562: The Deadly Cost of Bad Leadership. Lessons From Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. With Bing West

>Join Jocko Underground Full Episodes< https://app.redcircle.com/shows/64a89f88-a245-4098-8d8d-496325ec4f74/exclusive-content Marine combat veteran, author, and former senior defense official Bing West joins Jocko to discuss the brutal realities of war, the strategic failures of military and political leadership, and the lessons America continues to overlook. Drawing on firsthand experiences from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, West reveals how flawed decisions at the highest levels can have devastating consequences on the battlefield. 00:00:00 – The Brutal Reality of Combat in Vietnam 00:04:17 – Bing West's Early Life and Marine Corps Career 00:08:42 – The Strategic Failures of the Vietnam War 00:14:49 – Winning the Trust of the Local Population 00:21:56 – The Deadly Cost of Search and Destroy 00:33:41 – The CIA, RAND Corporation, and Origins of Navy SEAL Operations 00:44:45 – Iraq, General Mattis, and the Importance of Decentralized Command 00:52:29 – Fallujah, Ramadi, and the Consequences of Emotional Decisions 01:07:00 – Political Leadership and the War in Iraq 01:25:00 – Afghanistan: Repeating the Mistakes of Vietnam 01:44:50 – The Jupiter Complex: The Danger of American Arrogance 01:57:45 – America's Military Readiness and the Future of Warfare 02:12:35 – Leadership, Accountability, and America's Future 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.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 562 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Wilk. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  When a platoon left the wire to patrol, it entered an alien world. Death lurked in the dirt, in the hooches, in the patties, in the bush. Every step was a gamble. Sometimes you couldn't avoid death. You're either unlucky or outgunned. But sometimes your own fatigue blows up in your face. After several baking hours with no contact, we were passing a hamlet when wham, two quick dull explosions followed by a cloud of black smoke. Three Marines were writhing in the dirt, clutching their legs. The corpsman rushed up to tie rubber tourniquets to staunch the squirting blood. Staff Sergeant William Cunningham grabbed a handset and called for a medevac helo. In frustration, he yelled at the wounded, "I told you to stay in the tracks. I told you, I told you."

• 0:48Jocko Willink?

  From the hamlet, rounds were snapping over our heads. We hunkered down behind a dry paddy dike as hard as concrete. Bullets were pinging off the sides of the two Amtraks. One VC light machine gun and a half dozen rifles were shooting from the hamlet and from a trench line leading to a distant knoll. The medevac helo circling above couldn't land until the platoon snuffed out the incoming fire. A squad leader, Corporal Jerry Payne, yelled, "We're going in." The trench line and the hamlet were 300 meters away, a long distance under the blazing sun. Scarcely had we started forward when Payne grabbed me, "Wait, we stay in the tracks." He waved the two Amtraks to lead the way. They chugged forward and we followed

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  them at a shambling trot toward the hamlet. Before we got there, the enemy ceased fire. The Marines split up, checking one hooch after another. "Kill them all," a husky grunt yelled. I grabbed his pack and swung him around. "Bullshit," I shouted. He collected himself and we swept through fruitlessly. The women and children had fled, while the guerrillas escaped down a trench line. Assuming the trench was booby-trapped, we didn't follow. The action had lasted less than 15 minutes. The women cowered in a group with their children. One hooch was burning and the crackling sound was the only noise we heard. Sopping with sweat, the grunts flopped down. Private First Class Billy Adams had seen one gorilla

• 2:15Jocko Willink?

  fall, but that body was dragged away. Two other bodies lay on the dusty trail, one carbine recovered. There were a few desultory defiant shots from about a half a dozen guerrillas, probably low on ammo, who had fallen back into the distant scrub growth. We slumped down, out of water and energy. Three Marines were outbound, headed for surgery to keep their legs, God willing. The women were crying, hugging their young ones. The PFC who had screamed for blood as we raced among the hooches came up to me. In the high humidity and baking sun, his cammies were drenched.

• 2:53Jocko Willink?

  "Sorry, sir, for losing it back there. No harm done," I said. "Don't repeat it." Although we didn't know each other, what counted was that we were both grunts.

• 3:06Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is an excerpt from a book called Cat 5, The 2033 War, written by Bing West. And Bing West has an incredible resume, especially from a warfighting perspective. Bing is a combat Marine veteran from the Vietnam War. He also spent time in Vietnam working for the Rand Corporation as a counterinsurgency analyst. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs for President Reagan in the 1980s. And he embedded with troops during the heaviest fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan, including time with the 38 Marines in Ramadi in 2006, while I was in Ramadi and while his son Owen was down the road from us in Habania.

• 3:50Jocko Willink?

  He has authored and co-authored a dozen books, including The Village, No True Glory, The Strongest Tribe, Into the Fire with Dakota Meyer, which we covered on this podcast, episode 115, Call Sign Chaos with General Jim Mattis, and finally, his latest book, Cat 5, The 2033 War. It is an honor to have him with us here tonight to discuss his experiences and lessons learned. Bing, great to meet you. Thanks for joining us.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 4:20Jocko Willink?

  All right, before we jump in this book, and I know we're trying to move through this stuff, because as I said, when you walked in today, I could talk to you for probably 20 hours straight. So I don't want to take that long. But before we jump to the book, let's get a little bit of background. So you're born in where, Massachusetts?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  In Dorchester, which is a subset of Boston. Everyone from there says Dorchester. And I was born in 1940, and then the war began, and my uncle was immediately volunteered for the Marine Corps. And the Marines then would take the entire baseball team and put them together. They no longer do that because of the casualties. And whenever they, when they came back from Guadalcanal, my dad was the doctor in town. On the third floor of our house, they had their clubhouse. And my mom was having another child, so she decided, well, my brothers are the babysitters, so from the age of two on, from two to seven,

• 5:20Speaker 02

  most of the time I was up in the clubhouse with the Marines. And she knew there was something going on that was different when, in 1945, both of them were in the battle for Okinawa as platoon commanders. And she was scared to death. And I had a favorite blanket that I used to suck all the time. And she said, "You have to do something for Uncle Tommy and Uncle Wally." And she said, with that, I opened up the window, threw the blanket out and said, "That's for the dirty yellow baskets." And then she knew something was going on in that attic.

• 5:54Jocko Willink?

  Those baskets, huh?

• 5:57Jocko Willink?

  And what about your dad? What was your dad doing?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  My dad was, was the, the general purpose doctor in Dorchester at the time.

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  So, and then, so you end up going to high school, going to college, where you went to Georgetown?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  I went to Georgetown, and then I was supposed to go to Columbia Law School. And I wasn't wild about it, but you know, you go to law school, you do something. So I said goodbye to my mom, my dad was at work, and took my suitcase and went down to South Station to get on the train. And right across the road, it said, Marine Corps Recruiting. I walked across, walked in, and the captain looked up and he said, "You don't have to be in that big a rush with my suitcase." And I joined.

• 6:42Jocko Willink?

  Nice. So what year was that?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  That was 62. So I was 62 to 65, infantry, Camp Pendleton, great place. And we transposed, we went over to Okinawa, the usual stuff, you know, hung off Vietnam, not a lot was going on. Got out, I was going to graduate school at Princeton. And my regimental commander said, you know, we need, we're getting into this fight now in 66. And he had fought in World War II, the others had fought in Korea, the regimental commanders. And they said, "We have no way of telling the new lieutenants and platoon sergeants what they're getting into." So I said, "Well, I'm probably going to come back." So I came back and they immediately

• 7:28Speaker 02

  put me into different units. And I'd spend two or three weeks with a unit in combat, come back, write that one up, and go out, do, they'd send me to someplace else. So I did that for several months. And then eventually out of that came the training manual that was called Small Unit Action in Vietnam.

• 7:49Jocko Willink?

  So that's kind of where, where you pick up in the book here. And again, I just want to read some highlights from the book. It's a great book. And in the book, really, you know, it's called Cat 5, The 2033 War. But you draw on all your experiences in combat. And again, the fact that you were in Ramadi in 2006, and that's one spot.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  At the same time.

• 8:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, at the same time. But, you know, there was heavy fighting in Ramadi in 2006. You were in, you were in Afghanistan during the height of some of the worst fighting in Afghanistan. And how old were you when you were in Afghanistan?

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Ah, the last time I was there, 71.

• 8:26Jocko Willink?

  So you were out on patrols at 71 years old. God bless you. But you draw on all that experience. And plus, you know, again, you've served at the highest levels as well, Assistant Secretary of Defense. And you put all that together to kind of give some lessons learned. So it's a great book. Get the book. I'm going to jump forward a little bit here. This is kind of talking about what you were just saying. I was ordered to report to three-star Lieutenant General Louis Walt, the commander of one of the 100,000 Marines in the northern sector, sector of South Vietnam. I knew from briefings that Walt was fighting two wars. He had deployed half his force to combat the North Vietnamese soldiers advancing south through the jungles. In the lowland populated areas, the other half of the force

• 9:08Jocko Willink?

  was spread out in platoons like the one I had joined. In most districts, the VC had established shadow governments with civilian and military leaders. The mission of the Marine platoons was to push out the VC, allowing the villagers, in theory, to support the government. This was called pacification. Conversely, the top commander in Vietnam, General William Wes Moreland, disapproved of using American forces for pacification. He was convinced that killing tens of thousands of NVA soldiers would force the North to quit. But Wes Moreland did not directly countermand the Marine commander. With a large frame, close cropped hair, and piercing blue eyes, Walt questioned me intensely. He held up my report with several sentences underlined. He was troubled by its tone and the casualties

• 9:51Jocko Willink?

  taken by the platoon. And again, this is stuff that you cover in the book. His aides had warned me that he began every morning by reading the names of those killed on the day prior. My report indicated that patrolling blind, with no translator or communications with the villagers, was getting nowhere. That upset him, but he didn't reprimand me. Instead, he sent me to a different unit with instructions to, again, report what I saw.

• 10:18Jocko Willink?

  So that was a really, when I read that, you know, I've, I've read a lot about the Vietnam War and just that fact, I never thought about it from the fact of like this three star who's got two, basically fighting two types of wars at the same time. And from a political viewpoint and you, I think, I think you being in this, in this role where you were going in and basically trying to figure out and report on what was happening. It gave you a detached perspective that's very difficult for fighters on the ground to get sometimes. And it allowed you to see some of these glaring kind of strategic issues that were going on. Is that an accurate assessment?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Well, it was because he was so honest and, and he, he, he so believed in that he was doing something good for the people. That when I came to him and said, sir, we can't talk to them, that that really hit him like a bolt of lightning and he, he was chewing and he kept thinking, I could see he was thinking, what can I do here? What can I do here? He wasn't questioning me for what I was saying. It was just flying in the face of what he hoped he was doing. And I have to say, Jocko, I saw that time and time again in Iraq and in Afghanistan and it really pissed me off. That, that they come up with these ideas that we can send out 19 year olds who have trained for a long time in how to shoot a rifle.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  And somehow you're going to put them in these situations with villagers and, and they're going to some, some way magically just link up. It, it just always struck me as being crazy and yet generation after generations of generals believed in it. Conversely, and we'll get into that, I'm sure, when we get into the command action platoon, we did make a breakthrough. But at the same time, I only once briefed General Westmoreland. I have to tell you that I've been in three wars and at the top of government. The degree of dislike between the Marine generals and the Army generals in Vietnam

• 12:23Speaker 02

  was something to behold. Sometimes my jaw would just open. They intensely disliked each other. And it may have been a fallback from World War II. The Army believed that the Marines just charged ahead. The Marines believed that what the Army was doing was wrong and they never resolved it. The General Walt and General Westmoreland never to the best of my knowledge, ever sat down and just had a heart to heart talk. And so they went in two different ways. And at the same time, the North Vietnamese were coming into the northern sector where General Walt was. So he had to fight them at the same time he wanted to keep the population.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  And General Westmoreland was 500 miles away. And, and the antagonism was tremendous.

• 13:14Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's very interesting to me. So I've always believed, so in Ramadi, and you, you had to have seen this in Ramadi. You know, we had the Marine, the, the Marine Corps owned the entire battle space, but Ramadi was owned by, by Colonel McFarland. But he had Marine Corps Battalion 38 working for him and then a bunch of Army battalions. And you, you went to many brigades. We must've gone to the same brigade meetings at some point.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Of course, yeah.

• 13:37Jocko Willink?

  But you know, there was one big, I mean, I hate to make it sound, you know, so happy, but it was like one big literal happy family of, hey, this is what we gotta get done. Everyone was working together. It was, it was incredible to see. So it's very, and I always thought that, well, it was just so bad in Ramadi that everyone just, we had to, we had to work together. But it's not like it was going well in Vietnam and they still couldn't come together and shake hands and say, let's figure this out.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Steve Nary, wasn't Steve the, the battalion commander?

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yes.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It was a shame what happened to him.

• 14:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. He got in some, caught in some trouble, but he was, yeah, he was squared away and it was.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  He was.

• 14:14Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you know, we, we worked, we worked closely with the 38 and, and we, but we really worked more closely with the Army because the 38, first of all, at like the government center, it was so, it was so bad that we really didn't, couldn't offer anything, you know?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Wait, I, I heard about Bruiser. That was your, that was your gang, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, you walk down the street and be in a fight in five minutes. I mean, it's absurd.

• 14:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, but yeah, so it's really, it's really discouraging to hear that in Vietnam, that they just could not sit down at a table and figure out the best way to make things happen.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:51Jocko Willink?

  Just, it's, it's terrible. Um, fast forward a little bit in the book. Not having enough Marines, Walt tested an economical approach. And again, I'm, I'm jumping through this book. This book is great. You have to read the book to understand everything that's happening, but I'm going to read some of these highlights. Uh, we, Walt tested an economical approach, deploying a handful of grunts into each village. He sent me into an isolate, isolated village called Bing, how do you say that?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Bin Nia.

• 15:15Jocko Willink?

