439: General MacFarland, the Ready First Brigade, and the "Army SEALs" of Task Unit Bruiser in The Battle of Ramadi

>Join Jocko Underground< http://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Lieutenant General Sean Barry MacFarland is a retired three-star general who served in the United States Army. In 2015 MacFarland, then commanding III Corps, was selected as commander of the coalition against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. 0:00:00 - Introduction. 0:04:39 - September 11th. 1:32:40 - The Battle of Ramadi. 5:06:53 - Coming Home. 6:36:00 - Final thoughts and how to stay on THE PATH. 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 439 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. I felt like I had no life in Ramadi. I cannot describe the horror we lived in. Those were very bitter days. Those days, we lived in hell. We looked like ghosts out of a cemetery. We were very tired. We had lots of complaints to take to Coalition forces, but we were afraid. Some days, we wished to be dead, just to be rested. On the streets, they accused Americans of being killers. People welcomed Al Qaeda into their homes as a custom, but they killed families, raped wives, and took over.

• 0:45Jocko Willink?

  If one of them killed 60 people, he was called Amir.

• 0:51Jocko Willink?

  They killed doctors and leaders. They killed doctors and said that it was because they treated Americans. The doctors fled the country. They killed mullahs and said that it was because they liked Americans. Soon, there were no men left to kill, so they started killing women and children. They killed women and said that was because their husbands were policemen. They killed children and said it was because their fathers were policemen.

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  Fear made me very cautious. Sometimes, if a door opened, an entire family was killed, old people, women, and children. I had four huge locks on my front door. It looked like a protected holy place. I would only open the door for family.

• 1:35Jocko Willink?

  I was afraid of the Coalition forces and the insurgents. I used to leave the house at 6:00 a.m. Before 7:00 a.m., there was a Coalition forces curfew. After 7:00 a.m., the insurgents were out. I used to carry a white flag with me. It was my husband's undergarment.

• 1:54Jocko Willink?

  The Coalition forces know the white flag.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  Nothing works with the insurgents.

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  The ugliest torture was committed by Al Qaeda. If the discipline didn't work, the people were abducted and slaughtered.

• 2:10Jocko Willink?

  The head was put in a container and thrown away, or the neck cut and the head placed on the back.

• 2:18Jocko Willink?

  The awakening started with Sheikh Satar Abu Risha because Al Qaeda killed many of his family. The police started coming out slowly, people started coming out.

• 2:32Jocko Willink?

  We had the first women's meeting on December 15th, 2006 at the elementary school. Captain Tina of the Coalition Forces was present at the first meeting and she worked with us. We set up literary classes for females. I worked with her, but I was also afraid.

• 2:50Jocko Willink?

  Now women are going back to have pictures made with Coalition Forces.

• 2:55Jocko Willink?

  We have satellite TV now, we have internet. We're interacting with the rest of the world now.

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  It's a sign of civilization. Iraqis are conservative, but not extreme.

• 3:13Jocko Willink?

  And that right there was a quote from Miriam, which is a pseudonym, who was interviewed by Colonel Gary Montgomery and Chief Foreign Officer for Timothy McWilliams in 2009. Her identity was concealed to protect her, but she lived in Ramadi prior to the war and lived there through 2009. Her husband was an Iraqi policeman and she was involved in humanitarian efforts that focused on helping women and children. And that's, that's one example. Just one example of the horror that existed in the city of Ramadi, the capital of Al-Lanbar province in western Iraq.

• 3:54Jocko Willink?

  And it's also an example of how that horror was reversed and the insurgency was defeated. And the city was pacified by Coalition Forces. Initially Americans, but over time by with and through the Iraqi military and police.

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  And that incredible turnaround was made at an immense cost to Coalition Forces. Men and women wounded and killed to execute that mission.

• 4:28Jocko Willink?

  But in the end, the city was secured and the people of Ramadi were liberated from these evildoers from Al Qaeda and their demonic allies.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  Now, one of the lessons that I learned in this battle was that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, and that includes every level of leadership from those on the front lines, taking ownership of their part of the mission and executing, all the way to the top level of leadership. And in this case, the top level of leadership in the Battle of Ramadi was an Army Colonel, the commander of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division. And he developed a strategy and shared the vision and unified a team

• 5:25Jocko Willink?

  of US and Iraqi military and Iraqi police, along with Iraqi government officials, tribal leaders, civilians. And he implemented this strategy, made changes and adjusted the strategy when it was required, and directed and oversaw countless operations to secure and stabilize the city. And he is and was one of the best leaders that I ever served under, inside or outside the military. His name is General Sean McFarland. He served 37 years in the Army. He led troops in combat at every level. And it was an honor to fight alongside him

• 6:10Jocko Willink?

  in the Battle of Ramadi. And it's an honor to have the general here with us tonight to discuss his experiences and lessons learned. General McFarland, thank you for joining us.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks, Jocko. It's awesome to be here.

• 6:25Jocko Willink?

  I guess let's start at the beginning. And before we hit record, you are already starting to tell some, some memories of your youth and your family. So you're from upstate New York, Albany, born in 1959.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  That's right. Eisenhower administration.

• 6:43Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Right?

• 6:45Jocko Willink?

  You said it, I didn't.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I can't deny it.

• 6:48Jocko Willink?

  Now, you know, when I bring guests on, you know, we'll talk about what their, what military history they had in their family. Do we need to do a series of podcasts on the military history that you had in your family? Because it's a lot.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, no, we don't need to do a series. I can recap it pretty quickly. I mean, for me, I mean, my dad was in the National Guard. He retired as a Colonel in the Army Reserve. My grandfather was a West Point class in 1930. Started out in the Horse Artillery at Fort Bliss, First Cavalry Division and commanded an artillery battalion in the Ninth Armor Division at Bastogne and Raymagen, Bridgehead.

• 7:30Jocko Willink?

  So do you, do you, did you grow up with him? Do you remember him?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  He died when I was 10. I remember him pretty well. He was hard of hearing. As most artillery officers tend to be. I just, that was my big memory of him is watching TV with the volume up. But he was a, you know, big golfer. I wish I had half the skill that he had. He played polo when he was younger, you know, all the, that was what they used to do in the cavalry, you know, is play polo. But he married a local girl from Albany, my grandmother, Harriet.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And their first assignment was Fort Bliss, Texas, as was mine, you know, and he, you know, went through the whole Depression Army thing and, you know, the lean years and then Korea. And my grandmother was a pretty funny lady. She said, "World War II and Korea saved their marriage." So, you know, it's a silver lining to every dark cloud, I guess. But they,

• 8:45Speaker 01

  you know, did 30 years and then he taught meth at Albany Boys Academy and till he passed away. So, you know, probably what got him was all the smoking and drinking, which was very common back then. I don't have any memory of my grandfather without a cigarette and a glass of Scotch. Same was true with my grandmother. She was a little classier. She used a cigarette holder, you know, the long-stamp thing. She lived to almost into her late 80s though, and she looked great. She never looked bad, but she would always have Scotch with her. So she was drinking a bottle of Scotch a week until she died, you know, I mean.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And like I said, you know, just genetically, you know, so hopefully I've got a lot of runway in front of me, living the good life like they did. I don't know. But so, yeah, they.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  You know, his grandfather, his father immigrated over from Glasgow, Scotland, Archibald, Archie McFarland. And he came over in the 1880s as a 10-year-old kid or something, fought in the Spanish-American War, became the first motorcycle cop in Albany, New York. And on my mom's side, we go all the way back, you know, we have some recent immigrants, you know, from the troubles in Ireland, relatively recent, you know, so we don't know that military history, you know, the IRA side of it, but there was some of that. And others go back to the Mayflower, actually, fought in the Revolutionary War.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  My great-great-grandfather was a Union soldier, and his brother was killed in action at Petersburg. And he survived, obviously, and his regiment went down to New Orleans and Red River and, you know, fought it all through. So he was the first member of my family to make it to Texas, actually, I guess. So, and he went back and went back to, he was a carpenter in around Albany area. So, so, yeah, it's, it's not, it's a long but relatively undistinguished military history until I met you, Jocko.

• 11:04Jocko Willink?

  So, you're growing up, at what point did you realize you wanted to go to West Point?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  I didn't, I thought I wanted to go to the Naval Academy, but my eyesight wasn't good enough to go there without a waiver. So, and, and they said, well, you know, you know, you might be able to get in. I said, yeah, but I wanted to be a Navy pilot. And my fear was I... You know, get through the Naval Academy and not be able to fly and, you know, end up three decks below the waterline or something. So I said, well, I can get into the West Point without a waiver. I was like 2050 or something like that. That was before Lasik. So they were like, okay. And almost everybody at West Point wore glasses.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  You know, we were all the Air Force Academy and Naval Academy rejects. We all went to West Point. And this is post world, right after Vietnam fell. It was like two years after the helicopters lifted off the embassy roof. So not a lot of folks were applying to the service academies. So I, you know.

• 12:17Jocko Willink?

  You were able to sneak in there?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I slipped under the wire and my tactical officer, who went on to command the Ranger Regiment, was very unimpressed with me. He said, he wrote, this is in writing, that I had no potential to be a combat arms officer. And he, and that was because I didn't want to be on the company boxing, intramural boxing team. Cause I was a tall, lanky guy. I guess I still am, but even skinnier then, obviously. And he, he said, well, you could, you know, box at like the lowest weight class, you

• 13:01Speaker 01

  know, and outreach everybody, which, which I was doing in, you know, mandatory boxing classes. And I said, I'm more of a triathlon guy. He goes, that's not a guy's sport, you know? Men don't do triathlon. Men box, play football. And so he, he, he kind of wrote me off.

