On this latest episode of the WWIA Podcast, WWIA Founder and CEO John McDaniel is both honored and humbled to welcome today’s esteemed guest, General David H. Petraeus, U.S. Army, Retired. General Petraeus is one of the most distinguished military leaders, strategists, and national security figures of the modern era.

General Petraeus served our Nation for more than 37 years in the United States Army, culminating in six consecutive commands as a general officer, five of them in combat. His extraordinary career included commanding the Surge in Iraq, leading U.S. Central Command, and serving as Commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Following his retirement from the military, and after confirmation by the United States Senate by a vote of 94–0, General Petraeus served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, General Petraeus earned his Ph.D. in international relations and economics from Princeton University. Remarkably, he is the only person in Army history to graduate at the top of his class from both the U.S. Army Ranger School and the Army’s Command and General Staff College.

His military awards and decorations include four Defense Distinguished Service Medals, the Bronze Star Medal for Valor, two NATO Meritorious Service Medals, the Master Combat Action Badge, Ranger Tab, and Master Parachutist, Mountaineering, and Air Assault Badges. He has also been decorated by 14 foreign nations.

Beyond his military and government service, General Petraeus has remained a prominent voice on leadership, national security, international affairs, and the changing character of warfare. He has held academic positions at institutions including Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California, and the City University of New York, and has been recognized twice as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Today, General Petraeus is a Partner at KKR, Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, and Chairman of KKR Middle East. He is also the co-author, alongside renowned British historian Andrew Roberts, of the New York Times bestseller Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza, an examination of the evolution of warfare and the lessons that history holds for the conflicts of today and tomorrow.

Few individuals have experienced leadership and service from as many consequential vantage points—from the battlefield to the highest levels of military command, to the intelligence community, academia, and the global stage.

This is an intriguing interview full of wisdom and insight that only General Petraeus could offer through his unique experiences. It is our distinct honor to share this episode with you.

Takeaways:

• General Petraeus describes the Purple Heart is the one medal respected by all and sought by none.
• General Petraeus recalls commanding the surge in Iraq and emphasizes that a change in strategy, not merely additional troops, mattered most.
• General Petraeus explains that the loneliness of command requires guarded communication and steady resolve under constant scrutiny.
• General Petraeus explains our support for Ukraine and how we must urge continued military, economic, and sanction measures to compel a cessation of hostilities.
• General Petraeus outlines that successful leadership demands four tasks: conceive big ideas, communicate them, oversee implementation, and refine.
• General Petraeus describes his current work in geopolitical risk and investment, noting extensive travel, public speaking, and nonprofit support responsibilities.
• General Petraeus discusses mentors who shaped his career from West Point onward and how their example and counsel guided critical decisions.
• General Petraeus emphasizes that reconciling with former insurgents and pursuing political solutions were indispensable in stabilizing Iraq after the surge.

Foreign.

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WWIA Founder and CEO John McDaniel is both honored and humbled to welcome today's esteemed guest, General David H. Petraeus.

US Army Retired General Petraeus is one of the most distinguished military leaders, strategists and national security figures of the modern era.

General Petraeus served our nation for more than 37 years in the United States army, culminating in six consecutive commands as a general officer, five of them in combat.

His extraordinary career included commanding the surge in Iraq, leading U.S. central Command, and serving as commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Following his retirement from the military and after confirmation by the United States Senate by a vote of 94 0, General Petraeus served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

A graduate of the United States Military Academy At West Point, General Petraeus earned his PhD in international relations and Economics from Princeton University.

Remarkably, he is the only person in army history to graduate at the top of his class from both the U.S. army Ranger School and the Army's Command and General Staff College.

His military awards and decorations include four Defense Distinguished Service Medals, the Bronze Star Medal for Valor, two NATO Meritorious Service Medals, the Master Combat Action Badge, Ranger tab, and Master Parachutist, Mountaineering and Air Assault badges.

He's also been decorated by 14 foreign nations.

Beyond his military and government service, General Petraeus has remained a prominent voice on leadership, national security, international affairs, and the changing character of warfare.

He's held academic positions at institutions including Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California, and the City University of New York, and has been recognized twice as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world today.

