In this episode of Veteran Led, we sit down with General David Petraeus, one of America’s most renowned military leaders and strategic thinkers. General Petraeus shares invaluable insights on leadership, education, and the importance and impact of hiring our Veterans.
General Petraeus, who served as commander of Multinational Forces in Iraq, CENTCOM commander, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, and director of the CIA, discusses the importance of fostering a culture of learning in leadership, strategies for building high-performing teams, his approach to identifying and recruiting top talent, and the significance of supporting veterans and ensuring they receive earned benefits. Currently a partner and chairman of KKR Global Institute, a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale, General Petraeus brings a wealth of experience from both military and civilian sectors.
General Petraeus: You want a culture that fosters learning. To foster learning, you have to be willing to hear–again–principled, reasoned, respectful dissent.
John Berry: Welcome to Veteran Led. Today’s guest is General David Petraeus, one of our best-known leaders from OIF and OEF. General Petraeus served as Commander of Multinational Forces Iraq, Centcom Commander, Commander of Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, and Director of the CIA. He’s currently a partner and chairman of KKR Global Institute, a senior fellow and a lecturer at Yale, and he has a PhD from Princeton and completed a National Security Fellowship at Georgetown. On top of all of this, he is the only service member ever to throw out the first pitch in the World Series and flip the coin at the Super Bowl. Welcome to Veteran Led, General Petraeus.
General Petraeus: First, actually, let me say again, what a pleasure it is to be with you. And thanks to what Berry Law has done for our Veterans over many years to ensure that they get what it is that they have earned from the Veterans Administration and from other groups. My understanding is that you’ve gotten over $300 million in payments and so forth that our Veterans earned but had not been provided to them. And I want to thank you on behalf of all of us who have served our country in uniform for what you have done for them.
John Berry: In your biography, a New York Times bestseller, you give a great statement about leadership, and that is that sometimes making progress is winning. And why that’s so important to me is that as leaders, we’re always taught that this is a go/no-go criteria. Here are the key metrics for success and sometimes as leaders, we don’t hit those. In Afghanistan, you have the presence of mind to say, well, wait a minute, sometimes progress is winning. So tell us how you came to that insight and when is progress winning? And when do we as leaders need to hold steadfast to our metrics, our KPI, and our standards?
General Petraeus: You’re either winning or losing in some of these and, obviously, what you want to be is winning. But the point here is really that in the wars that I was privileged to command–Iraq and Afghanistan–there wasn’t a knockout punch that we could…this wasn’t going to be the Gulf War Part Two, where we could outflank the enemy, pin them down, destroy them, what have you, and go home to a victory parade. Rather, these were extended campaigns, and they required extended commitment. What you’re trying to determine is how do you continue to make progress to achieve winning, but not overall success. Again, you’re not going to win them, you’re going to either make progress or not. We had a series of metrics that guided us, told us whether we were winning or losing. We adhered to them very strictly. We ratcheted them down. We ensured that they were absolutely honest and accurate. I laid them out for Congress at the six-month hearing with Ambassador Crocker into the surge in Iraq and did so every six months after that.
General Petraeus: I did the same during Afghanistan. And happily, in each of those cases, we achieved very substantial progress, particularly so in Iraq, whereby our metric of, again, security incidents and so forth, we drove violence down by nearly 90%. Dramatically reduced loss of innocent civilian life due to violence, dramatically reduced our casualties and those of our Iraqi coalition partners, and dramatically increased the areas over which we and then Iraqi security forces exercised control.
General Petraeus: Lots of other metrics in there as well, including a lot, perhaps surprisingly, when it came to the nation building endeavors, which were all part of a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign. We tracked, for example, megawatts of electricity that were produced, barrels of oil that were produced and that were refined and exported. Again, many, many different measures. The bridges that had all been blown up. How were we doing with that? The electrical towers, transmission lines–all of this we measured, and lots of other economic indicators as well because it wasn’t enough to just achieve security, although that was the foundation. Without security, you can do nothing. There’s a famous quote from a particularly notable individual during the Vietnam War who said security may be 10% or 90% of the problem. But whatever it is, it is the first 10% or the first 90%. So, we had to achieve security. That was necessary, but it was not sufficient. The way you solidify the gains in security were by what you did to improve the lives of the people in a way to earn their hearts and minds or at least earn their tacit support because they’re recognizing that life is much better with us having gotten Al Qaeda in Iraq or the Iranian-supported Shia militia out of their lives and keeping them out of their lives.
General Petraeus: Again, a whole host of different metrics that could show, indeed, whether we’re making progress or not. That’s really probably the better term because I pointed out from the very beginning, particularly when I went back for the surge, having already been there as a two-star and three-star commander, of course, from the very beginning, the invasion as a commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the first year, then back for the train and equip mission and so forth. I laid out to Congress that, number one, it was going to get worse before it got better because we were going to have to go back into areas that the extremists and militia members had taken control of and where the violence between Sunni and Shia was most extreme. They’re going to fight us over that. We’re going to have to create essentially gated communities. You then clear them painstakingly and you keep the bad guys out and you just keep expanding those areas. Over time, as you restore basic services, provide humanitarian assistance, revive local markets, rebuild bridges, damaged roads, get the schools and so forth going again, then all of a sudden the people recognize that life is better and they begin to support you actively, having at least not opposed you in the beginning.