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  And you literally put it in your, in your evaluation or something?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's in there. It's black and white. I've seen it.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  That's beautiful.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, right?

• 13:31Jocko Willink?

  The irony of that, huh?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:33Jocko Willink?

  So when you get to West Point, how did that compare to your, cause you were raised in Catholic schools, right? Was it like a break for you when you got to West Point compared to the Catholic schools?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  It absolutely was. When I, I had a, my first squad leader was.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Not a nice guy and he was like the brigade boxing champion in his weight class, you know, he's from LA and this was 1977, this is the year the Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series, so he already didn't like me because of that. And I wasn't the best plebe anyway and he would just haze me unmercifully, but as soon as I realized that unlike the nuns, he couldn't hit me and I said, this is all downhill from here. I mean, second grade

• 14:29Speaker 01

  with Sister Maria Andre was much scarier than my squad leader at West Point.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  How is it when you're in class and you have these guys from Vietnam and Vietnam is now fallen, what was the morale and what kind of lessons learned were you getting? Were you getting strategic lessons? We just covered McNamara's book on here and it's really disturbing to read in many ways.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were all Vietnam vets and they were all like classes 65 through classes 67 and those classes got hammered, you know, and Vietnam lost a lot of kids. I mean, West Point, since the global war on terror, lost about 100 graduates, killed in action. And that's really like one of the highest percentages because now we're a smaller army and all volunteer that has ever been the case. But back then, they all had right patches, right shoulder patches from Vietnam. And I'll tell you, I didn't appreciate how they felt until August

• 15:38Speaker 01

  of, was it two years ago now, when we surrendered in Afghanistan. Now I can really, really relate to how they felt, but the...

• 15:53Speaker 01

  So, we all had sponsors as cadets and my sponsor had been a Cobra pilot in Vietnam. And I started out, I wanted to study international relations, you know. And, but I had taken AP Calculus and I was good at math and science, but that was hard, you know, and I thought, you know, I can BS with the best of them, I'm Irish, so I'll go international relations. And, and so my, there's a big paper, it's called the social paper, Social Sciences Department, everybody goes through, it's a rite of passage, and I was taking advanced international relations.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And I had taken advanced calculus and advanced, you know, I had taken a heavier course load in some of the engineering and sciences stuff, just because, you know, I liked it, I could, it wasn't hard for me, you know, so I, I kind of balanced it out, I was taking advanced French, advanced math, advanced engineering, you know, I didn't know what I really wanted to do, and I said, "Well, I'll do international relations." And I wrote a paper about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. And the thesis was, "The Czechs were wimps because they didn't fight back, they rolled over."

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And, and my instructor was a Vietnam vet, guy named, I still remember his name, Major Borowski, I thought he was Polish, but he was Czech, his family was Czech, he still had family in Czechs, and he hammered me on my paper, barely passing grade, and that was 50% of the grade. So I was lamenting this to my sponsor, who was this old, you know, was Cobra pilot, you know, pretty young guy at the time. And he said, "Well, look, Sean, you've taken, you know, thermodynamics and statics and dynamics and did well, and advanced calculus, and so why don't you switch to aerospace engineering, that's what I teach, I'll be your instructor pilot, we go in flight labs,

• 17:57Speaker 01

  fly around the Statue of Liberty, of course, this is all before 9/11, you could do all kinds of crazy stuff." And they had these, at Stewart Army Airfield nearby West Point, they had all these little trainer airplanes, single-engine, like Cessnas or Piper Cubs or something, and, and we'd take off and fly around and...

• 18:16Speaker 01

  You remember, I wanted to be a Navy pilot and I almost crashed twice. And they said, okay, we'll just, you know, stick with the classroom instruction here. You'd do better with that. But I, I went on and got my aerospace, my, you know, graduated with my concentration aerospace engineering and ended up with a Masters of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech. Later on, the Army sent me there. So, so the arrow, and that's what I did after I retired. I worked in, on hypersonics and kind of stuff like that, you know?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  But that's, that, that whole journey was kind of zigzag around and, and initially it appeared like my tactical officer was probably right about my potential as a combat arms officer. I, you know, I'm looking at this wooden tank that we gave you, you know, Abrams tank. I started out on the M60A1.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Add-on stay, but it's a pretty primitive tank. It was not unlike the tanks that my dad had in the National Guard Armory where we grew up and I was kind of familiar with them. But it was at, for, at night, it had almost no night capability. We had searchlights and you turn on the searchlights or you had to have mortar illumination.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, it was, or we had these things, we would do range card engagements. You were firing blind at night based on range card data. And you had a quadrant elevation and a azimuth indicator inside the turret. And, and I was in a cavalry platoon and cavalry platoon leaders didn't ride on tanks. They rode on armored personnel carriers and we had tanks in our platoon, but the platoon leader wasn't on a tank.

• 20:04Jocko Willink?

  Were you in like a 113 or something?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  113, yeah. It wasn't, we had nine vehicles in my platoon, you know? So anyway, we'd go out there and the squadron commander says, hey, you know, you're an armor officer. You should be able to qualify on a tank. I was like, we're like, oh yeah, but I'm not battle rostered on a tank. I've been preparing for it. So we had to pull together these pickup crews. And one of the cardinal sins in armor branches, if, as an officer, is you don't qualify on your first try. It's called, if you Q2, you know, you are persona non grata.

• 20:40Jocko Willink?

  And I Q2'd.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  And the thing of it was is I had like, I had it in the bag, a Q1 on our last engagement. And we, I just kind of lost track of the number of rounds we were shooting and we fired one too many and that's all it took. And so I was gonna get fired and my platoon sergeant, well, but there wasn't anybody to replace me, so we went out to, they had to keep me for the platoon battle run there. At the time it was called Table 9, now it's a different table number, but we had to take the whole platoon out there and, you know, the way it's, it's an offensive engagement and they give you the fire command, you know, and

• 21:24Speaker 01

  you're supposed to bound to the next phase line and then you're about a thousand meters closer to the targets when they come up and then you open up on, you know, it's like 10 or 12 targets. And I choked and I got, I opened fire from the first phase line instead of bounding forward to the next phase line. And the squadron commander was up in the tower and he said, I knew I should have fired that guy, you know, he's terrible and I heard all this from my, the squadron XO, his nickname was Champagne Bill, great guy, also Vietnam Black Horse guy. Everybody was Black Horse, 11th Cav in Vietnam, all the, all the guys

• 22:02Speaker 01

  I worked for. And he says, well, he says, so, you know, the squadron commander was livid and he started saying, you know, MacFarland's probably the worst platoon leader I've got in the regiment, which is funny because his predecessor loved me. But it was just, you know, we didn't, we didn't mesh personally. I was a little too lackadaisical. He said, he gave me a letter, rep man, that said I was too cavalier. And I, I probably shouldn't have said this, but I said, but we're in the cavalry. Aren't I supposed to be cavalier? And so that was probably the straw that broke the camel's back with him. So, so now he had an excuse to fire me, but this is one of the first leadership lessons that I learned

• 22:47Speaker 01

  is when we bound, when we opened fire at extreme range on the targets, my tank section and these primitive tanks did not miss once. And they had no business being able to hit targets at that range, but they nailed them all, one round per target, and they were all down within seconds.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  And the regimental commander, the 59th Colonel of the regiment, another Irishman named Fitzgerald, he was in the tower. And he's like, wow, that's really good shooting, you know? And, uh, and then the squadron XO who liked me a little bit better than the squadron commander stepped in and goes, oh yeah, that's Sean MacFarland. He's, he's one of our better platoon leaders. And, uh, and the regimental commander said, yeah, he's, he's one to keep an eye on.

• 23:36Jocko Willink?

  Wow.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  But I, so my NCOs saved my bacon. Uh, they absolutely did. And, uh, I'll always be grateful to them. My platoon sergeant was a guy named Staff Sergeant Kim, DK Kim, you know, uh, who went on to become like, uh, NCO of the year in the army, you know, top drill sergeant. And he was amazing. Barely spoke English, but he was an amazing NCO. Um, who really set the example of what right looks like for me in an NCO. And I owe most of my success to the non-commissioned officers, you know, but that was my first lesson.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  And what a good NCO could do. Cause you know, before that I had all these Vietnam NCOs, tactical NCOs at West Point. And they, they were telling me things like, you know, hey, when you get to your platoon, it's kind of like going to prison. You gotta pick like the biggest guy and knock him out or you know, he's going to respect you. It's like, what? I was, really? It was like, yeah. I'm like, I don't know if I can do that. Um, I mean, I was an okay boxer, but I don't want to get in a fight with one of my soldiers. I could go sideways. Um, and the soldiers were pretty rough and tough. This was before urinalysis. When I got to my platoon, I had 42 troopers in my platoon.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  And when we started doing urinalysis, within six months, I was down to 18 soldiers. And it was all because of urinalysis. I mean, these guys were like hardcore drugies and thugs. And half of them lived in Juarez and just commuted, you know, they had bunks in the barracks. Back then it was all open bays and all that kind of stuff, like you see in the movies now. But they were, they were a rough and tumble bunch and some of them were like really strung out. Um, you remember the miles harnesses?

