Service and Respect with General John Allen

Lindsay Chervinsky: What can the past teach us about leadership in an era of rapidly evolving technology? The founding fathers likely never could imagine the impact and scale of today's digital world. But as today's guest tells us, there is still much to learn about confronting change from their leadership example.

 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 innovative 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 we are joined by General John Allen. General Allen is a retired U. S. Marine Corps four star general. His career as a distinguished military leader and strategist spanned over four decades before transitioning to roles in the nonprofit sector and consulting.

General Allen's unique definition of leadership emphasizes humility, service, and respect as its core pillars. These principles have guided him from his early days as a Marine officer to his strategic command roles.

General Allen: The first is that from my experience, the very best leaders are humble leaders. They live in an environment of humility.

Lindsay Chervinsky: General Allen also explains his perspective of the transformative role of artificial intelligence in modern warfare and its implications for leadership in the civilian sector.

General Allen: But more broadly, I think AI is one of the great technological breakthroughs of the modern era, not just the 21st or the 20th century, it's the modern era.

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

Patrick Spero: Well, we're here with General John Allen. Thank you for joining us today, General Allen.

General Allen: It's a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Patrick Spero: Well, I want to have a conversation as somebody who's studied leadership, who has exercised leadership from a number of different perspectives, just to talk a lot about how you view leadership and also some of the inspirations that you maybe had in terms of how to think about leadership, how to deploy it, how to exercise it, both maybe some historical models that you've taken inspiration from but maybe also learn from past mistakes and I thought I'd just kick it off with a question that I always ask everybody and it sounds like it's a simple question, and that is, if you had to teach a course to somebody who's learning English language for the first time, and you came across the word leadership, how would you define it for them?

General Allen: I would define it for them as the means by which they'll be able to accomplish most of the hard things in their life. Almost everyone that you'll meet, almost everyone with whom you'll be involved will at some point in their life be involved with other people. And they may in fact have multiple individuals that they're responsible for and ensuring that whatever the role is that you have as a leader, as an individual responsible both for people and for a mission. That requires leadership.

And so it's very difficult not to be involved in our society or almost any society where some dimension of a moral relationship with those around you is not essential. And often for the very best leaders, that moral relationship translates into leadership.

Patrick Spero: That's great.

 Are there attributes that transcend no matter if you're in the private sector, if you're in the military, if even you're at home and trying to lead a family in some respects, are there attributes that transcend across all areas?

General Allen: I think there are a number of them. The first is that the very best leaders are humble leaders.

They live in an environment of humility. It's never about them, it's always about those around them and they live committed to a mission but very much live committed to the people that ultimately accomplish that mission. So humility, I think, is extraordinarily important. And then viewing themselves as a servant leader the individual who both serves the mission and serves the interests of those that they lead.

So I boil it down to being a humble servant. But then very importantly, I think another quality of the effective leaders that I've seen is a willingness to be civil at all times, to respect those that they lead, to respect those around them. So a civil and respectful servant leader who lives in an environment of humility I think is a set of characteristics and qualities that is essential to leadership however you find it, wherever you find it.

And I think that as I have done this, I was in uniform or served my country for 45 years. Those were the most effective leaders that I came across.

Patrick Spero: That's great. In fact I'd love to talk to you about some of your own personal experiences and I might start first with you went to the Naval Academy and you had a choice to either enter the Navy or the Marine Corps.

And so I didn't know if you could talk a little bit about your choice to become a Marine.

General Allen: It happened early in my life and it wasn't a qualitative decision. My father, who probably was the most influential leader with whom I was ever associated had served in the Navy during World War II very early in his career even before Pearl Harbor.

So even before the war started, he'd been on a destroyer that had been convoying in secret, in those days it was all in secret, a British convoy across the Atlantic. As you'll recall, the British were being starved to death by the U-boat fleet, and my father's destroyer was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

Now, the destroyer didn't sink, it's the famous USS Kearny, but it was saved, my father's story, it was saved by the young officers out of the wardroom, all of whom were Naval Academy graduates. And for him, the qualities of leadership and personal courage, resilience, they really impressed themselves on him.

He told me about this ship's skipper, who was badly wounded by the detonation of the torpedo, blew out both his eardrums and hurt his back, and he refused to leave the bridge to continue to fight the fires and to control the flooding to keep the ship from sinking. So years later he would serve in Korea, so he established for me that the Naval Academy was a place to go if you're going to be serious about a military career.

Years later, he was the OPSO on an aircraft carrier during the Korean War, and a Marine fighter squadron was flying off that carrier, supporting the Marine division, which was on the ground in Korea during the famous Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. Now that Marine division was completely surrounded in the dead of winter by six Chinese divisions, all of them intending to wipe this division out.

The Marine fighter squadron was flying off this carrier around the clock, providing close air support to the division as it was fighting its way out of the mountains, desperately trying to get to the coast to be evacuated. At one point a flight of F4U Corsairs led by the squadron commander was over top of the division providing close air support.

And at one point, one of the Corsairs was shot down, and the young Marine lieutenant parachuted out of the aircraft and was on the ground and the Chinese were trying to get him, a cavalry unit was trying to get at him. And the Marine Corsairs now provided support to this one pilot.

They were trying to get the helicopter off the carrier to come in and get him. And one by one, after they had expended all of their ammunition and bombs, they started to run out of gas and the squadron commander, who was with them sent them back one by one to the carrier to be refueled and rearmed, staying as the last one.

