt make tactical decisions, hit target x or y, because i wanted them to do that. I gave them an effect. I said heres what we got to do in this area. Create this effect. Defeat this netwo