232: Do Not Fail To Learn. Adapt to New Environments. The Boer War.

0:00:00 - Opening 0:15:25 - The Boer War. By Jay Stone and Erwin Schmidl 1:23:29 - Final Thoughts and take-aways. 1:24:51 - How to stay on THE PATH. 1:50:43 - 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.

• 0:01Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 232 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening.

• 0:09Jocko Willink?

  From Colonel Grossby, commanding 5th Manchester Regiment. Dear Madam,

• 0:19Jocko Willink?

  Your letter of the 20th of August reached me safely. Your poor son died a heroic soldier's death. And all belonging to the 5th Manchester Regiment from myself downwards are proud of having been comrades of so brave and honorable a lad. I am glad to be able to inform you, he did not suffer any great pain.

• 0:47Jocko Willink?

  He died saying he hoped if he ever got over his wounds, he would soon be able to return to his duty.

• 0:55Jocko Willink?

  I am informed by those who were present with him in the blockhouse at the time that he passed away happily and willing to meet his God.

• 1:06Jocko Willink?

  You have every reason to be proud of his memory and may God help and comfort you in your great sorrow.

• 1:15Jocko Willink?

  I will inquire if he has left any keepsake that could be either sent to or kept for you. I've asked my wife to call and see you the next time she is in Manchester. Believe me, yours faithfully, H. Grossby, Colonel.

• 1:39Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is a letter of condolence

• 1:45Jocko Willink?

  written

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  back to a grieving mother in England during the Second Boer War in Africa, South Africa. And

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  of course, the letter is, paints the picture of a...

• 2:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, let's just say a, a, a kind of perfect heroic death.

• 2:11Jocko Willink?

  Which is, I guess, is what any mother would want to hear. But.

• 2:18Jocko Willink?

  Make no mistake. About any war, including the Boer War in South Africa. That.

• 2:27Jocko Willink?

  This scene was awful.

• 2:32Jocko Willink?

  So the Boer War in South Africa. You know, it's, it's, it's a war that people consider to be one of the first. Modern wars. And there's, there's, you know, you, there's a bunch of wars you could throw in there. That, that are. Also called that, I mean, the American Civil War was in some ways considered a, a modern war. Um, you know, you had. Some, some wars that were right around there that, that weren't a modern war. They were kind of a, a mixing, you know, there was. There's one battle. That the British fought against the modest Sudanese. It was in 1898, September of 1898.

• 3:17Jocko Willink?

  And. During this battle. You know, it was British soldiers and actually Egyptian soldiers as well versus these, these Sudanese. And during the battle, there was 48.

• 3:35Jocko Willink?

  Of the British and Egyptians who were killed, 382 wounded. And on the Sudanese side, there was 12,000 dead.

• 3:44Jocko Willink?

  And 13,000 wounded. So, so that was kind of a lopsided battle.

• 3:52Jocko Willink?

  And. If you stand up against the British and try and fight them in that manner of, hey, we'll go toe to toe. We have machine guns or we don't have machine guns, but we have. We have repeating rifles. We have a massive advantage over you and you're going to continue to charge at us. We're going to mow you down. And that's what happened there. So what, what happens in the, the second Boer War? Is. An early example of asymmetric warfare, meaning you have a small group. In this case, the Boers, which is a Afrikaans term that means farmers.

• 4:27Jocko Willink?

  And there's between 20 and 60,000 of them. And they're going up against the British Empire. Which at the time was a massive powerhouse, obviously. They end up with 500,000 troops. So 350,000 Brits, 150,000 Colonials. And 100,000 Africans that are fighting on, on the British side.

• 4:53Jocko Willink?

  The, it's the Second Boer War. The first one took place in 1880, but it's a, it was much, much smaller. Uh, it started with a, a farmer that refused to pay taxes. You know, that's, seems to be a common thread. We don't like to pay taxes. And the government confiscated his farm and his equipment and they were going to have an auction. And then these other farmers got together and they attacked the auction. And this is the, this is the original term, the term commando. Which we use, well, we, we usually use it to talk about an individual person. But the original term meant a group of people.

• 5:36Jocko Willink?

  It was called a commando meant, you know, whatever, 30, 40, 100 guys. Band together, kind of like a militia group. And the way, and they kind of acted in the way we think commandos act, which means they, you know, they would use mobility and speed and violence of action, surprise and set ambushes and those kind of behaviors.

• 5:58Jocko Willink?

  And meanwhile, the Brits are still in that, in that, in that first Boer War. The, the Brits are still wearing red uniforms. You see what I'm saying? This is a, this is a, this is a strange world. This is as, you know, this is during the evolution of war. And they're still firing, you know, they're still setting up in lines and firing volleys together as a group and on command, you know, ready, aim, fire, that type of thing. And meanwhile, the, the Boer commandos are hiding behind trees and the first battle that they have, there's 120 Brits dead or wounded. And there's two Boers dead and five wounded. So.

• 6:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, this, this war lasted 10 weeks, the first one, and like I said, it was less of a war. Light action. Then eventually they kind of go into this uneasy peace. And then the second Boer War comes along and, and you know, I'm just trying to give some high level. I'm absolutely no expert on these things. And I'm sure some of, some people will let me know some things that I've gotten wrong, but. The second Boer War. Is a fight between it's, it's these allies, these, these new Boer allies. There's, there's two. New states that are formed. One of them.

• 7:22Jocko Willink?

  Is called, I think it's officially called the South African Republic, but I usually see it referred to as Transvaal. And then the other, there's another state or country called the Orange Free State. And so here's the basis of these, these are a little bit for, you know, the shape of Africa, you get the bottom of Africa. Where South Africa is today, you, you go inland a little bit. And what happened was.

• 7:49Jocko Willink?

  The Brits at one point, they stopped slavery, like no more slavery. And the Boers, they still wanted slavery because they were farmers and they, well, that, that was part of their economy. And well, they just thought that they deserved to have slaves.

• 8:07Jocko Willink?

  And then on top of that, when they got told, hey, you can't have slaves anymore. There was no kind of deal set up. For them to be compensated to say, look, if you want us to change the way we're running this. Economy. We, we need to, you know, we need money, you know, we need money to. Hire people and. So they looked for some kind of compensation. The Brits were like, no, this isn't a moral activity and we're not having slavery anymore. It's all, it's over. So the Boers or a large portion of Boers. Which again, now, now. These are, these are different groups of people. I want to say mainly Dutch. The Boers were mainly Dutch settlers.

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  Uh, which is why they speak Afrikaans, which is like a version of Dutch. So they, about 15,000 of them leave and they march north. And so now they set up these two states where slavery is still allowed.

• 9:06Jocko Willink?

  And they and and they kind of exist for a while in a in a relatively, um, I guess in a relatively peaceful way. Uh, at least in terms with the British. Well, guess what they find in this land that they end up settling in? They find gold, they find diamonds. And this starts to, well, now you now you gold, diamonds, war. That's where it leads to.

• 9:30Jocko Willink?

  The, there's kind of three phases that this war goes through. In the first one, the Brits are unprepared. They're not ready for this. In the second phase, the Brits bring in massive numbers of people and supplies. And they kind of just war of attrition overpower the boers. And then the boers go into like full guerrilla warfare mode, insurgency mode.

• 10:00Jocko Willink?

  And then the Brits go hardcore scorched earth. We're gonna win.

• 10:09Jocko Willink?

  War of attrition.

• 10:13Jocko Willink?

  First ever concentration camps. I'm pretty sure that the term concentration camps comes from this war. Because what the British ended up doing is saying, okay, we don't wanna, we don't wanna harm the women and children. So they took the the boer women and children and put them in these camps while the camps were a total disaster. And twenty five plus thousand women and children died of starvation and disease in those camps.

• 10:45Jocko Willink?

  And eventually, just through just harsh brutality, the the boers were broken. And they surrendered in nineteen oh two.

• 10:57Jocko Willink?

  But from a perspective, from just a strategic perspective, if you think about this.

• 11:03Jocko Willink?

  It took three long, bloody, and expensive years for the mighty British Empire to defeat these kind of ad hoc commando units from the Boer side. And that's what they actually were. They would, they would assemble, you know, hey, all of us are going to get together. They would kind of elect who's going to run it and then they would decide what they were going to do sort of by consensus. That's what these original commando units were. Winston Churchill, he worked as a reporter during this war and he was captured, I think he was captured on a train.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:46Jocko Willink?

  He was put into a prisoner of war camp. He escaped. I mean, that's kind of one of his, that's one of the things that made Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill. And that's also where he got this name, commando, that they started using in World War II. I'm pretty sure he derived the name, like for the British commandos, because their activities, their methodologies were going to be based on what the, what the South African Boers did, what the South African commando units did. And he applied that name to the, kind of the early special operations types troops in World War II. And there's another thing that I, I think about when I, when I think about the Boers

• 12:28Jocko Willink?

  and the, I think this kind of captures certainly an attitude that is prevalent in special operations forces and really in the military. And it's a, it's a saying, it's kind of wrapped up in a saying that the, that the South African Boers had and the, the saying is, and I'm not going to do this right because you know, it's a foreign language, but the, the saying is, "Un Boer maak 'n plan." And, and what it means is a buer makes a plan. And it's a pretty cool saying because what do you do when something goes wrong? What do you, you know, what's, what's our, what are we gonna do? When something goes wrong, you know what we're gonna do? A buer's gonna make a plan. We're gonna figure it out.

• 13:13Jocko Willink?

  We're gonna, we're gonna do something about it. We're not gonna sit back and just let things unfold. That was their attitude. That's still their attitude. And, and of course, look, South Africa has been a place of a lot of turmoil. Uh, apartheid. It's, it's been, you know, financially just a disaster at some points. It's, it's just a tough place. And I've been there. I've actually been lucky enough to have been down there. It's an awesome country. It's an epic country. The, the nature there is just unbelievable. Shout out to the troopers down there in South Africa. Paul Slade, his, his South African crew at his company. Um, they have, they have legit jujitsu.

• 13:59Jocko Willink?

  Shout out to fit, Fight Fit Militia down there. And, you know, that was interesting. Awesome guys, awesome gym. Guy named Chef.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 14:10Jocko Willink?

  Chef. And yeah, Chef, who's, who's legit. And, and his buddy Rich, they, they run this gym down there. And we, we went there and trained when I was in South Africa. I had like a, it seemed like about a 14 hour death roll with Chef, who's a total beast.

• 14:31Jocko Willink?

  Penny Thomas, also from South Africa.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Penny Thomas.

• 14:34Jocko Willink?

  Shout out to, to Penny Thomas. But in, incredible place, incredible place. And, you know, that gym was amazing, what they were doing in that gym. And one, one thing that kind of surprised me is I, it was totally, um, wide open. Like every different type of person was in there. Rich kids, poor kids, black kids, white kids, just wide open. There's incredible atmosphere and everybody freaking training hard. So if you ever are in South Africa, go check that place out. It's awesome. Uh, but. You know, ever since I went down there and even before that, I mean, it's, it's just a, it's a war. You know, you know, if you know the root word of the word commando, you always think about what this was all about.

• 15:19Jocko Willink?

  And so there's, you know, I'm always looking for lessons learned. There's a, there's a book called The Boer War and Military Reforms. And it's written by a guy named Jay Stone and another guy named Erwin Schmidl. And it's a very interesting book, the way it analyzes what happened and what lessons were learned. And I'm going to focus on the lessons learned that they pulled from it. And I'm sure at some point there's, I've got, I've got quite a few good books of, you know, the normal Jocko podcast, first person account of a guy that was on the battlefield, which, look, some of these battles were just insane. Especially because you get to see the, well, we'll, we'll, we'll just, we'll just jump into it.