He stayed beyond his ability to get back to the carrier. Staying over top of his young lieutenant. And eventually ran out of ammunition and was running out of gas, and the Chinese were closing in on the Marine just before the helicopter got there to save him. He took ground fire, ultimately crashed into the mountains and was killed.

My father's story was, back on the aircraft carrier when the word came that their squadron commander had been killed trying to save the life of one of the lieutenants, one of the downed aviators, the sense of remorse, the sense of grief was, he said, palpable. He'd never seen anything like this: of a unit that so loved its commander that they treated it just as though they'd lost their father.

So from that story, until I was commissioned a lieutenant, I wanted to be part of an organization that was like that.

So my father was responsible for that. So he gets the blame.

Patrick Spero: That's a remarkable story. How does a community cultivate that sense of belonging?

General Allen: Well, I think it's an emphasis on our history.

All Marines—we didn't at that time and during the Korean War—but we'd all come out of World War II, where the cauldron within which the Marines had fought in the South Pacific had been pretty hot, you know, the fighting against the Japanese, probably the greatest infantry we ever fought in our history, other than maybe the North Vietnamese.

It created a Marine Corps that was very hard and very tough and very reliable for the country. But as we became more mature as a service in the Cold War era, we created a school at Quantico called the Basic School. And every Marine officer, it doesn't make any difference whether you're going to be an armor officer, a fighter pilot or an infantryman or a combat engineer, you all go to that school for six months.

And it is the academy of the Marine Corps, and it is there where we instill in every officer of Marines this incredible sense of duty and commitment to our country. And it starts there and it permeates then out through our officers and our NCOs right down to the deck plates level to the Marine infantrymen or whatever the Marine might be in whatever field.

It creates a society in the Corps, a society where rank is important, but rank isn't how you identify yourself. You're first a Marine and you're second, a courageous thinker.

Patrick Spero: Well, that's great because it actually brings me to talking a little bit more about your own experience as an officer in the Marine Corps and having these values instilled in you in your early life and then going through the Academy and becoming a commissioned officer.

I was wondering if you could go back to that very first position you held. I presume you were overseeing a range of men, many of whom, were certainly older than you maybe had more years experience in the Marine Corps. I'd just love to know how you handled that position of authority, knowing that you also were in some respects very junior in the Marines.

General Allen: Well, there's the anachronism I think that we all face is that it's our youngest, least experienced officers who are responsible for closing with the enemy in the last hundred meters. And you're exactly correct. There is no corner on experience among those young officers and what they have to do is rely on their NCOs or noncommissioned officers.

And the thing that I learned very early along was that while I had ultimate responsibility for the rifle platoon, my first unit was a rifle platoon, 2nd Platoon, Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 8^th Marines, I relied enormously on the experience of and the leadership of my platoon sergeant, who was Staff Sergeant Eugene Lewis Walsh.

And my company first sergeant was a first sergeant by the name of Donnie W. Ritchie. And these two noncommissioned officers really raised me as a young officer. And they never questioned my authority. They never undermined my responsibility. They took as a—almost a sacred mission—prepare me as an officer to be worthy to lead troops in combat.

Staff Sergeant Walsh had a lot of experience. He'd been in Vietnam. They'd all been in Vietnam at this point. I was commissioned in ’76, arrived in the Fleet Marine Force in ’77, Fox Company. And they just took it as a sacred duty to prepare the young officers for what they knew war was going to be like.

And in doing so, they knew that two things would happen. The young officer would lead that unit to victory, to success, but they would also lead that unit in a way that would reduce the potential for casualty. And Donnie W. Ritchie, 1st Sergeant Donnie W. Ritchie, who would retire as a Sergeant Major, was really like a father to me.

You know, his—came out of the hills of West Virginia, first time he used a phone was to call a recruiter, go in the Marine Corps. He'd been a drill instructor. He'd had two tours in Vietnam, had been one of the few survivors of his rifle company in the Quang Tri province of Vietnam fighting the North Vietnamese.

And I can remember, I would eventually as a lieutenant be given command of this company, about 200 Marines, and it was a great honor to command so young. And he was with me one morning, as the sun was coming up. We'd been out operating all night long for several days. We were pretty exhausted. And we're in our fighting position and I saw him looking over as the sky was beginning to redden a bit with the dawn, with the sun coming up.

I said "First Sergeant, what's on your mind?" And he said, "in Vietnam we knew if we survived to see the dawn, we'd live the day. Because the North Vietnamese came at us all night, every night." That kind of an experience as a young officer, you can't pay enough. And they gave of that experience freely.

They gave of that experience as a sense of moral responsibility. And I learned to be, I think, an effective young officer. Not because of my own experience, but because of the experienced young staff, noncommissioned officers, almost all of whom had gone through the hot fire of Vietnam, were willing to impart to this young Lieutenant.

Patrick Spero: That's great. Hearing your story, you've now left the military. You've been in the nonprofit world. You've consulted with private industry. Are there lessons that you took from this early part of your career that you think leadership in nonprofits or the private sector could learn?

General Allen: Sure. There are very important lessons. I just got through teaching upstairs here at the Leadership Institute on what I think is the inherent responsibility of all leaders to create a vision for those they lead.

And the vision is where you want to go. To be able to clearly enunciate a mission, and the mission is how you're going to get there. And then to lay out very clearly what the values are of the organization. And those values ought to be an extension of your values, my values, whoever is the leader. That's something I learned as an officer, whether it was a second lieutenant or it was the commanding of the theater of war in Afghanistan.