• 25:30Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, I remember standing in the chow line and there was this one kid standing there. And I'm like, I hear like a miles harness going off like. Like, who is that, you know, and you know, you're five yards apart with your mess kits, you know, waiting, you know, to get to the mermites and get green eggs and ham. And you, so I, you know, my platoon sergeant and I started walking up the line to find out who's, who's miles harness is going off. And there's this kid, you know,

• 25:59Speaker 01

  you know, I was saying Specialist Rodriguez. So Specialist Rodriguez is standing there. I'm like, hey, Rodriguez, your miles harness is going off. He goes, really? So I wondered where that was coming from. I'm like, it's coming from you. And later, you know, of course, we had to kick him out of the army for, you know, positive urinalysis, you know. I explained all of the, the chapter proceedings to him. I said, do you have any questions? And I said, because you know, the only stupid question is the one you didn't ask. And he says, which one was that, sir? So that, those are the kind of soldiers that, that we started out with, you know, but I had good combat experience, NCOs as a cavalry troop commander in the full of gap. My, my first sergeant was a great guy, First Sergeant Sherman Catchings.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  He'd been a scout in Vietnam as a, as a young buck sergeant, you know. And, and so those black horse guys were kind of the guys who kind of impressed me. And there were different types, you know, I had black horse guys who I admired, others. I had a, I had a squadron commander who was hilarious and funny and had a distinguished service cross from Vietnam.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  But, you know, he, his squadron was the wild west, you know, and it was really like a frat house kind of environment where, you know, everybody cussed and drank and, you know, it was all about who was the best drinker and, you know, and, and if you could hang with the squadron commander drinking, then you were probably going to be one of his favorite officers. And if you were more of a, you know, introverted guy or not a heavy drinker, then he kind of puts you in a different category. So it was pretty rough and tumble. But this, this squadron commander was kind of legendary in the army and

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I won't give you his name because he has family in the army and I don't want to embarrass anybody, but he was legendary and everybody who's armor or cavalry knows who this guy was. And, you know, we were drinking, I mean, he would show up, we'd be shooting gunnery and, you know, he would have, he'd pull his flask out and, "Hey, you want a slug?" I'm like, "That's nine o'clock in the morning, I'm okay, sir, thank you," you know. But, he's, I said, "So how'd you get your distinguished service cross?" He says, "Well," he says, "he was a black horse guy," you know, he says, "I was flying an observation helicopter." And I'm telling you all this because you mentioned Vietnam.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  And they were the people who kind of influenced my early career and gave me all those letters of reprimand. He gave me one too, which I wish I had framed, because he called me, can I swear on this?

• 28:55Jocko Willink?

  You can.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  He called me a marble-headed motherfucker in writing.

• 28:59Jocko Willink?

  So is that in your record?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  No, that was a desk drawer letter of reprimand.

• 29:06Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay, got it.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  And I was mad, so I threw it away. I was like, "Man, why didn't I keep that to show to my subordinates?" But, you know, but those letters of reprimand and Q2-ing and almost getting fired, it gave me an appreciation for, "Hey, look, you know, the road to the top is not always an unbroken series of successes." And I used to be able to tell, when I was a tank platoon leader, my younger soldiers, "Hey," you know, my officers, you know, if they Q2'd, I'm like, "Hey, I Q2'd and I'm your battalion commander, so, you know, you can..."

• 29:39Jocko Willink?

  You're gonna be all right.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  "You're gonna be okay, I'm not gonna, but you're gonna have to improve now," you know. But anyway, so I asked this guy, "How'd you get your distinguished service cross?" And he says, "Well, I was flying an OH6 as a spotter, you know, for the Black Horse, and there was an 8-inch battery firebase that was under attack, and I was spotting for these 8 inches, you know, for an observer. And I took a round to my transmission, so I was gonna have to set it down. So I set it down inside the firebase. And I ran up to the battery commander, and I said, 'Hey, Daiwi,'

• 30:23Speaker 01

  he had a Mr. Captain, which he always called us, the cavalry troop commanders, he always just called us Daiwi, you know. And I said, 'Hey, Daiwi, you know, anything I can do to help?' And he says, 'Well, that M60 machine gun over there in the corner is out of action. Crewsman killed or wounded. If you get that back in action, that'd be great.' So he said, 'Okay, sir,' and I ran off and, you know, flipped it over, cleaned the feeder tray out, slapped the rounds back in, charged it, got it talking. And yeah, the NVA is coming out of the wooden line, you know. And he says, and I started mowing them down until, you know, I eventually ran out of,

• 31:08Speaker 01

  I had a couple of boxes of 7.62, a couple hundred rounds each, and then I was done. So, but they were still coming. So I looked around and there were, you know, one of the guys had an M16 and had some ammo left, so I got his M16 off of him, you know, the one of the killed or wounded crewmen, and started using that. And took out a bunch more of those guys, but there were still some guys coming towards me. And now all I had, back then, aviators had .38 revolvers, and he said, so I took my .38 out and fired all the rounds I had for my .38. They were close enough, I was able to hit some of them, but there were still like three of them left. So now, you know...

• 31:52Speaker 01

  I'm looking at all your knives on the table, you know, and he says, I didn't want to get in a knife fight, you know, and I didn't want to run away and abandon my position. So I'm looking around and I found one of the guys had a grenade on his LBE. So I took the grenade and I threw that grenade as hard as I could. And I killed one of them and the other guy jumped up and ran back in the wood line. And to this day, I wonder if I pulled the pin on that grenade, could I have killed the other guy too?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  I was like, what, at what point did that story, you know, become, but that was so typical of him. It was like a cowboy kind of a guy, kind of a Slim Pickens and, you know, Doctor Strangelove, you know, it was, but what was really interesting to me, Jocko, was we started, I was, I was a platoon leader in 1982, in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. And by, by the time I was a troop commander, took command of my cavalry troop in Germany in 1986, the army had completely changed. It had

• 33:04Speaker 01

  become a much more professional army. And I commanded my cavalry troop, 165 soldiers for two years, almost two years, and I only had one positive urinalysis. Remember, my platoon went from 42 to 18 in six months. Jeez. And 165 guys, and it wasn't for a lack of trying, we only had one hot urinalysis. And, I mean, the whole army just changed overnight. It was, and I know the other services went through a similar transformation. And it wasn't just the urinalysis, it was the, you know, we've had pay raises. I mean, as a second lieutenant, my pay was like, I think it was a little over $12,000

• 33:48Speaker 01

  a year was what I made. When I made captain, when I was a captain, I made clear 20,000 a year for the first time, I felt like I was finally a grown up. I was a grown up now, making grown up pay. But

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was the pay raises and but, you know, National Training Center and all these post Vietnam transformational types of things that were happening across the services really kicked in and had an incredible effect. So it was about that time when I stopped getting letters of reprimand and started to become a bit more serious about my profession.

• 34:31Jocko Willink?

  Is that when you kind of started to think about it as it was going to be a career? Or did you always have a career in mind?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I always thought I was going to be a lifer, but it didn't look like they were going to let me be a lifer. After like my third letter of reprimand, you know, I thought, geez, maybe it's just not, I'm not cut out for this.

• 34:51Jocko Willink?

  You know, I read a book and I covered on this podcast, it's called The Psychology of Military Incompetence. And the basic premise of the book is that some people have very authoritarian mindsets and very disciplinary mindsets. And they're attracted to the military because they see, oh, if I'm there, people have to respect me and they're going to have to listen to me and I can kind of impose my will on the world. And those people can do well in the military, especially in noncombat garrison situations, because they're running inspections and everyone's going to be in the right uniform. And yet, those people, when they get put in combat situations, they're very close minded. They're, they, they can't

• 35:33Jocko Willink?

  think outside the box. They can't look for other solutions. And so, the people that excel in combat might have records where they have letters of reprimands because they didn't do this, they didn't do follow the rules here, they didn't obey this. And yet, when they get into combat, that's actually the person that you want is this person that has at least some, some iota of rebellious mindset where they're going to say, this doesn't actually make sense. And I personally watched you do that countless times, like, oh, you want us to do that? That doesn't make sense. Why would we do that? Is there a better way? Is there a different way? So it's, this is reinforcing what I learned from that book. And that book, when somebody told me about the book, and I kind of said, oh, what's, you know, what's some psychologist gonna know about what it's like being in the military?

• 36:18Jocko Willink?

  Well, this particular psychologist was a British guy, World War II, wounded in combat, and then came back and, you know, did what he did in the psychological world. But yeah, this is, this is really fitting into the mold of someone that has, you know, is not quite staying inside the lines perfectly. But, but what that shows is they actually have an open, creative mind. And when it's required to have that, they're going to excel.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  There's, there may be an element of that. You know, I'm also a lucky person, you know, a bit of a Forrest Gump.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Just happen to turn up at the right place at the right time and have good people around me who were able to, you know, help me

• 37:06Speaker 01

  accomplish things that I probably never would have been able to accomplish otherwise.

• 37:10Jocko Willink?

  And even that right there. If you're a, if you have a closed mindset, authoritarian mindset, you look at the people around you and you think, you know, how can I make them do what I'm telling them to do? Whereas if you have an open mind, you go, oh, this person seems like pretty smart about that. And this character over here seems like he knows what he's doing. And maybe I should just take a backseat and let them drive for a little while.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 37:31Jocko Willink?

  So there's some serious benefits to that.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  So one of the things that

• 37:38Speaker 01

  is fundamental to critical thinking is something called intellectual humility.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Which is, I find, first of all, I like the expression, intellectual humility. But if you, it basically says you've got to be open-minded enough to recognize that other people have ideas and some of them might be better than your own. And not always. Somebody else said, if you're too open-minded, eventually your brains fall out, right? You know, you gotta, you gotta have an idea. But the idea of intellectual humility being fundamental to critical thinking

• 38:23Speaker 01

  is one that has stuck with me over the years.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  And has, I think, served me well.

