305: The Worst Mistakes are The Ones We Don't See. On The Psychology of Military Incompetence Pt.3

0:00:00 - Opening 0:01:41 - On The Psychology of Military Incompetence Pt.3 1:40:51 - How to stay on THE PATH. 1:55:34 - Closing gratitude. 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 305 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also, joining us again tonight, Dave Berke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. We are going to continue the review of the book, The Psychology of Military Incompetence, which we started on Podcast 303, continued with 304. We're going to continue it more now. And we got through some examples in the last podcast, some of the wartime examples. We'll get through the rest of these examples tonight. And this is a big setup. This is a, this is an arduous setup for part two of the book.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if we'll get into part two of the book tonight, which actually starts to dive into the psychology of military incompetence. But like I said before, those explorations continuously refer back to the examples from the beginning, part one of this book, which is what makes the book powerful. Because it's not just theory, it gives you examples that connects the theory to reality. So that's what we're doing. If you haven't ordered this book, order it. It's called On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, written by Dr. Dixon, who is a combat vet himself. If you haven't listened to Podcast 303 and 304 yet, you can go back and listen to those first.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  We're going through these military examples and we're starting, you can see him starting to tune in, starting to call out some of these psychological pathology that ends up with bad leadership. And with that, we're going to go into the book.

• 1:49Jocko Willink?

  This chapter is called Between Wars. So we end, we end World War I, and this chapter is called Between the Wars, because what should be happening between the wars? What should we be doing? We should be assessing what we did wrong, assessing what we did right, seeing what improvements we could make, seeing what new technology we could bring to bear. And let's face it, you fight a war like World War I, and there should be an insane amount of lessons learned.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, this quote starts off with um this book, this chapter starts off the quote from George Bernard Shaw. And he says, "The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office." What a horrible statement that is.

• 2:34Jocko Willink?

  Going to the book, "Military stock is never lower than at the end of a costly war.

• 2:40Jocko Willink?

  With a million dead, society's appetite for aggression has been assuaged. People were wary of the war and tired of soldiering. For the military, the truth was rubbed in by swinging cuts in men and materiel." We're done. World War I's done. You only think about being over it, they're over it.

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  "From being the most important members of the community, they were now relegated to a very minor role. That's the military. This thinly veiled ingratitude had three effects upon the military. With the hoarse yet self-consoling cry..." Now we can get back to some real soldiering.

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  "They withdrew into cocoons of professional impotence." Isn't that strange? You get done with the war, you say, "All right, now we can get back to soldiering." Which for them, what does that mean? "In accordance with the principle that more florid aspects of militarism are defenses against threat to self-esteem, there was a falling back upon the rights of the barrack square. Renewed attention to spit and polish helped to expunge the last traces of the mud of Flanders."

• 3:49Jocko Willink?

  At higher levels of military hierarchy, service thinking was now embodied in an extract from a paper on Imperial Defense dated June 22nd, 1926. Quote, "The size of the forces of the Crown maintained by Great Britain is governed by various conditions peculiar to each service and is not arrived at by any calculations of the requirements of foreign policy, nor is it possible that they should ever be so calculated." That's the most insane thing I've read in quite some time. Well, I guess since I read the last chapter of this book. Hey, we're just gonna, the, the, we're building our military, the size of our military is just based on kind of what they think it should be.

• 4:33Jocko Willink?

  Had nothing to do with what's going on in foreign policy. No calculations. That's not what we're doing.

• 4:41Jocko Willink?

  In the period between the wars, the shape and the equipment, if not the size of the armed forces were partly determined by a number of curious military attitudes. These centered peculiar, peculiar, particularly around three instruments of warfare: tanks, planes, and horses. Describing a tank attack which he had witnessed in 1916, General Sir Richard Gale tells how the British command tried to exploit it with cavalry. Apparently, they failed as it was borne out by the grim sight of riderless horses returning whence they had come.

• 5:13Jocko Willink?

  Man, that's an eerie image, isn't it?

• 5:17Jocko Willink?

  Of this experience, he writes, "I was impressed by the potential of the tank as I was unimpressed by the employment of horse cavalry in modern warfare conditions. Yet after all our experience in that war, it took us further 20 years to mechanize our cavalry." The lesson was clear, with the lesson was as clear in 1916 as in 1936. In truth, it was not 1936, but 1941, before the British began to implement lessons of 1916.

• 5:52Jocko Willink?

  What happened between these wars shows the alarming extent to which reactionary elements can draw the wrong conclusion from what to most people would seem quite unambiguous facts. Rather than recognize the potential of the tank, they drew the conclusion that innovation and progress are inherently dangerous and therefore to be eschewed. The symptom is not without precedent, nor confined to the army. While on naval maneuvers in 1893, Admiral Tryon wished to about-face two parallel columns of battleships. From his flagship, he ordered that the two columns should reverse course by turning inwards. Unfortunately, the combined turning radius of the ships was greater than the distance

• 6:36Jocko Willink?

  between them. With mathematical inevitability, HMS Victoria was rammed by HMS Camperdown and sank with great loss of life.

• 6:49Jocko Willink?

  Other officers had seen what was going to happen, but dared not question. The lesson from this disaster seemed fairly clear. Admirals should base their decisions upon information supplied by their staffs and junior officers should not be afraid of speaking up when their knowledge, for example, the turning circles of naval craft and their special abilities, for example, superior eyesight and greater capacity for mental arithmetic, led them to believe that a given order would end in calamity. The argument seems sound enough. Indeed, even the most junior charlady, which is a cleaning woman at the Admiralty, had she pondered the facts, could hardly have failed to draw the same conclusion.

• 7:34Jocko Willink?

  But this was not the conclusion reached by her lords and masters. For them, Tryon's laps just went to show that it never pays to try anything new. There was the lesson learned. Don't do inward, don't do, that's the lesson learned. Don't do inward turns in a column.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  To return to the tank, the successive chiefs of the Imperial General Staff between 1918 and 1939, with the support of other senior officers, did not exert themselves to mechanize the army. Some were actively obstructionist.

• 8:10Jocko Willink?

  Against these reactionary elements stood a handful of progressive army officers and a few like-minded civilians. The progressives who had assimilated the incontrovertible evidence from the preceding war with Germany and were only too well aware of Hitler's preparations for the next, made their views known through books, essays, lectures, and by word of mouth.

• 8:32Jocko Willink?

  These moves were countered by the military establishment in two ways. So you got this whole group of people that are saying, hey, bro and bros,

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  we need to make tanks, a lot of them. We need to mechanize our cavalry. Look what happened. And that's what they're doing. Books, word of mouth, lectures, essays.

• 8:53Jocko Willink?

  These moves were countered by the military establishment in two ways. Firstly, they resisted the dissemination of progressive literature.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  Hey, stifle that paper. Secondly, they did their best to curtail the careers of those who questioned their own obsolete ideas.

• 9:13Jocko Willink?

  That's like, that's like evil, as far as I'm concerned.

• 9:17Jocko Willink?

  Guys got a good new idea, curtail their career.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  For example, when Fuller, an early protagonist of mechanization, won the RUSI gold medal for his essay on tanks, and later produced a book on the same topic, he was castigated by successive chiefs of staff and remained unemployed in the rank of major general for three years, and then was forcibly retired in 1933.

• 9:47Jocko Willink?

  In the course of these events, CIGS Lord Kevin, whose ideas, according to Fuller, were about 800 years out of date, opined that no officer should be allowed to write a book.

• 10:04Jocko Willink?

  It's like insane. You can't make this up. You can't make this up.

• 10:09Jocko Willink?

  If you're ever in a situation where your subordinates are coming up with ideas that you don't agree with, and your, your reaction is to shut them down, question yourself.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  Not to be outdone, his successor Field Marshal Montgomery delivered himself of a diatribe against Fuller's books, while admitting that he had never read them because it would make him so angry if he did.

• 10:38Jocko Willink?

  Equally unambiguous was the treatment meted out to Liddell Hart, a man described by the press as, quote, "the most important military thinker of the age of mechanization in any country."

• 10:50Jocko Willink?

  This is the guy that we covered on the podcast. I don't know how many episodes we did, but it's a lot of them.

• 10:59Jocko Willink?

  BH Liddell Hart. "Over the years, Liddell Hart produced a number of articles and books on mechanization, on new infantry tactics, and on the strategic and tactical use of armor. His efforts encountered extreme hostility and resistance from the British general staff. When he submitted his essay, Mechanization of the Army for Military Competition, it was rejected in favor of an entry..."

• 11:24Jocko Willink?

  On quote limitations of the tank, the judges were a field marshal and a general and a Colonel.

• 11:31Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, Liddell Hart's entry was not entirely lost to view. Why could that possibly be unfortunate? Well, it's because along with other products of his pen, it was enthusiastically studied by Hitler's Panzer General, Gwardian, and became required reading of the German General Staff.

• 11:54Jocko Willink?

  You can't make this up. You can't make this up.

• 12:02Jocko Willink?

  Like those of his fellow protagonists, Liddell Hart's army career was prematurely cut short by the military establishment. The case is germane to the thesis of this book. Here is was a man who is cultured, fluent, lucid, highly intelligent, and that rare combination, a soldier who is also a first-class military historian, one whose advice on military matters was frequently sought by such civilian leaders as Hor Balicia and Winston Churchill, who in due course became the military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and subsequently the Times, chosen by these papers in preference to a number of retired generals who applied for the same job. And Hor Balicia, by the way, was the Secretary of War, prominent figure.

• 12:49Jocko Willink?

  Here's a man whose views and writings were eagerly studied and acted upon by many foreign powers, including Germany, Russia, France, and Israel, whose prophecies in the military sphere were borne out time and time again, and who lived to see his ideas on mechanization and tanks tactics used against us by Germany in 1940.

• 13:09Jocko Willink?

  But here was a man so deplored by the British establishment, by the British military establishment, that Lord Gort, chief of the Imperial General Staff at the outbreak of the war, felt moved to say during a lecture to 400 officers of the Territorial Army, quote, kindly remember that Liddell Hart does not occupy a room at the War Office.

• 13:36Jocko Willink?

  So not only do these people that can kind of play the game get advanced, people that have trouble playing the game, like Liddell Hart, get pushed out.

• 13:50Jocko Willink?

  Do I wish he could have played the game a little bit better? Absolutely. Do I wish he would have been a little bit more indirect? You know, in his book, when he talks about if you become a prophet, you get crucified. He became a prophet and he got crucified.

• 14:04Jocko Willink?

  It was this same Lord Gort, the army's top man at the outbreak of the war, whom Horbulisha described as a quote utterly brainless and unable to grasp the simplest problem. These are the people that are trying to get rid of Liddell Hart.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  Liddell Hart remarked, "If a soldier advocates," and here's exactly what happens. "If a soldier advocates any new idea of real importance, he builds up such a wall of obstruction compounded of resentment, suspicion, and inertia that the idea only succeeds at the sacrifice of himself. As the wall finally yields to the pressure of the new idea, it falls and crushes him." And that's what happened to him.

• 14:47Jocko Willink?

  "Some military leaders, even in democracies, have become adept at manipulating their civilian bosses. Such was the case over the issue of War Minister Horbulisha. It seems he was not appreciated by military establishment. Five reasons relevant to our general theory of military incompetence may be advanced for this antipathy."

• 15:11Jocko Willink?

  Firstly, he was probably brighter than some of the senior officers with whom he had to deal. Secondly, his ideas for the army were progressive. Thirdly, he made no bones about using Liddell Hart as his military advisor. Fourthly, he was, with every justification, critical of generals whose job it was to prepare the British Army in France against the German assault on the West in 1940. Fifthly, he was a Jew. It was for a mixture of these reasons that the general staff persuaded Chamberlain to sack the man who had probably done more for the army and defense than any other single person during Hitler's rise to power.

• 15:50Jocko Willink?

