Joint Special Operations University

7701 Tampa Point Boulevard

MacDill AFB FL 33621

https://jsou.libguides.com/jsoupublications

JOINT SPECIAL OPERATIONS UNIVERSITY

In this monograph, Dr. Richard Shultz provides key findings on how 

organizational change and innovation by Task Force 714 dismantled 

al-Qaeda in Iraq’s networked secret organization. Dr. Shultz utilizes 

sound methodology to show how TF 714 was able to achieve this 

incredible transformation. Drawing from memoirs and in-depth 

interviews with several TF 714 leaders, Dr. Shultz further analyzes 

these sources through the use of analytic tools drawn from leading 

business and management studies focused on organizational learning and innovation. This monograph provides critical insights and 

lessons learned for U.S. Special Operations Forces and interagency 

partners who will establish, deploy, or support a special operations 

command and control organization. It is also a good historical case 

study and provides a foundation on how to adapt, innovate, and 

grow military structures into learning organizations to meet the 

future challenges of complex environments and our enemies.

ISBN 978-1-941715-09-3

Military Innovation in War: 

It Takes a Learning Organization

A Case Study of Task Force 714 in Iraq

Richard Shultz, Ph.D.

JSOU Report 16-6

JSOU Report 16-6 Military Innovation in War Shultz
Joint Special Operations University

Brian A. Maher, Ed.D., SES, President

Kenneth H. Poole, Ed.D., Director, Center for Special Operations Studies and Research

Robert Nalepa, Lt. Col., U.S. Air Force, Ret., Editor in Chief

Will Irwin, MMAS, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, Ret.; 

Peter McCabe, Ph.D., Political Science, Colonel, U.S. Air Force, Ret.; 

Paul Lieber, Ph.D., Mass Communication & Public Affairs; Resident Senior Fellows

Anna-Marie Wyant, M.A., English, JSOU Press Editor 

Frederick Zimmerman, Master Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps, Ret., JSOU Press Editor

Editorial Advisory Board

Roby C. Barrett

Ph.D., Middle Eastern & South Asian History 

Public Policy Center Middle East Institute and 

JSOU Senior Fellow

James J.F. Forest 

Ph.D., Higher Education Administration

Associate Professor, School of Criminology and 

Justice Studies, University of Massachusetts 

Lowell and JSOU Senior Fellow

Mario Forestier

Chief Warrant Officer, U.S. Army, Ret.

Director, Joint Special Operations Command 

Center for Counterterrorism Studies

Thomas H. Henriksen

Ph.D., History, Hoover Institution 

Stanford University and JSOU Senior Fellow

Bernd Horn

Colonel, Canadian Dept. of National Defence 

Ph.D., War Studies

Director, CANSOFCOM Professional 

Development Centre

Russell D. Howard

Brigadier General, U.S. Army, Ret.

Senior Research Fellow and adjunct professor, 

Middlebury Institute of International Studies at 

Monterey and JSOU Senior Fellow

John D. Jogerst

Colonel, U.S. Air Force, Ret.

James Kiras

Ph.D., History, School of Advanced Air and Space 

Studies, Air University and JSOU Associate Fellow

William W. Mendel

Colonel, U.S. Army, Ret. 

JSOU Senior Fellow

Alvaro de Souza Pinheiro

Major General, Brazilian Army, Ret.

JSOU Associate Fellow

Louis Alberto Ordóñez Rubio,

Vice Admiral, Colombian Navy, Ret.,

Ph.D., Education, Director, Centro Regional de 

Estudios Estrategicos en Seguridad

James F. Powers, Jr.

Colonel, U.S. Army, Ret.

JSOU Senior Fellow 

Bryan C. Price

Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army

Ph.D., Political Science

Director, Combating Terrorism Center at 

West Point

Richard H. Shultz, Jr.

Ph.D., Political Science

Director, International Security 

Studies Program, The Fletcher School, 

Tufts University and JSOU Senior Fellow

Robert G. Spulak, Jr.

Ph.D., Physics/Nuclear Engineering

Sandia National Laboratories 

and JSOU Associate Fellow 

Jessica Glicken Turnley

Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology

Galisteo Consulting Group 

and JSOU Senior Fellow 

Rich Yarger

Ph.D., History 

JSOU Senior Fellow

Joint Special Operations University

and the Center for Special Operations Studies and Research

The Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) provides its publications 

to contribute toward expanding the body of knowledge about joint special 

operations. JSOU publications advance the insights and recommendations 

of national security professionals and the Special Operations Forces (SOF) 

students and leaders for consideration by the SOF community and defense 

leadership. 

JSOU is the educational component of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. The JSOU 

mission is to educate SOF executive, senior, and intermediate leaders and 

selected other national and international security decision makers, both 

military and civilian, through teaching, outreach, and research in the 

science and art of joint special operations. JSOU provides education to the 

men and women of SOF and to those who enable the SOF mission in a joint 

and interagency environment. 

JSOU conducts research through its Center for Special Operations 

Studies and Research (CSOSR) where effort centers upon the USSOCOM 

mission: 

USSOCOM mission. USSOCOM synchronizes the planning of Special 

Operations and provides Special Operations Forces to support persistent, 

networked, and distributed Geographic Combatant Command operations 

in order to protect and advance our Nation’s interests.

Press publications are available for download from the JSOU Library 

web page located at https://jsou.libguides.com/jsoupublications.
JSOU Report 16-6

The JSOU Press

MacDill Air Force Base, Florida

2016

Military Innovation in 

War: It Takes a Learning 

Organization

A Case Study of Task Force 714 in Iraq

Richard Shultz
Comments about this publication are invited and should be forwarded to the 

Director of the Center for Special Operations Studies and Research, Joint Special Operations University, 7701 Tampa Point Blvd., MacDill AFB FL 33621.

*******

The JSOU Center for Special Operations Studies and Research (CSOSR) is currently 

accepting written works relevant to special operations for potential publication. For 

more information, please contact the CSOSR Director at jsou_research@socom.mil. 

Thank you for your interest in the JSOU Press. 

*******

This work was cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Printed in July 2016.

ISBN 978-1-941715-09-3
The views expressed in this publication are entirely those of the 

author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position 

of the United States Government, Department of Defense, United 

States Special Operations Command, or the Joint Special Operations 

University.

Authors are granted academic freedom provided their work does not 

disclose classified information, jeopardize operations security, or 

misrepresent official U.S. policy. Such academic freedom empowers 

authors to offer new and sometimes controversial perspectives in the 

interest of furthering debate on key issues.
Recent Publications of the JSOU Press

Unconventional Economics: Operational Economics in Unconventional Warfare, 

March 2016, Riley Post and Jeffrey D. Peterson

2016 Special Operations Essays, March 2016

The War Within: A Look Inside al-Qaeda’s Undoing, February 2016, Jarret Brachman

Improving the Sustainment of SOF Distributed Operations in Access-Denied 

Environments, January 2016, Robert Haddick

SOF Role in Combating Transnational Crime, January 2016

The Collapse of Iraq and Syria: The End of the Colonial Construct in the 

Greater Levant, December 2015, Roby C. Barrett

Tactical Operations for Strategic Effect: The Challenge of Currency Conversion, 

November 2015, Colin S. Gray

Countering Violent Extremism in Mali, November 2015, Mark Moyar

The 2005 Iraqi Sunni Awakening: The Role of the Desert Protectors Program, 

October 2015, William Knarr

2016 Special Operations Research Topics

Saudi Arabia: Modernity, Stability, and the Twenty-First Century Monarchy, 

June 2015, Roby C. Barrett

On the cover. Clockwise from top right: General Stanley McChrystal 

(Source: Getty Images); CV-22 Osprey in night vision (Source: U.S. Air 

Force); Admiral William McRaven (Source: Department of Defense); model 

of terrorist network nodes (Source: Author); Airman at Talisman Sabre exercise (Source: U.S. Air Force).

Back cover. Iraqi special operations forces advised by U.S. Army Special 

Forces conduct a combat operation in Baghdad, Iraq. Source: Defense Video 

and Imagery Distribution System.
v

Contents

Foreword .......................................................................................................... vii

About the Author...........................................................................ix

Executive Summary and Key Findings............................................ 1

Introduction................................................................................... 7

1. Unforeseen Challenges, Ugly Surprise, and TF 714.................. 19

 2. Problem Solving and the JIATF................................................ 23

3. Organizational Practices: Empowerment, Agency, and 

Complexity.................................................................................. 29

4. Information, Knowledge, and Intelligence Dominance ............ 37

5. Augmenting the JIATF .............................................................. 47

6. Leadership Evolution: Nurturing Learning, Adaptation, 

and Change................................................................................. 57

7. Nonstop Learning and Adaptation ........................................... 61

8. Winning: The Irreducible Minimum......................................... 63

9. Afterthoughts: The Limits of Counterinsurgency and 

Counterterrorism ........................................................................ 73

Appendix A: Acronym List ........................................................... 75

Endnotes...................................................................................... 77

vii

Foreword

In this monograph, Dr. Richard “Dick” Shultz provides the reader key findings of how organizational change and innovation by the U.S. counterterrorism forces deployed to Iraq in 2003 as Task Force (TF) 714 dismantled 

al-Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) networked secret organization. His executive summary highlights: 1) the insurgent puzzle TF 714 encountered; 2) the organizational learning and innovation framework employed to assess the evolution 

of TF 714; and 3) how the Task Force transformed in order to adapt to and 

significantly degrade the enemy. 

Dr. Shultz utilizes sound methodology to show how was TF 714 was 

able to achieve this “remarkable transformation.” He draws from General 

(retired) Stanley McChrystal’s two books on Task Force 714, My Share of the 

Task: A Memoir and Team of Teams, and then augments these with in-depth 

interviews with General McChrystal, Admiral (retired) William McRaven, 

General Joseph Votel, and several other TF 714 leaders. Dr. Shultz further 

analyzes these sources through the use of analytic tools drawn from leading business and management studies focused on organizational learning 

and innovation. This analysis resulted in a monograph that captured the 

unprecedented organizational changes and lessons learned by Task Force 

714 in adapting to an enemy for which it was not prepared. 

The first chapter describes the unforeseen challenges and ugly surprise 

Task Force 714 encountered. Shultz discusses the impact of that surprise and 

unfamiliar wartime environment that required TF 714 to transform itself into 

an “industrial strength counterterrorism machine.” Chapter 2 highlights the 

task force’s development and use of the Joint Interagency Task Force, while 

Chapter 3 discusses how the leadership of Task Force 714 changed organizational practices of command and control and empowered decision making 

from a top-down to a bottom-up approach. The next chapter shifts into the 

intelligence dominance of the task force moving from finding, fixing, and 

finishing targets and adding track and assess, or exploit and analyze. 

Chapter 4 highlights the innovations in TF 714 and how learning organizations create innovative adjustments in procedures and mechanisms to 

respond to complex challenges. Chapter 6 addresses the leadership evolution 

and how collective learning, adaptation, change, and empowering members 
viii

of the organization are all essential for success in today’s complex, interdependent, and rapidly evolving environment. In the seventh chapter, Dr. 

Shultz provides an overall assessment of what “industrial strength counterterrorism” and counterinsurgency did to degrade and weaken AQI accomplished in Iraq, which he terms “the irreducible minimum.” He sums up the 

monograph with some thoughts on the limits of U.S. counterinsurgency and 

counterterrorism efforts.

This monograph provides critical insights and lessons learned for all Special Operations Forces and interagency partners who will establish, deploy, 

or support a special operations command and control organization. It is 

also a good historical case study and provides a foundation on how to adapt, 

innovate, and grow military structures into learning organizations to meet 

the future challenges of complex environments and our enemies.

Kenneth H. Poole, Ed.D.

Director, Center for Special Operations Studies and Research
ix

About the Author

Dr. Richard H. Shultz, Jr., is a professor of international politics at 

the Fletcher School, Tufts University, where he teaches graduatelevel courses in various aspects of international security affairs, internal/

transnational conflict and war studies, and intelligence and armed groups. 

He is also the director of the Fletcher School’s International Security Studies Program. The program is 

dedicated to graduate-level teaching and research on 

a broad range of conflict, defense, and strategic issues. 

In Washington he has served as director of research 

at the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) 

where in 2010 he completed, with NSIC President Roy 

Godson, a major study focused on Adapting America’s 

Security Paradigm and Security Agenda for 21st century security challenges.

With the assistance from the U.S. Marine Corps, he recently completed 

an in-depth study analyzing one of what he believes is illustrative of the 

types of conflicts that will characterize the 21st century security environment—the U.S. Marine Corps’ 2004-2008 campaign in Al Anbar Province 

in Iraq. To complete the research he had access to the records and Iraq oral 

history collection at the U.S. Marine Corps History Division. The study has 

been published under the title The Marines Take Anbar: The Four-Year Fight 

against Al Qaeda (Annapolis, MD: The Naval Institute Press, 2013). Recently, 

the book was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal.

His recent research project was “A U.S. Blueprint for Security Sector 

Reform (SSR) for the 21st Century.” The project focused on developing a 

framework for the U.S. that adapts SSR theory and practice for addressing 

dysfunctional security sectors of fragile states; examines the state of capabilities across the U.S. government for addressing these challenges; and identifies 

gaps in those capabilities that need to be filled if the U.S. is to employ SSR 

as an effective policy tool. The project was a joint effort with Dr. Querine 

Hanlon. The study was published as a book in the spring of 2016 by the U.S. 

Institute of Peace Press under the title Prioritizing Security Sector Reform: 
x

A New Approach. Support for the project comes from the Smith Richardson 

Foundation.

He has held three chairs: the Olin Distinguished Professorship of 

National Security Studies at the Military Academy, Secretary of the Navy 

Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, and Brigadier General 

H. L. Oppenheimer Chair of War-fighting Strategy, U.S. Marine Corps. Since 

the mid-1980s he has served as a security consultant to various U.S. government departments and agencies concerned with national security affairs. 

Currently he is Senior Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University and a 

consultant to the U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Marine Corps.

His other recent books include Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The 

Warriors of Contemporary Combat (Columbia University Press, 2006; 2009 

Paperback Edition) and The Secret War against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New 

York: Harper Collins, 1999; 2000 Paperback Edition). His recent articles 

include: “States in the 21st Century,” Geopolitics, History and International 

Relations 4:1 (2012); “A QDR for all Seasons,” Joint Forces Quarterly (Sept. 

2010); and “The Sources of Instability in the Twenty-First Century Weak 

States, Armed Groups, and Irregular Conflict,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 

(Summer 2011). His JSOU Press publications are Strategic Culture and Strategic Studies: An Alternative Framework for Assessing Al Qaeda and the Global 

Jihadi Movement (2012) and Security Force Assistance and Security Sector 

Reform (2013).
1

Shultz: Military Innovation in War

Executive Summary and Key Findings

The Puzzle

The U.S. counterterrorism (CT) forces who deployed to Iraq in 2003 as 

Task Force 714 (TF 714) faced an ugly surprise. Tasked to dismantle the 

al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) dominated insurgency, the organization could not 

achieve that mission. Retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, then 

TF 714 commander, concluded, “we were losing to an enemy ... we should 

have dominated.”1

But TF 714 transformed in the midst of war and during 2006-2009 was 

able to dismantle AQI’s clandestine networks to a degree that they could no 

longer function in a cohesive manner. By developing the capacity to operate 

inside those networks, TF 714 was able, in the words of General McChrystal, 

to “claw the guts out of AQI.”2

This transformation runs counter to what organizational experts identify 

as barriers inhibiting militaries from learning, innovating, and changing, 

especially in wartime. To decipher the puzzle of how TF 714 overcame these 

barriers, two questions were examined: 1) How did TF 714 transform from 

a specialized and compartmented unit customized for executing infrequent 

CT missions to an industrial-strength CT machine that by 2009 dismantled 

AQI’s networks that operated across Iraq, and 2) Why was TF 714 able to 

achieve this remarkable transformation? 

Organizational Learning and Innovation

Organizational learning has received considerable attention in business and 

management studies. That literature has identified behavioral/managerial 

characteristics that can equip organizations with the capacity to learn and 

innovate to overcome failures in operational performance. This study utilizes 

an analytic framework composed of those characteristics to determine if TF 

714’s success in Iraq was due to its adopting these learning characteristics: 

• Unforeseen challenges do not paralyze the organization,

• Problem solving is a core organizational competency,

• Organizational practices are challengeable,

• Knowledge collection methods set in motion systemic learning,
2

JSOU Report 16-6

• Leaders nurture a milieu conducive to learning, and

• Organizational memory captures and retains innovations but not 

rigidly.

To determine if TF 714 learned and innovated by adopting these behavioral and managerial characteristics, a series of in-depth interviews were 

conducted with a range of former practitioners and specialists who served 

in TF 714. These included the senior leadership of the task force.

Transforming Task Force 714

AQI was different. AQI’s secret underground apparatus was unlike its 20th 

century counterparts. It was not top leaders but a vast array of mid-level 

commanders and managers of AQI’s clandestine networks that fostered an 

enormous rise in attacks across Iraq in 2004-2006. AQI’s unanticipated and 

burgeoning violence caused many in 2006 to believe the Iraq war was lost.

This ‘ugly surprise’ led TF 714’s leaders to conclude they faced an enemy 

they never envisaged and could not degrade through existing ways of operating. They confronted an enemy they did not understand and for which TF 

714 had to change its operational focus from a strategic scalpel capable of 

executing a small number of missions to an industrial-strength CT machine.3

Organizational experts have concluded that for organizations facing complex challenges, problem solving is a shared responsibility for the whole organization, not just the task of the leadership. Problem solving must become 

the duty of the entire organization, a new way of thinking and acting.

TF 714’s method of problem solving was too deliberate, hierarchical, and 

self-contained to counter Iraq’s fast-paced and networked insurgency. The 

task force had to transform and partner with several U.S. intelligence agencies to neutralize this unprecedented operational challenge.

The mechanism for this transformation was a joint interagency task force 

(JIATF). The JIATF forged these intelligence agencies and TF 714 into a union 

based on interdependence and cooperation that established problem solving 

methods capable of deciphering AQI’s networks.

Having adopted the JIATF, TF 714 shed its top-down style of command, 

substituting decentralized authority and problem solving from below. To 

outpace AQI, problem solving and decision making could not wait for senior 

leaders to disseminate commands. That took too long.
3

Shultz: Military Innovation in War

Individuals and teams closest to the fight were best positioned to decide 

and act decisively. The velocity and volume of decisions needing to be made 

exceeded the ability of even the most gifted leader. Empowerment of those 

at the operational levels was indispensable.

Agency and empowerment were critical enablers. They allowed the JIATF 

to prevail over a complex enemy that made effective use of information-age 

technologies to form an array of evolving and transforming networks able 

to execute attacks across Iraq.

To defeat AQI’s complex networks, TF 714 transformed into an intelligence-led organization. The action arm of the JIATF, the operational units, 

was coordinated with a robust intelligence capability drawn from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal 

Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and other agencies—intelligence 

led the way.

To learn and adapt, TF 714 amassed information and knowledge about 

a new problem set—a complex, clandestine, and networked enemy empowered by information age technology. The task force achieved intelligence 

dominance over AQI.

This necessitated the JIATF’s adoption of a new operational concept—

find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate (F3EAD). This transformed 

targeting and provided the means to get inside AQI’s networks to dominate 

the operational tempo of the fight.

Once inside, the JIATF identified central and peripheral figures, patterns 

of behavior, and clusters of nodes to degrade parts of AQI’s operating system. 

By doing this fast enough, hitting many targets every night, TF 714 outpaced 

AQI’s capacity to adapt, causing it to collapse in upon itself.

To foster cross-organization ties, cross-fertilization of new ideas, and dissemination of new knowledge to respond to AQI’s complex challenges, the 

JIATF established an operating environment based on cooperation, trust, 

and interdependence among its interagency members.

Several innovative procedures and mechanisms were adopted to facilitate 

this environment. Each enhanced the capacity of the JIATF to act decisively, 

with speed and precision, to maneuver inside AQI’s networks fast enough to 

seriously dismantle those networks from the inside out.

As the JIATF matured and made headway, the stage was set for a showdown with AQI. But to reach the operational tempo needed to prevail, one 
4

JSOU Report 16-6

more hurdle remained. The more decisions were made at the top, the slower 

TF 714’s operational tempo.

This traditional approach to military leadership was turned on its head. 

Rather than disseminating commands from above, task force leaders became 

‘eyes-on, hands-off enablers’ that empowered those down the chain of command to take the initiative.

TF 714’s transformation from a highly compartmented organization augmented by a JIATF had an extraordinary impact on its operational tempo. 

In August 2004 the task force executed 18 raids. Two years later, in August 

2006, they were up to 300 raids a month.4

The Irreducible Minimum

By the fall of 2009 the security situation in Iraq had dramatically changed. 

“Significant acts of violence,” as reported in Pentagon’s Weekly Security Incidents summary, had plummeted to less than 200 a week from a high of nearly 

1,600 incidents weekly during 2007.5

Factors contributing to this turnabout included: 1) the adoption of a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy; and 2) the addition of 30,000 troops through 

the surge; and 3) the awakening movement which gave coalition forces the 

added capacity needed to control the physical and human terrain.

