Jocko Podcast 13: Chechens VS Russians, UFC 196 Review, Supplements

0:00:00 - Combined Arms Operations In Urban Terrain - Manual about Chechens vs. Russians 1:23:30 - Thoughts on UFC 196 / Holly Holm vs Meisha Tate and Connor McGreggor Vs. Nat Diaz 1:36:40 - BUDS Training stories get people FIRED UP. 1:43:49 - Is Jocko Too INTENSE? 2:01:40 - Jocko's thoughts on MARSOC 2:05:55 - Is Shooting a martial art? 2:14:37 - What Supplements do Jocko and Echo take? 2:24:39 - Leading others to a STRONG finish. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

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

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast, number 13, with Echo Charles, and me, Jocko Willink.

• 0:14Jocko Willink?

  This is extracted from US Army FM 3 Tac 06.11, Combined Arms Operations in Urban Terrain.

• 0:32Jocko Willink?

  Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Chechnya began to seek full independence. By 1994, Chechnya had fallen into civil war between pro-independence and pro-Russian factions. In December 1994, Russia sent 40,000 troops into Chechnya to restore Russian primacy over the breakaway republic. An attack was launched by 6,000 mechanized troops against the Chechen capital of Grozny. Instead of the anticipated light resistance, Russian forces encountered heavy resistance from the Chechens, armed with massive amounts

• 1:16Jocko Willink?

  of anti-tank weapons. The Russians were repulsed with shockingly high losses. It took them another two months of heavy fighting and changing their tactics before they were able to capture Grozny. Between January and May 1995, Russian losses in Chechnya were approximately 2,800 killed, 10,000 wounded, and over 500 missing or captured. The Chechen casualties were also high, especially among non-combatants.

• 1:56Jocko Willink?

  This war is a major and cautionary episode in military history. The large-scale lessons of Chechnya lie in these areas. It showed again the limited effectiveness of heavy weaponry in urban terrain and, by extension, the crucial importance of well-trained, well-led, well-equipped, and highly motivated infantry.

• 2:26Jocko Willink?

  It proved again that a society judged primitive or chaotic by Western standards can still generate a tremendous fighting spirit and very effective military discipline. This is not a new lesson.

• 2:46Jocko Willink?

  So that's a little introduction to the focus for today. And that's this Soviet attack on Chechnya, the breakaway republic. And it's just urban combat. The urban combat. And that's what's, I find it very fascinating. And I remember at the first time I started to...

• 3:13Jocko Willink?

  The first significant moment when I remembered hearing about

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  the lessons learned from Chechnya. Because you know, you watch it, you, you know, we all watched it. I was in the military at the time, you know. But the first time I remember hearing about the lessons learned was actually when I was going through officer candidate school in 1998. And for whatever reason, one of the Marine Corps drill instructors had, had put this series of lessons learned of the Russian military up on the wall. And this is something I talk about occasionally is that the, the lesson that I remembered seeing there was that it was when they, when they stopped shaving. When the Russian troops stopped shaving, it was like the beginning of the end.

• 4:01Jocko Willink?

  Discipline fell apart, morale fell apart, and everything turned into a disaster. And there were a bunch of other lessons learned, and I've looked for that specific document, and I haven't been able to find it. So, I don't know what specific document was that said that, but I've found others that are close to that. But what's interesting is that now, and this, this field manual, this army field manual that I'm reading from, was actually published in 2002. So, we had definitely looked at this war, and it was brutal. And if you want to go into some dark places, you can go into some dark places, because this is one of the first.

• 4:45Jocko Willink?

  It definitely is one of the first where, where you had, you know, information warfare happening, meaning there was propaganda coming out, homemade propaganda, you can see it on YouTube, especially from the Chechen side, of just brutal, brutal behavior. Yeah. And they were doing that purposely to strike fear into the hearts of the Russian soldiers, and they, they, they were effective in doing that. They did do that. Yeah, it's crazy how they make those videos just available to everybody. They do. It is, it is crazy.

• 5:24Jocko Willink?

  So, as we dig into this a little bit, this is still from within the FM3 Tac 106, but they're quoting "Lessons Learned from the World Turned Upside Down Military Lessons of the Chechen War" by Mr. Anatole Leven. And he said, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly, therefore, that the key to success in urban warfare is good infantry. And the key to good infantry, rather than good weaponry, is a traditional mixture of training, leadership qualities in NCOs and junior-grade officers, and morale, implying

• 6:08Jocko Willink?

  a readiness to take casualties." So, this is classic. This is what we, this is what Ramadi was all about as well. You know, good infantry, which they absolutely had. Great NCO leadership, which they absolutely had. The junior officers were outstanding and the morale, which, which he says the morale is a readiness to take casualties and, and it, you know, that's one of the things

• 6:35Jocko Willink?

  that no doubt about it, Colonel Sean McFarland, that was running the brigade. He had to overcome that fear that many people had, which was when you push into these enemy controlled territories, you are going to take casualties. It is going to happen. You cannot avoid it. And that's something that we SEALs had to deal with as well because SEALs had been in, had been in Iraq for three years at this point and not had any SEALs killed in action. So this idea that we're going to push into this heavy urban fighting

• 7:15Jocko Willink?

  meant to us, we were gonna, we were going to take casualties at some point.

• 7:22Jocko Willink?

  The US, back to the book, the US will not always have the ability to pick and choose its wars. And the key reason, Cheshmia, is that there will always be military actions in which a determined infantryman will remain the greatest asset. And that is very near and dear to my heart. Knowing that it's not the technology, it's not the, the drones, it's not the aircraft, it's the infantryman, it's the soldier that makes the difference. And the leader, the leaders of those soldiers that make the difference. Now, here was the Marine Corps analysis.

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  First of all, strategic lessons. Military operations alone cannot solve deep-seated political problems. Okay? Military commanders need clear policy guidance from which they could work steadily and logically.

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  Confusion generated by missing or conflicting policy guidance is made worse by poorly-defined lines of command and control. So those first two messages right there are all about clear guidance. And I, this happens all the time in the business world, where you don't see clear guidance making it all the way down to the front lines through the chain of command.

• 8:57Jocko Willink?

  Russian senior command lacked continuity and was plagued by too much senior leadership involvement at the lower operational level. Lack continuity, there's got to be clear message that every leader's got to be basically saying the same fundamental message.

• 9:15Jocko Willink?

  Contrary to initial expectation, operations were neither of short duration or low cost. When Russian security operations began achieving results, the Chechen started attacking targets within Russia.

• 9:31Jocko Willink?

  It was difficult to unite police and military units into a single cohesive force.

• 9:41Jocko Willink?

  Distinct tactical advantages accrue to the side with less concern for the safety of the civilian population. That is something that we absolutely dealt with in Ramadi. Again, it's that the distinct tactical advantage accrue to the side with less concern for the safety of the civilian population. This was

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  of utmost concern to every soldier and marine on the ground in Ramadi, was trying to protect the civilian population. And of course, the Al Qaeda insurgents that we were facing did not care at all about the civilian population, or any of their buildings, or any of their lives, or children, or women, or anything else.

• 10:27Jocko Willink?

  Concern about civilian casualties and property destruction declined as casualties among Russian forces rose. So initially, the Russians were also concerned about civilian casualties, but as they started taking casualties, it got worse and worse.

• 10:48Jocko Willink?

  Here are some operational lessons.

• 10:52Jocko Willink?

  Having well-developed military doctrine for urban warfare is not enough in and of itself.

• 11:01Jocko Willink?

  Gotta have that creativity.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  Doctrine does not answer everything. Situation-oriented training would have improved Russian military effectiveness, and we're gonna talk about that later today, but situation-oriented training. And that is when you put yourself in situations and you make people have to think. It's not about executing pre-planned moves. It's just like in martial arts. It's not about being able to do a kata and do a movement. That's not what it's about. It's about reacting to another free-thinking human being, and in this case, a group of free-thinking human beings. How do you react in those situations?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And they're in specific situations as well, right? Like in jiu-jitsu, we do situational training. They'll be like, "Okay, here, half-guard." If you get on top, you know, you start all over. If you, you know, tap the guy, whatever, you start all over. In half-guard, start all over, you know, in half-guard.

• 11:59Jocko Willink?

  Inadequate training in the most basic maneuver and combat skills inhibited Russian operations.

• 12:08Jocko Willink?

  So you've gotta be trained up in the basics, no doubt about it. Urban combat is extremely manpower-intensive and produces significant attrition of men and materiel among the attackers.

• 12:24Jocko Willink?

  Overwhelming firepower can make up for organizational and tactical deficiencies in the short run. If one is willing to disregard collateral damage. So yeah, you can just bomb, bomb the crap out of places and you can make up for your tactical and organizational problems in the short run if you don't care about a collateral damage. You know, this is, we, we, we don't do that. We as Americans don't do that. We care about collateral damage. The sudden requirement to deploy to Chechnya coupled with the unique supply problems posed by the weather and the urban environment overwhelmed the already fragile Russian military logistics system.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  And these are just bullet points, by the way, if this sounds stilted the way I'm reading it, I'm just reading bullet after bullet. A lack of high-quality intelligence made operations more difficult and dangerous on the Russian forces. The geometry and perspectives of urban combat are very different from combat in the open. Urban combat is much more vertically oriented. So in, in the desert, you do have elevation, you know, you have hills, mountains, whatever. So, so there is some vertically oriented things that you have to deal with, but in urban combat,

• 13:49Jocko Willink?

  every, you know, every foot can be separated by 10 stories, you know? And so it is a 360-degree environment. Not to mention you get subterranean situations. You have basements, you have cellars, you have underground sewers and pipes and things, tunnels that go from building to building. So it's a 360-degree environment for sure.

• 14:15Jocko Willink?

  Fracturicide was a serious and continuing problem throughout the campaign in Chechnya because it was difficult to tell friend from foe.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  That's friendly fire.

• 14:26Jocko Willink?

  That's friendly fire. And this is, you know, obviously in our book. I start off, I mean, the first chapter is about a fracturicide that happens. So obviously, we learned this.

• 14:42Jocko Willink?

  You know, in the, in the most horrible way. And anybody that's been in hardcore urban combat, and again, I'm not talking about doing an an operation with, let's say, one unit against a bad guy in an urban environment. I'm talking about urban combat where you have multiple units all over the place. Friendly units in buildings, on roads, and they're mixed in, there's no way you can help it, they're mixed in with enemy. And it becomes very, very challenging.

• 15:18Jocko Willink?

  Standard Russian military unit configurations were inappropriate for urban combat.

• 15:26Jocko Willink?

  Forgoing peacetime maintenance is a false economy.

• 15:33Jocko Willink?

  So there's something to think about.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Forgoing peacetime maintenance.

• 15:37Jocko Willink?

  For good, when you say, you know what, there's nothing going on right now, we'll just kind of slack off a little bit. You know what, I don't need to train in the off season.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  I don't need to prepare right now. Guess what, you do. You do need to prepare right now. It's, it's a lie to think you're gonna get away with it.

• 15:56Jocko Willink?

  The potential of special forces for urban operations was never realized in Chechnya. Well, we realized it in Ramadi for sure, and how to work it.

• 16:06Jocko Willink?

  The nature of cities tends to channel combat operations along narrow lanes of activity. That's just a, I mean, that's, they're called roads. And, and just like when you're in downtown San Diego, in the Gaslamp District, guess what, things are channeled onto long, narrow, long, narrow lanes of activity. It's called a road. That's kind of an obvious one.

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  Tactical lessons. Rigorous communication security is essential even against relatively primitive enemies. And this is what the Russians found out was that the the Chechens, many of whom spoke Russian, they they would listen to their radio calls, listen to their radio commands. They would, they would actually get on the radios and give false commands. So it was, it was just a nightmare for them. Now, in the, in America, we have very highly sophisticated encryption systems. So this is really no factor for us.

• 17:05Jocko Willink?

  Night fighting was the single most difficult operation in Chechnya for infantry forces. Again, this is something that we are very good at, we being America. We are awesome at fighting at night. We have incredible capability on our night vision. We do it all the time. And actually, that's, that's worth mentioning. The reason that we're good at it is because we do it all the time. We train it all the time. We do it all the time. And we're just used to be in, living in that way. We're used to living in that green world of night vision.

• 17:40Jocko Willink?

  Tanks and APCs cannot operate in cities without extensive dismounted infantry support.

• 17:48Jocko Willink?

  Now, Ramadi, they, they absolutely operated and they operated with a phenomenal success, but they, but they did have infantry support usually very close by, although they were, uh, they did push and do, do incredible operations on their own as well.

• 18:09Jocko Willink?

  Forces operating in cities need special equipment not usually found in the Russian TOE, which is the, basically the Table of Organization of Equipment, the list of normal things that they had. Lightweight ladders were invaluable for assaulting infantry. This is on my first deployment to Iraq. We actually, uh, we, we just built little ladders. We built little two by four ladders because there's walls all over the place. So we just, we just have ladders, have them hooked on to Humvees. When we need them, we just pop them off.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Like with spare wood those?

• 18:38Jocko Willink?

  Yep, just spare wood, little two by fours.

• 18:43Jocko Willink?

  Trained snipers were essential, but in short supply. We had plenty of snipers. Obscurence are especially useful when fighting in cities, smoke grenades. And other ways of blocking vision, but yeah. That's one of those things when, when I was a kid in the SEAL teams and we would learn like, hey, you gotta throw smoke and then once you throw the smoke, you can run away. And it kinda, it almost seems.

• 19:09Jocko Willink?

  Like a joke almost, I mean, right? That almost sounds funny when I say that.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, like Batman kind.

• 19:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's almost like Batman or, or James Bond, you know, he's got the little smoke button. It's freaking real. It's real, like you throw that smoke out, you let that smoke start to pour out and then all of a sudden you can get out of there. And it's, again, it's one of those things that. It almost seems like a joke when you first hear about it when you're a kid, you're like, wait, really? That's a real thing? No, it's a real thing.

• 19:39Jocko Willink?

