hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm here with stan mcchrystal i sometimes call him general stanley mcchrystal and he has a new book out co-authored with anna butrico it is new and exciting it is called risk a user's guide stan welcome thanks for having me tyler let me start with some questions about risk now if we go to the the post-war era after world war ii a lot of serious intellectuals thought the risk of a
nuclear war was pretty high in the next few decades we built bomb shelters everywhere were we then overreacting or are we today under reacting when were we thinking badly about risk it's funny my third great classmate david langely his father was an air force major and they actually built a shelter under their front yard a bomb shelter and that was the time in the early 1960s when that seemed very very real i don't
think they were overreacting i actually think that the likelihood of nuclear war was probably closer than we thought i think now we've lived near the precipice long enough where we take it for granted and so things like cyber security i think are a greater risk than we actually admit do you think 1950s america was better at thinking about risk because that had just lived through world war ii or are we better at thinking about risk
i think the people who were thinking seriously about risk you hate to generalize we're thinking better if you think about all of the deep thought that went on nuclear strategy while on the one hand nuclear war was unthinkable and we sort of laughed now with a doctor strange love idea how could they even contemplate it in reality i think game theory and whatnot was actually some pretty careful thought on actual risk and then things like
deterrence when it comes to warfare what do you think is today the most common probabilistic mistake made by u.s policy makers and i don't mean this to be about naming names just in general what's our blind spot yeah i think we want to oversimplify it we want to look back at world war ii and see it as simplistic you know you go crush your enemy into rubble and then in the in the aftermath you rebuild and yet from korea vietnam afghanistan
and iraq we often don't admit the complexities because you're dealing with war among people and of people and so you're dealing with societies not state weapon and weapon or army on army and i don't think we do that as well as we should so if that's the most common probabilistic mistake of policy makers what would be the most common probabilistic mistake of military commanders in the us yeah i think it's a subset of that i
think military commanders have been shaped to think that they have to win battlefield victories and it's hard to argue with the importance of being able to do that but in the modern era that very rarely solves the problem the problem is bigger and more complex than that for example the first gulf war which is held up as an example of a very sort of a clean victory in reality in the aftermath of that saddam hussein
used the chaos to brutalize part of his population and to submit his hold on power so we didn't solve the problem we solved one problem kuwait but we didn't solve the bigger problem and i think military would like to keep it neat and clean we would like to say give me a very straightforward military problem and i will solve that but very few problems in the world lend themselves to that if we think about military combatants in the field
you know say a sergeant right uh involved with combat what's the most common probabilistic mistake they're going to make well there it's a further subset you have taken a an individual trained him to be a warrior and to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail and so they are spring-loaded to want to use that particular tactic that's what they've been trained and then they run in to complex problems in villages and towns
and cities and they find it it's not simple so it's challenging for them if we think about today say the the risk that china would make a more serious move against taiwan whether an outright attack or something extremely provocative are we under overestimating that risk and and why are we making the kind of mistake we're making i think we're probably underestimating that risk i think when you consider china you have to consider the sweep of
their history and where they think they are now the middle kingdom and they are trying to avoid the idea that they're being contained by any outside power particularly the united states and then you look at taiwan itself taiwan of course formosa in the minds of most chinese is a legitimate part of china and so the idea that china part of china is being occupied by former chinese nationalists become this somewhat independent entity
is is like a rock in their shoe it can't help but be frustrating and so if you look at it from their standpoint one of their goals is to avoid containment another is to build up their national identity which means controlling all of your territory and then the idea that they want to be a more international power and i don't necessarily mean that they are going to go into foreign wars but they are going to push back those who would
stop them from being engaged in the world so i think the idea that they might do something on taiwan because it hasn't happened for so many years we tend to think it will never happen and we tend to think in terms of linear if something happened happen for a long time it never will and then we're always shocked so you think we extrapolate too much from the relatively recent past yeah if you think about most people they
think that national boundaries don't change much but that's because after world war ii not a lot of national boundaries have changed some have but if you go before that they actually change in history pretty routinely and
so the idea that the globe and national boundaries and identities are what they are now will be in the future would be counter to historical experience so let's say you're a thinker a planner commander and you want to train yourself
out of this habit this mistake that other people are making of extrapolating too much what literally is it that you do to your brain to your body to your habits to get you out of that way of thinking yeah to be honest tyler i wish i knew but you must have done it if you see this mistake right you have an outside vantage point were you not making it the other people are making it i think i've made it along with everyone else
and i i try not to but i think that i do the reality is i think you have to step back almost an out-of-body experience and look historically at things and say okay what has happened in the past and why wouldn't that happen again or some new permutation of that but i think it's a discipline the person i've seen most impressive with that is dr henry kissinger i've been in the room with him a couple of times sort of a fly on the