But an effective COIN strategy also required the capacity to dismantle 

AQI’s secret underground networks through which it executed operations. 

To do so, a specialized organization was needed that blended intelligence 

and paramilitary capabilities. TF 714 was that outfit.

By adopting the characteristics of a learning organization and transforming itself, TF 714 was able to sustain an industrial-strength CT operational tempo of 300 raids a month between 2006 and 2009. Those operations 

focused on attrition of AQI’s mid-level commanders and managers, those 

who made its networks function. General McChrystal described them as 

“the guts of AQI.”6

During 2008, the task force determined through intelligence collected on 

raids, interrogation of AQI members captured on raids, and by operational 

tempo that a major decline was taking place in the capacity of AQI to function. Task force raids were having a major impact on AQI’s networks.

Three years of industrial-strength task force raids seriously degraded 

AQI’s ability to function. By operating inside AQI’s networks, TF 714 
5

Shultz: Military Innovation in War

dismantled a large number of its operational cells, financial units, communications and media centers, improvised explosive device (IED) production 

facilities, and arms acquisition methods. In the words of General McChrystal, the TF 714 commander had “clawed the guts out of AQI.”7

As a result of three years of industrial strength CT, TF 714 reached what 

retired U.S. Army General Raymond Odierno, then Multi-National Force 

commander in Iraq during this period, characterized as the “irreducible 

minimum.” By this he meant that even when a COIN/CT program is able to 

greatly weaken and degrade a group like AQI, they will still retain a capacity 

to carry out periodic attacks and acts of violence.8

While TF 714 had greatly weakened AQI’s capacity to function by dismantling many of its networks across Iraq, it still could carry out periodic 

attacks and acts of violence. This was the irreducible minimum in such 

irregular wars.

The Limits of COIN and CT

Once territory was held and AQI’s clandestine networks were dismantled 

to their irreducible minimum, the conditions were established to begin the 

transition to post-conflict reconciliation, reconstruction, and institutional 

development.

Iraq had reached this stage by late 2009. It was the beginning of the long 

and challenging phase of all such internal wars in which the political causes 

of the conflict have to be resolved. And a political formula has to be conceptualized for reconciling the warring parties, establishing the foundations for 

state legitimacy, and initiating national reconstruction.

During this extended period of mediation and reconciliation there was a 

role for TF 714 and its Iraq’s counterpart. As retired U.S. Navy Admiral William McRaven, explained: “once we and our counterparts had our collective 

foot on AQI’s throat we had to keep it there. And we could do so through our 

support to our Iraqi counterparts. But we had to stay to help them.”9 This 

was all part of buying time and maintaining the irreducible minimum while 

the process of transition to post-conflict reconciliation, reconstruction, and 

institutional development took root. 

7

Shultz: Military Innovation in War

Introduction

The U.S. counterterrorism (CT) force was established in 1980 following 

the failure to rescue 52 Americans held hostage at the U.S. embassy in 

Tehran, Iran, and the results of the Holloway Commission review.10 Over 

the next two decades, the United States Special Operations Command’s 

(USSOCOM) CT force developed an array of highly proficient Army, Navy, 

and Air Force personnel tailor-made for hostage rescue and discrete direct 

action CT operations.11 Arguably, the CT force became the best unit of its 

kind in the world. It also was a highly compartmentalized force with a culture of secrecy and semi-autonomy. But for the infrequent missions it was 

designed to carry out prior to 9/11, those characteristics did not impede its 

operational capacity to do so.12

However, once deployed to Iraq in 2003 the CT force found itself facing an 

ugly surprise—a crisis in operational effectiveness. Tasked to find, degrade, 

and dismantle the burgeoning al-Qaeda dominated insurgent apparatus or 

clandestine underground, it became apparent the unit was not able to successfully execute this mission. Then Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, 

TF 714 commander, explained that as it was constituted, the CT task force 

could not keep pace with, let alone reduce AQI’s burgeoning operational 

tempo. In fact, as he subsequently recounted, “we were losing to an enemy 

that ... we should have dominated.”13 By early 2004, General McChrystal 

concluded the CT task force had to “adapt to a new, more ominous threat.” 

Deployed as TF 714, they “needed to become a more complex organization 

with unprecedented capability, and [they] needed to be able to employ that 

capability on a daily basis.”14

Over the next two years TF 714 did just that, transforming into a highly 

effective interagency organization described by one knowledgeable observer 

as “a precision-killing machine unprecedented in the history of modern 

warfare.”15 To achieve this degree of operational effectiveness, TF 714 was 

reinvented in the midst of the Iraq war. Consider the following acceleration 

in its capacity to conduct operations against the AQI network. TF 714 was 

able to execute 18 raids across Iraq in August 2004. “As great as those 18 

raids were, they couldn’t make a dent in the exploding insurgency,” General 

McChrystal explained. By August 2006, the task force was able to execute 
8

JSOU Report 16-6

up to 300 raids per month.16 And those raids did much more than decapitate 

the leadership of AQI. More importantly, they began to gut AQI’s extensive 

network of mid-level operational commanders and the managers of its financial units, communications and media centers, intelligence services, bomb 

and IED production facilities, and arms acquisition specialists. In doing 

so, TF 714 acutely degraded AQI’s capacity to operate well before the U.S. 

withdrawal in December 2011.

This was a remarkable transformation in the midst of war and runs 

counter to what more than a few specialists have discerned about the likelihood of military organizations, even highly specialized ones, being able to 

do so. For example, Janine Davidson in Lifting the Fog of Peace identifies 

an array of organizational, bureaucratic, and cultural barriers that make 

such transformations problematic.17 Each constitutes an acute obstruction 

to change. Other scholars, to include Adam Grissom, Kimberly Zisk, John 

Nagl, Michael McNerney, Theo Farrell, and Richard Downie find that only 

under certain conditions—civilian intervention, military service competition, or a major shock—is it possible that the obstacles to innovation identified by Davidson and others can be circumvented.18

The Puzzle

In spite of the odds, TF 714 was able to overcome barriers to transform and 

innovate. At first blush, this would seem counterintuitive given an organizational culture which, for over two decades, was honed to execute discrete 

and highly surgical CT missions and not to fight in an Iraq-type war. In fact, 

General McChrystal observed that even after it became clear that TF 714 was 

unable to weaken AQI, there was not a straight away recognition that major 

changes were demanded in the organization. This was because the CT task 

force constituted “very much a specialized culture for certain missions.” It 

employed a “surgical CT capability” and the view from inside was “we need 

to stick to our core tasks.”19 Consequently, “there was resistance initially to 

going to war. I was told by people, one, that’s not what the CT force is for, 

and two, you are going to take this wonderful national scalpel and break 

the blade.”20

To decipher this puzzle, two interrelated questions were examined. 

First, how did the CT task force, deployed to Iraq as TF 714, transform itself 

from a pre-9/11 highly specialized and compartmented unit customized for 
9

Shultz: Military Innovation in War

executing infrequent CT missions to an organization capable of a wartime 

operational tempo of 300 missions a month? Second, why was the CT task 

force able to achieve this remarkable transformation? These two questions 

were examined interchangeably to discover the ways in which TF 714, in the 

midst of an escalating war, was able to learn and innovate.

Organizational learning and innovation have been topics given considerable attention in business and management studies since the appearance 

first of James March and Herbert Simon’s volume Organizations, and then 

of A Behavioral Theory of the Firm by March and Richard Michael Cyert.21

Both works were concerned with the circumstances in which an organization 

faces a major challenge or crisis that critically undermines its operational 

performance. In other words, its capacity to accomplish core tasks has fallen 

below minimum levels of effectiveness. Subsequently, the organization faces 

the challenge of identifying and implementing critical changes. In order to 

do so, it must be able to learn, adapt, and innovate to reestablish its capacity 

to execute core tasks.

From this starting point, subsequent research has sought to identify those 

processes and procedures that foster or thwart the attainment of such knowledge, and assess the impact of those processes and procedures on the learning cycle and on organizational change. What these studies have discerned 

is that knowledge acquisition, learning, and innovation can be exceedingly 

challenging for organizations to realize. However, those studies also identify 

behavioral and managerial characteristics that—if adopted—can equip organizations with the capacity to learn and innovate, successfully overcoming 

crises and failures in operational performance.22

This monograph will examine the extent to which the presence of successful organizational characteristics helps explain how and why the transformation of TF 714 between 2004 and 2006 was possible. To do so, the study 

utilizes the analytic framework, described below, deduced from the business 

and management literature concerned with organizational learning.23 The 

construct is composed of the successful organizational characteristics that 

enable organizations to learn and innovate when faced with major challenges 

that undercut their capacity to function effectively.
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Assessing Learning Organizations

Descriptions of what constitutes a learning organization abound in the business and management literature. For David Garvin, a learning organization 

is one “skilled at acquiring and transferring knowledge and at modifying its 

behavior to reflect this new knowledge and insights.”24 Likewise, Marlene 

Fiol and Marjorie Lyles propose that “organizational learning means the 

process of improving actions through better knowledge and understanding.”25 Barbara Levitt and James March described organizational learning as 

“routine-based, history-dependent, and target-oriented. Organizations are 

seen as [demonstrating] learning by encoding inferences from history into 

routines that guide behavior.”26

The Learning Cycle

While there may be a consensus that learning organizations are those with 

the capacity to acquire new understanding about shortcomings in performance, and that such knowledge can become the basis for adapting institutional behavior to rectify performance shortfalls, what does not exist, 

observes Peter Pawlowsky, is a “theory or model of organizational learning 

[that] is widely accepted.”27 This is due, Martin Schulz reflects, to the diverse 

nature of the field: 

Is the main focus of the field on exploring the sources of organizational learning, is it on different forms of learning, or is it on the 

outcomes of organizational learning? It appears that organizational 

learning is about all three. At the root of this perplexing trilogy are 

divergent conceptions of learning and divergent ideas about the 

sources of learning.28 

Nevertheless, based on a review of the literature, Pawlowsky identifies 

the following features of a learning organization:

• A capacity to identify information that is relevant to learning and the 

generation of new knowledge,

• A mode for the exchange and diffusion of that knowledge from the 

individual level to the collective level,

• Knowledge that can be integrated into existing knowledge systems 

on the collective and individual levels or into procedural rules of the 
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organization whereby either integration or modification of the adopting system takes place, and

• Integration of new knowledge into organizational routines in order to 

have an influence on organizational behavior, developing new leadership styles, new products and services, and new praxis.29

The literature on sources and methods of learning has also generated several models of the learning cycle to illustrate the process by which organizations acquire knowledge and implement change. Chris Argyris and Donald 

Schön were among the first to do so.30 Many others followed suit, proposing 

various patterns and prototypes.31 Schulz describes these templates as:

performance feedback models ... based on the idea that organizations learn when they experience problems. Organizations would 

encounter a problem, initiate a search for solutions, adopt solutions 

which solve the problem, and retain good solutions for future use. 

Problems were conceptualized as performance shortfalls.32

Based on an examination of learning cycle designs, Downie proposed 

a basic model in which organizations “either learn and/or change their ... 

standard operating procedures to act on learning or disregard that information and retain their existing ... standard operating procedures.”33 When 

the former takes place, an organization “uses new knowledge and understanding gained from experience to adjust institutional ... procedures in 

ways designed to minimize [identified] gaps in performance and maximize 

Figure 1. The Institutional Learning Cycle. Source: Learning From Conflict: The 

U.S. Military in Vietnam, El Salvador, and the Drug War by Richard Downie. 

Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group via Copyright 

Clearance Center.
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future successes.”34 This process is illustrated in Figure 1. It depicts a basic 

cyclical course of action involving several steps that can result in learning 

and innovation by an organization.

Downie’s model begins with members of the organization recognizing 

there are serious performance gaps that can only be remedied through major 

change. The organization has to acquire and process new information and 

knowledge in order to pinpoint the sources of failure and to identify alternatives. Based on these developments, the “organization assesses and interprets 

the discoveries or evaluations made by individual members [and groups], and 

if deemed valid through consensus, explores options to resolve an anomalous situation.”35 Resolution of those problems will take the form of actions 

that “adapt organizational behavior” through changes in the organization’s 

“norms, doctrine, and standard operating procedures.”36

The cyclical process conceptualized by Downie and others propose steps 

through which an organization can learn and innovate. They make it sound 

straightforward. But the real world contains many obstacles that can undermine successful navigation of the learning cycle, and many of those impediments can be found in the institutional cultures, structures, and practices 

of organizations themselves. Nevertheless, some organizations are able to 

successfully manage gaps, weaknesses, and shortcomings in performance 

by introducing changes in their operating methods and processes.

Analytic Framework – Characteristics of Learning Organizations

Since the appearance of the books Organizations and A Behavioral Theory 

of the Firm, business and management studies have endeavored to identify 

those behavioral and managerial characteristics that facilitate a successful 

navigation of the learning cycle. Schulz notes that this research “has intensified considerably since the late 1980’s. The number of publications increased 

dramatically ... and new, empirical research programs got off the ground.” 

However, what has resulted is a “field of organizational learning [which] 

evolved into a diverse network of loosely interconnected clusters of ideas.”37

In other words, there is no agreement over what constitutes those behavioral and managerial characteristics that, if an organization possesses them, 

will enable learning to take place in today’s complex environments, resulting 

in subsequent improvements in operational practices. Rather, the literature 

contains wide ranging ideas, propositions, and empirical findings. Based on 

a review of a significant sample of that literature, the following conceptual 
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framework of the learning characteristics of organizations that successfully 

adapt to crises in performance in today’s complex and interdependent environment have been identified below by the author. 

1. Unforeseen challenges do not paralyze the organization. Learning 

organizations are not paralyzed by surprise. They develop competences 

for responding to unforeseen challenges that undercut operational 

performance. Members learn roles, methods, and modes of behavior 

that prepares them for the unexpected.38 To do so, management specialists have identified ways of making organizations more agile by 

adopting methods that address surprise through team-based exercises. 

Consequently, when surprise occurs, agile organizations are prepared 

to manage it.39

2. Problem solving is a core organizational competency. Learning 

organizations institutionalize problem solving methods that foster 

the diagnosis of operational challenges. Problem solving is a shared 

responsibility for the organization as a whole, not just the leadership.40 It is part of the organization’s disposition, a way of thinking 

and acting.41 Well-ordered and systematic problem solving is a central 

part of the organization’s personality.42

3. Organizational practices are challengeable. All organizations 

develop routines or standard operating procedures (SOPs) to accomplish objectives. But only a subset of them is capable of changing those 

routines when confronted with a sudden breakdown in performance.43

To do so, SOPs must be challengeable. Members of the organization 

are empowered to contest existing routines to foster needed changes 

in them.44 Agency is introduced by an organization to curtail negative performance. Agency is understood as individuals within an 

organization exercising the capacity to challenge existing routines.45

4. Knowledge collection methods set in motion systemic learning.

Learning organizations are able to understand the sources of failure 

in performance through their capacity to collect and analyze information about those shortcomings. Such organizations are collectively 

“skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge.”46 Through 

knowledge compilation and analysis, the reasons for which existing 
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practices have become ineffective can be determined.47 This understanding is then employed to make changes in operational practices.48

5. Leaders nurture a milieu conducive to learning. Leaders of learning 

organizations create procedures that encourage the cross-fertilization 

of new ideas and promote the dissemination of new information and 

knowledge. They empower members of the organization through a 

participatory approach that encourages collective problem solving.49

Organizations that function in this manner require a different style 

of leadership from that based on the assumption that only from the 

top can a decline in performance be understood and turned around.50 

In today’s complex, interdependent, changeable, and fast paced environment, leaders must decentralize authority to nurture initiative by 

subordinates at the operating level.51

6. Organizational memory captures and retains innovations but 

not rigidly. Once innovation takes place, learning organizations 

insert those changes into the organization’s memory. New SOPs are 

embedded in memory.52 Knowledge and learning are transformed 

into new operating routines.53 These are then put into practice by 

members of the organization. However, for organizations that function in today’s complex and interdependent environment, fixed solutions may remain effective and suitable for only a transitory period.54

In complex contexts, reconfiguring operating practices will require a 

resilient learning cycle.55

Research Approach

To determine how and why TF 714 was able to learn and innovate, transforming itself in the midst of war, a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews 

were conducted with a range of experienced former practitioners and specialists who served in the task force. These included, most importantly, the 

senior leadership of TF 714.56

The questionnaire utilized for the interviews was based on the analytic 

framework—characteristics of learning organizations. The objective of the 

research was to determine the extent to which the organizational and operational changes initiated by TF 714 in Iraq can be explained as a result of the 

task force emulating these successful organizational characteristics. In other 

words, to what extent can the TF 714 accomplishments in Iraq be explained 
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as the result of having adopted the practices and procedures of a learning 

organization?

To determine whether this was the case, each learning organization characteristic generated a series of CT task force specific questions that were 

investigated through semi-structured interviews with former members of TF 

714. These questions sought to ascertain the degree to which each successful 

organizational characteristic of a learning organization helps explain why the 

CT force was able to reinvent itself in the midst of a wartime crisis, equipping the organization with the capacity to overcome serious shortcomings 

in performance in Iraq. To what extent did these behavioral and managerial 

changes enhance TF 714’s capacity to acutely degrade AQI?

Supplementing the information collected through these interviews 

was related information gleaned from interviews with other Department 

of Defense officials knowledgeable about task force operations in the Iraq 

war. Open source literature on CT operations in Iraq and of the role of CT 

forces in those operations was also examined. There has been a noteworthy 

consideration of these issues in a number of open source venues. The author 

collected and reviewed these materials. They include General McChrystal’s 

memoir, My Share of the Task, and his subsequent book, Team of Teams: New 

Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, as well as his other publications, 

interviews, and public discussions.57 Several other sources were helpful to 

the study, including interviews with the former chief intelligence officer of 

TF 714, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and U.S. Army 

Colonel William Ostlund, who commanded CT forces in Afghanistan.58

Fall 2003: The War after the War and the Emergence of AQI 

With the end of full-scale combat operations in Iraq in late April 2003, no 

one at the senior level in Washington or Baghdad—military or civilian—

expected an organized resistance to materialize. Inside the U.S. defense and 

security institutions that planned and carried out Operation Iraqi Freedom, a 

‘war after the war’ was unimaginable. However, mounting violence in August 

suggested otherwise. Then in the early fall several high profile attacks took 

place. A member of the Iraqi governing council was assassinated, the United 

Nations Headquarters and International Committee of the Red Cross offices 

in Baghdad and the Italian police facility in Nasiriyya were hit by suicide 
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bombs, and a Chinook helicopter was shot down near Fallujah killing 15 

American soldiers.

By the beginning of 2004, the violence had shifted from periodic highprofile episodes to a rapidly increasing number of attacks against U.S. forces 

and facilities with small arms, mortars, rockets, IEDs, mines, and surface 

to air missiles. During early January, the number of significant insurgent 

activities reported throughout Iraq was over 200 a week. By the last week of 

April, these significant insurgent activities spiked to over 600 and continued to fluctuate around that number for the rest of 2004. During 2005 the 

number of weekly incidents, on more than one occasion, climbed over 800.59 

The result of this escalation of organized violence was TF 714 having a 

new mission. TF 714 now had the mission to target and dismantle the clandestine infrastructure or secret underground apparatus of AQI. This covert 

mechanism gave AQI the capacity to initiate and sustain rapidly increasing 

insurgent operations across Iraq. According to William Rosenau and Austin 

Long, the goal of such “anti-infrastructure operations” as a core element of 

classic COIN doctrine is to comprehend, map, and degrade through “intelligence coordination and the integration of intelligence with an action arm, 

[like TF 714] the subterranean ‘ecosystems’ that sustain insurgencies.”60 Only 

through such a dedicated effort, they add, is it possible to understand “the 

inner workings ... nature and contours of the largely invisible structures 

that sustain armed insurgent opposition.”61

However, what the CT task force soon discovered was that the secret 

underground apparatus of AQI was not like that found in yesterday’s insurgencies. The internal workings and organizational structure of AQI was 

considerably different from its 20th century counterparts. That realization, 

in turn, would have a profound impact on TF 714’s targeting strategy, necessitating a redefinition of what constituted a high value target (HVT). In the 

past, insurgencies were conceived as hierarchical organizations and HVTs 

were those in the top echelon. Consequently, taking out these key figures had 

a significant negative impact on the success of past insurgencies. This was the 

result, for example, of HVT operations against the National Liberation Front, 

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Shining Path, Kurdistan Worker’s 

Party, and Irish Republican Army (IRA), all hierarchical organizations. 

Removing such leaders could also undermine insurgency esprit de corps 

and cause organizational fragmentation.62 To varying degrees, each of these 

armed groups was demoralized when the top leadership was eliminated.
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But AQI’s effectiveness was not determined by its top echelon leadership. In fact, killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006 had little impact 

on the number of ‘significant insurgent activities’ taking place across Iraq. 

They increased from approximately 1,000 a week in the month of Zarqawi’s 

demise to nearly 1,600 a week one year later. The reason for this, TF 714 would 

discover, had to do with the decentralized and networked nature of AQI. 

