The Navy SEAL Art of War: Leadership Lessons from the World's Most Elite Fighting Force - Hardcover

Rob Roy, Chief Petty Officer, spent twenty years as a Navy SEAL (including service on the legendary SEAL Team Six) before founding Sot-G, an eighty-hour intensive leadership course that uses military combat training to teach executives and managers the leadership skills they need to succeed in business and in life. The program has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and Inc.
Chris Lawson is the speechwriter to the Secretary of the U. S. Army, the Honorable John McHugh, and was previously the chief civilian speechwriter for Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lawson a former national security journalist for Gannett, as well as the former managing editor for the Army Times and the Navy Times, and a former managing editor for Men’s Health magazine. He served for six years as a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent, from 1985 to 1991, and was the Corps’ Journalist of the Year in 1989. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and family.

Be Ready for Whatever the Booger Eaters Throw Your Way

No plan survives first contact with the enemy. That maxim is especially true in what SEALs call close quarters battle, or CQB, where homes, hallways, alleys, and streets become war zones in the blink of an eye. For a CQB mission to be successful—like the 2011 bin Laden raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan—extensive planning and training are essential. Nowhere is a SEAL’s value as a living, breathing precision-guided munition more necessary. And when it goes right, whether planned or freelanced in real time on site, CQB is an amazing—almost Zen-like—experience to behold: armed frogmen flowing like water through a house or building, shooting, moving, and communicating in an exhilarating, effortless dance of death.

Also known as close quarters defense or close quarters combat, CQB is one of the most difficult things a SEAL does. Something as intense as hand-to-hand fighting requires that an individual be honed to a razor’s edge so that actions aren’t debated or deliberated over, but are performed without hesitation. While meticulous planning is essential, successful missions like CQB always circle back to training. When you are well trained everything becomes instinctual. That’s the game changer. On a certain level, it’s no different than what a football or baseball player or emergency room doctor experiences during critical moments. Repetition (training) leads to memorization and memorization leads to instinct. Therefore, one must train and train their skills until they know a procedure cold. And then they must train some more. In unpredictable situations like combat, such training is the key to victory. That’s why the SEALS who got bin Laden didn’t bail when one of their stealth helicopters—a modified UH-60 Black Hawk—clipped a compound wall and had to make a hard landing. They had trained for just that kind of scenario. No panic. No problem. Instinct kicked in. They know what to do. Mission on.

It’s the same in business. Martin, a CEO of a small printing and graphics company in Maryland, created a culture of endless training for his sales and marketing force after listening to one of my lectures. He says the impact on his team has been miraculous.

“Just when we think we’re ready, we now train just a little bit more,” he wrote to me. “When it’s time to make a presentation to a potential client, a customer, or a board, we don’t believe there’s any such thing as being over prepared.”

As his teams put together their presentations, Martin said, he always asks them: “Are we adding real value? Are we challenging the customer and ourselves? Have we properly learned about the actual people we are planning for?”

“We never just ‘wing it,’ ” he wrote. “There’s a real difference in being confident and being cocky. Confident recognizes that there’s always something more we can add to the presentation that’s unique or specific or counter-intuitive for the client. Cocky says ‘been there, done that. Let’s just do it again.’ The SEALs have taught me the value of training—of doing my homework. The customer always knows if you’re good, or just mailing it in.”

Such rigorous preparation enables Martin’s teams to freelance with ease and confidence when necessary. They know how to blow away the client—not bullshit them.

When you have trained to perform on an instinctual level, you can act instead of react. In combat, ironically, bad stuff usually happens because of a lack of action. The moment you pause or second-guess, the bad guy may grab a hostage and change the whole equation.

So how does one train for these sorts of successes? By using the crawl, walk, run approach. In SEAL training, first we teach a SEAL to shoot. Then teach him to shoot and run. Then teach him to shoot accurately while running. Then we teach him to do it in total darkness. And so on. Once an individual is proficient, we begin training that skill in myriad conditions, situations, and scenarios—likely gaining real-world experience along the way. Equally as important: we train the way we fight, not the other way around. There’s a difference. If one fights the way they train, then they will act like they do on the rifle range. They will pick their weapon up, check it, and do all the safety bullshit, etc. The real world is dirty, aggressive, and intimidating, and one must train that way, too.