  It's weird how generals, I mean, it's not weird. It's so prevalent how generals become untouchables, right? How could you dare say anything about this general? He served his, and, and that's what's happening here. And, and look, just because someone served their country, just because someone served their country and did a good job as a platoon commander, as a company commander, as a battalion commander, it doesn't mean they're going to be awesome as a general. In fact, there's some, some things might indicate that those aren't very different jobs. Especially when they did good as a company commander or a platoon commander during World War I,

• 16:34Jocko Willink?

  when doing a good job was not disobeying orders and doing what you were told to do. And freaking scurrying to a position where you don't get killed. Right? Because what happened to the brave soldiers? Most of them got freaking killed.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  We've talked about this, thinking tactically and thinking strategically are really, really different. And it's actually really hard to evolve from a tactician to a strategist. It's not, and, and in the military, there's kind of a very clear delineation. Like you're sort of a tactician as a junior officer. In the middle officers, you're sort of like an operational guy which sits between them. And then the generals are the strategic thinkers. But that evolution is really hard. It's really hard. You talked about Peter's principle, I think on the last podcast. Where you get promoted to your level of incompetence. That barrier between tactical thinking and strategic thinking is hard to overcome.

• 17:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, you run into it with companies as well. Where you get some dynamic person in a startup and they're the CEO of the company. But there's only 48 employees and they can make things happen and they kind of impose their will. And they can, they can kind of win the market and talk to people and they're good salesmen. And it works out awesome. And then all of a sudden they got. You know, 500 employees and they've got a board and they've got regulatory environment that they don't know how to handle and they turn into a disaster. It doesn't always happen, but what we fail to do is we don't really do a good job of training people and at least making them aware of the situation that they're facing.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the other thing I wrote down was you're talking about this is, and I saw this as I got a little more senior in the officer ranks and kind of to get a little more observation of that, that general officer tier or that flag officer tier for the Navy is what gets them there is a bunch of success, a bunch of success. And with that success, if you're not careful, what that success can do, and it's not just true in the military, it's true everywhere, is that success is this equals validation. And if you kind of start to get to this validation, like, hey, what I'm doing is working. You know what I should do? I should keep doing the same thing. And that flies against what you just talked

• 18:41Speaker 01

  about, which is the training and the evolution to think differently from what you did. And one of the simplest things we see this is, hey, if I'm a really good at a frontline task, good at that particular task, I'm going to get promoted and I'll be the foreman of this other team. And why I'm the foreman is because I'm really good at the task, but my job isn't to do that task anymore. My job is to think strategically and lead this team. And I have no skills and no training to do that because the criteria for getting promoted is being good at the task. And that success and that validation, sometimes, not always, sometimes, leads them to a level that they're not capable of doing, but the system doesn't allow you to give them any feedback. Because when you're a general officer, guess what? I'm a general officer.

• 19:27Jocko Willink?

  There's, there's something that you said that requires a little bit more exploring. And that is, you said that when someone gets advanced to, you know, a general officer or a CEO, in many cases, it's based on their successes. There's something else it's based on. Their lack of failures. So, you know, Dave and I go on deployment. Dave does four operations. They all go, okay, he gets the job done. Jaco goes, they were on the same deployment. You're a task unit commander, I'm a task unit commander. My task unit does 170 operations. 168 of them go really well and have a huge impact. Two of them are jacked up. Who gets promoted?

• 20:13Jocko Willink?

  Who gets promoted? This is not like a theoretical question. Who gets promoted?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm getting promoted.

• 20:19Jocko Willink?

  Dave's getting promoted.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Cause I didn't make any headlines for this screw up. I didn't cause all this equipment and God forbid somebody got hurt or killed. Like we're not, we're not having a conversation with Dave.

• 20:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Dave, no friction, no resistance, no problem for me, no additional paperwork. I don't have to send an investigation out for what happened. So.

• 20:36Jocko Willink?

  And it's not even that extreme. It's really not even that extreme. Like you're, you're, you're making it really obvious, but it's like, hey, you know, Dave did four operations. They went well. Good job. Jaco did a hundred operations. They had a vehicle rollover, right? Um, they lost a radio. And they had a guy get wounded. The guy get wounded? It's like people understand that, but oh, you know, the vehicle rollover, what kind of, wasn't this, was this really necessary? And all of a sudden it's like, well, you know, Dave kind of keeps his nose clean. He did a good job. Who's getting promoted? Davis. So that's disturbing. The other thing is you took at these, these generals.

• 21:20Jocko Willink?

  Who made it? Who's, who's getting promoted? The ones that freaking lived. How did they live?

• 21:26Jocko Willink?

  They said, oh, you know, sir, maybe I could go back to the rear and, and help you with your strategic planning. You know, here's another cup of tea. I really like Dave, you know, he's, I want to bring him back with me. Makes my ego feel good. So you're a little brown noser and then you end up getting living through World War One, and now I put you under my wing and along you go.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm, I'm sticking around the army too after World War One. I can stomach that whole thing as opposed to all the guys that came back and like, don't ever call me again. I'm not, don't, don't ever call me again.

• 21:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And not to mention, I come back and I'm like, hey, look, I did my time. Cool. I'm going to go out and be an entrepreneur and make money and build a business. You're like, hey, I'm gonna come, I'm kind of scared to get out. I'll just stay in here. I'll be getting a paycheck. Three hots and a cot. You know, I get the uniform. People treat me with respect. I'm good.

• 22:21Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. To understand the psychology of these reactionary elements in the military establishment of men who choose to make the army their career painstakingly work their way up the hierarchy to the highest positions, but then behave in such a manner to ensure that if they are remembered at all, it will be only for their conservatism. We needs must have recourse to ego psychology. Thus, it seems, in that, in the present instance, military leaders like Deverell, Montgomery, Milne, Ironside, and Gort displayed behavior symptomatic of extremely weak egos. In this light, their behavior typifies the neurotic

• 23:02Jocko Willink?

  paradox in which the individuals need to be loved breeds, on the one hand, an insatiable desire for admiration with avoidance of criticism, and on the other hand, an equally devouring urge for power and positions of dominance. That's weird.

• 23:22Jocko Willink?

  The paradox is that these needs inevitably result in behavior so unrealistic as to earn for the victim the very criticism which he has been striving so hard to avoid. Consider a few concrete examples of this syndrome. For those who had despaired of anyone ever learning anything from the events of the First World War, 1933 brought a belated gleam of hope with the publication of the Kirk Committee Report, which was not uncritical of the High Command. It could hardly have been otherwise. But there were those for whom preservation of personal reputations counted for more than the need to avoid the repetition of senseless slaughter to which their direction had given rise. This is,

• 24:05Jocko Willink?

  this is evil. I'm going to say that word. This is evil. We have a report that comes out that explains what we did wrong, and some people, they wanted to preserve their own reputation instead of trying to save future lives from lessons learned. One such was Field Marshal Montgomery, whose immediate response to the report was to block its dissemination throughout the army.

• 24:28Jocko Willink?

  While one can wonder at a system which would make it possible for one man to operate such censorship, the precise reason for his behavior is by no means obscure. Montgomery, as he then was, happened to be the chief of staff in the 4th Division during the Battle of the Somme. So he's getting ratted out in this report.

• 24:51Jocko Willink?

  And he's like, puts hides the report.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  That'd be like if we had the blue on blue in Ramadi and I was like, hmm, hide that, stifle it.

• 25:03Jocko Willink?

  Our second example is rather more complex concerning, as it does, that major obstacle to military development, the horse. As a noble, if uncomprehending factor in military incompetence, this animal was much in evidence between the wars. This is very interesting if you know anything about horses. Upon reflection, it's hardly surprising that the horse became the sine qua non of military life. For a thousand years, Meded found it in it enormous advantages. There was nothing better for transportation and load hauling. Horses raised morale and enhanced egos. Horses took the weight off the feet and enabled people to go to war sitting down. When they lay down, you could hide behind them. When it was cold, you could borrow their warmth and when they died, you could eat them.

• 25:48Jocko Willink?

  Because of the traditionally rural origins of so many army officers and military families, horsemanship in the context of sports like hunting, became one of the preferred leisure activities since such sports as polo, pig sticking and in an earlier age jousting not only act out symbolic aspects of real warfare, but are also associated with a higher social class. There's little wonder that they should find so much favor with those who choose the army as a career. All in all, it's not surprising that the cavalry became the branch of the army with the highest status, nor is it surprising that they should have become the most vehement in the denunciation of the tank, which was seen as an intrusive junior rather than the apparent. So they had this long fascination with the horse. They loved the horse.

• 26:32Jocko Willink?

  The people that rode horses in the cavalry ended up with a bunch of, you know, prestigious positions and high ranking positions. And they saw the tank not as like, hey, this is what's going to take over the horse. It's trying to, to, to, to, it's juniors to the horse. It's not as good as the horse. Nor is it surprising that the desire of the War Office to placate the cavalry was stronger lot than logic. Not only did they veto any expansion of the tank corps, but under the direction of Montgomery, ruled that the new tank brigade should never be reassembled, and this in the mid 1930s with Hitler arming to the teeth.

• 27:13Jocko Willink?

  That's you can't you you just you have to have you have to be a kind of like a psychopath to do that.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  There's a there's a level of insanity in there. It's like, how how do you look at a horse in a tank and look at him go well?

• 27:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  And you know, I was thinking like, the bolt action rifle or the automatic machine gun. They fire that one.

• 27:31Jocko Willink?

  I think we're actually talking sword versus automatic machine gun.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  I'm just trying to come to something like, yeah.

• 27:37Jocko Willink?

  You gotta go for you gotta go harder, bro.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a fair point. It just the depths of craziness and look at that and and Carrie was talking about this after the last podcast. K Dog was talking about this was the culture of the of the the cavalry. And you just said in there, was it a thousand years? People using horses in combat like, there's a culture inside there that's going to be kind of hard to break into.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  The tank? Come on, man. And and it invokes a kind of the same frustration that I articulated in the very first podcast about the machine gun. No, it was before that. And when I talked about the machine gun of how how long does it take for me to watch a machine gun mow down some of my guys where I go, timeout, stop, stop. I got this one wrong. We need to come up with another plan. As opposed to like, no, just keep sending them in.

• 28:33Jocko Willink?

  And do that for four years.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  For four years. At the risk of literally, I mean, millions of people, but but the horse and the tank and even like old pictures of the world. The crazy thing about World War One tanks. So like the previous era of tanks that they'd be leveraging them, they're these giant massive things. They're like almost like comedically too big.

• 28:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  But you if you would have just put those two side by side, like you said, there's a level of psychopathy, a level of of of of crazy. You gotta go, no, the horse.

• 29:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Give me the horse.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Give me the horse.

• 29:07Jocko Willink?

  There was a little bit of, maybe even a little bit more than a little, um, when, when we started using night vision. Night vision goggles, yeah.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  You talked about that, man.

• 29:17Jocko Willink?

  We, we had guys that were like, we, we'd be wearing night vision on patrol guys, but we shouldn't wear night vision. Like, what? Are you insane?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  It lets you see in the dark.

• 29:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You get to fight an enemy that's blind to you.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I've said this and I, I mean, in, in, in aviation, I got to fly stealth airplanes. Like very modern stealth airplanes. And to this day, despite the insane advantage, the insane advantage. There is still an ongoing debate over as to whether or not we should have non stealth. This is not, this is like in fighters. There's reasons to have non stealth cargo planes and attack planes like. But in this world of like airplane fighting against another airplane or using airplanes to get into a contested space. There's still an ongoing debate of, hey, we should just retrofit like really nice legacy airplanes with cool, cool missiles and cool engines and stuff like that. Like, I, my airplane is invisible.

• 30:11Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  My airplane is invisible. You will not see it.

• 30:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter how fast you can go or how much gas you can carry or how cool your weapon is. You're going to lose.

• 30:23Jocko Willink?

  How much longer till pilots are not doing this job? Fighter pilots?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I, I think we are one generation away. My opinion is that the next generation, which what's scary is like it's much sooner. It's not like 40 years from now. The, the next generation airplane is going to come out in the next 15, 20 years.

• 30:38Jocko Willink?

  And there're gonna be no pilots?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  No, no. I, I think this gen, like they're building this now. They're designing and building it now. So that, yeah. And so technology, one of the drawbacks of, of airplanes, like from conception to development and building, it takes a long time. So this plane has been on the drawing board for 10 years.

• 30:54Jocko Willink?

  This is what happens when you got the military industrial complex. Cause if we gave this to Elon Musk, he'd be like, I got you a fighter pilot. It's electric.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  And, and to his dismay, he probably wants and thinks and understands that we should be a generation ahead. But be that as it may, even with that, I think we've got one more airplane in us with a person inside. That's my opinion. And. You know, even with that, it has met with so much resistance, so much institutional resistance.

