comments@c-span.org or send a tweet at c-span 12 comments. join the c-span conversation. like us on facebook. follow us on twitter. >> history book shelf features popular american history writers and airs on american history tv every weekend at this time. 13 years ago on october 7th, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attack, president george w. bush announced u.s. military strikes n afghanistan. next retired general stanley mcchrystal commander of u.s. forces in afghanistan discusses his memoir "my share of the task." in the book general mcchrystal recounts the major turning points in his 34-year military career which ended january 10. the hour-long event was hosted by the free library of hiladelphia last year.

>> well, thank you very much. thanks for coming out. i think it's a wonderful opportunity. the gentleman sitting next to me is kind of a big deal. -- pays e who is attention to american foreign policy and military affairs, you know that ever since the attacks on this country on 9/11, the united states has had to evolve militarily, in our intelligence community, and many ways to meet the challenge of this new enemy. and more than anyone that i can think of, general mcchrystal has been responsible for shaping that evolution and developing the -- what i call the targeting engine, which is what have i think adopted as our primary method of defending the country. so thank you for being here, general mcchrystal.

great to see you. >> thanks, mark. thanks for a too kind introduction. i always thought of you as a nonfiction writer but i know you're going into fiction now. >> now, i know that, you know, our -- you were the commander of our special operations in iraq and afghanistan. there has been as i mentioned a rapid evolution. i'm familiar from writing blackhawk down with the way things were in the early 1990's. can you give us an idea of some of the overall strategy that's evolved and we'll get to the specifics maybe but also the tactics that you've developed? >> well, not me. a group of people did. thanks. taking you back a little bit, at the end of the vietnam war as america has done at the end of other wars, the special operations units that are created essentially get gutted or they get disbanded entirely. there is a bias to do away with them.

and in the late 1970's american special operating forces when i first joined the green berets or special forces were in really pa thetic shape. they were barely a shadow of what they had been at the height of the vietnam war. in 1980 the mission eagle call was launched to try to conduct a rescue mission into tehran to rescue the american citizens held hostage in the embassy. it failed. it not only failed painfully, it failed for many reasons but one of which is our special operations capability while we still had people who were brave and strong and what not, they were not an integrated community capable of doing very complex things in deep. that was a very complex endeavor. and so it failed. and from the ashes of that, there was a report called the holloway commission and it recommended that we take a look at our capability to do this kind of operation and the structure to do it. i entered special operations a

few years later as a young ranger officer, and i was able, and i try to tell this in great detail in the book, because when you start to build a special operations capability as we were redoing in the early 1980's, the first thing you do is go find stereotypical special operators. typically guys with big shoulders, big knuckles, good shots, brave, and all that sort of thing. that's important. you got to have that. but it's really the easiest part of creating the organization. what you have to do if you're going to do complex operations, you have to have a huge intelligence capability, integrate it with operators, you have to have aviation ability to bring this all together and, most importantly, you have to have a culture and that culture has to be very mature. that is the word i've used very carefully. it is not a culture of stereotypical rambo kind of things. that is not the way special operations succeed. that's how you lose. and so you have to build a

culture that is evolved of problem solving and problem solving in which building teams does that. what happened is we went up through the first -- i was in the rangers and then joint special operations command through the first goal where we did scud hunting, hunting for iraqi missiles out in western iraq. we were getting better and better at what we did. we all paid huge attention to what mark wrote so brilliantly about in "black hawk down" the operation mowing -- mogg. we went to school on that experience aided by the document he had written on an operation that had gone very badly but then had been essentially dealt with by the force on the ground with extraordinary courage but a lot holes in what we could do came out. we came as a fairly brittle force. i.e. if everything went perfectly the way you planned it then you're in good shape. but when things start to go badly as they so often do how

do you deal with it? do you have the resilience to deal with it? we started to try to fix that and make it a more flexible and resilient force. we went up into 2001 after 9/11 and of course the first operations in afghanistan toppling the afghan government, driving out al qaeda, were some brilliant, deep raids. and in iraq with the initial invasion same thing. working against a nation state. but where we found ourselves in really late 2003, which was when i returned to special operations, is you remember in the spring of 2003 the invasion of iraq went sort of surprisingly well or deceptively well. and suddenly things in iraq started to go very badly in the late summer. we had a sense that if we could just arrest saddam hussein that that would potentially stop the problem. what happened was we did. the force found and arrested saddam hussein. what we found is what had grown sort of beneath the surface was

