Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir, 464 pp., $29.95.

UNLIKE TOLSTOY’S families, uninteresting books are uninteresting in their own way; interesting books all operate on several levels. Retired U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal’s My Share of the Task operates on three levels: first, the level of military memoir; second, as a detailed, even intimate, inside perspective on the concurrent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and third, and perhaps most important historically, as an account of the U.S. military’s transition from traditional wars between nation-states to the unconventional and irregular insurgency warfare of the early twenty-first century.

More than one of the endorsers whose words appear on the book’s back cover compare My Share of the Task favorably to Ulysses Grant’s historic memoir. And, at least on the third level of this book, they are right in doing so. This is a scrupulous, though unvarnished, account of a military life as an heir to an army family, a West Point graduate in June 1976, and ultimately as a four-star general officer in command of the NATO-sponsored International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan beginning in June 2009. McChrystal’s impressive career spanned one of the most complex periods of U.S. military history and operates, intentionally or not, as a guide through that history. As he says in the book’s foreword: “The Army I knew as a child, the one I experienced as a young officer, and the one I left in 2010 were as different as the times they resided in.”

Because McChrystal either maintained a detailed diary or made countless calls to colleagues and friends for dates, times and places, his narrative is nailed down with specifics. Shifting bases as he rises through the command structure, McChrystal’s book meticulously informs the reader as to where he is (where more often than not his long-suffering wife, Annie, is not) and who his colleagues in arms are in each venue. He assumes blame when things inevitably go wrong but is quick to share credit, almost to a fault, with those in a colleague or staff capacity.

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, McChrystal remembers “my mariners, souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me,” and possesses a kind word and generous remark for all who served with him along the way.

It would be a great surprise if this book does not become required reading at U.S. (and perhaps other) military academies and even more so in the network of command and staff colleges for rising officers. There is much to be learned here about strategy, tactics and doctrine, as well as the necessity for their adaptability in often rapidly changing circumstances. This is especially true as our military has been transitioning into an era marked by increased integration of services and commands and the rise of special operations. As proof, one need look no further than the relatively recent creation of the U.S. Special Operations Command, one of our most important joint combat commands.

The hallmarks of a soldier’s life, the first layer of this memoir, are duty, discipline and ambition. McChrystal’s father was a Vietnam veteran, a captain when the son was born, who would rise to become a major general. That McChrystal would attend and graduate from West Point was virtually assumed. The memoir’s early chapters trace his path through the staff assignments at various army bases to his inevitable progress up the command structure from company to brigade to battalion and eventually to leadership in newly formed multiservice special-operations combat units such as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Various academic detours to command and staff colleges and even a stint at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York broadened his horizons. Along the way he encountered and traced parallel career courses with other ambitious, fast-rising officers such as David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno.

There are invaluable insights into military thinking, not least the struggle between the destructiveness of conflict and the desire to be engaged when it occurs. Six months after he left the Army Rangers for the Naval War College, he missed the elite unit’s participation in Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama: “Soldiers don’t love war but often feel professional angst when they have to watch one from the sidelines.”

MCCHRYSTAL’S RANGER and other experiences qualified him to join a new task force in 1990, a joint special-operations command unit involving multiple services. He thus emerged at the point of the spear in the burgeoning special-operations approach to irregular warfare. The timing coincided with the winding down of the Cold War and the rise of low-intensity conflict. It would take a new generation of officers, and an even newer generation of national-security policy makers, to appreciate the historic transformation that was occurring. Nowhere would this become more evident than in the insurgencies that emerged from the postinvasion occupation of Baghdad and in the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Setting the stage for those insurgencies, Osama bin Laden unified a host of relatively minor conflicts throughout the Middle East and Asia into an Al Qaeda–led struggle against the United States and its stationing of troops in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia during and after the first Gulf War. Then came 9/11, and the world changed. The scramble to mount a force to capture bin Laden and crush Al Qaeda “felt dangerously ad hoc,” McChrystal reckons, and our “failure to trap bin Laden in Tora Bora in December and the messy Operation Anaconda . . . seemed to validate this concern.” Here as elsewhere, McChrystal refuses to pin the tail on the political donkey, but his message is implicit. He astutely observes:

I had a nagging feeling that a whole world of Afghan power politics . . . was churning outside our view. I felt like we were high-school students who had wandered into a mafia-owned bar, dangerously unaware of the tensions that filled the room and the authorities who controlled it.