Those three things are inherent to any civilian organization as well. Nonprofit, for profit, private sector, government agency, whatever it might be. That the leader must take responsibility for establishing the vision of the organization, must tell the organization, usually in consultation with the leadership, how they'll articulate their mission and accomplish it.

And then ensure everybody understands that there are some things that we'll do. And then there are some things that we will never do because our values are important to us. We'll embrace those values. And those all become touchstones, and those touchstones are a responsibility of the leader. And it's just as much a responsibility in uniform as out.

Patrick Spero: That's great.

[Break]

Patrick Spero: Now moving through your career you mentioned that eventually you had command of a 200 person unit and from there even larger responsibilities. So can you talk a little bit about how your own style of leadership or management had to change as your portfolio grew?

General Allen: I'm not sure my style of leadership changed all that much, frankly.

I had to change some of my management skills just simply because the units were diverse and complex and often distributed across geography in ways that make it difficult for me to touch on at a particular moment. But the leadership principles really remain. The question becomes, are you able to adapt those leadership principles to the reality of the size and the complexity of the organization?

So I commanded infantry units at the company level, several of those. I would then command and those were in the several hundreds in terms of the size of the unit. I would then command a Marine battalion landing team, which was slightly more than a thousand. All of these deployed with the Sixth Fleet forward and contingency missions.

And then would eventually command either schools or units in combat. In Iraq, I was the commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was thousands of Marines within a larger mission in the Western Desert along the Euphrates River, where we were fighting Al Qaeda and bringing the tribes over.

And it eventually would take command in Afghanistan, which was 150,000 troops. The leadership really didn't change. So as I did as a captain, within minutes of taking command of my rifle company, I had my lieutenants in my office to tell them what my vision and intent was as a commander, and I would give it to them in writing.

Within an hour of taking command in Afghanistan—again, 48 nations at the time would grow to 50, 150,000 troops, another 100,000 civilians—within an hour of taking command, because I'd gotten in the habit of this, I had all of my generals in one room, where I told them—I took them through the political objectives of the campaign, took them through the campaign itself, my vision of the campaign, then I gave them my vision for how we would fight the war.

And that hadn't changed. And as I always said to my younger officers, I expect you to be close to your troops. The responsibility to communicate comes from top down, not bottom up. You've got to know how your troops are doing. One of my last instructions to those general officers the day I took command—and again, it was across many countries, 48 nations had troops at that particular moment, many had large contingents, many of them had general officers who were leading in combat—but my comments to them was, rather than say, go down and be with your troops, I said to them, you are issuing orders to your troops that may send them to their death.

I expect you to know the conditions under which they're carrying out your orders. You're going to go to the field, you're going to find the most dangerous place on the battlefield, and you're going to find out how your troops are doing there in accomplishing your missions and the orders that you give them.

Now I will just say that that was not—and I, you know, I love my, my allied general officers. I never had any questions from any American general that I ever said that to. And they were, in fact, I had to fight to get them in my headquarters. They were always in the field with their troops, leading them from the front under very difficult conditions.

But the bottom line is, you know, leadership from the front is about presence, presence in the lives of those you lead, in the manner in which you lead them, the example that you set, your capacity to articulate the vision, mission, and values and then to live them. And that was no different for me commanding a theater of war than it was a rifle platoon.

Patrick Spero: And the communication is so key and it was so great to hear you talk about how you modeled it for others, but how do you ensure in an organization that's as vast and complex as those that you've overseen within the Marine Corps, how do you ensure that that happens and how do you deal with issues that might develop where things are falling apart or falling through the cracks?

General Allen: Well, you have to constantly be monitoring it. In combat we did something called battlefield circulation, and I was in the field constantly. And I had a whole series of metrics. Leaders have to measure success, regardless of whether you're, again, in the private sector or in uniform in the battlefield.

And in many cases, I was very fortunate in Afghanistan, we were winning. So in most cases, I didn't have to worry about catastrophic failure. I might have to worry about some setbacks. And as I was able to determine where there were resource deficiencies or what I might consider to be a leadership problem, I'd spend some time with them.

And there were several occasions where the, the leaders had to go home, because they had to go home. The mission wasn't getting accomplished and the troops were in danger and you just have to make those hard decisions.

Patrick Spero: Looking at your biography, you also spent some time in the classroom, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you maybe have learned about leadership while having to lead a class of Annapolis students.

General Allen: Well there's a lot I could say that'd be funny, but it wouldn't be true about my time as an instructor at the Naval Academy. First, it was an honor to be chosen to go there to teach. And my undergraduate degree was in operations analysis, which would eventually turn into applied math, but then has now become operations analysis again.

But when I was sent to the Academy, it was to teach in the political science department. And I taught a number of courses. Those courses were by and large international relations courses. And I took that mission, that responsibility very, very seriously because as a young officer, I had been forward deployed against contingencies almost constantly in my youth as a young officer.

My sense was that I needed to do everything I could to prepare them for the intellectual challenges that they're going to face in the face of the enemy. If you had one of them here in the room, they would say to you that I had told them that we all can't afford for them to be discovering these things for the first time in the face of the enemy.

And so I wanted to familiarize themselves with the challenges of international relations, the challenges of ensuring that you are committed to the cultural intelligence of those with whom you'll be living and alongside of those you'll be fighting. Ensuring that you understand the nuances of the society within which you'll be operating so that you're not constantly offending them. In fact, you are able to convince them that you're actually there for their betterment. In fact, I'll say this, this is not about me, but I'll say this as I worked hard in Iraq to bring the tribes over to fight alongside us against al Qaeda.