a cancer-like network led by a guy who had created an al qaeda related organization. it wasn't technically al qaeda at that point but it was a combination of foreign leadership and then frustrated iraqi sunnies. they were a network and they were not a small organization trying to do one or two things. they were trying to run an insurgency using what we call terrorist tactics. so suddenly the force that had been beautifully designed and honed to a fine edge for very precise but very episodic occasional operations was unprepared and unable to do the wider problem. it's like having a swat team for your police force for all of philadelphia, but in reality if you can't cover the whole city and you can't do a lot of things, that one swat team can never be decisive. that's where we found ourselves that began the significant evolution. that's where we really began to change dramatically. >> right. in somalia, i think task force

ranger had been there a month or two before the big battle that i wrote about. and during that period they launched six missions. so the path -- the pace was, intelligence gathering, finding targets, planning, and operations. sometimes very quickly once that intelligence came together, and then launching a raid. op tempo ow -- what means and exactly how it applied in iraq. frpblt that is very interesting. there were a series of raids in mogadishu, all happened a number of days apart. you gather intel, get it together, make a decision. when you set yourself criteria to launch when those criteria come, you launch. but it is a pretty centralized, pretty deliberate process. when we got in iraq we were originally doing that. we would have this precise thing. what we found is we were having that effect but very narrow effect, very slow effect. when we would go on a target, for example, we would go to

pick up an individual and there may or may not be a fight. if we captured him and his computer and his phone and documents and other things, we'd capture all those things, but the force, one of our small forces around the country would do the operation. then it might take a day or two for them to send the individual back to our headquarters where we could begin effective interrogation. and the stuff that was captured would typically go in a plastic garbage bag. and it would be written in arabic typically and then there would be a computer. and it would come back and it would be 48 hours old before it got to the main headquarters and then would sit there because we didn't have translators to do it. when i first took over i went in this room and there is a pile of this stuff that hadn't even been read or exploited as we'd call it, digested for intelligence. counterinsurgency or counterterrorism is all about intelligence. whoever knows the most, wins. and so we had this incredible inability to digest information, process it, and

then operate. we started to get where we could be a little bit faster but we developed a system called f 3 ea for find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze. that is a cycle you go through. you find somebody. you fix them in a location and a time now. you finish by capturing or killing. you exploit whatever you capture. you analyze that and you learn from it. it's basically a learning cycle, learning and then action. woo he would do that and go through that process fwu would be painfully -- but it would be painfully slow because we were operating with different organizations not all organic to mind and different agencies, intelligence agencies and what not. and this may surprise you but not all parts of the u.s. government work together seamlessly. [ laughter] so here we are as this cycle and we have these things, what we call blinks between the parts. and so one element would find a target but by the time the information got to the people who were going to fix it usually with a predator or

something like that to make sure they're there then, time would have passed and accuracy of information fidelity would have passed. then it would be passed over to the raid force. again, you'd have a loss. it's like the game telephone where you whisper around the room and it's unintelligible by about the fifth person. we're trying to do things in that. we say this is madness. and so we started. we went on a campaign to fix that process. bringing in different parts of the organization, building our intelligence capacity, giving ourselves a mindset that was different from before. before it was as if each element did its part of the process then they could take great pride. we succeeded and did what we were told. we wiped that clean and we said, nobody is successful unless the whole process works. the definition of winning is the same for all of us. only if we win this fight. that was quite a bit different than what we'd had. by the summer of -- things got really bad starting in late march of 2004 in iraq. that's when the country

basically melted down. and we started operating as hard as we could and the op tempo mark referred to is operational tempo. it's how fast you can operate. nd we realized the size of abu zackway's network that we were going to have to hit it a lot and not once a month. by august of 2004 we got up to 18 raids a month or about one every other night. and we thought we were moving at warp speed. literally we thought this is the most amazing thing we've ever done. we are the most efficient operations task force on the face of the earth. we were but we were still losing. so we came to the conclusion that we have got to speed up more. there had been this fixation on just going after the senior leaders or high value targeting, decapitation. we came to the conclusion that wasn't going to work. it was sort of simple. we started the war with the

idea if we got abu zakawri that the whole thing would fall apart but think of any organization you've ever been in. if the key person is taken out does it really get worse? i worked in the pentagon. it would have made it a lot better. so we realized you really got to go after the people who do the work, the people who do logistics, communications, pass information, build car bombs, communicate. you got to take those ute. we came up with a strategy. i used to tell people it's like rocky bail boa and apollo creed. we'll hit them in the mid section and hit them a lot. from august of 2004 when we did 18 raids two years later same month same force same fight we were doing 300 raids a month. that's ten a month. if you stop and say ten a night, that's a lot. that's impressive, that means every raid guy on the force is going on a raid at least one raid every night. every pilot is flying one or