  Bing, Bin Nia, just cause, with a population of 5,000 farmers. Two weeks before I arrived, a squad of 15 Marines had moved in. The district chief in charge of 50 such villages had assured the Marine Command that most farmers didn't like the VC, but were terrified of them. Very similar to Ramadi as a matter of fact.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  A militia unit called Popular Forces, PF's, led by Suong, was supposed to guard the village. The PF's were untrained farmers, paid $19 a month. They huddled inside their small fort whenever the Vietcong entered the village. And this is the basis of the book that you wrote, which is called The Village. So give us a breakdown on how these kind of early VSO, what'd you call these village stabilization operations?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  We call them combined action platoons. What really happened was that it wasn't like in Afghanistan or Iraq, that there were pockets of the Vietnamese people who really did not want the northerners there and did not want the Vietcong. But then there were resistance pockets on the other side. And in this particular case, there was a river, the San Trabang, and you had one village that was pro VC and you had the other village where they sent us, where the district chief said, they don't like them, but they can't stand up to them.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And General Walt sent in one Marine squad, 5,000 Vietnamese. And we had a, a dumpy old place where we were living and every single time, Jocko, that we went out, every single night, we, we, we weren't wearing helmets, we didn't have a radio when we went out. Uh, we only had one PRC 10, uh, for the fort. So we went out with a couple of red flares, uh, but we had those M14s and, and, and they put down a lot of power. And, and we had the grenades and we could throw grenades farther than the VC could. But when you go out, the Popular Forces, the farmers were scared to death.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  First night I'm out there and, and we get to some brambles on the path and that's the signal that the VC are in town, stay away. So the Marines immediately say, we're going in. And, and we turn around and the PF's are gone. They'd run away. So it took a long while. We kept doing it and fighting night after night and, and you couldn't see anything. Nobody had night vision on either side. You were just listening. And the first one to hear, boom, boom, boom, it opened up and they use green traces and we use red. And sometimes you thought, this is kind of like Christmas, but you can get killed in a hurry. Uh, and we fought night after night and we never knew what we were really doing because you never went into a kill zone afterwards. You just came back.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  And I remember the battalion commander calling down us, to us once after a fight. And he said, what's going on down there? I said, sir, you know, you want, give me a report. Well, sir, we do, da, da, da. Well, how many rounds you shoot? I don't know, sir, maybe a thousand rounds. How many grenades you throw? Well, I don't know, sir, a couple of dozen. Well, you do anything? We don't know, sir. You had to have done something. I'm putting you down as having killed four. You know, so you had that kind of thing, you know? But gradually and during the daytime, we began to recognize as we walked around that we got to know the villages as individuals. The, the unit was there for 385 days, never left. And we were allowed to sleep in their houses.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  We, we, we got this habit of wandering around and never staying in the same place twice. And that kept a lot of us alive, but not all of us. In the end of the 15, nine were killed in the village. Uh, but we stayed with it, stayed with it, stayed with it. And gradually Sung and his Popular Forces began to realize they were as tough as the Vietcong. Uh, but even to the end, the, all the villages in Bin Nia wanted the Americans to stay. They never wanted us to leave. And we had that problem in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 19:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, definitely. In, in Ramadi for sure. Interesting parallels there. When we would first go into people's houses in Ramadi, it was like they, they would take their family and like hide them in the corner.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 19:35Jocko Willink?

  Because they were so horrified that if, if the insurgents saw them talking to coalition forces, they'd come back that night and kill them.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:42Jocko Willink?

  But then as we set up the combat outposts and started being a permanent presence inside those neighborhoods, then the local populace started saying, hey, there's a bad guy in that building down there. He's not from here. You need to go get him. And that was really the tipping point in Ramadi was when the local populace stopped their passive support for the insurgents. And when they stopped their passive, because passive support goes a long way when, you know, someone comes in your house and you just, they're going to sit here until they leave, you know, that, that the, the locals weren't going to do anything about it because they didn't want to get murdered. But when they stopped that passive support, really made a huge impact. So that's interesting. The, the fact that, you know, you had guys, the PF's in the beginning kind of run away. I don't know if you remember this, but there was an entire battalion that left Ramadi.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the governor, the governor went to Jordan.

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  After, after you got back, his son that was, that was captured, he took his son, he, he went, he never came back?

• 20:35Jocko Willink?

  Yep. So there was people fleeing, um, the, the, there was an attempt on the battalion commanders, an Iraqi battalion commander, they, you know, there's some IED went off by him and he just grabbed all those guys and left. Well, I'm not doing this. I'm not going to get killed down here. Now, part of it was because he was Sunni. There was a Sunni battalion that they had put together. And so, you know, the American thought was, hey, this is a Sunni battalion, they'll be more accepted than the Shia battalions that most of the army was made up of. But it wasn't that they weren't more accepted, it was that they were targeted and they said, hey, we're not going to do this. So interesting parallels though, that always seemed to, you know, you look back at Vietnam and I always look back at Vietnam and think, how did we not learn these lessons? You know, it's kind of crazy.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  If you stay long enough and there is a connection to the central government, you can make a difference, but you have to be willing to stay in the same village for over a year and train people. I mean, when you looked at Iraq or Afghanistan, the troop-to-task ratio where you visited a village once a week, I mean, that's never gonna hack it.

• 21:45Jocko Willink?

  No, no, because the insurgents are there all day.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  All day, every day. Ah, great stuff. Um, fast forward a little bit, um, this is, oh, still in Vietnam, Colonel John Chason, am I saying that right?

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:59Jocko Willink?

  Colonel John Chason decided, I'd seen enough of the pacification counterinsurgency war, it was time for me to report on the main force war, and the search and destroy efforts by US battalions to engage the NVA battalions in the jungles. So now you're going, alright, we've seen enough of this, uh, counterinsurgency model. Fast forward and you get into some really, really harrowing stories, um, about what that was like. Lieutenant Art Blades of Bravo Company was pushing forward with his platoon unable to see 20 meters amid the undergrowth. His lead squad paused at a small opening and from 30 feet away, withering fire killed three of them and wounded another three. Lance Corporal Erwin Brazel led three grunts forward in a dash, all were cut down, writhing from their wounds.

• 22:43Jocko Willink?

  A corpsman stood up and was killed. Three engineers crawled forward to Brazel and kept him alive. Blades was in anguish, his platoon was decimated, and he hadn't seen a single enemy. Two Marines crawled up next to him. "Use grenades," Blades said. In response, they offered him some, several grenades. "Do I look like John Wayne?" Blades yelled. "Throw your own grenades." The Marines kept crawling forward, pitching grenades. In three hours, 14 Marines had been killed, the North Viet's lost 50 or 60. This was General Westmoreland's strategy of search and destroy.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  The problem, and, and fights like that all the time, and I, I keep telling people, the North Vietnamese are terrific light infantry, and the ground in the populated area where that fight was, is very, very soft, because you're, you're digging all the time into the, into the patties. As a result, the Viet's very quickly can dig a trench line, and they're down in that trench line, and you are exposed trying to get to them, and they put that fire out at about your knee level. And in this particular case, what, what really got to me was, of course, that night we were hit, uh, and then the next morning, and I knew most of the guys, when, when the four

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Marines came by with a poncho with, with somebody in it, and I said, "Who is it?" And they gave me a name like Jones. I, I said, "I don't even know him." They said, "No, sir, he was one of the replacements that came in last night, and he was, he was dead eight hours, within eight hours." And none of us, I generally sent a letter to everybody, to each family. I didn't know the, I didn't know him. Um, and we put him on a, on a, the next resupply chopper and, and stepped off again. And that always stayed with me, you know, that, wow, he died? Wow, what are we doing?

• 24:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, especially when we, you know, we Americans kill 50 or 60 of them, they kill, what was the number, 14? Yeah, 14. And General Westmoreland looks at it and says, "That's a win."

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Good, good, good kill ratio.

• 24:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Because he did, and the CIA was not able to dissuade him, uh, the CIA did not believe his thesis. His thesis was, and I get into it later with this whole Jupiter complex, but his thesis was, America's so strong, sooner or later, they're going to recognize that. That was the essence of what he believed, and that they're unwilling, they being the North Vietnamese, to put up with this all the time, killing the ratio we were killing, but they were willing.

• 25:28Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I've explained that many times here, um, you know, even in the Battle of Idrang, right? The first major battle, I think we lost 150, but we killed 1,500. And the, the generals looked at it and said, "Great, we can win. We can win, because we'll kill, whatever, 10 to 1." And what they didn't realize, what the generals didn't realize is, Americans were not willing to make that trade. We weren't willing to trade one American boy for 10 Vietcong. Like, we weren't willing to make that trade.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 26:01Jocko Willink?

  So, the, the will is not there.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I wonder what the future lies. Well, we'll get into that.

• 26:08Jocko Willink?

  Um, and, and again, you, you mentioned this earlier, but this, these experiences that you gathered got turned to this, uh, manual small unit action in Vietnam, and that's what they started putting word out to train the, the young platoon leaders and platoon sergeants that were gonna be going over there. Um, fast forward a little bit, this is kind of the conclusion here. US forces were fighting in an attrition strategy with which they could not win. In writing that conclusion in late, late 1967, I wasn't opining from a foxhole about grand strategy. General Waltz, General Walt and Chason had been candid with me. The North Viet's kept, kept replacing their losses while Marines were forbidden to take the offensive.

• 26:50Jocko Willink?

  Chason never told me what he did with my report, and I only briefed General Westmoreland once. His command in Saigon, measuring progress by kill ratio, persisted in stressing that the North Viet's were losing 7 to 1 in the search and destroy operations. The problem was that Hanoi was willing to lose 30 to 1 and keep on fighting. Vietnam is a return to medieval war, Walt had written, pitting man against man on a battleground where only the courageous could win. Much as I admired the general as a warrior, courage wasn't enough. America needed a sound strategy. Not the truth.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  The, the essence of the problem went all the way back to the beginning, and that was that when President Johnson, when the North began to really push against the South, he had to make a decision, are we going to let them take the South, or are we gonna stand up to them? And he didn't want to do either, so he was stuck. And, and I believe that President Johnson was a bully, and to a large extent, a coward, because he was on the phone to senators saying, "We can't win this war. At the same time, we're out there fighting that damn war for him." And that really stuck with me.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  And I, I talked to a Lieutenant Colonel, um, who said that he was the map that was brought into the White House Situation Room, and that is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1965 went in to see President Johnson with their strategy. And their strategy was very sound. It was several hundred thousand on the ground, but it was stopping all the supplies from coming in from China and from the Soviet Union, uh, blockading the ports and, and bombing the hell out of the North and forcing them to take their own manpower to have food to

• 28:55Speaker 02

  live, rather than having it brought in by China and the Soviet Union. And this Lieutenant Colonel, when they went in to give the briefing, they had their map, and no one was there, and they said, "Here, you come in and you hold the map." He said, so, he said, "I'm standing behind the map, listening to this." And he said, "The five four-stars are talking to the President, and the President cursed them and said they were sons of bitches, they were stupid, he was ashamed that they ever put a star on, he would never have them in his office again, he should kick them all in the ass, they didn't deserve to be in the military.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  If he followed what they said, we'd be in a war against China. Get the hell out of my office, I never want to see you again." Now, the interesting thing is, he based this entire strategy of leaving the North as a sanctuary and letting the Russians and the Chinese bring in tens to hundreds of thousands setting up in the North, because he was afraid that China would come in, Mao Zedong. The interesting thing is that in the Korean War, a little bit of a repeat here, but really, really interesting, that after General Ridgway had stood, stood down, General Van Fleet took command.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  And the Chinese had come so far south that we were decimating them, and in about April or May of 51, Van Fleet went back to Ridgway, who was in charge of the entire theater, and to the President, and said, "I can now finish them. I'm, I want to have another amphibious landing like we did early in the war, cut them off, and I'm going to destroy the Chinese army." And Ridgway and the President Truman considered that. Ridgway felt, "Well, we pushed them enough." And the President said, "Well, we really have them at the point where they want to negotiate."

• 31:02Speaker 02

  And Mao later acknowledged that he had begun this talk about negotiating because he knew he was about to lose his entire army. So by not finishing it, we had two more years of war, because we were too nice to finish it when we had the chance. And President Mao then, when he was faced with us in Vietnam, thought we had learned the lesson, and he wasn't going to send his Chinese forward to be cut off. So he ordered all his forces never, ever to, to cross a certain meridian to the North, because he didn't want them killed.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  And, and ironically, Johnson had drawn the exact opposite conclusion, that they were gonna come south. And Mao said, "I'm not sending them down into the meat grinder." And so, the CIA, I've tried to determine, to the best of my knowledge, the CIA never had the courage, because Johnson used to scream at people, to say, "Mr. President, you're wrong. Mao Zedong will not come south."

• 32:11Jocko Willink?

  Well, I've never liked Johnson. I've done podcasts about how much I don't like Johnson and Westmoreland, as a matter of fact, but you're making me hate him even more.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, Ridgway was working in some advisory position during Vietnam. And when they started brewing up the, the plans of how, you know, they're not going to want to fight, this is before Vietnam really got, uh, really accelerated. They were saying, oh yeah, that they're not going to do much. They're not going to do much. And he said, you know, I fought these people in Korea. They, they will, they will fight. That's what's going to happen. So interesting dynamic.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Well, the other, the other thing that, that, that would, that, and even Westmoreland was on the right side of this. The, the other lesson from Korea was to take a line and to cut all the trees down, make it open, sow it with mines and hold it. And that became the demilitarized zone across Korea that is held to this day. They proposed doing the same to go from the South China Sea to Thailand across Laos in 1965. And it would only have taken two divisions, knock down all the trees and then you have a barrier. And, and President Johnson just wouldn't hear that either. That would have been a little bit, maybe geopolitically, a

• 33:30Speaker 02

  little bit tough, but, but the military did say, and, and the DMZ, if they had done that, was shorter than the one we have in Korea. But we didn't do it.

• 33:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  You write that book, um, then you go and work for the Rand Corporation. Again, I'm fast forwarding. It's 1967.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:54Jocko Willink?

  They, the Rand, Rand hires Charlie Benoit.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:58Jocko Willink?

  You seem to think, impressive guy.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Oh, he was, he was second string All-American out of Yale, but he was first string, uh, All-American in lacrosse. He weighed about two seventy, two eighty. Uh, but he was absolutely fluent in Vietnamese. Both his, both his parents were musicians. And it turns out if you have a tonal upbringing, you can learn a language, especially a language like Vietnam, very quickly. He was so good in Vietnam, in, in Vietnamese that once he, he tried to call back to his parents at Christmas and the Vietnamese operator cut him off and said, this is only for foreigners.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  So did Charlie, and Charlie was fearless. So the two of us hooked up and we went, I, I think we went to well, well over 18 of the provinces over four years.

• 34:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You say in the book, from 1967 through 1969, Charlie and I visited 60 districts in 15 of Vietnam's 18 provinces to assess rural security. Um, God, what a, what an incredible understanding that you must have had.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  It was, it was, it was, it was an adventure.

• 35:09Jocko Willink?

  Who were you reporting to? Who was Rand reporting to?

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Uh, the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary.

• 35:14Jocko Willink?

  Did you feel like this was getting listened to?

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Oh, there's, there was no doubt. They, um, they were very nice. Uh, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Deputy, uh, Melvin Laird, when he came in, uh, he was terrific. Uh, and the Deputy Secretary of State, Elliot Richardson, uh, he had us in. So they would listen. They would listen. Um, the CIA was, our relationship because of Rudy Enders, well, the CIA was great.

