Lessons from Iraq for Building and Running SRE Teams: From the Assembly Line to the Web

General Stanley McChrystal led the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in the mid to late 2000s. While in command of the Task Force, he was responsible for transforming an organization that was dominated by Taylorist reductionism into an agile, responsive network that could dynamically adapt and win in the threat landscape around them. In his book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World [1], McChrystal outlines the key lessons that emerged from that process. The same issues and challenges face Site Reliability Engineers and managers for SRE teams as we cope with the complexity of our own and partner ecosystems.