• 16:03Jocko Willink?

  So a couple of things to kick this thing off. Here we go, going to the book. Britain was unique among European great powers in retaining a voluntary army. So at this time, a lot of, a lot of Europe had conscripts still. So you were just, you were just going to do your service, you're getting drafted. In order to maintain a flow of recruits, equipment had to be of above average quality, making the British army the most expensive in the world per soldier. So they're spending a lot of money. With government preoccupied by the budget, there was little room for innovation much of the 19th century. Not a lot of, not a lot of innovation happening. One of the things that they talk about is of all the specialized departments, it was intelligence where the dual British deficiencies of organization

• 16:48Jocko Willink?

  and budgetary restrictions are best illustrated. In 1899, the Germans spent an equivalent of $270,000 for an intelligence staff of 300 officers. Great Britain only spent 11,000.

• 17:03Jocko Willink?

  So they're not spending much on intel. And where this comes to play is perhaps the war's most glaring intelligence failure was the lack of adequate maps of South Africa and in particular of the Boer republics. The Boers, for their part, published no maps and would allow no British subject into their countries to draw them. They kind of knew what was going on. It's also interesting because for them to make that, for them to proactively do that, it meant they knew the importance of maps. And a lot of people don't understand the importance of terrain when it comes to combat. If you don't understand the terrain, you're in trouble.

• 17:44Jocko Willink?

  Here's a little cut of what the officers were like. A dandified, non-professional polo-playing officer corps recruited from a narrow social base resulted from a system which was itself dependent on private funding for an officer's expenses. The army was suited to recreational life. In the 1890s, an officer could absent himself from regimental duties for as much as 250 days annually in the name of sport.

• 18:19Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I'm going to tell you right now, you get 30 days leave in the US military. These guys are getting 250 days. Even when on duty, recreation was facilitated by making an officer's time his own after the completion of regular duties, usually about 9:30 a.m.

• 18:37Jocko Willink?

  While the ideal of sport may have been carried to an extreme, it perhaps helped develop the trait most often associated with British officers, their conspicuous courage. That virtue was to be indispensable for the attainment of rank. And the large numbers of Victoria Crosses won by senior officers attest to this fact. The officers' calm courage tended to radiate throughout the ranks. So this idea of these just totally brave British officers that are sort of, well, that's what they count on. They count on, hey, we're brave. That's how we're going to win.

• 19:15Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, courage alone, however, did not produce good officers. For professional education and attitude were often lacking.

• 19:24Jocko Willink?

  Few officers were acquainted with foreign languages and the writing of technical military studies was frowned upon. Think about that. You're the officer that's going to lead the military and it's frowned upon to write about military subjects. Crowning proof of this is the fact that in 1900, Germany produced 50% of the world's military literature. France 25% and Great Britain 1%.

• 19:50Jocko Willink?

  If the raw material of the officer corps was somewhat lacking owing to poor training, this system served only to compound its errors. So you can see what you're dealing with. Doesn't this paint the most stereotypical picture of, you know, these officer guys that are like, hey, I'm smart, I'm a great athlete, you know, you know, I don't need to study this stuff, I'm brave. And you also think about Germany. Look, Germany has a militaristic nature, right? And obviously even more so before World War II and before World War I even more so. Think about one country's producing 50% of the world's military literature. That's insane.

• 20:37Jocko Willink?

  And the Brits are producing less than 1%.

• 20:44Jocko Willink?

  A couple of other things here about what we're dealing with. Long-term 12-year enlistments created a professional rank and file in order to attract manpower, Britain had to pay in both relative and absolute terms. During prosperous times, pay had to go up or the army, it was feared, would be left with only the dregs of society. To deal with this perceived problem, the English army had always maintained a high proportion of officers and NCOs. Supervision was omnipresent and individuality was systematically stamped out of the recruit. So it's a super top-heavy organization.

• 21:16Jocko Willink?

  And everything's just being over-supervised and you're always being told what to do. It's always amazing to, you know, in the army or the Marine Corps, there'll be a guy that's 20 years old and he'll be in charge of like a legit number of guys.

• 21:35Jocko Willink?

  Whereas this is the opposite. This is where, hey, I've been in the army for nine years and I'm not in charge of anyone because I'm getting directed on how to do everything. The natural outgrowth of such closely ordered system was a soldier bred to deference and lacking in initiative. You can see where this is going. How much of this was due to process and how much was due to raw materials opened a question? 1899, only 18% of the enlisted men could be considered illiterate. So got a bunch of guys that can't even read. Reserve components, I gotta talk about this just to let you know that they're out there. Reserve components known as militia reserves, militia volunteers, or yeomanry had several distinct roles and they played the national defense system.

• 22:19Jocko Willink?

  So they're going to get called up as well, kind of the reservists. The army was totally directed toward home and colonial defense. In examining battlefield effectiveness, one must go beyond questions of organization and numbers to matters of tactical doctrine. For the British, this was most often equated with overwhelming firepower. That's what their doctrine is, we're going to overwhelm you with firepower. Every soldier received an issue of 200 rounds annually for target practice. That's a joke. All training and practice fire was carried out from kneeling and standing positions. I'm going to promise you, you don't want to be standing on the battlefield.

• 23:00Jocko Willink?

  Musketry practiced, and this is a quote, consisted of firing a limited number of rounds at stationary bullseye targets at fixed known ranges progressing from 100 to 1,000 yards. The distance is gradually increasing instead of decreasing as they normally do in war. Once a year, there was a field firing when the battalion would spend a glorious morning lazing away at the number of screens set up in conspicuous positions, which no sane enemy would ever think of occupying.

• 23:31Jocko Willink?

  So that's what they're doing. They're lining up 150 rounds were to be used solely for practicing collective fire. So out of your 200 rounds, 150 of them are going to be, hey, we're all standing up in line and we're practicing shooting together. On the battlefield, regulations stated that infantry fire was to be opened at 450 meters as opposed to 600 to 1,000 meters for the Germans. While the British continued to place undue emphasis upon volley fire, the Germans preferred individual skirmish fire. Large sections of training manuals dealt with close order battalion formations such as the square or echelon, which deemed especially useful in savage warfare. So what they're talking about there is the Zulu wars, like, hey, you're getting attacked. We're going to stay in line.

• 24:15Jocko Willink?

  And as these people attack us with spears, we're going to gun them down. And it's important that we stay tight and put up big volleys of fire. Meanwhile, the Germans are over there going, hey, skirmish line, you know, cover and move, make a little bound forward.

• 24:30Jocko Willink?

  Sir Frederick Maurice, the famed military historian of the period, lent his prestige to a volume that taught the advance is to be made as rapidly as possible, the main object being the attack with the bayonet. Independent firing is generally advisable only at short range, but so did you hear that? Individual firing is only advisable at short range. But if an especially favorable target presents itself, it may be ordered also at the middle of extreme ranges. Whilst the attack is being developed, volleys only are to be fired by section or subsections till the order is given for independent firing. That's what they're doing.

• 25:12Jocko Willink?

  More sophisticated solutions involving fired movement, cover and move, could not be developed as long as heavy reliance was placed upon the bayonet, which in turn was the most, which in turn was most effective in mass formations and proved a psychological weapon par excellence. Faith in the bayonet enabled troops to advance with the intent to use it. It was feared that if this principle was ever called into question, then the troops would not approach the enemy close enough to be of any use whatsoever. So they are, they're using the bayonet charge as sort of the foundational culmination of their movement.

• 25:56Jocko Willink?

  These guys have guns. You know, the enemy is gonna have guns.

• 26:05Jocko Willink?

  Tactical flexibility was extremely limited. Since the Drill Book of eighteen ninety six did not include any instructions for the movement of troops in extended order. Extended order means you're spread apart. They're all at close order. They're all basically shoulder to shoulder. Oral commands tended to be extremely formal to the point of awkwardness. For instance, one said, "That blank face," the blank being filled by some object such as a building, rather than right face. Similarly, one had to say, "Advance, right incline, halt," rather than "Take cover behind those rocks."

• 26:41Jocko Willink?

  The British tactical scheme supposed that once units were engaged, they would function mechanically.

• 26:48Jocko Willink?

  It was not considered that morale might falter under adversity.

• 26:55Jocko Willink?

  Think about that. They just think when they give the order to go, guys are gonna go. Morale will not falter. During the years immediately preceding the Boer War, the army had two opportunities to test the effectiveness of its organization and doctrine. Eighteen ninety eight, Britain staged its largest peacetime maneuvers in more than a generation. Some fifty thousand men, organized in two corps and two cavalry brigades, took part over a period of three months. The maneuvers, in fact, went on only from breakfast to dinner, as officers felt the need to be free in the evenings to attend to the London Theatre and socialize with the country gentry.

• 27:38Jocko Willink?

  It's horrible.

• 27:40Jocko Willink?

  This exercise was held on familiar grounds of Aldershot, which was unfortunate, such an encouraged and neglect of reconnaissance. So you already know, so we're not gonna do any reconnaissance. We already walk around here all the time.

• 27:53Jocko Willink?

  Perhaps the greatest revelation in the ineptness of the High Command in dealing with more troops than most of its members had ever seen in one place.

• 28:04Jocko Willink?

  Their flaws noted in the officers failure to mount secondary attacks and a continued lack of coordination with artillery. When forced to dismount, cavalry showed considerable firepower in the defensive, supported by machine guns on offense, however, it still proved inadequate in reconnaissance. The second phase, which took place at Aldershot, was even less successful than the first. Infantry advanced without the use of cover. This is a nightmare. Reconnaissance was poor. No digging in of trenches was permitted, allegedly for fear of damaging the downs, the fields that they're on. General Sir Butler, not having commanded troops for 12 years, ended maneuvers with

• 28:49Jocko Willink?

  a disastrous one-to-one assault after marching his command 14 miles. So. You can kind of see what we're dealing with. Are you getting a picture of what we're dealing with? Yes, sir, I am. It's not, it's not a good picture. No. It's not a good picture. It's a peacetime scenario. And, and look, they were, they were in wars during these timeframes. I mean, I talked about what they did. They, they were in wars. This was, this was England, man. They, they were all over the world fighting skirmishes, but they weren't getting in it in, in this kind of, they, these tactics that they were using were working because they're going against people that aren't armed properly. So here we go.

• 29:33Jocko Willink?

  At the outbreak of hostilities, the army could muster only 27,000. So now we're getting into this war. It could only muster 27,000 men in the theater of operations, whereas the Boers fielded 45,000. Clearly, the situation differed from colonial wars in which the opponents lacked the ability to monitor a gradual buildup of British strength. Requesting troops and knowing what to do with them are two separate matters. Even after the outbreak of the war, no effort was made immediately to increase the intelligence staff or draw plans for troop utilization. It was the army, after all, that was responsible for the request that the Colonials send only infantry and no cavalry. General Buller, and this is the guy initially kicking off this war, the theater commander.

• 30:16Jocko Willink?

  was to complain of the last minute plans. Here's what he had to say. The details were arranged by a committee sitting at the war office. So we already don't like that. Like there's a war. You're in South Africa. There's people up in England. There are no internet. There's no video teleconferencing. They're coming up with plans of how you're going to fight this thing. They're not even there. I was not invited to attend its meetings or furnished with the minutes of its deliberations. I pressed for the employment of General French with the cavalry. And for Colonel Miles on the staff, I had no voice in the appointment of the commanders or of the senior staff officers selected.

• 30:50Jocko Willink?

