Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

PowerPoint slides. In actual practice, we had only a few hours to plan for
our training exercises, so the long and detailed format invariably left us
far too little time. We wasted most of our efforts building slides and
neglected important pieces of the plan.
On my first deployment as a SEAL officer, we deployed to Baghdad,
Iraq. The war in Iraq at that time thrust many U.S. military units into
heavy combat. But I didn’t get to experience the flood of combat
operations as I had hoped. We spent most of our time providing security
for one of the top officials of the interim Iraqi government. And I spent
most of my time in the tactical operations center sitting at a desk making
phone calls, monitoring our team via radio, and building PowerPoint
slides. As SEAL officers, we were so inundated with PowerPoint that
some officers had patches made for their uniforms to jokingly designate
themselves “PowerPoint Rangers, 3,000 hours.” It was typical SEAL
humor to laugh at the misery.
Luckily, my executive officer saw the importance of getting his
young leaders into combat, and he tasked me to lead a small element of
SEALs in a series of sniper missions supporting a battalion of the
historic “Big Red One”—the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division—in the
city of Samarra. We were able to make a difference and lower the
number of attacks on U.S. Army Soldiers. But after three weeks, we only
had one confirmed kill on an enemy fighter and a couple more probable
kills. We coordinated with the Army units but didn’t really conduct any
detailed planning or briefing. If anything, I learned some bad habits
when it came to planning.
When I joined Task Unit Bruiser at SEAL Team Three and became
platoon commander for Charlie Platoon, I began working for Jocko. He
expected me (and my key leaders in Charlie Platoon) to utilize the