Admiral William H. McRaven
Retired four-star Navy admiral who commanded US Special Operations Command and oversaw the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden; best known publicly for his viral 2014 UT-Austin commencement address on small disciplined habits.
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William H. McRaven served 37 years in the United States Navy and retired in September 2014 as a four-star admiral and the ninth commander of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). He earned his commission through the University of Texas at Austin, where he took a journalism degree in 1977 before entering BUD/S — the Navy SEAL selection pipeline — and commanded at every level of the special operations community: SEAL Team Three, Naval Special Warfare Group One, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and ultimately SOCOM.
McRaven is most publicly identified with Operation Neptune Spear, the May 2011 raid he organized and oversaw that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Inside the special operations community, his earlier doctrinal contribution is more consequential: his 1995 book Spec Ops, drawn from his Naval Postgraduate School thesis, became the foundational analytical framework for modern special operations raid planning.
After retirement he served as chancellor of the University of Texas System from 2015 to 2018. His subsequent writing — Make Your Bed (2017), Sea Stories (2019), The Hero Code (2021), and The Wisdom of the Bullfrog (2023) — derives its authority from the SEAL career and tends toward short, anecdote-driven leadership instruction rather than systematic argument. Make Your Bed is a 144-page expansion of his 2014 UT-Austin commencement speech, which has been viewed more than 10 million times.
