Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by Stanley McChrystal

The fusion of operations and intelligence (O and I) was the essence of the meeting. An imagery analyst could report on recent activity at a location of interest during the meeting (say at 5:00 p.m. Iraqi time), and that house could be raided by Rangers within hours. At the next day’s O&I, another analyst could then discuss the chemical makeup of the explosives found in the house’s car-bomb workshop. The initial imagery analyst would get the visceral satisfaction that her work had saved lives and that her continued effort was impacting operations directly, not just generating a paper storm in D.C. Our organization was not just “getting smarter” or “doing more” in isolation. Instead, it was acting smarter and learning constantly, simultaneously. The best moments in the O&I were when the briefing touched off a debate between different agencies, or teams, or departments. Perhaps two analytical silos had reached drastically different conclusions based on the same evidence, and we needed to reconcile them and understand why. Perhaps a team in Mosul had seen a tactic, or a group of individuals, eerily reminiscent of what a team in Tikrit had seen last week. The meetings allowed critical information to reach the right ears and eyes. The risk, of course, was that it might reach the wrong ears and eyes as well. The question was how that potential risk stacked up against the benefits.