385: The Code of Combat: Moral, Ethical, and Legal Leadership and Conduct in War.

The Code of Combat: Moral, Ethical, and Legal Leadership and Conduct in War. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 385 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight Leif Babin. Good evening Leif. Good evening. So recently had Admiral McRaven on and we started to touch on some discussions about the ethics of war.

• 0:23Jocko Willink?

  And this is a very important thing to discuss. This is this is where we must learn and know that you have to take the high ground or the high ground will take you. That's true on the battlefield and it is certainly true from an ethical and a moral perspective. Now, the optics of war from the outside

• 0:47Jocko Willink?

  can be absolutely terrible and they can give the wrong impression. And I think a good example or a good correlation of that is the stereotype of military leadership. You know, you see the military leadership stereotype in the movies and it's filled with these authoritarian tyrants that yell and scream and bark orders and that kind of leadership in the military is not normal and it's not successful. When it does take place, does it ever take place? Yes, it does. There are tyrants in the military that yell and scream and bark orders, just like there's tyrants in the corporate world that yell and scream and bark orders, but it's not normal. It's not, it's not normal. It's not successful. Leadership in the military is

• 1:32Jocko Willink?

  by people that do the right thing and listen to their troops and and care about their people.

• 1:41Jocko Willink?

  Now, when we talk about the ethics of war,

• 1:46Jocko Willink?

  look, the same thing. There's movies that present these crazy ethical situations and show the military in a bad light, but on top of that, there's there's news media, there's social media, there's books out there that can give a terrible impression of the American military and the ethics in the American military that the American military is just unjust and immoral.

• 2:20Jocko Willink?

  When the fact of the matter is,

• 2:23Jocko Willink?

  that, that, look, that is true. There have been cases, obviously. But it is certainly not acceptable in any sense of the word. It's not even remotely common. Americans are incredibly, incredibly ethical on the battlefield. And Americans, and we'll talk about this, go through incredible lengths to protect the civilian populace, to mitigate collateral damage, and to uphold the moral standards of our country. And like I said, we have had horrific incidents in our history, like the Millai massacre, which was, which we covered on Podcast 31. Why do we cover the podcast,

• 3:09Jocko Willink?

  that on the podcast? Well, because we want people to know about it. We want people to understand. I want young military leaders to understand what happens when they don't take the high ground.

• 3:23Jocko Willink?

  The Sand Creek massacre. That's another one. I did a podcast with Daryl Cooper on that one. Why did I do that? Because people need to understand what happens from a psychological and a peer pressure and a leadership failure. These are the kind of things that can occur. But these type of incidents are completely atypical for America. And America has an astounding

• 3:48Jocko Willink?

  record in modern military times. Especially when you consider the, the vast amount of war that has been fought by America.

• 4:03Jocko Willink?

  But that being said, since US servicemen and women that are out there doing their job in a squared away manner doesn't get the clicks, doesn't get the views, doesn't get the lights, doesn't get the reads. It's the negative stories that are written more often.

• 4:20Jocko Willink?

  And they're written, even though oftentimes they're completely just unsubstantiated lies. But the headlines, those are the headlines that get read. Those are the books that get sold. That's the way the media works. So, talking to Leif, I thought it would be a good idea to come on here and talk about what it was actually like fighting in Iraq. Talk about the actual rules of engagement. Talk about the law of armed conflict. This way, people can hear the truth about what it was like on the ground, making decisions, leading, and how important it is for the US military,

• 5:05Jocko Willink?

  the entire US military, from special operations to conventional general purpose forces, to follow the code of our country. And which code is that? Well, it's pretty straightforward. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, the law that exists within the US military. And this law covers everything from drunkenness to conduct unbecoming of an officer, to forgery, to robbery. And it also goes all the way to things like kidnapping and rape and murder. And the Uniform Code of Military Justice, generally speaking, is stricter than civilian law.

• 5:47Jocko Willink?

  And usually delivers heavier punishments when these things take place. So you have the code, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You also have the code of conduct that we follow if captured by the enemy. We covered that on the podcast with Charlie Plum, who had to live by that code. We also have our military values. You know, in the Navy and the Marine Corps, we have the values of honor, courage, and commitment. In the Army, they have the values of loyalty and duty and respect and selfless service and honor and integrity and personal courage, both physical and moral.

• 6:24Jocko Willink?

  So there are codes that we are sworn and legally

• 6:32Jocko Willink?

  have to follow. We have to follow these codes. And when you don't follow these codes, you get punished. And you get punished severely.

• 6:44Jocko Willink?

  Now, knowing the moral strain that is put on men and women in combat, there's a high degree of focus on moral and ethical training in the US military.

• 6:59Jocko Willink?

  And that way, people have the right morals and the right ethics to act with, to guide them. And in case that fails during the stress of combat, like I said, there are legal rules of engagement that are in place and reviewed daily to ensure that servicemen and women obey the law.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  Because from a moral standpoint, from an ethical standpoint, we as Americans have to take the high ground or the high ground will take us.

• 7:40Jocko Willink?

  So what I miss, Leif, anything?

• 7:47Leif Babin?

  I think when you look at the US military, I mean, just as a student of history, I think that I, in my view, I don't know that there's any other military in the history of the world that has gone to such great lengths to try to minimize collateral damage and maintain the more high ground. And certainly there are incidents, as you mentioned, but I think when you look at the comparative history and particularly, you know, you see the war in Ukraine right now with things that the Russians are doing or other militaries that don't share our same sense of morality or ethics. When you see the gloves taken off, there's some horrible stuff that happens on the battlefield. And I think the US military goes to tremendous lengths to do that. And certainly something that I'm very proud of.

• 8:32Jocko Willink?

  So let's start off by reading a lot of times people throw around rules of engagement. But I wanted to actually get the rules of engagement that you and I operated under during the Battle of Ramadi. And these rules were not specific to the SEAL teams. They weren't specific to Task Unit Bruiser. They weren't specific to special operations. These were the rules of engagement that applied to every member of coalition forces in the country of Iraq. They very rarely changed. They very rarely changed. Why did they very rarely change? Because they didn't really have to change. They are, they are very squared away. And like I said, a lot of people hear about rules of engagement, but when you actually

• 9:14Jocko Willink?

  read through the rules of engagement, you'll see, and a lot of people think that the rules of engagement are so constraining that, that the troops are put at risk. And while we could identify cases like that, most of the time, that's not a rules of engagement issue, it's a leadership issue. And, and let me just get to it here because you're going to see right out of the gate. Rules of engagement, this is the ROE card. It starts off all caps. Nothing on this card prevents you from using necessary and proportional force to defend yourself. That's how it opens up. That's the opening. Nothing on this card prevents you from using necessary and proportional force to defend yourself. So anybody that you hear say, well, we, we had our hands tied.

• 9:59Jocko Willink?

  Listen, can you have your hands tied when it comes to, and I've heard cases like this. Hey, we couldn't drop bombs because the rules of engagement didn't allow it. Yes, those things happen. Now, I think if, if you went back case by case and reviewed, many of those would be a leadership decision where leaders didn't say, oh, I am willing to take the risk in this situation to protect my guys. Therefore I'm authorizing bombs to be dropped. That, that generally is a leadership issue, not a rules of engagement situation. But that being said, there has been situations where rules of engagement have, have restrained and, and cost lives.

• 10:41Jocko Willink?

  But as you listen to these, you're going to see it's most likely a leadership issue. Then it starts off here. One, you may engage the following individuals based on their contact, conduct. A persons who are committing hostile acts against coalition forces. B persons who are exhibiting hostile intent.

• 11:00Jocko Willink?

  Towards coalition forces. So hostile intent. Hostile intent, that means it looks like someone's gonna do something bad. A lot of times you'll hear say, "We had to wait until they were shooting at us." No. Hostile intent, they look like they're gonna do something bad. And then you can engage them.

• 11:23Jocko Willink?

  That's, that's, that's awesome. Next one, these persons may be engaged, subject to the following instructions. A, positive identification is required prior to engagement. PID is a reasonable certainty that the proposed target is a legitimate military target. If no PID, contact your next hire commander for decision. So.

• 11:48Jocko Willink?

  Reasonable certainty.

• 11:51Jocko Willink?

  You have a lot of leeway in these rules. It's not overwhelming. But to say to a troop on the ground, "Hey, listen, you need to be reasonable cer- reasonably certain that an individual has hostile intent and then you can kill them."

• 12:08Jocko Willink?

  That's pretty good leeway. That allows the shooters on the ground to make those decisions. And determine whether they should engage or not.

• 12:19Jocko Willink?

  The next one. Use graduated measures of force. When time and circumstances permit, use the following degrees of graduated force when responding to hostile actor intent. Then it goes through the escalation of force. One, shout verbal warnings to halt. Two, show your weapon and demonstrate the intent to use it. Three, block, access, or detain. Four, fire a warning shot. Five, shoot to eliminate threat.

• 12:45Jocko Willink?

  There's some escalation that you can use. And you and I, Leif, we've been through every one of those escalations. And sometimes you don't have time for these escalations. Sometimes you have time to go from one to four to five. Sometimes you have time to go to one to two to five. It, things can escalate quickly. But there they are, the, the recommendations of how you can escalate. And it literally says, "When time and circumstance permit." Doesn't say you have to go through all these five steps. It says, "When time and circumstance permit." So there you go.

• 13:24Jocko Willink?

  See, do not target or strike anyone who has surrendered or who is out of combat due to sickness or wounds. Check. Straightforward. Do not target or strike hospitals, mosques, churches, shrines, schools, museums, national monuments, and other historical and cultural sites, civilian populated areas, or buildings unless the enemy is using them for military purposes, or if necessary, for your self-defense.

• 13:51Jocko Willink?

  You can see a lot of time and effort went into these rules of engagement. These are, and you and I reviewed these many, many times on deployment,

• 14:02Jocko Willink?

  to make sure that we were following them correctly, and they are well-written, and they are certainly, they're certainly squared away for not only protecting the troops, but protecting, as you can see, hospitals, mosques, churches, shrines, civilian populated, all those people, all those things.

• 14:22Jocko Willink?

  Cultural sites. Which I remember, I went to places in Iraq where they're like, hey, this is a culturally sensitive area, you cannot go in there. Okay, cool, we can't go in there, got it. There's also situations where we are getting shot at from a mosque, and it's like, oh, we're sending troops in there. Got to get OSEX level approval, cool, we got it, let's go. So that's what happens. They put these rules in place, and these rules have a high element of decentralized command in them.

• 14:52Jocko Willink?

  Um, next one, do not target or strike Iraqi infrastructure. Public works, commercial communication facilities, dams, lines of communication, roads, highways, tunnels, bridges, railways, economic objects, commercial storage facilities, pipelines, unless necessary, again, they're trying to make sure the troops are protected unless necessary for self-defense, or if ordered by your commander. If you must fire on these objects, fire to disable and disrupt rather than destroy. Okay, they're trying to keep the country of Iraq infrastructure intact.

• 15:22Jocko Willink?

  Always minimize incidental, this is number, this is letter F. Always minimize incidental injury, loss of life, and collateral damage. Check.

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  The use of force, this is number three, going to the next section. The use of force, including deadly force, is authorized to protect the following: yourself, your unit, and other friendly forces. Detainees, civilians from crimes that are likely to cause death or serious bodily harms, such as murder or rape, and personnel or property designated by the OSC, that's the on-scene commander, when such actions are necessary to restore order and security. So these are the situations where you can kill bad guys. When they are threatening you, your unit, other friendly forces. They're threatening detainees, they're threatening civilians. And you can do these things.

• 16:18Jocko Willink?

  And then it says this, four, in general, warning shots are authorized only when use of deadly force would be authorized in that particular situation. Now, why do they throw that in there? They throw that in there because they don't want people bitten trigger happy with their warning shots. So you're not gonna take a, you're not gonna say, oh, this kid's getting a little close to me, I'm taking a warning shot. They don't want that happening. So therefore, warning shots are only authorized when you're gonna use deadly force. If you're not gonna use deadly force, you're not gonna fire warning shots. Number five, treat all civilians and their property with respect and dignity. Do not seize civilian property, including vehicles, unless the property presents a security threat.

• 17:03Jocko Willink?

  When possible, give a receipt to the property's owner. Number six, you may detain civilians based upon a reasonable belief that the person, one, must be detained for the purposes of self-defense, two, is interfering with coalition force mission accomplishment, three, is on the list of person wanted for questioning arrest or detention, four, is or was engaged in criminal activity, or five, must be detained for imperative reasons of security. Anyone you detain must be protected. Force up to, including deadly force, is authorized to protect detainees in your custody. You must fill out a detainee apprehension card for every person you detain.

• 17:42Jocko Willink?

  Number seven, MNCI one, or MNCII, sorry, MNCI, general order number one is in effect. Looting and taking war trophies are prohibited. This is the only rule in here I don't like. Like, why could we not take war trophies? Can you explain this to me, Life? Why could we, why I couldn't take, why I don't have a freaking Iraqi AK-47 on my wall right now? Or at least four of them? This is a bummer.

• 18:08Leif Babin?

  It is a bummer. It is a bummer. I think when you look back to, you know, the Samurai sword that, you know,

• 18:17Leif Babin?

  our grandparents' generation, you know, had in the Pacific War, or a Luger from the European battlefield off of a German officer. Those things, you know, I understand why we want to, we want to control that, but we could have easily gone through the de-mill process to get something, something that we brought back from Iraq that is a reminder of who we fought against and why we fought there. And I think it's unfortunate that we couldn't follow a process to de-mill those weapons and put them, you know, put them on the wall somewhere or pass down to our grand.

• 18:49Jocko Willink?

  Put together a protocol next time, next war. Give the boys the opportunity to take home some Iraqi weapons or whatever. All right, so now you got a part that I disagree with. So, we should be able to take some level of war trophies. We're going to fight, we're going to war, we want to bring back some freaking war trophies. Not, you know, nothing crazy. I mean, maybe a couple things crazy.

• 19:15Leif Babin?

  You're not, you're not talking about looting here. We're talking about, hey, we detained some terrorists who were shooting at us. And we want to, their RPG tube that we can de-mill and put on the wall and be like, hey, this was something that we took from an operation.

• 19:30Jocko Willink?

  Like, let's get that changed next time around. They're JAGs, the Judge Advocate General Lawyers for the US Military. Let the troops take some guns home with them. De-mill them, whatever you want to do, it's fine. But, let's go. All right, number eight, and this is the last one. All personnel must report any suspected violations of the law of war committed by any US friendly or enemy force. Notify your chain of command, Judge Advocate, CID, IG, or Chaplain. These ROE in effect as of 22 May 05. And these are the ones that we operated under.

• 20:07Jocko Willink?

  So these rules of engagement that we operated under and we did so very strictly and very completely, the reason we we were able to was number one, if you don't follow these rules, you are putting everything at jeopardy, everything at jeopardy. And it's just not worth not following these rules. And number two, these rules are squared away. These rules work. These rules make sense.

• 20:42Jocko Willink?

  So therefore, we utilized these rules.

• 20:48Jocko Willink?

  And that's the that's that's that's the beauty of these rules. They were effective, not just in protecting the troops, but also in protecting civilian populace and also in protecting the the infrastructure. They were good to go. Leif, you were out there on a daily basis.

• 21:05Leif Babin?

  The rules of engagement were good rules. Absolutely. And I think, you know, when I would, I remember hearing from friends of mine that were were forward in Iraq or had been Afghanistan, they'd be like, the rules of engagement are too restrictive. And, you know, and and as you said, that is a leadership problem. The rules of engagement were broad and allowed us to do our jobs while protecting the civilian populace and minimizing collateral damage. And following these rules of engagement, you made that absolutely clear for everybody tasked in a bruiser. This is a black and white thing. We will follow these rules of engagement. And because that's the moral high ground, it's something that we we were going to do because it's morally and ethically and legally the right thing to do.

• 21:49Leif Babin?

  But also, this is strategically, the most important thing that we could do as well is protect the civilian populace. And one thing that really stands out to me is, you know, we, you helped me see that, like, the rules of engagement give us everything we need to actually go out and protect the civilian populace, protect ourselves, and actually engage the enemy who is attacking us or other friendly coalition forces or innocent civilians, which which was a common thing that happened all the time in Ramadi, everywhere. But What really stands out to me is I think about these rules of engagement is oftentimes, I think what was pretty common in the SEAL teams at the time and friends that were returning from, you know, from the Iraq war, if you ask just about any SEAL operator out there, like what was their mission?

• 22:34Leif Babin?

  What was their mission? They would say, "Kill bad guys. Kill bad guys." And I think the thing that you helped me see and the rest of everybody tasked in a bruiser is that that's actually not our mission. Our mission is to secure the populace, stabilize the city of Ramadi, lower the level of violence. That's what our mission was. And so, does that, that meant that we were gonna have to kill some bad guys, because there were 3,000 to 5,000 enemy fighters living amongst this populace of 400,000 people in the city of Ramadi at the time. The US intelligence estimates were 3,000 to 5,000 enemy fighters. And so, we were likely gonna have to kill some bad guys. But our mission was to protect the civilians and secure them, and ultimately drive the

• 23:19Leif Babin?

  bad guys out of the city. And in the counter-servicy fight, that was, that was something that totally was a game changer for us in understanding that ultimately, our strategic mission is to secure the civilian populace. And so, you know, every time that you briefed those rules of engagement, you know, to us and told us that, that, summarizing all of that legal jargon down. And that's, that's what got a little intimidating to people, is all this legal jargon. And we had the JAG, the military lawyer coming to brief us and give a, you know, dozens of PowerPoint slides with all this legal jargon. What is, what is a reasonable certainty of hostile intent actually mean?

• 23:59Leif Babin?

  You know, and I remember just every operation, you summarizing that by saying, "If you have to pull the trigger, you better make sure the person that you're killing is bad." And when you said that, it was just instantly clear to everyone that... As long as I can articulate a reasonable certainty of hostile intent, that this person was maneuvering in accordance with a known enemy tactics, you know, techniques or procedures. And that is, it gave us the support that we needed to be able to go out and engage the enemy and protect the civilian populace. And that that was our ultimate goal was to secure the civilians, build relationships with them, show them that we were there to actually help them.

• 24:43Leif Babin?

  And they wanted us there as we met with them and talked to them to help them drive out this insurgency that was ruling over them. When we got there in 2006, just this brutal reign of terror and fear that it lived under. Those 3 to 5,000 enemy fighters, I mean, just, I've often said to people that those jihadi insurgents that we are fighting in Ramadi, I think that they are as evil an enemy as the US has ever faced in our long history. And I'm certainly well aware of some of the horrors of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And I think any of those individuals out there, just the torture and rape and murder and horrible stuff that they were doing.

• 25:27Leif Babin?

  You just, you clearly, you made it absolutely clear to us that these rules of engagement will be followed. This is black and white. We are here to help the 400,000 people that are living here. And we're here to liberate them from this, the evils of this insurgency.

• 25:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, case in point, when we got there, there had just been a civilian that had been skinned alive. And by the insurgents. When we got there, there had just been a family who had been, the father had, the insurgents thought he was cooperating with the civilian populace and they beheaded the guy and put his head on the, like on the front lawn of the family. These people were just absolutely... Just heinous in their actions. Um, so, yes.

• 26:26Jocko Willink?

  I, now, when we got, there was a couple of things that I had that was pretty lucky. Um, number one, as odd as this may sound, I was an English major in college. And when I was an English major in college, I had to go look at Shakespeare and I had there be words that I didn't know what they meant. And instead of me, if you were, before I was an English major, if I saw Shakespeare, I was like, that didn't make any sense, whatever. It sucks. When I went to college and I had to read literature and I had to analyze it and had to figure out what it meant. I learned how to use a dictionary. I learned how to be okay with saying, oh, I don't know what that word means, or I don't understand this phrase. Let me break it down. Let me parse it out. Let me break down these individual words and find out their meanings.

• 27:10Jocko Willink?

  And so for me, if I would have read that Rules of Engagement, which we just read in 1996, when I was 25 years old, I would have been like, uh. But having gone to college and studied English, I understood those rules of engagement. And I was able to articulate and explain to the troops what they actually meant. So I think I was very lucky in that respect. I was also very lucky in the respect that I had just got back from Iraq. And the first deployment that I did in Iraq was a very active deployment. We were lucky enough to have a very high op tempo. We were conducting mission after mission after mission. I got a lot of experience.

• 27:53Jocko Willink?

  I was very lucky to be able to do that. And this might sound strange, but we did a lot of direct action missions. Meaning we did a lot of the kind of the classic SEAL mission of there's a bad guy in this building in this part of the city. We'd go out kicking his door, grab the guy, capture him, bring him back to base, interrogate him, go out, get another guy. Like, that's what we did. Classic SEAL mission, especially for the war on terrorists. Classic SEAL mission. And I did so much of that, that.

• 28:26Jocko Willink?

  Without a better way of saying this, I kinda got my fill. And when you do that many missions, you're definitely stoked on it. But then, you know, my aperture opened up to where I started looking and saying, well, what else could we do? What else could we bring to the battlefield? And by the time we got to Ramadi, yes, I definitely, I was, I was looking to conduct those type of direct action missions. But I also thought to myself, how else can we help? So that was already in my mind. And look, I know you and Stoner and the rest of the boys wanted to conduct some direct action missions, no doubt. And we definitely planned to and did. But, I mean, it's like, you know, you really want to have chocolate chip cookies, you know?

• 29:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, I had eaten a bunch of chocolate chip cookies the previous deployment, a lot of them. And so I was like, hey, dude, there's steak over here. There's like good burgers over here. There's, there's, you know, it's not all, it's not all, we don't have to just keep eating these chocolate chip cookies. Let's get, let's have them. Let's definitely have them. But we can do some other things. So I, those are some things that I was lucky about. Lucky that I studied English. I hate to say it, it's embarrassing a little bit. Lucky that I studied English. Lucky that I had done, that I had a high on tempo in my previous deployment. And I, I didn't have any, um, man, for lack of a better word, I didn't have anything to prove. Like I needed to do a bunch of these missions so I could be like, oh, look what I did. And I had a lot of experience.

