Learning from History with General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts

Lindsay Chervinsky: Has strategic leadership changed since the American Revolution, or is there something we can learn from the historic examples set by George Washington and George III? Today's guests explore the timeless examples of strategic leadership across various contexts, from military strategy and global conflict to historical figures like George III and Napoleon.

In this episode of the podcast, we are joined by two distinguished guests, General David Petraeus and renowned historian Andrew Roberts. Drawing from their recent book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, General Petraeus and Baron Roberts explore how war has evolved over the centuries, and the ways in which leadership principles have remained the same.

Welcome to Leadership and Legacy, Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library. I'm Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. In this podcast series, we talk with leaders from across the nation about their growth, challenges, and inno vative approaches that made them the leaders that they are today.

 The first six conversations, which took place between August 2023 and March 2024, were led by our former Executive Director, Dr. Patrick Spero. In the spirit of George Washington's leadership, this series will feature the perspective of leaders from across industries and fields. As such, the thoughts expressed in this podcast are solely the views of our guests and do not reflect the opinions of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Today's conversation delves into the art of leadership. With insights from General Petraeus's military and strategic experience, and Andrew Robert's deep understanding of leadership across centuries, we explore what it truly means to lead effectively in both challenging and evolving environments.

General Petraeus: But you have to understand what will bring out the best in each of these individuals, uniquely each for them.

Lindsay Chervinsky: And to explore the ways in which past leaders also were inspired by their own histories.

Andrew Roberts: And Churchill, of course employed and harnessed history, especially British history, during the Second World War. The classic example, of course, being his speeches in 1940

Lindsay Chervinsky: And now our host, Dr. Patrick Spero, former executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.

Patrick Spero: Well, General Petraeus, it's wonderful to have you here for our podcast.

I wanted to ask you what might sound like a very simple question. If you had to teach a course for people just learning the English language and you had to define leadership for them, how would you do it?

General Petraeus: It's the art of getting people to do what it is you want them to do.

Patrick Spero: And how has your own thinking about leadership changed over time? I'd love you to think about when you were a junior officer, maybe taking your first command all the way up to commanding troops during the surge in Iraq.

General Petraeus: Well, I think that the tasks of a leader are the same at any level, they’re particularly important at the strategic level, because the first task of a leader is to get the big ideas right for whatever it is that he or she is trying to do.

And if you're at the very top, you really have to get the big ideas right, the strategy right, or else everything else is a building a shaky foundation. Everybody below the strategic leader performs that first task in particular within the confines or the constraints or the intent of the strategic leader.

And that's why, again, at the very top, that first task is crucial. And we'll talk a lot more about that because that was the biggest of the big ideas that came out of writing all these chapters. And we then went back and emphasized that in the introduction. In fact, I've actually developed over a number of years an intellectual construct for the conduct of strategic leadership.

There are four tasks: you have to get the big ideas right, you have to communicate them effectively, you have to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, and you have to determine how you need to refine them to do it again and again and again. And again, you do that at every level. The difference is that at the bottom level, if you will, for a commissioned officer, you are a rifle platoon leader, let's say, which is where I was privileged to be in a great airborne battalion combat team in Vicenza, Italy.

It's a very visceral task. And so the physical component is much more important at that level than it is obviously when you're a strategic leader. And it's—the style of leadership evolves because the style that you're trying to provide should depend on the audience, if you will. You're asking yourself, what will bring the best out in each of those who report directly to me, your direct reports.

And by the way, it may be different for different direct reports. One might, you know, the great Baron Roberts of Belgravia only needs a pat on the back once a year, and Lieutenant Petraeus might need a pat on the back once a day. But you have to understand what will bring out the best in each of these individuals, uniquely each for them.

And then you have to determine how do you bring the best out in the organization overall. And it's very different. In my day, you had nothing but men in these units. Now it would be women. And as you went up, all of a sudden you get individuals from different branches of service. In other words, now you're armor and artillery, aviation, all the others. And as all of that continues, again, the style of leadership that is required needs to evolve.

If I think about, for example, the style of the director of the CIA, you have four different groupings within the CIA in general. There's others, but you basically have the clandestine service officers, the spies, the operators, human intelligence collection officers. You have the analysts, very cerebral. You have the technology folks, really extraordinary. And then you have the support personnel who also are extraordinary in each of their different fields. Now we've also added information technology, basically the whole digital component of this because it's become so important.

