Stanley McChrystal: commitment

Transcript context

…If that’s the most common probabilistic mistake of policymakers, what would be the most common probabilistic mistake of military commanders in the US? I think it’s a subset of that. Military commanders have been shaped to think that they have to win battlefield victories. It’s hard to argue with the importance of being able to do that, but in the modern era, that very rarely solves the problem. The problem is bigger and more complex than that. For example, the first Gulf War, which is held up as an example of a very clean victory — in reality, in the aftermath of that, Saddam Hussein used the chaos to brutalize part of his population and to cement his hold on power. We didn’t solve the problem. We solved one problem — Kuwait — but we didn’t solve the bigger problem. I think military would like to keep it neat and clean. We would like to say, “Give me a very straightforward military problem, and I will solve that. ” But very few problems in the world lend themselves to that. If we think about military combatants in the field, say a sergeant, involved with combat, what’s the most common probabilistic mistake they’re going to make?…

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