• 35:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of Rudy Enders, uh, you say this in the book, this is 1970, we contacted Enders who put us in touch with the CIA operatives and SEALs in the Mekong Delta, 200 miles south of Saigon.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:59Jocko Willink?

  And you end up doing a report, which I informed you is in this incredible book. My friend, uh, Ben Milligan wrote this book called by Water Beneath the Walls. Absolutely incredible book. I don't know if you've read it.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:09Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's, it's an absolutely phenomenal book about where the SEALs came from and why the SEALs exist in the first place. Cause it makes no sense that SEALs exist because it doesn't make any sense, right? Why are these guys from the Navy out there on the land doing operations? This makes no sense whatsoever. And he tries to answer that question. And there's, it's, it's really interesting why it, why it is that way. But you end up doing this report and he references your report in his book. Um, it says, "The Navy SEAL Commandos, a case study of military decision-making and organizational change. And as best I can, am able to determine, the first academic level study of SEAL teams." This is what you did in 19, 1969. Uh, here's some quotes from, from the book. "It was a puzzle of

• 36:54Jocko Willink?

  personal importance to the author." This is why, why we exist, why the SEAL teams exist. "As the Marine Corps, the far more likely branch of service had never succeeded in creating anything similar. How the concept was shepherded through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress, I am still trying to determine." That's your words. Like how the hell is SEAL teams? Why do these things even exist? The author wrote, "For the mission of the SEALs exceeded the charter of the US Navy. As best as he could tell, the legality of this infringement had been tolerated because of its negligible size, but later had been allowed to widen." So you looked at it and said, "Well, I guess the SEAL teams are doing this, but there's only a thousand of them." At that time, it's even less.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  It, it was hard to find them. I mean, the Delta's a big place and I had heard about them. So I wanted to go down and, and I, we had to, it took the CIA to get us down there. MACV didn't. They, they kind of shrugged. They were very uncertain about it. And when we bumped into a Navy Admiral, he said, "Oh, sure. They're out there somewhere."

• 37:56Jocko Willink?

  Doing something.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and that was, that was it. There was, but the other thing I, I noticed, Jocko, every mission, um, like I was with Bill Early and, and Rick Willard and their team, they decide. I mean, there was nothing above them. They, they just wing it time after time. I thought, this is, this is, this is the Wild West. And some of the stuff they came up with was, you know, real, really far out there. Um, but there was no organized reporting system that was going up any chain of command. I mean, what, what does a Navy commander, let alone a Navy Admiral know about this? Nothing, you know? So they, they

• 38:36Speaker 02

  had huge degrees of freedom. So they finally hooked up with the CIA. That, and that's where the PROs and the SEALs and the CIA all got together.

• 38:47Jocko Willink?

  You say this, "Ultimately, the author decided, that's you. The most important factor in the SEALs' infringement was owing to the SEALs themselves and the culture that weighed upon them. Drawn from a notoriously selective training program that produced few qualified candidates, the SEALs naturally had, had to find a mission that kept their casualties low, a circumstance that might've pushed them, like the LERPs or First Recon Marines, into a reconnaissance role, had they had anyone to pass intelligence to. They hadn't." So like you're saying, like what's, if SEALs go out and gather intelligence, who are we going to give it to? Like, no, can't give it to the big army. Can't give it to the big Marine Corps. We don't, we don't have them. "Nor had there been any great pressure from the Riverine Force to engage in any sort of Green Beret-style advisory duty or civic

• 39:30Jocko Willink?

  action. Organizational orphans with no larger force to support or control them and possessing no love or admiration for the Vietnamese, the SEALs had set out into the swamps not to prove themselves. Their training had already done that, said the author, but because not to go would have been inexcusable to the others. They had developed a collective value system which emphasized physical hardiness and courage, and they liked to fight. What strikes me as most remarkable about the SEAL story, the author concluded, is their performance and their ability to learn and adapt in a decentralized, sub-optimizing environment."

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. They were just out there by themselves. Uh, it's true. And in my judgment, you had this culture where, okay, we're all tough guys and they were going to do something and no one was going to let the other one go out there by himself. And then afterwards, they began to think of other things they could do, but no one was paying any particular attention. I mean, they're just out there fighting. They, they had their own fighting. I mean, it was, what was that movie where, where they went up the river?

• 40:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, uh, Bat 21?

• 40:43Speaker 02

  No, the other one.

• 40:44Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Apocalypse Now.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but that's, that's the SEALs, you know? Hey, there's an enemy out there. Let's go get them. But they didn't have Mylon Brando that they were after. They were just out there doing these, these missions.

• 41:01Jocko Willink?

  Um, so again, you cover these, these high points of Vietnam, the strategic problems in Vietnam, but also what it was like on the ground of Vietnam. How was the, how there was a, a disconnect between what was happening on the ground and what was happening at higher headquarters, really sickening. You know, you, you were talking earlier about Johnson. I mean, Johnson had come to the conclusion that we weren't going to win when we had lost about 25 or 30,000 troops.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Well, even before it began, his heart was never in it.

• 41:30Jocko Willink?

  Unbelievable.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  McNamara's heart was never in it. Uh, he was a terrible Secretary of Defense. They just let the troops down. I, and then I had the opportunity to work for Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger, who was really a man's man. And he was the only one in the end, standing there with the troops and trying to help Vietnam toward the end. The, the, the, the Congress turned to such an extent that Jim Schlesinger had, and he had been Director of the CIA before he moved in as Secretary of Defense and I was his special assistant. He would have a breakfast meeting that he insisted he was going to have with every single Senator and Representative.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  And we'd have 12 of them in each morning for an hour to try to explain, this is in about January and February of 75, how important it was that, that we give the South Vietnamese the ability to continue to fight and we continue to use our air to pound the North. And what struck me as being remarkable was especially the Congressman would say, well, sir, you know, it's great that I'm here, you know, spending this time with you. People generally don't give this much time to me. I'm from Des Moines or something, but I can't go along with you on this. I'm going to vote against you. And so he was unable to change anybody's mind. Uh, and it, and he knew the tragedy was coming. You could see it coming

• 42:56Speaker 02

  and there wasn't anything you could do about it.

• 42:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, it's, we'll get through Afghanistan, the same, and, and Iraq for that matter.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:04Jocko Willink?

  Um, so you cover Vietnam. I'm going to fast forward here. We'll get to Iraq and in Iraq.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Oh, if we could just spend a minute though on Rudy Enders. Do you know Rudy? Have you, have you ever heard of Rudy?

• 43:14Jocko Willink?

  I've heard of him, but I don't have any background information on him.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Rudy, Rudy was, he was in charge of our special operations group eventually. The, the story's about him, a legend, but he began in UDT in about 19, before they had the SEALs, about 1960. And he was recruited by the CIA, went over to the CIA and his mission in 1960, about 1962 or so was just after the, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, uh, was infiltrating anti-Castro groups. And he had one group that he infiltrated and the group called radio,

• 43:56Speaker 02

  on the radio to him and he was offshore in a supposedly in a fishing boat and said, uh, there are Russians here and they have big, big tubes. We think they have missiles. And he, and Rudy thought, maybe they've been drinking. But then they called again. They said, we're seeing an awful lot of them. And he reported that to, I think it was the CIA Director Mccone. He said, hey, there are Russians. There were missiles. And so that they wouldn't give away the team and have them killed. Then they sent over the U2 and the U2 confirmed it. So it became the U2 story, but it was really Rudy Enders, the UDT guy who put them in there.

• 44:39Jocko Willink?

  That's amazing.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, yeah. And you cover a bunch of this stuff in, in that part of the book. Um, but I'm going to fast forward to Iraq and in Iraq, you cover, you cover the push up, you cover Baghdad, you cover what's going on when, when Fallujah, the big push through Fallujah happens. You talk about Ramadi as well. Again, it's kind of crazy that you were there and I were there at the same time. You were three Marines, um, you know, with Colonel McFarland. You talk about Travis Patrick Quinn. Right.

• 45:05Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you talk about Sheikh Satar. When I was there, we, I called him Sheikh Satar Bazia.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:11Jocko Willink?

  Um, his, his name, he's got a couple of different names.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yes, he does.

• 45:15Jocko Willink?

  But Abu Risha is a very common one.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 45:18Jocko Willink?

  Uh, and you talk about, you know, so tell me a little bit about, well, like, how did you end up going to Ramadi? And what, what was, what was your perception when you got on the ground?

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Well, before I get to there, there, there is one thing that people might be interested about, uh, on the march up, when we were attacking toward Baghdad, which was very, very fast. And I was with Jim Mattis, I was with the first Marine Division. I had gone over with, uh, E, Major General E2 Smith, who was the most decorated Marine from World War, from Vietnam. He had killed two, two, two North Viet's with an entrenching tool. Um, and, and we had no press credentials. We just showed up because we thought we want to, we want to cover this war. And, and Mattis and his deputy, John Kelly, Brigadier General John Kelly, they said, oh, okay. Well, you're here. Fine. And, and that was it. I mean, we,

• 46:11Speaker 02

  we needed no more intro than that. Um, and then they, they had shot up a Nissan with a Iraqi Brigadier General. So they knocked out the back window and there was blood in it. But they said, hey, rather than just being in an Amtrak or a tank, if you guys want this, you can have it. So we drove all the way to Baghdad in a Nissan. And, uh, the one-

• 46:35Jocko Willink?

  What did you use to mark that thing? How did you mark it as friendly?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  We, we, we, we-

• 46:38Jocko Willink?

  I'm going to put a big American flag on that thing.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Well, there weren't, there weren't that many other Nissans driving along in the car.

• 46:45Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  But, but the, the, one of the interesting things is when we got to Naziria, where there was a, a holdup because of a, of a fight and an A-10 had hit some of our people. And it was a real mess that the regimental commander who was in charge, uh, and we were right next to him and we knew him quite well. He had tried to get to that point and he had gone three days, moving up, moving up, moving up, and tried to remain in charge the entire time. Never turned over to anybody else, never slept. And he was falling asleep as he was trying to talk to his lieutenant colonels. And then he made a couple of errors. He wasn't

• 47:27Speaker 02

  able to push hard enough and General Mattis relieved him of command. The only time a Marine regimental commander was, has ever been relieved in combat. I am absolutely convinced, having watched this, this was the example of somebody who didn't recognize he had gone beyond the limits of where you have to sleep. And I saw it time and time again. And when you're in combat and you're exhausted and you know it, you're mentally, you begin to deteriorate. And, but you can't get so stubborn that you won't give the commander something to somebody else. And that's where I think in the future, it's going to be very interesting.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Uh, all the German tank commanders used amphetamines during, uh, World War II.

• 48:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Um, Hitler was on amphetamines all the time. Most of our pilots were on amphetamines a lot. And I think in biologics in the future, we're going to see some breakthroughs that enable more mental acuity because exhaustion and lack of sleep deteriorates the ability to think in combat awfully quickly.

• 48:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, in the meantime, before we put everyone on crystal methamphetamine, I hope, I hope we start using some decentralized command because if you're doing, doing good decentralized command, your troops are going to know what to do and you could take some time to put your head down for a little while. And that's a real sign of a micromanager. If I'm in charge of some operation that's going on for three days and the only way I feel comfortable is by being awake and making every decision, that's not a good, that's not a good sign for leadership at all.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good point. But the other thing we, we, you're thinking, thinking organizationally, look how deputies are generally chosen. They're generally chosen to be the executive officer, not the other commander in waiting. So the personality of the deputy is generally very much less than the hyper who's the commander.

• 49:26Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's, uh, if you're in charge and you're not willing to really mold your second, your secondary, your deputy, so that they can take your place, you should be. You should be looking at him going, hey, man, I might get killed tomorrow or I might need to go to sleep in four hours. So you, you gotta be able to run this thing. I think what prevents people from doing that in some cases is their ego's so big that they, they can't, they can't let it go. You know, I was, uh, in Ramadi, the, the battalion commander of the first, the 506 was just an incredible guy. And he went home on, um, what is it? The, the, the rest and relaxation leave.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:05Jocko Willink?

  And I was, I was a little bit surprised, you know, I was like, oh, you know, I said, hey, sir, I was going to brief him on something we were doing. I said, hey, sir, we're going to be doing this and that. And he says, oh, I'm not going to be here. And I said, oh, you know, what are you, gotta go to Baghdad or something? He goes, no, I'm going home. I'm going, I'm going on my two weeks leave. And I said, okay. And I think he saw the look on my face. I was kind of surprised. And he said, you know, Jocko, two things. If I don't go home, no one in my battalion will go home. If I don't set an example that, hey, when it's time to go and, they were there for over a year. So like, they needed a break. He said, if I don't go home, no one will go home. And he said, you know, second, if I can't leave and have this battalion function, what kind of leader am I?

• 50:43Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 50:44Jocko Willink?

  And I was like, Roger that. And interestingly, we're talking to General McFarland.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  There was a, one of the, one of the biggest days of combat success that they had, he was, he was not there. He was home. He was on, he was on leave. And he's so proud that he says, hey, all this stuff happened. I wasn't even in country and they did a great job. They, you know, it was a big thing with the tribes that had happened in, uh, just north of, just north of downtown, up in the hinterland there. And, you know, this whole big process had taken place and he wasn't there. And he's very proud of the fact that he didn't have to be there. So again, if you've got someone that's been awake for three days and they don't have, either their ego's too big or they don't execute good decentralized command where it's like, hey, my subordinate leaders will do the right thing. I, I trust them. I'm going to go to sleep. If the following three things happen, wake me up. Other than that, I'm going to be asleep. So.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Well, Jim Mattis, uh, with John Kelly, he used the example that you're using. Uh, when they got to Baghdad, um, Condoleezza Rice said, somebody has to go to Saddam's hometown, to Crete, to see if he's there. And, and Mattis said, John, why don't you take that one? So John took his own task force. Yeah.

• 51:57Jocko Willink?

  Um, yeah. And again, I'm trying to pick and choose. That's a huge, good, great, uh, feedback and lessons learned from the push up to Baghdad. You talk about Fallujah, of course, that, that huge operation. And then I kind of focused in on Ramadi because I was there, you were there at the same time. Yeah, let's go.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Fallujah just for a minute. Yeah. I didn't believe Fallujah in that, that is, I was there with a battalion on the lines, we're moving up, um, they, they had a good, good concept going, uh, we're halfway across, and the battalion commander, Brian McCoy, said to me, uh, we just got word that we have to pull a ceasefire and we're gonna stay here. And I knew Rumsfeld, and I said, baloney, Rumsfeld's never gonna let that happen. And then later, I saw, and I knew Bremer, I knew them all, but Powell, etc., but later, I saw the transcript of what actually occurred,

• 52:58Speaker 02

  that the president had become, President Bush had become angry when he saw the pictures of those, those poor contractors who were hanged. And Jim Mattis had a plan to use Spec Ops to get the people who did it, because they were foolish enough to stand around. But the president and the NSC, with the other members, the most senior members we had, they all acted emotionally, and they, they fed on one another in the meeting at the White House, saying, we can't let this happen, we can't be pushed around like this, all of them, Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State Powell, Condoleezza Rice,

• 53:41Speaker 02

  and the president, the vice president. And it was an example to me of, oh, oh, just raw emotions can affect anybody.

