General, US Army (Ret.) · Commander of the Surge · Former Director, CIA
Retired four-star general of the United States Army. He commanded the 101st Airborne Division in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq, then the Surge as commander of Multi-National Force–Iraq, then US Central Command, then ISAF in Afghanistan, before serving as Director of the CIA. He is a partner at KKR and chairs the KKR Global Institute, is the Kissinger Fellow at Yale, and spent six years as a non-resident senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, where he and his graduate students built the four-task framework for strategic leadership that this episode sets out. With the historian Andrew Roberts he wrote “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine”. He was the first guest this podcast ever had.
If you don’t have the big ideas right, you’re building on a foundation of sand as opposed to a solid foundation.
Photo: US Department of Defense (public domain)
Ukraine Military History Institute