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Major General Malcolm Frost · Five Questions for a General

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:03
  Speaker B: You're listening to five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern War Institute at West point. I am Dr. Charles Fate, the team lead for this podcast series which features interviews of senior military leaders conducted by specially selected and trained West Point cadet hosts. These exchanges produce timely, relevant, and inspirational insights for professional development of leaders at all levels.
• 0:25
  Speaker C: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the west point class of 1974 recording studio and the five questions for a Gentle Paul podcast. My name is Cadet Orion Van Busker, your host for this episode, and it is my pleasure to be here today with retired Major General Malcolm Frost. General Frost is a West Point graduate and was commissioned into the infantry branch in 1988 as a general officer. General Frost assignments included the Deputy Commanding General of the 82nd Airborne Division, the Chief of Public affairs for the army, and the Commanding General of the army center for Initial Military Training. General, welcome to the show.
• 0:57
  Speaker A: Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it. It's great to be here.
• 0:59
  Speaker C: General Frost, you went from leading infantry troops in combat to serving as the Army's Chief of Public affairs and completed your military service as the Commanding General of initial Military training. What led you to decide to join the army, and why did you choose the infantry?
• 1:14
  Speaker A: Well, it's interesting. The army choices goes back to my. My youth. So my father was enlisted in the Navy and he served in Vietnam, but I really didn't know that growing up because he was out of me when I was about two years old. I was, I was born in London, England, when he was stationed there. And it kind of goes back to that. It's interesting what happens in your life. So I go back to that, and it kind of goes when I was two days old, to be honest. So parents are both from Omaha, Nebraska. They had never heard of the sport of soccer in their life, barely back in the 1940s and 1950s. But after Vietnam, my father was stationed as a communicator for the embassy in London. And I was born on July 28, 1966. And if you were a student of sports history, and I'm talking like the most popular sport on the planet, soccer, you would know that when I was just two days old, that England beat Germany 42 in the world cup at Wembley Stadium in double overtime. And it is the only time that England, now, obviously, the United Kingdom, has won the World cup, the most popular sport on the planet. And it was absolute bedlam. It was a fantastic environment to be in. And so when I got back to Southern California, which is where I grew up, where my, my father got out of the Navy. They immediately thrust me and my brother into soccer. You say, okay, well, how does that have to do with your question? Well, trundling forward, when I was years old, I played for one of the best club teams in Southern California. And I did not know what I was going to tell you until I was 40 years old. So at 12 years old, one of my teammates fathers was a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. And he pulled my father off to the side and said, you need to send your kid to an academy. And my father, who barely even understood or knew what that was, said, well, tell me more. And then he learned what all of the academies were, obviously Air Force, Navy and United States Military Academy. And he did that because of academic athletic leadership and a bunch of traits that he, I guess, saw in me and said, hey, I think you should kind of orient your son towards that. And so little did I know. And then my junior year, before my junior year of high school, my father whips out all three of the academy books on me and says, hey, what do you think of these? I thought about military service. I said, it's something I hadn't really deeply thought about it, but I thought that would be great. And then we talked about the significance of the United States Military Academy especially. But all of them, the tradition, the values, the excellent that goes into it, the type of person that you are when you go there and when you come come out, how you would be pretty much set for life on the right path going forward. And that service was just for a short period of time. And that became really the first step for me. And then I ended up being recruited for soccer by Air Force and Army and throughout Southern California, but then ended up choosing West Point. And so that's how I got into the army. And when I. And when I got here, why infantry? I just wanted to be with troops kind of on, so to speak, the front lines. And so that was why I chose the Army. That's why I chose West Point, and that's why I chose infantry.
• 4:12
  Speaker C: So it sounds like almost going into that college decision, you were thinking more about, like, long term that, oh, I'm going to have a career military or. Or, you know.
• 4:20
  Speaker A: Absolutely. I looked at my life and said, service for five years, it's a great job. You learn a lot. It'll probably be fun. Never expected a career in the United States Army. You got to realize back then, yeah, there wasn't the Internet there. There wasn't a way to go on to YouTube to find out what it Was like to really look at all the career choices out there. It was, you know, nearly a blind decision. I did come on a recruiting trip to west, but those were the ways that we made decisions back then. You made massive life choices based off of very little information. And then you did your best to accommodate, adapt, see if you enjoyed it, liked it, and then. And then move forward. So that's kind of how it happened.