• 29:54Jocko Willink?

  I had a lot of experience planning and conducting operations. So I was very lucky from that respect.

• 30:00Leif Babin?

  Well, first of all, I think you studying English and you've always had, you know, I've said this before. I think if you have a superpower, it's, it's taking some complex things and, and simplifying it down to, to a point where the whole team could understand it. And the frontline troops out there executing can understand it. And it's, uh, I think that's something that you did a tremendous job of because the rules of engagement require decentralized command. And so not only for you to actually understand what those word means, what, what those words actually mean, all that legal jargon. What does it actually mean? But you you helped me and everybody in the task unit down to the frontline troopers understand that so that they can actually go out and perform their job and not have

• 30:44Leif Babin?

  to worry about, hey, can I take this shot without getting sent to prison? Or let me ask permission up three levels of the chain of command and then by that time, the bad guy that was shooting it at you is gone and is going to go out killing other people.

• 30:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, but real quick, props to our JAG. We had a judge advocate general who was working at SEAL Team Three. And the reason I have to bring this up is because sometime when I was in college, I wouldn't understand something that this writer had written. And I'd look up the words and I still couldn't make sense of it. So I might talk to our JAG and say, hey, what does this actually mean right here? What does this actually mean? Put this in some other words for me so I understand or explain what they're trying to get across here. And then he would do that. And so we had a very squared away JAG officer.

• 31:32Leif Babin?

  We had an awesome JAG.

• 31:33Jocko Willink?

  Who was was my professor when it comes to the ROE and what it means. So that was also beneficial.

• 31:41Leif Babin?

  And that enabled you to trust your troops to go out and execute the mission knowing that these are the rules. We have to follow the rules. It's black and white, and that's how we do things. You know, the other thing, too, your perspective is, you know, you had the strategic vision of what was actually driving impact and what wasn't, you know, in Iraq. And that experience, I think, played a massive part in it. I remember as I reported my first SEAL team, some Echo and I, some of our good friends were just coming back from from their first Iraq deployment SEAL Team Five. And I remember the thing that was being said about those guys was they saw more combat than any SEAL unit since Vietnam, which was a true statement at the time. They'd done a ton of operations. And then you took

• 32:25Leif Babin?

  over from those guys and did even more operations and continued that over the course of six full months. And they'd only gotten just a few months in, I think, of doing those kind of capture-kill raids. And so you had a ton of experience coming back from that. That's all the missions that we wanted to do. But you were able to. To able to for me and Seth Stone, the Delta Platoon Commander and and for the rest of Task Unit to really, you know, look at the counter insurgency manual, you know, look at the situation on the ground and and say, hey, enemy attacks are actually up 300% here. We've we've been doing capture kill raids for a long time. Is that actually having the impact that that we needed to and make that adjustment and really focus on that our mission isn't to kill or capture

• 33:10Leif Babin?

  bad guys and gather intelligence. It's actually to secure those populace. And that's how we're going to win this, you know, this counter insurgency fight. And I think you just you really opened our mind up. And I think that was based on all the experience that you had and the lessons that you brought back from from your platoon commander tour with SEAL Team 7. And I think that was integral to our success in tasking a bruiser to really think strategically about about what is our mission here and how can we make the most impact?

• 33:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, definitely. Very lucky in that respect. I was also lucky because I'd been an E dog. I've been an enlisted SEAL. And so I had done a bunch of deployments as an enlisted SEAL. And you know what? There was no war going on. There's no war going on when I when I was doing a bunch of deployments. I did a couple like contingency operations. We like the I locked and loaded my weapon maybe three or four times doing ship boardings or things like that. I guess I'd done some, you know, a bunch of ship boardings as well, you know, so you're I guess if you're locking loading your weapon, I always felt like I was doing something real, right? So I had lock in, I guess it was more than four or five times when I talk about all

• 34:18Jocko Willink?

  those VBSS operations. But I'd done a bunch of of operations, you know, that were real, even before I got to Iraq on my first deployment. And again, were they were they cool? No, we're looking back, of course, they were lame, but that's what that's what that's what we're doing at the time. I had taught a bunch of stuff in training cell at SEAL Team One, which that is when I feel like you really learn stuff well is when you start to teach it. You know, you go, you go teach jujitsu, you go teach an arm lock, your arm lock is going to get better. When you start teaching a heel hook, your heel hook is going to get better because you have to show the details. You have to figure out why it works. You have to show these little nuanced parts of the moves. And so I was doing that as an E5 at SEAL Team One. And when I

• 35:02Jocko Willink?

  was in SEAL Team One in training cell, I was a single dude. And guess what we were doing? We I would go on every trip. Like nowadays, you know, someone will be like a land warfare instructor. Back in those days, if you were willing, you go on that land warfare trip, you go on that CQC trip, you go on that combat swimmer, run that thing. We taught everything. So I got a bunch of experience and very lucky to have that. The other way, so it gave me a very good tactical sense. You know, and I had great people that taught me this stuff. So very, very lucky.

• 35:34Leif Babin?

  But there, I mean, there's, there's a difference between training and real world operations, right? And there was a ton of people who'd been in training for a long time and there's some great SEALs out there. And I think you were in a position as a platoon commander to, at the forefront of conducting these operations, just the efficiency at which you guys were able to do that and, and created the standard operating procedures for, for the entire SEAL teams, including the sensitive site exploitation, which is gathering intelligence. You guys actually created that in your platoon on that, that deployment. So I think those, you know, you were coming back from that deployment and, and taking over as our tasking commander with more experience than, than anybody else out there. And I think that

• 36:15Leif Babin?

  gave us, we were able to harness that to help us really set our, our tasking up for success and focus on where we could have the most impact strategically.

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  Remember when the army dude came to us in Ramadi and taught us SSE, sensitive site exploitation? And I was like, hey dude, like, it wasn't actually me. It was my, it was my assistant platoon commander. I was like, hey, we need a squared away way to do this. And we wrote about this in the dichotomy leadership. We need a squared away dude, way to make this happen. Where this is not working. We need to get it more streamlined and more, more disciplined. And he said, okay. And he created it. And then we, we started doing it and we started telling other units about it. And so then in Ramadi, three years later, this, the army shows up and is like, hey, here's how you're going to do this. I was like, wait, I don't know. We invented it. Now, listen, we didn't a hundred percent invent it because my assistant platoon commander reached out to people that he knew in law enforcement, people that he knew in federal law enforcement and said, hey, how do you guys?

• 37:09Jocko Willink?

  Like search a target and they gave him feedback and he took that and kind of fitted it to our situation. I looked at it. It was like, yeah, that makes sense. And then we rehearsed it, made some more modifications. But yeah, those are that, that, that is an interesting point that we were able to bring. But even my first deployment, like the first time we got shot at, I was like, oh, cool. I wasn't like, I was like, oh, cool. We're getting shot at. Here's what we do. Like, I wasn't freaked out. Why? Because I'd been through so much training. And it's like, we tell that story about Seth, the first gunfight that Seth ever, ever got into Ramadi, where he was like, making decisions, making calls, flanking the enemy. And this, you know, army majors like, hey, man, you must have a lot of urban combat experience. And he's like, no, this is my first firefight. Why? Because

• 37:54Jocko Willink?

  he'd been through awesome training. So I had done a lot of that. The other thing that was very lucky. So that that gave me a good tactical level picture. But then luckily, I had, I was the admiral's aide. And no one's, no one likes to say they were lucky to be the admiral's aide. But, and I certainly didn't want to go. And it was my commanding officer at SEAL Team Seven, that was like, my final mission is to make you the admiral's aide. And it was a smart move for him. And I, and I look back and thank him for it. It cursed him at the time. But working for Admiral McGuire, what I got to see was I got to see how much pressure the SEAL leadership was under. I got to see when we messed up, like

• 38:39Jocko Willink?

  there was some drama, there was some, some negative, negative impacts. We had some guys from SEAL Team Five, they went out, they took pictures, and those pictures got uploaded to some photograph site. Shutterfly. Yeah, or something. And they got seen, they got caught by the press, and the press published them. And it was a bad look. It didn't make the SEAL teams look good. There was the SEAL Team Seven, which I was at SEAL Team Seven, there was a prisoner abuse scenario that unfolded. I saw how that impacted the, not just the guys, those guys were my friends that got in trouble. Some of my guys, some of my friends got in trouble from, from other

• 39:20Jocko Willink?

  platoons. And, you know, so I got to see and think, wow, this is terrible. If, if you do something like prisoner abuse, and the prisoner abuse that I'm talking about, by the way, is Extremely minor, minor to the point that it's less than a, you know, a normal SEAL platoon, new guy hazing that we used to get. That's, that's the kind of abuse that I'm talking about. I'm not talking about torturing people. I'm not talking about bamboo shoots under the fingernails. I'm talking about

• 39:55Jocko Willink?

  non-professional treatment of prisoners is the best way I could, I guess I could describe it. So these guys got in trouble. My platoon, my sister platoon or other platoons at SEAL Team Seven actually got in trouble. Guys got court martialed. Guys got letters of reprimand for their behavior. And I got to see that, but not only did I get to see what it did to the guys, I saw what it did to my boss, the Admiral. I saw the scrutiny that he was coming under. I saw him having phone calls and video conferences with the Secretary of the Navy, with the CNO. You think the, you think the SEAL Teams needs the CNO calling, asking questions about what the

• 40:35Jocko Willink?

  hell's going on with this prisoner abuse stuff? No. So I saw how that hap- what happened to our community when guys did things that they shouldn't have done. Then I got to see what happened. We all got to see this one, but I got to see it even closer was Abu Ghraib scandal. So the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Again, here you have these soldiers, they're, they're not acting professionally. Look, were they torturing people? In my assessment, no, they're not. Were they, were they unprofessional? Yes, they were. Were they electrocuting people? No, they weren't. Were they putting bamboo shoots under fingernails? No. Were they waterboarding people? No, they weren't doing any of that. They

• 41:18Jocko Willink?

  were doing 19-year-old idiot stuff. That's what they were doing. And you know what? It was a massive negative impact on the war. It was a massive negative impact on America. It was a, it was a massive negative impact on our image. And our image counts. You can, when you go into a country and your image is bad, the local populace doesn't trust you and you have to earn that trust. And did Al Jazeera absolutely, and did the insurgents capitalize on this? Yes, they did. That Abu Ghraib scandal completely fueled the insurgency for three years.

• 42:02Leif Babin?

  You, you helped me see that too, because I remember when that, when that happened. You know, look, when, when we got, you know, there was all this discussion about enhanced interrogation procedures. And you mentioned waterboarding. Well, when we, you know, waterboarding was training when we went through, right? So only when it's used on the worst humans on, on the planet like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, this, the self-professed mastermind of nine 11, did it become this big deal. And so Abu Ghraib to me was kind of like, like you said, there, there wasn't torture going on. There was, there was some degrading photos that were taken.

• 42:36Jocko Willink?

  Good work degrading.

• 42:37Leif Babin?

  And, and it was certainly unprofessional. And I was like, what's the big deal? People need to just get over this stuff. They're making this giant deal of it. You actually helped me see it. I remember the conversation you had with me and, and Seth about this of like, hey, this is a huge deal. We just handed a giant victory to the insurgency by these knuckleheads doing stupid stuff. And these photos are now being used to recruit the next generation of Al Qaeda fighters all over the world. And, and that was an eye opener for me because my attitude was kind of like the attitude of, I think, probably most SEALs or, or military personnel that I knew at the time was like, hey, they're overblowing this thing. It's not that big of a deal. They actually torture people, you know, these, these are some photos.

• 43:18Jocko Willink?

  The insurgents actually torture people.

• 43:19Leif Babin?

  The insurgents actually torture people.

• 43:21Jocko Willink?

  The insurgents actually saw off the head of, of American citizens. And, and, and you say you're lucky that I was there. I'm lucky that I got put into that position, working for the admiral. And I got to sit, I mean, think about it. I was, before we were in a task unit together, I was sitting in a room with two, three, four star admirals and generals. I was sitting in the room with the, the, in the Pentagon and hearing how these things were impacting us. Otherwise I would have been the same as you, like, dude, who cares? Screw these guys, it's no big deal. But no, when you see it from a strategic perspective, it has a, it has a huge negative impact.

• 44:02Jocko Willink?

  On top of that, I'd seen that in 2005, there was a, a sergeant had gone to trial. And he'd gone to trial for shooting an Iraqi and killing him. That's not why he went to jail. That's not why he went to jail. He went to jail because he tried to cover it up. So it was a justified shot that they had actually gone in and cleared a building. I don't remember the details of it right now, but I do remember this. They had confiscated a pistol from that house and plant, taken the pistol that they had confiscated and planted it on the guy. And this guy, and this is why this sergeant got in trouble for doing that.

• 44:45Jocko Willink?

  And he had shot and killed, uh, basically, and please don't quote me on this. It was basically like they cleared the house. They found the pistol. They're in there doing, uh, you know, post sensitive site exploitation. And this guy makes a lunge for one of the American soldiers and this guy shot him. Okay. Totally within the rules of engagement. We just went through the rules of engagement. Is it hostile intent when you lunge and grab at the weapon of an American soldier? Hell, yes, it is. You get shot. You die.

• 45:15Jocko Willink?

  But instead of just calling it and saying, hey, this is what happened. Instead, they took the pistol that they had confiscated from this guy. So this guy's obviously, he's not a no threat. They like shot a round into the wall and then put the pistol in his hand and that's why they got in trouble. They didn't get in trouble for killing that guy. He, he tried to attack an American soldier at close range. So they shot him. That's perfectly legal, but they tried to cover it up. I saw that thing unfold behind the scenes. And so I had a, coming out of being the admiral's aide, I had a much better understanding of

• 45:57Jocko Willink?

  the professionalism that was required and the legal concerns that were happening and how they impacted everything. They impacted our community of SEALs negatively, but they also impacted America and they impacted the strategic possibilities of winning this war. So I was very lucky to have had these experiences. And again, um, and I've had Admiral McGuire on the podcast and

• 46:28Jocko Willink?

  you know, no one wants, no SEAL wants that job. No SEAL wants that job. But man, did I learn a lot from seeing these things take place.

• 46:41Jocko Willink?

  That being said, when we, and not that being said, those are the things that when we arrived in Ramadi, it was like, okay, our mission, you talked about what our mission was. I'll tell you our actual, you know, you said our mission was to secure the populace. The way we were supposed to do that, and from the Siege of Sotif, which is the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, the, the quote that I remember, because I had to say it so many times, was to train and fight company and platoon sized elements of Iraqi soldiers. What does that mean? It means you take Iraqi soldiers, they didn't say special operation soldiers, it was just Iraqi soldiers, platoon and company sized elements, this is between 40 and 150 Iraqi soldiers, train them and then fight them,

• 47:24Jocko Willink?

  not fight against them, but take and fight them with them, alongside them. That was what our mission was. And where I think the benefit of my previous deployments and seeing a little bit more of the big picture, and I think really, that big picture, you know, once you see one big picture, you start looking for the big picture more often. And I think that's one of the things that led me to say, hey, we, we can do DAs, and we're going to do DAs, we're going to go capture, kill bad guys, 100%, we're going to go do targeted raids. But I think seeing the bigger picture made me think that we could do more, we could provide more support, and we could do more than just the, the DAs that we had done in the past.

• 48:10Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I think that, that strategic perspective that you brought to the table was, was hugely eye opening for, for me and, and for everyone in Task Unit Bruce, I think, help us focus our mission, because we had trained to do those direct action missions, those targeted raids or capture kill missions. This was, hey, get intelligence, go out and grab a bad guy, you know, interrogate them, go out and grab another bad guy. And, and when you looked at, you know, you, you helped me see that, hey, if we continue to only do that, enemy, enemy attacks are up 300%, the, the, and this was Al Qaeda in Iraq battle space, two thirds of the city of Ramadi, this city of 400,000 people was totally controlled by Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is the precursor to ISIS and then, and their insurgent allies.

• 48:55Leif Babin?

  And, and so as we looked at that, it was very clear. That US forces weren't winning here and so we we had to actually really refocus efforts to to to help win strategically and that meant again securing the populace, stabilizing the city and ultimately lower the level of violence. And so you were the first person I ever knew who had read the counter insurgency manual. What counter insurgency meant to me before that was, oh, that means non kinetic operations, which is build, you know, drilling wells or helping people build a building, you know, like a civil affairs type operation, a construction project, you know, winning hearts and minds stuff and yet you helped us really see the counter insurgency fight.

• 49:40Leif Babin?

  This is our part is that we can go into areas that nobody else can get into and help secure the populace in those areas and drive the insurgents out.

• 49:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we will dig some wells and we will build some buildings, but in order to do that, you have to set the conditions and setting the conditions means you need to lower the level of violence and how do you do that? You kill bad guys. The the idea that we weren't winning, that's a very important concept that not many people wanted to actually actually make. It's a statement that not a lot of people actually make. Look, a lot of, at that time, 2005, 2006, there was definitely people in the US government that were saying, we're not winning, we're losing, we're you, this is never going to end, it's a quagmire, that was certainly happening. But amongst military people, you didn't hear a lot of, hey, we're not winning.

• 50:30Jocko Willink?

  And if you're not saying you're not winning, that's implying that that you are winning.

• 50:35Leif Babin?

  What I actually heard of was worse than that, though, because it was, well, we might not be winning, but you know, we're not losing. And I would hear that and you're like, what does that actually mean? So then you're in denial about where the situation actually is, so then you can't take corrective action to fix the problem so that you are winning.

• 50:54Jocko Willink?

  Yep, part of this, and we saw this just unfold in Afghanistan, part of this is The way we fight wars right now is we fight it by replacements. Now, listen, in Vietnam, they replaced individuals. Meaning you have a platoon, Leif Babins in the army and he's got a platoon of soldiers. And every two or three days, he gets two or three new soldiers and two or three of his soldiers leave. And so you're just getting these replacements. Well, we realized that that was bad because now we don't have continuity within, we don't have, we don't know each other. They real, and they also end up with guys that are like, hey, I'm just trying to survive for my year. Then I'm out of here. I don't care what happens to anybody else.

• 51:34Jocko Willink?

  So then they realized that was bad. So they started taking whole units and sending them over. The problem with that is, you know, if I'm the commanding officer of a battalion. And I do my one year deployment in the army or my six month deployment in the Marine Corps. And my boss says, hey, how did it go for you? What am I going to say? I'm going to say we won. We did this. We proved this. We moved, we moved in this neighborhood. We took over this thing. Our Iraqi troops got better. I want to say that we are winning. And so when I, when you show up Leif and I say, we've got 80% of the populace secured. And you take over from me, what are you going to tell the next boss? We are 90% secured. What is the next guy going to say?

• 52:17Jocko Willink?

  We're 100% secured. Meanwhile, we're still 30% secured. So this happened where we have people that are just saying, hey, we're winning. Let's keep doing the same thing over and over again. Certainly the, the 11 AD didn't have that attitude. Their attitude with, with general, now general McFarlane, Colonel McFarlane at the time was. We need to do something different. And I went through this on the, on, on some podcasts before of how that unfolded. But yes, reading the counter insurgency manual, which I had a draft copy of, found on the internet. A draft copy of it. I don't even know what triggered me to read it. I, I mean, sure, I'm, I'm sure I read something or saw something. You know, I, I had watched the movie about Algiers.

• 53:02Jocko Willink?

  What's that movie called? Do you know what I'm talking about? Battle, Battle for Algiers? You know what movie I'm talking about?

• 53:06Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I don't remember the name of the movie then.

• 53:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And it's, it's an insurgency and you can see that they're losing. The French are losing. And I just remember thinking there's gotta be, this is what's happening. I, I made that connection. That this is what's happening here. And France lost and we're gonna lose if we keep this up. So we, you know, the, the, the key component, and this is what I had to tell our chain of command is secure the populace, secure the populace. Well, how do you secure the populace? You go out and you have to work with the populace. You have to get amongst the populace. Later on, I think it was General Petraeus that said, we can't win by drive by counter insurgency, meaning you can't just drive by a neighborhood and think now they're secure.

• 53:51Jocko Willink?

  You gotta go in there. You gotta live there. You gotta set up shop. That's what the 118 you wanted to do. Which meant that they were going to be out and exposing themselves to danger. Going out into enemy controlled neighborhoods and exposing themselves, doing census operations, going and meeting the local populace, going, trying to do these civil affairs projects that we're talking about. Trying to lower the level of violence. How do you lower the level of violence? You go out there and you find the bad guys and you get rid of them. So the, when the army and the Marine Corps had this idea of going into these enemy controlled neighborhoods, setting up overwatches, how do we help them? Well, one thing I knew what we could do is set up overwatch positions, which I think on my, I think on my first deployment to Iraq, we might've done

• 54:36Jocko Willink?

  four overwatches, four sniper overwatches from fixed positions. And, but they seemed like it was a good idea. And I, I didn't even carry it through workup and our workup, I don't think we did one sniper overwatch. One, I don't think we did one urban sniper overwatch, did we?

• 54:56Leif Babin?

  Not one.

• 54:56Jocko Willink?

  Not one, but I kinda remembered, we had done this before. I think we could do this again. I think this will be really effective. Also, you know, who did, you know, who's really into snipers? Colonel David Hackworth. So I'm like, this is effective, man. We can pull this off. Um, and for some reason, again, luck, we had 13 snipers in Task Unit Bruiser, which is a high number.

• 55:18Leif Babin?

  BTF Tony, I think was pretty critical in that, uh, and, and obviously Chris Kyle in that regard of just making sure that we had,

• 55:26Leif Babin?

  that we had trained snipers because they knew how effective that could be. And, uh, and so I think getting guys ready were, uh, were, were they, they, there was some pre-planning that went into that to,

• 55:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 55:36Leif Babin?

  to set us up for success.

• 55:38Jocko Willink?

  And the other thing was.