He adds: “The strategy to help build Afghan institutions was well conceived, but the West’s effort was poorly informed, organized, and executed.” In referring to “the West,” he is clearly implicating the political and diplomatic, not the military, command structure. And as his and our government’s attention turned from Kabul to Baghdad, he recognizes yet again how unsophisticated and politically naive we were. The romantic balloon of neoconservative fascination with Iraqi expatriates quickly burst: “I came to believe [that] the inaccuracy of Iraqi expatriates’ claims about their ability to marshal opposition to Saddam should have made us question their overall credibility.” Three-quarters of McChrystal’s memoir is given to his service in senior command positions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which gave him a window into political decision making. His skepticism rose with the increasing transparency of the window as his military roles became more important.

Between McChrystal’s West Point graduation in 1976, the year following the end of the Vietnam War, and the post-9/11 dual engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military, and especially the army, had to rebuild itself—not only structurally but also, and more so, mentally. The U.S. military is not accustomed to losing, and Vietnam was seen as a loss. That experience caused young officers such as McChrystal to study the changing nature of conflict and to call into question the applicability of traditional nation-state military structures, weapons and doctrines to indigenous, postcolonial civil wars and the rise of so-called nonstate actors on the global scene.

Thus, the period of almost exactly twenty-five years between the end of the Vietnam War and the events of 9/11 saw the U.S. military rebuilding its morale at a time when it was also beginning the painful transition from “the most powerful nation on earth” in traditional military terms to a nation facing standoffs with more primitively equipped indigenous forces in two theaters. McChrystal was at or near the center of this historic transition, and that is what makes his memoir so valuable and important.

In this regard, he should consider a more philosophical account of lessons learned during this period, which could serve as a guidebook for the continuing transition. This memoir does not contain such a gold mine but rather nuggets of valuable ore represented by critical experiences along the way in both theaters. The two central military themes woven throughout are “jointness”—the integration of multiservice command structures and organization (often against stiff traditional service resistance, which he does not focus on)—and the expansion of special operations, notoriously so in the SEAL raid on the bin Laden compound.

BY EARLY 2004, the joint special-operations task force originally conceived in 1980, and in which McChrystal first served in 1990, had become JSOC, and he became the first head of this special-operations command. Its principal mission was in many ways a precursor to the dramatic elimination of Osama bin Laden years later. In several chapters McChrystal documents in considerable detail the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of the jihadist insurgency in Iraq, who led the anti-Shia forces, created terrible bloodshed, and prevented even preliminary stability and national unity. This narrative would provide a movie script rivaling Zero Dark Thirty. By now, McChrystal was becoming a sophisticated political analyst, as his summary of the motives and mentality of the Zarqawi-led jihad demonstrates.

But McChrystal is critical of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (waterboarding, sleep deprivation and so on) and the Bush administration’s initial insistence on separating the conflict in Iraq from the broader counterterrorism fight. That separation would soon disappear, and Iraq would become the centerpiece of the administration’s “war on terrorism.” He is equally critical of the chaos in the Baghdad Green Zone when he arrived in 2003 and the resentment of the CIA toward JSOC’s role in special operations, believed by the agency at that time to be its special domain. It is a measure of the military’s slowness to adapt to the new world of counterinsurgency that the CIA, meant to collect and analyze information, remade itself into a quasi-military special-operations organization.

McChrystal is fond of T. E. Lawrence, the famous Lawrence of Arabia, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom he revisited “countless times,” as much as anything because he saw himself in Lawrence’s shoes as he tried to corral disputatious Iraqi forces, “more tribes than modern military units.” And he demonstrates a human sensitivity more common to our warriors than most civilians realize. Accompanying a Ranger company in bloody Ramadi, he observes a young Ranger pull up a chair for an elderly Iraqi to sit in as a dozen other Iraqis are ordered face down on the ground. Then a four-year-old Iraqi boy, confused, joined the men and placed his face on the ground. Recalling the episode later, McChrystal mused that as he watched what must have been the humiliation of the boy’s father, “I thought, not for the first time: It would be easy for us to lose.”