• 31:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's which is crazy, right? Cause you take the pilot out of the plane. And, and, and the other thing is you can, you don't have to fight a plane with a plane. You can fight a plane with 19 unmanned drones that have, that cost a fraction of the price and can maneuver and don't have to worry about the stupid human in there screwing things up.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And that's why that story of the naval officer going, you should buy all these tanks. Because he's got no, he has no personal vested interest in the tank. He's not inside that whole thing. He's not a cavalry guy riding horses. He's like, I'm over here in a boat. I'm just telling you from my vantage point, it's not even close. Buy this thing, buy them all right now because he's detached. He's just like, oh, I know, I'm not, this is not for my personal gain. I'm not going to be in that tanker on that horse. I'm just telling you from, from over here, it's not, it's not even close. Just do this because he sees it from a perspective and

• 32:20Speaker 01

  that's what I think, that's where the, that is, the level of frustration of hearing this is really hard. Cause hey, you're, I said bolt acting rifle and machine gun, you know, like go harder dude. Go harder, you know, which is like a slingshot and a heavy machine gun, automatic heavy machine gun. That's how big the gap is. And the only way to not see the machine gun is to be so invested and so committed to your point of view that just like we said last time, you will dismiss the truth because it doesn't align with your preconceived outcome that you've, you've created in your head, which is probably to some degree, the definition of being a psychotic. A psychopath.

• 32:58Jocko Willink?

  Uh, by the way, they weren't just anti-tank, uh, and this gets into Dave Berke territory. They were anti-aircraft too. Uh, here we go. For once, the, for once, the usual rivalry between the two older arms sank beneath their mutual dislike of the new upstart. If anything, the admirals waxed more, rather more negative about aeroplanes than they did, than did the generals, whose minds, as we have seen, were already discomforted by the issue of tanks. As mechanization threatened horses, so aircraft. Threatened battleships, but unlike horses and military minds, battleships were only the last succession of obstacles to progressive naval thinking. Before battleships, it had been wood and before that sail, each relinquishing, each relinquishment and transition had been bitterly

• 33:43Jocko Willink?

  resented, heavily opposed and productive of such irrational thinking as tends to occur when dearly loved objects have been renounced. When this is, I've been, I've been referencing this a lot when I talk to people. When there was talk of iron replacing wood in the construction of ship, one admiral was heard to remark that the idea was preposterous since iron was heavier than water, the ships would be bound to sink. On this issue has been calculated that, and this is fascinating. Of the 20 major technological developments which lie between the first marine engine and the Polaris submarine, the Admiral, Admiralty Machine has discouraged, delayed,

• 34:26Jocko Willink?

  obstruction, obstructed, or positively rejected 17, 17 out of 20. The essential and necessary incorporation of these developments in the structure of modernization has been achieved by individual and sometimes undisciplined officers by political, industrial and industrial pressures, or and most frequently, frequently by their successful adoption in rival navies.

• 34:54Jocko Willink?

  So if you think I, I'm going to figure out some kind of, I'm going to figure out what that list is. It's like iron to, well, iron to wood and then getting rid of sails for steam and then from steam to what, you know, diesel and then from, and there was people resisted every single 17 out of 20 of those advancements. There was resistance. Put a nuclear reactor on a boat. Imagine the resistance. That's the dumbest thing you've ever heard. Right. And we're doing on a submarine. Are you insane? Can't be done. Can't be done.

• 35:19Jocko Willink?

  As for battleships whose future usefulness and indeed very existence was threatened by the advent of aircraft, "To most admirals, the respective value of battleships and aircraft was not basically a technological issue, but more in the nature of a spiritual issue." "They cherished the battle fleet with a religious fervor. As an article of belief defying all scientific examination, the blindness of hard-headed sailors to realities that were obvious to a dispassionate observer is only explicable through understanding the place that ships of the line filled their hearts."

• 35:58Jocko Willink?

  "A battleship had long been to an admiral what a cathedral is to a bishop." And you can't walk away from that.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  I don't know if there is an equivalent in the teams, if there is, let me know, but

• 36:11Speaker 01

  that description is beautiful. Because in aviation, you literally fall in love with your airplane like it's a person, like it's a human being. And the degree to which you cannot see the truth is, I would say, on par to the degree that you can't see the flaws in your own children. "Hey Jaco, you got an ugly baby?" "No, I don't. That baby is perfect from head to toe. Everything about this thing is unique and perfect and special." And I can't go and go, "Hey, man, your kid's got some flaws here." Because that is, and the degree to which pilots fall in love with the equipment matches what he described, or like the cathedral. That's not an exaggeration.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And you will see people make these decisions based on irrational physical attachment to a piece of equipment. "Thank God, I flew a bunch of different airplanes, so I kind of like, sort of fell out in love with my first girlfriend, that first airplane, but I still kind of look back fondly and go, 'Man, I really love that airplane.'" And to be told, "Hey, this thing that you have is flawed, like deeply, deeply flawed and generationally behind where it's supposed to be." And rather than sort of an objective, go, "Yeah, you're right. There's some things about this that aren't very good." Oftentimes you get just this hyper irrational emotional response, like you're talking about, like, "I'm not trying to be critical of your, this is a machine, right? We're not, we're not in love with the machine, are we?" Well, it's pretty spot on.

• 37:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's like when you come up with a plan and you fall in love with your own plan and I'm like, "Hey, Dave, not quite sure about your plan." And this thing will be, "What are you talking about?"

• 37:46Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of emotional detach- attachments, it was such strong emotional attachment that led admirals to deceive their political masters. You can't, it doesn't get any more horrible than this, I guess it does, but. The practical issue was whether or not battleships could defend themselves against aircraft. Having formed the opinion that they could, the admiral, the admiralty decided to prove its point. In 1936, while aircraft production by the Axis powers was getting into top gear, the king was invited to a demonstration in which naval ships would attempt to shoot down a radio-controlled Queen B target aircraft. Unfortunately, the demonstration did not go well. Despite the fact that the plane was limited to flying 80 miles an hour,

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  and flew up and down without jinking, while the ships were given a running start on a parallel course, thereby reducing the speed differential to something approaching 50 miles an hour, not a hit was scored. Dismayed but resourceful, the admirals played their last card, deliberately crashing the radio-controlled plane into the sea, thereby proving at considerable cost to the British taxpayer that planes are no match for the battleship when these are in the right hands.

• 39:05Jocko Willink?

  That's like an act of treason. That's an act of treason.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  I hate imagining the actual scene where you're like the remote control guy and I'm over your shoulder, like, "Do we hit it yet?" "No." "Hey, put that thing in the water." And the guy's like, "Uh, uh, seriously?" "Put it in the water now." You know, like, that event had to occur, like, in real time, where there's something like, "Hey, this isn't going the way we planned. Let's sabotage our own experiment to prove our point that we've already predetermined, which is planes aren't as good as ships." "Crash that, crash that drone." Well, like, well, like, and like, "Roger that, sir." And you're like, whatever you do, you put that thing in the water and go, "See? Look what happened."

• 39:43Speaker 02

  So that's just essentially on a big scale, like what you always say. You risk, like some people will sabotage your plan because they want their plan to be, they want to prove, you know, the buck or you know, you guys role player, whatever.

• 39:58Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Or if you approach the guy in the wrong way, he'll be like, yeah, I'll do your plan. If you shove the plan down the guy's throat.

• 40:03Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Right. And then they're like, okay, I'll carry out your plan. And then they might intentionally sabotage it to prove to you that, hey, your plan sucks. Therefore, we should have went with my plan.

• 40:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I, parallel, sort of, but um, this is actually just like, like treasonous, right? To just straight up lie because you want to protect your little fiefdom. And you are putting the security of your nation in complete jeopardy. Because you're so arrogant and stuck in your old ways and in love with your piece of equipment. That's like, that's treason. That's treason.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, and it's, it's also going to result in your, your people dying. Cause the test is actually designed to go, hey, let's see if we can learn some stuff here. Hey, it turns out this airplane thing is a good thing. We should, and rather than get to the outcome, you, you will sabotage the outcome to get what you want, which is I want to show you my, my battleship is still supreme. And the result is you're killing your own people. It's not going to happen for five years or whatever the, the timing of that was, but it's going to happen. And we're going to kill hundreds of thousands of people as a result of that. And that's, that's treason.

• 41:22Jocko Willink?

  I'm trying to remember, I had something happen one time where I was testing some GPS. For, and, and it was supposed to be waterproof. They're like, hey, this, this GPS is waterproof. You don't need to waterproof it. And I was like, trust me, I was like, like an E4, E5 in the SEAL teams going over the beach all the time. I was a freaking expert on what was waterproof and what wasn't. And I looked at this thing and I was like, you're saying this thing is waterproof? Like, that's what you're saying? And they're like, yep. And I said, no, but how do you, how should I prepare it? They're like, you don't need to. And I was like, you want me to test this thing? And they're like, yeah, it's waterproof. And I said, okay, cool.

• 42:03Jocko Willink?

  Shit was not waterproof, you know, like not even close. And brought gave him back their flooded out crappy GPS. But there was, there was sort of like indications of like, you know, wha- wha- wha- what did you do? You know, did you open it? Well, and I was like, no, I didn't open any of these things. It's not waterproof. But you can see, that's the kind of test where someone goes, hey, put it in a plastic bag and then say it's waterproof. You know, you got some contractor that's going to sell all these GPSs to, to naval special warfare. Not on my freaking watch, you're not. This shit is a joke.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Well, to quell any potential concern, just that scenario of like that war, that pre-world war two, you know, battleship airplane British thing where it was just like, hey, we're just going to sabotage and, and just falsify the results. I never saw anything to that degree. I saw some resistance for sure. But I never saw anybody or ever heard anybody, hey, falsify the report, sabotage the plan. So just so people realize like I, in my experience, and I, I had some interesting things happen in my career. I never saw that.

• 43:04Jocko Willink?

  I'm try, I don't think I have either.

• 43:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'll have to, I'll have to think on that one. But I probably would have stood out so much. I mean, somebody over my shoulder saying, hey, put that thing in a waterproof bag and call it good. Like, what are you talking, I would have never done that in a thousand years.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love the image. Willing put that drone in the water. Sir, what do you mean? Crash it immediately and tell everybody it got shot down.

• 43:26Jocko Willink?

  It was funny is we crashed some drones. As a matter of fact, we were in a, we were going through, through urban combat training and tasking a bruiser. And we're supposed to be using these drones and everything.

• 43:40Jocko Willink?

  AYC, it was one of the latest AYC's was like a drone pilot. And whatever he was doing, like he's like, all right, I'm going, you know, we're flying it, going to go look at the target. And he, he bring, tries to bring it back and this thing came in at like, well, I don't know how fast those things go. What would be a realistic speed for a drone? 50 knots? This thing comes in at 50 knots and just way lays into a tree. And of course they're like, hey, you know, how's that drone working out? And I'd be like, that drone sucks. And the advancement on drones between that timeframe, 2005 and now is like night and day. But if I would have been setting up the reporter, whoever would have been something, yeah, these things are great. No, we'd be like, this thing sucks. This thing sucks. Make it better. And that's what they did.

• 44:25Jocko Willink?

  So thankfully we, we also didn't like, uh, falsify stuff. All right. Those are the, that's, that, that's, now we're moving into the Second World War. The pre, the pre, the, the in-between war period is over. Nothing learned, nothing figured out, no, no one taking blame, responsibility for anything. Second World War, there's a quote in here from Liddell Hart. "The German's success in May 1940 could easily have been prevented but for the opportunities presented to them by the Allied blunders, blunders that were largely due to the prevalence of outdated ideas."

• 45:03Jocko Willink?

  "After an appalling start in which the Allies were outfought, outmaneuvered, and outstripped in the quality of their military thinking and equipment, the Second World War produced the biggest transition in military competence since the days of Wellington. It was born of necessity and may be said to have dated from Dunkirk. This jolt to 100 years of military monitoring and 20 years of blind complacency achieved three ends. Within a space of days, it shattered many long-held, dearly-loved illusions about the nature of modern war. It hastened the eclipse of the old, the reactionary, and the untalented. Finally, by rendering the armory temporary impotent, Dunkirk put the most junior service in the center of the stage." Dave Berke is excited.

• 45:46Jocko Willink?