wall and someone will bring up an issue and he will suddenly soar up to 30 000 feet and he will describe it in a way that no one in the world no one in the room has been doing at that point and i think there's a discipline of thought to do that and it's not very common do you think reading a great deal of history is useful for thinking about risk or only modestly useful i think it's not only useful i think it's essential i think if you don't know
history you can train you constrain your mind almost into personal experience only how useful are war games in thinking about risk and i mean like the the board games the box games i don't mean wargaming as you do in the military just plain old war games like avalon hill in the old days yeah i think anything that forces you to problem solve is very good about thinking about risk because you've got an opponent who is
trying to cause you problems to create threats and put you at risk and of course you're trying to do the same chest is of course another version of this so i think that they're really good at building that muscle memory in your mind how well do you feel we understand the probabilistic reasoning of the chinese say very different culture right quite different history are they a black box to us or do you feel
somehow we grasp their calculations i don't think we grasped their calculations i don't think they're a black box if you read their writings and if you listen to what they say in fact i think that they signal pretty carefully what their what their intentions or at least their aspirations are and their aspirations of course are to be much more a player in the world than we have seen them in our lifetimes because if i go back to most of my
lifetime at first it was china in the 1950s and then the cultural revolution then a very poor country sort of struggling to get ahead that's not china now and that's not china in the future and they don't see themselves that way so i think we send we tend to lag the reality by quite a lot how well do we understand the probabilistic and risk thinking of the russian leadership i think that's actually easier to
understand because in that case you can focus it almost in the mind of vladimir putin now he doesn't represent all russians but for the last 20 years he's been a pretty good proxy for where the russian psyche has been since he captured their imagination starting with chechnya so i think if we think of russia as having been prostrate at the end of the the cold war and we viewed them as a beaten former superpower they are trying to get back on the
national stage now they have far worse cards to play than china for the future they've got a real demographic problem they've got other issues but the reality is in the short term they've got some aspirations to be powerful in the mideast to be powerful look what they're doing with natural gas this winter with europe they're going to play the cards they've got more aggressively than we might expect them to so in your mental model of putin he's
not risk averse he's willing to suffer great personal loss if there's some chance of creating chaos and furthering russia's place on the world stage i think that he is when you use the term personal loss i don't think we've ever tested that but because we really haven't confronted putin himself very much but i think that russia is willing to suffer a fair amount of pain to try to get back into a position that they think
they should be as a superpower and if we're trying as american citizens to understand the risk calculations of say eu german french policy makers how they think about these risks what's the main thing we don't understand about them i don't think you can generalize too much but i think if you look at the european nations each of them has an interesting calculus there was a period in the cold war where their dependence
on the united states was comforting and it was irritating the idea that they needed the united states to to be the 800 pound gorilla in nato so they would like a measure of independence from that at the same time
independence from that without enough national power or enough unity across the eu is pretty dangerous and so i think the idea that although russia does not come close to what the soviet union's power is russia if they are aggressive in places
like the baltics or ukraine and others can really put the other european powers in a difficult position and then economically as i mentioned natural gas earlier if the countries of the eu are put in a position where they are less powerful economically and they don't have political unity then there's that balkanization that you would say where each individual country finds themselves not strong enough physically with
material power economic or military power to feel they can stand up confidently then it's it's problematic for it's a common view on the american right that say germany is not sufficiently afraid of russia right now i mean do you agree with that who's making the risk miscalculation the germans the american conservatives someone else i think the germans are sufficiently worried about russia but we forget that they are also in
close proximity to russia and so it's one thing to say that russia is a big problem but germany has a certain dependence on things like natural gas and other trade with russia that the united states doesn't have russia is a reality the united states from a long way away can put our finger in the eye of russia with relative impunity germany is a strong country but not as strong as the united states and not as far away so i think
germany is more likely to be in a position where they think a realistic approach with some kind of accommodation makes more sense whereas it doesn't seem to be an imperative when you have the geographic position in the united states since 9 11 there have not been many major terror attacks on u.s soil done by foreign terrorists why is that and should we take much comfort in that fact it's a great question tyler i asked myself
i think that the improvement in american intelligence and then to a degree counter-terrorist operations was part of that it became far harder for an organization like al-qaeda to pull off a 911 scale attack what i never have been able to understand is why they didn't try to prosecute a number of much simpler attacks bombs and shopping malls and whatnot because it would have been very difficult to stop and would have been terrifying for
americans so in my what's your best model of why that hasn't happened right they could have crossed the mexican border bought a few submachine guns done something terrible i i i'm really not sure my sense is that uh al-qaeda you know someone hits a grand slam in the third inning of a game when they get up in the sixth inning they'd like to hit another home run and my sense is part of that psy key in involved to him i just don't think that
