Chapter 4

Find, Fix, and Finish

General Michael Flynn is the sixth eldest of nine children and grew up in a poorer section of gilded Newport, Rhode Island. He is slender, with fierce, dark eyes. According to his brother Charles, a fellow army general, “You don’t get out of a family like that without learning how to scrap.”

Flynn first worked with Stanley McChrystal in the Afghanistan campaign, when the former was the intelligence officer for the army’s XVIII Airborne Corps and the latter assumed command of Task Force 180. At the start of the Iraq campaign, Flynn became a senior special forces intelligence officer, and McChrystal was called to Washington for Joint Staff duty. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld soon appointed McChrystal to head JSOC, and a year later, McChrystal asked Flynn to be his top intelligence officer.

To the extent that a man such as Flynn has martial fantasies, one has always been to integrate intelligence and fight a war in real time. In Afghanistan, early efforts at fusion teams (called Cross Functional Teams) were modestly successful but “depended on voluntary participation and their authorities were limited,” according to an influential study by National Defense University academics Christopher Lamb and Evan Munsing.1 At Bagram Airfield, the first formal Joint Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force helped several task forces in the early phase of the al-Qaeda conflict. Yet intelligence analysts did not sit in the same meetings as operators. Real-time access to databases was limited. Everyone understood the concept—battlefield forces needed intel—but no one really knew how to execute it. And everyone was obsessed with keeping JSOC’s secrets a secret, even at the cost of collecting and sharing actionable intelligence.

As his intelligence officer (or J-2, or “two”), Flynn operated with General McChrystal’s full authority. He leveraged his friendships with senior members of U.S. intelligence to send more analysts into the field. By force of personality, and during the course of several years, Flynn convinced officials everywhere from the State Department to the Internal Revenue Service to staff the experimental new interagency fusion teams he was developing. He crossed Iraq, trying to better integrate JSOC’s mission (which mostly involved hunting high-value targets) with other special operation forces and conventional units. (Before Flynn’s efforts began, when JSOC conducted a combat mission, the battle space would be cleared of conventional forces lest anyone disturb the secrecy of a black operation.) Flynn discovered that most intelligence and interrogation reports collected by JSOC units were stamped ORCON, meaning, “originator controlled,” which effectively precluded anyone else—even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—from seeing them. He wondered how often conventional forces missed an opportunity to capture or kill a bad guy because they couldn’t gain access to JSOC task force intelligence. Flynn issued an order that JSOC information should be classified only at the Secret level, bringing tens of thousands of intelligence analysts around the world into the fold.

McChrystal and Flynn slowly coaxed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Intelligence Agency back into JSOC interrogations and insisted to the agencies that he would deal with abuse complaints directly. McChrystal even charmed the CIA, bringing its main special operations liaison into his secure video conference calls (but he instructed the man to never, ever tell his superiors at Langley untruths about what JSOC was up to). McChrystal was famously enthusiastic for video conferencing and used the technology to “gather” officers, operators, ambassadors, politicians, and members of the intelligence community around the world in the same room to resolve issues and design strategy. In fact, his unit spent more than $100,000 on video teleconferencing bandwidth during the early stages of the counterinsurgency operation in Iraq. As his counterterrorism efforts in the Horn of Africa increased, he likewise coordinated regular videoconferences between CIA station chiefs, U.S. ambassadors, and policymakers in Washington.2

If it surprises you that it took years for the CIA—which is tasked with gathering intelligence on terrorists—to establish a regular, senior-level presence in daily conference calls with the military units tasked with killing terrorists, you can begin to sense the frustration that fed Flynn’s and McChrystal’s determination to set things right.

Changing the culture of a mysterious organization such as JSOC is hard, and it took more than three years before Flynn and McChrystal could create the real-time, flattened battlefield that allowed coalition troops to significantly reduce violence in Iraq. General Doug Brown of Special Operations Command eventually pulled in more than a hundred liaison officers from agencies and entities across the government, telling them that they were expected to be part of the team, not just note takers at briefings.