  Recovering damaged armored vehicles is especially difficult in cities. We absolutely learned of that. The insurgents took out. Dozens of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees and it was always very difficult for the engineers to get in there and get those things out of there.

• 20:01Jocko Willink?

  A failure of small unit leadership, especially at the NCO level. Was a primary cause of Russian tactical failures in Grozny.

• 20:17Jocko Willink?

  So. When you hear me say leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, that is what I am talking about. That is exactly what I am talking about. And it's the same thing in businesses, it's the same thing in teams and it's the same thing in life. We talk about leadership, we're not just talking about the overall person in charge, we're talking about leadership at every level.

• 20:43Jocko Willink?

  Both sides employed commercial off the shelf technologies for military purposes. Be ready for that. You know, in, in Ramadi, they, the enemy absolutely used, you know, little Motorola walkie talkies. They had Motorola base station set up. I mean, they were, they were using it.

• 21:06Jocko Willink?

  Tactical communications proved very difficult in Grozny. Again, you can't change the laws of physics and radio waves cannot punch through more than, you know, a couple, two, three buildings. So, once you get a couple, two or three buildings away, you're not going to be able to talk to the other units, you know, maybe four or five buildings. And the only way to do it is get on the rooftops. And so, you know, I was almost always on a rooftop because I was, you know, my main role was usually to make communications with the various troops that were out there, army and my guys. And so, I was almost always on a rooftop with a big old antenna sticking off my shoulder.

• 21:48Jocko Willink?

  And that's when, you know, when one of the guys needed to talk to me, they needed to go to the rooftop and they'd catch me.

• 21:56Jocko Willink?

  The cabs of supply trucks must be armored, no doubt about that.

• 22:02Jocko Willink?

  Bunker busting weapons are invaluable for urban combat. This is something that we used a ton of was the Carl Gustav eighty-four millimeter.

• 22:16Jocko Willink?

  Big thunder.

• 22:22Jocko Willink?

  Helicopters are not well suited for urban combat.

• 22:27Jocko Willink?

  And there's no doubt about that one. Again, in Ramadi, we found that

• 22:34Jocko Willink?

  anytime helicopters came into Ramadi, they received so much small arms fire that they left immediately. It was just too hot for them to go into these situations.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  When a helicopter comes in, what does it take to, to, you know, take down a helicopter?

• 22:52Jocko Willink?

  They could, I mean, you could take one round, right? It's almost like a human body, you know, there's some, some.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Oh, you hit in the right spot.

• 22:58Jocko Willink?

  Hit in the right spot, you could, you could take it out, but um, so it's really hard to put like a, an absolute on that, but you know, generally they can take, they can take some punishment, especially the Apaches, which are, you know, pretty well armored.

• 23:15Jocko Willink?

  But they're not well armored enough to get in there and do what they would wanna do.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:19Jocko Willink?

  So they end up just taking so many rounds that they they they couldn't they couldn't stay.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, like if you hit in that li- that that rear propeller.

• 23:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 23:29Jocko Willink?

  You you hit it in the weak spot, there's gonna be issues, which I won't talk about.

• 23:37Jocko Willink?

  Alright, now we that was the Marine Corps analysis, and again, this is all from the same manual. But I'm gonna I'm gonna go into they so they covered what the Marine Corps analysis had. And now this is the US Army Infantry School analysis, is Russian Army Lessons Learned From The Battle Of Grozny.

• 23:54Jocko Willink?

  You need to culturally orient your forces so you don't end up being your own worst enemy simply out of cultural ignorance. Many times, Russian soldiers made si- serious cultural errors in dealing with the Chechen civilians. Once insulted or mistreated, the Chechens became active fighters, or at least supported the active fighters. Russians admit they underestimated they the effect of religion on the conflict.

• 24:24Jocko Willink?

  So you gotta know your enemy, and you gotta know your friends. And this is something that they definitely uh. They definitely make that important in the US military, that you know, you gotta understand the local culture. And there was a true hero named Travis Patricklin, who we will have to do a show on at some point. But Travis Patricklin was with us over in Iraq in Ramadi. And he was just incredibly smart guy and a former SF guy, he was then he became a captain of the army. And he spoke Arabic and.

• 25:08Jocko Willink?

  He's the guy really that started saying, "Look, this is what we gotta do to make friends with these locals." And he ended up producing this, this actually pretty famous PowerPoint brief that just had a bunch of stick figures of, "Hey, this is the local guy. This is what he sees you as. This is what you see him as." "But this is what he really is and this is what, you know..." And it was a great, a great, uh... Document, a very simple document. Brilliant in its simplicity. In the way it explained and it, and it ended up being circulated all over the place. And that was written by a guy named Travis Patrickin, who was just, again, hilarious guy, very nice guy.

• 25:51Jocko Willink?

  And really had a vision of...

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  And a full understanding of the Arabic culture, the tribal culture, the sheiks that were there in Ramadi. And he did an amazing job moving that whole scene and that whole piece of the battle. He did an amazing job moving us forward and making sure that we were culturally oriented to, to understand the locals.

• 26:28Jocko Willink?

  And

• 26:31Jocko Willink?

  unfortunately, after we left Ramadi and, and they were still there, Captain Patrickin, Patrickin, Travis Patrickin was in a vehicle, I think he was heading south on a road called Sunset and Hidden IED. And he was killed in action. And it was a tragic loss of an incredible, not only incredible soldier, but just an incredible human.

• 27:00Jocko Willink?

  Someday we'll, uh, we'll go into some more depth about, about Travis Patrickin because he really had a huge impact.

• 27:13Jocko Willink?

  Next bullet point, you need some way of sorting out combatants from non-combatants. The Russians were forced to resort to searching the pockets of civilians for military equipment and to sniffing them for the smell of gunpowder and gun oil. This was crude and not very reliable. Trained dogs were used to detect the smell of gunpowder or explosives, but were not always effective. Nevertheless, specially trained dogs are probably the best way to determine if a person has been using explosives or firing a weapon recently. What was good for us was, you know, working alongside the Iraqi soldiers. They could tell. They could tell where people were from, they could tell where their accent was from, they could tell with a couple of questions. Who could tell?

• 27:57Jocko Willink?

  The Iraqi soldiers, when we went to speak to some random Iraqi civilians. Yeah, they could. They could tell. I wouldn't be able to tell in a million years. Right. Just like if you took an Iraqi and transplanted them here and putting them in a room with a guy from New Jersey and a guy from Southern California and a guy from Georgia. They wouldn't be able to tell where any of these people were from. But any American could talk to any of those three people and immediately know where they were from. Yeah, I got you. So, we used the Iraqi soldiers to help us with that and also our interpreters. We had, you know, interpreters that had, were fluent in the language and generally came from either Iraq or some other Arabic-speaking country. And so they had the same knowledge and they could do the same thing.

• 28:43Jocko Willink?

  The psychological impact of high-intensity urban combat is so intense, units should maintain a large reserve that will allow them to rotate units in and out of combat. If a commander does this, he can preserve a unit for a long time. If he doesn't, once it gets used up, it cannot be rebuilt.

• 29:12Jocko Willink?

  So that statement about the psychological impact of high-intensity urban combat.

• 29:21Jocko Willink?

  And there's so many little things that make this true. You know, I had talked about the 360-degree threat. There's the IED, there's the civilian populace. There's the close-in fighting. There's all these things that make urban combat the most intense kind of combat psychologically.

• 29:45Jocko Willink?

  And you have to be careful with your troops to make sure that you give them enough time out of the fight that they can maintain a long deployment in that sort of intensity.

• 30:05Jocko Willink?

  And the Russians did not always do a very good job of that.

• 30:11Jocko Willink?

  Next bullet. Training and discipline are paramount. You can accomplish nothing without them. You may need to do the training in the combat zone. Discipline must be demanded. Once it begins to slip, the results are disastrous.

• 30:42Jocko Willink?

  That is

• 30:46Jocko Willink?

  something I believe in across the board. I think you mentioned that before too, by the way. I may have mentioned that a few times. And there it is again. Training and discipline are paramount. Discipline must be demanded. Once it begins to slip, the results are disastrous. You have to hold the line on the discipline. You have to.

• 31:11Jocko Willink?

  The Russians were surprised and embarrassed at the degree to which the Chechens exploited the use of cell phones, Motorola radios, improvised TV stations, lightweight video cameras, and the Internet to win the information war. The Russians admitted that they lost control of the information coming out of Grozny early in the operation and never regained it.

• 31:42Jocko Willink?

  As expected, the Russians reiterated the need for large numbers of trained infantrymen. They said that some tasks, such as conducting a log pack, that's logistics, operations could only be conducted by infantrymen. The logistical unit soldiers were hopelessly inept at basic military skills such as perimeter defense, establishing security overwatch and so forth, and thereby fell easy prey to the Chechens. So that's something that our troops in America have

• 32:16Jocko Willink?

  have really done an outstanding job of adapting to the logistics support people being combat ready. Because every time you're, you know, if you're, if you're a supply guy in the army and you gotta bring whatever it is, water, food, ammunition from Baghdad to Ramadi, that means you're doing a combat patrol, that means you could likely get attacked. And so, America did a really good job of getting their folks trained up to run these convoys. And, you know, the logistics teams that supplied the warfighters, the frontline troops, they came under all kinds of attacks and did an outstanding job.

• 32:58Jocko Willink?

  So, all you folks that are listening, that were running those logistics convoys, thank you. And you did an outstanding job, and I know there was huge risk every time you rolled out the front gate.

• 33:15Jocko Willink?

  Next bullet. They found that boundaries between units were still tactical weak points, but that it wasn't just horizontal boundaries that they had to worry about. In some cases, the Chechens held the third floor and above, while the Russians held the first two floors and sometimes the roof. If a unit holding the second floor evacuated parts of it without telling the unit on the ground floor, the Chechens would move troops in and attack the ground floor unit through the ceiling. Often this resulted in fratricide, as the ground floor unit responded with uncontrolled fire through all of the ceilings, including the ones below that section of the building still occupied by the Russians.

• 34:00Jocko Willink?

  Entire battles were fought through floors, ceilings, and walls without visual contact.

• 34:09Jocko Willink?

  That's gotta be scary, right?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:14Jocko Willink?

  Ambushes were common. Sometimes they actually had three tiers. Chechens would be underground, on the ground floor, and on the roof. Each group had a different task in the ambush.

• 34:31Jocko Willink?

  The most common response by the Chechens to the increasingly powerful Russian indirect aerial, indirect and aerial firepower was hugging the Russian unit. The hugging tactics caused the Russians to, sorry, if the hugging tactic caused the Russians to cease artillery and airfires, it became a man-to-man fight and the Chechens were well-equipped to win it. If they didn't cease the supporting fires, the Russian units suffered just as much as the Chechen fighters did, sometimes even more, and the morale effect was much worse on the Russians.

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  So there's,

• 35:15Jocko Willink?

  I mean, it's very simple. Oh, if the, if the enemy is gonna use, or if the Russians are gonna use big bombs and big artillery and big bombs from the sky to, to defeat us, we'll just get so close in, we'll just close the distance and be so close that if you wanna drop bombs, you're gonna kill your own people.

• 35:37Jocko Willink?

  Both the physical and mental health of the Russian units began to decline almost immediately upon initiation of high-intensity combat.

• 35:48Jocko Willink?

  In less than a month, almost twenty percent of the Russian soldiers were suffering from viral hepatitis, which is a very serious depil- debilitating with slow recovery. Most had chronic diarrhea and upper respiratory infections that turned to pneumonia easily. This was blamed on the breakdown of logistical support that meant units had to drink contaminated water. Unit sanitary discipline broke down almost completely.

• 36:22Jocko Willink?

  So that discipline, like I said, it starts with the shaving and the next thing you know, you're not boiling your water and the next thing you know, you're sick and the next thing you know, you're crapping all over the place and the next thing you know, other people, you're making other people sick. And it starts with the discipline.

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  According to a survey of over thirteen hundred troops, this is Russian troops, made immediately after the fighting, about seventy-two percent had some sort of psychological disorder. Almost seventy-five percent had an exaggerated startle response. That's like when there's a loud noise and you shudder from it. About seventy-five percent had an exaggerated startle response. Twenty-eight percent had what was described as neuro-emotional and almost ten percent had acute emotional reactions.

• 37:15Jocko Willink?

  The Russians recommended two psychophysiatrists, one psychopharmacologist, one psychiatrist and one medical psychologist at each US corps-sized unit. That's a huge recommendation for mental health.

• 37:34Jocko Willink?

  Although their experience in Afghanistan prepared them somewhat for the physical health problems, they were not prepared for this level of mental health treatment. Many permanent combat stressed casualties resulted from soldiers not being provided proper immediate treatment.

• 37:55Jocko Willink?

  Again, this boils down to how harsh that urban combat is. And they were not ready for it. They were not ready for the psychological damage that that urban combat does

• 38:12Jocko Willink?

  to the soldier's mind. How it gets in the head and you've got the startle response and the emotional acute reactions. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  That acute emotional reactions, that's like, like what, they'll break down?

• 38:28Jocko Willink?

  Breaking down, yeah, breaking down.

• 38:34Jocko Willink?

  Chechens weren't afraid of tanks. Or BMPs, and BMP is like a Bradley fighting vehicle. It's basically an armored personnel character carrier for the most part with a big gun on top. They assigned groups of RPG gunners to fire volleys at the lead and trail vehicles. Once these were destroyed, others were picked off one by one. Oh, this is Battle Grazie, some facts. The Russian forces lost twenty of twenty-six tanks. A hundred and two of a hundred and twenty BMPs in the first three days of fighting. Yeah.

• 39:14Jocko Willink?

  So imagine you got a convoy of twelve vehicles with a tank in the front and a tank in the back. And the Chechens take out the front and back. So now, now guess what? You're stuck. And then they just sit there and pick off the rest of the vehicles.

• 39:29Jocko Willink?

  Che- this is also important. Chechens chose firing positions high enough or low enough to stay out of the fields of fire of the tank and BMP weapons. So you know, the, the angle of fire can only go so high and so low. So they just stayed out of those two angles.