they thought realistically enough about creating the effect that they could do i think they were looking for the big dramatic operation now that doesn't mean other organizations will be as limited i think it's very likely that another organization will take a different approach most likely cyber but they could have a significant effect with a number of smaller attacks if we had to shrink one capacity of the military say by 50
and double the capacity of another what would you pick to shrink and what to expand yeah this is always the tough one um i tend to think that the maneuver warfare part that we have created for ground warfare in europe or in the mideast is probably somewhere where we have to accept some risk we have to have fewer capabilities there and you could even argue maybe the number of aircraft carriers big capital things i think what we can't afford and
therefore i would invest is in really good people now that seems like a simplistic answer but we are going to need very crafty people at things like cyber warfare we're going to need very innovative people we're going to need people with cultural acuity which means language skills and i think that's going to be more important so if i was advocating i'd be leaning toward resourcing harder in those areas now of course your father was a general
you come from a military family why is it that military recruitment right now is so well predicted by having had a parent in the armed forces yeah what's driving that and how can we take advantage of that to recruit additional people well we've taken advantage of it to the point where it may be counterproductive now when i would travel the battlefield and go to small bases invariably the sergeant or lieutenant in
charge was the son or daughter of a friend of mine and that's in one way it's comforting because you know people have entered the service with open eyes and clear expectations and to make good soldiers but you don't want a soldier class in america you want military service to be spread across the nation geographically and sociologically so i actually think that the that aspect of the all-volunteer force has weakened us a bit
we have created a bit of a warrior cast and it's insular you grow up in it you know my family was very much that way and i think that it's not healthy for the long-term good of the force so i think we need to look at another way of recruiting and try to go out and get a broader cross-section of america and keep bringing that in because when we talk about diversity it's not about race or gender it's about different perspectives
and different experiences and different talents and i think that the military has to avoid the idea that we recruit best from you know the midwest or the south in a certain demographic because it it single threads us how much do you worry about what is sometimes called the woke a sometimes extreme set of political views do you think it turns some young people against the military or diverts their attention from the possibility of a
career in the military there have been some recent military ads that seem to be trying to appeal to the woke people how does this picture fit together for you yeah i'm going to start by you teaching yeah just to be clear so you come in contact with the woke yes i do um let me say first that everybody defines woke differently and i think there's certain an extremist level of that where people are have views that are far different than
mine but i think the idea of understanding that race and other and other things have been thought of in a pretty limited way in the united states for a very long time so questioning how things have been done in many of our social cultural uh habits is necessary so from that standpoint if somebody wanted to say is stan mcchrystal awoke i'd have to say probably i am so taking that i think what we need to do is tell people that the common defense of
america is every american's responsibility it's not the warrior class it's not a limited group of people with big biceps and maybe small brains in the minds of some people who are willing to go out and fight foreign wars it's got to be young people from every family and so that ought to reflect america if you hold a mirror up to the face of the u.s military you ought to see our nation if you don't see our nation then i think
you have a problem long-term so teaching now at yale what have you learned from that teaching about how to improve military recruitment because those are a lot of students who won't apply right you know it's interesting it's interest it's education i got to yale in 2010 and they were just making the decision to open rotc up again after 40 years and i would argue that yale used vietnam war and then they used don't ask hotel as excuses not to
have rotc for way too long and it limited yale's uh diversity and it emitted yale's you know open-minded perspective they started getting it back and that's been a good move there's increasing a balance there now at the same time most young people that are at yale don't have any real touch with the military their brothers and sisters haven't served often their parents haven't served maybe their grandparents haven't
served so when they get interaction with people in the military there are a number of active duty officers and senior ncos are being sent to yale now for graduate degrees and i teach a number of them they have a disproportionate effect on young people because it's sort of the first time any of these young people have been up close to anybody who's a soldier and it can be eye-opening for them because they have a view that's often
very narrow of what a soldier is they've seen some movies and they've got a two-dimensional stereotypic typical uh opinion of it and so it's very opening so that's where i think we need to open it i think more needs to be done is the us officer corps too educated or not educated enough i don't think it's possible to be too educated i think but are we selecting too much for highly educated people at the expense of talent that may be just as
good but not with an advanced degree i think that talent you're right talent doesn't always reflect itself in a degree sometimes talent reflects itself in a combination of values and experiences and native intelligence you want to you don't want a bunch of dumbasses but at the same time i think everybody having a phd isn't necessary either what you're really looking for is people with the right core values and
enough native innate talent to be able to be developed into good leaders with good sound judgment so if you're considering recommending someone for a promotion a high promotion what qualities in them are you looking for other than just the obvious like good values work hard smart common sense but what else what's your magic ingredient where something clicks and you say that person can make it yeah there's no single one but that there's