• 53:50Jocko Willink?

  So what, what emotional decision were they making?

• 53:51Speaker 02

  They were, they, they, they said, we cannot have Mattis, just, they didn't know who Mattis was, they just said, we cannot just go out and get a few people, we have to make an example, we have to show this city as an example. And they fed each other this idea. So they came back down the chain of command and ordered Mattis to take the city. And, and Mattis objected, but, you know, through the chain of command, but, but the answer was, no, you're gonna take it. And Bremer, they, you, so he said, all right, but once I start, you have to understand that when you tell, take Marines, tell Marines to take a city, they're gonna take a city. Then we're halfway over, and they get bad

• 54:35Speaker 02

  press that was manipulated by Al Jazeera, and suddenly, the same White House and Brema and the Iraqis at the top, the politicians, they all lose the nerve. And they, they say, no, no, no, you have to stop. And that caused Zakawi, that's when Zakawi had killed, he was in town, and that's where he killed Nick, the poor businessman, Nick Berg, and then he got all that publicity, now he has the Marines pulling out. And Mattis was so angry, I thought he was gonna try to provoke a firefight when we had to pull out, but he couldn't.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  And that decision, the White House decision, both times, go in and then quit, was emotional, emotional.

• 55:22Jocko Willink?

  Once again, from a leadership perspective, I always tell people, look, you have to have emotions in the calculus, right? You have to put the emotions in the calculus of your decision-making process. Because if you're really mad about something, and I say, no, you can't do anything, because you, you're too angry, I gotta, I gotta respect that you're angry, I might have to pull the reins on you, I might have to let you sit it out for a day. But I can't let your, my emotions or your emotions drive the decision, you have to consider it, but you can't let it drive, it sounds like here it's driving.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Twice, twice, drove coming in, and then drove, once they got bad publicity, to stop. And even Tony Blair, the prime minister, hearing from the Brits who were down in Basra, um, oh my goodness, how bad this is, calls the White House. So again, you know, stopped. And the other one that happened, we'll get into Afghanistan, I'll get into that one too, but, but emotions at the top really exist, and sometimes, it, it overwhelms, you, you might think that they're very, very smart at the top, no, they're not, they're not any smarter than we are.

• 56:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep. Um, by the time we're in Ramadi.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:34Jocko Willink?

  You know, Maliki had been, had been elected, they presented a plan to do a Fallujah-style push through Ramadi, go ahead.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  I said to, to, to John Kelly at the time, after Fallujah, I said, John, you should keep right on going, right up the street, to Ramadi. And, and John said, no, no, no, I said it to Joe Dunford, Joe was, um, um, Joe was then a brigadier, and Joe said, Bing, we're, we're dealing with the sheiks, we, we have something else we're dealing with. But I thought they missed a big opportunity, just to roll right up the street.

• 57:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, what happened, part of it was out in Al-Qa'een.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:13Jocko Willink?

  They did a mission called Steel Curtain or something like that, and that's where the first time, the locals were saying, hey, that guy over there is a moosh, that guy over there is a moosh. And so they started working with the locals.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Bill Journey, right?

• 57:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think so, I think so.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 57:27Jocko Willink?

  But that's when they first started this idea of like, oh, the locals, if they see that we're here, if they see that we're the stronger tribe, I know someone wrote a book called that, they see that, they'll start to support. And that started a whole program called the Desert Protector Program, which was hiring the local security, making them, hiring the locals to be security, kind of turning them into police forces. But when they went to push through, when they presented the plan to push through Ramadi, Maliki, smart move, he said, hey, if we, if you do to Ramadi, what you did to Fallujah, and it's Shia army that's going through there, it's gonna, civil war is like guaranteed to happen. So, need to figure out a less kinetic way to do it. And that's how we ended up doing Ramadi in the way that it was done. But, part of the plan was, when the 228,

• 58:11Jocko Willink?

  when the, when the 11 came to relieve the 228, and you're gonna have two brigades on the ground, all that combat power, we're gonna roll through. But then, they said no.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Ramadi was much tougher than Fallujah. Many more of us were killed in Ramadi. You were there, I mean, Ramadi was, oh my gosh, there wasn't much left of Ramadi.

• 58:37Jocko Willink?

  No, it was, it was rough. I, I wanna say, I wanna say there was 150 killed in Fallujah, and, um, no?

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, well, over the course of both battles.

• 58:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay. That, there was, the, the 228, and again, I, there was, there was guys that fought in Ramadi in 2004 and 2005, like, for sure. Like, so, all credit and salute to those guys, I can only talk about what I, what I was there for, which was the 228 and the 110, and they lost just under 100 guys each. Um, and then, of course, there's a bunch of Iraqi soldiers that were killed as well.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Well, I was there with Lieutenant Colonel Kennedy, uh, in 2004, the same fine Fallujah was going on, and he lost over 30 in his battalion. Yeah?

• 59:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, so, how did you end up picking Ramadi to go to? Did you just saw it as the, you're just a crazy person that saw it was the hottest place, and you decided to go there?

• 59:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, one, you go to one, you might as well go to the other. Besides, they're, they're so close to each other.

• 59:40Jocko Willink?

  Well, do you remember what months you were there?

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, when, Ramadi?

• 59:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I was there several years. So, 2004, I was, oh boy, 2004, I was there in April and May. It, it, I, I, I made 16 trips, so, you know, you know. And then I went there with Owen at the end, you know, my son, because that was, we're getting ahead, probably.

• 1:00:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, the, the, one of the things that shined in Ramadi was that it worked. It worked. I mean,

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  You mean eventually?

• 1:00:17Jocko Willink?

  Eventually, it worked. You know, you had very hard fighting, you know, it's interesting, I took a note earlier, you know, you mentioned my task unit, Task Unit B, we killed a lot of bad guys. And what people, and people always focus on that, we also spent more money than the rest of my entire task group combined, so there was two other task units, we spent more money on civil affairs projects than the rest of my task group combined. Uh, we did an excessive amount of training of not only Iraqi army soldiers, but also the Iraqi police as they stood up. So, we were doing all the lines of operation for counterinsurgency, the one that got talked about the most is the killing the bad guys, because, you know,

• 1:01:01Jocko Willink?

  that's what people talk about.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  But what about Satire and his gang? Were you working with them too?

• 1:01:07Jocko Willink?

  So, interestingly, you know, you were talking about earlier about, uh, young Marines that are 19 years old.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:14Jocko Willink?

  How do you expect these guys to become warrior diplomats overnight? Interestingly, I had this guy, who was a regular Navy guy, and I don't even know what his job was at my task unit, because I, you know, in, in a SEAL task unit, you get assigned all these people, besides your 40 SEALs that you have, you get assigned, you know, intel people and radio men. So I had this guy, great guy, I don't wanna say his name, because I don't know what he's doing right now, great guy, he was married to a Japanese woman, and he was a Buddhist. So he, he's an American guy, but he converted to Buddhism. And I needed someone to do tribal engagement, that was one of the lines of operation we had to do.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:51Jocko Willink?

  And I said, you know what, I'll take this guy off, you know, hey, he's very, he's very communicative, he's a very well-mannered guy, he's a nice guy, he was very good at connecting with people. I said, hey, listen, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna task you with tribal engagement. He said, Roger that, and what's that? You know, I told him what it was. And he started going out with, both with my guys, but more often, he'd go out with conventional units, and try and interact. And he came back to me one day, and I remember it distinctly, at some point, I'll have him on the podcast to tell the story, but he came back to me and said, hey, I met this guy today. And he wants to do Desert Protector. And I said, okay, well, Desert Protector, which again, was this, was this idea of, he said, he wants to do Desert Protector. I said, well, go back and tell him, we can't do Desert Protector, because that program's not here anymore. And the reason that program's not

• 1:02:36Jocko Willink?

  here anymore, because, because Maliki couldn't have a bunch of, of, of mercenary kind of groups, uh, running around the country that were getting paid by the government to do law enforcement, like, it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't a good plan. But what he could do is say, hey, you wanna do, you wanna do Desert Protector, we don't have that program, but what we do have is the Iraqi police, and we can give you training, we can give you weapons, we can give you uniforms. And he went back and told him that. And at that's, at this point, Colonel Dean from the 135 was involved, and Colonel Dean, kind of like, okay, we got this. And so that's, so yes, we worked, and Colonel Dean took over, and Colonel Dean, his guys did the bulk of the work with those guys, but that was all, was all of us working together to make that happen. But I knew who Sheikh Basia was really early,

• 1:03:18Jocko Willink?

  before it was anything. And then eventually, that, that my guy came, and he had a piece of paper. And it was the beginning of the Sons of Ambar, piece of paper, you know, the Al-Ambar Awakening, he, he handed it to me, it was like, it was like a picture of it.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  They had to sign it too, the pledge, but the interesting, you know, it, At one point, I was talking with Sheikh Satah after he really had it going, and I said to him, "I don't get it. We banged heads with you for two years. Why?" And he thought for a moment, and he said, "We had to convince ourselves. You couldn't convince us." In other words, the sheikhs, the Sunni sheikhs, had to come to realize we were their only hope, and they better get with us because Al Qaeda was going to take over all their tribes.

• 1:04:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and Al Qaeda had murdered, you know, a dozen of them, a dozen of the tribal leaders, and the rest, a lot of them had fled to Jordan. Yeah, it was, it was a very interesting dynamic. And again, I've had Colonel Dean on here to tell his side of the story, Colonel Farouq on here telling his side of the story. Just really incredible, the way everybody worked together, worked so hard, took huge amount of risks. You know, I had a guy on here that was wounded at the glass factory, when the glass factory got, Braxton McCoy, I mean, he was a young soldier, and he's out there at the glass factory, they're recruiting, trying to bring police on. This is before I showed up, and...

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Not when they killed them all, not that time. That was the time? Oh, my God.

• 1:04:46Jocko Willink?

  At the glass factory, but how many police, after sixty police recruits get killed and many more get wounded, how many more police recruits?

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  They were the favorite sons of the sheikhs, and they're all dead.

• 1:04:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so how many police recruits do you get after that? I'll give you the answer, zero.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Jocko Willink?

  So it took months and months, took a year, basically. Now, when I left, they started building up the police force. A few months later, there was 2,000 Iraqi policemen there. They really turned the tide, and, and peace broke out in Ramadi. It was incredible. That's why I say they worked.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:05:23Jocko Willink?

  As a matter of fact, Leif, my, my, my partner, who wrote the book with me, when he was running the junior officer training course for the SEALs, guys that were just out of training, they'd come, and there was a Green Beret that would present counterinsurgency. And the example that he would use as a case study of counterinsurgency was Ramadi.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  It was hard slogging there for a while, though.

• 1:05:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for sure, for sure. No, it was, you know, it was massive amounts of casualties through, through everyone that was there. I mean, it was, it was vicious. It was vicious, and it was a huge amount of sacrifice. You know, I went to the 20th year reunion of the 1-1 A.D. is incredible. The, the amount of people that were killed, the amount of people that were wounded, severely wounded.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  You know that picture I have in there of the IED on the street? Just, you know, "Welcome to Ramadi."

• 1:06:17Jocko Willink?

  Yep, it's, it was, it was vicious. But it worked. It worked. And unfortunately, we didn't follow through.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Well, at that stage, so we can talk about what happened?

• 1:06:34Jocko Willink?

  I'll give you, as 2011 withdrawal deadline, okay, I'm fast forwarding, because there's so much more information. As the 2011 withdrawal deadline approached, the Pentagon, State Department, CIA all insisted that Iraq would unravel if US forces left. This is, everybody's saying this. And by the way, everyone on the ground knew. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden disagreed. Quote, "All too often, our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight," Obama said, criticizing Bush. "That all too often, our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions." He ordered a full withdrawal. The decision reflected an ideological view that the US military was an instrument of imperialism, and that the United States had neither

• 1:07:19Jocko Willink?

  the right nor the obligation to remain. Once US forces departed, Maliki dismantled the Sunni watch groups and stacked the army with cronies, destroying cohesion and morale. Within two years, Al Qaeda renamed ISIS, poured back from Syria. In 2014, it seized Fallujah and slaughtered the Abu Isa tribe that had led the Ambar Awakening and overran the northern cities. Total disaster. You know, they, they killed, I got reports that they killed, there's about 500 families in Ramadi, in, just in Ramadi, that had been friendly with coalition forces. They murdered the entire families. We also got word, they, they wanted us back. Like, they wanted the SEALs that were there in 2006.

• 1:08:01Jocko Willink?

  They wanted, the locals wanted us back there. Obviously, we couldn't make that happen. Would have liked to.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  The, the President Obama, President Bush, I admire that, that he stuck to his guns about Iraq, but he made, but if I, if I draw back, I believed it was wrong in the first instance, because he was doing it for an evangelical reason. He, he's a strong Christian, and he said, "We owe them freedom." I think that's going too far. America has to not do that. I know we won't do it again, but, but once he had made that decision, he, he was going to try his best. The

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  big mistake that he made, and again, I get into this Jupiter complex, we can talk at some point, because he exhibited that, all of them do, but he had a one, every single week, he had a one-on-one with the Prime Minister of Iraq. First, it was Jaffrey, and then it was Maliki. And he was told, "Sir, Maliki in his heart is a strong Shia who hates the Sunnis and is close to Iran."

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  And President Bush kept saying, "At a certain level where you have responsibilities, if you work with someone, you can get him to come the right way." And he believed that, and I've always believed you cannot change the character of somebody at 50 years of age, but President Bush believed it. And we had a person in Maliki's office as the Prime Minister, and he didn't care that much. And, and he told me personally, he said, "Occasionally, at the end of the one-on-one, Maliki would come out of the room where he had been on the civets with the President, and he would

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  kind of smile and smugly say, 'He's at it again,' meaning, in a condescending way, meaning that Maliki would listen and say, 'Yes, Mr. President,' but in his heart, he was always going to be a bad apple. And most of the people in the CIA, in our military, and in the Foreign Service, not all of them, but most of them, they all knew it, and that's why they said, 'Sir, you cannot, sir, first to Bush, you cannot cut a deal with that person, but, but that is that we're willing to get out at a certain stage, because he, he's a son of a bitch.'" But the President didn't listen

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  to him. Then for President Obama, he didn't listen to anybody. He and Vice President Biden, they, they wanted out, so they simply said, "Okay, he's gonna let us get out. We're getting out." And, and again, the, the bureaucracy was saying, "Sir, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it." But he did it, and it was terrible. It was a terrible decision. I think we could have stabilized Iraq if we stayed, but we didn't. We gave it away.

