286: The Indirect Approach is The Best "Strategy" in All Cases.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:01:00 - The Indirect Approach. Pt 2. Strategy, by B. H. Liddell Hart. 1:58:22 - How to stay on THE PATH 2:12:42 - 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 286 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. And also joining us again, Dave Berke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. So if you haven't listened to 285, just go back and listen to 285 right now. We are exploring some of the works of B. H. Liddell Hart. I explained who he is on 285. He's a British soldier, World War I, military theorist, military historian, wrote, influenced. He's an influencer. He's kind of an OG influencer and he legit was. He had a lot of influence inside the British

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  military. He had influence in all kinds of different military organizations, including some enemy military organizations that actually listened to what he had to say. So if you haven't listened to 285 yet, go back, listen to 285 and we're going to jump right back in to his book, which is called Strategy. It's a, the last one we covered was the Strategy of the Indirect Approach. This, look, everything he does is tied into the Strategy of Indirect Approach. And, and we're going to jump back into this. His other book, well, he's got many books. One of his other books called simply Strategy. B. H. Liddell Hart, here we go. Dave, anything before I just jump right into this thing? No, let's do it.

• 1:26Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so we're going to get into a section here called Basis of Strategy. And I think it's very interesting how this one kicks off. "A deeper truth to which Fok and other disciples of Clausewitz did not penetrate fully is that in war, every problem and every principle is a duality."

• 1:53Jocko Willink?

  Like a coin, it has two faces. So this may remind you of another book you might have heard of called The Dichotomy of Leadership. There you go. Again, I think I owe this guy some royalties. I did, no, I mean, I could have called the book The Duality of Leadership, but I didn't. Right? Called The Dichotomy of Leadership. Like a coin, it has two faces. Hence, the need for well, a well calculated compromise as a means to reconciliation. What does that mean? Be balanced. Big shocker. This is the inevitable consequence of the fact that war is a two-party affair. So imposing the need that while hitting, one must guard. This just, you gotta balance the dichotomies of leadership.

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  You can't just be on a total offense. You gotta have your guard up. You can't just be have your guard up. You gotta go on offense. You gotta be balanced. It's a corollary that in order to hit with effect, the enemy must be taken off his guard. Effective concentration can only be obtained when the opposing forces are dispersed. And usually in order to ensure this, one's own forces must be widely distributed. Thus, by an outward paradox, true concentration is the product of dispersion. So isn't this interesting? We have to concentrate our forces, but we have to disperse our forces in order to dis- dislocate and put the enemy off balance. So there's a dichotomy.

• 3:19Jocko Willink?

  We have to be together so that we can act effectively, but we have to be spread out so we can put the enemy off balance. What happens if we get too far spread out? Well, now we're, now we're weak. What happens if we're too concentrated? Well, now we can't disperse the, we can't dislocate the enemy.

• 3:36Jocko Willink?

  A further consequence of the two-party condition is that to ensure reaching an objective, one should have an alternative objective or alternative objectives, plural. Herein, herein lies a vital contrast to the single-minded 19th century doctrine of Fok and his fellows. A contrast of the practical to the theoretical. For if the enemy is certain as to your point of aim, he has the best possible chance of guarding himself and blunting your weapon. This is why in jujitsu, you have to do more than one move. You can't just grab the arm and think you're gonna get the arm lock. It's not gonna work.

• 4:19Jocko Willink?

  If on the other hand, you take a line that threatens alternative objectives, you distract his mind and his forces. This moreover is the most economic method of distraction, for it allows you to keep the largest proportion of your force available on your real line of operation, thus reconciling the greatest possible concentration with the necessity of dispersion. So you have to have some different objectives. If you just grab the arm, that's not gonna... If you just flank, if you're like, "Okay, hey, we're gonna flank the enemy." Okay, the enemy goes, "Oh wait, it looks like they're moving over there." Cool, now we adjust our forces, and now that flank becomes the front. So you have to have multiple objectives.

• 5:03Jocko Willink?

  Now, what if you go to flank and they think, "Oh, that's just a fake move." So now they don't put their forces to work, then you attack it. But if you only have one objective, and the enemy recognizes what that is, they're gonna defend it heavily, and you're not gonna be able to achieve victory.

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  "The absence of an alternative is contrary to the very nature of war." It sins against the light, which Bourssette shed in the 18th century by his most penetrating dictum, that, quote, "Every plan of campaign ought to have several branches, and to have been so well thought out that one or the other of the said branches cannot fail of success."

• 5:54Jocko Willink?

  So you gotta have multiple branches, and they should be well enough thought out that one of them is gonna work.

• 6:03Jocko Willink?

  One of those branches, one of those lines of operation is going to work.

• 6:09Jocko Willink?

  This was the light that his military heir, the young Napoleon Bonaparte, followed in seeking always, as he said, you guys want me to go French?

• 6:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, kind of. Fair son fame and de fashion.

• 6:30Jocko Willink?

  There you go. What does that mean? It means make your theme in two ways. You've got to have two different approaches.

• 6:40Jocko Willink?

  And it's just, he calls it, it's a sin against the old dictums, right? Which was, you gotta have a focus, you gotta aim for that. Concentrate your forces in one spot. It's like, cool, what if the enemy defends at one spot? You're screwed. In technical terms.

• 7:00Jocko Willink?

  Seventy years later, Sherman was to relearn the lesson from experience by reflection and coin his infamous maxim about, quote, putting the enemy on the horns of a dilemma. End quote. In any problem where an opposing force exists and cannot be regulated, one must foresee and provide for alternative courses. Adaptability is the law which governs survival in war as in life. War being a concentrated, war being but a concentrated form of the human struggle against the environment. Thank you.

• 7:32Jocko Willink?

  Amplified. Intensified, but nonetheless. A concentrated form of the human struggle. To be practical, any plan must take account of the enemy's power to frustrate it. The best chance of overcoming such an obstruction is to have a plan that can be easily varied to fit the circumstances met.

• 7:57Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I just was saying this today on EF online. Like, you gotta have a flexible plan. You gotta have a flexible plan. And you'd think that seems super obvious, but you know what? You know what? People want to control. And they want to eliminate the unknown. And how do you eliminate the unknown? You come up with a plan. Well, guess what? They're still unknown, even when you have a plan. And the more rigid you make a plan, the less adaptable and flexible it becomes, which is bad.

• 8:29Jocko Willink?

  To keep such adaptability while keeping the initiative, the best way is to operate along a line which offers alternative objectives. For thereby, you put your opponent on the horns of a dilemma, which goes far to assure the gaining of at least one objective, whichever is the least guarded, and may enable you to gain the other one afterwards. Boom. In the tactical field where the enemy's dispositions are likely to be based on the nature of the ground, it may be more difficult to find a choice of dilemma-producing objectives than it is in the strategical field where the enemy will have obvious industrial and railway centers to cover. But you can gain a similar advantage by adapting your line of effort to the degree of resistance

• 9:12Jocko Willink?

  that is met and exploiting any weaknesses as found. A plan, like a tree, must have branches if it is to bear fruit. A plan with a single aim is apt to prove a barren pole.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  I'm just thinking of this idea of having multiple objectives and then the dilemma that that causes, and even just in aviation terms, like we go out on a mission and our objective is to destroy enemy air defenses. SAM sites or mobile SAMs, or whatever those might be. But it's actually reliant on them to have those systems active and operating, because that's how you find them. If they're shut down and dormant, you actually can't find them. They're not radiating, they're not uncovered, you could fly around and not have them there. But if they don't have their SAM systems or air defense systems active, then the things that they're defending are vulnerable. So the secondary mission, we'd have these called a TPL, a target priority list. If these things aren't there, cool, go to this. Those things aren't there, cool, go to this. And sooner or later, one will be exposed.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And as you start to attack those defended positions, like bridges or roads or things that matter. Better turn on those radars. Better turn on those radars, exactly right. And that idea that we would have multiple target priorities, which all eventually are designed to lead us back to the number one priority, which might not get on that mission, but we get in the next wave or the next wave. And sooner or later, they're stuck in a place like, well, if we don't turn these things on, we're going to lose all of our critical infrastructure and there's nothing to defend. And creating that dilemma by having multiple objectives on each flight.

• 10:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and in the business world, this, this whole concept is we hear,

• 10:55Jocko Willink?

  we hear debates or arguments against this, right? You've got to have a clear objective and that makes sense. I tell people that we've got to make sure we understand what the objective is. That being said, we also don't want to have a single point of failure. Where, hey, you know what? We're going to put, we're going to make one product. Yeah. We're going to make one product. And if this product does, this product is the one we're going to put all of our money, all of our birds in this basket. Is that the one? Eggs. All our eggs are going to go in this basket. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. That's, that's, there you go. Never mind BH Liddell Hart, whichever farmer thought of that one.

• 11:36Jocko Willink?

  After his kid dropped the, the, the basket full of eggs, right? He's like, hey, kid, don't put all your eggs in one basket. Put them in two baskets. Same thing. The exact same thing. Yes, sir.

• 11:51Jocko Willink?

  And yet we can get focused on one objective. And as soon as you meet resistance, if you're not ready to switch to another one, like Dave Berke flying, you know, up there and going, oh, there's nothing really to shoot at. Cool. What's the next objective? Bridges. Let's go. Rock and roll.

• 12:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so now we're going to roll a new section called cutting communications. In planning any stroke at the enemy's communications, either by maneuver around his flank or by rapid penetration of a breach in his front, the question will arise as to the most effective point of aim, whether it should be directly against the immediate rear or the opposing, of the opposing force or further back. When studying the question, so again, and I talked about this before on the last podcast is,

• 12:38Jocko Willink?

  Every time it talks about communications, it's telling you, hey, you better, you better keep your communication open. When we talk about attacking the enemy's communications, and that's how we cause unbalance, and that's how we kind of crush them, great, we're glad to know that. That's also a reminder to us as leaders, that communication is so paramount to getting our job done. When he's got a whole section called cutting communication, guess what that should mean to us from a red cell perspective? Don't let your communication get cut. And yet, we work with companies all the time where the communication isn't open, and it's not flowing, and people on the front lines don't know what's happening. And the people in the head shed don't get the feedback that they should be getting from the front lines. There's not communication happening. And yet, there's a whole section

• 13:22Jocko Willink?

  here about cutting communication, and you're allowing your communications to be cut when there's not even an enemy. It's not like your competitor got into your email system, or got into your phone system, and didn't let you call your frontline leadership. That didn't happen. You failed to do it.

• 13:39Jocko Willink?

  So, where do we cut the communication? When studying this question at the time that experimental mechanized forces were first created, and their strategic use was under consideration, I sought guidance on it by analysis of cavalry raids carried out in the past, especially in the more recent wars since railways came into use. While such cavalry raids had more limited potentials than a deep strategic penetration of mechanized forces, seem to me to promise that this difference emphasized rather than detracted from making the significant evidence which they provided. Making the necessary adjustment, the following deductions could be drawn. And I'm going to kind of burn through this section. The overall concept

• 14:20Jocko Willink?

  is that the nearer to the force that the cut is made, the more immediate the effect. And the nearer to the base, the greater the effect. This is common sense, right? If you kill the node at the headquarters, they can't communicate to anybody. But it's going to take a while for that impact to hit the front lines, for them to actually not know what's going on. Whereas if you cut the frontline node, that immediate node is kind of messed up. So, that's the, that's the general consensus that he gets into there.

• 14:53Jocko Willink?

  He goes on to say, "These deductions were confirmed by the experience of the Second War, above all, the catastrophic, the catastrophically paralyzing effect physically and psychologically that was produced when Gordian's Panzer forces racing far ahead of the main German armies severed the Allied Army's communications where these crossed the far back line of the Somme." And this is where you run into problems. So catastrophically paralyzing when we start to cut off communications. So, look, are you going to go into your competitors, you know, headquarters and destroy their, their, their internet and their email? No, you're not going

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  to do that. But are you allowing that to happen just by, just by human nature and laziness and lack of prioritize and execute? Are you going to allow your communications to fall apart? There's a decent chance you are. We work with companies all the time that aren't communicating. They might as well have had Panzer forces go and cut off their email between their front lines and them because there's no email happening. There's no conference calls happening. There's no text happening. We don't know what's going on. We've lost communications, not through enemy action, but through our own fault.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and one of the ways, one of the places we see that with business is that the communication is a one-way communication where I am, I am dictating or directing or communicating to you. I'm transmitting and there's no response to that transmission. There's no,

• 16:27Speaker 01

  the communication really isn't designed for me to hear what you have to say. It's for me to tell you what to do and how to do it and when to do it and where to do these things. And I get that compliance, but I don't get that communication, which is a, a, a almost guarantee that sooner or later, when, then when there is friction with that, without that communication, that that plan is going to fail.

• 16:51Jocko Willink?

  Even when I was just talking about communication, I said, "You're not getting, you're not getting the information from lines and you're not getting the feedback you need."

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:58Jocko Willink?

  Which is what you just said. It's like, "Hey, communication is supposed to go in two ways. That's what's supposed to be happening. If we don't let it happen, we're going to have problems. We're gonna have problems."

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And in the, and making this relevant to, to the civilian world of the private sector, the, the needle, the bias needle of the communication would be to be transmit as little as possible and, and receive as much as possible. When I have, when, when I have my team communicating to me more than I'm committing, communicating to them, here's what we're seeing, here's what we're doing, here's the problems we're having, here's how we're.