• 55:41Jocko Willink?

  Going to Army and Marine Corps memorial services. And you, we went to one of those almost immediately when we got there. And we continue to go to those memorial services. And if you go to one of those services and you see the, the broken hearts of these soldiers at losing their friends. And if you don't want to do everything in your power to go and help them, you're not, uh, you're not a man, you're not an American. Going to, the first one we went to, I had a overwhelming drive to see what we could do to help these guys that were out there

• 56:22Jocko Willink?

  patrolling in the day, going out there, getting IED, getting shot up, and what can we do? To help, there was no, you know, people talk about, oh, how do you draw? How do you draw enemy fire? You don't need to, you in Ramadi? How do you draw enemy fire? Be, be alive. Be alive and be a coalition forces and you're going to draw enemy fire. That's what's going to happen.

• 56:47Jocko Willink?

  So getting our snipers out there immediately and, and you know, and which we did, and I know BTF Tony, one of the most beautiful pieces of timing was BTF Tony taking a sniper team out to where up in Firecracker, which was an area of Ramadi that was very bad, where the Marines had just had a mass casualty IED. And BTF Tony takes a team up there and kills an IED in place or two. And I happened to be in the Brigade Tactical Operations Center as that report was coming in. And it was like, for the first time, there was

• 57:30Jocko Willink?

  some kind of. proactive offense happening and you could see you could feel it in the room and I could see it in the in the eyes of Colonel Gronski you know he looked at me is that your guys yes sir that's our guys and he immediately said to me I need you over in Eastern Ramadi like that's how impactful was it was so impactful that within 30 seconds he was asking me could we put snipers in Eastern Ramadi and I was like yes sir we can so

• 57:58Leif Babin?

  when you say mashed casually to I mean just to just to help everybody understand what that means we're talking about the everyone in the vehicles wiped out the ID goes off under the vehicle kills everyone in the vehicle and I remember talking to Lima Company 38 Marines awesome group of warriors that we were so forced to be able to work with learned a ton of our tactics from within their their patrol techniques their their snipers and how they set up overwatch positions but I remember talking about that and the turret gunner from that ID was ejected from the vehicle and it was he was thrown like several hundred feet and they couldn't they couldn't find his body for hours they were looking for it and it was

• 58:40Leif Babin?

  this it was just so hard it was one of the first things that happened when we got on the ground I'm hearing these stories and just yeah to your point like this just seeing this awesome group of warriors those Marines the soldiers that were out there whatever we could do to help those guys and try to mitigate the extreme risk that they were taking every single day we were certainly gonna do

• 59:02Jocko Willink?

  and one of those things was these these sniper overwatch positions setting those up talk us through just give us like generically because I want to get into how you how how you how we how our snipers what you're seeing what it's like and then we'll talk about some of those rules of engagement how they came into play but just talk us through like a normal sort of what's the word generic sniper overwatch

• 59:27Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I think just want to set the stage about that is we were going into areas that that had no coalition forces presence previously and ever and and certainly not for years at least. And when when we're going to these areas, I mean, the turnover that I got from the previous SEAL platoon commander was, don't go into these neighborhoods because you're all going to get killed. And nobody can even come recover your body to get you out. And so this was an extremely dangerous neighborhood that was totally in control of by the insurgents. Most of these areas, they had so many IEDs or roadside bombs planted in the roads that you couldn't drive in there. You couldn't even get into the areas.

• 1:00:09Leif Babin?

  So, you know, one thing that we realized we could do is, how could we support the soldiers and Marines? How could we support this counter insurgency fight? How could we support this mission of securing the populace, stabilizing the city, lower level of violence? Was taking a small group of, you know, heavily armed SEALs and often times we had Iraqi and US soldiers with us. We certainly had, you know, Marines with us on on many occasions as well, like Dave Burke and his Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company. But we would we would patrol into these areas.

• 1:00:44Jocko Willink?

  Real quick, small group, just for people out there. I know you think sniper team, you think small group, you think two people. Tell me, you know, small group in this case is between maybe seven or eight on the low end, the low, low end.

• 1:00:59Leif Babin?

  Minimum force was was eight SEALs on our operations. Usually it was, it was anywhere from, you know, 12 to 14 guys on the minimum side. And particularly when you're going into South Central Amati, where you know, 100 enemy fighters can attack your position and overrun and kill everybody. This, this was not a four man sneaky sniper team. This was a, a lot of times it was a 30 or 40 man element that's going to go in and lock down and attack a three story apartment building. And you're carrying belt fed machine guns and shoulder fired rockets because we knew that we had to carry all the firepower we would need. In order to defend ourselves from these attacks that we were absolutely gonna come our way.

• 1:01:42Leif Babin?

  And and I we knew that the soldiers and Marines would get to us or try to get to us if they could. But oftentimes they may not be able to just with the IED threat. And and so we had to be able to protect ourselves. So we would we would patrol in undercover of darkness. We would park our vehicles and foot patrol in because that was even at nighttime. I mean, those the insurgents were just waiting to blow blow you up in your vehicles.

• 1:02:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, just to clarify, when you say park your vehicles, we'd park the vehicles in a forward operating base or a combat outpost or the government center like somewhere. It wasn't like we were just parking them in the street and going on patrol, just just to make sure everybody knows.

• 1:02:23Leif Babin?

  No, this was going to the nearest forward operating base that we could as as close as we could get. You know, sometimes that was across the canal or the river. And then and then we would foot patrol in undercover of darkness when we had the advantage of night vision. And and usually things were a little bit quieter, but we're going in areas where there was. I mean, the enemy had complete free rein and total freedom of movement, as we call in the military, to do whatever they wanted to do. There was no one in there to stop them from that. And so we we'd patrol undercover darkness. You know, usually that was several kilometers into enemy territory, set up in in a position. If we could set up, if we could set up, you know, two or three mutually supporting overwatch positions

• 1:03:07Leif Babin?

  with interlocking fields of fire, that's certainly what we tried to do. At every chance that we that we could do, we'd set up in in get on the rooftops or get in the the windows of of buildings where we had some long access looks down down roads, establish a position there. And and particularly in support of of US Army and and Marine operations, where oftentimes we do this as the lead element on the ground for a giant operation of a thousand US troops and dozens of tanks and and, you know, engineering vehicles. So we'd go in there, set up these positions, wait. Till the sun came up with a call, first call of the prayer would kick off in the morning,

• 1:03:50Leif Babin?

  kind of just before the sun would come up, the city would start to come alive. You'd see insurgents moving around with weapons, maneuvering to attack nearby friendly patrols or setting up for attacks, loading mortars into vehicles. And, and our snipers would engage the threats in accordance to the rules of engagement. You could see, you could observe hostile acts happening and, or a reasonable certainty of hostile tennis, we saw them loading mortar tubes and mortars into the back of a truck. Obviously, that's well within the rules of engagement. We know they're about to go and attack coalition forces. And so we'd engage them and they would figure out where we were. And they figured out where we were every time and they would start to engage us.

• 1:04:31Leif Babin?

  And so then the tactic that we learned from three marine sniper teams was instead of being the sneaky sniper, sniper, uh, mission, that would transition from sniper hide to over fighting position. And so if you were in a large building, you had to have 30 or 40 guys in there with machine guns, with shoulder fired rockets, so that you could actually secure the buildings and defend yourself. But the thing that we really learned from them was unless we had an urgent surgical casualty, we were holding our position. That was an overt fighting position. So now as they started to attack us, the worst thing that we could do was extract from the building because then, then all of a sudden, and I remember a conversation with

• 1:05:15Leif Babin?

  our commanding officer was asking me a question, hey, why, why aren't you leaving once you're compromised? I was like, well, sir, we're behind concrete walls. This is exactly what the insurgents want us to do. They want to ambush us out on the street. And so what we would try to do is hold our position throughout the day and wait till it was nightfall, until we could extract more safely undercover darkness with night vision, you know, etc. But it was, that became the overt fighting position that we would utilize and they would attack us, they'd shoot our position, they'd hammer us with mortars, RPG rockets, machine guns hitting us from multiple directions. And we would engage those enemy fighters as they maneuvered on us. And What's hard also for people to understand is, I think, and it's certainly conversations with

• 1:05:59Leif Babin?

  our commanding officer, his staff and others, was oftentimes the threat of friendly fire was so significant, particularly when we were out there beyond the forward line of advance and we had US forces that were moving into that position. Well, they're getting shot at by enemy fighters. We would overtly mark our position. We would throw a giant blaze orange signal panel over the side of the building and let everybody know where we were because the threat of getting shot at by an Apache gunship overhead with their 30 millimeter cannon or tanks and, you know, their tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, soldiers or Marines in the street would, the threat of getting engaged by US forces was so high

• 1:06:40Leif Babin?

  that we had to, we had to let everybody know where we were and we would take the insurgents shooting at us all day long over, you know, a 120 millimeter main gun round from a US Abrams tank. So that was something that we often did. And there were times when we ran up the American flag as well to let people know where we were. And that was when we felt like we were in a good defendable position and the enemy wanted to, the enemy wants to come attack us, bring it on. This is a, this is a overt fighting position. And the times when I was a part of that was, that was my call to raise that flag up. It got a lot of attention, certainly, and we would get reports from the soldiers and Marines

• 1:07:23Leif Babin?

  that say, hey, the insurgents are coming. We're gathering intelligence that they know where you're at. And we'd be like, bring it on. We're right where we want to be. But oftentimes that was when we had friendly patrols out there. And we got friendly patrols with Iraqi forces that are out there trying to secure the populace and show a presence there. And so I would much rather have those insurgents attack our defendable fighting position in an overwatch position with the blaze orange signal panel or the American flag flying to attack us rather than those patrols that were around the street.

• 1:07:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we were gonna win. We were gonna win those 100% of the time. Like, oh, you want, you got 30 moos that are gonna fight 40 guys in a, in a concrete building with sniper weapons and like, they're gonna lose. And they did. They did. A couple of things that I was thinking about was... Shout out to the Marine Corps circ boats because we didn't always drive in. Sometimes we went on those boats and those guys were freaking awesome. Outstanding support that we got from those guys. So instead of having to take a Humvee to a FOB, go in on those boats.

• 1:08:34Leif Babin?

  They were, they were awesome. What an awesome crew of Marines there and we didn't have any of our typical special boat teams nearby that can help us, support us, but these, these Marines were awesome and they, they took us in on the circ boats, which is kind of a, kind of a a rib, but very heavily armed. They were putting it out there. I mean, hanging it out there on, you know, a canal that's maybe, you know, 40 or 50, 60 yards wide. And, and moving, you know, moving through at nighttime undercover darkness where you know, if you get ambushed, man, you're screwed. You're in the, there's nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. And they hung it out there for us, dropped us off quietly and enabled us to patrol into those areas of the city without getting blown up.

• 1:09:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was frogman activity right there. The thing about being out at night.

• 1:09:22Jocko Willink?

  The, the enemy knew that we had night vision. Obviously they knew that we had lasers and they knew they couldn't fight us at night. I would say the number of enemy that we killed was probably 2% during the day. Or sorry, during the night, 2%. I think you killed a guy. I mean, there's a couple of kills that were at night that were kind of chance contacts, but the enemy knew that we owned the night and so they didn't come out at night. The local populace had no reason to be out at night, so they didn't come out at night. But the local populace came out during the day and that's when the insurgents would come out as well. That's why discretion was so important. And not just this civilian. So you had civilians out there. You have Iraqi soldiers out there. You have Americans out there.

• 1:10:05Jocko Willink?

  The amount of discipline that the snipers had to have and the machine gunners had to have was incredible. And I remember. Uh, so you have Iraqi soldiers out there. I remember the first time, you know, a guy came running around the corner with a, with an RPG on, in his hand and RPG rounds on his back. And for my entire life, to me, RPG meant enemy. Kill this guy. And he goes running by and then I see like it's a bunch of Iraqi soldiers like this. So you, the PID is even harder. Cause you got Iraqi soldiers out there that are carrying AK-47s, just like the insurgents. And on top of all this, the insurgents had captured American uniforms.

• 1:10:49Jocko Willink?

  They had matching uniforms with the Iraqi soldiers, because the Iraqi soldiers were wearing kind of mixed match cammies. They had helmets. The insurgents had helmets. The insurgents had body armor. The insurgents had AK-47s. So they looked like the Iraqi soldiers. They had RPGs. So that idea of hostile intent had to be hammered home because if you just shoot a guy with an AK-47, you might've just killed an Iraqi soldier. If you just shoot a guy with an AK, with a RPG, you might've just killed an Iraqi soldier. If you just shoot a person that you see walking down the street, you might've just killed a civilian.

• 1:11:32Jocko Willink?

  So the, the discretion had to be absolutely massive and we learned that the hard way. Because as, as, as I wrote about in Extreme Ownership, the first chapter, we had one of our guys

• 1:11:48Jocko Willink?

  kill an Iraqi soldier. And I go through the circumstances in the book

• 1:11:54Jocko Willink?

  of how it specifically happened, but, but I had to make sure, therefore we had to make sure that that didn't happen again. So PID, Positive Identification, was front and center of every single person's mind. Front and center of every person's mind. So this is why it was such a, a, a critical component.

• 1:12:18Jocko Willink?

  And, and you know, you talked about like the, there were some, there were some, even, even inside the SEAL community, some people were like, oh, these guys, TU Bruce are just rolling out on these daytime presence patrols. We didn't do a lot of presence patrols of actual presence patrols. I think you you knew the number was 14. We did 14. So out of hundreds of operations, we probably did a couple hundred, you know, missions. We did 14 presence patrols in the day. They were dangerous as hell. That's why we didn't do a bunch of them. They were very dangerous. We never, we got in some contacts, we never took casualty. But the reason was, it wasn't a great job for us. We did it sometimes. But what we did do was combat advising of the Iraqi clearance forces that were on the ground

• 1:13:03Jocko Willink?

  in the daytime. And we would put seals with those Iraqi forces. So we might have four or five seals on the ground with the clearance operation. So you've got a clearance operation that might have 20 or 50 or 100 Iraqi soldiers. We put seals with them. The seals with them are doing actual combat advising. They're doing commanding control for them. There's probably 20 or 30 American soldiers. So there's deconfliction going on as well. And what they're doing is they're going house to house, doing clearance, meeting the locals, getting, building relationships with the people. Like you said, Leif, there's 400,000 civilians there. And if there wasn't

• 1:13:47Jocko Willink?

  400,000, there was 300,000. So this place is crawling with locals, crawling with locals. And so taking that partner force into the local neighborhoods to meet, to find out what's happening, to find out, to gather intelligence, to let them know that we were coming, to let them know that we were here. And the enemy would attack. Yes. And that's why this, this one-two punch of having a clearance operation happening with Iraqi soldiers, American soldiers, maybe some seals in the C2 element on the ground, and then these sniper overwatch teams, sometimes bounding sniper overwatch teams. That's another thing that we did. But sometimes in Engaging targets when these gunfights would break out. And the other thing, oh, go ahead.

• 1:14:31Leif Babin?

  I was just gonna say real quick about the, one is that you're 100% right. I mean, this, as the day would, you know, we're sitting Overwatch position as daylight, you know, breaks and the city comes alive. There's people out there just trying to live their lives. And you'd see the shepherd boys bringing his herd of sheep down to the river to, you know, water, water the sheep. And you'd see people working on cars and, and vehicles driving around and, and, you know, there wasn't, there wasn't a lot of commerce then because they certainly,

• 1:15:02Leif Babin?

  but there was, there was, these people lived in a, in a war zone. But yeah, there were, there were people out there. So you had to, the snipers had to be extremely scrutinizing and, and positive identification was absolutely key in every aspect.

• 1:15:18Leif Babin?

  The other thing about, about those, the patrols was, you know, people are like, it's crazy. You guys are out there patrolling to contact. Well, there was a real counter insurgency reason for that. And now, as you said, like we, we, we can't do drive by counter insurgency as General Petraia said later. You, you actually have to engage with the populace. Our mission was to train and fight platoon and company sized units of Iraqi soldiers. And that was getting those Iraqi soldiers out there to show them that they could actually show the populace that we're here. Was, was, that was absolutely in our mission. I think we, you know, it was dangerous, but we did the best we could to mitigate the risk we can control.

• 1:15:57Leif Babin?

  We set sniper overwatches in place in just about every case that we had patrols going on. We had bounding overwatches, as you said, of, you know, covering, moving for each other. One unit's covering while the other's patrolling. And oftentimes what most of our sniper overwatches were, was covering for the military transition teams, the US soldiers and Marines that were out there with the Iraqi soldiers, as well as the regular conventional US Army and Marine units that were engaging, out there engaging with the populace, meeting with them. When I say engaging, that sounds like they're, they're, they're out there knocking on doors, talking to people, saying, hey, where can we help? You know, where are the insurgents? What can we do to help you? We're here to help and protect you with the Iraqi soldiers, with them.

• 1:16:42Leif Babin?

  And obviously that was a huge piece of their counter insurgency. And we did that in order to support that effort, trying to mitigate the risks that we can control in that effort.

• 1:16:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the census operations, the, the hearts and minds campaign totally critical. And luckily, when a, when the, when the shooting starts, the women, the children, the innocent men, they hide. They're not, they're not, they're walking around. This isn't like you're sitting there saying, oh, well, is this person bad or good? This person's running across the street with an AK-47. They're getting shot by US forces. That's what's happening. They're not, oh, I, oh, a woman walking down the street during a gunfight. Oh, I wonder if she's good or bad. That's not happening. It's not happening. Just like y- you don't have a woman walking down the street during a gunfight. An innocent woman's not walking down the street during a gunfight.

• 1:17:33Leif Babin?

  That was actually one of the most eerie things. And I love the, the, one of the pictures that we used, uh, I don't know which chapter we used it for, in Extreme Ownership, but it's a, it's a picture of task unit bruiser seals to the left and, and right side of, of a street, kind of a, you know, going down this narrow street with walls on both sides, and you're looking down the street.

• 1:17:51Jocko Willink?

  Empty.

• 1:17:52Leif Babin?

  It's a city street and it's totally empty. And you knew it was, it was, it was amazing how the locals know what's coming. They see, you know, they can see down the side streets. They get the word. All of a sudden, you'd be on patrol. There's people moving around. Um, there's, there's a family, there's kids kicking a soccer ball, there's cars in the street, and all of a sudden it's just empty. And you know, okay, attack's coming. Set your stopwatch. You know what's coming. Now, now all of a sudden the hair on the back of your necks is standing out because you know that you're about to get attacked. So, so the locals would disappear. Um, which is also why, you know, you read the, the rules of engagement and in that escalation of force, if, if you've got someone who's maneuvering against you and you're pointing a weapon at them and shouting at them to stay back,

• 1:18:35Leif Babin?

  and you've got an interpreter telling them in Arabic to stay back, well, they're gonna move. I mean, a, a, an innocent person is gonna run. They're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna like, oh man, someone's pointing a gun at me. I need to, need to back off. Which they did. It was no, no problem. If, if they were to, to venture out. Um, and then obviously if they continue towards you, if, if it became a threatening situation, you could utilize a warning shot to let them know like, hey, you need to back off. And they would. So the idea, like, we were able to, uh, to use those rules of engagement to absolutely minimize, you know, any kind of collateral damage because they were, uh, the people would disappear, uh, number one, before an attack happened in most cases, uh, and in other cases, if you've got someone that's, it's a question, you don't see a weapon, but you're not sure why they're

• 1:19:20Leif Babin?

  maneuvering towards you, you would use that escalation, uh, and, and look, if someone's going to continue toward your position after they, uh, have been told to back off and that they have a weapon pointed at them, and then they get closer and they get a warning shot fired in the street 20 feet in front of them, I mean, they're, they're bad. There's no question that they're bad if they're, they're maneuvering in your, your position. Um, and so that, that, uh, that was, the rules of engagement gave us everything that we needed to do to, to protect innocent civilians, uh, in that regard and, and protect ourselves.

• 1:19:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it was also easy, you know, like, uh, I've heard people like, oh, you can't just shoot people with cell phones, right? Well, there was no cell phones in, in Ramadi. There was no, there was no cell, the Al Qaeda had blown up all the cell towers. They didn't want any cell phones to be there to be used by, for tracking, so they blew up all the cell, all the cell towers. So there's no cell phones. So when you saw someone communicating, they're communicating on a, on a radio, on a, on a high frequency or a very high frequency or ultra-high frequency radio, a Motorola radio. And guess what they were doing? They weren't ordering pizza, they were coordinating attacks. So that's a totally different thing. And again, you don't see innocent women out communicating on a Motorola radio, on a handheld

• 1:20:35Jocko Willink?

  radio, because they're innocent. No, there's military-aged male with radios, with radio out there passing intelligence and coordinating attacks. That's what's happening. So this idea that there's like, oh, well, oh, it's hard to tell if someone's on a cellphone if they're, what they're, what they're talking about. There's no cell phones. It's easy to tell what they're talking about.

• 1:20:56Leif Babin?

  It was a huge problem, but for, for US targeting purposes. I mean, our enemy, enemies often understand our tactics better than we do, uh, and obviously they're making adjustments. It's one of the things they did there was blow up all the cell towers so there's no network and we can't use signal intelligence, um, you know, to, to our advantage. So, um, that was a well-documented problem and, and something that we've been briefed on before we even arrived in Ramadi. I think that happened in 2005, you know, uh, well before we got there in 2006.

• 1:21:25Jocko Willink?

  You know, you mentioned earlier, you know, the my rules of engagement brief, you know, my brief brief, which was, hey, if you have to pull the trigger, make sure the person you're killing is bad. The for me, and this is a leadership principle.

• 1:21:42Jocko Willink?

