My Share of the Task(57)
Like almost all my meetings with John, this one was friendly, informal, and often irreverently funny. We would laugh at the absurdities of military life, and his trademark relentless, dry sarcasm moved like an undertow through the conversation. After our years together in the 82nd and on the Joint Staff, we had formed a bond. As we got to serious business, he expressed his concern with the situation in eastern Afghanistan, where some of Al Qaeda’s senior leadership had recently been reported. I agreed to conduct a major operation in the area. Significantly, he agreed to change the way he viewed my role. As my boss in the 82nd ten years earlier, John had liked to communicate with me personally, not through our staffs. So my proposal for direct interaction suited his style.
“Okay, Stan,” he said. “But if I call, I’ve gotta be able to reach you. If I call and can’t get you, the deal’s off.”
It was vintage Abizaid: friendly and unwaveringly demanding. As I looked at him, now with four stars on the lapel of his sand and brown desert fatigues, I pictured the ragged, sun-bleached Oakland Athletics baseball hat he used to wear on the weekends at Fort Bragg a few years earlier. He had the demeanor and temper of an experienced, wry baseball manager. He was supportive but unsentimental and wouldn’t hesitate to go to the bullpen if I stopped throwing strikes.
While I had enjoyed other jobs, I loved command. I had been in a command position for ten of the previous twenty-six years. But each new position was initially daunting. As I suspect many leaders feel, I was never sure if I could command at that next level until I actually assumed the job. I remembered how Douglas Southall Freeman, in Lee’s Lieutenants, had described Lee’s challenges in determining which brigade commanders could actually handle the wider responsibilities of a division or corps. The most aggressive brigade commanders often lacked the intangible qualities required for more senior leadership. Of course I wondered about myself.
As the demands of the positions differed, and as I grew in age and experience, I found that I had changed as a leader. I learned to ask myself two questions: First, what must the organization I command do and be? And second, how can I best command to achieve that? Experience taught me that many factors would shape my “command style,” and it would be some time before I settled into it.
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During the first weeks of command, I visited Green. Like our headquarters, Green’s compound was based at Fort Bragg, in a separate corner of the base. And yet the true distance between TF 714 and this subordinate unit was much greater than the ten-minute drive. At that time, someone on the TF 714 staff would not feel welcome just dropping by the Green compound, or that of the SEALs or those of other units, if he wasn’t himself a member. Many within these organizations viewed any higher headquarters as an unnecessary appendage.
The same qualities that made the units I now commanded so valuable also made them aloof. Although envisioned as a “team of teams,” in many ways TF 714 was more a “tribe of tribes.” The volunteerism at the heart of each unit, the unwavering standards, the rigorous selection processes, all gave them unmatched competence and cohesion. But in many instances that same tribalism made them insular.
Early on I saw each of TF 714’s subordinate units pushing their capabilities with competitive energy that needed only periodic direction from me. But I would need a much more nuanced understanding of these idiosyncratic bands to be an effective commander. While I had grown up in the Rangers and worked with the other units off and on in the 1990s, I knew they had changed in subtle ways. In time, I came to know more intimately each unit’s amazing talents, internal politics, and weaknesses.
Green was the most influential of the units. Created from the vision of General Edward “Shy” Meyer, then the Army chief of staff, in the late 1970s, it was an unprecedented organization, one modeled on the British Special Air Service. The force was a collection of experienced commissioned and noncommissioned officers forged into teams that specialized in surgical, direct-action missions, like hostage rescue and pinpoint assaults.