General Petraeus is a partner at KKR, chairman of the KKR Global Institute, and Chairman of KKR Middle East.

Few individuals have experienced leadership and service from as many consequential vantage points, from the battlefield to the highest levels of military command to the intelligence community, academia, and the global stage.

This is an intriguing interview, full of wisdom and insight that only General Petraeus could offer through his unique experience.

It's our distinct honor to share this episode with you.

So let's join John and General Petraeus now.

I'm John McDaniel, founder and CEO of the Wounded warriors in Action foundation, and this is our podcast Honor Connect Heel.

And I have with me a gentleman who I once worked for a long time ago in a very limited capacity, but one of the greatest military minds of the 21st century, a great battlefield commander, very notorious and wonderful person.

General Petraeus, welcome to the program.

Good to be with you, John.

Thanks for what you're doing for our wounded warriors.

Well, it's our pleasure.

Thank you for your time, General.

You know, I always like to start by.

We're always trained, you know.

Hey, sir, would you like to say anything before we begin?

I already asked you that, so let's just get right to it because I know your time is limited.

You.

You.

I. I don't know if I got you quoted as saying this once upon a time, and I use it, and I footnote it when I say it when I present the coin you said about the Purple Heart medal.

It's the one metal that's respected by all and sought by none, and that's.

That stuck with me.

And.

And I know you've pinned a lot of Purple Hearts on a lot of men and women, I'm sure.

In an Insider attack that the army took a long time to grapple with and actually conclude that they actually warranted the Purple Heart, something we'd recommended them for much earlier.

It was a privilege to pin the Purple Heart on several of those who had been present at that event.

And the wife and son of one of our fallen heroes in that particular attack.

Yes, sir.

Wow.

Yes.

It's still to this day, being around them.

That's.

I guess that's why I do the work that I do.

It's just for me, it's a very humbling experience to be around them.

Whether they, you know, received a gunshot wound or scratch to the buttocks or are missing pieces in parts.

It doesn't matter.

They all earned it.

It's the ultimate, you know, leveler, if you will.

It doesn't matter if you're a private or a general officer.

It's.

It's It's a very sacred award.

But, you know, I want to thank you for your amazing service to this country.

And you continue, what you continue to do is just nothing short of, you know, impressive.

But I got a few questions I'd like to ask you in no particular order, but let me ask you this, sir.

What's it like to be a four star general commanding?

You know, I mean, most of us have no idea.

I don't have any idea.

I stopped as a lieutenant colonel and I just got it.

I would love to hear what your thoughts are on that.

Well, it's the most awesomely awesome experience imaginable on a good day.

And in fact, I used to particularly describe commanding the surge in Iraq as that kind of experience.

This is a grinding experience.

Most of the senior military between me and the President did not support the idea of a surge.

Many of them had alternative proposals, felt that it would break a service or something like that.

The President rightly said what will break the army is losing war.

And the President had the courage to make that decision, to commit virtually everything we had that wasn't already in the fight from the army and the Marine Corps, other assets as well.

And thankfully our men and women in uniform, our coalition partners and our Iraqi counterparts proved his judgment correct.

Drove violence down by nearly 90%, pulled a country out of a vicious Sunni, Shia civil war and gave it a new opportunity for the future.

But along the way, the scrutiny, the questioning, the criticism, the doubts from Congress in particular, but also other quarters were pretty substantial.

And obviously what you have to do as the overall commander is you, you can never let your shoulders slump, as they say, it doesn't matter how bad the news is that somebody has just slid in front of you on a three by five card.

It would happen several times a day in the first, say six or eight months when the violence was at extraordinary levels.

But.

And there's really no one with whom you can share your experience.

You don't dare open up to anyone.

Even with my wife I was very guarded because we basically just emailed back and forth.

Anybody with whom you share something may well leak it to the press.

So you're.

It is the.

I've heard that phrase, you've heard it, the loneliness of command.

And that is very much the case, especially again if you're deployed in a theater of war where you're the only four star.

Right.

Share certain things with the ambassador who is the most extraordinary diplomat of his generation, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to some degree, with the three star operational commander, some of the other three stars.

But again, you have to be very, very careful, very guarded, because what you share could be shared further.

