able to make dramatic improvements in leadership quality down to the local level. he did at first guard at the top, he fired his top subordinate who was described as the secretary of state for colonies as a man who has no power of command and gives out no inspiration, and is of course quite useless to the chief secretary. . . greatly assisted by

winston churchill invited him to have the best and brightest. positions for top leaders. for example they picked a new commissioner of police who happened to be the police chief in london who was a fantastic individual. he imported british and australian officers from various places to lead not only british troops also indigenous forces. this is a marked contrast to our own personnel system. we have heard general stanley mcchrystal say he can't get anything out of the pentagon because it takes months and we are still operating on it. templar also, by spending so much time in the field, served

as an inspirational force and many of the officers who testified -- talking to people. in most cases had a positive effect on him although there was the occasional slip up where the guerrillas ambushed government forces, temblor showed up and said you are a bunch of bastards and the interpreter translated this as his excellency informed you he knows that none of your mothers and fathers were married when you were born. then he continue you may be bastards' but you will find out that i can be a bigger one which was translated as is excellently does admit his father was also not married to his mother. as a result of his personnel changes and contagious spirit

the government started collecting more intelligence, patrolling more aggressively, denying access to the population to live in the jungle. there was nothing edible in the jungle so school supplies became a big problem. by the time he leaves the insurgents are headed towards defeat. question of command uses this case and the eight other cases to first of all put forward an alternative view of how you win counterinsurgency which is significantly different from the main schools of thought right now. one of those is known as population centric and annamese and it view.

the key in counterinsurgency is leadership especially at the local level. these leaders have to be adaptive. you don't rely on doctrine or series. we have seen in counterinsurgency in iraq and afghanistan, pushed to the lowest levels because of the complexity of the situation. you don't have to have a strong central government that a lot of people think we need to have in afghanistan. if you look at the success in iraq in terms of gaining the participation of local elites, the commanders often times in the central government. we say a good central government does help and central

authorities select the commanders, help or hinder them. the population centric view, what you need is to create government legitimacy and you do this by social and political and economic reforms to bring an end to the population's grievances and you should minimize the use of force because force tends to alienate the population. i do agree gaining people's support is important but a different view of how you do that. security is a big part of it and good governance and virtuous governments and big social and economic programs. if you look in afghanistan, foreign governments and charities poured tons of money into these big social programs to pursue it had very little affect on the insurgency and

people have been more concerned about whether their lives were at stake and more concerned about how they have been treated by the afghan national police. one afghan researcher said people don't care if the roads are paved with gold, they would rather have security. after the population centric school which is a big part of the counterinsurgency manuel, the next is the population center cool, the key is using force to destroy the insurgents and once you do that things are fine. i do agree with the main points, it is critical that you kill or capture large numbers of insurgents. in most cases you have to do that.

it is also the case that popular attitudes shift according to security. if you direct force at the enemy, and look at major success in iraq, they is extensive force to be used throughout those engagements. the idea of fighting without winning applies in most cases. this is very relevant about how we should opt for reconciliation and i don't think you can have reconciliation without having security first. that is part of what general stanley mcchrystal said as well. how did i arrive at this leadercentric view? i won't be labor it now.

what is important about the other things? if we look at particular conflicts the quality of the leadership goes up and down, the effectiveness and counterinsurgency goes up and down, greater impact than anyone else. the resources -- it is a critical variable. if you look individual cases, you had one commander replaced by someone else and very different results, that is a function of individual leadership. the bulk of the book is devoted to how to improve leadership. that is what we want for practitioners and policymakers.