• 1:11:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they, you know, not only can you not change a person that's 50 years old, but if you want to change a culture, it's going to take generations. It takes generations, and you have to stay there for generations, like we did in Japan, like we did in Germany, where we're still in Japan, we're still in Germany. It takes generations if you're going to get people to change their culture. And so much of the culture, you know, not just from a Shia hating a Sunni, but by the way, when I, when I say hate, you know, people in America say they hate some certain coffee, right? That's not, that's a different kind of hate. This is a hate where they kill each other. This is a hate where they murder each other. That's the kind of hate that's very, very real. And so if you think someone that's hated and been wronged by and done wrong to an opposing

• 1:12:10Jocko Willink?

  group their whole lives, and their parents and their grandparents, that's the way it is. If you think they're just gonna wake up and say, "Okay, cool, now we're all on the same side," it's not happening. And the only way you can do it is you need to, you need to have a permanent presence there, not permanent, but it's got to be generations, generational presence, to subdue that type of culture that is completely embedded in the people there.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  And as in Korea, we're still in Korea. And the last time they had a gunfight in the White House in Korea, I think is about 1985, so it takes a long while.

• 1:12:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the other weird thing is, you know, thinking that every culture wants the same thing that we want. And one of the examples I give in this, we had this turnover with the SEALs that we took the place of. And one of the problems that they said, you know, the soldiers, the Iraqi soldiers are getting, you know, their officers are taking skim, taking a cut of their paychecks. And so, you know, my, one of my platoon chiefs is, you know, hey, this is bullshit. Like, these enlisted guys are getting their money taken by, we need to do something about this. And so, I'm okay, yeah, makes sense to me. Take care of your soldiers. You're not taking care of your soldiers if you're taking a cut of their paycheck. But as we dug into it, the soldiers were like, well, yeah, of course, my boss gets a cut of the paycheck. That's, you know, that's, that's, he's the

• 1:13:32Jocko Willink?

  boss. Of course, that's gonna happen. That's, we're not, that's the way it is. And so, our culture, which deems something completely inappropriate, they're just like, well, yeah, of course, that's the way it is. And so, to think that, oh, we're gonna just impose our culture on them, it's just, it just doesn't work that way.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  No, and you have to wonder whether the CIA was honest with President Bush, both about Afghanistan and about Iraq at the very beginning, when he said, you know, we owe them freedom.

• 1:14:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if you want freedom, it's not, if you want freedom, you gotta fight for it. That's an American thing. And we think, oh, well, everyone will fight for it. Because our forefathers said, oh, give me liberty or give me death. Like, I would rather die than live under this tyranny. So, we think that's normal. That's not normal. It's not even normal for the American revolutionaries. It's not a normal thing to do. There's plenty of wealthy, American Brits, or I guess, English at the time, that said, we're not rebelling against these, we're not rebelling against the king. Are you kidding me? That's too much to risk. You know, people ask me these days about, like, you know, do you think we're close to a civil war? And I always say, look, people are on their cell phones right now, on their $1,200 cell phone with 5G, sipping a $9 coffee. They're not ready to put down

• 1:14:53Jocko Willink?

  their iPhone and pick up a rifle. That's not happening. And that's the way most people think. You get to Iraq, it's like, mm, you will, because Saddam Hussein will kill you. So, you know what? I'll live here, and I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna cause any problems. He's killed plenty of people. He's not, he's not gonna think twice about killing me.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  But once you're the Shia, and you get on top, then, haha, now it's my turn. And I saw those snuff films that they had. They were awful just to look at, when the Sunnis would come into a town, the Saddam guys, and force people, they put, they were black and white, the ones I was watching, but they, they put them on, on the top of a building, and they would have a tree, and they would say, let's see if you can get to that tree, and knowing he couldn't. And one of them, they had on a Superman vest, and then they were all laughing as he leaped into the air and broke his legs. And they had thousands

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  of people watching. And in another one, they had put a person backwards on a donkey, and were bringing him around the, the square, beating him the entire time. And even though it was black and white, you could see the black lines on the back of his back. So, you can imagine, when the Shia had a chance to get back, they were going to get back. And that's why, that's why our military said, you have to leave us here, President Obama, because we, this is a flower that's just starting. And, and, and they respect us. And as long as we're here, they're not gonna pull that stuff. But the minute, the minute

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  we, we left, because President Obama said, no, I want out, then, of course, Maliki allowed his Shia to dominate. And the minute he did that, that brought back in Al Qaeda. So, yeah, it's bad.

• 1:16:48Jocko Willink?

  Tons more detail in the book, right? They hit the highlights of it. But let's get into Afghanistan here. And this is again,

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  If I could, before we go, Jocko, the reason I started writing this book was out of frustration, having been in three wars and lost all three wars, and now we have the fourth with Iran. So, you notice that at some point, I get, and I'm saying to myself, okay, why did this whole thing, and boil it down to one simple idea? As Isaiah Berlin said, if you're dealing with a very complex problem, keep drilling down until you get to the one idea that is generating what that decision maker is doing. And I, I call it the Jupiter complex. And

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  I've watched a lot of presidents. I've, I've briefed six, I've known six of them. What happens when you go into the White House, as, as I'm sure you know, when you go in, the carpet is two to three inches thick. And you walk down that corridor toward the Oval Office, boy, by those portraits of America, and then you open that door to that Oval Office, and you know, this is the power place of the globe. And you become very, very careful what you have to say. General Mattis once said to me that he was in one of the meetings, and there were 12 people. And he said, as the commander, he was the 12th at the table,

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  and he had about one sentence to say. And I have a few things in there about President Reagan. But, but what happens, I think, is that when you look at those wars, President Johnson, President Bush, and even President Obama, when he, when he pulled us out, they all assumed we couldn't lose. They all assumed that Jupiter was, of course, the, the Roman god who used to hurl thunderbolts at other gods, because you could do it. No one could stand up to him. And I think, beginning after World War II, we were so powerful economically

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  and, and physically, that when we got into Vietnam, I'm convinced, having been at Rand and listened to the intellectual arguments of Henry Kissinger and the others, and they would come, that somehow, they thought, if we just demonstrate, the other side will give up. And then President Bush, he doesn't really have to put that many people into Afghanistan or Iraq, because we, we are so powerful at some point, and so good, so benevolent, that at some point, they'll understand. And I call that the Jupiter complex. And I'm really worried about the future because of that attitude. But it's, and then, bluntly,

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, President Trump, okay, I'll whack the Iranians, and, and they'll see that I'm really, really strong. So, that it repeats, president after president, thinking, we're so powerful, in the end, the other person will understand that, like Jupiter, that we can do things. And no, no, you can't.

• 1:19:59Jocko Willink?

  No, doesn't work that way. There's, having discussions about all these things, you can't, there's so many factors that go into what's happening. When you take your wife out for dinner, like, when I, when I decide, hey, hey, babe, do you want to go to dinner tonight? The amount of information that goes into this decision making process on where, what restaurant we're gonna go to, well, she had a bad experience here. What's our budget? What's our timeline? Do we want to get, how far do we want to go? There's all these things you gotta figure out, just to take your wife to dinner. But now, all of a sudden, we're gonna assume that we understand how a nation is going to react to our interfering with them. It is a, it's a very arrogant thing to believe, that you can, you can ideate

• 1:20:43Jocko Willink?

  what they're going to do and how they're gonna behave. You have no idea. You have no idea what they're going to do. You can, you can maybe bat 50%, you know, 50% accuracy, maybe if you're lucky. But now, you're sending Americans in the harm way, with a 50% prediction on, on how this thing is gonna turn out. It's not a smart move. The other, the other thing I've noticed about wars that we haven't won, is we haven't had to win the wars.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Well, no, in existence, we don't think.

• 1:21:09Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. We're getting into wars, and, you know, I'd like to win. But at a certain point, we say, I don't want that bad. It's like when you're at a, at an auction for something. You know, I really want that thing. I was bidding on a gun one time at an auction. You know, it's like, I really wanted that gun. But at a certain point, you go, I don't want it that bad. So, we get in ourselves in these situations where we want to win, we think we can win, we think we're so strong, we think we're Jupiter, we'll just go in there, and they'll bow down. But then they push back, and it's like, well, I don't want to, I don't want to win that bad.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  The, I think the other thing, though, you lose, and you lose, and you lose, and you don't recognize that the respect of the military has been going down, and down, and down, as a consequence. And then, the Congress says to itself, well, they lose wars, so they're not really that great. They want these toys, if you will. But nothing happens because we've lost these wars. So, why do I have to spend 6% of my gross national product? Why don't I keep cutting it, and cutting it, and cutting it, and give more money to entitlements, then everybody's happy, and nothing seems to affect us. And I think

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  that's the long-term problem that we put ourselves into, gradually, year after year.

• 1:22:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no doubt. You know, the, one of the other things I think about is the replacement program that we do. You know, I always tell people, when you deployed to World War II, you know when you came home? When we won.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Jocko Willink?

  And that completely, completely changes the attitude of everyone. Hey, all I've gotta do is, my six months, or my one year, or whatever it is, they started it in Korea, halfway through Korea, they started the replacement program. And now, all of a sudden, everybody from the, the,

• 1:22:53Jocko Willink?

  Generals in charge, down to the frontline troopers, at a certain point, you go, man, I, do I really want to take that hill? Do I really want to take that hill? And of course, it's easy for the generals to say, yes, you want to take that hill. But does that trooper really want to take that hill? Is he willing to risk his life?

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  Well, I got into that in Afghanistan, watching that.

• 1:23:12Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so in Afghanistan, you embedded in 2009, you embedded a bunch in Afghanistan. 2009, you're in embedded in, uh, Korengal, you're in the insurgency, you're, you're looking at how that's going, um, fast forward here a little bit. I rejoined Battalion 132 in the fall of 2009. They had just finished another battle. The Afghan soldiers had a schedule, had scheduled a friendship visit to Ganjagall, a small village on a plateau leading into Pakistan. Forewarned, scores of Taliban had set up machine guns and hammered the unsuspecting friendly force. I described the battle in the book Into the Fire, co-authored with Corporal Dakota Meyer, who fought valiantly there. Fifteen Afghan soldiers were killed in Ganjagall. No firepower had been directed at Ganjagall before or during the battle.

• 1:23:54Jocko Willink?

  The villagers harbored no resentment over past deeds or misunderstandings. The Afghan troops had even brought copies of the Quran to distribute as tokens of friendship. Yet not one villager said a word as the Afghan troops walked past them into the waiting ambush. Five American advisors and eight Ascar Afghan soldiers were killed inside the hamlet. General McChrystal insisted that, quote, "The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy," end quote. The deceit at Ganjagall demonstrated the limits of that benevolent counterinsurgency theory. In South Vietnam, the villagers did welcome soldiers like Corporal Phil Brandon into their hamlets. In Iraq, Sunni tribes had come over to the side of the American, of America, the strongest tribe.

• 1:24:37Jocko Willink?

  In Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribes adhered to a culture and to tenants of Islam that tied them closer to the Taliban than to the government in Kabul and the foreigners fighting for that government.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  I never understood General McChrystal. I know he has a wonderful reputation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but his notion when he was in charge over there of, "Don't shoot them," um, was, was the antithesis of what he did when he was in charge of special forces in the JSOC. And this notion that you just have tea with them and you're going to persuade them, I, I thought he was, General McChrystal was extremely naive, uh, but he must do something right because people sort of say he's, he's the girl you want if you're going to, you know, listen to a corporate speaker, but I, I thought it was nuts, absolutely nuts.

• 1:25:30Jocko Willink?

  You know, again, we were talking about Ramadi. Why did Ramadi work? One of the reasons that Ramadi worked is because not only were we training the Iraqi policemen, not only were we training the Iraqi army, not only were we doing the civil affairs, projects, building roads, helping with med caps, doing all this stuff to help stabilize the civilian populace, we were also killing the bad guys by the bushel, as many as we could. That's what we were doing. And those balance, you know, even, even me talking to my senior leadership, you know, they said, well, we're supposed to be building capability. We have to build capability of the Iraqis, but at the same time, we need to lower the capability of the insurgents so that they, because they'll, they have, they have an easier fight. The insurgents, they have an easier game that they're playing.

• 1:26:15Jocko Willink?

  They're, they're playing an easier game. You know, it's like the, the basketball hoop on the insurgent side is, is this massive thing that they can just toss a ball into. On ours, it's like just barely the size of a basketball itself. So it's a much more difficult game for the Iraqi soldiers to play and the Iraqi police to play. So not only do we have to raise their capability, we also have to lower the capability of the insurgents. And you do that by killing them and getting rid of them.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  You also have to have a national government that extends down so that there's unity. I think if you look at Iraq today, no one can say it's, it's unified. And unfortunately, I think the, the Shiite militias that are connected to Iran have enormous power, you know? We should have stayed and not allowed that to happen, but you know, in Afghanistan, I, I never, I never saw a chance to begin with because of the sanctuary. Uh, if, if you allow the enemy to have a sanctuary and you allow him to have his forces there

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  to live in the hotels and gut and, and, and get a, to, to organize his command and control, and then you're talking to the Pakistanis who are doing this, and the Pakistanis say, "Well, yeah, because we think one day you're going to leave and the Taliban are going to win." And you say, "Oh, okay." Then you put yourself into a box that you can't get out of. And the only way out of that box would have been to consider that whole thing before you got yourself into it. Um, it, it's, it's, it was baffling to me, just af- I mean, Ganjagall, they, they walked down, the, the Afghans, of course, are, are great walkers and, and they walked, they walked

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  across five miles from Pakistan, shot the living daylights out of everybody coming in, turned around and walked back again. Well, you know, this is not how you fight a war.

• 1:28:12Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, the, the three cups of tea, that, that whole thing, it was funny because, you know, we were getting, you know, some of our senior leadership.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Oh, from, from like Mullen on down, there's a champion.

• 1:28:23Jocko Willink?

  Three, three cups of tea, and this is the way we're going to win.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  And he was a faker.

• 1:28:27Jocko Willink?

  When we, when we, when that whole story got busted that this guy was full of shit, that we, we, we did it in a respectful way, but boy, did we rub that in their noses. Like all this stuff that you've been telling us is wrong. Um, you know, I, talking about McChrystal, like I, I know that he went out on patrols with guys.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  Well, once, as I understand it, only once.