• 17:34Jocko Willink?

  You're saying that's what you would want? That's how would you, you would set up the bias?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yes, the bias is if I see that I'm the, as the leader, doing 90% of the communication, I, I'm, I'm, the needle is in the wrong direction. And so the ability for my people to communicate to me, for me to hear from them what they're doing, what they're seeing, where they are, and I'm doing less communicating to them than they are communicating up to me, that's where I want that needle.

• 18:01Jocko Willink?

  That falls into something I was talking about the other day on, on our online platform. I, I use this term in both, it struck, I think both you and Leif, because you've never heard me say it before. I started using the term traditional leadership.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:15Jocko Willink?

  And then like an archetypical leadership. What does that mean? Well, when we think of a leader, what do we think of? Like if you just say, oh, what does a leader do? Well, a leader gives orders, a leader talks, a leader tells everyone what's going on. They tell people what to do, that's traditional leadership. And actually in my mind, if I'm doing that sort of traditional leadership, I've made 47 mistakes to get to a point where I have to tell you what's going on. I have to give orders, I have to, uh, give you direction about where to go and what to do. I've made so many mistakes if I'm doing that traditional leadership role of like, all right, here's what we're doing. Does that happen sometimes? And that was what I was talking about.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:56Jocko Willink?

  The case does sometimes happen where we got a leadership vacuum, no one truly knows what to do. There's some confusion and sometimes we do have to take a role as traditional leader, step in, tell everyone what to do, this is what we're doing, this is the direction we're heading, heading. And in a traditional leadership role, I'm in charge, I'm the one that's putting out the word. We want to flip the script on that. To what, to your point, traditional leadership is not what my ideal is. Ideal leadership is Dave's actually giving me information and telling me what's going on. And I have to give very little communication back because he already understands the commander's intent and what his roles were. And he, by the way, knows more about what's happening on his front than I do.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 19:39Jocko Willink?

  And he's trying to inform me, but still he's there. So that, that traditional leadership versus ideal leadership is, is something to pay attention to.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  And if you had whatever version of a catastrophic communication failure exists where, you know, it doesn't have to be the phone lines in combat, but some, something that prevents you from communicating. If your people can't operate based on your intent with zero communication and just go out there and execute until somehow that communication line is reopened for whatever reason. That, again, that is a, that is your failure as a leader, that they don't know what to do if you're not there to tell them what to do. So I don't, you know, in whatever world you're in, your version of a, of a communication cutoff, your people should still be able to execute.

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 20:34Jocko Willink?

  Next little section called the method of advanced until the end of the 18th century, a physically concentrated advance, both strategic to the battlefield and tactical on the battlefield was the rule.

• 20:47Jocko Willink?

  Then Napoleon exploiting Bourse's ideas and new divisional system introduced a distributed strategic advance. The army moving in independent fractions. But the tactical advance was still in general a concentrated one.

• 21:07Jocko Willink?

  This is, you know, we start getting into decentralized command and you know, I mentioned Boursset already, B O U R C E T. He's another French general, 1700s, I think he, yeah, lit, born in 1700, died in 1780, but this is another guy that, that had a little bit of vision, right? Had a vision about decentralized command and that's kind of one of them. This divisional system where you can start to get people to move on their own and that is a better way to advance. Back to the book toward the end of, oh, and by the way, to Dave's point, we know where we're going. And if you lose, if, if you got your division and Echo's

• 21:49Jocko Willink?

  got his division and Kerry's got his division and you lose comms with me, it doesn't matter. Three days later, you're where you're supposed to be because you knew where you were going.

• 22:00Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book towards the end of the 19th century with a development of fire weapons, the tactical advance became dispersed, i.e. in particles to diminish the effective fires. This is when we really start to get to dispersion. But the strategic advance had become concentrated. This was due partly to the influence of railways and growth of the masses, partly to the misunderstanding of the Napoleonic methods. So when, when we started to use machine guns, well, then people started dispersing tactically, but because of trains, we are moving these mass groups together. Revival of the distributed advance was required in order to revive the art and effective strategy. Moreover, new conditions, air power and motor power,

• 22:45Jocko Willink?

  point to its further development into a dispersed strategic advance. The danger of air attack, the aim of mystification and the need of drawing full value from mechanized mobility suggests that advancing forces should not only be distributed as widely as, as is compatible with combined action, but be dispersed as much is compatible with cohesion. So what they're saying, there's a balance that you have to have. We got to be as far apart as we possibly can, but as long as we're still a cohesive unit. That's the dichotomy that you have to balance.

• 23:23Jocko Willink?

  This becomes essential in the face of atomic weapons. Obviously, we can't be all together because we're gonna get nuked. Sure. And it's crazy that we sit here and chuckle at that. Because for us, it's almost like, hey, that couldn't happen. But hey, and we've covered, we've covered some significant military manuals where they talk about the actual, their planning on how they're gonna maneuver when the enemy is using tactical nukes. Which is crazy to think about. Uh, "The development of radio as a timely aid towards reconciling dispersion with control." "Instead of the simple idea of concentrated stroke by a concentrated force, we should

• 24:06Jocko Willink?

  choose according to circumstance between these variants." Give some, some op, some, some options here. "Dispersed advance with concentrated single aim, i.e. against one objective." "Dispersed advance with concentrated serial aim," which, which means when we get there, we're gonna go off to multiple successive objectives. "Dispersed advance with distributed aim, i.e. against a number of objectives simultaneously."

• 24:36Jocko Willink?

  "The effectiveness of armies depends on the development of such new methods, methods which aim at permeating and dominating areas rather than capturing lines, at the practicable object of paralyzing the enemy's action rather than the theoretical object of crushing his forces."

• 24:58Jocko Willink?

  "Fluidity of forces may succeed where concentration of force merely entails rigidity, a perilous rigidity." So, at times, Bruce Lee. Sure. We want to be like water. Fluidity of force is sometimes better than just concentration of force. If you can move Jeff Glover on the jujitsu mats. You grab something on him and he's somewhere else.

• 25:29Jocko Willink?

  You grab something on Dean, he's countering. Right? But you grab something on Jeffy Glover, he's maneuvering, like it's gone. It's like a, a piece of slime. Sir? Yeah, piece of slime. You squeeze, one part, he pops out another part. Right? With Dean, you can't squeeze, like it doesn't go anywhere. He does the squeezing. Yeah, you're getting squeezed. That's the way it worked.

• 25:55Jocko Willink?

  All right.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Just the word fluid, and I mentioned it before, I talk about fluid mutual support, just the idea of, of being fluid is, it's flexibility, it's the ability to be reactive to the situation in a way that puts you in a place to be available to support as you need it, but far enough away to maneuver as you need to. And I just, I think the idea of, of in this era, them talking about fluid, when the backdrop of World War I, and I know we've hit this a thousand times, the backdrop of a World War I was, was whatever the opposite of fluid is, which is this incap-, the inability, the inability to, to, to adjust, to maneuver, to do something.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  You, that, that analogy you just did with like that slime thing of, I squeeze here and something pops it over there, that the, being, the ability to be fluid and the, the inherent, the, the way you'd want to describe your organization, or your, or your reaction to things go on in your organization of being fluid, and how quickly people get to being rigid with their thought processes, their ideas, their objectives, what they want to accomplish, and how quickly it becomes rigid.

• 27:14Jocko Willink?

  So, so check this out. We're in World War I, okay?

• 27:20Jocko Willink?

  We actually have a culture that views fluidity as weakness. The Victorian culture. If you wanna run away from danger, you're a coward. You're weak. Now, take that and bring a thread to the boardroom. Bring a thread to the conference room in a company. And if Dave presents an idea to me, and I back down because I agree with his idea, or I back down because I see some holes in my idea, I might be viewed as weak. So I'm not gonna be fluid. Instead, I'm gonna be rigid. I'm gonna stand up to Dave. We're gonna fight about it. And by the way, if I outrank you, I'm gonna win.

• 28:03Jocko Willink?

  It's freaking ridiculous. Crazy. But we have this culture. And, and that culture, you know, look, the culture, the reason that culture exists, especially the culture of rigidity, is directly tied to our human nature, our ego, right? Because we feel like, oh, I don't wanna, I'm not gonna back down to Dave. Not gonna let that happen. It's like, actually, you know what? Good call, Dave. I like your idea better.

• 28:30Jocko Willink?

  The, the odd thing about this is that it makes me look stronger. It makes me look open-minded and flexible and confident to be like, you know what, Dave? Like your idea. Let's roll with that. The whole room, the whole freaking conference room goes, damn, Jocko's got some confidence. He's, he's good with whatever plan. He just wants us to win. As opposed to, actually, Dave, you know what? I've heard enough from you. We're going with my plan. Everyone in the room goes, oh, he's weak. I think I'm strong. I'm being weak. And everybody perceives me as weak. Everybody perceives, this is the, one of the hardest lessons to learn. It's one of the hardest lessons to learn, is that flexibility is viewed as a strength.

• 29:13Jocko Willink?

  Fluidity is viewed as a strength. Putting your ego and being humble is viewed as strength. And when you do the opposite, when you're rigid, it's viewed as weakness. When you let your ego flare up, it's viewed as weakness. It's viewed as insecurity. And we see this all day long. We see this all day long.

• 29:32Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 29:36Jocko Willink?

  Next chapter. The concentrated essence of strategy and tactics.

• 29:45Jocko Willink?

  Do I own royalties for my book? Do I? I think I kinda do.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  At first I was like nah, but then now I think maybe.

• 29:51Jocko Willink?

  To the, to the,

• 29:54Jocko Willink?

  to the children and descendants of B. H. Liddell Hart. Unfortunately for you, this book was published over 50 years ago, so we are cleared. And I apologize, but that's where we're at.

• 30:09Jocko Willink?

  Hopefully people will buy this book and you'll get some support. It's fantastic.

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  This brief chapter is an attempt to epitomize from the history of war. And as soon as you hear this, Dave, you're gonna kind of be like, oh, here we go. This brief chapter is an attempt to epitomize from the history of war. A few truths of experience which seem so universal and so fundamental as to be termed axioms. They are practical guides, not abstract principles. Napoleon realized that only the practical is useful when he gave us his maxims.

• 30:47Jocko Willink?

  But the modern tendency, which we, I'm not gonna ask you. We covered Napoleon's maxims on this podcast. You can Google it since Echo does not know, nor do I. Check.

• 30:59Jocko Willink?

  The modern tendency has been to search for principles which can be expressed in a single word. And then need several thousands of words to explain them. Even so, these principles are so abstract that they may mean different things to different men. And for any value depend on the individual's own understanding of war. The longer one continues to search for such omnipotent abstractions. The more do they appear a mirage, neither attainable nor useful, except as an intellectual exercise.

• 31:34Jocko Willink?

  These principles of war, not merely one principle can be condensed into a single word, concentration. So he's saying this word, concentration, which we all learned, concentration of forces. He's saying you could take all these principles and put them into the word concentration. Okay, let's start there. But for the, but for truth, this needs to be amplified as a concentration of strength against weakness. And for any real value, it needs to be explained that the concentration of strength against weakness depends on the dispersion of your opponent's strength, which in turn is produced by a distribution of your own that gives the appearance and partial effect of dispersion. Your dispersion, his dispersion, your concentration, such is the sequence and equal, and each is a sequel.

• 32:18Jocko Willink?

  True concentration is a force of calculated dispersion. So he's saying, even though it's really easy to say concentration, it's like, oh, there's a lot more going on than that. Yeah. Here we have a fundamental principle whose understanding may prevent a fundamental error, and the most common, that of giving your opponent freedom and time to concentrate to meet your concentration. This is why, when you cover and move, you put down covering fire. And then the other element moves. Why? It's that covering fire that doesn't allow the enemy to maneuver to meet your concentration. But to state that the principle, but to state the principle is not much practical aid for

• 33:03Jocko Willink?

  execution. The above mentioned axioms, here expressed as maxims, cannot be condensed into a single word, but they can be put into the fewest words necessary to be practical. Eight in all. So far, six are positive. Eight in all so far, it's interesting. He's saying like, hey, this is probably going to change, but this is where we're at. So far, six are positive and two are negative. They apply to tactics as well as strategy unless otherwise indicated. Number one. And these are the positive ones. Number one, adjust your end to your means.

• 33:41Jocko Willink?

  Adjust your end to your means.

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  This is another thing that's we you gotta know your objective. You gotta stick to your objective. He's actually saying, look, man, you gotta make some adjustments. Your your end may change based upon your means. And here's what he says. In determining your object, clear sight and cool calculation should prevail. Wouldn't that be nice? It is folly to quote, bite off more than you can chew. End quote. And the beginning of military wisdom is a sense of what is possible.

• 34:21Jocko Willink?

  That's the beginning of military wisdom. What's actually possible?

• 34:26Jocko Willink?

  And this is where you can, you know, you can get into some, um, you know, theoretical ideas about, but if you believe it. It's like, no, and it's actually interesting. I remember at the early musters, I got asked about this and I explained belief as seeing an actual pathway to victory. You you've got it. Belief means you can actually see a an actual pathway, a viable pathway to achieve what you're talking about.

• 34:57Jocko Willink?

  Because to think, you know what? I want to be an astronaut.

• 35:01Jocko Willink?