More than one sheikh of the, of the various tribes, about the 12 tribes along the Euphrates that I spent my time with. More than one said to me, "we perceive that you have come to save us, not to kill us. And when we were able to agree that that was accurate, we chose then to join you.” And that came from my own personal understanding from having taught it at the Naval Academy, that you cannot learn too much about the people with whom you'll serve and the society within which you'll ultimately be involved.

So that meant, learn about the tribes, learn about their history, learn about the faith of Islam. And I spent a lot of time studying that. In fact, I read everything that was written by a British woman scholar by the name of Gertrude Bell. And Gertrude Bell was the first woman to graduate from Oxford.

She had studied, or as they said, “read” history there. She spoke fluent Farsi, would learn Arabic, became an archaeologist, so I had an affinity for her, because I'd have been an archaeologist if I hadn't gone in the Corps. But she wrote, she lived along the Euphrates, and she knew the sheikhs of those tribes.

And many years later, she died in 1926. She's buried in Baghdad. And many years later, I would be with the grandsons of these sheikhs and be able to tell them stories about their grandparents that Gertrude Bell had written in her journals.

And you know, I was talking about Gertrude Bell a lot at home. My wife eventually said, who—Gertrude, who is Gertrude Bell? Thinking—I said, don't worry dear, these, these are her books, and this is the picture of her grave in Baghdad.

So, but the point was I learned as much as I could about the culture and the history and the faith and the colonial heritage of these people so that as I then walked among them, I wasn't an alien in their presence.

They actually then, in fact I will say this, it'll be on my tombstone, the Provincial Council of Anbar bestowed upon me Anbari citizenship. So I am known to the Anbaris as Allen Al Anbari. And it was a great honor. And it came, not from killing them, it came from saving them, and being able to have that environment or to create that environment and to have them have that confidence, I think, is one of the highest tributes to military art.

Patrick Spero: Knowing that you know, one of our mantras here is that history matters.

General Allen: It does matter. You couldn't be more right. it's central.

Patrick Spero: And funnily enough, my dream was actually to become an underwater archaeologist and I decided to take the more conservative path of becoming a historian.

General Allen: I'm sure you're scuba qualified.

Patrick Spero: I am actually. It was my P.E. course at JMU. You had to take one and I decided to get a scuba diving license. Just the career paths for underwater archaeologists just are very tough. Not that historians have much better of a path.

General Allen: I joke that as an infantryman, I spent my entire life digging holes and never found a thing of value at the bottom of one of them.

Patrick Spero: Yeah. I also want to talk about your other time at the Academy, which was being the first Marine Commandant of the Academy. And so what was it like to be the first? And did you have to change or adapt in any ways?

General Allen: No, I don't think I had to. But again, I was the first, and there was a sense—not within the Navy—we have the Naval Service. The Naval Service is the Navy and the Marine Corps. And then there's the Marine Corps and the Navy. So we have a department.

And there was not a sense within the Navy, but there was a sense within some within the Navy, that the Commandant and the Superintendent of the Naval Academy should always be Navy officers. And at one point, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Jones, and the Chief of Naval Operations agreed that it was time for a change, and I guess I was the change.

When I was asked the question, “what's it like to be a Marine officer as the Commandant of Midshipman?” My response was, I may be a Marine, but I am an officer first and foremost of the Naval Service. And there was a first Submariner, and there was a first Fighter Pilot, and there was a first something.

I'm just another first, but first and foremost, I'm an officer of the Naval Service, so you can count on it that the values of the Naval Service will be preeminent in my thinking about the leading and the preparation of the brigade for what's coming. And what was coming immediately was 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

So as Commandant of Midshipman, I faced the fact that I was graduating midshipman—I was just touring around a young man and his father the other day who wanted to go to the Academy, up at Annapolis. And as we were walking out of the enormous dormitory there called Bancroft Hall, I said to them, I stopped at the doorway and I said, when I was commandant here, we had two wars going on and the casualties were beginning to come back.

People who had been in the brigade now being killed and wounded. I said, I remember many, many nights as I was walking out of Bancroft Hall on my way home, and home was 150 meters away in my quarters, quarters 14, stopping at the door of Bancroft Hall and sort of taking inventory about whether I had done enough that day to prepare the brigade for war.

Sometimes I went home, sometimes I went right back into the office and stayed there late doing something that I believed was really important to get the brigade, those young women and men who were on their way to Afghanistan and Iraq, to get them ready.

Patrick Spero: And when, it's always coming full circle, having been a, an Annapolis grad yourself.

And so when you were now in this position to train a rising group of future leaders in the service, what are some of the things that you wanted to make sure you imparted to them? How did you approach working now with midshipmen or not people that are yet in the, you know, graduating into the force or anything?

General Allen: Well, it didn't take much to get everybody's attention after 9/ 11. You know, we were all pretty focused. You couldn't leave or enter the academy without passing through a gate that was covered with sandbags, and for the first several weeks after 9/11 Marine sentries fully armed with body armor, and the gates were covered by machine guns.

We were not going to let suicide bombers get in. We had patrol boats on the Severn River and in Chesapeake Bay, ensuring that we wouldn't have a landing party come in and slaughter the midshipmen. So we were ready for battle there. And you know, sadly some folks thought we overreacted, but it would have taken only one suicide bomber, and we would have gotten credit for a lot of proper preparation.

The academic curriculum at the Naval Academy is almost second to none in the country in terms of producing engineers and individuals who are morally, ethically, and in terms of character development, ready to lead. But what the curriculum hadn't done was create a focused examination of the human factors in combat.