two raids every night. and these raids are not patrols. these are going in the door somebody is getting shot. extraordinary. and to do that, though, you can't use previous systems. one, you've got to be able to bring in this intelligence on an industrial scale. we got to the point where instead of the plastic bags of information on a target we would start to exploit their computers, their phones. we would take biometric data. it would be pumped back to west virginia right from the target to see if we'd ever had that person before. and if we'd ever had any dealings with them. we would move the documents back, immediately scan them, send them back to multiple places in the u.s. and in theatre and everybody would be analyzing at the same time. and we would be trying to turn this to learn as quickly as we could. we got to the point where we could hit three targets a night from the initial intelligence. we would find joe smith at 9:00

at night because we'd been looking for him. we would find out from what we got on that target about john doe. we might hit that at midnight. and we'd hit another at 3:00 in the morning. the reason it was important to the networks ause repair themselves very quickly. if we were terrorists as soon as mark is captured, pretty soon i'm going to hear about it and the first thing i do is i move my location. i change my -- all those things, connections that i have. you call it cutouts. because it moves to repair itself. you got to be quicker than they can repair themselves both the hit targets and also quicker than they can promote new people up, develop new leaders. over time we started seeing the relative age of leaders of al qaeda in iraq go down and the relative effectiveness go down because of that. so the op tempo became the rocky balboa strategy of pummel as fast as you can so it can't breathe. and then over time had the

decisive effect, which we actually did along with a number of other factors. >> one thing that i think is very interesting to me about that change and increasing the tempo is the role that technology played. i mean, obviously we've seen the development of drones. we've seen the application of super computers. one of the things that you did was move intelligence analysts out into your base there, integrating everything up front. can you talk about that a little bit, the role the technology played? >> yeah. there are several things with technology that changed the fight. one is obvious. it was predators. it wasn't drone strikes. it was drone surveillance. because you put a surveillance that gives you full motion video means that anywhere in our force to include the guys on the ground could watch what they, the predator is watching in full-time video or real-time video. the real effect of that is several.

one is where it used to take let's say 120 people when only 20 were going inside it takes a hundred to secure it outside to make sure you don't get people, reinforcement, what not. if you can do it from the air, you only send 20. now the other hundred can hit five other targets. so we could hit six targets in the time we're hitting one. and you know so much more. also you can put drones over it and you can watch people all the time. if we decided to watch someone in this room all the time, pretty soon we'd know what you call pattern of life. we'd know where you go, who you hang out with, what you do. we'd know how you walk, all those things. and whether you're good or bad or involved in the insurgency. and so you can build up this knowledge. suddenly you're very precise, not going out and just picking up a bunch of people and trying to figure out who is good or bad. you start to know a lot. that is one technology that dramatically changed it. another was night vision. we had night vision on all of our force, all of our helicopters, every one.

what that meant was you could of course see in the dark but in fire fights you're absolutely dominant. we put laser ending sites on all our weapons. in a fight against the enemy at night they're not as well trained as our guys but we have this incredible dominance. so fire fights our ratio was probably a thousand to one. in terms of people getting hit back. now, the problem is, we don't have that many guys so the ones mount up and every time you lose a person it's a huge cost because they're so well trained and so valuable. but you still have dominance and you have the willingness to go places and do things that you wouldn't otherwise. the other one that's less obvious is just the ability to communicate. video teleconferences and not so much radio, but video teleconferences, we did use radios. but, for example, we would take all of our radio nets that were happening on the ground. we would pick them up and we would put them into our

classified computer network system. so every -- we had a technology that allowed you to sit at your lap top. wherever you were in afghanistan, iraq, anywhere, you could watch from above what's happening and you could listen to their radio nets from our side down at the team level. now you say, well then i could micro manage. we didn't. we never micro managed. but you could reach down and you had this situational awareness which allows you to know what's going. something starts to go bad, you can move med evac, do a lot of things to help that force very quickly. e other thing, to be effective against an enemy network you have to be a better network than they are. think what your network in life is. it may be the people in church, community group, where you work, family, a combination of things. and how you communicate with them determines often the strength of how you share information. you know people for 50 years.

you know them pretty well. you don't need to communicate as often. we started every day with a 90-minute video teleconference with the whole command. thousands of people. we pumped information. we had a conversation about updates on intelligence. updates, what happened. updates in operation. senior leaders. every day i'm on it. with all the people. so everybody hears the senior leader every day and they hear the conversations plus they hear information go up and go down. we created what we called shared consciousness so the whole organization knows what we think the situation is, what's happening, where it's going, which the effect is, it decentralizes decision making. if everybody knows what the corporate leadership is thinking, what we're trying to do or explain it, they don't have to come up with decisions. they know what we're trying to do. they just make them. we didn't ask them to come up for decisions. i didn't make tactical decisions, hit target x or y, because i wanted them to do that. i gave them an effect. i said here's what we got to do

