Transcriber: Ana Allamand Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
Just before Thanksgiving Day 2005,
a U.S. marine ran into a house in a town called Haditha
which is not far from Bagdad in Iraq,
and began shooting children.
He later told the investigators:
"I remember they were kneeling down;
I don't remember how many there were, but it was a lot."
He also said, "I am trained to use two shots to the chest
and two shots to the head, and I followed my training."
The marine in question had just lost a comrade.
His friend had been killed by a roadside bomb,
literally blown him in half, and the team of marines
shocked and panicked, saw four men,
five men approaching in a white car,
a possible follow-up attack, and they just went berserk.
They rampaged through nearby houses.
They shot one child - she survived by playing dead -
one child's grandmother, grandfather.
They shot a man in a wheelchair, they shot an infant.
They killed 24 civilians.
And that massacre in Haditha
didn't even attract a great deal of attention at the time.
The situation in Iraq was so bad,
it was regarded both by many Iraqis
and by the U.S. Army itself as largely unremarkable.
If the situation in 2005 was bad, the situation in 2006 was worse.
2006 tore Iraq, if we are honest, sliding into civil war.
The Golden Dome at the Samarra Mosque
was destroyed at the beginning of the year.
This is an act roughly comparable
to the IRA blowing up Saint Paul's Cathedral;
it is significant.
Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims were fighting;
Al-Qaeda in Iraq was a vicious insurgent group.
The situation was utter failure.
And the U.S. Army simply did not have a strategy to deal with the situation.
Without excusing it,
that was why those marines, perhaps, behaved in the way that they did.
They knew the strategy they'd been given was completely failing.
They were frightened. They had lost a comrade.
They had absolutely no effective response.
And yet, by the summer of 2008,
the situation in Iraq had completely turned around.
American deaths had fallen, Iraqi deaths had fallen.
There was a measure of political stability.
Almost everything that mattered had changed.
And I think the question is
for any of us who wants to understand
how any really big organization that is failing badly,
any of us who wants to understand how such organizations change,
you really couldn't ask for a more testing example
than the war in Iraq.
One thing we discovered is:
organizations in those situations often don't change from the top.
We just love to think about leaders,
we love to analyze everything through the lens of leaders.
And the narrative we tend to tell ourselves
about organizational failure is:
"Well, the leader was bad,
and then there was a place for the good leader."
And that was the end of the story.
Part of that story is true in the case of the war in Iraq:
the bit about the bad leader.
Who was in charge: Donald Rumsfeld.
And just an idea about how Rumsfeld operated
could be got from a press conference that was held in Washington D.C.
just a couple of weeks after the Haditha massacre.
The facts about those killings had really scarcely begun
to make their way up the chain of command,
so the subject of the press conference was the wider conduct of the war.
Rumsfeld was there, and so was general Peter Pace
who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
these are the two most senior figures in the American military.
And journalists who sat at this press conference
noticed something rather strange:
given that Iraq was facing a really vicious, dangerous insurgency,
arguably 3 separate insurgencies,
it was pretty odd that Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't use the word "insurgent."
It was so odd that a journalist actually challenged him on this.
And Rumsfeld said:
"Well, I had an epiphany over Thanksgiving weekend,
and I realized that these people, they do not deserve the term 'insurgent'."
We just had this bizarre "Orwellian dance"
around the word that needed to be used to describe
the situation the U.S. Army was in,
to describe the enemy they were facing.
And it wasn't just Rumsfeld engaging in spin-doctory.
This had profound ramifications
for the whole way the U.S. Army conducted itself
and discussed its problems.
So, generals would visit their troops on the ground and say,
"This is not an insurgency."
And the troops on the ground are thinking:
"Well, if you would tell us what it is, that'd be awesome."
They just weren't able to discuss the problems they were facing.
The interesting thing about that is that there was really a strong precedent
for Rumsfeld's absolute refusal to accept dissent in Vietnam.
Vietnam-Iraq parallels are pretty dangerous,
but here is what I think works quite well:
if you read a history written by the historian, H.R. McMaster,
it's called "Dereliction of Duty,"
and it describes the way that Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara
failed and dragged America into the war in Vietnam.
If you want to summarize the failure one way,
it was the fact that they suppressed dissent.
They refused to hear alternative views.
They insisted on absolute unanimity.
And we know from psychological research, this is a terrible idea.
The very famous piece of psychology and research
conducted by the psychologist Solomon Asch,
I'm sure many of you have heard of it.
Solomon Asch got a bunch of young men around a table
and showed them a piece of card with three lines,
different lengths,
and another reference card with one line on.
He says, "OK, here is the reference card;
here are the three lines: A, B, C.
Which of these three lines is the same length as the reference line?"
