197: Time, History, and Knowledge, are All Connected. Truppenfuhrung: With Andrew Paul.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:57 - Truppenfuhrung. Leading Troops. 1:52:04 - Closing thoughts and take-aways. 1:53:05 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:06:30 - 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 197 with Andrew Paul and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Andrew. Good evening. For those of you that don't know Andrew, Andrew was one of my brothers from Task Unit Bruiser. He's now with us at Echelon Front. And if you haven't heard Podcast number 42, that's when Andrew came on and talked about his experiences. But we're not really interviewing Andrew today. He's just filling in for Echo Charles, who's on vacation again. Vacation? Yeah. So that's why Andrew's here. So I have someone to talk to. Otherwise, it gets lonely in the podcast room.

• 0:46Jocko Willink?

  All right. You've heard me say before, if you know the way broadly, you see it in all things. That's what, a little quote from Musashi.

• 0:57Jocko Willink?

  But beyond that, when you pull the thread on things. When you dig down and you dig in.

• 1:08Jocko Willink?

  You find that things are not just similar, they're actually connected. There's a thread that runs through time and through history. And there's a thread that runs through knowledge. Knowledge itself. And when you start connecting things, you understand them better. So there's some, I see them all the time.

• 1:31Jocko Willink?

  In About Face, my favorite book. Colonel David Hackworth talks about one of his mentors. A guy he served with, a guy named Glover Johns.

• 1:43Jocko Willink?

  Who was a officer in the Army, who wrote a book that we covered on this podcast called The Clay Pigeons in St. Lo. How crazy is that connection? I had John Stryker Meyer on and when he was on in one of his books, he was talking about Eldon Bargewell, a SOG operator that actually was a mentor to one of my mentors in the SEAL teams. The connection, how crazy is that? What about the fact that I read about and admired Dick Winters? Commander of the second of the 506, the Band of Brothers in Europe.

• 2:25Jocko Willink?

  And then in Ramadi, we worked with the first of the 506. So these connections, they're just everywhere. They're just everywhere you look, things are connected. Now, one of my favorite old field manuals is called FM 100 Tac 5, Field Service Regulations. It was issued by the Department of War on May 22nd, 1941. And it's an awesome manual, all kinds of information. And I'm going to cover it on the podcast. But the thing is, the FM 100 Tac 5 is not the most original document that I've ever seen.

• 3:08Jocko Willink?

  And I've talked about the roots of maneuver warfare. In fact, we covered a book called Maneuver Warfare.

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  And the influence of the Prussian armies defeated the Battle of Jena. You got General Scharnhorst and his influence on the Prussian military and thereby the German military. Well, what's interesting is FM 100 Tac 5. Again, this is an American field service regulations, an American field manual. It was so plagiarized. It completely plagiarized from another document. And this document. is called Truppenführung, which is my attempt at German. Truppenführung, which basically translates to leading troops.

• 4:00Jocko Willink?

  And it was first published in 1933. So we're talking about Nazi Germany. And it was prepared by, by a, a group of people, a group of military men, but the leader of that group of military men was a guy named Colonel General Ludwig Beck. Now Nazis obviously are a scourge to humanity. But what's interesting is this guy, General Beck, was not a fan of the Nazis. He wasn't really a fan of Hitler.

• 4:38Jocko Willink?

  In fact, he was eventually executed by the Nazis because he's one of the guys that coordinated and tried to assassinate Hitler. He's one of those guys and they figured it out and they assassinated him. So he had some good character and he had a outstanding military sense. He was educated, kind of like the traditional Prussian military education, served as a staff officer in World War One. He was, he, he objected staunchly to the, the offense of Germany starting World War Two.

• 5:23Jocko Willink?

  He did not want to go and fight. He realized that it was going to be a problem. And again, he resigned in protest, actually. He resigned in protest and he tried to get a bunch of other people to resign and. You know, they kind of covered it up and made him walk away. Then, like I said, eventually he tried to kill Hitler. He tried to plot to kill Hitler. And I think it was Rommel. Rommel was saying, because Rommel also participated in the attempted assassination of of Hitler, which is why he got killed. We'll go into that someday on the podcast. I'm sure they came to him and said, "Hey, you can come with us now and you'll die a hero.

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  You have to kill yourself, but you know, we won't say anything. Or we're gonna send you to court and make you a, you know, a public scapegoat for everything that's going wrong in Germany." And he chose the former and went out in the woods, said goodbye to his family, went out in the woods and killed himself. That's that's Rommel. So Beck was executed.

• 6:31Jocko Willink?

  But, like I said, his character obviously was a little bit, you know, he had some good character traits, stood up for what he believed in. And the fact that this book, Truppenführung,

• 6:43Jocko Willink?

  the fact that this book is, has been so widely copied, the Americans use something based on it, the Brits use something based, the Germans still use something based on it, really kind of reveals his leadership knowledge. So with that,

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  we'll go to the book. The book Truppenführung. Am I getting better at saying that?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  It sounds good to me.

• 7:05Jocko Willink?

  Truppenführung. All right. Kicks off with the introduction. The introduction starts with,

• 7:14Jocko Willink?

  "The conduct of war is an art depending upon free, creative activity scientifically grounded." Is that the way you think of it? Love that definition, out of the gate. "War is art, depending on free, creative activity scientifically grounded." It makes the highest demands on the personality. Boom.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  It makes, that makes complete sense to me, actually. It really does.

• 7:40Jocko Willink?

  I think the first time I said that was with Tim Ferriss at some point. And I said, I said, "War is an exercise in creativity." That's what I said. And here you have where I subconsciously or consciously stole that from.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Or just found that to be true.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  Yes, or just found that to be true.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Because so many people say, "Oh, well, you know, you have to be a robot to be a soldier." It's actually not like that at all.

• 8:01Jocko Willink?

  You will, you will be destroyed. Next, the conduct of war is based on continuous development. Oh, check. New means of warfare call forth ever-changing employment. Their use must be anticipated, their influence must be correctly estimated and quickly utilized. Situations in war are of unlimited variety. They change often and suddenly and only rarely are from the first discernible.

• 8:30Jocko Willink?

  Incalculable elements are often of great influence. The independent will of the enemy is pitted against ours.

• 8:41Jocko Willink?

  The independent will of the enemy is pitted against ours. Friction and mistakes are of everyday occurrence.

• 8:49Jocko Willink?

  So this guy is out of the gate. You know, he knows what he's talking about. Every one of these things, he just nails it. But what's always interesting, of course, is that he's talking about war, but guess what? It applies to everything you do in life. Because guess what? Everything in life is going to change. It's unlimited variety. It's a test of wills. There's friction and mistakes that occur every day, no matter what you're doing. In business, with your family, no matter what you're doing, you are going to experience this.

• 9:22Jocko Willink?

  The teaching of the conduct of war cannot be concentrated exhaustively in regulations. The principles so enunciated must be employed dependent upon the situation.

• 9:37Jocko Willink?

  So exhaustively, you cannot focus exhaustively on regulations. Which again, as you just pointed out, Andrew, that's what people think. That, oh, you're in the military, you just follow orders. No, you have to be able to think. In fact, if all you do is follow the regulations, you're wrong.

• 10:02Jocko Willink?

  Simplicity of conduct.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Simple.

• 10:06Jocko Willink?

  Logically carried through will most surely attain the objective.

• 10:12Jocko Willink?

  Yes. War is the severest test of spiritual and bodily strength. In war, character outweighs intellect.

• 10:25Jocko Willink?

  Many stand forth on the field of battle who in peace would remain unnoticed. That's an interesting.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  That's, yeah. I didn't, I didn't see that coming.

• 10:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  In this intro.

• 10:36Jocko Willink?

  That's just, I think what he's saying is

• 10:43Jocko Willink?

  that, that person with the strong will, that person with the strong character, hey, man, you can be a really smart person and be mentally weak. All day long.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Agreed, discipline.

• 10:54Jocko Willink?

  Yes, so you can be super smart and when things get crazy, you're shriveling up, you're thinking too much, right? You're shriveling up in the corner scared of what might happen. Where you, if you're just a dude that has strong character, guess what? You can step up and win.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Well, and how about when, if you can know all the right things to do, but if you lack the fortitude and discipline to, to do it.

• 11:20Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  You're, it does like, how many doctors know all the right things about health? And yet maybe are not in great shape. So they know the things to do, but don't do this, the same, same kind of thing.

• 11:31Jocko Willink?

  Maybe you don't see this very often anymore, but like doctors that smoke. Well, now I guess you just get doctors that eat crap.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:39Jocko Willink?

  Right? Horrible. So yes. Same thing. So that, that strength of character

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  doesn't matter. You can overwhelm the super smart dude over in the corner.

• 11:54Jocko Willink?

  Next.

• 11:57Jocko Willink?

  Armies as well as lesser units demand, and by the way, if you can tell my reading is kind of stilted, you know, because it's translation. So there's some weird words, some weird orders of words that don't quite flow, which is why I was gonna read the, the American manual 100 Tac 5 first, but no, I decided to do this one first because it's more challenging.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny though, I, when, as you've been reading this already, I've been thinking, wow, this is so concisely written and the words are so carefully chosen. And then I thought, wait, this is, was this, no, it wasn't written in English. It was written in German, yet it's translated so well.

• 12:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the American one, I'm gonna do that one probably next, but it's, it's even more like to the point. So, but you gotta know where, you gotta know where the connections come from.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  I agree. Keep going back.

• 12:48Jocko Willink?

  So continuing on, armies as well as lesser units demand of leaders, good judgment. Here's what leaders need, good judgment, clear thinking and far seeing, leaders with independence and decisive resolution, leaders with perseverance and energy, leaders not emotionally moved by the varying fortunes of war, leaders with a high sense of responsibility.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Really?

• 13:11Jocko Willink?

  Yes. Is this not everything I talk about all the time?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Oh, decentralized command here.

• 13:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, decentralized command. Oh, high sense of responsibility. I think we might call that extreme ownership.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  Unemotionally moved, not emotionally moved by the varying fortunes of war.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Detached.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  So yeah, this, this is just epic.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 13:33Jocko Willink?

  The officer is a leader and a teacher. Besides his knowledge of men and his sense of justice must be distinguished by his superior knowledge and experience, his earnestness,

• 13:45Jocko Willink?

  his earnestness, his self-control and high courage. I mean, it's just.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  So awesome.

• 13:52Jocko Willink?

  So legit. And it's funny because a lot of times people, you know, what's, what's, you know, they ask this question, almost like a rhetorical question, like, but what is a leader? You know, but what really is leader? There you go.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 14:05Jocko Willink?

  We just read it. So listen to that. Check those things in the mirror when you're trying to be a leader, you know? Check and see if you're emotionally detached. Check and see if you're earnest. Boom, earnest.

• 14:21Jocko Willink?

  Check your self-control. Check your knowledge. Check your experience. All those things. Continuing on, "The example and personal conduct of officers and non-commissioned officers are of decisive influence on the troops."

• 14:35Jocko Willink?

  Wow. "The officer who in the face of the enemy is cold-blooded, decisive, and courageous inspires his troops onward. The officer must likewise find the way to the hearts of his subordinates and gain their trust through the and understanding of their feelings and thoughts, and through never ceasing care of their needs."

• 14:56Speaker 01

  I mean, relationships, how much do we talk on this, right? And there's this dichotomy between, I mean, detach emotionally, but not unemotional. You have to care and they have to know that you care. I mean, yeah.

• 15:07Jocko Willink?

  So ridiculous. So ridiculously incredible that, I guess it's not that ridiculous incredible. It's like, oh, you put a guy in 2000 and whatever into a combat scenario where he's got to lead troops in a tough situation. If they're successful at it, they're going to come to the same conclusions that someone did in World War I, which is where this guy was coming.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  This is 80, 90 years ago that this was written, right? And well, here's the thing, people have been fundamentally the same for 5,000 years. These are fundamentally true about human nature.

• 15:41Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 15:45Jocko Willink?

  But never ceasing to care for their needs. When I had Muk, Mukon, General Mukuyama, he, he's the, he's the guy that used that word where I was like, yes, he was one of Hackworth's company commanders in Vietnam, and he was just, you know, I was saying this and I was saying that. He's like, yeah, you gotta care for your men. And I'm like, check. And that's what he was talking about Hackworth. Once again, Hackworth known as this, you know, badass, hard ass guy. And he, he just, Hackworth cared about them more than anything.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:26Jocko Willink?

  Mutual trust is the surest basis of discipline in necessity and danger.

• 16:34Jocko Willink?

  This is what I've been trying to explain to people for a couple of years now is that is that the the word accountability.

• 16:43Jocko Willink?

  I only have to hold someone accountable if they don't have if we don't have that mutual trust where they understand where I'm coming from and they just go, oh, you want the weapons clean? Cool, they'll be clean. I don't have to go and inspect the weapons.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:55Jocko Willink?

  There's a mutual trust there and in that trust is discipline.

• 17:01Jocko Willink?

  In all situations, every leader must exert without evasion of responsibility, his whole personality. Willing and joyful acceptance of responsibility is the distinguishing characteristic of leadership.

• 17:17Jocko Willink?

  This, speaking of plagiarism.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:20Jocko Willink?

  I just plagiarized this whole thing, I guess.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, well.