Commander’s Intent

When a military action absolutely, positively has to be mounted overnight, the president phones 1-800-USN-SEAL. That conversation—as it should be for senior leaders—is always quick and pointed. The commander in chief explicitly states the end goal—“Sink this boat; take out that bad guy; free those hostages,” etc.—and rightly leaves the details on how to accomplish that mission to his capable subordinates. No need for micromanagement. The SEALs accept the responsibility and are held accountable for their subsequent actions. More important, they know what needs to be done and what outcome determines and defines the mission’s success. They’ve been unleashed.

This vital communication is known in military parlance as “Commander’s Intent.” Not to be confused with organizational “vision” or “values,” Commander’s Intent is a clearly defined and articulated goal for a particular mission. Successful leaders—regardless of their operational environment—routinely issue it. By doing so, teams can properly plan and ultimately succeed on the battlefield. Remember, in the fog of war, plans change and confusion reigns. Armed with Commander’s Intent, however, dynamic operators on the pointy end of the spear can always press the fight. When everyone clearly knows what right looks like, individuals and small teams are free to deploy their knowledge and creativity when plans go awry. They maneuver in new and asymmetrical ways, develop tactics, techniques, and procedures on the fly, slashing and jabbing through the fog of confusion. No one stands around with their hands in their pockets wondering what to do next. Commander’s Intent is, therefore, an empowering tool—a leader’s guiding principle—that allows subordinates to display personal initiative in times of uncertainty. In many cases, individual improvisation will be what saves the day—not the original plan.

Imagine a combat scenario where enemy forces are harassing a military convoy route through a specific mountain pass. The commander issues his intent to the operating forces, ordering them to ensure safe passage through the treacherous pass. He does not, however, specify what weapons to use, which routes to take, or what units to send. He simply articulates his intent to clear the route. The details on how to accomplish that are left to subordinate commanders and their charges. To quote General George S. Patton, who could easily have been a SEAL: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

Jonathon is a senior vice president of one of North America’s largest building materials manufacturing companies. He’s also a recovering micromanager. After years of mowing through talented subordinates who ultimately tired of his overbearing, intrusive leadership style and palpable lack of trust, and quit to take their talent elsewhere, Jonathon attended one of my Leadership Under Fire seminars. He saw how SEALs thrive on a culture of trust. He grudgingly—but laudably—discovered that while successful in his business, he could achieve even greater success if he simply held his supervisors and employees accountable to their assigned tasks and got the hell out of their way. Employee morale—not to mention his own—increased, too. To get there, Jonathon had to learn to curb his obsessive-compulsive, controlling appetite. To his great credit, he even began creating a culture where people actually sought accountability, and acted as if they were part owners of the business.

“Too often I felt that if I didn’t hover over a manager, then my butt might ultimately be on the line,” he told me. “It was tough to let go. But I realized that we actually achieved better results when I gave people the freedom to do the job I hired them to do! That doesn’t mean I’m not enthusiastically involved. I am. It’s just that I’m no longer overly involved.”

According to Entrepreneur magazine, 90 percent of employees in the organizations included in their “2010 Great Place to Work Rankings: Best Small & Medium Workplaces” report believe management trusts them without looking over their shoulder. Ninety-two percent say they are given a lot of responsibility. How does management achieve this? By doing these five things:

1.Commit to hiring the right people.

2.Make people accountable to each other.

3.Clearly and frequently articulate expectations.

4.Give employees decision-making power.

5.Give employees an ownership stake.

SEALs know that the unbending bedrock of these concepts is trust. To confidently convey intent without micromanaging it, a leader must implicitly trust that his followers are properly manned, planned, and equipped to handle the mission. If one has trained his team properly, however, such trust should be easily bestowed. The best part: receiving such unquestioned trust from a commander will inspire and motivate subordinates in incalculable ways.

Remember the words of David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, who famously said, “Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it.”

Festina Lente: Make Haste Slowly

While it might sound counterintuitive, combat leadership and performance is an elegant art. Violent and cutthroat as their craft may be, Navy SEALs exhibit the same elegance we admire in a professional dancer or athlete.

In 2010 I starred in a Spike network reality show called The Deadliest Warrior. You may have seen similar shows on other networks where teams of elite commandos duke it out in a series of challenges to determine who the deadliest warrior and protector is.