And these young men would go around the table.
The answer is obviously B;
it's not complicated, it's not difficult.
And the first guy would say "A,"
the second guy would say "A,"
the third guy would say "A,"
and the fourth guy would say "A,"
and the eighth guy is starting to sweat,
because he is looking at it and it's clearly B.
He doesn't understand what's going on.
He starts to crack jokes, he starts talking about
how his eyes must be deceiving him,
and when it finally gets around to him he also gives the wrong answer;
he falls in with everybody else.
Of course, Solomon Asch had set up the experiment.
All these other people are stooges;
it's only the last guy who is actually being experimented on.
The funny thing is Asch repeated these experiments
with somebody else dissenting.
One of these other stooges also dissented.
And even when the stooge got the answer wrong, that was fine.
Everybody says it's A, this guy says it's C,
this person here finally feels able to tell the truth: it's B.
So dissent is very important.
Even if the dissenter is wrong,
the mere expression of dissent helps make better decisions.
And H.R. McMaster described this process of total failure going into Vietnam.
And exactly the same thing was happening at the top in Iraq.
Rumsfeld's completely refusing to accept
any alternative expression of the situation the U.S. Army was facing.
So, what changed?
How do you change in a situation
where you have got this total suppression of dissent?
Well, the answer is you need somebody very smart and very brave.
That person, in this case, is somebody, let's call him Colonel H.
Colonel H began the process of turnaround in Iraq
months before the massacre in Haditha.
Donald Rumsfeld didn't even know it was happening.
It was happening in a town called Tal Afar.
Colonel H had taken his men to Tal Afar and diagnosed the situation.
He said, "Look, here is the basic problem.
We are camped in a big concrete base outside the town.
We drive into the town, day-tripping like tourists in hell.
We ask people to tell us where the terrorists are.
They don't tell us.
The reason they don't tell us is because they are afraid.
They know they will get killed if they are seen talking to us.
We drive away again, we learn nothing."
And Colonel H said, "We are going to change this.
We are going to try something different.
Despite the fact that there is no insurgency,
despite the fact that this is contrary to U.S. Army policy,
I'm going to move my men into Tal Afar.
I'm going to set up small bases and we are not going to move."
Now this is a strategy of tremendous personal risk.
A lot of Colonel H's men got killed.
Colonel H himself, when I spoke to him,
had just had a hip replacement because of a roadside bomb.
But it was also a career risk,
because the generals above him are saying:
"Don't do this. This is not the strategy.
This is not the way forward."
Colonel H just said, "I'll just keep on going."
The pressure those men were under was incredible.
But it actually didn't take very long for the strategy to pay off
and for the locals to start saying:
"Well, actually that guy strapped a bomb to a mentally disabled teenager,
and gave her a 2 year old toddler's hand to hold
and told her to walk into the line of policemen,
and killed all the policemen.
And to be honest, we are not that fond of the Americans,
but there is no way we are harboring those people.
Now that we know that we are safe.
Now that we know you are not going anywhere.
We will cooperate."
So immediately, almost immediately,
Colonel H won the cooperation of the local people.
The amazing thing is this quickly started to spread.
So other colonels saw what Colonel H was doing
and they copied him and passed around advice and emails.
"Don't tell Donald Rumsfeld, just kind of.. this is working."
And so Colonel H's tactic started to spread,
despite the fact that he was repeatedly passed over for promotion to general,
because he was regarded as a troublemaker,
someone who wouldn't take orders.
What kind of guy does this?
What kind of person takes such risks with his career?
Well, the answer is pretty simple.
Colonel H was H.R. McMaster.
H.R. McMaster was the historian
who literally wrote the book on the failure
of top-down leadership in Vietnam.
He could see it happening all over again in Iraq
and he wasn't going to let the U.S. Army
do this to itself the second time, no matter what the risk to him.
There are some amazing communications
that were passed around the soldiers at the time.
There is a great PowerPoint presentation called,
"How to Win the War in Al Anbar" by Captain Trav.
It's matchstick figures wandering around:
"There's Joe, he is a soldier.
There is Mohammed, he is in the police.
These are the bad guys.
Oh no, they look like the good guys!
Joe and Mohammed don't know who is who, what to do?"
Just explaining in simple language.
He describes what actually happened
in Al Anbar province and how that war was won,
how the local sheiks were won over by the U.S. Army.
Captain Trav explains you need to wear a mustache,
because Iraqis have a really hard time
trusting people without mustaches, so grow one.
(Laughter)
Something is so simple.
Captain Trav was Captain Travis Patriquin,
and he wore his own mustache.
He explains this wonderful happy ending
was the sheiks come along, and they defeat the insurgents.