what are the challenges to underperforming leaders. there are a lot that prevent that from happening. you have sympathy factor, often times the commanding officer will develop a close relationship with subordinates and a lot of time in developing so they might be reluctant for that person. in a lot of countries the commanders have friends or relatives people close people will protect them. there is a fear that if you fire too many people you will inhibit initiative and undermine morale. it takes smart commanders to break through the obstacle. another was in the philippines. he spent a lot of time in the

field. he would often times where and aloha shirts so you would know who he was from a distance and he would show up unannounced and find troops sitting around doing nothing or stealing chickens. the command officer would get demoted or fired almost certainly. he was willing to fire friends and relatives which is often not the case. hamid karzai is not particularly interested in doing that. at one point, his generals came to him and said these changes are starting to demoralize the army and his reply was i don't care. if they are bad i will demoralize them some more. there are a few instances where political considerations outweigh merit in how commanders

are chosen. sometimes in the military there is a tendency to say how dare we let that happen? certainly it can be damaging in many ways but keep in mind that war is a political activity. there are cases where politics from merrick. our civil war is an excellent example. abraham lincoln gave ships to a lot of inexperienced politicians in the north in order to get their help in reporting people from their state and so forth. ultimately at the higher level you have some sort of balance between merit and political considerations. afghanistan has that balance and the government has not put merit often a enough. in the book i go into a lot of

detail on what foreign powers in the united states and afghanistan to improve the leaders of indigenous allies. the indigenous allies had severe leadership problems. this has often been ignored by senior officials in the united states. in vietnam after we entered the ground war in 1965 general westmoreland ignored the forces for several years and let them try to sort it out which is sort of nice in deference toward sovereignty. the reality was it allowed problems to fester. in iraq in the early years, they did not pay attention to the iraqis were choosing as police

commanders with unfortunate results. smarter great power allies came up with the variety of genius ways to deal with this problem. some of them in afghanistan, i would emphasize the personal senior decisionmakers should have the greatest knowledge to look at the different officers in the past to look at what might work here. the highest risk and highest reward was the covert action to replace the chief of state. this worked sometimes. in vietnam it was a catastrophic failure. in 1963 we orchestrated the overview of south vietnam's president. he was better than a lot of people and the people after him were a lot worse. the war went downhill

drastically. lots of people were purged from the government. a milder form of action that was used was used in el salvador funneling money into the political campaign. that proved to be a blessing for the counterinsurgency. a more recent example has been disclosed. in 2006 the united states, pressuring various means orchestrated the removal of iraq's first democratically chosen prime minister. i hasten to add he deserved to

be kicked out. he created secret prisons and killing people for sectarian reasons and during one critical meeting where lots of things had to be decided, whether tomato paste should be introduced as part of the rations for ramadan. another saying that worked well is promising additional aid. this works better than withdrawing aid. and we use the promise of extra aid -- the person that was installed turned the war around almost single-handedly. a huge success. we may need to think about the other uses of aid in

afghanistan. we want to try to get a power sharing and also to influence to be part of the cabinet. the defense minister can be crucial. we have two people in afghanistan right now. hamid karzai got away from the cabinet. that is a huge issue going forward. there have been instances where foreign governments tried to influence the way leaders are selected. in afghanistan it was pretty early on. hamid karzai was giving out too many jobs to his relatives and members of his tribe. the world bank and nato said we will force you to adopt a merit based hiring system.

hamid karzai said we will do that. he had to have the afghans in general. some of the other senior leaders ended up skirting the system. we have test answers and sneak them to their friends. it was really not that effective. a more effective way requires more pressure on the host government to control who their commanders are. we do this in vietnam with the reconnaissance unit program. with the cia leaders in these military forces we were able to remove the influence of these forces. these were outstanding. these were collecting information to the people, extremely effective. the model we used most often,

used persuasion of our allies particularly in the case of the book, this depends on the quality of personal relationships so the ambassador and senior military in the country tend to be very important in particularly, the social skills they have. do they have the right personality to engage that foreign leader, it suggests that we be wary of efforts to bring in people from out of the country for important diplomatic missions like special on a voice a senators and so forth. in vietnam you had personable people who got close to the south vietnamese president who

convinced him to do things the united states wanted him to do. some were standoffish and had social skills. some more rude to the south vietnamese president. the south vietnamese president, he was so offended. he was so bad the chief of the american military mission said he was better -- a good lady shoe store to be represented in the u.s. and asian country. when you don't have experienced leaders to draw on, that is will we face in afghanistan, spend a lot of time developing leaders. it is time consuming because a lot of people assume you can create these new forces, of

