The DF Dozen Leadership Secrets for Everyone

You gotta ask yourself, who the heck is this DF guy giving the rest of us leadership tips? Great question and the answers are really quite simple. It took me 20+ years of studying others, practicing the techniques, and testing the principles on hundreds of teammates and fellow soldiers over the years. Did I make em all up myself? Of course not. Did I try to apply them during my career? You betcha! The reality is, I learned them all from my mates, in one special operations unit or another, and simply tried to capture them along the way - most in the pre-9/11 era when man-hunting was a success if your piece never left the Thunderwear holster in your drawers, and then post tower-drop when a kill at the end of the hunt became the norm. In both environments, the secrets held. After retiring, I applied these secrets with another group of elite men with similar results. Can I lead? Youd have to ask the boys. However, guys like that provide the opportunity - you have to choose to embrace it. But these secrets arent really secret. They are for everyone to use to get stuff done to a high standard. They worked for me and many peers and superiors for years with high maintenance thoroughbreds that didnt impress easily and didnt need a lot of direction. Sometimes just getting the General to approve the hit is leadership enough. But when those mini-windows open that require your leadership, youll be prepared with proven, results oriented, and relevant techniques. All you have to do is make an effort. So, is it DF or DF? Wellboth.

DF Leadership Secret #1 - Play well with others...but remain the Alpha male.
Most leadership books and theorists tell you that to get ahead you have to play well with others. Dont go against the grain. Be a team player. This is sound advice - unless you happen to be the guy or organization that everyone aspires to be. Arrogance, in measured amounts and used prudently, actually benefits an organization. Of course, you have to be able to back this up with results vice rhetoric. More specifically you have to possess a long list of recognizable successes. Remember, the rules are made for the masses, but the masses don't finish.

DF Leadership Secret #2 - Get Over It!

The year was 1994 and the US Army was staged to invade the country of Haiti. Our Ranger battalion had just loaded the tail end of the last of seven C141 aircraft prepped to execute a combat jump on Dallas DZ. The 82nd Airborne had already taken off from Fort Bragg, NC. No sooner had we struggled into our seats did we see our battalion commander, then LTC Frank Kearney, come walking up the ramp still wearing his parachute. The colonel grabbed the nearby radio mike and made an announcement over the aircrafts intercom. The bastards cut a dirty deal. We are on a twenty-four hour hold, He barked before turning to leave and pass the word to the other aircraft.

That invasion was called off, at least the aggressive entry option, and we waited around a couple of days in the off-chance our services were still needed. Just prior to boarding the same planes to head back home to our families, Kearney executed one of the most memorable leadership acts of my career. He gathered the battalion around him as he stood atop a wooden PT stand and gave us a pep talk. We needed it. I turned on my tape recorder to capture his comments. Kearney simply told us that if you stay in the special ops business long enough, and especially the Rangers, that you would definitely see combat in your time. Just not this time and just not Haiti. Basically, he motivated us so much that by the time we loaded the planes we were looking forward to the upcoming Boxing Smoker more than we were feeling sorry for ourselves for not executing the combat jump. Not long after this event, Kearney gathered the officers and senior NCOs and told us that we weren't going to the Ft Benning cemetery once a month anymore to lay a wreath at the gravesite of fallen Rangers from action in Somalia a year or so earlier. He said it was time to move on mentally. We had done what we could for those heroes and it was time to honor them by physically and mentally preparing for the next action. It was respectful, spot-on, and the right thing to do. Years later, while serving in a different special ops unit, we gathered to farewell our squadron commander. We all were feeling a little underused by our nations decision makers. We openly bitched about American citizens being held hostage in Ecuador and the Philippines, practically daring our nation to do something about it. Sure, we spent a lot of hours planning rescue operations that were shelved. And even more hours hoping someone with enough authority would decide that Americans held hostage were important enough to repatriate. Like Kearney years earlier, our commander told us, Get over it! He then said, Someday the nation is going to need the services of this unit. It didnt take long.

