General Stanley A. McChrystal

As head of what Newsweek termed "the most secretive force in the U.S. military," Stanley A. McChrystal maintained a very low profile until June 2006, when his forces were responsible for the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. After McChrystal's team successfully located Zarqawi and called in the airstrike that killed him, McChrystal accompanied his men to the bombed-out hut to personally identify the body. Impressed, President George W. Bush publicly credited McChrystal and his troops by name for Zarqawi's death, breaking an Army policy against mentioning McChrystal in public. Asked to confirm that it was indeed McChrystal who had engineered Zarqawi's death, Multi-National Force - Iraq spokesman Major General William B. Caldwell IV said, "If the president of the United States said it was, then I'm sure it was."

McChrystal's Zarqawi unit, Task Force 6-26, became notorious for its interrogation methods, particularly at Camp Nama, where it was accused of abusing detainees. After the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal became public in April 2004, 34 members of the task force were disciplined; five Army Rangers were ultimately convicted of prisoner abuse at Camp Nama.

McChrystal was also criticized for his role in the aftermath of the 2004 death by friendly fire of Ranger and former professional football player Pat Tillman. The day after approving a posthumous Silver Star citation for Tillman that included the phrase "in the line of devastating enemy fire," McChrystal sent an urgent memo warning senior government officials not to quote the citation in public speeches because it "might cause public embarrassment" if Tillman had in fact been killed by friendly fire, as McChrystal suspected. McChrystal was one of eight officers recommended for discipline by a subsequent Pentagon investigation but the Army declined to take action against him.

According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, beginning in late spring 2007 JSOC and U.S. intelligence agencies launched a new series of highly effective covert operations that coincided with the Iraq War troop surge of 2007. Woodward reported that McChrystal employed "collaborative warfare" to integrate a range of tools from signal intercepts to human intelligence to find, target, and kill insurgents.