But each of those groupings needs a slightly different style of leadership. The analysts loved that they had a director who had a PhD and had actually taught, had studied some of these things pretty deeply and had spent time with some of the people that they were trying to psychoanalyze.

I remember they came in one time and said, today we're going to give you a psychoanalysis of the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. I said, well, great. You know, good luck with that. How much time have you spent with him? I spent—you know. So, and then the operators again, much more, again, somewhat physical and all the rest of this, also quite cerebral.

So the point is that, that leadership, your style has to evolve, but you're still performing four tasks: getting the big ideas right, communicating to those that you're responsible for, overseeing the implementation of the big ideas, and determining how you need to refine them to do it again and again and again.

Obviously, when you're a very large enterprise—the surge in Iraq, for example, about 200,000 men and women in uniform, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi security forces with whom we worked, hundreds of thousands of contractors. You have to perform these tasks in different ways and you can't wake up in the morning and say, I'd like to do this by noon.

You, you know, you're talking about substantial planning if you want to be somewhere six months or 12 months from now. But that's the essence of leadership. And we'll get into that a lot more because, as I said what jumped out at us as we wrote these chapters and what caused us go back to the introduction to make this even more explicit was our recognition that the most critical element that determines success or failure in war is the strategic leadership that is provided. We can give you lots of examples of great strategic leadership at the national level, a President, a Prime Minister, and then at the military level in the theater of war. And then we can give you some that was distinguished by its lack of good decisions on the big ideas—they just did not understand the nature of that war, the nature of the enemy, or the circumstances and that's why they lost.

Patrick Spero: That's great. And Andrew, you have studied some of the greatest leaders in time: George III, Napoleon, Churchill. I just wonder as a historian hearing the General talk about these attributes and ways and styles of leadership, when you look at the folks that you've studied, do you find common attributes that link them together?

Andrew Roberts: Well, do you know, actually, funnily enough, and, I, we've been writing about relatively recently, and yes, many of the attributes are the same as the people that I've written about before in the 18th century. And actually, if you think about it, of course they are because leadership is an extraordinary attribute if you've got it and if you can learn it.

And so I suppose that even Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar had to get the big ideas right and had to communicate them and had to develop them and so on. So yes, there are common attributes. What I also obviously, I want to point out is that they're not in and of themselves a good thing.

There were leadership qualities that Stalin and Hitler and frankly, very evil people have as well. In that sense, it's a bit like nuclear fission, or the sea, it can be, it can be good or bad. But, and, and therefore needs to be harnessed to democracy for it to work in a positive.

Patrick Spero: Yeah. And I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on George III, because here you are at George Washington's Mount Vernon, and we have a leadership institute here that teaches what we call the Washington Way. And in a few years, there's going to be an exhibition on the two Georges exploring actually the similarities between George Washington and George III, or at least part of it is going to be doing that.

So when you look at George III, this British king working within the British empire, how did a person in that position in the 18th century think about leadership, and how would you describe George III's leadership, which might be a surprise to a lot of Americans?

Andrew Roberts: Well, obviously, unlike George Washington, he got his job sheer—through sheer heredity, and nothing else.

And so he didn't have to lead troops in battle in the Seven Years’ War like George Washington had to. So in that sense, he wasn't sort of brought up through his own qualities and capacities. I think he did have very impressive qualities and capacities, but one of them was not being able to choose good commanders.

We wound up with a series of pretty terrible ones, frankly, both admirals and generals in the war. And, of course, he got the big idea wrong, which was to provoke the Americans to fight them in the first place. It would have been much better if there'd been some way out of that.

When it came to the war, once it had started, he did show good leadership. He didn't actually travel to any of the battlefields. That wasn't expected of a monarch at that time. Although that said his grandfather had fought in a battle and won it—the last British monarch to do so.

You weren't expected to show sort of personal courage, although he did when he had six assassination attempts on him and he showed tremendous courage. But you were expected to be able to lead a government.

Patrick Spero: I was gonna ask you about how much his decisions about Parliament—how you evaluate his decisions about Prime Ministers and the management of Parliament?

Andrew Roberts: He had 16 Prime Ministers in his life, and only two of them were good. So in that sense, it wasn't a tremendously high hit rate. The younger Pitt who was too young for the American revolution and the elder Pitt who by that stage was too ill, essentially, to give the kind of leadership that that he might have given in all this to try to ward off this revolution.