• 39:52Jocko Willink?

  Russian conscript infantry sometimes refused to dismount and often died in their BMP without ever firing a shot.

• 40:03Jocko Willink?

  So this is, this is a nightmare. Your vehicle gets hit, and if you know anything, when your vehicle gets hit, or like your convoy gets hit, get out. If, in other words, if the vehicle can't move, because it's trapped by other vehicles, or trapped by the road, or it's trapped by whatever, get out of the vehicle. Get out of the vehicle and take down a building. Get out of the vehicle and move to cover. Get out, but get out of the vehicle. The vehicle's just a bullet magnet at that point, and an RPG magnet. So just get out of there. Russian elite infantry did much better, but didn't coordinate well with armored vehicles initially.

• 40:41Jocko Willink?

  So I can tell you that we coordinated with the armored vehicles beautifully, and we loved them. We loved the US Army armor that we work with. Absolutely loved them, and we coordinated with them, and we worked together with them in a beautiful manner.

• 41:04Jocko Willink?

  Chechens were brutish, especially with prisoners. Some reports say the Russians were no better, but most say that the Chechens were the worst of the two sides. Whoever was at fault, the battle degenerated quickly to one of no quarter asked, none given.

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  Russian wounded and dead were hung upside down in the windows of defended Chechen positions. Russians had to shoot at the bodies to engage the Chechens. Russian prisoners were decapitated and at night their heads were placed on stakes beside the roads leading into the city. Over which Russian replacements and reinforcements had to travel.

• 41:59Jocko Willink?

  So you don't think of that in this day and age. That's something you hear, you read about in the history books. You remember it from the history books, but there it is. I mean, this is 1994, 1995, 1996, heads on stakes.

• 42:21Jocko Willink?

  Both Russian and Chechen dead were routinely booby trapped.

• 42:29Jocko Willink?

  The Russians were not surprised by the ferocity and brutality of the Chechens. But they were surprised by the sophistication of the Chechen use of booby traps and mines. Chechens mined and booby trapped everything. Showing excellent insight into the actions and reactions of the average Russian soldier.

• 42:55Jocko Willink?

  Mine and booby trap awareness was hard to maintain. As, as you look at this more, I mean, they, they booby trapped anything that, they talk about, um, how they showed insight into the actions and reactions of the average Russian soldier. They knew what would attract them. They knew what they couldn't keep their hands off of, and that's what they'd booby trap. Some little shiny object, some little, something that looked expensive or something that looked worthwhile, it was booby trapped.

• 43:27Jocko Willink?

  Now, that kind of wraps up that first, uh, book, but I pulled out some other little articles that I thought had some good information. This one here is Russian Tactical Lessons Learned From Fighting Chechen Separatists by Timothy L. Thomas.

• 43:49Jocko Willink?

  This section.

• 43:53Jocko Willink?

  With regard to general ambush guidance, Kozlov offered the following.

• 44:02Jocko Willink?

  First and foremost, mobilize your will, knowledge, and experience, no matter how difficult this may be, in order to reestablish command and control, repulse the enemy attack, seize the initiative, and report the situation.

• 44:24Jocko Willink?

  That, that is an, that is a powerful statement, and it's a powerful statement on how to react to any situation. First and foremost, mobilize your will.

• 44:40Jocko Willink?

  I love envisioning the will as like a military unit. First and foremost, mobilize your will. Bring it to bear. Wake up, Will. It's time to get it on.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, in college in football, they'd say, well, I heard this other places too, but they'd say buckle up and guard your grill.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  What was it?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Buckle up and guard your grill.

• 45:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  So it's like, you know, get ready to, to go.

• 45:12Jocko Willink?

  Mobilize your will, your knowledge and experience, no matter how difficult this mu- may be, in order to reestablish command and control.

• 45:25Jocko Willink?

  So you've lost it. Saying mobilize your will, reestablish command and control, repulse the enemy attacks, seize the initiative, and report the situation. That's some damn good advice.

• 45:38Jocko Willink?

  Some damn good advice.

• 45:43Jocko Willink?

  Moral, psychological support also was a training area for improvement. Of particular concern here were the mood swings that were observed among Russian servicemen during combat.

• 45:59Jocko Willink?

  So they're seeing these drastic mood swings and so much of this was psychological on the Russians. And Russians are hard people. Yeah. I mean, we're not, we're not talking about soft people. These are Russians. I mean, Russians are hard people.

• 46:18Jocko Willink?

  The end result of such training would be to improve the serviceman's fighting spirit,

• 46:24Jocko Willink?

  use of common sense and rationale to overcome confusion, the ability to act boldly, actively, and decisively in battle, and the ability to achieve one's assigned goal. Again, this is talking about training the mind to think, to use common sense, and this is what you want to do with all your people. I don't care what business you're in, whether you're in a war, whether you're in business, whether you're in some kind of team.

• 46:53Jocko Willink?

  Train the mind to use common sense.

• 46:58Jocko Willink?

  Train the mind for the ability to act boldly and decisively.

• 47:06Jocko Willink?

  Got to train the mind, you got to free your mind.

• 47:16Jocko Willink?

  Now, that same article pulled out Russian lesson learned from Spetsnaz GRU reconnaissance point of view.

• 47:28Jocko Willink?

  And the authors were K. Nikton and S. Kozlov.

• 47:40Jocko Willink?

  They called this one section, "The Commandments for Servicemen in Chechnya." And what they actually were was cultural, "Tips on Cultural Sensitivities for Russian Soldiers", and they are as false. And when I read through these, this is a directive on how to treat other human beings that you're dealing with. Chechen, Russian, American, subordinate, superior, doesn't matter.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  What was the title of that again?

• 48:10Jocko Willink?

  "Tips on Cultural Sensitivities for Russian Soldiers." "One, always maintain your authority among the local populace. The Chechens are very critical of people who try to create a false authority for themselves. A so-called patronizing attitude towards others usually afflicts those who cannot gain authority through other means." We talk about this all the time. You don't run around throwing your rank out. Makes you look like a jackass.

• 48:50Jocko Willink?

  "Next, avoid unwarranted confiscations and unlawful requisitions of food and property." That one makes pretty easy sense. Don't steal from people. "Next one, be fair. Every local inhabitant must be dealt with firmly but fairly. Injustice gives rise to negative attitude in any person." So be fair. "Reward a Chechen who performs his assigned task well. To accomplish a task that you need to get accomplished,

• 49:29Jocko Willink?

  choose the most authoritative person among the local inhabitants and get him to carry out the task. If he does the job right and does it quickly, you should reward the elder by giving him additional authority and by giving him some kind of gift." Reward your people when they do a good job. That's all we're saying here.

• 49:53Jocko Willink?

  When dealing with Chechens, display a calm, display a sense of calm and self-worth. You will achieve more through this than through screaming obscenities. Never beat a Cheshin.

• 50:07Jocko Willink?

  And it goes on to say, "Chechens are a proud people with a very intense sense of pride and self-worth."

• 50:14Jocko Willink?

  Therefore, you will achieve nothing by humiliating them, by screaming at them, and by abusing them. You will only embitter them.

• 50:27Jocko Willink?

  Right? This is how you treat other people. And it goes on to say, "Even in casual conversation, do not give orders and do not use profanity that you might normally use as interjections."

• 50:43Jocko Willink?

  So this idea of yelling and screaming, you think you're gonna, people will do what you want them to do, doesn't work.

• 50:52Jocko Willink?

  Next, "Respect Cheshin women, girls, old men, and children as if they were Russians."

• 51:00Jocko Willink?

  Always remember that Chechens respect manly qualities, therefore never permit any disrespect or vulgarity with regard to their women.

• 51:10Jocko Willink?

  Never allow yourself to curse at defenseless people in revenge for the outrages of militants against Russian women, old men, and children. So keep yourself in check and make sure you're not blaming people for something that somebody else did.

• 51:32Jocko Willink?

  "Study and be respectful of national traditions. The more you know about the Chechens' national traditions, the more you will understand their behavior."

• 51:41Jocko Willink?

  That means you will be able to predict their actions. "At the same time, a person that respects the local traditions will be respected himself." Gee, what a novel idea.

• 51:54Jocko Willink?

  Know who you're dealing with. Respect what they do.

• 52:06Jocko Willink?

  Always remember that the above-mentioned commandments apply to the fullest extents possible to local inhabitants, and they do not apply at all to the militants. Never forget, you are in a region where there are insurgents against whom you are at war. Therefore, you can never be certain that the person with whom you are speaking is not helping the militants. Under conditions of guerrilla warfare, it is better to turn down an invitation to someone's home and risk offending the host than it is to take advantage of his hospitality and ending up being an easy catch for insurgents.

• 52:51Jocko Willink?

  Again, I think those were just like rules on how to treat other human beings in the world and be successful with it. Now we get to a, another little excerpt that I found. And this is from Soldat Udachi, which is a, basically it's a magazine, it's almost like a Soldier of Fortune magazine. And these were some of the, some of the rules for a soldier in a zone of armed conflict. Fighters can be anywhere posing as peaceful citizens in the daytime and changing into killers at night.

• 53:32Jocko Willink?

  Don't accept someone's friendly just because they speak Russian and wear camouflage clothes. This is perhaps my favorite one right here. You don't get a second chance in wartime. Never lose the feeling of danger, or of the strength, the spirit of the Russian soldier. Never leave a base without the commander's permission in the field. Never touch bright or expensive objects as they may be mined.

• 54:04Jocko Willink?

  In the mountains, whoever is higher is stronger.

• 54:10Jocko Willink?

  Take the high ground, or the high ground's gonna take you.

• 54:14Jocko Willink?

  Pay attention to the flanks, as the basic maneuver of the insurgents is to get around your back and envelop your force. Always check your flanks. I'm gonna burn through some of these now. These are tactical observations from the Grozny combat experience by Brett C. Jenkinson, who is a major in the US Army.

• 54:40Jocko Willink?

  He wrote a really good article, worth checking out. Google it.

• 54:45Jocko Willink?

  But I broke down some of these

• 54:50Jocko Willink?

  Cheshin lessons learned. This is from the Cheshin side. Hit-and-run tactics confused the Russian units.

• 54:58Jocko Willink?

  Targeting Russian radio operators destroyed Russian command and control. Small units provided good mobility and were an effective, basic maneuver unit.

• 55:10Jocko Willink?

  Hugging, which we already talked about, which was staying 50 to 250 meters of the enemy, was the most effective way to avoid enemy artillery, mortars, or close air support.

• 55:22Jocko Willink?

  Synchronized ambushes confused the enemy to the point that he did not know where to shoot back. As a result, Russian units would start firefights between themselves.

• 55:38Jocko Willink?

  Destroying the lead and trail vehicles, and then each vehicle in between could easily isolate Russian armored columns. Shooting enemy soldiers in the legs caused snipers to engage other soldiers trying to evacuate the wounded.

• 55:58Jocko Willink?

  And on leadership, a loosely organized unit that allowed greater freedom of action was effective to defend Grozny.

• 56:08Jocko Willink?

  Little bit of freedom on the battlefield goes a long way. Now, the Russian lessons learned, training and preparation are the most important thing in winning battles. Urban combat training must be longer than days or weeks to be effective.

• 56:21Jocko Willink?

  Urban combat maneuver must be tailored to fit the enemy's situation.

• 56:28Jocko Willink?

  Task organizing into small squad-sized combined assault groups worked better than large units.

• 56:39Jocko Willink?

  Russians underestimated the Chechen will to fight.

• 56:45Jocko Willink?

  Lessons learned from successful tactics should be integrated into follow-on missions. To be successful, one must adapt quicker than the enemy.

• 57:03Jocko Willink?

  For the leadership perspective, again, this is the Russians. Adapted lessons learned from previous urban battles proved invaluable. The greatest challenge to leadership was maintaining morale. High casualty rates destroyed the already low morale of combat units.

• 57:22Jocko Willink?

  Another challenge to morale was the Russian soldiers' fear of enemy mistreatment if captured.

• 57:31Jocko Willink?

  And this is an important one. Failure to justify the nature of Russian military intervention in Chechnya resulted in low morale. So, the troops on the ground not knowing and not understanding why they were there, not understanding the strategic importance or the vision, hurt their morale big time.

• 57:50Jocko Willink?

  Now, I have a couple excerpts here from, this is from an article that was in the LA Times, January 13th, 1995, by Sonny Efron.

• 58:05Jocko Willink?

  Captured Russian soldiers paint bleak picture of Chechen conditions. So, this is Groznya, Grozny, Russia. Russian troop morale is so low, conditions are so poor and losses are so heavy that the Russian attempt to take Grozny is floundering. Two Russian soldiers captured in the capital of the breakaway Republic of Chechnya said Thursday. "The soldiers are against this war and so are our commanders."

• 58:33Jocko Willink?

  Said Alexey, a 20-year-old junior sergeant who was caught while trying to steal food from an empty house in Grozny after he'd gone five days without a solid meal. "We are forced to fight." The two soldiers said Russian positions had frequently been bombed by Russian warplanes. "Many soldiers had been killed by friendly fire from the Russian side and constant vehicle breakdowns made it impossible for them to pick up their dead and wounded."

• 59:04Jocko Willink?

  And this is, I haven't found the book yet, and I'm sure I will. The book that takes you into the battle, onto the ground, because I've been talking all this strategic stuff and generally I don't like to do that. I want to hear from the person on the ground.

• 59:19Jocko Willink?

  And this is where you start to get it. You start to see what the Russians, what the frontline troopers were thinking and what it was like for them. And here you had him saying that many soldiers have been killed by friendly fire from the Russian side.

• 59:35Jocko Willink?

  "Constant vehicle breakdowns made it impossible for them to pick up their dead and wounded."

• 59:41Jocko Willink?

  In a company that had 100 men, now there are only 50 left. "In our battalion, out of 350 men, over 250 had been killed."

• 59:53Jocko Willink?

  The soldiers' accounts indicate that the new official figures putting the Russian military death toll at 394 soldiers are vastly understated.

