#294 Pete Blaber - Part 1: Delta Force Commander on Roberts Ridge: The Battle of Takur Ghar

Pete Blaber is a retired Delta Force commander renowned for leading elite counter-terrorism and special operations teams across the globe, now applying his battle-tested leadership principles to corporate environments, authorship, and innovative security solutions. Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, as one of nine children in an Irish-Catholic household. Pete attended Southern Illinois University. His military career saw him rise through the ranks of Delta Force to high-level command roles, directing critical operations in Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Retiring in 2006, he transitioned from commanding elite combat teams worldwide to leading executive teams. A prominent voice on leadership, team dynamics, crisis decision-making, national security, and organizational effectiveness, he has been featured in profiles, interviews, and podcasts sharing practical insights drawn from his extraordinary career. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Post jobs for free at https://ziprecruiter.com/srs Get 20% off sitewide at https://helixsleep.com/SRS and enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you! Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get 20% off with promo code SRS at https://shopmando.com ! #mandopod Go to https://meetfabric.com/SHAWN and apply today, risk-free Go to https://shopbeam.com/SRS and use code SRS to get up to 50% off Beam Dream Powder, the sleep formula designed to help you fall asleep fast and wake up clear. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at https://claude.ai/srs and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today’s episode. One thing to pack, five ways to power! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code SRS at https://www. Ridge.com/srs #Ridgepod Pete Blaber Links: Substack - https://substack.com/@peteblaber⁠ Website - https://www.peteblaber.com Books - https://www.peteblaber.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Breonna Stewart here with Ally Bank. Whether it's at work or with family, life never calls a timeout. Sometimes you're ready, and sometimes you have to react on your feet. Unexpected travel, retail therapy, and of course, the kids need new kicks right now. Ally gets it, and they build banking around real life. So even in those clutch money moments, you can spend and save confidently with the bank that's got your back. Ally, do it right. Ally Bank, member FDIC.

• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  The Pete Blaber Hot Question. If tomorrow you were tasked with eradicating the cartels, but you could only bring five movie actors or fictional characters, who's on your team and why? And, in the most general terms, what's your weapon of choice? And what air support would you want overhead?

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Wow. Well, I don't... You know, I wouldn't go down that... I wouldn't use that approach.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  I wouldn't. I'd use... And you know, you've been down there. You've been... And we're going to talk about Colombia. We've both been to Colombia. You know, through, with, and by clandestine.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  Especially in, you know, south of the Rio Grande. If you're a gringo and you're seen in some of these places, especially now, after Venezuela...

• 1:57Speaker 03

  You know, they're gonna, they're gonna see you, they're gonna ID you. It's, you know, you're gonna have a really hard time collecting the on-the-ground intel you need. I don't want to throw a damper on that, so like, if I had the five, I don't, I don't, you know, as soon as you said that, I was going, well, I'd take Larry. I think you just interviewed Larry. You know, I'd take a really good shot. Yeah. Larry would be my shoot, one of my shooters. Um, and you know, I probably wouldn't take any Hollywood actors. I wouldn't either. Because, you know, they're just not, again, the, you, when you go into a contentious,

• 2:37Speaker 03

  very sensitive area like that, like counter narcotics, um, where it's sensitive because, as you know, the, the narco traffickers are embedded in the local society. Mm-hmm. And, uh, not all of them are the rich cartel kingpins. Some of them are the fruit stands. Yeah, exactly. Side of the road. Exactly. So you start, you know, if some of them are included, collateral damage or whatever, you've, you've just lost the hearts and minds for further ops. You might get one cartel kingpin, but Yeah. you're not gonna clean up the cartels. So, again, my advice would be go low-vis,

• 3:18Speaker 03

  make it a clandestine, uh, we should never say we have, we're even, you know, uh, that mission is ongoing, but the infiltration should be starting right now. Um, obviously, Spanish speakers are, a lot of seventh group guys, a lot of guys who, you know, can blend in down there, um, would be needed. And I think, you know, it would not be that hard to do some serious damage to them. You don't think it would be? I don't. I think, I think if we had the intel, uh, What would, what, how do you?

• 3:55Shawn Ryan?

  I just go to drones, marking a target, drone it.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:59Shawn Ryan?

  Well, is that, is that what you would do?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Well, with the drone, you know, you, you'd have to know who the guy you're going for and where he's at. And if you got that, yeah, the drone would work. But, you know, again, uh, as soon as you start that, they're going to start looking for the drones. And, uh, you know, we had drones, we had Predators, uh, for Bin Laden and we couldn't find him. We couldn't find Zarohiri, we couldn't, you know, find Mullah Omar, uh, and, and most of their lieutenants. Uh, we couldn't find, and we had those drones.

• 4:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Flying all the time and, you know, Predator is better than most of the drones that are flying today.

• 4:40Shawn Ryan?

  Is it really?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, resolution level, flight time, the whole thing, the little ones.

• 4:46Shawn Ryan?

  Have you seen, have you seen these new S.H.I.E.L.D. AI drones?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yep.

• 4:51Shawn Ryan?

  It's like 1200 nautical mile.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:53Shawn Ryan?

  With payload, I can't remember altitude, but it's up there.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then remember the thing, uh, end of 24, the supposed drone invasion in New Jersey and all that?

• 5:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  I mean, that was.

• 5:10Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody remembers that.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Well, I'm in, I, I told you, I got a cabin in the Tatchapi Mountains and so when you look south from my, where I'm at on the mountain, Edwards Air Force Base is right over to the east, uh, in the Mojave Desert there. And Edwards is where, you know, Skunk Works is and everything else, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin. Uh, and they were doing the same tests, I could, from my cabin, I was watching and, uh, you could see what it was. It, they were testing the mothership concept.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So the mothership is the big drone. It's got the legs, it's got the antennas and it's got the power to power that antenna. So, you know, it can go farther, send signals back from farther away. But it gets to vicinity of the target, opens up its payload and out come the mini drones. And the mini drones swarm the target or targets. And that they can go in a complete silent mode because the only thing they're communicating with is directly back up to the mothership. Then the mothership aggregates it and sends it back. But I was watching that.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  I was watching them test that in our mountains because they're completely, there's no, there's nobody in these mountains. They're, you know, replete with people. That's why it's so, I jumped at the opportunity to buy land up there. There's only 80 private parcels. So.

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you got the same thing here, man. This place looks fantastic.

• 6:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but you know, it's not surrounded by protected land. So.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  That was one of my prerequisites.

• 6:59Shawn Ryan?

  It's surrounded by a bunch of land that's probably going to turn into a neighborhood here pretty soon.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, then you move again.

• 7:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  You got a great, this is really, really nice and.

• 7:10Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:11Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. So weapon of choice, what was your weapon of choice?

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Uh, it's still just, you know, Glock 19 with.

• 7:19Shawn Ryan?

  Glock 19?

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, just a simple gun, you know, I've dropped it in the mud many a times. I slept with it. I had it in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was my sidearm. Uh, you know, it always functions. Uh, I got a Trigicon sight on mine, uh, red dot sight. I can hit anything with that, you know, up to 100 meters and, uh, again, I've got.

• 7:45Shawn Ryan?

  I got you a little something.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 7:47Shawn Ryan?

  I got you a little something.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  Wow, okay.

• 7:50Shawn Ryan?

  It's not a Glock.

• 7:55Shawn Ryan?

  But it is, uh.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 7:59Shawn Ryan?

  It's Sig's newest, uh, what?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Wow. That's yours?

• 8:05Shawn Ryan?

  Squad rifle, yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 8:06Shawn Ryan?

  That's the, uh, MCX Spear 556. So I got a friend over at Sig, his name's Jason. I told him you were coming on. He got all excited. He's at Shot Show right now. They're on. Talking about this exact thing, but, um, and then also.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Is this the new silencer on here?

• 8:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. So I got a friend at Silencer Shop and they heard you were coming on, so they wanted to throw a can on there.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Who makes this?

• 8:30Shawn Ryan?

  I believe that's a Sig.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:32Shawn Ryan?

  Suppressor as well.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 8:33Shawn Ryan?

  So the suppressor's from Silencer Shop.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:36Shawn Ryan?

  The rifle's from Sig and that's gonna be the new, uh, squad rifle for supposedly all the US military.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 8:44Shawn Ryan?

  They're gonna do it in this new round 6.8 too.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 8:48Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 8:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, maybe we could break that in a little bit later.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:52Shawn Ryan?

  So yeah, they're gonna send you one.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Are you kidding me?

• 8:56Shawn Ryan?

  No, I'm not kidding you.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 8:57Shawn Ryan?

  They're gonna send you the exact same thing, so.

• 9:02Shawn Ryan?

  So maybe that could be your weapon of choice.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it will be, man.

• 9:06Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 9:09Shawn Ryan?

  Look good up there on the mountains.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:12Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Clear.

• 9:15Shawn Ryan?

  So yeah, they'll send that to you.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Oh my God. Well, tell them thank you. I'm ecstatic. It'll have a place in my hidden safe up in the cabin.

• 9:25Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. And there was one, there was one follow-up question here. So if Delta Force was unleashed on cartel leadership in real life, what's your honest timeline to dismantle them?

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Um, again, I don't wanna sound like a contrarian, but I wouldn't put a timeline on it. You know, I, I, one of the things I think Putin did for Russia was he never told his generals, there's any time limit on, you know, take this sector. Uh, there's no time limit on you taking it. And a lot of people don't understand that. It's a, you know, the Russians are. Have incredible strategic acumen. They always have. If you go back, read about the Eastern Front, you're amazed at what they did, how they crushed the Germans, you know, the cores

• 10:18Speaker 03

  of Germans at a time. And all through their strategic acumen, they, they, they think deeply about strategy and then they implement it over time. So on the cartels, if the unit was doing it, I'd go back to what our other, you know, the answer to the other question, I would have them lead with plenty of other guys because you need all fluent Spanish speakers. So you're going to need to pick from a bunch of special ops units. And I would just give them the mission would be develop the situation, you know, get them a base somewhere they can operate. And then, you know, I haven't looked at the, at, you know, whether that should

• 11:03Speaker 03

  be where that should be. I'm sure someone with current Mexico expertise would be able to tell us that. So have kind of a base of operation, have these guys, you know, out working with. The, the, the tough part about it in Mexico, I think, is it's really hard to trust anyone in the Mexican military or Mexican government. And I'm, that's not a derogatory thing. It just, it's the reality. The way it is. Yeah. And what we said before, same thing, you know, you go in guns blazing and you're going to kill that guy at the fruit stand, you know, and who's supporting a family of

• 11:46Speaker 03

  six, you know, making a hundred bucks a month or something, which is what they pay down there. And, you know, it would, it would backfire on us. So I, I just think it'd be incre- it's incredibly sensitive thing and it requires an incredibly sensitive approach. And it, you know, clandestine as much as possible, you know, through with and by if possible. And again, I'm not a, my expertise in Mexico.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Is uh is not, you know, current operational, so there may be some people we can trust there that have been vetted. I don't know that.

• 12:28Shawn Ryan?

  Do you feel like, I mean, I feel, just from my limited, my experience. I mean, when we're talking, when we're comparing cartel to terrorists.

• 12:42Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think those, I think those are kind of apples and oranges. And here's why, you know, I think that terrorists, the ones that you and I are accustomed to fighting to.

• 12:55Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I hate to say this, but it is.

• 13:01Shawn Ryan?

  For lack of a better term, more respectable than a cartel member.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 13:06Shawn Ryan?

  Because terrorists are fighting for what they believe in. What they believe to be true, their values.

• 13:16Shawn Ryan?

  Cartel. Is a fucking transaction for money.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:21Shawn Ryan?

  And so, if you were to. It's harder to infiltrate somebody whose motivations are not financial.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 13:30Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it is, it is a religion to them. It is their values. It is their fucking core as a human being. But a cartel member is a prostitute.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 13:42Shawn Ryan?

  And all you have to do to win a prostitute over is paying more money than the next guy.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. But that's the kind of thing, so, you know, if, if the mission comes up. You know, guys, tell, we want you to do this, tell us, come back and tell us what you can do. That's the kind of input, you know, that's needed. It, brainstorming, uh, you know, multiple. Thought processes on the best way to do it and then neck it down, uh, and figure it out and. You know, a little bit on speaking from experience, cause you know, I, I had the privilege of, uh, you know, being part of both. Uh, going after Pablo and then, you know, we're the guys who, uh.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Captured the intel that captured the Cali cartel. Uh, so, you know, and we did the both of those were through with and by, um, you know, despite what some people have said in a few books. The Colombians killed Pablo. You know, there was no, the DEA guys came out and took pictures. As soon as they heard he was dead, they flew out of Bogota into Medellin, drove right to the target and took those, you know, happy to glad pics, which I think was a massive mistake because they're smiling over his body.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  And, uh, and again, you know, part of, part of any, any, uh, you know, operational space that we enter, as you know, you've been, you know, you got a picture of Yemen up there, uh, Afghanistan. You've got to respect, uh, the culture and the history of that country. And, you know, one of the things I would just remind everyone, even at further ops in Venezuela is everybody south of the Rio Grande, you know, grew up with Grenada, Panama, and now Venezuela.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  And so it was explained to me by the, uh, chief of staff of the Guyana military. We were down there doing jungle training in Guyana. And I said, he said, well, where the, will the helicopters fly after that? And I was like, well, they fly out, they can go around the, the, uh, the capital city and then come back. And he goes, Peter, sit down, let me tell you something. And then he explained that to me. He said, everyone down here goes to sleep at night and when they hear a bump, they don't necessarily think it's a criminal. They think, is this the Americans invading our country? Wow. Yeah. And it was, it, it, you know, he was.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  He was very sincere about it and I could tell by his seriousness and I never forgot that. And, you know, part of that's, that's a big part of what we did in Colombia and I think it's a big part of what we'd have to do in Mexico. I've been to Mexico, I tried to open a business there. So I went to Guadalajara 15 times. We almost signed a contract. The last minute COVID happened and What kind of business were you gonna open there? An armor car business, armor in cars. So I had a company, I'm just in the middle of selling it.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  I'm closing the deal right now, selling all my shares, which, you know, it's just time to do it. And I'm selling it to my partner, so, but until that closes, I can't, I can't talk about it. But it's, we make, we armor civilian vehicles. So we've been doing that since 2018. Do a lot of undercover cops, do a ton of, you know, exec VIPs. And then a lot of people who just have had threats against them. You know, for about 35 grand, you can put what we call the anti-intrusion package.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  We'll put B4 level, so nine mil shotgun. It'll take five, six, as long as it's not shot point blank, six, six feet away from your vehicle. So, you know, when you calculate armor protection, you, you have to calculate the angle that a bullet's gonna hit it at. It's all rated for six foot, point blank, I think it's called zero degree obliactivity, you know, perfectly flat, your, the weapon's perfectly flat at the same tangent level as the, as the side of the vehicle.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  But as soon as you move off that angle, every caliber round loses its penetration ability on armor. So B4 is really all you need in America. You can do that for 35 grand? 35 to 40 grand, depending on the vehicle, yep. Is it? We do, so we do the doors. So here, so if you had, say you had a, an Escalade.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  We do all your doors, we do all your windows, and we do your back hatch with armored panels. So interior armored panels and armored glass on all the windows. We would not do the top. Some people go, I want my roof done. And I'm so, well, what I always ask, what's the threat? And so if if a trained sniper is after you, you might want to do the roof. But same thing on the roof. If you explain to people that unless the guy is on a highway overpass, shooting at your roof is really hard to hit someone in the car, to hit the roof. And when you, you know, everything, there's a cost benefit to armoring every part of your vehicle.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  So you armor the top part of your vehicle. Now you are going to affect the driveability, the physics of that vehicle. You're going to make it a little more top heavy, a lot more if you go B6, which is 7.62. That's what, you know, we had in Afghanistan. Any embassy has B6 armor.

• 19:54Shawn Ryan?

  What vehicle would you recommend?

• 19:56Speaker 03

  All American SUVs are the best vehicles to armor. They have the most room in the doors, the least amount of superfluous crap, electric stuff like German vehicles are much harder to armor.

• 20:12Shawn Ryan?

  What about a Toyota LC?

• 20:14Speaker 03

  They're fantastic to armor too.

• 20:16Shawn Ryan?

  They probably last the longest.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Yep, so we, you know, we actually do a lot of Tacomas, you know, the Tacoma Pros, because people want a less conspicuous vehicle. But also, and when people ask me, I tell them always, if it's an armored vehicle, you might as well go four-wheel drive. Because, you know, the number one protection is not your armor. It's that accelerator, that brake, that steering wheel. You know, you drive into an ambush, your first reaction, your first course of action is drive out of the ambush. So.

• 20:51Shawn Ryan?

  What's the name of this company? Can I ask?

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Ad Armor. Yep, it's, there's a website, you could still, the website's still up. I'm still on the top of it as CEO. But that's getting switched over to.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  And yeah, my partner will still, if you want a vehicle armored, I can still get your vehicle armored. And this guy's a craftsman. He's been in the, um, in the coach business, you know, it's, that's what these companies used to be called. He was quality coach works for 30 years. He's, you know, he's our age. He's in his, uh, 50s. He's in, well, he's little, he's late 50s. But he's a great guy, total craftsman. Uh, and you know, when we started the company, we, we started it saying, okay, what's our, uh, what, what part of this company is going to make us,

• 21:45Speaker 03

  is going to be our competitive advantage. And I, my input was, let's make it trust. Let's make it, you can trust us to put, you know, real armor and attach it the right way, and then stand by it. If you, something happens, a panel comes loose, or you think something's wrong, we'll fix it, uh, for free. And we do that. And our, our shop is in Ontario, California, right outside the Ontario airport. But we do vehicles from all over the world, all over the country. That's why I wanted to move to Mexico. It's way cheaper. Uh, we were also going to move to Nevada, but again, COVID-

• 22:25Shawn Ryan?

  Thirty-five grand for an armored vehicle is, uh, pretty damn affordable, if you have my opinion.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 22:33Shawn Ryan?

  But, or to, or to Armor Avia, not for the whole thing.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:37Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, wow, wow, that's, you should have come on here before you negotiated that deal. I'll tell you that much.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:45Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, you ready to get into the interview?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 22:47Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Let me give you an introduction here.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:50Shawn Ryan?

  Pete Blaber. Colonel Pete Blaber retired. He commanded at every level of First Special Forces Operation, Operational Detach- Detachment Delta, including interim commander during the Iraq invasion. A combat veteran with operational experience across major US conflicts, including operations in Panama, Colombia, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan.

• 23:16Shawn Ryan?

  And Iraq, pretty much everything. The author of the bestselling books, The Mission, The Men and Me, The Common Sense Way, and The Common Sense Leadership Matters. And most importantly, you're a Christian. Welcome to the show.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Thank you. Great to be here, Sean.

• 23:36Shawn Ryan?

  It's an honor to have you.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 23:38Shawn Ryan?

  And so, a couple of things just to knock out before we get to get in the weeds here. So I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account that we've turned into one hell of a community. I think it's a hundred and something thousand strong now. And they're honestly, they're the reason that that I was even able to start this show. And they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. So I offer them the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from escroove140. Given the levels of fraud, deceit, and complete betrayal by the US federal government over the last 30 to 40 years, how can you best convince our next generation to want to step into your shoes?

• 24:21Speaker 03

  It's a great question.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  You know, I think you gotta believe. I think you gotta believe in what this country stands for. Certainly, right now, I would, I would tell anyone that the country is in as good a shape as it's been in a long, long time. I mean, even in Trump's first term, unfortunately, you know, they, they put cement shoes on him, 16 to 20, they were, right, the accusations started, the Russia hoax started in 17. He was completely sidetracked by that. He didn't have the right, you know, individuals, I think, in the key positions.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  Probably a little bit of naivete by the president, which I don't find it fault. You know, one of the reasons he makes a great president is because he's not a politician. But as you know, having the key people in the right, in charge of the right agencies is absolutely essential to, you know, reestablishing that trust, real trust. And, you know, I think we said it earlier. What is that?

• 25:45Speaker 03

  It's people who understand that they serve the people of this country. And everything they do is about the greater good. Every decision they make is about the greater good of this country. And the people in this country. We've had a great military. This whole time, we've had incredible economic power. But none of that does any good if we don't have the right leader in charge. And that right leader has to be someone who's guided by logic and common sense and faith and patriotism. And if they're not, we got the wrong person leading the country. But like I said earlier, I think we have the right person.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  You don't even have to agree with everything President Trump does. But certainly, if you look at what he's doing and listen to what he's saying, he's all about the people. You know, he just announced this thing. He's for, and I didn't even fathom this until he announced it the other day, that he's gonna end the requirement for for seniors, anyone who owns their own house outright, that they should not have to pay property taxes anymore on it. So, you know, we have all these retirees now who own their homes. And like, if you live where I live in California, you know, I'll just pick Yeah. A number.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  If your house is worth a million, you're paying around thirteen thousand bucks a year for that that house. And for a retiree, that's an incredible amount of money. And, you know, that's one of those things, that's not gonna help the government coffers. But he's, he understands the things that need to happen, and they need to be for the people. And his income tax thing, the tariffs, you know, historians will look back on this and and and just look at the body of work, look at the logic of why he's stated he does what he does. And I think

• 27:52Speaker 03

  The historical record will be shock that, you know, there's actually politicians who are against all these things. Gavin Newsom has said that he, you know, will not allow the no tax on tips in California.

• 28:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you just told me that.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  He did?

• 28:09Shawn Ryan?

  You just told me.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, so it's like, yeah, no, you told me he was here, but, I mean, how stupid is that? It's not gonna save the, you know, it's not gonna even be a drop in the California coffers, but it just shows you, he has no, there's no principle in his head that says do what's in the best interests of the people of California. He's wired to do what's in the best interests of himself, and that's, you know, that's one of the definitions of a toxic leader, and that's, you know, that's what, what happened to Pat Tillman and his platoon in Afghanistan. That's toxic leadership. Common sense leadership matters, toxic leadership destroys.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  And if you just look at the last five years, that, you know, the toxic leadership we lived under for four years, being lectured, you know, being told, "Don't go protesting, we have the F-16s, we have all the guns." I mean, when he first said that, you know, I was just like, no one, no one, no value-based person, no patriot in this country has ever once walked around and gone, "Man, we really need a civil war." That whole thing has come up from the left, out of their desperation, and I, you know, one of your other, I answered some Patreon questions out there, and that was one of the questions.

• 29:35Shawn Ryan?

  It's on everybody's mind.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  It is, it is, but, you know, my thing is, it won't be a civil war. I'd call it a civil grenade. It'll be about 10 hours long, and it'll be over with. There's no, no civil war that the left can win in America. There's too many freedom-loving, God-fearing patriots in this country, and although we haven't had a voice for many years, we have one now, and I think people would do the right thing, and anyone who would try to start a civil war would regret it very quickly.

• 30:21Shawn Ryan?

  If you've ever hired somebody like I'm in the middle of doing right now, you know this can be extremely overwhelming. You put a job posting out and the next thing you know, you have 2,000 resumes all wanting to be the next producer. Well, if you're hiring, here's the good news. You can now review all these resumes and applicants faster, thanks to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, quality candidates first. And today, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/srs. What I really like is it cuts through the noise. Their matching technology brings the right people to you faster. And with this new feature,

• 31:04Shawn Ryan?

  the candidates who are actually interested rise to the top. You're not wasting time guessing. You're getting straight to the people who want the job. And you even get a better sense of who they are because candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested. Cut through the standard and get to the standout with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/srs. That's ziprecruiter.com/srs. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.

• 31:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yep, I don't argue with you that on that. I think that there are three sides to that war. I think there's the left, the right, and the government.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 31:51Shawn Ryan?

  But that's the way.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  The shadow government or what?

• 31:56Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know what do you call it anymore. But I can tell you this, I don't think that very many people up there have our best interest. And I think that's becoming more and more apparent every single day. But, um, but anyways, I got something else for you too.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  All right. Love it.

• 32:14Shawn Ryan?

  It's a Vigilance League gummy bears made in the USA.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 32:18Shawn Ryan?

  Legal in all 50 states, not that it matters in California, but just candy, just candy.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Yep, you gotta, you gotta be careful of the gummies you take in California.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Find yourself.

• 32:30Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I hear.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Out in the backyard looking at the stars.

• 32:33Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, well, Pete, I want to do a life state, uh, life story on you and, um, I know you have a lot of stuff you want to talk about outside of your story too, that, that, that I'm interested in. In particular Venezuela, the Ukraine wars, your thoughts on that stuff, but.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:49Shawn Ryan?

  But starting off, where'd you grow up?

• 32:52Speaker 03

  Uh, I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. It's a suburb outside Chicago, uh, idyllic place to grow up. I was, uh, one of nine kids, Irish Catholic family. Uh, went to Catholic school, got my ass kicked by nuns, uh, you know, I, I grew up on.

• 33:11Shawn Ryan?

  Good old days.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and hose water, drinking hose water, not wearing helmets. And, you know, with one mission, just to have fun and that was not the best mission when it came to going to school and scholastically, I was a horrible student. I used to tell people, you know, the purpose of school is to learn how to be a stand-up comedian. Uh, I just wanted to laugh, you know, and I was not suited for being cooped up in a classroom. Um, but, you know, it was an amazing time to grow up, uh, you know, my, even though school, uh, was hard, uh, when I wasn't at school, you know, I pretty much the same pattern of activity every day.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  I'd wake up, get a bowl of oatmeal, put my shoes on and head outside and, you know, my amazing mom, uh, would always say some version of the same thing, you know, stay out of trouble and be home before the streetlights come on.

• 34:09Shawn Ryan?

  Aye.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  And, uh, you know, back then, uh, there was no cellular phone slash beacon, uh, on you. There were no text check-ins. Uh, you know, just freedom and independence and.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  You know, there's some amazing studies, psychological studies have been done on people who grew up in the pre-digital era. So I don't put a lot of credence to the alphab- alphabetical generations, you know, because I, I think more or less generations are in like thirty-year bands. And within those thirty-year bands, the ten-year bands all overlap, and then even the thirty-year ones overlap. And the reason they overlap is because, you know, the way you and me grew up is the way we try to raise our own kids. So if you grew up pre-digital, uh, you should be taking some of those great things that,

• 35:09Speaker 03

  you know, we were able to, the conditions we had, uh, because what this study showed is that, uh, you know, growing up that way was incredibly beneficial and they, they covered three things. The first was unstructured problem solving. The second was something they call adaptive risk calculations. And the third thing was, uh, the ability to believe in and trust your senses. And, you know, you can, you can see all three of those. It was aha moment when I read this thing. So let's just go back to, you know, the daily itinerary of, of kids pre-digital. So after your mom tells you that, you're, she kicks you outside and you're out in the

• 35:53Speaker 03

  backyard and you're like, okay, what am I gonna do now? So you're, this is unstructured problem solving. So, you know, most of the time, first thing you think is I'm gonna go get some buddies. I wanna hang out with some of my buddies. So whatever the type of neighborhood you're in, what proximity's everything, you know, for me, I walked across the alley, knocked on the door, the back door. You talk to, you know, the mom always answers, you know, can Billy come out and play? And, uh, you know, every mom is like, yes, hey, get down here, Billy. Pete's here, get outside. Pretty soon you got, you know, four or five kids. And you know, you're in the unstructured problem solving mode.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  First thing is you're realizing, wow, five heads is better than one, you know, more ideas. We can do more things. We can have more fun. But you know, you you figured it out. You realize I figured something out. It takes action to make action. And you know, you just did it. You just took action and found yourself some friends. And then off you go, you know, no, no itinerary. For for young boys, you know, you don't know a lot. So everything is a potential challenge. Every, you know, every tree, every rock wall, every construction site especially, you know, which is like an obstacle course to a little boy.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  And every one of those is full of hazards. Um, you know, this is what the school of hard knocks is. And it's why I think pre digital, uh, all of us, you know, there was never a moment we didn't have scabs on both elbows and scabs on both knees. And you know, that's learning the laws of physics. I was, I ran too fast. I should not have tried to grab that limb on that tree. And at some point along the way, you know, you're going to get one buddy. Let's stick with the tree who climbs up the tree. Come on, let's climb this thing. And, uh, you know, I had a friend who was an amazing climber, incredible strength of body weight and, uh, you know, grip strength.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  He could climb anything. And one day he was on a tree limb, you know, yelling like Tarzan. I was like, uh, hey Danny, you better, that that's dangerous. You better stop that. Sure enough, the branch broke. He fell, broke his arm, and I never forgot that. Uh, and you know, this is part of this adaptive risk calculation. You're building your memory, you're building, uh, you know,

• 38:32Shawn Ryan?