But frankly, the Revolution was going to happen anyway, probably in the 1770s. You had a burgeoning population. You had two and a half percent to 4 percent economic growth year on year. You had more bookshops in Philadelphia than in any other city of the empire apart from London. And you had a sort of burgeoning and self-confident middle class. I mean, these are the absolute key prerequisites really for a revolution, especially from a country that's three and a half thousand miles away. So it's—you know, I don't think it can be blamed on George III. I think it was going to happen anyway, and it was the right time.

Patrick Spero: Well, there's this interesting counterfactual, which I don't know if you've ever heard, but if George III had crossed the Atlantic and visited the colonies after the end of the Seven Years’ War, whether things might have turned out differently—if he brought the crown to the people.

Because that's what George Washington did as president. He spent several years traveling 3,000 miles on horseback and carriage throughout the countryside because everybody was concerned about this new institution called the Presidency. Is this secretly going to be a monarchy? And by bringing himself to the people he reassured—which was a style of leadership that he had.

Andrew Roberts: Well, George III never traveled anywhere. He did not come to America, he never went to Scotland nor Ireland, and he was king of both of them as well. He never went north of Worcester.

He loved maps. He had 40,000 maps and topographical charts, and he did really feel that he could sort of understand what countries were like just from looking at maps, and of course that's completely wrong.

He once said he didn't want to see a mountain, because he thought it might bore him and it was not necessary to anyway, because he could see the contours of a mountain on a map, but clearly that is not the way to fight a war.

Patrick Spero: That's great. I want to ask you about Napoleon too. How would you describe Napoleon's leadership style?

Andrew Roberts: He did very much exactly what David also said. He did have the big ideas. On occasion, like invading Russia out there, for instance, really bad ideas. But of course his plan to go into Russia in 1812 was not to go all the way to Moscow.

He was very good at communicating them. His orders of the day, his proclamations were things of beauty and extremely well written. One thinks, of course, about the proclamation before the Battle of the Pyramids in which he said that 40 centuries looked down upon them. He had these qualities.

He also had an extraordinary quality, which was to make people believe that what they were doing, essentially the wars they were fighting, were more important than them, that they were contributing to history. They were making history. They were doing something that was to be remembered forever. And that I think was one of the reasons he was able to get out so much out of so many people.

Patrick Spero: That reminds me of some of your analysis of the Ukrainian war where you emphasized the belief in a cause, independence, how important that's been in Ukraine now.

General Petraeus: Yeah, no, I think President Zelensky has been a phenomenal strategic leader. He's really impressive in getting the big ideas right.

I'm going to stay in Kyiv, I'm not going out to the western part of the country, My family's going to stay here. We're going to fight for it. All Ukrainian males are going to stay in the country. We're going to mobilize fully. And then he communicates very effectively to his own people literally every night, and then to the parliaments and the congresses and the bundestags of the world, and does so in ways that are particular to them and resonate with them.

He also really captivates the world by his examples. So now when you talk about overseeing the implementation, that is the example you provide, the energy, the inspiration, attracting great people, letting people that aren't measuring up move on. He's done a fair amount of that. It's how you spend your time.

Nothing is more important than where you, again, devote your time and people watch that. And if it is really important, you need to be there. He's gone to the front lines numerous times. Think of the example that on the very first day, he takes off his suit and he puts on an OD sweatshirt and keeps that on for the remainder of the war, various forms of that.

Even when he meets in the White House or when I met with him in Kyiv four months ago and so forth. Again, he's not in a suit or any elaborate uniform. It's essentially, some form of OD t- shirt or sweatshirt or what have you. Gives great energy truly inspirational, and he has determined how to spend his time and seems to be doing it very effectively and also has a tremendous work ethic.

And then he has sat down and determined how he’d need to refine the big ideas periodically, do it again and again and again. So very, very impressive strategic leader, and of course compare that with Putin. Who overestimated the capabilities of his own forces, underestimated the capabilities of the Ukrainian forces, clearly didn't understand or didn't sense that the U.S. and Europe and the Western world would respond as substantially as we have. So he, you know, he sent out to make Russia great again and what he really did is make NATO great again, even pushing two historically neutral countries, Finland and Sweden to seek membership in NATO, both of which, by the way, have quite competent forces.

So again, it's very, very interesting to compare and contrast strategic leaders and particularly those on either side. If you look at Vietnam, for example, the great strategic leader who emerges from Indochina in Vietnam is neither French nor American. It's General Giáp who is the battlefield leader in many respects including Điện Biên Phủ.