• 1:28:49Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, the.

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  But, but, but it was still baffling. I mean, you.

• 1:28:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, a part of it.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  And the, the, the tactical memo that he put out, holy smokes, you know, going on for a tactical memo to every single squad, telling them how they're going to fight. That's not what you do as a four-star general.

• 1:29:09Jocko Willink?

  The reports that people write, you know, I'm trying to think as a, as a four-star, if you're not very proactive and don't have good relationships with your subordinate leadership, they're going to tell you exactly what you want to hear. And you're not going to get the truth of what's happening. So I think that's a, a huge problem. And, you know, I know that we were very honest up the chain of command. Like, how are the Iraqis doing that you're training? I'd be like, they're not good, you know? Or could you think they can take over this, you know, this, this, uh, checkpoint? No, no, they can't. And occasionally we'd get a group that could. We'd say, we're going to put them out on patrol. They're going to go 40 meters outside the gate to this other thing. We're going to be here to support them if they need it.

• 1:29:54Jocko Willink?

  But if not, because if they're on their own, they're going to get slaughtered. You have to, the, the subordinate leadership has to put up the chain of command, the truth. And if you're not telling the truth, you end up with these terrible situations happening.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  The, one of the things that I found very interesting, I, I was in Sangin, uh, at an outpost, uh, where the fighting was particularly intense. Um, and you, you do wonder where in the chain of command does the truth get smothered? And since everything is in what they call the sipper net, you know, the secret net, um, there are no histories, oh, there are my books with being out there, but there's

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  no history that allows you to see the after-action reports, that the battalions were turning in. So you, so that somebody can trace, is this, did this, was this really what happened at the platoon level all the way up, accurate to the top, or gradually did it go off the track?

• 1:31:09Jocko Willink?

  There's a really interesting book about the Mele massacre, and it, and it, it spells out, and I'll, I'm not going to do this justice, but you know, division told brigade, "Hey, we want you to go look at this village and see what's going on there." Brigade told battalion, "Hey, we want you to go to this village, they're suspected VC." Battalion told company, "Hey, this is a VC village." Company commander told platoons, "These are all VC." Like, and they have that sort of tracked out where it's a very gradual change from, "Hey, go look at this village and see what's happening," to, "This is a VC village." And I'm sure the opposite happens, you know, with, "Hey, these, these, these Iraq, Iraqi

• 1:31:53Jocko Willink?

  soldiers, these Afghans, they can't do anything," to, "Well, they can do some things to, they can do, uh, things to, they can do a lot of things to, they're ready for, you know, they're ready for combat," which they weren't.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:07Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 1:32:11Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit here in the winter of 2000. Again, I'm get the book, everybody. And there's, there's an audio book version as well. Fast forward in the winter of 2011, I returned to Helmand province just during, just as a drug clearing operation was kicking off. And I'm going to fast forward here. Marjah seemed under control. The and Afghan officials arrived to manage the district. This is after this massive operation. This was described by McChrystal as quote, government in a box. President Barack Obama flew to Afghanistan where he said, our troops have pushed the Taliban out of their stronghold in Marjah. In response, the Taliban avoided the Americans and launched a murder and intimidation campaign against the locals. Soon, stories of stories abounded

• 1:32:54Jocko Willink?

  of night letters and beatings. Eight elders were beheaded. Finding dollar bills in the pocket of an eight year old boy, the Taliban's hanged him. Throughout Marjah, there were one room mosques with loudspeakers on flat roofs. Anti-government invective echoed daily through the fields. Like an ignorant preacher in the 19th century America, Ammullah made his living based on or oracle skills and connecting with the farmers. For Ammullah to preach radical Islam both protected him from assassination and guaranteed a livelihood. Killing the enemy, General McChrystal believed was not the best route to success. It's really about convincing the people that they want it, the Taliban insurgency to stop, and they ultimately will. When McChrystal visited Marjah, he asked the district governor whether

• 1:33:39Jocko Willink?

  he liked the bakery in the market. The governor said he never ventured into the market. In a testy mood, McChrystal took the marine commander aside, telling him he didn't have all the time in the world to get the job done. I can give you a slow win, General Lieutenant Colonel Brian Christmas said, or a fast defeat. A fast win isn't possible. The people won't cooperate. The general left and the grunts continued to patrol constantly. But unlike Nawa, this is other stuff you talk about in the book, the sniper fire didn't ease. To avoid being hit, the troops slept in the dirt as though in graves.

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other, the other bizarre thing about the rules of engagement, they used to, they're kids to a certain extent. Infantry is infants. So you're, and the brain isn't completely formed, but they like to get on their motorbikes. And three or four or five of them would go parallel to you when you're out on patrol. Almost kind of sneering at you, you know, the Malin Brando in the wild one or something. And you couldn't shoot at them. I mean, you knew they were Taliban. They knew they were Taliban, but the rules

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  of engagement was, yeah, so they could just ditty bop along. I mean, it was, it was very, very strange.

• 1:35:01Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's very, very strange indeed. Mid 2010, General David Petraeus replaced General Stanley McChrystal as the top commander. Petraeus guidance to the 140,000 coalition troops was to persist in counter insurgency. The problems, however, were insurmountable. The number of villages vastly outnumbered the number of coalition platoons. In Helmand province alone, there were 2,000 villages and hamlets. The Marines could deploy 240 squads. One squad per 10 villages was impossible odds.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  I don't, to this day, I do not understand when President Obama said, I'm going to have a surge. I'm going to put 30,000 more troops in. And all the top generals said, aye, aye, sir, we'll go along with that. And no one did the basic troop to task ratio and said, sir, what are we doing? Going in one day a week into a village for four hours and having a cup of tea and giving away $250 is blowing in the wind. And yet we, and yet that fundamental

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  math was never done. And counter insurgency requires you to stay persistent. Well, even General Petraeus himself said, persistent presence. Well, persistent presence isn't one out of every 10 days.

• 1:36:34Jocko Willink?

  Persistence presence is a combat outpost in downtown Ramadi with, with 150 American troops and 150 Iraqi troops there 24 hours a day.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. And you're not leaving. Yeah.

• 1:36:43Jocko Willink?

  And that's a huge, that's where a big difference with the rural versus the urban environment is. Like you have a massive influence over the population of an urban environment because you can have a persistence presence there. But in, you know, in these other outlying rural areas, you just don't have that.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  No, and postions with postions. I mean.

• 1:37:00Jocko Willink?

  From your experiences over there, you write a book called The Wrong War. You, you write another book called One Million Steps, which is a really interesting title because, you know, for people that have been around IEDs, and I never fought in Afghanistan, but I have a lot of friends that did and friends that were wounded and killed. We know every single step that you take is a roll of the dice.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:37:26Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you did, you ran the numbers and the average number of steps that a, that a soldier or marine took on their deployment was like a million steps. It's a million times you take a step where it could be your last. So very powerful title of that book. And then you get into this in the book here, you get into this Afghan policy, why we lost. Mistake number one, letting Al Qaeda escape. Out of the gate, 2001, we had a chance and didn't take it.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  The General Mattis, most people don't realize this, but was put in charge of a JSOC, combined JSOC marine unit of about 1,000 to 5,000. And they're in a dust ball somewhere in southern Iraq. They had hopped in and there they were. And when Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was in the Tora Bora mountain, Bob Harwood, who was the SEAL, he was the deputy, and Mattis came up with this idea. Well, they took one look at a map and they said, you know, we can, there are only, it was December, and there are only about

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  a dozen passes in and out of the Tora Bora. They said, we'll put a company at each one of the passes, and then we'll just starve them out. And it's elementary and we can be there. They can be there in one day, just fly up. They sent their plan up the chain of command, assuming they were going to be ordered to move the next day. Everyone was very excited. Nothing, not one word ever came back to them. It was killed up the chain. And no one would ever take responsibility for being the one. But Hank Crumpton, who was the CIA director, Ops Director was in speaking in the White House. And he said

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  to President Bush, he said, sir, you should take that spec ops marine group that's sitting down there, put them into Tora Bora. And the president said to him, words to the effect, well, that's an interesting idea, but no more. And later, years later, I was talking with Secretary Rumsfeld. And I said, I don't understand that one. He said, look, he said, the president decided he couldn't get into the military chain of command. And I was thinking, oh, wait a minute, he's, he's, he's, he's the commander in chief. So they missed a huge opportunity to finish it right then and there. And, and by the way, Osama bin Laden thought

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  he was dead. He didn't think he was going to get out of there alive. All the radio intercepts indicated that he believed that he was dead.

• 1:40:11Jocko Willink?

  Mistake number two, committing to a multi-decade democracy. Right? Bush changes the mission, try and shape Afghanistan into a Western democracy. We've kind of talked about that.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Pound of that one, yeah.

• 1:40:26Jocko Willink?

  Mistake number three, tolerating the Pakistan sanctuary. Again, this is kind of reminds me of Laos and Cambodia and what you were talking about earlier.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  What we could have done with the Pakistanis, we always went back and forth. Every, practically every chairman of the Joint Chiefs at some one point or another would say to me, I'm going to give them one more chance, Ben. I'm just taking over this job. I'm going to listen to them. Come on, you know, you think that they're not going to lie to you and they lied to everybody else? And every chairman would leave very bitter about the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis are magnificent liars. They are an army that has a country and they have no income tax. They are impoverished as a nation and rely upon economies of everyone

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  else giving them aid all the time. And they have nuclear weapons, which we were afraid could get in the hands of the wrong people. But we could have squeezed them from the start and said, no economic aid for you, buddy. On the other hand, with all the logistics we needed for what we were doing it, we had to go through Pakistan. So we would have had to change our entire concept of how we're going to warfight in order to take away that sanctuary, but we never did.

• 1:41:47Jocko Willink?

  Number four, nation building as military malpractice. When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he declared, they, the Taliban must be defeated. At the same time, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen and our generals were repeatedly saying, we can't kill our way to victory. That sentiment substituted compassion for logic.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  You only do one thing with a rifle. Why send over the infantry if you want them to be drinking tea?

• 1:42:22Jocko Willink?

  Not a good plan. Mistake number five, misunderstanding the counter insurgency. And I'll fast forward a little bit here. Every successive US commanding general claimed there was progress. This was not true. The Pentagon never conducted a lessons learned postmortem to determine whether senior officers were disingenuous or whether our military system was from bottom to top driven by a can do spirit of emphasizing the positive that rendered impossible cold candid assessments from moving up the chain of command. This is what you were talking about earlier.

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:54Jocko Willink?

  Just not even understanding that no progress was being made.

• 1:42:59Speaker 02

  Well, consider how often we've won against Iran.

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  I mean, we repeat this and repeat it and repeat it. It didn't stop with Afghanistan.

• 1:43:10Jocko Willink?

  Mistake number six, championing, championing losers from choosing, so they choose indigenous leaders. They, our policymakers refrain from choosing the indigenous leaders qualified to fill senior echelons of commands. This hands off approach reflected a post-colonial philosophy that we do not impose our preferred leaders on another country.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's nuts. I mean, why, why do we allow a set of generals, prime ministers, et cetera, whom we knew were, were punks to be the people calling the shots all the time? Well, it's because we didn't want to be like the, the British in the 18th century. Well, don't go into a country then where you're trying to do that. I mean, get your head straight one way or the other. If you, I mean, to allow the bad people to remain in charge is nuts. So if you're going to allow them to remain in charge, don't go in in the first place.

• 1:44:05Jocko Willink?

  And mistake number seven, quitting.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:10Jocko Willink?

  How were you, when you were watching the downfall of, you know, the

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  Oh, like all of us. Oh, it's just a great disgrace. It was, uh, Saigon repeated on steroids. It was just simply awful, simply awful. And again, it's, it's, it's a mystery. Who, and, and failure never has a father. So it's, it's baffling. We sneaked out of Bagram in the middle of the night like we were, were thieves? I, I don't get it. I don't get it. And, and then went to an indefensible airport. I mean, when is somebody going to say who it was who made those decisions?

• 1:44:57Jocko Willink?

  No accountability whatsoever.

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:01Jocko Willink?

  We talk, you talk about the Jupiter complex, which you've talked about already. I'm going to read this little piece though, just because it's kind of concise. Jupiter, the king of Rome's mythic gods wielded thunderbolts of volcanic force. He had immense unchecked power. No god, let alone any mere mortal man could stand up to him. When you walk down the thickly carpeted corridors of the West Wing, past the 18th century portraitures, that aura of immense power is overwhelming. As you enter the Oval Office and see the president behind the vast resolute oaken desk, you know that this room, that in this room, the fates of nations are debated and decided. Our veterans are assigned a grade of C minus to the performance of our presidents. In all three wars, the president and his policymakers

• 1:45:44Jocko Willink?

  failed to craft a strategy with sufficient military resources and a politically sustainable timeframe to achieve a feasible end state.

• 1:45:54Jocko Willink?

  Losing.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  That's kind of where it's, I put it this way, Jocko. I mean, if, if, if, if I ever had, and I know I didn't, but the opportunity to be the national security advisor, I would take that it has to be that when you sit around a table with very important people and the president, and you're, you're posing the idea that you're going to send our young men out and some of them are going to die. You have to keep working and working and working until you have from the president, a one or two sentence, this is the end state

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  of this war that I want, and I'm going to put this amount of resources in, in this timeframe, so that you force everyone to look at something written. Instead of blah, blah, blah, there's something right there that everyone can look at and, and agree. Is that what we're doing? Is that the end state of starting this war? Take Iran. What was the end state of killing the leaders in Iran that began this war? I, I'm, I, I, the, the end state was not, I don't think, to prevent them from having

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  nuclear weapons. I mean, supposedly we had hit them earlier about that. I don't understand how just killing a couple of people here would do that. So what was the end state? Did anyone sit down and write something so you understood before you started the war, where you thought the war was going to end?

• 1:47:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Um, as you know, we don't go on missions without defining what the purpose of the mission is, right?

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:47:45Jocko Willink?

  So to enter into wars and again, to think, well, if we do this, this could happen and this might be good for us. That trying to predict that, you know, hey, if we kill the senior mullahs, maybe the people will rise up. Sure, they might. They might not.

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:48:01Jocko Willink?

  And then what do you do? They might actually solidify together and unify because they've been attacked by an outside force that killed their senior leaders. That could happen too. So we don't know what's going to happen. So do we want to, you know, to me, you know, I used to tell guys that kind of bar fight, right? Don't get involved in a bar fight. You don't know what's going to happen in a bar fight. You get, you get stabbed with a glass bottle. You get stabbed. You get arrested. You kill somebody. They kill you. You don't know what's going to happen.