• 38:33Jocko Willink?

  You end up in the, in the first Gulf War. What was your position there? What, what was your experience like with that?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Well, ironically, I ended up working for that same squadron commander who wanted to fire me. Now he's a regimental commander and I'm a former troop commander. So it was a little bit of a love hate there, but um. I started out, well, I, I went through the, the war. As the officer in charge of the regimentals forward command post. We had a couple of, they're called M577s, uh, you know, they look like uh. M113 armored personnel carriers on, on steroids, right? Big, tall things. Riding in the back on one of those things is like being in a World War II German submarine, you know? Sausages hanging from the handles and from the ceiling, you know?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  But it was, uh, it was an experience and, uh, but. We had a couple of, uh. Tanks and a few Bradleys assigned to us, uh, for additional security. Uh, and, uh, we stayed right behind the, the lead echelon, kind of tucked up with them. Uh, in order to maintain radio contact with the forward elements of the regiment and, uh, and give, uh. And keep the, the main command post, which was a lot bigger and, um. Uh, harder for them to get established and set up. As informed as we possibly could. And when they weren't in the fight, you know, we would.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Basically take over those roles and, and keep the, um. Higher headquarters informed, which to me, the fact that the main command post was barely ever in Desert Storm. And the forward command post, which was run by a captain and. Me and I had, you know, two or three other captains and lieutenants working for me and some NCOs. Were able to keep a 7,000 man regiment, you know, commanded and controlled. Is, I think, informative because as we created these giant stadium seating command centers.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  You know, we've kind of lost the art of mobile command and control or command and control on the move, right?

• 40:57Jocko Willink?

  I had an experience, I was going to a big exercise, like a big giant joint exercise. Where was it? It was in Gibraltar. And in the middle of this thing, we get tasked with a real mission down in Africa. And so I'm, I'm a young officer, you know, I was prior enlisted guy, so now I'm a young officer and I was really, really close to the commander. He was a commander at the time, so an O5. And I kind of became his, you know, his, his right-hand guy that would just kind of go do everything with him. But I remember this, he says, hey, we're gonna go, we're going to Africa, we need a mobile talk.

• 41:33Jocko Willink?

  And I said, yeah, Roger that, sir. And I got, you know, two radios, five sets of maps, some pens, some pencils, and some tape. And I put it into an actual rucksack and we loaded that thing up and that was our actual, that's what we did. And then after a couple of years, I went to college, Navy sent me to college. When I got back, so now it went from, from, that was 1998. So now you fast forward, I guess it was more than, it was like five years forward. And one of the first things I did when I got done with college, went back to a SEAL team, there's a big exercise going on. And they say, oh yeah, you, we want you to, you know, come and be, come, come and look at the talk.

• 42:15Jocko Willink?

  So I come and look at this tactical operations center and it's the same thing. It's this huge room with TVs and all this stuff. Maps everywhere and computers everywhere. And it was shocking to see that I had done that job with two radios and a rucksack and some maps. And it was now transformed into this big, massive, and of course, some of it's necessary, there's more assets and all that. But it seems like we may have gone a little overboard.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, you think. So we're learning that in Ukraine where, yeah, the bigger the command post, the more targetable it is and then vulnerable. So yeah, the, uh, this little command post, these two, uh, command vehicles, we'd go ramp to ramp, you know, we would just stop sometimes, just lower our ramps and, uh, you know, guys wearing headsets and moving little stickies around on acetate. And one day this, the regimental XO flew up and, uh, you know, kinda looked at what was going on. He says, "I have no idea what you guys are doing, but you seem to know what you're doing and that's good enough and just drive on." Even as a battalion commander, uh, you know, I commanded my whole battalion task force and

• 43:23Speaker 01

  training center exercises off of a Plexiglas mapboard. And as we were in fights, you know, I would, you know, use a red pen or a blue pen and mark where things were going. Of course, we were all instrumented and the observer controllers would come up and say, "All right, sir, where do you think everybody in your battalion is?" I'm like, "Well, I think Charlie Company's over here and, you know, Bravo Company's doing this and this is where my scout platoon is and mortars and so forth and so on." And they said, "What do you think the enemy's doing?" I'm like, "Well, I think, you know, their main bodies over here, main defensive belt and I think, you know, this is where the reserve is or whatever." And they say, "Okay," you know, and they would just grade you on that. And then at the after-action review, they'd kinda compare what you thought versus what they thought.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  You know, you never had a completely accurate picture, but it was a way for you to measure your situational awareness in real time and see if you're good at it or not. And I think, growing up in an analog, kind of an world, I, I think those of us who are digital immigrants and not natives have a better ability to maybe create mental pictures of our environment. Better than those who rely on a purely digital picture. And I saw this as a senior general going out to the National Training Center. And I would, I would go up to young

• 44:52Speaker 01

  captains, you know, as a two-star division commander, a three-star corps commander, or whatever, like, hey, you know, show me your overlay. Show me your scheme of maneuver. And they would point me at their digital screen, you know, their Blue Force tracker, or FB CB2, or whatever they had on their tank, or Bradley, and they're like, well, here it is. It's like, that doesn't tell me anything. I mean, if you get killed, who's gonna know what you were trying to do here? You know, I mean, what, what's the, what's your axis of advance? You know, where do you think the enemy is? And they're like, well, let me, you know, you know, press some buttons and pull up what your enemy...

• 45:32Jocko Willink?

  Let me conjure up the electrons.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's like, you can't outsource thinking to these boxes.

• 45:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. There's also, I think, there's something inherent when you, when you're coming from the analog world, you learn to really utilize decentralized command up and down the chain of command. So the team knows, my guys know, oh, if they're gonna maneuver over here, I need to make this adjustment. If I'm gonna, I need to tell Jocko what's happening. I need to get permission to go there. Oh, but I can go over here on my own. And it just becomes the, the flow of information is more, more ready, more, more active. Because everybody knows that I need to know what's happening. So then guys are pushing me the information. But if they think I'm looking at a screen, and oh, you can just pull it from the screen, and now we don't really need to pass, and then there's a disruption in communication, and all of a sudden, everything just, it gets terrible real quick.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think it creates cognitive biases where you tend to believe what you see, right? So, kind of an anchor bias or something, where you say, well, you know, if it's on digits, it must be true, you know? If that icon shows up on my display at that, at those grid coordinates, that must be where they are. It's like, well, garbage in, garbage out. You know, who, who knows where that, you know, might be from a Blue Force tracker, it might be somebody hand jammed it in there, who knows? And or there may be latency, or there may have been a, you know, loss of signal, and that may have been their location two hours ago, and it just hasn't updated. Yeah,

• 47:04Speaker 01

  I mean, you just really cannot rely on that 100%, but we tend to. I mean, we're all guilty of it. Um, you know, I saw it on the internet, so must be right.

• 47:18Jocko Willink?

  So you're, the, the war, the first Gulf War, I mean, it's over pretty quick.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ended up in a burning oil fields outside of Basra. Yeah, it's quite something.

• 47:30Jocko Willink?

  But highly successful, right? I mean, by all measures, it's highly successful. Gosh, is there anyone that will ever be able to kind of stand up and, and really fight against America after that first Gulf War? It's like, no, well, I guess we've just achieved just complete world domination.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:49Jocko Willink?

  Did we get that feeling? So I was, now, so now I'm in the Navy at this point, and I was in SEAL training as the first Gulf War kicked off, and I missed the whole thing. And of course, I'm totally distraught because I think I missed the last war that's ever gonna happen.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:05Jocko Willink?

  What was the, you know, you're coming home from that, you know, I, I, I think we learned some really bad lessons in the first war because it was kind of easy for us, and we rolled up, and we did what we wanted to do, and we did it really fast, and we took a very small number of casualties, and everything kind of went to plan.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it was, uh, first of all, I have to say, it was a pretty phenomenal experience to see this Cold War Army, which was, you know, kind of at its peak, or military, really, all of DOD was at peak, in peak form, you know, it was like Mike Tyson in his prime. And to watch the massive amounts of combat power flowing in, uh, along the Tap Line Road, where we were just north of the Tap Line, and it was like...

• 48:54Speaker 01

  You know, one flatbed, you know, heavy equipment transporter after another with tanks and the crews of the tanks were riding on the tanks themselves and the gun tubes were, you know, traversed slightly, you know, in case they encountered the enemy while they're driving down the road on the back of a truck, right? And while these truck, you know, endless convoys of combat power are going by, you know, swarms of helicopters are flying overhead and you see B-52 flights going north. It was just really an experience that if you didn't, if you weren't there to see it, you can never really appreciate what it's like to look at a division wedge, an armored

• 49:38Speaker 01

  division in a wedge formation.

• 49:40Jocko Willink?

  So how many tanks is in a division wedge?

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Well, tanks, uh, back then the divisions were a bit bigger, so there were probably like 300 tanks and like about an equal number of Bradleys, um, you know, so you're like, you know, six or 700 combat vehicles and then there's the field artillery armored, you know, self-propelled F/A. I mean, it's just amazing to try to wrap your, your mind around that. And, you know, there were so many things going on at the same time. I mean, we got there and I was really, this command post I told you about, uh, I scrounged half of it, you know, we only had like one of the vehicles, we're supposed to have the

• 50:23Speaker 01

  other one, so I just drive down to the port and there's like the, an extra M577, a tracked vehicle, like who's got that? Oh, it's extra, I was like, I'll take it, you know? And then I had to find radios for it, so I'm talking to these Marines and, uh, and I asked them if they have any radios, they go, well, we just came off of a, a Marine prepo ship, a MIPS Ron ship, you know, we just downloaded it. And they said, uh, we've got tons of extra radios and these are serial numbered, you know, controlled items, they said, um, they said, what do you got to trade for it? I'm like, well, what do you want? They said, I said, we noticed you guys are drinking some Pepsi, you guys Pep, you guys got Pepsi? I'm like, yeah, like a case of Pepsi will give you two radios.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  It's like, really? Like, yeah, sure. I don't care, you know? So, I mean, it's not our radio. We'll give it to you. So, it was a lot of crazy stuff going on. It was a little bit of, you know, disorganized. So, I mean, it all came out okay at the end, obviously, because we didn't really appreciate how bad the Iraqi army really was. Because the projections were, we're going to suffer 10,000 KIA's.