Unfortunately there is no happy ending
for Captain Travis Patriquin himself.
Just before Christmas 2006, he was killed by a roadside bomb.
He left behind three children and his wife at home,
and at his funeral the local sheiks turned out in force.
These are the risks these man were taking,
and they were also taking amazing risks with their careers.
Now, the narrative we have of the war in Iraq was, of course,
David Petraeus, General Petraeus came in and changed the strategy.
That's not really what happened.
Petraeus is an amazing soldier, an extremely smart guy,
but he did not change the strategy from the top down.
What he did, and this is something I think
is much harder, and arguably more admirable,
is to realise what his own colonels were doing on the front line.
In fact, Petraeus sort of helped organize his own little insurgency
inside the U.S. Army to change its behaviour.
He wrote a counter-insurgency manual
and he invited in all sorts of people, all sorts of different perspectives:
human rights experts, people from the State Department,
British officers who had been incredibly critical of the U.S. Army,
he invited all these people in,
and produced this counter-insurgency manual,
which was then reviewed in the New York Times
and downloaded half a million times in the first month.
Petraeus got his face on the cover of Newsweek:
"Is this the man who can save Iraq?"
long before he was ever promoted
to be in charge of such things in Iraq.
There is a story, by the way:
Donald Rumsfeld was walking through Dublin Airport
and one of his aid was running in front of him,
rearranging the magazines,
so that Rumsfeld wouldn't have to see Petraeus' face
on the cover of Newsweek, because he was so angry
that Petraeus was kind of stealing his thunder.
It was an internal insurgency.
Of course, you could say, "Well, if only they had appointed Petraeus
who is a smart guy right at the start,
it would've been fine, he could've run it from the top down.
He could've been like Rumsfeld
only he would've been right instead of wrong."
I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding.
Good leaders are important,
but the local experimentation of figuring out
what is actually working is equally important.
It's been this fantasy, in the Army and in business
and in some parts of politics as well;
you can call it "Bond villain fantasy,"
I'll give you the idea that you sit in front of this huge screen,
maybe a huge wall full of screens,
and you stroke a white cat,
and everything plays out in front of you,
and you see all the strategic threats you face,
and you make these decisions and you get them all right.
And that is a fantasy that corporate executives sometimes have,
"if we have enough slide decks, we can control what's going on.
If we have enough data, we can control what is going on on the shop floor."
It's the fantasy that Rumsfeld had,
the idea that we are going to pinpoint every tank,
every plane, every enemy position,
and we are going to run this war from the center."
But in a complex environment you cannot do that.
It has to be experimentation on the ground.
You ought to be able to look the guy in the eye and figure out:
"Is this someone who is going
to cooperate with me or is this a terrorist?"
All the smart bombs, and the drones, and the helicopters,
and the satellite imaging in the world will not help you with that.
That's a lesson the U.S. Army has begun to learn.
It's a lesson that businesses has learned
because now businesses are finding these amazing new technologies we have,
they are not centralizing businesses,
they are actually decentralizing.
There is evidence that businesses are decentralizing
as they acquire better and better technology.
I don't want to involve Hayek in a discussion of military strategy,
but actually Hayek said something quite smart about this.
He said, "There is no substitute for the particular knowledge
of time and place."
He was talking about economic decisions,
but it's equally true of political decisions,
it's equally true of military decisions:
you have got to be there on the ground.
It's a lesson the U.S. Army should've learned in the First Gulf War.
We have this vision of the First Gulf War.
If you look it up or you remember it:
amazing satellite technology, and smart bombs,
and the generals who were fighting that war
knew where everything was.
If you are actually on the front line you saw it slightly differently.
There is a very famous tank battle,
Tom Clancy wrote about it and the U.S. Army writes about it
in their official account of the first Gulf War,
when a troop called Eagle Troop,
a troop of nine U.S. tanks in a sand storm,
went over a huge sand dune
and suddenly realized that they were outnumbered 10 to 1
by Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard,
almost 100 Iraqi tanks and personnel carriers.
They were in a sand storm,
they had no air cover, no warning;
nothing about that situation was working the way it was supposed to.
Eagle Troop's captain instantly decided:
"There is no way we can go back,
we have to go forward, we have to attack."
He made that decision like that, straight away,
ordered his men to fire and those nine U.S. tanks,
very well trained, gunners, brilliant tanks,
managed to destroy all 90 Iraqi vehicles without taking any casualties.
The whole thing took just a couple of minutes.
That is celebrated as a victory for the U.S. Army,
but actually it shows
there is absolutely no substitute, that generals cannot help you:
you on the ground have to make decisions.
And the man who made those decisions
was H.R. McMaster, captain H.R. McMaster,
and those are the management lessons of the war in Iraq.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)