  Rolodex of experience.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, and it it's it's experience for you, your body, your mind. You know what you can do physically. You know what makes sense to you. And so when that guy says, come on, what are you afraid? You know, on that one day, you say, "No, I'm not afraid. I just don't wanna, it's not worth it climbing up that thing and breaking my arm. So let's go play baseball." And you walk away. And the real benefit of that is, happens afterwards. You realize you made the right decision, and you've now etched that pattern in your brain that, "Hey, you don't have to do stupid shit. If it doesn't make sense, veto it. You know, take care

• 39:13Speaker 03

  of yourself." And I've been asked many, many times, you know, about survival in combat. And, you know, I tell people, one reason that I never got shot or seriously injured, you know, beyond luck, was that adaptive risk calculation. I was always thinking, "Is this worth it?" Number one. What's, you know, what am I risking? How risky is this? How much do I know about what we're doing? And if you don't know a lot, and there's a lot of risk to it, then it might not make sense. But you don't have that unless you've got the experience. And you, not just the experience of, of, you know, the, the conditions, but

• 39:58Speaker 03

  the experience of saying, "I don't think, I don't think that's smart. I don't think we should do it." So that's the adaptive risk calculation. The final thing is believing in and trusting your senses. And, you know, that obviously applies to both the same things, but where it really comes in handy is interpersonal relationships. You know, when kids are out, it's the law of the jungle. And, you know, you're gonna run into some older kids, you're gonna run into some strange kids, and you learn right away that, you know, you have to understand who you're dealing with, and that you can't trust strangers. You've gotta, you gotta get some data on this person first. And, you know, I mentioned the school of hard

• 40:43Speaker 03

  knocks, you know, mistakes have consequences. You get your face washed out with snow, if you say the wrong thing, or kicked in the stomach. And, you know, I remember both incidents like that happening to me and my friends. And it was, you know, one time we were just... Hanging out with these older kids and one of my buddies, we, you know, when you're, when you're 10, 11, 12, you say the word fuck as a comma. It's like, it separates the sentences you use. And when someone says something funny- This is still how I speak. Yeah, me too. You know, we'll probably, to the viewers, they'll probably see us regress

• 41:24Speaker 03

  to that during this conversation. I'm the same way. My son, when he hears me on the phone with my buddies, like, "Dad, I've never heard you swear so much." I'm like, "But I'm just back in military mode." Um, but you learn to read people. You learn to pay attention to tone of voice, uh, to the nuances of body language. And, you know, that's emotional intelligence. You're looking at a person, you're listening, and, you know, as we know, all, both those things, um, you know, kind of, uh, signal what a person's about to do.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  So, again, the real benefit is when you avoid problems, when you spot, "Hey, this guy's crazy. Let's, uh, let's get out of here. Let's not hang out here anymore." And same thing, you've now etched a pattern in your brain, and you realize that the only thing you got in the real world is your senses. And, and that's a biologic fact. Uh, you know, Ernst Mach, the guy who came up with the, you know, Mach 1, Mach 2, the Mach Principle, was a German scientist. And in 1869, he came up with the Mach Principle, which is just, uh, there's no other way to prove scientific fact than with your senses. And so, still

• 42:51Speaker 03

  to this day in science, if you have a new hypothesis or new theory, you have to be able to validate that hypothesis or theory with sensory information. Like, you can't say, when someone says, "Well, where is it?" And you say, "Well, it's invisible." Say, well, there's no such thing as invisible. Then the hypothesis or the theory falls apart. So believe in and trust your senses. It's all you got. It's. The ironic thing is that's even more important today than it was pre-digital. Because there's so much fake out there. There's so many AI-generated video clips. There's so much propaganda.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Um, you know, if you haven't learned to take every news report with a grain of salt, every government report with a grain of salt, then you're missing a big lesson of our time. So again, uh, you know, rock foundation is believe in and trust your senses. Um, and then the, the final thing from that study that I thought was interesting is that pre-digital, 70% of teenage boys had jobs. Either after school, on the weekends, or, you know, and including all summer. And the majority of those 70% were not working to save for college. They were working to buy a car.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  And, uh, you know, again, I'm reading this thing going, that's me. That's what I did. I bought my first car was a 72 Impala for 250 bucks. It had 170,000 miles on it. Uh, it had a hole in the passenger side floor that I had to cover with plywood in the winter because slush would fly up. My mom wouldn't even get in it. Uh, but that thing ran like a champ and I, I kept it and, uh, used it all through college. Drove down to my college and back.

• 44:45Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the, again, you know, to sum up, the point of all that is not to sit around and wax poetic and say, oh, those were the good old days. There's no such thing as good old days. They always, the world's always changing, society, culture, technology. But we could take those foundational aspects of human nature, unstructured problem solving, uh, adaptive risk calculation and believing in and trusting your senses. And we can understand how important those are to the development of the brain. And we can apply them and, and make every effort for our own kids, uh, and the society around us to allow that back, to have that as part of the way kids grow up today.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Um, you know. Big kudos to our parents. Today, you know, they call parents helicopter parents. They're hovering over their kids all the time, ready to swoop down as soon as they run into an obstacle or get hurt or have a problem. Our parents are called Home Depot parents. And Home Depot parents are parents where when you think you need something, you can't find anybody to help you. So you look around for a while, you still can't find anyone, you say shit. Okay, I'm gonna figure this out. And so you use deductive logic to figure out what aisle this part is you're searching for.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  And then you go down, find the part, you know, whether it's a toilet or electricity thing, and you start flipping them over, reading the specs on it, comparing them to the specs you brought, and you end up making a decision, you said, I'll take this one. And you go buy it. And again, the real benefit of it comes at home. When you find out that's the right part, you're like, I did that. I did it on my own. Yeah. And so, you know, we can also try to be more Home Depot parents than helicopter parents. Yeah. So, that's my... Certainly agree with you on that. Yeah, yeah. So that's my childhood. At high school, I ran cross-country, played

• 46:55Speaker 03

  hockey. I went off to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. It's at the southern tip of Illinois, about 350 miles from Chicago. The farther away, the better. And it's an amazing place. It's where the Ohio and Mississippi come together in the bottom of the state. The glaciers of 10,000 years ago did not reach Southern Illinois, so it's still full of massive hills, ridges, rock outcroppings, cliffs, lakes, and 275,000 acre Shawnee National Forest. And when I went down there and saw that, I was like, I'm going to, this is the school I'm going to. Wow. And I didn't even tour the campus. Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  I went there for the, you know, the wilderness and...

• 47:44Speaker 03

  You know, pretty much every weekend I was in college, I was out hiking in places like Panther's Den and Devil's Kitchen. Uh, it was the first time I used my own money to buy a book, which was Being Expert with a Map and Compass by Bjorn Kelstrom. Yeah, I learned how to navigate what terrain features were. Little did I know, I was, you know, inching my way toward, uh, joining the military. I didn't know that at the time.

• 48:11Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding? It wasn't even on your radar?

• 48:13Speaker 03

  No, it, uh, my, my first year, I think, was when the Iran hostage rescue mission went awry, Desert One.

• 48:22Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  And that had an incredible effect on me, uh, because, you know, eight guys died in Desert One trying to save the American hostages in Tehran. I think there was like 400 of them. It was a lot. Um, and it had a huge effect on me because it was the first time I ever stopped to think about how good I had it and what an amazing life I had in America specifically.

• 48:51Shawn Ryan?

  How old were you at that time?

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Uh, I was just a freshman in college, so, you know, 18, 19, something like that.

• 48:57Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, you thought that?

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:59Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like nobody feels like that anymore. Nobody takes the time, you know, to, to, to, to appreciate it.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you might be pointing out, I agree with you, and maybe it's because, look, we... Can you imagine anyone kneeling for the National Anthem when we were growing up or disparaging, you know, uh, people who served? You know, I grew, I remember as a kid hearing about the way they treated Vietnam veterans and, you know, being completely disgusted by that. Uh, but I think, you know, it was, it was a more patriotic time. Uh, we hadn't had a full...

• 49:40Speaker 03

  portion of the country who, you know, did nothing but criticize our freedom and criticize our forefathers, you know, tearing down statues.

• 49:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Um, so, you know, I was a marathon runner and triathlete at the time and I'd go on long runs in the hills of Southern Illinois and on one of those runs I decided, you know, I need to pay something back to the country. Uh, I'm gonna, and the way I'm gonna do it is join the military and I want to be in the units that do the toughest missions. I want to, you know, make sure that Desert One never happens again, that we don't have a tragedy like that on the world stage on an important mission. And, you know, I was super naive at the time. I went to a recruiter and I said, you know, I want to join the military and I'd like to be part of Delta Force. And the first recruiter-

• 50:34Shawn Ryan?

  You just said that right off the bat?

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, because they were, they were at Desert One. And, uh, you know, I didn't know they were a secret or anything and, uh, and this is the first recruiter-

• 50:44Shawn Ryan?

  How did you, so you heard about Delta Force from Tehran?

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:48Shawn Ryan?

  That was in the, that was in the media?

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 50:50Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  And, um, he said, look, let me tell you something. The only thing going into special forces is gonna do for you is when you get out is either make you a criminal or a hitman. And I got up from my chair and walked out and, uh, found another recruiter in the next town over. And this guy was great. I still remember his name, Terry Story. And he was like, what do you want to do? What, what do you want to do? And I told him and he goes, okay, you can't do that. But here you can get in, become a Ranger and then become that. I said, okay, well, how do I do that? And he goes, well, you can join, uh, to go in the infantry and then Rangers, or because you have a college degree, you can, uh, volunteer

• 51:33Speaker 03

  for OCS. Uh, the only catch is if you don't make it through OCS, you know, you're gonna be a PFC and they're gonna put you wherever they want to put you. So I signed up an OCS contract and, um, You know, again, I freeze that moment in time because it's happened literally millions of times since 1776. It's, you know, our grandfathers did it after Pearl Harbor and, you know, all these great soldiers who joined after 911, same thing. Pat Tillman joined, you know, the day after 911, he decided to join the military, to leave the Arizona Cardinals

• 52:14Speaker 03

  and join the military. So this, this process has been happening and, you know, it's important for us as veterans to say it out loud and, and be consciously aware of it because, you know, these patriots are our country's greatest natural resource and we have to treat them that way and we have to treat their lives that way. There, this is a fixed amount of individuals like this. There's, they're not a never-ending flow. So these are a special part of this country. And these young men join with a lot of naivete and they, but

• 52:55Speaker 03

  they're joining, they're, they're agreeing to sacrifice their lives and their livelihoods to serve and protect our great nation and the freedoms that our nation involves. And in so doing, they enter a contract with the government and that contract is sacrosanct. All those patriots ask for is that the government uses common sense on when and where they're going to employ them and provide them with common sense leaders who will make good decisions and solve complex problems so they can succeed when they're employed. And, you know, I, I say it's important because when you find out like how the Ukraine war started, a bunch

• 53:39Speaker 03

  of Ivy League, State Department, CIA people concocted that thing, made bad decision, senseless decision after senseless decision after senseless decision and

• 53:54Speaker 03

  You know, uh.

• 53:56Shawn Ryan?

  Can you elaborate? I mean, we have this entire portion towards the end of the interview.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:00Shawn Ryan?

  We can crank it out right now.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  So, so the, the Ukraine war was started by.

• 54:04Shawn Ryan?

  You, you say this is the biggest propaganda war of all time, correct?

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Yes, it should be called the propaganda war. The fighting's real, everything we've been told about it is basically a lie. Uh, and every piece of history that shows it's a lie has been either tucked, kicked under the rug or lied about too. Uh, so how the war started, uh, the war started when the Obama administration, I, I don't say US because the Ukraine war could not have started, uh, with any other administration because it couldn't have started without the press as part of the group that was going to provide cover for starting it.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  And they were all in on the start of the Ukraine war, but the US, uh, Obama administration, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, uh, John O'Brien and Joe Biden. Joe Biden had one job, you can look in his archives as vice president. It was, his one job was Ukraine. And Joe Biden, uh, and Jake Sullivan, his deputy, uh, were the architects of the start of the war. And the way it started was the, the State Department and CIA, non-elected officials along with their counterparts in the EU, uh, Ukrainian politicians and, uh, George Soros'

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Open Society Foundation, along with the neo-Nazi ultranationalists, uh, created the fake Maidan protests. You can still go online, I checked before I came, videos are still there, 2014, 15. Look at Maidan protests, you'll see. Brand-new GP mediums in the background, you'll see them serving soup. You'll notice that everyone has the same orange hard hats on, distributed to them. The weapons, you'll see weapons, the same common weapons being held by the ultra-nationalist neo-Nazis.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  And then there are interviews, there's BBC and German TV interviews with Ukrainian protesters. And one, in one of them, all the guy does is ask, "Why are you protesting?" Every single individual that they question says the same thing. "I'm here because they told me to be here, and I'm getting paid." And so, Victoria Nuland admitted afterwards that the US spent 5 billion in USAID funds to bribe all these people and to make it happen. And in February of 2014, the culmination of the Maidan protests was the violent overthrow

• 56:55Speaker 03

  of the Viktor Yanukovych government, the duly-elected government of Ukraine. He was elected not just by eastern Ukrainians, but by western Ukrainians. And his election was validated by the UN. But for some reason, they decided, "We gotta overthrow him." And the plan, and this is where this senseless decision-making comes from, and this is all in cables, it's in State Department, CIA cables, and in- For the audience, cables are basically secure emails. Yes, good description. It's all in those.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  They believed that by overthrowing Yanukovych, installing their Ukrainian puppet politicians, and then starting an ethnic war in eastern Ukraine, which is populated by almost 100% ethnic Russians, that by doing that, this would cause so much unrest in Russia that the Russian people would rise up and overthrow Putin. That was the plan. And, you know, when you read that, when you read the cables, when you see that, it's like- These, you know, Ivy League, never been in a war, never been in anything real in their life.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  It's like, they were like kids playing with matches. Completely unaware of the, the potential unintended consequences of throwing those matches into a, a pile of leaves, or into a, you know, something soaked in gas. And what happened afterwards is a classic law of unintended consequences. They had no plan for after they overthrew the government. And in the power vacuum, because they had no plan, the neo-Nazis took over the Ukrainian government. They had no, they had no contingency plans? No contingencies. They, and that's why Crimea caught them so by surprise.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  So, you also online, you can go on, any of your favorite search engines and just look up Victoria Nuland, Gregory Pyatt, he was the ambassador, she was the head of State Department for, for the overthrow. Their phone call was intercepted by the Russians and then published on YouTube initially, it's on all search engines now. Their phone call is them talking about who, which Ukrainian politicians that was, they controlled would be the next prime minister. And this is before the violent overthrow. It's like two weeks before. So they're on record talking about who to install in the new government.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  So there's no, there's like no, this is, there's, it's not a theory. Everything, there's a massive trail of evidence that shows exactly what happened, to include open source intelligence, the videotapes that show what's about to happen. So when the, the neo-Nazis controlled the five key ministries of the Ukrainian government to include the Ministry of Defense. John O'Brien was the head of CIA then, he flew in the day after they overthrew the Yanukovych government, met with the head of the Ukrainian intelligence and the head of MI6. And the very next day, they began the ethnic war on eastern Ukraine,

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  which was really one of the great, one of the most horrific humanitarian violations in modern history. They just began shelling the civilian areas with artillery and mortars. And again, it's all on video. You can see grandmothers crying in the streets with dead, you know, spouses and dead children and saying, "Why, why is our own country doing this to us? Why is our own government doing this to us?" The eastern Ukrainian oblasts that have since voted for independence and autonomy,

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  then independence and reunification with Russia, so Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, all three of them would have stayed in Ukraine, but they had no choice. Ethnic cleansing began and between 2014 and 2021, 14,000 ethnic Russian civilians were killed in eastern Ukraine, and most of them by artillery, mortar, and, you know, drone attacks. Wow, I had no idea. Yeah, horrific. The ethnic Russians petitioned the UN to come in and investigate, begged for the UN to investigate. They wouldn't do it.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  We should have, as the US, if, if, you know, Trump always says, "If I had been president, this wouldn't have happened," but any objective president, this was grounds for sending forces in. This was like, this was worse than Bosnia, worse than Rwanda, any of those places. We should have sent people in to stop it, but no one would do that. And the killing just continued, as well as the cover-up. You know, most Western Ukrainians still to this day believe what the propaganda said happened, that Maidan protest was an organic protest, that Yanukovych fled because of his corruption,

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  he knew he was going to get busted, he fled the country. And then they say that Putin invaded Ukraine, and he did not.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Um, so I told you fourteen thousand dead. Uh, Crimea was the first in May of two thousand fourteen. They, they knew what was happening. They instantly, uh, voted for independence. And in the vote, I think eighty-nine percent of people voted and of the population voted and something like eighty-five percent voted to, uh, secede from Ukraine.

• 1:03:18Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, uh, Russia, the, the part of Crimea that's so important is the Sivostopol naval base. It's Russia's only warm water naval base. They had a contract with Ukraine to keep that till twenty forty-five. They just left the base and helped the Crimeans secure Crimea. But Donetsk and Luhansk begged for Russian help. Putin demurred. He was incredibly conscientious about not pissing off NATO, if you can believe that, because NATO is, you know, actively working to undermine him. And he's not helping these ethnic Russians because he doesn't want it to look like, you

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  know, he's invading or that he's, uh, provoking NATO. So they set their own elections up, uh, in the summer of two thousand fourteen and the same results, you know, eighty-plus percent, uh, voted and eighty percent voted for independence. So why is that important? Because today, when you hear people say, "We, why would we give, uh, the, the Donbass Basin back to Russia? They invaded." Well, you're not giving Donbass back to Russia. Donbass can, Dun stands for coal, Bas stands for basin. So Donbass is the coal basin.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  And within it is Luhansk and Donetsk Oblas, or provinces. And both of those voted for independence. They had no other choice. After all the killing, in 2015, the president, the newly installed president of Ukraine, outlawed the Russian language, outlawed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is like the sister to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church was founded in Kyiv. Russia considers Kyiv the holiest of holy cities. It's like Jerusalem to them.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  That's why they've been so circumspect on the bombing of Kyiv, because it's a holy city. But the Ukrainians forfeited any right to those, to eastern Ukraine, when they started killing them, when they took away all their basic human rights: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. You can't practice religion, you can't speak your language. He stopped the pensions of all...

• 1:05:48Shawn Ryan?

  What the hell are you supposed to speak?

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Sign language. I mean, if you read the UN Charter on Human Rights, all those things are like the staples. And if you violate those, you know, the UN Charter more or less says the country has a right to, you know, for self-governance, to break away from whoever is doing that to it. So it's, again, clear-cut case, it's not theory. And then on the invasion, you know, I liken what Russia did to, you know, think of it this way: sure, you can technically call it an invasion, just like if you're walking down the street and you come up to a vestibule and see your buddy getting mugged inside

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  the vestibule, but on the door to the vestibule of the building, it says "No trespassing", well, you fucking kick that door in, smack that mugger on the head, toss him out, and save your buddy. Did you just trespass? Well, I guess technically you did, but, you know, no judge, jury, or common sense human being is going to say you shouldn't have trespassed. It's the same thing Russia did. 14,000 ethnic Russians slaughtered, begging him for help, begging for humanitarian assistance. And finally, he just broke into that vestibule to save his, you know, his people, ethnic Russians.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  Uh, and so calling him the invader, calling him the instigator or Russia just doesn't hold any water. It, it doesn't make sense as long as you cut through the propaganda. And that's, you know, that's kind of why I got involved. I, I've been to Kiev, I've been to Ukraine, I love Ukraine, I love the Ukrainian people. Uh, I've never been to Russia, would love to go there. Um, and I have buddies, I have a buddy in State Department, uh, two buddies in the agency. And, uh, a buddy who's over there is a long-term contractor. And they, one night, said, hey, let's call Pete and tell him this stuff and find out what he thinks we should do.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  And so they didn't call me, they just called and set up a meeting. We met, uh, at LAX, outside LAX, and they told me everything. And I was like, holy shit. Now, every one of these guys, uh, is still active. And, uh, you know, one reason they came to me was, you know, can you get the word out? And I was like, yeah, I've got a duty to get the word out. Um, you know, right now, we're at about 1.25 million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. So back to you. That many? Yep. 1.25 million? Yep. The Ukrainian mods database was hacked about four months ago and the number they had then was 1.2.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  I'm giving them benefit of doubt. They're, they've been losing about a thousand men a day, every day of 2025. Wow. So it's, it's incredible numbers. Uh, you can, you know, I'm on about five or six different Telegram channels that I subscribe to. And, uh, there's some great independent reporters. I think you might've had one of them on, Patrick Lancaster. If you have him on, okay, maybe he's on Tucker or something. Probably shouldn't have brought that up, but. All good. Yeah, so. We should look into him. Yeah, he's, he's an independent reporter. He's been over there from the beginning and. And the first thing that strikes you when you watch one of his reports is, where the fuck is the press?

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Why is there no mainstream, global media press coverage of the Ukraine war? Why have we not seen a single member? You know, they, they forced the US military to embed them in Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, and demanded it because, not, not because they wanted to cover it, because that's the quickest formula for getting a Pulitzer Prize and getting, you know, looked on favorably as a journalist. But from the beginning, the question has to be, why is there no coverage of the Ukraine war? And I'll tell you why there's none. Because if they cover it, they'll expose the propaganda stories that are happening.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  And the first way is, the entire war has been fought in eastern Ukraine. So every city that you gets, that gets taken by the Russians in eastern Ukraine, they're the liberators. And the people come out celebrating when the Russians come in and telling them about the hell they've been living through with the Ukrainian army occupying their town. These are ethnic Russians, the whole battlefield, all these flattened towns, all the infrastructure, that's eastern Ukraine. That's where these people live. That's Donetsk, Luhansk, and of course Crimea has Odessa right next to it.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  So it's been hit too, but, um, you know. When was this meeting? When was what? The meeting. Between, that I went to was right before 2022, right before the war started. So this was a while ago. Yep. And then we've stayed, uh, they feed me stuff all along. I get new stuff. They'll call me up and go, this is total bullshit. Uh, there's been fake massacres, uh, that were blamed on Russia. Uh, they're so fake, they're a joke. And this is again, why you see there's no Western press coverage.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  You know, peoples who were supposedly shot by Russians laying in the mud with their hands tied behind their back, but their hands are tied with pristine white ties. And then when they, when this French brave French reporter, who was actually one of the only ones who went and visited the massacre site, he saw the Ukrainian intelligence people pulling cadavers off out of frozen trucks, laying them on the ground, tying their hands together, and he's testified on that numerous times. Same thing, his life's been threatened, he's been censored in France, but he's, there's

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  two of them, actually two French reporters, independent of each other, reported the same thing. And then the war itself, massive lies about the progress of the war, about the casualties. You know, even President Trump was duped because his initial advisors to Ukraine were, were, you know, the, the one guy he had was an ex-general, his daughter ran a NGO in Ukraine. And so when he was in Ukraine, he was paying his daughter's NGO to take him around and provide security for him.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  How can a guy whose family is making money from the war be taken seriously and trying to stop the war? And he was feeding President Trump, you know, propaganda information. So initially, you know, President Trump was saying, hey, Russia's lost all these men, you know, really bad, million men, well, they haven't, they've lost probably about a tenth of what Ukraine has lost. Oh, shit. Yep. And Russia, remember I talked about their strategic acumen from the beginning, they saw this, this is a war of attrition, and all these ex-generals who are now paid influencers, of course, they can't understand that.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  And so one of the things you heard year after, you know, 22, 23, 24. You know, look at Russia. They're they're so weak. They've only moved, you know, fifty kilometers in the last three years. Well, they finished that sentence and then they say, and the reason we got to keep fighting is because they're getting ready to take over all of Europe. So, I mean, they contradict themselves with their propaganda. They're not, you're saying they're not strong enough and formidable enough to even take terrain in in Ukraine, yet they're gonna take all of Europe, which they're not. There's not a single statement from Putin or anyone else, intercepted or not, that says they have any designs on Europe.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  And of course, thank goodness for Tulsi Gabbard. She just released, she did a press conference just about a month ago and released, said, hey, we've already provided this to Congress. There is zero evidence nor zero indications that Russia has any intention to invade Europe or that that would ever make sense for Europe, for Ukraine to invade Europe. So that's been put to rest, but the propaganda continues. The influencers continue to repeat it on, you know, the global mainstream media and, you know, people without the truth continue to buy into it.

• 1:15:01Shawn Ryan?

  Man, which means everybody's repeating it.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So all these guys are dying, you know, and they're just being, and people are going, keep the war going. You can't let it stop. And they're taking their time on these peace negotiations. Again, historians will look at this and it'll really shine a positive light on on Trump because he's the only guy who has said from the beginning, we have to stop the war. We have to stop the killing. And he he used to say that every time he talked. He just, he talks about it so much now, he doesn't anymore. But he used to start, and that is the start point. And back to that, you know, as veterans, we understand that. We understand that sacrosanct contract that a veteran, that a patriot makes with his government. And so even though

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  these are, you know, Russian and Ukrainian military, I think as, you know, veterans, we, we share, um, you know, a responsibility for each other worldwide. And this is just senseless killing. Uh, and the really sad thing is, uh, that Ukraine, without knowing it, is being absolutely decimated, uh, because these people are telling them to keep fight. You can win. We're going to be behind you. And they're not, and they can't win. Uh, and you know, they're in a position now where not just manpower, but military industrial

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  complex, and then their command and control and leadership is so, uh, so contaminated and so dysfunctional, they just have no chance against the Russians. I wasn't expecting to hear all that. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And again, you, uh, most of it is still open source available, so anyone can do it. Uh, if people want, I've got a long form article on my Substack page, peteblaber.substack.com. It's the chronology of the Ukraine war. I expose it all. Uh, I provide the facts. I,

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  I have hyperlinks to videos, hyperlinks to pictures. Um, and, uh, you know, it's horrific. Uh, Mike Benz, uh, coined this and he was right. He said, "The overthrow of the Anikovitch government started the, the censorship industrial complex around the world." So when they figured out they could lie about something that big and they could collude to create a propaganda version of reality, they were emboldened. And, uh, you know, part of that is their control over tech, because, you know, Facebook had a big part in that My Done protest. Everyone

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  got their directions, uh, via Facebook. Uh, so, you know, during that period, both during the Obama and the Biden administration, those, those tech companies were controlled by the government. You know, the FBI was... Control in Twitter and content on Twitter at the time. So, you know, they were emboldened by it. And again, Mike Benz, you know, did a great report on this. That's what made them go, hey, in 2017, we can do the same thing in the US. Instead of Maidan protests, they did the BLM protests. Create chaos, burn infrastructure,

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  sow dissent and let that happen so that you, it leads to the eventual overthrow of the government. And that's what they were trying to do with those riots and everything else. It's called the color revolution.

• 1:18:44Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  It's bad.

• 1:18:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no kidding. Let's take a quick break.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:19:21Shawn Ryan?

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:19:32Speaker 00

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:19:45Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 1:19:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know, as of, since we're on the topic of Ukraine, as of today, Polymarket says there's a 12% chance Russia-Ukraine, there'll be Russia-Ukraine ceasefire by December 31st, 2026. Where do you think they're coming up with that? Do you think there's any legitimacy?

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  I think, well, what would, what would tell me that it's far more likely than not is just the momentum behind what Trump's doing and, and then the logic of why it makes sense to ceasefire. And I don't think there'll be a ceasefire, you know, unless it's part of, it's over, you know, they've agreed on something, but Russia's not going to agree to just a plain ceasefire. They'll agree to the terms that they put forward, you know, the, the 5-0 blasts,

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  the size of the Ukrainian army, the, you know, the...

• 1:20:57Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how are they even getting anybody to fight?

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I could...

• 1:21:02Shawn Ryan?

  1.25 million dead?

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  I could pull out my, my, I show these every Tuesday on the podcast I do on CDM Media, and it's also on my Substack. We show every week the forced conscription. They're beating, they're, they're tackling people, men in the streets, beating them, forcing them into vehicles, and the fights are unbelievable. And what...

• 1:21:29Shawn Ryan?

  That's their recruitment?

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  That's their recruitment.

• 1:21:31Shawn Ryan?

  They beat the shit out of their people to fight for their country?

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Yep. And so I've said this numerous times, never, I believe never in the history of warfare has a country won a war where they had to force their soldiers to, to join.

• 1:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  That's unfucking believable.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. No one wants to join. The, you know, Ukraine took a Zelensky, and Ukraine took a lot of criticism from Biden, Jake Sullivan, and Austin, that they did not immediately draft 18 to 23-year-olds. They drafted, they started, I think, at 25, they went down to 23. They still haven't drafted, but they've said, done the selective service thing.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  But when Zelensky established martial law, he closed the borders. So 18 to 23 year olds were not allowed to leave the country. He just changed that about six to eight weeks ago. The day after he did it, every border crossing was swamped. All the 18 to 23 year olds pretty much have either fled. Yeah. And what does that tell you? It tells you that the messaging, you know, one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Doesn't make sense to the actual people who are supposed to do the fighting. So when you have these actual citizens of Ukraine fleeing, fighting for their lives,

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  bystanders join in and help the recruits against these forced conscriptors. You'll see the massive fights. But and women too. Come over, they start beating on these guys. Let them alone, let them alone. This happens every day all across Ukraine. Um, because the logical why doesn't make sense. They, they see people disappear. They realize the, the truth is, you know, whispered among the people of Ukraine, what's really going on? Who's really trying to win this war? Whose war it really is? And it's not Ukraine. It's the EU, it's the globalists. Um, and they're the ones telling Ukraine, keep fighting to the last Ukrainian.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  But the Ukrainian people, the ones that are, you know, the, the go to war age are having nothing of it.

• 1:23:49Shawn Ryan?

  So they, they basically don't have a country?