  Like, right now, I'm forty nine years old. I guess I could figure out of of no, not really. I probably have a better chance of becoming an astronaut than a an NBA player. Right? Same. So is there? Okay, same. Thanks for the support, bro.

• 35:20Jocko Willink?

  Is there a viable pathway for me to become an NBA player? Not really. Not really.

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  So therefore, I need to adjust the end a little bit. Find something a little more feasible. He goes on to say. So learn.

• 35:39Jocko Willink?

  So learn to face facts while still pervert preserving faith. There will be ample need for faith, the faith that can achieve the apparent impossible when action begins. So look, we gotta have a positive attitude. Confidence is like the current in a battery. Avoid exhausting it in vain effort. And remember that your own continued confidence will be of no avail if the cells of your battery, the men upon whom you depend, have been rundown.

• 36:10Jocko Willink?

  So this is a, again, there's very few people that would think that the military mind should focus on, "Hey, I might have to adjust what I'm trying to get to." Because it seems like the military is, "You know, like, we're gonna get this done." Like, no.

• 36:31Jocko Willink?

  This is the number one, the number one axiom he's talking about. Adjust your end to your means. Number two, keep your object always in mind. Now, this is a dichotomy, right? Keep your object always in mind while adapting your plan to circumstances. Realize that there are more, realize that there are more ways than one of gaining an object, but take heed that every objective should bear on the object. And in considering this, just, just real quick.

• 37:07Jocko Willink?

  If you as a leader can understand the fact that there's more ways than one of gaining an object, your life just got a thousand times more easy. It's just got a thousand times easier. I've seen countless leaders

• 37:26Jocko Willink?

  think that they know the way and want to do something a certain way and waste time and effort and resources and most important, waste leadership capital

• 37:38Jocko Willink?

  to get something done a certain way when my attitude is like, "I don't care." "I don't care how you want to get this done. I don't care." "This is what we want to get done. How do you want to do it? Cool. Sounds good." "It's a viable plan. It's a minimally viable plan." "Dave's plan, you know what? I might do it differently. Dave's plan, it looks like it could work too. Cool." "And by the way, do we know your plan is gonna work perfectly?" "No, we don't." "Do I know my plan is gonna work perfectly?" "No, we don't." "So why am I gonna invest a bunch of resources and time and effort and arguing and leadership capital, trying to convince you to use my plan instead of your plan when they're both a freaking gamble?" "Don't waste your time."

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Connecting those two, I guess, axioms together, or those fundamental things from a leadership standpoint of... And we even talked about this, you know, as a leader, showing people a path to the end state. That might not happen today, might happen tomorrow, but it's possible. If you're gonna say, "Hey, let's bring in the three of us. We're gonna be a $100 million company."

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And I've got no way to show you how that's gonna happen, other than either just belief, or faith, or hope for a miracle, or, "Hey, this one product, this is gonna be... We're gonna have this magical product, and this is gonna work." And I could also say, "Hey, listen. Our goal, we wanna be a $100 million company. But let me tell you what we're gonna have to do. Right now, we're not. But we're gonna do this and this. And that's gonna allow us to bring in this other group, maybe getting an acquisition here." And you start to lay out this path, and people... And I've seen it in those rooms where you see the leaders lay out the path to getting there. Not the exact steps we're gonna take, but what... And all of a sudden, people go, "Oh, yeah, we can do that.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  And that's gonna lead to this. And then we bring in more people, and we bring in more resources. We bring in another company that does this." Just laying out the steps, so people in their minds understand... And I'm just saying this because of the word viable. The value of people saying, "Oh, that's actually not crazy. What you're saying is not this magic, crazy pipe dream. I can actually see how, if we do this." And then if I, on that second step, as a subordinate leader, understand what you're trying to accomplish, and you're not here saying, "Turn left here, turn right here, do this," and not telling me what to do, or how to do it, you're just telling me the end state that we want, then I actually get to be the one that drives us to that goal. That is actually so much more believable now,

• 40:18Speaker 01

  because it's viable, because you laid that out, and then let me move towards that objective.

• 40:23Jocko Willink?

  Here's a detail that I just picked up on. Taking what you said, when you said what I said back to me, and I was like, "Oh, there's an error in what I said."

• 40:35Jocko Willink?

  When I, when I say a belief is seeing a path to victory, what it should actually be is seeing paths, plural, to victory. And the reason I thought of this is because as you're sitting here talking about, well, if I say, okay, Dave, we're going to make a hundred million dollar company. And you go, oh, that sounds awesome. I'm in, but how are we going to do that? And I lay out one single path to get us there.

• 41:04Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's cool and everything, but your, your faith in that is gonna go down a little bit. But if I say, hey, listen, here's our five different lines of operations. And here's what each one of these things are going to produce. And you know what? Chances are, Dave, one or two of these might fail completely. They're good ideas. I like them, but we don't, haven't gone far enough down them to really understand. But we know that of these ideas, we have made some progress in all of them and we see potential. So if two or three of these paths go the way we want them to, we're going to be right where we want to be. We're going to get that hundred million. So even, you know, going back to the last podcast,

• 41:43Jocko Willink?

  having multiple avenues of approach is highly beneficial to your belief system.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Being distributed and how you go to an objective.

• 41:54Jocko Willink?

  Right, right. Having more than one objective, having more than one pathway to that objective.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:02Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, also saying, look, we might, we might not make this one objective over here, but we're still going to get where we want to be.

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  Same maxim here, continuing on. And in considering possible objectives, weigh their possibility of attainment with their service to the object if attained. To wander down a sidetrack is bad, but to reach a dead end is worse.

• 42:27Jocko Willink?

  So especially if the dead end is the only pathway that you've got. Yeah. That's why having a couple of different pathways is smart. Number three, choose the line or course of least expectation. Try to put yourself in the enemy's shoes and think what course is least probable he will foresee or forestall. Number four, exploit the line of least resistance. So long as it can lead you to any objective which would contribute to your underlying object. Right? Oh yeah, it's a cool path of least resistance, but it's gotta be going in the right direction. In tactics, this maxim applies to the use of your reserves and in strategy, the exploitation of tactical success. Number five.

• 43:13Jocko Willink?

  Take a line of operation which offers alternative objectives. Okay, sorry, we went a little ahead on that one. For you will thus put your opponent on the horns of dilemma. This comes from the last podcast, which goes far to assure the chance of gaining one objective at least, whichever he guards least. And may enable you to gain one after the other. Cause once you get one, like we make it in one line of operation and now we made a bunch of money. Cool. Guess what? We can invest in that other thing that was a little bit harder out of the gate, but now we have the money to spend on it and we can make it happen. Yeah.

• 43:48Jocko Willink?

  Alternative objectives allow you to keep the opportunity of gaining an objective. Whereas a single objective, unless the enemy is helplessly inferior, means the certainty that you will not gain it. Once the enemy is no longer uncertain as to your aim, as soon as the enemy knows what you're doing, your chances of success go down dramatically. Unless they're helplessly inferior. There is no more common mistake than to confuse a single line of operation, which is usually wise, with a single objective, which is usually futile.

• 44:22Jocko Willink?

  Number six, and the last of the positive maxims. Ensure that both plans and dispositions are flexible, adaptable to circumstances. And by dispositions, that's like where you're putting people.

• 44:37Jocko Willink?

  Your plan should foresee and provide for a next step in case of success or failure, or a partial success, which is the most common case in war. Your dispositions or formations should be such as to allow this exploitation or adaptation in the shortest possible time. You know, people, people will argue and fight and struggle with trying to figure out how they're going to task organize, organize a group of people. Like, well, no, actually, Dave, I think this person should report to Dave, and this person should report to Leif, and this person should report to me. We can argue about that stuff all way, all day long. And by the way, you're pissed, I'm pissed. And guess what?

• 45:12Jocko Willink?

  It's our company. And I go, you know what, Dave? You go ahead. That person can report to you. Cool, that sounds good. And you look up at me in two weeks, and you're like, hey, this doesn't really make much sense. Okay, cool, they can report. You know, like, you don't, it's not set in stone. You don't get a tattoo on your forehead of your task organization. And by the way, it doesn't look, quote, look bad to say, hey, you know what? Fred, you're going to be working for Dave. And then a month later, say, hey, Fred, it seems like your expertise is really going to be a little bit more beneficial to Leif and what he's got going on. We're going to shift you over there. Now, do you want to do this every two weeks? No, obviously not. But to put someone in a position, or, or task organize, organize in a certain way, and, and have it flexible,

• 45:56Jocko Willink?

  flexible dispositions, that's exactly what it is, is the smart way to do things. And obviously, it's with a flexible plan as well.

• 46:07Jocko Willink?

  The negatives. Do not throw your weight into a stroke whilst your opponent is on guard, whilst he is well placed to parry or evade it. The experience of history shows that save against a much inferior opponent, no effective stroke is possible until his power of resistance or evasion is paralyzed. Hence, no commander should launch a real attack upon an enemy in position until satisfied that such a paralysis has developed. It is produced by disorganization and its moral equivalent, demoralization of the enemy. So.

• 46:40Jocko Willink?

  Cool. Set it up. Set up the move. Eight, and the last one, do not renew an attack along the same line or in the same form after it has once failed. A mere reinforcement of weight is not a sufficient change, for it is probable that the enemy also will have strengthened itself. In the interval, it is even more probable that his success in repulsing you will have strengthened immorally.

• 47:09Jocko Willink?

  It's one of my favorite coaching moves in jujitsu. Is, you know, do it harder. I was, I was saying that to Kerry the other day. Like, he's like grabbing your wrist. Like, grab that thing harder. It hasn't helped him for six minutes. Grabbing the wrist while he's in your guard, but if he does it harder, you know, that might work. That's what this is. Like, it didn't work. It's not gonna work. Don't do it harder. Just because you add, hey, you know what? We spent a bunch of money on advertising. Uh, we haven't seen any bump in our, in our, uh, uh, sales.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Spend more.

• 47:45Jocko Willink?

  Let's spend more.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  I, I guess the only thing that surprised me is, is from the guy who's in World War I. That, that wasn't number one on his list. Like, the first thing he says is, hey, don't do what we did for three straight years.

• 48:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Maybe that's why it's his last point.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:04Jocko Willink?

  Like, hey, by the way, you freaking idiots.

• 48:09Jocko Willink?

  All this other stuff? Cool. Listen, you freaking idiots. If it doesn't work, don't keep doing it. If it didn't work with 10,000 men, it's not gonna work with 20,000, and that's crazy. You can see how you get sucked into that, don't you?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. You're like, you know what? The, the way you get sucked into it is when you commit yourself to the outcome of your plan. This plan is going to achieve this outcome. And if I, if I allocate resource, I work for you. Hey, this is the plan, this is what we're gonna do. I allocate resources and it doesn't work.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Well, I can either abandon that plan, make me look weak, like, oh, or I can go, hey, we're going to allocate more resources and more resources and more resources and more resources because I'm inflexible to say, well, actually, maybe I didn't connect my ends to my means to the end. And I might maybe didn't do just something, might need to do something different, or regroup, or reassess, or come in from a different direction. As opposed to saying, hey, you know what? That, hey, boss, that that plan didn't work. Let me take a step back. We need to kind of see what we what we did here with this marketing scheme. It didn't have the effect that we want. And before we start putting in more resources, let me get a better assessment of what's going on and kind of give that to you. And it may be that we do the same thing, but we're probably going to need to make some changes.

• 49:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, at least quantify your efforts, right? It's really disturbing because it really is one of these things where it is so tempting. When you get close, you get, you know, you feel like the pressure, like you try an arm lock, and you almost got it, you tried again. It's like the person defended it once, the person that can defend it again. You spend that money in marketing. You spend that money. And you, you know, you saw a little bit of an uptick, but it's not quite what you wanted. But still, maybe if we just put more money into it.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  And I'm listening, I'm listening to you talk about some of those things. And I'm almost trying to think of of what is the human nature to do that. And I think some of it is, is we kind of glorify this single minded, this, yeah, I think it's similar things. We, there's like this glorification of, I refuse to give in, I refuse to, to, to give up, I refuse to tap, I refuse to accept defeat. And so my answer is going to be is, I'm just going to send more. I'm going to send more and more. And I think the times that that perseverance pays off, there's some sort of like glorification of that single mindedness, when in, in reality.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  How much weaker does it make us look by being unwilling to say, "Hang on, I think there's a flaw in my plan here. Let me, let me just, I need to, I need to take a step back and rethink this. I'm, I'm missing something. I'm missing something." And the weakness that that shows, and you were talking about that before, is, you know, that makes you look weak when the exact opposite is true.

• 51:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I have a section in Leadership Strategy and Tactics called "When to Quit." "But I'm the big deal, never quit." Actually, totally wrong. Totally wrong.

• 51:16Jocko Willink?

  "When do you quit? Oh, this plan that we have is not working. We lost a guy, two guys, three guys. This is stupid. Let's go a different direction."

• 51:26Jocko Willink?

  Now just imagine doing that for battalions and brigades and divisions of soldiers, man. It's freaking crazy.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  It is crazy.

• 51:36Jocko Willink?

  Just give us a little, if we just had, if we just would have had another 10,000 soldiers at that moment.

• 51:43Jocko Willink?

  God, it's so tempting.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Is it like, do you feel like it's maybe like, because it's like you say glorify, um, you know,

• 51:51Jocko Willink?