General Petraeus: That’s what we were seeking to do. We were able to do that very dramatically in Iraq, again, driving violence down by nearly 90%, and every other possible metric very impressively improved, and most importantly, sustained over the subsequent three and a half years. In fact, violence continued to go gradually down during that time, even as we were reducing our forces, withdrawing them, and handing off to Iraqi security forces, until tragically, right after our final combat forces left, the Prime Minister pursued ruinously sectarian actions that diverted the attention of security forces to Sunni demonstrators, took their eye off the Islamic State, the forerunner of which was Al Qaeda in Iraq, which we destroyed. They were able to reconstitute, and then you had all the problems that followed. Afghanistan, as I told Congress, was going to be much tougher. I’d actually told Secretary Rumsfeld, after doing an assessment there as a three-star on the way home from my three-star tour in Iraq, that Afghanistan was going to be the longest of the long wars, even though at that time, the violence level was dramatically less in Afghanistan than it was the level in Iraq.
General Petraeus: But all the factors there were much more challenging.
General Petraeus: A country that had a neighbor to their east and south who allowed the enemy sanctuaries there, the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, as well as some other extremist groups, and wouldn’t allow us to go after them the way we wanted to. A country that had virtually no money–in contrast to Iraq that had potentially lots of money if you get all the oil pipelines patched up and exports going again and the electricity to support it–had serious physical terrain, the Hindu Kush Mountains, extreme weather in contrast to Iraq, which had some rivers and built-up areas, but not major mountain chains and so forth. A country that was largely illiterate in comparison to the literacy of Iraq, a country with virtually no physical infrastructure in contrast to that of Iraq, which had quite a bit, and on and on. We did, in fact, drive violence down year on year, which was the way to measure in Afghanistan. We sustained that for somewhere around a year or more, that my successor was able to keep that going as well until, unfortunately, the drawdown of the forces began at a pace that was probably not–in fact, I did not advise it.
General Petraeus: I argued against it. So, it was ill-advised. And it ended up being much more based on conditions in Washington than conditions on the ground in Afghanistan, as was the case in Iraq, where President Bush, and then supported by President Obama, allowed us to determine the rate at which those withdrawals could be sustained without seeing the security situation erode. Again, keep in mind that a strategic leader, which is what I was as the overall commander in Iraq at Central Command, Afghanistan and indeed CIA, and then some subsequent activities, has to perform four tasks very competently if that side is to prevail. You have to get the big ideas right. Craft the right strategy. You have to communicate them effectively through the breadth and depth of the organization and all who have a stake in the outcome of the conflict. You have to oversee their implementation; this includes the metrics that you are using to determine whether you’re winning or losing. It’s getting the best people. It’s the example, energy, and inspiration the leader provides.
General Petraeus: It’s the organizational architecture that you develop. It’s allowing those not measuring up to move on to something else. It’s how you spend your time, and so forth.
General Petraeus: Then the fourth task, which is to determine how you need to refine the big ideas as the situation evolves and the context changes. You do it again, again, and again. One element of that is those metrics. You really do have to pay attention to them. They have to be the right metrics. In Vietnam, for example, we had a metric which was enemy body count. That proved to be flawed. It also came to lack integrity over time. But the reason it was flawed was because the basic strategy was flawed. We were trying to win a war of attrition, search and destroy operations that had very ephemeral effects against the North Vietnamese, who could escalate just right along with us as we did. Instead of what we should have done, which took us 13 years to get to, which was a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign where security of the people is what you focus on, the metrics are keyed to that, and the enemy then has to come to you as opposed to you trying to go to them, thrashing around in the jungle.
General Petraeus: You’ve asked a really important question, but to get to that, you’ve got to keep in mind the tasks of a strategic leader, the first and foremost of which is to get the big ideas right–to craft the right strategy based on an understanding of enemy forces, your forces, the situation in the country, all the different elements that are present there, how it’s supposed to operate, how it really does, the neighborhood and on and on.
General Petraeus: When it came to the surge in Iraq, where the big ideas were literally 180 degrees different from what we’ve been doing before, you don’t get change management any larger than that. Then communicating them and overseeing imputation. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines on the ground, our civilian partners, all of them did such a magnificent job in pulling the country, the land of the two rivers, Iraq, out of a Sunni-Shia civil war of enormous intensity, and then driving violence down by nearly 90%, and giving Iraq a whole new lease on life, which they did well with for the three and a half years until, tragically, their Prime Minister made some really big mistakes.
John Berry: And so that is a great overview of the strategic view on the external KPI and building the outside. But I want to go back to when you were a Battalion Commander in the 101st, and you had a great insight that you were going to raise the standard, but you understood that by changing the culture, you may alienate some of the team members. And I found that fascinating because as a leader, a lot of times it’s like, well, we’re going to raise the standard. And yes, we’re going to alienate some people, but that’s okay. But you took a different tact. You said, I understand that there are going to be people in the team who are not going to fully embrace these higher standards. I’m just curious, how did that play out? How are you able to achieve that where you could raise the standards, understanding that not everybody in the team was going to fully embrace the new culture?