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  No, they don't. It's not a real country. Uh, and that's not a, um, nothing against Ukraine. I love Ukraine. I love the Ukrainian people. But if you just take what Zelensky did, so first off on Zelensky, uh, you know, in, in 2018, he, 2017, he became the lead in a, in a comedy show, servant of the people, which the producers of which, which like, you know, famous producers in Hollywood were two of the biggest oligarchs in Ukraine. Multimillionaire billionaire oligarchs. The, the head, the one, the billionaire decided, hey,

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  and probably in cahoots with, uh, the Biden State Department and CIA, because they needed a candidate. They needed someone for the 19 election. And it had to be a stooge. So they decided, let's make Zelensky a candidate. So up to that point, Zelensky had never even tweeted up, up any position on any political statement, any political event. He had never spoken, uh, about any political proclivities. Um, he had never written anything. He had never spoke. When he announced his presidency, the, his run for the president and his new party,

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  which was called the same thing as the sitcom, The Servant of the People Party. Uh, he refused to debate the other candidates. He did no campaigning. Does this sound familiar? Uh, he put out no, uh, you know, no campaign promises, no platform. Uh, and I think four months after he announced, uh, even though he was behind in the polls, the election happened. He won 73% mysteriously of the vote. The first thing he did was outlaw all political parties in Ukraine, except that his own party, The Servant of the People. And by outlawing and making them against the law, this is,

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  if you read the definition of a totalitarian regime, that's what they do. There's no, uh, they outlaw competition, uh, political competition. So what that did was allow him to take over a super majority of the Rada. Because all these other, uh, people in the Rada, that's their congress, were not allowed to run. So they just stacked it with new servant of the people. And now the Rada is, has a super majority for his party. He also outlawed press. All, all independent, uh, press, uh, newspapers, television stations were shut down.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Only stations that run in Ukraine still to this day are either Ukrainian government or NGO George Soros sponsored stations. So you outlaw political competition, you end any ability, freedom of information, and then he ended freedom of speech too. There's no, you can't criticize the government, you can't, no right to protest. Those are all the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime. That corruption scandal that just broke 100, it was a small one, 100 million off the

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  energy sector where his sidekick was indicted, he fled the country, he's now back working for him, he's just not in the same role he was before. So corrupt to the bone, this is not a government of the people, it's a government installed. Zelensky's out of the country more than he's in country. And again, that's a pattern too that should make everyone question, what leader in contentious times leaves the country even once? None. He's gone, in the last two years, he's been out of Ukraine more than he's been in.

• 1:28:01Speaker 03

  Usually he's in Europe, gallivanting around Europe in, under the guise of collecting funds. But you have to ask, how can he do that? Well, he can do it because there's no competition. He's the stooge and he's earned his right to maintain that from his EU handlers, from his globalist handlers and from his, he's got American handlers too, the neocons, the left, the people who put him in power from the Obama and Biden administrations, still want him to stay in power. They still keep the propaganda going. But the reality is, men are dying by the thousands every day for no reason.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  A fake war, uh, they don't even know what they're fighting for. They're definitely not fighting for Ukraine right now. Um, and their leadership is, uh, is also just a canard, uh, something other than what it seems to be.

• 1:29:00Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I can see why there's only a 12% chance of a ceasefire by March 31st.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's not having any of it. He's, uh, Trump just said it a few days ago that Zelensky's the main barrier. He said Putin's already said, hey, I want to end the war. Uh, and finally Trump's got good information. He's saying it now. He's talking about the Ukraine, over a million casualties. He's talking about they can't win. They have no military industrial complex. So if you can't make bullets and, you know, and, you know, beans along with, you know, ammunition, weapons, how can you fight an ongoing war against a superpower?

• 1:29:41Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, let me answer that for you, because we send them all of our shit.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, very true. Billions of dollars. I think 300 billion we sent them with no strings attached.

• 1:29:53Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, do you have any insight on when they would, when they would run out of manpower?

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  They're pretty, they're, they're, I think they're there right now. Um, so Russia, Russia brought in, uh, 443,000 recruits last year. Just to give you an idea of the standard. Uh, it's, no one knows what Ukraine brought in, but it's believed to be somewhere in the double digit thousands. So 50 to 99,000. So that right there just tells you, uh, you know, they can't keep up. And on this battlefield, uh, you know, uh, Ukraine doesn't rotate their forces. If you joined in 2022 and you're still alive, you're still out there.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  There's no ETS date, you know, which every soldier, you know, is counting off the days till they get to go home. Uh, you know, we talk about you fight for the guy next to you. Yeah, you do, but. You know, your foundational, what you're really fighting for is to go home to your family and, you know, where you live. And, uh, and they don't even have that. So they're dispirited. Um, the command and control, the leadership of Ukraine is, uh, is dysfunctional as can be. And, and we, again, the Obama and Biden administrations who, who were the architects,

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  along with the rest of NATO, the Brits have been hand in hand on everything, uh, the French and Germans to a slightly lesser extent, uh, trained this army. And it was the same mistake we've made everywhere, you know, from Vietnam forward. They decided, we're going to build an army and it's going to be a NATO compatible army. So everything they built was to make it by the standards of NATO. And you can't, you know, the lesson of Vietnam was don't try to build an American army in another country, a second world country, who's got its own tradition of military customs, courtesies, protocols, uh, and just ways of fighting.

• 1:32:06Speaker 03

  And the same thing in Ukraine, there are, most of the generals were Soviet trained. Uh, in fact, the commander in chief of, uh, Ukraine right now speaks Russian, was trained in Russia, Sierski, uh, but, you know, they don't care. Zelensky's in on the decision-making for combat. Um, you know, they're letting their guys die in these cities. I, I did an episode on this, uh, when Puck Ross fell, we had a captain, a Ukrainian captain, uh, talk to my guys on the ground and tell us how the thing unfolded. And he said, You know, he, he gave this example. He said, you know, when you're, you're laying in a position

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  for a long time, you know that position like the back of your hand and you know everything around you. You've calculated time, distance from every, uh, you know, terrain feature, every tree, every rock outcropping. And with Pakros, we knew where the Russians were and my frontline guys knew if they get to that cops of trees over there, this massive, you know, forest belt that protects the farmland, then we're dead in the water. We, we cannot, we've got to fall back. And fall back is not retreating. It's just fall back. That's called a supplementary position, which you always have in the defense. And so, once the Russians

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  made it to that point, to that, uh, cops of trees, they called in and said, hey, we've got this all set up. We've got alternate positions. It's time to fall back. Uh, Rogers, stand by. We've got to get permission from higher. That went all the way back to Kyiv and, uh, Zelensky and Sersky. And the answer was no, not one inch, stay and fight. And, uh, about three weeks later, they were surrounded, uh, most of them killed, many of them captured. Uh, and the same thing hap- just happened in Uye Puyye. It's a city down south Ukraine. Same thing. The guys knew if they make it to that position, we're surrounded. We're

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  in a cauldron and then you're dead. Because, you know, the cauldrons in this war, because of the terrain and the, the technology, the drone technology, whenever you see a position, that means that a 10 by 10 kill zone sits in front of that drone kill zone. So if you move up to here, now that 10K kill zone goes 10K from that point. So that's why when that captain, that Ukrainian captain said, when they make it to there, we got to get out of here. You listen to the guys on the ground, you know, you listen to the guys who are assessing

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  the reality of the situation on the ground, and they, they did not, and they continue that pattern, and it's because they're trying to keep this propaganda thing going that, hey, we can win, we just need more time, more money. And to me, it seems like the EU decided we gotta get them at least through 2026. And I believe the reason for that is that then they could get all the orders with the European military industrial complex, which is what's happened now. When Trump said, I'm not giving you stuff anymore, you can buy it from us, they saw that as an opportunity to reinvigorate the European military industrial

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  complex, which they had shut down. And though all those stocks skyrocketed before Trump got in power, and then in those first few months, but now they're all tanking, because, you know, most, most honest, objective people see that, you know, the end is a fait accompli, it's, it's gonna happen.

• 1:36:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, if, if these, if these guys are forced to fight for their country, some of them, I mean, why would, why do you think they're not, or maybe they are, why are they not surrendering?

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  A lot of them, yeah, a lot of them are. So, you, I've got tons of videotapes of guys coming out of holes. And, you know, Ukrainians are hard people, too. They're all slobs. So, the Ukrainians are not pushovers, if, you know, armed properly, led properly, and motivated properly. But think about that, they're not armed properly, they don't, back to the military industrial complex, they've got huge supply problems, which is totally exacerbated by corruption. They're skimming money off the top. A couple of cities have fallen because the 50 to 100 million dollar tranches to dig these, you know, nats-ass

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  trench systems never happened. The money just was laundered and went into the pockets of the oligarchs. So, the corruption has also, you know,

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  greatly handcuffed the Ukrainian military. But you know, there's their command and control. You tell guys on the ground, no, don't leave, stay and die. And you do that once, you're in big trouble. You do it twice, they're never going to forgive you. And I believe that the majority of Ukrainian military have lost faith in their higher headquarters and that they don't accept anything that's coming out of them as being credible. And then, you know, the final thing is just motivation on not knowing when you're going to go home, seeing all these dead bodies. They leave, they're ordered to leave dead bodies where they lay.

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  There's dead bodies all over the battlefield and Russia polices them up. Since those Istanbul talks, there's one of the things they agreed to is body exchanges to repatriate the dead bodies. That's happened, I think, something like 15 times. And the ratio, we just had one and Russia turned over 1,600 bodies. Ukraine turned over 29. So Whoa. It was a ratio of 39 to one. I don't know what it is now on bodies being exchanged. But you know, part of it is just the number of KIA's. But the other part is they're not even allowing these guys to, you know,

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  pick up their dead colleagues and bring them back to repatriate them for their family. There's monetary incentives behind that. If the body's not recovered, Ukraine doesn't have to pay the family and they don't. Even if the guy's off the ledger. Yeah. Holy shit. It's bad. It's bad. And this is all these globalists, you know, they're globalists doing like, again, little kids playing with matches, you know, in a gas station. No clue of the laws of physics, no clues of the laws of unintended consequences. And what they've done is, you know, one of the most horrific

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  humanitarian crimes, I think, against humanity that we've ever seen. A million, over a million guys dead just on one side. We lost 58,000 in Vietnam. 15 years, I think. Man, wow.

• 1:39:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that paints a very different picture than than what everybody's told.

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for asking. It's it's important to people. And again, do the research. All this stuff is available online. There's plenty of people that were there early who have come out and they talk about it. The war, it should be called the propaganda war, not the Ukraine war. The fighting's real. Everything we've been told about it is a lie.

• 1:40:03Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Well, let's get back to you. We were, you're going to Rangers.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I joined.

• 1:40:11Shawn Ryan?

  OCS, got a Ranger contract.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  Yep. So I went to Korea, my first tour, DMZ in Korea, it's a great tour. And I did that, like I said, because you could apply for the regiment. It's a one-year tour. I applied. I got fortunate to get in, even more fortunate to go to Second Ranger Battalion, Fort Lewis, Washington. Loved it there. It was, it would turn out to be, I was there four years. Ended up as a captain, junior captain, my last year. But it was a foundational experience because of the amazing leadership climate that was in place for all four of

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  those years. And, you know, I was taught then what a leadership climate is. And my battalion commander and my company commander said this to me. It was, you know, think of a leadership climate the same way you think of a real climate. You can feel the effects of a leadership climate. You can see the effects of a leadership climate. And when people find a healthy leadership climate, they put down stakes. They work together as teams, think of neighborhoods, to make their their place of duty, their place they're living, better. And the positive climate makes everyone who lives under it grow, progress, and succeed.

• 1:41:37Speaker 03

  Now, when you think of an unhealthy leadership climate, it stymies growth, people are miserable, and the only thing they think about is, how do I get the F out of here and get to a place where the sun shines occasionally? And I can grow, I can progress, and I can succeed, which is what everyone joins the military for.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  So, you know, the other thing they taught me, which was foundational, was

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  that, you know, that a leadership climate is not, is not, does not emerge from just the most senior leader in whatever the organization. Instead, a leadership climate emerges from the sum total of choices made by all the leaders in the climate system. So, you know, leadership, leadership is a collective thing in an organization. It's not just the guy at the top, right? Because he can be cool, and you can have tyrants right underneath them. And if they're allowed to operate, then, you know, you're living in a, an unhealthy leadership climate, even though the guy at the top's okay. But what it also emphasizes is the responsibility of leaders.

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  And my battalion commander, again, said this to me, said, you know, Pete, you can be the smartest, funniest, most handsome, most tactically astute commander a unit's ever had. But if you turn a blind eye to a tyrant who's making their lives miserable, they'll treat you with the same derision they treat that tyrant. That's your job. Your job is to remove these friction barriers that prevent your guys from growing,

• 1:43:25Speaker 03

  succeeding in what they do. And when you don't do that, it's, you know, you're not doing your duty as a leader. So, you know, from that day forward, I passed that on, but I also lived it. You know, leadership climate takes, you know, constant pruning, constant maintenance. It doesn't mean you're looking for guys doing things, but you always keep an eye open for it, because it's hard.

• 1:43:49Shawn Ryan?

  How would you? How would you take the temperature of the climate throughout your entire career? Not just at Ranger Battalion?

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, just talking to guys and, you know, and having and listening to other people who talk to the guys. You know, your Sergeant Major should be a huge part of that.

• 1:44:09Speaker 03

  But you take that temperature and, you know, remember a climate, just like a, just like how would you tell if you're living in a good climate? You know, the sun's shining, everything's growing, everyone's happy. Everyone takes pride in their, you know, neighborhood and gets along with their neighbors, makes an effort to get along with their neighbors. And I think those are things that are hallmarks of a positive leadership climate. I mean, one in particular is just freedom of speech, the ability to speak up, out, or with anyone in the battalion.

• 1:44:46Speaker 03

  And so, one of the things about, you know, common sense leaders is they talk the same way to a private as they do to a general. And that's the way we all should be. And when you become consciously aware of it, you know, you might even catch yourself at times. You know, why am I suborning myself to this general? It's not how I talk to a private. And then vice versa. Why am I treating this guy? Hey, no, I don't have time for you right now. You wouldn't have done that if the general stuck his head in the door. So, freedom of speech, to speak up, out, and with, is hugely important in any organization, corporate or military.

• 1:45:22Speaker 03

  Your people got to feel like they can come up to you and go, hey, sir, I don't mean to, I don't know who else to talk to, so I'm just at wits' end. But, you know, we have a real problem in B Company. And, you know, I know you're busy, but if you could send someone down to take a look, that I would totally appreciate it. You'll get that when you make yourself approachable, when you, when people know that they can talk to you without repercussions.

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  And so, freedom of speech, I think, is, is one of the hallmarks of a healthy leadership climate.

• 1:46:01Shawn Ryan?

  Good to know. Thank you.

• 1:46:05Shawn Ryan?

  So let's, let's move on. Let's move on in your career.

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, from the Rangers I went, I commanded a company, a light infantry company, Seventh ID. We participated in the invasion of Panama. Amazing experience. I had an amazing company, 111 guys. We deployed to Panama, I had 28 fluent Spanish speakers.

• 1:46:27Shawn Ryan?

  Were you with Bob Porras?

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 1:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  You know Bob?

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:46:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  I think he was in the unit then. I was in the Seventh ID. I was about to be in the unit, so.

• 1:46:37Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think he was in the unit.

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 1:46:39Shawn Ryan?

  He got, actually, I think he jumped in a van with some unit guys.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  Was he in the Seventh ID?

• 1:46:45Shawn Ryan?

  I can't remember what he was in.

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  I gotta ask him. Yeah, I know him. He's a great guy.

• 1:46:49Shawn Ryan?

  Did see some action down there and then he got picked up and it wound up in a van and I believe that in the van was a bunch of.

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  Unit guys.

• 1:46:55Shawn Ryan?

  Bunch of D-boys.

• 1:46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw him too.

• 1:46:59Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  But, you know, what it taught me was, we had better intelligence than the agency or, you know, our, our division intel, because same thing, always listen to the guy on the ground doesn't just apply to your, the guy who's fighting on the ground. It applies to civilians and to some extent, you know, people who are against you too, listen to what they're saying. But you can't listen if you don't understand the language and, you know, it sounds incredibly elementary, but, you know, for all of us who were in Afghanistan, Iraq, you realize, you know, one of the biggest barriers to, you know, not winning the hearts and minds,

• 1:47:43Speaker 03

  not losing the hearts and minds, and understanding where the enemy was, was the language barrier. You know, there, of course, we had interpreters, but, you know, that was usually one per whatever type unit you were in. So the inability to communicate should be, you know, a red flag in any type of expeditionary warfare we're considering. And it's just simple. If you can't communicate, you can't understand what that person's needs are. You can't even understand how to, you know, get the, get what you need to get out of that person. Intelligence, operational intelligence, or just, you know, like we were talking about with talking to your soldiers, finding out,

• 1:48:28Speaker 03

  taking the temperature of, you know, the society at the time. So from there, you know, I was very fortunate because I came right into the 7th ID, took command. Also very fortunate, I had a great battalion commander who understood. I told him, I want to go to unit tryouts after this. And he said, yeah, by all means. So I finished command. Two months later, I went to selection. Again, fortunate, made it through selection. And, you know, that experience, I saw your episode with Larry, and I can't come close to describing selection as well as he did, so I won't. But there were some great moments in it, again,

• 1:49:13Speaker 03

  that, you know, that taught me a lot about human nature. And, you know, it started with the initial psych interview. And a lot of people don't remember this, you probably do, but, you know, it used to be the biggest barrier to getting into the CIA or to special mission units was the lie detector test, the potential lie detector test. And of course, the biggest barrier of the lie detector test was one question. Did you ever do drugs in high school or college? And so, you know, there were tons of people who, you know, came back, said, no, they didn't take me, you know, I, because I, you know, I told

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  them I tried whatever in high school, and to include marijuana. And so there was a lot of angst about that. And I went, as I told you, I went to Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. I think way, way before I was there in the seventies Playboy magazine called it the number one party school in the country. It was kind of a party school, but you know, not egregiously, just in a very fun.

• 1:50:26Shawn Ryan?

  Now I know it wasn't the wilderness down there.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, but I was a marathon runner, triathlete. I had rehearsed all this in my mind. What am I gonna do when he starts asking the lie detector test questions? And, you know, just to be honest, I, it was impossible not to have tried marijuana where I went, grew up in high school and college. Uh, and again, the only thing that kept me, that allowed me to, you know, stiff arm it was I was a hardcore runner and I, I believed if I took a puff off anything, I'd be knocking like two minutes off my time. So, you know, I, I did not, uh, I stopped everything, uh, when I started competing in college.

• 1:51:11Speaker 03

  So I walk into the psych interview and Larry's the head psych guy and he's sitting there and he's got a manila folder up and he just motions me to sit down. I sit down, I'm like, what the fuck's he doing? And his first words out of his mouth are, Southern Illinois University, huh? That's quite the party school, isn't it? And someone had told me, uh, you know, whatever you do, don't give more information than the question. So don't answer them and then go into some long litany about how you tried it and it was not that great or you never tried it and you're, you know, all jittery, you can tell you're lying. So just answer the question.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  And I said, yeah, it got some rating in Playboy, but it was really, you know, a great college and I loved it because it was a great place to run and train for triathlons. I could swim in lakes, you know, run to the lake, run back, uh, and do my training there. And he asked me one more question. I can't remember what it was. It was something about, uh, did you ever, did you ever see cocaine or something? And I, I just answered him honestly. No, I, I never saw cocaine without context. And then he said, okay. And he put the manila folder down. And then at the end of the interview, his phone rang, his, his phone beeper. And it

• 1:52:38Speaker 03

  was like, yeah, I'll be right there, sir. And he, he goes, hey, I gotta leave, uh, you know, we got one more person. You gotta fill out some stuff. And so I go, okay, yeah, I'll wait. He goes out. I picked that manila folder up. It's empty.

• 1:52:53Shawn Ryan?

  This is Larry Vickers?

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:52:54Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  His name's Larry too.

• 1:52:57Shawn Ryan?

  Choice to give a.

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, he probably could have pulled that off too. Uh, but, you know, I, it was part of learning about human nature and about, you know, effects based, uh, activity that you can, if you know a desired outcome, then you can plan backwards and use little props to get that effect. And I probably did in my 13 years there, you know, there's two selections a year. I probably did 10 boards, sat on 10 boards. And probably five or six times, uh, me and my sergeant major, when there was a guy with, it was like, hey, he's got some serious, got in some police trouble. We don't know. It might be nothing, you know? And so we'd pull out the

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  manila folder. The thing about the manila folder is, it's not to try to catch the guy. It's just to see how they react. Because if the guy goes, yeah, I, you know, I smoked some weed and, you know, I smoked it for a while, but I stopped, you know, and, um, and I haven't smoked in two years, whatever. It's, that's fine, you know? Same thing. I got drunk one night. I got in a fight. You know, there are a lot of those. And guys would, yeah, guys would think I'm gonna get thrown out.

• 1:54:11Shawn Ryan?

  It'd be hard to find one that didn't, I'll bet.

• 1:54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But you, so you're not trying to trick them to say something. You just wanna see how they react and. I carried that forward into the corporate world and I probably

• 1:54:26Shawn Ryan?

  What is the reaction you're wanting?

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  You wanna see a cool calm collective, you want usually a smile, like, okay, you know, and then instead of getting all uptight and talking fast and stuttering, they just tell the truth, you know, they're, they're resigned to tell the truth, they're resigned to, hey, I'm gonna throw myself at mercy of the court, and they handle it, it's, it's a little bit of pressure, you know, it doesn't seem like much, but

• 1:54:53Shawn Ryan?

  Ownership.

• 1:54:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, and if you think about that, you know, it also, it also comes with when you're on a interview board, military or corporate, you know, respect for the person, they're there, they're, they've done everything to get there, this is their dream, you know, this is, uh, this is their life, so, you know, callous decisions going, nah, I don't like the guy, cuz, you know, he smoked weed once, or he got drunk, that's not what you're looking for, but guys who then turn that into, you know, stuttering, long-winded, making up stuff, uh, you know, and you, you're, you can already see that,

• 1:55:34Speaker 03

  you know, he was arrested, he got in it, he did battery, all this other stuff, and they're not talking about that, those guys, you know, you wanna scrutinize a little bit closer. Um, it's the same thing in the corporate world, like I said, I hired about 500 people, or I did about 500 interviews, I don't know how many we hired. Uh, you know, what you're trying to figure out is how that person thinks, you're trying to get inside their head, for whatever context you're hiring them, and I was hiring people for sales and marketing, you know, senior sales and marketing people. So you wanna see how they react under pressure, if you're a salesperson,

• 1:56:16Speaker 03

  you gotta be able to take pressure, you know, in the biopharma industry, you're in front of doctors, you're in front of payers, you know, guys who make a million bucks a year, uh, who are gonna price your drug and whatnot, you've gotta be able to stay cool, you know, under stress, and so

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  Part of that is what we talked about before, the unstructured problem solving, your ability to just work through something. And I had read this thing in Harvard Business Review, uh, right before I got out. And it was about what companies like Google were moving to, which was just intellectual questions that you ask someone and it, you're not necessarily looking for the right answer. You're looking at how they come up with the answer, how they approach problem solving and how they communicate that approach. So, you know, one, one question was, uh, how much water does the average family of

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  four use over a 48 hour period in their house? And, you know, you'd be surprised, some people immediately, well, I, I don't know, I've never worked for the water company. And, you know, someone else.

• 1:57:31Shawn Ryan?

  Dissects it.

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, smiles, goes, okay, four people, let's see.

• 1:57:35Shawn Ryan?

  Dishwasher.

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I drink a gallon a day, right. And goes through exactly, that's what you want to hear. They're unstructured problem solving, they're saying it out loud, they're using logic, uh, you know, deductive logic to come to an answer. Another question was, why are all sewer caps round? And, you know, there's no right answer to that, it turns out, but there's a lot of reasons they're round. They can't fall into the sewer, uh, you know, a round, uh, it's square will break the street, the, the structure of a square to put that into an asphalt street will cause, you know, the physics of the street, uh, to fail much quicker than a circle, which is,

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  you know, I guess the strongest self, uh, supporting structure, self sustaining structure. So there's no real answer, but you want to see how they handle it, if they can think on their feet, they can use logic and common sense. And. You know, you don't, if you ask pointed questions, tell me about a time, you know, the famous question is, tell me about a time you, you know, had a difficult customer. Most of that stuff, they've got already prepared. There's a pat answer. Uh, you're not going to learn how that person thinks with those type of questions, but ask them something that makes them think, that makes them problem solve. See how they react, see how they communicate.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  And that, that tells you a lot about that person.

• 1:59:07Shawn Ryan?

  Makes a lot of sense. What, I mean, how is it, do officers go through with the enlisted at, at O T C?

• 1:59:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:14Shawn Ryan?

  They do?

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:59:16Shawn Ryan?

  Any, anything extracurricular?

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  What do you mean?

• 1:59:20Shawn Ryan?

  That you'd go, for example, in, in, I mean, through the SEAL pipeline, the officers have, they have an extra, an extra section.

• 1:59:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's a, there's, there is an extra.

• 1:59:34Shawn Ryan?

  Is there?

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:35Shawn Ryan?

  How many officers are going through at once?

• 1:59:37Speaker 03

  It depends. Sometimes, you know, there's none. Uh, sometimes there's, there's a good number of them. I'm not sure on the current, but you know, there were always, it always seemed like there were four or five at least, um, per class.

• 1:59:53Shawn Ryan?

  I heard you had a, uh, incident with a bear.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. Uh, it wasn't a bear. It was a pig.

• 2:00:00Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, this is gonna be good.

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  Uh, I was, you know, navigating on one of the famous, uh, legs of the long walk and, uh, I was, I believe, no one knows the actual, so very few people know the standard. I don't. I believe I was way ahead of schedule, kicking ass. Uh, and I also believe I was close to the end. So, uh, I had to get up this mountain. I took this route that I thought would be the best route and I ended up in a, what? Every class, like ten guys end up in it. It's a manzanilla forest. Oh. So it's like swimming through a sea of a thousand pitchforks.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  You're caught in this thing and there's really, once you're in it, you know, you make the dumb decision initially to keep going. This thing's gotta end. Then you're in the middle and there's really no way out except picking your ruck, throwing it, knocking a couple of the manzanilla vines down, stepping on those, picking your ruck up again. And so, you know, it could take you a hundred throws to get out. So I tried to get up a little bit higher to see if I could spot, you know, which direction I should go to, to the, would take me quickest to the edge of the manzanilla forest. And so I got up a couple of, uh, branches high.

• 2:01:29Speaker 03

  You know, right as I'm reaching for this next one, I'm going, I probably should have taken my rucksack off before I started climbing. And snap, that thing snapped. I fell from the tree, fell down.

• 2:01:42Speaker 03

  Instantly thought, okay, I'm either paralyzed, I broke my back, something, because I fell right on my back. So it was probably a good thing. Well, it caused me to fall probably. So I don't know if it was a good thing, but it cushioned the blow. And, you know, as soon as I checked all my limbs and I was okay, I was like, all right, man. And then I heard, you know, this noise behind me and, uh, because I've been walking for thirty some miles. Uh, I tried to croon my, my neck like, you know, an arthritic old man, you know, when you're ruck, ruck sacking, you can't move your neck anymore. And I just turned halfway and I saw this thing coming at me, uh, small.

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  And I, you know, it was squeaking and screaming and I instantly thought, you know, that's a baby bear. And then I heard, you know, so I was like baby bear. And of course, any outdoorsman knows if there's a baby, there's a mom. Then I heard the massive crushing of the manzanilla vines behind it and like the snorting and bear's snort.

• 2:02:52Speaker 03

  And so, you know, adrenaline rush. I picked up my rucksack, used it as a shield and just started sprinting like a madman and mowing down Manzanilla as best I could. And sure enough, I came to the edge of the forest. The, the bears, what I thought were bears, were closing in on me. I could hear them getting closer. So my adrenaline was, you know, all I had left. And once I broke free, you know, the exaltation of breaking free was quickly dampened by the fact that the only thing in front of me was a cliff. Oh shit. And so I was, you know, I'm like, I'm not getting eaten by a frickin bear while trying to go through

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  selection. So I got up to the edge of that cliff and I, you know, it wasn't a sheer cliff. It was, you know, like the West Virginia hills, pretty steep. And I just hurled my body off the edge of that thing. Holy shit. Yeah, and hit, hit on my feet. I thought I was gonna grab this tree. It was a bad plan. They went right by that tree, cartwheeled down. And I ended up about 300 meters down and I lost my map. So, uh, it, I, one of the things is if you lose your map, your weapon, you're mapping your weapon, you're disqualified. So my map, you know, the end of it was a sheer cliff. My map was gone. It was like, that thing's history.

• 2:04:16Speaker 03

  But I had my weapon, my rubber weapon. And I'm like, fuck. Now what I'm gonna do, at least I didn't get eaten by the frickin bear. And then I look up and there up top is, you know, is a boar, a pig, a baby pig and a mama. You know, the, the, it was a massive pig. And of course, I'm from Illinois. So I never knew there were wild pigs, you know, in anywhere, much less West Virginia. Uh, and I was like, fuck. And you know, I had the momentary feel sorry for myself. And then I'm like, dude, you gotta get back in it. And I just brushed myself off, you know, made my way to the top. The pigs were gone.

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  It was just starting to get dark. Uh, so you know, I had no map. But I've been to Panama, J O T C, three times. And in Panama, you learn to navigate with your feet, to read terrain with your feet. So if your feet are are at this angle, you know you're walking off the ridge line. Uh, you know, when they're flat, you're on the top of the ridge line. Same thing. You're going left, downward. Uh, so you literally are, your brain is totally in touch with your feet because you can't see the terrain features in Panama. They're they're covered so thickly with jungle canopy. So you navigate with your feet, and that's what I did up there. It got dark. I just said, I know, I looked at this route.