  Never quit.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that never quit. And then they oversimplify it because you say persistence, right? Persistence always, you know, like, "That's the way this guy was successful. He was just persistent, you know, fail, fail."

• 52:03Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, dichotomy, right? It's a dichotomy. Like, you can say, "Oh, you know what? It didn't work the way we wanted to. Okay, screw it. We're gonna go do something else." So there's a dichotomy in this.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, even when I was talking about, like, you go for the arm lock, you don't get it. You go for the arm lock, you don't get it. There's plenty of fights where the person went for the arm lock three, four times. Finally, they get it.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's what I'm saying, where they oversimplify it, where they have all these cool sayings, like, you know, if, if at first you don't succeed, you know, try again, or, you know, all these things. But there's more to it than that.

• 52:31Jocko Willink?

  Some of those, yeah, some of the Pacific Island campaign. "Hey, we should be done with this operation in three days." Cool. 19 days later, we're not even a quarter way of where we're supposed to be.

• 52:46Jocko Willink?

  Like, guess what? We're gonna send some more resources there, we're gonna get it done. Oh, man. That's why this is, even this is a dichotomy.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the persistence and the, you know, if at first you don't succeed, try and try again or whatever. The, it's persistent, not in the same exact methodology. It's like persistence, but you kinda gotta make these little changes within that. But you can't really fit that in the little slogan, you know, a lot of the time.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  I was just gonna say, I mean, in very simplistic terms, you know, I think that's one of the differences between the tactics and the strategies. I will abandon a tactic. I will give up on a tactic very quickly if it, if it's the wrong tactic to get to the, now, giving up on a strategy is a very different thing. But giving up on the tactic, or, or, maybe that's not even the right word, but adjusting my tactics and adjusting the plan and getting feedback from the ones implementing the plan, while sticking to the strategy or the, or the long-term objective. Again, very simplistically, but the commitment to the tactic, when you see people committing to the same thing over and over and over again, as opposed to going, "Hey, this tactic isn't working.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Is there a better way to do this to accomplish that same end goal of what we wanna become as a company or as a team?" That difference for me is how often we see people unwilling to change their tactic.

• 54:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  When it's so obvious that they need to.

• 54:08Jocko Willink?

  And that's the exact, that's exactly in that section in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. Once I explain like, "Hey, you need to quit what you're doing that's failing. This doesn't mean you abandon your overall strategy." That's the actual words that I use, like, open it up, but that's, because that's, that's 100% right. Just because I go, "Oh, you know what? This doesn't seem to be working right." Look, when, when in World War I, it wasn't, "Hey, this isn't working, let's surrender." No, it's, "You know what? This isn't working, let's figure out a different way to do this. Let's figure out a different way to attack."

• 54:45Jocko Willink?

  I think it's also just a freaking sanity check that you need to do. It's neat. It's one of these things where, look, you beat your, I used to say this on the podcast. My limit for beating my head against the wall is 47 times. Like, once I've beat my head against the wall 47 times, like, okay, number 44, 45, 46. Okay, 47, this isn't gonna work. I gotta try something else. Like, you gotta check yourself. What is that number? How much are you, how much money are you willing to throw into marketing? How big, how many more people are you willing to give to that leader that's failed? How many more projects are you, you know, like, there's things where you gotta check yourself.

• 55:25Jocko Willink?

  Is it, have you beat your head against the wall 47 times? And if you had, have, don't go the 48th time. Time to reevaluate your tactic. Doesn't mean you need to abandon what you're trying to do. Means you need to freaking check yourself.

• 55:43Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. The essential truth underlying these maxims is that for success, two major problems must be solved: dislocation and exploitation. One precedes and one follows the actual blow, which in comparison is a simple act. So it's pretty easy to hit them. But you gotta set up the hit and you gotta exploit the hit once you've done. You cannot hit the enemy with effect until you have first created the opportunity. You cannot make that effect decisive unless you exploit the second opportunity that comes before he can recover.

• 56:20Jocko Willink?

  The importance of these two problems has never been adequately recognized, a fact which goes far to explain the common indecisiveness of warfare.

• 56:32Jocko Willink?

  So we don't make decisions because we don't understand how important it is that when Echo's off balance, I better freaking attack. Or before I get him off balance, I need to set him up so I can get him off balance.

• 56:45Jocko Willink?

  The training of armies, this is freaking epic. The training of armies is primarily devoted to developing efficiency in the detailed execution of the attack.

• 56:56Jocko Willink?

  The concentration on tactical technique tends to obscure the psychological element. It fosters a cult of soundness rather than surprise. It breeds commanders who are so intent not to do anything wrong according to the book, that they forget the necessity of making the enemy do something wrong. The result is that their plans have no result.

• 57:23Jocko Willink?

  For in war, it is by compelling mistakes that the scales are most often turned. Gotta make the person make mistakes. Here and there, a commander has eschewed the obvious and has found in the unexpected, the key to a decision. Unless fortune has proved foul, for luck can never be divorced from war since it's part of life. Hence, the unexpected cannot guarantee success, but it guarantees the best chance of success. That's why we gotta surprise people.

• 58:02Jocko Willink?

  Next section, the national object and military aim.

• 58:09Jocko Willink?

  Look, we talk about alignment a lot, and this is where inside of an organization, this is really talking about alignment. And so as you hear us discuss this, thinking about alignment through your organization, this is what we have to be cognizant of as leaders. In discussing the subject of the objective in war, it is essential to be clear about and keep clear in our minds the distinction between the political and military objective. The two are different but not separate. For nations that, for nations do not wage war for war's sake, but in pursuance of policy. The military objective is only the means to a political end. Hence, the military objective should be governed by the political objective,

• 58:52Jocko Willink?

  subject to the basic condition that policy does not demand what is militarily, that is practically impossible.

• 59:03Jocko Willink?

  So what are we trying to do in our company? What are we actually trying to do inside of our company? And if we're trying to do something inside of our company, does everybody on the team understand what we're trying to do? And are there maneuvers out there in support of what it is we're trying to do? Thus, any study of the problem ought to begin and end with the question of policy. The term "objective," although common usage, is not really a good one. It has a physical and geographical sense and thus tends to confuse thought. It would be better to speak of "the object" when dealing with the purpose of policy and of the military aim when dealing with the way that forces are directed in the service of policy.

• 59:47Jocko Willink?

  So I mentioned on the first podcast we did that he kind of goes into this "objective" versus "object," and he uses the term "object," I think it's not, it's a little bit of an archaic way of using it. I know it's only 19, whatever, 30. But for us, we use "objective" all the time. And we definitely use it in a military sense. But to his point, "objective," we think of like "Airfield," right? We think of "Beachhead." So, maybe it's a good idea. Well, we'll go with it. "The object in war" is a better state of peace, even if only from your own point of view. This is a, you know, I always talk about climbing the ladder of alignment.

• 1:00:29Jocko Willink?

  This is the highest you can get on the ladder of alignment for war. The reason we're in war is because we want a better peace. That's what we're trying to do. "Hence, it is essential to conduct war with constant regard for your, for the peace you desire." This is the long, long, long-term thinking. "That applies to both, both to aggressor nations who seek expansion and to peaceful nations who only fight for self-preservation, although their views of what is meant by a better state of peace are very different." History shows that gaining military victory is not in itself equivalent to gaining the object of policy. But as most of the thinking about war has been done by men of the military profession,

• 1:01:14Jocko Willink?

  there has been a very natural tendency to lose the sight of basic national object and identify it with the military aim. So how does this happen inside of a business? We start the business, the people that are out there in the field trying to make things happen, they might lose sight of what it is we're trying to do.

• 1:01:32Jocko Willink?

  In consequence, whenever war is broken out, policy has too often been governed by the military aim, and this has been regarded as an end in itself, instead of as a merely a means to an end.

• 1:01:47Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, for more than a century of the prime canon of military doctrine has been that, has been that, quote, "The destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield constituted the only true aim in war."

• 1:02:06Jocko Willink?

  That's what war is for, just destroy the enemy, destroy the enemy forces on the battlefield, actually. That was universally accepted, engraved in all military manuals and taught at all staff colleges. If any statesman ventured to doubt whether it fitted the national object in all circumstances, he was regarded, it was regarded as blasphemy and violating holy writ, as can be seen in studying the official records and memoirs of the military heads of the warring nations, particularly in and after World War I.

• 1:02:35Jocko Willink?

  So absolute a rule would have astonished the great commanders and teachers of war theory and ages prior to the 19th century, for they had recognized the practical necessity of wisdom of adapting aims to limitations of strength and policy. Like, how long are we gonna try and fight this thing before we say, you know what? This is freaking not good. We're expending all of our national treasure, and we're not getting anywhere. This is a bad call.

• 1:03:00Jocko Willink?

  And now we're gonna start hammering on Clausewitz again. Clausewitz's influence. "The rule acquired its dogmatic rigidity largely through the posthumous influence of Clausewitz and his books upon the minds of Prussian soldiers, particularly Molke, and thence more widely through the impact of their victories in 1866 and 1870 made upon the armies of the world, which copied so many features of the Prussian system. Thus, it is of vital importance to examine his theories." As so often happens, Clausewitz's disciples carried his teachings to an extreme which their master had not intended.

• 1:03:42Jocko Willink?

  Misinterpretation has been the common fate of most prophets and thinkers in every sphere. Devout but uncompromising, oh, sorry, devout but uncomprehending disciples have been more damaging to the original conception than even its prejudiced and purblind opponents. So what, what happens? We get people that take things to the extreme. And they do more damage than the people that are against the idea. It must be admitted, however, that Clausewitz invited misinterpretation more than most.

• 1:04:18Jocko Willink?

  Sorry, Clausewitz. A student of Kant, at second hand, he acquired a philosophical mode of expression without developing a truly philosophical mind. Ouch. Sorry, dude.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  He's hammering Clausewitz there.

• 1:04:33Jocko Willink?

  Clausewitz is taking heavies. How, how, did you guys talk about Clausewitz in a positive way in policy school?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Mostly, I mean, the, the, the pull from Clausewitz, the takeaway from that was there were components inside there that the things that he said makes sense. And, and he talks about ends and means, he talks about tactics and strategy and is really a, a good tool for people to understand. And the way, the context that we use in is actually, I think, very important and, and very similar to what he's saying is that the military, which has this sort of outsized recognition, this outsized uh, status of the, the, the, instead of being a tool to accomplish the political means of what the state wants, it, it, it's almost a means in and of itself, as if the military exists for

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  the military, as opposed to, this is a tool, one of many tools, that actually accomplishes the political means, which, and, and to just kind of bring that back a little bit, when he talked about

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  the object being a greater piece or a better piece, or, or, or whatever the term that you use, and it's funny because I think I've evolved in my thinking, when I hear objective, I don't think bridge anymore, I don't think airfield anymore, I think goals, I think outcomes, so, but I understand his point, and I certainly remember in the beginning of my military career, what's the objective? Oh, to secure that bridge, or, or to, to do whatever that particular thing is.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  If we've got a company and our company's object, our vision, our goal is to be, you know, the premier hardware producer for a product that every company in the world needs for them to be successful. And then I've got a sales team inside there and everybody's like, well, sales is like the most important thing we have. We gotta sell this thing. It's the military version for this company. And you're out there running the sales team and your objective is sell as many of these things as you can. Because that's obviously how we become the indispensable producer of this product that everybody's gonna need and be the most reputable and reliable company in the world. But if you're out there selling this product and it hasn't been made yet because our operations

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  team hasn't stood up, or you're selling this and we don't have the support for the clients that are gonna buy it to actually give them the tools they need, or you're selling this and we don't have the software to update it and back it up, you can actually accomplish your objective by selling this product that doesn't help us achieve the object, that doesn't actually help us be successful. And I'm not defending Clausewitz, but there is, the military has some... Somebody's got to... Yeah, I don't know, it's all good. The military in some ways has become this tool, this means that sort of in and of itself is its own thing. Like, the military exists to defeat, you know, to win wars and defeat the enemy and

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  destroy battlefields. Which actually, no, it's one of several different ways. And when you made that comment about the military's existence, like, the ideal thing you would think for the military is, I want this military to exist to deter any potential opponent from ever going to war with us. In terms of like, what would I want from my military? I don't want, I would love to never set foot on the battlefield. I'd love to never get, now, whether or not that's realistic, but I would love a military force of people, our opponents look at and go, you know what? I'm good with your plan. I like your plan. I'm here to support that plan. You wanna use our bridges and roads to, for commerce and maybe occupy some of my towns? Yeah, I, let's find a compromise to make that work as opposed to, no, this isn't gonna happen and your military shows up to compel me to do it in a way that I don't necessarily

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  want. But the object, objective thing, and I'm just trying to make the connection to the business world of, if you think you're out there just to do this one thing and it doesn't support the object of the company or the long-term goal... You're actually not successful. You're not winning. I sold the most product. Cool. Can we support it? No. Can we build it? No. Can we back it up? No. Can the clients get what they want? No. Then we actually aren't successful.

• 1:08:32Jocko Willink?