  "Now, the first time the continued existence of the Army and Navy became totally dependent upon their protection by the RAF." Look at the smile on this guy over here. "As for the bad start, this was a legacy of factors that touched on in the previous chapters: rigidity of thinking, overconfidence resulting from a pathetic belief in antiquated methods of warfare, and refusal to accept that enemy intentions may confound the armchair prophets." The following examples from Liddell Hart's History of the Second War illustrate these shortcomings. "On January 10, 1940, a German aircraft carrying the liaison officer of the Second

• 46:29Jocko Willink?

  Air Fleet lost its way and crash-landed in Belgium. By an extraordinary chance, the officer was in possession of the complete operational plan for Germany's attack on the West." Did you hear what I just said? "By extraordinary chance, the officer was in possession of the complete operational plan for Germany's attack on the West. He tried to burn the plan but failed to complete this task before he was captured. In this way, its contents became known to the Allies." Hitler's response was to devise a new plan which involved attacking France through the Ardennes rather than through Belgium as originally intended. This episode was damaging to the Allies for two reasons. First, firstly, in the belief that the captured plan was a deliberate deception, they failed

• 47:13Jocko Willink?

  to modify their own plans. Secondly, contrary to advice received years earlier, they clung to the belief that the wooded area of the Ardennes was impassable to tanks. As a result, the strongest Allied force remained poised for attack through Belgium while the Germans suffered little resistance to their outflanking drive through the Ardennes. Here's another one. The French, though possessing many tanks which were as good as, if not better than, those of the Germans, were steadfast in their belief that horset cavalry could destroy German armor in the Ardennes. For this reason, they refused to accept the suggestion that felled trees might be used to delay the German advance. Like the Poles, they were sadly disillusioned about the outcome of a conflict between horse and tanks.

• 47:58Jocko Willink?

  That's the Poles and the French, both making the assessment that, hey, you've got tanks, but we've got horses. The British retreat from the Gazala Line in 1942, which resulted in the loss of Tobruk, followed by a headlong flight back into Egypt, was the second worst disaster of the war after Dunkirk. Tobruk cost Britain 35,000 casualties and an enormous loss in ground and materiel. Why did it happen? Inadequate generalship. The Army Commander, Major General Neil Ritchie, a fine-looking man, has been described by his contemporaries in ways strikingly resembling of Elphinstone, Raglan, and Buller.

• 48:43Jocko Willink?

  Here's what his contemporaries had to say about him. Ritchie was all haywire by then, all for counterattacking in this direction one day and another the next, optimistic and trying not to believe we had taken a knock. When I reported the state of the First Armored Division to him at a time when I was planning to use it for a counterattack, he flew to see me and almost took the view that I was being subversive. Another one. General Ritchie had a great air of decisiveness. He was really rather indecisive.

• 49:13Jocko Willink?

  According to the same Corps Commander, he quote, "Had a tendency to ask your advice and having received it acted in the opposite way." Here's another one. Richie is not sufficiently quick-witted or imaginative. Another one. "A fine, robust-looking man with charm and manner, but no aura." And finally, "Confident and decisive in his speech, but one did not always feel he was quite so confident and decisive in his mind." That's another thing. I talked about that, I think, on the first one. This act that you learn. Yeah. You learn to kind of raise your voice a little bit. You learn to project. You learn to furrow your eyebrows a little bit. And you say, "Hey, listen, Burke." I love doing that, right? Because it's something that we experience so much in the military.

• 49:55Jocko Willink?

  "Listen up, Burke. Hey, I need your input right now. Look, we need to make a move, Burke." You know, like that thing. People learn that in the military. You learn how to act like that. And eventually, you can learn how to hide behind that. See that all the time. So, and people get fooled by it. Civilians get fooled like by that, like it's going out of style. I mean, that's what they're looking for. They're looking for the typecast Colonel, the typecast General, that furs his brow, sits up straight with a good posture, and then speaks in a clear, effective manner that people are going to listen to. And the politicians love to take that guy and put him out there to put out the word, you know? Well, you know what I'm saying? They do. They take that guy, they put

• 50:39Jocko Willink?

  him out there. "Hey, you know what? We got Willink. Willink can put on an act." No one's gonna mess with Willink. Put Willink on the stand. Put Willink on the stand. Willink gets in, he puts his uniform on, freaking puts his shoulders back, chest out, and then says, "I'm going to tell you this one time. Here's how it is going to happen." Boom. People aren't questioning that.

• 51:05Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, under the ineffectual leadership of this big, kindly, courteous, unimaginative, apparently complacent, yet occasionally touchy general, the army suffered a decline in organization, discipline, and drive. It became flabby instead of taut, sluggish instead of agile. Once again, that fatal amalgam of overconfidence and underestimation of the enemy produced a dulling of military endeavor. Rommel himself, in his diary, ascribed his success to the British predilection for frontal assaults. Brave but costly charges by small groups in which the attackers banged their heads time and time again against the hull-down German panzers.

• 51:48Jocko Willink?

  Hull-down.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's do a frontal assault against a tank.

• 51:52Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  And hull.

• 51:53Jocko Willink?

  That's, yeah. That's hull-down, meaning, meaning they've positioned themselves where the hull is, you can't see the tank, you can only see the turret. That's hull-down, Echo Charles. Hull-down, defilé. You park that thing in a little berm, in a little ravine, and you can't see it. The only thing you see is this, like, gun.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and guess when you see the turret?

• 52:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  About five seconds before it lights you up and you're just walking right up on that thing.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  It's hard to picture that because you know, you know the story of the, hey, the French are gonna dig this, hey, you know what we should do? A deeper, longer, wider trench, and a forest that's impassable by armor. Like, that's their plan. Hey, what did we learn? Hey, I got an idea. Hey, remember the trenches we didn't order one? Not good enough. Let's dig a deeper trench. And they're 100% sure that the armor can't go through this forest, so we're good. And we all know that story, so you're just waiting to hear this, this be revealed, which is the idea of, hey, the horses, you know, this, this, this forest is impassable by equipment. So you know what you're gonna need? Some horses.

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know what?

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Knock down some trees.

• 53:00Jocko Willink?

  When I had Ben Milligan on, from his book, By Water Beneath the Walls, one of the interesting things, the, like, the Marines had issues at Tarawa, and their solution, like, hey, we, our tracks didn't make it through, and some of our Marines didn't make to the beach because they hit, you know, hit the reef 800 meters out. Marine's solution was, okay, guess what? Real simple, we need more, more Marines and more tracks.

• 53:27Jocko Willink?

  We need, we need, you know, 80 tracks to make it through and half of them don't make it cool. 160 is the number. And the Navy was like, how about we go and, you know, try and figure out where those reefs are. Hence, UDTs.

• 53:48Jocko Willink?

  If you didn't listen to that podcast, I think it's 298 with Ben Milligan and get that book. Get that book. That freaking book is outstanding by Water Beneath the Waves. Talk about going into depth and figuring out and understanding why things are the way they are. It's an outstanding book. From the standpoint of human behavior, human feelings, leadership and decision making, the events of 1942 in North Africa exemplify in microcosm the major causes of military incompetence. Underneath his robust exterior, Ritchie, like Buller, before him and Elphinstone

• 54:27Jocko Willink?

  before him, lacked self-confidence and seemed more concerned with proving himself to himself than with prosecuting the war.

• 54:37Jocko Willink?

  The presiding over interminable committee meetings through which the army was run, the seeking of advice and then not taking it, and the disingenuous way in which he managed to convince the commander in chief that he was protecting Tobruk while in reality leaving it to the mercy of the Germans are the actions of a man beset by inner doubts. These doubts were skillfully but not perfectly concealed by his often inappropriate facade of monumental complacency.

• 55:15Jocko Willink?

  Now we go to Singapore, Chapter 11.

• 55:20Jocko Willink?

  One can sum up by saying that those responsible for the conduct of the land campaign in Malaya committed every conceivable blunder. Major General Woodburn Kirby, Singapore, the chain of disaster. In the nine weeks between early December 1941 and mid-February 1942, the impregnable fortress of Singapore, Europe's gateway to the East, with its thriving city, huge naval dockyard and strategic vital airfields, fell lock, stock and barrel into the hands of the Japanese. The invasion of this island stronghold, the complete defeat of the combined British and Australian garrison with its army, navy and air force units, was the ultimate unconditional

• 56:00Jocko Willink?

  surrender of the whole area was so rapid that even the Japanese were staggered, indeed one almost might say nonplussed by the ease, speed and enormity of their success. In the long run, the results of this disaster may be deemed incalculable. The myth of European supremacy over Asiatic peoples was exploded forever and the prestige of competence of the British military endeavor in the eyes of the world in general and America in particular were damaged beyond repair. In the short run, Britain lost her last and strongest foothold in the Far East, an appalling setback for the global war effort. We lost thousands of lives, both military and civilian, but worse perhaps than the

• 56:45Jocko Willink?

  loss of life, the military debacle condemned thousands more to three and a half years of misery in Japanese internment camps. Finally, the economic loss ran into hundreds of millions of pounds. We forfeited elaborate and expensive dock installations, naval and other engineering facilities, military stores, fuel, the major port for exporting urgently needed rubber and two new first-class battleships. Most of these material assets fell virtually intact into the hands of the enemy, thus in effect doubling their value, the value of their loss to the Allies.

• 57:26Jocko Willink?

  Like other cases we have discussed, that of Singapore is essentially a human problem, a product of human behavior, human intellect, human character and human error. No explanation in terms of geography, climate, broad political or military considerations can possibly do justice to the facts.

• 57:44Jocko Willink?

  At bottom and at the top, we are confronted with issues that are primarily psychological and which only a reduction to psychological principles can possibly explain. So this freaking disaster unfolds in Singapore, a disaster.

• 58:01Jocko Willink?

  And as you're gonna see, it's not about who is smart and it's not about like the military situation, it's the freaking psychopathology of the leaders.

• 58:12Jocko Willink?

  Let us state the problem in terms of a number of questions. Why was the impregnable fortress planned and serviced in such a way that while presenting apparently formidable defenses on its southern side, its back and northern shore was no more of a resistance than would be invader than the back of Bournemouth? Why was there an almost total lack of coordination and cooperation between those who had been entrusted with the job of defending the island? Why was it clear that the Japanese could and would assault the island from its northern side, was nothing done to erect defenses in their path? Why did the general officer commanding Singapore, Lieutenant General Percival, ignore the urgent

• 58:52Jocko Willink?

  advice of his subordinate Brigadier Simpson and of his superior, General Wavell, to implement these defenses? Why on the one hand was so little done to protect the civilian population against air raids and on the other, so much done to prevent their knowing the true facts of the situation as these unfolded? Why did General Percival persist in believing the Japanese would attack from the northeast when confronted with overwhelming evidence that their assault would come from the northwest? Why did the officer commanding the Australian forces on the island forbid his troops to escape while secretly plotting his own getaway from the island? Finally, and perhaps of greatest interest, how did the men who could perpetrate such colossal errors of judgment ever reach a position where this was possible?

• 59:39Jocko Willink?

  It's quite the setup.

• 59:42Jocko Willink?

  In 1925, there was a protracted and acrimonious argument between the Army, Navy, and Air Force Chiefs as to how Singapore should be defended. While the older services pressed for fortifications and heavy fixed guns to repel an attack from seaward, trencured for the RAF advocated for a large force of aircraft to repel any attack before it could become come within range of the island. Needless to say, the Army and the Navy won their case at the expense of more junior service. Heavy fixed armaments became the order of the day. This debate in which the RAF had to concede defeat had three unfortunate consequences. Firstly, the island was left exposed and undefended on its northern side. Secondly, senior Army commanders from that time on stubbornly clung to the dogma that no Japanese would ever advance on Singapore down the Malay Peninsula.

• 1:00:28Jocko Willink?

  Finally, the bitter inter-service quarrel which ensued resulted in an almost total lack of coordination between the three services.

• 1:00:39Jocko Willink?

  For future reference.

• 1:00:42Jocko Willink?

  Let me say this.

• 1:00:46Jocko Willink?

  Dave, you have a platoon. In your platoon, there's a two different, let's call them cliques.

• 1:00:54Jocko Willink?