And you will have to be very, very conscious of that.

Your own team, even.

You really can't let them see the challenges that you're.

You know, the rocks in your rucksack, as they say, and that was a pretty heavy.

That was the heaviest rucksack.

I. I guess not saying that Central Command was a dream when you were part of the staff there.

And I very much appreciate your own service and uniform, including in combat, and then also your service subsequent as a contractor, which was also important.

But again, CENTCOM Afghanistan, the surge was the one that was really, really hard.

As the ambassador and I used to say, it's all hard all the time, but hard is not hopeless.

And thankfully, again, our men and women in uniform and our counterparts validated the wisdom of the president making a very courageous call in the face of many of his advisors who disagreed.

And frankly, the wisdom of Senator McCain, who, together with Senators Graham and Lieberman, we called them, the three amigos, were out there all the.

Keep in mind that he along, somewhere along there, became the Republican nominee for president, was in a very tough presidential campaign.

There was a degree of fatigue with his party in Washington at that point.

And he was criticized for his support of the war.

And he famously said, I would rather lose an election than lose a war.

I am going to fully support this endeavor.

And of course, he did lose the election, but his support for us was so important, no one had our backs more than the three of them did.

Again, the three amigos, McCain, Lieberman and Graham, at crucial moments on Capitol Hill prior to the developments on the battlefield that began to show that this is actually working.

And of course, ultimately, again, when you drive violence down by 90%, it's pretty hard to dispute whether or not a particular strategy worked the way we intended it to or not.

You know, and that's.

From there, you go on and.

And then after your command, at some point, you go on and you become the director of the CIA, which is.

An awesomely awesome job.

I gotta ask, any day I thought it's just extraordinary.

It's again, the workfor course there is truly exceptional.

It may be the very best in.

In government in the world.

These are quiet professionals.

They can't even share what they do with their own wife, much less with their neighbors.

They know that going into their positions, it's the silent service and the selflessness, the capability, the professional expertise, even, really the morale.

It's just a great organization to be part of, to be around.

And the authorities are very, very considerable.

And for the most important missions of all, as is publicly known, the director of the CIA works directly for the President.

That is for covert action.

And that's the most important element of what the CIA does for our intelligence communities, essentially, is to steal secrets, recruit sources, and occasionally deal with some bad guys.

Yeah, when I saw that and in your new position, I just thought, wow, that's got to be an eye opener,.

You know, What I'm doing now, frankly, has been absolutely a privilege as well.

I mean, all of these are just the greatest of imaginable privileges.

But to do geopolitical risk for one of the greatest investment firms in the world.

This is over 13 years now during which the world has transformed dramatically from one of benign globalization to one of renewed great power rivalries, where geopolitical risk is now trumping economics.

It's driving.

The barriers to trade, investment, capital flows and so forth have all been increasing rather than decreasing as they were back again 13, 15 years ago.

And the intellectual stimulation of this is really exceptional as well.

I'm also the chairman of KKR Middle East.

That's more recent.

But to be a partner in a firm for this amount of time and to see it grow so dramatically, literally from $83 billion under management to 800 billion, this is another extraordinary team.

It's been great to be a part of.

Wow.

So KKR like that.

When I think of them in your routine, if you would, General, just give us a snapshot of what your day might, an average day in your life might be like.

Well, an average day is that I'm on the road because I travel to 30 different countries a year, many of them more than one time.

And we're pretty intense at the various stops along the way, but we have a whole battle rhythm.

The year is sketched out.

Often it coincides with major conferences at which it's valuable to be.

So there's an early one in India called the Ricena Dialogue.

So then you spend a week around that.

The Munich Security Conference, the Sun Valley.

There's a whole host of these throughout the course of a year.

We'll do a week in Australia every year, a week in Southeast Asia, week in Northeast Asia, weeks here, there and everywhere else, Mexico and Canada and so forth.

But that whole year is largely travel.

And even if I'm not actually traveling, if I'm in the Office.

The office is in New York, but we live in Arlington, Virginia.

We have a condo up in New York right next to the office, which makes it very convenient.

But so it's again a lot of time on the road.

I also visit just about every major US city during the course of a year.

I'm also on some boards of our companies.