• 4:54
  Speaker C: In addition to leading troops in combat multiple times, as an infantry officer, you also did a tour as the chief of public affairs for the Army. In that job, you were responsible for telling the army story during some turbulent times. How important is the skill of communication for an army leader? And what are some lessons that you've learned about balancing transparency with operational security?
• 5:16
  Speaker A: Yeah, so that's a great question. So first off, you got to realize I was a career infantryman. Now, however, you know, why do we call it general officer? Because you're no longer a specific officer, no longer an infantryman. You're a generalist. And so I was thrust into the job of being the Army's chief of public affairs, having absolutely zero public affairs background. And so very quickly, what you learn is that leadership is leadership. You have to learn about strategic communications, public affairs, media, real relations, community relations. And those were. That was one of the best jobs I've ever had, because I did that for two and a half years. Did that when we shipped anthrax across the world, women in Ranger school, integration, lots of very, very interesting things. But what I would tell you that as a leader, I like to say leadership. The foundations of leadership are really three things. There's lots of ways to talk about leadership, but I believe it's based on relationships. First, you have to build relationships on a human level with people. You've got to be transparent, authentic, vulnerable, and real. And then you start to build relationships. You start to build what I call trust cred with somebody because you're investing in them. But you have to be able to communicate to them. You have to be able to be a little bit of what I would call a chameleon. You can't just be an automaton and speak one way to people. The way I speak to you is different than I speak to Colonel Fein. It's a different way that I speak to a spouse or a partner, to a friend. You have to look at people and understand because they don't live in your mind. So how do you best relate to them? Communications is an art form. It's about what you say, when you say it, how you say it, who you say it to, who else is in the room when you say it? It's briefing skill. It is written skills. It is just a host of skills that have to do with an art of communication. I can sit in and speak to a room of, let's just say, a thousand folks, and I know that 100% of my message is going to connect with 10% of them. That's great. But what about the other 90%? How do you craft the message and communicate to a large group and understand that 100% of your message is going to get to 80 to 90% of them? And then those other ones, you're going to get a pretty high percentage. So how do you communicate? Look at an audience in various. Quickly say, okay, we've got all sorts of geographies, races, creeds, cultures, backgrounds, experiences, and be able to speak to them on a level, if you've noticed. And if I do use it, I will never use an acronym with you that I do not explain. And you have to get away from speaking to people in a language that's yours. How do you get yourselves in their mind? Because they don't live in your mind knowing your audience, and you've hit on something. So the number one thing is, what's the audience? Or more to the point, it's never an audience. The audience is multiple audiences, lots of audiences. Digital age now. Yeah, it's. Well, there's external audiences, audiences, there's internal audiences. Anytime a company or an army officer or a politician or somebody communicates, they have to realize they're communicating, maybe to Congress, they're communicating to the media, they're communing to shareholders or stakeholders, they're communicating to their employees, they're communicating to clients or customers. And so you have to realize that when you communicate, you have to keep all of them in mind and say, all right, now that I understand my audience and or audiences, then you have to find out what. What's the effect you want to have on those audiences? What is the effect you want to achieve? Once you understand those two things, you back it up into now, what is the message that I need to craft that best resonates with those audiences to have the effect I want to achieve? And that is an art form. And doing it on the fly takes years, decades to be able to master. And so that's where you begin it. And so when you say, what's the most difficult problem? When you look at it from the army level, as chief of Public affairs, from a communications aspect, we had to Integrate strategic communications, both internal communications to our force and then what went externally when we would roll out a new program or when an issue came out that we had to communicate to folks. We had a decision support matrix that was synchronized with the strategy of the army staff and the army secretary. And we looked at that and we had a D minus and an H minus checklist of what we sent out to whom and when we sent it out to. And an extraordinarily detailed plan of strategic communications for both internal and external audiences. Knowing and understanding. When you communicate, communicate something to one audience, it's going to have an effect on another. And somebody wants to, needs to know before someone else knows. There is a calculus involved with this and a human side to communication. And part of this is when you say OPSEC versus versus transparency. That was one ear. You know, the question you had as well, What I would tell you is I always default to transparency over operational security. I don't mean that operational security isn't important, but when anybody says, I can't tell you that, that's classified or whatever, I raised the BS flag right away. Yeah, because you can always communicate something in general about what occurred without compromising operational security. Every single week that I was the Chief of Public Affairs, I would bring in the Pentagon press. It's the only place in the government where the press is allowed to have offices in the building in the Pentagon. I would bring them in every week for an off the record communication with some of the leading defense reporters that