  This is a good old boy network. This is guys going, oh, it sounds like we've got a war in South Africa. I'd like to participate in that. Can you put me on? Put me on for, for a jaunt. True, yeah. Down to the colonies. To characterize British military establishment of 1899, much should be made of its apathetic, snobbish and non-professional officer corps. Its highly disciplined ranks, and this is, you're going to hear this a lot. Let me say this also. I've worked with the Brits before. They're, they are outstanding. They're an outstanding military. And, and they obviously transformed from what we're talking about right now.

• 31:33Jocko Willink?

  But, and this is why though, this is why. And I was going to say they use the word disciplined. And many times when they use the word disciplined, they use it both as a, as a negative and a positive throughout this book. Because they're, it's, when they talk about the extreme discipline, it's like, hey, these guys weren't going to make decisions on their own. They were just going to follow orders. So they use that term there. And they also talk about how it was a positive. In some situations as well, because they were disciplined soldiers that would make things happen. So here we go. Like I said, apathetic, snobbish and non-professional officers corps. Highly disciplined ranks and conservative, anti-militaristic maloo in which it functioned.

• 32:17Jocko Willink?

  How else to explain the Queen's Regulations of 1899 which found space for 71 regulations dealing with dress and only four for musketry and one for field training while still noting that the troops should wear old clothes to maneuvers since the troops would not be anxious to buy new ones. You see what we're dealing with?

• 32:45Jocko Willink?

  And here we go. Despite these deficiencies, the world as a whole held the British Army in high regard in light of its long string of victories dating back to 1815.

• 32:56Jocko Willink?

  You know, they beat Napoleon. They beat Napoleon, right? They beat the world champ, you know? And so now they're the champ. The British themselves believed that the army was never in better condition either as regards to the zeal and skill of its officers from the highest to the lowest, the training and discipline of the men and the organizations of all branches of the service. That's their attitude. Can we say arrogance and ego? Yes, we can. Thus, expiration of the Boer ultimatum on October 11th, 1899 regarding a cessation of all British military preparations held no major threat despite the fact that the army would be facing a relatively modern foe for the first time.

• 33:46Jocko Willink?

  If men and materiel, obviously not reading the whole book. There's the caveat. If men and materiel proved to be in short supply in the early stages of the war, such was not the case with shipping. Great Britain, as the premier maritime power, had long been accustomed to the movement of troops by sea. The massive commitment transported 188,000 men, 36,000 horses, 409 pieces of artillery, and 1,951 vehicles over 6,000 miles without any serious consequences on the level of British commerce. That's amazing. So, logistically, they can get it on. The British Navy, the Royal Navy.

• 34:29Jocko Willink?

  Oh, you want us to deliver some goods? We're gonna deliver some goods. Supplemented by reserves militia yeomanry volunteers and eventually colonials, the army grew to four times its original size. By the spring of 1900, the forces in the field actually outnumbered the combined population of Transvaal and of Free Orange State.

• 34:52Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine you're going to a war with more soldiers than they have people?

• 35:00Jocko Willink?

  And it's still gonna take you three years to get this thing sorted out? It's crazy.

• 35:09Jocko Willink?

  Manpower of any sort was increasingly welcome in the later stages of the conflict. Free use of the Empire's entire manpower could not be considered due to certain philosophical constraints, which Captain A. E. Oppenheim voiced.

• 35:25Jocko Willink?

  "We must never..." This is just such a... I just, I read this and I was like, wow. This is not, this is, this is very interesting. Here's what this guy says, this captain. "We must never depart from the cardinal imperial principle that the Imperial Army alone is privileged to meet any enemy at any time, under any circumstances. We must never resort to free use of native armies of the Empire. The white man, the ruling race, must bear the burden in the appeal to arms, must assert its superiority, and must do it willingly and sacrificingly,

• 36:08Jocko Willink?

  for therein lies the vital principle of empire. The day that sees the white man shrinking from his responsibility, that sees him shifting the burden complacently from his own shoulders to those of his subject races, will also see the doom of his imperial dominion." Now that's something that I, that definitely was interesting to me, because, you know, you think of these imperialist, you know, you think of the British Empire going in, "Well, we got a bunch of whatever, we got a bunch of black guys down here in Africa, let's make them fight." And here was this attitude of, "No, that's not right."

• 36:52Jocko Willink?

  That's kinda crazy, right?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  It's interesting, for sure.

• 37:03Jocko Willink?

  Fast forwarding a little bit, in retrospect, one cannot help but be impressed by the war's impact upon the army service corps, increased in numbers redesigned for a lighter and more durable enlarged system of animals. Furthermore, special bulk oriented faster supply columns were developed for cavalry support. For the first time, limits instituted on officers kits, this is why I highlighted this part. And the notorious cast iron kitchen and wagon load of champagne associated with General Buller became a thing of the past. This is like one of some of the things that they figured out during this war is that it's

• 37:42Jocko Willink?

  not smart to bring a cast iron kitchen and wagon loads of champagne.

• 37:53Jocko Willink?

  I think it's safe to say, to put this into modern parlance is that this is the war where shit got real. I mean, think about the difference, you're going to war and you're thinking, hey, let's make sure we got our champagne loaded up.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's what is it, I mean, where does that to come from, just the sheer numbers and history and what?

• 38:18Jocko Willink?

  History, man, they'd been running around, you know, kicking ass for, well, since, since they said they're 1815, you know, they, the British were just kind of dominating. And we know what happens when you get that disease of victory.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, champagne all day.

• 38:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, hey, I guarantee you, some of these officers that they're talking about were thinking, oh, I'd like to go to South Africa, it's a little war going on, I'll go and get, you know, go and get my adventure done.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, dang.

• 38:49Jocko Willink?

  And the, and the thing is, here's the bottom line, I have this in the notes later, but...

• 38:56Jocko Willink?

  Imagine you're you're used to boxing, right? And you're gonna box someone and you roll in there and you've you've trained to box, which means you're gonna stand up and you're gonna throw punches and you're not gonna kick or elbow or do a takedown or you're definitely not gonna do anything like eye gouge or you know, uh, uh, maybe have something in your glove and shank someone, right? You're you're definitely not doing that stuff.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah.

• 39:28Jocko Willink?

  And and by the way, so now you've been fighting under those rules.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:32Jocko Willink?

  For, what is it, 85 years? So for 85 years, you've been fighting and by the way.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  And winning.

• 39:39Jocko Willink?

  And winning, cuz cuz guess what? Everyone you're fighting, I mean, if we try to if we try to figure out what this looked like, I bet you this looks like a 300 pound boxer that's going up against a 100 pound boxer. That's kind of what all these wars have been like up to this point, right? Hey, we're gonna roll in there.

• 40:01Jocko Willink?

  And this person's gonna be small and weak and we're gonna do the boxing thing and they're gonna throw punches, their punches don't even hurt us.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:07Jocko Willink?

  They don't even hurt us. And eventually you just knock this human out.

• 40:13Jocko Willink?

  And then one day, not only do you go come up against someone that's gonna do double leg takedowns and nose chokes and arm locks, but they'll also shank you.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:23Jocko Willink?

  You know, they they don't have any rules. It's not just, it's not just no rules MMA. It's no rules, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have a shiv and I'm gonna cut your throat while, you know, ding ding, round starts, you know? I come out with a K bar and stick it into your spine. That's what we're talking about. So why did they have this attitude? Because for all these years, they were the heavyweight champ and they, hey, I'm I gotta fight tonight? Cool, make sure you bring the, you know, make sure you bring the shots for when we're done.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:53Jocko Willink?

  Because it's gonna take about three minutes.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:55Jocko Willink?

  And then I want, you know, I wanna have an after party, like the old UFC does. I'm sure they still do it, but I haven't been to an after party in a while. But that's what it was.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, like it was so much like that, that they would bring the champagne. It's like they'd bring their trophy with them.

• 41:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  You know?

• 41:15Jocko Willink?

  Exactly. This is disease of victory to the nth degree.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:21Jocko Willink?

  It's crazy, man. It's crazy.

• 41:27Jocko Willink?

  During the course of the Boer War, the Afrikaner armies, Afrikaner armies numbered about forty thousand men. No more of twenty thousand whom were ever on the field at one time. So, most people they ever had out in the field was twenty thousand. The question then is how could such a motley force of farmers defy the British Empire for so long? One answer is, as a French observer phrased it, was simply the rifle. The rifle of small caliber, rapid firing, flat trajectory, and smokeless powder. That's another big advance. You had guns that, the gun, the gunpowder didn't make smoke anymore. Which meant you could shoot and you could hide. And you could continue to attack and you wouldn't get, have the battlefield filled up with smoke.

• 42:16Jocko Willink?

  But then, this is a little bit, it goes a little bit further than that. The Boers' true strength was not at long ranges. Because they talk about how everyone thinks, oh, the Boers were hunters, they were farmers, and they would get really good shots at long ranges. But this is kind of just, in addition to that. Their true strength was not in long ranges, but rather in sharpshooting at under three hundred yards. Boer skill in that regard was demonstrated in the later stages of the war, when their arms were mostly captured from the British and they still maintained their mastery in small unit firefights. Rifles alone could not assure survival in the face of the vastly superior British numbers and cumulative power, firepower. From the beginning, even when they were overly attached to their wagons, the Boers were able to outmarch their opponents.

• 43:00Jocko Willink?

  When freed from their baggage, so they eventually, they, they, they carried wagons in the beginning, and then they finally were like, hey, we don't, not even bringing these things. When freed of their baggage, train, and camp followers, the difference in rate of movement increased rapidly. Boers mounted on ponies.

• 43:16Jocko Willink?

  Could on occasion travel 60 miles a day for several days on end and when called upon, their sturdy little horses could go for three days without food. Such marches however could only be considered the on the basis of a ready supply of remounts. An additional factor was the Boer's pony lighter load weight and its distribution. The Boer saddle weighed half that of the British. The rider carried only a little food, his rifle, his ammunition and a blanket. Everything else was transported on a spare mount. Consequently, a Boer pony carried 250 pounds as compared to the British Chargers nearly 400 pounds. So lightweight.

• 43:53Jocko Willink?

  Lightweight means going back to the heavyweight versus the 100 pound guy. That 100 pound guy's got some mobility and he's got some endurance.

• 44:03Jocko Willink?

  They used their artillery very well. Talking about that a little bit concealment and protection where their cardinal principle, this is for their artillery, they were for they were frequently outnumbered in the field. Several alternative protection protected positions were developed for each gun, thus permitting rapid replacement when a piece came under fire. Speed of movement was the essence of the Boer gunners. And the British were constantly amazed by their ability to bring heavy ordnance rapidly into action at unexpected locations. So they would pre dig positions. So as soon as they started taking fire, because eventually when you're shooting, the enemy is going to see where you're at or they're going to judge where you're at. They're going to start shooting at you. They would immediately move their gun into a predetermined position.

• 44:49Jocko Willink?

  The Boers use of single guns rather than battery. They're talking about big artillery guns was the focus of considerable amount of contemporary interest. A single piece could keep an entire army awake for a night firing at six miles range.

• 45:05Jocko Willink?

  The Boers realized the morale effect of unreturned fire and the sense of security provided when one is assured of covering fire from one's own guns under any withdrawal. They realized the psychological warfare, just dropping bombs from six miles away from one gun and how powerful that was.

• 45:27Jocko Willink?

  The machine gun proved more deadly and was considered an equivalent of 25 men.

• 45:35Jocko Willink?