in this area. create this effect. defeat this network. you figure out how to do it. the only thing i did was sort of constant pressure. and that revolutionized the way we could operate. it was communication at the heart of it. >> one of the things you mentioned in your book, general, is how -- the emotional impact this kind of video conferencing had on say an intelligence analyst and working in a cubicle in langley, who is getting briefed by the guy who went out and acted on the information that they just provided. what kind of effect did that have? >> you think about -- we talked about cultural differences. one of the things about special operators is you're brought up to have this tribal culture. it's very macho. and it's a little bit intimidating, intentionally so. so people who deal with them are often a little hesitant. and -- but the operators don't have all the expertise. you really have it in your intel people and what not. as we started to grow we became

a meritocracy because we were communicating so much. in one case i remember vtc's you'd see an operator communicating right back with a young analyst back in the united states or somewhere and the operation had occurred because of what the analyst had done and the operator is going, hey, jim, great job. you know, all part of the team now. another case you'd go into our headquarters in which we pushed operators everywhere and rotated analysts so everybody operated forward and back part of the time. i'd go in and see a big macho operator leaning over a plywood table. everything in the command was plywood. and there would be a 22-year-old female analyst, weighed like 98 pounds. she's got his finger in her -- her finger in his chest saying when you do this you got to do x, x, and he is taking it because it became a meritocracy. it wasn't perfect. this took years for us to get to. don't get me wrong. there were stops and starts and constant stresses but it was

key because suddenly everybody owned the problem. >> one of the things you also touch on in your book is the evolution of interrogation which is a very hot topic here. you mentioned that early on, you know, there was abuse of the enhanced interrogation methods. you evolved away from that. can you talk about that a little bit? >> sure. how many people here have ever run a prison or interrogation facility? [ laughter] that's how many we had in my command. and if you think about it, go back to 9/11. and the first responses. okay. what do we do? how do we do this? we start capturing very serious terrorists. what do you do? well we'll bring the specialists in. there literally weren't any. how do we do this? people go back to history books. we went to manuals on how to interrogate. but most of the manuals that were written in the military were designed to, in a conventional war between two armies where you capture private x of the soviet army

and you're going to ask him questions. that's the way they were designed. we're talking about guys that are in a terrorist network and some pretty hardened people. so we had to learn our way through it. as you can see, the nation had to come to grips with how we feel about this. we're still doing that with guantanamo and where we're going to try people. it's still an ongoing discussion. but if you remember after 9/11, the people jumping out of the twin towers holding hands to their death, it was a different period. everybody wants to remember it now as we're sitting in philadelphia. i'll also remind you that in baghdad we were literally knee deep in blood. it was unbelievable what was happening in the torture chambers we were finding and what not. so against that backdrop and the backdrop of losing comrades we had to take our interrogation techniques and figure it out. we were originally authorized to use what are called enhanced techniques which really wasn't have he dram -- very dramatic. it was you could limit a detainee to four hours of sleep

a night. you could make them kneel down in stress positions. i don't agree with that. but that's the limit of what we were at. there was no beating people. there was no waterboarding in anything i was ever involved in or saw, in fact. but the nation had to come to grips with it, how we do this. a couple of things. first, we learned that the best way to deal to get information was long periods of conversation. very respectful, very persistent. the individual that finally led us to the spiritual adviser for abu musab al zarqawi, we had him for weeks. and at one point we did movie night with him. we had two primary interrogators with him. they developed this close relationship. they've been talking to him every day, every day. they finally said, let's take a night off and have a movie. so they brought in his favorite movie and all three sat there together and watched the movie. it was "the ex-or sis th."

it was the exorsist. that's the way we did it. what you do is over time convince that person they want to communicate. they'll do it for lots of reasons. sometimes because they're cared of being prosecuted. with an iraqi law. sometimes because they're boastful. sometimes they're worried about their families. there are any range of reasons and the interrogator wants to use whatever reason is there. at the end of the day you have to convince them they want to give you information. the problem with torture, well it's multiple levels of problems with torture. the first is there is a sort of academic argument of whether it works or not, whether the information is good. don't know. i haven't tortured anybody. it is almost irrelevant. what happens with torture is you hurt yourself. the torturer crosses a line and becomes something different from what you're raised to be and what you believe in. once you do that, i don't think you can come back very easily.