General Petraeus: Well, you’ve got to convince the vast majority of an organization that you really want to achieve excellence, and that excellence is defined by certain standards. We had five big ideas there. One of those was physical fitness, and it was really serious. We were not fooling around. We had a program that was incomparable in the organization, the overall division, which had probably 50 or more battalions at Fort Campbell. The metrics there, we won the cross country race. Both years, I was a Division Commander. We won football both years. We were in the finals in basketball. We won all these other activities and events and so forth and distinguished ourselves most significantly by having three times the enlisted graduates of Ranger School of any other battalion in the entire division. That means more than any brigade in aggregate, our one battalion. And that was transformative because as you add enlisted Rangers and non-commissioned Officer Rangers to your units, they start to run themselves. If you hit 20 enlisted Rangers, enlisted and non-commissioned Rangers in a single infantry company of about 140 or 50 people, it just transforms it.
General Petraeus: It runs itself. Then we had all these higher standards for various components of physical fitness.
General Petraeus: We had competitions internally for everything. There’s just no category in which we didn’t have a competition. In fact, to this day, I still rue the fact that we came in second in the chili cook-off. This was as a battalion at the Hopkinsville Hoptown Salutes Fort Campbell. I’d like to have that one back. We really had it. But you have to have that attitude, and we did. Now, basically, the vast majority of the unit embraced the fact that we were going to live a higher standard. Those that did not, we allowed them to move on over time. What was also interesting is there was enormous self-selection. People didn’t want to come to the battalion if they didn’t think that they could achieve those standards. I also went out and recruited very widely. I was the aide to the Chief of Staff of the Army and Assistant Executive Officer for two years prior to this. I had a beautiful view of the Army and the superstars at the military academy, the ROTC Marshall Award winners, and so forth.
General Petraeus: I recruited from them very heavily to get them to Fort Campbell, then to my brigade, and then down to my unit.
General Petraeus: I think we successfully got about 10 or 12 of these, plus a handful of captains–these were Lieutenants–and a handful of captains. Again, you add that to the mix. Then others that decide, I don’t want to be in that mix because I can’t measure up. All of a sudden, you have a unit that is really quite special. We used to term it a high-performing unit, an HPU. We established standards. I laid them out the first day to the entire battalion, everybody in the bleachers. Then I allowed the enlisted men to leave, just the non-commissioned and commissioned Officers, then allowed the non-commission Officers to leave, just the commission just kept working our way through this. I had it in considerable detail. But then what was different is we actually enforced it. We had, for example, standards for tying down all of your gear. How did you wear your gear? So, your load-bearing equipment, your rucksack. Where is everything? It all had a place.
General Petraeus: They had dummy cords on it so that if it dropped off in the middle of an air assault at night out of a helicopter, that you didn’t lose it. You could find where it was and all the rest of it.
General Petraeus: There were practical reasons for all of this stuff. Where your name tag was on the back of it, the Ranger eyes, these were reflective so you could follow somebody during the dark in the rucksack. Well, we laid out the first company. I had them stand out in the street, all their gear laid out. I look at the Company Commander’s gear. He wasn’t a standard. I said, fine. Okay, here’s the standard again, Company Commander. All these guys now are starting to get irritated because they’re all out in the street in the hot sun. I said, fix your gear and let me know when you’re ready for reinspection. Thirty minutes later, they got a call, and I went back down. Okay, he was right. Then I went spot-checked others. Then I had some senior non-commissioned Officers help me look at the rest. The word went out. He’s not fooling around. We had a variety of others of these like that, some of which we probably could not enforce today.
General Petraeus: There’s some changes to how things are. We had higher physical fitness standards and really enforced these, et cetera. Everybody shaved the side of their head. Some of this was slightly nonsensical, but it all made that unit feel more special.
General Petraeus: Even the fact that we would then be criticized or razzed over the fact that everybody was living this standard, it pulled people together. It didn’t matter what it was. I mean, if we were challenged to get Association of the U.S. Army members, we ended up with more members than we had members of the unit. Don’t ask me how. I think it was the Mayor Daily School of Membership. There are probably names on tombstones that were members of the 3rd Battalion 187th Infantry Regiment’s AUSA membership roles. But again, there was a fierce determination to be the best, and also, I should add, to be the best team players as well as the best individuals and collectively.
John Berry: Well, and you have a great reputation for building teams and praising those teams. We all know that we don’t do it alone. And you, in your book and throughout your career, praise those aide-de-camps who helped you become so successful. Why is the aide-de-camp so important to a commanding general?
General Petraeus: Well, the truth is, it’s more than aide-de-camp. That’s one individual. You typically have one aide at a time. You start out as a two-star. Even a one-star, you have a Lieutenant, then a two-star, you have a Captain, and three-star, you’re authorized a Major, four-star, you’re authorized a Lieutenant Colonel. I didn’t usually get that senior. But they’re your right-hand man in a lot of different ways. They were all men in those periods, infantry units generally were. But it’s really about team and then teams of teams. You have your inner team. When you’re a four-star in command of 250,000 troops or whatever, even your inner team is large. I mean, that’s just, again, your executive Officer, your full Colonel, your chef de cabinet, the executive assistant who’s doing the scheduling, the trip teams, the aide, the enlisted aides who are actually taking care of other stuff for you, drivers, very large security elements, pilots, helicopters, planes, all of this stuff, speechwriters.
General Petraeus: That guy would have four and five speechwriters at a time. We had designated thinkers that were doing nothing but, again, help with slides and big ideas and all the rest, helping me translate big ideas into actual means of communication and all the rest of this.