you see and hear about today. When we'd bring in different ones, five or six or seven of them, and every week we'd rotate them in and I'd have lunch with them and everything was off the record. This is the other thing about communication. Off the record means you can't use it, but it's nice to understand the information on background means they can attribute it, but they have to attribute it to something other than my name. It could be a general officer, it could be an army official, it could be a DoD official, it could be an administration official. It's whatever level of background you want it to be on. And then they can use that information without quoting you. And then you have on the record. So off the record, what you have is you're building relationships with the Pentagon press. And then with that, they would ask me questions about stories they want to pursue or things that they've heard or this or that. And I would tell them, hey, you're actually onto something. There's some things that are going on there or no, I'd say that's absolutely not occurring. I don't know where you're hearing that. Don't do it. So what it ends up doing it. You build a relationship, it doesn't waste their time. And you're building a relationship with them where they know that they can come to you. And before they publish a story or when they want to publish a story, you have already kind of got with them and been transparent and authentic with them up front. Been a little vulnerable by coming off the record and telling them some things that you would not want published on the front page of the New York times, seen on YouTube or anything else. And you build this reputational relationship with them. And this was the Pentagon press. These are pros. And they know, they burn me, they're out, they're done. So it's kind of mutual assured destruction. But with that transparency came a way to. When the time came and I told them, I can't give any more information. There are reasons why I can't give you. I can tell you these generalities. Then they understand that, okay, for operational security, for hipaa, for privacy information, for other reasons. And they get. I know that's a long way of going about it, but that's how communications helps you. The relationship piece works. Those two things allow you to gain the most important thing. I'm going to say trust. It's all about trust rapport.
• 12:08
  Speaker C: Almost.
• 12:09
  Speaker A: Yes, it's trust. You got to realize every single day when you're communicating with folks, you are building trust with them. You're making trust, you're making deposits into trust credits. And one day when you need to kind of wake that withdrawal, the question is, do you have it or do you not? And so we can talk more about that later.
• 12:25
  Speaker C: At West Point, you know, we're taught that leaders need to be at the decisive point of battle and that as officers, our most useful weapon is all often in the radio. Do you have any examples of where you needed to be as a leader? Was not the point of immediate action.
• 12:38
  Speaker A: So, yeah, I'm going to give you a little bit of a scar tissue lesson that I, that I learned and I learned this a little bit of the hard way, but then was able to recover. And it was. I remember the date. It was January 27, 2007. I was a squadron commander for 3 3rd Squadron, 4th U.S. cavalry up in northern Iraq, based in the city of Tal Afar, Talafar. And it was about 20,000 square kilometers, had about 800 troops under my command. We were west of Mosul and it bordered the Turkey, Turkish and Syrian border. And we were at a point where Operation Restore Rice had happened about a year before. About 5,000, 6,000 troops was Colonel McMaster, HR McMaster. And that was where we developed the clear hold build strategy that the president, national security advisor and General Petraeus started to execute during the surge in Iraq. And when I got up there, I was. I had 800 troops, I had 100 troops in Tal Afar. And although it was successful, you know, the enemy started to creep back into the. To the city and a suicide vest cell had. Had gone back in and started to execute terrorist attacks, would pop off suicide vests and against in coffee shops, in marketplaces, et cetera. And was just devastating. Was trying to, you know, foment, reignite sectarian violence there in Tal Afar, which is a pretty strategic city because the entire strategy for Baghdad and Iraq was. Was built there and you couldn't let it fail. Not a good message to send. And walking out of a key leader engagement with the police chief on January 27, just a routine key leader engagement we called it. And all of a sudden it felt like the city had just blew up. I mean, the machine guns going off, explosions happening just a couple blocks away. And I was with my mobile tactical command post myself, four humvees, 15 of my soldiers. And so, you know, we're infantrymen and cavalry off cavalrymen. So you have, you know, infantry close with and destroy the enemy cavalry move to the sound of the gun. So we obviously mounted up. I'm in the lead vehicle. We go down a couple blocks, turn down this alleyway, just listen to the sound of the gunfire to figure out what's going on while gunfire happen. There was a lot of it. It was. There was a massive firefight going on. And so I get out of my vehicle, see walking up to me a. The next district police chief over. He's. He comes up to me to the Humvee. I get out, I get out with myself. Command Sergeant Major Brian Biggs, my, my Sergeant Major. Command Sergeant Major. My battle buddy, Captain Jim Modlin, a young captain who. What I did is I had a shadow program. Every time I went on patrol, I weaved in. I brought in one of my staff to come on to be part of that organization, to see and feel the battlefield, to understand so they could plan better back to the forward operating base and to see one levels up, you know, deep into the future. And then I had as well, Sergeant First Class Shark, who was my personal security attachment, my body man, so to speak. And we walk up and the police chief, blood all over him. And I look behind him, he's got a couple of policemen who are dead, couple that are wounded, and the rest of them are in this firefight. We're in the, down