uh the two that i would jump out is first self-discipline and you say well all soldiers are self-disciplined and i'd say that's not true self-discipline to me is not whether you get up in the morning and make your bed although those might be indicators it's really do you treat people the way you know they should be treated do you do the hard things even though they may be inconvenient or frightening and not all
military do that not all leaders do that the second is the ability to make a decision with uncertainty and i've struggled with years as to whether that is born or developed remember asking my father how do you tell who's going to be good in combat i was just a brand new lieutenant asking this old soldier's wisdom and he said who can make decisions in combat and i said well how do how do you know he says until you're in combat you don't know and
what people but you can't tell as he described a person who's trying to drive uncertainty to zero will keep asking for more information they'll try to to get to mitigate all of the uncertainty out and of course that's impossible so some people just have the ability to live with not having perfect knowledge and yet they can accept that and still make decisions decisively when do you think the united states will
have women as truly senior commanders in its armed forces and how would you manage that transition what would you do yeah we already have some so it's moved along pretty well but to understand why it hasn't moved
faster is for many years early in my career the jobs that were given to female officers even though they may have been just as talented you went to a military base the protocol officer was always a female and and so they would put them off in
these jobs and want to get time to select them for higher level responsibility their records of experience didn't match their male counterparts now it wasn't their fault but the reality is when you made that decision they actually didn't compare and so i think really you have to have a period of affirmative action you have to promote some senior women and you need to accept risk in that because they will be less prepared than some of their peers
and you say well that's too risky for the nation i think it's too risky not to now you're only going to have to do that for about a generation because you have to provide senior level examples to younger female officers to help them get up there without any it's really hard to continue the progress we've seen a lot but it still has a long way to go do you think there's too much of an up or out element to promotion in the
military um no i don't i think it's important that people realize they've got to perform and they've got to be good now having said that i am going to say that there is too much of a one strike in your out problem if we go back to the second world war a number of officers were given command of infantry divisions for example and they got relieved of command because they didn't do very well and then they got put in command of
another division in many cases they did very well we have a no blemish habit in the u.s army for example so even as a young officer if you get scuffed up a little in your record instead of someone taking that as well they had a bad experience and they learned from it instead that's almost guaranteed to prevent your promotion to higher rank so as a consequence what you tend to get higher level is people who've never had any blemishes
which means maybe they've not taken enough risks maybe they've lived a little too conservatively and and i think that's a real negative for producing a better officer let's say i'm in the military but i'm not in the moment in combat right i'm not on an aircraft carrier uh also what should be the restrictions on my smartphone never thought about that one tyler actually because there are some real challenges there um
one of the problems with the smartphones is people are able to call home every 20 minutes if they want to and so when a person's deployed they you know they live all the problems at home which is hard to do what you're doing at the
moment and and do it at home there's also the ability to track it of course you know and so i i'm really not sure but i think we probably need to to have a cell phone that they can use for work purposes you know one that that
does the function because we need technology to leverage but i think you probably have to put severe limits on things that would allow them to be leveraged by foreign intelligence should i be able to download tiktok which of course is chinese or wechat for that matter in my opinion no you've really got to take a look upstream at all of these and we've got to start cleaning that up we've got to get trusted clean networks and the ability
to improve what we're doing not just in cell phones but wider networks is there but we we really haven't done it today what would you do to limit the risk of the what you might call the seditious violent right wing in the military becoming more influential what can we improve to check that problem yeah i think it's a serious problem uh one is i think we've got to communicate in the military and not be shy about it
we've got to say that what the military stands for support of the constitution and whatnot cannot be perverted or corrupted by people who want to take a very narrow or extreme view on either side but you see it much more on the right right now and then i think just like we did with gangs in the 1990s we've got to go to ferret it out we've got to identify those people who are on social media or even face to face who are reflecting
those kind of views and you've got to have the courage to get rid of them or take ucmj action against them because that's a cancer that could grow inside the force and people say well how bad can it be well a sergeant can take young privates and have an extraordinary effect on them and a lieutenant can do the same with people so the ability to cascade down extreme views is is extraordinarily dangerous and if it has reached a somewhat
dangerous point i mean what should we infer about how we should change the culture of the military because it's not an accident that it's a problem right like there's something about how you train people that's connected to what can go wrong yeah and and i'm humble about my ability to to give you a really good answer on this one i think one of the things is our recruiting because it's gotten fairly narrow and it's got self-reinforcing
into certain areas of the country in certain parts of american society the danger is that the military becomes an echo chamber reflection of that so i would widen recruiting i personally think we ought to have a draft i think everybody be ought to be open to a draft now we don't need everybody in the military so i'm not saying increase the size but i'm saying have a draft and bring people in and use other people for other civilian