nowhere. what you can do is put these forces weapons and uniforms, you can't create the leaders you need in the natural time frame. you need ten years. a lot of people say 20 years to build people, battalion commanders and district police chiefs and those were the senior leaders who are in a crucial counterinsurgency. what happens is your experience -- you have to give authority to officers who don't have the experience or talent either. we started in 1980. let's double the security forces. that is similar to what we have heard today. the problem is they didn't have a lot of americans to help out. so you created these forces but

a lot of them were involved in death squads, gunning people down. civilians who were not closely tied to the insurgency. is not only fuel the opposition in el salvador but created opposition in the u.s. congress. this time factor has also been ignored when people tried to introduce a new elite class and support the old elite in running a country. we removed the leadership of the iraqi military and brought in exiles and other people who don't have a lot of experience running the country and this is chronicled in a fiasco as we saw how disastrous that was. in reconstruction after the civil war which i found to be fascinating, we introduced in

our curriculum, the parallels to a lot of experiences are pretty striking. the radical republicans in congress decided they had enough of the southern white a leak so they banned them from voting and brought in carpetbaggers and freemen to run the government without really thinking about whether they had the qualifications to run a government. we saw a lot of things in afghanistan and iraq. ineptitude, voter fraud, use of mood altering substances. this also allowed crime to flourish and the former confederate officers were particularly upset by this so

they formed the white militia organization and many others, initially as vigilante organizations, it is very similar to what happened in afghanistan in certain ways. the taliban made a lot of inroads. they were good at maintaining order and providing trials. in reconstruction the insurgents didn't prevail militarily but what they did do is eroded the will, the north said we will do what we called reconciliation. we are going to bring these southern whites back into the government but ended up losing what they did in the first place. the jim crow laws were worse than what had been there before.

given the size of afghanistan's security forces today and plans for expanding them there is definite leadership void we need to fill some how so they are not terrorizing people forgetting involved with drugs and so forth. this rules out the possibility that we will use in command of those units, there have been many instances, the defect 0 leaders whether they are advisers, partner arrangement because the afghan -- the american calls the shots. afghans have decent leaders but you need to have americans to do

technical things. we have heavily armed americans, and makes them more comfortable to get things done. and see that they are going -- they are not setting up these roadside checkpoints where they check people down. this need for american forces to bolster the afghan forces, compelling argument to why there ought to be more americans in afghanistan. lastly i am going to talk about the u.s. side of the equation. the u.s. army and marine corps. the army and marine corps is

tolerant. a survey of american officers who served in afghanistan, this is in the last part of the book. an interesting thing came out of this. 49% of the marines said their service ought to relieve commanders more often than is currently the case. there are number of reasons for this. there is the sympathy factor. they invested. there's also the fact that today you will probably kill your career in the military which was not always the case. in the military and particularly

the army, have not been promoting the right types of officers in the way they should. that not promoting people who are intuitive or outside the box who are good at creating innovative solutions and good at complex problem solving. they could learn some things from the business world. i worked in the business world for a few years. i destruct by the fact that the more affective companies spend a lot of time matching personality to tasks. there were personality tests to try to have the sales personnel, the engineering mentality. the u.s. military, interested in this at first.

we heard about these tests, it was a bunch of baloney and it was very useful managing personnel. the military particularly need this because the military tests, the military dominated by group of certain personalities, known as sensing, judging. these people rely on the 5 senses to tell them about the world. they like details, facts and structure. daylight doing things with standard operating procedures. if danny glover in lethal weapon or any of the other police chiefs insisting things be done by the book, they tend to like 200 slide power points, they like to haggle over the fog size and color, there has been more research done in the business

world. it is very interesting. the organizations dominated by these individuals tend to rely on standardization. plans that based on past experience. this tends to work well on dealing with an activity that doesn't require a lot of change or an environment that is fluid such as construction. the military world such as supply. that does not work so well when you have organizations in a changing environment dealing with ambiguity and computer software. that is a prime example in the military world. organizations are more averse to taking risks and another interesting finding for the counterinsurgency survey only 28% of the army respondents said that their service and courage commanders to take the risks.