• 1:00:03Jocko Willink?

  "Chechen sources put the Russian casualties at about 3,000 dead." "These Russians are worse than fascists." Said Grigory A. Smirnoff, 50, whose beloved cherry tree was decapitated by the rocket. "Four young guys have been killed in our street. They weren't fighters. They weren't against anyone. I apologize for what Russia is doing here," Smirnoff said. "I'm embarrassed by my country in front of the whole world."

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  A month after President Boris Yeltsin promised the Russian public that law and order would be restored in Chechnya and that the illegal armed formations in Grozny would quickly be disarmed, it was unclear whether Russian forces could soon break through the fierce Chechen resistance.

• 1:00:48Jocko Willink?

  "I don't think they can take the city", said one Chechen fighter. "They can destroy it, but they can't capture it." The two Russian prisoners who had entered Grozny on December 20th looked exhausted, filthy, and frightened. If their condition is typical of the rest of the enemy, it is not surprising that the Russians have not yet attempted another all-out infantry assault on Grozny.

• 1:01:14Jocko Willink?

  "Frankly, there is no discipline, no anything, in the military now", the prisoner said. "The soldiers are weakened, they haven't washed for a long time, they are hungry and unshaven."

• 1:01:29Jocko Willink?

  Even a soldier, when he wants to describe how bad things have gotten, he says that the soldiers are dirty, hungry, and unshaven. There were times where more of us were getting killed by our own people than by the Chechens. "We don't even have time to pick up our dead, just no time. We're either fighting the Chechen, or our own air force is bombing us." The prisoner added that they'd been ordered to kill everybody, from kids to old people, not just Chechens, but also Russians. This is a nightmare.

• 1:02:06Jocko Willink?

  The two soldiers said they went into a house in northeast Grozny neighborhood to look for food because they hadn't had a proper meal for five days. They'd been surviving on dry rations that were never enough and were delivered to their positions irregularly. As the prisoner spoke, Chechen fighters gathered around them to listen. Upon hearing the Russians admit that they had broke into the house, one man shouted angrily, "Looters!" "All we wanted was something to eat",

• 1:02:35Jocko Willink?

  muttered the prisoner. Now...

• 1:02:42Jocko Willink?

  We gotta remember, we've got a, you know, this is the, this is the Soviet Union, this is Russia, so they have their own media. And I found this article.

• 1:02:53Jocko Willink?

  And I shouldn't be laughing, because it's horrible, but this is the Moscow Times talking about the other story of Grozny. "The city of Grozny is cold and dirty." Again, this is some kind of a state-approved message. "There is no water and no electricity. At night, the streets are illuminated only by distant fires sparked by Russian shelling and the occasional flares. The air is full of sound, constantly thumping of artillery shells, the screams of Grod missiles, and the crackle of machine gun fire. The only source of heat in the burned-out basements of Grozny are from homemade furnaces that Russian soldiers had fashioned from bricks of destroyed buildings. At night, officers and soldiers huddle around them, their faces dirtied and covered with sweat since they rarely have water with which to wash it.

• 1:03:37Jocko Willink?

  It almost looks like they are wearing the kind of camouflage paint that is issued to soldiers in Western armies." These men are by and large, normal decent people. They believe that they are doing their duty in Chechnya. That's a little bit contrary to what we just heard from the prisoners. Of course, now the prisoners,

• 1:03:57Jocko Willink?

  those guys are in a duress situation too, because they might get their heads chopped off at any moment. So they're probably making the case the best they can that, hey, you know, yep, we're not in support of Russia, they're just trying to stay alive. They insist, back to the article, "They insist they do not intentionally attack peaceful civilians, but are instead waging battle against an organized and pitiless enemy." "The conscripts who are risking their lives in Chechnya might as well be considered volunteers."

• 1:04:26Jocko Willink?

  This is the paper, you know, saying that these poor guys that are fighting, they should be considered volunteers, even though they're conscripts that are being forced to fight there, they might as well be considered volunteers. "Russia has not declared war or martial law, so nothing threatens deserters except the moral condemnation of the comrades they leave behind." The army's morale has been steadily improving, as it becomes more experienced in street fighting.

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  Again, there's countless documented cases of the morale completely falling apart and being one of the premier causes of the loss of the battle.

• 1:05:06Jocko Willink?

  Its casualty rate is falling and is able to inflict increasing punishment on the Chechen fighters. The military is confident of victory. Among these soldiers, you hear a different opinion about the war than what you read in Moscow. Many reports in the media about Chechnya campaign are obviously biased against the military. Some may even be censored. When I was in Chechnya on January 22, a crew from Russian television was in Grozny shooting a report for the evening news program. The report included graphic footage of the bodies of Russian soldiers who had been mutilated by the Chechens. However, the host of the program refused to air it without even seeing it.

• 1:05:48Jocko Willink?

  Of course, only a fraction of the Russian army is fighting in Chechnya, but they have been sent here, there, from virtually every military district in the country. Eventually, they will return to their bases and tell their stories to the rest of their comrades in arms. And those soldiers will put a lot more stock in what the Chechen Chechnya veterans have to say than they will in any press reports or human rights activists.

• 1:06:18Jocko Willink?

  So there's the uh

• 1:06:21Jocko Willink?

  the official Russian version.

• 1:06:26Jocko Willink?

  Brutal.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  In your experience, has that ever happened here? Like you still hear stuff in the media and you're like, dang, that's that's not how it happened.

• 1:06:36Jocko Willink?

  It definitely happens here. There's no doubt about that. Um, the way that the media portrays things is is very wrong, you know, often very wrong. I think one of the classics that I've been telling lately or talking about lately is that they they never portray the Iraqi people as normal human beings that just want to live normal lives. They never portray the Iraqi people like that.

• 1:07:05Jocko Willink?

  When that's what they are.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Jocko Willink?

  The vast majority of Iraqi people are normal people that wanna have a job, raise their kids, let their kids go to school, improve their lives, do better. That's what the vast majority of Iraqi people want. But you know, when, when's the last time you saw? An American family on the news that was? Going to the store to go grocery shopping and then come home and, and do some yard work in the afternoon.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:07:35Jocko Willink?

  No, they don't show that because it's not news.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:07:37Jocko Willink?

  It's the same thing in Iraq. They don't show that.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42Jocko Willink?

  So we always get this impression that, you know? That everyone in Iraq is some kind of militant.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Right, where they're just tired of us being there.

• 1:07:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's not true.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:07:52Jocko Willink?

  Not true at all. So it's one of the biggest points I can think of where the media can just, they just get it wrong.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Jocko Willink?

  They just get it wrong and it really leaves people in America thinking, well, God, why are we there?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Jocko Willink?

  It's so crazy that we would do, you know, why they don't want us there. No, actually they do want us there, but you don't show those people.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:11Jocko Willink?

  You show the protesters.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's news.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Jocko Willink?

  It's not news to interview someone that says, yeah, it's great having the Americans here. Hopefully they can maintain the peace. That's not news.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, isn't that crazy how, how, sure, that's not news? And that, and that kind of makes sense, you know, what do you, why would you report on an American family? You just, you know, the dad went to work. You wouldn't report on that because that's not news.

• 1:08:30Jocko Willink?

  Not news.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  So that makes sense, but the fact that you're not reporting everyday stuff is essentially changing the, the accurate message into a message that's inaccurate. Then that's something, you know?

• 1:08:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is. It is. It's, uh.

• 1:08:45Jocko Willink?

  It's horrible. It's horrible to see. This is just another little section, the Russian counter insurgency. Operation in Chechnya, part one, winning the battle, losing the war by Matthew N.

• 1:09:03Jocko Willink?

  Jocko. RPG and sniper fire focused on exposed Russian troops. Small groups of ten to twenty Chechen fighters moved in and out of buildings and the surrounding mountains to engage heavily armed and armored Russian troops. The Chechen teams would attack in shifts. Some attacking while the others rested, so that a force of no more than fifty held entire battalions at bay, bottlenecked in the narrow streets and cities, or the tre- or the treacherous defilees of the mountains.

• 1:09:38Jocko Willink?

  The Chechen utilization of information and space and their highly sophisticated networking allowed them a tremendous advantage in terms of physical combat, and even more important advantage in terms of psychological impact on their enemy. Rather than a group of ragtag insurgent fighters fueled by hatred and national fanaticism, the Chechen fighters were highly trained, disciplined, well-equipped, and knowledgeable of the terrain.

• 1:10:05Jocko Willink?

  From the individual up through the army level, the Chechens held the advantage in all but air power and fire support. And we already talked about how they overcame that. The Chechen fighters proved better trained, equipped, technically skilled and fed, and demonstrated remarkably higher morale and motivation in addition to an intimate knowledge of the hazardous terrain. So it's incre- it's just incredible how over and over again they point out on both sides how big of a factor morale is.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:35Jocko Willink?

  So if you're in a leadership position, whether you're working with a team, whether you're working with a company, whether you're working with a business, morale is so important, and you have to pay attention to it.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, it seems that, kind of at a glance or something, it seems like morale is kind of this extra thing, you know? Oh, what, you don't feel good, you know? Business is business, you know? You don't feel good about it, but man, that's kind of the fuel, you know? You don't have the fuel, it's... Why even do it?

• 1:11:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I wouldn't say it's the fuel, I'd say it's the fire.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:11:08Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah.

• 1:11:11Jocko Willink?

  Throughout the first Chechen war, Chechen fighters, many of them former Soviet soldiers with combat experience in Afghanistan dug into the hills and fought a defensive and fierce war of attrition with the Russian troops, not unlike their former Afghani counterparts.

• 1:11:26Jocko Willink?

  Although both sides engaged in acts of brutality to weaken the enemy's resolve to fight, Chechen fighters far outdid their Russian counterparts in these grisly psychological tactics.

• 1:11:39Jocko Willink?

  They hung Russian wounded upside down, wounded and dead upside down on the windows of defensive positions, for example, forcing the Russians to fire at their combat comrades in order to engage the rebels. Clearly, that's the second time we've talked about that. Clearly, that had a huge impact. I can't even imagine what that does to you psychologically when you want to shoot at the enemy and you gotta shoot at one of your brothers.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  Who's either wounded. I mean, he might be dead, but he's possibly just wounded.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and either way, he's right there. You gotta shoot. Yeah.

• 1:12:13Jocko Willink?

  Both Russian and Chechen dead were routinely booby-trapped by the Chechens, who showed sophisticated insight into the likely actions, reactions of the average Russian soldiers. We already talked about that.

• 1:12:28Jocko Willink?

  In addition, Chechen fighters used dirty tactics collectively learned from dozens of asymmetrical guerrilla conflicts before, such as instructing snipers to aim for the legs of Russian troops, injuring but not incapacitating them, and then shooting free range at the subsequent rescue parties that were sure to come. Some snipers aimed specifically at the groin, dealing a crippling and humiliating wound, and a humiliating wound that resulted in a slow, painful death. And we, we experienced this in Iraq too, where, and part of it was like rumor mill, where people would say, oh, man, these, because there was, I remember in Fallujah, there was a sniper that shots a couple of guys in the groin.

• 1:13:13Jocko Willink?

  And then, you know, one person got shot in the groin in, in Ramadi. And I just remember everyone thinking, oh, they're going, this is what, and it's psychological. It's a psychological attack. Chechens routinely dressed in Russian uniforms to gain access to bases and used these opportunities to launch surprise attacks from behind enemy lines. Each Chechen took seriously the notion that the center of gravity in the war was no longer the enemy's army, but rather the enemy's people. Tactics were devised to attack the psyche of the Russians aimed at creating a constant level, high level of psychological stress on the Russian servicemen to undermine their morale.

• 1:13:54Jocko Willink?

  So the Chechens were attacking the morale, attacking them, doing things that were attacking them psychologically. Hardened by a united sense of purpose in driving out the invader, the Chechen troops terrified and terrorized the Russian troops, slowly bleeding out their morale and willingness to fight. The Russian troops, many still in their teens, were woefully unprepared and undertrained in comparison. The result of such a disparity in morale and military expectations had tragic consequences. According to one Russian participant, the men on the ground, shaken and angered by their

• 1:14:39Jocko Willink?

  losses, were just taking it out on anyone they found. There was revenge in the air for those comrades who had been killed. And now you end up with, so the Russian troops get so frustrated, they're so psychologically damaged that they're just going out and taking it out on the local Chechen, which are, some of these are Russians, some of these people are, are good Russians. And they're taking it out on them, they're taking it out on anyone that could be an insurgent, and now what happens? Now everyone starts turning against you. It's a nightmare. Without recourse to set piece conventional battle, the Chechen insurgents had arguably

• 1:15:20Jocko Willink?

  achieved the acme of skill by subduing their enemy largely before the fighting began. At the same time, the Russians, with their vast superiority in military firepower, failed to use it, use it to tactical and strategic advantage. By employing air and space power thoughtlessly or unimaginably, the Russians' power was less effective or even disastrously impotent.

• 1:15:54Jocko Willink?

  So a lack of imagination, a lack of creativity.

• 1:15:59Jocko Willink?

  Brutal, brutal war.

• 1:16:03Jocko Willink?

  And a lot of lessons learned. And I can tell you that there's a lot of lessons that were learned by those Russians on the ground that were absolutely implemented by American forces. In, I know in Ramadi. Absolutely, the amount of similarities for that urban combat. And the things that we watched out for because of the sacrifices made by the Russian soldiers. I'd say it had a huge impact. And I'm glad that we were able to take away some lessons.

• 1:16:40Jocko Willink?

  And take those to the battlefield in Ramadi. And do things like protect the local populace and do things like understand their, their culture. And do things like not take out our aggression on the local populace, which only turns the local populace against you.

• 1:16:58Jocko Willink?

  And it was that professionalism of the US military, of the US Army soldiers, of the US Marines, that professionalism

• 1:17:10Jocko Willink?

  to maintain that discipline

• 1:17:14Jocko Willink?

  throughout the battle. That was actually absolutely critical

• 1:17:21Jocko Willink?

  in bringing about the victory.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  It's crazy how all these, um, uh, all these strategies and, and tactics are, it's all the same. The Patton book, like all the books, these messages are, it's all the same. It's crazy.

