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

by Stanley McChrystal

Years later, in 2010, I took a teaching appointment at Yale University, where I had the opportunity to reflect on these experiences amid a community of wickedly intelligent people. One interaction proved particularly fascinating. Dr. Kristina Talbert-Slagle, a brilliant immunologist who studies AIDS, came to see me, curious about whether the similarities she saw between infections in the human body and insurgencies in a state correlated with my observations. They did; while neither HIV nor AIDS kills anyone outright, the human body is weakened to the point where it is fatally vulnerable to otherwise nonthreatening infections. The environmental factors that weaken the host indirectly strengthen and empower attackers. In 2004 I lacked this immunologist vocabulary, but I began to realize that an organization’s fitness—like that of an organism—cannot be assessed in a vacuum; it is a product of compatibility with the surrounding environment. Understanding that environment would be the key to understanding why we were failing and AQI was winning. We may have had the best equipment and the best special operations units in the world, but we were not—as an organization—the best suited for that time and place. AQI was successful because the environment allowed it to be.