Sean McFate - The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder

To warriors everywhere

For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill.

To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

Sun Tzu

It is daunting to face an enemy whose singular goal is to destroy you. When that enemys goal is chaos at any cost, the fight feels uniquely hopeless.

When I arrived in Iraq to lead the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in 2003, I watched the nature of war change before my eyes. With a fleet of car bombs and zealous suicide attackers, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) struck more civilian targets than any other terrorist group in history. Spaces that had been previously sacredmosques, outdoor markets, and protected areas for religious pilgrimswere suddenly at the top of AQIs hit list.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was defeating us within the penumbras of new warfare, specifically his willingness to eschew any traditional rules or structure. AQI, less by design than organic mutation, was uncontained and unconstrained. While other terrorist organizations, including and perhaps especially wider al-Qaeda, had operated under strict policies and procedures, AQI thrived because they had no such shackles. Zarqawi aimed to wreak anarchic havoc on Iraq, no matter the method or price.

AQI never struggled to find supplies in Iraqs anarchy; in fact, mayhem fed the groups cache of resources. With the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and Baath Party, the United States had inadvertently created a supercenter for insurgents. The pool of angry and out-of-work Iraqis, abundance of weaponry flowing into the region, and revenue from its vicious kidnapping ransoms meant that Zarqawi and his men had almost everything they needed to succeed.

The final ingredient, though, was AQIs skill in leveraging Information Technology (IT) to its advantage. Jihadists could admire and contribute to AQIs efforts from far beyond Iraqs borders. Most importantly, though, IT allowed the group to control both the pace and narrative of violence. With the ability to connect its nodes at a rapid pace, IT facilitated AQIs growth into a broader network, which in turn fueled its ability to seem larger and speedier than it actually was.

Despite AQIs embrace of the new rules of war, at the outset I had confidence in JSOCs ability to adapt to these unconventional methods; this tactical flexibility was, in my mind, our specialty. And as in many wars against such foes, my troops won most firefights. We were better armed, better managed, and better trained.

However, our tactical successes gave both soldiers and policymakers the false impression that our strategy was working. In reality, though, we were simply carrying out discrete missions that were often brutally effective against our foe, but which were not truly rooted in any unifying national strategy or ultimate endgame. We were living one operation at a time; we celebrated our successes, but lacked wide enough perspective to clearly assess the impact we were having. And as veterans racked up tours, I realized that we had not invested enough effort in diagnosing the nuanced conditions which made AQI so resilient.

The more I pored over our situation, the clearer the solution becamehowever surprising it was. Aspects of JSOC which had previously made us so unrivaledour structure, equipment, doctrine, and culturewere the very things constraining us. We were trapped in a cage of our own making; we believed ourselves to be tactically flexible, so much so that we stopped questioning whether our actions, or the nations broader strategy were correct. In uncharted waters, my team and I endeavored to reimagine both JSOCs role in the war effort and its place in American foreign policy.

Our saga in Iraq spotlights a larger problem endemic not only to JSOC, but to the entire Western worldour culture does not force leaders to reckon with the intersection of strategy and adaptability. This is, in part, due to our incredible privilege. AQI had to constantly recalibrate simply to remain alive. While America has absolutely faced terror and trauma, we remain a global superpower. We have, for too long, expected the world to play by our rules. In so doing, we failed to ask ourselves what would happen if those rules were incompatible with reality.

Paradoxically, America seems to remain fearful of strategic adaptability in any setting. We are wedded to the notion that we shouldnt change a policy until it has failed, unwilling to ask ourselves how we can do better. Clinging to the status quo is, in the short-term, an easy course of action, but it is also a dangerous one.

The world is changing faster now than ever before, and unsurprisingly, new styles of leadership will become more important than ever. We can no longer rely on the flexible iconoclast or the by-the-book manager alonewe must combine outside-the-box and ordered thinking. This kind of hybrid leadership will be necessary not only for success in warfare, but in other worlds as well.

Leaders must seek to prevent crises, not simply wait for them to happen. As we learned in Iraq, consciously sacrificing long-term strategy for short-term certainty is both unwise and unsustainable. We were lucky that, despite being on our heels, JSOC was able to withstand so many blows before we recognized the need to reinvent ourselves. Some organizations arent so lucky; just look at the slew of businesses who were slow to react to the rise of Amazon. However, the question remains: how do we create these strategically adaptable leaders in a world afraid of change?

The first step is to identify our cultural problem, as we did in Iraq, and as Sean McFate expertly does in this book. As he so aptly reports, military leaders must combine a level of elasticity and big-picture thinking when confronted with new styles of conflict. Accordingly, we must come to terms with the fact that following yesterdays rules of war will not lead to todays (or tomorrows) successesthat awareness alone can save lives. We must begin to grapple with the consequences of the new rules of war; if not, we will all be left behind.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Ret.)

For readers interested in more information about specific references and sources in the text, please see the notes and selected bibliography at the end of the book.

Why has America stopped winning wars?

On June 5, 1944, the day before D-day, General George S. Patton strode onto a makeshift stage in southern England to address thousands of American soldiers. Americans play to win all of the time, said Patton. Thats why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war, for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.

Since then, the American military has experienced nothing but loss. Korea is an ongoing stalemate. Vietnam turned Communist. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed, too. ISIS destroyed vast swaths of Iraq, and Iran has its tentacles in Baghdad. The Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than the local government does. Wars since 1945 have squandered American blood, wasted trillions of tax dollars, and damaged national honor, while resolving nothing on the ground.

We are losing. People are worried. Those not yet convinced that we are failing may owe their conviction to a false concept of victory. Winning is not about who killed more enemies or seized more territory. Those factors are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is where you are when the war is over. Did you achieve the objectives you set at the beginning? If the answer is no, then you cant claim victory. Some people try to cheat by rationalizing failure or redefining objectives, but history is never fooled. The last time the United States won a conflict decisively, the worlds electronics ran on vacuum tubes.