You talk about a bad big idea by a military commander, the French are frustrated they can't get the communists to come to battle, they can't come to grips with them, they're very elusive, they're guerrillas, they choose when they want to fight and where. So they decide, let's go out, way out into the countryside, we'll establish this base, it'll have a magnetic attraction for the communists and then they'll come and we'll finally be able to defeat them.

And oh by the way, in wonderful French fashion, you have not only the base at Điện Biên Phủ, you have some outposts out there, and they're all named for the mistresses of the French commander.

Patrick Spero: So, that’s a very French thing.

General Petraeus: The communists do come to battle and of course they defeat the French at Điện Biên Phủ. That's a, you know, an enormously strategically important tactical victory.

And that forces the end of the French and Indochina. The Americans followed, by the way, our early big ideas, and really for the—over the first decade were not sound. The Vietnamese knew they needed to fight a war in the hamlets and the villages. We said, no, no, no, let us tell you what you need.

We've just come from fighting the Korean War. What you need is big units, divisions up on the demilitarized zone, because they're going to invade you from the north. And so we essentially, and because we have the money and the equipment and the trainers and everything else, we create an army that's a bit of an image of our own.

That wasn't what they really needed. So we turned a small war, irregular war, into a large war. We brought over battalions, brigades, and divisions, and thrashed around out in the jungle instead of following what is really the most important principle of counter insurgency which is to secure and serve the people. And we allowed very poorly trained and equipped local security forces to do that. They didn't do it all that well. The communists infiltrated very effectively.

So, again, getting the big ideas right. Napoleon—there's a quote that we have in the book about understanding the nature of the war. And Clausewitz wrote that. There's a quote in the book about understanding the nature of the war. Clausewitz described that that is the first, the most important task in war. And we didn't get that right in Vietnam until probably 1968. There were elements of it, in the Marines up in the north with their combined Action Platoon Program and so forth had it right, but General Westmoreland didn't even really celebrate that.

He was frustrated that they weren't doing more big operations. So that's the critical component, again, especially in strategic leadership, but in acts below that as well. Every leader in every level has to perform these four tasks.

[Break]

Patrick Spero: Yeah, that actually brings me to a question that I was really looking forward to asking both of you, which is the importance of the past, how useful it is.

 Hearing Andrew's response to Napoleon, I wanted to ask you, General, actually, does Napoleon have anything to teach us today militarily or is it not useful anymore?

General Petraeus: Oh, no. I think it's helpful actually to use this intellectual construct that I keep coming back to.

By the way, I did use it myself, starting particularly with the surge. I distilled it when I was between the three and four star tours in Iraq. When I was at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, which oversees all of the professional development courses and training and so forth for the commissioned, non commissioned warrant officers in the entire U.S. Army. You have the Staff College, you have the Doctrine Director, you have the Center for Army Lessons Learned, Leadership, Battle Command Training Program, all of this—we count, and I think I had six or seven different hats, and that's where I first started to distill this and use it, then very explicitly used it during the surge in Iraq.

And eventually we turned this into a website at Harvard's Belfer Center. I was a fellow at Harvard, non-resident, for six years. And a team of individuals who had worked for me in Iraq and Afghanistan, were in graduate school, said they wanted to do that. And so we captured it.

So I keep, coming back to this. If you look at Napoleon's performance it was generally exceedingly impressive. The decision to go deep into Russia was a seriously bad idea. And then of course, although Waterloo was a close-run affair, that also proved to be, that was the ultimate undoing.

Andrew Roberts: And the, and the Peninsular Campaign as well.

General Petraeus: Exactly.

Andrew Roberts: …Spain, and Portugal turned out in the long term to be a disaster. The other thing, of course, about Napolean is that he prized audacity. Audacity, audacity, always audacity.

 The lovely thing also about keeping your enemy on the back foot all the time and occasionally doing the exact opposite of what he's expecting. These are, of course they're concepts that do go back to Hannibal, and the great leaders of the past, which still have tremendous resonance today, but they were used by Napoleon to tremendous effect.

Patrick Spero: I actually want to ask more on this line, because not naming names, I asked somebody that had a senior leadership position once, how they used history and they said, I don't read it, I don't need it.

So, and I know, General Petraeus, you wrote your PhD on Vietnam.

General Petraeus: On the lessons of Vietnam, which were not necessarily correct, but it was what the American military took from Vietnam, which was very, very important. Because it burdened the American military, would be the way I would describe it.

Patrick Spero: Yeah, yeah.

