William McRaven - A Life of Moral Leadership in Public Service

A single person who influences even a few other people for the better can effect wide-ranging change. This is one of the precepts that retired four-star admiral William H. McRaven lives by. Over his 37-year career in the United States Navy, McRaven has demonstrated his bravery, daring, and steadfastness time and time again. On May 2, 2011, it was McRaven who informed President Barack Obama that Operation Neptune Spear had succeeded in killing Osama bin Laden, after completion of a plan McRaven had orchestrated. He was also involved in planning the American military operation that captured fugitive Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 and coordinating the Navy Seals’ 2009 dramatic rescue at sea of Captain Richard Phillips from the hands of Somali pirates.

Directing special ops and counterterrorism

McRaven, a native of North Carolina and the son of a World War II fighter pilot, grew up in Texas. He became a Navy SEAL and worked his way up through the ranks, graduating from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His master’s thesis became the 1996 book Spec Ops, a now-classic text outlining how simplicity, strategy, and commitment to mission helped win some of history’s key engagements. McRaven accepted increasingly critical top positions in the Joint Special Operations Command and Special Operations Command. He has worked in military leadership under both Republican and Democratic administrations, eventually serving as the ninth commander of the US Special Operations Command. In 2001, McRaven was serving as commander of Naval Special Warfare Group One. While recovering from severe injuries sustained in a nearly fatal 1,000-foot freefall parachute jump, he watched news footage of the Twin Towers’ fall in New York and the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11. He understood immediately that the country was more in need of strategic special operations than ever. As soon as he was physically able, McRaven was back in Washington as Deputy National Security Advisor in the George W. Bush administration. He additionally led strategic planning for the National Security Council Staff’s Office of Combating Terrorism. As a three-star admiral serving in Afghanistan as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, McRaven was known for putting himself on the line alongside his troops as they conducted high-stakes hunts for wanted terrorist leaders. It was one of those raids, Operation Neptune Spear, that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Speaking truth to power

Most recently, McRaven has brought his laser-sharp strategic focus, in-depth understanding of foundational American values, and his personal moral courage back into public life by engaging in principled dissent at key moments during the United States’ current crisis of leadership. In 2017, while serving as chancellor of the UT System, he began sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly vitriolic attacks on journalists who were simply doing their job of informing the American public. Then, in 2018, McRaven penned an open letter in defense of former CIA director John Brennan. The President had announced that Brennan's security clearance would be revoked, in what most observers saw as a heedless and egregious act of personal retaliation. Brennan had been a vocal critic of the president’s policies, actions, and temperament. As soon as McRaven learned of Trump's treatment of Brennan, whom McRaven called a man of great integrity, he dictated a letter to the Washington Post while on vacation in Colorado. His tone was one of righteous indignation. In solidarity with Brennan and the principle of the rule of law, McRaven wrote that he would consider it an honor if Trump would also revoke his security clearance, allowing him to join the ranks of the many people of integrity whom the president had disrespected. In the letter, McRaven defined a good leader as someone who can set a moral example and put the needs of others ahead of his own. Observing that Trump exemplified the opposite of these qualities, he described Trump’s retaliation against those who dared to criticize him as “McCarthy-era” tactics. He noted that Trump had embarrassed the US on the world stage and divided the nation.

Advocating for true leadership

in subsequent newspaper columns, interviews, and public speeches, McRaven has only cemented this position. In a May 2019 interview, McRaven called President Trump a greater threat to the country’s democracy than the terrorists he once hunted. Citing the president’s multiple verbal and social media attacks on the freedom of the press, the integrity of the intelligence community, the administration of justice, and other core American institutions, McRaven said that he was afraid for his country’s future. And, in a New York Times piece in October 2019, McRaven contrasted the spirit of service and self-sacrifice demonstrated by heroic men and women in uniform with the behavior of the president, whom he said was incapable of supplying the leadership the nation needs in troubled times. McRaven shares the view of many policy experts that Trump’s withdrawal of American troops from northern Syria opens a path for the militant terror group ISIS to reinvigorate itself, and for Turkey to attack the Kurds, staunch US allies in the struggle to contain ISIS.

A life of service

In 2019, McRaven’s memoir Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations debuted, filled with his larger-than-life adventures and his appreciation for the character and courage of the men and women with whom he has served. In his words and in his deeds, McRaven demonstrates the best of American leadership: bravery, steadfastness, moral courage, and a willingness to speak out against threats to the institutions that make our country excetional.