• 17:24Jocko Willink?

  This does not mean that the subordinate should seek an arbitrary decision without proper consideration of the whole, or that he should not obey orders precisely, or that he should let his feeling of the greater knowledge take precedence over obedience.

• 17:39Jocko Willink?

  Independence of action should never be based upon contrariness.

• 17:44Jocko Willink?

  Independence of action properly used is often the basis of great success. So that's why you have to understand what the commander's intent is. It's because you've got to be support. When you make these decisions that you're making as a subordinate, you've got to make sure that they're in line, that they're not contrary to what's going on.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  But you know, he just touched on something real briefly about this contrarian mindset. There are, there are people who just walk around with a contrarian mindset and it doesn't matter what gets said, like they're always going to be like, well, what, but, you know, and

• 18:16Speaker 01

  and sometimes that other, that outside thought is a good angle to think about, but you, but he just said, he goes real quick, he just goes, but you can't just be independent for the sake of being contrarian, or how are we just said that?

• 18:26Jocko Willink?

  That contrarian mindset, which as you know, I, I mean, I have an open mind and I definitely try and think about things from a different angle, but you're right, people that are just being contrarian because they just enjoy the friction.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:38Jocko Willink?

  Of, of arguing with people. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a big supporter of that. And they end up having no influence because.

• 18:48Jocko Willink?

  Because everybody just, oh, you're, if you, they're crying wolf, basically, right? Everything, they just disagree with everything. So guess what? Yeah.

• 18:59Jocko Willink?

  In spite of technique, the worth of men is the decisive factor. Its significant is increased in group combat. So the way they translate it in the American one, I think they say the value, the, I think they might even call it the combat value, meaning basically are the dudes hard? Like, are the dudes hard? That's what they're talking about here. The worth, the worth of men is the decisive factor. This is an interesting translation here. "The emptiness of the battlefield demands independently thinking and acting fighters, who, considering each situation, are dominated by conviction, boldly and decisively to act, and determined to arrive at success." So the emptiness of the battlefield, in the American translation,

• 19:44Jocko Willink?

  they talk about because modern warfare demands that we be separate from each other. Like, as you and I know, if you and I are on patrol, we're not close to each other. You know, we're dispersed and we're going to spread out so that we're not going to get killed by one machine gun round or one mortar round. Yeah. So because of that distance, that's what they're talking about when he talks about the emptiness. So because of that emptiness on the battlefield, you have to have independent, think, independently thinking and acting fighters. Right? Because I'm not going to be there to tell you what to do. You're not going to be there to tell your guys what to do. They're going to have to independently act. That's the way it's got to be. That's something that we call decentralized command. "Being accustomed to physical accomplishments, lack of consideration of self,

• 20:29Jocko Willink?

  willpower, self-confidence and courage qualify a man to master the most difficult situations." There you go. There you go. Let's work on that. Physical accomplishments. What does that mean? Do athletic things. Right. You have to be in shape. Lack of consideration of self. Boom. You're not important. Willpower. Yes. Discipline. Self-confidence and courage qualify a man to master the most difficult situations.

• 20:59Jocko Willink?

  The worth of leaders and men determined the battle worth of the troops, which is supplemented by the possession, care and maintenance of arms and equipment. Superior battle worth can equalize numerical inferiority. So if you're just hardcore fighters, it doesn't matter how many people the enemy's got, because we're gonna get some.

• 21:24Jocko Willink?

  The higher the battle worth, the more vigorous and versatile can war be executed. Superior leadership and superior troop battle readiness are reliable portents of victory. The leaders must live with their troops, participate in their dangers, their wants, their joys, their sorrows. Only in this way can they estimate the battle worth and the requirements of the troops. Sitting around in the ivory tower.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  It's interesting though, because we do have a thing in this military about the separation to a certain degree, right? This is saying, and so there's gonna be a balance there too, right? I mean, but you can't be in the ivory tower and totally disassociate. People are like, well, who's that guy? I just get orders from that guy.

• 22:10Jocko Willink?

  Battlefield aloofness, you know? You gotta actually get out of the humvee and go see what's going on. That's what you gotta do.

• 22:21Jocko Willink?

  Man is not responsible for himself alone, but also for his comrades.

• 22:30Jocko Willink?

  He who can do more, who has greater capacity of accomplishment, must instruct the inexperienced and weaker. From such conduct, the feeling of real comradeship develops, which is just as important between the leaders and the men as between the men themselves.

• 22:48Jocko Willink?

  Troops only superficially and not through long training and experience welded together more easily fail under severe conditions and unexpected crisis. So if you're only superficially and you haven't gone through long training and you haven't been welded together, when the hard times come, you ain't gonna make it. And that's really when people ask me about.

• 23:12Jocko Willink?

  You know, how do you build a team and how do you develop the bonds in a team? You do hard stuff together.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:17Jocko Willink?

  You do hard stuff and when we work with companies now, companies that made it through the downturn of 2007, 2008, because a lot of companies didn't make it, but the companies that they always refer back to those experiences like, you know, that's what bonded them together.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:33Jocko Willink?

  Same thing with the military, you know, you go through boot camp. What is that? It's a hard experience. You bond with all these people and you know, when you meet someone else in the military, they went through, at a minimum, they went through boot camp or officer candidate school or whatever, some sort of hard kind of indoctrination. Then you go to airborne school, little thing where you're all going to overcome your fears of jumping out of airplanes or whatever. Then you go to some kind of special operations school, same thing. You're just, you're just putting people through harder and harder things to get them tighter and tighter and more and more bonded together. So they can overcome these adversities when they come their way.

• 24:10Jocko Willink?

  Therefore, before the outbreak of war, the development and maintenance of steadiness and discipline in the troops as well as their training is of decisive importance. Every commander is enjoined immediately to intervene with all powers at his disposal against any relaxation of discipline, against excesses, plundering, panic and other damaging influence.

• 24:38Jocko Willink?

  You gotta get in the game, see that stuff going on.

• 24:43Jocko Willink?

  Discipline is fundamental in an army. It's strict maintenance, a benefit to all.

• 24:53Jocko Willink?

  No big deal, just discipline.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  So, so it's interesting, you touched on a few things here, which I think, you know, we get that because it's military makes total sense and, and talk about it when you want, but there's, you know, people I think struggle with, how do you do that in business today? Oh, you know, HR and how do I involve, you have to still find a way to do that appropriately. Because.

• 25:15Jocko Willink?

  HR doesn't have anything to do with having disciplined process procedure, you know?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I'm talking about getting in and knowing what's going on with your people and in their life and, and doing hard things together, you know, because I think a lot of people go, well, you gotta show up on time, do this part of your job. It's like, well, how do you, how do you actually deepen those bonds in a company? Well, you gotta find ways to put people through difficult things together, through training, find events to do that builds that camaraderie, that gets them through a hard time, that strengthens the bonds of those relationships.

• 25:44Jocko Willink?

  I see good companies, good leaders do it in companies where they just set really tough goals that are very hard but achievable, whether it's a production goal, whether it's a sales goal, whether it's a project goal, and people have to really turn and burn to get it done.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:01Jocko Willink?

  And when they get it done, they, they have to, forced to work hard together, they're forced to go to the extreme a little bit, to work extra hours, to figure things out, to strengthen their relationships. And when they get done, everyone, you know, and it's stressful, and then they get done and everyone's kind of holding their head up a little bit higher.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:20Jocko Willink?

  And they're a little bit tighter. So it's not even, it doesn't even necessarily have to be that you have to allocate separate training to do this. You go, hey, guys, here's this project. It's due in 30 days. We're gonna deliver it in 24 days. I ran the numbers. I looked at the schedule. We can do it. Who's in? And everyone goes, yeah, we're in. And then everyone buckles down and they over, they, they achieve something. That's what they do. So that's what, that's how you, that's how you bring that, build that bond between people and strengthen teams by doing hard stuff. Set goals on normal things. Because think about it, when I come in and go, hey, guys, we got this project due, it's due in 30 days. Could take a little bit longer though, I don't

• 27:02Jocko Willink?

  know. Everyone, no, who, who gets fired up to hear that? No one. No one. Who goes, oh, cool, I'm gonna take an extra half hour for lunch every day. If that's, no, people don't even want to do that. Like, people might think they want to do that. People might think they want to do that, but they don't want to do that. No, they don't want to do that. They don't want to do that. They want to get after it.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And that's our job as leaders is to set that bar and to set it even a little bit higher and then and then inspire and encourage and bring everybody along to try and get to that next level further than what they wait, wait, oh, 24 days.

• 27:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  All right. Okay, boss.

• 27:36Jocko Willink?

  What am I gonna, yeah, what am I gonna do just here? Wait a second. You really think this is possible? Yes, I do.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:41Jocko Willink?

  And you know what? We're gonna make the whole world, we're gonna make everyone at this company look at us and say, dang, they did that in 24 days.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 27:47Jocko Willink?

  And guess what some other team is gonna do? They're gonna, we can do it in 23.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  That's what my team would be doing.

• 27:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I know. I know. And then we get some good competition going. So that's awesome. That's what you have to do. That's how you build teams. Stress builds teams. Now, if you have a team that's slightly fractured, guess what that stress will do? Break it apart.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's gotta find those weaknesses.

• 28:07Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 28:09Jocko Willink?

  So there's a balance. Oh, there's also a balance between, hey, you can set goals. Hey, there's a project that's due in 30 days. We're gonna do it in 15. It's unrealistic. Everyone just looks at it goes, yeah, Jock was an idiot. He doesn't understand. He's in the ivory tower. Doesn't even know what it takes to get this done. So balance. Balance there 100%.

• 28:28Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, back to the book. The strength of the troops must be able to meet the highest demands in decisive moments. He who unnecessarily fatigues the troops jeopardizes success.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. There you go.

• 28:44Jocko Willink?

  The strength employed in battle must stand in proportion to the objective desired. Unre- unreliable demands prejudice the trust in the leaders and shake the spirit of the troops. Again, this is a cry wolf situation. We gotta get this done in 15 days. It's like, and that's my, you know, the first time everyone goes, okay, then maybe we get it done in 15 days. And then people look up, well, what are we doing for the next 15 days? We're gonna, I'm, we're gonna do more. We're gonna, you know, and you eventually just burn everyone out.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:11Jocko Willink?

  So there's a balance to that.

• 29:14Jocko Willink?

  Back to the book, from the youngest soldier on up, the employment of every spiritual and bodily power is demanded to the utmost. Only in such conduct is the full power of accomplishments of the troops achieved. So do men develop and maintain their courage and powers of decision in hours of stress and carry forward with them to to greater deeds, their weaker comrades. So you can actually pass on your strength to the people around you in moments of stress.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 29:48Jocko Willink?

  If you're strong. Does that, you know, like when people quit in BUDs? I got, I like took their power.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  It's so funny you say that, man. I can't, I was literally about to say.

• 30:03Jocko Willink?

  Some people, some people goes the other way, right? Some people, they see someone quit and they're like, oh dude, if he's quitting, I'm quitting.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  That's, I can't even relate.

• 30:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not.

• 30:10Jocko Willink?

  But I saw it. I saw it happen.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  And not from some, dude, I'm not like some big, you know, I'm, this is not from some egotistical perspective. I say I can't relate. I just, I'm not wired like that. I, I'm wired like call it corny, but you know Highlander, like you know how he would absorb like the strength of like, that's kind of, but like, the, you know, when a guy would quit, I've somehow I felt like I absorbed his, what was left of his power. And it actually, it more like it inspired me, it's, inspired me to keep going. The fact that I could keep going and that guy couldn't, it just, I was like, okay, you know, I mean, it gave me more purpose even.

• 30:47Jocko Willink?

  That's why you just gotta stay hard, man. You know, people are starting to, cause you're, you're, if other people start to see you like cracking, and they're your troops, they're gonna be like, oh no.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:02Jocko Willink?

  This is a bad sign. Jaco's, Jaco's breaking down. This is not good.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. We, yeah, because we also are like, well, that will never happen with Jaco. So Jaco, don't ever do that. No, don't worry. If you took a knee, we wouldn't, we wouldn't let you, or we would just step in for you.

• 31:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  But I don't see that happening.

• 31:21Jocko Willink?

  Not happening. Here, this is what you, I was actually gonna jump right here, because when we started this thing off, you, you talked about this a little bit. The first demand in war is decisive action. So like you were saying, like, hey, you can be the smartest person with a great plan, but if you can't do it, if you can't act on it. Everyone, the highest commander and most junior soldier, must be aware that omissions and neglects incriminate him more severely than the mistake of choice.

• 31:51Jocko Willink?

  So if you decide not to act, you are a worse criminal in the world.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 31:57Jocko Willink?

  Than someone that just makes a bad, bad judgment, but moves.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  I just disappeared for a second back to Ramadi and, and thought of those exact, that exactly happening, like in real life, like

• 32:10Speaker 01

  in those moments when there is things going on, you, you act and you can maneuver and aggressively solve a problem, even if you make a small mistake. It's, it's the default aggressive.

• 32:21Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Right? It's the complacency, well, I sit back and

• 32:26Speaker 01

  no, I just steamrolled you.

• 32:28Jocko Willink?