this alleyway. So imagine looking down this alley and at the end of the alley there's a road that tees off and you had buildings that were staring at us and there's a T going left and right. And so immediately we get down because the policemen were firing down that tee to the right at some enemy we couldn't see. And so we immediately got the medics to try and take care of the two casualties. And then the four of us immediately got in and folks secured the back, but it was a very narrow alley. We got in and started to lay down suppressive fire with those policemen against the enemy to the right. As we were doing so off to our left in the building that was looking down the alleyway, all of a sudden we found out we started to take fire from that building. So here we are in kind of what you would almost call a little bit of an L shaped ambush to a degree and going down at the humvees and down at us. And so immediately that became the point of challeng that became, you know, at that moment that became a decisive point for us. Right? So the policeman kept laying base of fire against the enemy to the, to the right, down, down the, down the road. And we immediately went up to the building and got into a four man stack, getting ready to enter the building. And so you had Sergeant first class Shark was the number one man, I was the number two man. Number three man was command Sergeant Major Briggs. Number four man was Captain Jim Modlin. And we're sitting there getting ready to go in. And we're getting ready, you know, all right, looking up, down, getting ready to go in, four men to clear in this room and clear the enemy out of that building and just go up the floors and clear them out. And about when we're on, you know, one, two, when we hit, two, getting ready to go three and go in with Sarn, first class Shark, massive explosion, massive explosion happens, a suicide vest goes off in that room, blows through the door, almost knocks us over. We're standing there a little bit dazed, but we didn't get hit. I mean, five seconds later we probably would have gotten, you know, eviscerated. Whether he pre detonated, don't know what happened, but it went off anticipating us coming in or what have you. And we're sitting There. And I say, okay, we kind of regroup. We're getting ready to go in, and we're getting ready to recount, go back in. And as I'm getting ready to go in, my command sergeant Major, my battle buddy hits me on the back, says, sir, sir, is this really where you need to be right now? And I went, wow. Okay. So I was, you know, kind of born and bred an infantryman. I mean, that's what I'm. I'm supposed to do. I go in and, you know, it's the decisive point, get the enemy. And so what I did is I took a tactical pause, probably for about 10, 15 seconds max. As I thought through the situation, it felt like an eternity. And I stopped and I thought about this. And my battle buddy, who, you know, spoke truth to power, said, hey, sir, you know, basically, what the heck are you doing? And I thought to myself, my gosh, he's right. Any one of my soldiers can go in and clear this room out. Heck, the three of them can go in there and clear it out. And we now know that there's not much in that room left. Why am I going in? What I realized is this elusive suicide vessel that for nine months we had been chasing that. We were in the throws. We were, you know, we were in a boxing match with them. We're close in, like, we got them. We got them by the collar. They got us by the collar. Now it's a massive strategic opportunity, and there's only one person that can pull in the resources necessary to take care of these guys once and for all, and that's me. And I can't do it by walking into a room. So immediately I put Captain Jim Modlin in charge, because captain's outrank command sergeant majors. I said, listen to my sergeant major, though he knew not to be a dummy and not listen to sergeant major, right? And I went back to my vehicle, and I went back to my vehicle, I. E. Across the road, and we hit a trust point. You got to think about this. I mean, we're in the middle of a firefight. I trusted them to cover me as I evaded, escaped, and went across, back across the road to get to the vehicle. And they had trust in me. And this is life or death trust. I mean, what is the trust point you have with folks in your life? And that trust point for them was that I was going to get reinforcements, put about, plan together to help them as well. So I got back to my vehicle and I put together a plan and then immediately got on the Radio put together my, put my leader's intent out to surround and solely squeeze off this suicide vest sell and then what proceeded from there, you know, with that leader's intent went through everything you learn here at West Point leader's intent confirmation brief, got a back brief from my guys on the radio and then we executed, surrounded them and allowed my commanders to figure out how to, how to surround them. And we got in the Iraqi army, Iraqi police, we got air cover with UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles and with Kiowa warriors to help us with fires and with observation. And then bottom line is what happened there is what ensued was you thought was going to be just a few hour firefight. It turned into a three day operation where we destroyed that suicide vest cell and slowly squeezed them off and killed them with only one other casualty where I had one US wounded, shot in the foot. Other than that it was successful. So, so the lesson lear there back to the decisive point is the decisive point for me was not going into that building. I got caught up. Leaders should do only what leaders can do. Anyone could have done that. No one could have done what I did which was to harness the resources, pull in the reinforcements, get the three dimensional airspace and get the Iraqi army police in and put together an operation to take care of this threat. That's only I could have done that. And I lost it for a minute. Saved by my battle buddy command Sergeant Major Briggs taking that tactical pause then going back to brass tacks MDMP and planning military decision making process, leaders intent and think about how do we do this? And that's how it ended up so interesting. Yeah.