  Thanks to the masterly use of terrain and smokeless powder in battle, the Boers were often able to give the impression of greater numbers than in fact existed. Captain Slocum, the American observer, noted that at the Battle of Klesno, and we'll get into that,

• 45:52Jocko Willink?

  "Not a single Boer was to be seen from the beginning of the battle to the end." On occasion, the Boers would deliberately expose themselves in order to further confuse the enemy. So in this one of the opening battles, 14,000 Brits versus 4,500 Boers. The Brits had 143 killed, 755 wounded. The Boers had 8 killed and 30 wounded.

• 46:23Jocko Willink?

  Use of dummy guns, black powder to attract fire, and command detonated diversionary charges further confused the Brits. In the attacks at Spion Kop and Nicholson's Neck, the Boers advanced in small mutually supporting groups rather than long lines. Generally, they tried to deploy their younger men forward, their older men to the rear, and foreign volunteers till further back. So we have cover and move going on. Totally different. Mutually supporting elements. You know what the basis of maneuvering on the, you know what the basis of fire and move and cover and move and fire maneuver is? Mutually supporting elements.

• 47:05Jocko Willink?

  In fact, the minute that you get too far away from another element that you can't mutually support each other, you are going to die.

• 47:18Jocko Willink?

  Uh, pushing forward. By largely avoiding concentration and attack, the Boers forfeited the initiative and allowed British time to deploy. So this is something that the Boers didn't do well. Is, they didn't go on the attack. They didn't press, I shouldn't say they didn't go on the, they didn't press the attack. So they get an advantage and they wouldn't take advantage of the advantage that they had. When they could no longer extend their lines beyond the British, the British flanks conventional fighting ended. Inevitably.

• 47:50Jocko Willink?

  The advance of the British and ceaseless Afrikaner retreats took their toll on the Boer morale with the fall of Comari Port and the war seemed over. Unable to contend frontally with massive British armies after the fall of Bloemfontein, the Boers resorted increasingly to raids in order to divert forces, threaten communications and supply, gain information, alarm the countryside, disrupt mobilization and concentrations, devastate enemy held lands, and release prisoners. So that's the mode that they went into, that's straight up guerrilla warfare. For the Brits, war soon degenerated into a ceaseless pursuit of an elusive foe.

• 48:34Jocko Willink?

  They were all too frequently caught unawares by Boer commandos doubling back and attacking. Favorite Boer ploys were setting grass fires to slow pursuit or riding parallel to supposed pursuers, dismounting, firing, and falling back. Boer organization and war plans are also subjects of importance upon call. Every male citizen was responsible to present himself with 10 days' rations, a horse, a rifle, and 30 rounds of ammunition. So this is how the Boers were set up. Men were organized into commandos based on electoral districts, although they were free to change units at will. This is total decentralized command.

• 49:17Jocko Willink?

  A commando would have anywhere from 300 to 3,000 men. Command was vested in field cornets, elected one per ward. Since command was election, most new actions were undertaken by consensus. Such a system could not long survive in warfare. And we're gonna... This is massive decentralized command, and it's actually decentralized command to an extreme that becomes ineffective. And oftentimes, they end up not being able... That's one of the reasons why they couldn't coordinate attacks, work together, and be like, "Okay, the enemy's on the ropes, let's go coordinate and crush them." They wouldn't quite be able to pull that off. You know, they would deal with consensus, like, "Hey, I don't agree with that idea. We should wait a little longer so they don't take action."

• 50:02Jocko Willink?

  So there's the dichotomy of leadership. Decentralized command is great, but you can take it too far.

• 50:13Jocko Willink?

  If the three, this is where I was talking about earlier. If the three capabilities of any army are its marching, marksmanship and discipline, then it's obvious where the Boers fatal flaw lay in its lack of discipline. For without discipline, there can be no coherent attack. The Boers so valued their own lives and increased power of the defense that they tended to forsake the tactical offense. This lack of aggressiveness was evidenced in their proclivity for sieges. At Maffa King, they outnumbered Baden Powell's force 10,000 men to 700, but they didn't attack. They had 10,000 against 700. Hey, we're just gonna hold siege warfare.

• 50:58Jocko Willink?

  We're just gonna sit here and wait, wait you out. I mean, if I have 10,000 against 700, we're coming to get you.

• 51:10Jocko Willink?

  Such unwillingness to launch attacks consistently hurt the Boer cause tactically and strategically. Even in the field, the Boers, had the Boers been more aggressive, the British would not have had the time to maneuver around to their flank. Lack of discipline was not only a drawback to Boer attacks, but also had peculiar ramifications for the process of surrender. White flags had never been used during the native wars, and thus it was not understood that everyone must stop firing when the flags were raised by either side. The British frequently complained that while some Boers raised their hands, others would continue firing, and that caused problems. Much to British chagrin, Lord Roberts wrote, "The Boers have been the first to introduce into war

• 51:53Jocko Willink?

  the theory that every individual has the right to ask order for himself at any moment in an action. A theory which our own soldiers seem to have almost invariably accepted." So you have a couple of people surrender, a couple of people don't. That's confusing.

• 52:10Jocko Willink?

  And this is interesting. The Europeans never understood the Boer philosophy of inflicting damage and then escaping into the veldt, which is like the open field, into the bush, basically. To a burger, and the term burger in this case, it's basically the white citizens down there that were in control. Uh, to a burger, no position was worth dying for. If he could not retreat, he would surrender.

• 52:45Jocko Willink?

  Naturally, some might feel that horses only complicated the Boer's position. When kept to the rear and out of artillery range, the burger was capable of neither escape nor pursuit. The Boers seemed insecure without their horses and yet were incapable of dealing with cavalry when mounted. So this is something that comes up a lot. You know, you had these Brits where they look at, you know, the code of honor and they are, they're not gonna surrender and they're gonna fight to the death and they're gonna hold positions if ordered. And the Boers are kind of like, hey, why would I stay here? And if I, if, if I'm not just gonna die on this hill, if we're gonna lose the hill, I'm gonna stay alive, I'm gonna surrender.

• 53:25Jocko Willink?

  So what you end up with is a really fluid element and you end up with a really rigid element.

• 53:34Jocko Willink?

  As commander in chief, Buller violated one of the cardinal rules of warfare. This is kicking off the war by dividing the, an inferior force faced with a more mobile enemy operating on interior lines. So he, one of the first things that this guy Buller does, and, and interesting, it's not in this book, but I read it in some of the other literature about this. This guy Buller was like an old guy. I think he was 59 years old and he was kind of not in the best of health. And, uh, the, the Boers called him the Red Bull. Cause his name was Buller, they called him Red Bull, cause his face was all, I'm imagining like, you know, the alcoholic kind of sunburned. Yeah, yeah.

• 54:16Jocko Willink?

  You know, uh, guy, stereotypical guy, that's what he was. And so they kind of made fun of him. They called him Red Bull. And he had some issues, man.

• 54:29Jocko Willink?

  And this, this whole thing kicks off in this, in this thing that they call in the British military, the Black Week, because they took massive losses.

• 54:40Jocko Willink?

  Not just in personnel, but in on the battlefield. Um, and even when they would might win a battle, they're losing so many people because they're doing, they're winning battles at a massive casualty rate.

• 54:55Jocko Willink?

  So now it's, it's starting to talk about the problems, the British army problems at the beginning of the war. And it says, you just need to look at how the various major commands were set up in the early part of the war. It says by the Battle of Graspin, November 25th, 1899, the British had a four to one superiority, but it had come to respect Boer firepower. In this case, an attempt was made to pin the enemy frontally with infantry, while a well-spaced column of the naval brigade was to attack the Boer right. The tactically flexible Boers advanced to delay the pinning forces

• 55:35Jocko Willink?

  while converging their fire on the blue jackets as they bunched up to ascend the slope. Despite suffering 50% casualties, the sailors broke through, supported somewhat belatedly by overwhelming numbers of infantry. Again, the Burgers evaded pursuit. The British still believed in their system's superiority and overlooked then inflexibility of their open order tactics. The disproportionate nature of losses was still unclear. So they win this battle, but they take, you know, 50% casualties.

• 56:14Jocko Willink?

  And one of the things that they say is to cover up the low number of Boer casualties, stories circulated that the Boers had run away carrying their dead and wounded. In reality, men rarely stop to pick up their dead when they're being overrun. So the, the, the British kind of patted themselves on the back and said, well, you know, the Boers just took their dead with them. That's why there's no, that's why there's not many dead bodies here, even though we have a ton.

• 56:39Jocko Willink?

  I apologize to everyone in South Africa for my annihilation of all these words. Paul Slade, I apologize.

• 56:48Jocko Willink?

  At the Battle of Mader River, the British once again fell victim to poor reconnaissance. Methuen, so this is, there's one of the major players here, this guy named Methuen, a British guy, expected that the Boer positions would be on the far side of the river utilizing the high ground and a village as a defensive line. Instead, Dela Ray elected to place his men on the forward bank of the river in well camouflaged positions. Emphasis was placed on grazing fire over the flat veldt while artillery ranging was aided by strategically placed white stones. Oh, that's mean. So they set up visual targets that they could see and know the ranges of. Oh, that's nasty.

• 57:33Jocko Willink?

  From trenches, the Burgers could see three miles into Methuen's rear. As the British troops approached the river, the Boers opened fire, pinning them to the ground. Uncoordinated advances increased the slaughter. Boer gunners concealed 200 yards forward of some buildings suspected of harboring them wreaked havoc on the defense, on the dense British artillery formations whose batteries had been withdrawn to 1,400 yards to escape the murderous rifle fire and artillery fire. Charges were impossible when men had to crawl at 1,200 yards and no one could safely ride horseback within 2,000 yards of the front. So what happened here, let me break this out a little bit. You had the, so you had the British advancing in an open field.

• 58:18Jocko Willink?

  The Boers let them get close enough so that they could start killing them with rifle fire. When they get close enough and start killing with rifle fire, which is, you know, probably 400, 500, 600 meters away, they start running away. As they're out of range of the rifle fire, what comes in artillery, predetermined artillery positions by white, you know, white stones that they've laid out there. This is crafty.

• 58:46Jocko Willink?

  However, persistent pressure on the left flank event finally carried the river line and bought the British another victory at a disproportionate loss. So eventually they keep, they get it done, right? They, they have enough people to get around to a flank and they get it done. The British Army of 1899 had in reality stumbled into World War One type of battlefield. The question remained as to whether it was to be treated as an aberration or something new. It seemed easy to blame the near disaster on faulty maps, poor reconnaissance, disregarded information on Boer reinforcements, and general misunderstanding of their intentions. So isn't that interesting? Do we say, hey, that didn't seem to work out too well?

• 59:30Jocko Willink?

  Or do we say, you know, we didn't have good maps and our reconnaissance wasn't very good and that we didn't expect this from the Boers? That's not taking extreme ownership. That's blaming everything else, not, not us, not us as leaders.

• 59:46Jocko Willink?

  Methuen, hope to cover is advanced by means of heavy preliminary bombardment of the heights. And now I'm fast forwarding a little bit, but it, the Boers would set up, this is just, it seems so obvious right now, but instead of setting up in the perfect position, maybe on the crest of a hill where you like have total high ground dominance, they'd put a little distraction up there and they'd set up in a different position, maybe lower on the hill or in the military crest, you know, maybe a two thirds of a third of the way down the hill or whatever. So as the, as the Brits attack and they start bombing the top of the hill, because that's where they think they're going to be, they're not there.

• 1:00:26Jocko Willink?

