If all this sounds similar to our description of the IDF’s role in fostering Israel’s entrepreneurial culture, it should. While a majority of Israeli entrepreneurs were profoundly influenced by their stint in the IDF, a military background is hardly common in Silicon Valley or widespread in the senior echelons of corporate America.
As Israeli entrepreneur Jon Medved—who has sold several start-ups to large American companies—told us, “When it comes to U.S. military résumés, Silicon Valley is illiterate. It’s a shame. What a waste of the kick-ass leadership talent coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The American business world doesn’t quite know what to do with them.”11
This gulf between business and the military is symptomatic of a wider divide between America’s military and civilian communities, which was identified by the leadership of West Point over a decade ago. In the summer of 1998, Lieutenant General Daniel Christman, the superintendent of West Point, and General John Abizaid, commandant at West Point, were driving on the New Jersey turnpike and pulled off at a roadside food and gas station mall for a quick meal at Denny’s. Despite the clearly visible stars on their Class B green army uniforms, the hostess smiled and enthusiastically expressed her gratitude to Generals Christman and Abizaid for the cleanliness of the public parks. She thought they were staff of the parks department.12
Despite the military leadership’s outreach, too few young Americans today feel any connection to their contemporaries in the military, let alone have actually ever known one who has served. Even after two new war fronts, today only 1 in 221 Americans are in active-duty service. Compare that to the end of the Second World War, when 1 in 10 Americans were serving. Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation, told us that after World War II a young man who had not served would have a hard time getting a good job in business. “There must be something wrong with him” was how Brokaw characterized a typical reaction of employers back then to nonvets looking for private-sector jobs.13
But the way David Lipsky describes it, when the draft ended in 1975, after the Vietnam War, an opposite climate began to settle in: “Civilian culture and military culture shook hands, exchanged phone numbers, and started to lose track of each other.”
The economic implications of this drift were driven home to us by Al Chase, who runs an executive recruitment firm focused on the placement of U.S. military officers in private enterprises ranging from small start-ups to large Fortune 100 companies such as PepsiCo and GE. Having placed hundreds of vets, he knows what kind of entrepreneurial acumen is formed by battlefield experience. According to Chase, the Cold War military was different. Young officers could go an entire career without acquiring real battlefield experience. But the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have changed that. Almost every young officer has served multiple tours.14
As we’ve seen firsthand in Iraq, the post-9/11 wars have largely been counterinsurgencies, where critical decisions have been made by junior commanders. General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, for example, was predicated on U.S. troops’ not just being present and patrolling local Iraqi residential neighborhoods in order to provide security for Iraqi civilians but actually living in the neighborhoods. This is different from the way most U.S. military troops have fought in earlier wars, including in the early years of the Iraq war. Back then, U.S. soldiers and marines lived in forward operating bases (FOBs), enormous self-contained complexes that roughly replicate bases back in the States. A typical FOB could house tens of thousands of troops—if not more. But the soldiers and marines in neighborhood bases in Iraq since 2007 have numbered in only the tens or low hundreds. This alone gives smaller units much more independence from the division in their daily operations, and the junior commander is given more authority to make decisions and improvise.
Nathaniel Fick was a marine captain who fought in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, before pursuing a dual-degree program at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government and penning a book about his experiences called One Bullet Away. He told us that he was trained to think about fighting the “three-block war.” In Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, “Marines could be passing out rice on one city block, doing patrols to keep the peace on another block, and engaged in a full-on firefight on the third block. All in the same neighborhood.”15
Junior commanders in America’s new wars find themselves playing the role of small-town mayor, economic-reconstruction czar, diplomat, tribal negotiator, manager of millions of dollars’ worth of assets, and security chief, depending on the day.
And, as in the IDF, today’s junior commanders are also more inclined to challenge senior officers in ways they typically would not have in the past. This is partly from serving multiple tours and having watched their peers get killed as a result of what junior officers often believe are bad decisions, lack of strategy, or lackluster resources provided by higher-ups. As American military analyst Fred Kagan explained it, U.S. soldiers and marines “have caught up with the Israelis in the sense that a junior guy who has been deployed multiple times will dispense with the niceties towards superiors.” There is a correlation between battlefield experience and the proclivity of subordinates to challenge their commanders.
Given all this battlefield entrepreneurial experience, the vets coming out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are better prepared than ever for the business world, whether building start-ups or helping lead larger companies through the current turbulent period.
Al Chase advises vets not to be intimidated by others in the job market who have already been in the business world and know the “nomenclature.” Vets, he said, bring things to the table that their business peers could only dream about, including a sense of proportionality—what is truly a life-or-death situation and what is something less than that; what it takes to motivate a workforce; how to achieve consensus under duress; and a solid ethical base that has been tested in the crucible of combat.
Brian Tice, an infantry officer, was a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps when he decided that he wanted to make the transition to business. By that time he was thirty years old and had completed five deployments—including assignments in Haiti and Afghanistan—and was in the middle of his sixth, in Iraq. He wrote his essays for his applications to Stanford’s MBA program on a laptop in a burnt-out Iraqi building near the Al Asad Air Base, in the violent Al Anbar Province of western Iraq. He had to complete his application at odd hours because his missions always took place in the middle of the night. As an operations officer for a unit of 120 marines, Tice had to build the “package” for each operation against insurgents and al Qaeda—determine how much force, how many marines, and how much air support were needed. So the only time he could rest and plan future operations was during the day.16
Based over eight thousand miles from Stanford’s campus, he couldn’t meet the school’s requirement for an in-person interview. So the admissions department scheduled one over the phone, which he did between sniper operations and raids, while standing in an open expanse of desert. Tice asked the admissions officer to excuse the blaring noise of helicopters flying overhead, and had to cut the interview short when mortars landed nearby.