I now do senior advisor for our company because the boards can be a bit time consuming.

I'm the Kissinger Fellow at Yale.

I do a fair amount of public speaking and also support a number of non government organizations linked to causes that really matter to us like the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

No One Left behind, which has tried to help enable us to meet the moral obligation that we have not yet met when it comes to the Terps, the battlefield interpreters in Afghanistan in particular and their family members.

If you total all that up, we left about 150,000 of them behind when we did that exodus, the exfiltration, the operation center on Kabul International Airport as Afghanistan was collapsing around our operation.

So again, it's a very, very busy set of portfolio, if you will, of activities and still managed to get home on most weekends.

We spend weeks each year.

We apportion those for our kids who have five grandkids now as well.

And they're great fun.

So again, it's a very, very busy, busy year.

And we're working on another book already which combines the most brilliant of battlefield commanders with the most brilliant of industrial leaders again from around the world.

The very first one is Wellington and John D. Rockefeller.

You have Grant and Henry Ford.

And using this intellectual construct for strategic leadership that I developed between the three and four star years.

Tourists in Iraq the same time we did the counterinsurgency field manual.

We use that as the prison to examine these as we did each of the conflicts in that book, Conflict, which happily was a New York Times bestseller.

Not that I'm competitive at all, but that has four tasks.

You have to get the big ideas right, craft the right strategy.

You have to communicate them effectively through the breadth and depth of the organization.

You have to oversee their implementation.

You're obviously not implementing them yourselves, you're overseeing that through all the structure of your command and control.

And then you have to sit down and determine how you need to refine them as the situation evolves so you can do it again and again and again.

And we were very conscious of those tasks in my three four star combat commands and then at the agency and frankly at KKR and in the companies that we examined, we own somewhere around 130 companies around the world and have minority interests in another 130.

So it's a pretty extraordinary organization.

As I mentioned, the enormous growth has really come from very impressive performance of these four tasks, which included a couple of times saying this is not working, let's shelve it and then in other cases saying this would be a great new addition to our assets under management to buy an oil insurance company or embark on private credit or real assets, real estate, energy, infrastructure, strategic investing, where you buy it and keep it, delever it and it produces extraordinary returns.

So the leadership there, starting with the two co founders, Henry and Kravis and George Roberts, who then handed off about five or so years ago to new co CEOs who have been with the firm already at that point nearly 25 years, they have been very, very impressive strategic leaders as well.

But strategic leadership is an awful lot of what life is all about because you have big ideas that even have to do with obviously your nonprofit.

There's a big idea behind wwia.

There are big ideas behind every firm.

And even if it's a startup, the founder of that is a strategic leader because he or she has to perform these four tasks if that startup is going to scale and succeed.

Right, thanks for that sir.

I want to ask you on the topic of conflict, we were touching on that throughout our interview here.

But Clausewitz, one of the great military thinkers who wrote on war, always, I always remember him likening in his, in his work, you know, war to, as a contest of wills essentially.

And if you don't mind, would you give us your thoughts on just the Russia and and Ukrainian conflict cloaked?

Well, I'll do it for Iran as well, but no, both of these are contests at will.

And the objective with respect to Ukraine.

I'm a huge supporter of Ukraine.

Yes.

In fact I just published an op ed in the Wall Street Journal with the former PR on their 35th anniversary of their modern day independence.

Also just hit a zoom of all things with a bunch of retired generals who are all seeking to help Ukraine.

In fact I was sanctioned by Putin very early on after the full on invasion.

I've been there over 10 times in the ensuing years.

There's no question that the objective at this point in Time is to get Vladimir Putin to recognize that he needs a cessation of hostilities as much as does Ukraine and President Zelensky.

And I think that is actually achievable.

He will mobilize further.

He's trying to do that right now.

He will exploit the vulnerability of Ukraine because of the lack of missile interceptors by hammering them with ballistic and other missiles.

He'll continue to use soldiers in ways that create.

They are taking over 1,000 killed and wounded on a daily basis.

The Russians are.

They've now sustained well over 1.44 million casualties killed and wounded in this four and a half years of war.

That's more than we sustained in all of World War II.