General Petraeus: You have your own lawyers, your legal counsel, you have your own public affairs people. It’s quite extensive. In fact, I was the executive Officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, and he had a couple of hundred people, I think, literally just in his own. That’s one team. Then you have the bigger team, the overall staff, and you want that to be as good as it possibly can be as well. Once again, you recruit folks. I knew where every bright person in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines was at any given time. When I was commanding the surge in Iraq, my view was this is the most important endeavor for the U.S. Military in the entire world. If there’s a Rhodes, Marshall scholar out there or PhD or something, that person is either working for me, has already worked for me, or will work for me. There is no other alternative. Now, you couldn’t pull them out of command to do that, but you have your eye on them.
General Petraeus: I had lists of these people that we’re constantly trying to bring to the headquarters and to the key positions in those big staffs.
General Petraeus: In some of those, of course, your direct subordinates. I mean, you’re recruiting them directly as it should be. It’s about building teams of teams, and then, of course, all the relationships there and so forth, and, of course, supporting, promoting, encouraging, hopefully inspiring, providing an example for all of them, really rewarding those that are performing well. Then in the case of those that are doing their best but just aren’t measuring up, you allow them to move on to something else. Sometimes you tell the head of their service that they shouldn’t command again or shouldn’t be promoted again or perhaps shouldn’t continue to serve, but generally didn’t do public executions as some were prone to do unless there was a real reason for that. But this is a huge component of leadership. Again, it’s about building that team. It’s about creating a culture. The culture that we always tried to establish was not just one of real excellence, although that was clearly one of those.
General Petraeus: As I said, at small unit level, you could get into great detail with standards. We did, as I said, physical fitness. Discipline was another one. We really had metrics for this stuff.
General Petraeus: Small unit live fires. Our live fires were so intense that I actually got shot in one of them right through the chest in a freak accident. Air assault tactics and techniques, and then rangering. We had metrics for every one of these at that small unit level. You try to do the same at the strategic level, needless to say, as well. But we’re also seeking to establish a culture that valued, constructive, principled, and reasoned dissent, if you will, or difference. I actually took people back with me for the surge in Iraq and brought some more men who I knew were contrarians. There was a full Colonel, for example, Military Intelligence Officer, who had early on in Iraq, very forthrightly observed that we were facing an insurgency. Frankly, the Pentagon and his leadership did not want to hear that. That wasn’t consistent with what they were putting out at that time in Washington, even though it was the reality on the ground. He was actually sent back to the United States at a certain point, and I said, he’s coming back with me.
General Petraeus: I want this guy inside the tent with me telling me if he disagrees on something, particularly on an important intelligence assessment.
General Petraeus: He helped build the intelligence analytical element that supported me during the surge. There was a PhD, a Lieutenant Colonel who had so irritated the senior leadership of the Army with this criticism of them publicly in articles that his whole battalion was deployed, Field Artillery Battalion, without him. I figured out how to get him over there. Then I put him in a position where he could still oversee his guys, but also had access to me. I knew him. Again, there weren’t that many PhDs as battalion commanders at that time. You want a culture that fosters learning. To foster learning, you have to be willing to hear–again–principled, reasoned, respectful dissent. You may or may not agree with it, but in most cases, you benefit enormously for it. I brought H.R. McMaster in. He was a Colonel. He had been so outspoken that after his very successful Colonel-level brigade command tour in Iraq, he was sent to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He was not an executive Officer to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or Chief of Staff or Central Command Commander.
General Petraeus: I brought him in, and he led assessments for me, several of them.
General Petraeus: These are multi-month assessments, usually partnered with an ambassador or two, that would look at various aspects of our overall strategy, different important programs within it and so forth. Every single time he came in, I thought, there’s nothing he’s going to tell me. I’ve already been here three years–three and a half years–whatever it was at the time. Every single time, I would actually have a forehead slapping moment, and it was very, very valuable. You want that kind of individual. You want to promote that kind of individual in the military services as well. In fact, it was not entirely coincidental that the only promotion board I ever sat on was the one-star board at which he was considered for a promotion after having been passed over twice and happened to make it that particular year. By the way, it’s the only time a four-star Combat Commander has come back to sit on a promotion board for a week, but it was a very, very worthwhile endeavor.
John Berry: Well, and you were an enormous advocate for education beyond the military schoolhouse. You were looking for those contrarian views. You were looking for that wider education. How did you foster? We hear all about how you really wanted…they told the Officers, go to school. You have to keep going to school. You have to keep learning. It seems like it paid a lot of dividends.
General Petraeus: I had the benefit of this. One of the best, the greatest mentors of my life, General Jack Galvin, for whom I served three times personally. I was his aide when he was a two-star. I was a special assistant when he was a four-star. This was a temporary period down when he was in Southern Command, all of Latin America. But it was a great insight into the counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador, Colombia, and elsewhere. Then when he was the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, he pulled me out of West Point, and I was his speechwriter over there as well. An extraordinary figure in my life. But when I was a young two-star, all I wanted to do was go to the Ranger Regiment, he said, have you ever considered raising your intellectual sights farther than the maximum effective range of an M60 machine gun? I said, I think I get the point. I went to graduate school, went to Princeton. I had two years there and decided, hey, I’m going to not just get the Master’s.
General Petraeus: I want to do all the coursework, general exams, other requirements, dissertation perspectives for the PhD, and then try to finish it up when teaching at West Point, thinking I’d have three years, but ended up only having two years.