General Petraeus: I mean, another one of the lessons is we don't want to ever do that again, so let's consign irregular warfare to the ash heap of doctrinal history. So here we were several years into fighting Iraq and even more years into Afghanistan, we didn't even have a field manual in the U.S. Army on counterinsurgency, which is one of the big accomplishments, if you will, of that period that I was privileged to be the commander at Fort Leavenworth, because we produced the only manual in Army history that's ever been done in less than a year.

And it turned out to be hugely significant. It also turned out to get a full-page review in the New York Times book review on the front page.

Patrick Spero: So this is not a classified document?

General Petraeus: No, it was unclassified.

Patrick Spero: Oh, wow.

General Petraeus: In fact, some really smart person took the manual, slapped a forward on the top of it. I think it was the University of Chicago Press. And it was one of the contributors, I believe, and then also a woman who was teaching at Harvard. But I believe John Noggle is, had his name on that.

Andrew Roberts: Then you didn't get a penny of the royalties.

Patrick Spero: But imagine if you were in Vietnam, and you were a general in Vietnam, what history would you have pulled from to make the right decisions?

General Petraeus: There were examples of history of this.

We cite several of these in the book. Malaya is a good example, Oman is another example. There were a number of cases of irregular warfare—and frankly, France was an example of what not to do. History, you know, it can obfuscate, to be sure. But it can also illuminate. And you have to use it carefully.

The analogies are by no means always perfect or even appropriate or helpful. So you have to use it with care, but I've found it very useful. I also found it useful to read, biographies such as the ones that Andrew has written to see how they exercise leadership.

If you want to be a strategic leader, it's probably not a bad idea to read how other strategic leaders have done their tasks.

Andrew Roberts: And Churchill, of course employed and harnessed history, especially British history, during the Second World War. The classic example, of course, being his speeches in 1940.

I went through them when I was writing my biography of Churchill and in at least 10 percent of speeches were references to—to history. Sorry, during the actual speech, 10 percent of those speeches were references to history. And so, he was constantly talking about Drake and the Armada or Nelson, Trafalgar, and so on.

Essentially telling the British people that we've been here before. That there have been points in history where we're seemingly about to be invaded, where we don't have any allies—although that wasn't the case in the second world war, of course, because we had the Empire—but we were in danger and terrible peril, national peril, and we got through it and were ultimately successful.

So he drew on history all the time and it was tremendously helpful in his message to the nation during the Blitz.

General Petraeus: He also wrote history and wrote (unintelligible), of course and he also famously said that history would be kind to him because he would write it.

Andrew Roberts: And it's that, that's right.

General Petraeus: I’ll give you another—during the surge which was the, you know, the most difficult task that I was ever privileged to lead and, and, and in truth, a really grinding experience, particularly during the first probably five or six months, I was reading someone, a historian actually out at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas gave me a book as I was leaving there, and I thought, oh, this is great, you know. Somehow it got in the rucksack, and somehow it got on the table by my bunk. And it was Grant Takes Command, one of the real classic works of the Civil War and on Grant, by Bruce Catton. And I started reading and I found it truly inspirational.

Now, I'm not trying to equate the surge in Iraq to the American Civil War, but leadership at the strategic level is the same, again, in a different context, needless to say. But he was a truly inspirational figure. I remember reading particularly about the Battle of Shiloh, Bloody Shiloh, and, you know, he and his most trusted lieutenant, Sherman, were on—they're surprised by the enemy the first day. It's the one, it's the worst day they had, really, in all their time fighting together. They're almost pushed back into the Tennessee River. The troops are literally right on the bank of the river. That night, Grant's trying to get ships coming down, bring more troops, reinforce.

He's standing under a tree, slouch hat is on, there's a little rain dripping off the edge of the slouch hat. He's got a stump of a cigar in his mouth. He can hear the cries of the wounded still on the battlefield.

And Sherman comes out in the dark and he says, Well, Grant, we had the devil's own day today, didn't we? And Grant takes a stub of the cigar out of his mouth and says, Yep, lick ‘em tomorrow though. That's determination.

And we had some really horrible days in Baghdad, especially in the first, again, four or five months, although they continued throughout the conduct of the surge, you never drive all of those out. "Lick ‘em tomorrow" became a bit of a rallying cry, and it reflected the kind of determination that you have to have as a commander.

And Grant had it in spades. He was imperturbable. He was courageous. He was very quiet though, he was very self-contained, he was—there was no flamboyance at all. As you will recall, he used to wear a private's uniform with a general's stars on the, on the shoulders. There was no pretense. Remember the great story about when he was called—the one time—first time he meets Lincoln.