  What I need to do is keep my guys out of trouble. That's what I need to do. That's what I told you, you need to do. You keep your guys out of trouble. And by the way, this doesn't only apply to combat. This applies to where on liberty in Louisville, Kentucky, or Reno, Nevada, or Lake Tahoe, or San Diego. Our job as leaders is to prevent our guys from getting in trouble. It's not cover up when they get in trouble. It's actually prevent them from getting in trouble. We'll get into cover ups. Cause cover ups don't work. There's no such thing as a cover up. It's just, you're just getting, I already talked about it with, with that case that I, that I mentioned when I was the Admiral's aide that happened. Like if you're covering things up, you're making it worse for everybody and we'll get to that.

• 1:22:24Jocko Willink?

  But our job as leaders is to make sure your guys don't get in trouble. How do you do that? If my guys get in trouble, get an alcohol related incident, guess what? That's my fault. It's actually my fault. What did I do? Why didn't I explain to them what they need to watch out for? Why didn't I keep them busy enough that they weren't out doing something stupid? Why didn't I make sure they have a designated driver or designated brain as we used to call it? A designated brain meaning, hey, it's not just a person that's going to drive. It's the person that's going to think. So we got nine knuckleheads going out and getting drunk. We got a 10th person there that's a designated brain that makes sure nobody does anything stupid. That's our job. So it's our fault if we allow people to get into trouble.

• 1:23:10Jocko Willink?

  That means if we don't explain the rules of engagement, if we don't explain, and Admiral McRaven had a good way of putting this, if we don't draw the red lines that you're not allowed to cross very clearly so everyone understands them, we're allowing our guys to get in trouble. That's what's gonna happen. The same thing we talk about since day one. Being, taking care of your people isn't saying, hey, do whatever you want and I'll cover for you. That's not how you take care of your people. You want to take care of your people, you explain to them what the rules are and what will happen if they break the rules. That's how you take care of your people. You make sure they understand the rules of engagement. And then on top of that, they have to understand why this is happening.

• 1:23:54Jocko Willink?

  They have to, and this is what I would explain. I would explain, hey, this city is filled with civilians. This city is filled with civilians, with normal, good Iraqi civilians. It's filled with doctors and teachers and imams. And the day that we go out and we kill a doctor or a teacher and a mom out in the city of Ramadi,

• 1:24:20Jocko Willink?

  first of all, we've done irreparable damage to the war effort. We are not going to be able to take that back. This is a problem. This is going to get used by Al Qaeda. It's going to get used by the insurgents. It's going to be used for their propaganda. That's what they're going to show. So we've taken a huge negative strategic step the day we go out and kill an innocent person. Also, we're going to get shut down. That's what will happen. We go out and kill a civilian, some Imam or some doctor or some teacher, we're going to get shut down. We're not going to do any more operations. Not one of our

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  military army Marine Corps battalion commanders would have allowed that to fly, ever.

• 1:25:00Jocko Willink?

  So we would have gotten shut down. The deployment would be pretty much be over. And we would have been destroying what we were actually fighting to protect. So when we're in a leadership position, it's our job to make sure that the team understands all those consequences, not to mention you're going to go to prison, not to mention that part, but all those consequences, they have to understand all those consequences. That's our job as leaders.

• 1:25:27Leif Babin?

  Yeah, I mean, in that environment too, like there was, you weren't getting away with anything, you know, I mean, there was, this is a city with 400,000 people. There's a, there's a governor, there's a, there's a, you know, there's infrastructure in place, there's people out on the street. There was embedded reporters that were out there on operations. I mean, there was a CNN camera crew with a number of the Marine Army units that we worked with. I remember that specifically, Stars and Stripes reporters. It was, that stuff was, was always out there. In fact, we got busted for patches because Which we wrote about in in that company leadership, the I couldn't even hide the patches

• 1:26:08Leif Babin?

  from you because there was a combat cameraman that took some photos and the photos got back for approval out there snapping photos of of on operations. So there's always people out there, always folks with us. Every operation we did had had an interpreter with us, a civilian. You know, usually either either Iraqi citizen or maybe an American citizen who had grown up in Iraq. These were people that were with us on every single operation. This was their homeland. They love these people. There was they were they were a part of that on every operation. So I mean, that was something that we were that that it was just the reality of how we were operating. This wasn't just some some like deep in the hinterland of

• 1:26:50Leif Babin?

  Afghanistan somewhere where no one's going to know about this and there's no roads in there or anything like that. This was a city with hundreds of thousands of people and and constant scrutiny on every single operation that we did. I wanted to just talk about what you just said, which I think is a really powerful, a powerful point. And, you know, oftentimes as leaders, we talk about what does it really mean to take care of your people? What does that mean? And, you know, as you said, it's it is oftentimes the the trap is that people they want to be liked. Hey, I want to, you know, I'm gonna, hey, you know, yeah, you got in a fight, you got in a bar fight, or hey, you did something you shouldn't have done on liberty, you know, before we even deployed. Like, hey, I want to be liked

• 1:27:33Leif Babin?

  as a leader. So I'm not going to actually hold the line. I'm not going to hold a stand or I'm gonna I'm gonna I got your back. I'm gonna cover up for something that maybe you shouldn't have done. And you made it very clear from the beginning. I think it's one of the most important things that you've taught me is this, my job as a leader, my job as the platoon commander, the officer in charge, is as much as anything else out there, not just planning and executing a tactical mission out there, but is to take care of my people by making sure that they're doing the right things, that they understand the rules of engagement, that they're they're doing things, not not only from a perspective of, you know, to make sure that they're everything they're doing is is legal and moral and ethical,

• 1:28:15Leif Babin?

  but also to make sure that they're not going to harm our strategic mission or do something that's gonna gonna give our al Qaeda, you know, in Iraq terrorist enemies.

• 1:28:25Leif Babin?

  Propaganda to use against us or to undermine us with the local, local civilian populace, or to do something that they might regret for the rest of their lives. And you really helped me understand that what taking care of my people meant is, is looking out for their long-term good and, and the long-term good of the mission. And, and I think for me, it, it was, it's a hard thing, but, but as I've often said, you helped me see that like my job, that was my job as a leader and, and, and what I, you know, you helped me, you gave me the confidence to know that instead of just, instead of just, hey, I probably should be doing this, I probably should be making sure that the platoon shows up early and gets their training done. And, you know, if somebody gets in trouble on Liberty, um, instead of covering up for

• 1:29:09Leif Babin?

  that or saying, hey, we got your back, man, saying, hey, man, you're doing the enemy's job for them. If, if you get in trouble and you get arrested, you're, you're giving the SEAL Team a bad name, you're not going to deploy with us. That doesn't help us, that doesn't help our mission. And you got to think about that. And so you gave me the confidence to know that like I, I actually have to be, that's a leader that I have to be. And if I'm not doing those things, if I'm not looking out for the long-term good of my people, making sure that they're doing everything, that it legal and moral and ethical and following the rules of engagement, doing not just what they think is right, but actually what's legal. Um, if they're not doing those things, then, then I'm actually failing as a leader and I'm failing, failing the team. And, and so that gave me the confidence to know that this is absolutely black and white.

• 1:29:53Leif Babin?

  Uh, and, and that is my job as a leader is to keep my people from doing things that is, that are going to harm them, put them in jeopardy, you know, that are illegal, immoral, uh, unethical, but also things that they might regret for the rest of their life, things that might affect us and harm our ability to build relationships with the local populace and go out and secure them, stabilize the city, lower level of violence. And that was my job as a leader.

• 1:30:20Jocko Willink?

  I think one of the things that probably I utilized or maybe, maybe connected the dots for you. And by the way, a lot of this stuff, when I talk about this stuff and it sounds, it might sound like, oh, I was this big thinker and I had everything figured out. That's not true. Actually, I look back and I feel once again lucky because I feel like I was just ahead of the curve. I feel like I just was far enough. I was mature enough. I was old enough. I had been through enough. I'd learned enough. I'd had the right mentors at the right times. I'd seen enough that I was just ahead of the curve of being like, hey, this is our job. This is what we need to do.

• 1:30:58Jocko Willink?

  And one of the dots to connect is, look, if you're in the SEAL teams, your job and the number one priority is the mission. Look, we take care of our troops, but what our focus is, what we do, look, we take care of the troops, but our action, the actions that we take should all be driving towards one thing, and that is effectively executing our mission. And that, as I've said before, is the trump card. It's the trump card in any argument you're gonna have with a team guy. When that, when that team guy says, well, I, I want to go out tonight, or I want to do this dumb

• 1:31:38Jocko Willink?

  thing, or I want to go make this happen. When, when you say back to them, hey, do you not want to be able to go close with and destroy the enemy on the battlefield? There's no answer. There's no answer. The only answer is yes, that's what I want to do. Is this gonna help you do that? If you get in trouble tonight for being drunk, if you get in a fight, if you have some kind of an issue with your freaking credit card and your credit's bad and you lose your security clearance, all those things, they're all bad. And, and hey, I mean, when, when we were in Ramadi, I said, hey, anybody that fucks this up and you start to do things that are stu-, if you do something that's stupid, that's gonna interfere with our opportunity to kill the enemy, to do

• 1:32:19Jocko Willink?

  our mission, you're going home immediately. I don't want you here. You will not be here. And when you, so when you talk about the, the confidence, the confidence is just you figuring out, oh, there's no arguing with that. There's no SEAL that says, well, actually, I, I'd rather, you know, take the risk and get in trouble than, than fight the enemy. There's no, and if, if you do have a SEAL like that, kick him out of your platoon immediately. Kick him out. Kick him out of the teams. If you have somebody that prioritizes

• 1:32:50Jocko Willink?

  Anything other than executing the mission, then they're not in the right job. So I think connecting those dots was very important. Now, you mentioned like, oh, they had a government, they had a governor there. So, so just to take that a little bit further, there was a government center in downtown Ramadi. There was a, there was a bureaucracy. It was small, but they had a bureaucracy. They had a governor. I forget his name, but they had a governor and this governor that was running the city of Ramadi, met with the brigade commander two or three or four times a week,

• 1:33:29Jocko Willink?

  had sit down meetings to say, hey, one of your tanks drove over this bridge and now the, the cars can't go over it. You need to fix it. And the brigade commander say, yes, sir, we'll take care of it. The, the governor of Ramadi would say, hey, there was a, a Bradley fighting vehicle that rolled through the front gate of one of my people. You need to get out there and repair that guy. And the brigade commander would say, yes, sir, we will take care of it. Battalion commander would they get tasked, go take care of that gate. When a civilian got wounded or got killed. Well, first of all, if a civilian got wounded, they would immediately cas back that person trying to help. But if there was a civilian that got killed, because this is war and civilians did get killed in the battle of Ramadi.

• 1:34:14Jocko Willink?

  It was a small number, but they did get killed. When that happened, the governor would meet with the brigade commander. They would sit down. They would give reparations to the family. We would apologize as coalition forces. And we would handle that. So when civilians got killed, it was a huge deal. There was times, actually a lot of times, a lot of times, there was times, probably three or four times, that there was big protests where civilians had been killed and the local populace came and protested, hey, you, you know, coalition forces killed one of our, you know, one of our kids, one of our people, one of our, and, and then we had to go figure out what's going on. Again, I'm saying we,

• 1:35:00Jocko Willink?

  the brigade would have to then go figure out what had happened and sit down with the family that had lost one of their family members and pay reparations. This was a huge, huge deal. So to think that you could be out there just killing people was just, it's just completely insane thought. It's a completely insane thought. It could, it could not happen. Every civilian casualty was a catastrophe. It was a, it was a problem that got raised through the entire government of, of Ramadi and brought to the coalition forces and, and was solved. It was investigated. It was reparations were paid. That's what happened every single time.

• 1:35:42Jocko Willink?

  So it's important to think about that as you start to think about the job that you and I had, which was making sure that our guys understood that clearly so that they could make the right decisions. And what that all boiled down to is make sure that if you pull the trigger, you better freaking make sure that the person you're killing is bad. Otherwise, everything else is going to fall apart.

• 1:36:06Leif Babin?

  And you, you made that absolutely clear to us and I think that, you know, that, that it, I remember one particular time when, I don't know if it was soldiers or Marines, but there'd been, uh, there'd been, there was a protest at the front gate over, over a civilian casualty that had happened, um, on an operation that, that this is one that we, we hadn't been a part of. But I remember hearing about it. You talked to me about it like this is what's going to happen if we're not following the rules of engagement. And we were to a point where I remember you and I actually had a disagreement over the use of explosive breaching charges based on the, the, the impact of like, hey, if, if there's a family on the other side of that door,

• 1:36:51Leif Babin?

  we could possibly injure people. Let's, let's don't use an explosive breach. And the thinking of SEALs at the time was no, you have to use explosive breaching charge. And, uh, and we, I remember you and I had a big debate about that, like, no, actually, um, use, use manual tools. Um, let's, uh, let's, let's try not to do that. That shouldn't be our standard operating procedure so that we can mitigate any potential risk of collateral damage that might result. And there was some pushback in the platoons on that, but when you explained to me why that was important. And you know what would happen if if we accidentally injured a kid or you know a family member on the other side of the the door, then it made total sense. Okay, we need

• 1:37:33Leif Babin?

  to we need to back off using explosive breaching charges. We're going to use manual tools so that we can put the security of the populace, we're willing to take some more risk to ourselves in order to protect the civilian populace to to make sure that we don't cause you know unwarranted collateral collateral damage and that we don't give the enemy some you know recruiting tool to go out and say, hey, look, the look at, look at what the Americans are doing. They're out killing innocent civilians.

• 1:38:01Jocko Willink?

  Luckily for me, I'd already been through that. Those are those arguments that you were bringing to me, I had already been through them on my last deployment. I had already been through the whole breaching thing. I already been through the civilian casualties. Oh, and how bad those were for the war effort. So when the implication comes from life that I'm being a freaking wimp, right? Because that's what it is. Like, what do you mean? We can't explicitly breach. What? You're being a wimp, Jocko. Not only that, but now you're putting my guys at higher risk because if we don't breach the door and there's a bad guy behind the door and we're sitting there with a sledgehammer trying to open it, you're going to get my guys killed. Luckily for me, I'd already had all these discussions before. And hey, well, how many times have you taken rounds through the door on your on your on your explosive breaching charges? You haven't? How many times? So we start having

• 1:38:46Jocko Willink?

  these discussions. How many times have you been engaged inside the target building? I know you're getting engaged a lot outside. How many times? So we're having these discussions. We're having discussions that these are not actually black and white. That, hey, if you're hitting a target where you are deeming it as the commander on the ground, that is so high risk that you feel the need to use explosive breaching charge, do it. Do it. But let that be a decision that you're making. And if you look at that door and you say, you know what? I don't think we need to do. I don't think we need an explosive breaching charge right now. Don't use one. And the risk versus reward. We're going to up the risk to our

• 1:39:30Jocko Willink?

  troops. Yes. Yes. Why? Because we're trying to.

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  Accomplish the mission and the mission is to secure the populace and if you're out there hurting and killing the populace with explosive breaching charges, you're failing the mission. And Goli, I'm sure you want to talk about that one story where you made the call. You're, you know, you had a breacher that was like, hey, we're going to blow this door and you're assessing the situation. You see what the situation is and you said no breach.

• 1:39:57Leif Babin?

  That was a tough situation where my breacher wanted to put an explosive charge on the door and, uh, and it probably made sense to him to be able to do that. And I was, because I was detached, I was back from the door and I was observing the situation. I saw, uh, I saw a man's pair of sandals, which is the common footwear they wear, man's pair of sandals, woman's pair of sandals, kids, kids, kids, kids. Like there was three or four pairs of kid sandals next to this door and it was kind of a small room that we're about to go into. And, and I just, I told my lead breacher, who was a fantastic SEAL and an incredible guy, I was like, I was like, hey, let's pull, let's, let's manually breach that, get the sledge up here. And he wasn't too happy with me for that. He was like, what are you talking about?

• 1:40:42Leif Babin?

  And we, we almost, we kind of got in, in a back and forth there. Um, and I kind of had to put my foot down that to like, let's sledge the door. So we, we sledge the door, got in the room, were able to capture the target, uh, that we were after. And, and of course there was a family around the other side of the door. So it was the right call to be made there. Uh, but it was something that because we'd had that discussion about, about we've got to be, we have to be careful about not injuring civilians on this stuff. And so taking a step back to be wary of that and thinking about that, and certainly it was a higher risk. This was a high level Al Qaeda in Iraq, bad guy. We had, I think we pulled, there were, there were, he had beheading videos on DVD. Uh, this, this was a really bad guy that we're rolling after, uh, that he was directly

• 1:41:24Leif Babin?

  linked to some, some horrible, you know, torturing civilians and murdering people and a number of attacks. Um, and so it was a risky move, but I, it was the right call based on the situation that we wanted to minimize collateral damage.

• 1:41:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, also because we'd already cleared like other buildings. It wasn't like this was the initial breach, like it was. It was that that's what it painted and you know when you debrief my he briefed me on it. I was like, yeah, good call.

• 1:41:49Leif Babin?

  But that that there were also you did give me the leeway to make decisions when I did need a breach on things. And there was another situation where we were uh we we were after a particular guy and we the AC 130 gunship overhead observes him jumping from one building to the next building, next building. The rooftops were just a few feet apart. So he was able to jump from rooftop to rooftop. And so we're chasing this guy. I think we have four or five buildings down. And and so we know where he is. We we we leave the a target building we're in. We patrol down to hit that building. We know this guy's expecting us to be there. We don't have the element of surprise. So we use an explosive breach on that um you know on on that door.

• 1:42:31Leif Babin?

  And when we did, we blasted the door and we blew all the windows out of the you know, the front of the building. And as we it was it was a call that I made based on like, okay, this is a high threat guy. Um, he may absolutely have a weapon or a suicide vest on him and we uh we're going to explosively breach this charge. When we went into the room, uh, we locate he was uh another room deep. Lined up against the wall was the the family. And then uh what was interesting about that was they stood up and immediately pointed out the guy that was like, he's not one of us um and and through our interpreter. Uh, and we talked to this family. I was like, we're very sorry for the damage to your door, the damage to

• 1:43:11Leif Babin?

  your uh your your windows. Um, and and and through the interpreter, I'm telling them we're we're we gave them, we we carried SERP funds with us, which were I don't remember what the acronym stands for, but it was it was a it was it was a fund that we had available. I would carry uh $500 on it was it was like the standard SERP fund I would carry to which went a long way in the city of Vermont, certainly to pay for the damage that was done. Um, and the uh the head of the household, the the man uh was said, I I don't need your money. Thank you for getting this bad guy out of our neighborhood. I think he'd he'd tortured or murdered some of their relatives and and friends and uh and they were just happy for us to get get this guy out of there.

• 1:43:53Leif Babin?

  Which was, that was kind of the first, you know, the, the, the change amongst the civilian populace that had lived under that reign of, of terror and fear under these insurgents of, "Hey, we're actually happy to see you. We appreciate the work that you're doing." And we did send a civil affairs team out there and I think they prepared their door and, and fixed their windows, or at least gave them some money, you know, to, to do that. But you gave me the leeway to make the call. But knowing that, uh, when we, we were gonna make the call to try to minimize the collateral damage, uh, that could possibly happen at every opportunity. Uh, and that was, that was my job as the platoon commander, um, was to be detached and observe the situations and make a decision based on what I was seeing and to try to mitigate the threat, the, the risk that I could to my team,

• 1:44:37Leif Babin?

  but to, to also mitigate the risk to the civilians. We, we prioritize that over the risk to our own team.

• 1:44:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and the reason I was able to give you and Seth a bunch of leeway is because you knew and understood that the decisions, that the actions that your platoon took under your command were your actions and your decisions, and you had 100% ownership of them. You weren't gonna be able to come back and tell me, "Oh, the breacher put a charge on the door and blew the door and, you know, wounded a civilian. It was my breacher's fault." That, that wasn't happening. You were gonna make decisions. Every decision that got made was your decision. It's your platoon.

• 1:45:26Jocko Willink?

  And by the way, when my, my commanding officer came to me, I wouldn't say, "Well, Leif's breacher did this. It's Leif's fault or the breacher's fault." No, it's on me. I didn't explain this clearly enough. So the ownership up and down the chain of command is what allows there to be that kind of discretionary leeway, and you had to have it with your snipers. I mean, you can't, Seth had to have it with his snipers to say, "Yeah, if there, if you know the person is doing something bad, if you know they're a bad person, they have hostile intent, then you take the shot. You don't have to call me. You don't have to call Seth. You take the shot." That is because everyone is taking ownership of what is going on.

• 1:46:09Jocko Willink?

  And, and it goes direct, like when you, I mean, we, we started this in workup. You know, when your freaking point man got lost. And you came back to me and said, oh yeah, sorry, my point man got lost. I didn't go talk to your point man. I talked to you. I'd say, well, did you, did you go through the, the route with him? Did you know what the landmarks were looking for? Will you keep in pace? Cause this is your platoon. It's not your point man's platoon. When your machine gunner, you know, was outside of his field, shooting outside of his field of fire. I wasn't like, hey, machine gunner, let me talk to you. No, Leif, what is going on with your machine gunner? Why didn't you explain the fields of fire? You're in charge. Same thing with Stoner. Stoner has his freaking

• 1:46:51Jocko Willink?

  medic doing something that he shouldn't be doing. Well, do I say, oh, medic, come and talk to me? No. Hey, Seth, why is your medic doing this right now? Why did they take that action? So I, I definitely, you know, there's, things can get a little bit, I mean, this can happen in any organization, but certainly in the SEAL teams, the SEAL teams are tactically run by our enlisted leadership. Our, our platoon chiefs run the platoon. Our, our LPOs run the platoon. Our senior enlisted SEAs inside of a troop, run the troop. They're, they're, they're

• 1:47:33Jocko Willink?

  gonna make things happen. And it's pretty easy for an officer to start thinking, well, you know, the chief made that call. Maybe it's the chief's fault. It's pretty easy for that to happen. And I had many of these conversations when I was running training, when I was running trade at. Many of these conversations, you know, the, the OIC would tell me, well, you know, the platoon chief wanted to do this. So that's why we did it. Oh, so it's the platoon chief. You want to go talk to the platoon chief? It's the platoon chief's fault? It's the platoon chief overall in charge? And I know what I, when I used to teach that junior officer training course, I would say, you know, who's going to court martial?

