Start-up Nation

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.

More and more American military officers are applying for MBA programs and, like Captain Tice, are going to extraordinary lengths to do so. In 2008, of aspiring MBA applicants that took the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), 15,259, or 6 percent, had military experience. At the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, the number of military applicants rose 62 percent from 2007 to 2008. The first-year class in 2008 had 333 students, 40 of whom were from the military, including 38 who had served in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The Graduate Management Admission Council, which administers the GMAT, has made it a priority to better organize the path from war front to business school. It has launched its Operation MBA program, which helps members of the armed forces find B-schools that waive application fees or offer generous financial aid packages and even tuition deferrals for cash-strapped vets. And the council is even setting up GMAT test centers on military bases, one of which was opened in 2008 at Fort Hood in Texas; another is planned to open at Yokota Air Base in Japan.

Yet the capacity of U.S. corporate recruiters and executives to make sense of combat experience and its value in the business world is limited. As Jon Medved explained, most American business-people simply do not know how to read a military resume. Al Chase told us that a number of the vets he’s worked with have walked a business interviewer through all their leadership experiences from the battlefield, including case studies in high-stakes decision making and management of large numbers of people and equipment in a war zone, and at the end of it the interviewer has said something along the lines of “That’s very interesting, but have you ever had a real job?”

In Israel it is the opposite. While Israeli businesses still look for private-sector experience, military service