Jan Gleiman
When Stanley McChrystal commanded my battalion and later our regiment, he set a standard of discipline, focus, training, and leadership that shaped my early years as an officer. Like many who served under him, I felt anger and disappointment when his public career seemed to end abruptly in 2010. Yet the years that followed revealed something more enduring than position or power. McChrystal’s steadiness, humility, and intellect remained intact, and even strengthened by his reputation and example he set. His latest book, On Character: Choices That Define a Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2025. ISBN 978-0-593-655-120), feels like the culmination of that long process of reflection.
BACKGROUND
The project began as private essays written to clarify his own thinking, but the result reads as a public meditation on what it means to live with integrity in a restless age. McChrystal presents a simple formula. Character = Convictions × Discipline. But that formula is anything but simplistic and as the book goes on, it feels incomplete. He argues that convictions are the deeply held beliefs that give direction to one’s life, while discipline is the daily act of living according to them. When united, they form character, which he calls “the only metric that matters.” The book is not a memoir (though his personal stories are key) or a manual. It is closer to a modern Meditations as a collection of concise reflections that challenge the reader to measure belief against behavior.
REVIEW
It is difficult to read On Character without recalling the ancient Stoics whom McChrystal frequently cites. Like Marcus Aurelius, he writes not to impress but to remind himself what right conduct requires. His voice is quiet, but ultimately his challenge is not. He asks whether our actions reflect the principles we claim to hold, if we can be circumspect and disciplined in testing those convictions, and whether we have the courage to live by them when the cost is high. For readers of Small Wars Journal, this is not an abstract question. As a journal that speaks both from and to practitioners of irregular warfare, strategy, and the human dimensions of war and conflict, it is one that reaches to the heart of service and command, where the burdens of leadership are moral before they are strategic.
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