Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Army (Retired), with Tatum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell. Penguin Publishing Group, 2015. 290 pp. Illus. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Paul Becker, U.S. Navy
Team of Teams offers innovative ideas on leadership, management, and organizational design for both military and civilian sectors in this complex time period—with proof that they work. This high-impact and readable book is not a military history follow-on to General Stanley McChrystal’s autobiography, My Share of the Task (reviewed in Proceedings in June 2013). Rather, its focus is on the advantages of an adaptive, resilient organizational design model used by the Joint Special Operations Command to achieve tremendous effects in peace, crisis, and combat. The process that led to the development of this model and its effective implementation no doubt will appeal to the civilian sector as well, but the use of many military and civilian case studies should be examined also by Department of Defense leaders as joint and service headquarters consider optimized command-and-control structures for the future.
I served in Southwest Asia while three of the authors (General McChrystal and former Navy SEALs Dave Silverman and Chris Fussell) were with the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. I experienced the same challenges they encountered as well as the organizational solutions they implemented, which helped to achieve national-security objectives while forging high-performing “teams of teams” in the process. From the foreword by esteemed thinker and author Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of The Innovators, I knew this would be much more than a military book.
Drawing on their expertise as former special-forces officers, the authors apply the best practices for making small and large teams successful through integration: scaling the agility of small teams to the organizational level, taking actions that inspire trust, building common purpose, creating shared awareness, empowering individuals to act, and physically changing traditional work spaces and communication practices. The text is rich with allusions to classic business-management theorists and practices, historic military references (particular attention paid to British Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson and his fleet of captains), and current military and business case studies that highlight the imperative to adapt to succeed in today’s dynamic world.
In chapters full of memorable lessons, four statements merit particular attention:
“The [Special Operations] Task Force’s [organizational] shift was akin to that team moving from playing football to basketball.” This excellent analogy can be applied to active-duty operational forces. As a fan of both sports, I quickly envisioned basketball players instantaneously switching from offense to defense (or vice versa); a team must be trained to shift between the two postures. Contrast this with football teams, which have larger units, greater specialization, and a deliberate pace of play. The authors’ larger question is if the military (or business) organizational model can be compared to a football team playing in a basketball game.
“The common denominator of the professionals with whom I served was an almost mythical devotion to mission accomplishment.” I couldn’t agree more, and the authors subsequently emphasize that no matter the organizational principles discussed in any setting, the organization is not the end state; the “mission” is the end state. This forces the reader to reflect on if his or her military (or business) organization is optimized for process or mission.
“Big data will offer no respite from the unrelenting demand for continual adaptability.” An organization’s future success depends on its ability to make sense of data, turn it into useable information, and apply it in ways to improve performance or profit. If excessive data is not used well, it can result in an information and knowledge deficit.
“We did not want all the teams to become generalists. . . . We wanted to fuse generalized awareness with specialized expertise . . . emergent, adaptive organizational intelligence-shared consciousness.” As a naval intelligence officer, I regularly consider the “generalist vs. specialist” issue within the intelligence community and the Information Dominance Corps. This quote complements comments made by retired Navy Vice Admiral Jack Dorsett, the former Director of Naval Intelligence after the formation of the Information Dominance Corps: “The future of the intelligence profession . . . depends on our professionals becoming ever more specialized . . . with opportunities to sub-specialize in a wide variety of areas.”
Team of Teams effectively uses diagrams to emphasize key learning points and includes “recap” boxes at the end of every chapter to underscore strategic concepts. This book proves that you can’t just take a good leader and throw him or her into a dysfunctional organization and expect success. Declining to adapt an organization to a complex environment is a recipe for failure. Team of Teams offers an organizational template proven to work in the most dynamic arena imaginable that can also be adapted for the complex 21st-century environment. I recommend this book’s inclusion in the Navy’s professional reading list and hope that future commanding officers and senior staff officers will consider how its proven organizational concepts, from scaling the magic of small teams to an expanded focus on collaborative information sharing, can improve their team’s performance and results.