  You've got to make a call. Now, obviously, I hate having to point to stuff all the time, but it's the truth. If you just jump and make rash decisions without thinking about them, that's also stupid. You have to let things develop. But this idea of inaction, I mean, it is the worst, that's why, what do people say about inaction is a decision, so like, no decision is a bad decision, right? No decision is the worst decision.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  No decision is a decision, first of all.

• 32:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  No decision is a decision. And it, it might be the worst decision, sometimes no decision while I watch things develop might be the right call. But let's be clear, no decision is a decision.

• 33:07Jocko Willink?

  What I've been trying to teach people lately. Is like a standard operating procedure for when you don't know what to do. Here's the standard operating procedure for when you don't know what to do. You look at what the situation, you take, you detach, you take a step back, you look at what's unfolding. Then you make the smallest decision in the area that you guess is the right direction to move. And then you assess what that did. So you don't just jump off and flank left because you thought that was the right call. No, you go, okay, hey, guys, start pushing left. Okay, so they start moving a little bit. Do they meet major resistance? No, okay, cool. Continue with a flank. You don't just go flank left. Now they run over there. Now they're getting flanked and it's a bad situation. So that's the thing.

• 33:51Jocko Willink?

  You, you make a small decision, the smallest possible decision that you can. But you make a decision and you start moving in the direction that you think is correct.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Assess.

• 34:00Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Move.

• 34:02Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Assess.

• 34:03Jocko Willink?

  Assess, move. Yeah, you're getting in a loop is what you're gonna do. You're gonna end up in a little loop. But people get afraid of making a big decision. Now, sometimes you have to make a big, bold decision, of course. But people get afraid of making, they, they can't see, they only want to go 100% in.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:20Jocko Willink?

  They don't see that they can go 8%. You can go 8% in. Is it at the last muster? So I think it was at the last muster. Someone asked me something about this, but you know, when you say, hey, we want to go explore this new market area. Let's, let's buy three buildings in that market area and see where it happens. No, that's not what you do. First, do market research, then maybe you put a couple of kiosks up on the street corner and see if there's any interest.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Lease some space.

• 34:47Jocko Willink?

  Then maybe lease some space. You know, like that's what you do. That's the kind of mentality you can have. You don't need to just be paralyzed by the fact that it's this giant. You break it down into some smaller decisions. Iterative decision making is what I call it.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  And to be clear, this is in the, I don't know what to do right now. I, I'm in an unknown position, right? I mean, cause you know, we're not talking about sheepishly going in directions here. We're talking about, I don't know what to do here. So I will go in the direction that I believe to be the best, but I'm going to take as small a decision as I can. I don't want to take too much ground in the right, because it could be the wrong direction.

• 35:22Jocko Willink?

  Could be the wrong direction.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I'm going to go the direction that I think is right. But in the smallest of a decision that I can make in that direction, and then I'm going to reassess.

• 35:31Jocko Willink?

  Yes, and guess what? If it's the wrong decision, now you know that. If it's the wrong direction, you just, you hit a wall there. Now you just figured that out. Where, when you made no decision, you still, you don't, you still don't know which way to go.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:43Jocko Willink?

  You go 360 degrees. So when I say, hey, we're going to go 90 degrees, cool. We take a step and we realize there's massive resistance there. Cool, we're going to go 180 degrees. Oh, okay, right on.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's, you know, it's a really good, like, modern day example of that.

• 35:56Jocko Willink?

  What?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  You ever been sitting, like, using your map, like, like Google Maps or whatever? And if you're not moving in a direction, it sometimes doesn't know which direction you're going in.

• 36:04Jocko Willink?

  Oh, the little arrow just kind of rotates.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  It spins, right? It's like I step out of a hotel and I'm like, which way am I supposed to go here? Dang it, this thing is, doesn't even know which way. So, all right, you know, I think it's that direction is where I'm supposed to go. So I start walking. As soon as I take 10 steps, the map, the arrow orients itself and it's like, yep, you're going the right way. Sometimes I don't actually, it's like, oh, you know, you went the wrong way, idiot. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. I'll turn around and go back the other way.

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  Or you could have stood there in the door of the hotel, blocking the, blocking the traffic and staring at that compass rotating in circles.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  And never go anywhere.

• 36:32Jocko Willink?

  That is exactly what happens. And so that's why you, you make a small decision. You didn't, you didn't hail a cab and get in and start driving that way.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I didn't start sprinting down the road. I took 10 steps. Yeah, that's right.

• 36:43Jocko Willink?

  That's the way it works. All right. And by the way, I always have to say this, why I'm not covering this whole book. This book is online, PDF, you can download it, it's free. I'm not reading the whole thing. There's a bunch of like granularly tactical things inside that we're not going to cover, but we're covering the big stuff. The stuff that's applicable to everything that we do. Next section, section two. It's a section called leadership. So here we go. Great successes presume boldness and daring preceded by good judgment. Check.

• 37:25Jocko Willink?

  We never have at our disposal all the desired forces for decisive action. Newsflash, you're not going to have everything you want all the time. It's not happening. He who will be secure everywhere or who fixes forces in secondary tasks acts contrary to the fundamental task.

• 37:48Jocko Willink?

  So if you're A, trying to do too many things at the same time, we call that prioritize and execute. If you got a, if you're trying to do all these secondary tasks, you're not focusing on the main one, you're gonna get crushed. And if you're so dang rooted in your situation,

• 38:07Jocko Willink?

  if you're secure everywhere,

• 38:10Jocko Willink?

  if you're secure everywhere, you're not gonna make any progress.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, that's hunker down. I'm secure. I'm safe.

• 38:18Jocko Willink?

  Hunkered down. When you're hunkering down, the enemy's maneuvering on you. That's what's happening. The weaker force through speed, mobility, great march accomplishments, utilization of darkness and the terrain to the fullest, surprise and deception, can be the stronger at the decisive area. So boom, that's jujitsu, by the way.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  And special forces and everything we do to leverage our numerically smaller force.

• 38:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Time and space must be correctly estimated, favorable situations quickly recognized and decisively exploited. Every advantage over the enemy increases our own freedom of action. And yeah, it's not just special forces, not just special operations, it's every military unit. They all do this. If they're good. Rapidity of action in the displacement of troops can be greatly, can be assisted greatly or retarded by the roads and streets,

• 39:18Jocko Willink?

  nets and by the terrain conditions.

• 39:24Jocko Willink?

  The season, the weather, the condition of the troops are also of influence.

• 39:29Jocko Willink?

  The duration of strategical and tactical operations cannot always be foreseen. You don't know how long something's gonna last. Successful engagements often proceed slowly. Often the success of today's battle is first recognized tomorrow. It's an interesting one. Surprise of the enemy is a decisive factor in success. Actions based on surprises are only of great success when we do not permit the enemy to take adequate countermeasures.

• 39:57Jocko Willink?

  So you can, you gotta follow up. That's why you gotta follow up. That's why in striking, you gotta throw combinations. You can't just throw one punch. You gotta sting them with the jab. And then you gotta hit them with the straight and then you gotta come in with the hook. That's what you gotta do. You know, it's interesting, the um, the one about often the success of today's battle is first recognized tomorrow. What's interesting about that one, I don't know if you remember this because I don't know, you might not have been, I might not have engaged you at this level. But when we first started doing sniper over watches in Ramadi and I was getting some questions from up the chain of command. They were, hey, look, what, you know, this is after a couple of weeks.

• 40:41Jocko Willink?

  It was, hey, you know, we get that you're killing some people, but there's no metrics like there's the, you've said you've shot three IED emplacers. IEDs have not gone down, like the IED emplacements have not gone down. And luckily I had read the, the one, the, what is it? The one tech 24, the counter insurgency manual. And I had learned from that manual that the average counter insurgency takes seven years. So I replied back to the chain of command and said, hey, just kind of FYI, we're fighting a counter insurgency. The average counter insurgency takes, takes seven years to achieve victory. We've been doing this for two and a half weeks. Can I get a little more time to see some metrics on it?

• 41:27Jocko Willink?

  So, and that's true. And actually Colonel McFarlane, this was a battle that he had to fight because here you are, you know, it's a metrics based, people that are looking at things from a metrics based level, right? They're saying, okay, in Ramadi, there's 30 enemy attacks a day. And all of a sudden, McFarlane rolls in and starts this counter insurgency and the enemy attacks go up. And they go up a lot. And so his chain of command's looking at him, what are you doing? Right. What are you doing? The enemy attacks are getting worse. Your, your thing's not working. And he has to explain to them, you know, why the enemy attacks are going up because we are actually taking ground from them and they're fighting. Yeah.

• 42:07Jocko Willink?

  And we're killing them, but this is what's going to happen. So the initial metrics are the reverse of what you want. And that's the way it is. That's what so these the success of Vic, the success of a battle is not always visible today. You have to look at the long-term effects.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Well, we went into the hornet's nest. I mean, it's like, hey, you know what? My kid gets stung by this bee like, you know, once a year. Well, we're gonna go in and get get rid of the bee's nest. All right. Well, we go in there. Well, he got you guys got stung like 20 times. Well, yeah, it's because we went in and we actually are destroying the hornet's nest. So they're stinging us now even more. That's why it went up. And when we're done, though, they're not going to sting us at all. But for now, the numbers went up. That's exactly what happened when we went in there like that.

• 42:46Jocko Willink?

  We used to go after the hornet's nest. It was sort of a test of, uh, you know, when you're eight years old. It was always a test of of of courage, basically. Because you're gonna go in there with a stick and whack that thing and see if you can get it to fall down. And, you know, it's like playing pinata. You don't get it on the first shot. Like, it takes a few. So you whack and then you run and those things come after you.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Right. But then so all of a sudden, this thing's go up.

• 43:14Jocko Willink?

  Enemy attacks go up. Yeah, you're getting stung. Like, when you go in and hit a hornet's nest with a with a stick, you're getting stung. Pretty much.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  That's what's gonna happen.

• 43:26Jocko Willink?

  All right, back to the book. The enemy will likewise endeavor to make use of surprise. Our conduct must take this into consideration. The knowledge of hostile leadership and war principles can influence the decision and aid our battle conduct. But it must never lead to preconceptions. Oh, that's good, isn't it? Like, we know what the enemy's gonna do, but we don't really know what the enemy's gonna do.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 43:48Jocko Willink?

  Hey, they're gonna use the laws of combat, but we gotta remember that they might they might step outside the bounds of the laws of combat.

• 43:57Jocko Willink?

  Those conditions which facilitate the conduct of war in our land make it difficult, make it more difficult than foreign lands require consideration. Yeah, it's much easier on your own, granted. We've learned that over and over again.

• 44:11Jocko Willink?

  In strenuous combat, troops are soon worn out and quickly used up. The forces must receive timely reinforcements in leaders, men, animals, battle needs, and war materials of all kinds.

• 44:31Jocko Willink?

  Boys are gonna get worn out after a while. The mission and the situation form the basis of action. The mission and the situation form the basis of action. The mission designates the objective to be attained. The leader must never forget his mission. A mission which indicates several tasks easily diverts from the main objective. So, once again, prioritize and execute. If you've got a bunch of different things, you're not gonna achieve the main objective.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  I had a situation recently where people were wearing some of their teammates out. And was talking to this company about how to do this. And I said, "The mission is number one. That's our mission. Our mission is number one. But the mission requires people. And so, you have to take care of your people. And you have to balance their, you know, how tired they are, whether they're being replenished. But again, always in balance. But the mission is number one. But it takes the people and the team to accomplish the mission. So, if you wear your team out, then you've got nobody left to even accomplish the mission."

• 45:35Jocko Willink?

  That's the dichotomy. You talk about that in the dichotomy of leadership. I mean, if you, if, if all you're focused on is the mission, your men will be either used up, destroyed, they won't trust you anymore, it'll be a disaster. So, your men, your people, have to come first. And at the same time, the dichotomy is, if you do nothing but care about your people, then guess what? You won't have anyone, you won't accomplish the mission. Which, by the way, hurts your people. Because if you're in the business world, and you're trying to push your people to drive production, or do their job at a faster pace, great. Then you burn them out, and they leave, and all of a sudden, the company folds. Or the opposite, "Okay, guys, you know, take your time." Well, guess what?

• 46:20Jocko Willink?

  Now, we don't get anything done, and the company folds. So, what you have to do is you have to balance.

• 46:28Jocko Willink?

  Obscurity of the situation is the rule. Seldom will one have exact information of the enemy. Clarification of hostile situation is a self-evident demand. However, to wait intense situations for information is seldom a token of strong leadership, often of weakness. So, look, you're not gonna know everything. It's not gonna happen. You have to make decisions. That's what you gotta do. Otherwise, sign of weakness.

• 47:00Jocko Willink?

  They edited me on Billions. Oh, yes, they, they, there was one little section where, I was in the show Billions, and there was one little sections where, where they showed Dollar Bill getting like a massage or something like that, and I was looking at him and I just go, "Weak."

• 47:21Jocko Willink?

  But I didn't make the cut.

• 47:28Jocko Willink?

  Next, "The decision arises from the mission and the situation. The decision arises from the mission and the situation. Should the mission no longer suffice as the fundamental of conduct, or if it is changed by events, the decisions, the decision must take these considerations into account. He who changes his mission, or does not execute the one given, must report his actions at once and assume all responsibility for the consequences. He must always keep in mind the whole situation." So, not saying it's wrong. That's right. Yeah, they're not saying it's wrong. Somebody's gonna be like, "Hey, Andrew wanted me to go and take this building, and the building is untenable, the enemy's too strong, I, I need, you know, I make the decision, I'm not gonna take that building, we need to drop a bomb, we need to do something else."