• 1:48:13Jocko Willink?

  On that decision, it's not the platoon chief because it's your freaking platoon. You're the one that's going to answer. So making sure that people understand that when you're in charge, it's your decision. No matter who makes that decision inside the platoon, or inside the team, or inside the organization, or inside the company, or inside the department. When you're in charge of that department, when you're in charge of that division, that's your call. And you're going to have to own it. And that understanding for you, for Seth, that's what allowed there to be leeway.

• 1:48:49Jocko Willink?

  That's what happens. That's decentralized command. You have to have trust in order to get there. I have to make sure that people understand the why.

• 1:48:59Jocko Willink?

  And that's what allows us to handle those types of situations. Now, we talk about our rules of engagement, but the enemy,

• 1:49:11Jocko Willink?

  they understood our rules of engagement as well. And they certainly adapted. Because they have no rules of engagement. Which is a huge advantage for them. They don't care about civilian casualties. They don't care about destroying the infrastructure. They don't care if they have blue on blues. They literally don't. In fact, they have suicide bombers. They don't care about any of that. So they understood our rules of engagement, and they did their best to utilize our rules of engagement against us. It's tough to deal with.

• 1:49:42Leif Babin?

  It was horrible to deal with. And I think that's, you know, they were, they were, they came up with the most diabolical way they could to try to kill us, you know, in any way that they could. And they were incredibly adaptive, very innovative, always looking like probe for weaknesses and take advantage of where they saw weaknesses. You know, this is, they were hiding amongst the civilian populace. So you've got, you've got an individual out there, they're wearing a dishdasha, and which is kind of the Arabic robe, and you might have a kaffiyah wrapped around their face, which is like the Arabic headdress. They're shooting at us with, you know, a hundred round belt of PKC machine gun,

• 1:50:25Leif Babin?

  uh, which is a Russian belt fed machine gun. And then, and then they, you know, they dropped that weapon and now they're walking on the street as a civilian. So it was, um, they would constantly try to prey upon the, the mercies and the moral high ground and the rules of engagement of, uh, of our, our US forces as well. So, um, I remember my first deployment, when there was a, a VBID or a, a car bomb that was driven into a US convoy and, and they used an elderly man to do that. And the, the turret gunner was, did, you know, was, was reluctant to engage this elderly man who was driving up. He thought maybe it was just a problem. Next thing you know, maybe he just didn't know what was going on. Uh, next thing you know, he blows himself up and kills a bunch of Americans. So they

• 1:51:09Leif Babin?

  would always do that kind of stuff. They'd use spotters who weren't armed. You know, they'd send them out there, look, looking for, uh, uh, in, in enemy territory. You'd have, have somebody who's looking around the corner of, of the building. Um, and you know that he's talking to his buddy with an RPG that's standing probably six feet to his, his, his right behind the, behind the corner of, of the, uh, of the building, but you can't actually see that guy. So, so we're not gonna, we're not gonna engage that, the, the spotter, um, who, who's not armed. But we know that, that we could, you know, we could use the escalation of force to say, warn him to either get away, utilize a warning shot, um, in, in order to do that. And, uh, but it was, it was, they would, they would have the, I mean, the, the guys lined up and ready to go. And sometimes when

• 1:51:54Leif Babin?

  we had multiple sniper overwatch positions, we got to see that where they're, they're gonna attack one overwatch position. And I would see, we're in another overwatch position. We could see it from a different angle. They didn't realize that we were in one position. They knew where the other position was. And we'd see the behind the scenes there as the spotters actually looking out in the street and he's talking to a guy. There's, there's two, there's two insurgents with, with, uh, belt fed machine guns and, and, and, uh, uh, two more with RPG rockets that are ready to launch. And you could, you could witness that and see it happening.

• 1:52:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And by the way, that's hostile intent.

• 1:52:27Leif Babin?

  Total hostile intent.

• 1:52:27Jocko Willink?

  That, that spotters getting killed. You know, you, you, that's, that's, we killed spotters that were doing exactly that. And I remember the first time, cause we, and when we'll get into this, but. We had to send up shooter statements of who is engaged and why are they engaged? And I remember the, uh, the siege of Sodif asking about, hey, this is an unarmed person. Uh, that's just observing and giving directions. And I said, no, they're coordinating. I remember, I remember writing this, this email up the chain of command. When a person is, you know, giving, passing, uh, coordinating instructions to active military aged males that are armed, they are not just gathering intelligence. They are coordinating attacks and they are going to die.

• 1:53:12Jocko Willink?

  And I got the reply back, Roger, because it was absolutely warranted. That's, that's what the enemy was doing. They were, those spotters were out there coordinating attacks. And in order to disrupt those attacks, they needed to die. And so that was a, that's the way, that's the way we had to operate. And it wasn't, but just real quick, it wasn't like, it wasn't like, uh, someone was out bird watching. You, you wouldn't see someone, it didn't look casual. Like people might think, oh, you might get mixed up or how do you know? It's obvious. It's so obvious. They're, they're, they're, it's hostile intent, hostile act. You can see it.

• 1:53:55Jocko Willink?

  Any seven-year-old kid could watch and go, oh, that person's doing something bad. And then you take a trained military person that's been observing this enemy TTP for the last one month, two months, three months, they're going to get it every time. Yeah. And, and to, to paint the picture of what that looks like, you're patrolling down the street. All of a sudden you just, I would never observe like the civilians leaving. All of a sudden it would just click in my mind like, hey, they're, they're gone. As we said before, all of a sudden the street's empty. And then you gotta, then you got somebody around the corner who's like, you know, the peeking around the corner and, and looking and watching you. And you, you know, you're about to eat an RPG rocket or have some a hundred rounds of, you know, machine gun burst come, come in your direction any, any moment.

• 1:54:38Jocko Willink?

  And, uh, it was obvious that that was hostile. We have every justification for reasonable certainty of hostile intent.

• 1:54:44Leif Babin?

  In Overwatch positions, though, they often use, they would send out like a teenage kid. And this was something where they, they would send out a teenage kid to like knock on the doors, knock on the gates, because sometimes they would know we were in there somewhere, you know, some enemy fighters got shot and killed, they're shooting back, but they're not exactly sure where we are. But they kind of narrowed it down to a group of buildings on this block. And they send a 12, 13-year-old kid who's not unarmed, like knocking on the gates. Um, and you know exactly what they're doing and, and you know, they're, they're trying to figure out where you are. But in that case, we, nobody, we weren't gonna just kill some kid. Uh, what we did was, we either ignore them, uh, not answer the gate, or in some cases,

• 1:55:29Leif Babin?

  uh, we had a, we'd have the interpreter go out there covering for them with like the man of the house, talk to him briefly, uh, or in some cases, we detained the, the, uh, the, the kid. Obviously, they're gonna know exactly where we were, you know, at that point. But, um, but we didn't, we didn't engage that kid. We, we knew that they were, that kid was being used as, as probably through no fault of his own. And they're, they're taking and putting this teenager at risk, um, you know, to, to try to find out where we were so they could kill us and, and try to prey upon, you know, our mercies. Uh, but we, we follow the rules of engagement in that regard and we would, um, those kids didn't get engaged. We knew that we were in a position that we were about to, about to get attacked

• 1:56:13Leif Babin?

  and we would, uh, defend that position, but we would sometimes detain that kid, uh, or, or sometimes just ignore him, or sometimes have the, you know, the, the senior family member talk to him and, um, and, and try to, try to dissuade them in some way. But you, you knew that attack was coming, um, and it was something that we just had to be, had to be prepared for. Um, but we follow the rules of engagement. Yeah, and...

• 1:56:35Jocko Willink?

  There's and I remember explaining this, there's nothing that Al Qaeda wants more than for us to kill a kid. There's nothing that they want more for their propaganda than for us to kill a woman, us to kill a kid, us to kill an Imam, us to kill a doctor. That's what they want. They couldn't get make a doctor walk out there and do that. They couldn't make an Imam do that, but they could, they could force a 12 year old or 13 year old kid to walk down the street knocking on all the doors. They were hoping and praying that we would shoot them. And then they have their big propaganda victory. So why are we making, how can we make these decisions? It's because we're thinking about what's

• 1:57:17Jocko Willink?

  going on. We're thinking from a strategic perspective. We also know, like you said, I mean, uh, the, the enemy doesn't know right now, they're gonna know in about 20 minutes. They're gonna figure it out. So it's not like you're gonna, it's not like you're taking some tactical, some huge tactical loss where you're gonna be in a extremely compromised position now that you've been compromised by this kid. That's not happening. So there's no value. There's no value at all. And, and again, thinking about the strategic value of letting that kid live is infinitely more important than the tactical value of not, them not knowing we're there for another 10 minutes. But as a matter of fact, you engage the kids and now they know exactly where you are. So it was a lose lose situation.

• 1:58:01Leif Babin?

  No tactical advantage from doing that whatsoever. And, uh, and that's exactly what they want us to do a hundred percent. And we knew that. Um, and, and we weren't gonna do that. But more importantly, like that's not something anybody wants to carry on their conscience. Obviously, the, the immorality of that, that's, that's just not who the, the guys that we served with are. And, uh, and so that, that's not something that, that we, we would have done and, and didn't do. Uh, because, um, again, my, my job as, as, as, as the platoon commander out there was to make sure that people weren't doing something that was gonna, was illegal, immoral, unethical, or get them in trouble, or, or something that they would carry on their conscience for the rest of their lives. So, uh, that's something that I took very seriously that, and, and it's, it's, uh, even though our

• 1:58:46Leif Babin?

  enemies tried to prey upon that, that's something that we were not gonna give them.

• 1:58:50Jocko Willink?

  Also thinking about the fact that they, the enemy, literally used human shields and, and utilized these, like these 12 year olds that we're talking about walking solo down the street.

• 1:59:05Jocko Willink?

  The enemy also literally used, and it literally gets used all the time, but actually used children as human shields.

• 1:59:16Leif Babin?

  Yeah, we saw that a number of times and we're talking like a insurgent fighter carrying an RPG rocket over their shoulder who's holding a child, you know, a little 10-year-old girl in front of him as a human shield. And again, that's, they want us to shoot them. They, they want us to shoot them so they can use that as, as propaganda. As I said, I feel like these insurgents were as evil as any enemy that, that America's ever faced in our long military history. Uh, and it's because of stuff like that. It's just, just horrible, horrible stuff. What was awesome about that though, is that, you know, if you're a, if you're a, you know, a, a, a army private or a marine private man in a machine gun, a 50 cal, and you engage

• 2:00:00Leif Babin?

  in a surgeon like that, you're very likely to hit the, the, uh, you know, the big human shield, the 10-year-old girl that's being used as a human shield. Our SEAL snipers were able to regularly engage insurgents, headshot on those insurgents, eliminate the threat without actually injuring the kids. And they did that a number of times. And it was, uh, something that I know the army and marines are very appreciative of. And I was, I was impressed with the skill and discipline of our SEAL snipers who were scrutinizing those shots and able to, able to save the lives of kids that these evil insurgents are utilizing as human shields, um, as they're running across the street, you know, uh, and, and just, you know, do no father on this kid is just being dragged

• 2:00:44Leif Babin?

  along, you know, in horror, um, knowing that they're probably going to get shot and killed. And a SEAL sniper would, would be able to eliminate the insurgent and that kid's able to go run home to their family and not be killed.

• 2:00:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, props and, and salute to the, the snipers and the NSW, which is the, the Naval Special Warfare Sniper School. And just the training that they got, those guys got put through and how just outstanding they were and how, how, how focused they were on that craft to be able to execute shots like that is just awesome. So we had, I also want to point out that although there was 400,000 civilians there and although there was civilians, you know, in the populace, there was also an incredible amount of legitimate targets and.

• 2:01:34Jocko Willink?

  When we arrived, as you pointed out, the enemy wasn't used to Americans being in these neighborhoods. They weren't used to it at all. They weren't used to Americans being concealed in Overwatch positions. They weren't used to Americans being able to take accurate, long-range shots down long-axis roads. It was a target-rich environment. And the enemy killed in action, the numbers of enemy killed in action were big, were high, right out of the gate. And what that did is, immediately, we got a lot of eyes on what we were doing. A lot of examination, a lot of inspection, and even some scrutiny in the beginning, which is fine.

• 2:02:20Jocko Willink?

  We got a lot of scrutiny on what we were doing because the number of enemy killed so quickly hadn't been... that we really hadn't had that, that those high numbers since Vietnam. Since Vietnam, that there was just killing going on on a daily basis, enemy being killed, reports coming up. So the chain of command dug in and, and looked at what we were doing. They started to, they started to say, "Hey, what's going on?" And our attitude was, "Come and see." That's, that's just, and, and this is something that I actually learned from the Army, was, "Come and investigate, come and, come and look at what we're doing, come and see what we're doing, come on out here."

• 2:03:03Jocko Willink?

  You want to send the, you know, whoever from the chain of command, you want to send the ops officer, you want to send the CMC, you want to send anybody that you want to come out, send, come out, you want to send out our JAG? Send them on out, we'll bring them out, so they can actually see what's going on. And, and those, then they did. So they come out, this is exactly what we're doing. And then they put some things on us that were, seemed a little bit rigid, but if you thought about them, they actually made sense, things like, like sworn shooter statements.

• 2:03:32Leif Babin?

  Yeah, and that was something that I I got frustrated with initially because we were getting some scrutiny. Who, Leif got frustrated? Angry Leif. Well, and when you think about it from my perspective, if if I know that my snipers are out there, as I just said, that using incredible judgment, incredible discipline, minimizing collateral damage to the to as much as they possibly can in every situation, and yet protecting, you know, this civilian and a typical sniper overwatch, you might have, it's it's a city, you might have three or 400 people walk in front of your cyberscope, and they're engaging an enemy fighter who's carrying an AK-47 and another guy with an RPG rocket that's clearly either attacking us or maneuvering to attack a nearby friendly patrol.

• 2:04:17Leif Babin?

  And so we would, we would write that up, and and in in these sworn shooter statements, and the JAG, the military lawyer at at the Siege of Sot of headquarters, which was was two levels up the chain of command for us, and they were like 80 miles away to the north, where it was, so they're not with us, they don't know what's going on there. They would sometimes ask some questions, and I got very defensive about that. And just an example, you might, I might have a a statement that said, you know, two military aged males carrying AK-47s were engaged, resulting in two enemy killed in action. And so the the JAG would would ask some questions of like, hey, why did you engage these guys?

• 2:05:00Leif Babin?

  It's like, well, they're carrying AKs, they were attacking people, obviously. But in under the rules, there's no banks in Iraq. So each of each of the household was allowed to have one weapon per, I think the senior male per household. So one weapon per senior male per household, and that's their their home defense, because they have all their valuables under their bed, or, you know, tucked in a corner somewhere, or any money that they had, there's no no banks again. So so the JAG is simply saying, well, how do you know that these weren't people just out for a stroll? And so I got real defensive to say, well, how how dare you question my guys, you're trying to send them to prison for doing our job? Was my initial reaction. And then as I talked to Jocko, Jocko was like, yeah.

• 2:05:44Leif Babin?

  They're not here with us right now. They're 80 miles away, they're not on the ground with us, not on the battlefield. So how are they supposed to actually know what's going on? There's a, it's a legitimate question. If they're allowed to have an AK-47, how do you know it's not somebody? So I realized that I needed to explain to the JAG why we were doing that with those shooter statements. And, uh, and so, um, and so what, what I did was simply realize, okay, if I'm a JAG and I'm sitting in sandbagged headquarters and I've never been on a combat operation and I don't really actually know what's going on, then I actually need to explain it. So I, I, we, we, we made sure that those shooter statements captured what actually happened, which was, you know, with a 22 power magnification night force scope from 250

• 2:06:27Leif Babin?

  yards, a SEAL sniper observed two military age males carrying AK-47s in, in apparent attack in accordance with known enemy tactics, techniques and procedures on a nearby friendly US Marine and Iraqi patrol, determine a reasonable certainty of hostile intent and engage with two rounds, two rounds of 300 wind mag resulting in two enemy killed in action. Cause that's actually what happened. But as we described that to the JAG, the JAG was like, awesome, good shot, awesome. Keep doing, doing what you're doing. Uh, but that scrutiny was real and, and it certainly, we felt the pressure of that, um, initially. And, uh, and, and as we helped the, the JAGs see why we're making decisions we're making

• 2:07:10Leif Babin?

  and explain to them the situation that was going on. Um, those, the question scrutiny, they, they understood what we were doing, they understood why we're doing it. They just, they simply wanted to make sure that we were following the rules of engagement. And, uh, and, and so you helped me realize that, that they were actually there to help us, not our enemy trying to put us in prison, you know, for outdoing our job. They're actually trying to help us to make sure we're, we're following the rules of engagement. And that's what we did by explaining that to them, um, and by making sure that those shooter statements actually described what the situation was and why it happened.

• 2:07:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and them not being there, it seemed unnecessary at first because for us on the ground, we knew that if a civilian was killed, the, the. Civilian populace was gonna go wild, the government officials were gonna know and we immediately send that up to chain of command. We knew, we had Iraqi soldiers with us. We had Iraqi soldiers with us on every, almost every single, 98% of the operations we did, we had Iraqis, probably more. But we had Iraqi soldiers with us, they're not gonna just watch as civilian Iraqis are getting killed. We had Iraqi interpreters, as you mentioned, that are out there, they're watching us take shots. We had, you know, and some of them were Jordan, some of them were Lebanese, but they saw who we were killing.

• 2:08:26Jocko Willink?

  We had conventional forces that are out there every single day, interacting with the local populace, trying to build relationships. They're, they're trying to win the hearts and minds and now all of a sudden we're just going out and shooting civilians. Like it was insane for us to think that that could be happening.

• 2:08:40Jocko Willink?

  And like killing a civilian or an unarmed person was really just totally unacceptable on all fronts. The Iraqi army, the Iraqi Ramadi government, the US army, the Marine Corps, our guys. And so when you're, when you have all that and someone goes, hey, we need to know, we need to know why you killed this person. Like, what are you talking about? So I was like, okay, we need to just take a step back. Why are they asking those questions? Well, it's because they're not here. And that's why that attitude of come and investigate, come with us, come down and see what we're doing. And I learned this from the army, I learned this from the first of 506, they had some, they had some incident happen. And they were like, hey, come and, come and look at what happened. Do you want to know what happened? Come and look. And raise your hand and say, come and investigate.

• 2:09:26Jocko Willink?

  If you think we're doing something wrong, or if we think we did something wrong, raise your hand and say, hey, come and investigate this. We need a second set of eyes. And that is a totally positive things, totally positive thing. And we did that and we got investigated and it was like, oh, here's the outcome. Here's, here's what you did, here's why you did it, you followed the rules of engagement, here's what was uncovered. Okay, cool. There were, so, so.

• 2:09:51Jocko Willink?

  If you're operating within the ROE, which is what we stuck to, and you can articulate that, and you do articulate that properly, and the investigation shows, yeah, you followed the ROE, you engaged the target as you should, you have nothing to hide. You have, you have, you only say, this is what's happening. So, it was actually great. And I look back now, I'm so happy that we did those shooter statements. I'm so happy that when we got investigated, we got investigated, because it's like, yep, this is what we did, this is why we did it. And, the other thing is,

• 2:10:26Jocko Willink?

  you know, clearly, if you're doing things, and you're not doing the right things, you're going to jail. Like, you're going, and you're getting shut down, you're going to jail, that's what's gonna happen. But when you, if you, and if you cover it up, it's gonna get even worse. It's gonna, you know, learning from that event, with, in 2005, thank God I learned that event. Look, I'm not saying I would've been doing nefarious things, but it made it very easy for me to explain to you, and your guys, and Seth's guys, hey, if you try and cover something up, you're gonna get burned. There's no such thing as a cover-up, doesn't work.

• 2:11:05Leif Babin?

  It doesn't work, and there was, there was, there was no way that you were gonna actually hide, hide that. I mean, as we said, for all the reasons, you know, we have this huge civilian populace, you have embedded reporters that are out of operations, you have Iraqi soldiers that were with you, for all the reasons that you said. It was unacceptable to go out there and kill civilians. We're trying to protect the civilians, we're trying to actually build the relationship and secure them, so that ultimately, we can win in this counterincursion fight. And, you know, that's something that you taught me, the big cover-up is always wrong. It's always wrong, I remember that statement. And, you know, one of the biggest lessons that we brought back, to help young leaders, after that time, in Ramadi, to pass on to the next generation of SEALs,

• 2:11:49Leif Babin?

  as, as you were running training, and I was running training, to say, hey, this temptation to like, you think taking care of your people, means that like, you're gonna have their, you, you, you let them know you have their back no matter what, then that's totally wrong. The worst thing that you can ever do, is help, is, is, the worst thing you can ever do as a leader, is let your people know, or even think, that you're gonna have their back no matter what. Because we made it absolutely clear that, look, if you can articulate a reasonable certainty of hostile intent, we got your back all day long. If you can't do that, then, then I don't have your back. And that's why we gotta follow the rules of engagement. This is why this is

• 2:12:32Leif Babin?