  And they have two different ideas of what you should be focused on and how you should operate. And what you do is you sort of negotiate a piece between these two cliques. And you sort of compromise and you figure out, hey, like, we'll do a little bit of this click and a little bit of that click and you kind of, you kind of bring these forces to a compromise. You get them working together. You get them to like, take these things that they could be arguing about. You give one here and give the other side one here. And so you, you end up with a team that although they're not perfectly in sync, they're at least sort of working together.

• 1:01:32Jocko Willink?

  My platoon, I have two cliques. And what I do is I get mad at them. Because they don't get along. And then I agree with one of the cliques actually a little bit more. And so I give them favoritism. And now we end up with this, you know, head butting. Who, who's got a better platoon? Right, so. If you think about this in a large strategic view. And you look at a place called the United States of America right now. And you look at how miraculously, or strangely. We've become super divisive about all kinds of things to the point where we are banging against each other's heads.

• 1:02:18Jocko Willink?

  And we don't get along. And we've got people that sit so far apart in their beliefs. Not only do they sit so far apart in their beliefs, they can't find common ground on anything. On anything.

• 1:02:33Jocko Willink?

  And we've got known. Known actors in the world. That make moves to increase the division between the sides of people that we have in America. And the people in America don't even recognize that all of this fighting. Is making our platoon weak.

• 1:02:59Jocko Willink?

  It's very interesting, isn't it? It's very interesting that we know. That there are actors that are, there are state actors that are creating divisiveness in our own country. And yet, instead of saying, hey, you know what, actually, we shouldn't argue about that stuff. Hey, you know what, Dave, you got your opinion on that? I got my opinion, but you know what, there's a bunch of stuff we agree on. Let's focus on that. Okay, you know what, that makes sense. We can go execute the mission now. Instead, no, you know what, Dave, you don't agree with me on this? Well, screw you. I don't even want to work with you. Now we can't operate. We can't get anything done.

• 1:03:35Jocko Willink?

  So obvious.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Jocko Willink?

  It's so obvious.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  It's hard to look at too. Cause not only are you going to disagree with me, you're going to actively. Actively sabotage my efforts.

• 1:03:46Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  And, and the hardest part about that is that the reality is we are on the same team. Those two, those two platoons in your task unit. They're on the same team.

• 1:04:01Jocko Willink?

  Very disturbing.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Jocko Willink?

  I've been trying, I've got to think a way to articulate that a little bit more clearly. And, and present it in a way that people can see it. But it's very difficult because when you present it, if I present it to the platoon and say, hey, guys, I think it looks like we're, we're actually, looks like we're actually not, uh, helping here. We're not moving this thing forward. You know what? One side says, oh, so you're trying to take their side, are you?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Jocko Willink?

  That's exactly what happens.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  That's, and that's the point I was thinking when you said that, when, when you, you know, you, you, you were sort of over like, I show a little bias towards this one team. Which is, all the other side needs to go, oh, I see what side you're on.

• 1:04:41Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  I see what your agenda is.

• 1:04:43Jocko Willink?

  You're one of them.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I see what you're getting at.

• 1:04:45Jocko Willink?

  So I've got to think of a way to articulate this properly to people because right now, but we don't understand it as Americans. We are in this sort of trap where there's a total lack of coordination between the different sides.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Jocko Willink?

  Our government can't even get anything done. They're, they're, they're, they're losers. They're just not, not making any progress.

• 1:05:09Jocko Willink?

  And all they're doing is fighting with each other and not realizing that while we're fighting each other, number one, there's other state actors that are, that are feeding this fight. And while they're, while they're feeding our fight and we're having these infights, guess what these other state actors are doing? Growing their economy, unifying their people,

• 1:05:32Jocko Willink?

  growing their military strength, growing the will of their people. And we are being divided.

• 1:05:46Jocko Willink?

  I'll think of a way to try and communicate this so people will hopefully start to understand it. I haven't done a good job thus far.

• 1:05:56Jocko Willink?

  Meanwhile, back on Singapore, there's a total lack of coordination between the three services. The reason this is such a fitting thing is because you're going to see what happens in Singapore when you don't work together.

• 1:06:07Jocko Willink?

  And when your ego, oh yeah, by the way, Dave, I think I know everything. And so therefore, how can you possibly be right on anything at all?

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. You certainly know you're right.

• 1:06:16Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I definitely know I'm right.

• 1:06:20Jocko Willink?

  The RAF began constructing airfields without consultation with the army who would have to defend them. So there's a great move.

• 1:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Japanese military machine was, oh yeah, this was the belief was, look, the Japanese, they're primitive. They're not going to be able to, we shouldn't even take them seriously.

• 1:06:39Jocko Willink?

  Thus, and now fast forward a little bit, thus when the Malay Tribune published the news that Japanese transports had been sighted off the southern tip of Indochina, the editor was immediately castigated by the Commander in Chief of the Far East, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke Ponnem, Popem, who said, "I consider it most improper to print such alarmist views at a time like the present. The position isn't half so serious as the Tribune makes out." And this is such a great little section. He says, "This form of complaint is not without interest. Firstly, he did not deny the truth of the press release. He hardly could, since it originated in a report by Reuters,

• 1:07:22Jocko Willink?

  which had been passed by the censor and which undoubtedly was true. Secondly, he managed to imply all in one breath that the situation was both not serious and yet likely to cause alarm." Like, why are you causing alarm like this, Dave? And by the way, there's nothing to be panicked about.

• 1:07:42Jocko Willink?

  His words exemplified a tendency seen all too often to talk down to a civilian population as a group through some weakness of intellect or lack of moral fiber, oh, sorry, who, through some weakness of intellect or lack of moral fiber, could not be trusted with information held by their elders and betters. Meaning the military is like, you don't really know what's going on here. You need to worry about that. The Guardians of Singapore were prime exemplars of this motivation. After a long history of wrong thinking, they could not afford to be found mistaken. The more events proved them to be wrong, the stronger their defenses became against admitting this to be the case.

• 1:08:20Jocko Willink?

  And this is very important, as Hitler's administration demonstrated in its starkest form, man, this is important, suppression of the truth involves two procedures, on the one hand censorship, and on the other hand, official communiques. The High Command in Singapore employed both measures. Take the order of the day released to the melee Tribune a bare two months before Singapore capitulated, it reads, "We are ready. We have had plenty of warning and our preparations are made and tested, we are confident, our defenses are strong and our weapons efficient, whatever our race, we have one aim and one

• 1:09:02Jocko Willink?

  only, it is to defend these shores, to destroy such of our enemies as may set foot on our soil. What of our enemy? We have seen before us Japan drained for years by exhausting claims of a wanton onslaught of China. Let us all remember that we here in the Far East form part of the great campaign in the world of truth and justice and freedom." As the editor of the Tribune said, "It was hard to believe that anybody could deliberately tell so many lies." On Monday, the 18th, 1941, General Headquarters issued its first war communiqué. It stated that the Japanese had failed in their attempt to land at Kota Baru.

• 1:09:44Jocko Willink?

  This was followed shortly after by a second communiqué which stated, "All surface craft are retiring at high speed and the few troops left on the beach are being heavily machine-gunned." In fact, the communiqué was essentially untrue and deliberately misleading, within a space of a few hours from the time of the Japanese landing, Kota Baru was firmly in enemy hands. There's a couple battleships, as a desperate measure, two battleships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sent to Singapore to create an 11th hour presence. They were under the command of Admiral Sir Tom Phillips. In the words of one who met him, quote, "A real old sea dog bluff and tough." Unfortunately, he lacks efficient.

• 1:10:27Jocko Willink?

  Despite strong warnings that he could not expect adequate air cover, he was soon off with his two ships in search of trouble. At first, all went well as the ships steamed reassuringly up the east coast. When he heard that there was weather, so he thought he'd be okay, his ships, but the weather lifted. His ships were spotted by Japanese air force torpedoed and sunk with a total loss of 840 officers and men. By all accounts, Phillips was a brave and conscientious officer, but his braveness bordered on foolhardiness, and his errors of judgment not only had a devastating effect on that much cherished commodity, but the morale of the Singapore civilians also sealed the fate of their city. So much for the Navy. In their chosen field,

• 1:11:09Jocko Willink?

  the senior command of the RAF acquitted themselves little better. It has already been seen how Air Chief Marshal Brooke Pomham underestimated Japan's air strength in comparison with his own ill-assorted group of obsolete aircraft. The same 63-year-old officer, whose most notable characteristic was a tendency to fall asleep on the slightest pretext, showed such disastrous hesitancy and indecision in his capacity as commander-in-chief, that as the official history was moved to state, quote, "It is possible that he did not fully realize the importance of speed. The need for quick decision was not apparently realized at Headquarters

• 1:11:50Jocko Willink?

  Malaya Command." And this is something I talked about earlier, the first night raid, they get a, they get a warning 30 minutes early that there's Japanese inbound. And they didn't do anything. It seems the Japanese had committed the unforgivable faux pas of attacking at night, unforgivable because it conflicted with the official dogma that the Japanese were unable to fly their planes during the hours of darkness. This idea cost Singapore 61 dead and 133 injured, but the recklessness of the admirals and the dithering of the air marshals were nothing.

• 1:12:27Jocko Willink?

  As to the uncompromising of the generals, it seemed that nothing could move them, not even pleading of their fellow officers. As Noah Barber says in his book Sinister Twilight, quote, "When Brigadier General Simpson," and you remember this is like the good guy, "When Brigadier General Simpson, the chief engineer, went to see Major General Gordon Bennett, commanding the 8th Australian Division, he found it impossible to make him realize that there was an urgent need for anti-tank defenses. At first, he did not want to discuss the matter at all," Simpson noted after the meeting. Simpson was horrified. "Could not the Australian general understand that there was nothing on the long road to prevent the enemy from reaching them?" Apparently Gordon Bennett could not, for in his diary that

• 1:13:12Jocko Willink?

  night, he wrote, "Malay Command sent Brigadier Simpson to discuss with me the creation of anti-tank obstacles for use on the road. Personally, I have little time for these obstacles, preferring to stop and destroy tanks with anti-tank weapons."

• 1:13:26Jocko Willink?

  "No wonder that the Japanese never slowed down. No wonder that time after time, troops were annihilated by skillful Japanese enveloping tactics. On the British side, wrong decisions were made, communications broke down, whole pockets of troops were cut off. First, Japanese tanks appeared and came as a great surprise to the British, who had not one single tank in Malaya."

• 1:13:47Jocko Willink?

  "In a jungle country where the British had insisted that tanks could never operate, the Japanese tanks moved easily between spacious rows of rubber tree," end quote. Major General Gordon Bennett was not to use the appropriate vernacular, "an isolated pocket of resistance, nor did he hold the record of obstinacy." In Barber's words, "Attempts by Brigadier Simpson to move and add to the defenses had been balked at at every turn, largely by General Percival," "who seemed to have had a fixation against such measures. Nothing had been done, nothing was being done, despite previous pleas. A hazard of belonging to any rigidity, any rigidly authoritarian hierarchical organization, is that from time to time, the individual,

• 1:14:31Jocko Willink?

  out of dire necessity, or from strong personal conviction, feels compelled to apply pressures to those above him." "It is a hazard because the ethos of the organization, whether it be a Victorian family, an English boarding school, or the British Army, demands that pressure always moves only in one way, downwards, rather than upwards."

• 1:14:52Jocko Willink?

  To buck the system by prodding those above can have unpleasant consequences. You're in a totally freaking rigid situation.

• 1:15:01Jocko Willink?

  And Simpson is trying.

• 1:15:04Jocko Willink?

  Simpson is trying, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. It seems that Simpson was past taking no for an answer for, he said to the general, "Sir, I must emphasize the urgency of doing everything to help our troops. They're often only partially trained. They're tired and dispirited. They've been retreating for hundreds of miles. And please remember, sir, the Japanese are better trained, better equipped, and they are inspired by an unbroken run of victories. And it has to be done now, sir. Once the area comes under fire, civilian labor will vanish." He's wanting to get these, just get freaking obstacles set up. "The plea was forceful, respectful, and logical, but amazingly, the general remained unmoved. Simpson, in his rising anger, said, "Look here, general, I've raised this question time after time.

• 1:15:47Jocko Willink?