This thought raises a broader question rarely addressed by senior policy makers in Washington or senior officers in Iraq or Afghanistan: What does it mean “to win”? How do you define “victory” in venues where former European powers finally gave up and left? Is it the minimalist goal of refusing to be driven out by indigenous forces? Or is it the maximalist goal of establishing stable and enduring democratic governments and societies? Though he does not address these questions directly or at length, McChrystal comes much closer than most when he shifts his flag back to Afghanistan as commander of ISAF. As he landed in Kabul in June 2009 to assume command, he Velcroed on his four-star insignia.

Virtually all U.S. and allied operations produced at least a “steady trickle of dead Afghans,” which generated little attention and were an “afterthought.” Outraged at this casualness and its disconnection from the purpose of our presence, he writes:

I’d watched as a focus on the enemy in Afghanistan had made little dent in the insurgency’s strength over the past eight years and, conversely, had served to antagonize Afghans. Not only was Afghans’ allegiance critical, but I did not think we would defeat the Taliban solely by depleting their ranks. We would win by making them irrelevant by limiting their ability to influence the lives of Afghans, positively or negatively. We needed to choke off their access . . . to the population.

A more thoughtful definition of winning or victory is difficult to find.

As he traveled Afghanistan, as he had done as JSOC commander in Iraq, McChrystal refused to wear body armor, carry a weapon or wear sunglasses. He understood symbols and also the negative impact these symbols represented to citizens in both countries. From his account, the higher in rank and more responsible he became, the more sensitive he became to the noncombat side of our military presence and the greater the burden he felt to dispel images of occupier or conqueror. After a lengthy period of touring, watching and listening, he concluded that his job and that of ISAF were “as much about building Afghan confidence as killing Taliban insurgents.”

With more rank and responsibility, he also became more aware of the political, social and cultural dimensions of his mission and presence. It is interesting to watch his subconscious, or at least unarticulated, transition over many years and deployments from first-class warrior to seasoned commander and then sophisticated uniformed diplomat. It is a transition few senior-grade officers make with much success and marks the mind of a man willing to watch, learn and expand in scope and outlook.

McChrystal was able to make the transition, with notable difficulties, as much as anything because he was fully aware of its necessity. The warrior’s code is based on separation of civilian and military command and the subordination of the latter to the former. It is possible to rise to two- or even three-star rank and avoid much of the messy world of politics, including political journalism. But, as many have proved, it is virtually impossible to do so with the fourth star on your shoulder. As McChrystal’s experience proves, a senior commander at his level deals at least as much with political realities, both in the nation he serves and the nations in which he serves, as he does with military realities. If nothing else, congressional committees often summon service chiefs and combat commanders to testify, and they are challenged to state where their judgments may differ from their civilian superiors, including the commander in chief.

“The process of formulating, negotiating, articulating, and then prosecuting even a largely military campaign involved politics at multiple levels that were impossible to ignore,” he concludes. He later continues: “As a professional soldier I was committed to implementing to the best of my ability any policy selected by civilian leadership.” One seriously doubts whether, on reflection, he might stand by such a doctrine were an unhinged set of civilian leaders to emerge with designs beyond the military means available to achieve them.

And this too often is the rub: civilian commanders, up to and including the commander in chief, expect field commanders to meet military and political goals with fewer resources than their professional judgment tells them are required. After making their case and being denied, usually on political grounds, for more troops and support, the commanders in the field are expected to salute and say, “Yes, sir.” The history of American warfare is replete with instances of mismatches between political expectations and military resources available. And a commander is torn between the political duty of obeying his often-misguided civilian superiors and his moral duty to protect his troops.

By late 2009, toward the end of the Obama administration’s first full year in office, the struggle over the definition of victory in Afghanistan reemerged in the context of the debate over another surge of troops and the dimensions of such a surge. The discussions that took place via teleconferences between the White House and the senior military and diplomatic figures in the embassy compound in Kabul focused on linguistics. Was it our goal to “defeat” or “degrade” the Taliban? McChrystal defined the mission as: “Defeat the Taliban: Secure the Population.” Under questioning from an unidentified White House participant (it may have been Vice President Biden) as to why the Taliban had to be crushed or destroyed, McChrystal responded that defeat in military doctrine, since Sun Tzu, was rendering the enemy incapable of achieving its goals. “I never thought we’d crush the Taliban in a conventional military sense,” he writes. “I hoped to defeat it by making it irrelevant.”

