FORT BENNING, Ga., (May 20, 2015) -- "Knowledge trumps doctrine, finesse trumps mass, personal relationships matter and presence without value is perceived as occupation."
Retired U.S. Navy Adm. Eric Olson, former commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command spoke to a room of Soldiers in a various leadership schools here May 11 as part of a combat leader speaker program.
Military doctrine is merely step one, and step two is learning to deviate from it, he said.
Olson said there has been no military doctrine ever written that applied precisely to any situation that ever developed.
"Even the most kinetic of our operations requires some understanding of the environment in which we are working, some partnership with people who live there," Olson said. "We are a military operation, not a Peace Corps with guns."
Olson served as the commander of USSOCOM from 2007-2011 and was responsible for recruiting, training, equipping and deploying broadly capable forces worldwide. He was also the first SEAL to make three- and four-star ranks.
Olson said he grew up with a "U.S.-centric" map of the world with the Soviet Union split between the upper right and upper left hand corners of the map. Five years into his military career, he said he had an epiphany while serving as a U.N. peacekeeper in the Middle East. His boss, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, had a map in his office in Cairo, Egypt, with the Soviet Union in the middle and their sworn enemies split between the upper right and the upper left.
He stressed to Soldiers that perspective matters, the need to take a different view of the world is helpful and international relationships matter, both for operational purposes and personal purposes.
He used an example from Operation Desert Storm when one of the three Kuwait ships escaped from Kuwait the night the Iraqis invaded in 1990 towing a U.S. SEAL swimmer delivery vehicle conducting underwater operations.
"The quite remarkable thing that happened in Kuwait was ships towing the American mini subs through the Arabian Gulf, and the personal relationships that developed through that kind of operation," Olson sad.
Olson showed a photograph of the four Kuwaitis involved in the operation that turned out to be four of the five senior Kuwaiti Navy guys for the next 20 years.
"Those kind of personal relationships are really important to build and to nurture over time, and that's why I'm so glad to see so many foreign uniforms in (the) room."
In line with his world-view, Olson pulled up a map, a composite image taken by NASA, which displayed the places where the lights are on at night and presented to him a different kind of strategic thinking. Olson said the Cold War strategic thinking, or pre-9/11 strategic thinking was that the places where the lights were on at night were the important places on earth.
"On 9/11, in particular, we were struck from places where the lights aren't on at night," he said.
Where the lights aren't on are ungoverned or under-governed territories, where airports are less secure, borders are more porous and a different set of factors determine how people and societies behave, he said.
"We found ourselves very unprepared to deal with or against the people who lived in (those) places," he said. In those places, the U.S. did not have meaningful training relationships and personal relationships did not exist.
The U.S. knowing this still struggles to understand the cultures of these areas.
"We are, in my view, continuing to move toward a world where what happens in the places where the lights aren't on at night is ever more important," he said.
Another map with links between different places in the world that use Facebook showed that just because the lights aren't on at night, does not mean that area lacked connectivity, he said.
Aside from a broader perspective of the world, Olson gave examples of how he came into the positions he had been in, a major reason being he never quit.
"You guys all get this, but if you want to ensure that nobody ever quits on you, you have got to make sure that you do not ever quit on them," Olson said. "The top two respected traits of a leader in every survey I've ever seen are integrity and tenacity. People want their boss to be honest with them and ... that boss is going to take them to where he said he was."
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