  Under a driving rainstorm,

• 1:00:31Jocko Willink?

  the Highland Brigade Quarter Column set off for Boer positions only be discovered a few hundred yards from the Boers' real positions. Within six minutes, an estimated 650 men lay dead or wounded on the veldt.

• 1:00:47Jocko Willink?

  For the rest of the day, the survivors suffered horribly as they were pinned down by fire, baked by the sun, and ceaselessly attacked by the ants behind whose nests many of them hid. By mid-afternoon, the brigade was in a rout. Defeat was clear-cut. Had Methuen waited another day for the weather to clear, he could have used his balloon to explore Boer positions. Too much faith had been placed in shrapnel. They, another thing I didn't talk about this, but the Boers would dig really good positions. They would dig in. They would set up on these hills and they would dig in and they kind of described what they would dig in. They would dig in really deep foxholes that actually had a, had a little kind of roofs

• 1:01:32Jocko Willink?

  on them as well. And the Brits thought, hey, if we, if we're hucking bombs at these guys, they're all going to get blown up. But they were, was having almost zero effect because if you're in a hole and artillery shell hits near you, you're going to be okay. Unless it goes in the hole, you're going to be okay. So too much faith had been placed in shrapnel, which had been proven ineffective against the trenches. Poor reconnaissance, ineffective artillery preparation, and a complicated night attack. Are we doing things complicated? No. We're keeping it simple. And poor economy of force were hardly the ingredients of success. So we have complicated attacks, so we're not obeying the law of, keeping things simple, law of combat, and also poor economy of force.

• 1:02:17Jocko Willink?

  What that means is you're not prioritizing executing. You're not focusing your efforts on one thing. And this is a common mistake that these guys made. Fast forward a little bit, while Methuen may be accused of being unimaginative in his approach, such could not be said about General Sir William Gattacre, who had actually ushered in the Black Week at Storm, Stormberg on December 12th. He proposed to achieve both strategic, strategic and tactical surprise by means of a long rail move, followed by a 10-mile night march up the enemy positions before they even knew he was in the area. So he's got a pretty dynamic plan.

• 1:03:02Jocko Willink?

  Almost from the first, his plan went awry. After 17 hours in open-top railway cars under the midsummer sun, his command became lost in its night march. Fearing discovery, Gattacre sent out no scouts.

• 1:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Or flanking columns as his men stumbled through the night unclear as to his location. He decided on a flank approach to Storm Stormburg rather than on the original direct attack, but failed to communicate to his entire command.

• 1:03:34Jocko Willink?

  Poor march discipline alerted the local commando and the entire column was soon under attack artillery men with the sun in their eyes managed only to shell their own troops forcing them from a ridge line. They were on the point of taking.

• 1:03:49Jocko Willink?

  At this as mishap followed confusion gadacre ordered a withdrawal only later to discover he had abandoned the fusilier regiment. So, I mean, this is just every horrible thing that can happen. You got a blue on blue, you got the teams lost.

• 1:04:06Jocko Willink?

  You got them leaving an element in the field.

• 1:04:10Jocko Willink?

  The final defeat of Black Week was suffered by General Buller at Colenso, just 12 miles from Lady Smith. A mere 6,000 Boers repelled 21,000 British troops from behind a thinly held river line. The Boer position was by no means a strong one for a front of over 15 miles. They had to hold two bridges and several fjords. The southern fjords. They had, sorry, fjords. The southern fjords were particularly vulnerable as they were situated barely within rifle range to their rear, which formed a natural line of defense. As usual, the Boers ignored preliminary bombardment and fired only when the British advanced.

• 1:04:53Jocko Willink?

  At once it became apparent that the Boer medium and heavy guns far outranged British comparable British pieces. So this is the way this thing kicks off.

• 1:05:08Jocko Willink?

  Hilliard Hilliard's attack went off first and it was supposed to be closely supported by Colonel Long's field artillery. The 1889 Drill Book recommended that unsupported artillery not move closer than 1,700 yards from the enemy without notifying anyone long advanced within 700 yards.

• 1:05:30Jocko Willink?

  And unlimbered in close order. Unlimbered is when you detach your weapons from their, like your big guns, you have them on wheels, you detach them, that's unlimbered. Unlimbered in close order. Although this tactic worked in Egypt in 1881, here his gunners were shot to pieces by Boer riflemen. Later, Longwood claimed he had intended to unlimber it over 2,000 yards, but had been deceived by the night. So he's making excuses.

• 1:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Buller was one of the most popular and personally brave commanders in the army. He was actually a recipient of the Victoria's Cross, of the highest award.

• 1:06:12Jocko Willink?

  His care for men was legendary and closely entwined with his reforms in the Army Service Corps. However, his preparations were overly meticulous. And in the midst of the South African summer, his wagons carried great coats for the infantry. Got to keep these guys warm in South Africa in the summer. Despite his concern for his men, Buller had proved a poor troop commander who attacked with little knowledge of terrain or enemy dispositions. His command control is inadequate, orders imprecise, and the withholding of two brigades in the face of a vastly outnumbered enemy was unprofessional.

• 1:06:50Jocko Willink?

  This guy's making all kinds of mistakes. The defeats of the Black Week collectively had a greater impact than Dunkirk. Britain at the peak of her powers had been mauled by a nation of farmers. The insularity of decades was shattered, latent foreign animosity revealed itself in the international press. Yet the nation rallied to meet its moment of crisis head on as thousands volunteered for service.

• 1:07:22Jocko Willink?

  Lord Roberts had been appointed to supersede Buller when the latter in a fit of post defeat depression had signaled General Wright that he might consider surrender. Shaken by his demotion, Buller resolved to attack anew before Roberts' arrival by means of turning the Boer right flank. So this is just like, I mean, can you imagine what this, the whole scenario is like? This guy's, he's saying, I'm going to surrender. And then he flies off the handle and goes, no, I'm going to attack. I mean, we're just talking disaster. Emotional disaster. The whole world knows that you just got beat by a bunch of farmers. I mean, you're that heavyweight champ. And you just had a guy show up in a whatever.

• 1:08:07Jocko Willink?

  He's weighing in 125, you're 300 pounds.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Wearing basketball shorts.

• 1:08:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he showed up wearing basketball shorts, barefoot.

• 1:08:15Jocko Willink?

  And he kicked your ass.

• 1:08:20Jocko Willink?

  So he goes to try and make this happen. Some 1700 men were to assault a hill 1,740 feet high in the center of the Boer position. The rest of Buller's 20,000 men were to look on and do nothing. This is where you got to prioritize and execute. You understand that? Prioritize and execute means you're going to take your resources that you have and you're going to focus them on getting something done. Instead of saying, well, I'm going to keep reserves over here, I'm going to keep reserves over here, I'm going to send, you know, and I'm only going to send 1700 people to take a thousand of 1700 foot tall, tall hill. I got 20,000 people. This is a no brainer. You want me to take that hill? That's my number one priority? Cool. Watch this.

• 1:09:04Jocko Willink?

  The Boers had neglected to occupy much of its key position, but the British failed to make the most of the opportunity, inaccurately exploring or enhancing it. So they get the hill incorrectly sighted, shallow trenches, shallow trenches were dug by 20 sappers while over a thousand men lay idle. So they get this hilltop and I gotta continue it. Normally a battalion was, was allocated 70 spades.

• 1:09:34Jocko Willink?

  But they had been left behind in the ascent. Colonel Maurice complained, somehow our soldiers by dint of perverse training have imbibed the idea that there is somehow, that there is something cowardly and sneakish about sitting behind cover in the field. Or at any rate, if they have to get into trenches and works, it is the Royal Engineers' province to provide these defenses. So these guys got up on top of the hill and were like, hey, there's a thousand soldiers on top of the hill. There's 20 people, 20 engineers to dig. And they sit back and watch, A because they think it's cowardly and B they think that's not my job.

• 1:10:18Jocko Willink?

  If this is, what's weird about this is happening. Right? Like, we're looking back at it, but can you imagine you're sitting there, there's thousands of people. You know you're, you know you could be attacked. And you're thinking, I'm not picking up a shovel. And by the way, we didn't even bring shovels. And by the way, we only have 70 shovels for our whole battalion.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you'd think that in that situation, that's just kind of the leftover attitude or the straight up prevalent attitude of not having to really fight, fight, fight, fight, you know?

• 1:10:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because you've never had your ass kicked.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Jocko Willink?

  So like you took a shot and now you're like,

• 1:10:55Jocko Willink?

  I'm not gonna worry about that. It's gonna be okay.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Jocko Willink?

  You get taken down, like after the first round. In the first round, you get taken down and then your coach, you know, in between rounds, the corner man says, you're doing great. No, you're not.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he's like, man, I remember, so back a long time ago, right? Before people knew about jiu-jitsu, so this guy, it was actually my friend told me this story about,

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  when he got in a fight and he just learned jiu-jitsu. And I'm trying to remember the exact situation, but basically this is a story where he got in a fight with a guy and then the guy, you know, they got in a fight or whatever, and he choked him out, right? And when he woke back up, he wanted to fight again.

• 1:11:39Jocko Willink?

  Of course.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Before they fought again, he was like, yeah, I'm gonna, uh, he's like, yeah, you keep, you give me with that sneak attack stuff, right? Almost like they're not fighting or something.

• 1:11:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, almost like that's just doesn't count.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't count. It's cowardly or whatever, you know, it's like, yeah, they start, or the guy who gets taken down right here, and you see this actually even now. He gets taken down.

• 1:12:03Jocko Willink?

  Oh, he wants to just wrestle me.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Wants to just wrestle me. He's looking at the ref like, ref, stand us up, kind of thing, like almost complaining about certain situations in the middle of the fight. So it's kind of like that's that situation right there. Like, oh, I'm not taking nothing, you know?

• 1:12:18Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we don't do that.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, bro, your fight, you're in a war, by the way. So they just don't realize it almost, you know?

• 1:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Continuing on, while virtually the entire British Army stood idle, the Boer Army was free to focus its attention and artillery on the hilltop position.

• 1:12:39Jocko Willink?

  Lacking shelter, proper equipment, lines, clear lines of authority or knowledge that artillery was finally on the way up, the British abandoned the position as untenable.

• 1:12:49Jocko Willink?

  This is farmers.

• 1:12:53Jocko Willink?

  The superior, the superiority of the individual Boer marksmen and the inadequacy of the small, British small unit tactics was never more in evidence. Throughout the day, one brigade had carried the fighting, one demonstrated, and three stayed in reserve. A further testament to poor tactics. You had three other brigades. Five thousand, I'm guessing, you know, normal brigade might be like five thousand people.

• 1:13:24Jocko Willink?

  That's insane. Buller's qualities as a commander were in many ways indicative of the army. He did not know when to draw the line with his subordinates. And this is interesting. Hart was still, so one of his subordinates, Hart, was still marching his men in quarter columns at the Second Battle of Colenso, despite being told not to.

• 1:13:46Jocko Willink?

  Another guy named Warren was allowed inordinate freedom despite compromising the entire battle. At other times, Buller interfered with poor results, such as at Twin Peaks. He lacked a sense of terrain.

• 1:14:01Jocko Willink?

  Insufficient perseverance, time and time again robbed him of victory, as did his hoarding of reserves, as if his troops were 18th century professionals. At the first Battle of Colenso, only 4,800 men out of a force of 21,000 were engaged at any one time, and at spy and cop, 3,000 men out of 24,000.

• 1:14:30Jocko Willink?

  Staff problems bedeviled his battles, chain of commands were unclear, and artillery was frequently misplaced or uncoordinated.

• 1:14:39Jocko Willink?