General Petraeus: That was the most intellectually developing experience of my life. It took me out of my intellectual comfort zone big time, and nothing else would have done that in the same manner. I became a huge proponent of that experience for those who had proven themselves. First, you have to prove yourself in your basic branch. I had to show that I was a competent Infantry Officer, Company Commander, and so forth before you do that, because that’s the foundation. But if you’re able to do that and then can have this great opportunity, it is really transformative. I actually steered individuals to that. In fact, for years, I would tell Princeton who they should accept. And part of the agreement with that individual was that they weren’t just going to get a Master’s degree. They were going to go for a PhD in the two years that the Army provided them there. Now, the Army actually allows a period, an additional period to get a PhD, but a number of these individuals successfully did PhDs and then went on to contribute in ways that were really quite dramatic in our Army.
John Berry: And you mentored so many great leaders. I want to go away from the force multipliers and talk about some of those force detractors. I first heard this term from my father, a Vietnam Veteran. He called them the ticket punchers. My question to you is, as a senior leader, how do you know whether this leader that you’re getting ready to invest time and effort into is simply a ticket puncher who is looking to advance their career as opposed to one of those Officers who truly cares about the mission and the team?
General Petraeus: It becomes pretty evident. You can’t fake that. It’s a little bit like faking you love troops. You either do or you don’t. It actually is pretty apparent over time by the actions that you take, the willingness to use your own time and sometimes do something with the troops rather than doing perhaps what you might prefer to do in some cases. It’s really hard, I think, to hide whether somebody is truly sincere about what it is that he or she is doing. Again, what you’re trying to do is not just–you do have to ticket punch. Don’t get me wrong. You’ve got to, if you’re an infantry or armor, whatever it may be, you’ve got to lead a platoon, command a company, a battalion, a brigade, all the rest of this. You want to put yourself in position to be selected for those assignments, but you’re doing it for the right reason rather than just, again, punching that ticket and then moving on as quickly as you can.
General Petraeus: Again, I think that becomes very apparent. Sometimes it takes a while for it to emerge. Again, these are also individuals that take one for the team from time to time.
General Petraeus: Candidly, I took a lot for the team. I, on very short notice, went down to Haiti to be the Chief of Operations for the UN Forces. This is when I was doing a fellowship at Georgetown in lieu of the war college because I wanted another out-of-my-intellectual-comfort-zone experience. Packed up, went down there very quickly. Instead of enjoying the rest of that fellowship, spent it down in Haiti because he just fired his Chief of Operations and needed somebody desperately to come in and stand up the UN Force operation there. Bosnia was another year away, although that was at least I had noticed about it. Iraq, the first year, again, I was the commander. We see it coming and all that. But I got then called very quickly after getting home from a year in Iraq, and I never did a mid-tour leave or anything like that. The Sec Def called and said, you need to go do an assessment in Iraq of the Iraqi security forces, such as they were.
General Petraeus: They failed in many of the locations, except your former location. Tell us what happened. What do we need to do. I went over there with a team, came back, made recommendations to him.
General Petraeus: He said, great. Give up command of the 101st and get over there. We’ll promote you a three-star and establish what became known as the Multinational Security Transition Command, Iraq. This enormous train and equip effort to rebuild the entire Iraqi Ministries of Defense, Interior, with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of forces of different types, almost nearly a million, at the end of the day, with all the infrastructure, all the institutions, all weapons, logistics, et cetera. That was a pretty short notice thing. Then came back, was back, then got pulled out of that earlier than was expected to command the surge in Iraq, then was supposed to go be the Supreme Valley Commander of Europe, which my wife was really looking forward to. Again, I’ve been there before. She spoke the languages and everything. After all these years in the desert, four of them in Iraq alone, and then ended up being asked to go to Central Command. So, you’re staying in it, which again, is fine.
General Petraeus: And then the very short notice one to Afghanistan, where I’m announced on Thursday, I’m in Washington back on Monday, the hearing is on Tuesday, go home pack on Wednesday, and I think I deployed that night.
General Petraeus: So, the fastest confirmation in deployment in history in another year away. Again, I looked one time, I think I spent eight of my final eleven 4ths of July in some deployed area, Bosnia, Iraq, Greater Middle East, Afghanistan. And again, you either do this or you don’t. And I had tons of people that came along with me on these that I asked. And again, unless you’re sincere, you don’t agree to go back on short notice, as did so many of those in these teams that I was privileged to have around me.
John Berry: And with that much experience and 37 years of experience leading and responsible for hundreds of thousands of soldiers and service members throughout your entire career, was there something that, as a leader, kept you up at night recurringly? The one thing that you worried about that would come back, regardless of whether you were a Battalion Commander, Division Commander–were there things that would always come back as a leader that would haunt you?
General Petraeus: Oh, look, in the war zones, it was all about casualties. It’s about losses and seriously wounded. Keep in mind that when you’re commanding like that, virtually every night of the week, every night of the command, almost, not every single one, thankfully, over time, we drove casualty way down. But I would be writing letters of condolence to America’s mothers and fathers, husbands and wives and that can grind over time. This is a very, very tough experience. The Commander, just like a unit, is a vessel, and there are holes in the bottom, and bad news is poured in the top. The worst of all that news is losses and seriously wounded. And a unit or a commander can actually overflow. And there were several times in Iraq, in particular, where a unit we recognize had over–its vessel had overflown. It really couldn’t take more of the enormous casualties it had sustained. In one case, I think in each of three or four weeks in a row, they lost five or six in single incidents.