So the loss, the damage, and now Ukraine, I think, has a strategy that can generate the conditions that lead Putin to concede that he needs a cessation of hostilities.

They are essentially stopping the Russians cold on the front lines.

By and large.

There's little incremental gains here and there, and they're going to have to fight hard to ensure that they don't expand, cause enormous casualties to Russia that over time just are no longer replaceable.

Isolate the front lines from the logistics.

They now have drones that can go deep into the depth of the Russian rear.

They're basically taking out all of the fuel tankers that are trying to go down into the Crimean Peninsula.

They're isolating Crimea.

Can't buy fuel there as a civilian very easily anymore.

The lights are going out there is painstakingly taking out the infrastructure that keeps Crimea going.

And they're also going deep into the Russian Federation after their refineries, their oil storage locations, the export capabilities, and these dual use logistics facilities.

Wildberries and then ozone, which are essentially Amazon warehouses on steroids.

And they've hit the bulk of the wild berries.

These are the biggest again.

And these are the distribution centers that also send military equipment to the soldiers and to the units.

But they are basically the lifeblood of the economy.

That's how raw materials and components get to the small and medium enterprises, and it's how their products get to the customers.

So they're bringing the war home in a way that was not the case until probably just the last six months.

And if we continue to help them deal with the situation on the front lines with the defense against drones and missiles, and hopefully the Europeans will be able to help somewhat with this as well.

Because our missile interceptors have been expended fairly considerably, probably half of all that we have of patriots and similar systems then also help Ukraine with Fiscal and economic resources.

The EU Commission provided 90 billion euros, about $105 billion, and then take actions to crush the Russian war economy.

And there's one big additional step needed there, and that is the so called Senator Lindsey Graham sanctions bill passed in the Senate.

It's in the House now.

I think it will be approved and then get it to the White House, signed into law and implemented.

And that will be a tremendous complement to the EU's 21 or 22 rounds of sanctions and the other actions by other countries around the world, UK and other Western partners.

But that's the way forward.

And as you said, this is a contest of will.

War often is, and we're seeing something similar in Iran.

This is very much a contest of wills.

And the key here is to ensure that CENTCOM can get out of the Strait of Hormuz on a nightly basis and into the Gulf as well.

Sufficient tankers with crude oil that together with what the Emiratis can send to the Gulf of Oman, about 2 million barrels a day, what the Saudis can send to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, about six or more million barrels a day, some of which are refined there, but others are exported.

If you could get 10 million barrels a night out through the Gulf and you have China consuming far less, they have the largest strategic reserves in the world and they've actually reduced their demand by as much as 3 to 5 million barrels throughout the course of this conflict on a daily basis.

And then you have 500,000 extra barrels being produced by a combination of the US and Venezuela.

You put all that together and you almost have supply and demand in the world balanced.

That would enable the US because the price of Brent crude would go down and we could sustain the policy domestically.

Here.

Noting that presidents do have to be concerned about midterm elections as an example.

And if your major initiative is affordability, you need to do everything you can to ensure that that is being pursued.

The only way to do that in this case, where we maintain the blockade on Iranian maritime commerce, which is somewhere around 80% of their economy, and noting that the UAE is no longer facilitating transshipment through Dubai, nor access to the financial system through Dubai.

Iran is in a very difficult situation economically already, and this will really again hurt them enormously further.

Again, how do you win the contest of wills is you just pressure, pressure, pressure, until Iran comes to the table and is willing to accept a reasonable resolution of freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and drops these absolutely outrageous demands for wartime reparations, unfreezing tens of billions of dollars of frozen assets, allowing Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz, et cetera, et cetera.

So you're right to focus on that.

In the book Conflict, we also note another important observation.

He has so many out of his book on war, but one of.

Because we start the title or we start a chapter by quoting Clausewitz saying the foremost task of a battlefield commander is to identify the type of war he is fighting and not to make it into what he'd like to fight.

Which is exactly what we did in Vietnam, where It took us 13 years to get the big ideas right, to craft the right strategy.

And we said, no, you don't need to worry about that.

What you need is a big army, because we have learned the lessons of Korea.

And what you need to worry about is an attack across the new demilitarized zone between newly established North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

We focused on them creating an army for that and really did not help them the way we should have, with security of the people.