national services this would be women also in your vision of course in fact i would argue now even people with significant handicaps can serve now there are some that would disqualify you but many of the jobs the vast majority of the jobs in the military don't take a strapping six foot two barrel chested mail they require somebody willing to do your job and a smart person and so i i would open that up what if someone can't read and write
very well they're not disabled it's just they're not highly literate what do you do with them well you've drafted them they show up maybe they even mean well yeah in the 1970s and 80s of course we had to deal with that in my early years we had something called bsap basic skills education program now it was inconvenient to put people in basic skills education but it was important it wasn't a bad thing for society or for the military
so i probably would look on a case-by-case basis i would avoid maca or uh what's what's his face is a hundred thousand mcnamara's hundred thousand when he brought in people with very low scores because you just you limit the forces capability but if somebody doesn't have education if they're ignorant but not stupid you can address that if someone doesn't have the mental abilities to learn then you probably gotta take another look
what would you do to improve our ability to train foreign armies which is hard right very different cultures language problems gender issues religion yeah if you look at places in history where that's worked well it takes cultural acuity on the part of the trainers the idea of u.s special forces has always been to train teams in the language and the culture and put them in an area you have them very familiar but we we haven't been able to
stay the course very much we've moved people around so much that we really don't have a cadre of people who've got real experience in parts of the world that we can use that's what you've got to develop the british used a tremendously effective technique of just small numbers of people seated but they were sent for long periods of time in the northwest provinces of india when it was british india now pakistan
they used to send officers the east india company would bring officers in and their tour of duty their first tour was 10 years and then after that 10-year tour they would go home for a year typically and get married and then come back so by that time they have become completely fluid in the language fluent in the language and fluent in the culture i don't think if you don't do that you're ever going to be very effective at doing it
but if recruiting is hard and we want to recruit more people and learning languages developing cultural acuity is hard how do we push all that together and make it work like what has to give well you got to be willing to train them i mean you can go out and try to hire people with already have language skills or fair or very high language potential to learn but we have not taken the time to train people in languages who have put the
resources during world war ii in the first year or two we trained something like 5200 americans to become fluent in japanese a very difficult language in the period in afghanistan and iraq i don't think we trained one-tenth that many even though we were there much longer we were unwilling to make the commitment and it wasn't just money that the military services were have been averse in the past to sending someone like tyler cowan to school for
language because they have fear that you'll become focused just on that and they will lose your skills for the wider service so we've always celebrated and promoted generalists in fact when i was a young officer i had spanish language on my on my record and i wasn't very good in spanish but i'd taken advanced spanish at west point but it was not a good thing to have on my record because every year or two they'd come up with this
idea they'd send me off to some assignment i really didn't want which wasn't going to be very good for my long-term career so i kind of tried to and jive and avoid those you got to change that a bit i think you've got to make being fluent in at least laying one language for officers a requirement and for more junior soldiers something that we will re-reward when you went to west point what was for you the most interesting class
oh by far revolutionary warfare there was a class taught by recent uh veterans from vietnam but it covered revolutionary warfare through history yugoslavia indochina vietnam and whatnot and it was war among the people whatever the popular term in the moment was and we really we dug into the doctrine of it the experience of it the difficulty of it and i found that was the one that when i left the academy i thought most about
later and what made the professor so good well the professor i had was good but they had personal experience and a passion for it but they also leveraged some very good literature on it books like the centurions and others so we read some novel historical novels but we also really studied the experiences and i think because vietnam was so recent it felt very relevant to the instructors it felt very important they had to they
had to get that it's across to us to make sure we understood what a challenge this was if i'm looking to movies which movies can people watch do you think ultimately are the most accurate portrayals of the military well are there any good ones yeah i mean it's hard for me to judge portrayals of the military back you know from wars that i wasn't in you know because i know the ones i like but i don't i can't tell which are accurate
if you watch the movie blackhawk down the the very high-energy pictures of the actual combat i think were a little overdone and guys who i close friends of mine who were there will say that yeah that was hollywood up but at the same time i thought that the depiction of how the movie portrayed delta force operators the json commanders who i had known general garrison and they depicted him in the movie and then the rangers was
remarkably accurate it felt as though they had captured the essence of how the people i had known for so much of my career acted so i thought it was pretty pretty realistic to the personas is military fiction a genre in decline so norman mailer naked in the dead was a huge bestseller in its day now people live in brooklyn they read jonathan franson has that changed or is military fiction still relevant i think it's in temporary decline and
one of the reasons i think it's in temporary decline is you don't have a broad experience in in the population with military service so i think military fiction is more apt to be interesting to people who either served earlier in their lives or they were close to someone who served and therefore there's a curiosity right now we have some military fiction some of which is way glamorized and but but if you've had no connection with