  In addition, strong willed and ambitious subordinates such as Warner, Long, and Hart were difficult to control. Buller came to appreciate the value of cover, rushes, and creeping barrages, and according to Maurice's official history, was the originator of curtain fire at the Second Battle of Colenso. He now used, so these are some things, you know, he started catching on a little bit, he now used mounted troops as a maneuver element on the flanks of infantry, that's a good idea. The new battlefield involved protracted firefights along extensive front coordinated with precise artillery support and an incessant creeping forward of the infantry. Whereas Buller had taken several months and three major engagements to develop a counter

• 1:15:22Jocko Willink?

  to the Boer methods of warfare, Roberts, so a guy gets sent down to take his place, Roberts arrived in South Africa with his own strong preconceptions, and old India hand, he placed his faith in cavalry, in cavalry and mobility rather than firepower. Roberts had arrived in Cape early in January to find the army everywhere in retreat. Rather than create, this is interesting, rather than create immediate political problems, he allowed both Buller and Methuen to stay in command, although with limited forces, this is like a little, this is a little play in the game. So instead of just coming down there firing these guys, he knew that that would be very disruptive, so he kept them there, he just

• 1:16:06Jocko Willink?

  gave them like really small elements to control.

• 1:16:10Jocko Willink?

  Roberts would always remain careful with generals associated with Woolsey Ring, with the Woolsey Ring. And so there was a guy named General Woolsey, who was like a war hero and a general, and he had like his crew. And these guys were part of his crew. And he, you know, the, this guy, General Woolsey, Garrett Woolsey, was a war hero and a general and a powerful guy. And so he had a crew and, and these guys were part of that crew. And so he was also, that's another reason why he kind of playing long game, you know, not just gonna come down there and fire these guys because Woolsey's got a lot of power. The entire army was suffused with pettiness. Hamilton and Littleton lost no opportunity to betray Butler

• 1:16:52Jocko Willink?

  and clearly, and Cleary constantly fought Warren and Littleson. So you just have like babies, right?

• 1:17:02Jocko Willink?

  Roberts funneled all reinforcements to the Cape rather than Natal. Despite an increasing numeric predominance, he lulled the Boers into the belief that he was tied to the railways. So the, the Brits, and I haven't really talked about, the Brits were using the railways to run their supplies and stuff like that. And so he's kind of, he's kind of letting the Boers think that we're addicted to the railways. When ready in late January, Roberts massive army struck far to the east, threatening Boer supply lines as the Boers withdrew from their earlier blocking positions. French's, this is one of the, uh, Brit generals, French's entire cavalry division, the largest such British unit in history, was launched around their flank for the relief of Kimberley.

• 1:17:48Jocko Willink?

  With victory so close, fast forwarding a little bit, they continue to kind of do well, the Brits now under Roberts. With victory so close, nature now intervened for Roberts was incapacitated by a cold. He got sick. And Kitchener, his chief of staff, assumed command.

• 1:18:09Jocko Willink?

  Kitchener launched an immediate concentric assault against the Boers, which now, which most veterans realized had little chance of success. More than a corps was thrown into the fruitless and uncoordinated attack. So this is ridiculous. So this guy, Roberts is doing pretty well. Kitchener takes over because Roberts is literally gets a cold. But when this guy takes over, man, he just goes, gets, he goes hard. He's trying to get a name for himself. And he starts all these attacks, trying to basically surround the, the Boers.

• 1:18:46Jocko Willink?

  More than a corps was thrown into fruitless and uncoordinated attack. Commanders were ignored. Kitchener rode about the field, directing battalions and raising havoc. Frustration mounted as battle dazed men began to trickle back from the front line and wander about for lack of orders to entrench. As Kitchener attempted to launch yet another attack, he stripped troops from a key terrain feature.

• 1:19:12Jocko Willink?

  This guy's just a micromanager, just trying to make things happen. It's horrible to read. Once back in command, Roberts ceased further assaults and resorted to 10 days of bombardment and a final night attack. So isn't it, you know, we always talk about how leadership's the most important thing on the battlefield? And I skipped a whole chunk of where everything's just falling apart.

• 1:19:32Jocko Willink?

  Kitchener suffered 1,200 casualties. He almost lost one of the major cities. Ridiculous. So Roberts comes back in and just, stop.

• 1:19:46Jocko Willink?

  And then he kind of starts these more methodical attacks and continues that. The start and stop offenses of Roberts had but one objective, the capture of the Boer capitals and with that, the presumed end of the war. Despite continued guerrilla attacks, Pretoria, the second Boer capital, fell on June 4th. The link up with General Buller on July 4th signaled the end to all conventional resistance. By mid-December, Roberts had departed and Kitchener was left in charge of mopping up operations.

• 1:20:22Jocko Willink?

  So that's kind of the the overview of how it went down. Um, at the, at least up till that point, the most general examination of the British Army's performance in South Africa reveals flaws on virtually every level of command. Lord Woolsey, this is the guy I just talked about, the commander in chief had been excluded as the field commander on account of his age. Army and royal politics, along with anti-India prejudice, served to eliminate various other candidates for the post, and General Buller rose to the top of the list despite his recent poor showing in maneuvers and lack of independent command experience. Although an able staff officer, like most British officers, he confused personal bravery

• 1:21:07Jocko Willink?

  with the ability to lead an army. This is just a common theme, and I'm not hitting as much of it as I should in the book, but this idea of the Brits that like personal bravery was going to be enough to win the day, it's so strange to badmouth that, right? Because courage is, you know, one of the most, one of the most powerful characteristics that we can envision a human being with, right? This ultimate level of courage and sacrifice. But in many ways, it was a negative quality because they thought if they had that, they're good to go. You know, then this, you want to take it back to the MMA.

• 1:21:46Jocko Willink?

  Metaphor is like, you know, you, you see that one guy that's all kinds of fired up, and he's yelling and screaming for a fight, and he's highly motivated, and he might even be training really hard in his strength and conditioning.

• 1:22:01Jocko Willink?

  And he might be ready to go the distance, he might be ready to die when he goes in the ring.

• 1:22:07Jocko Willink?

  And it doesn't matter. When you get in there against someone that has better skill than you and that outmaneuvers you, all that courage and bravery doesn't do a damn thing, but gets you killed. So I guess it's not that crazy to look at that characteristic with, from a different angle. If you, if you're, if you're putting your whole, now, look, if you have a fighter that's a wimp, right, that lacks any kind of courage, that lacks bravery, right, they're not even going to get in the cage, or they're going to be scared to get hit, they're going to run away, and they're going to lose. But you have to have both. You have to have courage, you have to have skill.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and kinda, I mean, to add to that, too, you know, you get a guy, MMA, again, a guy who's like, he's, you know, he's a great wrestler, great grappler, good submission guy or whatever, and then the other guy's maybe a really good striker, and he talks a lot of trash in interviews and stuff. So, he gets under the guy's skin, the guy goes in, super mad, super fired up, super motivated, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna basically beat him at his own game, I'm gonna knock him out, I'm gonna strike," you know, rather than strategically go for, you know, make yourself in a, in a better position as far as like tactically, strategically, whatever. And then he tries to stand him, and then he gets knocked out.

• 1:23:17Jocko Willink?

  Of course.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Like, you can be motivated, but, bruh, that guy's way just better than you, bruh, you gotta be smarter than that, you know, kinda thing. Yeah, it feels like that's what they're doing, too.

• 1:23:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Jocko Willink?

  Now, so that kinda wraps up some overviews of what happened on the ground. And, look, like I said, there's, there's, I got some books that are first-person perspective, on the ground, Boer War, and we can go into those, I'm sure we will at some point. But where this book goes next is how they took the lessons learned and what they did with those lessons learned, positive and negative. But as I sit here and look at my notes, it's,

• 1:24:10Jocko Willink?

  it's, it's, it's not short. There's, there's a lot of things that got learned, and there's a lot of lessons that they incorporated, and there's a lot of lessons that they didn't. Or there's lessons that they made progress towards and then backed away from. So, rather than do it right now, I wanna leave enough time for that. So, let's call it, and we'll pick up the Boer War Military Reforms on episode 233. So, in the meantime, Echo Charles.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:24:46Jocko Willink?

  Since we are trying to learn.

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:24:50Jocko Willink?

  Since we are trying to make progress.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:24:53Jocko Willink?

  How can we continue to make progress as individual humans?

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  Well, first off, making progress isn't always comfortable.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  It's not always painless. But the good news about that is we have help. So speaking of pain and growing, growing pains, if you will. So joints get a little sore when you lift.

• 1:25:18Jocko Willink?

  Indeed.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  And I gotta be honest, I've been out of the supplementation situation for a little bit. This was a little while ago, a few weeks ago. But I got the replenishment of supplements. And what I'm talking about is

• 1:25:33Jocko Willink?

  That's bad planning.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:25:36Jocko Willink?

  You sound like the British Army on that one.

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  I know, I'm looking around for things to blame. You know, I got busy, caught up. Nonetheless, anyway, what I'm saying is, look, when we're on the path, we go hard. Most of the time. I'm not saying go hard into the ground. I'm saying you go hard, you know, you gotta, progress demands hard work.

• 1:25:58Jocko Willink?

  We gotta push the envelope.

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Gotta push the envelope. I heard a quote from Denzel Washington. He said, ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship is. I was like, ooh, that was pretty good.

• 1:26:11Jocko Willink?

  Concur.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Cause it's true.

• 1:26:12Jocko Willink?

  Very true.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  But through that hardship, you get joint pain sometimes. Same.

• 1:26:18Jocko Willink?

  For Denzel Washington. He worked his whole life to achieve this level of skill and you just took his, his quote and turned it into your little personal advertisement for joint warfare.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:26:30Jocko Willink?

  That's what just happened.

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  It's, I more turned it into my personal

• 1:26:34Jocko Willink?

  I apologize to you, Mr. Denzel Washington.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Well,

• 1:26:38Jocko Willink?

  But we're gonna let Echo roll.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  He'd be happy because I'm incorporating that into, how should I say, my, my daily, my life, my approach to life. How about that? Don't seek ease. Don't seek the rest between sets. Oh, you gotta take the rest between sets, but don't seek the rest between sets. Unless, anyway, when you, basically when your joints get sore, take joint warfare because it actually works.

• 1:27:03Jocko Willink?

  You could have said that like four minutes ago.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Well, you know, uh, yeah, like, yeah, you're probably right about that.

• 1:27:08Jocko Willink?

  You know what I saw a video of, somebody posted, somebody posted the support section, but they were just listening to you talk and listen to you and I go back and forth, but they were laughing hysterically. And I was like, that's a good thing to see.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:27:22Jocko Willink?

  It's a good thing to see.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Jocko Willink?

  Cause most of the time I'm figuring this, the number of people listening right now is zero. Like when they, when they hear me say, uh, okay, echo, they go, oh.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, podcast over.

• 1:27:33Jocko Willink?

  Podcast is over.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Fast forward to, yeah.

• 1:27:35Jocko Willink?

  Do you think they're missing any, if they did that, they just missed a Denzel Washington quote.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Jocko Willink?

  Tell it to me one more time.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Ease is a greater threat to hardship than, or sorry, ease is a greater threat to progress.

• 1:27:47Jocko Willink?

  Than comfort.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Than hardship is.

• 1:27:49Jocko Willink?

  Ease is, okay, got it. Yeah. Good. We'll give some props to Denzel Washington.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  It was good. I liked it.

• 1:27:56Jocko Willink?

  But anybody that pressed stop a little early, they didn't get to hear that.

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  Oh, they missed it.