• 1:17:42Jocko Willink?

  It is, it is, it is all the same. It is crazy how similar they are and when they just completely line up. And again, it's amazing how the, the tactics from the battlefield reflect the tactics in business and reflect the tactics in human life.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, which one, which kind of gave me an eerie feeling is when you talked about the, the Chechen. Rebels that they there were the rebels, right? Some Chachin rebels, um, they uh, how they'd attack the Russian morale. Right? So what gave me an eerie feeling is that's what you get with like um, guys who abuse their girlfriend or their wife. That's what they do. They attack their morale.

• 1:18:25Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  And I don't know why they gave me that feeling, but it's like so.

• 1:18:30Jocko Willink?

  Because it gave you that eerie feeling because you understand how devastating that is.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  You know, and it's not exactly. Yeah, that's the perfect way to put it because it's not this thing where it's different than chopping off the guy's heads and putting it, you know, on on stakes. That that's something for sure, but it's way different. It's on this weird like kind of covert level, but still so devastating. So it's weird where it's it's it's man, it's bad when you you see a guy doing that to like to a girl.

• 1:19:00Jocko Willink?

  Yes, it's it's it's horrible. And also, and you mentioned this earlier. The morale piece is something that gets ignored so often.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Jocko Willink?

  Especially in the business world where people just their morale will take a beating. The market's bad, all these things. And if you don't prop up that morale, you don't protect the morale, and you don't defend the morale, and you don't strengthen the morale. That's when you get what's what's what happened to the Russian soldiers. The morale fell apart.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of times um,

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  if the morale is down like in a company or something, the leader, if he's bad, he'll kind of blame them. Like you guys have bad attitudes. You know, we're trying to do some business here and you guys have bad attitudes, but it's, you know.

• 1:19:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  It's kind of the opposite there.

• 1:19:44Jocko Willink?

  Leader that's not taking ownership of the situation. Which is why ownership is so important. Because the minute you start blaming, I mean, you're you're just you're just putting a nail in the coffin. When you start blaming people for bad morale. You know, it's a it's the hey, the the beatings will continue until morale improves.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Right, yes, exactly, yeah.

• 1:20:05Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't work.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:07Jocko Willink?

  You know, the beatings do not improve morale.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Would you say, kind of off the top of your head, would you say that that's more common than not? That just that whole thing where, you know, just to blame people in general?

• 1:20:20Jocko Willink?

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, i- i- it is absolutely a very common problem in leadership.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's why our book is done really well, because people say, oh, man.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Jocko Willink?

  I do that. Oh, I, I can't believe I do that.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we never hear any of this stuff, like, growing up. You'll say, okay, don't blame, but it's, it's not like a real strong message that you're sent growing up. I know I wasn't.

• 1:20:44Jocko Willink?

  I don't think that, that people have isolated

• 1:20:50Jocko Willink?

  and focused on ownership at this level. I think that's why the, I think that's why the book is done very well.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Jocko Willink?

  I think that's why people continue to contact me and say, hey, you guys, thank you for writing this book. It's changed the way I look at everything. It's changed the way I've done my business. It's changed the way I'm treating my wife. It's changed my family. It's changed my outlook on my physical failings. So, so when you take ownership to that high level and that intensity, and you call it extreme ownership, yeah, I think it, I think it has a huge impact. And I think that we are the first people that have said, you know what? This needs to be the focus.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:28Jocko Willink?

  This is the game changer. This is the fundamental principle in life that is going to turn you from failure to success. It's not when you say, hey, this person didn't help me, and this person went against me, and this person sabotaged me. That's great, but it doesn't matter. When you take ownership of everything, somebody sabotaging me, I gotta own it. I gotta figure out how to stop them.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's just so, when you, when you kind of know that, or you kind of get wind of that, it almost seems so obvious, like, yeah, well, what was I thinking? If I'm gonna blame someone, no, of course, they're gonna blame me back. If I, if I get belligerent towards someone, of course, they're gonna get belligerent back, but you don't, you, and you already knew that, really, if you're asked, but it's almost, it's almost like you don't think, if I take ownership, everyone else is gonna start, start taking ownership. I don't, you know, you don't really think about that, that much, even though after you know it, it seems real obvious.

• 1:22:26Jocko Willink?

  These things are simple, but not easy.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  But not easy, yeah.

• 1:22:30Jocko Willink?

  They really are. And ownership. When you take ownership of problems, when you take ownership of your life and when you don't have anybody else to blame, it hurts.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:41Jocko Willink?

  It hurts. It hurts the ego, it hurts the mind, it hurts. So people, even though it's really easy, you're not gonna take ownership of everything. It's hard to do. It's difficult for people to do. And when they do do it,

• 1:22:59Jocko Willink?

  when they do step across that line and they do take ownership, they absolutely see things turn around. And I've, I've heard that, you know, I mean, thankfully for the internet, thankfully for Twitter and Facebook and all these things, people hit me up every single day.

• 1:23:15Jocko Willink?

  And say, either, hey, this changed my life, but sometimes it's just something minor, you know, they'll say, had some issues at work today, took ownership of them, problem solved. And you're like, okay, that's great. What would that person have done a month ago before they read the book? They would have blamed somebody else, they would have shifted the problem, you know? They would have, they would have ignored it, they would have cast blame somewhere else, they wouldn't have solved the problem. So when you take ownership, it allows you to then solve the problem.

• 1:23:44Jocko Willink?

  So, that's what you gotta do.

• 1:23:47Jocko Willink?

  So now it is time for

• 1:23:50Jocko Willink?

  questions from the interwebs.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  We actually have a current event question, which technically has never happened.

• 1:24:00Jocko Willink?

  Well, I would say it's not, I'll explain why it's not a current event, once you ask the question.

• 1:24:08Jocko Willink?

  Cause it's not.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, but, alright, alright. What are your thoughts on

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  the Conor McGregor versus Nate Diaz fight and the Holly Holm versus Misha Tate fight? That's UFC 196 this past weekend. Women's bentum weight championship, Holly Holm versus Misha Tate, and then, uh, it's like a super fight, right?

• 1:24:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  A super fight, Nate Diaz and Conor McGregor, who's a champ at 145.

• 1:24:38Jocko Willink?

  And here's why this is not a...

• 1:24:42Jocko Willink?

  Current events question to me because this is just a question about fighting. It really is because and you could say this at any time. These were good examples and we'll be talking about these examples in one year, five years. And there's other fights that are similar examples. Holly Holm, who is a world-class kickboxer and boxer.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  And boxer, yeah.

• 1:25:06Jocko Willink?

  And a very good mixed martial artist, however, not that great at jujitsu. Not, not horrible and not trying to bag on her because she is awesome.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  And a smart fighter too.

• 1:25:17Jocko Willink?

  Very smart with a great coach, great corner.

• 1:25:21Jocko Willink?

  She lost to Misha Tate, who is definitely not as good of a striker, but who is better on the ground.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she's real well-rounded.

• 1:25:32Jocko Willink?

  She's extremely well-rounded.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Jocko Willink?

  She's extremely well-rounded and she's also gotten beat uh twice by Ronda Rousey. And the, the, the strategy in those fights that she had was awful.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  In the Misha Tate, Ronda Rousey fight?

• 1:25:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for some reason, Misha kept clinching and grabbing and trying to take the fight to the ground against Ronda, which was just stupid. She was clearly a better striker. So, I don't know, I think that might change the next time they fight. Misha will hopefully have a smarter game plan than trying to grapple with Ronda. There's no reason for it. She's a better striker. She needs to take advantage of it.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, on the other hand, with Holly Holm, she does get the grappling going.

• 1:26:18Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  And not, not easy, you know, Holly Holm's good at avoiding the takedowns.

• 1:26:22Jocko Willink?

  Awesome at takedowns.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Man, so good. Um, but yeah, finally does it in the, in the fifth round. She had her. At the end of the second round there. But you know, it's kind of, you know, the, the time ran out. Um, and then yeah, managed to, and in the fifth round, managed to get it to the ground. And immediately finish.

• 1:26:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I mean, she managed and that it's key that you said that she managed to like get it to the ground. Cause it wasn't a beautiful takedown or anything. She got in on her finally. She'd gotten stuffed a couple of times. It was Holly was doing a really good job of keeping her at bay. And Holly was obviously scared because even in the second round, she got, once it was on the ground, it was just domination by Misha. And then.

• 1:27:10Jocko Willink?

  Holly didn't want to go to the ground with her again, but then she let her get in. And then, like you said, Misha just forced that thing, kind of dragged it in an ugly way, just kind of make out it to the ground. And once she got on the ground, she got her back, boom, got her back. And then when she got her back, she got the choke in, once she got the choke in. Holly kind of tried to flip her off, like, and

• 1:27:34Jocko Willink?

  even that was a little bit of a mistake. If Holly would have just like stood and shook her off.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:38Jocko Willink?

  Like a really good experienced jujitsu player might do. But she didn't. She flipped her over and landed on her back and then Misha had the choke in deep.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49Jocko Willink?

  And finish her. And Misha's, I mean, Misha's been in some scraps before. She is a scrappy, tough. She's got a big heart. She fights with a lot of heart. I give her, I give her some props. I mean, so does Holly, of course. I mean, Holly went to sleep. She didn't even tap.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:03Jocko Willink?

  She was like, what? No, I'm not tapping.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Jocko Willink?

  And you could see her instinctively started throwing.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:28:08Jocko Willink?

  Throwing punches at the end, I mean, into the air in a different direction, because that's her, that's her training instinct. Yeah.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  That's crazy how you see that all the time. Even when guys get knocked out. You ever see guys get knocked out and then start grappling?

• 1:28:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  With her eyes closed or with a raft or something like that, just kind of unconsciously doing it.

• 1:28:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  It's kind of a, it's kind of a compliment, I would say. You know, to their skill, like, that's how automatic it is.

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  So automatic that she's just throwing punches at the air.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Jocko Willink?

  Even though she's asleep.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, so in this case, straight up, yeah, jujitsu works, right?

• 1:28:46Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:28:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we'll talk about, give us a debrief on the McGregor Diaz fight.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  See, that one, I think it was there is a lot of components, I think, to that. I think, I, I think that

• 1:29:01Jocko Willink?

  But just give us the outlook of what happened. What?

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Just, okay, yeah, they, they fought, they fought at one seventy and Nate Diaz is either one fifty-five or I think sometimes one forty-five.

• 1:29:12Jocko Willink?

  He's fought, no, he's fought at one seventy before.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:15Jocko Willink?

  Nate. But, but he's, his normal weight for fighting is one fifty-five.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  McGregor's normal weight for fighting is one forty-five. So he came up ten pounds, but due to the late nature of the bout, they actually ended up fighting at one seventy.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they fight and it was it was a little battle and I think from what I saw it was it was close. But I think Conor McGregor caught him like some solid ones.

• 1:29:46Jocko Willink?

  Caught him a couple solid ones in the game, yeah.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  And then um then yeah, it shifted and then Nate started catching him and jamming him up and and and. I think that's really what did it because he he started beating him up. And then Connor went for a takedown and that's what typically what you do when you when you go for that takedown the the way he did. That's when you get beat up and you go for the clinch, you know, to to avoid getting beat up.

• 1:30:09Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Even in boxing, they do that, you know, you get beaten, you go for the clinch. So that was kind of what that kind of was. And in MMA, you just you go for the takedown. That's kind of what it is. Um so he did, but and that's the thing that here comes the jujitsu, right? Where Nate Diaz. So the reality is Conor McGregor couldn't he that wasn't an option for him. Where sure, he went for the takedown, but going to the takedown is even worse now because Nate Diaz is one of the. He's a really good jujitsu guy, really good. So and Conor McGregor is still working on his jujitsu. It's good. From what I hear, whatever, but not like Nate Diaz. Nate Diaz is like levels above him.

• 1:30:48Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  It goes to the ground and it really showed. So not only is Connor kind of beat up a little bit and and dazed. Now he's on the ground, he has to do jujitsu now, which is that's a that's a double a double strike on him. So. Of course, he, you know, he takes a couple more shots and then Nate choked him out pretty pretty quick.

• 1:31:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he brought in that jujitsu skill and and. One thing that Diaz is pointing out the whole week when they were getting interviewed and everything, he says that. You know, I have better training partners than you. Look who I'm rolling with and look who he is rolling with. He's rolling with his brother Nick. He's rolling with Jake Shields, who's a beast on the ground. I mean, he's rolling with all those little badass wrestlers too. He's got.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  And Krong.

• 1:31:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's got Krong up there. I mean, these guys are getting after it. You know what I mean?

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Jocko Willink?

  And so, uh.

• 1:31:37Jocko Willink?

  Who's, I mean, I don't know. I mean, he trained with Gunner. What's McGregor trained with Gunner?

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's good too.

• 1:31:42Jocko Willink?

  Gunner's good and everything, but yes, but the thing is about the jujitsu and about the training.

• 1:31:50Jocko Willink?

  The guys that you're training with all the time, that's the guy that you train with every day. That's what makes you good. Not the guy that comes out for a two week camp or a four week camp or a six week camp. That does not make you good at jujitsu. Might sharpen up one or two things, but it's not the life.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:07Jocko Willink?

  It's not the deep, daily grind with the, with the masters. You know, that's what's make you really good.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:16Jocko Willink?

  So I think that, like I said, I mean, it's, it's definitely showed that jujitsu definitely works. Uh, and, and it also shows you how hard it is to get good at. How much harder it is to get good at, at striking. I mean, Misha, no, she was not dominating, but she was surviving.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:39Jocko Willink?

  On the stand-up. You know what I mean? And this is a world-class striker. I mean, she's, she's definitely a better striker. Then Misha Tate is a grappler. I mean, Misha Tate doesn't have any tremendous accolades as a grappler. She's a high-level MMA grappler, but she's not a world champion grappler.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:57Jocko Willink?