DF Leadership Secret #3 - Apply Your Sixth Sense and Seize the Moment
You are a commando, the guy that everyone in the room is looking at to go against the grain, to challenge the conventional wisdom, to say something with passion, something based on empirical evidence and that follows logical thought that even the stuffiest senior leader in the room can't argue with. In fact, the senior conventional minded leader wants to hear what you have to say. Even if they dont admit it openly, they know you carry an enormous amount of clout with their subordinates the moment you walk through the door. Only hours into Operation Anaconda in March 2002, the well thought-out plan for attacking the Shah-i- Kot to rid the valley of al Qaeda fighters began to fall apart. Senior conventional leaders, well-removed from the fighting, developed cold feet. Emergency meetings were held where some recommended immediate retreat to prevent further loss of life and equipment. Near the fighting and hearing this latest news from Delta officer Jim Reese, Pete Blaber grabbed his Satellite radio hand mic, called the Joint Operations Center, and convinced the ambivalent leadership not to retreat, but rather reinforce and seize the moment. Anaconda is now considered a major victory for US forces in Afghanistan. It was gravely close to becoming a major embarrassment.

On a different battlefield, in mid July 2003, Saddams notorious sons were still evading US special ops forces. An informant had failed a polygraph three times and some intelligence agency elected to disregard anything else the fella had to say. One seasoned special operator, with a keen sense of intuition, opined the informant was simply too nervous to ever pass a poly. The operator told his commander that he believed the guy. He was telling the truth. Within hours, the murderous sons of the former President of Iraq were being hauled down two flights of stairs wrapped in bed sheets and thrown into the back of a waiting civilian van. Ace of Hearts, Uday Hussein, and his brother, Ace of Clubs, Qusay, were hiding in the house in Mosul after all.

DF Leadership Secret #4 - Admit Mistakes with Confidence

We all do it. We fumble something important and instinct tells us that maybe we werent at fault. Or maybe the blame can be shared with a couple others. Mistakes are the stepping stones to success, but a good special operator learns from other peoples mistakes and never makes the same mistake twice. But as a leader of high-performance teams most eyes are on you. A fouled shotgun breach can easily be fixed with a spinning mule kickand nobody is the wiser. But the leader that sends one of his assault teams to the wrong target building is a true liability. It happens, your men expect it. But they also demand two things. One, that you own up to it as soon as the post-mission hot wash begins, and two, that you learn from it and dont screw it up again. Selection is an ongoing process, particularly for the leaders. In a short note to President Clinton in the fall of 1993, former Delta Commander and commander of Task Force Ranger MG Bill Garrison took full responsibility for the disaster in Mogadishu, Somalia. Never mind that the Clinton administration denied multiple requests for AC-130 gunships and armored vehicles from Garrison himself. A month or so later, on a hot autumn day on a remote parade field at Ft. Benning, GA, Garrison told the 700 members of the 3rd Ranger Battalion that we were as close to Americas Foreign Legion as you could get. He went on to say that our job was to fight the dirty little wars that nobody else wanted, was capable of, or could stomach. He finished by telling us that if we couldn't handle the potential consequences of the business, or if our families couldn't, then we needed to find alternative employment. Nobody expected Garrison to shoulder the blame, but he did it anyway, and still to this day he is considered to be one of the finest leaders ever to command Delta Force.

DF Leadership Secret #5 - Find Your Maverick...or Grant.

When the future of the Union was in doubt and the Confederacy was giving it to the Yanks, President Abraham Lincoln turned to the unrefined, abrasive, results-oriented General Ulysses S. Grant. Grants leadership turned the tide and ensured the North won the Civil War. Four modern day superstar special ops leaders - GEN (R) Stan McChrystal, BG Scott Miller, COL (R) Pete Blaber, and MG Bennet Sacolik, - at some point in their black ops career, turned to one man as their Grant. Year after year, commander to commander, maverick warrior LTC (R) Jim Serpico Reese, a stand-out Ranger and Delta officer, quite possibly would have made Grant appear wanting when it came to working through chaos, calming nerves, and demanding the best out of subordinates.

Before Reese there was founder of Delta, Colonel Charlie Beckwith. From the beginning in the mid-seventies Beckwith was very clear that the men of Delta would not be subject to any political innuendo, bureaucratic standard, or be pressured by some higher authority to do something that might be the product of some harebrained couch potatoes. In 1980, while at a remote desert air strip, just conceivably twenty-four hours from rescuing American hostages held in Tehran, Iran, Beckwith made the call of a lifetime. It was a call that is still questioned by current senior military leaders today. He knew the technology of the day specifically that the allowable load capacity of the helicopters prevented him from taking his entire assault force - the minimum force to be successful in his eyes - on to the next rendezvous point. It wouldnt cut it. Beckwith sent a radio message to then President Carter that he was aborting the operation. It is likely that had Beckwith simply gambled and proceeded with a smaller force the outcome would have led to significant loss of life, both American and Iranian. Many critics of Beckwiths decision argue that it resulted in the most internationally embarrassing failure of our time. But one could also argue that the same decision quite possibly saved Delta Force from disbanding before her third birthday.