  What happens to our reputation? What happens to our backlog? We get crushed. And you're going to see, he, he, he goes, he goes relatively hard on Clausewitz. He also explains some of the things that people missed, which he, he kind of also blames on Clausewitz. But there's a lot of things that Clausewitz says in the, that just aren't as memorable. That aren't as memorable as some of his really kick ass statements. And people remember what sounded cool.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if I'm not mistaken, like I think however many chapters are in On War, I think he wrote like the first three by himself and they're really well written and super complete. And then several chapters were written by his wife after he died and they're like half done and like, and they've been, you know, Hartz probably wrote this in English. And Clausewitz was written in some sort of Prussian version that's been translated a thousand times. So again, in his defense.

• 1:09:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And when you do that translation, if you kind of think that maybe, uh, you know, concentration and mass is how to win, you definitely are going to emphasize that.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  I think this is what he meant.

• 1:09:38Jocko Willink?

  And yeah.

• 1:09:41Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book. His theory of war was expounded in a way too abstract and involved for ordinary soldier minds. Essentially concrete. He's saying the soldier minds are concrete to follow the course of his argument, which often turned back from the direction in which it was apparently leading. Impressed yet befogged, they grasped at his vivid leading phrases, seeing only their surface meaning and missing the deeper current of his thought. Clausewitz's greatest contribution to the theory of war was in emphasizing the psychological factors, raising his voice against the geometrical school of strategy. Then fashionable, he showed that the human spirit was infinitely more important than operational lines and angles. He discussed the effect of danger and fatigue,

• 1:10:25Jocko Willink?

  the value of boldness and determination with deep understanding. It was his errors, however, which had the greatest effect on subsequent course of history. He was too continental in his outlook to understand the meaning of sea power. And his vision was short on the very threshold of the mechanical era. He did, he declared his conviction that superiority in numbers becomes every day more decisive.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Jocko Willink?

  So he kinda was a little bit late. They didn't even fucking tank yet.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  One of the classic discussions was the, the, um,

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  what's the word I'm looking for? The relevance of Clausewitz in the 21st century. You know, start talking about, you know, like nuclear power, your nuclear weapons, stealth airplanes and things like, hey, do, do these maxims of these, do these, do they hold up to the scrutiny of the 21st century of warfare, the modern warfare and a bunch of discussions on that. I kinda chuckled at the idea of like his disciples, the Clausewitz disciples who kinda aren't that smart, but really like what he had to say. You know, that'd be like me reading leadership strategy tactics and there's a chapter that says, don't care. And me be like, hey, everybody, don't care.

• 1:11:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  But getting that wrong, but misunderstanding like, I don't care. As opposed to, I don't care how we do it. You want to do it your way? I don't care. We'll do it your way, which is a little bit different than don't care. Next thing you know, Dave Berke, Jaco's disciples running around telling all the rest of his people, we don't care.

• 1:11:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:11:54Jocko Willink?

  I don't care.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like, I don't care. And we're now a bunch of people that don't care. And how, how easy you could see a disciple who's, and I, I'll never remember the quote, but

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  the, the most damage was done by, um,

• 1:12:09Jocko Willink?

  The concrete brain.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Well, he said the disciples that, the misunderstanding of his disciples did way more damage than the opponents.

• 1:12:16Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Because I'm running around espousing Jaco's, you know, edicts, but I actually don't really know what he meant by don't care. And I'm just using that one example of kinda pulling from this book of like a great way of like, I don't care. Like dude, that, that is not what he meant. I know that's what it says on paper, but that's not what he was saying.

• 1:12:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, or like knowing to quit. Hey, man, you know what? You gotta throw in the towel.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Whatever. We quit. We give up. Shut it down.

• 1:12:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Uh, so he's talking about how important, oh, I know what I was gonna say. I was taking a note when you were writing. I only got down the two letters M A. And then I was looking, I was like, what the hell was I gonna write? I was gonna write machine gun. Because for me, where the tactics sort of solidified, where you could say, yep, these things hold up. It's, you gotta have the machine gun. That's where we start to get the modern machine gun, where we can start to kill a lot of people.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  And how concentration is like the worst thing and spread cover and move becomes totally important. And it's important in all eras, but it really starts to solidify around there. Well, you use the example of, of like on steroids of nuclear weapons, you know, talking about dispersion, you know, versus concentration with nuclear weapons. Um, I thought of another one, just as I was thinking of is, is hold the line. Jaco says, hold the line. Cool, got it. We're gonna hold the line.

• 1:13:34Jocko Willink?

  And look, what we're talking about is the story behind the book, the dichotomy of leadership. The dichotomy of leadership is chapter 12 in extreme ownership. So cool, we covered it. Why do we have to write a whole new book about it? Because people still like extreme ownership. We gotta hold the line. It's disciplined and all. It's like they took everything to the extreme.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  And that's why the story of the patches at muster is so powerful. Because people are like, oh, this is gonna be awesome. Jaco is going to hammer that platoon and destroy them for violating his direct order to never wear patches that aren't professional. And it's like, no, I didn't care. No factor. Like, wait, what? It says right there, hold the line. It's like, yeah, but actually, living in the extremes is actually, doesn't work. Usually doesn't work. But the title of the book is extreme ownership.

• 1:14:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, there you go. There's perfect examples. This is what happened to Klaus Fritz. And he didn't even get to finish his book. He wrote freaking three chapters. And his old lady finished it up.

• 1:14:32Jocko Willink?

  Such a commandment gave reinforcement to the instinctive conservatism of soldiers in resisting the possibilities of a new form of superiority which mechanical invention increasingly offered. It also gave powerful impulse to the universal extension and permanent establishment of the method of conscription as a simple way of providing the greatest possible numbers. So if you want a big army, if I want to be in charge of a bunch of people, you know what I have to say, "Look, we need more people if we're gonna win. Cool, start drafting people. I want to be in charge of more people? Cool, draft more people." This, by its disregard for psychological suitability, meant that armies became much more liable to panic and sudden collapse. The earlier method,

• 1:15:14Jocko Willink?

  however unsystematic, had at least tended to ensure that the forces were composed of good, fighting animals.

• 1:15:22Jocko Willink?

  This is an interesting shot at Clausewitz. Clausewitz contributed no new or strikingly progressive ideas to tactics or strategies.

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  He was a codifying thinker, rather than a creative or dynamic one. He had no such revolutionary effect on warfare as the theory of the divisional system produced in the 18th century, or the theory of armored mobility in the 20th, which by the way, that's what kind of Liddell Hart like is about, right? So he said, "Look, Clausewitz didn't do anything compared to the theory of armored mobility like me."

• 1:16:00Jocko Willink?

  I feel bad. I actually feel bad talking about these guys, talking smack. Is that weird?

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  I didn't know how much of a hammer he was gonna be on Clausewitz. The cool thing is, I'm hearing all this, but, but I mean, there is a lot of, I understand what he's saying.

• 1:16:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. And again, why didn't I, we're 286 episodes deep in this and I haven't covered one of the most respected and well-known canons of military strategy.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Jocko Willink?

  Clausewitz is on war. Why is that? This is kinda why.

• 1:16:36Jocko Willink?

  Boy, I'm gonna catch some grief for this one. Yep. Going out, getting crazy.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Well, what's interesting is that I think if you were kind of just pulse a bunch of, it doesn't have to be historians that are civilians, but if you look at what the military and sort of key policymakers study, Clausewitz is higher on that list than Hart.

• 1:16:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:16:57Jocko Willink?

  For sure. Not even, not even the same ballpark, I think.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  You may get some heat because if there's someone that's been studied and sort of kind of lionized, Clausewitz is the guy, you know what I mean? So, yeah, there's some people out there going, hey.

• 1:17:08Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, I've taken some heat over the years. I had a little guy named Colonel David Ackworth, who was a complete black sheep of the army and hated by the Navy.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:17:17Jocko Willink?

  And I was in the Navy.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Jocko Willink?

  Talking about that guy.

• 1:17:24Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, but in seeking to formulate the experience of the Napoleonic Wars, the emphasis he put on certain retrograde, retrograde features helped to cause what might be termed a revolution in reverse, back towards tribal warfare. Clausewitz's theory of the military aim. In defining the military aim, Clausewitz was carried away by his passion for pure logic. Quote, the, and this, this makes it really, this starts to make it really obvious why this stuff doesn't mend with my normal way of thinking.

• 1:17:57Jocko Willink?

  Quote, "The aim of all action in war is to disarm the enemy, and we shall now show that this, in theory at least, is indispensable. If our opponent is to be made to comply with our will, we must place him in a situation where, which is more oppressive to him than the sacrifice we demand. But the disadvantages of this position must naturally not be of a transitory nature, at least in appearance. Otherwise, the enemy, instead of yielding, will hold out in the hope of a change for the better. Every change in this position, which is produced by a continuation of war, must therefore be a change for the worse. Worse, the worst condition in which a belligerent can be placed is that of being completely disarmed.

• 1:18:40Jocko Willink?

  If therefore the enemy is to be reduced into submission, he must either be positively disarmed or placed in such a position that he is threatened with it. From this follows that the complete disarming or overthrow of the enemy must always be the aim of warfare."

• 1:19:01Jocko Willink?

  End quote. This reminds me of, uh, the bath party in Iraq being completely disarmed. How much did that help? Freaking hurt, right?

• 1:19:14Jocko Willink?

  Maybe some Clausewitzian people were saying, yep, gotta disarm them. Yeah, completely. Completely. Good job. The influence of Kant, Kant, where's, where's Daryl Cooper? Daryl Cooper is making jokes about, like, he's just bringing in deep. Echo and I are looking at him like, bro, wrong crowd.

• 1:19:32Jocko Willink?

  The influence of Kant can be perceived in Clausewitz's dualism of thought. He believed in a perfect military world of ideals while recognizing a temporal world in which these could only be imperfectly fulfilled. So he's giving credit. Here's a little credit going back to Clausewitz, like, hey, man, he got it that you got these ideals, but it's the real world and it's not going to quite go that well. For he was capable of distinguishing between what was militarily ideal and what he described as a modification in the reality. Thus, he wrote, reasoning in the abstract, the mind cannot stop short of an extreme. But everything takes a different shape when we pass from abstractions to reality.

• 1:20:13Jocko Willink?

  This object of war in the abstract, the disarming of the enemy, is rarely attained in practice and is not a condition necessary to peace. So he wasn't even saying what he was saying. He goes back and kind of backs off it a little bit. Clausewitz's tendency to the extreme is shown again in his discussion of battle as a means to the end of war.

• 1:20:37Jocko Willink?

  He opened with the startling assertion, there is only one single means. It is the fight. He justified this by a long argument to show that in every form of military activity, quote, "The idea of fighting must necessarily be at the foundation," end quote. Having elaborately proved what most people would be ready to accept without argument, Clausewitz said, "The object of a combat is not always the destruction of enemy forces. Its object can often be attained as well without the combat taking place at all." So there you go. He's saying some of the stuff that, that I do agree with.

• 1:21:18Jocko Willink?

  Moreover, Clausewitz recognized that, quote, "The waste of our own military forces must ceteris paribus," which means all things being equal, "always be greater the more our aim is directed upon the destruction of the enemy's power." The danger lies in this, that the greater efficacy which we seek recoils on ourselves and therefore has worse consequences in case we fail of success. So he's got some quantifying statements about his thoughts and theories. Out of his own mouth, Clausewitz here gave a prophetic verdict upon the consequences

• 1:22:02Jocko Willink?

  of following his own gospel in World War I and II. For it was the ideal and not the practical aspect of his teachings on battle which survived. He contributed to this distortion by arguing it was only to avoid the risks of battle that, quote, "any other means are taken." So it's like, we're trying to avoid battle, that's the only reason that we're gonna do anything else, because we're trying to avoid battle. And he fixed the distortion in the minds of his pupils by hammering on the abstract ideal. And this is, here's our, I guess, I guess, uh, Liddell Hart's just gonna go hot on everybody. He says, "Not one reader in a hundred was likely to follow the subtlety of his logic or to preserve a true balance amid such philosophical juggery.

• 1:22:46Jocko Willink?

  But everyone could catch such ringing phrases as..." And here's where he gets the branded, the Clausewitz branded statements that are clickbait. Here we go. And they're freaking good to go? Like, you hear me like, "Yeah." We have only one means in war: the battle. The bloody solution of the crisis, the effort for the destruction of the enemy's forces, is the firstborn son of war. I mean, come on, dude, if you're in the military, you're eating these things up like a giant, nice, cool mulk.

• 1:23:24Jocko Willink?

  Only great and general battles can produce great results.

• 1:23:30Jocko Willink?

  Let us hear not of generals who conquer without bloodshed, right? That's a, that's a quote from a guy that earlier was saying like, hey, listen, you don't always want to go to war.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Jocko Willink?

  But, but who remembers, hey, sometimes you can use other means to achieve victory. No one wants to hear that. They want to hear, let us not hear of great generals who conquer without bloodshed.

• 1:23:49Jocko Willink?

  So he branded himself, but man.

• 1:23:53Jocko Willink?

  By the reiteration of such phrases, Clausewitz blurred into the outlines of his philosophy already indistinct and made it into mere marching refrain.

• 1:24:05Jocko Willink?

  Which in, in, inflamed the blood and intoxicated the mind. In transfusion, it became a doctrine fit to form corporals, not generals. For by making battle appear, quote, "the only real warlike activity," end quote, "his gospel deprived strategy of its laurels and reduce the art of war to the mechanics of mass slaughter." Moreover, it incited generals to seek battle at the first opportunity instead of creating an advantageous opportunity.

• 1:24:37Jocko Willink?

  Clausewitz contributed to the subsequent decay of generalship.