  And yet, you know, she was able to hang because striking is a, for the most part, from a thought perspective, is a linear thought pattern of throwing strikes at another human. Grappling is way infinitely more complex. Infinitely. It's infinitely more complex.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Jocko Willink?

  And so you have to learn it earlier and if you want to

• 1:33:26Jocko Willink?

  ma- make something of it. I mean, cause striking, striking has an element of luck to it. Yeah, I don't care what you say. Striking has, I mean, when, uh, when two MMA fighters go in the cage, there's not a guy that says, hey, I, I can definitely knock this guy out. There is absolute luck. There's, you know, knockouts are seldom even in boxing.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Jocko Willink?

  Where the whole object is to punch the other guy in the head and knock him out.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Jocko Willink?

  Whereas a rear naked choke is a rear naked choke.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:33:52Jocko Willink?

  It, like you, you know, it's a rear naked choke. It is a very, very. Assured weapon to be utilizing in those situations.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember one time I was talking to Henner, Henner Gracie. He just made a real small, short comparison to, I think it was boxing. He said, the average person can walk into a boxing gym and, and rock someone. And knock him out, he used the word, he and rock someone if he just swings for the fences, right? And, and that is possible, but jujitsu, when you can't really do that, you can't really, a new guy come in as a white belt and just go real hard.

• 1:34:30Jocko Willink?

  And just like somehow catch someone.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in this one of these submission holds. So, yeah, and, and once you learn that, you, and the other guy doesn't know it, and he hasn't learned it, or hasn't learned it even close to, to how much you've learned it. It's that, it's that easy, really. It's the, and really the, the best way to say it is you have that much control over the fight.

• 1:34:51Jocko Willink?

  You do. Now, the, the thing is, I don't want to make like all of a sudden,

• 1:34:57Jocko Willink?

  jujitsu by itself is the all powerful thing because you can't discount the, the dozens and dozens and dozens of jujitsu people that have been beaten in MMA. They've been beaten down, they've been knocked out, they've been had their shots stuffed. So,

• 1:35:15Jocko Willink?

  there, there's no doubt about that, but

• 1:35:20Jocko Willink?

  it, it's, it is definitely the skill that you have to have in this day and age for mixed martial arts, for sure. I mean, without it, you know, you get beat and without it, what you have is UFC one and UFC two. And jujitsu just beats the other martial arts, whether it's wrestling, whether it's boxing, it doesn't matter. You know, but you do have to train everything. I mean, and jujitsu takes the longest to learn, there's the most to learn, so you should start with it, but you gotta know how to box, you gotta know how to wrestle, you gotta know Muay Thai.

• 1:35:57Jocko Willink?

  And that's the way it is.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and when you have that much of a discrepancy between like a certain element of of people's game like and and I think jujitsu tends to be the more prevalent. Because a lot of times people people be like, oh, well, certain guys like, let's say, like a Chuck Liddell or Clay Guida. They're like, hey, these aren't what actually we'll just say Chuck Liddell. Um, he's not necessarily a jujitsu black belt and he was champion or whatever, but the thing is he he had wrestling background, so he had grappling, but he knew about jujitsu.

• 1:36:26Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Thoroughly, he knew about like where the arm bar comes from, where the chokes come from, how to defend the choke, you know, all these things. So knowing jujitsu saying like you need to know jujitsu isn't doesn't necessarily mean you gotta be a black belt in jujitsu or you have to have the slickest, sharpest submissions necessarily. You just have to know jujitsu. And if you don't know it or know very little, you I'd say the chances of you getting exposed exposed is really high.

• 1:36:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Jocko Willink?

  I agree with you.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  And I think these just so happened last night um that that that those fights exemplified that.

• 1:37:03Jocko Willink?

  I agree with you. Gotta gotta know the jujitsu.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  As I was listening to your recent podcast, I thought that of a few topics you could discuss that would be good and helpful for your young guys who want to join the military and go special ops. I know that BUDs and other training are just baseline entry level schools. But in my experience, those stories are what get guys excited and fired up.

• 1:37:32Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, guy wants to hear about BUD stories and

• 1:37:38Jocko Willink?

  what it's like going through those stories through through those those types of training because it gets people excited and fired up. Well.

• 1:37:48Jocko Willink?

  There's, there's actually kind of a reason why I don't sit around and talk about BUDs, which is Basic SEAL, Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training. There's a reason I don't sit around and talk about it a bunch. Um, one of those reasons is because BUDs is not the SEAL Teams at all. And it doesn't mean anything. And I try and say that as often as I can because I don't want people to get the impression that

• 1:38:17Jocko Willink?

  that the SEAL Teams is the little initial training that is barely even a fraction of your career in the SEAL Teams. And it has nothing to do with what you actually do when you get in the SEAL Teams. I also don't want, and this isn't intentional, this is more of a response to the question, but I don't tell stories to get guys fired up to join the military about BUDs because that isn't what the SEAL Teams is. That's not what an SF ODA team is. That's not what Ranger Battalion is. Ranger Battalion and SF is not the selection course to, that you go through to get into them. That's not what the job is. And you shouldn't be joining

• 1:39:02Jocko Willink?

  the military and shouldn't be trying to get into special operations because you want to do that training. You should do the training because you want to do the job.

• 1:39:14Jocko Willink?

  You want to do the actual job of being in special operations and being in special forces and being in the Rangers and being in Marsoc and being in the SEAL Teams. You should want to do that job.

• 1:39:29Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to do that job,

• 1:39:34Jocko Willink?

  what it really boils down to isn't running or rucking or pull-ups or swimming or any of that crap. It boils down to whether you have the two wills that I talk about that war is determined by.

• 1:39:49Jocko Willink?

  And that is

• 1:39:52Jocko Willink?

  the will to kill because that is the entire premise of your job. If you're in the military at all. You may be somehow

• 1:40:05Jocko Willink?

  supporting that. If you're in the military, but the ultimate goal of the military is to kill the bad guys. And if you're going to be in special operations, you're going to be on the tip of the spear of that. So you absolutely have to make sure that you have the will to kill.

• 1:40:28Jocko Willink?

  And you also, obviously, if you're going to join special operations or you want to be in the SEAL teams. You have to have the will to die. Not that you want to die, not that you want to be a martyr, not that you're freaking suicidal or anything like that, but you absolutely have to make sure that you have the willingness

• 1:40:57Jocko Willink?

  to die. And I would say put your life on the line, but no, I'm going beyond that. I'm talking about the willingness to die.

• 1:41:07Jocko Willink?

  Because if you join special operations or you join the SEAL teams. Or you join any of the combat arms in the Army or in the Marine Corps.

• 1:41:20Jocko Willink?

  You will be asked to put your life on the line.

• 1:41:26Jocko Willink?

  And you've got to be ready to do that.

• 1:41:32Jocko Willink?

  You've got to have that will. You've got to be ready to make that commitment.

• 1:41:42Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, the training, if you, i- i- if you have that will to kill and you have that will to die.

• 1:41:51Jocko Willink?

  The training? Run, swim, do pushups, do pullups, dips, sprints, do rope climbs, do flutter kicks. All that stuff?

• 1:42:03Jocko Willink?

  Is the easy part.

• 1:42:08Jocko Willink?

  And so if you're sitting there and you see SEAL training on TV and you think, oh, that'd be cool.

• 1:42:16Jocko Willink?

  Don't think about that as what being a SEAL is because it is not. That is just the selection. It's just the weeding out of the week.

• 1:42:31Jocko Willink?

  If you want to be a SEAL, it means you want to be a commando. It means you want to go into harm's way. It means you want to meet the enemy on the field of battle.

• 1:42:44Jocko Willink?

  That's what being a SEAL is.

• 1:42:52Jocko Willink?

  And that's why I really don't. Sit around and tell Bud stories.

• 1:43:03Jocko Willink?

  I don't think I have too much more to say about that one. I'm sure at some point I'll get, I mean, there's funny things that happen in Bud's, I mean, of course, but there's just. Compared to like what happens in a SEAL platoon, they're just no big deal.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting how you put it. Don't focus, don't do it because you want to go through that training.

• 1:43:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  Do it because you want to do the job.

• 1:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's a big, that's a big mistake. Maybe I can help some people out that are out there right now thinking, oh, I'd really like to go through that training.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:33Jocko Willink?

  No. Don't do it to go through the training. Go it, do it because you want to do that job.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  Is it true they they they take a pin and they stick it in your skin and clip it or pin it on your skin? Is it true they do that?

• 1:43:49Jocko Willink?

  Well, when you get your trident.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:51Jocko Willink?

  The the it has like three little prongs that go out the back of it to stick it onto your uniform.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:58Jocko Willink?

  And when you get your trident, yeah, they put it like into your skin. Yeah.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Like you're standing there with no shirt and they're like, oh.

• 1:44:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and then they and then they like punch it in and then you know, everybody when I went when I got my trident, the whole team lined up. And everyone punch you right in the chest until you're just bleeding everywhere and a big bruise on your chest.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Interesting. Next question. Do you have experience with people telling you that you're too intense?

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Or that you need to work on not being so upfront and straightforward? Sometimes it's called working on your how. I think it would be great to hear how you could apply this using extreme ownership. In the business world, there is a big push on diversity, which is wonderful. But often it comes with also diversifying away from intensity and male aggression, quote unquote. I'd love your thoughts.

• 1:44:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, this is. It's it's kind of interesting to get this question. It's kind of strange to get this question because all the time when I talk about leadership.

• 1:45:08Jocko Willink?

  I talk about.

• 1:45:10Jocko Willink?

  How often do you hear me say, take the indirect approach to something?

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:45:14Jocko Willink?

  I I always talk about the indirect approach. Because the direct approach is is not jujitsu. The direct approach is beating your head and punching someone in the face.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:45:26Jocko Willink?

  So I'm always talking about using the indirect approach. So by its very nature, indirect is not straightforward.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:37Jocko Willink?

  It's not intense. So, no, I don't have people telling me I'm too intense or I'm too straightforward. Why don't I have them telling me that? Because I'm not.

• 1:45:50Jocko Willink?

  I'm not, and I'm not saying that I'm not intense, I'm not saying that I'm not straightforward, but I'm very, very careful not to go too far with either. This is, this is like a fighter that's swinging too hard, or being too predictable, or just will stand and trade and take damage.

• 1:46:09Jocko Willink?

  And do damage. That's the direct approach. The direct approach is I punch you in the face and you punch me in the face and we play a war of attrition. I don't want to enter into a war of attrition.

• 1:46:24Jocko Willink?

  I do not want to enter into a war of attrition. I want to use maneuver warfare. I want to move. I want to slip unseen into the weak areas and set my bombs and have them go off.

• 1:46:41Jocko Willink?

  So I just got this, asked this the other night by a relatively new client of mine, you know, are you gonna get in their faces and, and get in the faces of the leadership and tell them straight up that they need to get their act together? And you could see that this person was very excited by that idea. And it was one of the senior leaders and I, you know, that was that, you had this idea that I was gonna come in and just get in their faces and tell them how screwed up they were. And I said, no, I, I likely will not do that.

• 1:47:14Jocko Willink?

  And then I said to him, I said, look, what if I told you that you were all screwed up and you're a failure at your job and you do, you're a weak leader?

• 1:47:22Jocko Willink?

  Would, would you then be, feel like you really wanted to listen to me? Would you, would you be open to my suggestions at that point? Do you think I'd be an efficient coach? Do you think I would even appear as an intelligent human being?

• 1:47:39Jocko Willink?

  If the best I could do to coach you was to tell you that you sucked as a leader and you were a failure at your job and you're screwing everything up?

• 1:47:49Jocko Willink?

  And obviously the answers were no, no, no, of course not. I would be a horrible coach. I would be a horrible leader myself if that's what I resorted to.

• 1:48:02Jocko Willink?

  And most importantly, if I want you to change, and the way I'm trying to get you to train is by, change is by being abusive? And begging you to send up your defenses and not listen to me? What the hell good am I doing? Why would I do anything that's going to inhibit? My goal, which my goal is to get you to change, get you to be a better leader?

• 1:48:34Jocko Willink?

  So if I slap you in the face?

• 1:48:38Jocko Willink?

  With aggression or with straightforwardness that makes you defensive? How does that help me?

• 1:48:48Jocko Willink?

  The answer is it doesn't. Now, again, that doesn't mean that I'm never straightforward and that I'm never aggressive, but I calculate those moments.

• 1:48:59Jocko Willink?

  I calculate those moments. There's a reason

• 1:49:05Jocko Willink?

  why we sugarcoat medicine for little children. Right? There is. Why is it? So they take it. It's so they take it into their system.

• 1:49:18Jocko Willink?

  And it's the same thing with adults. And people say, "Don't sugarcoat it. Don't, you know, just tell me how it is." They don't mean it.

• 1:49:28Jocko Willink?

  They want it sugarcoated.

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  Because they want to accept it into their body.

• 1:49:37Jocko Willink?

  It's just like jujitsu. You need to use jujitsu. You need to set things up. You need to manipulate. To get people to do what you want them to do, especially if it has to do with them changing themselves.

• 1:49:53Jocko Willink?

  One of the worst ways to get someone to change is by telling them exactly how you want them to change.

• 1:50:00Jocko Willink?

  I mean, of course, there's a situation where you have this beautiful relationship and you've built it with someone and you have this intimate trust with another human being. I don't think I have that with anybody.

• 1:50:13Jocko Willink?

  But there have been situations in my life where I've had, oh, just complete utter trust with, you know, maybe there's three or four people that I have that with in my whole life, that I can just say, "Listen, man, here's the deal. Don't get defensive. Here's what's going on. Here's what you need to adjust." Very few people do you have that relationship in life. So you gotta use that nuance and that maneuver warfare. And it's the same thing with aggression. It's the same thing that this, we just read in this article. Don't yell at the Cheshan people. You're not going to be able to get what you want from them.