MCCHRYSTAL’S BOOK contains many unaddressed undercurrents that require further thought, if for no other reason than that future Iraqs and Afghanistans are just an insurgency or terrorist attack away. It should be instilled in four-star generals that retirement comes with a requirement to write lessons learned: What did we do right that deserves to enter our doctrine under similar conditions? What did we do wrong that should never be repeated? And why did we do it?

My Share of the Task will attract attention for lessons it may hold concerning that elusive standard called leadership. It is not a primer on this topic. McChrystal does not provide sustained reflections on the nature of leadership or its qualities. He does offer anecdotal accounts of ways in which he sought to lead his troops and his subordinate officers. And those are valuable anecdotes for this purpose. But he might have expanded, and still might, on leadership’s more profound aspects: ability to see over the horizon (the “vision thing”), ability to devise new policies, programs and methods to deal with anticipated changes, and finally the ability to persuade others that the old ways must give way to the new.

McChrystal’s military career traces the arc of transition from set-piece major battles that have characterized nation-state wars for three and a half centuries to the advent of a new kind of conflict, whose roots are centuries old but whose recent resurrection is characterized by low-intensity, largely urban, nonuniformed insurgencies whose adherents notoriously violate established rules of war. His career marks an extremely important era of transitional leadership. Already, national-security experts have judged his tenure in Afghanistan as “not a success.” But we still have not decided what “success” in that theater might realistically look like.

While insiders debate whether counterinsurgency, as practiced by generals such as McChrystal, Petraeus and others, is or should be the prevailing doctrine of twenty-first-century American warfare, realities on the ground in Afghanistans yet to come must be addressed in practical ways that will often differ from historical and traditional doctrines. The world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries requires experimentation, with all the uncertainties and likelihood of failure such experiments imply. A mature perspective will show that Stanley McChrystal was among the few willing to experiment in the service of his nation in an age of transition and transformation. That alone is a demonstration of leadership.

It is something of a comment on our times that McChrystal’s military career ended in controversy. All who followed his story in 2010 are familiar with the circumstances in which a journalist, invited to join a convivial evening with McChrystal, his wife and his senior staff, reported on unguarded remarks, which McChrystal later deemed “unacceptable,” casually critical of the Obama White House. The accuracy of that report remains in doubt. Nevertheless, he flew to Washington and offered his resignation, which the president promptly accepted. The entire incident occupies only a page and a half of his four-hundred-page memoir. But upon publication, this incident dominated the news in the New York Times and elsewhere.

My Share of the Task will take its place among books on leadership for a time—and perhaps for considerable time. But those looking for guidance on leadership might also ask why our society and culture dismiss leaders so casually. There seems to be a disjunction, a mismatch, between the search for leaders and demonstrations of leadership over a lifetime and the often-incidental reasons for dismissing them when they are presented. McChrystal makes no excuses. It is unclear whether he was even aware of the controversial remarks made during what seems to have been a crowded evening. Nevertheless, he accepts responsibility and metaphorically falls on his sword.

A mature nation can surely find a way to reconcile the needs of journalism with the preservation of serious leadership. At present, there seems to be no “give” in the system, no ability to weigh perceived transgressions against the larger scope and scale of command and leadership. McChrystal was right to tender his resignation. The president might have given more thought to rejecting it.

For McChrystal was and is a leader, one with invaluable experience at multiple levels of the changing nature of warfare and the transformation in our military structures and doctrines that those changes are going to require for some time to come. Replacement in his command in Afghanistan need not have required his dismissal from active-duty service in that rare capacity of wise man in a department, and even in a government, not overburdened with wise men and women. To their credit, Yale University and those responsible for his engagement there understand the value his lifetime of leadership experience offers to students who may themselves someday be called upon to demonstrate leadership in a variety of transformational environments.

I, for one, would like to meet him and thank him for his service.

Gary Hart is a former U.S. senator from Colorado.