General Petraeus: I mean, these are just horrible blows and seriously wounded as well. These are very, very tough. I remember one night up in Mosul in the very beginning when I was commanding the 101st Airborne Division, near the end of that particular tour, we had two helicopters collide in the night and I think lost 17 soldiers in one night, had several other of those burned.
General Petraeus: Really horrific. What was interesting in that case–that’s such a terrible loss that you can think of nothing but that, yet you got to go on with it. You got to do the morning update. You’ve got to do all the…we’d been out all night, of course, trying to figure out. We didn’t even know that two had gone down. We knew one helicopter had gone down. Then gradually, we came to realize there’s one more missing. Then everything pieced together. Then you find the wreckage and some of the survivors and then those that died. I remember I was coming out of the morning update, which we still did because you got to keep up the appearances, if you will. You can’t let your shoulders shrug and all the rest of that. Everybody’s watching you. Your example matters. I remember as I’m walking out of the command post, a young private comes up and he puts his arm around me. He said, Sir, I’ve been a bit worried about you.
General Petraeus: I hope you’re hanging in there. He said, it looks like your dog tags are dangling a bit in the dirt because you were…I said, well, no, no, no.
General Petraeus: I said, as always, always got to drive on. And he said, “I think you’re right, sir. I think that what these men would have wanted us to do is to continue the mission on which they were embarked when they were killed.” It’s a Private. Of course, obviously, this is real wisdom here, and it’s absolutely the way that you have to approach these tough situations. But again, there are some units whose vessels overflowed, and what we did was we did the battlefield geometry. That was shorthand for we got to get this unit out of this place because they can’t sustain more tough casualties as they have. We’d move them elsewhere, bring in a fresh unit, and see if they could deal with this particular situation. In most cases, that was the outcome. But individuals go through that as well. I think, again, you can never allow your shoulders to slump. You can never allow others to see the emotions that might be inside and the rest of that.
General Petraeus: You got to be strong and all this stuff. But inside, everybody, again, it can be a very, very grinding experience. So, what keeps you up at night, it’s kind of that terrible loss.
General Petraeus: Which sometimes you really have to look hard to find meaning in it.
John Berry: I want to shift that to those that have found meaning in that, and that being our Veteran community. Now that you are a Veteran and a civilian, I’m curious about your position on the capabilities of our Veterans. As you know at Berry Law, we love to hire Veterans. We see Veterans as a strength, but it seems that too much of society looks at as, well, Veterans are a group that need us, that need help. My position has been that we need Veterans in leadership positions more than ever in the private sector, in politics, leading our communities. I’m curious because you have worked with some of the best of the best, some of the best minds in the Veteran community. As a civilian now, you have access to brilliant minds. I’m curious as to your position on the capabilities of the American Veteran today.
General Petraeus: Well, my position is pretty clear. In fact, I have a position. I’m the chairman of the Vets at Work for KKR. For those not familiar with KKR, we’re one of the largest investment firms, and I think they are the best in the entire world. We manage over $600 billion. We own well over 120 companies around the world. Some of them own 120 companies themselves. We have minority investments and another hundred. We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees in the companies that we own. We love Veterans. We cannot get enough Veterans and spouses. We believe that it’s not just Veterans that bring these unique experiences, unique qualities, attributes, mission-focused, Army values, respective values, all the rest of this, that the spouses bring that well. They have also had unique experiences, have sacrificed alongside, have these values and commitment and so forth that are what distinguish our Veterans. The bottom line is that when we run the annual hiring fairs, Vets at Work usually partners with some other investment firms like our own, we’ll have 60, 70 companies there.
General Petraeus: They cannot get enough Veterans. In fact, our companies alone have hired over 100,000 Veterans and spouses in the 12 years of the Vets at Work program at KKR.
General Petraeus: As I mentioned, I’ve been the chairman of that for over 11 of those years. Again, nothing speaks more than where you put your money, and we put our money on Veterans. I would also say that I generally share, very much share, again, your view on this. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some Veterans out there that need help, and we need to recognize that, and we need firms like yours to ensure that they get what they earn and that the Veterans Administration and others provide that to them. But the vast majority, again, of our Veterans are the kind of individuals that every business actually does want at this point in time. Veteran unemployment now is much lower. Active duty Veteran–because, again, National Guard and Reserves have slight differences because of the communities and some other issues that they have and less mobility in some cases. But the active-duty Veterans that we have are extraordinary. What we need to do, though, is provide them not just a job, but a career opportunity.
General Petraeus: They don’t want a handout. They just want an opportunity. But the opportunity should include potential advancement. It should include investment in them, whether it is job training, even education, mentoring, affinity groups, all of this.
General Petraeus: But most important is the opportunity for advancement, and they will make the most of that if they’re given that opportunity. Now, I believe business broadly recognizes this, which is why, again, even at the lowest of unemployment rates that we saw in recent years, Veteran unemployment was even lower. Active duty Veteran unemployment was even lower than that of the general population. That is a tribute to the businesses that recognize what they bring and a tribute to what it is that the Veterans and spouses actually do bring to their prospective employers.
John Berry: I think of the investment that the military made in, say, creating a Sergeant. You can’t buy a Sergeant. You have to make a Sergeant. That leadership development has happened over years. And so to take that trained leader and to put them out in the civilian community for the company that has the brains to pick them up, it’s a force multiplier. It is a huge immediate advantage. And so I’m always amazed when companies don’t quite want to understand, well, why would I hire this Veteran? Well, because we need leaders to scale our organizations. And that leadership has been built over years and years and refined. And so my position has been, I learned from Sergeants as a young Lieutenant, and the backbone of the Army, the backbone of our military is something that I think sometimes companies overlook that leadership. And you’re absolutely right. That doesn’t mean we give them a dead-end job, but rather an opportunity for upward mobility. That’s how we were trained in the military.