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  I just, that's fine, but I need to tell you, and, I need to keep the whole picture in mind, because if that building was strategically important for what we were trying to accomplish, well, then, maybe I have to take more sacrifices than I thought to take the building down. "The, the, the decision must depict a clear objective aimed at with the whole force. The strong will of the commander must support it. Often, the stronger will gains success."

• 48:41Jocko Willink?

  Without very good reasons, a decision once made should not be abandoned. Okay, so this is again, critical. Without, without very good reasons, a decision once made should not be abandoned.

• 48:57Jocko Willink?

  And then it says, however, in the vicissitudes of war, an inflexible maintenance of the original decision may lead to great mistakes. Timely recognition of the conditions and the time which call for a new decision is an attribution of the art of leadership. Yeah. Don't stick to the one plan that you came up with. Doesn't work. If it's not working, change plans. You really, I've worked for some hard headed people and the plan would be completely falling apart and they're riding that thing into the ground. They're just taking that thing all the way. They got real ownership of their plan. They're taking real ownership of the plan. They're not gonna let it go. They're gonna be right.

• 49:39Jocko Willink?

  The commander must permit freedom of action to his subordinates insofar that this does not endanger the whole scheme. He must not surrender to them those decisions for which he alone is responsible. So, freedom of movement, what does that mean? That means decentralized command. The attack is launched in order to defeat the enemy. The attacker has the initiative. Superiority of leadership and of troops show the best advantage in the attack. Success does not always come to superiority of numbers. So, go on the offense. I say that all the time. Go on the offense. Now, is this a hundred percent of the time? No. But you, you have, you're, you're just that much better off when you're on offense. You have surprise, you have initiative, you have the people on their heels.

• 50:24Jocko Willink?

  It's amazing that we were able to take down the, the island, like the island campaign in World War II, going into those heavily fortified, where the Japanese Imperial Military had been digging in for three, four, five years, preparing those islands for, to defend against assaults.

• 50:49Jocko Willink?

  United States Marine Corps come and get some. Seriously. United States Marine Corps and of course the Navy, the Army, but dang, just unbelievable. That they were able to, that's, that's going on offense.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  That's right. Momentum.

• 51:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're going on offense. Oh, you've been digging in. Oh, you built a miles long tunnel system to defend this island? Cool. Watch this. We're coming in. We got naval gunfire. We got corsairs. We got flamethrowers. And we're coming and, and obviously a great sacrifice. But being on the offense, being on the offense is a weapon in its own right.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 51:28Jocko Willink?

  Notice this in jujitsu too, like when you're on offense. You're, you're, you have the edge, you know, you're, you're one step ahead. When you, when you're on defense, you're one step behind. And it's not fun. And if you're defending for too long, eventually you will get caught. You will, if you're on defense, defense, defense, defense, defense, defense, defense.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Eventually.

• 51:50Jocko Willink?

  You will get caught eventually. You have to at some point switch.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:55Jocko Willink?

  And get on offense.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  I don't know who said it. It maybe it's even cliche at this, in these days, but you know, the best defense is a good offense. So you're on defense, so you need to convert that to an offense. So somebody attacks you, you're on defense.

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  The best defense is a good offense.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  So.

• 52:10Jocko Willink?

  Be an offense.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So my, I'm, somebody attacks me first, I'm on defense. My best defense to that is to return with an offense.

• 52:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know what's interesting is a time when this is different is this is another thing I was talking about at the muster is if there's, if we're arguing about something.

• 52:35Jocko Willink?

  If my, if I go with that theory, the best defense is a good offense and you start to try and tell me something and I jump in and cut you off. And I'm like, no, we do like this. That's actually wrong.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  I agree with you in that.

• 52:45Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:46Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting because, and I see that all the time because leaders, people end up in leadership position, their personality kind of drives them to be sort of. Outspoken and speak up and all those things when the reality is the the more senior you get in the leadership position, the more you should actually use this the ears, you know, and what I said at the muster was ninety ninety eight percent use your ears, two percent use your mouth. That's where you end up. So this idea that that, you know, being on offense is the best way. Well, when it comes to discussions, you should gather some intel before you act and

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  listen to what other people have to say. Check. The possibility that an attack may miscarry should never permit the fettering of energetic leadership from the first. Yes, we may lose. Doesn't matter. We're gonna get some. Pursuit reaps the fruits of victory. It strives to destroy the enemy which destruction was not possible in the preceding engagement. Only a through going relentless pursuit which prevents the enemy from gaining time to rest and recuperate saves ourselves sacrifices necessitated if we permit the enemy force another decisive engagement. No, when you

• 54:09Jocko Willink?

  get them on the ropes, go. Put them all the way to the river and then toss their bodies in the river. It's one book we read on here. The defense waits for the opponent. The defender seeks to prescribe the battle terrain. That's important, right? If you're on defense, you want to bring people into your arena. Right. The defense is chosen when our own inferiority permits no other choice, or if for other reasons, it appears advantageous. I was just reading a note from a friend of mine, a team guy who's grandfather was in World War II, still alive, gonna get him on the podcast.

• 54:51Jocko Willink?

  And when he did the island campaign and then went into like Japan surrendered after the bombs and the Japanese were told on your gun emplacements, put a white flag like so Americans were sailing in like the war's over sailing in, I think it was into like, I don't know, he was into some big port in Japan. And when he was sailing in, there was just white flags everywhere, everywhere. And he was looking around, he said it, he said it literally looked like snow. Wow. There were so many weapons and placements. And he just said, I knew at that point that those atomic bombs saved hundreds of thousands of Americans that would have had to go in

• 55:36Jocko Willink?

  there and fight until the end. So the advantage of the defender, as a defender, you want to pull people into your, into your zone to where you know, that's what the Russians do, right? Channelized terrain. Yeah, channelized terrain, perfect. But the Russians, what do the Russians do? Oh yeah, you want to fight us? Cool. Come on, come a little bit further, come a little bit further, come a little bit further. What is it? It's September? Come a little bit further. Oh, it's, it's October? Come just a little bit further. It's November. Welcome to Russia. It's negative 48 degrees. Hope you brought your warmies. Hope you brought your warmies.

• 56:13Jocko Willink?

  The defense is chosen when our own inferiority permits no other choice, or if for other reasons, it appears advantageous. So if you can be on offense, but if you have to, you go on defense. Breaking off an engagement has the purpose of terminating the battle or giving up the former position in order to continue the engagement at a more favorable position. In the latter instance, delaying action is often employed. So yes, sometimes you have to retreat.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  The retreat intends to avoid further combat. The engagement must for this purpose be terminated and the withdrawal of the troops be protected. The changing fortunes of battle demand often the passing from one type of engagement to another. So sometimes you've got to attack and sometimes you've got to defend. That's what's gonna happen. That's the reality. And Hitler was not, Hitler got to this point as the war went on where he actually didn't understand that. Which is why at Stalingrad, they left those guys. And they had plenty of opportunities to retreat. No, no, hold the line. I did that, I covered the book called Stalingrad from the Nazi perspective.

• 57:28Jocko Willink?

  And those guys were surrounded. They were listening to the radio and Hitler was making speeches, talking about the brave sacrifices of them in Stalingrad. They weren't even dead yet. Like he was, he was saying, hey, look, they're surrounded, but they fought to the end. They're still there. They were still there. Wow. Talk about coward, talk about being in your ivory tower. He left those guys to die, surrounded. Delaying action avoids the decision. It will gain time, keep the enemy busy and deceived.

• 58:11Jocko Willink?

  So delaying action, let's, let's, let's, let's let things develop a little bit more. During the course of the battle, the commander influences the action most strongly by the concentration and increase of fire and through the employment of his reserve. Distribution, location and employment of the reserve require careful consideration. Mobility increases the possibility for their employment. Always have a little bit in the tank. You know, always gotta have a little bit in the tank. Everybody says that.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting about delaying. You're talking about like, like the Russians, oh, wait a little bit further, a little bit further. And then going on in this next couple of sentences, if you, whether it's an enemy, whether it's a competitor, you know, when they're going on the attack, they're also expending considerable resources.

• 58:58Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Right? So, so if you can kind of think, think about a jujitsu match, a guy's on the attack and you're, you know, you're in the guard and you're kind of in a defensive position, right? But you're kind of letting them use his energy up, right? So let them keep using that energy, use that energy and, and the troops are expending, it takes effort, logistical support to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. You're spreading further and further and further away from, you know, home base where you've got all your support. And then when they're spread and they've expended their resources and they're down to just maybe the last of their fuel and their food, know it. Boom. Then you launch your counter attack.

• 59:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So. And speaking of, you know, what I brought up before about when you're, I don't want to use the term arguing, but when you're discussing something from a leadership perspective, you're in a group, you're in a meeting. The exact same situation. Let the other people talk and express their viewpoints, because every time they express their viewpoint, you have an opportunity to, to listen to it, to, to understand it, to hear someone else make a counter to it and hear their counter to the counter. So you're getting all this information. You're receiving all this information. You haven't, you haven't given up any, you haven't used any bullets, you haven't used any magazines, you haven't, you, you've got everything. And you're just observing, I mean, it's, um,

• 1:00:12Jocko Willink?

  I think it was, it was either Dick Winters or, but they wrote, hey, when, when I let someone talk, I know everything that they know and I, I know everything that I know. It's like, well, there you go. So you keep talking, because I'm going to know everything that you know. And I'm going to know everything that I know. And you know how, you know how when you? When you do anything for the second time, it's like, it's not twice as easy. It's not twice as easier. It's exponentially more easy to make a decision. So when you go into a room for the first time and there's a guy in the corner, you don't know what to do with your weapon. Like, it's hard. And then you go into that room again, or there's, there's whatever, there's like a couch and an obstacle, whatever. And you gotta do, you gotta, you gotta make a decision. The first time you go in there, you see a new guy going in there, the very first time he's ever done it.

• 1:00:57Jocko Willink?

  He jams up and everything's disaster. He does it one time, you know, he looks at it and go, okay, you step out, do it again. He's exponentially better at doing it. So when we're having a discussion and I get to listen and listen and listen and listen and hear other people give points and counterpoints around a table. And you sit there and just listen and go, okay, and you can assemble it all. You can assemble the, the strongest facts. You can identify the biggest weaknesses. And then when you finally, like you said, you've now, you've now, everyone has expended all their ammunition, but you, you have a full magazine. Your magazines have, has actually been filled up with more rounds because everyone else is expressing their, their points and counterpoints. So you just sit there and listen and then by the end, here we go.

• 1:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Here's the plan. And everyone goes, dang, Jock was smart. How did he do that? I just shut my mouth and listened.

• 1:01:51Jocko Willink?

  All right, going back to the book. This next section, communications, information, reports, situation maps. So if you think about it, what leadership is, is actually just communicating with other human beings. That's actually what it is. Agreed. You, you have to be able to communicate what it is that you need to get done to other people. That's what it is. So how does that work? The reports and information of the enemy form one of the most important foundations of the estimate of the situation. The decision and its execution. You gotta know what's going on. And here it talks about air and ground reconnaissance. It talks about continual observation. It talks about information secured through special means.

• 1:02:36Jocko Willink?

  And I'm sure they're talking about human resources, you know, like humans, human intelligence, so spies or whatever.

• 1:02:44Jocko Willink?

  That's not human resources, is it? Different.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  Different kind of human resources.

• 1:02:47Jocko Willink?

  Different kind of human resources. And, and then it says, from the whole, from the whole of all these different things, the commander is able to draw correct conclusions. Apparently unimportant details in connection with other reports have considerable worth. And this is something that they always told us in the military. When you come back from an operation and you debrief, you'd say like, well,

• 1:03:09Jocko Willink?

  I remember this specific thing. Where did you guys find? Cause we, my first deployment, we would be looking for weapons built, you know, munitions or some, anything that they could be using to build IEDs, right? And the question was always, where did you find it? Where did you find it? And I, at first I was like, well, we found it in the bedroom, but where? Because is it, is it inconceivable to think that if you and I were bad guys? And I said, hey, man, I'm keeping my stuff taped up under my table. When the, when the good guys come in, they never find it there. Oh, okay, cool. So I'll do the same thing. And we, I'm going this from an actual example. We found det cord taped up underneath a Mujahideen fighter's table in his house.

• 1:03:51Jocko Willink?

  And so there's like, I was like, oh, that, that's when it clicked to me. Oh, well, we should tell everyone that, cause they probably tell everyone.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:00Jocko Willink?

  Cause that's a pretty good place to hide. You know how tables, well, this tables have like legs, but then they've got things that the legs attach to. So if you just look glance under it and it's up under there, it's kind of hard to see.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:11Jocko Willink?

  So maybe someone says, hey, this is where I've been hiding it. They've looked, searched my house three times, haven't found it. We'll find it now.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  That's why we flip things over.

• 1:04:18Jocko Willink?

  That's why we break it in half.

• 1:04:21Jocko Willink?