• 1:28:00Jocko Willink?

  From you slash Denzel.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Denzel, the man. All right. Well, there you go. And, uh, like I said, joint warfare, if you don't have joint warfare, forget joint warfare.

• 1:28:11Jocko Willink?

  That's your whole point.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  That is the point.

• 1:28:13Jocko Willink?

  That is the whole point. That's why Denzel Washington said what he said.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the reasons.

• 1:28:17Jocko Willink?

  His basic message was get joint warfare and krill oil. That was what he was trying to say.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, essentially at its core, that's what it, what it meant for sure.

• 1:28:25Jocko Willink?

  Don't forget about the, don't forget about the discipline, the discipline go in cans, the discipline powder form, Jaco Palmer. My recommended scenario, why? Cause it tastes like a, uh, an Arnold Palmer iced tea with the perfect amount of lemonade in there. It's kinda, it has a little bit of sweetness to it. But it's sweetened with monk fruit. That's not sugar. You're all good. You're not getting any insulin spike. No, you're going smooth, flatline that thing.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  Easy money, yeah.

• 1:28:55Jocko Willink?

  And you'll get a little bit of, a little bit of hype, a little, a little bit of a.

• 1:29:02Jocko Willink?

  You know, you have that noise that you use for a sound effect. It's like that high pitched like thing that's being prepared. What's the noise? There's a name for it.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Oh, there's two of them, but the one you're talking about is like, it's basically like, you know, the old school flashes from a camera.

• 1:29:15Jocko Willink?

  It kind of feels like things are about to prep.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:17Jocko Willink?

  Things are about to go off.

• 1:29:20Jocko Willink?

  So we do, we need to, you can edit this and you can put in, when I say you get that little and you can put it right. So I'm gonna do it. So I'm gonna give you, leave you a little spot. When you get that little boom, there you go.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  There you go. And that's the discipline go.

• 1:29:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Imagine if you did all your, all your CGI into the actual podcast. And I was talking about covering fire and there was machine guns going off. That'd be the most popular podcast of all time.

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  Tracers.

• 1:29:48Jocko Willink?

  Tracers coming between us.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that could be something.

• 1:29:51Jocko Willink?

  There'd be horses getting killed. Do you know how many horses got killed in the Boer War? It's crazy. Crazy.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would think so. I would think that'd be kind of the strategy in a, in a way, right?

• 1:30:01Jocko Willink?

  Kill horses?

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, get the horses.

• 1:30:03Jocko Willink?

  Hmm, I think they're trying to kill the people. But yeah, but we're trying to kill the enemy. The, the enemy horses, I guess, are right in there.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:10Jocko Willink?

  Stop their mobility.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Right. Like, and it's a big target, you know, I don't know. Hey, man, I don't know. I've never tried to kill a horse, so, you know, I don't have that experience.

• 1:30:17Jocko Willink?

  What else we got?

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, milk. So speaking of milk, I made a milkshake last night.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  So I mixed them dark chocolate and the peanut butter chocolate, right? Whatever, you know, not much of a deviation. It's not like a mixed strawberry with, you know, with it anyway. And so the thing is, I haven't had a milkshake in a while in front of the kids. And they don't, you know, they don't know. They think I'm making like, I don't know, some dessert thing, you know? And so they're like, yeah, I want some. So I'm like, cool.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  And I give them some, they drink the whole thing. And this is regular milk too.

• 1:30:52Jocko Willink?

  Can you imagine like you can just give your kids something that makes them so strong and healthy? And they think that they're, that you're just a great dad.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Like they squirt.

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  That's literally what I thought. They were looking at me kinda like, like, can we actually have the, cause it was big. And you know, there are two kids.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't taking it back. I wanted to, cause you know, it was mine, but at the same time, I was like, yeah, man, have at it. Cause it was just so, it brought so much happiness.

• 1:31:21Jocko Willink?

  Did you see your, your, did you see your son starting to get a little bit jacked? When he got done, was he just like?

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Yep, that's just the way his body is. Drink one milkshake, boom, jacked.

• 1:31:30Jocko Willink?

  That's a guarantee. That's actually, oh well, now we can, it's guaranteed now. Now we know it's been tested.

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:36Jocko Willink?

  Your son is now jacked.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  How old is he?

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Three.

• 1:31:40Jocko Willink?

  Three years.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Jack.

• 1:31:43Jocko Willink?

  Get some more, get some Warrior Kid milk, get some Jaco White Tea. You can get all this stuff at the vitamin shop if your vitamin shop opens up. Jaco Fuel. That's what it's called.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  What it's called.

• 1:31:53Jocko Willink?

  Apparently.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Yes. Also, what we're doing is jujitsu. Okay. Look, varying levels of participation jujitsu right now. I understand. And I think it's gonna slowly, slowly, this tournament's going on.

• 1:32:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  So, hey, that's something.

• 1:32:07Jocko Willink?

  Some people are making it happen. It's good.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  So, anyway, so we're doing jujitsu. We're starting jujitsu, we're continuing jujitsu. So, when we do jujitsu, we need a gi, get a Orjin gi, we already know that a hundred percent. Because they're the best gees. Straight up. That's the, the, the number, the primary situation.

• 1:32:25Jocko Willink?

  Factually.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Factually.

• 1:32:27Jocko Willink?

  As you like to say.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  Proven, yep. And they happen to be made in America. Actually, they don't happen to be made in America.

• 1:32:33Jocko Willink?

  Is there a problem?

• 1:32:36Jocko Willink?

  The fact that these gees are so comfortable that Denzel is sort of, you know, at parade rest over in the corner shaking his head saying, boys, what's up?

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  That's a good, that's a good question.

• 1:32:50Jocko Willink?

  Cause when you put the Rift Gi on, you, you, you're, you're in a different world of jujitsu. You're, you're in a different world of jujitsu when you put the Rift Gi on.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. And, and the thing is, you feel it. And here's the thing I think about most of us is like, we get used to nice stuff. We just get used to it.

• 1:33:06Jocko Willink?

  You could not go back. It's like if you ever flew in an airplane first class, it, economy sucks forever.

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  I know, man.

• 1:33:14Jocko Willink?

  When you put on a Rift Gi, every other gi that you put on for the rest of your life is economy class.

• 1:33:23Jocko Willink?

  That's what's happening.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  It's a visceral insult to my senses.

• 1:33:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Do you, you, in the old days, man, I had some gees that I felt like I was putting on something that was made out of concrete. That's what I was feeling. This is as good as it gets.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  It's not concrete at all. It's luxurious. I'm gonna say it. It's luxurious, straight up. And they happen to be, so I actually do say happen to be made in America, but they're not, they don't happen to be made in America.

• 1:33:50Jocko Willink?

  That didn't just happen.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  It's kind of one of the purposes behind them.

• 1:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And also, speaking of just next level, first class, sorry, Denzel, comfort, get yourself some Delta sixty-eight jeans, which are, we need to, it's like another category of clothing.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:11Jocko Willink?

  Cause you not, you're not feeling like you're wearing jeans, right? You're not feeling like, oh, I gotta put these jeans on. I'm gonna feel constricted and hot.

• 1:34:23Jocko Willink?

  No, you're putting on the Delta sixty-eights. You're ready just to do a straight up, you know, maneuver.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Jocko Willink?

  You're ready to do a go-go plata in those things.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you kind of think of it, and not to go too deep into a tangent, far be it from me, but.

• 1:34:41Jocko Willink?

  Did you just say far be it for you to go into a tangent?

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  You know, for, for me, yes.

• 1:34:45Jocko Willink?

  Right on.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  But, you know, okay, so there's a difference between ease and comfort and functionality.

• 1:34:54Jocko Willink?

  So if you're maximizing your functionality and because of comfort.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes. So, yeah, and even saying comfort is kind of misleading. So, look, if I have a sword, I'm fighting in a battle with a sword. And this sword is ergonomically designed for my hand, ergonomically, right?

• 1:35:13Jocko Willink?

  Performance will increase and it's a benefit. Even though it's comfortable.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:35:17Jocko Willink?

  You're doing better.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  You're more, whether it be efficient, more functional, more everything, comfortable, yes, but more, see what I'm saying? So that's the Delta sixty-eight scenario.

• 1:35:26Jocko Willink?

  That will work good. Like when you go into battle, if, let's say you go into battle and you have that sword that ergonomically fits your hand, that is gonna be, work really good. Until I cut your freaking arm off, because that's what I'm gonna do.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  Alright, man. So yeah, you took it in an interesting direction, you know, as far as the point, but you know, I dig it and you're probably right.

• 1:35:48Jocko Willink?

  But nonetheless, the point- You're sitting over there saying that you get this ergonomically correct sword and that's gonna be the difference. I'm saying, bring it. I'll cut your damn arm off.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. You realize you just assumed that I was going into battle against you.

• 1:36:04Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, I'm here.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  You're the only guy here. Alright, hey, you're right, and you do make a good point on top of my original point, for sure.

• 1:36:12Jocko Willink?

  And I haven't even really trained much sword, but I will start training.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  You're, yeah, you're down. You have a lot of, what do you call, bravery and aggression.

• 1:36:19Jocko Willink?

  You know what, it doesn't even matter, ergonomically correct or not, I'm taking your arm off.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Alright. Strategically, that's the move.

• 1:36:24Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're doing. Yeah, and you can get jeans, you can get boots, you can get t-shirts, you can get whatever you want from originmaine.com. M-A-I-N-E. Originmaine.com.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  Yes. Also, we have our own store. If you're interested in representing while on the path, discipline equals freedom. Good.

• 1:36:45Speaker 01

  Take the high ground, or the high ground will take you. That was a little sleeper one. That was good.

• 1:36:51Jocko Willink?

  We got some designs coming.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:53Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, we're not gonna talk about it now, but the last design you submitted to me.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:58Jocko Willink?

  It's almost for full approval. I had to do a couple historical researches, make sure we were 100%, but we're there.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 1:37:05Jocko Willink?

  We'll do one little, maybe two little things to it, just to clean it up, but we're, we're real happy about that one.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Designed by Jaco.

• 1:37:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was good. I'm fired up about as far as being fired up about a design goes, for sure. But yeah, so you go to jacostore.com.

• 1:37:22Jocko Willink?

  I don't know if I like this whole thing about designed by Jaco, that's kinda weird.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe not push that, but factually, it's true.

• 1:37:29Jocko Willink?

  Let's move on.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Fashion designer. Yes. Anyway, yes, jocko store.com. Uh, yeah, we got a lot of stuff on there. Hats, hoodies, shirts, obviously, various accessories, good stuff. I, I think it's good stuff. Anyway.

• 1:37:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And by the way, if you wanna, if you like, if you listen to this podcast and you wanna support the podcast, this is a way to do it. You don't, you know, you don't, we're not over here saying like, first of all, we're not saying, hey, you need to listen to the next six minutes of us reading about some random thing that we don't actually care about or know about, right? We're not doing that. We're not saying, hey, donate money to whatever because whatever. We're not doing that. We're saying, hey, listen to this. If you happen to feel like, oh, let's throw some support. We don't even want your support. We want you to have a T-shirt. You know, that is, that's what we want. Yes. That way we can PID you in the wild.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  Yes, that's.

• 1:38:26Jocko Willink?

  Positively ID you. There's no, there's, you know, you're looking over a little glance. I see a little, I see a little whatever shirt. We know what's up. You know what you're gonna get? Heading on. We're all good. I will get, I know if something goes down, you got my back.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:38:44Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 1:38:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:45Jocko Willink?