AQI’s center of gravity was not in the top leadership but in all those who 

commanded and managed its mid-level functional components.63 Therefore, 

AQI’s clandestine underground apparatus was composed of a wide array 

of planning and decision-making mechanisms, operational detachments, 

financial units, communications and media centers, intelligence branches, 

bomb and IED production facilities, and arms acquisition systems. It was 

AQI’s mid-level leaders and managers who had authority and capacity to 

keep up and even escalate operations. They were the new HVTs, and there 

was a plethora of them operating across Iraq. TF 714 found itself ill-equipped 

and unprepared for its new mission. 

Transforming Task Force 714

As noted earlier, in planning Operation Iraqi Freedom, consideration was 

not given to the possibility that in its aftermath a protracted irregular war 

would follow, and that TF 714 would play a major role in it. Consequently, 

following the fall of Baghdad, General McChrystal, who took command 

of the CT task force in the fall of 2003, focused on “capturing or killing 

high-value former Baathist leaders—a group known colloquially as ‘the deck 

of cards’ after the Pentagon had printed packs of playing cards with the 

grainy photographs and names of the top Baathists.”64 To that end, during 

the summer of 2003, TF 714 tracked down the Iraqi dictator’s two sons, Uday 

and Qusay. Then on 13 December in the town of ad-Dawr, near Tikrit, they 

captured Saddam himself.

However, while this was taking place, the security situation in Iraq was 

rapidly deteriorating. During the fall, these signs, often dismissed by Washington, pointed to a robust and organized resistance taking shape. And as it 

grew in intensity, executing more and more devastating attacks, the mission 

of U.S. forces to include TF 714 was about to change dramatically.

Iraq was turning into another one of those ugly surprises that war always 

seems to spawn. Recall what Winston Churchill counseled: “Never believe 
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JSOU Report 16-6

any war will be smooth and easy or that anyone who embarks on that strange 

voyage can measure the tides and storms he will encounter.” Rather, in the 

war room “on the morning of the declaration of war,” several unwelcome 

guests will “all take their seats,” including ugly surprise.65 Iraq’s burgeoning 

violence, contrary to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s characterization of it 

as due to “pockets of dead-enders” and “small ... networks of attackers,” was 

illustrative of Churchill’s warning. The AQI-dominated insurgency plunged 

Iraq into an ugly surprise of unanticipated proportions as 2003 turned into 

2004. 
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1. Unforeseen Challenges, Ugly Surprise, 

and TF 714

As AQI escalated the violence in Iraq, the mission of TF 714 transformed 

from taking down a small number of HVTs—the deck of cards—to 

going to war against an enemy that was different from any it had previously 

prepared to confront. Lieutenant General Flynn, TF 714’s intelligence chief 

beginning in the late spring of 2004, characterized the way in which AQI 

was operating as “a strategic surprise” because “the capability and scale of 

the threat [it posed] was far bigger than any we had ever previously thought 

about ... Clearly, the scale of the terrorist networks that existed, the quality 

of the leadership, and the scope of AQI’s operations surprised us.”66 Others 

in the TF 714 leadership concurred. U.S. Army Lieutenant General Bennet 

Sacolick, who commanded one of the Army units, observed that, “The capacity of the insurgency to escalate and to change and to reinvent itself was a 

surprise.”67

The specialized units of TF 714 had been honed over decades to conduct 

highly discrete and surgical direct action and hostage rescue missions. A 

former mid-level member of TF 714 described this legacy as follows: 

the units were closed, compartmented, and super-secret. They were 

... like a skilled mechanic, very precise. Hostage rescue, single terrorists, onesies and twosies, go get them. By air, by boat, by whatever 

means go and take them out. And then Iraq happened ... The whole 

context changed, the enemy we were fighting changed to a combination of an insurgency and a terrorist organization that was using 

grizzly methods causing all kinds of problems for stability in Iraq.68 

Surprise in war is a constant. Organizations can develop know-how to 

respond to such unforeseen challenges that undercuts their operational effectiveness. At the tactical level, the individual units that comprised TF 714 

were prepared for surprise. They had learned roles, methods, and modes of 

behavior that prepared them to adapt to the unexpected. But the surprise 

TF 714 experienced in Iraq was not at the tactical level, and that proved to 

be a major challenge for an organization comprising units that had excelled 

at tactical adaptation.
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Consequently, TF 714’s initial response was to do more of what it already 

did extremely well. “The initial response,” explained General McChrystal, 

was that “we will just do more of what we are already very good at and 

then we would have done our part.”69 Retired U.S. Air Force Major General 

David Scott, who from 2003-2006 served as one of two TF 714 deputy commanders, saw this resistance to change as due to a culture predicated on a 

self-perception of excellence:

The CT force was based on a culture and that culture was one that 

the members of the Task Force believed in. And this was a culture 

that developed over a long period of time, many years. And so the 

culture was believed in and doing more of the same, but improving it, doing more of it, refining the standard operating procedures 

of the CT force, that was the first choice because to change meant 

having to face failure and there was resistance to that. This was an 

organization that was based on a culture that believed it was the best 

in the world and so failure was not something that one expected. So 

there was resistance to changing routines and standard operating 

procedures to rectify major performance problems or the fact that 

the Task Force couldn’t keep pace with the operational tempo of 

AQI. It was resistance to that idea that we had to change.70

What became evident to the CT task force leadership was that a ‘more of 

the same’ response was not going to have any meaningful impact on AQI. To 

be sure, those operations that TF 714 executed were highly successful. The 

problem was there were not enough of them. They had, at best, only a limited 

impact on AQI’s operational tempo and on the new means it employed to 

maintain that tempo.

The CT task force was facing an enemy that it had never envisaged and 

could not degrade through its existing ways of operating. Doing more at 

what it excelled at—stepping up its own operational tempo—was not going 

to bring success, explained Lieutenant General Flynn. “We realized that we 

had to significantly increase our ops tempo because the enemy’s tempo was 

outpacing us ... Tactically, we felt we are beating these guys, but operationally and strategically we were being outmatched, completely outmatched, 

and we were actually losing.”71

Reaching a consensus among task force members that existing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) were inadequate proved difficult, 
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explained General McChrystal, because the individual units were comfortable with what they believed were the effectiveness of their TTPs. The 

task force members excelled at the tactical level and that sense of excellence “increased inertia ... Why should we change ... [At] a micro-level 

we could do a lot of things very, very well. Even from the beginning of the 

fight [against AQI] we could go and we could hit targets, we could capture, 

kill, we could do those things exceedingly well.”72 But the CT task force was 

operating as a peacetime strategic scalpel, and no matter how excellent, it 

was losing ground in an unfamiliar wartime environment.

That realization was going to necessitate a renovation in how TF 714 

defined mission success and organized to accomplish it. A sea change was 

demanded, explained General McChrystal: 

We needed to view the mission differently and that was whether 

we were winning or losing in Iraq against al-Qaeda ... [and] not 

just whether we captured or killed its members. We had to view the 

mission differently and we had to say that winning is what counts. 

That’s our metric of success, winning or losing, not whether or not 

we get this particular target ... We needed to change our thinking 

to say that capturing or killing is irrelevant unless we win.73

That was how TF 714 had to respond to an unforeseen and an unfamiliar 

challenge that undercut its operational performance. Its members had to 

learn ways of making the organization more agile so it could manage surprise 

above the tactical level.

By the fall of 2004 the realization had set in that the CT task force had 

to change from a strategic scalpel to what came to be termed an industrialstrength CT machine. It was going to need to “capture or kill on an industrial 

scale which is not something it had ever been built to do,” explained Admiral 

McRaven, who served as deputy CT task force commander under General 

McChrystal and then replaced him as the commander of TF 714.74

To operate at the industrial-strength level meant that “the basic mission 

fundamentally had to change,” which was going to “require us to change 

the way we were organizationally structured, manned, trained, equipped, 

and everything else.” But to do so meant, in the first place, that TF 714 “had 

to understand the enemy’s organization ... and that took us a while to realize it was a network.”75 Moreover, that AQI network, General McChrystal 

observed, was unlike any terrorist network that had preceded it. AQI was 
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different, it was “much bigger ... much more dynamic. It had more speed, 

momentum, and it was benefiting from a very different operating environment than the task force had ever anticipated.”76

The complex nature of that network became apparent, recalled the commander of TF 714, when the CT task force tried to portray it on a standard 

map at its headquarters. They could not do it. “In place of maps, whiteboards 

began to appear ... As we gathered intelligence, we diagramed the relationships between members of the organization” on those white boards. But 

what the task force found was “tangled networks that did not resemble any 

organizational structure or pattern we had ever seen. New and unfamiliar 

patterns began to appear on the white boards.” They were not hierarchical 

or orderly, and there was little consistency to them. Soon, those charting 

AQI found that the organizational patterns they expected were “not there 

at all—AQI and this war were fundamentally different from anything we 

had seen in the past.”77

TF 714 had suffered a strategic surprise for which it was not prepared, but 

it was not paralyzed by that revelation. Rather, it was able to recognize the 

significance of what it had discovered and that it would have to demonstrate 

agility and adaptability to overcome an enemy it did not yet fully understand. 
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 2. Problem Solving and the JIATF

As described previously, learning organizations are those that institutionalize and employ problem solving methods to diagnosis new and 

unforeseen operational challenges. And when facing today’s complex challenges, problem solving is understood as a shared responsibility for organizations as a whole, not just the task of the top leadership. It has to become a part 

of the disposition of the entire organization, a way of thinking and acting.

The CT task force, however, was shaped over two decades as a top-down 

military organization, which was highly compartmented and semi-autonomous. General McChrystal noted it was a closed system that broadly reflected 

Henri Fayol’s five step management formula:78

1. Prepare. Examine the context and draw up a plan of action. 

2. Organize. Buildup the structure, both material and human, for the 

undertaking. 

3. Command. Maintain the activity among the personnel.

4. Coordinate. Bind together, unify, and harmonize all activity and effort.

5. Control. See that everything occurs in conformity with established 

rules and commands.79

Problem solving in Fayol’s system of management is the responsibility of the leadership. They break challenges down, think through puzzles, 

marshal information, and select the most efficient solutions. No matter how 

complicated the problem, there are discoverable solutions to them. Those 

solutions, once identified, are then implemented by the organization’s rank 

and file membership. There is a hard line separating leaders and managers 

from workers or, in the case of military organizations, operators. The CT 

task force did not completely conform to Fayol in that there was flexibility in 

terms of problem solving at the tactical level. But above that level, the evolution of the CT task force reflected Fayol in its chain of command.

This was the structure of TF 714 when it deployed to Iraq. Its organizational configuration was hierarchical. But that “organization was designed 

for a problem set that no longer existed,” explained General McChrystal. 
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“We brought an industrial-age force to an information-age conflict.”80 

They planned for complicated problems but found a complex one, as will 

be explained later. Figure 2 shows how TF 714 was structured for problem 

solving, according to its commander.81 It mirrored Fayol.

This traditional method of problem solving was too deliberate and hierarchical to decipher the puzzle presented by Iraq’s fast paced and networked 

insurgency. The CT task force faced an existential crisis in its capacity to 

understand and prevail against AQI. And, as noted above, doing more of the 

same would not suffice. TF 714 had to be redesigned and partnered with several other U.S. Government security agencies to be able to comprehend and 

counter the unprecedented operational challenge confronting it in Iraq. The 

problem of understanding and degrading AQI could not be accomplished 

by a highly compartmented and top-down military organization. It came 

down to transforming or losing. Problem solving had to become a shared 

responsibility for the organization as a whole. And this meant changing 

roles, rules, and patterns of interaction within the organization. Moreover, 

that organization itself would have to expand to include new affiliates that 

were not normally part of the team. And they all were going to have to learn 

to work together as a team.

The far-reaching scope of that transformation was, only subsequently, 

captured in the often quoted General McChrystal maxim: “To defeat a 

networked enemy we had to become a network.” By this he meant that 

TF 714 “had to figure out a way to retain [its] traditional capabilities of 

Figure 2. Traditional Chain of Command Structure82
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professionalism, technology, and, when needed, overwhelming force, while 

achieving levels of [unprecedented] knowledge, speed, precision, and unity 

of effort that only a network could provide.”83

But a mechanism for setting such a transformation in motion was not 

immediately apparent to the task force, as it grappled with this complex 

challenge. There was no blueprint for turning TF 714 into the kind of problem-solving organization that could achieve the objectives envisaged by 

its commander. However, there was a relatively unknown organizational 

concept—JIATF—that Admiral McRaven knew about and suggested to General McChrystal. If adapted to TF 714’s complex Iraqi battlespace, Admiral 

McRaven would propose, it could provide a way forward in unraveling the 

AQI puzzle.

A JIATF, according to Evan Munsing and Christopher J. Lamb, is a 

“model for whole-of-government problem-solving” that, by fostering “cross 

organizational collaboration,” seeks to overcome the “natural tendencies [of 

many organizations] to seek autonomy rather collaboration.”84 Since the end 

of the Cold War such interagency collaboration has frequently been touted 

as the mechanism for addressing complex and unconventional international 

security problems. However, examples of successful JIATFs are few and far 

between.

The reason for this shortfall has to do with the demanding performance 

requirements of a successful JIATF. From their study of JIATF-South, which 

detects, monitors, and disrupts air and sea smuggling of illicit narcotics into 

the U.S. from Latin America, Munsing and Lamb identified the following 

preconditions:

• First, “there must be a single organization dedicated to leading the 

effort,” in which cooperation with others “is on a voluntary basis.” 

That lead organization must be able to convince interagency associates that they want to join up because “there are rewards for pursuing 

the mission.”85

• Second, interagency collaboration is more possible when there is a 

“discrete, clearly identifiable problem with a meaningful and measurable outcome.”86 In the case of JIATF-South this entailed disruption 

of drug shipments and weakening of the cartels.

• Third, to recruit collaborative core partners, the lead organization 

has to learn about those it wants “to partner with, understand their 
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equities, and appreciate what it would take to develop a trust relationship with them.” And beyond core partners, building a truly networked task force necessitates “forging additional partnerships with 

varying levels of intensity ... with a diverse set of [other] interested 

parties.”87

• Fourth, the lead organization has to foster within the JIATF a “culture 

of trust and empowerment,” which takes the persistent nurturing of 

teamwork.88

While JIATF-South was one of the best kept secrets of interagency success,89 USSOCOM in 2003 sent representatives to learn about it. In fact, “then 

U.S. Army Major General Dell Dailey, director of USSOCOM’s Center for 

Special Operations, was so impressed by JIATF–South that he visited the 

command every 3 months with his staff.”90 And Admiral McRaven, who had 

served in the White House, was aware of the JIATF concept and thought it 

had applicability.

Admiral McRaven recalled that in 2004 there was significant frustration 

within TF 714 for reasons noted earlier. And this was voiced at a CT task 

force commander’s conference during that year. Among the quandaries identified was the paucity of obtainable intelligence to infiltrate AQI networks 

in order to disrupt them. Admiral McRaven recalled proposing at the time: 

We need a joint interagency task force and Stan’s up at the whiteboard writing that down—joint interagency task force ... So, we 

talked it through. I said look, we need CIA, we need FBI, we need 

everybody, all the three-letter intelligence agencies. If we don’t 

understand what CIA’s doing, or what FBI’s doing, or NSA, then 

we’re missing things. They have information we’re not seeing.91

General McChrystal was convinced that the highly compartmented TF 

714 needed a JIATF. Embracing the concept was the easy part; operationalizing it to meet the preconditions for success identified by Munsing and Lamb 

would prove very demanding. Deeply rooted cultures of secrecy, autonomy, 

and exclusiveness that infused not only the CT task force organization but 

also all those three-letter agencies had to be overcome. General McChrystal 

would have to convince each to voluntarily join the JIATF and collaborate in 

a work environment of interdependency, cooperation, trust, and transparency. “The need to share information was apparent,” explained Lieutenant 
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General Flynn, but “not everybody was sharing. The CIA was probably the 

most difficult ... NSA was probably second. And then third, right behind 

NSA and CIA were the operational elements ... of the task force. They weren’t 

even sharing.”92

It took until 2005 to establish the JIATF. To institute among its members 

problem solving methods capable of fostering effective diagnoses of AQI’s 

operational practices proved a knotty undertaking. It necessitated forging 

together members of the intelligence community—those three-letter agencies—and the CT task force into a union of trust and common purpose. 

Lieutenant General Flynn explained that creating trust meant, for example, 

that CIA would give the task force “access to some of their most sensitive 

human intelligence data and you’re going to use it appropriately. We had to 

constantly work to make sure that the big intelligence community agencies 

felt that they could trust the task force with their information.”93

In sum, the operating environment dominated by AQI demanded change 

in the cultures of secrecy, autonomy, and exclusiveness that pervaded in both 

the intelligence agencies and in the task force. The organizational mechanism 

to bring about that change was the JIATF. Through it, the CT task force 

leadership sought to foster a new operating environment of interdependence, 

cooperation, trust, and transparency, all essential attributes of effective problem solving in learning organizations. To bring these different organizations 

together to embrace the preconditions of an effective JIATF as spelled out 

by Munsing and Lamb took a great deal of convincing on the part of the CT 

task force leadership. One key to winning them over was to persuade each to 

join forces because there were rewards in it for them in pursuing the mission 

together. One of those rewards, explained Lieutenant General Sacolick, was 

to be part of an organization that had success in Iraq: 

What you had then in the JIATF were a number of organizations 

that had elite institutional cultures. They tended to operate on their 

own. So why become a member of the task force? The answer was 

opportunity—opportunity to get involved with the counterterrorism task force. They wanted to become part of the mission because 

the task force was playing an important role in the war in Iraq. So, 

in a way this was an organic process that then was fostered and 

developed by Stan McChrystal and by Bill McRaven. Success held 

it together. The anchor was success. The JIATF initially was fragile 
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JSOU Report 16-6

but as the insurgency started to grow so did the mission of the task 

force and so McChrystal began to build an interagency team and 

as that team became successful others wanted to be part of it. They 

wanted to participate in the success of the CT task force.94

There was another reason to share in the intelligence the CT task force 

was collecting as part of its operations. As will be underscored in the next 

chapter, it was considerable and, Admiral McRaven noted, it brought the 

intelligence agencies onboard. 

[As] we started closing in on Zarqawi, I believe that is what really 

brought the CIA and task force together. CIA realized they did not 

have the sources where we had sources. They didn’t have a screening facility like we had a screening facility and before long we were 

driving the train and the agency was very happy to be part of it.95

Achieving buy-in by the three letter intelligence agencies to set this in 

motion “took quite a while,” recalled General McChrystal. The key was to 

convince each that “this isn’t TF 714’s mission that you are supporting; this is 

our mission that you are a part of.” And TF 714 would “share our intelligence 

completely; we shared things that they would not have otherwise had access 

to ... Suddenly [they learned] we weren’t just consumers, we were providers 

of intelligence and partners.”96
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3. Organizational Practices: 

Empowerment, Agency, and Complexity

Agency is a critical feature of learning organizations facing complex 

challenges.97 It equips individual members with license to contest existing routines when those operating practices break down and fail to deliver. 

Members are empowered to appraise existing operational TTPs and to propose changes to them.

Having adopted the JIATF structure, the next step in the transformation process was to instill into new interagency partners an interdependent 

learning and problem solving way of thinking based on agency. That entailed 

empowering its members, down to the lowest practical working level, with 

the capacity described in the third characteristic of a learning organization 

previously noted.

The leadership of TF 714 knew it would have to shed its top down approach 

to command and control, substituting for it decentralized authority and 

problem solving from below. To outpace AQI, General McChrystal concluded 

that problem solving and decision making could not wait for him or his top 

deputies to disseminate commands. “A big piece of why we lagged behind 

AQI lay in our need to relay decisions up and down the chain of command. 

The requirement to consult me for strikes was symptomatic of a bureaucracy 

... grown slower and more convoluted as the world around it had become 

faster.” The process was taking too long and its “effects were crippling.”98

Instead, he asserted that “individuals and teams closest to the problem ... 

offered the best ability to decide and act decisively.”99 That was because “the 

velocity and volume of decisions needing to be made in today’s complex 

environments so exceeds the capabilities of even the most gifted leaders. 

Therefore, empowerment of those lower rungs is a simple necessity.”100

As the JIATF began to take shape and enlarge with the addition of CIA, 

NSA, FBI, DIA, NGA, and others, personnel from each deployed to TF 714’s 

headquarters. Once deployed, they found a different kind of work environment from that at their home institution. Lieutenant General Flynn 

explained that they learned: 
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JSOU Report 16-6

you’ve got voice [agency] ... Everybody had a voice and so rank 

didn’t matter, age didn’t matter, what mattered was the value you 

added. Did you have value to provide, and if you did, provide it! 