  Blackwater, it's why we have to follow the rules of engagement. And the cover-up stuff, you know, the, the idea that like, so, i- it's, it's a temptation of like, hey, I don't want an investigation if, you know, if this thing happened, or if that thing happened, I don't want an investigation on us. Hey, we'll just, you know, we'll just, we'll just, uh, like, like the, the, the example that you used. Hey, we'll fire the weapon at the wall, drop the weapon on the guy and say, hey, this is, you know, this is totally good to go. And it's not. And instead, if, if, instead, what you have to do is say, hey, we shot a civilian, you know, this is why we made that decision. Here's why, uh, we had a reasonable certainty of hostile intent. You're gonna get an investigation. There's gonna be an investigating officer, you're gonna, you're gonna, uh, uh, file statements and, and, and a JAG. And actually,

• 2:13:16Leif Babin?

  this is, uh, this is what we're going to do in order to protect us, to show everybody that, that this is actually, um, that, that this was done in, in the correct manner, in a course of the rules of engagement. And it was a very interesting way of looking at those investigations. Cause I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I never wanted to be investigated. I want to protect my people and I wanted to have their back as, as a leader, you know, that's, that's where you go. And you helped me see that, no, come and investigate, come and investigate, look at this. And we had a situation happen where, uh, you know, we had a, uh, an individual, we were sitting in a sniper overwatch position. We had an individual come in the gate, we'd zip tied the gate. And so we went in there at nighttime,

• 2:13:59Leif Babin?

  off the boats from the river. So this was a, a big compound, there was, there was, uh, there was some, some mobile buildings in this compound. And the buildings had been, um, vacated. So they had been lived in, it looks like, not too long ago, but there was, there was no one in them at the time, we were occupying them. So we had multiple overwatches. We'd zip tied the gates. And we thought we had zip tied the entire gate. We didn't realize that there was a walk-in gate. We just zip tied the vehicle gate, the larger gate that opened. There was a walk-in gate. So we had, the sun had come up, we were observing, this was ahead of a big operation that was gonna happen with the Marine Corps in a very bad area of Ramadi where they couldn't even get to us without some massive clearance operations, dig the IEDs out of the road.

• 2:14:43Leif Babin?

  And the boat certainly couldn't get out there in the daytime as well because they had gotten shot off the river. But, so the sun comes up, we engage some targets, they're shooting at us, we knew that the insurgents knew where our position was. And as all of a sudden, I hear one of my cybers yell, "Hey, someone's in the compound." There was, an individual had opened a walk-in gate that we had not seen at nighttime to zip tie. They'd opened a walk-in gate and pushed, so it's a military-age male pushing a wheelbarrow full of heavy equipment. And it clearly was heavy, he's pushing it up against, he pushes it right up against the building.

• 2:15:26Leif Babin?

  And the SEAL sniper that was observing this comes off his sniper rifle, grabs his M4 rifle and engages this individual. Because he has a reasonable certainty of hostile intent that this is a guy who's planning an IED up next against the building.

• 2:15:41Jocko Willink?

  Which, just real quick, that's absolute executed tactic, technique and procedure by the enemy. The enemy at this juncture, we had known before we were there and while we were there, if there was snipers in an overwatch position, they would, the enemy would, put IEDs outside that building. So when the sniper team went to leave, they would get IEDs clacked off on them. And in fact, within days of this operation that you're talking about, the Marine Corps had gotten blown up on Exfil. I think they had two killed and like three wounded.

• 2:16:24Jocko Willink?

  Like, I mean, that happened, matter of fact, I briefed that. I briefed that.

• 2:16:30Jocko Willink?

  As one of the points of, hey, we need to be watching out for this. This is what they're doing now. So, all that's in this particular sniper's head. He sees someone putting a wheelbarrow up against the building that you're in. He's probably getting ready to clack off an ID. So, yeah, he made the decision, took the shot.

• 2:16:48Leif Babin?

  And he makes a split second decision. He literally has like seconds as the gate opens, this guy trucks his wheelbarrow in. And this had been a guy who was, he had been observing our position. He'd been talking to a group of people and pointing in our direction. Um, it was a guy that we'd been watching and again, we'd been shot at. Uh, so they, we knew they, they knew our position. So, he, he drops, he, he, he brings the wheelbarrow right up next to the building and, and the sniper engages him. We go out there and, uh, and as our EOD bomb technician is looking, uh, at, at, looking at this wheelbarrow. Uh, I mean, this wheelbarrow is full of like heavy equipment. There's like, there was like a sandbag,

• 2:17:30Leif Babin?

  uh, or like burlap sack filled with piping material with wires coming out of it. And, and, uh, and as he's looking at that, it's, it's not an ID. We can't, there's no explosive there. It looks extremely shady, uh, you know, from, from every, every, uh, angle. And yet as he's actually looking at it and he's meticulously, you know, looking at it, it's, it's, it ends up not being an ID. So, we have, uh, I, I don't know what that individual was doing. I'm pretty dang sure that he was probing us. Um, and, uh, and that if, even if that wasn't ID, he was gonna, maybe he was, maybe the insurgents had said, go see how close you can get. Take this wheelbarrow and cause the next time it was going to be an ID to see if that was a viable tactic.

• 2:18:12Leif Babin?

  I don't know. I don't know if we'll ever know. All we know is now we have, uh, we have a individual who is wounded. Uh, and what we thought was an ID, isn't an ID. And so what we did was bring that guy inside. And our SEAL corpsman, who's got some incredible life saving skills, goes to work on that guy, does everything he can to try to save that individual. Um, in accordance with the rules of engagement.

• 2:18:36Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

• 2:18:38Leif Babin?

  And then the law of armed conflict. So, this is what we have to do as, uh, As a, you know, in accordance with all that and so, and it was the right thing to do. So the SEAL Corps is expending our life-saving medical equipment to try to save this guy's life and did everything he could and just because of the gravity of his wounds, we were not able to save him. But we called that into the Marine Corps and so we actually had two different investigations because of that. It was through our own Special Operations Command and we had a Marine investigation that was conducted. We sat down with the JAGs, we talked about it after that operation was concluded and

• 2:19:23Leif Babin?

  we brought that individual back, we brought and delivered him to the Marine Corps so that his body can be recovered and given back to his family and reparations made in, you know, in every way that they could make them. And those two investigations both cleared us to show that the SEAL sniper had acted in accordance with the rules of engagement. He had a reasonable certainty of hostile intent. As you said, those Marines had just experienced something very similar to that where a bomb was planted right next to their building and killed a couple Marines and wounded several others. So it was, it was, it was an unfortunate and horrible situation that happened, but we did everything we could to try to save that guy. And this is the realities of war, that even when you try to minimize collateral damage,

• 2:20:07Leif Babin?

  there are things like that that happen. And when it does happen, you don't try to cover it up or try to make it sound like something it wasn't or plant a weapon on the guy or pretend like it didn't happen because everyone would have known about it. Everyone would have known about that. What you do is, is, is take the investigation, come investigate, see what happened. This is why this decision was made in accordance with the rules of engagement. We required a bunch of interviews, it required sworn statements and ultimately we were cleared as a result of that, that it was a, it was, it was a shot that was taken in accordance with the rules of engagement because there was a reasonable certainty of hostile intent in that situation.

• 2:20:47Jocko Willink?

  So, young leaders, old leaders, I don't care if you're, that story right there is just so important for people to understand. It's so important, especially military, law enforcement. That story right there is so important for you to understand. The move is, this is what happened, come investigate. That's the move. Like you just said, to say, okay, hey, let's plant some explosives on, hey, breacher, give us some of your breaching charges and we'll make it look like he had explosives. Give him a weapon, put an old AK in his wheelbarrow, any of those things, then we won't get, if you make that move,

• 2:21:31Jocko Willink?

  you are going to get busted and rightfully so. You're, it's gonna get found out. They're gonna go, oh, he had explosives, oh, this is American explosives, oh, this is, this serial number goes back to your task unit, so this is you. Or the weapon, oh, the guy up the street said this weapon was taken from his house by you four days earlier, you're getting busted. Or whatever, you are not, or somebody in the platoon, or somebody in the Marine Corps is gonna say, I saw that guy get shot. And then I saw those guys, you know, or somebody with a cellphone was sitting there recording, or with a camera, any of these things, that's what's gonna happen. And you're screwing yourself, and you're screwing your guys over by trying to cover this up and by lying about it.

• 2:22:14Jocko Willink?

  So, number two, don't do that. I'm saying number two, because number one has to have already taken place. And number one is, you make sure that your troops know that if you do something that is immoral, unethical, or illegal, you will not have their back.

• 2:22:35Jocko Willink?

  Hey, if they do something that is, that is within rules of engagement, if they're doing the right thing for the right reasons, not only do you have their back, you will die for them, that's what the SEAL Teams is. You, I will die for you, you're my brother.

• 2:22:53Jocko Willink?

  But if you do something that's illegal, immoral, or unethical, I don't have your back anymore. And you know what I used to tell guys? There's nothing I can do for you. There's nothing I can do for you. You, oh, you like me because I'm gonna, I'm gonna help you out and I'm helping you with your getting to the right schools. And I'm helping you with your evaluations and I'm helping you with your career. And you did something stupid over the weekend and we're gonna bring it up the chain of command. We're gonna get it taken care of. I'm helping you. You do something that's immoral, illegal, unethical, I can't help you. I remember that actually used to scare guys a little bit because I had a lot, I had a lot of clout. If you did some dumb shit, you did some stupid stuff, you got into, you got into some little incident out there. I'm gonna get it taken care of. I am. I am.

• 2:23:38Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna take care of you. You get in some trouble, you make a mistake, you do something that you shouldn't have done. You stepped outside the box a little bit. Okay, there's gonna be some price to pay, but we're gonna get it squared away. But if you do something that's immoral, that's illegal, that's unethical, I'm not gonna be able to help you. And I'm not gonna help you. So that's step one. And actually, the way Admiral McRaven was talking about like there's red lines. You go outside these red lines, there's nothing I can do for you. There's nothing I can do for you anymore. You're on your own. You need to know that. Where guys, where leaders slip up is they don't want to say that. They don't want to say that because it's kind of sound like, I mean, even, even, even sitting here in this room

• 2:24:20Jocko Willink?

  with you, my brother, Leif Babin, saying like, hey, I got your back to a point, doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel right. It's like, you'd be like, what do you mean you got my back to a point? Hey, the, here's the, here's, here's how this comes full circle. The way that I have your back a hundred percent is by making sure that you know what the rules are and what lines you cannot cross. And if you cross them, you're on your own.

• 2:24:48Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're talking about. This is the crux of what we're talking about. And you as a leader have got to say that. You have a leader, as a leader, that's step number one. To make sure that the team realizes that there's lines that if they cross, you will not have their back because they're doing something that they shouldn't be doing. And the honor of our country and the honor of the teams trumps your stupidity. Or your nefarious behavior. And I don't got you anymore. That's where leaders mess up. They don't, they don't clarify that. And that crushes them.

• 2:25:32Jocko Willink?

  I always felt comfortable because I know that you guys do that. And that's, you know, like, whatever it is, me, you know. You know, you know, there's, you know, there's lines. Everybody knows there's lines with me. You know not to cross them. You know there's certain things, if you do it, you're fucked. I will, I will destroy you. I will, I will hate you. You know, if you do something that gets our platoon in some situation where we don't go to war, I'm going to hate you for forever. And I'm probably going to try and kill you.

• 2:26:11Jocko Willink?

  Within the rules of engagement. Within the rules of engagement. But, but you know what I'm saying? It's like, listen, everyone understood me in the fact that the most important thing to me was we have a job to do. And we are going to do this job. And look, part of doing this job is we take care of our troops. How do we take care of our troops? We make sure that they understand what the rules of engagement are. They understand if they cross those rules of engagement, there, there's nothing I can do for them. There's nothing you can do for them. There's nothing anyone can do for them. They're on their own.

• 2:26:40Leif Babin?

  I think what's so powerful for me for that Jocko is it was, as I was saying earlier, like that, it just crystallized on my mind, like this is black and white. And I remember you saying, you know, that that's what, that's what good leadership actually is. That's what good leadership actually is. You're screwing me over if, if I think, hey, I can just get away with whatever I want. Jocko's got my back. We're going to cover it up. You're actually setting me up for failure.

• 2:27:06Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely.

• 2:27:07Leif Babin?

  And disaster for me, for the platoon, for the, our mission, for everything. And I think you, you just crystallized my mind, like that is, no, that's, that's what you do as a leader. That's what you do. That's what good leadership looks like, so that I could execute with 100% confidence. You know, and I remember that the, you telling us, when we're talking about Wilson engagement, we said it was black and white. The words that you used were, because I remember coming up in the Naval Academy, you know, I would be told things like, well, you know, you gotta do the right thing, because it's the right thing to do. And when you're on the battlefield, the right thing can, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of hard to determine sometimes. When you're fighting against an evil enemy, and I remember what you would

• 2:27:47Leif Babin?

  say was, you can't do what you think is right. You have to do what's legal. And so it made it totally crystal clear in my mind. And for us in Task Unit Bruiser out there of like, okay, what is legally, what do we have to do in this situation? So we, we're gonna, we're gonna do the thing that is legal and moral and ethical. So we're gonna do what's right and legal. That's, that makes it clear in my mind. And it, it helps me understand the decisions I have to make. Not only me, but for everybody else in the platoon, for those in Delta Platoon, for all of Task Unit Bruiser. And then you taught that to the next generation of SEAL leaders. I remember you giving that brief every time you came in, you know, for the, the junior officer training course, a leadership program that I was running,

• 2:28:30Leif Babin?

  to all of the, the SEALs that you trained through three years of training, you know, to pass these lessons on of like, that is your job as a leader.

• 2:28:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:39Leif Babin?

  Is to make sure that your people are following the rules, are not doing stupid shit that's gonna, that's going to. You know, get them sent to prison for the rest of their lives, impact our mission and cause strategic damage to our mission or tarnish the legacy and heritage of the SEAL teams. And that was something that you you crystallize in my mind and then I went going forward knowing I knew exactly what I needed to do as a leader in order to to maintain that standard. And it was very black and white.

• 2:29:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you know, I've been talking a lot lately about the mob mentality that the that the team has, any team, you know, company, whatever, they've got this mob mentality working and that mob will start to do things as a mob. And you, as a leader, can't be in the mob. You can't be in the mob because then you can't tell which direction they're going. Sometimes they're going in a great direction and you you can just sit back and you can encourage them, let them go. But when they start going in the wrong direction, you're the one that has to pull the reins. And this doesn't matter, you know, we could have a sales team that's starting to sell a bunch of stuff and they're making some good deals, but they're starting to cut margins. And if you're part of that, we're hitting records and like, yeah, we're going to sell the most we ever sold this month and you're all excited about it with the rest of the team, all of a sudden you're losing money. You can't do that. You have, you can't be inside that mob.

• 2:29:51Jocko Willink?

  You've got to be stepped out to say, hey, listen, I know we want to break records this month on our sales, but our margins are getting too low. We're not going to be profitable, we're going to lose money. The other, the opposite thing could happen too, where the team's not making good sales and they're all bummed out and they're not not being proactive and aggressive in their sales. So you can't be bummed out too. You got to say, hey, listen, we got this many days left in this month. Here's some things we're going to do to make things happen. I just talked to the boss, we're going to cut margins a little bit more so we can get improve our price point. But if you're in the mob, you can't do that. And then, and this goes back to our earlier conversation, and now we get back to combat, you have to have the moral strength to say, hey, we can't do this. Here's the red line.

• 2:30:35Jocko Willink?

  If you cross this red line, you don't have my support anymore. And as a matter of fact, you're going to get arrested and that's what's going to happen. If you don't make that clear as a leader, you're you're absolutely failing. And I think that

• 2:30:51Jocko Willink?

  With with us, everybody knew and understood this. And I think that's what was powerful. And that's why it was so appreciated by the Army and the Marine Corps. The Army and the Marine Corps had us out there on, you know, they wanted us to support every operation that they did. The reason, because we had the most squared away. Well, we, we look, I'm not going to compare, not, not the most. We had, they knew they could count on us to make the right decisions out there on the battlefield. They knew that with, with the highest percentage of certainty. They knew if we had an incident that happened like you're talking about, what would we do? We would raise our hand and say, this is what happened. Just like in the opening chapter of Extreme Ownership. That, you know, who knew about that blue on blue?

• 2:31:36Jocko Willink?

  When it happened, you know, who had figured out what it had gone down? You know who knew what had happened? One person, me. Me, I'm the one that actually said, oh, this was a blue up. No one else knew. No one else knew. And what did I do? Went back to the battalion commander and said, hey, sir, this was a blue on blue. This was, this was a blue on blue. This is what happened. I explained it to him. I actually didn't have to do that. I actually didn't have to do it. And you know what? Eventually it would have come out most likely, but, and I would have looked like a real jackass and I would have been in prison. But to say, hey, here's what happened. I know what happened and here's how it went down. Okay, got it. When you start covering stuff up, you're terrible. So the Army, the Marine Corps, they knew that they could count on us.

• 2:32:21Jocko Willink?

  They could count on us to do the right thing and they could count on us if we made some kind of a mistake. What we would do is raise our hand and say, hey, here's what happened. Please come and investigate. So we can make sure it doesn't happen again. And, and that's why they had us conducting operations until the day we left. We conducted operations that entire time. The, the, the conventional forces trusted us implicitly. With hundreds and hundreds of shots taken, hundreds and hundreds of enemy killed with precision and lethality and all the while protecting the local populace.

• 2:32:57Jocko Willink?

  And that's what you do when you understand and you lead. That's how you maintain the moral high ground. You take ownership of what you do. You take preemptive ownership. You know that you're the one that's going to be responsible.

• 2:33:15Jocko Willink?

  And then you do the right thing, you do the legal thing, you do the lawful thing. That's, that's how you can come back and hold your head high and say, we did what we're supposed to do. And that's how you can be proud of what you did.

• 2:33:34Jocko Willink?

  And you know, that's one of the things, you hear these, the news media is out there, books are out there, articles are out there. And what, what really is terrible about those things is the incredible sacrifices that were made. Incredible sacrifices that were made. And you think, you know, you think about all those soldiers and Marines in the Battle of Vermont, you think of tasking a bruiser, the sacrifices that were made and for, you know, people to say, oh, well, there's, they were killing civilians. It's, it's disgusting. It's actually disgusting.

• 2:34:12Jocko Willink?

  Speaking of, speaking of the moral low ground, like to propagate that type of information would, it just, it's sickening.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  But

• 2:34:27Jocko Willink?

  lessons can be learned and I'm glad we were able to get together because I, I know, like I said, I feel like I was ahead of the power curve just a little bit. I was ahead of that crest of the wave. I was lucky enough to have a very lucky career. I happened to go to Iraq at the right time. I happened to do a bunch of operations. I happened to work for the admiral. I happened to be a prior enlisted guy. I happened to be a freaking English major. All those things, I, I happened to have a good understanding at the right time. You happened to come work for me. You happened to be humble enough to listen to what I had to say. Seth happened to be humble enough to listen to what I had to say. The platoons happened to have the respect for you guys that to nod their head and say, yeah, this makes sense.

• 2:35:11Jocko Willink?

  So you add those things together, that's leadership.

• 2:35:16Jocko Willink?

  And it's hard. But it all boils down to that idea.

• 2:35:25Jocko Willink?

  You have to maintain the moral high ground. You have to. You have to. And you do that by taking ownership, preemptive ownership of what you do. If something goes wrong, you take ownership of that. And then, as you mentioned, you do the right thing, the legal thing, the lawful thing, the ethical thing. And then you don't have to worry about anything else.

• 2:35:52Jocko Willink?

  With that, any other comments, Leif? It's a heavy subject.

• 2:35:56Leif Babin?

  It is a heavy subject, but I could tell you that I couldn't be more proud of the incredible SEALs that I served with in Task Unit Bruiser and and how they conducted themselves on the battlefield. I mean, just what an extraordinary group of men and the honor of my lifetime to get to serve alongside them in an incredibly difficult and violent battlefield. And they went out day after day and put their lives on the line and some sacrificed their lives, like Mikey Montsor and Mark Lee and and Ryan Jobe. And I think the, just the, how they conducted themselves in the midst of that battle is something that I'll always be proud of. You know, the discipline that they used, how they followed the rules of engagement, the collateral

• 2:36:39Leif Babin?

  damage that they minimized, and the impact that they had as a result of that. And it's definitely something that I'm proud of. And we can be proud of that because because we understood the rules of engagement and we had the moral high ground and we maintained the moral high ground. And we knew we were on the right side of that conflict. And it was, it was the honor of my lifetime to serve with you in Task Unit Bruiser and be a part of them.

• 2:37:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We were not the first and we won't be the last. And there's people that are listening to this right now, they're going to be in those leadership positions. There's, there's people that are, you, you might be listening to this right now. It might be in three years, it might be in three months, it might be in 10 years. I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy, enemy for 13 years. For 13 years. But just know, just listen to what we're saying. Look, we try and teach our, our leadership lessons all the time. Cover, move, simple, prioritize and execute, decentralized command. We literally started a company to, to pass these lessons on.

• 2:37:49Jocko Willink?

  But

• 2:37:51Jocko Willink?

  if you are not thinking about these truly impactful lessons that we were, that we got to live through. We got to live through it. And, and, and you know, I said that before about combat, you go, you go through combat, you don't question on anybody. But you're, I'm, as you said, it was an honor that we actually got to do what we did.

• 2:38:16Jocko Willink?

  And the lessons that we learned, we try and teach, but this is like another area. And, and you know, sometimes I think it seems obvious. You know, it's some, it seems obvious now, but I also know. And as a matter of fact, you and I were talking about this yesterday. There's a lot of pressure on a young leader. There is a ton of pressure on a young leader. All kinds of pressures. You want to be liked, you want to get the job done, you don't want to let your guys down. You want your guys to respect you, you want to do the right thing, but at the same time, sometimes the right thing is viewed as different by different people. All those things, all those things are going on. All those things are going on.

• 2:39:00Jocko Willink?

  Let me tell you this, there's no escaping this. There's no escaping this. You have to own what happens in your team. You have to, you have ownership of that. There's no getting out of it. There's no sloughing it off on anybody else. You can't do it.

• 2:39:18Jocko Willink?

  When you, when something happens, it's yours, you own it. When your sniper takes a shot, you might as well have pulled the trigger.

• 2:39:28Jocko Willink?

  When your machine gunner lays down fire, you might as well be the person laying down fire. It's on you, it's on you.

• 2:39:36Jocko Willink?

  And if you have that attitude, you might recognize that, hey, I gotta get control of this situation.

• 2:39:45Jocko Willink?