• 1:24:42Jocko Willink?

  When he, when in an oft quoted passage, he wrote, "philanthropists may easily imagine that there is a skillful method of disarming and overcoming the enemy without great bloodshed, and that is the proper tendency of the art of war. That is an error which must be extirpated." So like, hey, this idea of bloodshed, we gotta get rid of that idea.

• 1:25:06Jocko Willink?

  That you can, that you can have war without bloodshed. Gotta get rid of that idea.

• 1:25:12Jocko Willink?

  It is obvious that when he wrote that, he did not pause to reflect that what he decried had been regarded as the proper aim of generalship by all masters of the art of war, including Napoleon himself.

• 1:25:25Jocko Willink?

  Like everyone, Sun Tzu, Napoleon, everyone in between, like, hey, man, if you can win without fighting, that's what we're doing. And he's saying the opposite.

• 1:25:35Jocko Willink?

  Clausewitz phrase would hence force be used by countless blunderers to excuse and even justify their futile squandering of life in bullheaded assaults. The danger was increased because of the way he constantly dwelt on the decisive importance of a numerical superiority. With deeper penetration, he pointed out in one passage that surprise lies, quote, "at the foundation of all undertakings, for without it, the preponderance at the decisive point is not properly conceivable." So that's what we're talking about. That's cool. That's maneuver warfare. But his disciples, struck by his more frequent emphasis on numbers, came to regard mere mass as the

• 1:26:19Jocko Willink?

  simple recipe for victory.

• 1:26:23Jocko Willink?

  Horrible.

• 1:26:25Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? What's a similar idea to that is like my rank, right? It's a rank. Hey, I outrank you. That's my superiority and that's what I'm going to use to lead.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  I mean, that was, that was brutal. Yeah, that was kind of a brutal indictment.

• 1:26:40Jocko Willink?

  There's some little statement that was like, hey, he also said this, but

• 1:26:45Jocko Willink?

  it's like, uh, when the general reads it, when the soldier reads it, what does he want to read? He wants to read about kicking ass.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Jocko Willink?

  And what does he want his corporals to read? He wants his corporals to read about kicking ass. So what do we start reading about? Kicking ass.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Jocko Willink?

  We hear what we want to hear. Echo Charles. Yes, sir.

• 1:27:06Jocko Willink?

  We're not done yet with Clausewitz. Clausewitz's theory of the object. Even worse was the effectiveness theoretical exposition and exaltation of the idea of absolute warfare and proclaiming that the road to success was through the unlimited application of force.

• 1:27:24Jocko Willink?

  Thereby a doctrine which began by defining war only as a continuation of state policy by other means led to the contradictory end of making policy the slave of strategy and bad strategy at that. You know, that's, I would say that's one of his most famous quotes, right? Is that war is a continuation of state policy by other means.

• 1:27:44Jocko Willink?

  But he, he, he ends up taking things to a point where it's like war is what we're doing. Like you said, what the military exists for the military. Everything else exists because of the military. The government is here to provide the military with the resources that we need to go fight battles.

• 1:28:01Jocko Willink?

  The trend was fostered above all by his dictum that quote, "To introduce into philosophy of war, a principle of moderation would be an absurdity. War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds."

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Dude, he's getting some good quotes there for they sound kick ass.

• 1:28:18Jocko Willink?

  Unless you're a freaking soldier in World War One.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  The crazy thing is I'm, as I'm just kind of picturing this, I mean, I'm asking myself now a question that I probably should have asked five years ago, 10 years ago, when I was thinking about this on a more academic mind of, how did Clausewitz or any of these people that are, I guess, disciples of that, of that kind of pure logic train? How did they perceive the value of their own people? You know, because you could see the train of thought of like, hey, this is the, the, the, the purpose of the military is the utter destruction or what, you know, those, those quotes. Whereas the, the, the, you could make a very easy link of like, hey, my soldiers, they're just implements and tools. They're just resources to be expended to achieve that end state.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  And how quickly you could make the, the stretch to like, in World War One, you could almost imagine like, yeah, they're not, they're not people, they're resources. Hey, just give me 10,000 more resources or more tools to, to accomplish this thing.

• 1:29:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you kind of phrase that as a question. I don't think there's much of a question.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:29:23Jocko Willink?

  I think it's pretty obvious where, where these guys were coming from. And it's, it's, it's really scary that you had a culture that supported that. And you had, you know.

• 1:29:37Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's like, it's, it's really strange. You think about like Kipling. And, and Kipling, who wrote these very patriotic poems. That fueled this culture inside of England.

• 1:29:53Jocko Willink?

  And his son was killed in, in World War One. And like, the last thing they saw of him was he's blinded and he's kind of like stumbling on the battlefield before he was killed and his body. I don't think they ever even recovered his body. He's just lost in the mud and muck. And he's got a really harrowing poem. I think, I, I, I know the phrase of the poem is, is, is my boy Jack or my son Jack. It's, it's, it's harrowing to read and if you know what the fuck he's talking about, which is that he. You know, he was this patriotic guy who supported England and, and was

• 1:30:38Jocko Willink?

  contributing to that propaganda.

• 1:30:42Jocko Willink?

  This Victorian, this, this, this culture of look, look, you go over the top. It's time to go, you go and, and he lost his son and you wonder what kind of, um.

• 1:30:56Jocko Willink?

  You know, how that just, the impact that that had on him and, and there is an impact when you read his poems and you see before and after, you see what happened. You can see that it definitely had an impact. But the, man, man, the idea that

• 1:31:12Jocko Willink?

  tens and thousands and hundreds of thousands of, of people, like you said, like, we're like, okay, cool. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. We're, we're going to go over there and

• 1:31:24Jocko Willink?

  when they say go over the top, we're going to go over the top. The Germans, the French, the Canadians, the Americans, the, I mean, that's what we're doing. It's very, very hard. You know, you talk about the value of life and your question around like, well, what do they think of these people? It's like, yeah. What did they and how did we get to a point where modern civilization? But this is a hundred years ago. It's a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, this was happening. It's like, it's crazy to think about.

• 1:32:04Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, and you can kinda see, I mean, what's, there's another good saying, uh,

• 1:32:11Jocko Willink?

  it's

• 1:32:13Jocko Willink?

  uh, something along the lines of like, old men like to send young men to fight and young men like to go fight. Like, that's kind of a thing, right? And you can see how those sort of animalistic instincts that we have and tribal instincts that we have are, and, and the heroic instincts that we have are captured and capitalized on and by like a Clausewitz. Like, when you read Clausewitz, you're like, cool, I'm down with heroic efforts. I'm down with tribal behavior. I'm down with being brave. Like, all those things just roll right into this. So if you don't want to be that guy, that's sort of like, well,

• 1:32:57Jocko Willink?

  maybe we should think about these soldiers as human beings. Well, who's doing that? Apparently, no one. Apparently, no one.

• 1:33:07Jocko Willink?

  So what you have, I guess what I'm saying is you have a, a human instinct and a human slash animal instinct to be tribal, to be heroic, to be sacrificial, to make sacrifices for the tribe. I mean, what is a hero? You know, I've talked about this before. A hero is someone that's not doing, that not making a sacrifice for himself, right? A hero is someone that's making a sacrifice for someone else. And that's a common, that's just the definition of a hero in any language. So when you say, hey, we've got kind of a program here that allows us to be heroic on a massive scale. This is what you end up with.

• 1:33:48Jocko Willink?

  And we kind of lean towards and we tend towards, and you can see how, you can see how the contrary is that you have B. H. Liddell Hart, who's saying, hey, not smart. Not smart. It's better to maneuver. It's better to leave. It's better to retreat. It's better to attack on a different day. And, and how is he getting branded? He's getting branded like, what the hell are you talking about? Were you a coward?

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Jocko Willink?

  Is that what's going on? You're a coward? He's like, hey, bro, I went wounded three times and gassed almost to death, you fucking savages. And you don't know what that was like.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  You talk about, I don't know how many times this has come up, the capacity for the dehumanization of our enemies, and how there's a danger in there. And there's a natural piece of that, but you gotta keep it to a certain place. But I think for me, just to reconcile the dehumanization of your own men. I understand the dehumanization of the enemy, I understand that. And I also understand that there is a limit to that too. And if you go too far, you can undermine your own objectives. We know that, we know that. But the ability to do that with your own men, your own people is, it's, I think that's just why World War

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  I just sits in its own category of, it's just so hard to come to grips with, with us doing that.

• 1:35:21Jocko Willink?

  It does. It's in its own category, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Jocko Willink?

  And I guess that's where we end up with these two kind of opposing theories of war. And who wants to be called the wimp? Who wants to be called the weak? Right? Because that's where you could easily go back to B. H. L. Del Harte and say like, well, he wants to run away. He wants to, you know, attack people from the rear. There's a time where attacking someone in the rear, shoot them in the back was like a horrible thing.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  Right. It's a sign of cowardice.

• 1:35:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. It's a sign of cowardice to go around and, you know, not line up like the other team.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Shoot them in the back, yeah. You know, I've been, the coolest part about being on the podcast in this seat is that this is, I hear this live, as you're reading it. I don't get the advanced copy. You don't like say, Dave, we're prepping this. I get to hear this. And I'm thinking and I'm trying to analyzing, I'm making connections and correlations. And I've kind of just been chuckling a little bit of like, Harte's just hammering Clausewitz. But he, it's almost like I understand more now of why he's so brutal on the attack of him, when he made that connection of, he's the reason why we had generals, and I think he used the word blunders, which is about as nice as you can describe what those leaders did in World War I, is...

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  I actually think I understand why he's so brutal on him is because of what it led to. And I think he's doing a good job saying, I know Clausewitz's goal was not to create this circumstance, and he's defending components of that, but his point was, this is the outcome that he created. His words and his philosophy is what facilitated this window of warfare in our time that allowed us to dehumanize our own men on a scale that's really hard to really comprehend. And I think I'm understanding in real time why he's saying what he's saying about him in such a brutal fashion. And I understand it.

• 1:37:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I kicked off this whole podcast, the last podcast, by explaining what he'd been through. And I said, this shit left a mark on him. I mean, look, it leaves a mark on you when you lose one guy in combat.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  One.

• 1:37:45Jocko Willink?

  One guy in combat, it's gonna leave him, you're never gonna forget it. You're never gonna live it down. You're never gonna go a day without thinking about it. Can you imagine when your battalion gets wiped out?

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine when your brigade, when your division, when you take 60,000 casualties in a day? That's what's going on?

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  And the quote that you're reaching back for was, Clausewitz's phrase would henceforth be used by countless blunderers to excuse and even justify their futile squandering of life in bullheaded assaults. Yeah, he's talking about exactly what he lived through. And that shit left a mark on him without question.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  And this is his opportunity to tell a generation of leaders contemplating the impact of that guy's words with the reality of, without some logical thinking about what he really is trying to say, this is the path you will go down. And this is his way of saying, you cannot go down that path.

• 1:38:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you wanna go and read the rooftops of this guy and turn it into how you're gonna fight a war? You're an idiot.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  You're an idiot.

• 1:39:05Jocko Willink?

  "War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds." That's the last quote I give. He says, "That declaration has served as a foundation for the extravagant absurdity of modern total warfare. His principle of force without limit and without calculation of costs fits and is fit only for a hate-maddened mob." So, he's not done yet. "It is the negation of statemanship and intelligence strategy which seeks to serve the ends of policy. If war be a continuation of policy as Clausewitz had elsewhere declared it, it must necessarily be conducted with a view to post-war benefit.

• 1:39:46Jocko Willink?

  A state which expands its strength to the point of exhaustion bankrupts its own policy." And by the way, that's all players in World War I. Clausewitz himself had qualified the principle of "utmost force" by the admission that "the political object as the original motive of war should be the standard for determining both the aim of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made." Still more significant was a reflective passage in which he remarked that "to pursue the logical extreme entailed that the means would lose all relation to the end, and in

• 1:40:29Jocko Willink?

  most cases, the aim at an extreme effort would be wrecked by the opposite weight of forces within itself." What's the return on investment you're gonna get? His classic work on war was the product of 12 years of intensive thought. If its author had lived to spend a longer time in thinking about war, he might have reached a wiser and clearer conclusion. As his thinking progressed, he was being led toward a different view, penetrating deeper. Unhappily, the process was cut short by his death from cholera in 1830. It was only after his death that his writings on war were published by his widow. They were found in a number of sealed packets bearing the significant and prophetic note."

• 1:41:13Jocko Willink?

  So, he wrote a note on his writings, and it said, "Should the work be interrupted by my death, then what is found can only be called a mass of conceptions, not brought into form, open to endless misconceptions."

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  Sorry Clausewitz, I mean, he covered it. He did his best to cover it.

• 1:41:37Jocko Willink?

  Much of the harm might have been avoided but for that fatal cholera germ, for there are significant indications that in the gradual evolution of his thought, he had reached a point where he was about to drop his original concept of absolute war and revise his whole theory on more common sense lines when death intervened. In consequence, the way was left open to endless misconceptions far in excess of his anticipation, for the universal adoption of the theory of unlimited war has gone far to wreck civilization. The teaching of Clausewitz, taken without understanding, largely influenced both the causation and the character of World War I, thereby it led on, all too logically, to World War II.

• 1:42:28Jocko Willink?