• 2:05:44Speaker 03

  What's left is about four or five kilometers on the ridge line. The ridge, you know, meandered too. So I gotta stay on this ridge. Uh, you know, with no map. And so I stayed on it. I remember, you know, because probably the the adrenaline rush, uh, I was completely depleted. I was droning my ass off. I remember looking ahead of me and going, why is there a washing machine on the trail up there? And, you know, I keep going, keep going. And I, yeah, I thought it was a washing machine because there was a little red light and I got up to it and it, to the washing machine. And it was, you know, one of the Delta, uh, cadre.

• 2:06:28Speaker 03

  And he was like, you know, color and number. And I gave my color and number. And he goes, go sit over there. And I went and sat over there and, uh, I was like, uh, I fucked up. I don't have a map, nothing. And, uh, about five minutes later, Sergeant Major came over and said, you know, welcome to the unit. You made it. No shit. Yeah. So, so, you know, it's just, uh, never give up. Oh, I felt amazing. It was, you know, my dream. It was my, uh, my singular goal in the military. It's why I joined. So I was ecstatic and, uh,

• 2:07:09Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:07:10Shawn Ryan?

  They didn't ask for the map?

• 2:07:11Speaker 03

  No, I, I can't remember. Somehow they knew I lost it. Somehow he, cause later, uh, later, a guy who became my, my sergeant major was one of the cadre and he goes, "Yeah, we laughed pretty hard at you." And he goes, "You know that happens about two or three times every single..." And I said, "No." And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "Have anyone ever been chased by a pig before?" And he said, "Not that I know of, but, uh, but bears, yes. And, you know, I don't know what else is up there. Coyotes or something, so."

• 2:07:48Shawn Ryan?

  Today I want to talk about something a lot of us put off: life insurance. But if you've got people depending on you, it's not really about you. It's about making sure they're taken care of if something happens. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. Made for busy parents like you, all online, on your schedule, right from your couch. You could be covered in under 10 minutes, often with no health exam required. If you've got kids, and especially if you're young and healthy, the time to lock in low rates is right now. And if you already have coverage through work, that's a great start, but it might not be enough, and it doesn't follow you if you leave that job. Fabric makes

• 2:08:30Shawn Ryan?

  it simple. They've got flexible policies that fit your family and your budget. Even something like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day, depending on your needs. And there's no risk. 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel at any time. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/shawn. meetfabric.com/shawn. And use my link so they know I sent you. M-E-E-T-Fabric.com/shawn. Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company, not available in certain states. Price is subject to underwriting and health questions.

• 2:09:16Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. So where do we go from here?

• 2:09:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, just, uh, I don't know. It's, uh, you're the-

• 2:09:23Shawn Ryan?

  What squadron?

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  B.

• 2:09:25Shawn Ryan?

  B?

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  I started in A. I commanded in, uh, B.

• 2:09:28Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Well, I mean, how is it, talked to a lot of enlisted guys that have been over there, but never an officer. So, I mean, what is it like for an officer to check into the squadron as a new guy?

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, you know, to me, it's as it should be. You're, you know, you gotta earn, if you're gonna get any respect, you gotta earn it.

• 2:09:51Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:09:51Speaker 03

  Um, that's not gonna come quickly. You gotta earn it over time. So, you know, you going in and talking to people and telling them, you know, how great you are and what you're, how you think is not gonna do it. Uh, you know, you've gotta like earn their trust. And, uh, part of that is, you know, is your competency with tactics, techniques, and procedures and the other parts. Just your, you know, ability to use common sense to communicate, to talk to people. And, you know, for me, like, when I, my first job, the first troop I got

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  as a brand new, you know, I was a major, so I'm brand new in the troop. That, that troop, Larry was one of the team leaders. So Larry and I, right from the beginning, you know, kind of connected. Uh, he was one of the three best shots in the unit. Uh, you know, stories of his, you know, amazing, uh, shots had circulated the unit and had been known to me and a lot of other people. But more than that, he was always a very astute tactician. And, uh, never minced words, would always tell you like it is. Uh, and so we just,

• 2:11:16Speaker 03

  you know, he, he was like a sounding board for me, uh, operationally. You know, when I would think of something, "Hey, what do you think about this?" And, you know, one of the things we talked about was dogs. And, uh, he was one of the first guys who said to me, "Yeah, a lot of people have talked about it a long time. There's a lot of people don't want them, but somebody tell me, uh- Uh, they're go- they gotta go down and clear a deeply buried underground bunker and tell me that they don't want a dog with them to go in first. And, uh, and I was like, I agree, same thing. How about perimeter security? Uh, how about clearing a, just a building, a house, uh, where you got known enemy?

• 2:11:59Speaker 03

  Uh, so, you know, Larry was a big source of common sense to me. Uh, he's also very funny. You know, he and I used to sit through briefings and, you know, go back and forth, cracking each other up. And the most famous one was when, uh, for nine one one, after nine one one happened, we were up at JSOC. And the JSOC intel officer was briefing the plan they had come up with, which was an empty target raid. And it wasn't even the empty target raid they ended up doing. It was another empty target raid. And me and him were sitting there going, okay, so he opened the, the presentation up,

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  said, you know, we have to do something meaningful. And then he said, we've been, we've got the whole staff, we've been working for 96 hours and this is what we came up with. And Larry and I, in that conversation, created this concept, we called it the operational cul-de-sac. Uh, you know, you're, you see the sign that says dead end, but you decide to go down the street anyway, just to get turned around in the cul-de-sac and ending up back where you started from in the beginning. And that's what we're gonna do here. We'll do an empty target raid and then we'll be like, okay, let's find a target. Why not find a real target? Why not, you know, instead of just looking for targets, why not make

• 2:13:26Speaker 03

  the mission, get some guys on the ground and start figuring things out? And, you know, so to, back to your question, if you don't have someone like that, who you can speak freely with, who, you know, you respect their opinion, they tell it like it is, uh, you know, I think it's a lot harder for an officer. But, but, you know, it should be because, uh, it's an incredible position. You have to be, in my opinion, you know, they don't need an officer.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  They but they need someone to be looking over the next terrain feature. Someone's gotta be talking on the radio to hire. Someone's gotta be able to call, you know, a medevac. Someone's gotta be marking off buildings if you're clearing, you know, a small town or whatever. So, you know, focus on what, how you can contribute. Uh, make sure you stay in your lane and, uh, and the guys, you know, see the value of having you around. But if you do nothing but, you know, act as a barrier, uh, negative

• 2:14:38Speaker 03

  squasher of ideas, uh, overbearing, you know, and tactical operations and planning. You know, the, you're gonna fall right into the, you know, the, I, the famous, I don't like officers.

• 2:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:54Speaker 03

  Uh, and, and again, to be fair, uh, when I got there,

• 2:15:01Speaker 03

  you know, there were, there were some individuals where I just scratched my head and said, you know, what the heck? How did they ever get in here?

• 2:15:09Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, no shit, even at that command.

• 2:15:12Speaker 03

  Yep. So I think it's good. It's part of the process. You learn, you know, you've got to adapt. You've got to blend in. You got to figure out your role and you got to respect the amazing combat and intellectual power of a bunch of operators.

• 2:15:29Shawn Ryan?

  I do believe Larry did say you are the only officer that he ever liked working with. He wanted to make that clear.

• 2:15:35Speaker 03

  Wow, wow. Well, I think that is a high compliment. I did not pay him for that, so.

• 2:15:42Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. So you went to, you went to Columbia with?

• 2:15:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was my first, uh, deployment, so.

• 2:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  That was the first one?

• 2:15:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so getting, getting into the unit, you know, I, I just give you my impressions like. It was like Nirvana because when I got there, everyone I talked to at some point talked about common sense. And you know, back then, that's what if you had to do an elevator speech on what the unit was, it was just a, an organization that uses common sense. And there were symptoms of that. There were, I don't remember any SOPs. There were no binders that said, this is how we clear a building. This is how we, you know, the formation we use when we're doing, uh, desert mobility or whatever. Uh, you know, there were, there were historical records. There were things

• 2:16:36Speaker 03

  that showed here, here's the formation we use for this or that. But, you know, back to that adaptive risk assessment, it was kind of this adaptive approach to any mission. Don't take set piece approaches to things. Don't, you know, every mission does not take one troop, one squadron, or one platoon, one company, one, you know, battalion. Think about what you need and then, you know, array allocate and group your forces that way.

• 2:17:04Shawn Ryan?

  I really like how I've never heard, none of the, none of the guys that have come in here have talked about that. And described the unit as a place of common sense. And that really fucking resonates with me.

• 2:17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18Shawn Ryan?

  Because

• 2:17:23Shawn Ryan?

  man, I'm trying to put it into words, but I mean, it's just

• 2:17:28Shawn Ryan?

  other units are not able to operate with common sense because of the fucking red tape and the guardrails that are put all around them.

• 2:17:36Speaker 03

  So true.

• 2:17:37Shawn Ryan?

  Flying at night, daytime operations only, all these kinds of fucking things. And that's, I mean, those are just the two that pop in my head immediately, but.

• 2:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't have those guidelines over there. Why don't you think that more military units use fucking common sense? Because I've, even in the SEAL teams, a lot of common sense fucking completely gone.

• 2:17:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I, uh, that's what I do now. I consult, I teach companies how to use common, the common sense way to make decisions and solve complex problems. And it's, it's not, again, it's not theoretical, it's biologic. You just gotta, you know, follow your instincts, what the brain tells you to do. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. Uh, but that's, that's the way the unit was described to me when, you know, the unit had, the, the closest thing to like, a charter was three guiding principles. And, you know, I used them on every mission I, I went on. Uh, the first one was understand what's going on around you. The second one was blend in anywhere. And the third one is the only failure is

• 2:18:41Speaker 03

  a failure to try. And later I would, you know, minimize those to learn, adapt, and interact in any situation. Learn about the situation going on around you, adapt to it, adapt to what you learn, and interact. It's the only way you're gonna learn. You gotta get out on the frontier and interact with the Indians in the terrain. You've got to understand that. So, you know, when that was first told to me, I was, you know, I took it like you take any guiding principles. It was like, wow, those are cool. But when I got down to Colombia, uh, so Colombia, just to give you some background, it started

• 2:19:22Speaker 03

  91 when Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison. Um, and the president of Colombia said, you know, no more, no more deal making, no more, uh, being nice. He's going to jail and he's going to jail for life. So the, the manhunt began. Um, and of course, You know, the manhunt in a foreign country or any operation is run by the embassy country team. And, you know, you know that. A lot of people don't understand that. But the embassy country team, which is an ambassador, usually the key instruments of national power. There's a mil group commander for the military. There's a CIA station chief. There's a DEA station

• 2:20:07Speaker 03

  chief everywhere down south. And there's usually an FBI guy, smaller group. They do criminal, international criminal stuff. But the the mil group commander, the CIA and the DEA were the, you know, key honchos down there. The ambassador, the guy incredibly astute ambassador, his name was Ambassador Busby. He was very unhappy with his country team because of one of the most common symptoms of all country teams. Instead of working together and collaborating as a team, they work at cross purposes. And a big reason for that is because they're incentivized to. Whoever gets credit for taking out Pablo is going

• 2:20:50Speaker 03

  to get the big budget. They're going to all get rewarded. A lot of people don't do it in DoD, but, you know, in the agency, if you do well on a mission, even back then, you got like a 30K stipend for, you know, not a, not an ARCOM, not a little ribbon with a piece of, you know, that we were like, did you see this ARCOM I got? Wow. All proud of it. They got like 30 grand. So they were, you know, the system like incentivized them to work at cross purposes. And then same problem, you know, you've seen it in the agency, the majority of people that end up in those stations are people with no life

• 2:21:32Speaker 03

  experience. They're never going to leave the embassy. All the reports, you know, a big eye opener down there. I'm like, you're the guy who writes the reports? Never left his office in Bogota. He's writing about Cali, writing about Medine. Wow. Yeah. But they're working at cross purposes. And so he said he had been to a demo and he, he's called back and I'm not sure who he called to, but he said, I want some unit guys down here to help me figure this thing out. And so the unit sent a first team down. I wasn't with the first team.

• 2:22:09Speaker 03

  But that team, he told, same thing he told me later, which is, I need you guys to help me bring this team together. They don't work together. I might as well have four country teams, because there's no communication, there's no sharing of information, and if you guys get in on this, then maybe you can do that. And, you know, one of our missions was, we are what you need us to be. So, you know, we took that on as a challenge. And when I got down there, it was the last of Pablo, it was when Pablo got killed in Medellin.

• 2:22:52Speaker 03

  And my job was liaison in the embassy in Bogota. So I was part of the country team. And right off the bat, you know, I was like, when I came in and the ambassador told me, gave me my charter, he goes, look, I'm depending on you. And if we're gonna get him and get the other guys, we're gonna need you guys to do it. And so I went back to my office and I was like, okay, what in the F do I do now? And then I just thought about it, you know, the three guiding principles, understand what's going on around you, blend in anywhere, the only failure is a failure to try. So understand what's going on around you, immerse yourself in the history of the country, immersed myself specifically, not

• 2:23:36Speaker 03

  just in the cartel traffic, but, you know, all the way back to the Panama Canal times, where basically Panama used to be part of Colombia. And why is that important? Because a lot of Colombians still carry a chip on their shoulder about Panama and the canal. That's one thing, getting up to speed on the Spanish language, making sure you're fluent. I had a good, you know, I took it in college, I had a good understanding, but I had to, you know, up my game on the language. That's understand what's going on. And the other part that was key was understanding the two

• 2:24:14Speaker 03

  guerrilla armies that were actually a huge part of the cocaine processing network. And that was the FARC and the ELN. And, you know, they're both, I think, back around again because Maduro refinanced them and, you know, rebuilt them. The ELN's in the north, Ayer Sito Liberación Nacional, and the FARC is down south in the Amazonia. So, you know, and then blend in anywhere, you know, now you're working on a country team. So besides, you know, my khaki jungle stuff, I gotta wear a suit every day.

• 2:24:55Speaker 03

  I gotta comport myself so that, you know, the people in the State Department, CIA aren't calling you a knuckle dragger. You gotta be able to communicate. And, you know, only failure is a failure to try. My, my main thing was we gotta get people out of Bogota. They need to be down where the narco trafficking is going on. We have to be interacting with the environment and the people. And that eventually, I mentioned Pablo got killed. The Colombian HRT deserved 100% credit for that, and they did it. The Agrupación is what they're called down there.

• 2:25:37Speaker 03

  But immediately, the day after he died, the ambassador called me in and he goes, okay, I wanna go after the Cali cartel now. And I want you to lead the effort to go after the Cali cartel.

• 2:25:49Shawn Ryan?

  This is after Pablo was killed?

• 2:25:51Speaker 03

  The day after.

• 2:25:52Shawn Ryan?

  Can you talk about the day he was killed?

• 2:25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's pretty much, he, you know, one thing about him was he loved his family and they had identified this weakness. He had to get on, you know, a mobile phone and talk to his son. And his son, at the time, his son and his mom were staying in like the Hilton in Bogota. They were, you know, house, under house arrest or whatever, because they tried to flee, I believe, in a number of countries, said they, they would not allow them. So Pablo was in Medellin. I can't remember the relationship of the house. I think his mom was either his mom's house or his mom's friend.

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  He was hiding out there and he got on his cellphone to call his son. His voice, he instantly was voice matched. We had trained up the agrupación on how to use the, the direction finding, uh, singing, you know, uh, package, which was literally a package. You put it in the backseat and then you had a, um, you know, like the equivalent of an antenna that you would point out. It looked like a, a bullhorn you'd point out. And that thing could triangulate a cell signal. And they literally, the, because the, the initial hit on it just put it in, I think a 400 by 400 meter area.

• 2:27:19Speaker 03

  So they went out driving, uh, two guys with the direction finding equipment. And they just did, you know, a comprehensive search of the neighborhood, up, down, up, down, and on like their third up, down, bing, a hit. And the guy who got the hit, you know, looked up and there in the bathroom window of this house was fat old Pablo on the phone. And, uh, they immediately slammed on the brakes, ran up there, got in a gunfight and, uh, and shot him dead.

• 2:27:52Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:27:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:27:53Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 2:27:55Speaker 03

  And, uh, yeah.

• 2:27:57Shawn Ryan?

  In Bogota?

• 2:27:58Speaker 03

  Uh, Medellin.

• 2:27:59Shawn Ryan?

  You were in Medellin?

• 2:28:00Speaker 03

  No, no, I was in Bogota when it happened. Yeah, but I, there were guys down there in Medellin when it happened and they were in a safe house. But it was a hundred percent, you know, Colombian, when you hear people say the US did it, that we had nothing to do with it. And we, that was not by accident. We knew how sensitive it was and we knew that, you know, to kill Pablo, it's gotta be by the Colombians or capture him. Um, because, you know, a bunch of gringos grab him. It just makes him a martyr, a hero, you know, and, uh.

• 2:28:34Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people liked him down there.

• 2:28:36Speaker 03

  They did, especially around Medellin. He sponsored soccer teams, built parks, uh.

• 2:28:43Speaker 03

  You know, employed a lot of people.

• 2:28:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:46Speaker 03

  So, uh, but anyway.

• 2:28:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how does, how does that feel? First, first deployment killed probably the number one most wanted guy in the world.

• 2:28:54Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I didn't do it, but I mean, it felt good to see it happen, to see success, that the efforts, you know, which had been going on, I think, six or nine months were, you know, were successful. And then, you know, I didn't have time to reflect, uh, because that next day he said, we're going after the Cali cartel and, you know, I did the same thing. I was like, what do we need? Uh, how are we going to do this? And, you know, to our conversation earlier, the first thing was no embassy employee had stepped foot in Cali up to that point. So you had this place that was supposedly 100% controlled by the cartel, you know,

• 2:29:37Speaker 03

  totally inhospitable to any outsider. And we were like, well, there's only one way to find out. Let's get some guys down there. And there was, there's a military airfield down there. So we, you know, flew down there, uh, unloaded our guys. The Colombian, our partners, the HRT was, you know, very sensitive about down there. They're like, you guys have to, you know, maintain low vis, uh, out here or, you know, it can get really bad. But what they found, first off, Cali's beautiful. If they ever turn it into a resort, uh, it'll take off like almost nowhere else in the world. Gorgeous terrain. Yeah, it's, it's beautiful. People, you know, all across Colombia are, are great.

• 2:30:22Speaker 03

  They're super nice, super friendly.

• 2:30:26Speaker 03

  And, you know, so we had, we had the beginning of, of an op and, you know, I returned, I would go down there, check on them. The guys, you know, uh, the guys were living in squalor. Uh, I went back to the embassy, um, and, you know, I had instantly an amazing breakthrough. And this is probably.

• 2:30:51Speaker 03

  Three weeks to four weeks in from when he gave us the mission. So I'm back at the embassy. It's uh, it's Christmas time in Bogota and I can't remember, I think it was like the 23rd. And I was in my little office next to the ambassador's office. It was seven o'clock at night and uh, I just, you know, the, the, I just got off the satcom with the guys down there. They were, uh, and what they told me, you know, gave me pause. They were like, Pete, we barely get any food. The Colombian supply system's heartbroken. It's not their fault. They're not getting much food either, but the real problem is water. Uh, you know,

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  we've been out of bottled water. We're trying to boil it. A lot of the, we're not sure if some of the food the Colombians are feeding us is cooked in, you know, water that was boiled at the right temperature. And sure enough, we're all sick as dogs, you know, shitting our brains out. We've lost like 15 pounds. Uh, we're living in squalor and the, the safe house, what's supposed to be a safe house, it's definitely safe, but it's not a house. It's a shit shack. So it's a safe shit shack that we're staying in. And I said, well, shit, man. Do you guys, you want to come home? I'll, I'll send an aircraft down tomorrow and bring you home. They're like, no, no, no, no. We're fine. We can hang another couple of weeks. Just don't forget about us,

• 2:32:14Speaker 03

  Panther and, and get some good intel. And I'm like, Roger that. So I literally, you know, put the satcom receiver down. I was standing there and then another satcom uh, radio that printed out digital messages beeped to life. And this one was uh, was an intel uh, net and it was sending me a SIGINT hit from the massive, you've seen them, the massive radar dishes that dot South America. It was a SIGINT hit. And I, you know, tore the thing off and read it and it was like SIGINT hit.

• 2:32:51Speaker 03

  Uh, Miguel Rodriguez Oriela, one of the Oriela brothers, head of the Cali cartel. What, uh, positive ID at this lat long. And I'm like, holy shit. So I go over, we had a wall map, you know, about half the size of this, or cut this wall in half, it would cover the, half the wall. And I went on and, you know, it took me a couple of minutes to do the lat long. And I remember looking up at it and going, wow, these fucking guys know what they're doing. He was in, he was in a hundred meter square around the most pricey condominium real estates up by the Zona Rosa in Bogota. And then because it was

• 2:33:33Speaker 03

  a one over 25,000 topographic map, I followed the terrain down from the Sigan hit and right below him was the 10 acre US ambassador's residence. And, you know, my first thought was like, simple genius. What better place to hide than right next door to the guy who's leading the search against you? So my next thing was I, I gotta, you know, we gotta take action on this. So I left my office, like I said, I think it was around seven at night. I left my office, went down to the agency's office, locked tight, no one there, lights off. DEA locked tight, no one there, lights off. Uh, Mill Group locked tight,

• 2:34:18Speaker 03

  no one off. And I was, I was really looking for DEA or CIA and specifically CIA, uh, but nothing. So I got on the phone, the landline, I called their emergency numbers, got voicemail on all of them. So this was, this is another, you know, as I'm doing this, I'm going, this is why the ambassador brought us down here. Probably out drinking. Yeah. Well, you know, it's On the agency. We're, we're like military guys. When they're on a mission, they're on a mission. There's no time limits, you know, you're going to pull an all nighter if the mission, uh, you know, requires it. But that's not the same and, and for good reason. They all had their families there, but you could see.

• 2:35:03Speaker 03

  Most embassy company, country teams have this corporate mentality, you know?

• 2:35:08Shawn Ryan?

  You just cannot match the work ethic.

• 2:35:10Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:35:10Shawn Ryan?

  Of military guys, probably especially soft, I've not worked in a conventional unit, but you cannot, you cannot fucking match that work ethic anywhere you go.

• 2:35:22Speaker 03

  You're right.

• 2:35:22Shawn Ryan?

  Unless you work at here at Sean Ryan Show.

• 2:35:25Speaker 03

  I've talked to some of your employees, they told me.

• 2:35:27Shawn Ryan?

  They work their fucking asses off. That's what they do.

• 2:35:29Speaker 03

  You got a heck of a team out there.

• 2:35:31Shawn Ryan?

  But that is one of the things I noticed immediately.

• 2:35:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:34Shawn Ryan?

  When I started contracting for CIA, these people's work ethic fucking sucks.

• 2:35:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yep.

• 2:35:39Shawn Ryan?

  All they give a fuck about is getting drunk.

• 2:35:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:41Shawn Ryan?

  At the tally bar.

• 2:35:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's, it's not good. And then for the wrong reasons. And you're trying to do something, it gets frustrating if you let it. Uh, but anyway, you know, so, so I'm trying to figure out what to do and there's a knock on the door. And I'm like, come in. And it's the ambassador's secretary. Her name was, I'll call her Maria. Uh, and she was like.

• 2:36:07Shawn Ryan?

  This could go one of two ways here.

• 2:36:12Speaker 03

  Oh, Sean.

• 2:36:15Speaker 03

  Maybe both ways, I don't know. So, um.

• 2:36:19Shawn Ryan?

  I heard you're a Delta.

• 2:36:21Speaker 03

  She, I already had a good relationship with her because as funny as it sounds, she was a career State Department employee. And she was just an administrative assistant. But if you needed an answer in that embassy, like if you needed to know, hey, you know, I got this, who do I talk to? And then what do I do after I talk to them? She'd tell you, okay, don't talk to this guy. Talk to this guy. Don't tell him what you want. Just tell him what you found. She'd give you advice like that. Very highly contextual. Very valuable, you know, she, she helped us. I can't, you know, put a, put adjectives on it.

• 2:37:00Speaker 03

  But she stuck her head in the door. She goes, hey, uh, I just wanted to check on you. It's pretty late. You're the only one here. And I'm like, yeah. Yep, I got a really, we got something kinda hot right now, Maria. I, you know, I'm super busy. And she goes, oh. Well, I wanted to just tell you, we're having dinner at my place tonight. A bunch of people from the country team are coming over. We've got, you know, the steaks in Columbia are like all world steaks. We've got fresh steaks. The chef's gonna put them on in like 20 minutes. They should be ready in an hour. And I'm like, you know, Maria, I can't. I'm here, I'll probably be here all night. And, you know, this is really hot. I'm sorry.

• 2:37:43Speaker 03

  And she goes, okay, well, um, you know, if you change your mind, here's my address. And I don't bite. And I took the address and she said, I don't bite. And this is part of not working with women. The door shut and I awkwardly said, well, then how will you swallow your meat? And I was like, fuck, I cannot believe I just said that. It's the fucking stupidest thing I ever said. Oh shit. And I go back to plot the thing and all of a sudden the door opens up again. And she goes, what did you just say? And I go, I asked, how will you chew your food? And she goes, oh, okay. I thought you said something different, but okay, the offer still stands.

• 2:38:28Speaker 03

  Uh, we're gonna be there. You work really hard, so if you finish this up, uh, please just come over. Steaks will be ready. It'll be a good time. And I'm like, yep, I, you know, no change. So I went back. I called my guys down, um, uh, down, you know, in Cali. And I told, bounced it off them. I said, hey, guys, here's what I got. And they're like, Panther, you gotta figure something out, man. You gotta act on this. This could lead to a lot of intel. And, uh, you know, this could be it. This is the opportunity we can't pass up. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I'll get back to you guys. I'm gonna keep trying to call these other country team members. I tried again, no answer.

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  So I went over to the map board and, you know, something about this yellow sticky she gave me. I was like, I wonder where this is. So, you know, it was like 122 Callaway, something like that. Dr. Cali, you know, C A L L E. So I went up the map. I go.

• 2:39:31Speaker 03

  Inside the circle, like in she's her condo is uh which makes sense is also above the Ambassador's residence, the best real estate in town. Inside this, at the time it was a hundred meter circle, the Siggent circle is her apartment. So I'm like, damn. So I called the guys back up and I go, guys, horns of a dilemma here. You know, uh, no one's answering their phone. This, this Siggent hit is getting colder by the minute. Right now it's 26 minutes old. Uh, so what I found out is the Siggent hit comes either the same

• 2:40:14Speaker 03

  apartment or the apartment next door to one of the embassy employees who asked me to come over for dinner, but I told her I can't, you know, I'm not going over to anyone's house for dinner while you guys are shitting your brains out. They're like Panther, come to your senses. Get your ass in the car and drive to that party and check it out. It's the only thing we got. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna be gone. I gave a five point contingency. I said, it takes, it should take me about a half hour to drive there. I'm gonna drive. So give me a half hour there, half hour back. Uh, I may need to hang out in the party just as part of my cover for action. So give me two hours

• 2:40:56Speaker 03

  max. If I'm not back in three hours, call Southcom and tell them, you know, what happened and where I went. They're like, Roger that.

• 2:41:06Shawn Ryan?

  Sleep, it affects everything. When it's off, you feel it. Focus drops, recovery slips, and you're just not operating how you should. And that's why I started using Dream. Since I started using Dream, I've seen a real difference. I'm falling asleep faster, staying asleep, and waking up feeling like I've actually recovered. Dream isn't the cheap, overpowered stuff you find at the drugstore that knocks you out and leaves you foggy. Dream helps you fall asleep fast and wake up clear. No grogginess, no crash, just deep, restorative rest that lets you hit the ground, ready to work, train, and show up for the people who are relying on you.

• 2:41:47Shawn Ryan?

  Best of all, Beam is an American company that makes clean, science-backed products designed to help people perform at their best. Dream is their sleep formula, and it's loaded with ingredients your body actually needs to recover. Reishi, magnesium, L-theanine, apigenin, and melatonin, but dosed intelligently. I mix it up about 30 minutes before bed, and it's just part of my nightly routine now. And for a limited time, I've got my listeners an exclusive discount of up to 50%. Go to shopbeam.com/srs, use my code SRS to get up to 50% off. This is the best discount Beam gives out, so tell your friends too. Even if they don't listen to the show. If they want to fix their sleep, they've got to try Beam.

• 2:42:32Shawn Ryan?

  So remember, go to shopbeam.com/srs, use code SRS. With my code SRS, you can grab Dream for 50% off. Try it today.

• 2:42:46Speaker 03

  So, you know, again, this is my first deployment. I get in my car, it's nighttime. There was not a restriction against driving at night in Bogota, but it was highly discouraged by the State Department of Security. But I knew the route. I'd driven all over Bogota, and the route to get there took me through Parc National, which is a pretty hairy part of Bogota. And I remember all my, you know, all my training had come into place. I took my 45 out. It had a piece of Velcro stuck to the hand grip. I also had a piece of hook pile tape, which is what Velcro sticks to on the dashboard.

• 2:43:30Speaker 03

  So I stuck my 45 on the, because I got to drive, you know. So I stuck my 45 on the dashboard, put my hat over it, so that if I ran into an ambush in Parc National, I could just blast away through the front windshield and drive out of the ambush. So I drove, you know, made it there. I got within, you know, about 500 meters, slowed down.