the problem is you're dealing with people with the press of time, abu musab al-zarqawi was killing thousands of iraqis as well as many of our guys. you feel the press of time and you also see your comrades being killed. you see this extraordinary thing and you say i got to stop him. the ends justy fice the means and you have to stop there. it doesn't because you corrode the force. the other thing that happens is the worst thing that happened to us during the whole war in iraq was abu ghraib. what happened is those pictures that came out we all believed were an aberration and i think they were but to many people in the muslim world they were proof positive that america does that by policy. and we had thousands of young men come from north africa, syria, saudi arabia, and other countries because they had seen abu ghraib and felt they had to join the jihad for that reason. once they're in interest,

essentially we had to kill most of them, but they were amped up on a vision of something that met preconceptions about the u.s. and so if you let terror or if you let torture become a policy, that's what happens. you mobilize your foe. you mathematically increase your foe and you mobilize him. any information you get in my view is much less valuable than the cost of getting it. >> well, i could ask you a thousand more questions but i think i'll share the wealth. we are, this is on television so we have speakers. we have actually amplifiers or whatever. so wait for them to come give them to you before you ask a question. okay? i'll start with my friend, trudy ruben. >> hi, trudy. >> should i stand up? does it matter? okay. trudy ruben. >> get in the pushup position, trudy. that would be nice. >> i'd never get to the

question. >> that's the idea. >> you have said and written that you feel drones, alone, is an insufficient policy. i wonder if you would talk about why you feel that and, also, given the wearyness in the united states of the afghan conflict and the ineptness and corruption of the afghan government, what do you think is the most effective thing we could do and should do after 2014? >> sure. first i think unmanned aerial vehicles or drones as we know them are really important. they are extraordinarily good for american defense and let us do things we couldn't otherwise do. so they need to be part of what we do. that said, if we issued a bunch of drones to the philadelphia police department and said go after the drug problem in philadelphia, they would be able to figure out some drug

dealers, shoot some drug dealers with hell fire missiles. in fact, they would be right in many cases. but if you think you'd solve the drug problem, you probably would not. in some cases you would make it worse because many people would experience the explosion even though they knew the person was a drug dealer they'd be offended by the fact that you do that. put that in a sovereign country and suddenly you have a very effective tool that gets a perception of, one, violation of sovereignty. two, there is a perception even though the shot may only kill people who are absolutely guilty, the perception of everyone one ring away is there were civilians there. noncombatants. and so very quickly there is the impression that the united states uses power with a certain arrogance. when that happens, you lose potential support.

if i'm correct and i may be just a little dated with this, but american popularity among the population of pakistan is not high. at one point it was below india. that's impossible. and the people who are most upset about the drone strikes inside pakistan were not people in the waziristan region where most of the drone strikes occurred. they were in other parts of the country. so they're outraged about the theory of it. but it's important because people act on their perceptions. so i think we need to have that capability. we need to use it. but we need to be really mature about how we think about it. we need to really think through our process because you create negative forces with even well ntentioned, positive things. it's got to be balanced. >> the gentleman in the sweat shirt back here. that's right. >> what was the second part? i forgot it. question inaudible]

>> probably should repeat. >> yeah. the question is with the war weariness on the part of the united states and the situation on the ground as it is in afghanistan what should our policy be? and the answer is, i can't give a perfect prescription. i can't tell how many troops ought to be there and how much money we ought to spend. what i do think is several fold. first, we went to afghanistan. people say we shouldn't be in afghanistan. one, that is pointless. we are there. two, we went for our reasons not for afghanistan. they didn't invite us in 2001. we went because it met our goal to get rid of al qaeda. when we up ended the taliban government and we set the country sort of into free play, i think we developed some kind of moral responsibility for helping them set it right. third, geo strategically i do think it's in america and the world's interests to have a stable region. if afghanistan were to be completely unstable, then i

think that pakistan's stability would be very tenuous. and they have challenges anyway. i think it's important. so my view is what we need to do is be consistent and persistent in the region. the reason people in afghanistan are so nervous is because in 2004 they think we're going to leave and they've seen us leave before. in 1989 we turned from the region. now, again, it doesn't matter whether each individual afghan saw that. it's become commonly accepted truth. that we left in 1989 and they're starting to think, well we're just going to walk in 2014. there will be nobody that they can rely on. they don't have other strategic allies. so what they're looking for in my view is they're looking for the idea of a long-term strategic partnership. i don't think that's a specific number of troops or even a specific amount of money. i think it's the idea that you got an ally somewhere. and their fear is that they're very far away.