You have a responsibility to do that. It’s not just the commander or 

the J2 or the J3, it’s everybody.101

Lieutenant General Flynn gave two putative illustrations of how agency 

and empowerment manifested itself in junior personnel at the TF 714 headquarters. In the first, the joint operations center (JOC) scheduled night capture-kill operations to be executed in eight hours. In the interim, a junior 

interrogator happened to learn something during the interrogation of a 

prisoner captured on a similar mission the night before and realized “that’s 

going to impact tonight’s missions. So, he would step away from the interrogation and wouldn’t go back through a layered hierarchy to report what he 

learned, but would go straight to the officer running the JOC to explain we 

just learned this and we think it’s going to affect tonight’s operations.”102 In 

the second example, very proficient but junior analysts would be embedded 

to support elite Army units at their austere forward operating bases. With 

no bureaucratic layers between them, and in a context of interdependence, 

cooperation, and trust, the analysts “began to see their ability and effectiveness just go through the roof. Operations were exponentially improved by 

having this type of communications between operators and analysts working 

side-by-side in the field.”103

A member of the JIATF who served at the working level in 2007-2009 

gave the following description of how agency and empowerment manifested 

itself during his time: 

[It was] the only organization I have ever been in where as long as 

you’re going toward mission accomplishment there was no fear 

of speaking out ... In some organizations I’ve seen it be feared to 

do so especially if the leader was going to bleed you white if you 

said something he didn’t agree with. General McChrystal himself 

had a voracious thirst for knowledge. And if someone had a more 

accurate conception of what the truth was, what the right answer 

was, he would support him ... it didn’t matter what rank they were.

It could be an intel captain doing an update. [What was important 

was] creativity, imagination, and innovation.104
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Agency and empowerment were critical enablers if the JIATF was to 

prevail over what its leadership came to describe as a complex AQI challenge. Over the last two decades the difference between complicated and 

complex problems has received considerable attention, mainly in business 

and management studies.105 Gokce Sargut and Rita McGrath observed that 

coping with accelerating “levels of complexity” has posed an acute challenge 

for those “managing a business today.” 

[Complexity] affects almost everything we touch: the products we 

design, the jobs we do, and the organizations we oversee. Most of 

this increase has resulted from the information technology revolution ... Systems that used to be separate are now interconnected 

and interdependent, which means that they are, by definition, more 

complex.106

What the leadership of TF 714 discovered was that coping with complexity to remain competitive was not a challenge only facing the business and 

corporate world. It was equally true for military organizations engaged in 

modern irregular warfare. 

Complex Challenges

Problem solving that advances adaptation in a complex environment warrants different leadership and managerial TTPs. This is because complex 

challenges “are far more difficult to manage than merely complicated ones,” 

explain Sargut and McGrath. “It is harder to predict what will happen, 

because complex systems interact in unexpected ways.”107 Complicated problems, on the other hand, noted Roberto Poli, “originate from causes that can 

be individually distinguished; they can be [broken down and] addressed 

piece-by-piece; for each input there is a proportionate output ... and the 

problems they present admit to [identifiable] solutions.”108

David Snowden and Mary Boone have been in the forefront in differentiating how complicated domains or contexts diverge from complex ones, and 

in prescribing the methods and practices for managing each. They assert that 

executives who understand “which context they are in ... can not only make 

better decisions but also avoid the problems that arise when their preferred 

management style causes them to fail.”109
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JSOU Report 16-6

Defining characteristics of complicated domains include “a clear relationship between cause and effect.” For leaders facing these challenges, a 

successful outcome is discernible through systematic investigation. However, 

attaining it “is not [necessarily] easy and often requires [outside] expertise 

... because a complicated context calls for investigating several options.”110 

This can take time. But the right answer is knowable, as Poli noted above.111

An identifiable resolution can be attained for complicated problems. There 

is “one right answer.”112

Complex challenges are different in degree and in kind.113 Three characteristics of complex challenges according to Sargut and McGrath, illuminate 

their distinctiveness: multiplicity, interdependence, and diversity. Complex 

domains have a much large number or multiplicity of “interacting elements.” 

And there are scores of connections and linkages among those elements fostering considerable interdependence. But those interactions are nonlinear, 

making the identification of enduring patterns unlikely. Finally, diversity 

is reflected in the high “degree of heterogeneity” among the elements that 

comprise a complex milieu.114

Unlike complicated situations, the outcome for complex ones cannot be 

identified beforehand. That becomes known only in retrospect. Complexity 

does not lend itself to reductionism. The consequences of actions are not, 

in advance, comprehendible due to the number of nonlinear interactions 

taking place among its parts. Sargut and McGrath observe that “in a complex system, the same starting conditions can produce different outcomes, 

depending on the interactions of the elements in the system.”115

In sum, leaders and managers faced with complex challenges have to 

think and act in ways that are different from the past, when they could 

assume an ordered universe. This is because an underlying characteristic 

of complexity is the presence of continuous change driven by innovative 

technologies.116 To be successful in a complex setting, firms have to develop 

the ability to transform themselves continuously, explains E.K. Weick, by 

embracing “ongoing accommodation, adaptation, and alterations,” to “produce fundamental change.”117 Snowden and Boone summarize the characteristics of complexity in Table 1.118

AQI posed a complex challenge for TF 714. Understanding it, General 

McChrystal recalled, was “not an easy insight to come by. It was only ... 

with considerable difficulty that we came to understand how the emerging 

networks of Islamist insurgents and terrorists were fundamentally different 
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from any enemy the United States has previously known or faced.”119 Those 

differences were most apparent, David Knoke observed, in AQI’s “organizational structures and strategies. In place of vertically integrated hierarchies, 

today’s Jihadis assemble in continually shifting networks.”120 Their organization did not mirror the hierarchical organizational structure depicted by 

Fayol. Their strategy was “to drive out foreign occupying forces by inflicting 

such high levels of injury and death that a democratic government would 

be forced to withdraw.”121 This was AQI’s method of fighting—a plethora of 

decentralized groupings that made effective use of information technologies 

to form into an array of dispersed networks able to conduct operations across 

Iraq. They became “the embodiment of netwar,” observed Martin Muckian.122

The concept of netwar was not new to SOF. It had appeared in the 1990s 

as an outgrowth of globalization, the information revolution, and emergence 

of networks. The impact of these developments proved to be far reaching. 

They gave power to a wide range of non-state actors who were gaining the 

capacity to challenge states in a number of ways to include warfare designated as netwar.

The term can be traced to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, who in the 

early 1990s proposed that future conflict would be waged through Internetbased modes of communications. The information age was “altering the 

nature of conflict” by “strengthening network forms of organization, often 

giving them an advantage over hierarchical forms. The rise of networks 

Table 1. Complex contexts. Source: Author

Complex Contexts Involve: 

• A large number of interacting elements.

• Nonlinear Interactions in which minor changes can produce disproportionately 

major consequences.

• A dynamic context in which solutions cannot be imposed but arise from the 

circumstances ... frequently referred to as emergence.

• Elements evolve with one another and with the environment. Evolution is 

irreversible.

• While a complex system may, in retrospect, be ordered and predictable, hindsight 

does not lead to foresight because the external conditions are changing.

• Unlike ordered systems, in complex ones the agents and the context constrain 

each, preventing the prediction of outcomes in advance. 
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means that power is migrating to societal-level non-state actors, because 

they are able to organize into sprawling multi-organizational networks ... 

more readily than can hierarchical state actors.”123

Netwar could be waged over various Internet-based configurations and 

those actors engaged in it were diverse. They included terrorist organizations, 

criminal syndicates, activist groups, and social movements, among other 

non-state actors identified by Arquilla and Ronfeldt in the 1990s.124 The following encapsulates how netwar was understood during its embryonic stage:

Netwar refers to an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal 

levels, involving measures short of traditional war, in which the 

protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age. 

These protagonists are likely to consist of dispersed small groups 

who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an 

internetted manner, without a precise central command.125

What TF 714 faced in Iraq in 2004 far surpassed these early iterations of 

netwar, General McChrystal explained: 

We had studied terrorism and terrorist networks. So, it wasn’t this 

epiphany that this is different than what we thought ... this is much 

bigger, this is much more dynamic, and more complex. It had much 

more speed and it was benefitting from a very different operating 

environment than we had anticipated ... And that created the scope 

and complexity of the problem on a much greater scale than we had 

ever dealt with before or anticipated we would ever face.126

What TF 714 encountered was an AQI that was evolving and transforming expeditiously, said Admiral McRaven. “It was a rapid evolution ... The 

insurgents were building those networks very fast. They didn’t just come into 

Iraq with a perfect organization. They had to build it.”127

However, as AQI unfolded and evolved in the fight against TF 714, its 

component parts, as depicted in Figure 3, morphed and transformed the 

shape of its networks. It emerged as a web of dispersed, dynamic, and interconnected networks, described by one observer as follows: 

The insurgency was primarily made up of clandestine cellular networks, applying excellent tradecraft to remain hidden and to hide 
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the connections between the 

individuals in the movement. 

Thus, the unseen linkages that 

connected the distributed cells 

were the clandestine infrastructure (form), further protected by 

the clandestine arts (function), to 

minimize signature so that the 

clandestine cellular networks 

were not readily visible.128

Clandestine insurgent infrastructures were not new. AQI’s 

underground networks carried out 

functions that were not dissimilar 

from its Cold War forerunners.129 The 

difference was the new “sanctuary” 

within which AQI was embedded 

and the speed with which it could 

execute distributed operations in Iraq. Lieutenant General Flynn explained 

the “global communications revolution” has provided AQI with: 

a new complex terrain—an electronic sanctuary—in which actions 

can be hidden among the innumerable civilian signals that constitute 

daily cell phone and Internet traffic. It is from this new sanctuary 

that the enemy coordinates activities from dispersed networks in 

order to self-synchronize, pass information, and transfer funds. In 

this way, the insurgents have become ‘networked coalitions of the 

willing’ that come together temporarily and are thus difficult to 

observe and destroy. Drawing support from their networks, they 

remain low contrast until time to strike and then quickly blend 

back into the population.130

To defeat this complex web of networks, Lieutenant General Flynn told 

General McChrystal during an early 2004 visit to Iraq, TF 714 had to become 

more of an intelligence organization than an operations organization. Lieutenant General Flynn was in Iraq assessing the state of TF 714’s intelligence 

capacity in preparation for becoming the J2, chief of intelligence. 

Figure 3. AQI Web of Networks in 

Iraq at One Point in Time. 

Source: Author
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JSOU Report 16-6

I said to Stan, “your intelligence operations are a small part of your 

organization and they need to be 80 percent of what you do as an 

organization. It needs to be the majority of what the task force does 

because frankly, what we were facing we don’t know squat about.” 

In those couple of weeks spent assessing TF 714 what I realized was 

that this organization was an exquisite capability but they didn’t have 

the intelligence that they needed. They weren’t even considering it 

to the degree that they should have.131

In sum, an important learning point for TF 714 was the realization that 

to be an effective action arm of the JIATF, the operational units had to be 

coordinated with a robust intelligence capability composed of several of the 

three-letter agencies of the intelligence community. Actionable intelligence 

had to lead the way in the fight against AQI. 
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4. Information, Knowledge, and 

Intelligence Dominance

Business and management studies have found that successful learning 

organizations are able to identify the causes of their ineffectiveness 

by developing the means to secure information and knowledge about those 

shortcomings.132 For a military organization at war this is an essential capability. And this was true for TF 714, which was embroiled in a fight with a 

clandestine and networked enemy. Intelligence—information and knowledge—had to lead the way. Amassing and disseminating timely and accurate 

intelligence about AQI was the sine qua non for success. The task force had 

to achieve what has been termed intelligence dominance.

Intelligence dominance has been an essential tool employed by a number 

of intelligence services to overcome the threats posed by contemporary 

armed groups. According to Roy Godson and his associates, achieving intelligence dominance means to develop “sufficient local knowledge to map the 

infrastructure of armed groups, and gather the evidence to arrest and/or 

neutralize the support structure and leadership of the groups.”133 A former 

senior member of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, described its 

importance as follows: 

To defeat terrorists you must know everything about them. Everything! Who are their leaders and how do they plan and carry out 

operations? How are they organized and what methods are used 

for recruitment? What are their weaknesses and vulnerabilities ... 

Without systematic knowledge of the enemy, operations to neutralize 

such unconventional adversaries are usually futile.134

A former intelligence officer who worked against the IRA described the 

methods he used to collect such information as “complete block by block 

coverage—of each location out of which the terrorists operate.”135

In 2004, TF 714 was nowhere close to having intelligence dominance. 

General McChrystal recalled that his organization was not exploiting the 

intelligence collected on operations. The process was defective. Across the 

task force, he explained, operations should have been conducted to collect 

and produce more and better intelligence on AQI’s networks. They should 
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JSOU Report 16-6

have generated intelligence and that intelligence should have been the means 

for accelerating the tempo of operations. 

We intuitively knew that the day we had that kind of knowledge 

on AQI we would win, it would be over. Because any time we knew 

where they were and who they were we could capture or kill them 

quickly. The challenge was to know enough to rapidly carry out 

operations that degraded AQI’s networks. It was this constant search 

for intelligence.136

This was not how task force intelligence functioned in 2004. Operators 

were collecting considerable intelligence as a byproduct of raids, but that 

intelligence was not being exploited to ramp up the pace of operations. “On 

each mission,” explained TF 714’s commander, operators “found documents 

and electronics, as well as people who knew names and plans that we wanted 

to know. But human error, insufficient technology, and organizational strictures limited our ability to use that intelligence to mount the next raid.” 

Instead of exploiting it to achieve intelligence dominance, the teams “filled 

emptied sandbags, burlap sacks, or clear plastic trash bags with scooped-up 

piles of documents, CDs, computers, and cell phones, and then sent them 

down to our base in Baghdad. Detainees thought to be important made the 

trip with the bags.”137 Once the bags arrived they were placed in storage. 

General McChrystal found little to suggest that their contents were being 

methodically mined—intelligence was not leading the way. The CT task force 

focused on the standard find, fix, finish (F3) construct, explained Lieutenant 

General Flynn. That was the main effort. What was missing was attention 

to “track and assess” or “exploit and analyze.” After Lieutenant General 

Flynn got to the CT task force, he said, “F3 was where we were spending 

most of our time. I looked at that and I asked what are we doing in the areas 

of exploiting and analyzing? F3 is where 80 percent, probably more like 90 

percent, of the attention of the task force was focused.”138 “The problem with 

that cycle [was] you never understand the scope of the network you were 

fighting,” Admiral McRaven added. 

[A]s in years past, somebody like CIA would find the target, somebody like NSA would fix the target, they would give it to us to go 

finish the target. We’d hand what we collected on the mission back 

off to CIA or FBI to do the analysis of the captured materials. They’d 
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hand it to somebody else to do the dissemination and we’d just wait 

for the next target to come to us.139

General McChrystal very early on recognized he had to “own it all.” He 

needed to “own find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate.”140

But AQI posed a new, complex problem set enhanced by information age 

technology. To achieve intelligence dominance the JIATF had to develop a 

new approach. The task force, as matters stood, only excelled at the ‘finish’ 

part of the equation. ‘Finish’ was necessary but far from sufficient. The task 

force was pitted against a networked insurgency and that necessitated adoption of a new operational concept for attacking and degrading it. That concept was F3EAD.

To step up the operational tempo against AQI, the JIATF had to collect, 

analyze, and utilize intelligence collected on each operation. F3 had to be 

transformed into F3EAD. To accomplish that, said Lieutenant General Flynn, 

“the task force flipped the targeting process completely around.” Instead of 

80 percent of the task force effort being focused on operations and 20 percent 

on intelligence, the opposite became the case. What this meant, he explained, 

was that “the days are gone where intelligence was a subordinate component 

of operations. Intelligence now was going to be the leading component.”141

He argued that transforming F3 into F3EAD was essential:

if we were going to defeat this enemy. They had to have pressure 

applied to them constantly. And the only way to apply pressure 

constantly was to make them feel like they will never have a good 

night’s sleep. And that they would have to constantly be on the move 

... And that’s what we had to do. And that’s what our raids did, and 

that was across the board.142

Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate

By itself, the CT task force could not execute F3EAD. It did not have the 

intelligence capacity to do so. That necessitated an interagency collaborative effort. Therefore, achieving the buy-in of the three-letter intelligence 

agencies, as discussed earlier, was essential to achieve intelligence dominance. It was the indispensable prologue. Without it, the process of analyzing 

and exploiting intelligence collected on operations to foster more operations could never have achieved the tempo needed to degrade the insurgent 
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JSOU Report 16-6

underground and networked apparatus. As a highly compartmented and 

semi-autonomous organization, TF 714 did not have the necessary intelligence capacity.

The JIATF brought together three critical ingredients—people, process, 

and systems—to employ F3EAD to achieve intelligence dominance. Charles 

Faint and Michael Harris describe it as a “system that allows Special Operations Forces (SOF) to anticipate and predict enemy operations, to identify, 

locate, and target enemy forces, and to perform intelligence exploitation and 

analysis of captured enemy personnel and materiel.”143

The key to successful employment of F3EAD was speeding up turnaround 

time. “The goal of operations/intelligence fusion and of the rapid pace of the 

F3EAD process” was to enable the task force “to plan and execute operations against the enemy faster than the enemy could react” to those operations. It provided the way for the task force to get inside AQI’s networks to 

“simultaneously direct [multiple] operations against several parts of [it].”144

When done successfully, the reconfigured interagency JIATF dominated the 

operational tempo of the fight.

F3EAD transformed targeting. No longer was the focal point on seizing 

or destroying enemy personnel, equipment, and facilities. Rather, the main 

effort now concentrated on the intelligence elements of the process—exploit 

and analyze. This set in motion a continuous cycle, captured in Figure 4, 

which provided the JIATF with the capacity to dominate the operational 

speed of the battle with AQI.

Figure 4. The F3EAD Process. Source: Joint Publication 3-05, 

Special Operations, page IV-1.
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F3EAD, as with its F3 predecessor, began with target selection. Targets 

were identified organically by personnel within the JIATF. Faint and Harris 

note that “the targeting start point can be deliberate or opportunity-based, 

and can focus on a known personality, a facility, an organization, or some 

other type of signature.”145 

But once identified, the JIATF could call on the full toolbox of intelligence capabilities its interagency partners brought to the table to locate 

and fix a target “in time and space.”146 And having representatives from the 

intelligence agencies deployed forward and present at TF 714’s headquarters 

increased the speed with which their capabilities could be brought to bear to 

track and frame a target’s pattern of life, physical movements, and connection within one or more AQI networks. Their presence also made it easier for 

the CT task force to have a reach back connection to draw on the capabilities of those agencies at their home headquarters. Through the JIATF, the 

CT task force could marshal the intelligence capabilities available to it from 

across the intelligence community, drawing on specific agencies to provide 

specific expertise to help fix a specific target.

At the center of the intelligence process was TF 714’s J2 Chief of Intelligence Lieutenant General Flynn. He explained that intelligence began with 

operators during a mission; they were “primary collectors. The convergence 

of intelligence and operations began with the operator not with the intelligence specialists in the task force. Operators had to accept the fact that 

they were going to have to do things differently,” and that their operations 

had more in common with techniques used by “the law enforcement community.” For example, they had to collect details on the detainees from a 

mission at the site of the raid. Lieutenant General Flynn gave the example 

of “pocket litter.”147

In the past, three guys would be captured on a mission and a bag of 

items collected. A bag of stuff would be captured, and we might ask 

the operators, where did you get this particular item? And they would 

say ... we don’t remember. We wanted to know whose pocket it was 

in, who was in possession of it. This kind of detail was important 

because we found over time that guys who were holding documents 

were not actually the guys we wanted. It was somebody else who was 

in the room. And that somebody else would play dumb. Because 
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they knew we didn’t always keep everybody detained. So we needed 

to know that kind of detail.148

This could lead to an interrogation that revealed information on another 

target in the same neighborhood where the initial operation took place.

Other items in that bag, such as laptops and cell phones, likewise could 

quickly identify other members of an AQI network, resulting in new targets. 

General McChrystal described how these were mined at TF 714 headquarters 

by intelligence specialists from those three-letter agencies. 

We went from ... bags of captured items sitting there and we’ll read 

them when we get time, which was weeks later, to all these analysts 

sitting in a series of rooms. And this room was the cell phone room. 

Detainee phones were taken there immediately after a raid and they 

had these machines that as soon as we capture someone with a phone, 

we hook the phone up and we have computers that suck the guts 

out of the phone, they see who he’s called ... who he’s talked to. Has 

anybody else that we captured talked to these people? 

Triangulating this was the beginning of the uncovering of a network of 

new targets. A similar capability existed at TF 714 headquarters for captured 

computers, he explained. “Specialists laid everything out in the computer 

room ... they start triangulating what they found, they start translating it ... 

they’re doing a scan for information which we could use for target identification and simultaneously ... we’re pumping it back to the CIA, to the NSA.”149

Targets generated by this process could be immediately “fixed” by the 

J2 employing what Lieutenant General Flynn described as “a robust allsource intelligence network” that could call on airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) in conjunction with human intelligence 

(HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), and detainee intelligence, to track 

a target continuously.150 Against an enemy embedded in both the population 

and on the Internet, it: 

took multiple sources of intelligence to corroborate one another. 

