Carlyle has a secret weapon for training its top leaders: a four-star Navy Admiral who led thousands of sailors into battle and captured cocaine-filled cartel submarines

• James Stavridis, a retired Navy Admiral, is leading a new leadership program for Carlyle partners.
• It’s the private-equity firm’s first-ever training program for its highest-ranking employees.
• Stavridis applies the lessons he’s learned from the battlefield to a different kind of war zone: Wall Street.

When Navy sailors captured a submarine filled with 10 tons of cocaine in a 2006 mission in the Caribbean Sea, four-star Admiral James Stavridis ordered it to be displayed in front of the US Southern Command’s Miami headquarters for the entire base to see.

A drug cartel had built the submarine in the jungle of Colombia to transport $153 million worth of narcotics, he told Insider. At the time, Stavridis was the SOUTHCOM commander in charge of all military activity south of the US, which included 45 countries, territories, and waters.