the military at all it's hard to really appreciate whether someone's captured things in a in a very you know compelling way do you read science fiction for military ideas i don't and you know i read some when i was young but you know heinlein and whatnot but i have not read much of it if we just take the military living corridors you've experienced throughout your career and think of them as hotel rooms what would you do to improve them
yeah i was very happy with the quarters i got when i was young we had very small quarters given to us when i was a captain and whatnot but everybody had the same quarters and we were all in these neighborhoods where you knew your peers nobody had a bigger house than anybody else everybody made the same amount of money and it was sort of shared experience that made it special then as i got older and i was lucky
enough to live on posts that had older quarters built in the 1930s they were these big rambling old brick houses that have basements and things that you know many modern houses don't have now so i loved them they weren't as modern as many other houses they didn't have many of the conveniences you would joke about that the plumbing didn't always work as well as you like and there were a hundred coats of paint on every wall
but they were a wonderful life to live in so the reality is the only thing i would do for military quarters is change where they are and how they're used so for example if i built barracks i would build rooms for sergeants who are not married to live in the barracks and i'd give them apartments there you want people of multiple generations in some kind of close proximity you don't want to have just all the young people boxed off here and
the older people completely somewhere else as you may know in the netherlands disabled individuals under some circumstances they're given vouchers so that they actually have access to sex workers now many people men also come out of the u s military disabled should we do the same for them i've never thought about it you know the problem with uh doing something like that is the argument that sex workers are often exploited very badly
and so to the degree which i have not personally experienced the industry close enough to say it wouldn't be but i'd be really frightened that we would create a bunch of people who end up having to be sex workers because that's the job they can get and you don't want to force people into that kind of life what more should we do for the disabled leaving the military let's say they can't serve anymore yeah clearly you've got to give them an
opportunity to get a job that the great cure for so many problems in life is some kind of very functional way to work and contribute because that's where most of us derive our satisfaction and see feeling of self-worth so i think that's important and i think we could do a better job than we do right now i think we could because again with technology there's so many things even someone with significant disability can do
that we we need to fight to to decrease the barriers let's say an enlisted man or woman who is quite young possibly headed into combat and they come to you or or someone you know and they ask for advice on how to write their will how they should think about this or what they should do i mean you're not going to tell them specifically how to allocate any resources they might own but what do you say to them how do you think about that
issue yeah and i have been asked this before you know i say don't be superficial about it think about if you really go on who could use whatever it is you can leave whether it's your insurance policy if you have outside money and whatnot and i.e don't find your bunk mate in the barracks and just because it's funny you sign each other's wills to each other think about someone in your family or someone because you want to make an impact
you're going to be gone obviously if you will's being exercised but you want to have an impact on somebody who will actually benefit from it and so i think it's one of the first times in life many young people can think very realistically about the reality they're not immortal and that what they do can have an impact on other people what do you think emotionally has been the hardest part of the military jobs you've had
you know you'd say up front that it would be putting people in harm's way but it's not because everybody enters the military with that expectation the people who are making the decision to put people in harm's way or the people who are being set in harm's way i had the most difficulty with debilitating injuries that people got a few in training but more in combat that ended their ability to be soldiers and it's one thing if a person is killed but
it's another to go to the hospital bed or see them when suddenly they are physically unable they they've lost a limb or or something and they can't be in the club anymore and you know we all say we'll be friends forever and stay connected but the reality is the healthy ones go on into the next operation and you leave the wounded and dead behind and they they try to band together i found it most difficult to make that
you know separation from the wounded and what gave you the greatest joy clearly when you see young people grow up as i'm sure somebody watched my generation grow up as well a young person comes in the military there is a private or a young officer and then suddenly one day you see them operating with confidence and actually doing really good stuff and and talking to you like a fellow leader it's an extraordinarily special moment
and then of course when they get older as you get older i had some sergeant's major who had been privates when i was a young officer and so we literally had parallel our way up and that sense of both had become [Music]
experienced professionals and there's a mutual respect that is a pretty neat feeling you're not in the military now obviously so what what is it you do to fill that gap yeah i mean the moment i left the military there was this sense
of uh loss because i'd grown i've been born in a military hospital i'd gone to west point at age 17 and in a moment in an instant i was no longer a soldier i couldn't identify myself as a soldier i didn't feel you know at home suddenly among soldiers so what i've done is i've tried to replicate that you know we joke about it but soon after i retired we started a company and we got 85 people now and essentially when people ask me why i
did it i said because i want to be part of something i want to be part of a team i wanted a place to go around people that i really liked and admired and it's got young people and middle people and some old people and i can do enough of self-analysis to know that i was trying to recreate the comradeship part of my military experience and it's largely been successful so i really enjoyed that i get many of the same satisfactions that i