• 2:43:55Speaker 03

  It was like, okay, you know, am I doing the right thing here, you know? And I know I don't want to go to the department, but I gotta check it out to see if, I gotta check the sig and hit out. So I drive up and, you know, my cover for action is I'm going to this dinner. So, you know, I'm, I shift my mindset. Don't act like a guy checking out a sig and hit. Act like a guy, a dumbass embassy employee going to an embassy party. So I pull up, beautiful, glass faced, you know, high rise condominium, 20 stories maybe. Beautiful, you know, you can tell these are massive condos. Full glass vestibule.

• 2:44:40Speaker 03

  And I get out of my car, I park it, park in front. And the car next to me was a Lexus, a black Lexus with tinted windows. And as soon as I got on my car, I was like, there's someone in that car and they're looking at me. And, uh, you know, the same thing had happened to me. My house had gotten robbed in Washington a couple of years earlier and I came home from a bar and the guys who robbed it were in a car next to me and I had the same thing. I was like, my spider senses set off that someone was looking at me. So, you know, I dismissed it. I'm like, stick with your cover, stick with your cover, keep walking. So I walked up, you know, uh, act like you've been here before.

• 2:45:24Speaker 03

  I opened the door, act like you know where you're going. I walked over to the, you know, the doorbell call box thing, uh, saw her name, hit the thing. Um, you know, walked over to the elevator. It was a private elevator and, you know, turned and as I turned, four guys were getting out of that Lexus. Uh, three of them were gigantic. One was, you know, uh, your typical like CEO looking guy in the backseat, which, you know, fit the whole profile. And you know, I'm like, come on elevator, come on, because they're coming into the lobby. And soon as their door opened into the lobby, the elevator door opened for me.

• 2:46:09Speaker 03

  And I took one glance before I walked in and I saw the lead guy, you know, thousand dollar suit at the time, and I saw a sidearm that he was armed. You know, there's no guns, you're not allowed to have guns in Colombia unless you're a narcotrafficker or pistols in Bogotá. So up, you know, up elevator, I'm going up, I'm like, what the fuck? I think that's them and they're in this building. So up the elevator goes. It comes to her condo, bing, the doors open. The whole condo is like dark. There's, you know, like five people in there drinking champagne, soft music.

• 2:46:54Speaker 03

  There's like candlelit table in the background and all five of them turned at the same time. And they're all dressed, they somehow changed, dressed to the nines. All of them turned, Pete, welcome, so glad you're here. And you know, I looked at them and again, you know, can't hide my geekiness. Bam, I hit the closed door button and the down button at the same time. They're like, the last thing I heard was one of the guys say, what the fuck?

• 2:47:23Speaker 03

  All right, all right, man, all right, breathe, breathe, you know, I'm going down, I'm going down. What if they're still in the lobby? First thing I did was touch my, my 45, you know, and then touch my spare mag. I had eight rounds in the 45, seven in the mag, so I had 15 shots. Should be more than enough if I get in a shootout, but I don't want to get in a shootout. What I want to do is walk right by them, get their license plate and then drive away. And so, bing, the doors open up.

• 2:47:54Speaker 03

  There they are again. Same thing, this time they're standing in, inside the lobby. Just, one of them's on like, you know, the old school brick cell phones. So, I take a deep breath, I walk, you know, right by him. I walk out, I look at the Lexus, it does have license plates. I, in a split second, I was able to memorize the license plate number. I got in my vehicle and I drove away. And, uh, I, you know, I drove about a block away and then just watched. And sure enough, they, right after I walked out, they loaded their vehicle and I was like, I might have spooked them. You know, I gotta like, think worst case scenario.

• 2:48:37Speaker 03

  So, I got back to, uh, the embassy, I immediately got on the satcom to my guys. I go, "Guys, here's what happened." They're like, "What the fuck? Did you go back there?" I'm like, "No." You know, "I can't go back again, I don't want to blow the cover and I don't want them to, you know, know that there's embassy people living there or whatever. But, we gotta process this thing and so, can you guys somehow without, uh, you know, letting the Agrupacion intel guys know what we're doing, just see, you know, I know they, they run plates all the time. They have a massive data base of Colombian plates. See if you can run it and see what happens." And he goes, "No problem Panther, we know the guy who does it, we'll do that."

• 2:49:22Speaker 03

  So, they ran the plates and sure enough, they were registered to this office in Cali, uh, which, you know, they called up on a, uh, satellite photo that they had on their laptop. Like, it's an office, it's a one-story office. "Can we go now?" And I'm like, "Guys, it's gotta be HRT," you know, and they're like, "Yep, yep, Roger. Okay, we'll get them ready for an op tomorrow morning." And so... I stayed in my, in, slept in the, uh, my office that night.

• 2:49:54Shawn Ryan?

  FBI's HRT?

• 2:49:56Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 2:49:57Shawn Ryan?

  FBI's HRT?

• 2:49:58Speaker 03

  No, these are the Colombian HRT is their equivalent of SEAL Team Six and Delta Force. They're the Agrupacion is what they're called. Uh, they're their CT force. Uh, and so, you know, uh, the next morning I wake up, uh, cause I hear voices out and it's the ambassador, he was an early riser and the CIA station chief out there. And CIA station, I walk out and CIA, CIA station chief's going, ambassador, we, we got this SIGINT hit last night, we processed it, we know where it's at, uh, and we're ready to go. And, uh, and ambassador goes, okay, make sure you, uh, brief Pete and then let me know what you guys decide to do. And he turns to me and he goes, okay. And I go, hey, man.

• 2:50:44Speaker 03

  Check out this license plate number and tell me what you find out. And he goes, okay. You mean, you know what happened? And I told him, yeah, I was here last night. Do you, didn't you get my answering machine message? He goes, oh, that was you? Yeah, I never listen to those. Uh, so that next day, all this work together to get approval for the Agrupacion guys to hit this, uh, a small office, one story office with my guys. So they get to the, they get to the, uh, facility. And this is, uh, ninety-two, I think, ninety, yeah, ninety-two.

• 2:51:25Speaker 03

  So, I mean, think about even in one thousand, most people don't know what, you know, a computer hard drive is in two thousand, even in two thousand, people were still learning the internet and stuff. So it was full of computers and hard drives and printers. And, uh, my guys called me and they're like, Panther, we gotta go inside. They don't know anything about computers. They don't know what to grab, uh, you know, what could be sensitive. They don't know how to interrogate the devices. And we had our SIGINT guy down there, he had all this high speed shit you could just plug in. So I go, okay, I gotta, I gotta talk to Southcom because our ROE is we're not allowed to go step foot on any target that the HRT is in.

• 2:52:10Speaker 03

  So I call Southcom. And I'm going, this probably isn't the smartest thing to do, but I gotta do it. So I call him, guy gets on the phone, he goes, okay, okay, let me run it by the boss. Calls me back 10 minutes later.

• 2:52:25Speaker 03

  Permission denied, you shouldn't even be out there. It's, uh, it's their op, should be letting them run the op themselves. Uh, but permission denied, they, they're not allowed to go in. So I call him back up, I go, guys, here's the guidance. You're not allowed to go inside. They're like, Roger that. So, you know, they had all the, had the agropasion open all the windows. They went to each window around the building. They got on top of the roof. There was a massive skylight. They opened the skylight. They started pointing, that's a hard drive, get that, get that. And the, the result was all that info turned up. It's somewhere in there were two things.

• 2:53:07Speaker 03

  Eight key congressmen that they were bribing, um, in the Colombian government. And also an address of, uh, one of their main residences. And that resident was, uh, was taken by DEA and, uh, agency guys. And they ended up, uh, going in there with the Colombian HRT and arresting, uh, the Oriela brothers. Found one of them, he was hidden in, he was in a hidden room, uh, in there. So, you know, to me, I reflected long on, on that, you know, and, uh, my lesson was how sensitive decision-making is to context.

• 2:53:50Speaker 03

  And that you can never pre-decide anything, or you can never tell what you would do in a given situation without context. You know, was, was I going to the party?

• 2:54:07Speaker 03

  As an excuse to check out the Siginn hit or was I going to the Siginn hit as an excuse to go to the party? I don't know. Uh, would I have gone if it had been somewhere else? I can't say that. But I know in the context of the moment, why I did what I did and you know, I was happy with every bit of it to include, you know, leaving, hitting the down button on that elevator, uh, it going down. And you know, they, they, they found out what happened and, uh, all that did was get me invited to about 10 more of those.

• 2:54:44Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 2:54:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. But you know, we, we had very clear lines, demarcation lines of never mixing business and pleasure. So.

• 2:54:54Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 2:54:55Speaker 03

  So, yeah, that was my, uh, and, and so, you know, you started this asking about going after the cartels in Mexico and that's what I mean, something similar to that. But the added challenge, it's so difficult to know who to trust in Mexico and specifically in the government.

• 2:55:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:16Speaker 03

  Um, that, you know, it, it's going to be tricky, but I'm sure there are some, you know, Mexico experts, uh, who can come up with a counter solution and then just incrementally work, develop the situation, work the intel, have people in place where you can take advantage of opportunities. Uh, and then, you know, the courage of your convictions to act if it makes sense, do it, uh, even if it seems like you're bending the rules a little bit, fucking bend them, man. And you know, ask for, ask for, uh, you know, ask for permission later or ask for forgiveness later.

• 2:55:54Shawn Ryan?

  Um, I've got a question for you. You know, well, since we're talking about cartels and I'll just wrap it up into, you know, everything. I mean, would, if we're, if we are taking out a cartel, a terrorist organization, some type of a, uh, a machine. Through everything that you've been through, cause you've been through just about every damn conflict that's, that's, that's happened and what since, since Panama, would you rather go start with the bottom up or the top down?

• 2:56:32Speaker 03

  I think if you got the intel on the top down, go top down. It's just usually it's the inverse. You got the intel on the, you know, the subalterns, the lieutenants, and it's much sketchier on the big guy. But if you got good intel, you know, you got to take it while you got it. Because finding a guy who doesn't want to be found is, even with all the technology today, is super difficult. Um, you know, the Maduro thing is an incredible op. And someday, I'm sure we'll find out, you know, where the intel came from. But it had to be pretty good. I wouldn't have passed that up either. So, yeah, I'd always go top.

• 2:57:15Speaker 03

  I think, you know, that's why human hunting, you know, if we had taken out Hitler, if we had had the balls in 98 to take out Bin Laden, and we, he wasn't that hidden. He was in caves. He was living in Kandahar, driving to Khaust, uh, you know, every week, which is like 400 miles on, you know, elephant-sized potholed roads surrounded by landmines. So it takes like 10 hours to drive there. And he was doing that every week. Uh, we could have gotten him in Raoul. We could have gotten him in Khaust, could have gotten him in Kandahar. We stayed in his house. We used it as a safe house after the invasion.

• 2:58:00Speaker 03

  We could have taken that thing out, but no audacity, no, uh, you know, no listening to the guys on the ground. Uh, you know, I, I doubt President Clinton at the time had someone telling him, you know, we can do this. It's not this complicated thing. But at the time, uh, he had a four-star, the head of the military was telling him, you know, whatever we do, we can't, it can't involve boots on the ground in Afghanistan. It's like, dude, why? You know, no one even know, you could land in Afghanistan, could have landed anytime before 911 on a, on a dry lake bed, a dirt road, anywhere, and no one would have known you were there. Yeah.

• 2:58:43Speaker 03

  So, you know, uh, those are the components and, you know, we have those now.

• 2:58:50Speaker 03

  So it's just a matter of, you know, the interagency unity of effort again, and that's critical, and I'm hoping that that that's working.

• 2:59:03Speaker 03

  You know, I know that the CIA is still needs a lot of course correction from the, you know, tidal wave of woke hires they made from, you know, 2020 to 2024, and I'm not being derogatory. I'm just, that's the truth, and and I would say that if they were all right-wing fanatics. You can't have political people in the CIA. You just can't. Can't have them in DOD either, but you can't have them in CIA because it's much more prone with the money and everything else to nefarious activities.

• 2:59:44Speaker 03

  And as we saw, you know, we now have seen again Tulsi Gabbard released that memo where, you know, the head of the CIA had already approved that the memo, the famous, you know, Hunter Biden laptop memo of 51 had already endorsed sending that thing around. Gina Haspel, right, was the... So you just can't be that way, and it's so foreign to most of us. Like, if anyone had ever said to me during the Obama administration, "Hey, we got some guys. There's guys on the inside, and they're working to overthrow Obama." I fucking rat him out, man.

• 3:00:29Speaker 03

  He's the President of the United States, and, you know, they wouldn't have said that because it's so far out of the, you know, out of the, just any concept of righteousness or logic.

• 3:00:45Speaker 03

  But, you know, that was the case. They were doing everything they could to, you know, get rid of Trump. And who knows how many opportunities were missed, you know, with real criminals, real narco terrorists, real terrorists during that time. They were all focused on Trump. Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:01:08Shawn Ryan?

  So where do we go from here Somalia?

• 3:01:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, we go there next.

• 3:01:13Shawn Ryan?

  What was your involvement there?

• 3:01:16Speaker 03

  I was a backup, so I'm in a...

• 3:01:20Speaker 03

  So C did the mission, so before the mission happened,

• 3:01:26Speaker 03

  it actually coursed through all three squadrons. So B had, if you were on alert, you had the mission and you rehearsed it. The Somalia mission, how to get a deed. You know, it was more or less a single snatch type thing we were working on. And so B had it first, then A, which was me and Larry, and then C. We passed it like the day of that they deployed was the turnover and the commander decided to give it to them, which, you know, it's fine, and they did amazing there. But, you know, the rehearsals were, I think, you know, have some key learning points in

• 3:02:09Speaker 03

  them too, because the rehearsals, this was, this was the, the like onset of the MH60 dominating every mission that special ops went on. They were, they were new, the fleet was just updated. All the 160 Blackhawks were new, they were big, you know, they were, they held the most people. And they want, every mission was, you know, default to an air assault raid. And so we were out there rehearsing, there's no competition between squadrons and like all missions, you're not really believing this one's gonna happen because, you know,

• 3:02:52Speaker 03

  we've been through a thousand dry holes or a thousand, nope, don't need to plan anymore, you know, knock it off. So it was just, you know, the way I described Larry before, like, just common sense, looking at shit, what works, what not. And so after the first night, we were like, these Blackhawks are not assault platforms.

• 3:03:16Speaker 03

  It takes 45 seconds for a Blackhawk to break, flare, hover, and get his rope down. And then it takes another 45 seconds just to get one aircraft load of unit operators all the way to the ground. So you're talking a minute and a half. A little bird with four guys on it can pull up to a balcony, the top of the building, the side of the building. If it's a balcony, it can do one skid, turn around, do the other skid. But basically, a little bird, it's brake flare hover, dislodge 15 seconds. So, a little bird was 15 seconds in and out, and a Blackhawk was a minute and a half. And we

• 3:04:00Speaker 03

  were like, they're gonna blow that fucking Blackhawks out of the sky. Common sense. Common sense. And Larry, Larry, it was me and Larry, it was like 2:00 in the morning. And unfortunately, in the AR was led by all Blackhawk pilots and stuff. And they were great guys who I know, and I would be honored to fly with. But they took it like, you know, personally, or like we were making an emotional thing. And it's like, guys, I like your Blackhawk too, but I just don't want to ride that thing into combat. We have enough little birds. Why don't we put the whole squadron on little birds? So we needed 12 little birds to do

• 3:04:39Speaker 03

  that. The whole assault force, I should say. And, uh, and you know, that went all the way up to the commanding general. Well, the commanding general was a helicopter pilot, a Blackhawk pilot. And so the answer came back very swiftly, keep the Blackhawks. And so the next thing we were doing is, you know, we were rehearsing the shit out of them. We're like, can we at least try some other techniques? And, you know, one idea someone in the, someone in the troop came up with was, uh, you know, they have these shit sucking trucks that is the only way they, they don't have sewer, sewer lines. They just have shit sucking trucks that suck the shit out of their little vats below the houses. And they drive all over.

• 3:05:25Speaker 03

  Why not get a shit shot, shit?

• 3:05:30Speaker 03

  Shit sucking truck. Hollow that thing out, clean it out, and we ride inside the shit sucking truck, right to the target, jump out, grab them, you know, we can even wait inside of it until the target presents itself. And that idea got kind of quashed too. And not by, you know, any, not by other squadrons or anything, by the higher headquarters. So it just, you know, it was just formidable to me because, uh, you know, I already, it was already apparent that everyone expected the US to come in helicopters, you know, and, uh, and,

• 3:06:11Speaker 03

  and we knew how easy it was to knock a helicopter out of the sky, just with an AK-47, much less an RPG. So, you know, it just did not seem to make sense. And from then on, you know, I was, you know, I was dogmatic about now, no helicopters allowed. And the, and the main reason is, you know, not even the, the tactical operational that I was just talking about, it's because

• 3:06:41Speaker 03

  when you default to the helicopter solution, you immediately divorce yourself from the real deep thinking that's required for any successful op. You know, what time does the guard shift change? What time do they eat dinner at? Uh, what's the pattern these guards do each night? You know, at the specific time we're looking at H hour. Uh, you know, can we, can we use something like the shit sucking truck to get in there? All these things that if you don't have a helicopter, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna think about. So I guess going back again to, uh, unstructured problem solving.

• 3:07:23Speaker 03

  You know, you're, you're not, it's not unstructured problem solving if someone says, I need you to do a raid on these Blackhawks. There's, the only option is either fast rope or land where a Blackhawk can land. So already you're, you're fencing your options in, uh, and then that means you've completely lost surprise. Uh, and so squatters, unless you're surrounding the target, you're going to have squatters and squatters almost always get away. Uh, so. You know, defaulting to the the helo mindset, it's nothing else. We still need helos. They're, you know, we need to have them. But I think even most Blackhawk guys would agree.

• 3:08:06Speaker 03

  It's not an assault platform. It was never built to be an assault platform that flies to a target with known enemy and somehow lands or disgorges its guys. The Little Bird is. It's like a flying dirt bike. It can get anywhere it wants to go. It's got that small bubble signature. It even crashes well. It bounces when it crashes, very survivable. And they're in and out, you know, like that. Fifteen seconds versus a minute and a half. So, you know, I just became a big advocate of don't use helos unless you have to. And if you do have to, always try to use Little Bird first.

• 3:08:51Shawn Ryan?

  Who shot that down?

• 3:08:53Speaker 03

  Uh, well, multiple were shot down. It was just the Somalis with the RPGs.

• 3:08:59Shawn Ryan?

  No, no, no, no, no. That's who shot the the ideas down?

• 3:09:03Speaker 03

  Oh, JSOC.

• 3:09:06Shawn Ryan?

  JSOC shot it down?

• 3:09:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:09:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, at the time, you know, probably take some hits for this, but yeah, like the helicopter mafia was in place. And by God, we've got these multimillion dollar machines and we got to use them. We got to show results for spending all that money on these helos. It's human nature.

• 3:09:31Shawn Ryan?

  So, so it was a, was it, it was a TF-160 mafia, it's JSOC?

• 3:09:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I wouldn't even call them. They were old TF guys. But, you know, I think.

• 3:09:45Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that is a mistake.

• 3:09:47Speaker 03

  Maybe what?

• 3:09:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that that in itself is a mistake, isn't it?

• 3:09:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. I'm, again, I don't want to sound controversial, but, you know, in in those first years, I was commanded by my JSOC commander for the Battle of Shaikot, was an Air Force one-star general who flew transport planes. And he flew C-141s his whole career. And so, and he was a nice guy, but my uncle's a nice guy too, but I'd never put him in charge of a bunch of commandos in a war zone. And, uh, you know, where, show me where in the military, guys like you and me are taking

• 3:10:31Speaker 03

  command of F-16 wings or F-15 fighter squadrons. It's not, they don't put ground guys in charge of air, so why are you putting air guys in charge of ground? Zero fucking sense. Yeah, but there's been a bunch of them and, uh, you know, nothing against those guys, they're just taking what they can get, but I, I just agree with your premise, it's, it doesn't make any sense. You know, you, all you can contribute at that level is wisdom and knowledge, uh, and hopefully learn through experience, but you've gotta be able to relate the nuances. You only get that from a well-rounded team. Yep, yep.

• 3:11:14Speaker 03

  What was the sentiment at the unit after that happened? After? Mood issue? Uh, it was, you know, great, uh,

• 3:11:24Speaker 03

  like, concern, I mean, first empathy for the guys, you know, and see, and the families, um, I, you know, I, I can't speak for everybody, but for us, it was my circle of guys, it was just, you know, uh, we need to learn, like, hard lessons and be very honest, and the unit was always very good at that. Uh, you know, you, you pull off what you think's the most successful op in the world and you get your ass ripped apart in the AAR afterwards, and usually good stuff brought up, you know, they were, they were productive, they weren't, uh, character assassination events. But we never really were able to hot wash it.

• 3:12:08Speaker 03

  You know, a number of key commanders got hurt. General Harrell, he became a general. He was injured by that mortar round. Um, so, you know, was in a little bit of turmoil. I don't think we ever, you know, did justice to all the lessons. And quite frankly, you know, more, more than that, I wanted to hear like each of these team leaders who were in C, I wanted to hear their stories, you know, what happened to them because they were all in slightly different battles, you know, all throughout Mogadishu. And one guy pretty much became a personal hero of mine, Paul Howe, because he was taking

• 3:12:52Speaker 03

  it to the enemy, you know, uh, uh, the Rangers and a bunch of other people had to, you know, ordered, hey, stay static, stay in position. We got to get, figure out where everyone is. Well, Paul Howe was like, I'm not staying static. Let them surround me. And he just started moving and clearing buildings and, uh, clearing up a huge portion of the sector, uh, to ensure it wouldn't, you know, they wouldn't get surrounded on the, you know, one or two square block area where everyone was located. So, you know, I wanted to hear more of that. Um, but other than that, I mean, it was no, there was no negativity.

• 3:13:35Speaker 03

  It was just empathy and, you know, compassion for the families and, uh, the guys who got injured, some of them, you know, very seriously. So it took a, you know, it took a big toll. And, uh, you know, same thing I said to you earlier, no one was walking around cursing Bill Clinton. No one was walking around, that didn't exist, you know? We didn't take it out politically. We take out on ourselves, what could we have done better? You know, should we have agreed to this? Uh, you know, I know one of the things, uh, C brought up was. This template mentality, they were forced to follow.

• 3:14:16Speaker 03

  It was the same, because you had this helicopter package, the same package was used. The little birds went in immediately around the, whatever the target building was or on top of. The Blackhawks went to the four corners, dropped fast ropes, Ranger, Isolation Force, Security Forces. And so that package, you know, it was even called a template at the time, became, you know, the default. And, uh, you know, though I, definitely a lot of us learned formidable lessons from it. And I know I did because it affected every op I was on from there on out.

• 3:14:54Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 3:14:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I've interviewed, um, Tom about that. I've never heard anything like it.

• 3:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he was in the real shit. He's an amazing guy, too. I would love to have heard his, you know, classified AR, um, every bit of it. Because so much of the stuff those guys did, you know, changed, course corrected the unit on things like CQB, our tactics, techniques and procedures. As Tom probably told you, you know, we all went to Mogadishu with skateboard helmets on. Uh, and we only wore helmets to hold our nods and, uh, you know, our peltors to our ear. Uh, but after that, the unit's the one that invented what's now, I think, called the mole. You know, the partial helmet, the unit invented that, you know, started cutting, just like they always do.

• 3:15:50Speaker 03

  Started, you know, turning operators loose, uh, with saws and helmets and cutting them into the right shape and then turning back to vendors and going, can you do this? Can you make one like this and change the padding? And they changed it and they built the current helmet, you know, of the version that produced the current helmet that everybody wears in the military. So that's just one thing, but tons of tactics, techniques and procedures, uh, changed after that. Moving along walls, stuff like that, because. The walls were getting hit by RPGs and bullets and you can, you don't really have to aim if someone's running along a wall. If you just hit the wall in front of them,

• 3:16:33Speaker 03

  uh, with an RPG, it's gonna splash all over them with, uh, you know, a 7.62 round. If it's a good wall, it's just gonna, you know, ricochet and go through however many guys are in a line along that wall. So that's another one I remember, but I'm sure Tom and the rest of those guys have a ton more that would be fascinating to hear.

• 3:16:57Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Pete, let's take a quick break.

• 3:16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, sounds good.

• 3:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  For this show, the biggest thing is preparation. When you're sitting down for a long-form conversation, you can't just show up with surface-level notes. You need real depth, structure, and the right questions. That's where I've been using Claude. It's helped me with research, building outlines, and shaping better questions before I sit down with a guest. I'll take a topic or a guest, run it through Claude, and it helps organize everything and tighten up the structure. It's a tool I use every day, and it has become a huge part of my workflow. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at the midnight hour or strategizing your next

• 3:17:45Shawn Ryan?

  business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. It's not doing the work for me, it's helping me think deeper. I still bring my own perspective, but it sharpens the questions, tightens the flow, and helps me get more out of every conversation. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at claude.ai/srs. That's claude.ai/srs and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai/srs.

• 3:18:22Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Pete, we're back from the break. I think we're moving to Bosnia and the Balkans next.

• 3:18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Bosnia, I did seven rotations in Bosnia.

• 3:18:35Shawn Ryan?

  What was, what were we doing over there?

• 3:18:37Speaker 03

  It was, uh...

• 3:18:39Shawn Ryan?

  I came in on the tail end of this.

• 3:18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was to capture war criminals. S4 was the security force for Bosnia. So, uh, the International Criminal Tribunal, Iciti, I can't remember what the last part is, indicted these Serbian, uh, war criminals for, there were, for good reason. There were massacres, uh, you know, massive massacres, hundreds of people. Um, and they, you know, once they were indicted, there was, uh, the NATO and the UN, uh, charged the US with, uh, and the multinational force over there with capturing them.

• 3:19:24Speaker 03

  And then we, I, well, JSOP was selected to, uh, you know, run the op, which was continuous. Now, I think it started in, I want to say 95, went to 99. And, uh, you know, I think the war ended in 95, so, you know, you saw the end of the war, you saw what happened, uh, and it's crazy. I mean, uh, like the ethnic hatred, you know, on all sides was pretty, pretty heavy. And, uh, you know, you remember what I said about, understand what's going on around you. The first thing you do before you go to Bosnia is, again, understand the history.

• 3:20:09Speaker 03

  And you understand, you know, Bosni- Bosnia is Muslims and they were the, the object of most of the, the ethnic killings.

• 3:20:19Speaker 03

  But, you know, the history of of that area goes back to 1389 when uh when the Turks came in and slaughtered uh Serbs and Croatians and they kind of never forgave them for that. And, you know, the Turks brought Islam to the Balkans. So, you know, you'd hear Serbian guys and Croatian guys talk about that and it's like, wow, 1389. Heck, man. That's a long time ago. But, you know, you understood. And uh and to me, you know,

• 3:21:02Speaker 03

  I sum up Bosnia as it was a living laboratory. It was like this, you know, um, you can do whatever you want to figure out how to capture these guys. And uh and we did, you know, uh, back to that unstructured problem solving, you know, first thing blend in anywhere. Uh, you know, usually when you're over there, you wore what most males wear in Bosnia and that's like blue jeans, a white t-shirt and a leather jacket. Some cigarettes. Some cigarettes, yeah, a lot of cigarettes. The uh, you know, I always remember uh,

• 3:21:42Speaker 03

  one of the girls came down and uh on the first day of her tour and the, for some reason, the most common color of hair in Bosnia at the time was a color that knows no uh equal in nature. We just called it red not found in nature. [laughing] She somehow went out, bought a box of this red not found in nature, dyed her hair and it was like, whoa. But it was all about blending in and, you know, the ability to go into a town, do a close target recce, walk down the street, see if you could spot the the war criminal.

• 3:22:22Speaker 03

  A lot of cool innovations at the time like, you know, to track someone, you need the, I forget what the triangulation thing is the cops have, is it LoJack? I don't know. Yeah, I think it's called LoJack, but it's the three antennas, when you're, when you're tracking a beacon, you know, you optimal is to have three antennas, so you have three little antennas on top of your car, but it's like, how do you keep that from sticking out? Well, same thing, you understand what's going on around you and, and people in Bosnia use their cars for everything, you know, a Yugo is a five cars in one, it's a pickup

• 3:23:02Speaker 03

  truck, it's a dump truck, it's a bus, you know, and so you'd see, constantly see cars with, you know, everything strapped to them, and we just decided, hey, let's put a box on top of the car to cover the antennas, and we'd switch the box out every few days, you know, make it look like a washing machine or something, and strap it on and drive around like that, you know, there was no, it was the 90s, so there was no Google Maps or anything, so you had to have also a satcom antenna to downlink, you know, your digital satcom, your maps, because you might want one, you know, that you don't have a satellite photo or something.

• 3:23:41Speaker 03

  So a lot of little innovations, just again, in the, in this, you know, art of human hunting, tracking, you know, surveillance, and then the setup, you know, setting these guys up. There were some incredible ops that were pulled off over there, you know, really, really valuable, long-term, one device that was invented was, we called it the Kevlar tennis net, and it's a good example of how stuff, you know, how the unit, you know, does research and development, it's just, hey, guys, we gotta find out another way to stop vehicles.

• 3:24:23Speaker 03

  We already had the spikes, which are good, but, you know, we wanted to stop a vehicle and then with the intention of pulling people out and capturing them.