John Berry: Success is moving up. Move up or move out, but continue to lead, continue to get better. And that’s ingrained in the values of our NCOs. And so I do think there’s a huge opportunity for corporate America and throughout, beyond corporate America, but just service in general, real leaders.
General Petraeus: Couldn’t agree more.
John Berry: So, General, this takes us to the After Action Review, where we talk about three examples of great leadership and three examples of bad leadership. Let’s start with a good. Could you give us three examples of great leadership that you learned from?
General Petraeus: Yeah, if you want to include history, which I do, I’d start with Ulysses S. Grant, the man who saved the Union. Lincoln finally found a General after trying just about every other General in the senior ranks of the Union Army, including McClellan, twice. Finally found Grant after Grant was successful as a one and two star out in the West and Land Between the Lakes. Then the incredible risky Vicksburg campaign. Then comes east through Chattanooga, saves the day there. And then crafts the first overall strategy for all Union forces so that he gets the big ideas right finally, communicates it brilliantly to all the commands that are part of the Union Army, then oversees the execution, literally sits in the back pocket of the Main Effort General, whose instructions are, you go where Lee goes and you stay with him. He’s right in the back pocket, again, of that particular element. Then you start to see the victories accumulate, Sherman in Atlanta, Savannah up the Coast, and then Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.
General Petraeus: It’s those victories that ensure Lincoln’s re-election, which was not certain before Grant began the execution of this strategy. In fact, running against him was the guy who failed twice, McClellan, who would have sued for peace.
General Petraeus: Keep in mind, there were draft riots that were so damaging in 1863 that they did enormous destruction to New York City and other locations in the North that were starting to think the war was unwinnable–it wasn’t worth it, and so forth. An individual who excelled as a strategic leader, also had very humble, wore a Private’s uniform just with the straps of the General Officer on it, impervious to fire and so forth, a skilled horseman. But most important was his ability to see a battlefield in time and space, and then to communicate the orders in the day in which they wrote them all yourself, and then aides carried them out to the Commanders, to carry out, to synchronize, to get the timing right and all the actions in particular, battlefield operations and also campaigns. Ridgway, brilliant on the battlefield in World War II, is the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division that jumps into Sicily and then Normandy–incredible, courageous leader by example at the front, distinguished service crosses and so forth. Then the Commander of 18th Airborne Corps, and then saves the day in Korea, taking over from MacArthur, who failed to get the big ideas right.
General Petraeus: And again, I’d stress that what Grant did was get the strategy right. So, it’s about that task. Ridgway does that in Korea, retrieves a situation that was very desperate, gets back up to what is now the 38th parallel and so forth, and stabilizes the situation. In contrast, by the way, our leaders in Vietnam, successively for 13 years, failed to get the big ideas right, failed to craft a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign instead of this battle of attrition, search and destroy operations that often did as much damage as they did good, and the effects of which were very ephemeral. So always start with that very first task. And then some other leaders from whom I learned enormously. General Vuono, who I was privileged to serve as aid for two years when he was the Chief of Staff of the Army during the Panama invasion and then Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He just had these big ideas that he repeated and repeated and repeated. I can still repeat the six imperatives to this day, and they were brilliant big ideas for the head of our Army, the objective of which always was to provide a trained and ready Army to our nation and to the Combatant Commanders, Schwarzkopf among them, who would employ them as successfully as he did out there.
General Petraeus: General Jack Keane worked for him multiple times as well. In fact, he was standing next to me when he was a one-star. He was a Lieutenant Colonel, got shot, stayed with me the entire day, the post-hospital, then Vanderbilt Medical Center, where I had thoracic surgery and so on. But he had this ability. He had operational and strategic judgment that I think is unparalleled, and he still offers it. He’s on Fox News. Eventually, he was a four-star Vice Chief of Staff and Acting Chief of Staff of our great Army. And again, saw what was needed at the time, even when it wasn’t popular, for example, the surge in Iraq. He was one of the few proponents of that as well. At a time, when I might add, most of those above me didn’t favor the surge, or at least very much questioned it, and continued to do so for quite a period of time until it actually succeeded. The person in the corner was the President, thankfully.
General Petraeus: Because of that, the ambassador and I were able to carry out the campaign that was necessary and that did produce the extraordinary results that we had. Then General Hugh Shelton, for whom I was privileged to serve as executive Officer when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs for two years, great airborne–aerosol–airborne special operations leader who was incredibly forthright at the highest levels with President Clinton, then the early year of President Bush and so forth, and did not shrink from laying out what was likely to happen in some pretty critical situations.
General Petraeus: At a time when on occasion, he’d arrive at a National Security Council meeting and people would be saying, we got to do something. We must do something. He said, stop. What do you want to achieve? Lay that out. Determine that. Lay it out for me, and I will try to explain to you how we might achieve that, what I recommend, but I’m also going to lay out the cost to you. In fact, he had on his desk underneath the glass at the very top, staring at him every day, were pictures of coffins with a flag on them from an operation. As a reminder, again, at the end of the day, that’s what it was all about.
