General Stanley McChrystal and his senior leaders had perfect information — access to cutting-edge technology that provided real-time drone feeds and instantaneous global communication — and a massive advantage over the drastically under-resourced Al Qaeda in Iraq. And that’s precisely why he wanted to control everything, making his Task Force slower rather than faster.
McChrystal was trying to defeat a rapidly metastasizing insurgency using the world’s most highly trained, disciplined, and technologically advanced military force. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of AQI, was trying to do the opposite — stoking chaos and civil war through a shape-shifting, decentralized network of autonomous fighters who operated entirely in the gaps of the American bureaucracy.
Having access to the bigger picture and more context changes the way leaders think. They want to get a grip on the situation by exercising control — because they feel they have a deeper and broader read on things. Sure, the soldiers are out there in actual combat, knowing exactly what’s happening on the ground. But they can also be too close to the action to see the bigger picture.
And so the leader micromanages, just to stay “aligned.” Maybe they want to feel important, responsible, and needed — like McChrystal, being woken up in the middle of the night to authorize a life-or-death strike — without realizing they’re creating a decision-making loop that’s choking their own system.
Having to seek approval for each and every strike slowed the Task Force to near paralysis. Operators could only execute a fraction of the raids they were capable of — because opportunities vanished while they waited for the chain of command’s approval. I’ve witnessed and been part of too many scenarios just like this. Perfect information doesn’t translate to smoother, faster execution. Instead, people sit on information because they now see more than they thought they knew and want to act on it.
Most leaders assume that pushing decision-making down to the front lines requires a painful trade-off — lower quality in exchange for speed. McChrystal called this accepting the “70 percent solution today” versus the “90 percent solution tomorrow.”
The reality, when he finally relinquished control, was quite different. The Task Force delivered 90 percent today, and the quality of decisions actually went up, because the people on the ground understood the immediate context far better than McChrystal watching everything via a live feed on a screen.