We ourselves then embarked on a big war, thinking that we could win a war of attrition against the north and their Viet Cong allies in the South.

And that just was not possible.

Late that year, General Creighton Abrams came in and changed the strategy to what it should have been much earlier, which was a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign, pulling together all the efforts of the embassy, the Agency for International Development, the CIA, with programs they were running, and the military and focusing much more on security of the people.

But unfortunately, it was a little too late.

There were achievements.

This is what enabled Vietnam to survive for two years without our forces on the ground after we finally pulled out.

But it was too late.

And again, the military commander has got to get that right.

Frankly, prior to the surge in Iraq, the big ideas had been invalidated.

It set off a sectarian civil war between Sunni and Shia and Reached terrifying levels.

The Iraqi forces were no longer combat capable.

So we had to go back into the neighborhood.

We had to do a 180 degree change.

Which is often why I've talked about the surge that mattered most in Iraq was not the surge of forces.

As important as having 25 to 30,000 extra forces in the ground was from the US alone.

The surge that mattered most was the surge of ideas.

The change in strategy by 180 degrees from clear and leave or clear and handoff to clear, hold and build.

Right?

Right.

Yes, sir.

Well, let me ask you here.

I know our time is kind of running short here, but there's a couple other questions I want to ask you, if you don't mind, sir.

There's two of them.

Tell us about your mentors.

Every leader has to have mentors.

Oh yeah, and wonderful mentors.

I mean it started with my father in law who eventually was a four star general.

He was the superintendent of West Point when I all three years I was a cadet.

We made him an honorary member of the class.

I met his daughter my senior year blind date.

Was horrified to learn that I was dating the Supes daughter.

But we hit it off.

She was horrified that she was dating someone that no one else knew.

There'd been a little miscommunication.

But we hit it off, got married and he went on to be what I always wanted to be, which is a soldier, scholar, statesman he was.

Each of those eventually had two four star NATO positions and we were in Europe during that time as well.

General Jack Galvin, for whom I was an aide when I was a captain.

He was the division commander of the then 24th Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

I then worked for him again as a special assistant speech writer when he was a four star Southern Command.

This is TDY for me, which is an extraordinary experience because there were numerous wars going on at that point in time.

We were helping the Salvadorans against their insurgency.

We were supporting an insurgency in Nicaragua.

We were helping the Colombians with their essentially counter narcotics which had become an insurgency.

And even the Peru with the Sendero Luminoso.

And then worked for him when he became the supreme ally commander Europe as a speechwriter as well.

He truly was an extraordinary soldier, very highly decorated in Vietnam, a truly extraordinary scholar.

He had written three books by the time I joined him.

He did one more for which I wrote the forward, essentially his memoirs.

He wanted a title at Cold Warrior.

I forget what the ultimate title was and have a picture of him with snow on the front of his cap during Some NATO exercise, and then, gosh, General Jack Keane, who was standing next to me when I got shot in a freak training accident in a very aggressive live fire.

When I was a battalion commander in the 101st Airborne Division, he was the assistant division for commander for operations.

Stayed with me the whole day as I got thoracic surgery, had multiple helicopter trips, and then he made me the G3 of the division.

When he became the division commander, we really ever after that.

He was the Corps commander when I commanded a Brigade in the 82nd and collaborated very, very closely over the ensuing time, including when he was vice Chief of Staff and then acting chief of the army in the first year in Iraq and even subsequent to that, where he became a great spokesman for a think tank study that laid out what we needed to do in the surge and was very helpful to me as I was laying that out for the President and for the members of Congress and the new Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, again, we're still friends to this day.

He's the chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, another very important think tank that I support, which has the Petraeus center for Emerging leaders.

Then.

General Carl Vano, for whom I was aide for two years, he was the chief of Staff of the Army.

A really extraordinary figure in army history and his efforts and those of many others in the wake of the Vietnam War, really were those that produced the army, that rolled over the Iraqi army in 100 hours of ground war and Operation Desert Storm after pounding them for the air for a number of weeks.

And then General Hugh Shelton, who commanded the same brigade.

I later, much later commanded the 82nd Airborne Division.