He's summoned to Washington, he had been given command of all of the Union forces for the first time. And for the first time, he crafts a strategy for all of them. And that's, it's truly decisive. It's, you know, he is the man who saved the Union. That title is deserved. And it's for a reason. He crafted the campaign that won the battles and ensured that Lincoln was reelected in November 1864.

And that was not a certainty as late as, say, June or so of 1864. So he's back there. He's at the Willard Hotel. He's checking in with his son. And they said, well we're sorry that there's no more rooms or, oh, well, we have a little one up on the eaves. And so they turned the book around and he signs his name.

The hotel clerk looks at it. Are you General Grant? Oh, sir, we have a suite right here. But again, he was not going to, he would have gone up to that room and, and then he walks over to the White House because, you know, the Willard's very close, a very—again, very unassuming, just sort of walked in. He was not all that tall either.

And all of a sudden, someone realized that Grant was there, and the cry went up and so forth. And, a really, truly admirable figure. I think the greatest general in U.S. military history. Greatest flag officer really, with all due respect even to, to Washington. I guess I—I guess I—sitting here in the Washington library.

But if you think about again, the role that he played—really, really extraordinary. And so this started out by saying, well, you read history. Well, you learn from, you are inspired by, you are instructed by it. You have to be careful that it doesn't deceive you, if you will.

It can obfuscate as well as illuminate, but I’ve found it very instructive in life. And you see complex figures who are brilliant at this and then make major mistakes later on. Think of MacArthur—as we recount, how MacArthur—really bad idea, if you're going to go all the way to the Yalu and think that the Chinese aren't going to enter the war. And it just transformed that war, they almost lost, almost pushed off the peninsula.

And then he starts talking loosely about using nuclear weapons, disrespectful to the President. And he ends up being sacked. Doesn't keep him from having a monument at West Point, of course.

Andrew Roberts: But then he was replaced by Ridgway.

General Petraeus: And he's replaced by Ridgway, who gets the big ideas right, provides the example, the energy, the inspiration, the drive, exercise, and does a really masterful job.

There are very, very few individuals in any military history, but especially in American military history, who were successful on the battlefield and then brilliant as a strategic leader in combat. Now, very few people you can get to do these kinds of jobs in combat, much less have multiple jobs like that.

Grant was definitely one of them. In fact, he did it at the tactical, operational, and strategic level, all three levels of warfare. Ridgway, I think, arguably was that, but there are very, very few others.

Patrick Spero: And, actually, your story of Grant and then referencing MacArthur reminded me of something else in the book that really struck me, and it was—I'm going to get the facts a little wrong, but MacArthur issued, was it 140 press releases or videos, and 109 of them had himself in it.

General Petraeus: Yeah, truly admirable.

Patrick Spero: Yeah, and I think that's one of your--

General Petraeus: He was the odd general who didn't like a microphone.

Patrick Spero: But that also gets it I forget if it's a third or the fourth piece of your idea of strategic leadership, which is adaptability.

And I think you need to have humility to be able to admit errors and rectify and adapt. So I wanted to end with one final question, but before that, Andrew, if you could talk about studying Churchill and others, and how they adapted, and also any weaknesses that you saw. I mean the General was just talking now about how everybody has their foibles.

What was Churchill's? Churchill, who stands up in your book as well, is kind of the greatest strategic leader. Essentially, where's his weakness?

Andrew Roberts: Oh, well he made lots and lots. The classic one being the Gallipoli Bay in the Dardanelles in 1915, where 147,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded.

And extraordinary, really, that his career could have survived after that. He obviously then went into the trenches himself, and obtained a sort of personal redemption by facing danger. But nonetheless, there were people who were still shouting, what about the Dardanelles at him in the 1930s. And he was trying to warn the world against Hitler and the Nazis.  Lots and lots of political mistakes.

But overall, on the really big things, foresight—and this is a key aspect of leadership, of course, as well—he showed foresight before the First World War in recognizing the threat of Germany to the hegemony of Europe, he showed tremendous foresight and was almost alone of the major British political figures to warn about the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. And then after the Second World War in Fulton, Missouri, when he made his Iron Curtain speech, that at the time was tremendously unpopular, it was criticized, denounced in Congress and Parliament and the press, and he was proved to be absolutely right about that as well. So there was a capacity for foresight.