Rear Admiral Becker recently completed a two-year assignment as the 20th Director of Intelligence (J2) on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He previously served as the J2 with the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, J2 with ISAF Joint Command in Afghanistan, N2 with U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain, and commanding officer of the Joint Intelligence Center, Central Command, in Tampa, Florida.
American Arsenal: A Century of Waging War
Patrick Coffey. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. 328 pp. Notes. Illus. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel William J. Astore, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
Technology has been an essential part of military action since ancient days. What would the gladiator be without his short sword, the Viking without his ship, the aviator without his F4U Corsair? In the U.S. military today, warriors are terminators of a sort, human/machine hybrids, exercising lethal force using high technology in a programmatic way.
How did the United Sates, a country with a small military (if powerful Navy) in 1914, come to embrace military technology with such enthusiasm? Patrick Coffey, a historian of science and technology, tackles this question by focusing on chemical- and airpower-related topics. These include Billy Mitchell’s rise and fall; the U.S. doctrine of precision bombing, the development of the Norden bombsight, and the doctrine’s failure in the European theater during World War II; the fielding of napalm and the switch to area and incendiary bombing by Curtis LeMay against Japan in 1944–45; and the logical terminus of area bombing, the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs.
Further topics addressed include chemical weapons in both world wars such as nerve gas in World War II; nuclear-tipped missiles; lessons from the Vietnam War that advanced technology often backfires when maladapted, as with early versions of the M-16 rifle and dioxin-laden Agent Orange; Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars,” a political football tossed about by all subsequent administrations; and a cursory examination of recent developments in smart (precision-guided) munitions and aerial drones.
Coffey’s approach is episodic and lacking in overarching themes. He opens with his freshest case study, recounting Thomas Edison’s involvement in developing batteries for Navy submarines during World War I. Edison chafed against Navy interference as he saw it, working to develop batteries that would pose less of a hazard to submariners. Here Coffey shows that civil-military divides and antagonisms were as active a century ago as they are today.
Mentioned in passing are the moral dilemmas of working on weapons of mass destruction. After World War I, James Conant defended his work on chemical weapons as being no more immoral than working on conventional ones. (He wrote that he could not comprehend “why tearing a man’s guts out by a high-explosive shell” is acceptable but “maiming him by attacking his lungs or skin” via chemicals is not.) Louis Fieser, the inventor of napalm, similarly saw his work as helping the United States to win World War II, even as he later came to deflect credit as napalm became associated with burning children during the Vietnam War. Others such as Edward Teller (the father of the hydrogen bomb) were consumed by the technical challenges and expressed no moral qualms about the weapons they created.
In regard to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Coffey argues that President Harry Truman put it best when he said, “Having found the [atomic] bomb, we have used it,” simple as that, with the goal of ending the war as quickly as possible. Coffey himself is agnostic on whether the bomb really did shorten the war.
Coffey’s case studies are always readable and often entertaining, but altogether less than the sum of their parts. He has an eye for telling anecdotes, recounting how American chemical casualties in World War II came from their own mustard gas stored on board the Liberty ship John Harvey and released when the Germans bombed her in an Italian port in 1943, a fact suppressed by the U.S. government until 1959. And he shows how the unimaginable, such as the deliberate targeting and mass murder of civilians, can quickly become desirable under wartime pressure. The Chemical Warfare Service, he writes, together with the Army Air Forces during World War II, worked to develop napalm to do precisely what AAF doctrine had precluded: “to burn civilians [indiscriminately] in their homes.” Weapons technology, rather than serving military doctrine, often subverts or even supplants it.
Coffey’s broad survey of the technology/warfare dynamic should be supplemented by Martin Van Creveld’s Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (Free Press, 1989), Robert L. O’Connell’s Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (Oxford University Press, 1989), William H. McNeill’s The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Max Boot’s War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History (Gotham, 2006), books that are not cited in his brief bibliography.