DF Leadership Secret #6 - Pull the Trigger

How much information or intelligence does a special operations unit need before they launch a high-risk kill or capture mission? I argue that very rarely will the intelligence picture be better than a seventy percent solution, and at that point action should be taken. Waiting for another ten percent, or even five percent, only closes the window of opportunity faster as we wring our hands and stare at the live Reaper feed on kill TV. I firmly believe that the American tax-payer doesnt want our most highly-trained and highpriced special mission units to waste precious time with mental masturbation and analytical paralysis just as strongly as they dont want them sitting around playing X-Box all night. Sure, some missions are just stupid, or so extremely high risk that it makes much more sense to level the place with a 500 pounder. Special operators arent required for every problem set. But, special operators are expected to manage risk, get on target, figure it out, and run it down even when the picture is sketchy. It is well documented in open sources that al Qaeda in Iraq, led by the murderous Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was destroyed by a unique operational shift in mindset championed by several special operations officers. The recent revelations in the controversial book Task Force Black, that chronicles the actions of British commandos in Operation Iraqi Freedom, serve as testament to the pull the trigger philosophy. High risk raids night after night, from one target to the next, running the intel and pulling the thread from point of discovery to point of capture, defined a never before attempted tactical tempo. It was the tipping point in the battle against AQ in Iraq for American Tier One forces, Army Rangers, and even the conventional forces who strapped it on with little notice or knowledge of exactly where the next target was or who the personality hunted was. The hand wringing, hesitation, and over-thinking it that defined and hamstrung the first few years of war after 9/11 was finally over.

DF Leadership Secret #7 - Manage the Boss

Elite special operations units spend as much time on what to do on target when things go bad as they do with the primary plan. For well-trained units, most plans do in fact survive first

contact. A gunfight rarely should drive a switch to Plan B as it is expected on high risk missions. This holds true when the luxury of extended mission planning is in play think UBL hit in early May 2011. But the majority of special ops missions are intel driven with launch triggers that appear rapidly and with little notice. Commonly referred to as In-extremis Assaults, where a few minutes are spent viewing a signature on a UAV feed, superimposing a numbering system on a fresh satellite photo, and moving to the vehicles or spinning helos. These are only possible when the operators are well-tuned on standard operating procedures, understand the contingencies, and are well aware of what their teammates will do in certain situations. Extended planning or in-extremis, managing the boss on target is equally important. Dont let the boss get cold feet just because you hit a SNAFU. Develop and work through your contingencies well ahead of time. When they are needed, before someone hastily calls to abort or retreat, remind your boss that you have already anticipated the problem and are prepared for it. If he wants to remain on the helo during the assault, or in the employee lounge, thats fine. But on target, or on task, youre driving until you need something from the boss.

DF Leadership Secret #8 - Drive Risk

We are all familiar with the difference between a gamble and risk. Conventional wisdom says gambling is a no-no because you cant recover from it. But you can recover from risk-taking gone bad if you planned for contingencies and applied mitigation measures along the way. Personally, Im on auto-delete when I hear anything is conventional, but semantics aside, what really matters is that someone needs to be focused on the next step, the next phase, maintaining the vision, and as much as possible, foreseeing the future. Assaulters worry about what is behind the door, the troop commander worries about what is down the alley or what to do if we have a sniper compromised or a helicopter go down. As a leader of high-performing teams, you have to be willing to execute on incomplete information, listen to your own instincts, and see the forest through the trees. Nine times out of ten, your boss is nowhere near the target, and even if he was, youre just in the way if you allow him to lead for you. You arent mule-kicking doors. Sure, you know how to, but your focus needs to be on how you can best support the team and forecast the next step quickly, before one of your team leaders appears from the darkness and says, Dry hole, what next? At that point, you are either leading these high-performers or you are simply a strap-hanger on the manifest. What you do next, most assuredly will be high risk. Someone is going to have to go over the wall of the next compound over, and chances are, they know youre coming. Speed and surprise were spent on the initial target going in, and violence of action sounds great at the mission brief, until you know there are a dozen screaming women and children in the unseen courtyard. In a situation like this, you alone will drive the risk, and what happens in the next few minutes is the burden you carry after willingly accepting the role of the leader.