got in the military relationship and it made me realize that what i loved about being a soldier was less about carrying a weapon and being a soldier than it was about being a part of a team if we think about the post-world war ii era and to some extent after the korean war vietnam war you have a significant percentage of american males having been through that camaraderie but also a pretty high degree of traumatic stress
and that's not the case anymore right it's a much smaller minority how do you think that changed our nation in the 50s and 60s that so many men had that background i think it was positive because one um so many people were veterans or been
involved heavily in war sacrifices that nobody felt they could pound their chest and say i served and therefore i'm special everybody thought that was a responsibility and i met my responsibility i think it was very good
also even though there was trauma involved everybody went through some kind of trauma through that period so instead of feeling or being viewed as victims everybody viewed as we as a group went through this and i think that was very positive i think now that we've got a very small percentage of americans a couple of things happen one is americans who didn't serve feel a bit guilty and they look from the outside and they
say thank you for your service and they they try to be nice but also the danger is that people who did serve start to feel self-righteous you know i served and therefore i must be more patriotic i must be something more than other people and neither of those things are really healthy we all have a responsibility to society and each other and i think we've got to view it as common requirements as common i would argue that
our failure against covet 19 is a failure to view public health as in the common defense and so i i think that's one of the challenges that's come out of this maybe it's hard to generalize but if a young man say has been through extreme traumatic stress in combat emotional psychological stress are you more in the direction of well they need a lot of therapy they need to talk it through or do you think just suppression is better because after
world war ii a korean war it seems to me we as a nation mostly practiced suppression and what do you think about that issue well i i don't agree with suppression because there are some people who have real trauma but i will be honest with you i also think if you go looking for trauma long enough you'll find it meaning whether it's there or not you can almost create it by by looking for trauma and telling people
you must be traumatized because you went through this then after a while they go i must be traumatized and it almost becomes self-fulfilling having said that i think that a lot of people have gone through a lot and they
need what they need to do is understand that anyone who goes to combat comes out differently they don't come out worse they're not all trauma doesn't always produce weakness it doesn't produce flaws it may produce a little bit more
resilience it may produce a little bit more maturity so there there are competing things so i i don't like the idea of suppression because i think that's unhealthy but at the same time i think we need to take a we don't want to look at every veteran as a victim or a casualty if you think about the numerous afghanis who fought with the united states and afghanistan how is it you think they understood america and what did they value in their
picture of america and how accurate was it yeah it was it was flawed but it was genuine and what i would say is in 2001 amer the afghans had a view of america from having helped uh america fight our cold war enemy in the 80s they fought russia we never fought soviet union but the afghans lost 1.2 million afghans in that war which we funded and what not and then we we turned away and they had their internal problems with a civil war and
then with the rise of the taliban when we arrived in 2001 their expectations were huge they expected that now this is a chance to lose the taliban leadership which they didn't like but also to make political and economic progress because now the united states the 800 pound gorilla in every way was on their side and in their corner now some of those expectations were unrealistic they they hoped so many things would
happen and they contributed to many of the failures the inability to wrestle corruption out of the system and whatnot but over the years that i was involved from 2002 to 2010 there was an increasing gap between what they were getting from the relationship with the united states the experience and what we were able to provide or did provide now there's a lot of blame to go around on that and actually a tremendous amount of
progress was made but they got increasingly frustrated that all of this they felt was possible and yet couldn't be achieved for a number of reasons and that almost created a a sense of bitterness you know we ought to be able to sort this out but we're not we're not doing that i i still think and there's a there's a differing body of knowledge many afghans didn't like america and viewed our use of too much power as being negative and there's
certainly some validity in that at the same time if you'd ask most afghan would they rather have americans there in a big way helping them or the taliban in charge i think they'd absolutely lean toward the americans but they didn't believe we were going to stay and so they didn't feel like we were reliable and i think that became another source of frustration what was the main thing you learned from them you know the afghan people
could go through a tremendous amount you would go to an afghan village and there would you'd fly over it early in the morning and it'd be freezing cold in the winter and there wouldn't be a single bit of smoke coming out of a chimney there was no heat whatsoever and life was primitive beyond which most americans can even conceive and this is in the 20th century 21st century and so first they've got a stoic ability that is just
maybe it's been forced upon them but it's amazing and their ability to tolerate things and their ability to take a long-term view at the same time um and and they would have a tremendous sense of loyalty to people to whom they they built a relationship with this idea that they would stay true to someone that they committed their chefs to at the same time they like any other population they suffered from misinformation and ignorance and and
belief in things that were completely wrong or misperceptions which uh made it difficult for not right now but how much medium-term optimism do you have for afghanistan it's great you worded it that way tyler medium-term i think things are going to move forward i don't think afghanistan's anything like it was in there's been too much progress socially too much education i think the taliban are going to find that