SIGINT, for example, can locate a target but may not be able to 

discern who it is. FMV [full motion video] can track movements 

but not necessarily identify the targets intentions. HUMINT can 

provide intent but may not be able to fix a target in a precise location. 

However, these intelligence disciplines and others working together 
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are able to focus the spotlight on low-contrast foes, so they can be 

captured or killed.151

What these intelligence capabilities permitted the members of the JIATF 

to do was to develop the ‘pattern of life’ for a member of AQI and then to map 

out his place in an AQI network. In effect, they could put the target under a 

multidimensional stakeout. And all the intelligence that was gathered could 

be fed into the exploit and analyze part of the F3EAD cycle. Having these 

capabilities forward at the headquarters was essential for speeding up turnaround time to achieve the operational tempo needed to degrade the insurgent network. Lieutenant General Flynn gave the following example of how 

the system worked when processing a captured insurgent from a night raid:

What exploit meant was to know what it was that you were going 

after and what you were looking for. You could already have intelligence that you collected from previous operations. For example, 

our interrogators would go into an interrogation looking for something in particular. We might be going after a particular individual 

and we find out that the just captured detainee knew him, was in 

contact with him, and could know his location. How did we know 

this? Here is an example I remember. At 2200 one night we do a 

download on the phone of a just captured detainee, and we have 

the technology in place because technology was never the problem. 

So, we would process it immediately. Here are his contacts. We do 

a quick contacts check, and that’s all done internally. We didn’t 

have to go back to big NSA, all is being done internally. And we 

find out here is a number that’s associated with an insurgent we are 

looking for. That information from the analyst is provided in real 

time to the interrogator who would go back into the interrogation 

booth and bring the guy back in to the booth and ask about this 

guy and about his location. This led to a new target that we put ISR 

collection on. This is all happening in a span of 3 or 4 hours. Now 

we know the house, we have a phone number that’s associated with 

it, and we have the site under observation. If the phone rings, we 

can listen in. If the target leaves the house we can follow him. And 

as we are doing this, a team is preparing to carry out a raid on the 

house and capture the target. It is still the same night. To me this 

is revolutionary; it is an RMA, a revolution in military affairs.152
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The example illustrates the speed of the F3EAD cycle with respect to one 

night. The faster TF 714 could move through the cycle, the faster its operational tempo. General McChrystal explained: 

the great change for the task force was in taking this process and 

basically bending it into a seamless, repeating circle. We made it a 

circle but then we also made it possible that you could go to here 

in the cycle and then go to there within it. You didn’t have to go 

slavishly through every step of the cycle. The idea was it was an 

interconnected system.153

 A member of the CT task force in Iraq described the F3EAD process as 

making TF 714: 

more agile, responsive, and speedy. We could capture, kill, exploit, 

develop, and disseminate intelligence within a 24-hour cycle, and 

in one period of darkness we would sequentially execute up to eight 

to 12 missions. And some of those missions are on the same night, 

exploiting intelligence captured that night. We could do that because 

of all the interagency representatives. They all brought something. 

NSA brings their signal capacity, DIA and CIA bring in their analytical capacity, FBI helps with forensics ... We tracked targets with 

all the tools of intelligence.154

F3EAD achieved intelligence dominance against a modern, networked 

armed group. However, what this intelligence process could not produce was 

a grand organizational design of all of al-Qaeda’s different elements in Iraq. 

There was no such fixed structure that the F3EAD process could discern. 

AQI was a complex system comprising a large number of interconnecting 

networks, as illustrated in Figure 4, which were always adapting and changing. It was not an ordered system. The F3EAD process allowed TF 714 to get 

inside an AQI sub-network to reveal particular nodes and the interrelationship between them. It could expose an operational unit or an IED production 

and distribution facility or a financier group. And once inside the task force 

could distinguish central and peripheral figures, patterns of behavior, and 

clusters and groupings of nodes in order to disrupt and degrade that part 

of AQI’s system. Do this fast enough, hit many targets rapidly every night, 

and the task force would outpace AQI’s capacity to adapt and renew itself.
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At first, explained retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Eric Fiel, “we 

would not know what a particular element of AQI looked like. All we knew 

was that a certain geographic location was experiencing a high level of insurgent activity. An initial raid could give the task force pieces of information 

about it.”155 It all began with a piece of intelligence from a phone, computer, 

or detainee interrogation gathered on a night raid. In that data the analysts 

were looking for a number of things. First, for contacts—who is talking to 

whom? Second, information found on phones and computers was used to 

press detainees to outline his network grouping. Who comprised it and what 

did it do? Third, based on that intelligence, analysts begin to put together 

the outline of a sub-network for one part of AQI in one part of Iraq. They 

figured out where it was located, who populated it, what the communication 

patterns looked like, who was in charge, and what they were planning to do.

All of this intelligence, collected and exploited in a very short period of 

time, was triangulated with information already in data management systems. This allowed the analysts to fill out a diagram of an AQI sub-network 

in a particular part of Iraq. The schema that emerged was not orderly and 

hierarchical. Rather, it seemed chaotic, disorganized, and dispersed. They 

had no single operation center. But it was effective. Those who comprised it 

used technology competently, they had military skills, and they were adaptive. The picture that emerged was of a complex, adapting system. There 

were critical nodes within the network that could be attacked to disrupt and 

degrade it once the task force was able to operate inside. General McChrystal 

summarized the process as follows: “The way we dealt with a particular part 

of their network once we identified it was to dominate its operational tempo, 

to pummel it constantly through raids against it, to drive it down and make 

it collapse in upon itself.”156

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5. Augmenting the JIATF

Learning organizations create innovative procedures and mechanisms 

that foster cross-organization ties, cross-fertilization of new ideas, 

and dissemination of new knowledge to respond to complex challenges. 

The JIATF established a networked operating system based on cooperation, 

trust, and interdependence among its members. Moreover, several innovative procedures and mechanisms were adopted at the TF 714 headquarters 

to augment the JIATF’s operating system. Each helped foster an environment that generated real time interaction and problem solving across the CT 

task force to exponentially increase operational tempo. These innovations 

enhanced the capacity of the JIATF to act decisively, with speed and precision, to maneuver inside AQI’s networks fast enough to seriously degrade 

them from inside out. Below, several of these innovations are highlighted 

beginning with the physical layout of the headquarters.

Open Spaces and Unrestricted Workspace

Given the JIATF’s essential preconditions of cooperation and interdependence, the command center could not take the form of a standard military 

headquarters, divided into offices that were segmented into cubicles with 

little common space and security restrictions on movement. The TF 714 

headquarters was its antithesis, dominated by a large open space without 

cubicles, compartments, or limits on movement within it. It was an unrestricted, organic workspace whose aim was to facilitate the free flow of information and ideas through collaboration and interaction. At the front was 

a large U-shaped set of tables where General McChrystal, his component 

commanders, and senior interagency representatives sat. This allowed them 

to communicate easily with each other as well as with all of those seated 

outward from them. The rest of the space was filled with a plethora of tables 

and chairs for all of the working level personnel assigned to the headquarters 

from the various interagency components of the JIATF.

General McChrystal provided the following description of the layout: 

Our personnel were placed strategically throughout the space, 

depending on their function—those with access to real-time 
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information critical to ongoing operations were closer to the center 

of the room, those with longer term focus were on the fringes.

But they were not cordoned off from one another. Rather, 

any of them could walk freely across the room for quick face-toface interaction. And with the touch of a button on a microphone, 

everyone’s attention could be captured simultaneously ... almost 

any document or issue relevant to our operations, many of them 

very sensitive, could be discussed and debated on the open floor. 

This was an unprecedented adaptation for a military organization, but it 

was essential if the JIATF was to foster transparency throughout the force 

and with partners, 

providing every component on the task force with an unobstructed, 

constantly up-to-date view of the rest of the organization. It was 

the type of transparency that those of us raised in the comfort 

of bureaucratic silos found uncomfortable. But it was absolutely 

critical to our ability to coalesce and succeed as a team of teams ... 

We normalized information sharing and interdependency among 

people [and agencies] use to the opposite.157

The Daily Operations and Intelligence Briefing

A second innovation enabling the evolution of the JIATF into a networked 

operating system that normalized information sharing and interdependency 

was reflected in the protocol for conducting the daily operations and intelligence briefing (O&I). Attendance was open to everyone assigned to TF 714 

headquarters, regardless of rank or position. Each session began at 4 p.m. 

Iraq time and ran for 90 minutes or longer. It started with up-to-the-minute 

details and appraisals of the raids conducted the night before and of the 

intelligence collected on those operations. This included a delineation of key 

intelligence insights deduced from those missions and what that information 

and knowledge contributed to furthering understanding of the makeup and 

inner workings of specific AQI networks.

The daily O&I also reported on and discussed missions planned for 

later that night. “These briefings were interactive, information sharing, and 
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problem solving exercises,” said Lieutenant General Sacolick, at the time 

commander of one of the TF 714 Army units.158

If you had something to say, you could weigh in and comment 

on what was being discussed that day about operations from the 

previous day or about different methods that were used as part of 

operations ... [The] organization was challengeable. To win you had 

to be adapting to this adapting enemy.159

Video Teleconference: A Vehicle for Intelligence Sharing

The JIATF transmitted the daily O&I brief out from TF 714 headquarters 

by video teleconference (VTC) to 20-30 operational detachments and intelligence units affiliated with TF 714 located across Iraq.160 It was also transmitted to other units of U.S. CT forces fighting elsewhere in the Levant, 

Maghreb, and beyond. Finally, the home headquarters in Washington, DC, 

and other regional posts for each of the JIATFs intelligence community 

partners with personnel at the TF 714 headquarters could also take part in 

the daily O&I brief.

To be able to do this, noted Admiral McRaven, it “was necessary to overcome a VTC architecture that was not built for this kind of undertaking and 

kept crashing.” The CT task force had to “make the investment to get the old 

technology changed out and to build a whole new network that created a 90 

percent reliability on the VTC.”161 As a result, the attendance grew to “7,000 

almost daily ... [T]he information that was shared in the O&I was so rich, 

so timely, and so pertinent to the fight in Iraq and beyond, no one wanted to 

miss it.”162 Information and knowledge learned about AQI was often highly 

valuable to others fighting al-Qaeda elsewhere and vice versa.

The JIATF made use of VTC technologies in other ways as well. For 

example, Lieutenant General Flynn stated: 

cameras were placed in special rooms at the task force headquarters where intelligence exploitation teams worked examining and 

assessing items captured on raids only a few hours earlier. As they 

poured over those materials, intelligence specialists at CIA in Langley [Virginia], for example, through video links, took part in that 

exploitation process in real time.163
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VTCs were also used to elicit help with problems TF 714 faced in Iraq, the 

TF 714 J2 pointed out. It might be explained in a VTC session that: 

we thought we needed some help with something and we might ask 

NSA specialists linked in through VTC ‘do you think you guys can 

do this for us?’ And their answer would come back right then and 

there. They would answer the question right there ... In the early 

days they usually would say I have to go back and ask their higher 

officials. But as time went on they would immediately say ‘we can 

do that.’164

These information technologies provided “a great deal more knowledge, 

a great deal more information, and a great deal more speed,” a former analyst summarized. This was “the essence of the JIATF network. Connectivity made it work and having a shared understanding of the enemy and the 

environment and how it was changing were crucial facets of how we built 

an industrial strength CT capability.”165

Airborne Stakeouts: Intelligence, Surveillance and 

Reconnaissance

Other technologies likewise made significant contributions to the effectiveness of TF 714. Of these, Lieutenant General Flynn and General McChrystal singled out ISR, which is defined as “an activity that synchronizes and 

integrates the planning and operation of sensors, assets, and processing, 

exploitation, and dissemination systems in direct support of operations.”166

According to Lieutenant General Flynn, against a dispersed enemy like AQI, 

the ability to amass airborne ISR provided the task force with “long dwelltime [and] persistent surveillance directed against known and suspected 

terrorist sites or individuals.” The goal was “to apply multi-sensor observation 24/7 to achieve a greater understanding of how the enemy’s network 

operates by building a pattern-of-life analysis.”167

In Iraq, this resulted in hundreds of successful raids because airborne 

ISR provided the technical means to become “intimately familiar with a target’s habits and characteristics to the degree that they could easily recognize 

something unusual and in some cases even detect a visual signature of how 

the target walked, traveled in groups, or engaged other people.”168 ISR was a 

tremendous force multiplier. General McChrystal recalled that, “at one point 
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I went to General [George] Casey [Multi-National Force–Iraq] and I said if 

you double the amount of ISR we have I’ll more than double the number of 

targets we can hit. Guaranteed! He did, and we did. We tripled the output.”159

ISR was particularly crucial in the fix phase of the F3EAD targeting 

process, noted Lieutenant General Sacolick, because of the intelligence it 

could generate.170 Fixing a particular target was akin to a police stakeout. 

But it was much more dynamic because of all the special intelligence tools 

that TF 714 could bring to bear in watching and listening in on a particular 

AQI member or facility for an extended period of time. And, when able to 

do so, Faint and Harris add, the task force employed the “practice of ‘federating’ or spreading the intelligence effort [the stakeout] amongst multiple 

intelligence agencies.”171 The reason for doing so was to enable the task force 

to fully exploit the intelligence collection process during the fix phase by 

reaching back to specific members of the intelligence community, and even 

particular individuals in those agencies, to engage them in the operation in 

real time. This would allow the CT task force to fully exploit the individual 

or facility under observation before proceeding to the finish stage. By reaching back and bringing these actors into the process, the fix phase could be 

fine-tuned to generate new knowledge, and intelligence might be gleaned 

on a particular part of AQI, resulting in additional targets. 

Analytic Toolbox: Operating Inside AQI Networks

ISR also provided important intelligence that was needed to exploit AQI’s 

increasing use of modern communications devices, General McChrystal 

added. Once under video surveillance, a target’s cell phone and computer 

could likewise be monitored from airborne ISR platforms through SIGINT 

collection [signals intelligence], revealing the identities, locations, and activities of other potentially key mid-level commanders and managers of AQI’s 

networks.172 The JIATF also had available a close-in, on-the-ground SIGINT 

capability it could deploy to monitor a target’s cell phone usage. Once this 

intelligence was collected and processed it was fed into databases in which 

the JIATF employed an analytic toolbox of innovative methods to search for 

linkages and relationships among widely dispersed members of al-Qaeda’s 

networks in Iraq. Within the F3EAD process, the exploit phase involved an 

array of specialists at TF 714 headquarters who identified and triangulated 

important pieces of intelligence about AQI personnel and activities gathered 
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through ISR, as well as found in all of those communications devices, documents, and other materials collected by task force teams during night raids. 

Sometimes what they found clearly identified a new target that could be 

quickly fixed in time and space by all the intelligence capabilities available 

to the JIATF.

But when this was not the case, the intelligence was then integrated into 

large data management systems for deeper network exploitation using various analytic tools.173 According to Admiral McRaven, “a great deal of money 

was allocated for these systems. Every bit of intelligence collected was coded 

and put into them.”174 It all was digitized and made available to U.S.-based 

analysts at CIA, NSA, DIA, and other intelligence agencies. They received 

direct access to it.

Social network analysis tools and methods allowed task force specialists, 

as well as their counterparts in the intelligence community, 

to identify and portray the details of a network’s structure. It shows 

how an insurgency’s networked organization behaves and how that 

connectivity affects its behavior. Social network analysis allowed 

analysts to assess a network’s design, how its member may or may 

not act autonomously, where the leadership resides or how it is 

distributed among members.175

This understanding is then placed on a network graph which lets the analyst identify more important individual actors or nodes and the connections 

or links between them. Based on this knowledge, “organizational-level analysis provided insights about the insurgent organization’s form, efficiency, and 

cohesion,” while “individual-level analysis characterizes every member of an 

organization and identifies ... key individuals from a large mass of data.”176

Through an examination of the nodes that connected AQI sub-networks, 

JIATF analysts were able to get inside its clandestine apparatus. In doing so, 

it could concentrate targeting on a network’s mid-level commanders and the 

managers of its financial units, communications and media centers, intelligence services, bomb and IED production facilities, and arms acquisition 

systems. They were AQI’s center of gravity, as General McChrystal explained: 

by degrading “the middle of the network ... you caused the network to collapse in on itself.”177 Consequently, that is where TF 714 targeting eventually 

focused.
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However, this initially was not the case, he noted. At first, “we started the 

war thinking ‘Mr. Big’ was the answer. And it was a great temptation to think 

if we can remove Mr. Big that will do it.” However, eliminating Zarqawi had 

little impact on AQI’s operational tempo. Against complex, decentralized, 

networked enemies, old theories focused on HVTs or ‘Mr. Big’ no longer were 

the answer, as was noted earlier. Consequently, General McChrystal refocused on “those doing the work. Those who directed operations, managed 

communications, those who made AQI’s networks function ... I described 

them as the guts of AQI. I said we will claw the guts out of AQI and it will 

collapse.”178 To do so, this analytic toolbox played an important part. 

Detainees and Interrogation

The detention and interrogation of captured members of al-Qaeda following 9/11 generated tremendous controversy because of the use of coercive 

methods employed by the CIA to extract intelligence. With the release in 

December 2014 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) of its 

“Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” the controversy 

reached a new level of intensity. Senator Diane Feinstein, chair of the SSCI, 

went so far as to characterize the program as “a stain on our values and our 

history.”179

Interestingly, the task force approach to interrogating all those AQI 

members captured on raids did not rely on such coercive methods. Many of 

those operatives captured nightly had extensive knowledge of a particular 

function or aspect of the AQI network in which they were situated and that 

information often generated new targeting options. The challenge was to get 

the detainee to ‘spill the beans.’

If this was to take place, CT task force interrogators concluded, an interdependent relationship between interrogators and intelligence analysts was 

essential. The knowledge exploited by analysts from the intelligence collected 

by ISR and HUMINT, and extracted from all those devices and documents 

gathered up on TF 714 raids and utilized to identify the nodes and links in 

AQI networks was also vital to how interrogators conducted the questioning 

of detainees. All of this information could greatly empower the interrogator.

The goal, explained Lieutenant General Flynn, was that as an interrogator, “I wanted to know more about that guy being interrogated by me than 

he knew about himself. And that was our goal. In fact, that was one of our 
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stated goals for our interrogation officers. I want the detainee to think that 

I know more about him than he knows about himself.”180 The master Israeli 

interrogator, Michael Koubi, described this as convincing detainees that 

“they cannot hide anything from you ... You have to learn everything about 

his background. You have to know about his family, his wife, his children, 

his friends, and his neighborhood.” With such knowledge, he concluded, 

“people who talk tough in public often submit in interrogation.”181 

JIATF interrogators could rely on subtle and clever methods because they 

had information dominance over detainees. “It became this machine,” said 

General McChrystal. “When we started, we had, I don’t know, 10 people 

handling the detainees. By the time this was cranking, in this facility at our 

headquarters, the task force had approximately 300 personnel working in 

there focused on detainees.”182 These included analysts, who often were part 

of interrogations.

This approach of integrating analysts into the interrogation process has 

been employed by other intelligence services operating against armed groups. 

Here is how a highly experienced Israeli intelligence analyst described how 

she interacted on a daily basis with her case officer counterparts. 

[S]he could request that a specific suspect be detained for interrogation if, based on other sources, she knew he was potentially a valuable source for a critical piece of information. She could request the 

interrogation take place quickly, especially if the intelligence sought 

was perishable. She could provide a local interrogator with specific 

questions and detailed knowledge that he could use in interviewing 

the suspect.183

And she even could listen into the actual interrogation and “say to the 

case officer, ‘Ask him about this ...’ or ‘Get him to clarify that ...’ By being 

able to do so, I could get the specific details I needed to guide the police and 

military commanders.”184

These approaches developed by other intelligence services to integrate 

intelligence analysts into the interrogation process were fully employed by 

the task force at TF 714 headquarters. Admiral McRaven deemed that these 

methods were so successful that detainees became “the single best source 

of knowledge and information on AQI and greatly facilitated the targeting 

process. Amazingly, the detainees would tell you literally everything they 

knew about their place in the network. And you did not have to use force 
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to get them to do so.”185 Matthew Alexander, one of those skilled task force 

interrogators, provides numerous illustrations of how this process worked 

in his book.186 The end result was that intelligence gained from a detainee 

one night could generate one or more targets for the next night. It was yet 

another innovation that contributed to the transformation of TF 714 into an 

industrial-strength CT machine.