  You've always refused. What more? You've always refused to give me any reasons. At least tell me one thing. Why on earth are you taking this stand?" He's like, "Why the hell don't you want me to build obstacles? What's wrong with you? Why not?" At long last, the general officer commanding Malaya gave his answer. Quote, "I believe the defenses of the sort you want to throw up are bad for the morale of the troops and civilians," end quote. Simpson was, quote, "frankly horrified and remember standing there in the room, suddenly feeling quite cold and realizing that, except for a miracle, Singapore was as good as lost." As he put on his Sam Brown, Simpson could not forbear to make one last remark.

• 1:16:27Jocko Willink?

  Quote, "Sir, it is going to be much worse for morale if the Japanese start running all over the island."

• 1:16:38Jocko Willink?

  You can't make this up.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  That is so hard to listen to. And for whatever sense of validation in my head of as soon as he said it's bad for morale, I first thought was, you know what's worse for morale? And of course, you know, I don't know what he's gonna say, but I understand that that's what this guy is seeing or thinking. And you saying that doesn't make me feel any better because it's just, I mean, I'm just getting repetitive at this point. It's just a, you have to be crazy to not accept.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  To not accept the facts that don't align with the worldview you've created in your head.

• 1:17:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I'm only reading chunks of the book. It's even worse than it's worse than I'm making it sound.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  And I have the distinct disadvantage of seeing how much of this book you've actually gone through and go, wow, there's chunk. I mean, big, big chunks, which I can only assume.

• 1:17:28Jocko Willink?

  Just reinforce over and over again.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Another example, another example, another example, another example. And this dude is a good writer and he's a good writer and you and I'm glad that in the very beginning you set this up. This, this isn't a researcher. This isn't like a theorist or, or, or a, you know, an academic. He, he has all those pedigrees. This guy fought, this guy fought. He was a warrior.

• 1:17:53Jocko Willink?

  And was wounded.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:17:56Jocko Willink?

  By his own incompetence.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Through his own admission by his own incompetence, which is like, and he's humble. Yeah. Which is awesome. So. Yeah, this is, this is rough. And, and I think what I'm still adding to this is just, I think it's at a point of repetition of just.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  It's really hard to accept that these are real stories from real people in real leadership positions. Leading up to what was just people getting slaughtered.

• 1:18:26Jocko Willink?

  You know, like you said, he was a soldier, but he was also a psychologist. And so he gives these psychological assessments as too. So here's, here's one of them. In the case of Percival and Gordon Bennett, to erect defenses would have been to admit to themselves the danger in which they stood. In other words, their professional anxiety about civilian morale was really displaced anxiety about their own morale. Looking further into the story of Singapore, one is struck by the compulsive element in this refusal of the military to defend itself. Such compulsive behavior is typical of many who present an authoritarian personality

• 1:19:05Jocko Willink?

  and are reared in an organization which traditionally deals with fear and danger by ritualistic means. I E. Bullshit, chicken shit, drill and parades, et cetera.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Or is what I think he referred to earlier as like the real business of soldiering. We're going to get back to, you know, um, drilling ceremonies.

• 1:19:27Jocko Willink?

  So there's a, there's a admiral that comes along or, yeah. Uh, who was it?

• 1:19:35Jocko Willink?

  Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Far East, this guy Archibald Wavell. And he, he shows up and is kind of like, what the hell's going on, bro? Uh, so then next thing that happens is a directive from Churchill giving detailed instructions on how to defend the North Shore. The measures listed were precisely those which had been advocated by Simpson. But despite these pressures, Percival still did nothing. When he eventually issued a plan, it was already too late for the necessary civilian labor was no longer available. Just as Simpson had said it was going to be. On the disposition of his forces, Percival's thinking seemed no less deranged. Rather than hold a force in reserve that could, could be rushed quickly to wherever the Japanese eventually chose to land.

• 1:20:19Jocko Willink?

  He decided to spread his troops thinly over a long front. In other words, he decided now because it would be good for morale, just exactly what he had refused to do early because it would be bad for morale. In this battle of Singapore, and they put that in quotes, order of the day, Percival made it, made great play of phrases like the enemy within our gates, loose talk and rumor mongering, all calculated to alarm civilians.

• 1:20:48Jocko Willink?

  And this from the man who had laid such stress on the importance of civilian morale.

• 1:20:54Jocko Willink?

  Of this period, Barbara writes, in all the catalog of ineffectual leadership, nothing is quite so public puzzling as the virtual absence of any deterrent action during the last precious hours of daylight before the Japanese attacked. It is hard to believe that a modern general could so easily ignore what was happening around him.

• 1:21:18Jocko Willink?

  That's, I've never heard quite as bold of a statement as in all the catalog of ineffectual leadership. That's a bold one.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a big catalog.

• 1:21:32Jocko Willink?

  Says for the Allies, "It was a week of chaos and confusion, unrelieved by any vestiges of competent leadership or generalship. Thanks to the absence of defenses, including a failure to use searchlights, which had been assembled to blind and make targets of the attackers as they paddled their way across the Johor Straits, the Japanese landed almost unmolested. Despite a devastating barrage from Japanese artillery, British guns, instead of pounding the enemy's point of embarkation, remained mute, awaiting orders that never came. Despite weeks of warning, Allied ground forces were speedily outflanked, encircled, cut off, or routed.

• 1:22:16Jocko Willink?

  In the event, 138,708 British, Indian, and Australian soldiers either died or went into captivity." This is the beginning, if you've listened to podcast number 12, Alistair Urquhart, The Forgotten Highlander. This is, this is where he starts his captivity. I think he'd been in the army for like two or three months at this point, 19 years old.

• 1:22:54Jocko Willink?

  138,000 in one event. Of all the instances of military incompetence considered in this book, is the fall of Singapore, which most clearly gives the lie to the so-called bloody fool theory of military ineptitude. Percival was in fact highly intelligent and had shown himself in previous years to be a brilliant staff officer. What he shared with other earlier military incompetence were passivity, the opposite of default aggressive, by the way, and courtesy, rigidity, and obstinacy, procrastination,

• 1:23:38Jocko Willink?

  gentleness, and dogmatism. 138,000. Two battleships, by the way. Insane.

• 1:23:59Jocko Willink?

  The next chapter is about Arnhem.

• 1:24:07Jocko Willink?

  This is one we covered. We covered, so we've covered part of Singapore, obviously, when we covered Alexander Urquhart. Arnhem, we covered Podcast 94. The, the book was called Men at Arnhem, written by Jeffrey Powell, who was there, who fought there.

• 1:24:25Jocko Willink?

  And I think, you know, when you read, reading this assessment,

• 1:24:31Jocko Willink?

  really puts it, really puts that book into perspective. It starts off with this couple quotes. "All the accumulated evidence confirms that, like Gallipoli, this was a British disaster where naked courage lacked the bodyguard of competent planning, competent intelligence, competent technology. Yet war's object is victory, not the Victoria Cross. And it was shameful that by autumn of 1944, we could still be so amateur."

• 1:25:04Jocko Willink?

  The object is victory, not the Victoria Cross. We don't, that's the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in England.

• 1:25:12Jocko Willink?

  Here's a private soldier's comments. "It began to seem to me that the generals had got us into something they had no business doing.

• 1:25:23Jocko Willink?

  If it achieved nothing else, Operation Market Garden, Montgomery's plan to capture and hold a bridgehead across the Rhine in northern Holland, at least demolishes the myth that military incompetence stems from stupidity. For sheer initiative, quickness of mind, fortitude, and selfless heroism, the conduct of those who actually fought the battle has never been surpassed.

• 1:25:48Jocko Willink?

  By the same token, the men who planned and administered the operation were probably as intellectually gifted, well-trained, professionally competent, dedicated, and conscientious as any military planners have ever been.

• 1:26:05Jocko Willink?

  And yet, the unfolding of Market Garden revealed all the symptoms of high-level military incompetence."

• 1:26:13Jocko Willink?

  That's like incre- how would you feel if someone said, you know what, Dave? You're intellectually gifted, well-trained, professionally competent, dedicated and conscientious. That's what we're looking for in our leaders. And yet, this thing is a disaster.

• 1:26:33Jocko Willink?

  The failure of the operation resulted from a linked

• 1:26:40Jocko Willink?

  together of the following factors.

• 1:26:45Jocko Willink?

  One, as a result of his neglect to open up the port of Antwerp by clearing the shelled estuary, Montgomery allowed the German 15th Army to escape north into Holland, where it was available to defend the approaches to Arnhem.

• 1:27:02Jocko Willink?

  Two, the arrival at Arnhem of 30th Corps depended upon the advancing across 64 miles of enemy-held territory on a one-tank front along elevated unprotected highways, flanked by a soft and sodden tank-proof landscape interspersed with waterways. Any delay, a blown bridge, an enemy ambush, a blocked road, and the entire column would be stopped. Any delay and the Germans would have more time to bring up reinforcements. In the event, it is hardly surprising that 30th Corps never did reach Arnhem, that they could not achieve it even in nine days, what had been scheduled to take 48 hours.

• 1:27:46Jocko Willink?

  Now, I'm gonna say, I know I gave credit to your 12-year-old daughter, and I'm gonna say, your 12-year-old daughter might not be able to figure this one out. Look, you gotta go 60, what is it, 64 miles, 67 miles, 64 miles?

• 1:28:04Jocko Willink?

  But, pretty much, any Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps sees a channelized 64-mile road that's completely exposed to the enemy,

• 1:28:19Jocko Willink?

  and doesn't like this plan.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  If I'm hearing it correctly, what you're describing is a one, essentially a one, he called it a single tank approach, a one lane highway, which on either side is impassable due to, you know, canals and the terrain, whatever it is, it's impassable. You have a one lane highway and your entire formation is going to be single file. That's how this is going to work.

• 1:28:39Jocko Willink?

  And he mentions, we might get ambushed, right? Or, or we might get a blown bridge. How about this? A broken down tank? How about, how about we have a freaking crash?

• 1:28:55Jocko Willink?

  Number three, as might have been expected from what is known of English autumns, the mists, if not the mellow fruitfulness of the, of an English late September, delayed the departure of subsequent gliders and paratroopers for the reinforcement of the first armored division. Like, we didn't think there might be fog in the morning where in England?

• 1:29:13Jocko Willink?

  Market Garden, perhaps more than most military operations necessitated good communication between the various units and commanders of the attacking force. But here, technology failed them.

• 1:29:25Jocko Willink?

  Though it was now 50 years since Marconi had succeeded in sending messages by wireless, the radio sets carried by the invasion force proved useless.

• 1:29:34Jocko Willink?

  Unless within earshot of each other, no one knew what anyone else was doing. And look, you can say technology failed them. If I'm a freaking military planner,

• 1:29:45Jocko Willink?

  and I'm relying on the communications in 1944, that's what's going to make us successful? You're an idiot. We could barely rely on communications 10 years ago. We can rely on them a lot more now. Maybe, okay, not 10 years ago, sorry. 20 years ago. 20 years ago?

• 1:30:07Jocko Willink?

  You're barely, you're barely, like, the year 2000, you're barely saying, oh yeah, don't worry, we'll get comms. We had backup comms all the time. Backup communication plans. We had all the time. And you know what? We had them in Ramadi as well, of course. So to think that your comms is going to be good to go in 1944? That's not technology failure. That's a freaking lack of planning.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. A single point of failure of probably the most critical thing you're able to do is talk. More than employ your weapons, even more than moving, your ability to talk is probably the most critical thing that you have to coordinate all these different assets, all these different things going on.

• 1:30:48Jocko Willink?

  I can't imagine.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  Secondary, I mean, we had, I remember when I was in Ramadi because as an Angloco Marine, comms was my, was really the number one thing. It was secondary to the, to the utilization of the aircraft. Number one was comms. We had this incredible comm suite and every brief was, hey, let's hire, let's create the prioritization of how we're going to communicate. And it was based on where we were, how far away we were going to be, what assets were available. If I have a Humvee, cool, I got a vehicle, it's powered, I got this high-powered antenna, I've got these cool powered radios. And if I gotta get out of that Humvee and start walking, I don't have that thing anymore. So I gotta have a backup plan. And every single mission I went on, me and my radio operator talked about, if this doesn't work, what are we gonna do? And guess what? Stuff, the nicest, best, highest tech didn't work routinely.

• 1:31:31Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And by the way, what are you doing then? You're getting out your signal panel. Right? We're marking our position with a big orange panel.