• 1:48:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:48:25Jocko Willink?

  Don't get in a bar fight.

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:48:26Jocko Willink?

  Avoid it.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:48:27Jocko Willink?

  You have no idea what's going, you're, oh, I'm bigger and stronger than the person. Doesn't matter.

• 1:48:30Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:48:30Jocko Willink?

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:48:34Jocko Willink?

  So you get into some, um, ideas here. What then are the prescriptions of a president, a president should heed when faced with immense, immense, the, the imminence of major combat?

• 1:48:46Jocko Willink?

  Below are three factors for the president succeeding Trump and his policies, policymakers to bear in mind. Number one, rally the nation to recognize the threat of China. And you go into some great detail about China. Talk to me about China.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  I think, well, I'm just going to start. There is good and evil. Uh, I'm, I'm a Ronald Reagan kind of guy. Um, we represent the good, America. America stands for freedom of the individual, uh, a government by the people, of the people and for the people.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  China is an autocracy that wants to control every single individual. The leader of China is going to tell everyone else what to do. It is the antithesis of us. And the idea that we're going to forever just get along is preposterous. Sooner or later, one of these two regimes, the autocracy or the democracy is going to fail. It's going to be one or the other. And there is no, no evidence that China is becoming less autocratic. It's

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  becoming more autocratic. Xi has a mess in his economy that he has not cleaned up. He trusts nobody. He will be 80 within the next decade. He has promised that he will take Taiwan back into the fold. And he does believe that his legacy will be better than that of Mao Zedong if he achieves having Taiwan come back to him and have control over the Pacific. And I have no doubt that is what he believes. So for us to think that we do

• 1:50:55Speaker 02

  not have an adversary who's deadly serious is very, very foolish.

• 1:51:02Jocko Willink?

  Deadly serious and playing the long game.

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  That's what I mean. Yeah.

• 1:51:07Jocko Willink?

  Uh, number two, write out an end state, which you, you just talked about. And number three, exhibit magisterium. And this is a, this is a word that actually comes from the Catholic church. It's like the authority of teaching, the teaching authority is magisterium. And you give some examples. Talk, talk to me about what you saw and when you've seen magisterium.

• 1:51:32Speaker 02

  Well, the one I like is with President Reagan. I had to, I was flying over Africa and Secretary of Defense Caluci called me and he said, I was the Assistant Secretary at the time, I was going to see somebody, and he said, "You have to drop into Somalia because President Saad Baray is very angry that you're going over his airspace and you didn't have the courtesy to come by." So, I landed my plane, I walked in, and there he was with his cabinet. And at the meantime, the CIA had brought me up to speed, and they said, "He's about to let the Soviets use his ports because they want to recalibrate their missiles on

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  some of their ships." And I said to Baray, "I've heard this, you're thinking of this." And he was showing off in front of his cabinet, and he said, "So what?" And I said, "You know, that's not a good idea. I don't listen to you, Assistant Secretary. I will talk only with a Chief of State like your President." So I walked out and I called up the White House, I called up Secretary Caluci, and I said, "You know, do we have 20 minutes?" So they set up a table. I walked back in, and I said, "Fine, on April so-and-so, you have 20 minutes with the President of the United States," and I left. The night before this meeting, he's at the Mayfair, I get this phone call.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  He's a very tall gentleman, about 6'4", and I go over and he's pacing up and down, and I said, "What is it?" He said, "What am I supposed to say?" I said, "You told me that you wanted to come here because you are going to allow the Soviets to have their port right there and calibrate your missiles, and you want to tell that to the President." And I said, "So, 10 o'clock tomorrow morning, I'll see you there." So I met him in front of the door, and it turned out that the Secretary of State at the time had something else going on. So they basically said, "You just handled it trivial, you know, Somalia, you just handled it." So I walked in, and I said to the President, and he's sitting behind his desk, and I had

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  my briefing book, and I said, "President, this is President Saad Baray of Somalia." And I went to show him the book, he said, "Uh-uh." And I had read here at the time. He said, "There you read, I don't need that." He said, "Just tell me what the issue is." So I told him. And the President sat there for a moment, looked up at Saad Baray, all 6'4" of him, and said, "Doing business with the Soviet Union would not be a good thing for your country and your future in your country, and I'm sure that this is a mistake, and you didn't intend to do this.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  And so I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me in your own words what you intend to do." At which point, Baray says, "No, no, no, it is all a mistake. It's all a mistake." And President Reagan looked at me as though to say, "Come on, what was all this?" And Baray totally wilted because of the magisterium. Now he's sitting there with an evuncular but very strong President of the United States. And then the President said, "Now, sit down," as though he's talking to a second grader, and he said, "Now, tell me what you're doing for your country."

• 1:55:02Speaker 02

  And for the next 10 minutes, he spoke with Saad Baray about how he had to get his economy going, and he said to Baray, he said, "Give me one example." And Saad said, "We take camels, and we slaughter them on the dock, and then we take the parts and bring them over to Saudi Arabia because Saudis love camel meat." And the President said, "The Abeline Trail, that's what we did in the 1870s." He said, "Now, you have to move beyond that. He said, "You have to think of how you pack that meat. He said, "Then you have to think of other things that you can be doing, that you have to get Saudi Arabia to understand that you're worth much more than just a few camels."

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  And we walk out of the Oval Office, and you go down the West Wing, and there are two steps to where the cars are. And honestly, Baray was so bemused that I had to grab him because he was falling down the stairs. And that's magisterium. Your ability as the President of the United States to make your case, to be evuncular, no, the other person knows, you're not fooling around, you're not going to embarrass him, but you are going to change.

• 1:56:17Jocko Willink?

  Well, that would get my vote, I'll tell you that much. Next chapter, the three-tiered threat. You talk about these major issues. The first one is our emaciated military. How do you think we're doing now?

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  I believe that Secretary War Higgsith has the worst press I've ever seen compared to what he's actually doing in the building. Recruiting is way, way up. The minute he came out and said, "I'm against DEI," recruiting skyrocketed. He said, "Look, I don't want to have the number of generals that Mexico has for its army. We have to cut back on the number of generals." People have whacked him for doing that. Well, he had to, there were just too many of them just hanging around. He basically said, "We have to go to AI and autonomous warfare.

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  We simply have to change our entire system of procurement." So when you look at what he does inside the building, I think he's doing a good job. His press is terrible. Overarching that, if you really look carefully at what's happened, the Congress of the United States, since President Reagan, has cut our budget for the military from 6% of gross national product to 3%, 3% of our income. We each spend on our own insurance more than 3%, but we're spending only 3% in the insurance

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  of our entire nation. We've cut too far. The other thing Congress has done, and again, Congress sits there and the press goes, "Oh, yes, they're wonderful." Congress has taken away all the authority from the Pentagon. The Secretaries of the Navy, the Air Force, the Army, and the Secretary of War, they have very, very little control over the budget. The budget is really managed by the Congress, and they get away with it. No one says, "Stop criticizing them. You've taken all the power over the last 20 years."

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  So the problem I see coming for Jocko is huge. There are two problems coming. The first is AI and autonomous warfare is not a joke. It's here. Ukraine shows that. Okay, so what are we doing about it? The services are putting less than 5% of their budget into autonomous systems, putting 95% into old divisions. There's not one Marine platoon or one Army platoon that has one drone today, not one.

• 1:59:26Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, you're, "Come on, Bing, you can't be serious." I am serious. The Navy wants to have aircraft carriers through the year 3,000. My God! And then, and they're not changing. So one huge problem is getting the services to change. But then you look at who has the power, well, Congress has the power. And you look at, "Oh, where does the money come from? Who gets what in a district? Who gets some money for his reelection?" It all comes back to Congress. That's a huge problem. And then the other problem that I see, and I just...

• 2:00:12Speaker 02

  We, it gives me, so, we have built up so much debt that within, by, in the next presidency, at some point, we are going to have, in our entire budget, 25% of all, our entire budget, will go to pay the interest on the existing debt. And the other 75% go to entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, et cetera. Well, if you take 25% and 75%, you got 100. So, the only reason you're going to have any money whatsoever for defense,

• 2:00:57Speaker 02

  or for other discretionary programs like the FBI, is you have to borrow another $2 trillion each year. At some point, under the next presidency, there's going to be a huge financial crisis. And everyone says, the debt is unsustainable. Well, yeah, fine. And then, everyone keeps adding to it. The definition of unsustainable is, once it gets to 25% of all our budget going to pay the service on the debt, it's going to crash. And that means that everyone who has bonds, is going to get out of the bonds, because they think that the interest

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  is going to go up and up and up. And it's going to be a disaster when it happens, and it's going to give China an opportunity to squeeze Taiwan.

• 2:01:53Jocko Willink?

  Rough outlook.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is a rough outlook. Yeah, it really is.

• 2:01:57Jocko Willink?

  You gotta, fast forward a little, we got a section in here about, um, how the Pentagon can heal itself. You know, one of the first things you put is, "Fire the support contractors." "About 650,000 civilian contractors provide services to our military, at a cost of $250 billion, a quarter of the entire defense budget. These are not workers building ships and aircraft. Instead, service contractors perform everyday tasks, such as maintain computers, deliver supplies, patch communications, train the troops, and so forth. Since 1980, America's combat forces have shrunk by 37% to about 400,000, while the contractor workforce supporting them has increased by 70%."

• 2:02:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:02:37Jocko Willink?

  Insanity.

• 2:02:39Speaker 02

  Insanity. But, but, look, when you were in Iraq, I mean, we, we had one contractor per every soldier in Iraq. You go to the mess hall, I'm sorry, it's no longer the mess hall, it's the...

• 2:02:53Jocko Willink?

  Defact.

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  Defact.

• 2:02:54Jocko Willink?

  Dining facility.

• 2:02:55Speaker 02

  Thank you, dining facility. And you have 28 flavors of ice cream, and it costs $64 a meal. I mean, and, and they never went away. We finished, we finished in Iraq, we finished in Afghanistan, and the contractors stayed. And the Congress is due to a large responsibility for this, because the contractors, the Congress will not allow a defense budget every year, so that the services can plan, but they can go out and contract with contractors for five years. So gradually, you have a huge number of contractors doing everything.

• 2:03:39Speaker 02

  But they cost more money. It's insane. But, we're doing it.

• 2:03:47Jocko Willink?

  Another thing which you already mentioned is, well, you didn't mention this number, but buy a million unmanned, AI unmanned systems.

• 2:03:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:03:55Jocko Willink?

  The future of warfare.

• 2:03:57Speaker 02

  It should be more than that. It should be even more than that. I mean, if you send out a carrier, and you send out a destroyer, what we're seeing right now in Iran, we don't even dare send a destroyer into the Straits of Hormuz. Why? Because they can fire drones that cost $50,000, and we have to fire a $2 million missile to shoot it down. Well, the, you can't win a war if your defense costs 20 times what the offense cost. So, you have to go to autonomous war. You have to. And that's where technology is going?

• 2:04:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the capability is so there, too. Like, these drones...

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  Oh, totally.

• 2:04:36Jocko Willink?

  When, in 2005, we started using these drones, I forget what they're called, they were absolutely just pathetic. Like, these terrible model airplanes, they made a bunch of noise, unstabilized camera, you couldn't get any... I mean, now, you could go over to Walmart and buy a drone that's 1,000 times better than what we had. So, and then you can arm that thing, and that's what they're doing in Ukraine. It's incredible.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, the commoditization of technology has struck the entire world, but we're stuck. I mean, our services want to keep the legacy systems they have. I mean, look, we don't want all those infantry on the battlefield. I mean, all they are, to a large extent, you got to be real careful, are targets that get killed. So, you have to have a smaller force structure, that's much more autonomous, but the services have been fighting it.

• 2:05:32Jocko Willink?

  Is that, is that the military-industrial complex at play?

• 2:05:35Speaker 02

  I think it's both. I think, I think it's partially the legacy. If you're an admiral, you want to command a ship, or a captain, you want to command a ship. What good does it do to have an unmanned vessel if you're, if you're in the Navy? But, therefore, you want ships, just to have ships.

• 2:05:55Jocko Willink?

  And you want airplanes, so you can fly airplanes.

• 2:05:56Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:05:57Jocko Willink?

  You want tanks, so you can drive tanks.

• 2:05:58Speaker 02

  There you are. There you are. So, it's, you know, you want that horse cavalry, because it really looks good on parade. But, Ukraine has shown that technology has passed it by. Now, I must say, to his credit, Hegseth is trying to change this, but he's running into fierce opposition. Fierce.

• 2:06:19Jocko Willink?

  And would you say that that opposition, how much of that opposition is just pure political? Like, they just don't want anything that they, you know, I think that President Trump could come up with a cure for cancer, and people would be mad at him.

• 2:06:29Speaker 02

  I agree. I totally agree.

• 2:06:31Jocko Willink?

  And same thing with Hegseth.

• 2:06:32Speaker 02

  I totally agree. Just blind. But I don't know the solution to it. It really, it really concerns me. I mean, when all the logic says to do this, and you say, "Well, I don't like him as a personality, so I'm going to, I'm not going to do it." I mean, that's, that's emotional immaturity, with a big cost.

• 2:06:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, with a massive cost, because we're not going to be able to defend ourselves.

• 2:06:58Speaker 02

  This is where it heads. This is eventually where it heads. Yes.

• 2:07:03Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:07:05Speaker 02

  Hey, you want to hear a good joke? I don't have one.

• 2:07:08Jocko Willink?

  Please. I'm going to fast forward to the closing chapter here.

• 2:07:12Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:07:13Jocko Willink?

  Get the book, everybody. "The Task of the Next President. By 2033, the annual interest on our debt will consume a quarter of federal outlays. At the same time, tax base is narrowing. 44 million households pay no federal income taxes, while the underground economy is expanding. Roughly one-fifth of the US economic activity circulates inside a shadow economy, resulting in $800 billion in uncollected taxes." What's the shadow economy made up of?

• 2:07:38Speaker 02

  Everybody who doesn't pay anything, and doesn't cash.

• 2:07:42Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 2:07:42Speaker 02

  You can, but it's huge. And it's going to the extent that no one knows the exact size of it.

• 2:07:48Jocko Willink?

  So, is this like, what, is this drug dealing? What is this?

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. This is anybody who, who wants something done. You, you want something done on your house? You want a repair on your house? Somebody says, "Well, if it's cash, it's 400 bucks. If, if, if you have to pay me another way, it's 700." It's, and, you know, big cities, holy smokes. You know, every, everyone is unemployed, yeah, sure they are. But, the other thing is, that no one is, is certain about how big this is. It's somewhere between 18% and 25% of, of all revenue, but no one knows. Because, supposing you, you went to Harvard and you study economics, you're going to get in to figure out the underground economy, you'd stand out like a sore thumb. So, it's, it's, it's very difficult

• 2:08:36Speaker 02

  to get high quantitative, but, but we all know it's there.