  So it continues on every report and the best information are of little or no value when they reach too late into the command for which they're intended. So yeah, if you don't pass information timely, doesn't make any difference. All commanders are enjoined as early and to the greatest extent possible to inform the higher commander of the situation and to transmit all important information. Yes. The one making a report must express himself clearly and positively. He must differentiate between what he has seen, what another has noted or stated, stated, and what is presumed. The source of the information must be stated.

• 1:05:05Jocko Willink?

  Suspicions must have basis. Those are big.

• 1:05:12Jocko Willink?

  I've.

• 1:05:15Jocko Willink?

  You've got, you've got to pay attention to those things. There's a big difference and that's why we use appears to be. That's right. That's one of the biggest ones that they teach us is you don't say, hey, he has an AK-47 or hey, he's got a weapon. If you can't confirm 100% that that guy legitimately has a weapon, because there's a big difference between, oh, it looks like there's something under his dish dasher, right? Oh, it looks like he's, looks like he's got a chest rig underneath his dish dasher. That's a lot different than he's wearing a chest rig. Right. And he's got an AK-47. So it's always appears to be unless you can confirm it. And there's a, when I did the Mila massacre on here, that

• 1:05:53Jocko Willink?

  breakdown of intelligence, of it going from like the division level, which was, hey, this is a, I, I, I think they use the word, the, the original word was like a suspected VC. Oh no, it was like possible, possible VC coordination point. Went from there down to like the brigade level. Then it turned into like from, from possible to suspected. Just a little bit of a different word. Yep, yep. And then from brigade to battalion, it was like. Likely. Likely. And it went all the way down. When those guys, when those, when that Charlie company got those words, it was,

• 1:06:34Jocko Willink?

  this is a VC stronghold. Not only was it that, this is a VC stronghold, the civilians are, are no longer there. The civilians, there's no civilians there. And what they had heard was on Wednesdays, they go to some market, the, the, the, the women and children go to this market. And maybe they did, but it wasn't like, I mean, does every single person in your neighborhood go and shop on the same day at the same time? No. Is there, hey, Wednesday, they got a, Wednesday, they got specials at, at the grocery store. Cool. A bunch of people go down there. Not everyone. But the report that they got was there's no friendlies in this village, all VC. And so as that escalated, you know, you tell that to a 18 year old trooper,

• 1:07:19Jocko Willink?

  this is an enemy village. And guess what they did? They went in there and they killed. They murdered everyone. So. That's why you have to pay attention to those. And I had this happen to me too. We did an op on my first deployment. We got a piece of overhead imagery and on that piece of overhead imagery, there was a red X on one of the buildings. And I was like, cool. I mean, this was early in my deployment. I'm like, oh, that's where the bad guys are? Cool. We'll go get them. We went out, we hit this building and we cleared it, you know, blew the door off the hinges, go in there, start SSE. While we're doing SSE, our Terps are interrogating or what's the tactical questioning?

• 1:07:59Jocko Willink?

  Cause we don't do interrogation, but doing tactical questioning of the people. The people were like, oh no, that's not me. The person you're looking for is three doors down. And so we went and hit it and we actually got the bad guy. When I got back, I was, I was pissed because I'm thinking, A, like we wrecked this person's house. Now we, you know, that's, that's horrible. That's not good for our strategic vision, what we're trying to get done here. The guy, the enemy, the real bad guy could have escaped. And so I asked the question, I said, who drew this? Who put this red X on this building?

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, who? Like, what was the reason?

• 1:08:34Jocko Willink?

  And who? And I actually said, yeah, yeah, who and why? And as I dug down into it, they had, they had through various intelligence sources narrowed it down to like this one area. And this one area, the center of that circle was the building with the red X on it.

• 1:08:56Jocko Willink?

  So that's my fault, right? That's my fault because I should have said, okay. So from then on, it was my deal to say, who put this red X there and why?

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  And what does that mean?

• 1:09:07Jocko Willink?

  What? Yeah. What does it mean?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that red X implied at the time that like that was the target house as opposed to, hey, there's the center of the ring and it could be anywhere in there. You would have planned that mission completely differently.

• 1:09:18Jocko Willink?

  There's five houses in this ring and it's one of them.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  We would have cordoned off the whole area.

• 1:09:22Jocko Willink?

  And if you, you can think about all the different ways that intel can come in and every different type of intel that you could have could come up with, you know, hey, here's, here's the probable chances, you know, it's going to be one of these houses. So that was a big lesson learned for me. And you know, if you're people, people to know, when we would make a mistake like that, we would, obviously we, what we did is we carried money. We carried money and we'd pay them for the damages that we caused. And, and we would more than.

• 1:09:53Jocko Willink?

  More than pay for the damages that we caused. It was kind of a good deal to get your door blown off.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Would you like to use my home? No, I mean, the thing is, yeah, we gave him a good chunk of money and you know, it was all documented. We had to account for all that. I mean, I remember dealing with the logistics of that, but, but the, but. Nonetheless, I mean, it's still terrifying. Those people who hadn't done anything wrong. All of a sudden have their door blown off. Bunch of Americans are already.

• 1:10:16Jocko Willink?

  It's absolutely horrible.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:18Jocko Willink?

  The money doesn't, the money doesn't.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  It's a strategic loss.

• 1:10:22Jocko Willink?

  It's a strategic loss. So that's why I was so pissed that this happened. And that's why I was pissed at myself because I accepted that intel. As what we were just talking about. Hey, cool. There, there's the red X. That must be the bad guy. Cool. Let's go hit that house.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  So many examples in life and in business on that too. People say something and you're like, well, wait, did they say they, did they say they weren't going to be there? Or did they say that they didn't think they could be like, I mean, there's just so many conversations that you can have about. Whether it's marketing in your business, whether it's something you're doing with your family. Hey, just clarify for a second. Hey, hey, wait. What did they really say? Did they actually say this? Well, no, they didn't really say that. Oh, okay.

• 1:11:03Jocko Willink?

  That totally changes everything.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  And it's in that moment. Yeah, it totally changed. And that's in those moments as a leader. So, okay, well, hold on before we actually go and pull the trigger on this. Actually, in the case of combat or figuratively, before we start marketing, let's just clarify real quick before we go pushing off in this direction.

• 1:11:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh yeah. The, the rumor mill, the gossip, the he said, she said. Those things are just awful. And as a leader, you have to take a step back. You can't let your emotions get a hold of you when someone says, oh, he said he didn't want to come to this thing.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 1:11:35Jocko Willink?

  Oh, oh, really?

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  So he didn't want to come?

• 1:11:37Jocko Willink?

  He didn't want to come or he, his father's sick.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's got a parent teacher conference on, and his kid's really struggling in school right now. So he, he just, he can't be there. Oh, well, that's a totally different situation.

• 1:11:47Jocko Willink?

  Totally different story. Totally different story.

• 1:11:51Jocko Willink?

  Check.

• 1:11:53Jocko Willink?

  Next one. Battle itself provides the most reliable means of estimating the enemy. Boom.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  For sure. That's a confirmation.

• 1:12:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's just legit. That's the truth, which means sometimes you gotta take some risk. Gotta take some calculated risk and figure out what's going on.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  All of this is just, is talking about preparing, you know, mindset, the troops, the tactics, the techniques, logistics, all of that. But now to, now to, okay. Sooner or later, battle's gonna happen.

• 1:12:22Jocko Willink?

  That was a tough one in Ramadi. They, so there would be little checkpoints out in town. And the checkpoints would be run by Americans. And then eventually, there'd be run by half Americans and half Iraqis. And at some point, it was okay. Iraqis are gonna have to run this checkpoint by themselves. And that was a huge risk every time to see if they could pull it off. Then the first several times, it was not successful. And we would turn over the checkpoints to the Iraqis. And there was, there was, I think, three of them got overrun.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:02Jocko Willink?

  Overrun.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Jocko Willink?

  And just mass casualties. But that's what we're, what, that's a risk that the commander had to take. You know, that's a risk that Colonel McFarland, at the time, had to take. You had to say, okay, we've trained them, we've, we've pushed them, they've been out there, we've done the right seat, left seat. We need to see if they can maintain it. We need to see what the enemy's gonna do. And so, the first few times it got tried, it was horrific. And eventually, we did get the level of violence down, and we did get the Iraqi soldiers trained up enough that they could handle it. But it took some, we, we had to do what we're talking about right here. Battle itself provides the most reliable means of estimating the enemy. Sometimes you gotta take that risk. It's awful.

• 1:13:49Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on this next little section, called estimate of, it's called estimate of situation, period, decision, period.

• 1:13:59Jocko Willink?

  An estimate of the situation provides, precedes each decision. It demands rapid thought, simple, logical consideration of the essential details only. Our mission is the basis. We proceed from it and determine what it prescribes and how we can best accomplish it.

• 1:14:20Jocko Willink?

  Rapid thought, simple, logical. You wouldn't think that you would need to tell people in the military and business in the world that, hey, when you're going to make a decision, you need to think simple and logical. Right? How often do I see people making decisions that are not simple?

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:38Jocko Willink?

  And not logical.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Emotional.

• 1:14:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just emotional decision making. Here, this is why, and you know that General Beck had seen this over and over again in order to get to a point where he's making it evident in this book that you need to be logical about your decision making process. That would be like if you, if you were to sit there and talk to, hey, listen, guys, here's the most important thing I want to start off with about your decision making process, make sure it's logical. You get laughed out of the room. Well, no kidding. Okay, let's see what happens when we crank up the stress.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Right. That's right. Yeah.

• 1:15:11Jocko Willink?

  People are not making logical decisions.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  You know when things get emotional? Whenever people are involved.

• 1:15:17Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Like, that's it. And because that's just, there's, there's all those dynamics of those relationships and history and the way people talk and treat each other. And it creates, and then people become emotionally attached to their own plan. And so he has to put it in the book to codify it as you've got to be able to unemotionally detach and analyze what is the best decision that is going to have the biggest impact on the battlefield or to impact the battlefield.

• 1:15:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Jocko Willink?

  The character of the hostile leader and the hostile troops may be used in estimating the conduct of the enemy, especially if we have had previous battle experience with those. So you've got to know who you're going against. That's a patent right there. I read your book.

• 1:16:03Jocko Willink?

  As a determined decision must be logic, must be the logical result of careful consideration of all factors. The decisions made will not always correspond to the actual conditions presented. This is interesting. The decisions made will not always correspond to the actual conditions, conditions presented.

• 1:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Then the situation develops other than the decision contemplated. He has the greatest prospect of success, who quickly and skillfully exploits other reconnaissance, but does not change the decision, except with compelling reasons. So it's the same thing we were talking about earlier. You stick with your decision until you see that it's not a good decision.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  And the faster you can do that, get quickly analyzing, right? That's how, like Boyd said, with the OODA loop is quicker you can go through that OODA loop, the better you can outmaneuver.

• 1:16:59Jocko Willink?

  I used to do this all the time in, even in Task Unit Bruiser. When things weren't going the way I expected them to go, my, my, my strongest desire was to keep doing what we planned to do. Like, okay, look, oh, we didn't expect to take contact from over there. Cool, but we're going to keep pressing through from the north or whatever. And that was my, that was my, that was where I leaned toward. I always leaned toward go with the plan. You know, plan your dive, dive your plan, right? We say on diving, hey, you come up with a plan. You go out there, everyone's walked through it. Everyone knows what the plan is. We briefed it. If you can stick with that, you stick with it. But then sometimes you gotta go, oh, you know what?

• 1:17:41Jocko Willink?

  I didn't expect what that, and that is too big of a curve ball for us to handle. I'm making an adjustment or making a call. And that's why we have standard operating procedures. And we make an adjustment based on something that else that we've rehearsed a thousand times.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:17:54Jocko Willink?

  So you've got to pay attention to that. Now we get into orders. This is pretty cool. The order puts the decision into effect. Clear orders are an essential for the frictionless cooperation of all commanders. For the higher commander, the written order provides the foundation for leadership. It is communicated to the lower units printed as a carbon copy, typewritten or written by hand or by technical communications means. Frequently it is dictated over the telephone. In every instance, the most sure and suitable method of transmission is to be chosen. Should the order, should the order be simple or short?

• 1:18:38Jocko Willink?

  It may be orally communicated. It must later, however, be committed to paper.

• 1:18:46Jocko Willink?

  So this is something that I talk about a lot. And I always throw out this question to trip everyone up. I say, what's better communication, email or voice? You know, email or, or conversation? And everyone goes, conversation, conversation, conversation. And, and they're right, right? Yep. Kind of. Cause what goes on? What goes on is if, if I call you up and I say, hey, Andrew, we're going to do A, B, and C. You good with that? And you're like, cool, got it. And then you go out and what I said isn't what you heard. And you do A, B, and D. That's right. And I go, what, what's wrong with you? And you say, what? You told me to do A, B, and D. No, I told you to do A, B, and C. And here we go. Right. We have a problem. So that's why when you and I have a phone conversation,

• 1:19:29Jocko Willink?