John Berry: And now the bad examples. Don’t have to name names, but what we shouldn’t follow.
General Petraeus: Vietnam, and again, took 13 years until General Abrams took over from General Westmoreland radically overhauled the strategy. Unfortunately, by that point in time, the Tet Offensive had occurred, and it totally undermined support in the United States, discredited our leaders, led LBJ, President Johnson to withdraw from the election and so forth. So again, really a failure on our part. MacArthur, who does the brilliant amphibious assault into Inchon, but then goes too far north, brings the Chinese into the war a terribly bad big idea. The civilian leaders in the first few months in Iraq, where we had things going quite well and decided that we should fire the entire Iraqi military without telling them how we would enable them to provide for their families and themselves, and then compound that by firing the bureaucrats, yes, members of the Ba’ath Party, Saddam’s party, but down at the bureaucrat level that we needed to run a country that we didn’t sufficiently understand without an agreed reconciliation policy. So, in each case, this was absolute.
General Petraeus: There was no recourse. And the incentive, therefore, was for hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers who had weapons to oppose the new Iraq, and tens of thousands of bureaucrats to do likewise.
General Petraeus: Again, these are seriously bad big ideas. That’s what it should come back to time and time again, is the quality of this strategy. Frankly, the failure to capitalize on the opportunities for many years in Afghanistan when the violence was very low and we could have built up the security forces and institutions much more effectively than we did, but we didn’t return to Afghanistan as a focus. It took us nine years there to get the inputs right, about eight years to get the right big ideas, and then another year to get all the forces in, the right organization architecture, the right individuals, the right preparation of our forces, the right numbers of diplomats, spies, development workers, and others, all of this. Then we only kept it right for about six months before we started withdrawing forces, something that we actually announced we would do, telling the enemy that we wanted to leave in the speech that we announced the buildup of our forces. So again, plenty of examples where we didn’t get it right as well.
John Berry: I want to end with one last question about something you brought up. You were shot in a training accident. I believe you were injured in a Golden Knight’s parachute jump, and you had this reputation for coming back from injury sooner than expected. I believe your doctor was upset when he found out you were trying to swim with a broken hip. But as a leader, how important is that to be able to stand up and show the troops that you’re going to get back in the fight as soon as you can.
General Petraeus: Actually, I did check with the doctor before I strapped a pull buoy between my legs because, again, I’d broken my pelvis. We’re trying to let it heal, so you can’t do anything that can jeopardize that. And then taped around it and so forth. So, it immobilized my legs, but I could sure swim with my arms. And he was actually…I managed to persuade him on that particular count. And then with the getting shot in the chest thing, I just was so irritating to everybody in the hospital that I was doing laps with all the tubes and everything else in a wheelchair and bumping into people and trying to stay fit. I was only there for a few days. Then I said, if I can do 50 push-ups, will you let me out of the hospital? But there’s some downsides to that, and I actually need to be cautious about that because, for example, I got out of the hospital after, again, this is thoracic surgery. They cut right down in and they’re in there, pulling out bones.
General Petraeus: And they found an artery that had been nicked and not severed or it would have bled out. They had to fix, cauterize that and all the rest of that.
General Petraeus: I got home and I said, hey, I’d like to just go over to the fitness center. I’m not going to do anything big. And I just want to feel how it’s going, to see what it feels like and all the rest of that. And one thing leads to another. I ended up on the track outside where I used to run 4:40s for time as part of interval sprints as part of the running fitness, and ended up actually probably…it didn’t rupture something, but it strained something, and they could actually pick it up on an X-ray the following week. You need to be a little bit careful about that. Then I also developed plantar fascia issues, which is the bottom of your foot, the sheath around your heel, by coming back much too fast running. Again, some of that is a bit of bravado. There’s a little bit of mythology. There’s a little bit of stupidity. But pushing the envelope, I think oftentimes in these things, is probably not bad.
General Petraeus: You just have to know when you push it too far. And once or twice I did that in coming back. In the broken pelvis, what they did is they thought they could stop me by saying, you only get one set of stairs a day.
General Petraeus: And they figured it would be the set of stairs in our quarters from the main floor up to the bedroom floor. Well, I had a hospital bed put in on the bottom floor. So, I said, oh, the set of stairs will be the one into the headquarters. But I make sure I had my aide literally right behind me because I was on crutches and not the steadiest of crutch guys. To make sure if I fell backwards, that he would grab me. But look, everything in life, I think, is coming back from setbacks. The real mark of a leader is not how you react to success, how well you spike the football in the end zone after you score a touchdown. It’s how you react to setbacks, to failures, to mistakes, whether they’re personal or the organization or what have you. As always, what you got to do is take stock, understand what happened, learn from it, make amends if that is required, and then do all that you can to reduce the chances of it happening again.
General Petraeus: Then put your rucksack back on and put one foot in front of the right, the other again and repeat the process.
General Petraeus: The organization has to do the same.
John Berry: Outstanding. Yeah, especially for the organization, because the organization will take a hit as well, and that’s always a tough one. Well, General, I want to thank you so much for your time and your leadership, wisdom, and insights. It has been a true honor.
General Petraeus: John, the honor has been mine. Again, thanks for what your organization has done and continues to do for our Veterans. Thanks for what you did in your time in uniform and now as a Veteran as well.
John Berry: Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting Veteran leadership in business, strengthening the Veteran community, and getting Veterans all of the benefits that they earn. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @VeteranLed on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
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