there is, i talked to president karzai one day and i was asking him this question. i said, what do you want in the future years? how many u.s. troops do you want here? he says, i'm not really worried about you us troops. i want u.s. business. and i want you to be here making money. that's interesting. he goes, because if you're making money here, you'll have an interest in our stability. it'll be good for you and it'll be good for us. the fear of afghanistan is they're far away. they're land locked. they don't make anything we need. so we won't care. pakistan actually i think has many of the same feelings. i think pakistan, people say pakistan wants us out of the region. i have a different view. i think they want us in the region and they want us to be consistent and stay there. their fear is that we are going to come in and then pull out again and sort of up end things and cause issues. >> yeah. i'm a vietnam veteran. i've been in the peace movement for probably the last 30 years. i was also in iraq in december of 2004 and tried to get in the parking lot at the abu ghraib

prison and of course they would not let us in. my question is kind of i consider kind of the elephant in the room. i think i see our current military as dealing with the american people who of course pay their way as dealing in two very distinct modes, one secrecy and one public relations. as a master of one leg in each of those. you of course were the one-star briefer for the press during the shock and awe invasion. my question is given the vast amount of secrecy that is necessary for the culture that you're evolving very brilliantly i would concede, isn't it -- does it ever concern you how this -- what impact this has on democracy and the citizenship that really doesn't know what the heck

you're doing? and to me it's a very important question and i think it would rest in the sort of things that you do. i just wondered if that concerns you at all. >> if i understand your question right, and in many ways i'd argue i've been in the peace movement for a long time as well, if i understand your question you're worried about the balance between necessary secrecy and wider secrecy because there is a certain amount of necessary secrecy. if you have a son or daughter serving and essential information is given on their whereabouts or their plans they become more vulnerable. i think that is a very real problem. if we have any desire to collect intelligence in the world from sources, people willing to give it, their identities and safety must be protected. so there is a requirement for secrecy that is very, very real. i think it's balanced against i

think your wider point which is really are the american people informed about the policy? i don't know if you read daniel elsberg's book the book "secrets" in 2005. i read it in 2005 i think when it came out. he is the guy who copied the pentagon papers and propagated them out of there. it was a very interesting book. i had been a student of vietnam before that. but his basic outrage came from, after being part of the pentagon papers study is what it was, he came to the conclusion that american policy makers weren't stupid. they had done analysis after analysis and they kept coming to the conclusion that what they needed to do in vietnam was x but politically they weren't willing to do that so they were only willing to do y so they were following policy y cynically, knowing that the probability of success was low.

so they were taking a politically expedient route against what they -- what policy prescription actually said if you wanted to succeed you would have to do. i thought a lot about that as we went through this. it is a very difficult question to ask because you ask yourself at each stage, what do the american people know? who is supposed to tell them? how much are they supposed to know? i think that we struggle today with trying to explain something as complex as afghanistan and not doing it in an organized enough manner. you know, if you go back to world war ii, if someone could put up a map and you could show progress across the country, one, it would be hard to do that for afghanistan and iraq because it is so complex. even when you're there you're constantly grappling with what truth is. i could go to afghanistan and i could write 15 stories and they would all convince you that afghanistan is an utter disaster. they would all be true. i could write 15 stories that

would convince you afghanistan is a tremendous amount of progress and a good thing. they would all be true. the problem is what is truth overall? everybody wrestles with that. i didn't see a lot of effort to deceive the american people. i didn't see that. i didn't see people trying to get things wrong. i saw some bad decisions i disagreed with. i saw people wrestling with things that they felt near term political pressure or near term media pressure, you know, we all kind of get up in the morning trying to get through the day and then sometimes we go, boy. we should have been thinking about next year. i saw some of that. i didn't see a lot of, let's deceive the american people. i didn't see and haven't seen as effective a process for a truly informed debate on policy issues like iraq, like afghanistan, like syria. a few months ago everybody was screaming we got to get into syria tomorrow. we got to go save the syrians. whether that's right or wrong i

don't think it was very well informed because most of what i heard was people are dying so we got to go there. and the response is okay. what side you going to be on? you have to figure that out first. but i think it gets to your point. i guess i'm not a conspiracy theorist because i've been involved close enough to know that there aren't many conspiracies that work and there aren't as many secrets as you think because most of them get leaked. they don't always get leaked completely accurately but that is sort of my experience. thank you. >> this gentleman in the back, you had your hand up, straight with the beard. wait for the microphone. >> general, when i was growing up a big concern was nuclear weapons, nuclear war, nuclear deterrence, that sort of thing. that sort of faded away with the dissolution of the soviet union. yet we hear about the nuclear

capability of so-called rogue nations like north korea and iran. and this constant drum beat of what happens if iran succeeds or what happens if the north koreans have a weapon that can reach america. i'm just curious to know your perspective on where we stand in the nuclear arena in the world whether we have adequate defenses. should we be worried about missiles from north korea? should we be worried about israel attacking iran? all these things in the news. thank you. >> a great question. i would be worried about it. i don't think the destruction of the world is anywhere close, you remember five minutes to midnight or one minute to midnight with the cold war. you have the ability with a miscalculation a war that would end civilization as we know it. i don't think that is as likely now. however, i think what you have is you have nuclear proliferation of not only weapons but also the technology and understanding of it. at some point it gets to