Liaison Officers 

The final innovation highlighted here was the use of liaison officers, or LNOs, 

by the TF 714 to generate trust and strengthen ties with a wide array of partner agencies and organizations that were tasked with managing different 

aspects of al-Qaeda’s global franchises, activities, and operations beyond 

Iraq. The role of LNOs was to facilitate effective working relationships with 

this larger U.S. Government CT network. The mission of the LNOs, General McChrystal writes, was to foster a reciprocal rapport in which each 

partner agency shared and benefited. “We hoped that if the liaisons we sent 

contributed real value to our partners’ operations, it would lay a foundation 

for the trusting relationships we needed to develop between the nodes of 

our network.”187

LNOs were necessary, the TF 714 leadership had concluded, because AQI 

did not exist in a vacuum. It was part of a Jihadi global apparatus of alQaeda associates and affiliates. Consequently, the sharing of information 

and knowledge was essential. The value of the intelligence the task force 

could provide to other parts of the U.S. Government was apparent by the 

attendance at the previously discussed daily O&I briefings. Individuals from 

across the U.S. CT network concerned with AQI’s global activities sat in each 

day through VTC because the information that was shared during the O&I 

session was so rich and timely, and often quite pertinent to the fight beyond 

Iraq. And the JIATF had much more to share than just what was provided in 

the daily briefings. All of the intelligence derived from the exploitation of the 

locations of night raids plus the detainee debriefings was fed into databases 

the JIATF shared with others working against al-Qaeda.

By assigning LNOs to facilitate the sharing of this new knowledge and 

information, the goal was to contribute valuable intelligence to their partners’ operations. In return, TF 714’s commander hoped they would reciprocate because “we wanted to get a better sense of how the war looked from 
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our partners’ perspectives to enhance our understanding of the fight. We 

saw our piece of AQI up close and daily, but we knew that they were part of 

a larger, global system of finance, weapons, and ideology about which other 

people [and agencies] knew more than we did.”188

To enable this process of reciprocal sharing, the LNOs were handpicked, 

according to Admiral McRaven. They were “always high performers,” because 

each was expected to breakdown bureaucratic walls and build relationships 

between their assigned location and the task force. Therefore, “they had to 

have a proven record of exceptional success in previous assignments. Task 

force LNO assignments were seen as critical and you picked from among 

your best for those positions.”189 For Lieutenant General Flynn, the LNOs 

were “transformational.” The goal was for “those liaison officers to transform 

the State Department’s view, primarily CIA’s view, the country team’s view” 

of their relationship with the task force. The LNOs: 

had to be incredibly mature, they had to become a trusted member of 

that country team, they spoke directly for the task force commander 

so they didn’t work for the staff’s chief of operations (G3) ... The 

ambassador knew if [he] needed to make sure McChrystal knows 

this, that the LNO would get that information to McChrystal. They 

didn’t have to go through three layers. Most LNOs in the military 

have that problem. They work for some G3 ops chief ... At one time 

there was 84 LNOs. And they were part of the organizational construct. They had to be transformational and not transactional. LNOs 

of the past are transactional. Give me some information I give it 

back to you. Transformational means they’re going to transform how 

you support me and how we support you. That was much different 

thinking and that was the idea that we wanted in all the LNOs.190

The CT task force had first transformed from a highly compartmented, 

semi-autonomous organization into a joint interagency task force, and then, 

through the LNOs, had transformed again into a globally interconnected 

network of U.S. Government agencies tasked with CT missions. To achieve 

this level of cooperation, the LNOs had to mediate and build trust and cooperation in bureaucratic environments that not infrequently were hostile to 

such interlopers. This was yet another innovation that augmented the TF 

714’s operating system, contributing to the exponential increase in operational tempo.
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6. Leadership Evolution: Nurturing 

Learning, Adaptation, and Change

Organizational experts argue that in today’s complex, interdependent, 

and fast-changing environment, leaders can no longer assume that 

only from the top can a crisis in operational performance be understood 

and turned around. Instead, today’s leaders are called on to decentralize 

authority in order to nurture initiative by subordinates at the operating level. 

They must empower members of their organization through a leadership 

approach that nurtures collective learning, adaptation, and change. To this 

end, Snowden and Boone maintain that:

In the complex environment of the current business world, leaders 

often will be called upon to act against their instincts. They will need 

to know when to share power and when to wield it alone, when to 

look to the wisdom of the group and when to take their own counsel. 

A deep understanding of context, the ability to embrace complexity 

and paradox, and a willingness to flexibly change leadership style 

will be required for leaders who want to make things happen in a 

time of increasing uncertainty.191

What Snowden and Boone found to be true for conducting business in 

today’s complex world was also found by the leadership of TF 714 to be 

equally true for the conduct of war. What this meant was that in order to 

increase operational tempo to overwhelm AQI, decision making had to be 

decentralized. Those down the chain of command had to be empowered, 

and the leadership of TF 714 had to learn to, in the words of Snowden and 

Boone, “act against their instincts.”192

With the establishment of the JIATF and its maturation through the 

transformative steps explained above, the stage was set for a showdown 

with AQI. But in order to reach the operational tempo needed to prevail, 

yet another hurdle had to be overcome—the problem of what Lieutenant 

General Sacolick characterized as “blinks” in the F3EAD cycle.193 A blink 

was a bottleneck that slowed the cycle down. The more blinks, the slower 

the process, the fewer the raids against AQI’s network General McChrystal 

explained: 
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When we first started, those five steps were performed by different parts of our organization or different security agencies. And 

as a consequence, each time you passed information from one to 

another, it would be like a game of telephone, so that by the time 

information got to the end, it would be not only slow but also corrupted. We learned we had to reduce the number of steps [and time] 

in the process.194

To gain a better understanding of this problem, Lieutenant General Sacolick conducted a deep scrutiny of the cycle and discovered “that between each 

of the F3EAD elements there [could be] an unintended pause or ‘blink’ that 

resulted all too often in a missed opportunity to hit a target.” If you could 

“remove the blinks from the process,” said the commander of an Army unit 

of TF 714, the result would be a “dramatic increase in operational speed that 

the enemy could neither understand nor counter.”195

Lieutenant General Sacolick added there were different sources of blinks. 

Early on, many were due to a lack of trust and cultural barriers among the 

agencies that comprised the JIATF. Although it took time to establish interdependence and cooperation, these blinks were reduced considerably as the 

JIATF took root. Technology shortfalls could likewise slow down the cycle, 

as Admiral McRaven noted above. However, these too were reduced over 

time. The final source of blinks identified by Lieutenant General Sacolick 

was the command system. The more decisions had to be made at the top, he 

noted, the slower was TF 714’s operational tempo. The more traditional the 

command and control process, the slower the cycle moved, and the stronger 

AQI remained.196

To overcome this last source of blinks—bottlenecks caused by the chain of 

command hierarchy—would necessitate a change in the traditional approach 

to leadership exercised by military organizations, even special ones like TF 

714. Blinks in the command and control system could be removed, but that 

meant empowering the rank and file by delegating authority downward. 

Operational decision making would have to be decentralized and pushed 

downward if the number of raids were to be accelerated. Waiting for General 

McChrystal and the senior leadership of the task force to make the call on 

missions would only delay TF 714’s capacity to win the fight against AQI.

Empowerment of those at the operational level of the task force was necessary to accelerate the rate at which raids were carried out, explained General 
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Joseph Votel, who replaced Admiral McRaven as TF 714 commander. To do 

so meant decentralizing authority and decision making. Within the parameters set as the task force commander, “lieutenant colonels and colonels leading raiding teams in the field had a great deal of decision making authority 

to select and hit targets. There were standards that had to be met, but within 

them they made the call.” This ran counter to the traditional conception 

of the military chain of command. It required that senior officers let go of 

authority. And, General Votel added, it meant that the task force commanding general “had to be willing to accept risks, give up control, and trust those 

they were empowering.”197 Only in this way could the task force speed up the 

operational tempo from 15-20 to 300 raids a month.

To accomplish this, writes General McChrystal, traditional leadership 

models were turned on their heads. In those approaches, 

subordinates provide information and leaders [make use of it to] 

disseminate commands. We reversed it. We had our leaders provide 

information so that their subordinates, armed with [knowledge 

about the] context, understanding and connectivity, could take their 

own entrepreneurial, empowered initiative.198 This was a very different approach. Now, those “individuals and teams closest to 

the [fight], armed with unprecedented levels of insights derived 

from across the [JIATF] network, offered the best ability to 

decide and act decisively.”199

As a result of this transformation, task force commanders became 

enablers rather than “hands-on leaders whose personal competence and 

force of will dominated battlefields and boardrooms for generations.”200 To 

defeat the AQI network, the JIATF chief concluded that “the temptation to 

lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization” had to be 

eschewed. Rather, he and his cohorts became “eyes-on, hands-off enablers”201

that facilitated a milieu in which those down the chain of command took 

the initiative. 

They did not have to look over their shoulders wondering am I 

doing it the way Stan McChrystal said it should be done or thought 

it should be done. And that opened up for people a sense of freedom 

which had a lot to do with this change in leadership. They are not 

looking over their shoulder wondering what does the old man want 
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done. The old man wants to win. That’s it, and so a lot of them were 

ready to do it, to take the lead, particularly in the specialized units.202

The impact on F3EAD operational tempo was remarkable recounted 

General McChrystal in a Foreign Affairs interview: 

In 2003, in many cases we’d go after someone, we might locate them 

and capture or kill them, and it would be weeks until we took the 

intelligence we learned from that and were able to turn it into another 

operation. Within about two years, we could turn that cycle three 

times in a night. We could capture someone, gain intelligence from 

the experience, go after someone else, and do three of those in a 

row; the second two involving people we didn’t even know existed 

at the beginning of the night. In August 2004, in all of Iraq, our 

task force did 18 raids. And we thought that was breakneck speed. 

I mean, we really thought we had the pedal to the metal ... Two 

years later, in August 2006 we were up to 300 raids a month—ten 

a night. This meant [our] network now had to operate at a speed 

that was not even considered before, not in our wildest dreams.203

The only way this could be achieved, he added, was by changing the TF 

714 command and control process. “It had to have decentralized decisionmaking, because you can’t centralize ten raids a night. You have to understand them all, but you have to allow your subordinate elements to operate 

very quickly.” They had to be able to “understand who or what is a target, 

locate it, capture or kill it, take what intelligence you can from people or 

equipment or documents, analyze that, and then you go back and do the 

cycle again, smarter.”204

Finding such leaders for TF 714 took careful consideration. “You have to 

handpick the leaders,” Admiral McRaven explained when describing how 

each was selected. “The fact of the matter is we handpicked them because 

they’re the right ones to lead. And you also have to handpick those that are 

below because the team of teams is not just about the task force commander 

... Will those leaders work well together, because that was also a key piece.”205
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7. Nonstop Learning and Adaptation

In the past, a breakdown in an organization’s operational practice was 

resolved by making changes in SOP. Recall what Downie proposed: organizations could “either learn and change their doctrine, norms, and standard 

operating procedures [SOP] to act on learning or [they could] disregard that 

information and retain existing doctrine, norms, and standard operating 

procedures.”206 The institutional learning cycle proposed by Downie assumed 

that there are identifiable changes in standard operating procedures that can 

resolve an organization’s crisis in practice. March and Levitt explained that 

once identified, new routines capture these learning experiences and embed 

them into the organization’s SOPs to “guide behavior.”207

The underlying assumption is that a SOP end state—a set of conditions 

that will produce a desired outcome, in this case a solution to performance 

shortfalls—can be identified. In other words, it is possible to pinpoint 

changes in SOPs that will resolve performance shortfalls. And once identified, learning organizations can institutionalize those changes in “organizational memory ... which can be consulted, retrieved, and utilized.”208 Those 

changes will bring efficiency and stability back to organizational practice.

However, to manage complex challenges like those that were posed by 

AQI, changes in SOPs may have only a momentary or short-lived applicability. This is because, as Sargut and McGrath explained, organizations 

managing complex challenges must be “designed to continuously adjust.” 

Consequently, the relationships among network nodes cannot be “reduced 

to clear predictable interactions. It’s not possible to understand complex 

systems in this way, because all the elements are interacting continuously 

and unpredictably.”209

What this meant for TF 714, General McChrystal makes clear, was that 

there could be no rigidity in operating procedures. 

You do have to have certain SOPs but they have to be understood 

as very fluid and flexible. And they may have to be able to change 

every day. There may be some SOPs that don’t have to change. But 

each should be viewed as only good until it’s no longer effective. In 

which case the day it doesn’t work we have to look at it and decide 

whether that is a temporary problem or do we need to change it.210
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General Votel gave two examples of SOP fluidity and adaptation. The 

first had to do with the standard way a raiding team entered a building, 

which was to bust in fast and go hard to find the AQI target. This method 

had been the SOP for entering a target for some time. But it was generating 

a great deal of public criticism by those present at target sites as extremely 

abusive behavior. General Votel explained that it had to be changed because 

of this, even though it gave up surprise. The new method adopted was to 

“call out the name of the target before entering to give him the opportunity 

to surrender.” The second was to change to daylight operations. The modus 

operandi of the SOF units had always been to strike at night because they 

owned the night. But as AQI found ways of offsetting that advantage, TF 714 

went to daytime missions.211

Given that AQI frequently changed its networked shape, was composed of 

an interdependent, dense, and unpredictable tangle of nodes, and operated 

in an environment that extended across Iraq, SOP flexibility and adaptability at all levels of the task force was essential. And it had to be able to 

take place at the lower levels of the organization. The context in Iraq did not 

lend itself, explained the chief of TF 714, to the application of rigid SOPs and 

operational planning based on predictable outcomes. Rather, resilience and 

flexibility on the part of task force operating procedures was essential. To 

confront a protean and constantly changing enemy, SOPs had to be adaptable 

and changeable to be relevant. In other words, there was no SOP end state.

To make the task force comfortable with the proposition that newly 

adopted SOPs were subject to change due to the unpredictability of AQI 

was not easy, Admiral McRaven asserted. “A lot of people had trouble with 

that” because they “wanted clarity.”212 The challenge was to take the adaptive 

attributes of the TF 714 members and to scale that up to instill those qualities 

at the broader organizational level. 
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8. Winning: The Irreducible Minimum

A situation report of U.S. prospects in Iraq as 2006 devolved from the 

spring into the early fall would have had the following ominous bottom 

line assessment: surging violence and grim prognoses. To be sure, such a 

forecast could have been deduced from the escalating significant acts of 

violence reported in the Department of Defense’s Weekly Security Incidents

summary. By September 2006 those totals had risen well above 1,400, nearly 

double from the previous summer.213 And by the summer of 2007, significant 

acts of violence peaked at nearly 1,600 incidents weekly.214 Enemy violence 

was skyrocketing, while almost every prediction of any possibility of U.S. 

success in Iraq was spiraling downward.215

However, by fall 2009, significant acts of violence had plummeted to fewer 

than 200 a week. And this continued during the first part of 2010 with a 

weekly average of 169 security incidents.216 As depicted in Figure 5, the security situation had dramatically changed.217

A number of factors contributed to this turnabout, to include: 1) the 

adoption of a new strategy—COIN; 2) the addition of 30,000 troops through 

the surge; and 3) the Awakening movement which opened the door for the 

remarkable growth of police and, in turn, gave the coalition forces the capacity needed to control the physical and human terrain.

The introduction of COIN began with the Marine campaign initiated 

in early 2006 in Anbar Province. At that time many believed Anbar was 

lost.218 But by the end of 2006 Anbar was reaching a security tipping point. 

The COIN program with its interrelated elements of clearing out insurgents, 

holding territory through combat outposts, engaging and aligning with the 

sheikhs and their tribes, and building local Iraqi police units drawn from 

those tribes had shifted the ground in Anbar. The conditions were in place to 

bring about a sea of change in 2007.219 And that came in the late spring when 

the weekly security incidents for the province dropped from 450 attacks the 

first week of January to roughly 150 four months later. By July it was less than 

100.220 And when General John Kelly took command of the Marines in Anbar 

in January 2008, the number was down to 50 attacks a week.221

In February 2007, General David Petraeus replaced General Casey as 

commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq. He initiated a similar COIN effort 
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JSOU Report 16-6 Figure 5.
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that was enabled by the addition of 30,000 surge forces and the Awakening 

movement. The focus initially was on the greater Baghdad region. As in 

Anbar, the results were the same as the violence declined precipitously by 

the end of 2008.

But an effective COIN strategy requires more than the “clear, hold, build” 

formula found in the classic COIN literature of the 1960s,222 as well as in its 

post-9/11 counterpart, FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency.

223 It also necessitates the 

capacity to dismantle the clandestine infrastructure or secret underground 

apparatus of the insurgent organization. It was that subterranean networked 

mechanism that gave AQI the capacity to initiate, rapidly increase, and sustain insurgent operations across Iraq. The mission of the task force was to 

learn about the inner workings of that largely invisible ecosystem in order 

to dismantle it or, in the words of General McChrystal, to “claw the guts 

out of AQI.”224

To what extent was TF 714 able to accomplish this mission? As noted earlier, by adopting the characteristics of a learning organization, as this study 

has illuminated, TF 714 was able to raise its monthly operational tempo from 

18 raids in August 2004 to 300 in August of 2006 and to sustain that rate forward to 2009. But how effective were those operations? To what extent were 

they able to “claw the guts out of AQI” so that it collapsed in upon itself?225

Did they achieve General McChrystal’s goal of winning against AQI? Finally, 

what constituted winning in this kind of war?

To answer these questions, follow-up sessions were held with the leadership of TF 714, beginning with three former commanders—General 

McChrystal, Admiral McRaven, and General Votel. To each, as well as to 

other senior members of the CT task force, the following questions were 

posed: 

• TF 714 sought to degrade AQI’s operational tempo: How did you know 

when you had done so? Could it be gauged? 

• By the end of 2008, what was the assessment of AQI’s capacity to execute operations? To what extent had its operational tempo declined?

• Were you able to determine the degree to which you degraded AQI’s 

mid-level operational commanders and managers?

• Was the task force winning the fight against the AQI network? What 

did winning constitute in this kind of war?

• How do you prevent an AQI revival once you put them on their backs?
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The linchpin for degrading AQI’s operational capacity was to reduce its 

mid-level commanders and managers, those who made AQI networks run. 

This was what General McChrystal described as the guts of AQI. They were 

identifiable and vulnerable because they had to move, communicate, and 

make things happen. “But the way to degrade them was not,” said General 

McChrystal, to try to identify, isolate, and focus on one key node or individual within AQI networks at a time. “That was a fool’s mission trying to 

be so precise. It was beyond what we could have known when we initiated 

operations against a particular part of AQI,” he noted. The alternative was 

to take an industrial approach and focus on the attrition of those mid-level 

elements as they emerged through the F3EAD process. “To hit those targets 

faster than they could replace them, to make them worry about our ability to 

constantly pummel them, and to make younger and less experienced those 

who replaced them.”226

The goal was attrition, said Lieutenant General Sacolick. “We intended to 

conduct raids at a rate that they could not withstand. Through those raids 

we sought to disrupt, degrade, and dismantle their networks faster than 

they could re-establish them. Over time, we concluded, that would lead to 

the decline of their networks.”227 The results were demonstrable over time, 

and “we could see our impact on particular parts of their networks during 

a given period,” explained Admiral McRaven, once TF 714 reached the 300 

missions a month tempo. 

We measured cycles in different operational elements such as 

bomb making facilities and financing elements. We might seriously 

degrade a bomb making unit and we could measure its decline in 

productivity. The same was true for other parts of their operating 

systems. We could also see when that unit was able to re-establish 

itself, and how long it would take to do so. Then we would begin 

hitting it extensively again, driving down its capacity.228

In sum, there were several indicators of TF 714’s ability to weaken AQI’s 

operational capacity through the attrition of its network components. But 

it was not a linear process explained Lieutenant General Fiel, who served in 

the task force during 2006-2008. Rather, to weaken AQI was understood as 

decreasing a components’ ability to carry out attacks, to keep it on the defensive, to keep up the pressure on it over time to have a cumulative impact. 
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“You had to be like a machine that pounded away at it and weakened it 

cumulatively over time.”229

Between 2006 and 2009 the task force maintained an operational tempo 

of 300 raids a month against AQI’s networks in Iraq through the JIATF 

system described in this study. During 2008, explained Admiral McRaven: 

what we saw in the intelligence being collected during our raids 

and from the interrogations of the many members of AQI that we 

captured on those raids was that a major decline was taking place 

in the capacity of different parts of their network to carry out operations. Our kill/capture raids were considerably driving down their 

operational capacity. We were able to evaluate that decline.230

In fact, added General McChrystal, as early as the late fall of 2006, the 

commanders of TF 714’s raiding teams began sensing the impact of their 

operations. They began telling him that AQI was “cracking, it was not at the 

same level of proficiency and its effectiveness was lessening. We can see it.” 

He noted that this was “counter-intuitive because at that time violence was 

escalating in Iraq.”231 But those who were at the level to best know were seeing 

a subtle weakening. “What they saw and what we heard from those captured 

was that AQI could not control territory as they had earlier. And that the TF 

714 teams were able to attack them in those areas and beat them up badly.”232

By the late spring of 2007 those same commanders were coming to the 

conclusion that AQI was in decline.233 One year later Lieutenant General Fiel 

believed the indicators were stronger, signifying that “AQI had been seriously 

degraded.”234 These indicators, pointed out General Votel, also included: 

“What AQI was saying about the situation in their own messaging and communications.” This reinforced what “we were learning from detainees about 

the impact of our targeting.”235

“Capturing or killing AQI’s mid-level managers and commanders were,” 

according to TF 714’s leadership, the most important targets because they 

“made the organization function.”236 But “estimating with precision the 

degree to which the task force was able to degrade those mid-level operational commanders and managers was difficult.” This was because there was 

no “finite target set we could know about,” observed General McChrystal. 