  And if you think you can cover things up, you can't. It's always gonna come out.

• 2:39:50Jocko Willink?

  So if you're in a leadership position, do me and Leif a favor and lead.

• 2:39:58Jocko Willink?

  It's not easy.

• 2:40:01Jocko Willink?

  It's not easy, especially not easy right in that moment. That's when it's most important.

• 2:40:11Jocko Willink?

  With that,

• 2:40:14Jocko Willink?

  uh, appreciate everybody listening. What do you got? Echo, give us a freaking, uh, what do we used to call that? Rough transition?

• 2:40:21Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 2:40:21Jocko Willink?

  Give us a rough transition, man.

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  We're not transitioning out yet.

• 2:40:24Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:40:24Speaker 02

  I got some questions. Uh, so you mentioned rewind a little bit.

• 2:40:28Jocko Willink?

  Are you gonna ask Leif if you have to be in the Navy to be a SEAL?

• 2:40:33Jocko Willink?

  Leif, you haven't heard this yet. At the end of the podcast.

• 2:40:35Speaker 02

  Do we get that question?

• 2:40:36Jocko Willink?

  Uh, at the end of the podcast with Admiral McRaven,

• 2:40:41Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, who is a grown man? He's been, he's been on this podcast with me for seven years. He sat and listened to hundreds of military books and military guests. Am I built up enough? He asked Admiral McRaven, uh, do you have to be in the Navy to be an Admiral?

• 2:41:03Jocko Willink?

  Well, anyways, what do you got for us today?

• 2:41:05Speaker 02

  I guess, I mean technically he could be a Coast Guard Admiral. That's, yeah, actually he said that, right?

• 2:41:10Jocko Willink?

  He did say that.

• 2:41:11Speaker 02

  He was like, well, I guess in the Coast Guard or something like that.

• 2:41:13Jocko Willink?

  What a pro. He was a pro. I, I, I didn't, I actually, no, I wasn't pro. I didn't know, I, I thought you were leading up to a joke. I thought this was gonna go somewhere. He, he's like, do you have to be in the Navy to be an Admiral?

• 2:41:24Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:41:25Jocko Willink?

  And you, I could see like, he. Admiral flashes eyes at me for like a millisecond like is this real? And I was just like, oh no, it is. He went into it.

• 2:41:36Leif Babin?

  I agree with your perception of that because remember we had, we had an individual and in our, in our task unit that we, we called Captain Obvious. And then he wasn't.

• 2:41:48Jocko Willink?

  He got promoted.

• 2:41:49Leif Babin?

  He got promoted to Admiral Obvious. And then, and then that, that didn't sound cool enough. So we had to go to Field Marshal Obvious. So I guess you could definitely be Admiral Obvious and not be in the Navy.

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  All right. Well.

• 2:42:01Jocko Willink?

  What do you got?

• 2:42:01Speaker 02

  Clarification from that. Thank you, Jocko, for that rundown. But no clarification was I said, how do I become Admiral?

• 2:42:08Jocko Willink?

  Which is an equally dumb question.

• 2:42:10Speaker 02

  No, that's not for someone on the outside because it's like, hey, remember we, we used to discuss it afterwards. Like what's like the process? You know, like sheriff, you kind of got to run for sheriff, right?

• 2:42:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:42:20Speaker 02

  Or like governor is different than just getting promoted to go. Anyway, I didn't know that process.

• 2:42:25Jocko Willink?

  I'm being a jerk. I'm sorry.

• 2:42:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, that's true. And then through that asking process, I said, what do I have to, I have to be in the Navy? You know, like almost like confirming it. Cause I figured, but I, I don't know. But maybe you could be in the Coast Guard or Marines. I don't know. I didn't know for sure.

• 2:42:42Leif Babin?

  Marines, you're going to be a general.

• 2:42:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, what's your question for today?

• 2:42:45Speaker 02

  All right. Rewind back to the trophies, taking trophies, war trophies. Yeah.

• 2:42:49Jocko Willink?

  Damn, you've been thinking about that for the last three hours?

• 2:42:51Speaker 02

  A little bit because it kind of makes sense. What you're saying makes sense. But so why do you think? That they're like, hey, that's not, that's not permitted at all because technically.

• 2:43:02Jocko Willink?

  I'll tell you what. Go ahead.

• 2:43:04Speaker 02

  I figure anyway, and I don't know, maybe this is the answer where it feels like it could be a slippery slope, almost like a, you know, like your thing with the drinking and the big boy rules and all that stuff. Where it was like big brother rules, right? You'd think, you know, in a nutshell, it's like, eh, okay, big brother rules. Everyone's responsible here. No problems. But inch by inch, probably problems can come about. And then if you take that to like, an extent, like an extreme. You got just people drinking all the time.

• 2:43:29Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:43:29Speaker 02

  Kind of the same deal.

• 2:43:31Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Um, I, I think you're right. I think it's just a, the easiest blank, the easiest way to lead this is say no war trophies.

• 2:43:41Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't make it the right thing to do, but yeah, I could see the slippery slope being like, oh, we're gonna have guys here trying to smuggle back. What they should have said is like, hey, here's the protocol. You know, every, every, you know, company sized element is allowed to take back three uh, enemy weapons. They have to go through this process. You know, and I kinda said like, it'd be cool to have one on my wall, which it would be. But at a minimum to say like, a company sized element is allowed to take some war trophies for their freaking heritage, you know, like at SEAL Team Three right now, there should be a wall that has some RP, some Iraqi insurgent RPGs.

• 2:44:25Jocko Willink?

  They, they, they did do that in Vietnam, like there's SEALs that brought stuff home from Vietnam. I think the statute of limitations is probably clear by now, but you know, that you can go and you can see like they have some of that stuff. They'd have it in some of their, sometimes we'd have old like CHICOMs in the weapons, in the armory. So they would bring stuff home.

• 2:44:42Leif Babin?

  Moki Martin and, and other Vietnamized SEALs would, would, we, we had that displayed on the old SEAL Team One quarter deck with a B-40 rocket that had been shot at them and uh, some AK-47s and things like that, you know, uh, just weapons that they'd recovered. So there's a, there's a real heritage uh, uh, thing to it. I think the, the, the bummer about this is that for really senior people, they were able to make that happen. You know, so they're, they're like, hey, I'm gonna put that in my office. I've got this. So like they pulled strings. Uh, I, I know there's some, there's some senior people out there that have that stuff in their office, but I think for the frontline troopers that were like, hey man, it'd be really cool to have this, you know, this FN, FAL that, that we, we captured on target from this particular bad guy.

• 2:45:26Leif Babin?

  You know, D-milled and like put up, put on the wall. And we weren't allowed to do that. It was like no war trophies. Uh, whatsoever. It was like evil and bad and yet then you like walk into a command and you're like, oh, where did that come? Oh, that 2005 bad guy. Okay, Jack.

• 2:45:41Jocko Willink?

  We, we, we messed that up. So yeah, war trophies next time, you know, think about that there, leaders. Give, give the opportunity to get some, get some, put some protocols in place. Here's your war trophy.

• 2:45:54Leif Babin?

  You ever seen the movie Three Kings?

• 2:45:57Jocko Willink?

  No, I haven't seen it, but I know what it's about. They find gold, right?

• 2:45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's, yeah, there's kind of more to it. So if, and we won't go into the movie. I know you're thankful, but it's like one of those things where, hey, you know, we go on these missions and maybe there's like some downtime. And remember, oh, I remembered that one guy, he might have, and this is hypothetical, obviously. That one guy, he had a bunch of, I don't know, cool weapons. We caught him. No one grabbed the weapons. Let's go back and get those weapons for our war trophy. Kind of a thing like a, it's almost like you can kind of imagine a scenario like that where, where, you know, people might take it upon themselves to maybe or skew the priorities of their presence there in favor of war trophies in general.

• 2:46:40Jocko Willink?

  Another reason for the role.

• 2:46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. And that's kind of what the Three Kings movie was about, essentially.

• 2:46:45Jocko Willink?

  It could, it could, that's another reason. Maybe there's some, you know, thing I'm not thinking about, but for me.

• 2:46:52Speaker 02

  Because technically, think about any rule where it's like, wait a sec, there's no rule against this, but that thing can lose control real quick.

• 2:46:59Jocko Willink?

  You put a protocol in place.

• 2:47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:02Leif Babin?

  And to your point, Echo, there's always some jackass that does, you know, if you allow something like that, somebody goes and loots or does something stupid and, you know, the, the one person does something bad and prevents other people. You know, but I mean, to me, I look at it as like, hey, if your grandfather took a Luger off a German officer in, you know, in Bastogne and, you know, World War Two, that's a pretty freaking cool family heirloom, you know, to have around. Like that's something to, that thing is, or, or a flag, you know, or I mean, it's not just weapons, but it's a, there, there's, there's some neat things like that, that I think are, are worth having that preserve history.

• 2:47:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and this, when you start talking about the slippery slope, just going back to this whole conversation we just had about ethics and what you're going to do and what you're not going to do and, and literally taking care of the boys, right? Taking care of the boys. Look, if.

• 2:47:57Jocko Willink?

  JP Denell is 23 years old and he gets in a fight out in town. Guess what? I'm gonna do what I can to make sure that he doesn't get in any trouble at all and and I'm gonna take care of him. Now, is he gonna maybe get some freaking?

• 2:48:13Jocko Willink?

  Get an ass chewing? Is he absolutely? Is he gonna get some extra duty? Is he absolutely? Is he gonna be the designated driver on the next three trips that we go on? Absolutely. So there's this, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, number one, I don't wanna give the impression because it's not the right impression that I was like, oh, you know, if you cross, if you disobey any rule at any time, I'm gonna, you know, you're out. That's, that's not what we're talking about. I probably should have clarified that better. Like, hey, you're gonna, you're a young team guy. You're gonna do some dumb stuff. You're a young whatever Marine. You're gonna do some dumb stuff. I'm not gonna wreck your career over it. Right? So there is, there is that and and I'm actually probably kinda known for that.

• 2:48:55Jocko Willink?

  Like if you, hey, look, man, you do something dumb out in town or you make a mistake or you, e- even, you know, going through the house, you do something stupid, it's like, oh, I'm gonna ruin your career. No, actually, I'm gonna train you. Going back to what I said earlier. If JP Denell gets in a fight out in town, whose fault is it? It's actually my fault. I actually didn't do a good job explaining how if JP can't go on deployment with us, he's aiding Al Qaeda. Do you think JP Denell wants to hear the words, you're aiding Al Qaeda? That freaking guy would go nuts. So, so it's actually my fault. But if I didn't do a good job of making him understand that and then he ends up getting in trouble, well, I failed him, I'm not gonna fail him twice. I'm gonna say, dude.

• 2:49:40Jocko Willink?

  All right, listen, you just got your freaking, you just got your, uh, your alcohol drinking card pulled. You're not allowed to drink anymore till, you know, till we get back from deployment. You are the designated driver from now on. You are gonna do whatever, whatever little assignments to get him tightened up and make sure he doesn't get in trouble again. So that's how you take care of the boys. And then it goes into, hey, there's things that you could do that are immoral, illegal, unethical. And if you cross those lines, you're on your own. And I'm actually gonna do my best to crush you. Because I don't want you to misrepresent the teams, the nation, our country.

• 2:50:26Jocko Willink?

  So just, I wanted to get that point of clarification. Cause I don't want a bunch of my, uh, guys that work for me over the years sitting there going, what are you talking about? Cause yes, if you did something stupid, I was gonna handle it. I was no, I was, I just had a couple of conversations over the past weekend. You know, we went, had some retirement ceremonies and whatnot. And I had some great conversations with guys that were like, oh, hey, remember when you, when I did this and you, you, this is what you did to me? And basically what I did to them was punish them on, by myself, not running up the chain of command. And I had, I, for some reason, this, this is, this is an interesting statement.

• 2:51:08Jocko Willink?

  I didn't mind, if someone did something dumb, I didn't mind being the senior guy with a secret. Like the senior guy, like, okay, this happened, you did something stupid. It stops with me, you're gonna get punished. And by the way, if the, my boss calls and says, what the hell, I just found out about this. You know what I say? Oh yeah, sir. I didn't want to bother with you. Here's the punishment that I administered. Here's, you know, he's no longer allowed to drink. He's the designated driver for the next six months, like all those things. That's what I did. I'm okay with that. And my boss still might get mad, but my boss probably is gonna say, alright, Roger that, I got it. Next time you better give me a heads up in case this comes back. So being the senior man with a secret on something that you have, you have handled,

• 2:51:51Jocko Willink?

  and something that's not like a stain on the reputation of the teams, or a, or a transgression of the morals of a human. I got you. You do some dumb shit, like, you know, we, we were, I did a whole freaking, we did a whole podcast about doing dumb shit.

• 2:52:11Jocko Willink?

  And if you do some dumb shit, you work for me and you're a good dude, I'm gonna make sure you do less of it.

• 2:52:18Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you know, Leif, you did some dumb shit, right?

• 2:52:21Speaker 02

  I did plenty of dumb shit.

• 2:52:22Jocko Willink?

  You did plenty of dumb shit. Did I freaking write you up and, and, and, uh, give you a bad fit rep? No, because you just did some dumb shit and we're gonna learn from it. No big deal. Fucking Stoner? Think Stoner wasn't out doing dumb shit? Come on. This dude was captain dumb shit, right? He's getting out, out there getting after it. What are we doing? Like, hey, bro. You can't do that here. What, what, think about the repercussions. Think about what, you know, like, we think through these things. So, again, I don't, I don't want to sit here and give this impression that we're over here running, running the Boy Scouts, right? We're over here running the Boy Scouts, because we're not. We're not running the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts doesn't have to kill people for a living. We do.

• 2:53:07Jocko Willink?

  But the, the people that are gonna kill people for a living, they got a lot of testosterone in their body. You know how testosterone affects people? You know? Makes people want to fight. Makes people want to go get with girls. This is what happens. This is not like, this is the physiological stuff that goes down. So, what kind of person wants to become a frogman? I'll tell you what kind of person wants to become a frogman. He's got a high testosterone level. He wants to fight. He wants to break shit. That's what he wants to do. I actually want that guy in my platoon. And it's my responsibility to make sure he knows what to break and who to fight and who to kill. That's my responsibility. To take that frogman and keep him contained and make sure he doesn't get in trouble. That's on me.

• 2:53:53Jocko Willink?

  So, I just wanted to clarify that point.

• 2:53:57Speaker 02

  Makes sense. So, maybe, back to the trophies thing. Maybe all your forefathers, World War II, Vietnam, they took trophies, right? It wasn't a rule, whatever. And then after a while, maybe it kind of started to get out of hand. Then someone was like, hey, no trophies. See what I'm saying? Maybe they could do it and that's why the rule was made.

• 2:54:17Jocko Willink?

  There it got, I got mine.

• 2:54:19Speaker 02

  Yep. Something like that. I don't know. Hey.

• 2:54:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, and you could see where all of a sudden it turns into, you know, every single person's got their war trophy. Which honestly, I'm still good with that. Like, I think it should be like, hey, if you deploy and you're in combat arms, you get your, you can get, you can bring back one, you know, weapon. And you know what? I bet you're right too. Like I've heard some of those stories about like the Marines going on the beach and they come back out and the Navy guys would do anything to get, you know, a Japanese freaking Samurai sword or whatever, a German Luger. You know, then maybe you get into black market stuff. Like maybe it just escalates to the point where they just had to shut it down. But again, you need to make a protocol. If you make a protocol, like you're allowed to take one, you're allowed one weapon.

• 2:55:03Jocko Willink?

  It needs to be de-milled. It needs to be serialized. It needs to be assigned to you and you're going to sign for it.

• 2:55:08Leif Babin?

  Yeah. Eugene Sledge, you ever talked about that with, and with the old breed where he's like making fun of the guys that that were coming in like the, you know, after they did all the fighting in Okinawa or, and, and Pelulue. And then, and then like, oh, now you've got these, these guys that are showing up in like clean uniforms that are looking for like a, a, you know, some souvenir to take home. Uh, they obviously weren't collecting souvenirs because they were busy fighting the Japanese. So I think there's those, that those things can be controlled, right? We're not talking about just uncontrolled looting and pillaging. We're talking about following a carefully, you know, crafted rules of engagement. And when you're, when you're talking about captured weapons that were enemy property that they now forfeited.

• 2:55:51Leif Babin?

  And we had a giant armory full of them at, at, at Tasked Bruiser when we were in Ramadi.

• 2:55:57Jocko Willink?

  We should have brought them all home.

• 2:55:58Leif Babin?

  Yeah, it would have been.

• 2:55:59Jocko Willink?

  De-milled them all. That would have been so awesome.

• 2:56:00Leif Babin?

  It would have been really cool.

• 2:56:01Jocko Willink?

  De-milled, they, they welded them shut. So they can't, they can't work anymore.

• 2:56:05Leif Babin?

  Okay. Yeah, just something to put up on the wall. So you don't have to worry about it. It's not a working weapon.

• 2:56:09Jocko Willink?

  Right, right.

• 2:56:10Leif Babin?

  Um, it's, it's, uh, it would, it would have been a super cool though to have that stuff.

• 2:56:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, so sometimes I'm a little bit too much of a rule follower, you know? That's one of those situations. Uh, it's like, hey, you know, like here's a situation where I didn't follow the rules was they were hot on the photograph thing. Like you're not allowed to take pictures of operations. And I, at my first deployment, we didn't, we, we followed the rule. Like I was like, hey, here's the rule. And so no pictures. It was so, it was very limited pictures. I don't have a lot of pictures from that first deployment. Again, there was some situations where guys took pictures. I'm actually, and I'm actually thankful. But a probably a little while into our deployment, I kind of realized we better take pictures of our friends. And, uh, I'm really thankful that we did that because

• 2:57:00Jocko Willink?

  we now have pictures of our friends that aren't here anymore, you know? And that's freaking awesome. But that was a rule and it was actually a heavily enforced rule at the time because photographs were against general order number one, like you weren't allowed to take pictures. You know, uh, it actually wasn't general order number one. General order number one said you couldn't take pictures of like enemy combatants. But the NS, the naval special warfare rule at the time was like no pictures of operations, period. That's it, period. And, and so we weren't, and then very quickly in deployment, I cleared everyone out. It was like, hey, take freaking pictures.

• 2:57:40Jocko Willink?

  Cause we're, we're gonna want them. Um, and that's one of those rules, you know, you gotta, and I would, I could easily, uh, explain that to anyone in my chain of command that would have said, hey, why did you take pictures? I said, hey, we were in a serious combat situation. There was a chance someone was gonna get killed and I wanted it, us to have pictures of our freaking friends. And if you want to send me to a court martial for that, let's go. Let's go. Cause I think that's, I think is actually the ethical and moral and right thing to do was to take pictures and we did. So there's an example, you know, um, we didn't quite follow the rule.

• 2:58:21Jocko Willink?

  Oh, well. All right. Um, let's wrap this up. You got any more questions, Echo Charles?

• 2:58:25Speaker 02

  No, no, that was, that was it. Thanks.

• 2:58:27Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Hey, uh, if you want to support this podcast, go to jockofuel.com. Get yourself some, some go drinks. They're awesome. I'm too deep right now, too deep into the Jocko fuels. You, you only got down one?

• 2:58:42Speaker 02

  I got one, one citrus psycho. I gotta get on it. Yeah.

• 2:58:45Jocko Willink?

  Uh, check. You can get those. You can get the, the mulk. The ready to drink mulk, the pow, the pow pow mulk.

• 2:58:54Speaker 02

  Bro, I was on a call last night even.

• 2:58:57Jocko Willink?

  Look at this guy.

• 2:58:57Speaker 02

  With, with, uh, one Dave Burke.

• 2:59:00Jocko Willink?

  Good deal, Dave?

• 2:59:01Speaker 02

  Good deal, Dave. So he, he actually brought up a good, or not a good question necessarily, but he brought up a question that got me thinking, hey, wait, we don't talk about like all the stuff that Jocko Fuel actually has. I'm not gonna do it right now necessarily, but yes.

• 2:59:15Jocko Willink?

  Come on, you're all now, but.

• 2:59:18Speaker 02

  People just press stop.

• 2:59:19Jocko Willink?

  No, no, no.

• 2:59:20Speaker 02

  Go to Jocko Fuel dot com. You can see all the stuff because it's not just, we always blow up the drinks and the, you know, the energy drinks and the RTD because that's like super exciting right now, you know? But there's like all kinds, there's like joint stuff, like test stuff, sleep stuff. There's a lot of cool stuff on there that we might be doing a disservice in a small way of not mentioning for certain people.

• 2:59:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, check this out. Go to Jocko Fuel dot com and you can check out all this stuff. You can check out the joint warfare, the super cool, the time war.

• 2:59:50Speaker 02

  Time war all day.

• 2:59:51Jocko Willink?

  The time war all day. The, I mean, oh, it's not all day. It's every day. It's just a good way to feel better across the board in a, in a legitimate way. So give that one a crack. Uh, you can get the stuff at Vitamin Shop. You can get it at Wawa. Wawa, you're gonna have to look a little bit. Trying to get, we're getting the squeeze. We're getting the squeeze from some of the big empire beverage companies. So, but Vitamin Shop, number one brand. Do you know that?

• 3:00:19Speaker 02

  No big deal.

• 3:00:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're in the military commissaries, commissaries. We're working on the military exchanges too. God, it pisses me off when I go into the, the N E X and we don't, we're not in there. I like going to the commissary and we're in there. That's, that's good. But the N E X and all they have is poison for our troops. For our troops. For these men and women that are putting their lives on the line and they gotta, then we're, we're actively giving them stuff that's bad for them. Well, this is wrong. So we're working on it. Hanafords, Dash Stores, Wake Fern, Shop, Shop Right, H E B, Tejas. You gave me a report this morning from the field, Leif Babin.

• 3:00:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, representing man, my local H E B's got a, got a awesome like end cap of mulk and uh, this one go.

• 3:01:05Jocko Willink?

  Sure freaking outstanding.