that is a huge problem, initiative and risktaking are fundamental. a lot of people in the leadership fall into the intuitive thinking category. these individuals use intuition to understand the world and abstract ideas and paint a big picture and rigid structures and standard procedures. theodore roosevelt or steve jobs tend to like kansas memos that get to the heart of the matter and these massive power.presentation this and the process that other people use. people who have intuitive

thinkers tend to be very good at adapting to change with innovative solutions. there are quite a few of these people. they are at the lower level of the officer corps. why are there not as many higher of. a lot has to do with the fact that people with higher ranks are in a judging category. people think like they do. people need to spend a lot of time and effort trying to bring up and cultivate more of those intuitive thinking types. this is at the heart of one of the most important structures in the military today over the future of the officer corps. general stanley petronis and general casey very much understands we have seen them talking a lot about the

leadership. general david petraeus in the promotion board. they were not given a fair shake to the more intuitive thinking types. with those heavyweights behind you you would think they would be fixed. there they large constituency in the military that is averse to making the changes. if you go into iraq and afghanistan a lot of people were not in villages, a lot of them have not bought into this idea. we will see an ongoing battle, this book will be used as fire support in this battle. thank you very much. [applause] >> can you all hear me?

i am going to provide a lot of comments. i will ask mark to interrupt me. it is a pleasure to be back where i did write fiasco five years above here in 2005. lot of people say you are going to call that book what? are you sure? a year later a guy said to me fiasco, where were you when i needed you? i want to begin by saluting several friends. from here and iraq and afghanistan. would you put up your hand if you are a veteran of iraq or afghanistan? keep those hands up. put up your hand if you are a veteran of vietnam or else all door. thank you all very much for your

service. [applause] put up your hand if you have been a troop advisor anywhere. keep the intern's honest. i agree with 90% of what mark said. i will focus on the 10% with which i don't agree with you are free to interrupt as we go along. leadership is necessary in counterinsurgency. i agree leadership is even more necessary in counterinsurgency. i saw this in iraq. the greatest achievement of general david petraeus is not. that was passed over by the french and british.

what the achievement was was pushing it down through many special commands through this sort of thing like a battlefield circulation, going out and talking. they both spent an entire day's sitting and talking, skipping the core done to battalion -- i ran into two leaders quoting general david petraeus's letters to the troops. at there was a private reading. this was a radical change. for the first time in the iraq war which we had been fighting for four years. everyone was on the same sheet of music. there was a common understanding and common goals. a radical change in the way the military operated. it was from energy and will

power. leadership counts. another example is in afghanistan. he thought he was doing counterinsurgency. he was issuing the right orders. they were talking about protecting the population. but out in the field, wasn't buying it. no one said you don't get a vote here. what you found in the field was an emmyeccentric operations. a real gap between what he thought and did. that is an example of leadership not working. leadership is necessary. charismatic leadership is great. it was hardly sufficient. i have seen charismatic leadership. without strategy. it is disastrous. you do not want to go there. charismatic leadership without

strategy or theory leads troops off of a cliff. you have to have a strategy. charismatic leadership without a strategy is a ferrari without a steering wheel. that is what we had driving around a lot of places in iraq for the first four years of the war. the steering wheel ends in one place. in the ditch. >> there are differences in the front. at the beginning of the book i lay out ten important attributes in counterinsurgency and one of them is charisma. you don't have to have all of those. you can be very good conventional leader and or at counterinsurgency. the individuals you are referring to will fit that mold and they may be charismatic. someone like general patton in conventional warfare would have

been good in counterinsurgency. i am not sure. they have to have some sort of basic strategy but without having the battalion commanders. you will not be able to turn that strategy into success. some of the stuff you covered. battalion commanders come up with their own way to bring leads from the other side. general david petraeus emphasized the model. >> mark, you ignorant slut. that takes us back to 40 years ago. when local officials and afghanistan were abusive or corrupt that was the failure of doctrine and leadership. one of the problems american officials have to face is your

host government if it is corrupt, you need to go against that because that is your goal, to get people to support the government, not to get them to support you. you don't care whether they give some form of grudging allegiance or tolerant to the host government. the afghan villagers were explaining why they prefer the taliban to the afghan police. we don't like the taliban, the women can't go to the marketplace and we have to grow beards believes they don't take our little boys away. that is a problem. that is something you need to deal with and that is why general stanley mcchrystal's plan that says you need to get troops out with the afghan police in order to police their behavior, we have two enemies in afghanistan.

