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

who was out working on his weapons and gear, conducting maintenance
on our vehicles, or building demolition charges for the breacher, he
walked into our mission briefs wondering: What are we doing next? He
had no context for why we were doing the operation or how the next
tactical mission fit into the bigger picture of stabilizing and securing
Ramadi.
I realized now that, as their leader, I had failed to explain it to them.
Clearly, there was some level of strategic perspective and
comprehension that would only come with time and reflection. But I
could have done a far better job as a leader to understand for myself the
strategic impact of our operations and passed this insight to my troops.
When Jocko saw my reaction to the slide and the presentation he had
built, he too realized that he should have more fully detailed the strategic
impact of what we were doing and why. It was a realization for him that
even when a leader thinks his troops understand the bigger picture, they
very often have difficulty connecting the dots between the tactical
mission they are immersed in with the greater overarching goal.
Looking back on Task Unit Bruiser’s deployment to Ramadi, I
realized that the SEALs in Charlie Platoon who suffered the worst
combat fatigue, whose attitudes grew progressively more negative as the
months of heavy combat wore on, who most questioned the level of risk
we were taking on operations—they all had the least ownership of the
planning for each operation. Conversely, the SEAL operators who
remained focused and positive, who believed in what we were doing, and
who were eager to continue and would have stayed on beyond our six-
month deployment if they could—they all had some ownership of the
planning process in each operation. Even if they only controlled a small
piece of the plan—the route into or out of a target, the breach scene on