• 1:50:53Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, it doesn't just apply to those people. It applies to all people. You gotta bring people in and you gotta manipulate them. And I know that, again, that has negative connotations, but it's what you're doing. You're trying to get someone to think a different way. That's manipulation. You can call it influence. You can call it whatever you want, but that's what you're trying to do. And the most difficult way to manipulate someone is to slap them in the face with aggression. So there's a little dichotomy here, of course, because, you know, I always say the default mode has to be aggressive. But I don't mean necessarily overtly aggressive.

• 1:51:33Jocko Willink?

  It means that you're aggressively forcing things to go in your direction through every means necessary, through overt and covert and clandestine. And honestly, the preferred method of all is covert. The preferred method for me to get Echo to do something different is for Echo to never even think I had an opinion on it. Is for me just to sneak in there, behind enemy lines, plant the seeds, and let them grow and let Echo come to the conclusion that you're going to change the way you're doing something. You're going to think differently about something.

• 1:52:16Jocko Willink?

  That's leadership. That's real leadership. So that's what you gotta work on. If somebody is telling you you're too intense and you're too aggressive, guess what? You are.

• 1:52:41Jocko Willink?

  You're giving away your greatest weapon.

• 1:52:48Jocko Willink?

  You're advertising your attack. Surprise is one of the most key components in a battle. And when you tell people aggressively and overtly what you're doing, you're giving up that element. Don't do it. I'm asking you not to be a manipulative person behind the scenes

• 1:53:21Jocko Willink?

  with weird plans.

• 1:53:27Jocko Willink?

  But that is what I'm asking you to do. That is what I'm asking you to do because that is how you get things done. That is how you get into people's minds. That is how you lead.

• 1:53:43Jocko Willink?

  Not by yelling, not by being overly aggressive, not by being so intense that people don't want to listen to you. Because intensity is a form of emotion, right? And the minute you come across as an emotional intense maniac, people are questioning already your validity. This guy's too intense. Don't be that guy.

• 1:54:09Jocko Willink?

  Manipulate, influence, be clandestine and covert. And that is how you win.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  The reason that I was kind of laughing when I was reading this question is that it kind of makes sense from someone kind of from the outside. And the only, and the main times when me personally where I would view you as being intense or aggressive or, or is like when you're just talking about something. Now you, you're never doing it towards anybody, you know, like you'll never lose. I've never, then I've known you since.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Oh six, I think.

• 1:54:54Jocko Willink?

  Something like that.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, and I've never seen you lose your temper, get mad. I mean, kind of one time. It's funny, I was talking to Leif about it. We'd never really seen you get mad, but maybe one or two times. You have this aggressive and intense persona for sure. And when you talk about things for sure, but yeah, when you're dealing with people, it's it's real, like, basically the way you'd wanna be engaged.

• 1:55:23Jocko Willink?

  With another human.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:26Jocko Willink?

  Who wants to have somebody get aggressive with them? It's never, it never, the only time it works is like if you're handling a prisoner. Like literally, if I'm handling a prisoner, I'll be aggressive with them.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Jocko Willink?

  If I'm trying to get command of a, of a, of a chaotic situation and there's a, there's another aggressor in the situation, I might have to be more aggressive than that person. But any normal situation dealing with human beings, aggression isn't a attribute. It's a negative because all it does is make people defensive. Now, listen, it, it doesn't mean that you're sitting back and you're shirking and, and shriveling up. No, but it, it means that you're finding the balance with another person.

• 1:56:21Jocko Willink?

  And you're, you're working with them and conversing with them to bring them along into your way of thinking.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Jocko Willink?

  That's what it is. And, and, you know, when somebody asks me a question like this,

• 1:56:39Jocko Willink?

  it, it, it really signifies to me.

• 1:56:43Jocko Willink?

  That. It makes me nervous because I think to myself. I say this all the time. I mean, I say, use the indirect approach. Don't, you know, get people's defenses up. I say this all the time. And yet someone can still come back and say. You know. People are telling me I'm being too aggressive. Like they're not even taking ownership of the fact that they're being too aggressive, right? It's like the other people are weak.

• 1:57:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:08Jocko Willink?

  And therefore, since they're weak, they think I'm too aggressive. I can't believe how pathetic they are.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Jocko Willink?

  That's the reality. That's what's going through someone like this mind like. Sometimes it's called working on your how. You know, he's kind of saying, oh, they're they've got a euphemism for it and and. In the business world, there's a big push on diversity, but it comes with diversifying away from intensity and male aggression. I mean, you can guarantee what. What this this guy thought I was gonna say, like, no, you gotta just stay the path. You gotta if people can't take it, you gotta crush them. No, no, actually, that's a complete wrong answer.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49Jocko Willink?

  If people can't take it, it's because you are being too aggressive.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, the way you're giving it is wrong.

• 1:57:55Jocko Willink?

  The way you're giving it is wrong.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:57Jocko Willink?

  So that aggression needs to be. Channeled in such a way that it's being utilized to further the goal. To further the goal. And you know who you get aggressive with? Yourself.

• 1:58:13Jocko Willink?

  You get aggressive with yourself. That's who I get aggressive with. You know who I'm straightforward with? I'm straightforward with myself. That's who I'm straightforward with. I'm the one guy that I'm allowed to get aggressive with, to be straightforward with, to put things in. To not sugarcoat anything. I'm allowed to do that with me.

• 1:58:37Jocko Willink?

  But I'm not allowed to do it with another human because it's not an effective way of leadership. It just is not.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny, it's funny, it's funny how like, that's absolutely true and with you what I said is absolutely true. I don't think

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  I've ever seen you get mad at someone else, but at the same, at the same time, and I think a lot of people who may not know you good, but, but have, have experienced being around you, they all feel, I would say that they all feel the same way. And that is that, yeah, fucking Jocko's cool or whatever, but if he were to like lose his temper on me, he'd, I'd probably die.

• 1:59:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, good, good.

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  And they're right. Like, I'm glad I'm not losing my temper on people, right? That wouldn't be good at all. That'd be bad. I have, you know, that would not be good for people.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I don't think so either.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  That's that dichotomy though, right?

• 1:59:42Jocko Willink?

  That is that dichotomy.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  The sense of safety, yet the sense of impending doom is there at the same time.

• 1:59:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and, and, and I think it, I think it does genuinely surprise people.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:59Jocko Willink?

  Because I look like a serial killer, I'm a big guy, whatever, and they expect that

• 2:00:08Jocko Willink?

  that I'm gonna be aggressive in implementing this and you know, you gotta get your shit together, right? But it's just not, it's just ineffective way of leadership. If that was, if that was leadership, leadership would be easy, it would be easy, right? I'm just gonna yell at everyone, they're gonna do what I say.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25Jocko Willink?

  I'm just gonna yell at everyone and then they'll do what I say. That just does not work.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy though, because just the way you talk, a lot of the times, not all the time, but just the way, maybe it's like just how you sound, I don't know, your voice, I don't know. It's probably everything really, is you do sound intense, even though you're not being intense, you know, you just kinda seem that way. For all these reasons, of course.

• 2:00:45Jocko Willink?

  Well, it's like you said earlier, when I'm talking about something that I care about, yes, I am definitely going to be intense about it. Especially when it's something that is impactful to me and, and something that means something to me. And to me, leadership does mean a lot to me.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:01Jocko Willink?

  And, and trying to help people.

• 2:01:05Jocko Willink?

  Lead is an important thing to me. I enjoy it and I like to see people succeed. So therefore, when I talk about it, sometimes I get a little bit fired up and I get intense with what I'm saying.

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  That isn't scary. That just kind of, it's like indirectly scary. So it's not, I mean scary. Okay. I'll just, I'll use the word scary. It's indirectly scary where when you do it's like, oh, I'm not scared of what you're doing, but you kind of can imagine. You're like, oh, what if, you know, you're kind of like, you're like this raging hurricane that when it comes by, it turns into like a warm, gentle breeze. You know what I mean? That you're kind of like.

• 2:01:43Jocko Willink?

  And maybe that's a, that's probably part of the advantage.

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:47Jocko Willink?

  Part of the advantage is people, you know, I, I said this, I think it was Tim Ferriss. I said this too, you know, people are surprised when I can sit there and have a conversation with them. And I'm not aggressive with them and my mind is open to what they're saying.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:05Jocko Willink?

  That's part of the game.

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:11Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  Next question.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Okay, Jocko, your reaction to Marsoc, right?

• 2:02:21Jocko Willink?

  Marsoc.

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  Call it Marsoc, M A R S O C forming.

• 2:02:26Jocko Willink?

  Marine Corps Special Operations Command.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's a new, a new thing. Um, so, and this is the question that he's asking. So Marines think they're SEALs now? Or yeah, we should be, or we should have been Marines all along?

• 2:02:46Jocko Willink?

  So this is a question about, like I said, the Marine Corps Special Operations Command. It was formed in, I don't know, 2005, 2006, maybe.

• 2:02:58Jocko Willink?

  Um, and, and if you don't know, the army has its own special operations group. The Navy has its own special operations group, the Air Force has its own special operations group, and the Marine Corps did not.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  What, what is force recon? Have you ever heard of?

• 2:03:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, force recon was a part of the Marine Corps, but it wasn't broken off. And, and it didn't get the extra money and the extra funding and it didn't fall into the chain of command of special operations.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 2:03:29Jocko Willink?

  And so when they made Marsoc, it did. So now they took a bunch of the force recon guys and put them into a group and have their own funding and everything else. So the bottom line is on this

• 2:03:43Jocko Willink?

  is that the Marine Corps is awesome and I love the Marine Corps and I think that this was long overdue. I think that the Marine Corps as a whole

• 2:03:56Jocko Willink?

  is likely, it's likely the most capable fighting unit the world has ever known, to be honest with you. I mean, maybe the, in addition, the airborne divisions from the army are also just highly capable. But the Marine Corps with its air, ground, sea, it's got command and control, it's got integrated intelligence, it's got everything and it can use it all together. And so that makes it just an extremely

• 2:04:30Jocko Willink?

  effective and efficient fighting force. And they are highly disciplined, they are highly motivated, there's an incredible esprit de corps. So for me, this was long overdue. And I think that I actually did a turnover with the, with the initial kind of Marsoc group in 2004 in Baghdad. And I had worked with the Marine Corps on, I had more worked with force recon on multiple deployments when I was a younger SEAL. And they took a bunch of those guys, a bunch of just legendary force recon guys and put them into this first Marsoc company. And they were awesome. Awesome warriors, awesome guys.

• 2:05:17Jocko Willink?

  And I think they actually have one thing that that's a huge benefit to them is in the Marine Corps. You're in the Marine Corps, so every Marine Corps, every Marine is a rifleman. They have the opportunity to work with big conventional infantry companies and platoons. And battalions, so so their guys will be very experienced. And I think that they are going to be, I mean, I think that the Marine Corps Special Operations Command is going to be an extremely capable force. In the future. And I am. Glad. To say the least. That they will be defending. Our country. And freedom.

• 2:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Around the world for many, many years to come.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that kind of goes along with what how you were saying, or a lot of these points that these books make about how the discipline and the training are so paramount. You know, and success, now you have yet another division that's going to get some solid training, you know?

• 2:06:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. There's no doubt the Marine Corps will put these guys through outstanding training.

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  Next question. Do you consider shooting a martial art? And how has your firearms training? Been like or unlike martial arts training?

• 2:06:40Jocko Willink?

  Well. Shooting is absolutely. A martial art. I mean. Maybe not the way people picture martial arts nowadays, because when you picture martial art, people picture, you know. A guy with a gi on doing karate. That's that's right. That's the generic picture. To me, that's not that's not martial arts, actually. To me martial arts is. The art of war, the art of the individual warrior. Skills that it takes. And firearms are absolutely a martial art because it's something that you train. It's something that you get good at. It's something that you need to maintain your skill at. And. It is absolutely a martial art and to me.

• 2:07:30Jocko Willink?

  It's another piece of the puzzle. It's another thing that you should, you need to know how to do. And just like tactics that go along with shooting are an important part of being a warrior. You need to know how to shoot and the training is very similar in my mind to martial arts training. In that it takes, you know, repetition. You have to know what the basics are and you have to repeat those basics and then you get more advanced. And it's, it's about movement and getting efficient with your movement. And then you want to train it very similar to the way that you train.

• 2:08:15Jocko Willink?

  Mixed martial arts or martial arts in general and that is, you know, you're going to have different threat levels and how you're going to deal with them and you want to deal with your weak. Side, you know, you, can you shoot with your offhand? In various environments, in the low light, in the dark, in the rain, in the. You want to mix it up. So you're used to all of it. You want to be used to people at close range. You want to be used to people at further range. And then once you get all those mechanical skills down. Then you want to train your mind around this thing. You want to train your mind around this skill. So that your mind knows how to utilize this skill.

• 2:08:56Jocko Willink?

  When things are unexpected and when there's chaos and when there's mayhem going on. And that's, that's one of the things that I really like about simunition training or paintball training or laser tag training is it allows you. It allows you to have somebody else shoot back at you.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:09:17Jocko Willink?

  Which is just like, you know, just like rolling in jujitsu or sparring Muay Thai or sparring MMA. Is you have to react to the person. It's no longer just a kata.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:28Jocko Willink?

  It's no longer just shooting paper targets that don't shoot back and don't move.

• 2:09:32Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:09:34Jocko Willink?

  So you, so I love to take it, once you've got the skills down and then you learn, you've got the fundamentals down, then you take the advanced fundamentals, and then you begin to train to simulate combat. And this is, I'll tell you, I had these, um, I got these laser tag guns.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:09:57Jocko Willink?

  For my son. And I just got two of them at first, but that escalated very quickly. Because they were awesome. They're these little Nerf laser tag guns. And you could shoot each other at, I don't know, maybe a hundred meters, which is a pretty good shot. It was like a pistol. And so when I got these, and as soon as I got two of them and I realized how good they were, I bought two more so I could go against my son and his friends and they could go against each other. And I taught my son like all the basic military maneuvers that he would need to know. And this is when he was maybe eight years old. And he, we would play this game all the time, you know?

• 2:10:39Jocko Willink?

  And so I taught him how to cover and move. I taught him how to get elevated positions. I taught him how to do individual movement techniques where you don't show your face at the same spot like twice in a row. Every time you get up, you move a little bit.

