Stanley A. McChrystal

Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity.

What I'm trying to do is teach people how to actually get individuals in organizations to do the kinds of things to make a difference. It starts with not just studying the mechanics but really understanding how people operate.

Our bureaucracy had excelled at compartmentalizing intelligence - we had a 'need to know' system - but by 2004, it was impossible to foresee what elements of our organization would and would not need to know a given piece of information.

In our society, I see public media as a lever. It pushes people by elevating them and their sights. It brings them into more thinking and understanding, and it brings us together.

The military likes to figure out how to do something, put it in a manual or an operating procedure, and perfect doing it, and have everyone do it the same way. I don't like that.

I knew from history that war comes with frightening regularity, often fought over the same ground and similar causes as previous conflicts.

Military leaders, many of whom were students of counterinsurgency, recognized the dangers of an incremental escalation and the historical lesson that 'trailing' an insurgency typically condemned counterinsurgents to failure.

Any war or conflict you enter where you are likely to lose more Americans and expend more treasure is something worthy of very detailed debate. There ought to be a lot of skepticism. There ought to be a lot of discussion.

President Obama had voiced strong support for the effort in Afghanistan during his campaign, pledging to add two brigades, which he did. But since the inauguration... the administration had signaled that the U.S. commitment needed careful assessment, and we needed to recalibrate the strategy and objectives.

I was raised with traditional stories of leadership: Robert E. Lee, John Buford at Gettysburg. And I also was raised with personal examples of leadership. This was my father in Vietnam. And I was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful; they didn't lie, cheat, steal, or abandon their comrades.

A fundamental principle that I learned in my career, and a principle that my consulting company McChrystal Group helps American civilian companies to adopt, is that winning units and organizations ensure that the time they actually spend - daily, weekly, and yearly - must hew closely to their priorities.

I spent a career carrying typically either an M16 or an M4 Carbine. An M4 Carbine fires a .223 caliber round, which is 5.56 mm at about 3000 feet per second.