Risk: A User's Guide - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stanley McChrystal retired in July 2010 as a four-star general in the U.S. Army. He was Commander International Security Assistance Forces - Afghanistan. He had previously served as Director, Joint Staff and Commander Joint Special Operations Command. The author of My Share of the Task, Team of Teams, and Leaders, he is currently a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the cofounder of McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm.
 
Anna Butrico graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in English after spending time at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She joined McChrystal Group in 2018, where she has advised Fortune 100 companies and partnered with General McChrystal as his speechwriter. This is her first book.

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The Commander

It was the summer of 1965. I was ten years old, and in the weeks before my father deployed to Vietnam for another tour of combat, my parents took my five siblings and me to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, where my mother had been raised and family abounded. My soldier father was my hero, but on a warm evening at my aunt Margaret's lovely mountain home, she showed me a black-and-white photograph of a young-looking naval officer and told me a fascinating story about another member of my family. For a ten-year-old history buff, the story was a seductive mystery.

The officer was Commander Thomas Calloway Latimore, a 1914 graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. After a twenty-

seven-year career of shipboard and shore assignments, including a tour in military intelligence and a brief stint as the governor of American Samoa, Latimore was given command of the USS Dobbin, a destroyer tender stationed at Pearl Harbor, in April 1941. The USS Dobbin supported the US Pacific Fleet that had been forward positioned from the West Coast to Hawaii by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to counter increasingly aggressive Japanese moves in the region.

By all accounts, Latimore was a quiet man and an avid hiker who liked to walk the hills overlooking the sprawling Hawaiian naval base. Once, he injured his arm while hiking, telling crew members that he had fallen. The injury required a cast, but after a time he appeared to fully recover.

In July 1941, Latimore went out again. Clad in a hat, a khaki uniform, and comfortable shoes, and carrying a walking stick, the commander left the trailhead alone, hiking into the Aiea Range above the base-and he disappeared forever. Late that day, his crew, concerned about his well-

being, unsuccessfully combed the hills before a wider effort involving local authorities joined the search, all with the same result. No sign or any clue of what had happened to Commander Latimore was ever found.

Like most stories, it got a bit better in the telling. I remember it described as having happened only days before the Japanese attack, so it was assumed that Latimore had unexpectedly run into Japanese agents collecting intelligence on the US fleet and they had kidnapped or killed him. No evidence supports that hypothesis, but it's too enticing to ignore.

A less romantic but far more likely risk came from the danger inherent in a fifty-one-year-old sailor hiking alone. The terrain above Pearl Harbor is not obviously treacherous, but Latimore had already been injured earlier doing the same thing. Risks are not always obvious, nor are they often legend-worthy. We may never know the truth of what happened, but in any event, Commander Thomas Calloway Latimore had vanished-his family and nation were left to wonder how things might have been different. And less than five months later, his disappearance became forever associated with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Some pondered whether it could have been part of a larger failure to effectively assess and respond to potential risks.

Though I was just ten years old that summer in 1965, I was already very familiar with the story of Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Just before 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, six Imperial Navy carriers infiltrated the base along a northern route to a position 230 miles from Oahu before launching 353 bomber, fighter, and torpedo aircraft in two waves against a series of US naval targets on the most developed of Hawaii's islands.

By midmorning the United States counted 8 battleships severely damaged or destroyed, 11 other vessels bombed and strafed, 328 aircraft

damaged or destroyed-and 2,403 souls killed with more than 1,100 wounded. For days oil fires burned in the harbor and desperate taps could be heard from sailors caught in the bowels of capsized ships.

The effect was devastating. But should the attack have been a surprise?

Conflict between Japan and the United States had long been brewing. With the 1898 US annexation of Hawaii and occupation of the Philippines following the defeat of Spain, America became a true Pacific power, putting Japanese and US objectives increasingly at odds. Logically, the United States began to fortify its possessions in the region, and naval officers at Newport's Naval War College conducted regular war games to refine strategies for conflict with Japan.

After 1931, the friction between the two nations rose. Japan's increasingly militaristic government, its aggressive expansion in Manchuria and then China proper, and its symbolic alliance with Germany and Italy convinced American diplomats and the military that war was not only likely but inevitable.

In the months before December 7, American pushback targeted Japan's dependence on foreign resources to fuel its increasingly industrialized economy. The United States imposed embargoes on oil and scrap metal shipments, leaving the proud Japanese to face the prospect of humiliating retreat-or war. If unable to trade for these goods, surely Japan would take them by force. It would only be a question of when and how.

In July 1941, Japanese leaders began a series of meetings to set a strategic course. The game of chess became more complex when Nazi Germany, Japan's nominal Axis ally, invaded the Soviet Union and requested that Japan join the attack on Stalin's enormous communist state. The Japanese deferred but committed themselves to securing a political and economic order for Asia that would extend far beyond their home islands and subordinate hundreds of millions to Japanese rule.

The outcome of the meetings did not remain secret for long. US intelligence had broken the Japanese code used for diplomatic messages, and within weeks had intercepted a coded message from the Japanese Foreign Ministry to its embassies overseas, communicating to the Imperial Conference that their nation would not hesitate to use force to secure its strategic objectives.

These messages also included instructions for Japanese diplomats to report on American military facilities like Pearl Harbor, thereby giving the United States advance notice of potential targets. Simultaneously, the US military, government sources, allied countries, and the press continued to collect information about Japan's designs.

The Greatest Risk Is Us

Unless we believe the story of Japanese spies, Tom Latimore likely died from a mistake he made while hiking-a stumble, a misplaced step, perhaps dehydration. On an island devoid of likely predators, and crossing inanimate terrain, the likely determining variable, and responsible party, is Latimore himself.

The Japanese attack on December 7, while far more famous, shares DNA of sorts with my lost relative. Although Pearl Harbor has long been used as a synonym for treachery, the risks-of war with Japan, of a Japanese first strike, even of an attack on America's Pacific Fleet's primary base (although considered less likely than other targets such as the

Philippines)-were well known. Indeed, responsibility for much of Japan's success lay with the failure of American leaders to effectively assess and respond to the risk.

Why didn't the United States have the ability to better estimate Japanese strategic plans? Why was the attack on Pearl Harbor such a devastating surprise?

It is a familiar pattern. Fixated on external factors, individuals and organizations fail to tend to their Risk Immune System and become vulnerable even to perceivable risks.

Time and again we see that the greatest risk to us as individuals, and to our organizations, is us.

Like Latimore, whose personal miscalculation likely cost him his life, his nation ultimately posed the...