  Theory in flux, next section, after World War I. The course and effects of the First World War provided ample cause to doubt the validity of Clausewitz's theory, at least interpreted by his successors. On land, innumerable battles were fought without ever producing the decisive results expected of them. But the responsible leaders were slow to adapt their aim to circumstances or develop new means to make the aim more possible. And maybe that's why, you know, when he was going through the eight items that we were talking about earlier, on the earlier podcast,

• 1:43:02Jocko Willink?

  his number one thing, remember you're saying the number one thing was his number eight thing? His number one thing was, "adjust your end to your means." And here he's saying, "The responsible leaders were slow to adapt their aim to the circumstances or develop new means to make the aim more possible." Instead of facing the problem, they pressed theory to a suicidal extreme, draining their own strength beyond the safety limit in pursuit of an ideal of complete victory by battle, which was never fulfilled. That one side ultimately collapsed. That one side ultimately collapsed, so the Germans ultimately collapsed, do more to emptiness of stomach produced by economic pressure of sea power than the loss of blood, although blood which was lost

• 1:43:46Jocko Willink?

  in the abortive German offensive in 1918, and the loss of spirit in consequence of their palpable failure to gain the victory hastened the collapse.

• 1:43:56Jocko Willink?

  If this provided the opposition, the opposing nations with a semblance of victory, their efforts to win, it cost them such a price in moral and physical exhaustion that they, the seeming victors, were left incapable of consolidating their position. Became evident there was something wrong with the theory, or at least with its application. Alike on the plains of the tactics, strategy and policy, the appalling losses suffered in vain pursuit of the ideal objective and the post-war exhaustion of the nominal victors showed that a thorough reexamination of the whole problem of the object and aim was needed.

• 1:44:41Jocko Willink?

  Besides these negative factors, there were also several, several positive reasons to prompt a fresh inquiry. One was the decisive part that sea power had played without any decisive battle at sea and producing the enemy's collapse by economic pressure. That raised the question whether Britain in particular had not made a basic mistake in departing from her traditional strategy and devoting much of her effort at such terrific cost to herself to the prolonged attempt to win a decisive victory on land. Yeah, England freaking survived forever just by rolling, ruling the sea. Britannia rules the waves. That's what we do in England. Now we're over here fighting these, these people on land?

• 1:45:23Jocko Willink?

  Two other reasons arose from the new factors. The development of air forces offered the possibility of striking the enemy's economic and moral centers without having to first achieve the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield. Air power might attain a direct end by indirect means, hopping over opposition instead of overthrowing it. Good deal, Dave.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  I mean, that's always been the goal, whether it's, whether it's ever going to prove to be true. You could make a couple of arguments, but that's always been the goal. We can do this without actually fighting on the ground, on the ground.

• 1:45:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:02Jocko Willink?

  At the same time, so at the same time we have air power, at the same time, the combined development of the petrol motor and the caterpillar track opened up a prospect of developing mechanized land forces of high mobility. This in turn foreshadowed a newly enlarged possibility of producing the collapse of the enemy's main forces without a serious battle by cutting their supply lines, dislocating their control systems, or producing paralysis by the sheer nerve shock of deep penetration into their rear. So all of a sudden, you've got vehicles that can haul ass, not get shot up, and move a bunch of troops in a short amount of time. Mechanized land forces of this new kind might also provide like air power, though in a lesser degree, the possibility of striking direct at the heart and nerve system of the opposing country.

• 1:46:44Jocko Willink?

  While air mobility could achieve such direct strokes by an overhead form of indirect approach, tank mobility might achieve them by indirect approach on the ground, avoiding the obstacle of the opposing army. To illustrate the point by a board game analogy with chess, air mobility introduced the knight's move and tank mobility, a queen's move into warfare. Analogy does not, of course, express their respective values for an air force combined with the vaulting power of the knight's move with the always flexibility of the queen's move. On the other hand, a mechanized force, a mechanized ground force, though it lacked vaulting power, could remain in occupation of the square it gained.

• 1:47:24Jocko Willink?

  A couple of other things. These, these new, these new technologies increase the range of military action against military objectives, making it easier to overthrow an opposing body such as an army by paralyzing some of its vital organs instead of having to destroy it physically as a whole by hard fighting. If you could, you could knock out some of the key nodes, that's going to be better. The sum effect of the advent of this multiplied mobility, both on the ground and in the air,

• 1:48:06Jocko Willink?

  was to increase the power and importance of strategy relative to tactics. The higher commanders of the future would have the prospect of achieving decisive results much more by movement than by fighting compared with their predecessors.

• 1:48:25Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, though skipping ahead a little bit, unfortunately, those who were at the head of the armies after World War I were slow to recognize the need of a fresh definition of the military aim in light of changed conditions and war instruments.

• 1:48:41Jocko Willink?

  I mean, you should be absolutely rethinking every, you imagine going from not having tanks and aircraft to having tanks and aircraft? You should be completely changing the entire way you're thinking about warfare.

• 1:48:56Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, this is after World War I.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:01Jocko Willink?

  You know, we did a piece, we did a podcast on the Boer War and they learned all these lessons during the Boer War and then they freaking didn't capitalize on any of them. Like World War I shouldn't have happened, but just based on what they learned in World War, in the Boer War. I'm going extreme. I don't want to go this extreme. There are many lessons that there were learned during the Boer War. That they could have taken back and said, we need to do things differently. And they didn't freaking adjust very many of them at all.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  Well, going back to the last podcast and one of the first comments he made about the, the, the natural resistance, the, the automatic resistance that will happen when you propose change and I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember the exact quote, but the idea that when I suggest a change to the norm, there will be, there will be resistance. You know what? To call me even a history, an amateur is, is a compliment. But I even think about, you know, the advent of air power and the resistance, even in the Navy to the idea that air power would somehow supplant the battleship as the preeminent force.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  And how obvious it seems now, certainly, but at the time we're thinking, hey, do you not, can you not see the, the potential advantage if we could somehow occupy this third dimension of battle? Exclusively, and how much risk it creates and the resistance and I, my guess would be is that for the few folks that have the audacity to vocalize those lessons.

• 1:50:35Jocko Willink?

  Run out of the Navy. And by the way, remember the last podcast when I talked about 17 out of 20 advancements in naval warfare? One of them was aircraft carriers and air power.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:50:47Jocko Willink?

  That's one of the people, are you kidding me?

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  You're kidding me.

• 1:50:48Jocko Willink?

  We have a battleship, bro.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:50Jocko Willink?

  Back off.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  It's, it's, this book is getting harder and harder to listen to. Because, because, because I have the, the his, the hindsight of his, of, of what he's saying and the context of that, which he, he didn't have the future context that we all have now, but it's making it just so much more damning to, you know, what he's saying.

• 1:51:17Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit, practice in World War II. When the next war came, the handful of new land forces of mechanized kind that had been created amply fulfilled the claims that had been made for them and for their decisive effect if employed for long range strokes at strategic objectives.

• 1:51:39Jocko Willink?

  Unfortunately, it's the Nazis that are

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  I just gonna say, yeah.

• 1:51:42Jocko Willink?

  A mere six divisions of this kind were largely instrumental in producing the collapse of Poland in a few weeks.

• 1:51:50Jocko Willink?

  A mere 10 such divisions virtually decided the so-called Battle of France before the infantry mass of the German army had even come in action and made the collapse of all Western countries an almost inevitable sequel. This conquest of the West was completed in barely a month's campaign with amazingly small cost to the victor. Indeed, the bloodshed all around was very slight and in the decisive phase trifling by a Clausewitzian standard.

• 1:52:20Jocko Willink?

  I mean, can you imagine you fight those freaking three bloody satanic battles? I mean, campaigns in World War I.

• 1:52:32Jocko Willink?

  Just incomprehensible and then fast forward how many years 20 years

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  20 years

• 1:52:38Jocko Willink?

  20 years, 22 years, whatever and it's over in less than a month like that's what we're talking about and there's almost no bloodshed because it just happened so fast because we have maneuver on our side

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, even and even in between those two examples not not to marginalize you know what the Germans did to Poland but it's what happened to the French that seems to me more remarkable because because of what they had just been through and then to see I mean the the image of of Hitler at the Eiffel Tower I mean like that's a that's a it's hard to put into words what that means for him to be standing there with with with basically no real cost of doing it relative

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  Crazy

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  Crazy

• 1:53:31Jocko Willink?

  While this sweeping victory was attained by action against objectives of military nature it was mainly through action of maneuver strategic more than tactical so it's a different he's playing a different game

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah

• 1:53:42Jocko Willink?

  Playing a different game

• 1:53:48Jocko Willink?

  Similar reflections apply to the even swifter conquest of the Balkans in April of 1941 which once again demonstrated the paralyzing effect of the new instruments of strategic application battle was insignificant in comparison and destruction palpably inappropriate term for the way that the decision was achieved when it came to the invasion of Russia a somewhat different method was tried many of the German generals particularly Halder the chief of the general staff complain of Hitler's tendency to aim at the economic rather than military objectives but analysis of the operational orders and of their own evidence does not bear out the charge while Hitler was inclined to think that the economic aim would be more effective

• 1:54:28Jocko Willink?

  it is clear that in the crucial period of 1941 campaign he conformed to the general staff's preference for fighting battles

• 1:54:37Jocko Willink?

  Thankfully, thank God, yeah. The pursuit of this aim did not prove decisive, although it produced several great victories in which immense forces of the enemy were destroyed. Okay, went and killed a bunch of Russians.

• 1:54:51Jocko Willink?

  Whether concentration on economic objectives would have been more decisive remains an open question, but the reflection that some of the ablest of the German generals consider that the best chance of defeating Soviet Russia was lost by aiming to win battles in the classical way, instead of driving through as fast as possible to the moral come economic objectives offered by Moscow and Leningrad. The leading exponent, or Gordian, the leading exponent of the new school of mechanical mobile warfare wished to do on this key question Hitler had sided with the orthodox school.

• 1:55:25Jocko Willink?

  Like we said, thank God.

• 1:55:32Jocko Willink?

  In the series of swift German conquests, the air force combined with the mechanized elements of land forces in producing the paralysis and moral disintegration of the opposing forces and of nations behind. Its effect was terrific and must be reckoned fully as important as that of the Panzer forces. The two are inseparable in any valuation of the elements that created the new style of lightning warfare, the Blitzkrieg.

• 1:55:57Jocko Willink?

  So I'm going to fast forward a little bit. There's a section in here about strategic bombing and, and what he calls grand strategic bombing or industrial bombing. And he kind of goes into,

• 1:56:15Jocko Willink?

  into how affected actually, how effective it actually was. He says, "The actual effect which this kind of bombing achieved in contribution to victory is very difficult to assess despite much detailed investigation. The estimation of the data is confused by partisan estimate assessments, both by those who favored industrial bombing and those who opposed it on various grounds. Apart from the fog thus created, a correct assessment is handicapped and made almost impossible by the amount of imponderabilia."

• 1:56:48Jocko Willink?

  In the data even more than the evidenced about any other type of military action imponderabilia, meaning things that can't be determined. So he's basically saying that some of the industrial bombing may have not have been effective as we thought it was. Fast forward a little bit, still clear is the extremely detrimental effect of industrial bombing on the post-war situation. Again, we're going to think grand strategy, we've got to think about what's happening afterwards. Beyond the immense scale of devastation hard to repair are the less obvious, but probably more lasting, social and moral effects. This kind of action inevitably produces a deepening danger to the relative shallow foundations

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  of civilized life. Think about what you're doing to this civilian populace and how is that going to affect the future? That common danger is now immensely increased by the advent of the atomic bomb. Here we are brought to the fundamental difference between strategy and grand strategy. Whereas strategy is only concerned with the problem of winning military victory, grand strategy must take the longer view. For its problem is the winning of the peace. Such an order of thought is not a matter of putting the cart before the horse,

• 1:58:13Jocko Willink?

  but of being clear where the horse and cart are going. And I'll tell you what, with that, we're approaching two hours right now. We're probably really close, if not at two hours, and we have a lot more to cover. So Echo, is it cool if we wrap this one up for now? Sure. All right, so we'll come back to you, one more podcast about this book. And well, I've got about these books. Until then.

• 1:58:47Jocko Willink?

  Until then and look, we're going deep right now. We're drinking some, we're drinking some drinks. Uh, we're getting after it. How do we get these drinks we're drinking? What are we doing? You just cracked another one open.

• 1:58:59Speaker 02

  Sure. What do we got? Actually, real quick, I had a thought. So Klaus Witz and Liddell Hart, they're kind of like, you ever watch Karate Kid?

• 1:59:08Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  The OG, original Karate Kid, John Kreese, Mr. Miyagi.

• 1:59:13Jocko Willink?

  Okay, yep.

• 1:59:14Speaker 02

  So Klaus Witz, Klaus Witz or Klaus Witz?

• 1:59:18Jocko Willink?

  Depends on what kind of an accent I'm kind of like attempting, but yeah.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  So he's John Kreese. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, like kind of that philosophy.

• 1:59:28Jocko Willink?

  Wait, that's Mr. Miyagi?

• 1:59:29Speaker 02

  No, that's John Kreese.

• 1:59:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 1:59:31Speaker 02

  You know, kind of the bad guy, but he'll get you fired up. He'll get you fired up to fight and destroy.

• 1:59:36Jocko Willink?

  Let's face it, we all want to say no mercy in this dojo.