• 3:24:33Speaker 03

  So, one of the guys did some research and he found this German scientist who had sewed together a Kevlar tennis net and he did it to stop, to put on the side of the autobahn for cars that lose their brakes to be able to drive through, you know. And he's, so he came to me one day and he said, hey, have you seen this thing? And I'm like, no. And he's like, this guy in Germany, I'm pretty sure he was German, has it, it's made of Kevlar and it'll stop a car up to 60 miles an hour. That's incredible, man. You gotta check that out.

• 3:25:11Speaker 03

  And sure enough, you know, he flew over, checked it out, we bought it and we employed it and one of the biggest war criminals, he was a Serb general, I won't name him, was captured that way and it was cool. We spray painted it gray so it would blend into the asphalt on the road. We, first you gotta find the right terrain, so you, you know, anytime you're doing an ambush, you want it around a curve so there, you can get the vehicle as slow as possible when you do the hit. So we found a good curve in the road and then, as luck would have it, there was a

• 3:25:52Speaker 03

  bridge abutment, so we were able to anchor the net on both sides to, you know, and I'm not talking, I'm not talking a bridge over the road, I'm talking, it was a bridge, the creek went under the road. Gotcha. And it had like the guardrails and stuff, but the cement abutments and we anchored the net that way. Then the guys dressed up as road workers, road worker vests, shovels, about six of them were out there and then two people followed the target. He got in his car and then passed it off to an aircraft that was tracking the vehicle.

• 3:26:34Speaker 03

  The aircraft tracked it, downloaded it to the assault force. The assault force was waiting in the woods off to the side. Not, it was the capture. The guys were gonna do it. The workers were had, were all armed. They were gonna be the initial, but you know, we had like twenty-five guys out there. And sure enough, here he comes, down the road, fifty miles an hour. You know, you just, you, sometimes you can't believe shit while it's happening and, you know, they pulled that net and it stopped that vehicle and, you know, everyone was pretty serious, but it was like little kids in a, you know, some kind of, I don't know, Christmas store. It was like, yeah, you know, running out there and this thing

• 3:27:17Speaker 03

  snagged this vehicle, uh, and captured him without, you know, hurting him. He had an amputated leg, so his leg, his, uh, fake leg came off. But, uh, you know, captured him without hurting him, uh, you know, which is what the intention was. And in the process, invented this new, you know, vehicle stopping device, uh, that I think is still relevant today.

• 3:27:43Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:27:44Speaker 03

  If you need to do it. So, that's what I mean by living laboratory. A lot of things were invented, a lot of things were perfected. Um, and, you know, they set us up really well for, uh, Afghanistan because, you know, the last tours, I think, were ninety-nine in Bosnia. So, only about a year and a half till

• 3:28:06Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:28:07Speaker 03

  Nine-one-one happened.

• 3:28:11Shawn Ryan?

  Anything else notable? How many, how many war criminals do you think you guys took?

• 3:28:16Speaker 03

  Uh, I think captured seven or eight. There was, you know, uh, there were a couple of things, uh, so-

• 3:28:26Speaker 03

  Bosnia was the first time VTCs ever showed up, video teleconferences. So the Bosnian, um, command and control cell was called S4, uh, security forces Bosnia, I guess. And, uh, and it was the most bureaucratic structure you've ever seen. A four-star general, American four-star at the top, like a two-star Brit below him, a one-star German below him. They all, they all needed to approve everything. Uh, so.

• 3:29:01Shawn Ryan?

  On your guys'?

• 3:29:02Speaker 03

  On our guys'. Yeah. So it was crazy. Uh, I remember one op, and this actually op, when it actually came to fruition, we passed it. The, uh, you know, the SEALs eventually came over. We were rotating, doing, uh, I can't remember if they did autonomous, but they were definitely over there and they did a couple of the capture ops. And on this one, it was a guy we had been following for a long time. He's an old man, uh, you know, just living quietly. We knew where he lived, lived in apartment every day. You know, got up, walked to the fruit market, bought some fruit, walked back. So, you know, the SEAL's plan was we're just gonna pull a van up there. When he walks by, we're gonna open the van

• 3:29:47Speaker 03

  doors, grab him, throw him in and drive off. I'm like, fucking hey, great plan. And, uh, and so, but it had to be approved by S4 and like I.

• 3:29:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no shit. How else are you gonna do it?

• 3:29:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I can't remember why I had to go to, to brief it with them, but you know, I was up there and the, you had all these generals and they listened to the plan. They go, "Once he gets inside the apartment, how many steps to his apartment?" SEAL guys like,

• 3:30:22Speaker 03

  Twenty twenty-three. It's okay. We need to know exactly how many steps. It's like, all right, uh, what else? What kind of anti-intrusion devices do you think he's got in the apartment? I was like, I don't, probably not many. He seems pretty casual, you know, he's just walking up and down the street. I, I don't see him taking a lot of measures. And this is a, an exact comment. He's like, you know, I read somewhere that one of the best devices to tell if someone's breaking into your house is to just put a a soup can on the door with some change in it. Do you think maybe he's got a soup can on his door?

• 3:31:02Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. What the fuck, man?

• 3:31:06Speaker 03

  And we were just like, holy shit.

• 3:31:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's when you know it's not even.

• 3:31:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's when I, we started, this is, it's gonna come into play later, but you realize this, this hierarchical decision-making, this, these disconnected chains of command, and this is, even though they're, you know, on the other side of the city, they're completely disconnected. They're running the construction, all this admin shit, and they wanna play, you know, infantry, uh, commando, you know, when the missions come up.

• 3:31:38Shawn Ryan?

  I hate these fucking people.

• 3:31:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really tries you, and it tried everyone's patience. There were guys pulling their hair out, and.

• 3:31:47Shawn Ryan?

  This is the shit why I only have six years of the military.

• 3:31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31:50Shawn Ryan?

  Cause I just looked, I, it, as a twenty-four-year-old, I was able to go, you're a fucking idiot. I'm out.

• 3:31:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I think, uh, common sense again, winning the day.

• 3:32:02Shawn Ryan?

  Makes the fucking hair on the back of my head stand up. It makes me so angry.

• 3:32:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it should.

• 3:32:07Shawn Ryan?

  So fucking angry.

• 3:32:08Speaker 03

  It should, cause you care about soldiers, you care about doing the right thing, and, and that's what it messes up. So that guy.

• 3:32:16Speaker 03

  I mean if you

• 3:32:16Shawn Ryan?

  You ruined my fucking dreams. I'm not fucking around. All I wanted to be was a SEAL. And then I got there and that's what I witnessed. And I was like, this is not what the fuck it was cracked up to be.

• 3:32:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:29Shawn Ryan?

  And a lot of, a lot of guys had a great experience, you know, but I had some really good experiences, but I just ran into that too many times. And I was like, this is not the fucking place for me, man.

• 3:32:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:32:42Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 3:32:42Speaker 03

  No, I'm with you. Um, and you know, just to give you like the, the final story, I was again, 99, I believe. So it was in the middle of that we NATO bombed, uh, Belgrade, uh, for like 78 days. I don't know if you remember that, the capital of Sarajevo.

• 3:33:06Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 3:33:07Speaker 03

  Or capital, excuse me, of, of Serbia bombed it for 78 days. It's NATO doing offensive operations, uh, in order to bring the country to its knees. Another stupid ass decision. But during that, the Kosovo thing was also going on. So what happened was the Serbs finally decided to pull back out of Kosovo. And this was all being run from now UCOM headquarters because Kosovo wasn't part of the Bosnia thing. It was up to UCOM. So, uh, one day, uh, the, I get this intel tipper and it said, hey,

• 3:33:46Speaker 03

  the Serbs are pulling out of, of, uh, the Pristina airfield. Pristina airfield is the only airfield in Kosovo that can land transport aircraft. It is absolutely critical to US interests that we secure that airfield. So I was like, I know exactly where it is. I had 20 guys. We were doing some, either prepping for something, or we were gonna do some training thing. So I had 20 guys and I'm like, we have vehicles. I can get in my car right now. We'll drive there with the 20 guys and we'll hold the gate and hold us, uh, uh, by force a perimeter by covering it, you know, with weapons.

• 3:34:26Speaker 03

  But we can easily secure that base because no one's going to fight us for it. It's just whoever arrives there first owns it. So I briefed this right to the S4 commander and the S4 commander was like, okay, well, we don't have approval authority. It's got to come from UCOM. So he gets on the phone to the 4-star in UCOM. The 4-star in UCOM goes, "Negative, negative, negative. We need to, we need to put this into the planning cell, figure out how to do this." So UCOM goes into this 96-hour planning cycle. That same day, a lot of people don't know this, the Russians

• 3:35:05Speaker 03

  were part of the multinational security force in Bosnia. And the day before that intel tipper on Pristina came in, we had driven out and bumped into these guys. They had like 10 BTRs parked on the side of a road near where their base was, and it was their sector and everything. We stopped. It was kind of cool, you know, we was like, this has got to be the only time US and Russian military guys have sat, you know, sat down, talked to each other, and we shot the shit, gave memories. They gave us our food. We

• 3:35:45Speaker 03

  talked for a while. You know, they were, they were like normal guys. Well, Russia obviously wanted that airfield too. You know, Serbia was a huge ally of Russia, and they were red hot pissed off. We were bombing it anyway. So they were looking for ways to, you know, get their moxie back and do something, poke, you know, the eagle instead of always having the bear poked. And so 18 of those BTRs loaded up with guys, followed by 20 civilian vehicles. They drove 400 miles to Pristina, got in the gate, shut the gate behind them, and

• 3:36:27Speaker 03

  still to this day, Russia controls that airfield in Pristina. And the Russian general just put this out, he's a civilian now, he put it out a couple of years ago, someone interviewed him. And he said, uh, well, the first thing is, we knew that NATO was a paper tiger. They wouldn't do anything if we went there. So we were convinced to go there. And then we knew, all's we gotta do is start out, because the multinational bureaucracy that they have in Bosnia can never make a decision. It's, they'll still be talking to each other between Germany, the US, Britain, and the other commands. And, I mean, he called it, like, laughingly.

• 3:37:08Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking embarrassing.

• 3:37:10Speaker 03

  It is, but, and, but, you know, again, it's only, you know, experience only matters. What's that?

• 3:37:16Shawn Ryan?

  I said those fucking generals probably got awarded for it.

• 3:37:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But again, experience only matters if you learn from it. And the lesson was, if you want to be nimble, you gotta be quick, and you gotta be audacious, and you can't go through this hierarchical decision-making process in the real world. It doesn't work. And remember, there was no real world. Bosnia is kind of a, you know, it's not a war, definitely. And, uh, and, you know, Colombia wasn't a war. So we were not at war. We weren't, these generals were the same way. They don't have a concept of operations, of how things unfold. For me and my guys, we could see instantly, just drive there, you know, 400 miles, we'll

• 3:38:00Speaker 03

  be there in, uh, six hours, or eight hours, seven hours. Uh, and it's a simple thing. No one's gonna do anything, we'll take it. But, you know, this demurring and this, you know, get the Jag in here, we want to see if this is legal, uh, it's never gonna work. And, uh, again, I, I add that in because, uh, we're about to go to Afghanistan and see all of these, you know, negative, uh, destructive C2 protocols just, uh, you know, impede any potential for success on some of the biggest ops in Afghanistan.

• 3:38:46Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that shit just, it just enrages me.

• 3:38:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gonna get worse when we

• 3:38:55Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I know.

• 3:38:56Speaker 03

  Talk Afghanistan. And that's what Ukraine is, just to keep going back to Ukraine. Um, because we only talked 2021. So the New York Times just did an exposé. Uh, and it's a funny thing, you know, it was meant to be a propaganda piece to prop up the DOD and CIA guys who've been fighting the war. Well, it turns out the Ukraine war was commanded and controlled by US generals from UCOM in Wiesbaden, along with Brit generals, and I'm talking four-star, three-star generals. They're micromanaging. They're coming up with these attacks. They're coming up with these counterattacks.

• 3:39:37Speaker 03

  Applying this, the number one negative lesson of all the way back to Bosnia, but for sure of GWOT, uh, which is what I'm, I'm describing, and I'll describe again. And that's that decision-making and problem-solving by disconnected chains of command never has and never will be capable of making sense of the reality of the situation on the ground, nor will it be capable of making sensible choices for what the guys on the ground should do next. And the reason for that is not theoretical. It's biologic. The very nature of a disconnected hierarchy means its senses are disconnected from the environment. And as I mentioned earlier with,

• 3:40:22Speaker 03

  uh, you know, Mach, uh, the only way to prove scientific facts is with your senses. The only way to make sense of any situation is with your senses. Uh, a video, anything else does not work. It has to be sensory information. That's how the brain works. Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. So these disconnected hierarchies that are, are, you know, have, are on steroids now. They're $10 million every one of these jock talks is a massive space-age, uh, you know, conglomeration and

• 3:40:58Shawn Ryan?

  Where did this stem from? When did this start to happen?

• 3:41:01Speaker 03

  I think it was part of technology. They they figured out they could do it. And I think what entices these generals is when you're running, when you're telling people what to do off of BTC, it's like being a captain again. Like being, they can be a company commander again and tell tactical shit. But they never understand that they're looking at a one dimensional view of reality, that they can't smell. They can't feel the cold. They can't feel the fear that a guy has because he heard some guys coming up behind him. None of that is relative, relevant to guys who are sitting in

• 3:41:42Speaker 03

  uh, TOCs, tactical operations centers with a wall of big screen TVs. Uh, in, you know, air conditioned, heated in the winter. You know, eating their three, four meals a day, working out. Um, and so I think it just became intoxicating to these generals to

• 3:42:01Shawn Ryan?

  Did it, did it stem from entitlement? Do they think they don't need to be on the battlefield anymore? Because they have a fucking star? I mean, would it? Where did this shit stem from?

• 3:42:12Speaker 03

  No one ever self corrected it and you know, that's

• 3:42:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's fucking crazy. I mean,

• 3:42:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:42:17Shawn Ryan?

  There's this, oh man.

• 3:42:22Shawn Ryan?

  Jamie Sands. Have you ever heard of this guy?

• 3:42:25Speaker 03

  Uh-uh.

• 3:42:28Speaker 03

  Who is he?

• 3:42:30Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, he was, he was, he was, uh, what the hell? I can't, I'm having a brain. He was in charge of the, all of the SEAL teams. And that's like

• 3:42:41Speaker 03

  Same thing?

• 3:42:41Shawn Ryan?

  Battlefield experience.

• 3:42:44Shawn Ryan?

  He was, he was my CO at two.

• 3:42:46Speaker 03

  Oh man.

• 3:42:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Just all, he just got fucking shit canned, finally. But it's, it's, I mean, just I just don't fucking get it.

• 3:42:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:42:58Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I would love to know when this started happening. Was it World War II?

• 3:43:04Speaker 03

  Well, I think, I think the VTC, I think the Satcom and VTC, yeah, have allowed these, I mean, I think it's always been, you know, you see in the old movies of World War II, the generals in a chalet moving, you know, little icons across a board. So it was probably to some extent then, but the chaos of World War II and the inability to send messages quickly, uh, precluded a lot of that micromanagement. But now you've got, you've got a predator, so you're seeing eye in the sky stuff. You think you're, you've got better SA than the guy on the ground. You don't have any idea what he can see. You've got Satcom radio, so you're hearing soundbites of people talking and sit reps

• 3:43:49Speaker 03

  of what's going on on the ground. And they, I think they just get, uh, caught up that they feel like they've got this, this tactical omnipotence, they can understand everything. And then, you know, the very nature of the fact, you know, their generals makes them realize, well, no one can come up, you know, with a better decision than me. I'm going to use my wise general officer, uh, you know, wisdom to, to inflect this operation and they just can't resist it. And I've seen it, I remember coming in, uh, from Shaheen Coe back to Bagram and sitting

• 3:44:31Speaker 03

  in one of the talks and, uh, an op was going on, they were all watching the Predator and, uh, they called in fast movers. The fast mover dropped a bomb and it nailed these people and, you know, I was not even convinced they were enemy. Definitely some of them were civilians. And the whole place started cheering, yeah. And me and my agency buddy were standing in the back and, you know, we, we didn't even, we never even gave a peep. We didn't cheer, we didn't say anything because we were still looking going. How the fuck do they know who that is that just got hit?

• 3:45:13Speaker 03

  And it's this, you're, you're, it's just this enticement that, hey, I can't resist injecting myself into this battle and potentially, you know, hitting the, hitting the mother lode and capturing Bin Laden or whatever. And I remember a, a general at that same BTC said, Pete, come over, sit down next to me and put a headset on. And guys started asking questions and I knew the answer to the question. And then somebody asked me something like, well, you know, what should we do? And, you know, I, because of Shawn Coe, I, I knew what the response is to that.

• 3:45:56Speaker 03

  The response is, what's your recommendation? And get that guy talking. Get him unloading the tacit knowledge that he's accumulated on the target because most of it is tacit. In other words, he hasn't made it physical yet. It's just inside their head, but no one has given them a chance. No one said, hey, blank slab, tell me what you'd do if you were in charge. What, what do, what do I need to know right now? And they just start talking and within that conversation, you, these pearls of wisdom, these nuggets come out and you're like, of course, that's what we need to do. And it's, you know, back to that principle, always listen to the guy on the ground.

• 3:46:37Speaker 03

  But, you know, the, the best question any commander can ever make when he's trying to figure something out to a subordinate is to ask, what's your recommendation? And get them talking, uh, you know, so you have some kind of accuracy to pivot off of. And again, I think that comes with experience. Most of these, you know, generals, they don't care. It's been, we've been doing it now 25 years. So if you just take, if we take the end of Bosnia till today, I guess it's 26, because we spotted, uh, it's one reason that I believe Ukraine's been so unsuccessful.

• 3:47:17Speaker 03

  Uh, not only we build an army that was supposed to match NATO, which doesn't match Ukrainians and Ukrainian military training.

• 3:47:26Speaker 03

  We commanded and controlled it with the same disconnected hierarchies that cannot make sense and they, in their zest to keep self-correcting, they just micromanage more.

• 3:47:40Shawn Ryan?

  What a shame.

• 3:47:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:47:43Shawn Ryan?

  We're never gonna learn.

• 3:47:46Speaker 03

  Well, shows like this, you gotta get the word out, you get the, the truth out and educate people and I think at least we can chip away.

• 3:47:56Speaker 03

  You know, the right guy is in the right place at the right time and who's heard, you know, the lessons and that's, that's the other part, you know, I said it earlier, experience only matters if you learn from it and I don't give a shit about proving I was right or someone else was right or someone was wrong, that doesn't matter and that's why I try not to say names, you know, but people are like, why don't you name the guy, I'm like, because then you'll be thinking about that guy instead of thinking about, it's one of the perils of human nature and that guy's out, but there's 10 of him back in right now, so it could happen to you again, but it might surprise you because you only think that guy does

• 3:48:36Speaker 03

  that shit and so, don't personalize it, just talk about the foundational lessons and we have a responsibility to do that so they don't happen again and, you know, that's an example of one right there, prevent these tragedies from happening again.

• 3:48:56Shawn Ryan?

  When did you show up in Afghanistan?

• 3:48:59Speaker 03

  Uh, we were the, you know, November of, uh, 2001.

• 3:49:04Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 3:49:05Speaker 03

  So, we, you know, did the, the initial raid on Muammar's house was kind of the opening, uh, combat, boots on the ground, uh, I was flying, I was the LNO in the AC-130 during that, so I flew above it, um, and then from there, uh, you know, again, a piece of history, uh, our command wanted to go home after that empty target raid, said, you know, there's no more missions for us and, uh, I had had this...

• 3:49:39Speaker 03

  A PowerPoint presentation that we built in 1998 when we were told by the Clinton administration, "Come up with, you know, a way to get bin Laden." And I described to you, he drove from Kandahar to Khaust, 400 miles. So I showed him this template, which was get guys in, move to a safe house, sequester them in the safe house, and then, you know, wait for the right moment, move out, set up an ambush, grab them and get out. But what we found out while we were doing that was that southern Afghanistan is full of these dry lake beds that are like pool tables. So you can land C-130s on them, you can, you know, land a C-130, disgorge

• 3:50:22Speaker 03

  vehicles, disgorge little birds, and that became our plan. Let's fly into these dry lake beds, unload vehicles, unload little birds, let the little birds go hunting, AH6s, have a couple MHs, but mostly AHs, and the vehicles go out, we can take key roads, block those roads, interdict the roads. And they, we're gonna still blow it off, but it turned out, Franks, General Franks, was so pissed off, he's like, you know, "Why do we pay you guys all this money? You're not even, you don't do anything. You raid two empty targets, you know, you didn't capture anybody. I need you to do something." So they sent

• 3:51:07Speaker 03

  that plan up to Franks, he's like, "Approved." And the next day, we started the process, haloing guys into the dry lake beds, doing penetrometer checks to check the soil and, you know, the surface hardness, and C-130s were landing like a night later, unloading gowers and little birds. And that's when the hunting began, that's when, you know, almost all the enemy fled Kandahar after that and ended up, you know, in eastern Afghanistan in the Shaikhut Valley where they hid.

• 3:51:41Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 3:51:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:51:45Shawn Ryan?

  You were in on Anaconda?

• 3:51:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yep, I was the AFO commander.

• 3:51:55Shawn Ryan?

  Lot of history there.

• 3:51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, uh, I mean, it was the biggest battle at the time and it ended up being the biggest ongoing battle of the war. Uh, but you know, it started same way, you know, we described earlier, uh, General Franks, I was on the ground, it was the Taliban had fled, it was, uh, early January now, and, uh, we had forty-five, I had forty-five AFO guys under me and they were mostly unit guys, I had some SEALs, uh, some SEAL Team Six guys, uh, Air Force CCT and, uh, some special mission SIGINT guys along with us. And then

• 3:52:40Speaker 03

  the agency had, you know, a small group of ground branch on the ground, but that was it. And, uh, you know, I had given the mission, guys, we're gonna move out the frontier and start developing the situation. And Franks heard, he had read one of our sit reps and he's like, now this is what we should be doing. So he flew into Bagram and he said, tell Blaber to come see me. So I, you know, went to Bagram and it was a, it was a shithole at the time. There wasn't even a fence around it. And I met him in, uh, in a room but off of a hangar. And he said, look, it's real simple. I want you to get AFO, go find the

• 3:53:21Speaker 03

  enemy and then kill or capture them. And I was like, Roger that, sir. This is the best mission statement I think I've ever gotten in my life. And, uh, it was, it was a blank canvas and, uh, you know, immediately got together with the guys, I, you know, shared that, guys, here's our mission. Okay, you know, how do we, how do we accomplish this? Uh, Afghanistan's massive, six hundred forty-five thousand acres and so you'd think, you know, uh, forty-five AFO guys wouldn't be able to do anything, but... You know, that's where like logic and the process of elimination comes in.

• 3:54:02Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, but Bin Laden's only allies in Afghanistan were Pashtuns. So, uh, there's almost no way, everyone else hated him, uh, all the other tribes. So he's not going to be hiding amongst tribes that hate him. He's going to be hiding among tribes that like him. The tribe, which is Pashtuns. And that's really just the southern part of the country and then up the east side of the country. So you've now necked the country down by about a third. Uh, and then if you start looking at, you know, what you have in that third, there's vast tracts of desert, flat, this can be same place as we landed on. He ain't going to be out there, too vulnerable.

• 3:54:48Speaker 03

  There's, you know, all throughout massive mountains, 20,000 footers. He ain't going to be up at altitude. He's, you know, old, the rumor at the time was that he had diabetes or kidney failure. Um, but, you know, we just kind of necked it down. And then, uh, we, you know, one of the big breaks that happened for us is I had been there for the initial invasions and then, uh, like I told you, the, our higher headquarters swapped us out. They wanted to start rotating people. We'd only been there like three or four weeks. And so everyone was like, why, why do it now? But, you know, we did it. So Roger that.

• 3:55:31Speaker 03

  So we all went home, the SEALs came over and then the AFO concept, I, you know, was selected to lead AFO. So I flew back, uh, and I came back a different route this time, uh, under alias and everything.

• 3:55:49Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people hesitate when they're told they might need to start taking something for their cholesterol that they're not comfortable with taking long-term. People want to feel like they still have some say in how they take care of themselves. That's why more Americans are turning to more gentle alternatives with ingredients they recognize, things like CoQ10, ginger, pomegranate, and amla. One of those is Dose for Cholesterol. Dose for Cholesterol is a clinically-backed cholesterol-support supplement that targets triglycerides, LDL, HDL, and total cholesterol levels. I'll say this too, I use Dose myself. I've been consistent with it and it's just part of my daily routine now.

• 3:56:30Shawn Ryan?

  It's a daily 2-ounce liquid shot, tastes like mango, no capsules, no powders, and it fits right into your routine. I love this stuff. New customers can save 35% on your first month's subscription by going to Dosedaily.co/srs or entering SRS at checkout. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y dot C-O slash SRS for 35% off your first month's subscription.

• 3:57:02Speaker 03

  So, you know, in that initial portion, while I was home, this intel guy I had worked with for many years had called me up and he's like, "Hey Pete, there's a guy who used to be one of Bin Laden's trained but not in security detail, worked on his detail, and he's in prison right now in the US and he's written a, like, you know, his own personal, like, little pamphlet on how to find Al Qaeda in Afghanistan." So it was like 20 pages long, legal paper. He goes, "You got any interest in reading that?"

• 3:57:46Speaker 03

  And I go, "Hell yeah, man, can you get that to me right away?" And he goes, "I should tell you one thing." And I go, "What?" And he goes, "He's been in prison since 1998." And I said, "Well, you know, if Warren Buffett wanted to give you a stock tip two years after he retired, would you take his stock tip?" Yeah, you'd fucking take his stock tip. So why would I turn down the guy who trained Bin Laden in security detail, you know, two and a half years earlier? He still knows how they're trained, their habits. There's gotta be something in there. So he sent it to me and this thing read like, you know, a bestselling novel, every bullet. I was, I highlighted the entire document, ended up being

• 3:58:31Speaker 03

  highlighted, tabbed. It was just full of solid, logical, operational information. And the part that stood out most was he, uh, was his recommendations for once we go over there. So before I tell you what those are, I called the guy back and I go, hey, man, can I talk to this guy? He goes, yeah, sure. Uh, he's in the, you know, he's in a prison up in a large city on the east coast. It's a prison that sits right in the middle of a large city and I'm not going to say what that city is. Uh, and I'm like, okay, uh, what do I need to do? He goes, you just need to, uh, I'll take care of it on the army side, but you need to call

• 3:59:16Speaker 03

  this number at the Bureau of Prisons and get permission. And I always point this out. This was, this period right after nine one one happened was a unique period in American history because it's for a brief, short period, this is how you saw how the government should work. Uh, bureaucracy was not the watchwork. We're all Americans. We're all pulling together. And I saw it right off the bat. I called the guy in Bureau of Prisons, say, I'm Pete Blaber. I explained what, who I was, what I'm doing. Uh, you got any problem? He's seen it. He goes, ready to see you tomorrow. Just give me a time. We'll be ready. Same thing. DOD was like, yeah, tell him to go. Uh, we don't think he's going to produce anything, but let him go.

• 4:00:00Speaker 03

  So, you know, we had this, we broke down these bureaucratic barriers, uh, and you could actually get things done. So that next day I showed up at the Bureau of Prisons, uh, at, at the prison itself, uh, showed my ID. They took me up into a room, you know, all the tables and chairs are, uh, connected to the floor, can't be used as weapons. Sat down and a couple of minutes later, door slid to the side and in, you know, in chains and an orange jumpsuit came this terrorist, Ali Mohammed. And he was in prison for, uh, the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings, but he had also trained Bin Laden's, uh, security

• 4:00:44Speaker 03

  detail. So I had his thing and I told him, "Hey, I just want to talk to you." And when I asked him point blank, "Hey, how do we find Al Qaeda in Afghanistan?" He said, "Ask the shepherds because they have to have lamb meat to, to survive. Ask the shopkeepers because Arabs eat different spices than the Afghans and the shopkeeper will tell you, be able to tell you who bought them. Ask the money exchangers because all the Arabs, Al Qaeda who come into country come through Pakistan. So they have Pakistani rupees instead of the currency of Afghan choice, which was the American dollar. And ask the taxi drivers because the Arabs don't have driver's licenses. They don't know how to

• 4:01:27Speaker 03

  drive." And so, you know, we took that. We were like, "Wow, this is really good." And, you know, I finished my meeting with them, uh, like a couple of days later, flew back to Afghanistan. And, uh, and then we just started, we necked everything down. Uh, we had a warlord tell us, we asked a warlord, "Hey, uh, do you know where Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan?" And he told us, um, "Somewhere in the mountains around Gardes." So we occupied a safe house, uh, outside Gardes. And we started, you know, a methodical searching. And, uh, you know, one day we were out, it was a long day, about eight hours, driving

• 4:02:12Speaker 03

  around and, uh, the, I think the driver's the guy who saw him, you know, just all of a sudden looked over to the right and I, I was looking at the same time and he yelled,

• 4:02:25Speaker 03

  A fucking shepherd, you know, because we've been talking about these shepherds. Everyone knew the ask the shepherd, ask the shopkeeper. Everyone was saying it, but it wasn't real yet, you know? We hadn't had a shopkeeper, a shepherd, or a taxi driver, or a money exchanger. So we see the shepherd in like, yeah, I think there were five of us in the vehicle, like little kids, you know, we got out laughing our asses off. Motherfucking shepherd, I can't wait to talk to this guy.