the other is the afghan government. the idea is to put an additional thing to have them located. we need to remember the counterinsurgency and the finer point -- stance on the head of a pin. counterinsurgency is a minority view. general david petraeus is a hero to the american people and a liar to the core of the u.s. economy. they don't like general david petraeus. he has three strikes against him. he likes reporters and journalists and reporters and politicians and washington. he had a successful first tour in iraq and has a ph.d. from princeton. they tolerated him but pushed him out. don't come back to pollute our

young troops. the problem in just getting people to take on counterinsurgency, this is one of the jobs of leadership, to make sure battalion commanders are with the program but not just giving you lift service and hitting the locals take over the head. on leadership, i totally endorse mark's view of relief of ineffective work week leaders. it is a great management tool. it should be used more often. my short unhappy life as a newsroom manager i only fired one person and he and i were happy over the next day. he was a screenwriter in hollywood. he was the smartest person who ever worked for me but went to capitol hill to cover hearings to read charles dickens novels.

in large chunks of the testimony of what happened to the banking committee, you don't do any favors by leaving them in which they are not fit. it is not people who don't get it but people at odds with you. the corollary to that is relief cannot be a career terminator. you are not the right person for this job right now. you are an honest, loyal, duties will officer. that is what made general officer management work in world war ii. you were not successful within 90 days. sometimes less. relief did not end your career. one of the great nickname's ever was an assistant division commander, was relieved and

devoted to colonel. saved the army and retired as a four star general. a more famous case, general terry, commander of the first infantry division of sicily in 1943. first time american troops fought german troops on european soil. he won that battle and was relieved. a year later he was commanding another division across northern france into germany and had a happy and successful leadership. this is even more important. it encourages risktaking. all war requires risktaking but in a one year rotations system in corey and vietnam and iraq in a one year rotation system,

creates a powerful disincentive. you get a lot of commanders who think get my head down, get my head down and we will be okay. why take any risk? the threat of relief balances that incentive system and creates more incentive to get out there and take the initiative in what is essential especially in counterinsurgency. what works? the megaprojects are not the way to go but it is the stalinist five your project to restore electricity. americans felt about restoring electricity, i saw half of baghdad string the generators. when donald rumsfeld said the lights are on it was not because of anything he did but the study generators who were across

baghdad in other neighborhoods. look at what the locals do. the locals know what the solutions are. microprojects are the way to go. quick projects that are sustainable and seen and controlled by locals. some one pointed out don't hand out soccer balls. empower the local. don't make them like you. give him the soccer ball. kill or capture, you have to kill or capture a few but fewer than we think. you will not find stronger advocates of the counterinsurgency approach than people who try to kill or capture their way out of iraq and afghanistan. this is why general kristol is such an advocate. he is trying plan a and he knows

it didn't work. >> i agree with that. there is the enemy centric view which focuses on the enemy. they are partially correct. we don't need to focus on the enemy at all. there is some language that says that. we have to do some of that. general david petraeus would tell you, you have to be relentless in pursuing the enemy. that can't be all you do because you get into problems on political, bringing the population in. >> running after them with wads of dollar bills, not with a weapon in their hands. the key facts in ending the insurgency or achieving a cease-fire was general david petraeus agreed to pay

$30 million a month to put 100,000 insurgents on the payroll. they were not disarmed or demobilized. they remain with their weapons control in areas. it was not a bad deal. $30 million is what george steinbrenner pays for a mediocre second baseman. $30 million bought a long-term cease-fire. how long it lasts we don't know. a lot of people think they could have a good civil war down the road. finally, something that is quite crucial is the countersinsurgency, a big role that the manual did not speak to at all, this was the problem with counterinsurgency. we borrowed french and british