• 20:23
  Speaker C: Infantry officers oftentimes, you know, they're infantry officers for a reason. They like to fight.
• 20:27
  Speaker A: And it's one thing if you're a platoon leader, right? But I was a squadron commander and I was in charge of again I had six different bases, I had 20,000 square kilometers that I was responsible for with, with our unit. I, I did not to be need to be going into that, into that in that building. Now maybe initially going against it, you know, when you, you looked at the immediate reaction to the contact, that's fine. But that was not the most important place for me to be. Especially after that suicide vest went off when the entire situation changed and we knew what we're what and who we were up against.
• 20:54
  Speaker C: That's incredible. So Jennifer Oz, during your career you've navigated plenty of crises ranging from combat operations to public controversies. Can you share an example of a particularly tough moment and how you approached it?
• 21:06
  Speaker A: As a leader, yeah. I'd say one of the toughest moments in my career is when I was a Brigade combat team commander, second of the 25th Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Iraq in 201011 and commanded about 6,000 folks. We were a striker brigade and an advise and assist brigade. That's when the mission was changing from combat operations into support and stability operations. Still combat though. And it came down to sometimes as a leader you are faced with what I'll just call an unwinnable situation. And you have to make a decision, make a choice. I call it the Kobayashi Maru. For anyone who might be a Star Trek geek out there, which may or may not be this audience, you know that Kobayashi Maru is Captain James T. Kirk having a situation where no matter what choice he made, he was going to lose. You can find out the history on that later. But so we had a Kobayashi Maru situation. It was a. In Diala Province there was an organization called the mek, the Mujahedin Ekelk. They were a terrorist socialist Iranian organization that fled Iran after helping Ayatollah overthrow throw the Shah of Iran. They had a beef with the Ayatollah and they had to flee Iran. And then they helped Iraq during the Iran Iraq War. And frankly, you know, then they, they are on the terrorist watch list back then they had killed Americans in the 70s and Westerners. They were a terrorist organization. And there was this compound called Cop Grizzly Combat Outpost Grizzly which was there. Camp Ashraf is what it was called for them where they had a compound where they were just living out their life. And they were, you know, 40s and 50s. This was a cult like organ organization. But they had a pr, their PR Public relations and public affairs was off the chart and communications ability. They literally had senior US Senators that they were paying to help them to try, you know, that were lobbyists to try and get them off of the terrorist watch list that they were, you know, lobbying just like anyone else can lobby anyone from Congress. You know, they need, they needed help.
• 23:05
  Speaker C: Gamer sex game from a public affairs.