 We didn't need to at that particular moment because we weren't at war. Suddenly we're in two wars, and it was important to me, because I had been teaching this and studying it for most of my adult life, it was important to me that we try to make every dimension now of the midshipman experience relevant back to their inherent moral responsibility to be prepared to lead sailors and Marines. And whether it was as, I had been commissioned by the Marine Corps to create a martial arts program for the Marine Corps in my previous tour, just before I went to the Academy, I introduced the martial arts program into the curriculum at the Naval Academy. The idea being I want the midshipmen to be thinking about martial arts.

We created a course called human factors in combat, which I intended ultimately to be a course that would be taken by all seniors, what they call First Class Midshipmen. And as part of that course, they were reading about the literature of war in the context of, this is what the human experience in combat is like.

This is—this is what fatigue is like in combat. This is what your first exposure to death and dying actually looks like. Because again, if you believe, as I did, that their first experience shouldn't be a personal experience, I had a moral obligation to get them ready. And one of the things that we did was to break the class.

We only had one class and I departed to go. We're going to go ultimately to the Office of Secretary of Defense to East Asia. But we broke the class down into four-person teams, and off they went to surgical units, hospitals, where they would spend a day or two on the weekends in the emergency rooms.

Because I wanted them to see, the carnage that they would have to confront. Now, not everybody's going to be a grunt. Not everybody's going to be an infantryman. Many of them were going to go, but they'd never see anybody more seriously injured than a sprained ankle.

But I didn't want, regardless, their first exposure to the realities of the horror of war to be a personal exposure. And so they would spend Friday and Saturday in the emergency rooms around Washington, D. C. You can imagine what they saw. And there's two reasons. One is I wanted to have the exposure. And the second reason and this was the infantry experience really was, I wanted them to see that there are people who can be very badly injured, very badly injured, but can still be saved.

Medicine is capable of bringing them back truly from the very brink of death. And that has an important playover effect in combat, so that you can have a confidence that even while you're taking casualties, somebody behind you is going to take care of them and save their lives. You need to press on with your mission as an officer leading troops in combat, whatever that may be.

Whether it's SEALs or you're driving a fighter at a target on the ground or you're leading an infantry unit of some form or another. So I wanted the brigade, as we're now facing the true reality of two major wars. I wanted the brigade to have a sense, first, this is very serious.

Second, they have a moral obligation to prepare themselves to be worthy of the privilege and the honor of leading sailors and Marines in combat. And third, to be personally prepared as well.

Patrick Spero: On that idea of the moral obligations I wanted to ask you if there was ever a, instance where the vision that you received from a superior was one that you disagreed with and how you dealt with that, both as somebody who had an obligation to follow orders in the military, but it might put you in an awkward position, whether it's tested your moral or ethical beliefs or you thought it was a bad decision, period.

General Allen: Well, from the moment—and I'll say this very quickly, and I think all the services do it the same way—from the moment you're commissioned, you are trained to disobey an illegal order. You are morally committed to disobeying an illegal order. Now if you think an order is illegal, you probably want to consult with some folks before you decide to disobey it publicly.

But then you may be confronted with orders or expectations that you think are improper. They may be legal. They may be ethical but you think for a whole variety of reasons, your own view of the environment, the tactical situation, whatever it might be, that this order is not going to get you where you want to go.

There's a lot of risk with this order that's unnecessary. It's maybe a gamble rather than a risk. As a general officer, I was faced with an instruction from Washington to do something on the battlefield in terms of releasing detainees that I was holding.

And these detainees had been serial murderers and rapists of the Afghan people, and they'd killed a lot of my troops. I said, I'm not going to do it. And the response was, you are going to do it. And I said, no, you find yourself a general who will follow this instruction and send him out here and bring me home. I am not going to do that.

And that was the end of the conversation. So I think that it wasn't an order that I was being given, but I was being given what was prefaced as the potential order that was coming. And I just said—now let me explain to you why I just reacted that way. Every single one of these people I'm holding is a murderer.

There's no question about this. This isn't a debated issue. These are all murderers. And they mostly murdered innocent civilians. And they mostly murdered Afghan women and children. And they killed a lot of my troops, they killed a lot of Afghan soldiers and police. So releasing them as a goodwill gesture isn't going to be what I do, just understand that.

So I wanted my explanation not to be an in your face disobedience. I wanted the explanation, first, to let them know I wasn't going to do it, but second, very importantly, to set them up for success by understanding that while they believe that it was a politically efficacious gesture to do this, in reality, we would all pay a much bigger price.

And that was part of my obligation, was to explain why I thought that that instruction was inappropriate at that particular moment. It wasn't illegal, but it was inappropriate.

Patrick Spero: And that's a fascinating story because it gets at both those that are closest to the situation and understanding it in a way that those perhaps further up the chain, whether in this case it's the military but in larger organizations might not be fully aware.

General Allen: There was no malevolence in, in the instruction. It was, as you pointed out very properly right now, their perspective on the situation did not benefit from my understanding of the situation, nor did it benefit from my explanation.

Once I explained the reality of what I was facing and the reality of what would happen if we did this, they very quickly backed off.

Patrick Spero: Yeah, and that's one of the other things in studying leadership that I've often come across, which is saying no itself is often not sufficient. If you give the reason for it, people often accept a no, even if they disagree with it, they can at least understand your reasoning and therefore, accept it in ways that if you just say, a strict no, raises, problems.

General Allen: Well if it's illegal, then you say no, and you don't have to give them an explanation at that point.