30 which comes from their colonial experiences. that is important because they were fighting to stay in those colonies. americans are fighting to leave the places we are in. we have a very different outcome in mind. the host government is not something we can appoint. it is a different set of problems. when the host government's interests diverge from us, exhibit a, south viet nam, exhibit b, iraq. and cars i -- hamid karzai in afghanistan. the host government must divorce you. must effectively become

anti-american in some form. that took care of my comments. this is a really thoughtful insightful book that you need to buy. >> we have time for just a couple questions for mark and tom. please visit the back table. we have copies of this fantastic book as many of you can tell. tom is a red sox fan. we have microphones coming around. >> thank you for the presentation. the leadership being an important aspect, command and control structure, that was the

obvious factor. counterinsurgency, i am not sure by doing that you are leaving aside a number of extremely important aspects to be developed. counter counterinsurgency's relationship to government and actually development but also developing aspects being adaptive to the local environment, understanding culture, habits and in the case of afghanistan and increased dynamics of tribes. by making that focus, you mentioned aid as not being that helpful. and we focus on leadership. it wasn't effective.

the delivery process of aid from the international community, $0.90 on the dollar to the ground. that was affected. small projects were important. that relates to something else you brought up. certain leadership is important in the command and control process. he also mentioned the important issue, what was to be done with what is to be done, the u.s./nato command in terms of affecting local host government structures of leadership, tom mentioned some issues about police and training, i would agree with that but you want to be careful where you take that. you don't want to be perceived

as affecting government in terms of the leadership because that could be used against you very easily. that is the issue raised. if you want to elaborate -- >> let me hit on this quickly. maybe not cover these in enough detail. in terms of governance, leadership is important in all of those. corruption is almost entirely bad leadership especially in afghanistan. if somebody is taking a bribe they were probably involved in it too. if you don't have a police -- there will be corruption. you are also dealing with

tribes. the problem solving skills that will help them deal with it, the question about influencing -- afghanistan's leaders, there's a lot of this going on. the police has terrific leadership problems. there have been terrible afghan police chiefs who didn't know what they were doing. this guy really needs to go. we haven't always twisted their arms. they have a new interior minister who has been very cooperative. so and so is corrupt and allowing his troops to rape young boys.

there are still exceptions. things become problematic. we are going to defer to the host nation's judgment but we have to have a role. we will let the afghans do it. sometimes that just doesn't work. >> question over here. >> i have two comments. the civil affairs guy, i have a comment and question for mark. i have to pick up on where you left off. in my experience as a practitioner in this business to include low-level counterinsurgency operations --

>> i want to.out -- point out the great hero of southern iraq when he tried to keep cuba from blowing up. >> there is too much influence on hearts and minds. as i tell people i don't care if you like me because i'm going home to ride my harley-davidson. by mission here is to make you like yourself. we are done. our time is short and it is not our country. the emphasis is not just capacity but confidence on their part. it is too much about hardstand minds. i find your presentation

fascinating but also john's book and to talk to john at lyiength. his premise -- please comment on the role of leadership and this idea of learning organizations. >> there are aspects of the learning organization model. one of the points i make is a big mistake to throw counterinsurgency out the window. the marine corps did some instructions. it was always part of the mission. we want that to be an important part. there is a danger. if you focused on being a

learning organization you tend to get too drawn into doctrine and rely on the past. certain personalities use the past rather than the present. he thinks the u.s. military has to some extent become overreliant on its doctrine. the army has a greater tendency in that regard. you can't use a model and apply it everywhere but most of the good practitioners, the very good ones have studied a lot of history so they have a lot of familiarity with a subject. how you want to have a lot of familiarity, if you spend a lot of time thinking about it and capturing lessons learned, a toolbox will help you address

those problems. >> if you summarize this, the army has a doctor in, the marine corps has a culture. >> i have time for one more. >> >> i'm not talking about targeting. i'm talking about strategic intelligence. the population and so forth. >> most of what i cover in the book in terms of intelligence, the most important intelligence is at that local level in getting villagers to tell you where the insurgents are which comes back to leadership in vietnam. that is how i got into this.

which areas really getting more intelligence. it was always the question of the south vietnamese police chief. it is critical. in terms of the largest strategic intelligence i you talking about understanding culture or in a country or -- >> from the u.s. perspective. who is doing the intelligence? >> we are doing what needs to be done. as i mentioned battlefield's circulation of commanders is a big part of this. you have someone like stanley mcchrystal who is going out and talking to people in the field. he tends