• 23:07
  Speaker A: Yeah. And they, I'll tell you, they, they. Their communications when they, when, when things happen to them but they didn't have any weapons happens anymore. You know, they were just adults trying to live off their life. There were a few children. We never saw them very kind of cult like just trying to live out their life in peace in this, in this camp. And so when we attacked in 2003 into Iraq, you know, we had to kind of. We ran across this and then helped to Secure it the entire time. And now here we are seven years later. But you got to realize the regime turned from every, a Sunni based religious regime to a Shia based regime. And a Shia based regime is aligned more to Iran. And so there was a lot of pressure from Iran to go in and clear these folks out because they were enemies of Iran, enemies of the Shia, so to speak. And so there was a heck of a lot of pressure built. There were a couple of what I'll say, early attempts to kind of round them up that failed or didn't go well. And so we call it the Kobayash mirror. So here it is. And what happened was the, the three star general, General Tarek, in charge of the JAL operations center, about 30,000 folks in Jala was ordered to go in and to arrest all of the Mujahideen, a KILQ under, you know, the watch where I was there. Now here's the problem. Arrest is kind of code for arrest. Maybe kill, we don't know. And so here you are. So you are advising, assisting the Iraqis. Now you have to understand that the rules of engagement had changed. The status of forces agreement had changed. We could not do operations. We had to do it by, with and through the Iraqis. We're under Iraqi law now. Iraqis were in charge. Bottom line is it's their country. I mean we had given them the keys back. We were there just to advise them, to train them, to assist them. We could protect ourselves always. But we had to do things by, with and through the Iraqis. So now here you are as a commander, you know that the Iraqis, the moral side of you says if we allow the Iraqis to go in there, they are going to kill dozens, if not hundreds of innoc. Now once upon a time, terrorists, but innocent unarmed civilians. And it's going to get broadcast across the globe because that's how good their PR is. So that's the moral side. I can't allow that to happen. But here's the problem. Legally I had to allow them because Iraqi law, the security forces agreement, the rules of engagement say that I must do certain things. I must obey. I can't stop them because it's the Iraqis. But so what do you do? It's the Kobayashi minimum all. It's unwinnable. On the one hand, do I violate my morals or do I violate the law? If you violate the law, right. If I violate the law, I violate the rules of engagement, the security forces Status of forces agreement, I jeopardize the Iraq US relationship You know, et cetera, and potentially really upset. But on the moral side, how can you stand by and watch innocent people get slaughtered? What do you do, cadet? What do you do? Colonel, It's a tough situation. And all I can tell you is, and there's a whole I could talk for 20, 30 minutes on this is what you have to do is you got to buy time and you got to. And you got to try and arm up with information to try and set and change the conditions. And you need to innovate and allow your folks to find ways to figure out in a gray zone, in a gray area to overcome this. So what did we do? Here's what happened. Number one, we really got down to advising and training and assisting, really advising. General, General Tarek. I advise General Tarek so, so well about violations of the Geneva Conventions law of land warfare, all the things that would happen to him personally, that he refused the order. Victory. He refused the order. No, they fired him. They just put in his deputy. So his deputy is doing it. So what do we do? We train them. We talk them about how to go in there softly, how to conduct the operation. We walk them through how to do it. We were outside the compound. I was training them, talking to them, showing them my folks were trying to tell them how to do this in a nonviolent fashion, everything that we could. In the meanwhile, one of my young battalion commanders, Bob Molinari, just happened to do a key leader engagement with the Mujahedena Kelp on Camp Ashraf, and he goes in there with his Stryker vehicle and, oh, darn, it just broke down for about a week. And so you're buying time in space. Meanwhile, we're communicating. Allowed my division commander to go to General Austin, Lloyd Austin, the old SecDef, and Ambassador James Jeffries, and they went to Maliki. They went to the chief of the armed forces for Iraq and tried to plea with them not to do this in. So we're buying time to get a political, a diplomatic solution. In the meanwhile, my battalion commander, they're not going to attack while American unit is down there. And so buying time and buying time. Eventually, though. So we bought about a week and we did our best to set the conditions so this would happen correctly. Maliki said, still, go do it. We failed with Ambassador Jeffries and with General Austin, and literally we had a slide calling this the Kobayashi Miru. We knew this was going to happen, happened one day. And so we were told to back off. And I looked at General Jameel, who was the deputy commander, the Iraqi deputy. And I told General Jameel, I said, General Jamil, I have liaisons at every hospital. We are just off of eyesight from what's going to happen here. I said, if we get reports or if we see or hear anything about atrocities, anything about wounded and dead, you need to understand, Sadie, Sir, I am going to come in here with myself a couple of platoons in advanced trauma life support. I said, all hell will break loose. I will not, not stop until I prevent any more atrocities from happening until we start to treat this. I said, do not test me. And so he knew. And so what happened? We back off. And then that night, what we found out was the chief of the armed forces in Iraq at the time, General Ali Gaddan decided to come down from Baghdad and lead the attack himself. Four star general came down and also we started to get reports of casualties and so immediately rallied the troops. Troops came in and went to the front gate of Camp Ashraf, guarded by the Iraqi army. And the Iraqi army had a platoon there. Basically said, nope, you can't come in. And I looked at the young platoon leader and I said, get the hell out of my way. And we trained all of our guns on him. I said, I'm coming through that gate, get out of the way. And so we ran through the gate, we came in and what we saw was absolute carnage. There were 35 mujah deen kelk that were dead. There were dozens of them wounded. And for about the next 18 hours, my guy's advanced trauma life were up to their shoulders in blood, doing everything they could to save as many lives as possible. We started to evacuate casualties, you know, got an exception to policy, evacuated on US helicopters to bases to try and treat them. And so here's the deal. Sometimes you are in a no win situation where doing the moral thing and doing the legal thing are diametrically opposed. What do you do as a leader? I feel like somehow I failed. 35 lives were lost, but did we save 365 because there were 400 of them. You just don't know. So that's, that's probably the hardest, toughest decision in crisis I ever had to deal with as a leader.