• 51:38Jocko Willink?

  I remember that.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, we didn't know when we crossed the berm what we were getting into, but it pretty quickly revealed itself that, you know, we were talking about two different leagues, and we were really punching down.

• 51:52Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:54Jocko Willink?

  So, you get done with that, and you must feel like you kind of, you won the lottery. I would imagine you felt like you won the lottery.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:02Jocko Willink?

  You're in that position.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:04Jocko Willink?

  Seeing all that, directing all that, leading all that.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:07Jocko Willink?

  You must have felt like you, yeah, you won the lottery.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, so it was a little jarring. So, yeah, I hadn't been in combat before. I remember a news reporter asking me what combat was going to be like during a live-fire exercise we were doing. And I said, "Well, probably at least twice as loud as this, because there'll be somebody shooting back," right? You know, "So, it won't be just us shooting." But I didn't know. And, you know, you know, we had, like you do in combat, you have your situations, your scrapes or whatever. But then, and, you know, I had never seen anybody killed in action before, you know. So, that was, that was, you know, one of those life-changing events, you know. I'm fortunately no friendly KIA's, but plenty

• 52:54Speaker 01

  of enemy KIA. So, we get, I come back, and I was doing an R and D job, you know, and I went straight back to my research and development job. I was working on anti-satellite systems and what we now have for our ground-based interceptors. You know, I was doing requirements, you know, doing aerospace engineering stuff for the Army. And I get back and my old boss like, okay, the fun's over, come back to work, you know, because I, I kinda had stepped out of that job to go with the regiment. And then I had to go back to it. And so I, I go there and they said, well, we, we need

• 53:39Speaker 01

  you to go to Seal Beach, California to meet with Rockwell, you know, they're, they're the prime contractor on this anti-satellite kill vehicle that we're working on. And so I get on a plane, I fly to Seal Beach, California, you know, it's a, a, a nice place. And, and, you know, we have our meetings and I, you know, a couple of folks that I was meeting with, we go to this little bar there and it's, you know, people aren't even all back from Desert Storm. And I'm in a bar in Seal Beach. And to me, it was just

• 54:22Speaker 01

  like an out of body experience. I was like, I can't believe, I flew out of a burning airfield on a C-130 that was in a huge hurry to get off of that runway so fast that the loadmaster said, just throw your gear on the floor and lay on top of it. And they took off. They couldn't get off of that runway fast enough. Because I was one of the first ones to redeploy because I was kind of borrowed military manpower. And, and like a week later, I'm sitting in a bar in Seal Beach, you know, and people are, you know, you know, grooving to the music and drinking, you know, fancy cocktails. And I said, I don't know, I feel

• 55:05Speaker 01

  like I'm on a different planet, you know? It was one of my first readjustment, redeployment, you know, kind of challenges.

• 55:17Jocko Willink?

  Um, you, so, so you get done with that job and then you go back to, you go back, you, you end up in battalion command after that?

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Well.

• 55:28Jocko Willink?

  A few years after that?

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, a few years after that. So, yeah, I, I went to Fort Leavenworth, you know, for school, for prison and, and I did the two-year course there. I did the extra year for the School of Advanced Military Studies. The so-called Jedi Knights, you know, that helped plan Desert Storm. I became one of those guys. Um, and, uh, and then after that, I went back to, to Germany and, uh, I was in the cavalry squadron there in Schweinfurt and it was all, it was interesting because it was post-Cold War now. Uh, and I'd been in Germany during the Cold War and, you know, I'd been to Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, you know, and all that's kind of stuff.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  And then to come back after the wall was down to see how, you know, Germany was reunifying was pretty interesting. And, and so, uh, so, yeah, I was, uh, uh, you know, uh,

• 56:25Speaker 01

  you know, we went to the Balkans, you know, as when I was in S3XO, went to Bosnia. We were the second unit across the, the float bridge in the, on the Saava River there and, uh, uh, separated the, uh, the Serbs from the Bosnians, uh, and created a zone of separation. And, um, it was our cavalry squadron that found all the bodies from Srebrenica when the snow melted. Um, you know, so, uh, so, yeah, so I, we did the Balkans and then I, uh...

• 56:56Jocko Willink?

  Is that where you started? Or, or I should say, at what point did you kind of start? You seem to have a very diplomatic mind, meaning it seems like even in that situation, you're aware of this whole diplomacy that's happening along and in conjunction with some, hopefully in conjunction with what's happening on the military side. It seems like Bosnia would be a good place where you are now, you know, there's ambassadors, there's State Department. Is this where you're sort of starting to see that?

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So, I mean, it might have started in Desert Storm or Desert Shield, you know, because they, I had to be a liaison for a couple of months to a Saudi Brigade. And so I got to learn a little bit about coalition stuff. And then in Bosnia, we had to negotiate with some of the locals to, you know, establish our base camps and things like that. So, you know, we, it was interesting to see the pecking order of who got what interpreters. I learned a little bit about interpreters there because by the time we get down to a major, you know, my interpreter was a, you know, kind of an agony faced 16 year old boy, you know,

• 58:04Speaker 01

  who, you know, and you talk to, you know, who's the, the four star, the two stars interpreter? And it's probably, you know, some glamorous, you know, post doctoral gal. Harvard educated. Yeah, beautiful or really, you know, put to, well put together kind of guy. So I, I was talking to some local mayor and trying to negotiate a, you know, kind of a Ford area rearming point for our helicopters. We had little Kyle warriors in our cavalry squadron. And this kid kept, you know, I would ask the guy, you know, you know, how much is the land?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Who owns it? You know, who's got the deeds or the titles and all this stuff? And the guy's kind of answering me in a businesslike manner. I don't, of course, I don't understand a word of it, you know? And this kid would turn and he says, and, you know,

• 59:06Speaker 01

  would tell me what he was saying in an extremely offensive and profane way, you know? And I was like, you know, the, the way you're responding to me, I mean, it sounds like he, he just hates my guts, but I'm looking at him and he looks friendly enough, you know? So either he's like a psychopath, you know? Or you're not giving me a very accurate translation. So I said, I said, is he really calling me these things and saying these things? And he's, he's like, well, you know, you know, that's basically what he's saying, you know? I'm not giving you the word for word translation. I was like, I said, so how did you learn to speak English?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  You know, uh, cause he's very slangy, informal, you know, and profane. He says, I watched a lot of American movies. I'm like, what kind of movies? And it was all like Jean Claude Van Damme, you know, all these like action movies. So I was like Chuck Norris and all stuff. I was like, okay, I got it, you know? So I said, you know, people don't, Americans don't all talk like that to each other all the time, you know? It's not, you know, it's not all Clint Eastwood, you know? It's just, you know, make my day punk or anything, you know? So, but you know, that's, so, uh, so I learned a little bit about the importance of watching

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  body language and not just listening to what the interpreter's saying. Cause interpreters can have agendas or just not be very good, you know? So, yeah.

• 1:00:43Jocko Willink?

  So you're, you're, what's your next step after you get done with that?

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Oh, well, so after, after that, I'm going back, I'm on the division staff and I'm working for a great chain of command, great guys, first infantry division. And, uh, and it's funny, I just was telling the story to somebody not too long ago.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  So, uh, my boss says to me, and my boss at the time, he's lieutenant colonel, he retired as a three star as well. And he says, so Sean, what do you want to do next? And I said, well, you know, I guess everybody's supposed to go to a joint job if you want to get promoted, right? You know, Goldwater Nichols, blah, blah, blah. Goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Okay. He says, oh, hey, look, the guy in charge of all armor assignments, you know, armor officer assignments is, is a buddy of mine. So I'll, I'll ask him, uh, I'll write him a note. What do you want to do? I said, well, you know, here's some different joint jobs. These seem like they'd be fun. So he, he sends an email to this guy. This guy later ends up being my division commander, but that's another story.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  So, so he sends this note to this guy and goes, "Hey, you know, uh, hi, uh, this is Keith." Well, never mind. So he says, "My deputy's a guy named Sean McFarland. Good guy, wants to go joint, you know, and uh, these are the kinds of things he wants." So, uh, he gets an email response back to him. Now, because I was his deputy, I, he, he had set things up so that everything auto forwarded to me. Um, so I see this email come back from the armor assignments. I was like, "Oh, it's him. I'll just open it up and see what it says." "Hi Keith," uh, gave his name away. "Um, this is Mark and uh, yeah, yo, how, how are

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  the wife and kids? Blah, blah, blah. Great to hear from you." Uh, he says, uh, um, "Yeah, Sean McFarland. Yeah, we're not gonna waste a joint position on this guy. He's got no potential to be a battalion commander. Um, you know, he's kinda, he'll, he'll probably make lieutenant colonel, but that, that's it, you know. So, we're gonna send him to an elephant's graveyard kind of a job, you know, next."

• 1:02:55Jocko Willink?