• 1:31:44Jocko Willink?

  Number five, since the airborne assault was to take place in daylight, and because it was vital that 30 corps should complete their journey within 48 hours, 64 miles and 48 hours on the single track, the whole enterprise depended upon the absence of strong German forces, both in Arnhem area and on the approach route from the south. Hence, it came of something as a jolt when they received reports from the Dutch underground that two SS Panzer divisions, which had mysteriously disappeared some time previously, had now reappeared alongside, almost alongside the dropping zone. This information passed on to Montgomery, received support from the British aerial photography of German tanks

• 1:32:27Jocko Willink?

  in the Arnhem area. Meanwhile, forward troops of the British Second Army reported a buildup of German forces along their intended line of advance.

• 1:32:38Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, might want to reconsider. This is the moment to reassess the risks involved, but since these ugly facts did not accord with what they had planned, they fell upon a succession of deaf ears. Taking the lead from Montgomery, who described the report as ridiculous, British Second Army Headquarters were quick to discount it also. When one of his intelligence officers showed him the aerial photographs of German armor, General Browning at First British Airborne Headquarters retorted, "I wouldn't trouble myself about these if I were you. They are probably not serviceable at any rate."

• 1:33:19Jocko Willink?

  Is there any stronger form of just straight like denial and idiocy than that right there? You get shown the, first you get intel reports and then you get shown photographs of the armor tanks, the German tanks on the ground and you're like, they're probably not serviceable. You can't make this shit up.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  You also know that there was two divisions there that are gone. It's, it's, they didn't appear out of nowhere. You know these divisions existed. Yeah, that's.

• 1:33:52Jocko Willink?

  The intelligence officer was then visited by the corps medical officer who suggested he should take some leave because he was so obviously exhausted.

• 1:34:03Jocko Willink?

  And at first allied army headquarters, the chief intelligence officer, British Lieutenant Colonel decided there was no direct evidence that the Arnim area contained quote, "much more than the considerable flak defenses already known to exist." As Ryan puts it, quote, "all down the allied line of command, the evaluation of intelligence on the Panzers in Arnim area was magnificently bungled."

• 1:34:28Jocko Willink?

  Finally, just in case there were any residual doubts, the intelligence staff of the second army came up with the reassuring opinion that any German forces in the Arnim area were, quote, "weak, demoralized, and likely to collapse if confronted with a large airborne attack."

• 1:34:47Jocko Willink?

  That's insane.

• 1:34:50Jocko Willink?

  The freaking Nazis. The Nazis are trying to defend their Reich.

• 1:34:59Jocko Willink?

  They're fighting for their lives.

• 1:35:03Jocko Willink?

  They're fighting for their country. They know what happens if they lose. They're some of the finest fighting forces in the world and yet we're just gonna go ahead and catalog them as weak, demoralized, and likely to collapse. And by the way randomly, it just, if they're confronted with a large airborne attack, like that's the thing. Because hey, when you're in airborne attack, cause that means you, you, do you even have anti-tank weapons? Barely. You've got no armor. This is ridiculous.

• 1:35:35Jocko Willink?

  Market Garden went ahead, but not so quite as planned. Instead of encountering a few old men who collapsed or ran away, 1st Airborne Division fell upon a hornet's nest of German armor. Far from being demoralized, the enemy fought like tigers to defend the gateway of their homeland. And far from sweeping across Holland to aid the hard-pressed paratroops, the tanks of the 2nd Army's 30th Corps were reduced to a crawl by the combination of unsuitable terrain and determined opposition.

• 1:36:11Jocko Willink?

  And this is going to finish out this section of the book. Defeat was absolute and terrible.

• 1:36:18Jocko Willink?

  Short on everything but courage, the men of 1st Airborne Division held on until their numbers had been reduced from 10,005 to less than a quarter of that figure.

• 1:36:31Jocko Willink?

  Total allied losses and killed, wounded, and missing exceeded 17,000. Some 5,000 more than those who became casualties on D-Day.

• 1:36:53Jocko Willink?

  So, there you have it. Defeat was absolute and terrible.

• 1:37:00Jocko Willink?

  And that despite the fact that for the beginning of this section, sheer initiative, quickness of mind, fortitude, and selfless heroism, the conduct of those who actually fought the battle has never been surpassed. And this, you want to talk about disturbing.

• 1:37:19Jocko Willink?

  Field Marshal Montgomery described the mission as a 90% success. That's how he presented it. 90% success.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  I think, to be clear, if I understand what you're saying, in the aftermath.

• 1:37:33Jocko Willink?

  In the aftermath of everything that happened.

• 1:37:35Speaker 01

  He considered it, yeah.

• 1:37:36Jocko Willink?

  He reported, considered, told people

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:42Jocko Willink?

  That this was a 90% success.

• 1:37:47Jocko Willink?

  Um, actually, there's a little quote in there I got to read based on that.

• 1:37:54Jocko Willink?

  There's this, he, so he says this is a 90% success. And um, there's a Prince Bernard of the Netherlands. Said, "My country can never again afford the luxury of a Montgomery success."

• 1:38:14Jocko Willink?

  So that's what we've got. Um, it's insane. It's weird how you and I are at a loss for words over and over and over again.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  If, you know, if you're listening to this and you've got some free time, I think I mentioned it last time. We're talking about some of the characters, but Band of Brothers covers this and, and Market Garden from the American, um, you know, uh, airborne troopers and, and are, um, there's a cool replaying and retelling of this and what we saw in the combination of that, but this is revealed there. It's, it's, it's very well done, but it does not, it does not, um, expose the depths of the why behind it. It looks at, it looks like it, looks at it from a tactical point of view and it's, it's very good to see. It's really, you should watch it. It's not, Band of Brothers is awesome. But this takes it and reveals it on a level that, that for me, the reason I can't, I don't know what to say.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  It's just really hard to just, it's, this is, this is 1944.

• 1:39:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we aren't new.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  We, we are not.

• 1:39:18Jocko Willink?

  We're experienced combat.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  Yes. Indeed, he is behind us. Like this isn't figuring out, hey, how do we get our footing here? Things are not going well. This isn't Singapore. This isn't Pearl Harbor. This isn't the invasion of Poland. This isn't even the Battle of Britain. This is 1944. It's, it's, it's crazy.

• 1:39:38Jocko Willink?

  Yep. You know, you can see, uh, I guess the British, the British generals, but they, they have a different little character that they play, you know, when they get up and they need to convince people. You can see like Monty, right? You know, getting up, "Well, gents, it's a rough fight, but we've got 90% success, right?" You know, you can, like, they're doing a different thing, but it's the same, it's a different accent. But it's the same bullshit. Chest out, furled eyebrows. Little bit more, little bit more haughty from the Brits from Montgomery. But he's playing that same role.

• 1:40:19Jocko Willink?

  And you gotta ask yourself, why does this happen? Why, why is this happening? Why are we going through these historical examples? It's not from technology. It's not from lack of fighting spirit. It's not the terrain.

• 1:40:34Jocko Willink?

  Um, it's bad leadership.

• 1:40:37Jocko Willink?

  And where does this bad leadership come from? Where is it rooted? Well, it is rooted in the psychological. The psychological minds of these leaders. And there's plenty of great ones and we're not talking about them on this podcast. We're talking about the psychopaths. And we will dive into that on the next podcast. Until then, Echo Charles.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 1:41:05Jocko Willink?

  Um, you know, we're, we're trying to not be psychopathic types of leaders.

• 1:41:12Jocko Willink?

  We're trying to be better than that. We're trying to be better in all ways, you know?

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Jocko Willink?

  Got any recommendations for us? How to get better?

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  We're trying not to have monumental complacency.

• 1:41:22Jocko Willink?

  That's definitely, we're trying not to do that.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  I think that was a thing.

• 1:41:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  So yeah, let's not do that. How about that? Okay. Well, let's start with ourselves, right? You start with yourself.

• 1:41:34Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna put your oxygen mask on before my own.

• 1:41:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  Otherwise I cannot breathe and then I cannot, you know, function.

• 1:41:42Jocko Willink?

  Well, I, I guess technically speaking, if I was in charge of a group of soldiers.

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  And I was, uh, I had gout. I was overweight.

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Jocko Willink?

  I was unhealthy.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Jocko Willink?

  I was mentally unstable.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:41:58Jocko Willink?

  I don't think I'm gonna do a good job leading my soldiers.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  It's gonna be very hard.

• 1:42:02Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna be difficult.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:03Jocko Willink?

  So let's, to your point, let's make sure we got our shit together.

• 1:42:08Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. I, I agree. And yeah, here's some ways to do it. Look, we're working out, we're reading, we're reading.

• 1:42:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're definitely reading.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  We're listening.

• 1:42:17Jocko Willink?

  Uh, that's what I do.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I listen.

• 1:42:20Jocko Willink?

  Work out and read.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I work out and I listen, you know, and I'll read here and there. Either way.

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  When we work out, we do things, we gotta put our bodies through little something. So they can adapt to be ready for a big something, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully. On this path, we're gonna take some beatings. It's okay, we got some supplementation. Okay, let's talk about energy drinks first. Energy drinks, the good energy drinks. Actually, now, I think nowadays when we talk about energy drinks, we're not even talking about the bad ones anymore.

• 1:42:51Jocko Willink?

  Well.

• 1:42:52Speaker 02

  Unless we indicate so.

• 1:42:53Jocko Willink?

  We need to make sure that we tell people that when we talk about energy drinks, we're talking about a certain type of energy drink that's good for you in all aspects.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying, exactly.

• 1:43:02Jocko Willink?

  Okay, there are energies that are horrible for you.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  Yes, sir, but now for now, for now, from now on, we're gonna indicate that we're talking about that kind. Either, either way, I got you. Okay, Jaco, discipline, go. Energy drinks, if you don't know, that's the, that's a healthy energy drink, got a little bit of caffeine in that one.

• 1:43:19Jocko Willink?

  Ninety-five milligrams, like a cup of coffee.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. Um, a bunch of other healthy stuff. It's an energy drink that is literally healthy for you.

• 1:43:27Jocko Willink?

  Neutropics, vitamins.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  Boom, there you go. Yeah, it's basically everything that you've, that you come to energy drinks for without the, the backside, what do you call it, tab, you gotta pay with your health.

• 1:43:37Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever, do you like the taste of any fast food?

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  Well, you know, depends on, uh, like and fast.

• 1:43:44Jocko Willink?

  Let me clear the path for you.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 1:43:45Jocko Willink?

  Let me clear the path for you. You, if you bring me to a Wendy's, which I used to work at, I'm going ham in Wendy's, right?

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 1:43:53Jocko Willink?

  Like, I, I would, I really enjoy the taste of Wendy's. Probably two years ago, I think one of my kids went and got, uh, McDonald's. You familiar with this place?

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  I, I, I hear things, yeah.

• 1:44:04Jocko Willink?

  I, I had a couple fries. And let's face it, dude, I mean, these things are engineered by doctors and physicists and chemists to satisfy your, your taste buds and your dopamine's firing, right? All this stuff is going on. So now imagine this, all that goodness, imagine if you had all that goodness and there was zero downside, right?

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny, I had this mental extras.

• 1:44:34Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's what you get with, with, with a go.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Jocko Willink?

  You get all that, you get all that goodness, you get all that goodness.

• 1:44:40Speaker 02

  Everything you signed up for, yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:42Jocko Willink?

  No downside, you just go, eh, eh, just go ham.

• 1:44:46Speaker 02

  You literally drink four of them.

• 1:44:49Jocko Willink?

  You're not gonna sleep tonight, by the way.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  No, actually, I probably am. Well, maybe. I don't know. Either way, I signed up for all that, see what I'm saying? Yeah, the McDonald's thing. I talked to my kids before they go to bed.

• 1:45:01Jocko Willink?

  Wendy's, Burger King. What's your go-to?

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  Well, I don't have a go-to.

• 1:45:04Jocko Willink?

  I haven't legitimately had fast food in years. Like, I haven't. Okay, like, I had a few fries. Wait a second, Chick-fil-A.

• 1:45:15Speaker 02

  Uh, well.

• 1:45:15Jocko Willink?

  During wrestling season, during wrestling season.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Chick-fil-A is not like as greasy. Let's face, okay, so we talked about this actually briefly. Why I went when I was on my way to Greg Jane's house and I had some McDonald's straight up. And I went kinda hard, too. I didn't eat anything. It was weak. It was very, very weak.