• 30:09
  Speaker C: Yeah, that's an incredible story. Sometimes you just have to do what you can. And kind of relating to that, looking back, sir, what was the most challenging situation you had to make as a general officer? And what did you learn about yourself in that process?
• 30:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, so switching gears to being a general officer, I think the most difficult situation or project that I had to Deal with when I was commanding general for the center for initial Military Training and I had this side project, an additional duty, so to speak, that was part of my responsibility, which was I was in charge of holistic health and fitness for the United States Army.
• 30:44
  Speaker C: Nice.
• 30:45
  Speaker A: Yeah. And so we're in the middle of trying to figure out a new physical fitness test looking at the five components of H2F, holistic health and fitness, physical, mental, spiritual, sleep and nutrition. And how do you do, how do you drive fitness? Change? Any change across an organization? One that's 1.1 million people with Guard, reserve, and regular Army. How do you drive change? How do you drive people? For 30 years, we've known about the science of health and fitness, yet we've neglected it in the Army. Commanders think they know what's best for physical training. They go out, do what they're strong at. We were creating a bunch of gazelles who could do push ups and sit ups, but we were neglecting the majority of the components of fitness. Cardiovascular endurance and muscular endurance. That's great. The older the PT test tested those, no one else did anything but trained for that. They trained for the test. We neglected explosive power, muscular strength, speed, agility, flexibility, balance, reaction time. So we had to change the culture. Do you know how you change the culture? You change the standard, you change the test. And that's where we dove in hard on the Army Combat Fitness Test. Now you would know it as the aft. Right, the Army Fitness Test.
• 31:56
  Speaker C: In my heart. There you go.
• 31:58
  Speaker A: So we developed the Army Combat Fitness Test. So here's the challenge. The challenge is, is everybody that you would go to would say, oh, that's great. What a great test. We'd love to do it. How do you do something and make change at the scale and the scope of 1.1 million people putting a test in with equipment that's went from three events to six events that could be done in 70 minutes and could be sold, so to speak, to all aspects of the army. And everyone you talk to said, that's a great test. That's a great test. It's fun. I'll give you an example. I, we would go to the guard in the reserve, and this is where I learned a huge, huge lesson and in leadership is how do you influence up and out? How do you get stakeholders to buy in? On the surface, everyone sees the goodness in it, but down deep, they know how hard this is going to be in their organizations, much less on them, especially older people. Because we, you know, 30 years, we don't want to change the damn test 20 years. No, I don't want to change the test. That's for the new folks.
• 32:51
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 32:51
  Speaker A: Not for us. That's not the way it works. So the guard of the reserve would say, you know what? We need three times as many lanes as you're estimating. We need lanes of equipment. You know, the army fitness team chest lanes, we need six times as much. And I looked at him, I said, okay, what else do you need? Here's what you do. You take no away from them. Take away their ability to say no. That's the major lesson. When you're influencing people and stakeholders who are going to on the one hand support and say, but on the other have all these reasons why they cannot do something, then fine, take no away. So changing the culture of fitness in the United States army and getting that test through the first test in 40 years, that for 15 years we'd been trying to change and being able to influence and to be able to convince and to take no out of the mouths of all of the naysayers and all those who would say yes, but didn't want to. And it was across the board, across the army on all levels, from the bureaucracy to resourcers, to folks who said the equipment's not going to work, to acquisition folks, to contract folks, to commanders out there, to all the different subcultures in the army who said, yes, it's good, we need to change. But now here are all the reasons why we can't, or we can, we shouldn't, or you got to take no away. And so we took no away. I had great support from leadership. It was great timing for the institution based on all the millions of medical injuries and musculoskeletal problems we were having. And so the conditions were right. You can want to change three things you need to know before you change or transform the leadership. You need leadership support to do it. The environment has to be there. There's got to be a good solid reason. The met, you know, 1.5 billion in medical injuries and half a billion we were spending a year in muscular skeletal and the non deployable rates. Those conditions were set. It was ripe for change. And then you've got to recognize that as a leader and then try and change the culture. And when you do that change, you'll fail if you don't take no out of people's mouths when they say, I need this. Yes, yes, happy to. How can I help? We're going to do that for you. Those are the three lessons you got to learn. And that's what you do strategically as a general officer to make change and transform an organization.
