Stanley A. McChrystal

We've gone from one...

I don't want to use the word extreme, but one approach to another where you had the Courageous Restraint era with General McChrystal, which was deeply unpopular with soldiers on the ground, but conceptually... conceptually was sound, and it had a caveat for counter-terrorist operations anyway, and that's often overlooked.

But nothing had stemmed the blood loss of British soldiers.

And Cameron had already switched from what I call a conditions-based to a times-based exit strategy.

There's no second place.

But to Scott's point, and I think I told this story on this show, when I was a captain, company commander, General McChrystal was a one-star at Fort Bragg, and we had this tasking my company did, at the army science board right like these brilliant mit like super smart dudes and and dudettes were gonna come visit and general mccrystal was their kind of hosting officer um and he's a one star at the time so we're on this range And listen, he was as much of a soldier's soldier as anybody.

And so he's out there, and he grabs one of my young paratroopers, and he starts having this discussion with this kid about his weapon system and what it can do and what it's capable of.

And he's a one-star talking to an E3, but they're engaged as two infantrymen talking about killing people.

But then...

The Army Science Board, the bus pulls up, and all these scientists get off.

And I watched General McChrystal flip the switch, turned around, and he was talking to MIT graduates.

And it literally was like a shift.

Like that's our main deal and how we get the organization to work together for that.

And there's a longer story around Navy SEALs that brought me to that and some learnings I had reading a book called Team of Teams by a four-star Admiral Stanley McChrystal.

And that really was about empowering your teams, empowering your individuals, give them guardrails to operate within, But however they achieve their goals within those frameworks, allow them to do that because that's what they do best.

And that's what we're trying to achieve at Lazard.

And for that first month, we would have been the only palmlet team in the whole area of operation.

So we were being used by the whole battle group to do this kind of stuff because that's when I think general McChrystal came out and said we had to win the hearts and the minds and it had to be about the Afghan phase.

So that's the police were always being used.

So they were soft pedaling everything.

And I and I'll tell you, Tom, I had a lot of good examples.

set for me, you know, Stan McChrystal, Bill McRaven, a whole variety of people that I had, I was, who's in circle and I was in that were setting really good examples for me on how to do this.

But when, you know, what I found was that as I became a senior leader, it was that, you know, just setting up some forums, we used to have, I used to have a battle rhythm of activity as a as a SOCOM and CENTCOM commander, we would invite analysts down from the CIA or from other intelligence agencies just to come down to Tampa and have a discussion about a particular topic.

We'd take a couple hours to do it.

I mean, you know, he's gone mentally.

Yeah, well, you know, as General Stanley McChrystal said, right, there goes a potential war criminal.

And my favorite line by General McChrystal's public comments on him about six months ago was, you're just a reserve, not even a reserve, it's a National Guard major.

That's right.