But it's useful to do that because they may not have intended to issue that order as they did. And they may also, by the way, have a different view that once they explain it back to you, you've, you've now seen what their reasoning was, and it isn't, it's now not an illegal order in your mind.

But there comes a time, frankly—we, we call it throwing your stars on the table.  There comes a time when if you cannot execute this order and your choices are either execute an order that you believe is either morally wrong or illegal or resigning, you throw your stars on the table.

Patrick Spero: Oh, you were a general at that point?

General Allen: I was.

Patrick Spero: Wow. Amazing story. Thank you for that.

I want to follow up with a couple more questions about your scholarship. And you mentioned teaching international relations. And one of the questions I really wanted to ask you about was how a country should think about leadership.

So far, we've talked a lot about individual leadership, but we often talk about the United States’s role in the world. It is the superpower, obviously faces a number of threats to that position right now, and how should a country think about exercising leadership.

General Allen: This nation has been great, at least from World War II on—it's always been a great nation, but it's been great during the period of World War II, and the Cold War, and the aftermath, not because of the numbers of carrier strike groups but because of our capacity to create alliances.

If you drive around capitals of many countries in the world, as I have, early in the morning on your way to a meeting or something, one of the things that you'll discover pretty quickly is there are long lines outside the American embassy of people desperately wanting to get a visa to come to the United States in some form or another.

Now, you're not going to see any lines outside the Russian embassy. The lines are very short in front of the Chinese embassy, although they're getting longer actually. There is a sense in the world that America stands for something. And, are we critical of ourselves? Are they critical of us? Yes, they are.

We've had some pretty spectacular policy failures. But on the whole the world is far more secure, far more prosperous, far more capable, because of American leadership in the 20th and 21st century than without it. And just imagine, as a thought exercise for your listeners, what this world would be like if the United States had not led the Cold War, if the United States had not led really in COVID in many respects. And we deserve a lot of criticism because the global South suffered a lot because of our focus. But we also did a lot to help the rest of the world when the Chinese, for example, was trying to leverage their moderately effective vaccine on their own behalf with regard to international relations, at our expense and at the expense of our European partners.

So there is a sense in the world that while there are flaws in American leadership, American leadership is essential right now. I fly from here to another part of the country to help advise a company on its artificial intelligence. I'll be meeting tonight with a number of folks from major tech companies to talk about embracing artificial intelligence for the security of our country.

The United States is leading in that process and we are solitary leaders in the context of using these technologies to defend ourselves and our allies, our democracy, and our values. So just that alone speaks to the essential dimension of American leadership in the global environment today.

Patrick Spero: And looking at the future, what threats—not external, I think we can identify the nations and groups that might pose threats to American power. Internally, what are some challenges that the United States faces that are going to affect its international relations?

General Allen: Well I think this administration and probably all administrations would say it if they were thoughtful about it, but this administration specifically said that our international relations are a function, the success of them are a function of their capacity to appeal to the American middle class.

The American middle class has been under enormous pressures and stresses. Flatline income improvement, challenges associated with employment, although employment is better than it's been for many, many years. These difficulties, these economic difficulties have fallen disproportionately on the populations of color. They have fallen on our Native population disproportionately. We, as a nation, have to understand that our success as a country and our success as a people has to be a success for everyone. So, a commitment to social justice, a commitment to equity, a commitment to ensure that all components of our society, however they are measured in whatever form they take, however they're described, has equal access to the benefits of this country.

And whether that's broadband—which so many of our children and populations of color either had no access to the hardware or access to broadband that gave them the capacity to be networked in to education opportunities, to their fellow citizens. I mean, just that alone, resolving that, empowers a huge amount of our population to be productively contributory to the ultimate success of our country.

So that's just one example. As we master technologies that can deal with our climate issues—you know, the United States is becoming a poster child for what a climate can do to a country. You know, we have fire years, and the temperature of the water is so high in the eastern—southeastern part of the United States and in the Atlantic. At the ferocity of the storms and the speed with which they turn and the moisture that they drop, their capacity to drive surge, saltwater surges inland. We've never seen anything like that before. The ferocity of the storms inland, the flooding in the central part of the country. These are all things we've got to get our hands around and problem is they're not politically aligned to do this.

There are large elements of our body politic that deny that this is a human caused crisis. Look, we've gotta move past that issue. The crisis is here. Whether I caused it, or they caused it, or no one caused it, the crisis is here. And if we don't deal with it, this is the juggernaut that is the great challenge to the United States.

We can handle the Chinese, and we can handle the Russians. They're handling each other. That's not, for me, the great threat to America. The great threat to America is the coming climate crisis. And when you think about the enormous tragedy we just saw in Hawaii, or when you think about the hurricanes that are bearing down on the Gulf Coast and on the East Coast of the United States, the problem, of course, is the economic devastation that that inflicts disproportionately on the lower portions of our society in terms of income, the bottom quintile of our society. They can't move after a crisis like this and they can't afford insurance in the next few years. So we've got to come to grips with this because this will have a disproportionate effect upon the stability of our very society.

So, yeah, I'm, I'm conscious of the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians and the North Koreans and the terrorists. We've got people that can handle that. But we haven't yet organized ourselves effectively to deal with climate. And there are bright spots. There are people really committed to it.

We have a lot of political attention to it, but we also have a lot of political negativity that subtracts from our capacity to focus on it as well.

Patrick Spero: Yeah, that's great. So you also mentioned AI and I wanted to ask you about that because you were publishing and talking about artificial intelligence before it was on every evening headline show and everybody was talking about it.

