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

questions, our CO and his staff were working hard to get the information
they needed so that they could approve our plans, forward them up the
chain for further approval and enable us to launch on combat missions to
get after the enemy. I needed to check my negative attitude, which was
corrosive and ultimately only hampered our ability to operate.
I now accepted Jocko’s challenge full on. “You’re right,” I said. “I
can bitch about their questions and scrutiny all I want, but at the end of
the day, it gets us no closer to getting our operations approved. If I get
them the information they need and put the CO in his comfort zone with
what we are doing, we are going to be much more effective getting ops
approved, which will enable us to inflict greater damage on the bad guys
and win.”
“Exactly,” Jocko said.
From that day forward, we began a campaign of leading up the chain
of command. We provided extremely detailed mission-planning
documents and post-operational reports.
We pushed the understanding of this to our team leaders within the
platoon. We invited the CO, our command master chief, and other staff
to visit us in Ramadi and offered to take them along on combat
operations. Our command master chief accompanied us on several
missions. The more information we passed, the more our CO and staff
understood what we were trying to accomplish. He better appreciated our
detailed planning efforts, how we coordinated our quick reaction forces,
and the substantial lengths to which we went to mitigate the risks. The
CO grew more comfortable with our combat operations. He and his staff
developed trust in us. As a result, all the combat missions we submitted
received approval, which allowed Charlie Platoon and Task Unit Bruiser
to deliver huge impact on the battlefield.