  Tell me this, you're looking, something's going down, whatever, call it whatever you want. There's nine people that you can go, hey, come with me. One of them is wearing a Jocko Podcast T-shirt. Who's going with you?

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  He's going with you.

• 1:38:57Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, yes.

• 1:38:59Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent. I don't care what the other people are wearing, actually. They could be wearing, I don't even know, they could be wearing a sports team. What else do people wear on a T-shirt? A rock and roll band?

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:09Jocko Willink?

  Like, look, there's some categories that are gonna be, you know what I mean?

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  Sure, yes.

• 1:39:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, but if a guy's got a Jocko Podcast T-shirt on, he's coming with.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  Automatic admission.

• 1:39:19Jocko Willink?

  Hey, he might even be, there might be a, like, let's say you see with a guy with a Jiu-Jitsu T-shirt on. Let's say it's that kind of situation that's going down.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Well, he's coming too.

• 1:39:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. He's coming too.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  Yep, very similar.

• 1:39:32Jocko Willink?

  So you might as well just prep for that moment.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:39:35Jocko Willink?

  And represent. And by the way, look, it might not be me, it might be some other trooper out there.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:39Jocko Willink?

  That's gonna, that's gonna, that's gonna detach, that's gonna look around, that's gonna make the right decision at the right time.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Jocko Willink?

  That's gonna understand what you say, when you say, "Cover me."

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna go, "Got it."

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 1:39:51Jocko Willink?

  Boom, we're already in action.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Jocko Willink?

  We got a militia, we got a commando.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  It's true. Pootie, if you want, you have a choice between someone you know is on the path so versus someone who you don't know. I'm not saying they're not, I'm saying you don't know.

• 1:40:03Jocko Willink?

  And if they're on the path, you kinda know them, right? They didn't get it, they didn't just get that t-shirt, right?

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:40:10Jocko Willink?

  They listened to the podcast, they know where we're coming from. They understand there's gonna be some, some, some suffering that might unfold in the next 13 seconds while this situation's happening. We got it.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:40:21Jocko Willink?

  So anyways, you might wanna get yourself a Jocko Podcast t-shirt.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  Yep. JockoStore.com.

• 1:40:26Jocko Willink?

  We appreciate it.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Also, subscribe to the podcast on your favorite or your preferred podcast listening app. Application, whatever. Anyway, yeah, so subscribe if you haven't already and, you know, leave a review if you're in the mood, I think.

• 1:40:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's good, it's good. If you wanna look, throw a little, um, communication our way, we, we, I read the reviews.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:52Jocko Willink?

  Haven't highlighted one in a while. I gotta read a funny review. I'm gonna go on there, pull up a good review.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  You.

• 1:40:58Jocko Willink?

  I, I, for a while, I was copying and pasting some of them because they were really good.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:02Jocko Willink?

  They had, they had something that we like to refer to as layers.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:08Jocko Willink?

  Uh, what else we got? Uh, don't forget about some other podcasts. We got a podcast, we had a podcast, it was called The Thread, we'll be re-releasing it soon.

• 1:41:19Jocko Willink?

  I, I, I said we've, we're coming up with a new name and we are, but that's what we're doing. So that'll be out soon, and episode eight, yes, everyone's been asking for it, I'm sorry, it's been taking a while. We got the Grounded Podcast where we talk about jujitsu. Somebody just asked for a podcast about women's jujitsu for Jocko Podcast, and we already had it, we had it on the Grounded Podcast. So check out Grounded Podcast if you wanna hear about jujitsu and life. Warrior Kid Podcast. Just get your kids on the path. Set them up to have an awesome life. Get them on the Warrior Kid Podcast. If you also want to support a Warrior Kid, you can go to IrishOaksRanch.com and you can get Aiden, who is making soap,

• 1:42:04Jocko Willink?

  which allows you, your family, your friends, everyone you know, if you get this soap, you can all stay clean.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  Yep. Speaking of which, if I'm not mistaken, I didn't look deep into it, but I saw, I saw hints of a new Warrior Kid soap.

• 1:42:24Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep. Warrior Kids Soap is coming out. Saw little hints.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Alright, yes.

• 1:42:28Jocko Willink?

  So you want your children to stay clean.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  Hell yeah. Also YouTube channel, we do have a new YouTube channel for video, video version of this podcast. Excerpts on there.

• 1:42:40Jocko Willink?

  If there's anyone that would like to see CGI special effects during the podcast, let's get Echo freaking working harder. Cause right now, he just cut, what do you, how hard is this? You show me, you show you, you show me, you show you. This podcast, you didn't say anything, so it's just basically me, me, me, me, me. You're not doing any work.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  But, but that's where the...

• 1:43:02Jocko Willink?

  Can we get some, some horses trampling across, I mean, how cool would that be? What do they call it when they, when they hide something in like a video game or a movie? They hide something that you gotta look for?

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Easter egg.

• 1:43:13Jocko Willink?

  Yes. People should go on to YouTube and they see when I mention something.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:18Jocko Willink?

  You know, all of a sudden, there's a Zulu warrior over my shoulder or whatever. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's a very good idea.

• 1:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Why is it that you claim to be the creative guy? And I'm over here coming up with all the ideas. Have you noticed that?

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:43:33Jocko Willink?

  Where are you at?

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  I don't think you are.

• 1:43:34Jocko Willink?

  Why am I covering the movie? For this whole thing.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  How about this, we'll look into it.

• 1:43:38Jocko Willink?

  Cool. If you don't put a special effect, at least one thing that happens during the podcast, you're disappointing everybody that's here.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm sure that's factually correct.

• 1:43:51Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I guarantee that's factually correct.

• 1:43:55Jocko Willink?

  You know, when we did the audiobooks for Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy Leadership, Extreme Ownership, so if you listen to Extreme Ownership audiobook, I don't want to try and make it sound crazy, but there's audio effects in there.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:07Jocko Willink?

  There's machine gun fire, there's the call to prayer, there's some explosions. And when we, when we decided to do that, well, first of the main reason as Leif and I, we've got like words written in there like ba ba ba ba ba ba ba, right? Like machine gun fire? And I don't want to start off the chapter going, uh, you know, for instance, this one, chapter six, simple, starts off with the word, "whoom!", right? It's trying to tell you an explosion just happened. I didn't want to have to say that. Right? So I said, and so, you know, we decided a bunch of these chapters start like that. Here's one, enemy tracer rounds zipping overhead, right? I don't want to have to make that noise.

• 1:44:48Jocko Willink?

  So what we did was they put special effects in there and the, the company, the, the publisher was kind of acting, they were cool, but they were kind of acting like this was like it was crazy, like it was a little bit of a crazy idea. So anyways, they did it and that's, a lot of people are stoked on it, but you got to be ready for it because if you're driving in your car and you hear an explosion or machine gun fire, especially if you've been in the game, you know, like for real, you might get a little bit of a, a little bit of adrenaline flow, no big deal, all good. So.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe.

• 1:45:19Jocko Willink?

  So I think that the same way that that enhanced the audiobooks for the Dichotomy Leadership.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Jocko Willink?

  And, and Extreme Ownership.

• 1:45:29Jocko Willink?

  If someone had their requisite skills to actually make something cool in here, it'd be good.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  All right, well, I'll keep it in mind.

• 1:45:38Jocko Willink?

  Okay, we also have Psychological Warfare. If you need a little psychological hitter, when you need to go overcome a little moment of weakness, you can just check out Psychological Warfare. It's on all the MP3 platforms. Flipside Canvas, if you want a visual representation of the path, check it out, flipsidecanvas.com, Dakota Meyer.

• 1:46:03Jocko Willink?

  Putting cool graphic representations of things that you can hang on your wall. We got some books. We actually, it seems like we have a bunch of books.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:46:12Jocko Willink?

  For some reason. We've got The Code, which just came out, which is a real good way just to step up and just go for it. That's The Code. We got Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual. We got Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, and 3. We got Mikey and the Dragons.

• 1:46:33Jocko Willink?

  We got Discipline Equals Freedom Field Manual. We got Extreme Ownership and the Agony of Leadership. Check out all those books if you want to. Good information, and I'll tell you what's cool. I hear this all the time. You read the book once, and you're like, ah, cool, you know, I grabbed it. I grabbed, you know, you took a page of notes. You can take a page of notes on that book. If you read it 50 times in a row, you'll take a page of notes every time on any of these books that I'm talking about. Even the kids' books.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe it fully.

• 1:47:02Jocko Willink?

  So, so check those out. We got Echelon Front, which is a leadership, my leadership consultancy, where we solve problems through leadership. If you need help with the leadership in your organization, then go to echelonfront.com for details. We also have an online platform called efonline.com, where we train, coach, mentor, discuss, guide people through pre-existing volumes that are on there and through live webinars that we're doing all the time. So if you actually have a question for me, go to efonline.com, come to one of our live webinars and ask me your question.

• 1:47:46Jocko Willink?

  That's what's happening. So, we also have The Muster. And I'm, I, you know, look, this is going back and forth. We got the virus, this and that. We had to cancel Orlando. I'm making the call right now. Phoenix is on. We're going to Phoenix.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Straight up.

• 1:48:02Jocko Willink?

  We're going to Phoenix. Phoenix, Arizona, September 16th and 17th. I actually just got off the phone with Jamie. I'm like, can we do this? Jamie says, we can do this. And I said, all right, rock and roll. Look, and if we get to that point in September, and we still have to do some kind of social distancing scenario, whatever we gotta do, we gotta do it. But we're gonna make it happen. So.

• 1:48:26Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna sell out. Everything we do sells out if you want to come and and look, here's the deal. Depending on the social distancing mandates, we may have to limit the seating more than we normally would, which means if you want to come, buy your tickets now so you don't get cut off because you thought there was going to be more seats. So that's it. It's September 16th and 17th in Arizona. It's December 3rd and 4th in Texas, Dallas, Texas. People have been saying we should have gone to Dallas day one and we probably should have. And I'll tell you another thing. We went to Austin and it was awesome. We did it kind of last minute. And when we were in Austin, people like, hey, come to Dallas. So we're coming to Dallas. That's December 3rd and 4th. We're going to do that one too,

• 1:49:10Jocko Willink?

  by the way. Who wants to get some? And of course, we have EF Overwatch. If you need executive leadership at your team, if you need senior leadership at your team and you want somebody that's experienced, that's been tested, then go to EFOverwatch.com. It's military leaders from special operations from combat aviation that understand the principles we talk about here and can employ them in your company. And if you're a vet and you have those kinds of experiences, go there as well. So we can connect the dots. Also, AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Mama Lee, Mark Lee's mom. And she is put together

• 1:49:55Jocko Willink?

  an organization that helps service members. It helps their families. It helps Gold Star families all over the world. Guys that are on deployment, guys that are home from deployment, guys that are active duty, guys that are retired. She is just unbelievable with what she does. So go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org to either donate or get involved if you want to get involved. And at this point, if you haven't had enough of my horrible, horrible, inexcusable pronunciations of various languages, or you want to hear more of Echo's sort of bewildered stream of consciousness thoughts.

• 1:50:42Jocko Willink?

  Then you can find us on the interwebs as Twitter, Instagram, and of course, Facebook. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jocko Willink. And thanks to our military men and women out there around the world in uniform, who stand and face the darkness and evil every day. And thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, who stand and face darkness and evil here at home. And to everyone else out there,

• 1:51:20Jocko Willink?

  do not fail to learn. Do not fail to learn. Adapt to new environments. Change the way you operate.

• 1:51:35Jocko Willink?

  Don't get stuck in the past. Get better. Get better and improve. And the way you do that is by going out there and getting after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.