In my field, which is the academy, AI is generally dismissed because everyone's afraid about what it's gonna mean for students cheating and all these other things. I think a lot of the coverage is about the dangers of AI and tends to be negative. So I wanted to ask you what you saw the future of AI is in the military, but also more generally in our society.

General Allen: Well, I'm actually going to a dinner tonight, a very small dinner of some fairly senior folks to talk about that very issue.

What happens if our military isn't aggressive in adopting AI when all of our enemies are? And that's not insignificant consideration, frankly. But more broadly, I think AI is one of the great technological breakthroughs of the modern era, not just the 21st or the 20th century, it's the modern era.

I mean, it takes its place alongside electricity and maybe even more. People are worried about generative AI because of the potential for cheating and those kinds of issues. And I think that there's a reality to that, which if unconstrained can be considered a limitation to how it could be employed.

But often now, for example, when I'm confronted with a question on something I haven't thought deeply about, I go straight to the generative AI and I ask it that question. And it, in 15 seconds, gives me 800 to a thousand words of relatively coherent text. Not that I'll then turn in, but it gives me footnotes and it gives me citations that helps me in 15 seconds with research that might have taken hours in the past.

So I think this has accelerated our capacities to deal with problems. It's accelerated our capacity to do very, very serious medical research, for example. When you think about what AI can do in drug discovery. We're using natural language processing into which we can feed the sum total of written research, unstructured data, written research that exists for hundreds of years to include now the data that we're harvesting as a matter of course. The capacity for us now to be able to see in x- rays, aberrations, very earliest indications of an aberration or an anomaly which might have been missed before because it had a pair of human eyes looking at the x ray and couldn't see it. But now that aberration is found long before it's a stage one. Even before stage one cancer and far earlier than it might be a very serious disease.

We have the capacity now just in the medical realm for breakthroughs that we couldn't even imagined five years ago much less 50 years ago. The question really isn't whether it's good or bad. The question is who's employing it and most technologies really are neutral. You don't build evil into the algorithm. You can, but most times we don't. We build an algorithm, which then is employed in parent to the character of who the master of the algorithm is, and that can be for good or it could be for bad.

So for us, the challenge is first and foremost, how do we employ these technologies for good to the good of humanity? And how do we constrain these technologies in ways that regulate the application of artificial intelligence, generative AI, biotechnology, high performance computing, all of these things are enormous breakthroughs for the future. And all of them hold great promise for humanity and for the American people and for the populations of our allies.

But there are evildoers out there that will use biotechnology to, to bioengineer a plague which we could suffer millions of casualties for. Now, we might not be able to do a thing about that, but we can certainly keep that from accidentally occurring in our own society through the right kinds of legislative and regulatory processes.

I'm not afraid of the technology. I've seen it applied. I've seen it where it can be used for good. And I have great confidence that with the right kinds of constructive leadership in principle based societies, that we can use this generally for the good. And I, so I'm optimistic, frankly.

Patrick Spero: I was going to ask you if you could imagine the future of the military with AI assistance, how is that going to affect leadership?

General Allen: Yeah, look, it's a really important issue. I've been writing about this a lot just recently. In fact, tonight's going to be part of a conversation about this. Artificial intelligence has the capacity to accelerate various dimensions of warfare, conflict and warfare. Conflict is the large-scale state to state or multi state to multi state competition, if you will.

And it occurs in multiple domains, whether it's information or cyber or space. And periodically, that conflict breaks out into war in the physical domain. Our opponents are going to use artificial intelligence in ways that accelerate virtually every dimension of military command and control, or intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination, and the application of fires.

There is a dimension of this called lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). And we are, as we face technological superiority, as we have now, and as we face the reality that if we approach AI with an intention to do as much as we can within our military, to automate and to give autonomy, cognitive capacity to our capabilities, so it actually thinks, we're going to be faced with the reality of having to decide where the human is in this process, because in the end you have, as Clausewitz said, the character of war, which is about the technology and the, nature of war, which is about the human role in all of this, and the more pervasive and the faster the character of war moves, the greater the challenge that the human dimension faces in intervening in this process in a way that is consistent with our values.

For example, we don't want a system of drones, or a swarm of drones, making autonomous, unilateral decisions on taking life or destroying critical infrastructure. So for us, having a human in the loop, where once that drone, based on intelligence that we have fed it, has gone through the process of target identification and target acquisition, before that drone, as we say, pickles off the Hellfire missile, a human says yes or no.

That's in the loop. A human on the loop is a human that's observing everything and just intervenes when he doesn't—he or she doesn't like it. Our enemies aren't going to do that. Our enemies are not going to be predisposed to, because their values based in their processes to interpose a human dimension in the final decision about taking a human life or destroying critical infrastructure.

We're taking a shot at the airport, we're taking a shot at the dam, we're taking a shot at the electrical facilities, which keep hospitals going, et cetera. They're not going to care about that. We have to care about that. But the cost of caring about that is we may be moving slower than our enemy.

So this is a process of moving us towards something called hyperwar, which is moving so fast that the traditional historic role of the human in the decision making process of taking life and destroying things is now profoundly changed by the fact that there are cognitive processes occurring in this, that used to be done by humans that are now being done by algorithms.

Patrick Spero: Yeah. It sounds like it's a video game unleashed on humanity in some ways.

General Allen: This could easily be.

Patrick Spero: I just have a couple, you know, final questions and I really appreciate all the time you've taken for us. As you know, the Washington Leadership Institute here, you've taught with us, tries to teach leadership through the lens of history, especially the, the lessons that Washington learned and the means in which he made decisions and mobilized both troops and people to support a cause.