That said, TF 714 did “keep a running total of the Emirs, commanders, and 

managers that were taken off the battlefield. And there was real attrition.”237 
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During the 2006-2009 timeframe the count grew considerably because 

the task force was gaining extensive knowledge about various parts of those 

networks through the methods and processes established by the JIATF. This 

included who the commanders and managers were of various sub-network 

components. Admiral McRaven observed that as this period progressed, 

“we were able to map out different parts of their networks, what they were 

involved in, who was involved, how they were linked together. With that 

knowledge we would be able, through raid after raid, to shatter it.”238

But by the end of 2008, after three years of what earlier in this study was 

described as an industrial-strength CT campaign, did TF 714 reach General 

McChrystal’s goal of winning the fight against AQI? And if so, what did 

winning constitute in this kind of war?

Among senior commanders interviewed for this study, there was a strong 

consensus that by the end of 2008, AQI had been seriously degraded by the 

CT task force operations, and this was reflected in the decline in its ability to 

function and carry out missions. Lieutenant General Sacolick, in asserting 

this was the case, employed the “continuum of effects” framework—disrupt, 

degrade, dismantle, and defeat. By 2009 the CT task force had disrupted 

AQI’s clandestine apparatus and operational timetable, putting it on the 

defensive. It also degraded the group’s ability to conduct larger operations, 

took away its freedom of movement, and disrupted a large number of AQI’s 

operational cells, financial units, communications and media centers, bomb 

and IED production facilities, and arms acquisition networks. Finally, TF 

714 dismantled networks of the terrorist group to the degree that they could 

no longer function in a cohesive manner.239 The task force had developed 

the capacity to operate inside those networks to break up a considerable 

number of them.

However, when it came to defeat and winning, Lieutenant General Sacolick proposed that in today’s irregular conflicts, a final defeat of the insurgent 

underground networks is illusive. This is because, he elaborated, the remaining elements of such organizations, once they have been seriously disrupted 

and degraded, can go into a semi-dormant stage, regroup, and then phoenixlike reappear. Consequently, once AQI was largely dismantled, it had to be 

kept at that stage, while the larger political and governance developments 

that follow a successful COIN/CT program have time to be established and 

take root.240
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On this point, General McChrystal added that: “Winning is relative in 

these kinds of wars. There is no VE Day. We put AQI on its back, having 

badly beaten it up. But until the larger political causes of the conflict are 

addressed, it could reemerge.” Consequently, during this interim period 

which can go on for an extended period of time because post-conflict political reconciliation, development, and reconstruction do not happen overnight, AQI “had to be kept on its back.”241

In effect, after three years of industrial-strength CT, TF 714 had reached 

what General Raymond Odierno, the Multi-National Force commander in 

Iraq during this period, referred to as the “irreducible minimum.” By this, 

he meant that even when a COIN/CT program is able to greatly weaken 

and degrade a group like AQI, they will still retain a capacity to carry out 

periodic attacks and acts of violence.242 At the operational level, said Admiral 

McRaven, this is winning. During 2009, the task force was “only carrying 

out two to three raids a night because AQI’s operational tempo was way 

down. And we were beginning to hand those missions off to our Iraqi CT 

force counterparts.”243 In early 2010 those missions contributed to the killing 

or capturing of 26 insurgent leaders including Abu Ayyub al-Masri, AQI’s 

overall leader, and Abu Abdullah al-Raschid al-Baghdadi, the head of the 

Islamic State of Iraq.244

That said, the conclusion of those who had led TF 714 was that an effective 

COIN and CT program can take you only so far. COIN and CT (or counterinfrastructure) are necessary parts of the resolution of such wars, but they 

never are sufficient in and of themselves. This critical conclusion was stressed 

by the entire leadership of TF 714. What COIN and CT can achieve, each 

explained, is to establish the prerequisites for post-conflict political reconciliation, development, and reconstruction. For the COIN forces, the goal 

was to sweep the insurgents from the cities and towns in Iraq in which they 

were embedded and then to hold that ground after it was cleared. In Iraq, the 

Awakening movement was an important facilitator for holding ground once 

the insurgents were cleared out of a location. For TF 714 the mission was to 

disrupt, degrade, and dismantle AQI’s clandestine networked infrastructure 

or secret underground; to hit AQI’s networks every night, killing or capturing a large number of its mid-level managers and operational commanders, 

and undermining its operational tempo.

Once territory was held and the insurgent clandestine infrastructure 

disrupted and degraded to its irreducible minimum, the conditions were 
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established for attention to shift to the non-kinetic lines of operations and 

to begin the transition to post-conflict reconciliation, reconstruction, and 

institutional development. This was the critical juncture in all COIN/CT 

campaigns, and once it is reached it is not the responsibility of those COIN/

CT forces. It is the beginning of the long and challenging phase of all such 

internal wars in which the larger indigenous political causes of the struggle 

have to be addressed. Moreover, a political formula has to be conceptualized 

for reconciliation of the warring parties, the foundations for state legitimacy 

established, and national reconstruction initiated.

During this extended period of mediation, reconciliation, and political 

development there is a role for Iraq’s counterpart to TF 714, explained the 

former leaders of the task force. As 2009 came to an end, those counterparts 

were taking over the finish phase of the F3EAD process. And they were considered by the leadership of TF 714 to be operationally quite effective. But, 

explained Admiral McRaven, they still needed our “find, fix, exploit, and 

analyze” intelligence support capabilities. While Iraq’s CT raiding forces 

were judged to be very professional by Admiral McRaven, they needed the 

task force to maintain a presence in Iraq during and after the draw down 

to help them with intelligence support and operational mentoring.245 The 

former TF 714 commander added: 

once we and our counterparts had our collective foot on AQI’s throat 

in 2009 we had to keep it there. And we could do so through our 

support to our Iraqi counterparts. But we had to stay to help them. 

Without our find, fix, exploit and analyze support, as well as operational mentoring, they were not capable of keeping AQI down.246

This was all part of buying time and maintaining the irreducible minimum whilst the process of transition to post-conflict reconciliation, reconstruction, and institutional development took root. But that was not meant 

to be.

What transpired during this phase of the conflict in Iraq was just the 

opposite, as several accounts of the post-2009 period have documented. The 

transition to post-conflict reconciliation, reconstruction, and institutional 

development was not facilitated through the formation of a long-term strategic partnership between Washington and Baghdad. For that transition to 

have had a chance of succeeding, General Odierno believed according to 

his long serving political advisor Emma Sky, “there needed to be a political 
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agreement among Iraqi leaders. Otherwise the security gains the troops had 

fought so hard for would not be sustainable. He took every opportunity to 

communicate the complexities of Iraq to the new Obama administration.”247

The new administration had an important role to play in helping mediate that 

political reconciliation process, was his persistent counsel. But, Sky observed, 

“the administration ... just wanted to get out of Iraq.”248

As Sky and others chronicle,249 following the March 2010 national elections 

in Iraq, the U.S. set a course for withdrawal from Iraq which was carried out 

in two stages. On 31 August 2010, following the departure of the last U.S. 

combat brigade, President Obama declared, “the American combat mission 

in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over.”250 This left approximately 

50,000 troops in Iraq, which were serving in an advisory and assistance capacity as part of Operation New Dawn. Then, with the failure of the U.S. and 

Iraq to reach a Status of Forces Agreement to extend the presence of U.S. 

forces in this advisory and assistance role, President Obama announced the 

full withdrawal of troops and the formal end to the American mission in 

Iraq on 14 December 2011. The remaining U.S. troops left Iraq four days later.

It was during this crucial period following the March 2010 election that, 

explained Sky, Washington chose not to help mediate the establishment of 

a new Iraqi government that reflected the electoral outcome and was not 

dominated by sectarianism.251 This was an essential starting point in the 

reconciliation process. But instead, the U.S. backed Nuri al-Maliki for yet 

another term as prime minister, even though in the national election results 

his was not the winning bloc with the most seats in the parliament. The U.S. 

looked the other way as Maliki manipulated the electoral process.

The details of why and how Washington chose to take this course of action 

and then in 2011 completely withdraw from Iraq during the critical period 

of transition from successful COIN/CT military operations to post-conflict 

political reconciliation is beyond the scope of this study. Likewise, the consequences of those decisions and the takeover of a part of Iraq by ISIS will 

not be covered here.

What this paper has established is that as a result of the transformation 

of TF 714, with all that entailed in terms of learning and adapting, the CT 

forces were able to reach that irreducible minimum and put AQI on its back. 

In 2009, TF 714 was poised to continue to advise and assist its Iraqi counterparts going forward to prevent a revival of AQI during the critical transition 

phase of political reconciliation. 

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9. Afterthoughts: The Limits of 

Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism 

An important component of COIN campaigns is the capacity to attack, 

degrade, and dismantle the insurgent’s clandestine infrastructure or 

secret underground apparatus through which it plans and executes operations. To do so, specialized organizations are needed that blend intelligence 

and paramilitary capabilities. TF 714 was one such outfit that was recreated 

in the midst of war to fight and overcome a complex networked enemy for 

which it was not initially prepared.

TF 714 was able to transform itself and establish an operational tempo 

that hit AQI’s networks multiple times every night between 2006 and 2009, 

killing and capturing a large number of AQI’s mid-level managers and operational commanders. TF 714 dismantled the networks of the terrorist group to 

such a degree that they could no longer function in a cohesive manner. The 

CT task force was able to do so because it developed the capacity to operate 

inside those networks to break up a considerable number of them.

In Iraq, these CT operations were an important complement and made 

a vital contribution to the overall success of the U.S. military’s COIN campaign. While those COIN forces conducted ‘clear, hold, and build’ security 

related operations and trained the emerging Iraqi security forces, TF 714 

systematically attacked and dismantled the clandestine networks of AQI, 

degrading them to the irreducible minimum. That is the most that can be 

expected of such a CT force in this kind of internal war. They can make a 

critical contribution to the overall COIN program which can, if successful, set the conditions for post-conflict reconciliation, reconstruction, and 

institutional development.

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Appendix A: Acronym List

AQI al-Qaeda in Iraq

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

COIN counterinsurgency

CT counterterrorism

DIA Defense Intelligence Agency

F3 find, fix, finish

F3EAD find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, disseminate

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation

HUMINT human intelligence

HVT high value target

IED improvised explosive device

IRA Irish Republican Army

JIATF joint interagency task force

JOC joint operations center

ISR intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance

LNO liaison officer

NGA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

NSA National Security Agency

O&I operations and intelligence

SIGINT signals intelligence

SOF Special Operations Forces

SOP standard operating procedure
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SSCI Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

SSR security sector reform

TF 714 Task Force 714

USSOCOM United States Special Operations Command

VTC video teleconference
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Endnotes

1. Stanley McChrystal et al., Team of Teams: The New Rules of Engagement for an 

Interconnected World (New York: Portfolio, 2015), 19.

2. Follow-up interview with General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Army retired, Alexandria, VA, May 2015.

3. “A Conversation with Stanley McChrystal,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2013).

4. Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Penguin Books, 

2013), 92.

5. Department of Defense Report to Congress, “Measuring Stability and Security 

in Iraq” (June 2010), accessed at: http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/June_9204_

Sec_Def_signed_20_Aug_2010.pdf.

6. Follow-up interview with General McChrystal.

7. Ibid.

8. Cited in David Strachan-Morris, “The Irreducible Minimum: Al Qaeda in Iraq 

and the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation,” RUSI Journal (August/September 2010), 32-36.

9. Follow-up interview with Admiral William McRaven, U.S. Navy retired.

10. Holloway Commission Report, led by Admiral James L. Holloway III, U.S. Navy 

retired, review with observations and recommendations.

11. William B. Ostlund, “Irregular Warfare: Counterterrorism Forces in Support of 

Counterinsurgency Operations,” The Land Warfare Papers, No. 51 (September 

2012).

12. David Tucker and Chris Lamb, United States Special Operations Forces (New 

York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Linda Robinson, Masters of Chaos: The 

Secret History of the Special Forces (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); Susan L. 

Marquis, Unconventional Warfare: Re-building U.S. Special Operations Forces 

(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); and Thomas Adams, US 

Special Operations Forces in Action: The Challenge of Unconventional Warfare 

(London: Routledge Press, 1998). For a discussion of the theory underlying such 

forces, see chapter one of William McRaven, Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special 

Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Presidio Press, 1995).

13. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 19.

14. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 92.

15. Robert Scales, “The Quality of Command: The Wrong Way and the Right Way 

to Make Better Generals,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2012).

16. “A Conversation with Stanley McChrystal,” Foreign Affairs.

17. Janine Davidson, Lifting the Fog of Peace (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 

Press, 2010), Ch. 1. According to Davidson, organizational resistance to military 
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innovation is the result of formalized norms, standard operating procedures, 

and the routine ways that large organizations in general, and military ones 

in particular, function. Those practices often serve as barriers to innovation. 

Davidson sums up this constraint as follows: “in this model, even when actors 

within a military organization desire a change in strategy or doctrine, structural 

mechanisms ... mitigate against it.”

18. Adam Grissom, “The Future of Military Innovation Studies,” The Journal of 

Strategic Studies (October 2006); John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Richard Downie, Learning From 

Conflict: The U.S. Military in Vietnam, El Salvador, and the Drug War (Westport, 

CT: Praeger, 1998); Kimberly Zisk, Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory 

and Soviet Military Innovation 1955-1991 (Princeton: Princeton University 

Press, 1993); Michael McNerney, “Military Innovation During War: Paradox 

or Paradigm,” Defense & Security Analysis (June, 2005); Theo Farrell, “Figuring 

Out Fighting Organizations: New Organizational Analysis in Strategic Studies,” 

The Journal of Strategic Studies (March 1996).

19. Interview with General McChrystal, Alexandria, VA, July 2014.

20. Ibid.

21. James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958), and 

Richard Cyert and James March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood 

Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

22. For two good reviews of these studies see Martin Schulz, “Organizational Learning,” in Joel A. C. Baum, ed., Blackwell Companion To Organizations (Malden, 

MA: Blackwell, 2002); Linda Argote and Ella Miron-Spektor, “Organizational 

Learning: From Experience to Knowledge,” Organizational Science (March 2011), 

1123-1137.

23. Among the major texts on the subject are ones by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge, 

as well as the classic studies of James March. See, for example, Argyris, On Organizational Learning (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Senge, The Fifth 

Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, revised edition (New 

York: Random House, 2006) and March, Decisions and Organizations (Oxford: 

Blackwell, 1991) and Organizations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). There 

also is a rich literature in the business and management professional journals.

24. David Garvin, “Building a Learning Organization,” Harvard Business Review 

(July-August 1993), 4.

25. Marlene Fiol and Marjorie Lyles, “Organizational Learning,” Academy of Management Review (October 1985), 803.

26. Barbara Levitt and James March, “Organizational Learning,” Annual Review of 

Sociology (1988), 319.

27. Peter Pawlowsky, “Management Science and Organizational Learning,” in M. 

Dierkes et al., ed., Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 2001), 64.
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28. Schulz, “Organizational Learning,” 423.

29. Pawlowsky, “Management Science and Organizational Learning,” 80.

30. Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action 

Perspective (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

31. See Mark Easterby-Smith and M. Lyles, Handbook of Organizational Learning 

and Knowledge Management (London: Wiley: Chichester, 2011); Peter Pawlowsky, 

“The Treatment of Organizational Learning in Management Science,” in Meinolf 

Dierkes et al., eds., Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 62-88; and Tracy A. Jenkin, “Extending 

the 4I Organizational Learning Model: Information Sources, Foraging Processes 

and Tools,” Administrative Sciences (No. 3, 2013, 3) 96–109.

32. Schulz, “Organizational Learning,” 426.

33. Downie, Learning From Conflict, 34.

34. Ibid., 22.

35. Ibid. Davidson notes that “some organizations actively promote the collection 

and dissemination of new information, while others rigidly adhere to standard 

operating procedures and ignore new information—especially if that information 

challenges existing paradigms and norms.” Davidson, Lifting the Fog of Peace, 

19-20.

36. Downie, Learning From Conflict, 34-35.

37. Schulz, “Organizational Learning,” 418.

38. Such shocks may be difficult to predict because they can lie beyond the realm of 

what can be anticipated. Learning organizations recognize this limitation or the 

fallacy of what March and Simon described in their classic volume, Organizations,

as the assumption that “all the alternatives of choice are a given” and that one has 

“a complete utility-ordering for all possible sets of outcomes.” While this may 

be the case in some situations, they observe that not infrequently “this becomes 

problematic.” Why? Because of uncertainty. James March and Herbert Simon, 

Organizations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 158-159.

39. See Nirmal Pal and Daniel Pantaleo, The Agile Enterprise: Reinventing your 

Organization for Success in an On-demand World (New York: Springer, 2005) 

and Emmanuel Gobillot, The Connected Leader: Creating Agile Organizations 

for People, Performance and Profit (London: Kogan, 2008). Nagl found this was 

true of the British army in the colonial period. It was structured “precisely to deal 

with the unexpected” and was “actively expected to innovate.” Nagl, Learning 

to Eat Soup with a Knife, 215.

40. Creating and sustaining such an organizational approach to problem solving, 

explain Spender and Grinyer, should be a responsibility “shared by top management and employees.” They do so by nurturing a “dialectic between the organization as a whole and its parts.” J.C. Spender and P.H. Grinyer, “Organizational 

Renewal: Top Management’s Role in a Loosely Coupled System,” Human Relations 

(No. 8, 1995), 913.
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41. Garvin describes this as “relying on the scientific method, rather than guesswork.” 

Members of the organization “become more disciplined in their thinking and 

more attentive to details. They [learn to] continually ask, ‘How do we know that’s 

true,’ recognizing that close enough is not good enough if real learning is to take 

place. They must push beyond obvious symptoms to assess underlying causes 

... Otherwise, the organization will remain a prisoner of sloppy reasoning, and 

learning will be stifled.” Garvin, “Building a Learning Organization,” 4.

42. In other words, the organization en masse as a body applies a method of analysis 

that systematically weighs contending facts and data with a view to the resolution of those differences through a process that engages all members in problem 

solving. See Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning 

Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1990), part III.

43. Routines, according to M.C. Becker, “allow organizations to do four things.” 

They 1) provide stability of behavior; 2) foster coordination; 3) economize limited 

resources; and 4) bind knowledge to application. M.C. Becker, “Organizational 

Routines: A Review of the Literature,” Industrial and Corporate Change (No. 4, 

2004), 662. In their classic study, March and Levitt describe routines as “rules, 

procedures, conventions, strategies, and technologies around which organizations 

are constructed and through which they operate.” Routines become accessible 

to organizational members and they draw on them to “guide their behavior.” 

Levitt and March, “Organizational Learning,” 320.

44. Organizational routines, depending on how they are structured, can be either 

resistant or open to change. Studies have found those resisting change do so 

because they are “bound by rules and customs.” Marther Feldman, “Organizational Routines as Sources of Continuous Change,” Organizational Science 

(November-December 2000), 622. Becker notes this is particularly true “in 

situations of pervasive uncertainty. Routines make an important contribution to 

actors’ ability to pick a course of action ... Empirical results support the idea that 

routines can indeed help actors cope with uncertainty.” Becker, “Organizational 

Routines: A Review of the Literature,” 657-658. Such a mechanistic commitment 

to routines not infrequently results in organizational misfortune because it prevents change when it is most needed. M. Kilduff, “Performance and Interaction 

Routines in Multinational Corporations,” Journal of International Business Studies

(1992), 133-145; and N. Costello, Stability and Change in High-Tech Enterprise: 

Organizational Practices and Routines (London: Routledge, 2000).

45. Feldman found that implanting agency within the organization will allow 

those executing routines to foster change if needed. “The potential ... for ongoing change in organizational routines is intrinsic to organizational behavior,” 

concludes Feldman, “so long as human agents [have the flexibility to] perform 

them.” He notes that if this exists within an organization’s culture, it will allow 

for change when routines 1) do not result in the intended outcomes; 2) generate 

new problems that need to be solved; 3) produce new resources and therefore 

enable new opportunities; and 4) produce a successful outcome but reveal the 

need for further improvement. Feldman, “Organizational Routines as Sources 
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of Continuous Change,” 622-623. See also Edwin Hutchins, “Organizing Work 

by Adaptation,” Organizational Science (No. 2, 1991), 14-39.

46. Garvin, “Building a Learning Organization,” 3.

47. Spender explains that “collective knowledge is the most powerful strategically” 

because it “comprises both meaning (cognitive, affective, symbolic and cultural) 

and praxis (behavior, rituals, and organizational routines) ... This knowledge is 

both situated and embedded in the organization as a community of practice.” J.C. 

Spender, “Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Memory: Three Concepts 

in Search of a Theory,” Journal of Organizational Change Management (No. 1, 

1996), 73, 75.