Lieutenant Colonel Astore is the author of “Science and Technology in War,” Oxford Bibliographies Online: Military History (2012). He taught the history of technology and warfare at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
The Global Village Myth: Distance, War, and the Limits of Power
Patrick Porter. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015. 243 pp. Notes. Index. $49.99, hardcover; $29.99, paperback.
Reviewed by Commander Benjamin Armstrong, U.S. Navy
Sailors and Marines cannot go much more than a few days before reading or hearing the truism that we live in the most complex and dangerous times ever. Usually the reason for this is explained as the results of globalization and the introduction of new and “game-changing” technologies. From the senior ranks of our military to political leaders in the United States and abroad, this conventional wisdom has become ingrained in how we discuss military operations, strategy, and international affairs. Patrick Porter’s new book offers a cogently argued, smoothly written, exhaustively sourced, and desperately needed counter to this normally unquestioned narrative.
As an Australian and the chair of Strategic Studies at the University of Exeter in the U.K., Porter brings not only an academic pedigree but also a refreshingly detached eye to his study of American strategy and foreign policy. He explicitly states his intent to dispute “both the [globalism] myth’s empirical claims and policy agenda.” In doing so, he takes his reader on a tour de force across elements of U.S. and world history, through the strategic thinkers and writers of the past, and into modern debates in the fields of political science and international relations.
The book has a simple structure. First, Porter lays out the theory and history of the ideas behind globalism, as well as the thinkers and practitioners who have countered it in the past. From Immanuel Kant and George Kennan to Anne-Marie Slaughter and Robert Kaplan, his discussion illuminates the philosophical, academic, and practical arguments about globalism’s role in the world. Then he selects three case studies that he claims should be “easy wins” for those who purport the dangers of the globalized world: Al Qaeda and the perils of networked non-state actors, the threat to Taiwan from the People’s Republic of China, and the alleged dangers of drones and cyber conflict. Through his well written and sharp deconstruction, he effectively questions the conventional wisdom on these challenges. He demonstrates how distance and geography still introduce strategic maneuver space for today’s nation states. The modern world is not quite as dangerous as we are led to believe, because there are positives as well as negatives. He concludes the book with a very brief examination of the policy implications of his studies, and some direction for future thinking by American strategists and policymakers. This final conclusion, however, does leave the reader wanting a bit more definition from Porter’s suggestions.
Naval readers in particular will be drawn to the fourth chapter, which discusses the realities of geography and distance involved in a Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan. While we are all familiar with the cliché that “the enemy gets a vote,” Porter illuminates another adage perhaps best described as “the enemy has problems, too.” He points out that a good strategist is one who looks to take advantage of the enemy’s problems rather than simply planning toward one’s own strengths. There are parts of his analysis of the cross-strait amphibious assault that well-studied navalists might quibble with, but the larger questions he asks in the chapter are enormously relevant. This isn’t only true to the specific Chinese operation he discusses, but also to the modern vision of amphibious operations more broadly.
That is where this book has its greatest strength: the questions it poses and by extension the ones it forces its readers to ask. There are moments that a reader may say “yeah, but . . .” in response to some of Porter’s analysis, but it is very hard to challenge his fundamental conclusions. Some national-security watchers have recently suggested that we lack the ability to think critically and develop strategy in Washington, D.C., and the Pentagon. At times it seems that our definition of “critical thinking” is to think about important (or “critical”) things. But that isn’t the point. Rather, the point of critical thinking—and by extension strategy—is to ask hard questions, be critical of the claims made by others, and challenge the assumptions that underlie our reasoning. Porter’s book does this at a fundamental level and with such skill and deep research that it is impossible to ignore. This book should find itself on the bedside table of many readers: the political campaigns ramping up for the presidential-election season, our flag and general officers, and the men and women in the fleet. The Global Village Myth is an important contribution to our strategic discussion.
Commander Armstrong is a naval strategist, member of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Editorial Board, and PhD Candidate with King’s College, London. He is the editor of 21st Century Sims: Innovation, Education, and Leadership for the Modern Era (2015, Naval Institute Press).