Pete Blaber - The Mission, the Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

Table of Contents

A book about the complexities of combat thats just as applicable for dealing with the complexities of business and our personal lives. The guiding principle lessons Pete shares in this book can dramatically alter the way we think, and help make the right decisions to achieve success in every part of our lives.

Kevin Sharer,
Chairman & CEO, Amgen

If you cant take your immediate observations and stitch them together into context... how are you going to make sense of the situation youre in? Recognizing patterns allows you to understand whats going on around you. If winning in combat, business, or life matters to you, you must read this book.

Jeff Jonas,
Engineer, Chief Scientist, IBM Entity Analytics

Books written by former government leaders are part of a distinct genre of literature. As any writer will confirm, writing a book is a monumental taskthere are no shortcuts to sitting down, day after day, week after week, constantly saturating, incubating, and illuminating, then rewriting. Former government leaders assume the added challenge of ensuring that the content is free from any sensitive information that could aid a sophisticated enemy in harming the United States or its service members. Names, dates, tactics, techniques, and methods all have to be filtered and sanitized to ensure operational security. Therefore, the most important and vexing challenge facing any government official who sets out to write anything for publication, regardless of format, is the need to maintain the operational security of the participants and methods involved. For military and intelligence operatives, this responsibility is spelled out in a formal nondisclosure agreement that each member signs upon entry to their unit, activity, or agency. The agreement generally prohibits unfettered release of the following information:

1. My former unit, Special Forces Operational DetachmentDelta (Delta) is the same name that geologists use to describe the end of a river that empties into the ocean. It is also the Greek word for difference. The army unofficially considers the name and unit classified. However, Delta or Delta Force has been so popularized by the Hollywood movie and publication industries that one would be hard pressed to say that these names are not in the public domain. Moreover, my official military records, which are unclassified and available to the public, likewise record the dates and specific jobs I held while assigned to this unit. The reality is that those of us who served there rarely use the term Delta. Instead, we almost always refer to the organization as the Unit. Since I am trying to write this book in an accurate, reality-based context, the Unit is the term I most frequently use throughout the book. When I refer to other military or government organizations, activities, or agencies in this book, I do so only in the interest of continuity, and only if another publication or official unclassified government document has already mentioned that organizations participation in the mission at issue.

2. Nicknames, titles, and pseudonyms are used to address this concern. Again, I do this to protect persons, units, activities/agencies and their tactics, techniques, and procedures from compromise or harm by sophisticated enemies of the United States. In the interest of continuity with previous publications, I sometimes refer to certain publicly recognized senior military leaders by their true names. I do this when its obvious that there is no operational security issue involved. I have otherwise intentionally depersonalized the stories to maintain the anonymity of the individuals involved. So, unless a person is named in a direct quotation from a book or periodical, I refer to that person only by their position (e.g., commanding general).

Even when military leaders are identified in other open-source documents, such as the bestselling books Not a Good Day to Die and Cobra II, I only refer to them by their duty position. My intent is not to make judgmental assessments of anyone; rather, it is to extract and share the timeless lessons from the action or mission in the form of guiding principles.

3. All of the operations discussed in this book have been written about in numerous other civilian and government publications. The stories of me and my men in Afghanistan and Iraq are recounted in the two bestsellers listed above. The army expressed no concern with these authors using my true name to recount the events described in those publications. In both cases, the army never sought my permission to use my name or likeness before approving these books for publication and into the public domain.

4. I have used great care to avoid going into context-specific detail concerning any tactics, techniques, and procedures used by any military organization. As described in the opening chapter of this book, the key to success on all battlefieldspast, present, and futurehas very little to do with electronic whiz-bang gadgets and top-secret technologies; instead, its all about how you think, how you make decisions, and how you execute those decisionsnone of which may be properly considered classified.

The content of this book is as clear, detailed, and accurate an account of the events and experiences in which I took part as I can provide while maintaining the sanctity of the operational security issues described above.

All of the material contained herein was derived from unclassified publications and sources; nothing written here is intended to confirm or deny, officially or unofficially, any events described, or the views of any individual, government, or agency. The insights in this book are based on my personal perceptions, experiences, and interactions. If a story seems to be missing some level of context-rich detail, the reason is more than likely to protect operational security.

In an effort to protect the nature of specific operations and/or individuals who participated in some of these events, I sometimes had to take liberties with the dates, times, or order of events. Nonetheless, none of the security-instituted adjustments affects the context of the lesson that the story reveals or compromises the persons or agencies that may have been involved.