Patrick Spero: That's great. And General Petraeus, I wanted to ask you about yourself, actually writing the counter insurgency textbook, the field manual that somebody else produces a textbook and made money off of it.

Clearly, you're in the field, so you issue this thing and probably almost as soon as it's issued, you have to make adjustments. So I was wondering, what are some lessons you learned about making adjustments in the field?

General Petraeus: Well, we had a process for doing this, actually, and again, as I said, the fourth task of a strategic leader is to determine how you need to refine the big ideas and do it again and again and again.

And one of the elements of that for me was that I did a one-hour video conference with the individual who succeeded me at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas every month. And during that session, I would relate to him, here's what you need to change in, and we have an acronym for it called DOTMLPF. Here's what you need to change in doctrine, here's what we have learned. And these different doctrinal manuals need to be refined. Organizational structure, we control that to a degree as well, headquarters in particular. Training scenarios at the major combat training centers, particularly the mission rehearsal exercise that a unit conducts before it deploys.

And also the battle command training program scenario, that's a digital one for divisions and corps headquarters. You can't put them out in the Mojave Desert, they're too big. And materiel requirements, we're constantly identifying issues with the materiel that we had and explaining to them because that commander also controlled all the people in all the different bases in forts that issued the materiel requirements, which drive the entire procurement process.

And then personnel issues and facility issues. So we would actually address all of these with him and you'd֫—we used that to structure the conversation. In theater I had a one hour a month with the lessons learned chiefs, the colonels of the army Marine Corps special operations lessons learned teams, the asymmetric warfare group, the counterinsurgency center that we had in Iraq and so forth.

And there was a process by which they would present to me lessons that they believed needed to be learned, but they weren't learned until they're incorporated in the big ideas and then communicated through a change in the campaign, mission statement, the SOPs, policies, practices, and so forth.

So again, it's a very continuous process. And by having that construct, it really kept us focused on what it was that I needed to do in particular as the strategic leader of the surge in Iraq.

Patrick Spero: Yeah. And General Petraeus, you've had your feet in so many different sectors: the academy, universities, government, military, private sector now. When you think about leadership are there elements that are universal across all these?

General Petraeus: Students want to embrace strategic leadership of all kinds. So, you know, up there was Jack Ma at Alibaba, and Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and so forth.

So think of Netflix, it starts out, the initial big idea. And by the way, I've talked to him about this. He has his own leadership construct that is very close to the one that we laid out. His big idea for organization leadership is no rules, rules, there are no rules. You should figure out what they are.

Netflix's original big idea is we're gonna put movies in the hands of customers without brick and mortar stores. So they're gonna undercut Blockbuster. Couple of years that works really well, Blockbuster starts to lose business, they gain business. Blockbuster eventually goes out of business except for one in Big Bend, Oregon, which has sort of become a tourist attraction. And that's, all of us were nostalgic about being able to rent movies from brick and mortar.

But then of course, a couple of years later, they sit down and they're performing task number four, how do we refine the big ideas? Because people are saying, well, others are doing what we're doing. So the new big idea is, well, you realize as broadband speeds are fast enough. So they're the first to really—to allow downloading of movies. That's a new big idea. Third big idea is we're going to make our own content.

That was a real breakout moment. A hundred million dollars on House of Cards alone. A lot of the other iconic series that we all binge watched during COVID and so forth. And then the fourth big idea is we're going to make major motion pictures, and they go out and actually buy not one but two major movie studios.

I did have issue with him. I discussed this with him I took issue that in the movie that Brad Pitt played my good friend, General McChrystal. He made Stan McChrystal out to be very wooden and, you know, marched around like a little toy soldier and all this stuff. Didn't have a sense of humor. I said, that just didn't work. Besides, I said, I just can't believe that Brad Pitt didn't play me.

[Laughter]

So this construct applies wherever you are, the nonprofit sector—you know, nonprofit leadership has to be a slight bit different than the military. If you really have to, at the end of the day, you could actually give someone an order. You want to try to be persuasive most of the time. I mean, you do get orders, don't get me wrong, but you actually want to have a culture as well, in which people aren't afraid to tell you that maybe the big idea isn't as persuasive and powerful as you think it is.

And I would actually surround myself with some of the people, including the individual who had been thrown out of the theater because he had the temerity as a military intelligence officer to say that we were facing an insurgency. Pentagon didn't like that. They said, throw him out of the theater. They did. I brought him back some years later.

Patrick Spero: Andrew, thinking back on all that you've studied, written in this book but also your previous scholarship. What's one leadership lesson that you'd like our listeners to know about?