I commanded the 82nd, was the corps commander also when I was at Fort Bragg and watched him at SOCOM.

And then he was selected to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and he selected me to be his executive officer for two years.

So again, and then there's many others.

General Dan McNeil, another All American Six, was his assistant division commander and then his chief of staff at 18th Airborne Corps.

The list goes on.

But.

But those are absolutely, really important in my life.

And I'd add one last one, Colonel retired Keith Nightingale, who had long experience, had been in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, also was an Advisor for the Vietnamese Rangers, who was a company commander in the 1st Ranger Battalion when it actually started.

He was a major in the 1st Battalion Airborne, 509th Battalion Combat Team when I was a lieutenant and started providing top cover and guidance at that moment.

And that continued literally all the way to this day as well.

Just a huge influence on my life over the years.

And again, another individual, a very close personal friend, as well as a great professional mentor, and he mentored so many others as well.

He went back, commanded a Ranger battalion, a battalion in the 82nd during Grenada, and ultimately was the commander of the Ranger Training Brigade.

Well, thanks for sharing that with us, sir.

We appreciate it.

One last thing.

If you've got the time, you're so accomplished, I looked you up on Wikipedia just for.

Just for the sake of doing it.

I don't know how many pages there were, but it's.

It reads like a small book.

It's just really remarkable.

But of all your accomplishments, of all the things that you've achieved in your life, if you look back on that, if you had to single one thing out that you're most proud of, what do you reckon that'd be, sir?

Well, there's, you know, you have to ask almost which facet of life.

I mean, we're pretty proud of our son and daughter.

In fact, our son who's a Ranger, right?

He served, in fact, Ranger Recon after being lieutenant in the 173rd Airborne Brigade on the ground in Afghanistan as a platoon leader when I was the commander, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School.

Now serving our country again as an Assistant U.S. attorney, but again so we could again, our daughter, equally accomplished, extraordinary.

She made more money than I did as CI Director, as an extraordinary sponsored athlete, food, fun, fitness, and eventually mommy blogger.

You know, the grandkids are wonderful.

We enjoy an awful lot, my wife and I together.

But if you ask professionally, I think you have to come back to the surge in Iraq.

It was basically an effort that many people opposed, criticized, and felt would not succeed.

And in the end of the day, it did.

And it pulled a country out of a vicious Sunni, Shia civil war, as I mentioned earlier.

In fact, the month the President decided to surge instead of leave or do more training or some other option that was much easier in that respect, but would not have achieved what the surge did.

And noting, again, it wasn't the surge of forces, it was the change of strategy that really was most important.

And it wasn't just clear whole build.

It was reconciliation.

We cannot kill or capture our way out of industrial strength insurgency reconcile with 103,000 former insurgents and lower level Shia militia.

It was the even more relentless pursuit of the irreconcilable leaders of Al Qaeda, the insurgent groups in the Shia militia with the greater civil military.

The advent of the provincial reconstruction deems a whole host of a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign that turned that around, enabled enormously by the additional forces to speed that up.

And that was crucial because if I had not had progress at the six month hearing, we might have lost support for that war.

What small support remained.

But at the end of the day, that is the endeavor that was so crucially important and it was again the greatest of imaginable privileges to be selected to command it.

Empowered by the President in a way that no commander and ambassador had been empowered before or since.

We had a weekly video teleconference with him every 7:30am on a Monday morning to show how he started his week in Washington with a whole national security team around the situation room table.

He did one with Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq later in the week that both of us attended as well.

He went all in on this, just as our military forces did as well.

So look, as you know, I mean, I'm very, very fortunate, privileged, some cases lucky as well.

Timing does matter, but I've always also thought that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

And I'd work very hard to be prepared for the different opportunities that actually ultimately did present themselves to try to be ready for the awesome responsibility that is leading America's sons and daughters in combat.

Yes, sir.

Soldier, scholar and statesman.

General, it's been a great pleasure.

I'll leave you the last word, sir.

Well, again, I'm just appreciative of what you did while you were in uniform.

What you did is even as a civilian contractor for our forces at CENTCOM and elsewhere.

And now what you're doing in this particular endeavor that is so important for our wounded warriors.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Yes, sir.

Have a great day.

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