  I say, we get done and I call you and I send you an email. It says, hey, just want to confirm we're on the same sheet. We're going to do A, B, and C. And you email me back and say, no, I thought you said you wanted me to do A, B, and D. No, sorry. I didn't articulate it right. We're definitely doing A, B, and C. And you say, okay, cool, got it. So verbal is great. Voice is great. Phone is great, yes. But email is very clear. Now you flip that over. Okay, now I'm just emailing you, hey, Andrew, do A, B, and C. And you're like, wait, why is he telling me this? Is he, is he telling me this because he thinks I don't know how to do this myself? You know, it's like, and then we get into this whole thing. Or you get these long emails. Long, super stupid, long emails that you didn't, don't even read the whole thing because it's too long.

• 1:20:14Jocko Willink?

  So what you want to do is you want to use both.

• 1:20:18Jocko Willink?

  This is, this stuff here.

• 1:20:23Jocko Willink?

  The fact that, this is why I, this is actually why I majored in English. Cause when I was a young officer and I hadn't been to college yet, luckily. So I was able to figure out what I wanted to major in, but I could already see, and there was no war going on. This is like 1998, 1999. I could already see that the written messages that we'd get, the, they, they were so important to be able to understand. And then you had to be able to write a concept of operation that made sense. And so I knew, I was like, okay, well, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to get really good at this. And I realized that this idea of communicating with other humans, humans, was the actual basis of, of all leadership, up and down the chain of command. And what really helped me a lot was

• 1:21:07Jocko Willink?

  when I, when I had to study Shakespeare in college.

• 1:21:12Jocko Willink?

  The thing is Shakespeare is very humbling because you don't know what the freaking words mean because they're barely English, right? It's barely English and anyone that says they can pick up Shakespeare and understand it is lying, either lying to you or they came from a time machine in Middle England because it doesn't happen. So what I realized, you know, because at first you're reading Shakespeare and you're like, oh, I must be stupid. I'm stupid because I, and you know, the, it's like, no, actually you wouldn't know that word. That word hasn't been used since 1648. So why would you know this word? Why would you know the meaning of that word? You wouldn't know it. So you have to look it up and you got, I got very, it's just, it's, you know what it is? It's just humbling. So when I would get some ROE from down from some rules of engagement down from the chain

• 1:21:57Jocko Willink?

  of command and I'd look at it, go, I'm not really sure what this means. I didn't just go, oh, well, screw it. I'll just make my best guess. No, I would get out a dictionary and look up the damn words that I didn't understand and then simplify them because I, you know, if I don't understand what a word means, there's no way in hell.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  And you're an English major.

• 1:22:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I'm an English major and there's no way in hell that some of our frontline guys are gonna know it. So you gotta translate it for them. So this stuff about communications.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  Huge.

• 1:22:23Jocko Willink?

  It's just, yeah, it's gotta be simple, clear, concise is what we say at Echelon Front. Simple, clear, concise. That's the way it's gotta be. Continuing on, this is so good. The more pressing the situation, the shorter the order. Where circumstances permit, oral orders are given in accordance with the terrain, not the map. Oh, that's good. So whenever chance, whenever I can, I'm actually taking you out there. I'm actually looking, okay, Andrew, you see that hill over there? I want you to get, you know, put some machine guns up there because we're gonna assault through. You go, okay, got it. Not looking at a map, we're looking at the terrain itself. How often can you actually get eyes on?

• 1:23:05Jocko Willink?

  In the front lines and with the lower commanders, this is particularly, this is particularly so. With important orders, it is often advisable to use two or more means of transmission, which is what I just said. And I tell that to companies all the time. Hey, you want to get your, you want to get your vision out to the company? Email it to them, do a video, do a conference call, do a, a poster that they can do it all. Get that message out there. Do you, you know, I hate to say over communicate because that implies it's too much, but over communicate. When I think of over communicate, it's like, I'm going to send you, hey, Andrew, I'm going to send you 48 emails every day.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now I don't even know which one I should be reading here. Yeah. You know, I had a good conversation with Sarah at the, at muster about this and about how in this day and age, if anything, people tend to overuse email. And we have these just swamped inboxes and having, in this modern day and age, having a good plan in place for some comms discipline of, and it's exactly what, what you said earlier, and I've been using this in business for years. It's, it's a conversation because you can get to the bottom line quicker because so much of the communication is non-verbal. It's like tonality. And then if you can do it over a video of ETC or Zoom or Skype or whatever, great.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  So you get to the solution quicker because we're, we're going back and forth on each other. We get to this, we get to that final conclusion. And then you follow up with an email because then it's black and white. And then you have like the confirmation of this is what we talked about.

• 1:24:35Jocko Willink?

  Documented. Yep.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:24:38Jocko Willink?

  It is easy to underestimate the time required to get an order through. If that's a good one. It's going to take a little bit longer than you thought. Oh, here we go. This is what you were just talking about. Too many orders, especially in battle, during which the communication means may miscarry, produces the danger of causing injury to independence of action or lower, of the lower commanders. So if you're, if you're trying to tell everyone exactly what to do, guess what? Eventually that order is not going to get through. And you know what they're doing? They're waiting to hear it because you haven't decentralized command enough. You've, you've trained them like a dog, only to do what you tell them to do.

• 1:25:13Jocko Willink?

  An order should, shall contain all that is necessary for the lower commander to know in order for him to execute independently his task. It should contain no more. Correspondingly, the order must be brief and clear, decisive in tone and complete, adopted to the understanding of the receiver. Oh, that's what I just talked about. Adopted to the understanding. So you've got to translate those big words in the ROE down to the frontline troops. And according to conditions, his peculiarity. The commander must never fail to place himself in the position of the receiver. I talk about perspective all the time. You've got to understand the perspective of the person that you're talking to. They don't have all the context that you have.

• 1:25:56Jocko Willink?

  You've got to, you've got to recognize that. The language of orders must be simple and understandable. Clarity, which eliminates doubts, is more important than correct technique. Clarity must not be sacrificed for brevity. So sometimes you've got to go a little bit more detailed. Negative expressions and changes lead to half-measures and are objectionable. Exaggerations are equally bad. Orders may bind only insofar as they correspond to the situation and its condition. And its conditions. So that's a good one. Orders may bind only insofar as they correspond to the situation and its conditions.

• 1:26:40Jocko Willink?

  So as soon as there's something outside that, you can't, you can't say, no, don't go across the line of the limit of advance, ever. Cause guess what? You might get into contact and the only way to get out of it is to cross that limit of advance. So you better leave some flexibility in there. Still, it is often necessary to issue orders in uncertain situations. If changes in the situation are to be expected before the order is put into execution, the order should not go into details. So if you don't know really a hundred percent what's going to happen, if you have, he says still, still, it is often necessary to issue orders in uncertain situations. You're still going to give orders, but.

• 1:27:22Jocko Willink?

  If change in the situation is to be expected, before the order is put in execution, the order should not go into details. In great strategical operations, especially when orders must be issued for several days in advance, this absention from details is to be specifically observed. The general intention is expressed, the end to be achieved is especially stressed. In the execution of impending action, the main instructions are given, the immediate conduct of the engagement is left to subordinate commanders in such a way the order is fully executed. Decentralized command, 100%. Mission and state. Yes. This is what we're trying to get done. Here's where we're trying to end up.

• 1:28:07Jocko Willink?

  Go make it happen.

• 1:28:10Jocko Willink?

  In so far as conditions permit, it is often best for the commander to clarify his intentions to his subordinates by word of mouth and discussion. Yet he must not make himself dependent on his subordinates. The decision and orders are therefore solely his. This is, hey, you talk to your platoon chief as a platoon commander, and your platoon chief is saying, we should come in from the west and attack from the west, and you go, okay, sounds good. And then you get hit, strong forces, and you fail your mission. You know, go, well, chief told me we're coming in from the west. You said that's right. No, shut up. It was your call. He made his recommendation. Continuing, it is recommended that the written order which directs the activities

• 1:28:49Jocko Willink?

  of different elements to a common goal be paragraphed and the paragraphs numbered. That's a, I've kind of left that in there because this is the kind of detail this manual goes into, like, number your paragraphs. Yeah.

• 1:29:04Jocko Willink?

  That which is important should be placed first. Check.

• 1:29:10Jocko Willink?

  Here we get, this is, this is good. The following sequence is recommended for operations orders.

• 1:29:19Jocko Willink?

  Number one, information. So in the US military and in NATO, as a matter of fact, we use something called the five paragraph order, SMEAC, Situation, Mission, Execution, Admin and Logistics, and Command and Signal. That's what we use in the US military. That's sort of our abbreviated troop leading procedures. Boom. You use Situation, Mission, Execution, Admin and Logistics, and Command and Signal. So here's, they're talking about operational orders. The first thing, information of the enemy and neighboring units insofar as this is importance of the receiver. So what is that? That's the situation. Enemy situation

• 1:29:59Jocko Willink?

  and friendly situation. Next, the intention of the commander insofar as it is communication, as its communication is essential to the accomplishment of the end sought. What is that? It's mission. So we've got situation, mission. We've got literally the exact same thing. Execution is what we have next. And there's is missions for the elements of the whole command. What's that? Yeah, that's, that's the execution. That's what we're actually gonna do. For America, we have admin and logistics next. And they have orders for the light motorized columns, the field trains and baggage trains, the battle echelon, and

• 1:30:41Jocko Willink?

  the remaining reserve elements insofar as this is of importance to the troop. So what's that? It's all the logistics, all the admin. And the last one we have is command and signal, which is how you're gonna communicate and where, you know, this is when you'd be briefing, you'd say, uh, you know, hey, as the tasking commander, I'm gonna be on this ridgeline. So we have command and signal. And the last thing that they say is command post and communications to and from.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  I wonder where we got SMEAC from.

• 1:31:09Jocko Willink?

  So there's the origination of SMEAC. It's, it's, you know, it comes from the Troop in Führung. That's where we got it.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Good, man. How this book has escaped.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Like my junior officer training, you know what I mean? Like it.

• 1:31:26Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're trying to solve right now.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're trying to solve. We can't solve it. We can't go back in time, but I promise you there are NCOs out there. I talk to them all the time. There are junior officers out there. I talk to them all the time. They send me messages. There are battalion commanders that that go through this and listen to it. So we're good.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Jocko Willink?

  We've worked. We're taking care of the problems of the past. We're this. This is absolutely true. That's why I'm sitting here. It's literally why I'm sitting here because I get a I get a damn email or I get a message from a Marine Corps second lieutenant that's in the game, or I get a letter from an army sergeant that's leading a squad and is like, thank you. Got it.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  I gotta admit, when I was a junior officer, I was so busy, so busy, you know, rabbit ears. You guys can't see that like with whatever I was tasked with. I never had time to read a book like this. I read what books I was basically forced to read and I got through them as best I could. And the best leaders made me do those things because I was so darn busy. It wasn't a priority to me at 23 years old to do that. But man, some of these things I learned firsthand and like as you're reading them, I'm like, yeah, well, I absolutely know this to be true. But I learned it like by actually touching the hot stove myself, you know?

• 1:32:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, Dave Burke was talking about it when he was at the basic school. He's like, they gave him a stack of manuals. It said, read the manuals, but the problem is you don't have the context around them.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Jocko Willink?

  So that makes it much, much harder to read.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  It's like distant. You don't really.

• 1:33:07Jocko Willink?

  And even for me, when I, when I'm reading something

• 1:33:12Jocko Willink?

  with all the context I have around it, like when I read it, like when I first started reading books that I knew I was going to do on the podcast, it it gave me a new level of appreciation for what I was reading because I was like, oh, okay. So here's how I'm going to describe this to everyone. Because.

• 1:33:28Jocko Willink?

  Just like we were talking about written versus email versus verbal, right? When you read the written word, it's different than when someone is putting the influence on the right spot, right? The, when you're using the tone and all that stuff. And I mean, it's, that's coming from, that's coming from Colonel William Reader, who had, I was reading his book to him on this podcast. And he's like, this is very emotional for me because I haven't, you know, read this book since I wrote it and it's very hard to listen to.

• 1:34:11Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's like, yes, when you add the voice, it's, there's something more to it. And then when you have someone that's a knuckle dragger like me that says, oh, here's what this is, here's what we're talking about here. Here's what, here's what this actually means. Here's what this translates to on, on, on the battlefield, in the boardroom somewhere. Here's the way it actually works. So that's what's good. Even though we didn't get the ideal training, we can give it to them now.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it's so important. We talk about training and how important training is for preparation. Like at least, at the very least, hey, you gotta read this book. At the very least, okay, I mean, in the absence of that, it's like a complete failure. But at least, okay, read these books, but you've got to find the time to do the training. Read the books and then as a leader, sit down, okay, what does that really mean? When we go out and we operate in this way, what are the lessons from this book that we can apply? Really do it.

• 1:35:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You know, it's like for me, when I was reading About Face, and I read About Face, like when we were in Ramadi, I read it for the first time. I'm not sure, a hundred percent sure when I read it for the first time. But I knew that when I brought it to Ramadi, I was like, that's the only book I brought with me.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:35:22Jocko Willink?

  And the thing is, I would read that like I would read that to fall asleep, right? I just get up to my room. I would open up to a random page because I've read it enough times that I don't need to read it from cover to cover. But I'd open up to a random page and I'd be like, oh, oh, this is, this is what I'm experiencing right now. Oh, yeah, okay. He experienced the same thing. I remember one of the first nights I was there, flipped it open and I start reading it. And what it's saying is he, they're working with the South Vietnamese military. And the South Vietnamese military was untrained, unequipped. They were, they were totally devoid of any kind of ethics in terms of money. And, you know, it was corrupt.