• 3:01:07Speaker 02

  It's awesome.

• 3:01:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So rolling to H E B, rolling to Meyer out in the Midwest. Lifetime Fit, you know what Lifetime Fitness is?

• 3:01:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Dude, have you been to a Lifetime Fitness?

• 3:01:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:01:15Jocko Willink?

  They're insane. Have you been to a Lifetime Fitness?

• 3:01:17Speaker 02

  Um.

• 3:01:18Jocko Willink?

  Freaking massive, massive gym. Anyways, they're, they're good to go. They're working it.

• 3:01:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so go check all that out. Get yourself some Jocko Fuel, Jocko Fuel dot com.

• 3:01:31Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Origin USA. So you go to OriginUSA.com. This is where we're getting our jeans. You know, there's a new black wash jeans.

• 3:01:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:41Speaker 02

  They're black.

• 3:01:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:44Speaker 02

  You wear black jeans?

• 3:01:45Jocko Willink?

  I'm about to be wearing black jeans. You know what, you know, I, I am gonna, I think, I think those black jeans, especially when they're new, are gonna be suitable for like, a little bit elevated scenarios.

• 3:01:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:01:57Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 3:01:58Speaker 02

  Yes, I do.

• 3:01:58Jocko Willink?

  Like date night.

• 3:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:59Jocko Willink?

  With the old lady.

• 3:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, hey, look, I know you're not into the fashion rules. I don't know, maybe Leif is, I don't know, maybe, maybe not. Questionably, he's doing good right now, but either way, so the, the darker the jean, the more formal. Yeah, oh yeah, you look good too, by the way.

• 3:02:17Jocko Willink?

  The more formal the scenario.

• 3:02:18Speaker 02

  The more formal the scenario, yes, the more special the scenario. So like daytime scenario, like a daytime, um, event, or whatever, something more casual, that's gonna be the lighter jeans.

• 3:02:27Jocko Willink?

  Bro, I walked down, like with a pair of jeans on and a T-shirt, a black T-shirt.

• 3:02:33Speaker 02

  Down from where?

• 3:02:33Jocko Willink?

  Down from my like, house upstairs.

• 3:02:35Speaker 02

  Oh, right, downstairs.

• 3:02:36Jocko Willink?

  Walked downstairs and my daughter, my thirteen year old daughter sees me with like jeans and a black T-shirt on. And she goes, hey, oh, she's like, oh, why are you all dressed up?

• 3:02:46Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. And the dark jeans.

• 3:02:48Jocko Willink?

  No, no, these were just jeans.

• 3:02:50Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 3:02:50Jocko Willink?

  This is how not dressed up I'm getting.

• 3:02:53Leif Babin?

  That's pretty awesome.

• 3:02:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:02:54Leif Babin?

  You, you know, I love most about the Origin jeans is they got that little stretch to them and, uh, at our, our gym store Jiu Jitsu, we have a combatives, uh, program. So we're, we train, we train with like weapons, uh, you know, weapon shapes and stuff and they're, they're awesome to roll in. They're, they're like, it's, it's, it's plain clothes, so you gotta have your, gotta have your shirt locker shirt on and your, uh, your Origin jeans.

• 3:03:17Jocko Willink?

  Stoic Jiu Jitsu.

• 3:03:18Leif Babin?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:19Jocko Willink?

  What's the, what's do, what's the address? What's the scenario? Where are we at?

• 3:03:22Leif Babin?

  We're in Dripping Springs, Texas.

• 3:03:24Jocko Willink?

  Dripping Springs, Texas?

• 3:03:26Leif Babin?

  Marcus Dalfit, awesome instruction and it's uh, yeah, every, every Friday we run a combatants program for some, uh, some of the sheepdog response instructors that train there. Tim Kennedy's program, it's awesome. It's uh, the combatants program is, is legit and those origin genes are, everybody in there is training the origin genes.

• 3:03:45Jocko Willink?

  What's good about that is um, you know, just the same way that I talk about jujitsu, like if somebody, if, if, if you don't train and someone grabs you, you have a level of panic and shock and, and unknown to overcome before you can even take action. Like you're just frozen for at least, even if you're, even if you're a squared away person, you don't know what to do for at least three quarters of a second. And by the way, that could be all it takes. So when you start doing combatives, when you start training, like you start training pistol, you start training knives, you start thinking through those things,

• 3:04:19Jocko Willink?

  you all of a sudden, you're okay. And that three quarters of a second, it gets, starts to get minimized. I actually have to run the numbers. Let's see. If you don't, if you don't train jujitsu and someone grabs you, you're probably dealing with 10 seconds, five seconds, six seconds before you start processing what's happening in a legitimate way. If you train jujitsu, you're, you didn't, there's zero seconds, you're already processing. It's the same thing with like doing combatives, doing weapons type training where someone's pulling a knife on you. If you've never seen it before, you are not, not knowing what to do for five seconds. Even, literally even if the reaction is, I know I need to run away. If you haven't fought through that before, that knife comes out and you freeze for three seconds. Guess what? You got stuck in the neck. You're bleeding out, homie.

• 3:05:05Jocko Willink?

  So, so don't let that happen. So actually when you were setting up uh, your gym, Stoic Jujitsu, you sent me the name. You're like, we're going to be called Stoic Jujitsu. I was, I just, I stoically just nodded to myself and thought, hell yeah. Hell yeah, especially because Mark is kind of stoic dude, right?

• 3:05:23Leif Babin?

  Mark's a total stoic guy.

• 3:05:24Jocko Willink?

  So Stoic Jiu Jitsu, check it out, dripping springs.

• 3:05:29Jocko Willink?

  How many times a week do you have classes? How many times a day do you have classes?

• 3:05:33Leif Babin?

  Three, three classes a day for adult classes, a couple of kids classes.

• 3:05:36Jocko Willink?

  The Utes?

• 3:05:37Leif Babin?

  Yeah. Monday through Thursday as well. So it's a, it's a great program, awesome training down there and yeah, that, that, that just quality instruction.

• 3:05:48Jocko Willink?

  Do you have a website?

• 3:05:49Leif Babin?

  Yeah, stoicjiujiu.com.

• 3:05:51Jocko Willink?

  Stoicjiujiu.com?

• 3:05:52Leif Babin?

  Got it.

• 3:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Go get in there, people. Go get in there. Stoicjiujiu.com, freaking good name. It's a good one, man. You done good.

• 3:06:02Speaker 02

  You figure those Delta 68 jeans are gonna be kinda different and maybe even better in a way than even gi pants when you think about it. As far as the mobility goes, you're saying?

• 3:06:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:15Speaker 02

  They're more mobile than gi pants.

• 3:06:17Jocko Willink?

  They are, they are mobile. They are more mobile. We actually are, have some experimental phase gi pants right now. Now, there's gonna be problems, right? Cause you got, you got IBJJF, you got rules, you're not allowed to have stretch because it's gonna interfere with things. But we're trying to see what is the, what is the parameters of that? Like what, what, what could be legal, right? Cause there's a certain amount of stretch that gives no difference as far as jiu jitsu goes, but giving you a little bit more of that mobility. Now, listen, as a, as a, as a Jocko right now, I'm definitely not getting limited by my jiu jitsu gi pants. I'm getting limited by my own freaking lack of ability to stretch.

• 3:06:55Speaker 02

  Your lack of mobility.

• 3:06:56Jocko Willink?

  My lack of, lack of mobility in my own self. So we gotta watch out for that one.

• 3:07:00Speaker 02

  I was gonna say like, right as I was saying that, I can just hear Pete right now yelling at me, like of all the like different things they've done to design the gi pants to be so mobile.

• 3:07:10Jocko Willink?

  I have a pair that's got, I have a pair that's got a little, just a little bit, like he sent me the experimental ones.

• 3:07:16Speaker 02

  Bro.

• 3:07:16Jocko Willink?

  And here's the thing, I think if you didn't announce that they were a stretch, no one would be able to tell.

• 3:07:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:22Jocko Willink?

  So I think that's probably gonna be the answer. Like it's so small, you can feel it, but you can't feel it.

• 3:07:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:07:29Jocko Willink?

  You can feel it, but they can't feel it is what I'm getting at.

• 3:07:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's how it would have to be because the stretchiness, I mean, obviously there's different ways.

• 3:07:36Jocko Willink?

  You can't have somebody grabbing your gi pants and it scratches.

• 3:07:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. It kinda defeats a lot of the purpose of the, the gi to begin with, right? So, but.

• 3:07:45Speaker 02

  The mobility or lack of mobility has never been an issue in gi pants. I don't think, especially the Origin ones. I'm just saying, stretch wise, because look, we're putting on jeans. We're putting on jeans for a different reason than we put in on the gi pants. Let's face it.

• 3:07:58Jocko Willink?

  Apparently, I have some kind of a black tie event I'm going to, so I'm putting on jeans.

• 3:08:02Speaker 02

  Jeans all day, yeah. Hell, yeah. So, I get it. It's not that gi pants are not mobile. It's just that as far as stretch goes, you're going for looks, formal or informal, depending on who you are. You put the jeans on, you're gonna have some mobility in the event of you having to do jujitsu or combatives as the case maybe.

• 3:08:21Jocko Willink?

  Origin USA, get yourself some of this stuff. By the way, it's made in America. Everything we just talked about, going and fighting and trying to preserve freedom in the world. That's awesome. We appreciate the military 100% for sure. We also have to appreciate economic power. And right now, we've shifted economic power overseas. That's what we've done. We've done it. Corporations have done it. They've just voluntarily said, oh, we can make an extra $1.78 on every pair of jeans. So, we'll just fire everyone we have here in America and we'll move the factories overseas. And that's exactly what they did. Because they're scum.

• 3:09:05Jocko Willink?

  They're scum. Well, we're not doing that. We're building here. Every, when you put on a pair of Origin jeans or an Origin gi or an Origin rash guard, you are putting on the cloth of the nation, actually. This is American made. From the cotton to the rivets to the zipper, it's all American made. So, get yourself on board with America. Get yourself into a situation where you are defending America and bringing back this economic power that we've given away. And by the way, it starts with manufacturing things like jeans and clothing,

• 3:09:44Jocko Willink?

  but we're reliant on other countries, actually adversarial countries, for things that we need. And that's terrible for our national security.

• 3:09:57Jocko Willink?

  So let's start, you can start with a pair of jeans. You might not feel like you're helping out our national security when you buy a pair of jeans, but you are. You're actually helping out our national security when you buy a pair of jeans. That's what you're doing. So, look, you may or may not have served this country as a military individual. If you did, thank you. If you didn't, you can still serve by, by building our economy. So there you go. OriginUSA.com.

• 3:10:26Speaker 02

  That's true. Also, the shirt that Leif is wearing is from Jocko's store. This is where the JacoStore.com is where you can represent the path that we're all on. Discipline equals freedom. Good, as the case may be. All different attire items on there.

• 3:10:44Leif Babin?

  The Shirt Locker, man. Those are my favorite shirts. They're awesome.

• 3:10:47Speaker 02

  Shirt Locker, if you don't know, is a subscription service. Every month you get a new shirt. You know, sometimes there's a hit, sometimes there's a smash hit in the Shirt Locker, design-wise, as Leif is demonstrating right now with his current shirt. Anyway.

• 3:11:02Jocko Willink?

  That one was a smash hit?

• 3:11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. So a lot of people like that one.

• 3:11:07Jocko Willink?

  What was the inspirado behind that shirt?

• 3:11:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:11:09Jocko Willink?

  So it says, if you're just listening, it says "good," but it says in a fancy, kind of cursive kind of way, kind of a black tie kind of affair.

• 3:11:15Speaker 02

  Calligraphy-ish, right? So it's kind of, yeah, like a black tie, right? So, so the idea is the layers, if you will. Oh, that's the thing. All the designs have some sort of a story kind of layers behind it. The one for this one is, okay, so you know, good, right? The whole thing. It's like, hey, when things go bad, there's always some good to come from it. So when you said that, you were saying it in reference to the original source material was when Seth would be like, hey, you always say that, like, you know, for real stuff in life, like military operations, like that kind of stuff. Not all of us are in that kind of, those kind of deep waters, you know, where we got to reference the good terminology, right? Not all of us are in that. Some, some of us are kind of more on a, for lack of a better term, a higher level. More, um, how should I say, everyday kind of level. It's not, it's not down in the dirt.

• 3:12:00Speaker 02

  It's kind of higher up on the, on the, maybe the street, maybe even the third, fourth, fifth floor level.

• 3:12:04Jocko Willink?

  We're talking, is this a first world good over here?

• 3:12:06Speaker 02

  Yes. That is exactly, exactly what that shirt is. Think about it. Look at it. It's like, so it's called good, high level problems. So like, hey, look, high level problems, meaning not low down in the dirt. So it's high level, meaning, hey.

• 3:12:20Jocko Willink?

  Meaning.

• 3:12:20Speaker 02

  That, uh, I'm trying to potty train my dog and it freaking went in my off, home office. See what I'm saying? Like that kind of stuff.

• 3:12:28Jocko Willink?

  Meaning my Mercedes has a flat tire.

• 3:12:31Speaker 02

  Or what have you, or what have you, you know?

• 3:12:33Jocko Willink?

  My Cadillac Escalade for the Echo Charles.

• 3:12:36Speaker 02

  It, it shouldn't be called high levels problems. It should be called good everyday problems.

• 3:12:41Jocko Willink?

  I think it should be called first world problems.

• 3:12:43Speaker 02

  First world problems. Yeah, I think so too.

• 3:12:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Which is, what the funny thing about that is you legitimately have to say, if you got a flat tire on your Cadillac Escalade Echo Charles, you can legitimately be like, good. You know, I got a Cadillac Escalade, bruh. An Escalade.

• 3:12:57Speaker 02

  It's true. I get to practice my tire changing capabilities.

• 3:13:01Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Like it. Alright, so there you go. Jocko Store, uh, subscribe to this podcast, uh, Jocko Underground. Subscribe to that too. Costs eight dollars and eighteen cents a month, unless you can't afford it, then you just email. What do you email? Assistance@jacoun underground.com. Subscribe to the YouTube channels. We got, we got for YouTube channels. We got Jocko Podcast. We got Origin USA. We got Jocko Fe. We got Ashland Front. We got Ashland Front, uh, YouTube channel.

• 3:13:27Speaker 02

  Yes, we do.

• 3:13:27Jocko Willink?

  Some, some content on there. So go and check those out. Subscribe to them. We got Psychological Warfare. We got Flipside Canvas Dakota Meyer. Dakota Meyer, just a freaking stud and he's got studly stuff for you to hang on your wall. So go check out flipsidecanvas.com and go get something to hang on your wall. We got a bunch of books, um, that we've written. Check those out. Final Spin, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, Code, Discipline vs Freedom Field Manual, The Way of the Warrior Kid Series. There's five. I keep meeting people. I'm doing, I'm such a bad advertiser. I have people go, oh yeah, I read your Warrior Kid book.

• 3:14:07Speaker 02

  The first one.

• 3:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, they're like, it's the best book ever. I've had people say, you should write more. I'm like, there's four more. Kid, Kid in the Game. Where's your parents? I'm gonna smack them around.

• 3:14:18Speaker 02

  It's their fault.

• 3:14:20Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, no, it's my, it's my fault, as I just said, because I haven't done a good job of, of putting the word out. So get those books for, for all those kids. Mike and the Dragons, About Face, Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership, written by myself and Leif Bab and Sitnikro. You heard a lot from him today. So yeah, we wrote those books a while back. We also have a leadership consultancy, which is called Echelon Front. And we solve problems through leadership. We've worked with every different kind of company that you can imagine in every different industry. We take lessons learned from combat, from the battlefield, from life, and we help you solve problems through leadership.

• 3:15:03Jocko Willink?

  You can go to echelonfront.com for details. I know you're heading out, you're heading out after this, going to work with a construction company.

• 3:15:10Leif Babin?

  Good deal, Dave.

• 3:15:12Jocko Willink?

  Yep, and that's what, that's what we do. So let's say a construction company in this instance, they're wanting to perform better. They're wanting to do better. Oh, what, what do they want to do better at? Doesn't really matter. They're wanting to do better as, as a construction company. They have some issues. Okay, cool. How do we solve those issues? We solve those issues through leadership. That's what we do at Echelon Front. So go to echelonfront.com if you need help inside your organization, and we'll get a team out to you to assess and then fix. That's what we're doing. We also have some live events. I guess the next muster is Dallas, October 18th through the 20th.

• 3:15:51Jocko Willink?

  And we oversold the last muster. So we sell out and then we sell out a little bit more. So we sold out. It wasn't overly crowded where you were stuffed in there, but none of the instructor staff or Ashland Front staff got a seat. We had to give it all up to people. So my point is we sell out. So if you want to go to one of those things, you want to go to Gettysburg, you want to go to the Battle of Little Big Horn, you need to go and register now. You want to go to the FTX and see what it's like to utilize these things in simulated combat situations so that they really make sense. And then you can apply them in your life. Go to the FTX. So we got all those things. Go to ashlandfront.com.

• 3:16:35Jocko Willink?

  We also have an online training academy where you can learn to take ownership of your life.

• 3:16:43Jocko Willink?

  That's what you can do there. And man, it is magic. It's magic in the same way that jujitsu is magic. It's magic in the same way that jujitsu is magic. So back in the day, if you knew jujitsu, you could win any fight, right? You could, you could, oh, this person's going to mess with me. Cool. I'll beat him. Hoist Gracie, UFC 1, goes up against boxers and wrestlers and Muay Thai, and just is able to beat him. Why? Because he understood this magic called jujitsu. There's magic to leadership. And by the way, just what leadership means is interacting with other human beings. That's what it means. That's actually what leadership is. You're going to communicate to those human beings.

• 3:17:28Jocko Willink?

  You're going to build relationships with those human beings. And it doesn't matter if they're your wife or your husband. It doesn't matter if they're your coworkers at work. It doesn't matter if it's your children's football team.

• 3:17:40Jocko Willink?

  It doesn't matter if it's your buddy, your girlfriend, you have to interact with other human beings. That's what's going on. And there's actual moves. There's actual magic, just like jujitsu. And if you want to learn some of that magic, you want to learn what to do when someone's irate with you, you want to learn what to do when someone is blaming you, you want to learn what to do when one of your subordinates is not completing their projects on time, you want to know what to do when your boss is not making any decisions. You want to know what to do when your husband is leading the family in the wrong direction,

• 3:18:24Jocko Willink?

  and you want to get it steered in another direction. Well, that's what we teach. This little bit of magic, it's just like jujitsu, you can get it all under control. Go to extremeownership.com. Got a bunch of courses on there. We do live sessions. What's the latest course? You know what the latest course to get posted is?

• 3:18:39Leif Babin?

  Yeah, it's about relationships.

• 3:18:41Jocko Willink?

  Gee. Gee. Oh, I mean, I don't know how to work a relationship. Cool. Just like idiots used to say, I know how to fight. You don't know how to fight. You don't. You don't know how to fight. You don't know how to build relationships. There's actual tactics, techniques, and procedures that you can utilize to build relationships. Those are the facts. You don't know what they are. You think you know what they are, but you don't. Just like, just like I was in 1992, thought I knew how to fight. Soon as I got on the mats of justice, I learned there's techniques, there's tactics, there's procedures, there's maneuvers. I didn't know. So it's the same thing with leadership. Go to extremeownership.com, learn how to lead.

• 3:19:25Jocko Willink?

  And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, their Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got an incredible charity organization. If you want to donate, you want to get involved, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. Also, check out HeroesAndHorses.org. That's where Micah Fink is taking veterans out into the wilderness where they are finding themselves.

• 3:19:54Jocko Willink?

  It's really helping out a lot of individuals. So, check that out. What else we got? If you want to connect with us, Leif, where are you at? On the interwebs, where are you at? What's your social media?

• 3:20:06Leif Babin?

  Uh, RealLeifBabbin on Instagram and LeifBabbin on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn.

• 3:20:12Jocko Willink?

  There you go. Echo's on there.

• 3:20:14Leif Babin?

  It's true.

• 3:20:15Jocko Willink?

  He's at Echo Charles. I'm at Jocko Willink. Just watch out when you sign into those things. They're tracking you. They're trying to get into your brain. They got that algorithm. The algorithm's coming after you and it's, it's strong. Has no rules of engagement, by the way. It doesn't care. Doesn't care about collateral damage. Doesn't care that you are gonna miss jujitsu because you were watching something stupid. Doesn't care about that. Doesn't care about that you're not paying attention to your kid because you're scrolling through your timeline. They should call it the time sucker, right? The time eater, the time destroyer, not a timeline. Is timeline, is timeline on Facebook or is timeline on Instagram or Twitter?

• 3:20:53Leif Babin?

  One is timeline, one is news feed.

• 3:20:55Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. And then it should be called the brain eater, not the news feeder because it's killing you. But we are on there. So, there you go. Uh, Leif, thanks for coming back. Appreciate it.

• 3:21:07Leif Babin?

  Thanks for having us.

• 3:21:07Jocko Willink?

  It's always good. We just talked for a long time, didn't we? Yes, we did. But at least we hit record at the appropriate time. Uh, and hey, thank you to all of our military men and women that are out there right now, doing the right things for the right reasons, holding the line and protecting this great nation, while defending the moral high ground.

• 3:21:33Jocko Willink?

  Thanks to all of you. Also, thanks to our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. Thanks for what you do to keep us safe. And everyone else out there,

• 3:21:50Jocko Willink?

  you gotta take the high ground. And you gotta keep the high ground. The tactical high ground on the battlefield. And you, more importantly,

• 3:22:00Jocko Willink?

  have to maintain that moral high ground. And you do that by taking ownership. Taking ownership, preemptive ownership, knowing that there are no excuses. And you cannot recover.

• 3:22:18Jocko Willink?

  You have to take the moral high ground and you have to keep it. And you do that by doing the right thing, doing the legal thing.

• 3:22:28Jocko Willink?

  And until next time. This is Leif and Echo and Jocko. Out.