  Well, where did that come from? I mean, as-

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  I, so I'd been, I had a good file, you know, but, I mean, it's really hard to get to be a battalion commander, you know. Um, so, um, it was kind of a thread the needle kind of a thing. And, and there were like lean years and, and years of plenty in terms of battalion commands. And I, I was tracking towards one of the lean years. So, you know, and I did, I ended up on the alternate list, you know. Uh, uh, number one on the alternate list, but didn't get activated. So, so they, so they shipped me off to, um, 3rd Army at Fort McPherson, Georgia then, in Atlanta. And, uh, and you know, in the Valley of the

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Blind, a one-eyed man is king. So, um, I, I was a SAMs graduate. I was the only, this was during the drawdown, you know, after the post-desert storm, Cold War drawdown.

• 1:03:51Jocko Willink?

  We're talking like 98, 97, 98?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, right in there. Yeah. So, uh, exactly. And so, uh- Like, there were like 10 of us that were eligible for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, 10 majors. I was the only one who got promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. It was so embarrassing. I didn't have a promotion party because I felt like it would be really awkward, you know, so I, it was nothing, you know, it's like, no, no, no, don't even mention it, you know, hopefully nobody notices the different color oak leaf I'm wearing.

• 1:04:20Jocko Willink?

  No victory laps with the other guys.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. No, I didn't want to dunk on them. So, um, so the, the, uh, the 3rd Army Commander at the time was a guy named Tommy Ray Franks, and he needed an initiatives group chief or an action, you know, chief from that actions group, which is kind of a prestige job, you know, because now you're getting written, paper written by a general officer. And it was literally nobody who wasn't, with that level of experience, who was not being told to get out of the Army, you know, I was like the only guy standing, you know, so I ended up as his sick chief. And then from there, I went on to be aide-de-camp for General Shinseki, um, and because I guess they figured that, you

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  know, he's, he's not so bad after all, and Shinseki was looking for a cavalry guy with Germany experience because he was the US Army Europe. So I got to work with one of the great, uh, Army, uh, four stars. Um, and then, then he went back to be Vice Chief of Staff in the Army, and actually to be Chief of Staff in the Army. But I, the day he found out about that was the day my household goods arrived in Germany and my, my wife's like, you know, you're not going to DC with him, are you? I'm like, I don't know, I don't think so. So I went and asked him, he said, oh, you don't have to, you can stay if you want, you know. I said, well, if you don't mind me asking, who's your replacement going to be? He says, uh, General Montgomery Miggs. And I was like, oh,

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  he was my division commander when I was, you know, being told that I had no future, you know, so, uh, maybe he'll keep me on as aide-de-camp, and he did. Um, so he goes, oh yeah, I remember Sean, he's a good guy, you know. So, uh, so I got to stay with, with General Montgomery Miggs. And a little interesting Vietnam War story is, uh, as, as aide-de-camp, I got their medical files, and I picked one up from the hospital, I'm taking the other one over to Heidelberg Army Hospital, which is where Patton died, you know, and And I mentioned to General Mix, I'm like, hey, sir, you know, what's your blood type? A positive. That's what General Shenseki's was. He said, I know that. I was like, well, how do you know General Shenseki's blood type? He said, who do you think gave him blood when he got his foot blown off in Vietnam?

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:06:34Jocko Willink?

  That's wild.

• 1:06:38Jocko Willink?

  And because of that job, this kind of puts you back on track with getting battalion command?

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that got me back to battalion command and that was another one of those experiences. It was probably the best experience because we weren't at war. Well, 9/11 happened while I was in battalion command, but up until 9/11, it was a great group of folks in beautiful Willsack, Germany. I had, you know, a terrific team and really, oh my God, the best non-commission officers, you know, my E7s were just firing on all cylinders and made my job so easy.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  So we had highest re-enlistment rate, highest operational ready rate, you know, all this stuff. And, you know, I mean, I don't know how to fix a tank. I'm like oddball in Kelly's Heroes, you know, I just ride them, you know, I don't know what makes them work, you know, so. But my, my NCOs knew how to fix them and they just kept them running and, and shooting extremely well. And the soldiers were happy with good NCO leadership, so they were re-enlisting at record rates. And, and I was just along for the ride. It was, it was a fantastic experience. And, and I, you know, I, you know, I like to think I did a few things to make the battalion better, but it was just a really good battalion, you

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  know. And people say, oh, you don't want to take over a good unit, you know, you want to take over a really bad unit. So, you know, by comparison, right? You know, it's like, ah, you know, when I got here, everything was terrible, you know, inflation was 9%, you know, and now it's 3%. And, but, no, you know, you know, I took over a unit that was really good. And what that allowed me to do is take it. To the next level, you know, instead of trying to do blocking and tackling, you know, we could do west coast offense, right? You know, that was pretty fun, right? So it's like, no, let's do the air raid, you know, and people say, yeah, okay, let's try

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  that. Yeah. And it worked really well. And they, our four didn't know what was hitting them. So, um, so that was a really wonderful experience. And we lived in a nice house. We were, our kids were going to good schools there, you know, army department of defense schools there in, in, um, in Vilsec, Germany. And my fellow battalion commanders are still some of my best friends, you know, uh, that I had. It was not like a team of rivals. We were really, you know, uh, everybody helped each other out. It was a really good group.

• 1:09:24Jocko Willink?

  So when September 11th happens, how far into battalion command or how much battalion command did you have left?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  I was pretty well into it. Uh, I was probably halfway through and, uh, you know, nine 11 happens to be my wife's birthday and we were going to go out that night, you know, and I was out in the field, uh, with, uh, one of my companies was doing platoon level training exercises and I was out there to watch them. And, uh, I, I guess we had like cell phones back then, you know, they weren't like we have now, but yeah. So I get a call and, um, it might've been even over my Humvee, you know, on my radio. I don't know, but somebody was trying, but it was my wife, you know, and she says, a

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  plane just flew into one of, into the World Trade Center. I was like, so, you know, I mean, that's too bad for the airplane, but you know, you're not going to knock over the World Trade Center. It's like that B-17 flew into the Empire State Building in the 30s and, you know, state building's still there. But, uh, she's, no, it's, it's pretty serious. So, um, uh, you know, and, uh, and oh my God, another one just hit the other tower, you know? So I was like, well, let me get back and to headquarters to see what's going on. And, uh, cause nobody had, you know, iPhones or anything like that. Or in Grafenwehr, Germany. So I get to a TV and like, oh my God, you know, I couldn't

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  believe it when the towers collapsed. So, so I knew something had fundamentally changed. And of course, we immediately have to go into lockdown and the, my battalion just happened to be the, the unit that had the responsibility that month for securing the gates and, you know, the call, the plan called for putting tanks at the front gates. So I rolled tanks to the front gate, you know, which was pretty excessive, but that was the plan, you know, and we eventually, you know, dialed it down a little bit. And then it got into this whole thing, you know, you were in Germany, right? You know, so the gate guards, you know, the guys checking all the vehicles coming onto the post, they're just soldiers, right? And,

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  you know, do we, they're armed, but, you know, are the magazines in the weapons? Are they in the ammo pouches? You know, are they locked up in an ammo can, you know, with the sergeant of the guard under a series 200 lock and, right? And I was like, look, if you're gonna put soldiers with weapons at the gate, they gotta have the ammo and the weapon, or otherwise let, leave the weapons in the arms room. Well, you know, we don't wanna do that. So I said, look, I'm not gonna put soldiers at the gate with, you know, unloaded weapons.

• 1:12:11Jocko Willink?

  There's that common sense thing I was talking about earlier.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  And, and I was told, yes, you will. Cause, and so I said, all right, well, then I'm gonna be at the gate, you know, cause if anybody's gonna, you know, get in trouble, it's gonna be me. So, so I was at the gate. And the guy was, of course, my next, as chain of command up as brigade commander, you know, and he comes through the gate, you know? And you, we were picking cars at random to inspect. We weren't doing a hundred percent.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  But he was the guy I was arguing with. I was like, inspect this car, you know, pull, pull the trigger. He was so mad.

• 1:12:47Jocko Willink?

  I thought you were done getting reprimands at this point.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  He didn't give me a letter of reprimand. Probably should have though.

• 1:12:54Jocko Willink?

  Did you think, so when, when, when nine eleven happened, because I'm a, a young, stupid person, I thought, oh, you know, there's gonna be, like, this is gonna be over it very quickly. You know, this is gonna be, we're gonna do some attacks, we do some strikes and it'll be over. There, there's not one part of my mind that thought two decades of war was coming my way.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:14Jocko Willink?

  Where was your head at?

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, I, I never, never expected. First of all, I mean, you and I served together in Iraq.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  At the time, I believed people that I trusted, you know, like Colin Powell and others, that there was a reason for us to go in Iraq. Now I don't. I, you know, I, I'm not there anymore. I, it, to me, you know, Saddam was a bad dude and maybe he was gonna develop a nuclear weapon or whatever. And I don't feel bad about, you know, the regime change that we affected there or anything like that. And we made some really stupid mistakes. In the aftermath of that, and I was there, uh, when we made some of those, like disbanding the Iraqi army and all that kind of stuff. But,

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  the, the moral imperative for that war seems to me a little bit harder to, you know, reconcile. Um, but I think, I mean, there's just war and there's just this in war. I'm not saying that Iraq was an unjust war, uh, because you could, you could make the case, but it's not the case that was made for us to go in there. You know, I mean, there was a justification, but it, but it wasn't yellow cake uranium, you know, uh, or uranium yellow cake. You know, I mean, we, we, we probably did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Let me put it that way.