• 1:36:04Jocko Willink?

  So I was like, okay, so he, so in Vietnam, they were dealing with the exact same thing that we're dealing with here. Okay, cool. Let's look at how he dealt with it. You know what I mean? Look, there, that's the person that actually made me say, okay, the Iraqi soldiers are not going to be like us. They have a different culture. They, they run things a different way. It's not, it's not wrong. It's just different from the way we do thing. The classic case is the Iraqi officers skimming money off the enlisted guys paychecks. Right. And we're, to us, this is like a total, total sin, right? The ultimate sin. You're going to steal money from your enlisted troops?

• 1:36:46Jocko Willink?

  For them, the enlisted guys, that's what they expected. Yeah, they totally expect. He's the boss. Yeah. Hey, he's going to take a little bit, he's going to take his little cut. Of course, he's the boss. You know, what are we doing? We're, we're, he's going to, he's still generous to us, you know? He's not taking all of it. Right. And we had to get that through our minds, you know, that, that, that their attitude, their cult, they're culturally different. And so if we waste a bunch of time trying to sort out their pay, they're all looking at us going, what are you doing? What, why are you trying to create a conflict with us? We, I'm the boss. I'm going to take my cut. What are you talking about? Right. To them, it's just as simple as. That's how it is. That's just how it is. Yeah. You know? And, and so.

• 1:37:28Jocko Willink?

  For me, like reading about face, that was, that was the book that really tuned me into, okay, there are lessons here. I mean, that's why, that's why I named Task and Bruiser, Task and Bruiser, because that's what, that's what Hackworth did. 100% stolen from Hackworth. 100%. But all the little things, cover movie talks about in there, talks about decentralized command all the time, talks about, all those things are in there. He doesn't, it's not even a leadership book. It's all in there though. So, yes, these types of situations where the other thing that happens is, everything we've said so far, right? Just every topic that we've talked about is in extreme ownership. It's in the dichotomy of leadership. It's all in there. But all of it is a different angle. And just like when you, when you experience

• 1:38:13Jocko Willink?

  the same thing, but from a little bit of a different angle, you know it better. That's right. You know it. If I teach you an arm lock, and then Dean teaches you an arm lock, and then Andy teaches you an arm lock, you got a little something different from each one of us. It's just a little different sign, a little different movement, and you get better at it. Same thing happens here. You, you hear that same message, maybe in a little different way, maybe a little different spin on it, maybe shown in a different scenario. You actually learn from it. And that's what's important. Because the more you, the more, the more variations of the same thing you've seen, the better off, the better you understand it. And it makes you that much better. And if you see the way, if you know the way broadly, you see it in all things.

• 1:38:56Jocko Willink?

  And the more you see it, the more you know it. So, yes, that's the way it should be. That's the way it should be. Continuing on.

• 1:39:14Jocko Willink?

  Suppositions and expectations are to be so indicated. Reasons for the measures ordered belong only exceptionally in the order. Detailed instructions covering all possible contingencies, which are matters of training, do not belong in an order.

• 1:39:35Jocko Willink?

  It's interesting, they say suppositions and expectations. What do we call those in the military? We call them assumptions. And we just talked about that too. Yep. Eli.

• 1:39:44Jocko Willink?

  Is often suitable to issue a warning order. Warning order informs the latest developments of the situation. It is used to effect with the most urgent preparations. Likewise, it is used to permit the troops to come to rest earlier and also permit them to plan to rest longer. So, warning order, something that we also use.

• 1:40:08Jocko Willink?

  Another section here. When an order or report is transmitted orally, the one bearing the order or report must repeat it to the issuing person. A person transmitting a written report should be instructed as to its contents insofar as conditions permit. Officers transmitting orders should, as a rule, be instructed as to the tactical situation. It's funny, even in the teams, when someone says peel right, everyone repeats the call. You repeat it back to the person that just told you, and then you repeat it to the next person.

• 1:40:44Jocko Willink?

  The place of the commander and his staff. This is the next section we're going into. The personal effect of the commander on the troops is of great importance. He must be near the fighting troops. The choice of location for the corps commander should be based upon the requirement of the establishment of rapid and continuous communication to the divisions and the rear. He cannot rely on technical communications, meaning telephone, wires and all that. We can do better with this now, but back in the day, and even, even so, there's nothing that beats face to face. Nothing. Nothing beats, beats face to face. Great distance, in spite of adequate communication facilities, lengthens the command and report lines, endangers the system,

• 1:41:29Jocko Willink?

  and may lead to late reports and orders, or even failure of arrival. Moreover, great distance makes difficult personal terrain study and a personal knowledge of the process, progress of the battle. The division commander belongs with his troops. Boom.

• 1:41:51Jocko Willink?

  Don't get so detached.

• 1:41:56Jocko Willink?

  This section is called, we just, I just jumped through a bunch of really granular tactical stuff. If you're military, good stuff to read.

• 1:42:06Jocko Willink?

  Gonna jump through it. This section is called attack, which is just worth covering in its own right. The attack is affected through movement, fire, thrusts and through thrusts and through the direction in which it is directed. The attack can be directed from one direction against the front. But ordinarily, the greatest strength is launched against the flank or the rear of the enemy. Moreover, an attack can be launched from several directions with a breakthrough of the hostile front. New attack directions are provided. So when you flank someone, guess what? There's gonna be other opportunities that appear.

• 1:42:41Jocko Willink?

  The frontal attack is the most difficult of execution, yet it is the most frequent. Out, the outflanking attack is more efficient than the frontal. Simultaneously, outflanking of both enemy flanks presumes considerable superiority. An envelopment of one or both hostile flanks and reaching deep into his rear can lead to the annihilation of the enemy. This is something that's very tricky. Because we talk about envelopment of the enemy, which means surrounding the enemy. And in a small, that's cool. If you're in a battalion or bigger, and actually I want to say brigade or bigger, like we're talking massive battlefield movements.

• 1:43:24Jocko Willink?

  Because when you get, when you, if you envelop, if you have a, if you have a company of soldiers, 150 soldiers, and you envelop the enemy, guess what you're doing? You're spread thin. Well, not only you spread thin, when you surround an enemy, you are all pointing your weapons at yourselves. That's the real problem. So ran into this a lot in, in the teams where guys would want to surround a target and, and there's some. It's problematic. It's very problematic. You have to, that's why, you know, the classic L-shaped, whether ambush or L-shaped assault, there's a reason for that. There's a reason why the guys in Vietnam taught us to do that.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:44:05Jocko Willink?

  Because as long as you know what your fields of fire are, you can, you can go hot if you're in an L-shaped ambush, or you're in an L-shaped assault. The minute I put people, you know, whether it's 270 degrees around the target, or 360 degrees, I can, now I have to worry about my backdrop, and it's a real problem. And you know what? You can get away with those, you can get away with enveloping a target all day long, as long as there's no shooting. But the minute the enemy starts shooting, it's a problem. So, there are ways to cover exits from an L. You extend that a little bit, you can put some overwatches in, but it is a real problem to think

• 1:44:46Jocko Willink?

  that you're gonna envelop a target in a small, you know, let's say with, with direct fire weapons, company size or smaller, it's a real problem to think you're gonna be able to envelop a target and not have a problem if there's a big firefight. It's gonna suck.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and those lines, those phase lines can get confused real quickly, as we know.

• 1:45:09Jocko Willink?

  But flanking the enemy is awesome, and you should do it every opportunity you get, in all aspects of life.

• 1:45:19Jocko Willink?

  Continuing a little bit more about the envelopment. The envelopment presumes a frontal fixation of the enemy. So you, you still have to lay down some sort of fire to make them distracted. The enemy is most certainly fixed if his entire front is attacked. However, such an attack demands strong forces, which must be absent from the enveloping wing. Often, therefore, must the attacker be content with limited, objective, or faint attacks. So you're trying to...

• 1:45:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, if you if you use every troop that you have to do the frontal assault, well, then you've got no one left to flank. This is another cool thing, like in the teams, you'd have the little assault force that was gonna move. And so when I first was like going through SQT, well, we'd just take all the big machine gunners and put them in the base element, like you guys are gonna lay down fire and then all the all the other guys with the with the M4s. We would be the assault team. Well, what happens when the assault team gets compromised?

• 1:46:24Speaker 01

  They're compromised.

• 1:46:24Jocko Willink?

  They're compromised and now they can't advance. So now they lay down and start laying down fire. Well, now the base force just became the assault force.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:46:34Jocko Willink?

  And guess what they're holding?

• 1:46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Jocko Willink?

  A bunch of heavy weapons. They're not very, they're not as mobile. And even worse, the now base force, all they have is M16s and they're going ping, ping, ping.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:46Jocko Willink?

  That's not gonna keep anyone's head down compared to an M60.

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:46:51Jocko Willink?

  So I learned that very early, what you don't, you don't. And it was great for me because that was another thing that initially taught me, hey, you got your standard operating procedures. You got two squads. You know, you got two squads in a platoon. Cool. One is base, one is assault. Don't pull the heavy weapons into the base force because you might need them.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think in two, it's it's if the enemy in there, he's saying, well, if the enemy is is fixed, right, you have it, it presumes the frontal assault, like that's the main effort and and but if that shifts, if they become wise to the flanking maneuver and they begin to put more forces there, then the whole thing just dynamically shifted around. And so by loading up your base with your automatic weapons, now you're now you're totally off balance.

• 1:47:35Jocko Willink?

  Yes, yes. These are the little things that I learned along the way that I that I was like, oh, that makes sense.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  So there's a good reason to have an AW or two in each squad.

• 1:47:45Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:46Jocko Willink?

  AW2. That's the best, best position.

• 1:47:53Jocko Willink?

  Check. Here's talking about execution of attacks. Basis of the cooperation of arms. So what are we talking about here? Hmm. The objective of combined arms in an attack is to bring the infantry in its decisive action against the enemy with sufficient firepower and shock action. So that is possible to drive through deeply and break down the final hostile resistance. This goal is first reached when the hostile artillery is taken or is forced to retire. All arms cooperating in an attack must recognize their mutual capabilities and consider their respective limitations. They require continuous, close communications with one another.

• 1:48:39Jocko Willink?

  The cooperation between the attacking infantry and the supporting artillery governs the course of the attack. Full cooperation must exist in time and space throughout the attack. This is a little something that we call cover and move.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:54Jocko Willink?

  And what's interesting is how much they talk about communication. Continuous, close communication with one another.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  And the cooperation.

• 1:49:01Jocko Willink?

  Cooperation. You know, in the Marine Corps, when we covered, when, when Dave Burke and I covered the tactics manual, they call cover and move cooperation. That's what they call it. And so that's, I wonder where they got that from.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, cooperation, working together, but also look like break the word in two pieces. It's cooperation, right? So you have two different elements that may even have different chains of command, right? You got an artillery unit, you have an infantry unit. And, you know, we, we saw this in Ramadi too. We're, here we are, a naval special forces unit with one set of communication method, working with army and Marines who use different types of communication, who own the battle space. We were guests in their battle space and we had to cooperate, right? We had to cooperate. That meant communication, working together to ensure, you know, that synchrony of effort. And without that, that's when, you know, we're, well, we're, we're going to be operating this here. What are you, where are you going to be? Well, I don't need to tell you. Like that was kind of like this old, you know, some people talk like that. That's not what we did. And that's part of why we had

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  success there is because we cooperated with the army and the Marines.

• 1:50:04Jocko Willink?

  No doubt about it.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Continuously.

• 1:50:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We covered moved with them. A hundred percent.

• 1:50:13Jocko Willink?

  It is the duty of both infantry and artillery to secure their cooperation through mutual established, permanent and effective communication. What does that mean? That means you better have a relationship with them.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  Dude, I mean, it's just, sorry, I didn't know you were about to read what I just said.

• 1:50:28Jocko Willink?

  No, no, it's good. That's, that's once again proving that, that actually what we're talking about is timeless. And it, and it, and it should be obvious to people on the battlefield. It should be obvious to people in the, in the business world. It should be obvious to people that are trying to work together inside of a family. Should be obvious. But, once again, the reason we have a business, the reason we have a business is because it's not as obvious, it's not as easy to execute this stuff.

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:51:04Jocko Willink?

  As it is to read it.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:51:06Jocko Willink?

  And it takes practice and it takes technique and, and the best way to get good at it is to do it. But you're gonna make mistakes and you, and you're gonna learn from them. You, well, you better learn from them. So, I think that's actually a good place to wrap up this, um, this document, you know, this document, this crazy document, Coup in Führer, which is just tons of those lessons in there. And either lessons learned, most of them are just lessons reinforced. That's what most of them are. Simplicity of conduct will most surely obtain the objective.

• 1:51:47Jocko Willink?

  Friction and mistakes are an everyday occurrence. This is for, for those of you out there with the, um, what do they call it? A zero defect mentality? Wrong. People are gonna make mistakes. There's gonna be friction. There's not, you're not gonna get to do anything easy. If you're doing something easy, guess what? It's, you shouldn't move on and find something more challenging. Mutual trust is the surest form of discipline.

• 1:52:10Jocko Willink?

  That, right there, when you, when you think of discipline as something you're going to impose on your troops, you're wrong. You're wrong. Discipline is formulated through trust.