So, I didn't know if you could reflect on your own career and think about are there any figures, historical or otherwise, that were, you know, essential to you understanding what leadership meant?

General Allen: Well, Washington was one. I was born at Fort Belvoir.

So, I was born four miles from here. So, I grew up literally in the shadow of George Mason and George Washington, and my daughter went to James Madison. So the, the founders of the country and the framers of the Constitution, I get these guys, and they solved everything in many respects at a moral level except slavery, and that took the next war.

And it's in that war where U.S. Grant became to me one of the most important figures in American history. He was a flawed character. He resigned from the army as a captain just ahead of being cashiered over his alcohol problems. But when he came back in the service, he was a different man.

And he saw in ways that many of the Union officers, and many people in America didn't see. He saw early along, and perhaps even before Abraham Lincoln, that this was a war not just to unite the states. This was a war to free ‘em.

And he was committed to the elimination of slavery as a general officer, and then he was committed in the aftermath of the Civil War when Andrew Johnson really threw it all away after Lincoln had been assassinated. Both as the commander of the army—he opposed many of the things that Andrew Johnson was attempting to do in the South, or not do in the South, as the white supremacists were once again organizing against the recently freed Black population down there, and then as President.

And he was committed, ultimately, to fulfilling Lincoln's vision of what would happen in the aftermath of the Civil War, which was to empower a freed race and to enfranchise them, and give them a chance in the future.

You know, the cruelest round fired in the Civil War was the one that killed Abraham Lincoln. Because his vision of what this country could become was never achieved, because in essence, Andrew Johnson really turned the South back over to those who had been the slavers.

Grant put everything on the line as a general. He put everything on the line as the commander in the aftermath, immediately aftermath of the Civil War, and he put everything on the line to deal with this massive social inequity that would ultimately become Jim Crow. And he gets a lot of credit as a pretty good commander. He doesn't get nearly enough credit for the leadership he personally exerted to make this difference.

And so, when I look out across people who were good military commanders, he was deeply, morally committed to this issue, at the same time he was militarily committed to the defeat of the South, to the ending of slavery and to the enfranchisement of a large segment of the population that had been enslaved, to make them part of the mainstream of America.

Ultimately, we fail. We failed. But it didn't, we didn't fail because he failed. We failed because the enormity of it was never properly dealt with at the end of the Civil War.

Patrick Spero: Last question. Looking back at your career, are there any lessons that you learned yourself, maybe mistakes that you made or decisions that you, in retrospect, look back and wish you had done differently?

General Allen: Oh, every day. You know, I think I made some decisions more quickly than I probably should have. You know, the decision making spectrum runs along a timeline, if you will, from the decision you make immediately—it's called an executive decision, to the decision that you make after due deliberation and input from others and staff, that's called the deliberate decision.

And I probably made decisions sometimes too quickly. And in retrospect, you know, in my mind, I always realized from my study of history and my attempt to emulate military leaders, that often in battle, time is everything. So the more quickly you can make the decision and move out to accomplish it, the more likely it is you'll be ahead of your opponent.

This is the hyperwar idea. But as I became more senior, and I had less occasion to make a quick decision that influenced the hundred people around me, as opposed to a quick decision that influenced the hundred thousand people around me, I probably should have taken a little more time with my staff and others to seek the advice that I should have taken.

Patrick Spero: That's interesting. Because one of the things that I've studied is that oftentimes, they say decision making, decisions might be right, but it's the process sometimes is just as important as the decision.

General Allen: And that goes to the point, it all occurs along a timeline. If you've got the time and you have the capacity to apply a process, then the deliberate decision will more likely deliver you where you want to be.

But if you don't have the time and you've got to make a decision, the executive decision gets you out ahead of the issue or gets you out ahead of the enemy. The challenge becomes with all of the vast experience that one hopes to acquire in their life, is being able to see immediately along that timeline where you should focus.

So sometimes you might make a decision, but take a little bit of advice, but you're gonna make it fast and off you go, or you don't have to, you just don't, don't have to make that decision. I worked for, was a senior aide and eventually the military secretary for General Krulak, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps, and he was a magnificent leader, as was General Jones and some of the other great commandants we had, but General Krulak, he used to have an acronym, he called it NIDBIT, "no decision before it's time."

And there will be people who are confronted with the need for a decision, and make, it when in reality they didn't have to make it then. And waiting gave them the ability to make a more informed decision, assemble the resources to make sure that it actually will work when you make the decision for the implementation, et cetera.

And I learned a lot about, don't make the decision because you're confronted with it right on the spot. Take a second, step back, determine whether you have to make this decision right now, because you might not have to. And not making it now sets you up for greater success later. So NIDBIT. And it wasn't bad advice for me as a young colonel.

Patrick Spero: That's great. I'm glad we can now share it with thousands more who are going to tune in and listen.

Thank you, General Allen, for taking your time. This was a fantastic conversation.

General Allen: Thank you. It was an honor to be with you today and to be back at Mount Vernon.

Lindsay Chervinsky: Whether he was commanding troops in combat or leading diverse teams in the nonprofit world, General Allen emphasizes creating a clear vision, adhering to strong values, and maintaining a personal connection with those he leads. His reflections not only offer valuable lessons for aspiring leaders, but also underscore the timeless nature of effective leadership principles.

Next time: General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts explore the art of leadership and what leaders of today can learn from the past.

Andrew Roberts: 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.

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 guest, General John Allen, for joining us.

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.