irrational or irresponsible actors. the whole idea of nuclear strategy in the 1950's through the 1970's was based on the fact that your opponent was a rational actor who had something to lose. the danger is when someone gets a weapon like that but they don't perceive that they have nything to lose. i think what everybody is scared about with north korea is erratic leadership. although they've been a rational actor to date of a sort, they haven't bombed anybody, but there is the concern, i think the thing about it that worries people so much is they have been so irresponsible by using people like lebanese hezbollah and other surrogates and president mahmoud ahmadinejad does not inspire confidence in the west. there is the sense that they don't have to destroy the world. all they have to do is get a few weapons out. because of where they are and what they can do they can do, you know, irreparable damage to a small country like israel or

to their foes in saudi arabia, the oil fields and what not. what it's done is lowered the threshold. they don't have to do as much but if they did any of that it would be very painful for the people involved. even worse is the next step. once you get beyond a nation state the one thing good about a nation state having nuclear weapons is you have a geographical place to go after if they act with nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. if it gets to a terrorist organization, they don't have one. they have nothing to hold at risk. and so suddenly they can use it th complete irresponsibility atlanta you are. again, they won't destroy the world, they don't have to. they can do it. i think we should be very, very worried about it. i think nuclear and biological and chemical weapons are a real threat. i think cyber weapons are coming into that same area because they don't -- the barrier to entry for cyber

attack is pretty low. you don't have to have a lot of stuff to go after somebody's cyber system so we need to become more resilient and hardened. >> gentleman in the suit with his hand up. keep your hand up. here you go. >> thank you. general, you know our great capability in electronic warfare, etcetera. what happened in benghazi? >> yeah. i've got a very classified briefing on it and i can't share that stuff but what i'll tell you is we really don't know. there was a brave ambassador out in a consulate with only seven americans total and then some local forces guarding it. what i saw of the attack, it looks like a very disorganized group of people who walked in.

they didn't attack to get in there. there is not an attack into the consulate area, the residence area. they walked in an open gate. they walked around. they didn't even know the ambassador was there. they started a fire in a building. he happened to be in the safe room and was killed by smoke inhalation. so i think at least that part of it appears from what i saw to not have been a very organized thing. now, could it have been somebody organized and saying let's go do it but in execution they look pretty disorganized? could have been. it strikes me more as an emerging good idea. you know, let's do this. then more people came in. now there was a later attack on another location that involved weapons that somebody was more serious. mortars and rocket propelled grenades. but i couldn't see a well orchestrated -- you know, i've seen a lot of well orchestrated attacks before. that didn't appear to me to be one. so i think the bigger question is what do we do about it? because there is a certain desire to say, well, we can't

put our diplomats and service people in harm's way. i say if we can't do that we can't be in the world. you can't put a marine battalion everywhere because the host nation won't want it. you can't build fortresses and engage with the people. what we have got to do as much as this hurts is celebrate people like ambassador chris stevens who died bravely but we got to get a lot of americans out there dealing with people. some will be harmed. but we'll learn the language. we'll learn relationships. we'll build people. we'll have a real interface with the world. that's why i think all the finger pointing now has the danger of creating this fortress mentality wherever we are. >> this gentleman in the corner over here. >> good afternoon, general. thank you to you and mrs. mcchrystal for the joining forces initiative. i am a marine sergeant in the reserves and i'm working for the navy. so good afternoon again. my question is do you think,

sir, that we're at risk of the same mistake we saw after vietnam in losing the expertise with this potential sequester and the possibility of losing special operations funding and the expertise of our special operators? >> yeah, yeah we are. first, the defense budget is already coming down and it needs to come down a lot. the defense budget got huge and based upon the nation's finances and all we got to bring it down. but i think that process is already under way. and when people talk about defense, people also sometimes talk about we need to spend three or four percent of gdp for defense, i think that's a dumb approach. you need to spend as much for defense as you need to defend yourself. but no more. and i think they're working on that. now the sequestering is completely different. sequestering was designed to be something that was so

unpalatable that sane people would never let it happen. we confused the last part. because what happens is now if you sequester in 2013 and you don't make the decision until early spring, they only have the rest of the fiscal year to execute that which means they've got to take all of these cuts out about the last six or seven months of the year. there are a whole bunch of things you can't cut because they're contracted or long lead time things. you don't have that ability. so it's like me coming to you and saying, next month you have to spend 20% less or 15% less of your income but in reality you know that only 15% of your income is what you spend on food and that sort of stuff. everything else is rent. suddenly you got your house but you don't eat. that's kind of what happens in sequestering because you have to take it out of those areas where you have that ability. so it produces this lopsided thing. we stopped sailing ships, stop flying planes.