• 4:02:52Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 4:02:54Speaker 03

  That picture you had up there at the sniper hide site, you know, what guys do during the downtime, they laugh. Most of the time you're laughing. So we got up to him through our interpreter, we asked him respectfully if we could talk to him. He said, of course, and we just said to him, you know, do you know where Al Qaeda is hiding in Afghanistan? And he just beckoned us with his fingers, turned around, headed for this probably about 1,500 foot hill, um, and then just power strode up that thing like a, you know, Olympic gold medalist speed skater. And behind him was us, the warrior athletes, who know no peer.

• 4:03:37Speaker 03

  And I always remember I got to the top and I'm like, hands on the knees, next guy's up, we're all, you know, sucking air. And I look up and there he is at the edge of the, of the ridge and, you know, I follow his arm down to his gnarly finger. And he's, at the end of it was these daunting palisades and he just said, you know, two words, Shawn Kot. And, you know, they never used maps, they always pointed to stuff or drew you a little sketch in the ground. And so we could see the mountain range, we still didn't know where the Shawn Kot Valley was, but we saw this mountain range and. You know, to to give you an analogy, it was kinda like looking at the Grand Tetons

• 4:04:22Speaker 03

  from, you know, Jackson Hole. Damn. Still a big ass thing, but at least, you know, we had it necked down. And we use the same process, same way our brain makes sense, it's process of elimination. It just starts chopping shit down to get to the relevant part that has a chance for whatever success you're trying to achieve. And so we looked at these mountains and you could see, you know, he's not up at Alpine level in the snow. Uh, that would be too difficult. We already knew that the Afghans weren't creatures of habit, so they they needed an urban umbilical cord. They needed quick access to a small town or somewhere where there was water, wells,

• 4:05:04Speaker 03

  and food to buy, you know, to feed, uh, to feed them. So they weren't like to be a Kong who could survive on grubs and stuff. They needed that urban umbilical cord. So by the time we necked the whole mountain range down, it was not a big chunk. It was pretty much the area they ended up being in and probably a small area off to the right of it. And, uh, we decided, okay, we need to do environmental recons, uh, which is just go out, walk through the hills, check the route up to the area we think we want to go, like, is there a route? Um, and then, you know, understand the environment. Is there any source of water up there?

• 4:05:49Speaker 03

  Um, you know, what's the terrain like? Can you can you hide up there? Are these barren, you know, mountains? Are they too exposed? Is there any sign of life, civilian activity, enemy activity up in these mountains? Uh, then all the operational stuff, how does the cold and altitude affect our our batteries, our nickel cadmium batteries? How about our weapons? You know, we learned we needed the desert, um, you know, uh, silicon spray for our weapons to keep them from, uh, clogging up and getting frozen up. So a lot of little things, the

• 4:06:31Speaker 03

  environmental recon's proved, but, uh, mostly they proved we can, we can do it, we can get in there. Um, then we came back and started planning to go in with three teams. Uh, I first had to request those three teams, which was incredibly contentious. I got on a VTC with the higher level commander. I was proud of what we'd done. I thought this is a no-brainer. So I went in, you know, like a naive kid. And when I finished my briefing, you know, all the intel we found, it was like very clear that this was not going to go that way. The general said, what makes you think that your theory that there's Al Qaeda

• 4:07:16Speaker 03

  hiding in a pocket is correct? When we've combed that area with satellite imagery and there is nothing in there. And I'm like, well, we've talked to people, uh, we've had a warlord tell us they're there. We've had a shepherd, uh, there's activity. We've, uh, we talked to a couple of, uh, Afghan who lived in the villages and they confirmed they had seen these guys, Arabs, going in and out. So we had a lot of circumstantial evidence. Enough certainly where this was not like us just guessing, you know, they're in that mountain over there. So finally, again, same thing, pressure from Franks, he approved

• 4:07:58Speaker 03

  two teams. So two teams, uh, I got two teams from the unit. I needed three. And, uh, at the time, my, my acting sergeant major, I, we didn't call him that, but he was, you know, like my sidekick, was a guy named Homer, a SEAL Team guy. Uh, he was my sergeant major and he goes, you know, The SEALs are all sitting back at Bagram, cooped up, dying to get the fuck out of there. And I know for a fact that if you request a couple of teams from the commander, he's almost assuredly gonna give them to you. And I go, "Well, can you, can we work it from both ends?" And he goes, "I already started. They're already waiting for your request." So I went back, requested two teams. They gave me one.

• 4:08:43Speaker 03

  And that team was a team led by a guy named Mike Goodenbow. Fantastic guy, you know, sniper wrecky mentality to the nth degree. Funny, common sense guy, warrior.

• 4:08:57Shawn Ryan?

  I knew him.

• 4:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, great guy. He was killed in action as a contractor after he retired. But

• 4:09:05Shawn Ryan?

  I worked with him over there.

• 4:09:06Speaker 03

  Did you?

• 4:09:06Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking amazing guy.

• 4:09:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, really. And, you know, just to bring him up, it takes, you gotta personalize it. Now go to, back to what that thing on Ukraine, you know, 1.25 million of those guys dead. And, you know, Goody's dead. And, you know, there's a number of other guys. So when, you know, we had the debacle of the pullout from Afghanistan, you know, it like, to me, it dishonored all those guys who made all those sacrifices. But anyway, Goody was out there, so we were set.

• 4:09:47Speaker 03

  We moved in. One team used ATVs, two teams, we did vehicle drop off. They walked in and within a couple of days, they were set in position. And the battle began. I'm gonna try to give you a short version of it. So the battle began two days after the teams had surrounded it. And it opened with a thud because the 10th Mountain's plan was to land on the valley floor. We told them, "You can't land on a valley floor and you shouldn't fly those helicopters because there's dishkas." And if you look in my book, there's a picture.

• 4:10:30Speaker 03

  Of that goodie took with a cool pics camera of an enemy standing right next to a dish gun. He's standing right where the brigade commanders of the hundred of the 101st, who was participating in this with 10th Mountain was going to land. And right on the OP we picked. So, you know, another lesson is when you, when you pick out something because it's good terrain, don't be surprised to find that the enemy made the same choice. Expect every OP that you're going to to be occupied because it's good terrain. And it was. And so, you

• 4:11:07Speaker 03

  know, that fight started off, it was going well for us. They, the guys remained uncompromised. First time in modern history, I think I've ever, that's happened. The three OPs, they were just calling fire in nonstop. You know, liquidating targets. Five here, five there, 10 here, 10 there. It was shooting fish in a barrel. But again, things were not going well for the 10th Mountain. They were pinned down. They knew they couldn't get the second chalk in with the second wave of Chinooks because the first ones had taken so much

• 4:11:51Speaker 03

  fire. So, the brigade commander, who's didn't have a radio, his sat gun broke, came up to Goodie's position. He was like, can I use your radio to call back? So it was our AFO sat net and he called back. And he said, hey, to the 10th Mountain commander, great guy, General Hagenbach, said, hey, sir, I recommend we call off the op, bring everyone back, we reset and come back in another day. And General Hagenbach said, Roger that. You know, he listened to the guy in the ground. Now, it was our net. So, I couldn't, you know, hold

• 4:12:32Speaker 03

  back from adding some context. So I got on the radio and I said, look, I just want, before you make a decision, I want you to know what we're seeing because it's a totally different battle than what, uh, what your guys are seeing. Uh, we've prosecuted at the time, I can't remember, 37 targets or something. We've, uh, bombed damage assessment, uh, between 50 and 100 guys killed so far. Uh, we've cut off all the ingress egress routes by fire. Uh, our guys have enough supplies to stay in position for another 48 hours before

• 4:13:13Speaker 03

  they need resupply. Uh, and quite frankly, this is the battlefield opportunity of a lifetime. And I, if you guys leave, I totally understand, but we're staying. And, uh, then Hagenbach did something that, you know, I, I think is a model for all future generals. He changed his mind. He consulted with, uh, his two one stars who were there. One of them was, uh, General Harrell, ex-unit commander, great guy. Um, and they said, yeah, uh, I, I don't think you should pull out. And he got back on the radio and he said, okay, we're not pulling out. We're staying. We'll get the next chalk in tomorrow. Here's what I

• 4:13:56Speaker 03

  want you to do. And, uh, you know, he did the right thing for the mission. He did the right thing for the men and he did the right thing for himself, uh, by changing his mind. And so, you know, I point that out because, you know, the future battle commanders never feel, don't allow ego to stop you from changing your mind. Changing your mind is what you do when you got more information. And the only reason you change your mind is because you have relevant information that makes you change it. Never hesitate to do that. Whatever you do, don't talk yourself out of it because you might embarrass yourself

• 4:14:37Speaker 03

  by saying, you know, I was wrong or I shouldn't have said that, uh, when I did. So, you know, they, uh, we stayed in, we kept the fight going. And that night, you know, the battle was like on everyone's computer, everyone was being briefed on it. The Predator feeds were on in the White House Situation Room. CENTCOM was monitoring our SatCom 24/7, having meetings about, you know, what was happening. And that night, the phone rang. And so all that adulation was coming to JSOC. So CENTCOM

• 4:15:22Speaker 03

  was calling JSOC, "Okay, great job. This is unbelievable what you guys have done." You know, who knows if the President called, but they knew that they were getting a lot of positive attention for this. And so that night, the guy who was the JSOC commander at the time, a one-star Air Force general, calls me up on the red phone and he said, "Hey Pete, great job on everything. You guys have really, you know, really done super. But look, you know, we can't have you do this anymore. It's too much. I need to get you out looking for the next battlefield. I need to get you out looking for where the

• 4:16:06Speaker 03

  other places the enemy are. And what I want to do is pass this mission off to the SEALs." And you know, sometimes when someone says something so outlandish, you have no response. And that's the way I was. I was, I guess it's called dumbstruck. And I had like three firefights going on at the time. So I'm like, "Sir, can I get back to you?" You know, and he's like, "Yeah, okay." And I hung up. And my intel guy was like, "I fucking cannot believe this." Because essentially, what he's doing is trying to change the command and control in the middle of a battle. Jeez. And it's an incredibly nuanced battle. The terrain, the enemy, what we'd done

• 4:16:47Speaker 03

  to prepare ourselves, just being acclimated. We were telling everyone, "You need four days here, minimum to acclimate." Gardaz is 7,800 feet. The battlefield was between 8,500 and 11,000. So, serious altitude. Yeah. So, I got back on that night and I go, "Sir, you know..."

• 4:17:12Speaker 03

  This, this makes no sense. We're fine. The teams are fine. They got another 48 hours. I'm not, I'm fine. I'm not redlining it. Um, we can keep commanding and controlling this thing and, and trying to, trying to pass it off to people who have not been immersed in all the things we've done and all the coordination is a formula for disaster. And he ended the conversation with Pete. Uh, I'm sending the SEALs down, uh, tonight. Put them in by tomorrow night and that's an order. Holy fucking shit. Yep. And so he sent that, you know, I went,

• 4:17:53Speaker 03

  went to get a couple of hours of sleep. Me and my intel guy were trading off.

• 4:17:59Speaker 03

  When I woke up, uh, you know, the sun was just coming up and I noticed, you know, a couple of cars, new cars in our, uh, our parking area. Um, and so I went into the dock and there were, you know, there were the SEALs and, uh, um, I said, you know, what, what are you doing, man? And why didn't you tell us you were coming? Because they're really lucky. They didn't get shot by the Afghan guards. They'd shot someone two days earlier, a civilian who just drove up without stopping at the sign. He said, uh, because General Tawon told us to come down and, uh, you know, he said you were,

• 4:18:39Speaker 03

  you were all good with it. And I'm like, oh, man. So one of the guys with them was a guy named Britt Slabinski and I knew him from Bosnia. He, he had done a tour same time I did. Um, I had ridden in a car with him for like 20 hours. So, you know, and I had a lot of respect for him and we had a good collegial relationship. I said, Slab, can I talk to you outside? And he's like, yeah, sure. I said, Slab, you're a sniper recce guy. You know, this makes no sense. Putting you in tonight, you haven't even acclimated yet. You guys haven't talked to the Afghans. You haven't talked to the guys who already went in and did the environmental recons. You haven't reconfigured your kit. Uh, you know, we've got all this, these

• 4:19:24Speaker 03

  spray paint cans so you can get the mottled look of the mountains, the lava rock and everything else. Um, you know, your weapons, you guys need to test fire your weapons, your nods, everything, frequencies. And he's like, I hear you. I hear you, Pete, but. I already fought this back at Bagram and they wouldn't listen to me there and they're not listening to me now. I've been told it's an order and, you know, we have to obey orders. And then he said, I know you guys don't have to, but we do. And that's a joke. He doesn't, we do have to obey orders. But like you said earlier, in a unit based on

• 4:20:04Speaker 03

  common sense, one of the hallmarks is freedom of speech in the unit. You tell a guy to do something outlandish and he's gonna go, tell me the logic of why. Why does that make sense? And you're gonna debate it. And the irony of, of having that culture is leaders end up saving themselves more often than not from doing really stupid shit. Because they're saying it out loud. They're brainstorming, you know, with another human instead of just in their head, bouncing off the walls of their head. So, you know, and I understood

• 4:20:44Speaker 03

  that. Like, you know, the, the culture at the time was, you know, you obey your, your officers and you don't ask questions. And, you know, SLAB had to do it. So, and I was given an order. So, we let them plan. They came up with a concept to go up to Takargar. And the original LZ was called LZ1. It was to the east of Takargar on the flatland. It was down on the mountain. And we chose it because one of our other teams, Juliet team,

• 4:21:24Speaker 03

  could see that HLZ. So, at least we'd be able to cover it by visual, visual overwatch and by fire if needed.

• 4:21:33Speaker 03

  So the, the mission was on for that night in helicopters and I also told the general that we had a no helicopter policy. So, but the only way that they were going to get in was by helicopters because to get them in tonight, that's the only way. You can't drive them and have them walk and expect that they're going to make it tonight. So, you know, now we had an air assault to bring them in and that night, we, me, my agency counterpart, my special forces counterpart, all moved forward with the convoy, the Afghans. We were going to reinsert the Afghans that night. The Halos to pick up Mako 30 slabs

• 4:22:17Speaker 03

  team flew in and landed at Gardes and immediately, you know, called back and said, we have engine problems. So it was darkness, so probably eight o'clock at night, local engine problems going to be an hour. They're at nine now if things go right. And the problem was slabs backwards calculation of the time it would take to get up that mountain in nightfall was about 30 to 45 minutes away from being, you know, passed. So, you know, 45 minutes,

• 4:22:58Speaker 03

  they still couldn't get the aircraft right. But during that time, the SEAL troop commander, who was a major, went up to the pilot and he said, hey, what do you think about landing on top of the mountain? And the pilot was like, I don't know if it's possible. And he said, it is. I've seen imagery. I have the imagery. So I think he went in, got the imagery, showed the pilot. I think the pilot was Al Mack. I think you've had him on. I did. And. And it was. Yeah. And so Al's like, you know, he can land a fricking Chinook on a gnat's ass

• 4:23:40Speaker 03

  if he wanted to. So he's like, yeah, we can make it up there. Thinking, you know, this is all good. Well, slab had already recommended we roll 24 hours because it's now at like an hour and a half and he's passed his minimum amount of time to make it up to the top in darkness. And.

• 4:24:02Speaker 03

  And so SLAB said, no, my recommendation is roll 24. Well, the troop commander walked away from SLAB, got on the blue sat, called back to his headquarters, said, hey, here's the deal, uh, we got engine problems, SLAB wants to roll, what do you want me to do? And they were like, Charlie Mike, you need to, you need to get on that mountain. Um, and so he went back, he was completely, you know, and this is what I meant by a troop commander. Uh, you don't know anything yet, but you're full of vim and vigor, you know, I want to get in combat, I want to be in the greatest firefight. And I think a lot of that was operating with this guy. And, uh, he went back to Al Mac, said, the mission's

• 4:24:43Speaker 03

  a go, let's do it. And, you know, SLAB, same thing, he told SLAB, you're going up on the mountain. And so now things are just getting worse, uh, the delays keep coming.

• 4:24:58Speaker 03

  I'm forward, but I'm full suite of comms. So I had SACCOM, I had UHF, VHF, uh, I had a Predator downlink. But they never called me. They never, whether it was headquarters or, or anyone else, never called me and said, hey, and, and the troop commander should have called me. The last thing I said to him, anything happens, call me and we'll talk it out. And he should have told me, cause I would have immediately shit canned it and said, we don't need to go up there. There's no, we control the valley, not them. There's movement on that hilltop, but they're not shooting any weapons. So when we have time, we'll go up there. And the 10th mountain was halfway up the mountain anyway. So I

• 4:25:39Speaker 03

  kind of figured they'd end up doing the top of the mountain clearing. Um, but so SLAB, you know, finally the helicopter goes, they hop in, they fly up to Takurgar. Uh, before they reach there, someone told an AC 130 to check it out.

• 4:26:00Speaker 03

  The MAC 130 came back and said negative activity on the mountain. Turns out it was spider webbed with paths. There was a donkey tied to a tree, a fire up there. Somehow they didn't see any of that. And Slab goes flying in and you know, the way this mountain is, is the only place to land, the peaks up here, the only place to land is right here. It's 50 feet or five stories below. So the place where the, where the donkey was, there was also a bunker, you know, a hardened bunker. So here comes the Chinook. Brake flare, flaring, its whole belly exposed.

• 4:26:45Speaker 03

  RPK machine gun fire, RPGs. They knocked the shit out of that. Somehow Al Mac, credible, you know, example of airmanship, steadies the thing. But while that was happening, Neil Roberts fell out the back of the helicopter, tumbled down onto the, onto Takur Ghar and the aircraft went over the side, did a controlled crash landing on the valley floor. And you know, Slab got out of that thing. He immediately called me on line of sight radio, gave me a sit rep and said, you know, I said same thing to him, what's your recommendation? He said, I gotta go back up there.

• 4:27:27Speaker 03

  I gotta go up and either rescue him or recover his body. And I was like, Roger that.

• 4:27:35Speaker 03

  And so we began planning to reinsert those guys up on top of the mountain.

• 4:27:41Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 4:27:52Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 4:27:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we're not even to Takur Ghar yet. And that's, that's what's coming next. And that's the real tragedy.

• 4:28:05Speaker 03

  But you know, it's the same thing. It's these, you'll hear this disconnected chain of command trying to make decisions and solve problems and then injecting those decisions and those solutions into the battlefield. And guys who can see everything, hear everything, know what the right thing to do are, you know, nothing more than like gnomes who have to obey these mindless orders from the starship. And that's why I say it's the main lesson of GWAT. And, you know, I just saw something that they're looking to spend a couple billion

• 4:28:50Speaker 03

  dollars on this new C2 thing that has AI and, you know, all the screens and I'm, I want to tell Hegseth, do not do that. Do not invest the money. You need to go back to the old way. You need to go back to the, the whole goal of the military should be reorganized so that command and control is always at the lowest level possible. We don't, you know, you can still have TOCs and JOCs because they're good for things like helicopter and fixed wing aircraft deconfliction. They're good for beans and bullet stuff, logistics. But we should call TOCs the support TOC.

• 4:29:35Speaker 03

  You know, the TOC's job is to support the guys on the ground, whatever they need, not tell them what to do and only talk to them, you know, when they're not watching a BTC with another general officer in it.

• 4:29:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:29:52Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 4:29:55Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break.

• 4:29:59Shawn Ryan?

  I've got to tell you, this is one of those things I didn't realize how much I needed until I actually started using it. Every device I got needs a different cord. Phone, headphones, watch, it's a mess, especially when you're traveling. But Ridge, they fixed it. Their 5-in-1 travel power bank has everything built in, so you're not carrying a bunch of cables around anymore. You've got MagSafe wireless charging, Apple Watch charger, lightning USB-C, all in one device. I've been using it and it just simplifies everything. I'm not digging through a bag or fighting for outlets anymore. It's got 20 watts of power, charges

• 4:30:39Shawn Ryan?

  your phone fast, and with 10,000 milliamp hours, you're getting multiple full charges out of it. And like everything Ridge makes, it's solid. It's built to last and it actually looks pretty good, too. Not like those cheap airport chargers. One thing to pack, five ways to power. You can find Ridge's power bank at Best Buy or our listeners can get 10% off at ridge.com by using code SRS at checkout. Just head to ridge.com and use code SRS and that's it, you're all set. After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. Please be kind, support our show, and just tell them we sent you.

• 4:31:23Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Pete, we're back from the break and it's about to get heavier.

• 4:31:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, we picked up, Neil Roberts fell out of the Hilo, Almac crash helped, crash landed, controlled crash landed the Hilo right in the middle of the Shaheid Code Valley. Slab gets out, immediately calls me, gives me a sit rep what happened, and in that sit rep, it's I'm going back up. So, you know...

• 4:31:53Speaker 03

  Right off the bat, he never, no one was telling him to go up, you know, no one had to cajole or convince him he was going back up. Well, that helo is not airworthy, so another helo comes to pick them up. And remember, what's happening here, back to context, you know, slabs, I'll go now to go back and pick him up, right? So the context of the moment matters. So the helo picks him up, takes him right to Gardaz, it's only a minute and a half, two minute flight. We're, we're, the Gardaz safe house is exactly seven kilometers from the center of the valley. So touches down at Gardaz to wait for another helo,

• 4:32:34Speaker 03

  an airworthy helo, to take them back up. So I'm, I'm at the base of Takargar, so to speak, you know, the, the base in about a half mile away. So I can see Takargar from where I'm standing. I have line of sight. I'm talking, you know, I can talk to the top of the mountain with line of sight. No one's up there right now. But the AC-130 is narrating what he sees. And unfortunately, you know, when we look at the tapes, there were a lot of missed opportunities there. The enemy's just, you know, nonchalantly

• 4:33:16Speaker 03

  walking around in the open. At one point, about 30 guys surrounded Neil's body, and we know why, they were taking his equipment. One of the guys who's later gets killed, a guy named Redbeard, we called Redbeard, is wearing Neil's Gore-Tex pants, laying there dead with his pants on. So, you know, they're, they're tapping into this Bonanza material. But we're not, you know, there's no high resolution feedback. And I, you know, I don't, I don't have a Predator video. I'm walking around, you know, in the Shaikh Code Valley. So Slav gets back to guard as the other aircraft picks him up.

• 4:34:01Speaker 03

  Now, all these talks, Bagram, which is 50 miles away, Masira, which is 1,000 miles away in a time zone, are going beehive. You know, this is, we got a crash, you know, we've got a man missing, we're gonna launch a rescue operation. And you can hear, they're, they're trying to get, inject themselves. And remember, all the accolades had come the night before, you know, and everyone's watching. So, I think, you know, and this was described to me by a staff officer, they were conscious that this thing they just got complimented for and then took over, immediately went to shit.

• 4:34:44Speaker 03

  Now, little did I know, they were taking it over because that was about to start. My deputy, whose name was Jimmy, another unit operator, I had put him in the 10th Mountain Talk, right in the beginning, so that we'd have an LNO there, all our radios, they could hear our radios, they knew everything we were reporting, and Jimmy did an amazing job at that. Now, in totality, he's probably got the best essay of anybody, because there's a Predator downlink, he's got that, he's got the AC, both AC 130s on radio, they're orbiting around, he's got AFO sat, he's got purple sat, he knows where the 10th Mountain guys are.

• 4:35:27Speaker 03

  So Jimmy gets on the radio, and he goes, Roger, sit rep follows. The enemy is surrounding Roberts right now, bunching up. If we hit him right now with the AC, we should, we should be able to either disperse him or kill some of them. He was making a recommendation. The Air Force One Star I told you about, gets on the radio, goes, "Stop getting all emotional on the radio, why don't you just get off the radio?" Kicks him off the net. You fucking kidding me? Nope. And, and little did we know at the time, this was, you know...

• 4:36:11Speaker 03

  This was, this was like, you know, injecting cancer. What's that?

• 4:36:17Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know that fucker's name?

• 4:36:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. General Chabon. It's, uh, it's out.

• 4:36:23Shawn Ryan?

  What a fucking piece of shit.

• 4:36:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it gets, it's gonna even get worse.

• 4:36:30Shawn Ryan?

  How the fuck do these guys live with themselves?

• 4:36:32Speaker 03

  I don't know. Yeah, so.

• 4:36:37Speaker 03

  Jimmy's off and unbeknownst to me, uh, right after he did that, he gets on what's called the purple sat, JSOC sat. So I'm, I'm AFO sat. The blue sat is the SEAL sat. Everyone's got their own SEAL, their own SEAL, their own satcom, uh, freak for command purposes. But for this mission, it's AFO sat. AFO is running this battlefield. But they get on the radio and unbeknownst to me, they say, "Switch all stations to purple sat," without telling us. So now it's quiet and I'm like, "Wow, well, at least they exercising some, you know, uh, radio discipline."

• 4:37:19Speaker 03

  And I'm not, we're not hearing anything. What's going on, what we now know, because, uh, we've got the tapes, the tapes from the radio. So they switch the sat frequency and this, they put, so he's the commander, and this is another point.

• 4:37:38Speaker 03

  The guy they put on is a major. He's a field artillery major. He's never commanded controlled anything before, much less a complex, multi-unit infantry battle, because that's what this is now. You call it special ops, but we're battling like infantrymen on a mountain and down in the valley and using fire support, uh, to reach out and touch the enemy. Puts this guy on and this guy is confused. He doesn't even know, he begins injecting himself into battle. He doesn't even know that Roberts fell off on top of Takur Ghar. He thinks he fell off in the middle of the valley where the Al Mac put the Hilo down. About 50 meters from

• 4:38:23Speaker 03

  that Hilo is a mortar platoon. So he immediately begins obsessing, telling the AC 130s, "Grid, you know, 123456, I want you, you're cleared hot. I want you to waste them." And the AC, luckily, the lead AC pilot, heroically, he's, he knows, he knows Roberts fell on the ridge, he knows that ridge, that grid he's talking about is in the valley. It's not where Roberts is on top of Takur Ghar. And they're like, you know, 5 kilometers away from each other. They're not right next to each other. So he continues talking these guys in, trying to get them to

• 4:39:03Speaker 03

  open up. This is a 101st mortar platoon. And luckily, he gives the approval to fire in the AC 130. You hear the pilot say, "Negative, negative. We're not, you know, we're not going to do that. Do not fire on them." Then he straightens him out. At the same time, the guy is telling everybody, everything flying, "Okay, we're going to assault this mountain. We're preparing for an assault. Uh, how many shooters you got on board?" First thing he calls is an HH-60, which is a Medevac Hilo. "How many shooters you got on board?" It's a female pilot. She's a good pilot, scored away. Uh, "None really. How many guys got guns?" "We all got guns."

• 4:39:47Speaker 03

  "Okay, you're all shooters now." Holy shit. A Medevac Hilo. Are you fucking kidding me? No, and he's saying assault, and he ended up saying it, I counted 15 times on the three tapes. And, major, major point here, in infantry and special ops, words matter. Ever, especially words that describe offensive tasks. Assault is what you do when you have enough people, enough firepower against a position you can overwhelm. This is a bunker.

• 4:40:24Speaker 03

  Five stories above them through the snow. They've got nobody. Slab's team is not assaulters. They're sniper reconnaissance guys. They got SR25s. I believe he had plastic helmets on there too. They have no Kevlar on. They're kitted light like snipers.

• 4:40:46Shawn Ryan?

  Like they should be.

• 4:40:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:40:47Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking sniper.

• 4:40:48Speaker 03

  But he's telling them assault and he's telling everybody assault. Slab's aircraft lifts off. So their aircraft has purple SAT.

• 4:41:01Speaker 03

  Chapman, who is a CCT, you know, I don't know exactly and I've asked Slab if he knew what he was doing. And he said, no, I don't, but I believe he was plugged in to the intercom on the aircraft. And if you're on the intercom, you can hear the comms, especially the purple SAT. So Chapman, who's a new guy and he's an Air Force CCT, is hearing this assault, assault, assault, which is, you know, beyond belief. It's the last thing. The plan that we made, Slab ran by me was they fly us up, we're not going to land on the same spot. There's a defilade position up there. We're going to move to the defilade, contact the AC130 and then do recon by fire and begin picking off

• 4:41:46Speaker 03

  targets from our defilade. And it was a beautiful spot surrounded by rocks. And that was the plan. But now I'm no longer talking, there's no one to talk to because I can't talk to Slab. He's in the aircraft. I can, I could have talked to the 47s, but they'd switched freaks. So I'm thinking, wow, why, why is nobody talking anymore? You know, there must be something going on. Must be internal comms and they must be stuck at Gardes. So I should mention before they left, I got a radio check from Gardes. It was Mako 30 Charlie, which is John Chapman. Charlie is the suffix for RTO.

• 4:42:31Speaker 03

  He's a CCT, but he was their RTO and CCT.