• 2:10:54Jocko Willink?

  And he, he realized that that's how you win in these little games. And they're real. Those are the real tactics.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:00Jocko Willink?

  And so I had, uh, speaking, speaking of, speaking of the Marine Corps, I had a friend that, uh, was, was, came over to the house one time. And he was, you know, of a Marine and we got in the conversation and all of a sudden, you know, my son comes out with the laser tag guns and my son's like, oh, you know, do you want to go? And the guy's like, you know, yeah, of course. Let's do it. So my son looks at him and says indoor or outdoor? And all of a sudden you could see there was something going on and the guy goes outdoor, outdoor. So my son, you you press the button on the thing and it counts down for 10 seconds and then it's on.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Wait, so you go find cover or something like that?

• 2:11:48Jocko Willink?

  So so 10 seconds, my son hits the thing, my son takes off out the door. So I'm watching the guy and I go, this guy's doomed. Because you know, you you're going against a trained.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  Trained killer.

• 2:12:01Jocko Willink?

  So the guy comes out and and it's dark, right? But the guy comes out of the door and I'm watching him, he's kind of crouched a little bit and all of a sudden his gun. Cause it all is in this one system, it's all takes place inside the gun. You don't wear a helmet, you don't wear anything, you actually are shooting the other person's gun. And when it shot, when you when it gets shot, it goes

• 2:12:21Jocko Willink?

  and shakes and the red light flashes. So he walks out and sure enough, my son had run around the block, gotten in an elevated position. And as soon as he came walking out, my son started drilling him and the guy's like, he freezes. It's interesting, like he freezes, he doesn't even think to myself, oh, I'll take cover. No, he just froze and got drilled. And then as soon as it's he's standing there, he's kind of looking around, looking around, looking around. Finally, he sees my son, he starts to point the weapon up towards my son, my son just disappears.

• 2:12:52Jocko Willink?

  And then the guys, the guy starts kind of walking over in that direction. And then 15 seconds later, my son pops up on his flank and drills him again from behind another fence and a hole in the wall. Anyways, he ends up killing him. And then the guy's okay, let's go again and and my son beat him like three times in a row. And it's because he had the basic, the basic skills, basic infantryman skills is what it was. You know, he would shoot and then move and that's what it boils down to. So that kind of thing is is very important in as far as being a martial art. And you should train, you know, that's another thing, you know, I said this to Sam Harris when I was on his podcast.

• 2:13:36Jocko Willink?

  You know, yeah, maybe there's a no chance because you live in a, in the bubble and you live in a great neighborhood and you're well protected, you have alarm system in your house and all that, and maybe you're never gonna have a problem. And that's great. I mean, there's always a chance. I would never believe that you're never gonna have a problem, but there's always a chance that somebody's gonna confront you that's evil's gonna enter your world. And you wanna be ready for that.

• 2:14:02Jocko Willink?

  Now, if that makes me sound paranoid, okay, let's just say you're not paranoid.

• 2:14:08Jocko Willink?

  And you don't think it's ever gonna happen.

• 2:14:11Jocko Willink?

  But it is still highly valuable to train in these situations because they make you a better person. They make you sharper, they make you smarter, they make you more prepared if something does happen. It's just good to know this stuff and it makes you a better person, more reliable. It's a real skill set. You know, I always was kinda bummed out about basketball or football or baseball because those are the, there, there are life skills involved in them. I don't wanna say that, but the skill itself

• 2:14:44Jocko Willink?

  of throwing a baseball, of shooting a basketball, of throwing a football is not as valuable as a skill as number one, a martial artist, you know, Muay Thai, boxing, wrestling, jiu jitsu. Because those are real applic- applicable to life, hundred percent.

• 2:15:06Jocko Willink?

  And it's the same thing with shooting a gun. I mean, that is a real applicable skill that you may need at some point in your life and you should have it.

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  What supplements do you and Echo take?

• 2:15:21Speaker 01

  What supplements do you take?

• 2:15:22Jocko Willink?

  Well, my number one supplement is steak.

• 2:15:28Jocko Willink?

  Steak, yes. Beautiful steak. That's the number one. Um, well, there, there are a couple of things that I take. Number one, I take krill oil. I've taken it every day for probably

• 2:15:45Jocko Willink?

  Ten years, maybe a little bit longer.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:48Jocko Willink?

  And I take glucosamine. And I've taken that every day for ten plus years. I got, I had, when my shoulder was bothering me. Many years ago, and someone said, hey, take krill oil, take glucosamine.

• 2:16:06Jocko Willink?

  And I said, actually, no, what it wasn't krill oil, it was fish oil at the time.

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:10Jocko Willink?

  But at the same time, I just started taking both. And within a short period of time, my shoulder got better. And it had been a nagging nine month injury. So I don't know which one of those two did it, but I'm never gonna find out, because I'm always gonna take them both.

• 2:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:25Jocko Willink?

  Um. I. You know, I eat a lot of coconut oil. Whenever I get the chance, I like dipping things in coconut oil. Coconut oil is a. If you get a taste for it, it's a really. Nice tasting thing.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so that's, that's the supplements that I take. Uh. People ask me, you know, oh, what do you do, you know, because I'm forty four years old, old man, right? But I don't feel forty four.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:54Jocko Willink?

  I feel twenty four.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  You don't feel forty four.

• 2:16:56Jocko Willink?

  I feel, I feel twenty four. And actually. The thing that originally turned me on to fish oil was there was a guy that was a badass guy. And he was fifty four. But he was a competitive, uh, power lifter when he was younger, and he was in really good shape. And this is probably when I was, well, what was I at that, that's fifteen years ago or something like that. I was like thirty years old. And this guy looked young and healthy. And I said, you know, hey, wh- wh-. What do you do? Like, what's your main thing to keep you so young and healthy? And he said. I take fish oil every day. I said, okay, cool. And I just like, let's try that. Yeah, I will get on board that train.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:41Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, too bad I asked you for some today and.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  No, no krill oil.

• 2:17:47Jocko Willink?

  We'll get you some krill.

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Right on, thank you.

• 2:17:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  Nonetheless.

• 2:17:50Jocko Willink?

  People probably want to know what supplements you take.

• 2:17:53Speaker 01

  People mainly would ask me that in college. When everyone wants to, hey, what's up with me? Because they think for some reason that supplements give you big muscles or something.

• 2:18:01Jocko Willink?

  They don't, they don't think about that whole working out.

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole working out thing. I mean, yeah, that was secondary. Um.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  But yeah, and then in jujitsu, they they care less about muscles. So they'll be like, you know, it's actually you get kind of teased sometimes in jujitsu if you have big muscles. It's weird.

• 2:18:19Jocko Willink?

  You don't get teased, but you lose credit for your skills based on your size.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that that too, but you kind of do get teased.

• 2:18:26Jocko Willink?

  Every person I ever roll with, you know, you get done rolling, they're like, man, you're strong.

• 2:18:34Jocko Willink?

  I'm always like, you're damn right.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:36Jocko Willink?

  And you're weak.

• 2:18:37Speaker 01

  I've been training for twenty years too, by the way.

• 2:18:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that has nothing to do with this.

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I take, uh, the only supplement I take, I do take a pre-workout, which is, I mean, I'm gonna be honest, I don't know if I should take a pre-workout. Pre-workout is just, you know what that is, right? You just like a little powder. It's like, it's a stimulant.

• 2:18:57Jocko Willink?

  It's caffeine, right, basically.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  There's caffeine in it typically and, um, N O two nitric, nitric oxide. It basically makes your, it vasodilates you. So your vessels get dilated. So you get more of a pump. It gives you energy. It's just like, it's basically stimulating energy. Um, so you know, if you're not in the mood for working out, but, but yeah, so yeah, that's it. That's pretty much it. It's funny because a lot of people, they think that if you take protein powder, it'll make your muscles big, like it'll help you get big muscles. Um, but no, like if you take your favorite supplement, which is steak, just eat normal, you know, and if you're working out, you're gonna eat a little bit more.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  That's how you get big muscles. Work out good and have the correct workout for muscles, which is a different kind of workout than if you want to, you know, get conditioning or something like that. And then eat enough. That's that's what you gotta do and eat right after your workout. I know you you gotta do that too, I think.

• 2:19:52Jocko Willink?

  No, actually, I think I don't.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:19:57Jocko Willink?

  And somebody, actually, somebody put on Twitter that that I was right. There's like something about testosterone release or H G H or there's some kind of s- something happening in your system. We'll research that one and get back to you.

• 2:20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:11Jocko Willink?

  I don't want to have an uneducated argument right now at all.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  So Joe Rogan and them call it bro-science.

• 2:20:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly. I don't want to get going down the bro-science road right now. That would be wrong.

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  Last question. Jocko, I would enjoy hearing your thoughts on leading others to a strong finish in both a deployment and in the civilian life.

• 2:20:38Jocko Willink?

  This is, this is something that I saw

• 2:20:42Jocko Willink?

  in combat, even on my first deployment to Iraq. And it's something that I tried to train out of people. And that was a tendency to relax.

• 2:20:53Jocko Willink?

  Once a target was secure, or the vehicles were loaded, and we were leaving the target area, people would have a tendency to let their guard down.

• 2:21:08Jocko Willink?

  But you can't let your guard down then.

• 2:21:16Jocko Willink?

  Or ever, really. And in training, when I was running training, we always hit the platoons hard on target. But we always, we always hit them even harder after they left the target. Once they were patrolling back to base, and their mind had already gone home, and then turned off. And that's when we'd bring it to them.

• 2:21:41Jocko Willink?

  We'd hit them from multiple angles, with all kinds of mayhem.

• 2:21:49Jocko Willink?

  Because I wanted to instill into them, I wanted to instill that attitude, the muscle memory,

• 2:22:00Jocko Willink?

  to always keep going, and always stay focused.

• 2:22:07Jocko Willink?

  Because that's, that's the mentality that you have to have, is that it's never finished. It is never finished. You always have to do more. Another mission, another task, another goal.

• 2:22:27Jocko Willink?

  And have that attitude that the enemy is always watching, and waiting, and looking, looking, and studying you for that moment of weakness.

• 2:22:41Jocko Willink?

  Looking for you to exhale, put your weapon down, and close your eyes.

• 2:22:52Jocko Willink?

  And that's when they attack.

• 2:22:58Jocko Willink?

  So my rule is, don't be finished.

• 2:23:03Jocko Willink?

  Be starting, be alert, be ready, be attacking, be relentless.

• 2:23:12Jocko Willink?

  Let the enemy stop. Let the enemy rest, let the enemy finish, but you

• 2:23:21Jocko Willink?

  don't finish, don't stop, don't rest. Not until the enemy is completely destroyed.

• 2:23:34Jocko Willink?

  And even then, even then,

• 2:23:40Jocko Willink?

  when the enemy's gone,

• 2:23:44Jocko Willink?

  that's when you turn that focus inward on yourself and you take the opportunity, not to rest,

• 2:23:53Jocko Willink?

  but as always, you take that opportunity to make yourself better, faster, smarter, stronger.

• 2:24:04Jocko Willink?

  And with those goals,

• 2:24:09Jocko Willink?

  nothing

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  is ever finished.

• 2:24:18Jocko Willink?

  So, thanks to everybody

• 2:24:22Jocko Willink?

  for tuning into the podcast and listening to it.

• 2:24:27Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for subscribing and reviewing and spreading the word, telling other people about the podcast.

• 2:24:38Jocko Willink?

  Thanks to OnIt.com for the support and what do we got with Amazon.com for support?

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  Um, the, I put a little link on, again, both the websites where you can, um, like if you shop at Amazon, it's like an affiliate, it's like, just like a way to support this podcast. If you shop on Amazon, you click through there first and it kind of gives us a referral kind of fee, you know.

• 2:25:08Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so all these books that people are buying?

• 2:25:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:25:11Jocko Willink?

  From the podcast?

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:13Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 2:25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So yeah, if you click through the website, you get, you know, we'll get like a little percentage or whatever. It's like a referral thing. And your book is actually on there as well, Extreme Ownership.

• 2:25:25Jocko Willink?

  Nice, nice. I like that.

• 2:25:27Speaker 01

  But yeah, that's a, that's a good way. Good deal.

• 2:25:30Jocko Willink?

  Cool. Couple of ways to support the podcast. Appreciate all that support from everybody. There's a, I know Echo's running this thing. He's paying for server costs and all this stuff, equipment and whatnot. Me, I'm just showing up and talking. So appreciate the support. So Echo's not coming out of pocket for the gig.

• 2:25:59Jocko Willink?

  If you want to connect with us, if you want to continue these conversations, if you want to ask questions, and we got some great questions tonight for sure.

• 2:26:08Speaker 01

  Agree.

• 2:26:10Jocko Willink?

  If you want to know what we're up to, you can connect to us through the interwebs. On Twitter, I'm at Jocko Willink and of course Echo Charles is at Echo Charles.

• 2:26:27Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna start a Facebook page, I think.

• 2:26:30Jocko Willink?

  And Echo Charles is gonna start a Facebook page.

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  Jocko for Podcast Facebook Page.

• 2:26:38Jocko Willink?

  That'll be good, I think. And thanks for leaving reviews of the podcast on iTunes. That's kind of how, another way that the word gets spread. And of the book, Extreme Ownership on Amazon.com, that also helps us. And if you want to support this podcast, you can get some supplements from Jocko Fuel.com. You can get some gear and clothing from OriginUSA.com. You can get a bunch of cool t-shirts and whatnot from Jocko Store.com. And you can check out my leadership consulting company at Echelon Front.com. And everything is available at Jaco.com. And finally.

• 2:27:20Jocko Willink?

  If you really want to help me, get out there in the world, in your car, in the train, at your apartment, at your house, wherever you are, at work or at play.

• 2:27:35Jocko Willink?

  Get out there, and get after it.

• 2:27:41Jocko Willink?

  And so, until next time, this is Jocko and Echo.

• 2:27:48Jocko Willink?

  Out.