McChrystal and Flynn came to realize around the same time that JSOC’s operational tempo could be rapidly stepped up by introducing radical decentralization and radical transparency into an organization that had always been centralized and extraordinarily discrete. Flynn once told one of McChrystal’s deputies that his “ah-ha” moment came when he saw that the key to actually doing tactical military intelligence right was as simple as making sure that everyone had access to everything.3

At another moment in history, with any other unit, these insights might not have produced even a ripple of change, much less a wave. Yet JSOC was special and feared, and the bureaucracy paid extra attention to it. McChrystal was uniquely suited for the challenge—humble and exacting, capable of incorporating into his inner circle personalities (such as Flynn’s) that were the opposite of his own.

And there was urgency. Nothing but JSOC’s networked warfare was working. Not the CIA’s operations, not whatever the National Counterterrorism Center thought it was, not outsourcing intelligence to liaison organizations. JSOC’s success begat success. Iraq was a horrible place to be as JSOC’s operational strategy gelled. Sometimes, Iraqi police would have to cart fifty dead bodies a day to the morgue in Baghdad alone. Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the commanding general of the Multi-National Force in Iraq at the beginning of the McChrystal era and then, in his second tour, as the usher of President George W. Bush’s surge, had a slightly more measured view of JSOC’s success; he knew how much his conventional forces were contributing to missions that JSOC was supplementing, and he was not above pulling rank to refuse to authorize a JSOC mission when he felt it would compromise another strategic goal. Yet he deeply respected McChrystal for his strategic vision. Likewise, McChrystal saw in Petraeus the model of a warrior-intellectual that he aspired to be. The two men got along well; had their relationship not developed, it would have been disastrous to the mission.4 Petraeus, now the director of the CIA, is on better terms with special missions unit commanders than any of his predecessors ever were, because they served under him just prior to his appointment.

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A newly minted real admiral named William McRaven was equally instrumental in their endeavors. The former SEAL Team Six member and SEAL Team Four commander had just spent eighteen months as a director on the National Security Council (NSC). He’d been itching to get back to the combat zone during his tenure at the NSC, but his time at the top of the chain proved useful. He now knew the bureaucracy in ways that McChrystal and Flynn did not, and he knew its trigger points. McRaven was given command of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force–Arabian Peninsula, which oversaw all JSOC operations in Iraq. He had a direct line to the White House through his former boss, Michele Malvesti, the senior National Security Council director for combating terrorism. (They shared adjoining desks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.)

After mending old wounds and reorganizing the bureaucracy, the three men turned their guns to the doctrine itself. Flynn and McChrystal wanted to operationalize what Flynn calls “network-centered warfare,” a PowerPoint term that conceals as much as it reveals. With Malvesti’s help, they developed a new model of using intelligence to aid combat against terrorists and insurgents. Technology now allowed (at least, in theory) for the reduction of blinks between collecting and exploiting a piece of intelligence. The model went by the initials FFFEAD, or F3EAD—find, fix, finish (that is, the getting of the bad guys), exploit, analyze, and disseminate (that is, using the first get to get other bad guys). The “finish” of F3EAD—the kill—is certainly the most dangerous part of any operation. “But exploitation is where you truly made your money and enabled you to go after a network, vice a single target, once we all embraced F3EAD, which was relatively quickly,” said a U.S. Army Ranger who served in Iraq. “This was the strength of McChrystal and Flynn. They believed in the process and then set out to resource it.”

As simple and intuitive as it sounds, F3EAD was terrifically difficult to actually do. Most soldiers—even the elite special operations forces—were trained on a much less elegant model that privileged firepower and hardware over thinking and strategizing. For Flynn, the key word in the model is “disseminate.” Information, he told one colleague, “was fucking less than worthless” if it couldn’t be widely distributed. This meant that JSOC’s culture had to change. No longer could it be some secret task force. It had to open the tent. Meanwhile, high-level commanders in Iraq had to learn to be patient.

Notes

1. Christopher J. Lamb and Evan Munsing, Secret Weapon: High-Value Target Teams as an Organizational Innovation (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 2011), 11.

2. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 223, iPad edition; Sean D. Naylor, “Years of Detective Work Led to Al-Qaeda Target,” Army Times, November 21, 2011.

3. Based on interviews with firsthand participants.

4. From the author’s brief interview with Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, shortly before his death.