• 4:42:36Speaker 03

  And so, you know, he told me, we're loading up Gardaz, take off ETA 10 minutes or something. I was Roger that. So off they go. Instead of even going right from Gardaz, we're now, we're now like an hour from when Slab initially said that. Instead of going back to the mountain and landing offset, the, the guy they put in charge, that major who's a thousand miles away realizes he made this mistake and he was telling the AC to waste a mortar, a friendly mortar platoon. He, he's a whoa, whoa, whoa, we gotta get things straight. Tell Razor 04, I think it was,

• 4:43:16Speaker 03

  to go into an air loiter. So instead of going and landing and getting on the mountain, they go only one nautical mile away, which is nothing. You, the thump, thump of rotor wings of a 47 are like they're in your backyard from a nautical mile in the mountains. So the guys on top of the mountain, the enemies, like they're over there, they're doing something over there. They sit in that air loiter for, I think, I think it was 40 minutes. And then he gives them the go ahead. Okay, send them in and does one final assault. So if you look at the video, the video

• 4:44:00Speaker 03

  that's on the internet and, and the more videos will be coming out, the actual videos, unedited, that show the full sequence of events. And when you see them, everything becomes clear about what happened. Uh, on the video, you watch the 47 lands in the exact same place it tried to land the first time. So all this gibberish on the radio he's doing, he never tells them, and oh yeah, remember, do not land on the same spot. But they do, they land on the same spot. Luckily.

• 4:44:35Speaker 03

  The enemy decided to just wait and shoot once the aircraft took back off to try to knock it down again. So it disgorges Slab's team, Mako 3-0. And you can watch on the video, and it's on the internet right now. You'll watch four guys run as planned to the defilade position, and one guy alone beelines it for the bunker. When I first saw that, I didn't know what happened. So after everything happened, I'm jumping forward a little. The two days after it happened, I flew back to Bagram to watch. I wanted to see the tapes. That's when I first watched the AC-130 and the Predator videos.

• 4:45:20Speaker 03

  When I see this guy get out of the helo and go right to the bunker, I'm like, I thought it was Slab. And if it wasn't Slab, I thought, you know, I didn't know, even know that, you know, I didn't even, wasn't even thinking he's got a CCT with him or anything. I'm like, fuck, what are you doing? Because one guy is going right for the bunker. Well, what I believe is that, you know, Chapman is a junior guy. He heard over and over, I told you 15 times, we're going to assault. This is an assault. So he gets off that helo. He's new. Remember, this is 2002. There hasn't been a war. So everybody is a new guy in actuality.

• 4:46:04Speaker 03

  We've been out there at least a little while. We've been sneaking around. So we're a little more, you know, attuned to things. But everybody else is new. So all the little things that became second nature, like getting off a helo and making sure you never stray from the guy in front of you. And, you know, as an RTO, you just follow your leader. And if that's a team leader, you follow that team leader. That radio is your weapon, and it's the most effective weapon up there. But I believe he was confused. It's cold, it's cold, it's dark, snow's blowing.

• 4:46:45Speaker 03

  You've gotten off many helos, and you know how easy it is to be just temporarily disoriented. But if you've also been listening to this cacophonic... You know, uh, gibberish and this assault, assault, assault. He's fucking thinking, "The plan changed. We're assaulting the bunker." And off he goes. And, uh, you know, I point this out, and I mean it.

• 4:47:10Speaker 03

  He's a new guy, but this is kind of a heroic thing. He's charging a machine gun nest. You know, he's, he believes his mission now has changed, and he's charging the machine gun nests. Well, Slab obviously takes a head count, notices he's missing, sees, they can see him up ahead. He's heading for the bunker. He yelled to Chappy, "Chappy, what are you doing?" And I, I can't remember exactly what Chappy said. It was something like, um, "I don't know," or "I'm not sure." And right when he said it, the bunker opened up, uh, on all of them. Firing blindly. They don't have, uh, night vision. They don't have sights.

• 4:47:51Speaker 03

  So, you know, the one thing they, these guys had going for them was they had night vision and the, uh, the Ouzbeks who were up there did not. So, so Chappy heads up, Slab goes right after him. And you watch on the tape and it's, you know, the guy on the tape says, "The team leader never catches up with them." Well, duh, because he's going up five stories through a foot and a half of snow. You're not going to catch a guy, uh, who's ahead of you, up going up five stories in a foot and a half of snow. And everyone's on adrenaline. Chappy makes it all the way up there, uh, to the top. In the video, they call it bunker two. It's not a bunker. It's a stove.

• 4:48:33Speaker 03

  It's just a cutout into the ground, surrounded by rocks. In the video, they say he first clears bunker two. Uh, it's not a bunker. There's no one in it. There's no, you can see the heat signatures of everybody up there. You can see the donkey, uh, still alive up there. So Slab follows up. Chappy goes down right, you know, right when Slab gets there. Uh, and they're under withering fire. Slab brings the rest of his team around, because they followed up too, and starts trying to position them. They're on a rock, the big boulder, uh, a couple of guys. They're spread out like they should be. Four guys, two, two.

• 4:49:15Speaker 03

  And another guy gets hit, another one of Slab's guys gets hit, he's on top of the boulder, rolls down, hit in the leg. So now Slab's got one dead, one non-ambulatory injured, and he said, and they're under crossfire from three directions. Behind him, the side of him, and in front of him, the machine gun nest. So Slab makes the decision, okay, we gotta go over, let's go over the side, we need, we need to get out of this kill zone. Right decision again, second guess by a lot of people. He gets over, as they're going over the side, one more guy gets hit. So now he's got two guys injured, one guy dead, he's actually got two guys dead, because Roberts is dead

• 4:50:00Speaker 03

  too. And, you know, he's got him and one other guy who are ambulatory. They go over the side. This is 20, 24 minutes after they landed, so from the minute they landed, the AC-130, I had briefed the AC-130, I'm talking to him line of sight now, so he doesn't know I'm not on the purple sat. The ACs don't know that, but I'm talking on the line of sight fires net. And so I told the AC, okay, here's what you need to do. You need to cover these guys' movement when they get out of the helicopter. Any enemy you see up in the bunker area, you're cleared hot to fire on them. Any movement you see, you're cleared hot to fire on them.

• 4:50:45Speaker 03

  He said, Roger that. So when they got out of the aircraft, within one minute, the AC-130 is calling, Mako 3-0, Mako 3-0, this is Grim 3-3, Grim 3-2, over. No answer, no answer. So I get on. They, they call back to me, you know, Ultra 0-1, this is Grim, no answer from Mako. Are we cleared hot to fire? And I go, I can't clear you hot now. I, only Slab can clear you hot. I can't see the top of the mountain, so I can't do that. I don't know where anyone was. Good thing, because, you know, if Chappie was even, he was non-ambulatory, he might have still been alive, but those Slab's team hadn't made it all the way down.

• 4:51:29Speaker 03

  And the AC is usually very inaccurate on its first rounds. So, uh, I tried, I did what you're supposed to do. You don't want to clog the net by non-stop. Make-o-three-zero, Ultra-zero-one, over. So I go to every forty-five seconds to a minute. Make-o-three-zero, Ultra-zero-one, over. It turned out, remember I told you, they demanded they get put in that night? So Slab's team had less than twenty-four hours to prep, probably eighteen hours, for one of the most complex deadly missions you could ever send guys on. My guys had two weeks and ten days of immersion, and during that immersion, you

• 4:52:11Speaker 03

  do stuff like, okay, what freaks are we all on? You're all on your internal comms, which they were on, but unless you've been in combat, you don't, everybody doesn't have the fires freak loaded, or unless a fires guy comes around and loads it, right? That's just even assaulters. The fire guy comes around before, goes, "Hey, you got the fire support freak?" "No, load me up." So, none of them had that. Slab had it, but he's on his internal comms. He's not, even though the Empire can monitor both, he's doing what he should do, talking to his team, trying to, you know, keep him alive. Uh, but for twenty-four minutes, I called every forty-five seconds to a minute, no answer. Finally, at twenty-four, when Slab

• 4:52:55Speaker 03

  makes it over the side, he switches freak, he knows, "I gotta get the AC," and boom, now we're talking. To, you know, my initial assessment, the reason I never thought that Chappy lived was because of that right there. Uh, not only did I watch the videos and never see a body move, but I called for twenty-four minutes, and no one answered. He's the CCT, I know his radio worked, because he called me from Gardes. That's his lifeline. Even if he was injured, he'd be on that radio, fucking calling in hell on earth, on top of himself. And from everything I know, he was that kind of guy, he would have done

• 4:53:38Speaker 03

  that. But he didn't have it, he wasn't on that freak either, so I don't know, I don't, you know, I believe he was killed right off the bat. Slab begins, I, you know, I tell Slab, "Slab, you gotta control the AC, just go ahead and have at it, you know where everyone's at." I don't, I can't see it. So they open up the AC. Like I said, it's one oh five fire, it's incredibly inaccurate.

• 4:54:04Speaker 03

  They bombed the shit out of it. When you watch the full tape, you'll see this is hell on earth. They probably fired their basic load, which has got to be 25 to 50 rounds of 105 on top of that mountain. Why they're doing it, you look up at this tiny rock crop, uh, rock outcropping up on this finger that leads down to the bunkers. And there's two guys just fucking huddled up, sitting there, you know, showing you what kind of warriors that are up there. These are mountain fighters, man. And, and you know, we have pictures of them because, uh, from the sensitive site exploitation.

• 4:54:44Speaker 03

  These are fucking hardcore mountain fighters. And sure enough, they hang out. The AC 130 ceases fire. It's, you know, they're, they're about out of ammo, but then they fly off station and, and this enemy somehow knew that. And you watch, this is, I, I told you, I asked when I saw the, the edited tape, where's the enemy? Where's that enemy that comes IMT in individual movement technique across the snow plane? And that's when, you know, he's like, ah, forget it. You don't want to watch it and he shut it down.

• 4:55:23Speaker 03

  So I, it, it's not on there, but that's what kept me skeptical and wanting to find out more information. Sure enough, uh, this is Redbeard, the first guy of the two comes down. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Well-trained fighter. Uh, they're confused. Uh, I believe he thinks Slav's team has taken over the bunker. And, but here he comes. He's coming back to get the bunker again. So again, telling you what kind of guy this is, he's IMT and back to assault that bunker. But the first place he goes to, and he, the whole way he knows this mountain, he's got, uh, Robert's pants on, his Gore-Tex pants on. He knows this mountain because...

• 4:56:10Speaker 03

  When you track where he went, he went into a perfect defilade position where the bunker could not shoot. You know, it's below that five-story thing. You can't de-elevate your weapon to shoot at that angle. The first thing he does is go up to that stove where Chappy was hit. IMT's right up to it, sits there for 30, 45 seconds, probably checked, saw that John was dead. IMT's right back down, his position is out of defilade, goes down all the way around, flanks the bunker, gets up. You watch his AK, you watch the report on the Predator video. He begins firing at the bunker, then the fire comes

• 4:56:55Speaker 03

  out of the bunker. Both RPK, machine gun, and RPG, Redbeard goes down. And how do we know all that about Redbeard? Because where he goes down in that videotape is exactly where my guys found him, when they came across him on the sensitive site expectation. We took pictures, we marked the body, marked the position, never, never moved from that position. Now, the other enemy who was hiding up there starts IMT and down. He too comes down, all the way to where Chappy ended up, but he doesn't leave, he stays there. And

• 4:57:36Speaker 03

  what's going on in the background, again unbeknownst to me, I'm down there, it's starting to get a little bit light. Not, not light enough where you can see anything, but you can see the horizon. And behind Takur Ghar, Takur Ghar's 11,000, behind it is another mountain to the east, it's like 12, 12.5. So sunrise and BMNT are even later for the top of Takur Ghar. You'd think mountain top, it's gonna get sun first, but it's not. It's occluded by this other mountain range to the east of it.

• 4:58:12Speaker 03

  And uh, so the sun's rising, all of a sudden the AC says, "Hey, we've been ordered off station." I said, "Negative, you cannot go off station." He says, "Yes, we're going off station." And so I got another radio to have Jimmy check it out, see if he could find out what the order was. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, uh, the general who took over the battle in Bagram, launched the Ranger QRF. The Ranger QRF, who's, that's your job, QRF, so you wait around and then during firefight, you get ready. They ran into them, they said, "We need to get the QRF forward right now." The QRF commander, captain goes, "What's the mission, where are we going?"

• 4:58:55Speaker 03

  "There's no time, just get in the helicopter, we'll tell you when you get to Gardes." Well, the helicopter they get in has no SATCOM. So, these Rangers from First Battalion getting this helicopter to come on a mission, they know nothing about, they don't even know Roberts fell out of the helicopter. So, they're flying forward to Gardes. They pause in Gardes, and then I hear this, this radio transmissions on the line of sight say, "Uh, tell the AC they need to stay until the QRF gets here." And I get on the radio and I go, "QRF? What, what's going on with the QRF?

• 4:59:41Speaker 03

  The QRF is inbound, they're like five minutes out." Now I hear the whoop whoop of rotors, "Here they come." They, they, so they're going in on short final. The AC is pulling off, saying, "I've been ordered off." I tell the AC 130, and this is a quote, I say, "If you, you are, I am alter 01, I'm the ground force commander, I'm ordering you to stay on station. If you leave station right now, they're gonna blow that helicopter out of the sky." When we watched the tapes later, that aircraft was already on its way back. When that, when that tape's playing, they're already on their way back, so they're gone.

• 5:00:25Speaker 03

  Now here comes, here comes the QRF. This is...

• 5:00:31Speaker 03

  Either 51 or an hour plus after Slab had landed. Slab was told in the beginning, remember I told you when he said I'm going up? He was told on the radio in the helicopter, "The QRF will be right behind you." So Slab's getting out of that heli- when he got out and you know Chapman headed up, Slab's thinking, "Well, we got QRF right behind us." They're not. They're an hour out still, uh, which again, he never would have executed this mission. Slab would have called the thing off with the helicopter before it ever landed. But he didn't know that either. He's not, no one's talking to him either.

• 5:01:12Speaker 03

  So here comes the QRF and you know, I wish I had my pictures here. I'd show you the QRF lands in the exact same place. Oh my gosh. So now we're on our third helicopter, landing in the exact same place. Five stories up from where it's going to land is an RPK machine gun. It's already sighted in on two other helicopters. This one comes in, nails it with RPG, nails it with RPK, shreds the helicopter. I believe three guys are killed before they ever get off that helicopter. Um, no one on the QRF helicopter still knows.

• 5:01:54Speaker 03

  Roberts fell out of a helicopter, there's SEALs up there, there's enemy and they've, of course, they don't know, don't land on the same spot. The second QRF helicopter somehow got word. It lands over on the other side of the mountain, uh, down a bit. These guys go into Superman mode, power up that mountain. Took them, I think it took them about an hour, but it was an incredible, uh, feat by those Rangers. But they tore up, uh, the rest of the Rangers, uh, and you know, the guys continued to get hit. They were pinned down again, three directions. Um, Slab's now, you know, calling, trying to figure out what's going.

• 5:02:39Speaker 03

  I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to figure out who's up on top of that mountain. Something else that happened, that same troop commander who overrode slab for sliding it 24 hours and told him to go, hopped on the second QRF aircraft at Bagram, didn't tell anybody, didn't tell me he's leaving Gardes, he was, you know, like the acting OIC of Gardes, gets off the Ranger helicopter, goes, "You guys do your thing, I'm going off," goes off on his own to find Mako and finds him, and he doesn't have radios, but

• 5:03:21Speaker 03

  he's got a cellphone, so he makes cellphone connectivity back to Dam Neck, Dam Neck is talking to the blue talk, "I still don't even know this guy's on the mountain." So now things are compounding even worse, we can't figure out the head count, we've got dead guys, we've got live guys, but there's extra guys up there and no one knows, it doesn't make sense. In these, in these, in this period after the Rangers arrived up the second half of the QRF, Jason Cummingham, who's this heroic, JCU, he's a, he's a Air Force medic, he's

• 5:04:02Speaker 03

  treating the pilots, both pilots have been shot, got IV bags going, a guy from behind them sneaks up, shoots him, gut shots him. So now we're on golden hour, you know, we got a gut shot guy, we got to get him off in one hour, so, you know, I got to get this, this count correct, so they can allow this medevac helicopter to fly in, I'm telling them, "Bring it in." Finally get the count correct, because someone comes up, someone says, "Hey..."

• 5:04:35Speaker 03

  The troop commander's up there, the blue troop commander, I'm like, fuck. So, we added him, the count now works. And I'm talking to JSOC and I'm saying, I need that medevac now. We're 20 minutes into the golden hour, he's got 40 minutes to live, I need him now. Yeah, Pete, we've talked it over, we can't send another helicopter up there. Uh, we've already lost two. And, uh, it's, the risk is not worth it. And I'm like, mother fuck, I told him again, I need that helicopter, you need to send it. I'm, you, I'm giving you my word, the top of the mountain's secure. They got some other report that a mortar had been fired or whatnot.

• 5:05:18Speaker 03

  And there was still enemy, but it was worth bringing a Blackhawk in. You know, with the amount of guys we had up there, uh, to provide fire support, we could have built a wall of fire. I still would have brought him in, it was worth saving a guy's life at this point. But the, you know, the request was denied. And, uh, Jason bled out up on the mountain. Uh, so, we, we weren't allowed to medevac him, everything went quiet. Uh, the bunker, I should add, was still firing away. There were at least one, maybe two guys in there on that RPK, they had plenty of ammo. They held the Rangers, the Rangers could not assault and take it, they were pinned, uh, down there.

• 5:06:02Speaker 03

  And, you know, there's no, there's no superpowers when it comes to frontal assault on a machine gun nest. Nothing you can do. Uh, so, they were, they brought F-15s in, the F-15s were missing. And I'm like, one of my OPs said, hey, Panther, do they know the Predator has a Hellfire on it? And I'm like, I thought they did, but great, you know, great point. And I called the CCT up there and I said, hey, use the Predator Hellfire. It's one shot, one kill. And sure enough, he used the Predator Hellfire, one Hellfire, blew up the bunker, killed the guy. The mount was secure. And that was midday, I think 12 or 1 o'clock.

• 5:06:49Speaker 03

  And they wouldn't allow Hilo in there the rest of the day. We had to wait for night. Finally, uh, Helos were sent forward and evacuated all the guys off the mountain. So they all left. JSOC went back to not commanding controlling. We stayed, finished the battle up, I think, four more days. Uh, and then we headed out for, uh, the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan. But, you know, again, everything from the injection, the forced injection of a team that doesn't even want to go in, not giving them sufficient time because you don't understand how critical time is that we don't pull shit out of our

• 5:07:32Speaker 03

  asses in combat. We prep ourselves to address every possible contingency, especially on top of an 11,000 foot mountain because all you got is what you got. Uh, so it's in, you know, PhD combat packing list. Uh, but they didn't have time to change their freaks. Um, then changing the radio net, taking command over without telling the ground force commander or even consulting, you know, telling me, hey, we got this. Nothing like that. Um, then putting the aircraft, telling the AC 130 is the wrong target, putting the aircraft in

• 5:08:13Speaker 03

  an air loiter, delaying it beyond comprehension, sending it in, not telling it to land offset or in a different spot from where the other helicopters landed. Uh, this is the prima facie. This is 2002 and I'll just say the lesson that would go on to haunt our military throughout GWAT and still haunts it today and, and has now been exported to Ukraine. And that is decision-making, problem-solving by disconnected chains of command never has and never will make sense. Because the only way to make sense is with your senses.

• 5:08:52Speaker 03

  And a disconnected chain of command by very definition cannot make sense because their senses are disconnected from the environment. So, you know, never again, we've got to shit can this whole concept. That a battle can be commanded remotely from a multimillion dollar top. It does not work.

• 5:09:12Shawn Ryan?

  It's a fucking ego problem.

• 5:09:13Speaker 03

  It is an ego problem.

• 5:09:15Shawn Ryan?

  How the fuck do they live with themselves?

• 5:09:17Speaker 03

  I don't know. And uh.

• 5:09:19Shawn Ryan?

  There's a documentary about to come out about this, I've heard.

• 5:09:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is. Well, there's a movie too. Uh, Ron Howard, I believe, is making a movie about the version. That, you know, from the edited video that Slab left the guy and, you know. I've said to people, Slab's my friend. Not like we hang out. I haven't talked to him in a year or something and, you know. A friend like anyone you go to combat in is your friend. Uh, and Slab is my friend. I knew him in Bosnia. I rode around in a car and him. He's, if you know Slab, you know, he would never leave someone on a mountain who he had any doubt was not dead.

• 5:10:05Speaker 03

  Uh, and to character assassinate him like they did to get this other narrative forward. Just doesn't make any sense.

• 5:10:15Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know anything about that.

• 5:10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you'll find it out. That's what the whole, that's what the whole documentary is. The documentary is proof. That John Chapman was killed, uh, by that first volley, which even the autopsy backed up. It was terminal, uh. Terminal, uh, injuries from the first rounds. But in order to get the, you know, he got up and cleaned out the bunkers himself. Uh, you had to include that Slab left him up there and that became the narrative. And, you know, I'll say this, Slab wouldn't mind, but he, he went through, you know.

• 5:10:57Speaker 03

  It caused physical harm to him, uh, to say that. There's a hard enough balancing your. The whole PTSD thing when you get out, especially with all the shit he went through. But when you being, you know, falsely accused of something, it makes it even worse. So yeah, there's a movie and then the documentary, uh, which is being made, which is, in my opinion, a, you know, a very productive, uh, piece of history because they go into great detail. They interviewed all the Rangers. They interviewed all the helicopter pilots. They interviewed AFO. They interviewed General Hagenbach, the 10th Mountain Commander.

• 5:11:41Speaker 03

  Uh, they interviewed SEALs. They interviewed other Air Force CCT. It's really a comprehensive, uh, uh, you know, piece. I haven't seen any of it. I know what they're doing. But a lot of that info is what needs to be put out.

• 5:11:57Shawn Ryan?

  They've reached out before.

• 5:11:59Speaker 03

  Have they?

• 5:11:59Shawn Ryan?

  They've reached out before to come on here.

• 5:12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, they'd probably be, probably be a good guest and bring some of the clips. He went back to Takur Garh, got permission from the Taliban. And, uh, some unbelievable footage. They went back and filmed the battlefield geography again and the geometry, you know, what I was talking about, the five stories, the areas that are in defilade and, and those that aren't. So, you know, my thing, Sean, I'm not, I'm not getting involved in the, the bickering. A lot of it's inter-service because it started in 2015 when the secretaries of all the services put out a memo and it said, "All services are directed to re-review

• 5:12:47Speaker 03

  all Silver Stars and above to see if any of them qualify for Medal of Honor." So all the services did that. The Air Force had not had a Medal of Honor yet in, uh, Afghanistan. And they, this is 2015 and so they put, you know, that's where the, that's where the John got put in for the Medal of Honor. The Navy countered it and put Slav in for a Medal of Honor. And then it began this inter-service bickering. I know nothing about that. I, what, no one called me. I remember hearing about it. I'm like, they're changing their award? I wrote Slav's initial reward. I think there's a reg that says

• 5:13:29Speaker 03

  you can't change it unless you consult with, you know, the prior commander, but. You know, the SEALs, the SEALs-

• 5:13:37Shawn Ryan?

  SEALs have a history of this shit.

• 5:13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:13:39Shawn Ryan?

  The SEALs have a history of this shit.

• 5:13:41Speaker 03

  Well, the, it, both sides did it, neither side, you know, called, so I would have just told them, I don't have a parochial bone in my body.

• 5:13:50Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of fucking lies come out of the SEAL teams.

• 5:14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, in this case, you know, I'm, I think they were, they were pretty accurate and they ended up being accurate. But, you know, the battle, so the battle to, still today, online and everything, is these narratives. And someone asked me to address, you know, the Air Force guys' criticism that I was supporting this other narrative. And I'm like, it's, I'm not supporting anybody. I'm the ground force commander. John Chapman and Britt Slabinski were my guys. I still consider them my guys. And my only responsibility, once that battle ended, was to make sure that the lessons that were learned from that battle

• 5:14:45Speaker 03

  are shared and passed on to current and future warriors, so the same thing never happens to them. And that's all I give a shit about. I give a shit about accuracy. I don't care about either side's parochialism. Uh, I don't have a dog in a fight. I don't have a favorite. And I'm not gonna get involved in a debate with any of them about what they think. They got involved in this in 2015 off an edited video. I've been involved in it since 2002 off real world experience. And I'm the only guy who's seen every video from start to finish. So, uh, you know, to me, it's about learning and the fact it's turned into this-

• 5:15:28Speaker 03

  Narrative battle about, you know, what happened after John got shot is also letting off these people you very elegantly, uh, directed some, you know, emotional intelligence toward, uh, you know, they're the ones, the lesson is the disconnected chain of command caused this entire thing. This op was going, you know, as smooth as a massive battle op could ever go, especially when you're talking about three, uh, sniper recce teams infilling over 11,000 foot peaks amongst a thousand enemy and never being compromised. But what happened

• 5:16:10Speaker 03

  on Takur Ghar happened and we gotta learn from it, good, bad, and indifferent. You know, uh, all the little things, every, maybe some guy in the future will go, hey, do I got my fires freak on my radio? Another guy in RTO will go, okay, when I get up this helicopter, follow the team leader, follow the team leader, follow the team leader. Don't ever, even if you're by yourself, just take a knee and hold what you got. You're not an assaulter. You don't go assault in something unless you're with the assaulters and preferably behind them. Uh, but the biggest lesson of all is that this C2 system is broke hard. And this was the first major incident. Uh, you know, if we talk about Pat Tillman, it's

• 5:16:53Speaker 03

  the same thing happened to Pat Tillman and his platoon. Uh, you know, the, I'll, I'll explain that one, but it's the exact same thing. They were, their deaths was the responsibility of this disconnected chain of command, micromanaging and ignoring when they needed it, uh, ignoring the guys on the ground. Uh, and again, same thing. We need to learn that. And if we don't change it, that's why I'm so big on Hegseth understanding this.

• 5:17:24Speaker 03

  We're gonna get our asses kicked the next time we get into a real battle, something, a real war like the Ukraine war. We're gonna get our asses kicked. Because, and it, it's also tragic because the real strength of the American military is bottom up, command and control. It's letting guys adapt and improvise on the battlefield, communicate themselves, they know what to do. But when you take all that away from them, uh, you know, you've, you've messed with nature and you've messed with human nature and the results continue to be to this day, either catastrophic or massively unsuccessful.

• 5:18:08Shawn Ryan?

  Have there been any consequences?

• 5:18:10Speaker 03

  No.

• 5:18:11Shawn Ryan?

  With the leadership? They're probably still fucking in.

• 5:18:14Speaker 03

  The one star got promoted to two.

• 5:18:17Shawn Ryan?

  Course he did.

• 5:18:17Speaker 03

  The two star got promoted to three.

• 5:18:19Shawn Ryan?

  Course he did.

• 5:18:20Speaker 03

  Uh...

• 5:18:23Speaker 03

  You know, no, no consequences at all. They, they covered it up. They-

• 5:18:28Shawn Ryan?

  Slapped some awards.

• 5:18:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:18:30Shawn Ryan?

  Make everybody a fucking hero.

• 5:18:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:18:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, good job.

• 5:18:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:18:34Shawn Ryan?

  That's what the fuck they did.

• 5:18:35Speaker 03

  I know.

• 5:18:35Shawn Ryan?

  That's where those awards came from.

• 5:18:37Speaker 03

  And to me, the crime is you're denying those current warriors and future warriors, their freedom to learn the lessons that could keep them alive in combat. And these are foundational lessons, but they're also, it's the beginning of, you know, a cancer that is now metastasized in our military. We've got to end this senseless C2 method and go back to dispersed C2, guy on the ground C2, flexible C2, uh, but everybody works

• 5:19:18Speaker 03

  for the guys on the ground. You're in support when guys are on the ground and that, that's like a philosophical shift that has to be taught and repeated over and over. Repetition breeds recognition. We need to, everyone to know that. A tox job- is to support the guys on the ground and that's all they're there for. If there's a request, they answer it. If it's intel that they need to update, they can send the intel. But they don't tell the guys on the ground what to do. Uh, and they certainly don't tell them, uh, you know, key life and death decisions. Uh, like they feel free to do, uh, right now.

• 5:20:01Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I, I just want to clarify something. I am, I am not commenting on whether they.

• 5:20:10Shawn Ryan?

  Whether those awards should have been given or not. I don't fucking know. I wasn't there. But I will fucking comment on this. The United States Navy has a fucking history of turning people into heroes to cover up fucking. Shit that never should have happened.

• 5:20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:20:25Shawn Ryan?

  And you know what the fuck I'm talking about.

• 5:20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. No doubt. And, and.

• 5:20:29Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking bunch. The Navy has a fucking integrity problem.

• 5:20:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:20:34Shawn Ryan?

  Probably every other fucking branch does too.

• 5:20:37Speaker 03

  They do.

• 5:20:37Shawn Ryan?

  Just what I'm aware of because that was the fucking community that I was involved in and I am fucking ashamed of it.

• 5:20:43Speaker 03

  I think it's higher ranking people. The first recourse when an operation goes south. And it's very clear why it went south because the fucking orders that were. Delivered via micro messenger, uh, whether it's, uh, over the radio or in person are what caused it. So the first recourse to cover up a tragedy is what you said. Drowned the participants in a tidal wave of awards. Then the awards, uh, eclipse the fuck up.

• 5:21:14Shawn Ryan?

  Is it a positive?

• 5:21:15Speaker 03

  Right. And no one stops asking, well, yeah, but what do we learn from it?

• 5:21:19Shawn Ryan?

  And the generals get promoted. The admirals get promoted.

• 5:21:22Speaker 03

  Because it's looked at as.

• 5:21:23Shawn Ryan?

  Good job for fucking killing people, you fucking pieces of shit.

• 5:21:30Shawn Ryan?

  Sorry, man. No. Let's take a break.

• 5:22:10Shawn Ryan?

  ...