• 1:14:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Um, but, and then when we were in there, I think we.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  We fought the war justly, but poorly at first.

• 1:14:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:14:59Jocko Willink?

  A couple of things that I think about that is, is when you're weighing the decision to go to war, and you're like, well, you know, they might have yellow caker in them. They might be building a WMD. You know what? Let's go stop that. And look what we did last time. It took us 72 hours. We'll go in there. We'll mop it up. It'll be no problem. And then you think, yeah, okay, that's, that's what we'll do. No one was sitting there thinking, oh, we're going to be over in Iraq. We're going to lose thousands of Americans. We're going to really disrupt the whole, the whole area of operations. No one put that into the calculus. That wasn't one of the variables that anybody figured on.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Well, you know, as Clausewitz said, war is the province of chance, right? Uh, you can't with any level of assurance know what's going to happen once you, once a war starts. But, you know, the conventional phase of the war was fought brilliantly, the 3rd Infusion Division and, you know, the fight in Baghdad and First MEF and First Martyve and all that. Everybody who did that, hats off. Well done.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  And then we, we botched the transition to post-conflict operations, stability and support operations. We just botched it. Um, and then, um, and I was there while that happened. I was in Baghdad. I saw it happening, you know, you know, the.

• 1:16:24Jocko Willink?

  What was your job at that point?

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  I was, uh, Chief of Future Operations for 5th Corps and then Combined Joint Task Force 7, which was evolved into Multinational Corps or Multinational Force Iraq.

• 1:16:38Jocko Willink?

  What year was that?

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  It was 03 to 04.

• 1:16:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Jocko Willink?

  I was, I was there in 03 and 04.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was, so I mean, you, so you saw it too, you know, it's like, you know, things are not going in the right direction here. Um, and but, you know, this was when the IED started to show up and, uh, you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the one that you want. And, you know, we had the Haji armor on our Humvees and, you know, but I was still driving around in an unarmored Humvee, you know, in an SUV in downtown Baghdad and route. Irish.

• 1:17:11Jocko Willink?

  About Irish.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was, uh, we were so naive, uh, in some ways back then, but then we had the, the, you know, the UN mission, you know, was destroyed, uh, by a car bomb and, uh, killed this, you know, special representative from the UN. You know, just things started going south while I was there and, uh, but, but I didn't, even then I couldn't have imagined a 20-year, you know.

• 1:17:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Campaign.

• 1:17:47Jocko Willink?

  I was, so I was there, got there in the fall of 2003 and we showed up there. We're doing direct action missions. We're rolling up former regime elements, thugs, criminals that are running around. They're shooting mortars. We're gathering intel, finding out where those mortars are coming from. We go get them. We high five, you know, we, we totally dominate, you know, we're, we're going into these targets. They don't even know what's happening. We're just capturing all these, all these, I don't want to call them insurgents because they certainly weren't insurgents yet. We're capturing these criminals and these thugs that were running around.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Dead enders is what we called them at first, right?

• 1:18:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  But former regime elements was really what we considered them, yeah.

• 1:18:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, one of the last missions that we did, and so I'm wrapping up deployment. It's now the spring of 2004. And the whole time that we were there, we were tracking to target Muqtada al-Sadr.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  So I was on the other side of the radio when you were doing that, yeah.

• 1:18:48Jocko Willink?

  So we're, so we're tracking to get him and we never get approval, but what we did get approval to do, and again, that's when I say approval, we weren't even, very few missions that I did as a SEAL were top-down directed. Like, hey, here's a mission, you go do it. It was almost all, here's what's happening. We gather the intel, we put it together, we run it up the chain of command. Very few operations were, this is the mission, you go do it. And I'm talking, when I say that, I mean, like, probably less than five missions of my whole career were, here's a mission, you go do it. So one of these was they didn't really quite feel, and I guess I'm talking about you.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Jocko Willink?

  But didn't really feel quite comfortable getting Mukhtar Al Sadr. But let's see what happens if we grab one of his lieutenants.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  So, yeah, we had a whole op plan called, I think it was called Lee's Lieutenants, you know, and he was, he was Objective Lee, Mukhtar Al Sadr.

• 1:19:42Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  And then, you know, all of his lieutenants had all like Confederate.

• 1:19:47Jocko Willink?

  Confederate names?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Jocko Willink?

  What did you call Yakubi?

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, Yakubi was one of them. I can't remember what, you know.

• 1:19:53Jocko Willink?

  So we.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Who was who, but yeah, but yeah, that was, yeah, let's like kick the hornet's nest and see what comes out.

• 1:19:59Jocko Willink?

  So, so there I was winding up deployment and I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world because I got to do this deployment. We got to do all kinds of operations and I think when we go home, like there might be one more SEAL deployment here that gets to do anything. And then after that, we won't be here anymore. It'll be over because that's what the trajectory of, of combat looked like. So we go get Mukhtar or we go get Yakubi down in the Jaffa. And that, like you said, I mean, that was, it was a immediate, drastic, horrible change.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was like kicking over an anthill. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, so I was at Chief of Future Ops. I was the guy who was saying, you know, we probably need a targeting cycle here. We probably need to figure out what we're going to be doing because we're starting to have an insurgency and we're going to have to do something about it. So we started putting together, you know, a fairly, um,

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  you know, primitive, simple kind of a targeting process, but we began the targeting process and one of the first sets of targets was Sadr and his, his crew.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  So were you gone when we went into Sadr's house and all that stuff?

• 1:21:16Jocko Willink?

  I'd have to know what, it had to have been after. Because we did that op, we got Yakubi. We came back, the whole world, I mean, like we were, there was fights at the front gates. There was, and I was, I was down at Baghdad International Airport. We had a little adjacent base there. There's, it was mayhem. I remember standing in my towers and I'm looking at, I think it might've been Route Mobile. Route mobile goes to Fallujah, right?

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Jocko Willink?

  We could see it.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Mobile in Michigan.

• 1:21:42Jocko Willink?

  From our tower, we could see it and the whole thing is just smoking vehicles and it's just, and I said to myself, geez, this is, this is not good.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah. So, yeah, that was, um, the beginning, um, of our problems in the south there.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  We had, um, so this was fall of two thousand and three. Yeah. Yeah. So I remember the Yakubi raid.

• 1:22:09Jocko Willink?

  The Yakubi raid was spring of two thousand and four.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Okay, I left in April of oh four.

• 1:22:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we must have left at the same time, right? Either you left right after I did or right before I did it.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  So we, so, cause we went into, we actually were gonna grab solder. And we had it all. We had the cordon and everything set. And then we got a call from DC that said, don't do it. I mean, we were like literally in his house when we got the no go call, you know? I mean, it was right up to the line. Um, so, yeah, so we, we kind of vacillated on how we wanted to do things there in the south and, uh, you know, cause we, you know, the Shia were a different kettle of fish because they were the, the marsh Arabs, you know, that, you know, we wanted to, we wanted them to rise up against Saddam after Desert Storm.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  And then we let, you know, the Republican Guard escape and then they could keep their helicopters and then they started using those to attack the marsh Arabs who we were surrounded by. Um, in, you know, at, at index at the end of the war, uh, and they were brutally suppressed. And then the Republican Guard turned and went north and did the same to the Kurds. Um, and that's, you know, the, the Shia in the south did not forget that when we were back, you know? It's like, oh, you were the guys that told us to rise up against Saddam and then pull the rug out from under us.

• 1:23:42Jocko Willink?

  So you go home in 2004. When do you, when do you take over the 118?

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so while I was there with, in Iraq with you, the army made a decision, we're not going to do any changes of command in theater. And I was due to take over a brigade of the first infantry division, actually, and would have been during its deployment in Baghdad. And they said, no, we're not going to do that. So they, so instead, you know, I was already in the course, fifth corps staff, so we went back to Germany and I became the corps G3, the chief of operations and, and then they, they found another brigade for me. They looked around and they said, oh, first brigade, first armor division is opening up. You're an armor officer, you know, seems like a good fit. So I went up there and took over that brigade instead because

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  my brigade, when it came back, was going to convert to a striker brigade infantry unit, you know, they said, well, you know, it was just sort of a random chance event that I ended up commanding the ready first.

• 1:24:47Jocko Willink?

  And how long, once you take over, do you have a workup cycle? Are you?

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Training cycle? How long does that last?

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Um, I took over in May, I think, May or June of 2005. And we began shipping out in December. So, so about five, six months.

• 1:25:08Jocko Willink?

  And that you're just doing gunnery, you're getting everything squared away, getting to know your people?

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, gunnery, we did, you know, went to national, the, the training center in Germany, at Hohenzollern, Germany, was kind of like a miniature version of like.

• 1:25:25Jocko Willink?

  Fort Irwin?

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Fort Irwin, yeah. You know, and did our, our mission rehearsal exercise there, pre-deployment site surveys, all that kind of stuff. Form and storm in the team. Everybody was kind of in new positions, but that brigade had spent 15 months in combat around Najaf and Baghdad on its previous deployment and had only, when we deployed it only, had been home for a little over a year. So it had, it had only just gotten back itself and then it turned around and went back. So. Very high percentage of combat veterans in that brigade combat team when we went back to Iraq.

• 1:26:06Jocko Willink?

  And when you're going back to Iraq, you're going, you're going to Tal Afar and you find that out? That's where you do your Advan and whatnot?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, yeah, we, we sent one battalion to heat, um, to replace a Mew that was coming out. Uh, and the rest of the brigade went up to Tal Afar, Sinjar, you know, where via, you know, western Ninnal province to replace HR McMaster and the, and the third ACR.