DF Leadership Secret #9 - You Are Not an Action Hero.

Counterintuitive to what you may be thinking, to lead action heroes you have to first realize that you are not one. Thats right. When I somehow made it through Delta Selection and Assessment and an extended Operator Training Course, after more than a hundred other far

more talented men fell by the way side for one reason or another, I knew I wasnt hired to be an assaulter or a sniper. Nobody told me this, as an officer, it was just a no-brainer. Did I have to learn the same skills? Absolutely! I had to be able to get over and through the obstacle courses, hit the x-ring, carry Mr. Heavy, fight Mr. Goodbar, stay in the circle, leap at 25,000 feet, execute a J-turn, and put a 5.56 kill tap in the cranial vault of a paper terrorist while under goggles and stepping over a rickety coffee table. Just to get in, everyone has to meet the standards. But for an officer, once the standard has been met, and you drag your bags across the hall to your first troop a group of extraordinary people the last thing they need from you is to kick in the door or snipe the guy in the cockpit. No, you have the easy job some will tell you of leading these men. And at that moment when you apply this secret, realizing you are not one of the action heroes more Clark Kent than Superman you have met the first standard for actually leading highperformance teams. Not just in Delta Force, not just in SEAL Team Six, but in any industry, corporate big-boy, or ambitious start-up.

DF Leadership Secret #10 - You Cant Determine Your Own Success.

The men and women you lead determine this for you. If they are successful, then you are successful. Your stake holders will recognize it; your commanding officer will recognize it. Just prior to taking command of an infantry rifle company a former battalion commander of mine sent me a personal note Now is the time to pay back all the people that got you where you are now, by ensuring their success. I kept the note under the glass on my desk at work and read it literally every day. Years later I was in a musky safe house with a couple other special operators in a bombed-out Balkan slum when I received a message to call my boss. I reached him on the satellite phone within the hour and he passed on that I had been selected for promotion below-the-zone, essentially ahead of 95% of my peers, to the next rank. I was shocked, totally humbled, and quite embarrassed actually. I hung up the phone and tried to play it off with the guys around me, but they didnt fool easily. So, there I was, a fairly new Delta officer, the boss of a classified real-world mission, with the unenvious task of having to tell my men who I barely knew at the time that I was some hotshot officer that some Department of the Army board decided needed to be promoted earlier than most of the other guys. At that moment, with an early 90s era life-size poster of teeny-bopper Brittany Spears hanging on the wall, the only thing I could do was laugh at the absurdity of the situation, admit that the board members must have made a big mistake, and try to refocus the conversation back to the mission. But inside, I intuitively knew that my former battalion commander had been spot on. I mentally checked off the countless soldiers and sergeants, peer officers, and the talented and caring superiors I was so fortunate enough to have served with, to have learned from, and to have ultimately benefited from. Incidentally, I dont recall any of those earlier influences and great Americans being former Tier One operators...which says a ton about the modern day American soldier.

DF Leadership Secret #11 - Empower SMEs.