48. Knowledge acquisition has received considerable attention in the literature on 

organizational learning. Garvin notes that it can be derived from two sources: 

one, “the experiences and past history” of an organization itself; and two, “the 

experiences and best practices of others.” With respect to the former, organizations 

“review their successes and failures, assess them systematically, and record the 

lessons in a form that employees find open and accessible.” Learning organizations also recognize that “powerful insights can come from looking outside one’s 

immediate environment to gain new perspectives. Enlightened managers know” 

that others likewise “can be fertile sources of ideas and catalysts for creative 

thinking.” Garvin, “Building a Learning Organization,” 4-9.

49. Spender describes such organizations as one’s “re-conceptualized as a community 

of practice ... The resulting model is a firm which is a dynamic self-referring 

system only partially responsive to managerial influence.” Leaders foster transformation of the organization’s praxis through a collective learning process 

that engages those at all levels of the organization. They do so by empowering, 

motivating, and building the trust of members of the organization through a 

participatory approach that embodies collective problem solving and adaptation. 

Spender, “Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Memory,” 72-75.

50. In the traditional approach, notes Senge, appraisal “is based on assumptions 

of people’s powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master 

the forces of change, deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders.” Juxtaposed to this traditional view, Senge and others propose a different 

approach to leadership. They find that organizations that are able to learn and 

innovate to address declining practice have senior leaders and managers who 

foster and institutionalize interplay and interaction between themselves and 

the rest of the organization’s staff. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, 340. See also: Peter Drucker, Management, 

revised edition (New York: Harper Collins, 2008); Douglas McGregor, Human 

Side of Enterprise, annotated edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006); and A. 

Edmondson and B. Moingeon, “Learning, trust and organizational change” in 

M. Easterby-Smith, L. Araujo and J. Burgoyne, eds., Organizational Learning 

and the Learning Organization (London: Sage, 1999).

51. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, Ch. 10-12; J. Richard Hackman, Leading Teams: 

Setting the Stage for Great Performances (Cambridge: Harvard Business School 
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Publishing Corporation, 2002); and Morton Hanson, Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results (Cambridge: 

Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2009).

52. At its core, an organization’s memory captures and retains the decisions it has 

made about changing operational praxis to solve the problems it has encountered 

in executing its missions. Argyris and Schon assert that “learning agents’ discoveries, inventions, and evaluations must be embedded in organizational memory.” 

Argyris and Schon, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, 19.

53. Once innovation and adaptation takes place, explains Downie, learning organizations “institutionalize those lessons in organizational memory.” He characterizes 

this as a “prerequisite for institutional learning.” Downie, Learning From Conflict, 

23.

54. F. A. Hayek, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” in Michael Martin and Lee 

McIntyre, ed., Readings in the Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build 

Common Ground, and Reap Big Results Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge: 

MIT Press, 1994); Ben Ramalingam et al., Exploring the Science of Complexity: 

Ideas and Implications for Development and Humanitarian Efforts (London: 

Overseas Development Institute, 2008); and John Urry, Global Complexity

(Cambridge: Blackwell, 2003).

55. Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (New 

York: Simon and Schuster, 2012); and Brian Walker, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 

2006).

56. To gain access to these individuals the author drew on his long standing and close 

association with the special operations community. Since the mid-1980s, he has 

maintained a close working relationship with various elements of that community. 

Currently, he is a senior fellow with the U.S. Special Operations Command’s 

Joint Special Operations University (JSOU). And this research project is being 

conducted under the auspices of JSOU. In addition to the U.S. Special Operations Command, the author has worked closely with other parts of the special 

operations community including the U.S. Army’s Special Warfare Center and 

School (SWCS). It was with the assistance of SWCS that he conducted research 

that led to his book The Secret War against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use 

of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam, which is the most 

comprehensive assessment of MACVSOG’s campaign during the Vietnam War.

57. See McChrystal, My Share of the Task for the most complete description of the 

evolution of TF 714. Also illuminating is his article “It Takes a Network: The New 

Frontline of Modern Warfare,” Foreign Policy (March/April 2011), and “Lessons 

from Iraq: It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network,” accessed at: http://www.

mcchrystalgroup.com/index.php/lesson-from-iraq-it-takes-a-network-to-defeata-network/. See also McChrystal et al., Team of Teams. The volume includes a 

great deal of information that relates directly to the questions that served as the 

basis for the author’s interview of General McChrystal. 
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58. See Michael T. Flynn et al., “Employing ISR: SOF Best Practices,” Joint Forces 

Quarterly (3rd Quarter 2008) and William B. Ostlund, “Irregular Warfare: 

Counterterrorism Forces in Support of Counterinsurgency Operations,” The 

Land Warfare Papers (No. 51, September 2012).

59. This data, which was compiled weekly by the Department of Defense from 

January 2004 to April 2009 is contained in Anthony Cordesman, The Uncertain 

Security Situation in Iraq: Trends in Violence, Casualties, and Iraqi Perceptions 

(Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2010).

60. William Rosenau and Austin Long, The Phoenix Program and Contemporary 

Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), vii-viii.

61. Ibid., 24.

62. Graham Turbiville, Hunting Leadership Targets in Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorist Operations (Hurlburt Field, FL: JSOU Press, 2007), 74-75.

63. For an interesting discussion of what constitutes al-Qaeda’s center of gravity, 

see Peter Neumann, Ryan Evans, and Raffaello Pantucci, “Locating Al Qaeda’s 

Center of Gravity: The Role of Middle Managers,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 

(No. 11, 2011). The authors argue that “the ongoing debate about the structure 

and dynamics of al Qaeda has failed to appreciate an organization layer that is 

situated between the top leadership and the grass-roots. Rather than being ‘leaderless’ or ‘leader-led,’ it is the group’s middle management that holds Al Qaeda 

together ... that facilitates the grass-roots’ integration into the organization and 

provides the leadership with the global reach it needs in order to carry out its 

terrorist campaign. They are, in other words, the connective tissue that makes 

Al Qaeda work.” While not focused on Iraq, but al-Qaeda regional components, 

their argument parallels what TF 714 discovered in Iraq in 2004 about the need 

to target mid-level commanders and operators. The authors write that; “From 

an operational point of view, therefore, a much higher priority—both in terms 

of attention and resources—should be given to identifying and neutralizing the 

middle managers who connect the top of the organization with the bottom, and—

in doing so—undermine Al Qaeda’s military strength and strategic coherence.”

64. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 101.

65. Cited in Richard Shultz and Andrea Dew, Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: 

the Warriors of Contemporary Combat (New York: Columbia University Press, 

2006), 230.

66. Interview with Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, U.S. Army retired, Alexandria, 

VA, October 2014.

67. Interview with Lieutenant General Bennet Sacolick, U.S. Army, McLean, VA, 

September 2014.

68. Interview with a mid-level member of TF 714 who served during 2007-2009, 

August 2014.

69. Interview with General McChrystal.
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70. Interview with Major General David Scott, U.S. Air Force retired, Tampa, FL, 

June 2014.

71. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

72. Interview with General McChrystal.

73. Ibid.

74. Interview with Admiral McRaven.

75. Ibid.

76. Interview with General McChrystal.

77. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 25.

78. Ibid. For a discussion of this point see chapter 2 and 208-210 

79. Henri Fayol, General and Industrial Management (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino 

Publishing, 2013, reprinted).

80. Stanley McChrystal, “Lesson from Iraq: It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network,” 

(21 June 2013), accessed at: www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130621110027-86145090-

lesson-from-iraq-it-takes-a-network-to-defeat-a-network.

81. Ibid.

82. This graphic is drawn from McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 129.

83. Stanley McChrystal, “It Takes a Network: The New Frontline of Modern Warfare,” 

Foreign Policy (March/April 2011).

84. Evan Munsing and Christopher J. Lamb, Joint Interagency Task Force–South: The 

Best Known, Least Understood Interagency Success (Washington, DC: National 

Defense University Press, June 2011), 1, 83.

85. Ibid., 83.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid., 83-84.

88. Ibid., 85.

89. Munsing and Lamb attribute this to: “First, interagency research suffers from 

the ‘tragedy of the commons.’ Even though it is clearly in everyone’s interest to 

better understand the relatively few interagency successes that the national security system has produced, it is not perceived to be in any given department’s or 

agency’s interest to conduct or fund such work. Second, there is the widespread 

presumption ... that JIATF–South is a unique organization that cannot be easily 

duplicated.” Ibid., 82.

90. Ibid.

91. Interview with Admiral McRaven.

92. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn. 

93. Ibid.

94. Interview with Lieutenant General Sacolick.

95. Interview with Admiral McRaven.
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96. Interview with General McChrystal.

97. In the social sciences, an agent refers to an individual engaging with the structure 

of the social system. Human agency is about how individuals and groups can, 

if empowered, exercise their capacity for acting freely to question the operating 

procedures and processes of the larger organization of which they are a part. 

Individuals can take part in a range of activities in doing so. Human agency 

challenges the hierarchical structures of traditional organizations built on the 

Fayol framework. Albert Bandura describes agency as “people’s beliefs about 

their capabilities to exercise control over events that affect their lives. Self-efficacy 

beliefs function as an important set of proximal determinants of human motivation, affect, and action. They operate on action through motivational, cognitive, 

and affective intervening processes.” Albert Bandura, “Human Agency in Social 

Cognitive Theory,” American Psychologist (September 1989), 1175. See also: Erasmus Mayr, Understanding Human Agency (Oxford; New York: Oxford University 

Press, 2011).

98. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 202.

99. Ibid., 219.

100. Ibid., 209.

101. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

102. Ibid.

103. Ibid.

104. Interview with a mid-level member of TF 714 who served during 2007-2009.

105. For a review of these studies see Bernard Burnes, “Complexity Theories and 

Organizational Change,” International Journal of Management Reviews (Issue 

2, 2005), 73-90.

106. Gokce Sargut and Rita McGrath, “Learning to Live with Complexity,” Harvard 

Business Review (September 2011), 68.

107. Ibid., 4.

108. Roberto Poli, “A Note on the Difference Between Complicated and Complex Social 

Systems,” Cadmus (11 November 2013), 142. See also: Roberto Poli, “Complexity, 

Acceleration, and Anticipation,” ECO (No. 4, 2012), 124-138.

109. David Snowden and Mary Boone, “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making,” 

Harvard Business Review (November 2007), 2. See also: David Snowden, “Strategy 

in the Context of Uncertainty,” Handbook of Business Strategy (2005), 47-54.

110. Ibid., 3. 

111. Poli, “A Note on the Difference,” 142. 

112. Snowden and Boone, “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making,” 4. 

113. Ibid.

114. Sargut and McGrath, “Learning to Live with Complexity,” 4.

115. Ibid.
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116. Burnes, “Complexity theories and organizational change,” 73-90.

117. E.K. Weick, “Emergent Change as a Universal in Organizations,” in M. Beer and 

N. Nobria, eds., Breaking the Code of Change (Boston: Harvard business Review 

Press, 2000), 237.

118. Snowden and Boone, “A Note on the Difference Between Complicated and 

Complex Social Systems,” 3.

119. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network: The New Frontline of Modern Warfare,” 2.

120. David Knoke, “It Takes a Network: The Rise and Fall of Social Network Analysis 

in U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine,” Connections (July 2013), 2.

121. Ibid.

122. Martin Muckian, “Structural Vulnerabilities of Networked Insurgencies: Adapting to the New Adversary,” Parameters (Winter 2006-2007), 15.

123. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, 

Crime, and Militancy, RAND (2001), 1.

124. Ibid., 17.

125. David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham E. Fuller, and Melissa Fuller, The Zapatista 

Social Netwar in Mexico (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1998), 9.

126. Interview with General McChrystal.

127. Interview with Admiral McRaven.

128. Derek Jones, Understanding the Form, Function, and Logic of Clandestine Insurgent 

and Terrorist Networks: The First Step in Effective Counternetwork Operations

(MacDill AFB, FL: JSOU Press, 2012), 39.

129. Ibid., 20.

130. Michael Flynn, Rich Juergens, and Thomas Cantrell, “Employing ISR: SOF Best 

Practices,” Joint Forces Quarterly (No. 3, 2008), 57.

131. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn. 

132. Garvin, “Building a Learning Organization,” 4-9.

133. Roy Godson et al., “Intelligence Dominance Consistent with Rule of Law Principles,” in Godson and Richard Shultz, Adapting America’s Security Paradigm 

and Security Agenda (Washington, DC: National Strategy Information Center, 

2011), 134.

134. Richard Shultz and Roy Godson, “Intelligence Dominance,” The Weekly Standard

(31 July 2006), 23.

135. Ibid.

136. Interview with General McChrystal.

137. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 105.

138. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

139. Interview with Admiral McRaven.

140. Ibid.
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141. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

142. Ibid.

143. Charles Faint and Michael Harris, “F3EAD: Ops/Intel Fusion Feeds the SOF 

Targeting Process,” Small Wars Journal (31 January 2012), 1.

144. Ibid., 3.

145. Ibid., 4.

146. Ibid.

147. Pocket litter can include a variety of different materials found on a detainee 

during his or her capture. This can range from notes written on pieces of paper 

found in an individual’s pockets or backpacks to various forms of identification, 

transportation cards, photographs, computer thumb drives, documents, and 

related material.

148. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

149. Interview with General McChrystal. These issues cited from interviews with 

General McChrystal are also discussed in several places in My Share of the Task, 

105-107, 138-140, 153-157, 199.

150. Flynn, Juergens, and Cantrell, “Employing ISR: SOF Best Practices,” 55.

151. Ibid., 57.

152. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn. 

153. Interview with General McChrystal.

154. Interview with a mid-level member of TF 714 who served during 2005-2007.

155. Interview with Lieutenant General Eric Fiel, U.S. Air Force retired, Tampa, FL, 

28 May 2015.

156. Follow-up interview with General McChrystal.

157. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 163-164.

158. Interview with Lieutenant General Sacolick.

159. Interview with Major General Scott.

160. VTC or video teleconferencing is a set of information technologies that connect 

multiple remote physical locations together through video and audio transmissions to communicate simultaneously with one another. The technologies used 

for real time video conferencing include digital compression of audio and video 

streams.

161. Interview with Admiral McRaven.

162. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 168.

163. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 155-156.

164. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

165. Interview with a mid-level member of TF 714 who served during 2007-2009.
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166. Joint Publication 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (March 2013), 14, accessed at: http://www.lawfareblog.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/jp1_02.pdf.

167. Flynn, Juergens, and Cantrell, “Employing ISR: SOF Best Practices,” 58-59.

168. Ibid.

169. Interview with General McChrystal.

170. Follow-up interview with Lieutenant General Sacolick.

171. Faint and Harris, “F3EADD: Ops/Intel Fusion Feeds the SOF Targeting Process,” 

4.

172. McChrystal, My Share of the Task, 157-158.

173. Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and 

Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); Stephen P. Borgatti, 

Martin G. Everett, and Jeffrey C. Johnson, Analyzing Social Networks (Los 

Angeles: Sage, 2013); and Charles Kadushin, Understanding Social Networks: 

Theories, Concepts, and Findings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See 

also: Brian Reed, “A Social Network Approach to Understanding an Insurgency,” 

Parameters (Summer 2007).

174. Follow-up interview with Admiral McRaven.

175. FM 3-24, “Social Network Analysis and Other Analytical Tools,” Counterinsurgency (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 2006), B 10-13.

176. Ibid.

177. Cited in Peter Neumann, Ryan Evans, and Raffaello Pantucci, “Locating Al 

Qaeda’s Center of Gravity: The Role of Middle Managers,” Studies in Conflict 

and Terrorism (No. 11, 2011), 825.

178. Follow-up interview with General McChrystal.

179. Mark Mazzetti, “Panel Faults CIA over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations,” The New York Times (9 December 2014), 1.

180. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

181. Michael Bond, “Interview: Michael Koubi, Israeli Interrogator,” New Scientist 

(20 November 2004).

182. Interview with General McChrystal.

183. Shultz and Godson, “Intelligence Dominance,” 25.

184. Ibid.

185. Follow-up interview by telephone with Admiral McRaven, 3 May 2015.

186. Matthew Alexander, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used 

Brains, not Brutality, to take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq (New York: St. 

Martin’s Press, 2011).

187. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 177.

188. Ibid.
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189. Interview with Admiral McRaven.

190. Interview with Lieutenant General Flynn.

191. Snowden and Boone, “A Note on the Difference Between Complicated and 

Complex Social Systems,” 6.

192. Ibid., 8.

193. Interview with Lieutenant General Sacolick.

194. “Generation Kill: A Conversation with Stanley McChrystal,” Foreign Affairs 

(March/April, 2013).

195. Quoted in Paul Bontrager, Renovating Organizational Culture: Influencing your 

Unit’s Destiny (Washington, DC: Joint Advanced Warfighting School, Master 

Thesis, 2011), 59-60, accessed at: www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a545544.pdf.

196. Interview with Lieutenant General Sacolick.

197. Interview with General Joseph Votel, U.S. Army, Tampa, FL, 29 May 2015.

198. McChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 216.

199. Ibid., 219.

200. Ibid., 231.

201. Ibid., 232.

202. Interview with General McChrystal, 25.

203. “Generation Kill: A Conversation with Stanley McChrystal.”

204. Ibid.

205. Interview with Admiral McRaven.

206. Downie, Learning from Conflict, 34.

207. Levitt and March, “Organizational Learning,” 320.

208. Ibid.

209. Sargut and McGrath, “Learning to Live with Complexity,” 5.

210. Interview with General McChrystal.

211. Interview with General Votel.

212. Interview with Admiral McRaven. 

213. This total included: 1) attacks against Iraqi infrastructure and government organizations; 2) bombs (IEDs and mines), both those found and those that exploded; 

3) sniper, ambush, grenade, and other small arms attacks; and 4) mortar, rocket, 

and surface-to-air attacks.

214. Department of Defense Report to Congress, Measuring Stability and Security 

in Iraq (June 2010), accessed at: http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/June_9204_

Sec_Def_signed_20_Aug_2010.pdf.

215. Consider the December 2006 report of the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former 

Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton. 

It painted a grim picture. “The challenges in Iraq are complex,” it said. “Violence 

is increasing in scope and lethality ... If the situation continues to deteriorate, the 
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consequences could be severe.” The Report made 79 recommendations, but the 

key issue was security and the role of U.S. forces. With respect to that it asserted: 

“There is no action the American military can take that, by itself, can bring about 

success in Iraq.” Moreover, it proposed changing the “primary mission of U.S. 

forces ... to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary 

responsibility for combat operations.” If the U.S. took this course of action, then 

“by the first quarter of 2008 ... all combat brigades ... could be out of Iraq.” This 

amounted to a call for a phased withdrawal and it would go forward whether or 

not the Iraqi government reformed. See the Iraq Study Group Report, 7, 48, 51, 

accessed at: http://media.usip.org/reports/iraq_study_group_report.pdf.

216. Department of Defense Report to Congress, Measuring Stability and Security in 

Iraq, 27.

217. Ibid., 30.

218. Thomas Ricks, “Situation Called Dire in West Iraq,” Washington Post (11 September 2006).

219. Richard Shultz, The Marines Take Anbar: The Four Year Fight Against Al Qaeda

(Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2012), chapter 5.

220. Ibid., chapter 6.

221. Ibid., 232.

222. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: 

Praeger Security International, 1964); Sir Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Frederick 

A. Praeger, 1966); Richard Clutterbuck, The Long Long War: Counterinsurgency 

in Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966); Frank Kitson, 

Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (Harrisburg, 

PA: Stackpole Books, 1971); and John McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary 

War (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Press, 1966).

223. Sarah Sewall et al., The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

224. Follow-up interview with General McChrystal.

225. Ibid.

226. Ibid.

227. Follow-up interview with General Sacolick.

228. Follow-up interview with Admiral McRaven.

229. Interview with Lieutenant General Fiel.

230. Follow-up interview with Admiral McRaven.

231. Follow-up interview with General McChrystal.

232. Ibid.

233. Ibid.

234. Interview with Lieutenant General Fiel.
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235. Interview with General Votel.

236. Interview with Lieutenant General Fiel.

237. Follow-up interview with General McChrystal.

238. Follow-up interview with Admiral McRaven.

239. Follow-up interview with General Sacolick.

240. Ibid.

241. Follow-up interview with General McChrystal.

242. Cited in David Strachan-Morris, “The Irreducible Minimum: Al Qaeda in Iraq 

and the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation,” RUSI Journal (August/September 2010), 32-36.

243. Follow-up interview with Admiral McRaven.

244. Strachan-Morris, “The Irreducible Minimum,” 32.

245. Follow-up interview with Admiral McRaven.

246. Ibid.

247. Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New 

York: Public Affairs, 2015), 311.

248. Ibid., 321.

249. See Joel Rayburn, Iraq after America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance (Stanford: 

Hover Institution Press, 2014); Michael Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, 

The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, From George W. Bush to 

Barack Obama (New York: Vantage Books, 2012); Robert Gates, Duty: Memoirs 

of a Secretary at War (New York: Vantage Books, 2014); and Zaid Al-Ali, The 

Struggle for Iraq’s Future: How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism Have 

Undermined Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

250. For President Obama’s speech, see: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38944049/ns/

politics-white_house#.VbOQYbVmqFg.

251. Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, Chapter 18.