• 35:00
  Speaker C: That's an awesome answer. Like I said, you guys did a pretty good job with that test. Although I was not too sad when they took the ball throw away.
• 35:06
  Speaker A: Well, you know, that's, that's because you're not exactly super, super tall in stature. Younger. Yes. Vertically challenged. There you go. Yes, yes. It was biased. It was biased for, for, for taller people. So I don't disagree with you.
• 35:18
  Speaker C: No offense. Take you there at all. That's absolutely correct. I'm gonna wrap this up. Sir, a final question. Knowing what you know now after all that experience, what advice would you give to your younger self?
• 35:28
  Speaker A: Two major pieces of advice. The, the first is don't be so intense. Don't be so intense. My point was, is that I early on tried to hold everybody and my subordinates to the same high standard that I held myself to. And that made me a very intense individual. What I've learned is that the better way to do this, especially with multi generational people that you lead is you have to not lead as you want to be led. You have to lead as they want to be led. And you have to understand that every generation of leaders needs to be led differently because of their generational traits and the way that they think and feel. And that is different. And how do you get. I don't need someone to get them the 100% that I can give. I need them to give their 100%. It might be, and, and, and maybe my hundred percent is only what, doing that will only get 40% out of this person. 60 here, 70 there. How do you get 100% out of each individual? And that is your challenge as a leader. As leaders lead as they want to be led. Don't change your standards, don't change the way you lead the organization. But how are you nuanced and lead individuals and understand, be adaptable to how each individual needs to be led. That's number one. Number two is that do not allow the uniform, do not allow the rank, and do not allow your service to identify who you are. You know, what is your identity? Here's the deal. You have to be yourself. I have watched too many officers and too many leaders who have changed who they were. I don't recognize them five, 10, 15, 20 years later. It's not the person that I knew growing up. So, so what is your identity? Don't lose yourself. And too many people tie their identity to their rank or to their service. And I Watch them. When they transition, and they don't know who they are, they're lost. I like to say that I was born Malcolm. I'm going to die Malcolm. And everything in between. You know, it's not the profit and loss. It's not the revenue you make. It's not the service. It's not your rank. It's not your title. It's who you are at the core and what you do to do two things, gain results. But more importantly is to mentor and lead the generation that comes behind it, because that's truly your legacy. And so not forgetting who you are, what your identity is, that I think is massively important. And not that I did, but I started to get a little too big for my britches, a little too caught up in, you know, in. In things. And I didn't lose my identity, but I watched people start to lose, and I said, I don't want to go down that track.
• 37:55
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 37:56
  Speaker A: You know, don't forget who you are. You need to be the same authentic, true person that you've always been, and don't forget who that is, and don't become someone that's not the true you.
• 38:06
  Speaker C: Absolutely. That's great advice. Well, sir, been a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you very much for coming. Some good lessons learned from that. As a token of Modern War Institute's appreciation for you coming, like to present you with this Modern War Institute coin. I. I'm sure you have a pretty big collection, so I don't know.
• 38:20
  Speaker A: I'll show it to you right after this. But Cadet Van Buckskirk, thanks to you, and thanks to the Modern War Institute, thanks for what you're doing. It's been my. My pleasure, my honor to be with you, and. And. And thanks much.
• 38:28
  Speaker C: Appreciate it once again, sir. All right, cool.
• 38:33
  Speaker B: This has been an episode of Five Questions for a General, a production of the Modern Institute of West Point. If you like what you heard today, please download, like, subscribe and share this podcast to help us reach an even larger audience. All statements in this podcast represent the personal views of the speakers and do not represent an official position of the United States Military Academy or the United States government.