Top shelf leaders seek out subject matter experts and designated performers. Everybody is good at something. Learn from them. Take as much of their time as they will give you letting them teach you what they know. In fact, as the leader, you have to dedicate time to learning the little things that you may never have to use if Plan A goes. But if not, you better know how to fix the radio when your communicator is hit and it drops fill, or how to insert a J-tube in one of your men while the assaulters handle things, clear a fast mover for danger close, or jump on the MK19 when the gunner is down. Maybe someone will get to these things before you, but you might find yourself first in line. Some guys are hard wired for sniping. They are comfortable in solitude, have no problem remaining motionless in complete silence for hours on end, and enjoy solid control over their emotions. These are things that would drive an assaulter crazy. But, jamming on the X-Box with teammates till 0300 hours, hearing kit up, were rolling, and quickly downing a two-pack of Red Bull tallboys is a little more aggressive than the sniper would like to be. Other guys are hardwired for IT. In the early 90s, as a ranger lieutenant, I had the distinct pleasure of supervising a young ranger whiz kid named Jim Thyne. Ranger Thyne was an Infantryman by training and was just as valuable or capable as any other ranger to assault the objective, parachute into combat, or create havoc in one of the local establishments downtown. Ranger Thyne could meet the normal standards required by everyone to serve in the rangers those days, but in another much more valuable way, he was the most important single ranger in the battalion. Ranger Thyne spent his off-duty time self-sequestered in the barracks, reading those big thick computer catalogs and tinkering with anyones broken microwave sized desk top computer. It didnt take long to recognize this unique personal drive and interest, pulling Ranger Thyne from a fighting position, and Knighting him with the dubious and not much sought after billet as Company Clerk. In that day and age, when battalion HQs was still using monographic Harvard Graphics, MS DOS, and Word Perfect 5.1, Jim Thyne proved to be a true innovator and pioneer of the shape of things to come. Rumor of Jims savvy for hard drives and floppy discs spread around the other companies like word of the plague. We were in an era of technological change and everyone was automating their personnel records, training records, and supply records. But only Ranger Thyne knew what to do when things like the blue screen of death reared its ugly head, or a hard drive crashed a few buildings over. When that happened, our office phone quickly rang followed by pleas for help. Can Ranger Thyne come over to our company today? We have a computer problem? they always said. Overnight, Jim Thyne became a true Power Ranger. Information is power! he liked to tell me over and over. Often we horse traded Ranger Thynes services; A 2 ton truck here, a couple of extra crates of frag grenades there, exclusive access to the closest flat range, you get the idea. The day for Ranger Thyne to PCS came and he brought me his orders for the 82nd Airborne Division. I thought what a waste of raw talent. He didnt need to be jumping out of airplanes; he needed to be developing innovative tactics, techniques, and procedures to secure our relevancy in the fledgling computer age and into the 21st century.

A few phone calls later and Ranger Thynes orders to Ft. Bragg were rescinded. His new job a relatively souped up clerk job officially termed computer specialist. Instead of just worrying about a single ranger battalions IT needs he now was responsible for FT. Benning proper and the Infantry Center specifically. During this final assignment in uniform, Ranger Thyne continued his self-study and made a lot more friends, particularly those senior officers and NCOs who wanted their computers fixed yesterday. I visited Ranger Thyne years later just before he was to leave the service. He was working in the basement of an old WWII era brick and mortar building. The damp and stuffy old storage room was crammed to the ceiling along three walls with desk top monitors and partially opened CPUs. Wrapped bundles of cables of all sizes and colors snaked up through the ceiling leading to every senior Infantry leaders office. During our catching up, he remarked to me, Sir, do you know how fast I could pull the plug on this entire IT infrastructure? Who would they call? Im the only one on post that knows what all this stuff does. What corporation or military organization can function in the 21st century without a platoon of Jim Thynes? Empower them and learn.

DF Leadership Secret #12 - Ride the Logic Train

Elite units are fundamentally problem solvers. They were created to solve complicated, sensitive, and delicate problems that, for one reason or another, a tank, a bomb, money, or a politician can't fix. And whether or not you are in the boardroom or on the battlefield, complex problems require the team to possess a working common operating picture and collective energy moving forward to reach a logical conclusion. If your team is comprised of type A personalities, which probably make up 90% of any special operations unit, your job as the leader becomes not only ten times more difficult, but a thousand times more important. As the leader, nobody expects you to have all the answers, the most switched on comments or suggestions, or even the most intelligent questions. Your mates, the experts, got that. Your job, a challenging part, is understanding the big picture and maintaining a keen sense of how each enabler supports the solution, how the intent of the boss and his boss focuses the task, keeping the gorillas focused, and generating steam toward an acceptable end. Most importantly though, the leader needs to consistently reset the left and right limits of the problem, splice important pieces of each warrior's thoughts and opinions with the others, and apply consistent, repetitive context and shared purpose. If you need to get from A to B, and the Logic Train pulls in to station and everyone gets on, if you don't keep them on throughout the ride your force eventually becomes scattered, unorganized, vulnerable, and defeated.

Dalton Fury is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man and a Delta Force Thriller series that chronicles the disgraced but resilient Kolt "Racer" Raynor. The series was launched in 2011 with Black Site. The second book in the series, Tier One Wild, is available 10.16.12.