• 1:52:24Jocko Willink?

  Strictly maintained discipline is the benefit of all. And, and then this one, one of my favorites from this is, "The first demand of war is decisive action." Decisive action. That is what we need. That's what we all need. The words and the thoughts and the plans and the ideas, they all mean nothing without action.

• 1:52:53Jocko Willink?

  And I'm definitely not saying that you don't need to think, or you don't need to plan, or you don't need to have ideas, but I am saying that none of those things matter unless you take action. So, I think that's all we've got for tonight. And if you want to take some action in your life, in your world, here's some things that you can do. Train jiu-jitsu. That's a good one. You're training right now, Andrew?

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  I am.

• 1:53:23Jocko Willink?

  Check. Back on the mats of justice.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Very humbling. The last muster, which is what got me back out of the mats.

• 1:53:30Jocko Willink?

  Oh, because you realized you need to get your game back?

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Oh, it was just humbling. That's just the only way I can describe it.

• 1:53:37Jocko Willink?

  See, you're lucky you had that jiu-jitsu. You had, you had jiu-jitsu before a lot of people had jiu-jitsu because you were training in the 90s?

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:44Speaker 01

  Yep, late 90s.

• 1:53:45Jocko Willink?

  So you kind of rested on those laurels a bit, right? Right?

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  I, yeah, well, and everybody else got really good and I got rusty.

• 1:53:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:54Speaker 01

  And I hadn't been training, not in jiu-jitsu anyway.

• 1:53:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So, back on the mats. Hey, if you're, if you're training jiu-jitsu, go to originmaine.com. You can get American-made, everything. Geez, the best geez. You can support this podcast and you can support America. We got t-shirts, hoodies, geez, did I say geez? Yes, I did. And jeans, by the way. Now we got jeans. That's right. American-made jeans. Cotton from America. Woven in America.

• 1:54:29Jocko Willink?

  Sown in America. By Americans. It's awesome. And actually available now for the first time for preorder. Origin Boots.

• 1:54:47Jocko Willink?

  Origin Boots. So same thing. You know, we've, we, we invested in the machinery. We found the, the old timers. That know, that did that for their living before. Factory started going overseas. So check out the Origin Boots, supplements, joint warfare, krill oil, discipline, discipline go, and also discipline go, ready to drink, booyah. I see you've been sucking on that thing over there. You drank a lot of those during the muster.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  You know, I.

• 1:55:16Jocko Willink?

  I was like dang.

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  Well, you, I had some at night and you're like, you're drinking that right now. I'm like, yeah, man, tastes great. I like it. I, I'm a fan of the Tropic Thunder.

• 1:55:24Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:27Jocko Willink?

  So we got Tropic Thunder. We got lemon lime, which is called Citrus Psycho. I'm running low on that right now. That's why I didn't bring them.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought when you brought it in here, you just remembered that my preference.

• 1:55:38Jocko Willink?

  No, you got lucky.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  I was like, oh wow, look at that, Jaco, paying attention to the guys that work for him, like, you know, you know, what ended up lights.

• 1:55:44Jocko Willink?

  Don't care. All the thing I said about caring was not true. I just, that's what I have left. I didn't want to sacrifice any of my lemon lime.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Right to that, right to that.

• 1:55:52Jocko Willink?

  No, dude, I remembered. I was taking care of you. So yeah, you can get the, you can get those cans. Ultimately, you're going to be able to get those everywhere in the world. That's what I'm talking about. Cause it's good for you. I was, the ingredients. Have you seen the ingredients? Filtered carbonated water, natural flavor, citric acid, monk, monk fruit extract. That's the ingredients. Look at the ingredients on any other can of what crap is in there.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  That's so bad for you.

• 1:56:17Jocko Willink?

  So it's got a bunch of other things, B12 and magnesium and sodium potassium. And there's caffeine in it. So anyways, check it out. You'll dig it and it will get you. It'll get you kind of fired up. It'll get you going.

• 1:56:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly. Warrior Kid Mulk, Mulk, strawberry, chocolate, whatever, a bunch of different flavors. Jaco White Tea, check that out. We have our own store, jacostore.com, rash guards, t-shirts, truckers hats, beanies, hoodies, everything on there is legit. If you want to support the podcast, it's awesome. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to this podcast, The Warrior Kid Podcast. I got a couple that are approaching readiness, so we'll be there. I usually roll those out three at a time. So I got one in the bank, working on a couple more. YouTube, if you want to see Echo Charles's legit videos, then you can go there and you can, in the comments, tell Echo that he's jacked. He's not here right now to defend himself, but boy, does

• 1:57:15Jocko Willink?

  he love it when people tell him he's jacked. He acts all humble, but he loves every second.

• 1:57:21Jocko Willink?

  Psychological Warfare, you can get that on iTunes, Google Play. If you want an alarm clock, you want the Jaco alarm clock, Jaco, you should make an alarm clock. It's there. Oh, I have it. This is what I use. It's called Psychological Warfare. If you want that, go to any MP3 platform. You can get it, flipsidecanvas.com. Dakota, my brother, he's making cool things to hang on your wall. Got a bunch of books. The next book to come out is called Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. Breaking down this stuff at a tactical level pragmatically so you can execute it. Also, way the Warrior Three Kid just came out a little while ago. It's called Where There

• 1:58:01Jocko Willink?

  Is A Will. We talked about will today. Shouldn't children know about the power of their will? Yes, they should. Get them the book that's literally called Where There's A Will and you know the rest of it.

• 1:58:14Jocko Willink?

  The other way, Way of the Warrior Kid books are also available. Way of the Warrior Kid and Mark's Mission, Mikey and the Dragons, best kids book ever. You're one of the first people I read it to.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  Before was even in print.

• 1:58:25Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't even in print. It was like, I just scratched it out.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  It's so good.

• 1:58:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was awesome. When I read it to you and you were like, I could see the look in your face. You're like, how did this knuckle dress? Same exact.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  So good. That's a gift I give to like, um, friends of mine to give to like kids, like it's a bedtime story. It's so good. And there's something in there for all of us adults.

• 1:58:51Jocko Willink?

  There is. There is indeed. Uh, and then there's Discipline Goes Freedom Field Manual. How to Get After It Manual.

• 1:59:01Jocko Willink?

  The audio version of that is on, it's MP3, it's not audible. It's because same thing, I want people to be able to break it down and put on their alarm. So that's what I did. iTunes, whatever, MP3, Extreme Ownership with my brother Leif Babin, Dichotomy Leadership with my brother Leif Babin. Everything that we're talking about in modern language, examples from the battlefield and the business world. Very straightforward principles.

• 1:59:26Jocko Willink?

  One of the best, I think it's the best selling business book since it came out, Extreme Ownership. Dichotomy Leadership, people say is better, interestingly enough. So get those two. EF Online.

• 1:59:40Jocko Willink?

  We made online training for leadership because you can't just go to one event or read one book and think that you're all good to go. You need to continually train and, and that's what we made EF Online for, EFOnline.com. It is leadership training, interactive leadership training.

• 2:00:02Jocko Willink?

  Online. Check it out. And we have one more muster this year. It's in Sydney, Australia. All the other muster we did, we did Chicago, sold out. We did Denver, sold out. We had to change the room around in Denver.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:15Jocko Willink?

  To, to, because we had so much demand, so we changed the room around. That's not happening in Sydney. Sydney is absolutely going to sell out. Go to extremeownership.com if you want to come. I look forward to seeing you all in Sydney. And we're going to announce the 2020 dates pretty soon. How'd you like muster?

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Oh, muster is amazing. So good. And, you know, teams need to come together. You know, you, I mean, I've, I've gone to events for years. There's nothing like muster, you know, running a business. There's nothing like muster. And I'll just tell you that you come as a leader for sure. The value of bringing several of your other key leaders with you. So you're all hearing the material together. It's one thing to go individually. Sure, that's great, but the tendency is to come back like Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets. And everyone's, you're fired up and everyone's like, okay, but when they, when several of you hear it together, you can really implement change in your, in your organization.

• 2:01:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a good call. And we've seen a lot more of that. There were some people, some companies that brought 20 plus people to the muster.

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 2:01:17Jocko Willink?

  And we, we set aside some seats so that they could be together, like you're talking about. Like 20 plus people and there's, there's plenty of companies that brought four.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:01:27Jocko Willink?

  You know, brought six. Some people come alone. That's fine too. But yeah, if you can bring a few people from your team. And you can all hear it from the horse's mouth and you can all bounce these ideas off each other. It just adds that much more to the experience. And just kind of FYI, when we do these, we go to the hotels. The hotel people are like, this is the most incredible thing. This is the only event where when the doors open at seven 45 in the morning, after we do PT at seven, at four 45, come back, shower. When the, there's people lined up waiting to get in there.

• 2:02:05Jocko Willink?

  And then every, you know, the, the hotel staff will be like, everyone's so proactive and nice and, you know, no one's rude. It's just like good people. It's awesome. Because what are people focused on? People are focused on getting after it, winning. And and and being good.

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you too, just something I've seen, because I don't, you don't see this at other events. For those of you listening, Leif and Jaco, basically, they don't basically eat all day.

• 2:02:30Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Every break, so-called, Leif and Jaco are sitting there talking to everybody. And that's something, the feedback that I see consistently, if people are like, wow, Leif and Jaco, and all the instructors are so accessible.

• 2:02:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  So it's not like the session, sessions end and Leif and Jaco disappear back into their green room.

• 2:02:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  For a cup of tea. They're out front meeting, so you get a lot of really good interaction.

• 2:02:49Jocko Willink?

  I stopped saying no green room, but there is no green room at the muster. So we're, we're there. If you think, if you want to come hang out, come hang out. That's what we're doing.

• 2:03:00Jocko Willink?

  And of course, right now, we have EF Overwatch, and this was cool too, to see this at, at the muster. You know, people say, where can I get leaders that have these principles in their brain? How can I get them to my company? Well, believe me, Leif and I have been getting asked that for years. And so what we did was, we created a company with Mike Sorelli, who's another echelon front guy, another one of our brothers from TU Bruiser. And, and you know, he said, hey, look, he'd, he'd been working with veterans transitioning into the civilian sector. And he said, hey, let's rock this. And so that's what we did. Great idea from Mike. And so now we've got it.

• 2:03:41Jocko Willink?

  EF Overwatch, whether you're a special operations veteran, or aviation, combat aviation veteran. And little news flash, coming soon, we are opening it up. We're, we're, we got another wing of EF Overwatch we're about to bring online, which is going to be for everyone in the military. Because we, the demand is so high. And look, you, you were in special operations, great. You've got some, you, you know, you've got great leadership experience. You know who else has great leadership experience? An infantry platoon commander, right? An infantry platoon sergeant. So, we started with the community that we know. We know it best.

• 2:04:24Jocko Willink?

  But the fact of the matter is, and you know this as well as anyone, the rest of the military, they're great people. They're great leaders. They have great experiences. So, we're creating something right now that is going to open this up so we can plug in our great experienced military people from every branch, from every MOS, from every job specialty, and let them apply those leadership skills, that discipline, to the civilian workforce and make the veterans' life better and make America better, make the companies better. It's just a win-win. So, we got that rolling out in the next few months, but just a heads up on that one. And if you need more of this conversation,

• 2:05:09Jocko Willink?

  because two straight hours of me and Andrew Paul is not enough, then you can find us on the interwebs. We're on Twitter, we're on Instagram, and we are on Dain Frozenbach. Andrew is TheAndrewPaul. And I am @JockoWillink. Andrew, you got any closing thoughts?

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  Get after it every day. I love your posts, you know? None of us are promised tomorrow. Make as big of an impact you can every single day. I've had a lot of time to think about life, and particularly recently, the passing of my grandfather and other friends of ours. At the end of the day, we're only here on this earth for a certain amount of time. And I think the biggest legacy that we can leave is how we impact the lives of other people. And that can be at a small level. It doesn't cost anything to say a kind word to somebody, to offer some encouragement, to show an act of kindness, to hold the door. That doesn't cost anything. And I think we can make a huge difference every day

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  in just how we interact with other people, in kindness and in getting after it every single day. So, that when I meet St. Peter at the pearly gates and I meet my Maker, he says, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

• 2:06:29Jocko Willink?

  Check. And it's interesting that that ties right back into this premise that as a leader... One of the most important things, if not the most important thing that you can do as a leader is care about your people.

• 2:06:46Jocko Willink?

  Now, we learn from military history and those lessons are of course written in blood.

• 2:06:56Jocko Willink?

  Written in blood by the men and women around the globe that have served, that are currently serving, that protect our freedom every day. So, thank you to all of them, our police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol and secret service. And all the first responders out there, same thing.

• 2:07:20Jocko Willink?

  Holding the line, thank you all for keeping us protected here at home and to everyone else out there, whether you're in the military or not. Whether you're a first responder or not, whether you have a mission or you just have a job. No matter what situation you're in.

• 2:07:43Jocko Willink?

  It all starts when you start. When you actually start, when you take decisive action.

• 2:07:54Jocko Willink?

  That's what you need to do. You need to make it happen by getting up every day.

• 2:08:01Jocko Willink?

  And getting after it. And until next time, this is Andrew Paul and Jaco. Out.