The Spike show had some interesting hooks, in addition to the traditional mano-a-mano matchups of these reality shows. The producers and hosts showcased twenty-first-century science and the latest in computer-generated image technologies to record quantifiable, evidence-based statistical conclusions. Everything we touched had a sensor attached to it. Every move we made was measured and captured. The result: with withering accuracy—and in high-definition, slow-motion photography—the host and scientists could show viewers whose hands punched harder, knives slashed deeper, which weapons and shooters engaged targets faster and more accurately, or whose explosives delivered more killing power per square inch.

On the episode I was featured in, I was paired with former Navy SEAL (and demolitions expert) Colin Palmer; we faced off against two former Israel Defense Forces commandos. The competition featured, among other things, knife fights against ballistic dummies (gel-torso mannequins with realistic-looking organs, skeletons, and blood) and combat target shooting using a pig carcass tied to a moving robot. It was, literally, a bloody hoot.

At the end of two days and four intense competitions (using knives, pistols, machine guns, and explosives), the producers uploaded their results and ran a high-tech battle simulation, which they later used to create a scripted, seven-minute battle scene with actors. After 1,000 simulations, the SEALs recorded 518 kills compared to the Israelis’ 482. It was close competition, but the SEALs were deemed the Deadliest Warriors.

But what I wanted to point out was that elegance, crazy as it sounds, played a large part in our victory.

While SEALs are usually faster, smarter, and more adaptable than their adversaries, we’re also more elegant in how we operate. That elegance translates into lethal accuracy when it matters most.

In my world, elegance is not defined by grace and beauty, style and sophistication. In fact, if you watch the YouTube video of me attacking the gel-torso dummy with my Recon-1 combat knife, you’ll see why few folks would describe it as elegant. No, what I’m talking about is a mindset that manifests itself in beautifully tactical action.

Elite combat operators are decidedly elegant individuals. They rely on simplicity, refinement, dignity, inventiveness, and ingenuity. This may reveal itself as poise and performance under fire. Or it might result in an elegantly neat and clever idea or solution. To those practiced in the art of warfare and self-defense, the polished splendor of these elegant actions is both breathtaking and effective.

But you can train yourself to be the same way in the environment you work and perform in.

Think about your favorite quarterback as he drops back to pass under relentless pressure from a thundering phalanx of three-hundred-pound linemen bent on rearranging his spine. The elegant quarterback seems to effortlessly avoid danger, eluding his tacklers and nimbly finding a way to release the ball in a smooth and accurate fashion to his open receivers. He appears calm, methodical, and commanding under pressure. It is clear his mind is focused, and his actions are practiced and measured.

Now imagine yourself in a tremendously stressful, pressure-packed scenario—a production crisis at work, an injured child screaming for help, the potential loss of a huge contract.

Are you the sort who panics, and screams at the top of your lungs or runs around waving your arms like a madman? Do you panic or look to others for help? Do you freeze in fear, losing any chance at gaining a tactical or opportunistic advantage? Do you cave and capitulate?

Or are you the sort who can keep a clear head, and compartmentalize your responses in chaotic situations? Can you emulate the cool and collected quarterback, delivering the required results based on the right decisions? In short, can you perform under pressure with grace, dignity, and selfless command?

The ability to perform under pressure is a SEAL trademark. In fact, it is a requirement. When I went toe-to-toe on the TV show with IDF vet Mike Kanarek, a weapons and tactical knife-fighting expert who also holds more black belts in more martial arts than I could even begin to count, the pressure was intense.

In one contest in particular, I needed to send 30 rounds into a moving target—a pig carcass tied to a maneuvering, tactical robot—at a distance of 75 feet, scoring as many kill shots as I could without harming dozens of innocent, nearby civilians. My weapon of choice: the M4 Colt Commando, a compact 5.56-caliber submachine gun with an 11.5-inch barrel and a rate of fire of 750 to 900 rounds per minute.

As soon as show host Geoffrey Desmoulin yelled “Deploy TacBot!” I calmly raised the rifle butt to my shoulder, put my cheek on the stock, lined up the M4’s iron sights, and began managing my breathing. Within nanoseconds, I started squeezing off well-aimed shots while adapting to the continually shifting scene before me. I made no unnecessary movements, no forced or unwanted actions, gave in to no sense of panic. I tried to remain a model of smooth, artful elegance.