they caught something they really aren't prepared for they're going to try to re-implement what they had in the 1990s and it's going to be very uncomfortable so i expect in the near term there will be a lot of friction and then one of two things is going to happen the taliban will just find they've got to mature and accommodate and evolve themselves into a different kind of government or they won't be able to maintain control
i think that the former is more likely that the taliban are forced to to change who they are but i'm not sure which of those two options is going to play out what did we learn from the armenia azerbaijan war is it all just about drones now or is that an outlier no i think it's an awful lot about drones now i think the idea that you can use technology we really started seeing this in the ukraine when russia started using a combination of
drones and really quick intelligence sharing to to mass artillery and whatnot i think in the armenian azerbaijan conflict that you're finding that even relatively i don't say backward but less advanced nations can put out really advanced technology and so you're not talking about that being limited to super powers to have smart weapons and whatnot everybody's got them now when will be the first drone assassination within the borders of the
united states and what should we do about that now um i think it is probably closer than we think i don't think it's hard to do i think you can go and buy off the shelf technology at you know best buy or a radio shocker you know anything like that and you can get enough to do it and it's hard to stop they're developing techniques but it's really hard to stop and if it's not just an assassination of an individual
what about somebody going after an aircraft as it's taking off things like that i mean just the ability to do to mass things so i am surprised we haven't seen it i every morning i get up i wouldn't be surprised and i think it could easily come from domestic players but say 20 years from now 30 years from now what does the equilibrium look like for controversial public figures will it be a world where you almost can't go out in public
if if the trend continues where it is i think you'll have a tremendous number of people who won't even consider becoming public figures they would just avoid it and then you will have these people who are i call them teflon celebrities where their goal in life is to be a celebrity and they just don't mind that and so they will step into the limelight as many have now and they will live there the danger is that our politicians
become that from that latter group people who are willing to go into very public spaces like that are actually the people who in previous times who have been superficial celebrities so i think that's very very dangerous but we're going to have to come to grips with it the social media ability that the glare if we can't get some kind of maturity in this and some kind of new accommodation then i think that we'll have a very difficult period 20
years from now i can't envision exactly what the solution is but i know there's gonna have to be something do you is there any plausible scenario where defense beats offense or at least holds it back in a sense uh in one sense yes and you say well we've got this high technology available to terrorist groups and you know homemade precision strike and thing assassinations are going to be easier on the other side and maybe
equally negative we've got a surveillance-based society now we actually can know everything about tyler cowan and we can watch you almost every minute and as that expands more the ability to be a nefarious player or something like that it's going to get really hard and so i would argue that that if you consider that as defense knowing everything all the time then that could easily get more powerful than the ability to attack
so more nations will go the chinese route in some manner i i absolutely think so and in fact we'll probably go faster than we expect to now if drones are so important to become so much more important we mentioned cyber attacks before great risk right what does this mean for who the military has to recruit it seems like a very different recruiting problem than what we used to have and maybe a harder problem because people
who can work with cyber attacks they can earn a lot more money in the private sector than say a guy with six foot three with big muscles how are we going to deal with this well that's that's a cultural shift that has to occur in the military but it has to occur and has to occur soon i think we're going to have to start recruiting people with the talent for that or the ability to be taught that may not have the skills walking in so i
think the military needs to become as it did in the aerospace age needs to become the training ground for people to train teach them high-tech skills right now the commercial world is ahead of the military on things like cyber in terms
of training just basic skills and digitization and so the military's relied on trying to bring people in who are pretty good already and then focus them on certain tasks i think the military's got to think about creating
an education system for talented people so that becomes a recruiting tool if you come in and work in the military you get access to technology and training that it's hard to get on the outside and so you get people for a number of years and then they graduate on to to whatever kind of tech firm but that means we've got to reverse we got to get the caboose in front of that the engine on the train right now because
it's not there to close with two questions about you now you're famous for eating only one meal a day do you still do that i do okay the question is what's the meal it's dinner and uh i mean what do you prefer to eat for the one meal if you have your way yeah i'm not a foodie i'm sort of basic i like salad but i like a very basic dinner i like a lot of chicken i like things like that because you know if you take me to a fancy
restaurant you try to serve me fancy food i mean i'll eat it because it's my one meal a day but the reality is it's completely lost on me i just don't get any uh satisfaction so it's very basic food in significant qualities quantities at night and final question what will you be doing next your new book is out risk a user's guide co-authored with anna butrico what next um i think i'm never going to write another
book it's a lot of hard work this is the fourth one and what we'll be doing is in the crystal group we'll be taking the ideas in risk and we'll continue to work with civilian companies and we've worked with a number of states and cities to
try to let them find a path to become more resilient more capable as entities because that's where i think the future has to to go in organizations stan mcchrystal thank you very much my pleasure tyler thank you