Andrew Roberts: Moral courage. I think the moral courage necessary to tell your superiors that you disagree and the moral courage also, of course, to feed your people below you into situations that not comfortable for anybody, but which need to be mastered in order for the victory to be won.

I think that really is an absolute prerequisite. And your academies do teach that which is excellent. I believe that ours do in the United Kingdom as well. And so long as you have people who do have the moral courage to lead in a world where leadership is very often doubted, frankly, and for some good reasons in politics, are doubted, our democracy should be strong and stable.

Patrick Spero: That's great. And General Petraeus I want to ask you a question that might feel a little bit like from left field, but the figure that was most instrumental in your career development?

General Petraeus: I was really privileged to work for Major General Jack Galvin, John R. Galvin, when I was a captain to be his aide. So you're working directly for him all the time, obviously. And he was a true soldier scholar and ultimately statesman, and he eventually, his final military position was as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe for five years, I think, and then he was actually the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.

So, quite a remarkable figure. He'd already written three books by the time I worked for him which is quite rare. He'd actually taught in the English department at West Point, not in the history or the social sciences departments, which were the ones that were seen as a little bit more of the path to stardom.

And he was the one who at a critical juncture in my career ,where I was considering going to the ranger regiment, which is great and he loved that. But he actually said, have you ever considered raising your intellectual sights farther than the maximum effective range of an M60 machine gun? And I got the message, cause I had another option, was to go to graduate school.

And it was a life changing decision. But going to graduate school at Princeton was a truly out of my intellectual cover zone experience. It came from his encouragement to do that, or his nudge. I worked for him, by the way, personally, twice more as a special assistant when he was the commander in chief of U.S. Southern Command. That's where I saw my first counterinsurgency up close, or at least, reasonably close, in El Salvador.

There were several other insurgencies going on in the area as well, at that time, there was one in Columbia, Peru, and then we were actually supporting the insurgents against Nicaragua. And then when he became the Supreme Allied Commander, he pulled me out of the job—I was teaching International Relations and Economics at West Point, and he pulled me out of there a year early to go over (unintelligible).

It was, again, these were life changing experiences. We used to exchange lengthy letters back when people wrote real letters. And we stayed close through his entire life, and in fact, when he died of Parkinson's that we think he got from Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, where he was a real hero on the battlefield as well, his family called up and said, we want you to eulogize him. Keep in mind now when I first worked for him, he was a two star and I was a captain. Yes, by then I was a four star, a retired four star, I guess. I felt very deeply honored to be asked to do that.

My wife's father actually was a four-star, soldier, scholar, statesman as well, huge. He was the superintendent at West Point the entire time my class was there. He's an honorary member of our class. A number of other figures, you know, General Jack Keane, I worked for Chief of Staff of the Army, Carl Vuono, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hugh Shelton, again, directly for them writing or Chief of Staff or what have you.

All of that was, you know, hugely important. And then there were a number of others. There was noncommissioned officers, Sergeant Major that did four combat tours, five combat tours that I had. He was with me. Major Keith Naimiel, who when I was a second lieutenant, ultimately commanded Ranger unit and others.

So I think, you know, you're very fortunate to have great mentors in life. You have to try to be a good mentee as well. If you ask which one it would have to be General Galvin.

Patrick Spero: That’s great. I hope everybody will Google his name. Thank you. I hope everybody will buy the book. It is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Getting the big ideas right is the first task for any leader. In this conversation, we uncovered leadership from both historical and practical perspectives. General Petraeus and Andrew Roberts shared profound insights into the importance of strategic vision, adaptability, and moral courage in effective leadership across various fields.

Their discussion highlighted the need for continuously refining ideas, the value of mentorship, and the universal traits that characterize exceptional leaders.

 Next time: we've discussed strategic leadership, but what is presidential leadership? Archivist of the United States and political scientist Colleen Shogan explores the nuances of the American executive branch and outlines the challenges and promises of a born digital world.

Colleen Shogan: The biggest thing that I wrote about was that Presidents have to choose their words carefully to meet the political strategy of the time.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Leadership and Legacy, Conversations at the George Washington Presidential Library is a production of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. This podcast is hosted by Dr. Patrick Spero and Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky. Our executive producers are Dr. Anne Fertig and Heather Soubra. We would like to thank today's guests, General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts.

To learn more about Washington's Leadership example or to find out how you can bring your team to the George Washington Presidential Library, go to www.gwleadershipinstitute.org.