• 1:59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:39Jocko Willink?

  We kind of like that.

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  Fear does not exist in this dojo.

• 1:59:43Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  Right? All this stuff. So it gets you fired up, you know, but Mr. Miyagi, 442nd, by the way.

• 1:59:49Jocko Willink?

  Oh, really?

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  He was in 442nd.

• 1:59:50Jocko Willink?

  Real life?

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:59:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  In the story.

• 1:59:52Jocko Willink?

  In the movie, okay, got it, got it, got it.

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:59:55Jocko Willink?

  I got a book about the 442nd. I gotta get a better one. I got one of it as a history book. And it was cool and somebody sent it to me and I was kind of stoked like, yeah, but it was a history book. Wasn't a lot of first person. I was like, cool, we can do a history book as long as a bunch of first person accounts. It really wasn't that many in there. I gotta get, I gotta get on the 442nd.

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  I dig it. Nonetheless, Mr. Miyagi, his whole thing was balance, right? Takes Daniel's son out on the river or the lake. And he has him on the boat, right? Balance first before, he's like, when do I learn how to fight all this stuff? What else did he say? Why learn karate? And he was like, so you don't have to fight, whatever. You see what I'm saying? The balance, man. It's what it seemed like to me. I don't know. There you go, bro. Provided some more understanding.

• 2:00:39Jocko Willink?

  Here I am, reading these books and you're just getting it from a karate kid.

• 2:00:42Speaker 02

  You could have just watched Karate Kid, yeah, that's true. Nonetheless, you are right. We are here drinking discipline go. Sometimes you gotta drink discipline go. It's good. Nonetheless, last time I was saying how now the path is a little bit easier. Thing is, I don't know if the path is actually easier because easy, easy is not the right word.

• 2:01:02Speaker 02

  Maybe it's comfortable.

• 2:01:04Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:01:04Speaker 02

  That doesn't sound like the right word either. Cause like comfort, you want to be capable, you want to be comfortable. Nonetheless, it's more pleasurable. How about that? We're drinking discipline. Go, it tastes good. It's good for you. It's a win-win strategically and tactically.

• 2:01:17Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:01:19Speaker 02

  I think all this stuff is along those lines. Alright, same thing with milk. You can have something that tastes really, really good, plus provides protein, plus is healthy. Boom. This is all the Jaco Fuel stuff. So also we got your joint stuff, uh, your immunity stuff. Joint warfarin, supercrill oil, vitamin D3 and

• 2:01:40Speaker 02

  cold war.

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  It's true. Get these things at JacoFuel.com. Get the discipline go energy drinks. I'm just gonna call them energy drinks just for because that's what we're doing.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  Drinking the energy drinks. Get those at Wawa and Vitamin Shoppe. Actually, you can get everything from Vitamin Shoppe. Also, yes, or at JacoFuel.com. Get the subscription if you don't want to get, uh, if you don't want to, you don't want to forget about, um, you know, restocking.

• 2:02:10Jocko Willink?

  Check it out. If you subscribe to whatever you want from Jaco Fuel, shipping's free. And shipping can be expensive. Let's face it. And we want to not expend resources that we don't have to.

• 2:02:24Jocko Willink?

  A little indirect attack, get subscription. All of a sudden, shipping's free. It's true. Your resources are spared and can be utilized for other offensive operations.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:02:37Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of like a kind of badass way of saying that, right?

• 2:02:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of. I agree. I agree. Yeah, yeah, fully. Also, speaking of operations, Origin USA, American-made stuff, durable goods, clothing. What that means is you want to get some American-made jeans, made out of American-made denim, made out of American-made cotton.

• 2:02:57Speaker 02

  Origin USA, that's where you can get this stuff. Also has athletic wear, some jujitsu stuff, gi's, rash guards, belts, wallets, boots. I still have your boots, by the way.

• 2:03:07Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I think I'm gonna need those soon.

• 2:03:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't worry, they're downstairs in the car. So, you're all good. Nonetheless, Origin USA, that's where you can get this stuff. Real good stuff. It's a big deal too, made in America, the way it is made in America from the beginning, all the way up into the final product.

• 2:03:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we have a factory full of awesome American people up there, creating this stuff, sewing it, printing it. I mean, just every aspect, cutting it, sewing it, it's just legit. And if you follow that, if you, if you pull the thread on a pair of jeans, you're gonna end up in a cotton field in, in Texas.

• 2:03:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:03:45Jocko Willink?

  Or in Georgia. Like, that's where it's coming from. So, know your roots.

• 2:03:50Speaker 02

  Know your roots. It's true. Speaking of roots, also Jaco has a store. That's his roots. It's called Jaco Store. That's where you can get the Discipline Equals Freedom, or Good, or Get After It. All, you can get the shirts, the hats, hoodies.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  Some rash guards on there.

• 2:04:09Jocko Willink?

  Stuff.

• 2:04:09Speaker 02

  A bunch of stuff. Anyway, yeah, check that one out. Jaco, it's at jacostore.com. And yeah, if you like something, get something. We also have a subscription situation there, called The Shirt Locker. If you want a cool, kinda off-shoot conceptual designs.

• 2:04:27Jocko Willink?

  I don't think you've really figured out how to describe your designs yet.

• 2:04:30Speaker 02

  No, it's a work in progress. See what I'm saying?

• 2:04:32Jocko Willink?

  I see, but each time, you gotta progress. You haven't progressed your description.

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but just like, um, what do you call, uh, warfare, you know? You don't, you're not always progressing. See what I'm saying?

• 2:04:43Jocko Willink?

  But you wanna be.

• 2:04:44Speaker 02

  Hey, some, sometimes you go forward, sometimes you go backwards, you know? Hopefully, the whole grand, uh, what do you call, freaking?

• 2:04:49Jocko Willink?

  Grand strategy?

• 2:04:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hopefully I end up forward. Hopefully I end up achieving the goal of explaining how cool the Shirt Locker is.

• 2:04:59Jocko Willink?

  See, you already did a better job, right there. You just needed a little help.

• 2:05:02Speaker 02

  A little help, okay, good.

• 2:05:03Jocko Willink?

  Needed some criticism, some direct feedback about your weak ass repetitions.

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  I'm over here trying and you know, and I think the people are responding. You know, people seem to like it.

• 2:05:14Jocko Willink?

  I gotta admit, when we were at the muster and I saw some people that had Shirt Locker shirts on.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  Totally representing.

• 2:05:21Jocko Willink?

  Extra level of connection.

• 2:05:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I felt the exact same thing. Anyway, yeah, Shirt Locker, that's at jocko store.com. So yes, sign up for that if you're down.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  And you can subscribe to this podcast too. We also have Jaco Unraveling Podcast that I'm doing with Daryl Cooper. Who knows what's gonna happen? We're getting crazy on that thing. Got all kinds of topics we're digging into. We don't always agree on stuff. It's come to find out. In DC, sometimes it gets a little hectic in the podcast room. Check out that, the Jaco Unraveling Podcast. Check out the Grounded Podcast. Check out the Warrior Kid Podcast. You can also check out, we have another alternative podcast called Jaco Underground. You can go to jacoun underground.com if you want to hear some amplifying information, if you want to hear some other topics that are adjacent to, yet not fully embedded with

• 2:06:15Jocko Willink?

  Jocko Podcast topics. But, look, even though I think about leadership 20 hours a day, there's other things I think about like psychology, like sociology, like questions, answering questions from people. So there's a lot of stuff going on that. Also, it gives us the opportunity to have an alternative platform besides the mainstream platforms, which we do not control. We don't mind, you know, being on those platforms, but they could make moves that would, we would mind, that we would not appreciate, and we know you wouldn't appreciate. So in order to prevent us from being in a situation that we have lost total control, we have some contingency plans. It's called Jaco Underground, jacoun

• 2:06:59Jocko Willink?

  underground.com. You can join. We'll get you this little extra podcast. Costs $8.18 a month. That way, we have it if we need it. And if you can't afford it, it's cool. We still got your back.

• 2:07:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:07:14Jocko Willink?

  Email assistance at jockounderground.com. We've got a YouTube channel where I am the assistant director for many of the videos. And hence, some of the videos have very high quality. Some of them that I don't work on, a little bit subpar, but cool. Echo's working on it. He's working on improving.

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:07:34Jocko Willink?

  So there you go.

• 2:07:35Speaker 02

  Uh, psychological warfare. It's an album, Jocko album with Jocko tracks where, you know, if you want to skip the workout, you want to cheat on the diet when you have those feelings. You need some help, boom, Jocko's there to help. Get you through those moments of weakness. Sort of play the tracks, boom, and around we go. You can get those, anywhere you get MP3s, that's where you can get them. Amazon, Google Play, all those places.

• 2:07:55Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about flipsidecanvas.com. If you want to hang some cool stuff on your wall, which you probably do, things that remind you of the path.

• 2:08:05Jocko Willink?

  Go to flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota Meyer. Imagine having something from Dakota Meyer's hanging in your house. It's freaking just legit.

• 2:08:13Jocko Willink?

  If you think about Dakota Meyer, you'd just be like, cool, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get after it.

• 2:08:19Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 2:08:20Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 2:08:20Speaker 02

  That's what I think. Yeah, fully.

• 2:08:22Jocko Willink?

  You know what's funny? Dakota, Dakota and I, when we talk, we will have conversations and that, we will be laughing hysterically about stuff.

• 2:08:31Speaker 02

  That is not surprising.

• 2:08:31Jocko Willink?

  He actually makes me laugh harder than anyone currently in my, uh, regime of contacts.

• 2:08:41Speaker 02

  Interesting. What about Theo Von, huh?

• 2:08:43Jocko Willink?

  Theo can crack me up too. That's true. Yeah, that's a good point. But it's a different kind.

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it's different. Yeah, it's true.

• 2:08:52Jocko Willink?

  You know what? Theo will getting me to laugh, get me laughing on a tactical level.

• 2:08:56Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:08:58Jocko Willink?

  With, with, with, man, with Dakota, man, sometimes we're laughing at a strategic deep level.

• 2:09:06Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, so we got that. Flipsidecanvas.com, Dakota Meyer. We also got a bunch of books. Final Spin.

• 2:09:13Jocko Willink?

  It's a.

• 2:09:15Jocko Willink?

  Book, poem, manuscript, transcript, new form, new format of literature. Sure. Notice how I said that? Sure, I did, yeah. New format of literature. My wife says literature because she's British. Literature. So a new form of literature, which I invented. The text. Text. You gotta go to the text. If you want to observe the text. That's the highbrow deal. Did you, I teach you that? No, no, you didn't know about that. Yeah, you taught me that. Did I teach you that? That's what they say. Did you, they say that in, uh, when you went to get your masters? They say, if you, if you, if you reference the text in this situation, like they don't call it a book. Cause you're just like a loser if you just have a book. You have to refer to the text. Yeah. The text. Yeah.

• 2:10:00Jocko Willink?

  We don't like that. Anyways, if you want to check out the text, you can check out Final Spin. You can preorder it right now. Also, Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Code, The Evaluation, The Protocols. Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual. Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, Miking the Dragons, About Face by Hackworth, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. Just all the things that we're talking about when it comes to leadership and all these different books. Also, speaking of leadership, we have a leadership consultancy. What do we do, Dave? We solve problems through leadership.

• 2:10:32Jocko Willink?

  But aren't, but what about problems that aren't really leadership related?

• 2:10:37Jocko Willink?

  All your problems are leadership problems. Isn't that crazy? It's true. If you want us to come and help you inside your organization, go to echelonfront.com. We also have an online training program, efonline.com. It's Extreme Ownership Academy. We have, we have courses on every chapter. We have live Q and As that we do. We have leadership primers. We have question of the day. We got all kinds, we had a forum on there. We got all kinds of stuff on there. To help you with the most important skill that a human being can have, which is leadership. Leadership can prevent things like freaking the Battle of the Somme.

• 2:11:18Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 2:11:21Jocko Willink?

  Muster 2021.

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Orlando done. Next up, Phoenix, August 17th and 18th. Las Vegas. October 28th and 29th. These are our leadership. Conferences. Come and get it. We also have the FTX where you where you get your gear on. Get set up with a high-speed laser tag gun, get taught some of the basic tactics, military tactics, and then you go with your team and you conduct operations. You put these strategies and tactics and principles that we talk about all the time. You put them to use. And you see how they work out. And you learn and you get debriefed. So if you want to do that.

• 2:12:07Jocko Willink?

  Check out the FTX, San Diego, July 12th and 13th. Go to ashlalfront.com. If you want to help service members. Active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, you can check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. And if you want more of my exhaustive explanations, or you need more of Echo's disjointed delirium.

• 2:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Perhaps you need more of Dave's exhilarated expositions. You can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, on the gram, and on Facebook. Echo is at Echo Charles. Dave is at David R Burke. And I am at Jocko Willink. And to all the military personnel out there.

• 2:13:01Jocko Willink?

  Thank you for taking these tactics that we are talking about and putting them to work around the world to keep us free. And the same to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe here at home. And to everyone else out there.

• 2:13:29Jocko Willink?

  Well,

• 2:13:32Jocko Willink?

  if you know the way broadly, you see it in all things. So I've got an idea.

• 2:13:41Jocko Willink?

  Try your best to open up your eyes, look around, and see the way in everything that you do.

• 2:13:52Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Dave, and Echo, and Jaco. Out.