As the core heartbeat of our battle rhythm and the nucleus of each day, the O&I ran six days a week and was never canceled. Our force, spread across time zones, operated uniformly on Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time), so the O&I began at noon Zulu time (4:00 P.M. inside our Balad hanger, 9:00 A.M. on the East Coast of the United States—by design at the start of the workday for the agencies in D.C. that we wanted to participate.
The O&I audience began relatively small that winter of 2004, when we could connect a constellation of D.C. conference rooms, our bigger bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and teams in embassies across the region. But by the following summer, the video link was seamless and reached all the way to our austere forward operating bases in the Iraqi desert or Afghan hills. We developed prepackaged communications bundles that could connect from anywhere in the world. We installed secure communications in embassies to entice our partners to participate. Eventually, every member of TF 714 and partners in D.C. could view the meetings on their personal computers, listening through their headphones. Especially as TF 714’s battlefield success gained notice, by 2007 the O&I was a worldwide forum of thousands of people associated with our mission.
The size of the forum invited an array of perspectives that built a collectively richer understanding of the topic at hand. So too did the depth of information we discussed and the regularity of our conversations. Few topics were off limits: Granular tactics were discussed alongside strategy, intelligence alongside operations, resourcing alongside values. The best moments came when a briefing sparked a conversation among multiple people at different agencies that disclosed information that was known but had not been shared across the community.
I quickly saw, however, that beyond its value for the information shared, the O&I was the single most powerful tool I had at my disposal in leading a dispersed force. A video teleconference couldn’t replace a hand on a shoulder. But the O&I provided me nine hours a week during which I could seek to influence, inspire, and learn from those I led. I asked probing questions, but also ones I knew the answers to, in order to give them a moment to demonstrate their mastery in front of an audience of thousands of their peers. I would restate something I feared was unclear or provide my personal assessment of something I wanted to ensure was accurate, only to have the experts correct me. These exchanges were helpful in calibrating my thinking, but they also hopefully demonstrated to everyone that we were less a team led by me than we were a team leading one another. The regular briefings also reinforced the briefers: As Admiral Nelson knew, decentralizing did not mean disengaging, and those farthest out could not have any doubt that their work fit into a wider mission.
Unless someone in my room was talking, one camera was on me the whole time. By nature an introvert, I found the requirement to be on camera for so long exhausting, but it forced me to be a better leader. My interactions with one person were amplified to the thousands—subordinates, peers, superiors—who were watching. If I probed until people were uncomfortable, I tried to resist chastising them in the open forum. I tried hard to address all the briefers by their first names, something that got easier the longer I was in command. I was glad one day to get a cheeky but well-meaning e-mail from a subordinate who had tried to calculate the number of times I said “thank you,” or some form of it, in the morning stand-up. He had lost count before it was over.
Critically, the O&I fostered decentralized initiative and free thinking while maintaining control of the organization and keeping the energy at the lowest levels directed toward a common strategy. This was meant to liberate subordinates and remove unnecessary hesitation. When I told a major, for example, that he did not have to ask permission to do something, I simultaneously broadcast that directive to all of the other majors. They now didn’t have to waste time dialing up headquarters. Everyone left the O&I confident they knew the latest update of our organization’s intent, strategy, rules, and approvals. Our discipline of schedules, processes, and standards did not reduce adaptability or creativity. It was the foundation that allowed for it.
In subtle and overt ways, the O&I helped us to animate Beltway conference rooms and cubicles with the “This is a war” ethos that filled our austere, dusty outstations downrange. By spanning time zones, we were gluing together groups of people with different levels of devotion. We relied on people in the States for whom this was a nine-to-five job, who picked up their kids from soccer practice after work. Even when their commitment was outsize for D.C., it often didn’t match the grueling pace maintained in three- and four-month spurts by people downrange. The O&I helped stoke further commitment. In most stateside locations, the military wore the dark green uniform or the blue blouse to the office. So after months and eventually years of appearing in the tan uniforms worn by those deployed, we built up moral suasion. The impact was more immediate when people outside the war zone watched the operators brief. They saw their days-old beards and the guns, helmets, and body armor hanging on the wall. They knew those men would in a few hours be out in dark, tight spaces. The stand-up reminded analysts that their work was not just paper traffic; it affected lives. Those who were frustrated by sending intelligence reports into the ether had the simultaneously sobering and exciting experience of hearing that their work did, or could, lead to a senior leader being captured or to a car-bomb factory being shut down.