President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
One particular thing hasn’t changed across decades and generations of intelligence operations: the quality of our leaders and their demonstration of three core attributes which kept our community focused on meeting mission and developing personnel to face today’s and tomorrow’s threats. These three core attributes are Teamwork, Tone, and Tenacity.
Ultimately, this film is about many things. Stale and hollow storytelling is not one of them. A War is ripe with the chaos that is war. Watching it, one is struck by courage, tragedy, death, grief, and the circumstantial bureaucracy of war. One has thrust upon them the impact of deployment on family, the demands of brotherhood, and its connections beyond the blurred lines of battle.
The future of the tank is secure. Men first mastered animals to move faster on the battlefield than their foes afoot, and it continues today. Men build machines that are faster, but more importantly to protect them from weapons on the field, and enable them to carry more devastating firepower than they could if on foot. This is the magical combination of mobility, firepower, and protection that all armored vehicles balance in some way, shape, or form.
In the end, getting leadership development and retention correct actually saves lives. Young Americans are placed in the capable hands of junior and senior leaders in almost every part of the U.S. Government on a daily basis. We must meet these development goals. The future will demand that our leaders at every level be mentally agile, sound in judgment, and resilient, building upon their strong foundational character.
The reality is that we value considering war in a certain way: the Clausewitzian way. Just like other values, people can disagree, but they should recognize that they are disagreeing based on value and not fact...Arguments about the definition of war are always, in some sense, efforts to shape, constrain, or channel violence and power, but this makes it all the more important to consider whether we should think of the nature of war as Clausewitz does. To which I answer, most definitively, yes, because if not Clausewitz, then whom?
That next generation of leaders who will decide the fate of thousands on the battlefield almost certainly stands in our ranks today. The most valuable thing we can do now is to invest our lives in them, mentor, develop, and counsel them so that when history calls, they will stand ready to do their duty. If we expect to have Eisenhowers and Pattons on tomorrow’s battlefields, we must begin by creating a cadre of Fox Conners today from the leaders currently in our ranks.
Simply, Victor in the Rubble is a delight. It produces that same sense of glee that comes from opening an MRE to find a pop tart perfectly whole rather than smashed into a gazillion crumbles. Alex Finley, a former CIA officer, has crafted a magical satire of the Intelligence Community post-9/11, Iraq, and the 2004 intelligence reforms.
Raqaa is not Munster, Obama is not Waldeck, and the Sunni-Shia face-off is not the Thirty Years’ War. But the comparisons are seductive for a reason, as they help explain a highly complex set of events (like the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS, the fight in Iraq and Syria and the execution of a Shia cleric) in terms that we know—or think we know. Put another way, historical analogies are useful (and the Thirty Years’ War analogy is particularly useful), but only so long as we get the history right—when we understand that the Thirty Years’ War had nothing to do with God. It was about power. And that’s true today, in the Middle East.
Leaders must accustom themselves to the uncertain and the ambiguous. They must train themselves and their subordinates to fight equally well across the entire spectrum of conflict. They must be prepared to dominate any battlefield through decisive action at the critical point, even without the benefit of technology or constant oversight. Leaders at all levels must honestly and deliberately exercise mission command at all times or they, their units, and the mission will pay the price when it truly counts
The capacity of the United States military to fund and field an institutional force is an asymmetric advantage over enemies and adversaries around the globe...The development and advancement of knowledge necessary to improve the force is not a distraction from the operational elements in the current fight. By recognizing the value of the institutional level of war and the contributions of leaders practicing the institutional art, the United States will maintain this asymmetric advantage for decades to come.
The bottom line is that the rise of ISIS has exposed the weakness of a strategic approach, which, for too long, focused just on neutralizing terrorist plots and killing or capturing senior terrorist leaders. This approach looked and often felt, as if it was proactive—taking the fight to the enemy. But in reality, as the defeats of 2014-15 have shown, it was too narrowly focused to succeed.
Innovation and leadership converge on this point: crafting environments and cultures in which the desire to improve outweighs the desire to stick with old habits. Because innovation and leadership have this in common, leaders shouldn’t think of innovation as something they do in addition to their real jobs. Innovation is leadership.
Our soldiers, officers, and civilians have faced the most intense fighting since Korea, and they have endured the stresses admirably (with remarkably few mistakes given the corrupting nature of war). Nor do I fundamentally disagree with how leadership theory has developed from these experiences; works such as Team of Teams by Stan McCrystal are already helping develop military leaders fitter for the future challenges of war. The problem is that all these remarkable feats of leadership have ultimately been tarnished, infected if you will, by one thing: the dramatic absence of strategy in the Western world since September 11th, 2001.
It’s not true that your life flashes before your eyes when faced with death. For me it was the books I’d read and the characters that had left an impression on my soul.It’s not true that your life flashes before your eyes when faced with death. For me it was the books I’d read and the characters that had left an impression on my soul.