• 2:08:40Jocko Willink?

  How about these, all these fraud cases that are going on?

• 2:08:44Speaker 02

  Well, all that.

• 2:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely and completely insane.

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:08:47Jocko Willink?

  Totally insane.

• 2:08:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then, then they went against Doge for, for trying to stop this. I mean, it's, it's nuts.

• 2:08:54Jocko Willink?

  And again, were they against Doge because they don't like Elon Musk, or?

• 2:08:58Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no. I think, I think, I think...

• 2:09:00Jocko Willink?

  Or is it because of shutting down their programs?

• 2:09:03Speaker 02

  You know, you have to walk that one back, but you remember, Elon Musk used to be the favorite of the liberals and the left, you know, with his, you know, super duper electronic car, yeah. Then, all of a sudden, he began to say, "Hey, you know, we have to balance our budget." Uh-oh. And then he said, you know, "We have a lot of fraud and waste." Uh-oh. And then he became the enemy. And so, Doge became the enemy, and they immediately started with lies, saying, well, you know, they have these 18-year-old kids. No. Most of the people who went to work for Doge were all volunteers for $1 a

• 2:09:40Speaker 02

  year, who were CEOs and COOs of major corporations. And when they walked in, they were aghast at what they found in the federal government. But, the press has done a magnificent job with the Democratic Party of indicating they're the enemy, because they want to cut it out. I mean, what kind of a country are we, when, if people say, "I'm, I'm against fraud," you say, "Oh, I don't want them."

• 2:10:06Jocko Willink?

  It's insanity.

• 2:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:07Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's billions, if not trillions of dollars.

• 2:10:10Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Oh, no, no, no. You're talking huge numbers.

• 2:10:14Jocko Willink?

  The frustration of paying massive amounts of taxes, when you know it's literally going to people that are stealing money, is crazy.

• 2:10:23Speaker 02

  And that becomes, you, you get very cynical about that, and therefore, gradually, you don't want to pay your taxes, and you get into a downward spiral. And you don't want that in a country. France is running up against that right now.

• 2:10:40Jocko Willink?

  You have a great quote in here, Arnold Toynbee, who I don't know who that is. Who is that guy?

• 2:10:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, you know, Toynbee, the guy who, the guy who looked at 31 out of 35 civilizations, and came to that great conclusion that, that not any great civilization has actually been overthrown by another. They all commit suicide, because what they do is, they, they begin to rest on their laurels, and feel they don't have to do anything anymore, the way they used to. They lose their dynamism. They lose their idea, we have to stay ahead. It, and they, they want something. They, they need affordability, and you have to pay for it.

• 2:11:26Jocko Willink?

  Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder. There you go. And I'll close out the book with this. The president must embrace these three principles. First, he must rally the nation to confront twin dangers, discarding the comfort illusion, the comforting illusion that growth and power are magically guaranteed. Second, he must define the end state he intends to reach within his four-year term. A naval fleet rebalanced by a shift toward unmanned systems and a successful campaign against fiscal borrowing. Third, he must exhibit magisterium using the authority of the presidency to summon unity, impose discipline, and set a moral tone.

• 2:12:10Jocko Willink?

  The desk in the Oval Office is named Resolute for a reason. The next president must embody that word. He must ask Americans for sacrifice, rebuild our military,

• 2:12:21Jocko Willink?

  curb a wasteful Congress. A resolute captain can steer the ship away from the iceberg.

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

  We have seen in our history some magnificent presidents who really have changed our course, Jocko, and that's my great hope going forward, that we have a president who rises to the occasion.

• 2:12:43Jocko Willink?

  Do you think that people that have that kind of character want to be the president of the United States and want to go into politics?

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  Obviously not, but, but, but, I don't know, but, but, but I have, I, I do feel that, that people, that, that there are many like Elon Musk who see that the danger is profound and we may be surprised who comes forward. We have two more years. We may be surprised that it won't be a typical president who comes forward. I mean, a typical politician.

• 2:13:22Jocko Willink?

  Right. One thing that scares me is I, I used to say in the SEAL teams, there would be some problem on the horizon and no one would want to deal with the problem. And no one will deal with a problem until it slapped them in the face.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:33Jocko Willink?

  And, and sometimes I feel like America's not going to deal with this, these massive problems that we have that are all on the horizon. We're, we're already feeling the waves and the rains hitting us from these, from this Cat Five storm that's out there. It hasn't hit us yet, but it's coming. And no one wants to do anything. I always fear that America won't do anything until the catastrophe already hits and we have to suffer, you know, whatever kind of catastrophic scenario in order for us to make real changes.

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  There are many who would subscribe to that, that the Congress really isn't going to get off its ass and work together until the crisis in finances is such that they have no choice whatsoever.

• 2:14:19Jocko Willink?

  Maybe I do need a good joke from you.

• 2:14:24Jocko Willink?

  So does that get us up to speed for, for this book? And what you're doing right now?

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 2:14:31Jocko Willink?

  Where can people find you? So you're, you're West Authors. We mentioned your son, Owen. Again, he authored a book called The Snake Eaters about his time as an advisor in Iraq. The guys that were on the MIT teams in Iraq and the pit teams, the police advisories, the military advisories, incredible, incredible job that they did. Crazy job, risky job, not glorious job. And he wrote about that in his book. He also wrote Sharkman Six and Four Days to Veracruz, some great books. And then you can also be found on Twitter and Facebook, at Bing West.

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I don't know, you know, but anyway, I enjoyed writing Cat Five and Owen has moved on now to try to help the Pentagon with unmanned systems. So, you know, we try.

• 2:15:14Jocko Willink?

  Any, any other closing thoughts?

• 2:15:16Speaker 02

  No, I listen, I really appreciate you all having me here. Thank you. Thanks.

• 2:15:21Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for coming out. Thanks for your service and not only your service, but the risks that you took to capture information and, and pass that information on to your fellow Marines in Vietnam, and then the risks that you've taken since then. Again, in some of the worst fighting, when you should be on a retirement, you know, somewhere on the beach drinking Mai Tais, and instead you're in the mountains of Afghanistan, in the streets of Ramadi. So thanks for doing that to capture the history, capture the lessons learned and continue to serve our country by putting out good information like this. Thank you for your service.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jocko.

• 2:15:52Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Bing West has left the building.

• 2:15:58Jocko Willink?

  Seventy something years old on patrol in Afghanistan.

• 2:16:04Jocko Willink?

  Just freaking getting after it. And, and by the way, like I just wanted to point this out, he's going into the worst places at the worst times. So it says in the book, he, when he talks about that, I think he was 71 in Afghanistan or something like that. He was running, he's like, yeah, I run five miles a day. And he also mentioned in the book that he put, I want to say he replaced some of his body armor with like cardboard.

• 2:16:31Jocko Willink?

  Cause it would be light. Maybe he replaced his backplate or something like that. He's like, okay, chance of me getting shot, small. Chance of me getting a heart attack, maybe a little larger. Yeah, but what a wealth of knowledge. And I told him before we hit record and as he was leaving, you know, I could talk to him for days, weeks to, to try and squeeze a bunch of information out of him and just hear his opinion, perspective on stuff. So great book, get the book. But you know, if you're going to stay mobile like that, dude, you better be running five miles a day, training, sprinting, jiu-jitsu, surf, the whole nine yards, swimming, lifting.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Hell yeah.

• 2:17:08Jocko Willink?

  And when you do those things, you need fuel. We recommend, at this outfit, we recommend Jocko Fuel. Have you tried the new clear protein yet?

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  No, not yet.

• 2:17:17Jocko Willink?

  Freaking, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a paradigm shift.

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:22Jocko Willink?

  Because like this morning, got done lifting and running this morning. And it, but it's hot in California right now. And so you, you're not in the mood for like the heaviness, right?

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can see.

• 2:17:33Jocko Willink?

  So I just mixed up the, it's like a fruit, it's so good.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  Like some Kool-Aid.

• 2:17:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's like a Kool-Aid scenario. So it's just so good. So we got that, it's called clear protein. It's not actually clear. It's a, it's like got a whitish color to it, but it tastes like clear. It tastes like, like you said, it tastes like Kool-Aid or something.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:50Jocko Willink?

  Freaking tasty. And it's just the macros, just 25 grams of protein. That's it. That's it. That's 25. It tastes good as hell. So we got that at Jocko Fuel, we got regular protein at Jocko Fuel, we got protein powder, we got RTDs, we got energy, we got hydration, we got everything that you need. Supplementation, we got everything that you need. Super Krill, Time War, we got everything that you need. Check out JacoFuel.com or go to whatever store you go to in your neighborhood and say, I want some Jocko Fuel over here and they'll show you the, the right aisle. Cause sometimes it's in the health and wellness. Sometimes it's in the new supplements. Sometimes it's in the regular food section, depending on what the scenario is. So you might have to ask them. And if they don't have Jocko Fuel, just say, hey, we want Jocko Fuel here and they'll get it to you. So JacoFuel.com, check that out. Also, OriginUSA.com, all these, you know,

• 2:18:35Jocko Willink?

  we talked about the threat of China. Manufacturing, if we don't know how to manufacture things here, we're not going to beat China. So we got to be able to manufacture stuff. Well, yeah, we got to be able to manufacture drones and technology, but you also got to be able to manufacture a pair of jeans and a pair of boots and a hoodie and a sweatshirt and a T-shirt and a jiu-jitsu gi and a rash guard, right? Guess what? We got it all. We got that capability. And when you spend money, which you have to spend to buy a pair of jeans, when you spend money, instead of your money going to support the Chinese Communist Party, which is looking to overtake us,

• 2:19:09Jocko Willink?

  you don't want to support them. Why would you give them money? Makes no sense. So go to OriginUSA.com and buy 100% communist free, American made goods, OriginUSA.com. Check it out.

• 2:19:20Speaker 01

  The jeans are 100%. The uniform, by the way. The daily uniform. Awesome. Don't forget about Jocko Store. You know, we got merch on there. I guess you could call it, shirts, hats, hoodies, representing discipline equals freedom and good. Stand by to get some. Like, these are all things that we are representing while we're on this path. You know, running, sprinting, jiu-jitsu, swimming, surf, the whole deal. See what I'm saying? We've got shorts on there too, by the way. Board shorts. So when you're surfing, boom, you can represent it there too. Also Shirt Locker subscription, new design every month. Check that one out. It's on the Shirt Locker page on Jocko Store.

• 2:19:56Jocko Willink?

  Subscription scenario?

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  Subscription, total scenario. It's a good one. Yeah, if you're interested in what that looks like, the design's a little bit more creative.

• 2:20:06Jocko Willink?

  According to you.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  According to me. But you can check it out. If you don't know what that means even, it's like, what do you mean creative? Like what? You know what I'm saying?

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Go on there, check it out. You can see kind of, kind of what it's all about.

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  What if you like something?

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  If you like, you like something, then you get something. Christmas is coming up. By the way, we got gift cards on there too, by the way.

• 2:20:28Jocko Willink?

  Check you out.

• 2:20:29Speaker 01

  So I'm saying, yeah, we're very accommodating to the, the holidays, Christmas, you know, somebody's birthday, something like this, man. I'm telling you, good to go, JacoStore.com.

• 2:20:38Jocko Willink?

  Right on. We got some books. Cat Five, The 2333 War by Bing West. Also Bing West has written a dozen books. They're all different, they're all dynamic, they're all really good ground truth. This is a guy that would go in the field and report what's going on. He was, you know, Read the Strongest Tribe. If you want to learn more about the Battle of Ramadi, if you haven't heard me talk about it enough,

• 2:21:00Jocko Willink?

  then you can read that book, but all of his books are great. So check those out. Then of course we got Put Your Legs On by Rob Jones. We got Need to Lead by Dave Burke. And then I've written a bunch of books about leadership. Also mentioned by Water Beneath the Walls today by my brother Ben Milligan, who wrote the best history book about the SEAL teams. So check that one out. I wrote a foreword for it, for the re-release when it came out on paperback. It's such a great book. Every time you open it up, you start reading, you're like, this is a good section. The whole book is like that. And it is a fat book. I mean, it's like 700, 600 pages or something crazy like that. Hold on, let me get through the footnotes here. I guess when you include the footnotes, it's not as long. It's 500 pages, small writing.

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  Some whole ass pages. That's what they call it.

• 2:21:43Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  Whole ass pages.

• 2:21:45Jocko Willink?

  Those hurt, dude. Sometimes when I get a book for the podcast, I'm like, I'm super fired up. I open it, it's a whole ass page with real small writing. Dude, about face, the old school about faces. There's like, the paper is just like so thin.

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, like the Bible.

• 2:21:59Jocko Willink?

  And the, the words are just racked and stacked so tiny. And you're like, yo, every, every page is like a, like a five-minute page. A five-minute page. So that's rough, but great books. So check those out. Also, EchelonFront.com, we have leadership consultancy. You heard us talking a little bit about leadership today. Successes and failures, all based on leadership. So if you need leadership inside your organization, check out EchelonFront.com. We also have an online training academy. Check out ExtremeOwnership.com. If you want to learn the skills of leadership while you're at home on your computer. So check that out as well. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, want to help Gold Star families, check out Markley's Mom, Mom Alees. Got an amazing charity organization.

• 2:22:43Jocko Willink?

  If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also check out HeroesAndHorses.org, Jimmy May's organization, BeyondTheBrotherhood.org. You might want to check out WarriorsInNeed and StrongholdRescue.org as well. And then if you want to connect with Bing West and his son Owen, check out WestAuthors.com. And then Bing is on Facebook and Twitter X, at Bing West. And then for us, check out Jaco.com and then on social media, at Jocko Willink and Echo's at Echo Charles. It's better if you don't go there. It's better if you don't go to social media and you actually save your brain cells for doing something productive. That's my recommendation. Thanks once again to Bing West for joining us tonight. Thanks for your service in the Marines and thanks for what you continue to do to try and share your knowledge with the world.

• 2:23:28Jocko Willink?

  Thanks to all of our military men and women who, as we speak, are out on the front lines around the world. We thank you for your service and for protecting us and our way of life. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, Secret Service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks for what you do to keep us safe here at home. And everyone else out there, just watch out for that Jupiter complex, also known as arrogance. Cause what happens is we let our ego get out of control and we don't think we can lose, but we can.

• 2:24:00Jocko Willink?

  So don't get complacent. Don't let down your guard. Stay humble, stay sharp, stay alive. And you do that by going out there every day and getting after it. And that's all we've got for tonight. And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.