• 1:45:34Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's the time you got, like, taunted by, it was right on the side of the road.

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  Right on the side, like, literally, like, not even out of the way.

• 1:45:41Jocko Willink?

  It was almost easier to get to Greg Jane's house if you went through the McDonald's drive-thru, yeah. This is what you convince yourself of.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  That is what it felt like, yes.

• 1:45:47Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, there's that Wendy's right by Victory MMA and Fitness.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, yeah, that's another one. That's another. But I fell for the trap of Wendy's one time. I told you this, I think I told you this, where after training, I was like, I was in the wood for Wendy's for like forty-eight hours. And I was like, okay, man, look, there's the Wendy's on the way to training. I'm like, there's the Wendy's. Today's the day. I can't deal with this feeling anymore. I go train, like, kinda hard. After training, I go, boom, right into the Wendy's, right out of the Wendy's, drive-thru, boom, go, eat it, and I felt completely like shit afterwards. Completely after training, Wendy's, boom, it like, it jams you up. Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:22Jocko Willink?

  You shouldn't do that.

• 1:46:23Speaker 02

  From then on, Wendy's is easier to resist.

• 1:46:26Jocko Willink?

  Check this out. Imagine if you could go to Wendy's and you ate it and it was delicious and made you feel great.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, help you recover.

• 1:46:32Jocko Willink?

  That's what this drink is. That's what this drink is. It's a miracle. It's a miracle.

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  Chalk it with a miracle.

• 1:46:38Jocko Willink?

  It's a miracle. That you can have all upside and no downside, that's a miracle, right? Am I wrong?

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  You were not.

• 1:46:44Jocko Willink?

  Am I wrong, dude?

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  You are correct, actually.

• 1:46:46Jocko Willink?

  All right. Well, so there you go. You might wanna try some of that.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so now everyone's fired up. I get it.

• 1:46:51Jocko Willink?

  Hey, similar vein, milk. Similar vein, milk.

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:55Jocko Willink?

  Because the same thing, you're fired up to have something that tastes really good. You're fired up for a milkshake.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:01Jocko Willink?

  But you can, you know, you can, if you go gut bomb a milkshake, bro, like you feel like insulin coming out of your eyes. It's a disaster. But you go eat a milk.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, easy money.

• 1:47:13Jocko Willink?

  Your, your insulin level's freaking flatlined.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:17Jocko Willink?

  There are no spikes sweetened with monk fruit. No, no reason to go kill yourself. No reason to drink poison.

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  No, no reason to drink poison.

• 1:47:24Jocko Willink?

  It's another miracle.

• 1:47:25Speaker 02

  It's true. So.

• 1:47:27Jocko Willink?

  Miracles brought to you by Jocko Fuel.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  Yes. While you're at it, take care of your joints. You got joint work for a super krill oil. While you're at it, take care of your immunity. Cold war and vitamin D three. Sometimes we don't get out in the sun as much as we need to.

• 1:47:41Jocko Willink?

  That's bad.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  You know, that is bad, but the, the sun provides vitamin D, but if you don't get it from the sun, boom, vitamin D three. You don't have to go to out in the sun if you don't want to.

• 1:47:50Jocko Willink?

  Dude, my dog goes out and in, in my, uh, on a lounge chair, like a chair, what is it called?

• 1:47:58Jocko Willink?

  Like a deck chair. He just goes out there and he just gets vitamin D all day.

• 1:48:02Speaker 02

  He goes sunbathing. The sunbathing dog. Okay. All right. That's good. Well, yeah. So he might not need this, but for those of us who may not hit the sun as often as your dog or whatever. Uh, yeah. Vitamin D three. All good.

• 1:48:13Jocko Willink?

  All right. Where, where, where are we to get these miracles? jogofuel.com

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  Yep. Also at the vitamin shop.

• 1:48:18Jocko Willink?

  Vitamin shop.

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  Also for the energy drinks.

• 1:48:21Jocko Willink?

  Wawa.

• 1:48:22Speaker 02

  Wawa. I'll tell you, yeah.

• 1:48:23Jocko Willink?

  You know what we're working on?

• 1:48:26Jocko Willink?

  Ready to drink milk. You just roll in and you just pull it off the shelf and you're slamming a milkshake. That's good for you.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:34Jocko Willink?

  This is like another miracle.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  Dishing out miracles. It's good. But yeah, so yeah, also you can get a subscription to this stuff. If you didn't know that you, you get free shipping and you get it. You don't gotta, uh, remember to order it. Cause sometimes when you order, it takes one, two, three, four. I don't know. However, I don't know where you live. So I don't know how long it's going to take to get to your house, but sometimes there will be that lag time that you don't want, especially with the joint stuff. Actually, it's pretty much with all the stuff. So you get on the subscription. Boom. You get it reliably. Boom, boom. Free shipping, by the way. Also. Origin USA.

• 1:49:09Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah, you're gonna want to get on that.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  Yep, you want some American made stuff, especially the denim and the boots. So then again, I guess, you know, depends on what you like, what you're into.

• 1:49:17Jocko Willink?

  Well denim and boots aren't gonna do you any good if you're looking to train gi jujitsu.

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  Yep, but boom, we got some gi's, American made, the rift gi, by the way. Women talking about the rift gi, but that's one that's like, depends on who you are, but you can sleep in that thing like pajamas.

• 1:49:32Jocko Willink?

  For sure. If we made a long one, like a long jacket, you could be straight up in a robe.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 1:49:40Jocko Willink?

  You'd be straight up in a robe, bro.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  I might even exercise my right to wear that robe too, from time to time. Looks good. But yeah, a lot of good stuff, all made in America.

• 1:49:49Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  Like from, from the beginnings of the materials, probably even from the thoughts of the beginnings of the materials, all made in America. So yeah, you want to support an American economy.

• 1:49:58Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  One of the ways right here.

• 1:49:59Jocko Willink?

  You want, and you do want to support the American economy.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 1:50:03Jocko Willink?

  You do want to do that.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true. Again, originusa.com, if you like something on there, yeah, get something. You support, you support a lot, actually. Also, speaking of, speaking of supporting a lot, Jaco's store, it's called Jaco's store. You know, represent, support yourself, support the cause, support the path, represent of the path. Get a shirt, get a jacket, get a hat, something like this. We have a subscription situation too called the Shirt Locker. If you're interested in creative artistic, yet representative designs, Shirt Locker is for you. Good feedback on that one, I'm telling you. But yeah, look into that one, Jaco's store.

• 1:50:43Jocko Willink?

  If you're subscribing to stuff, subscribe to this podcast, subscribe to Jaco Unraveling with Daryl Cooper. Grounded Podcast, Warrior Kid Podcast. Also, you can subscribe, is that the right word?

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:50:54Jocko Willink?

  For the underground?

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:50:56Jocko Willink?

  JacoUnderground.com. You can subscribe, sure, but more importantly, you can support a methodology that we can turn to, should there be problems? What kind of problems? Banning, shadow banning, censorship.

• 1:51:15Jocko Willink?

  Those kind of things, we're, we're not saying that that's gonna happen, but what kind of preparation would it be if we didn't have a contingency scenario? So we got that, uh, Jaco Underground dot com. It costs eight dollars and eighteen cents a month. If you want to be a part of that, we do another little podcast called Jaco Underground. Where we talk about different topics, we answer your questions, we bring up some adjacent things.

• 1:51:38Speaker 02

  Compli- com- com-

• 1:51:40Jocko Willink?

  Complimentary.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  What's the word that, what do you contemplate, contemplate?

• 1:51:44Jocko Willink?

  Contemplation?

• 1:51:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, contemplative, if-

• 1:51:49Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:51:50Speaker 02

  Thoughts of Jaco's. That's what I've kind of discerned from it. You'd be like, hey, I was thinking about this. And you're like, this is-

• 1:51:56Jocko Willink?

  It gives me a little outlet.

• 1:51:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:58Jocko Willink?

  Outlet for a little deeper dive in a various subjects.

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  Little discussions. Yeah. Some good Q and A on that one, too.

• 1:52:05Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. We also have a YouTube channel where we put up the videos of this podcast. We've been putting up the Unraveling Podcast, slowly but surely.

• 1:52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Jocko Willink?

  Maybe some more of those could get up there. You know, if, if we are not too busy.

• 1:52:21Speaker 02

  We're working hard on that one, for sure.

• 1:52:24Jocko Willink?

  Uh, some, uh, other clips that Echo Charles puts together. What do you think, Dave? What's your favorite, uh, Jocko podcast YouTube channel video?

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  Not the one of him talking trash to me, I'm assuming.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  I think the framing one's my favorite one.

• 1:52:41Speaker 02

  Was that on YouTube?

• 1:52:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:52:43Jocko Willink?

  Framing up, yeah.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  Framing up, yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:46Jocko Willink?

  Wait, you think it's just on, uh?

• 1:52:47Speaker 02

  The ground.

• 1:52:49Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  No, yeah, the longer, the longer ones are on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  If you want to see some, what's that called? Behind the Scenes?

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Jocko Willink?

  Which is basically me talking shit.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:52:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:59Speaker 02

  Hard, you go hard.

• 1:53:00Jocko Willink?

  Deserved, in many cases.

• 1:53:02Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:53:03Jocko Willink?

  Not always, sometimes it go a little too hard.

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  Maybe your black guy is deserved. I don't know, maybe, maybe not. Also, speaking of YouTube, uh, uh, channels, your Origin USA. They have a good YouTube channel, Origin HD. You want to see how the inner workings of an American factory resurrecting manufacturing? By the way, you want to see how that works, man? That's a good, that's a good outlet right there.

• 1:53:24Jocko Willink?

  American factories. We got multiple factories now. We're growing. We're going, we're bringing back manufacturing to America.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. Also, Psychological Warfare is an album with tracks, Jaco tracks of him telling you how to get through moments of weakness. These are weaknesses that I experienced, literally, I experienced. I told Jaco, make this little thing, this recording. You listen to it, boom, no more moment of weakness. A moment of strength, really? At the end of the day.

• 1:53:54Jocko Willink?

  Flipside Canvas, if you want something to hang on your wall, that's cool. Dakota Myers making it for you. Go to flipsidecanvast.com. Got a bunch of books. You know what they are. Final Spin. Look, Final Spin, coming out November 9th. What are you shaking your head at, Dave? I cannot wait for it to come out. I'm just... It's freaking, it's rad. Super stoked on it and looking forward to that coming out. Then everything else, you know, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Code Evaluation Protocol, Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual, Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, and 4, Mikey and the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth, Extreme Ownership, and The Dichotomy of Leadership. Echelon Front is our leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. That's what we do.

• 1:54:36Jocko Willink?

  Leadership is the solution. Go to echelonfront.com if you want details on that. We have live events. We also have an online training academy, because leadership isn't something you learn in one shot. It's something you have to work on, just like going to the gym, just like jujitsu. So, there's a bunch of courses on there you can take. There's live sessions that we're doing two, three times a week, where if you want to ask me a question, you can ask me. You want to ask Dave a question, you can ask Dave. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to get involved in that. And also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, go to our family, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization helping out in so many different ways. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americas

• 1:55:19Jocko Willink?

  mightywarriors.org. And if you want more of my repetitious reciting...

• 1:55:27Jocko Willink?

  Or you need more of Echo's unattached assertions, or Dave's exploratory explanations. You can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the Gram, on Facebook. Dave is at David R Burke, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks to everyone out there in the armed services who step up and execute and get the job done even when leadership is lacking. And also thanks to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for standing duty here on the home front and keeping us all safe.

• 1:56:08Jocko Willink?

  And to everyone else out there, there's a common theme in this book, that like I said, it's really not in this book, and that is a failure to detach. And as we read these blunders and errors and catastrophes, it's so easy to see these mistakes being made. But they're not obvious to the people that are caught up in making these mistakes. They can't see the tactical errors, they can't see their emotions, they can't see their ego. And it wrecks them, and it causes these disasters. So don't allow that to happen to you.

• 1:56:52Jocko Willink?

  The worst mistakes we make are the ones we don't see. And we don't see them because we're too close. So step back, detach, see what you're supposed to see, and that will allow you to do what you are supposed to do. And until next time, this is Dave, and Echo, and Jaco. Out.