we stop doing a lot of things we need to do. if you're going to cut the defense budget like anything you have to contract it consistently and carefully. again, it has to come down. it just has to come down intelligently. semper fi. hanks. >> this woman right here. third row. yeah. >> general, you certainly make war sound very exciting. i'm a long-term peace activist. so it's not easy to say that. my concern is the drones. the drones as mark bowden is quoted as saying are a terrifying tool. he ability to target far off individuals and places is a terrifying tool. how can you condone the use of drones somewhat indes crim natalie? they seem to be opposite of our

democratic process and decisions about drones seem to be made unilaterally. i think that is kind of inconsistent with our democracy. >> very fair questions. i see it slightly differently. i know the process and it is actually very, very carefully done. you know, i used to ask the question and people would say, well, you can do this. but you can't do this. if you are going to go kill somebody at the end of the day in a legal sense it doesn't matter. if you parachute in american special forces and kill somebody as opposed to using a drone sometimes that creates more. but there is a cultural part of it that you're hitting on that i think is really, really important. and u are a nation or part particularly a nation like afghanistan or pakistan that culture and somebody has

technology that allows them to stand off and shoot at you with impunity they don't respect you as a warrior. they don't think of you, this guy came up, took his best chance, and he got me. all right. they don't respect the technology. they respect it on one sense but think how you would feel if there were drones above you and at any moment they could shoot. t's a little bit -- you resent this be omni present, omni lethal entity that can just reach in. and so there is a cultural part of it that we need to understand. it really creates a lot of resentment on people. the other thing i worry about even more is the threshold. go back to 1998. president clinton launched thalk missiles based on the intelligence from the embassyies blown up in east africa and launched tomahawk missiles into the sudan and into afghanistan.

and they hit targets and if you had asked any of us in this room the next morning, whether america was at war, i trust that all of us would have said, no. we fired some tomahawk missiles. we're not at war. if you'd asked people near the impact of the tomahawk missiles they'd have a different view. the danger is it can potentially lower the and gness to use force not think of it as war. and yet you build up enemies. you build up people who think they're at war with you. when did al qaeda go to war with the united states? and the average answer is 9/11. al qaeda declared war against the united states in 1996. ost of us didn't get the memo. they attacked the code.

they were at war with us. there is always a danger when one side is at war so the danger of all of this technology is that cyber has the same potential. any time you can sit back in relative safety and do something to somebody else, you don't necessarily feel -- now if your son or daughter was going into the target area and you were going to spend a sleepless night worrying about them you'd have a different view of that mission. you'd be at least more connected to it. but technology has the danger of lowering the threshold and it can become politically easier to operate it, you know, without putting forces at risk so that lowers it yet again. >> this gentleman in the front. two quick questions. thank you for your service and leadership. one do you support or oppose chuck hagel as secretary of defense and, two, what is your evaluation of thomas riske' criticisms of american generals since world war ii except for

you and general petraeus? [ laughter] >> he must be brilliant. i'll take the second first. i just finished his book. it is painful to read about generals being criticized because a lot of it's correct. you see it and you go, well, you know, that's me. i'm guilty of that. and we had short comings of not being strategically enough minded. you know, you get very focused on your job, your tactical part of the mission and not thinking the big, strategic problem you're trying to solve. one of his big criticisms is not firing enough people. we don't fire enough other generals. you know, that may or may not be a good criticism. it certainly is worth paying attention to. but, you know, it's a useful thing to throw out there. it's a useful thing. what was the first one? oh, chuck hagel. if chuck hagel will take the job right now, god bless him. i mean, whoever is going to be secretary of defense, think

about it. they are going to go through this constricting budget. they are going to implement things like females in combat which i agree with but implementing it is going to be hard. something is going to come to a head with iran during this four years just mathematically. it is going to be a very difficult four years. now, i think that he's got great background to bring to it. you know, from the senate is really useful. his time in vietnam is useful. it just gives you context. but the most important thing is if he and president obama are a good team, that's what matters. i don't much worry about his policy positions one way or another because he is not going to be a policy maker. the president's policy is going to go. but the fact that they feel that they can be a good team, to me that's the important thing. unless the president nominates somebody who is just in my mind unqualified or something, i tend to think a leader should get who they want because we'll hold him responsible for the outcome. >> thank you, general

mcchrystal. we have to stop now. >> thank you. [ applause] > thank you. >> on history book shelf hear from the country's best known american history writers of the past decade every saturday at 4:00 p.m. eastern. and watch these programs any time by visiting our website c-span.org/history. you're watching american history tv. all weekend every weekend on c-span 3. >> the c-span cities tour takes book tv and american history tv on the road. traveling to u.s. cities to learn about their history and literary life. and this weekend we have partnered with comcast for a visit to boulder, colorado. >> my book is called "the beast in the garden" because it's a book about a large animal that in anxious th times or in the american history we would have called a beast, the mountain lion.

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