• 1:26:31Jocko Willink?

  And you get this, you get this view of what, uh, third ACR and HR McMaster did in Tal Afar? You kind of show up and get to look around and see how effective it was?

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, got to meet Mayor Najem and Sheikh, uh, uh, some of our Sheikh Abdullah, the Shamari tribe there and, yeah. Uh, so HR had, um, kind of developed the, the combat outpost, uh, technique, uh, for, and clear, hold and build was really, that term was coined by, um, Conalisa Rice, I think, not HR. I mean, it's like, what's your strategy? Clear, hold and build. And everybody's like, sounds good. Uh, so, um, yeah, we, uh, looked at what HR was doing and it wasn't,

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  he hadn't finished clearing Tal Afar. There were still some pockets of resistance in there, some bad no-go areas. So we had the opportunity to, you know, set up some of our own combat outposts and borrowing from the, the TTPs, the techniques and procedures that HR and his team had developed, um, we, uh, you know, we, we got to learn. And the nice thing about Tal Afar was it, it wasn't a really big city. It was a fairly small city, you know, um, and, um, And we, we had the opportunity to kind of learn what writing looks like, you know, because HR had started some projects for reconstruction. We got to build up on those

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  and, you know, and so we really, we had our mission rehearsal exercise in Germany, which, you know, a bunch of German civilians pretending to be Arabs, you know, to negotiate with you, you know, you had to have a willing suspension of disbelief to make it work. And you're sitting in the, you know, freezing mud, you know, in Germany. It's like, this is a desert. Okay. Just keep telling yourself that and you'll believe it. But we, you know, in some ways, Tal Afar was like a, a live training event, you know? I mean, people

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  were really shooting at us. We took some casualties. We inflicted some casualties. And we were conducting real-life operations in a city that was, at that point, relatively, you know, low to, moderate to low threat, you know? But, you know, we honed a lot of our processes there. And we thought that's where we were gonna stay.

• 1:29:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. At what point did you get word, first rumor, that you might be going to Ramadi?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Almost as soon as we got there. Because there was a brigade in Ramadi, you know, the 2nd of the 28th Infantry Division out of Pennsylvania Guard, and they were due to rotate out. And, you know, I, the guys on the Corps staff, I knew all the Corps staff folks, because I was a former Corps G3, you know, and I know everybody, you know, on, you know, Baghdad staffs, or a lot of them anyway. And they're, they kept telling me, well, we don't really know who's going to replace this brigade in Ramadi. Could be you guys. You're one of the options. So I told my staff, well, okay, let's think about this.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  If we're one of the options, what do we need to do to make sure that we stabilize RAO sufficiently if they have to pull us out and send us someplace else? You know, how do we want to configure ourselves for follow-on operations? So we had to keep, so I kept Ramadi as a potential task in mind as I kind of distributed my forces and conducted operations. And one of the things I wanted to do was accelerate the transfer of battle space to the Iraqi Army.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  I think it was the 3rd Iraqi Army Division up there, Kurdish mostly. You know, let's get that going and let's transition the western parts along the Syrian border and work our way back into Tal Afar so that, you know, I had two of my battalion task forces with me. One of them was already down there. And I said, it'd be good if we were the brigade that went down, is what I told the corps staff, because one of my battalions is already next door in heat, you know? So it'd kind of get the band back together again. And they didn't disagree, obviously, in the end. But I'd already kind of had some pretty good situational awareness because of my battalion commander in heat.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  And so we began thinking about, all right, how would we transition the battle space so that all I have left is like one battalion task force that I have to leave behind here in Tal Afar? And then maybe even turn that over to, you know, my friend, the Striker Brigade Commander over in Mosul, Mike Shields, the 172nd out of Alaska. I mean, he could take this over. And so that, but I mean, one of the options was we, you know, they would send the Striker Brigade to Ramadi and we would take over Mosul. You know, it's just all these different courses of action and we were trying to plan for all of them at once. But finally, I guess in May...

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  And I forget why, you know, or maybe I never did know why, you know, but they finally made the decision that it was going to be our brigade that's going to move. And that's, General Casey, I remember was up in Mosul and and I had to go link up with him or, and that's when he told me.

• 1:32:40Jocko Willink?

  It was similar for me. We were scheduled to go to Baghdad. We were going to go work with the ICTF in Baghdad. I went on a pre-deployment assessment, went over there, did some ops with the ICTF, came back, kind of debriefed everyone. Hey guys, you know, this is what we're doing. And then everyone went on pre-deployment leave and during pre-deployment leave, my, my boss, my commanding officers, you know, said, hey, I need to talk to you, went in and he said they're re, they're putting us all in the West. All of SEAL Team Three is going to be in the West. So you're not going to Baghdad. You're going to Ramadi. And for, I knew about Ramadi. I tracked Ramadi. And at some point I had talked about Ramadi with my guys.

• 1:33:20Jocko Willink?

  And so it was almost a little bit of self fulfilling prophecy that I'd been tracking Ramadi and how bad it was. I got some stuff, some, some stuff to read here. This one here is the situation on the ground. This is Major Alfred B. Ben Conable, USMC.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I know Ben.

• 1:33:35Jocko Willink?

  2005, 2006, Senior Intelligence Analyst and Fusion Officer for 1&amp;2MIF at Camp Fallujah. Interviewed, this interview is from 2009. And he says this quote, "At the end of April, May, I think, if you looked at the color tone map of all the cities that were good, bad and ugly, Baghdad was yellow. Ramadi was orange going towards red, as in the deeper the color, the worse it gets. So Ramadi, according to intelligence experts, was the worst city in the country in that timeframe. By the middle of 06, Ramadi essentially looked like Stalingrad. We were dropping shells in the middle of the city. It was a disaster at that point." Here's the New York Times, June 2006.

• 1:34:16Jocko Willink?

  "Ramadi, the capital of Al-Anbar Province, has bedeviled American forces for months, making itself the toughest city in the most violent of Iraqi regions. Whole city blocks here look like a scene from some post-apocalyptic world. Row after row of buildings shot up, boarded up, caved in, tumbled down. Many neighborhoods are out of the control of either American or Iraqi government forces. Insurgents hold the sway."

• 1:34:42Jocko Willink?

  AP Report Todd Pittman, May 2006. Whole neighborhoods are lawless, too dangerous for police. Some roads are so bomb-laden, US troops won't use them. Guerrillas attack US troops nearly every time they venture out and hit their bases with gunfire, rockets, or mortars when they don't. Though not powerful enough to overrun US positions, insurgents here in the heart of the Sunni Muslim Triangle have fought undermanned US and Iraqi forces to a virtual stalemate. "It's out of control," says Army Sergeant 1st Class Bitt Rubel, behind the sandbags of an observation post in the capital of Al-Lanbar Province. "We don't have control of this. We just don't have enough boots on the ground."

• 1:35:24Jocko Willink?

  The sheer scale of violence in Ramadi is astounding. One recent coalition tally of significant acts—roadside bombs, attacks, exchanges of fire—indicated that out of 43 reported in Iraq on a single day, 27 of those occurred in Ramadi and its environs, according to a Marine officer who declined to be named because he's not authorized to speak to the media. And that, he said, was a quiet day, when nothing from Ramadi even made the news. We also have the glass factory bombing that happened in January of 2006. You had the murder of— You know, there was a little uprising, I think we'll talk about.

• 1:36:03Jocko Willink?

  There's a little uprising of the tribal sheiks in late 2005, early 2006, and Al Qaeda murdered them all.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, they beat that one down pretty hard.

• 1:36:15Jocko Willink?

  So, you get this task in the order, Ramadi. One of the concepts of operation that's interesting, you know, you and I were emailing a little bit back and forth how we're reviewing some of this stuff. And one of the original concepts of operations that I heard was that when 11 AD came in and 228 is gonna leave, but there's a timeframe where we'll have all that combat power on the ground. We'll have double combat power, and that's gonna be the time when we're gonna conduct this big Fallujah-style clearance of the city. And I told my guys, you know, "Hey, we're gonna be doing this what they did in Fallujah. We're gonna be doing it. That's what it's looking like right now." That didn't make it very far. The information that I got was Maliki said, hey, we don't want

• 1:36:56Jocko Willink?

  to send in the Shia army against the Iraqi army, or we don't want to send the Shia army into Ramadi filled with a bunch of Sunnis. We're gonna have a civil war possibly.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  Which is what happened in Mosul in 2016, but that's another story.

• 1:37:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and we'll talk about that one, too. So another strategy was needed, a less kinetic strategy, spare the infrastructure, keep, because they had done that in Fallujah, destroyed everything, the populace was displaced, that's a whole problem. That, so the strategy was to be less kinetic, spare the infrastructure, keep the populace in place, and secure the populace, protect the populace while eliminating the insurgents. That's kind of the rumor mill that I was hearing as you were showing up.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got that right. So, yeah, John Gronski, the my, the brigade commander, the 228, good guy, you know, counted as a friend, but he, he said, hey, it's gonna take three brigades to clear this city. And, you know, Ramadi was about four times bigger than Tal Afar, and 3rd ACR was bigger than the Ready First Brigade Combat Team. So, his math was probably right. So, so, yeah, the idea was, well, we'll keep the 228 and bring in 110A D, and we'll bring in an Iraqi army division, you know, which-

• 1:38:25Jocko Willink?

  Whatever that means.

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, you know, when we got down there, God bless them, you know, our National Guard, Brothers in Arms, you know, they started to smell the barn, you know, and our TOA date, our transfer authority date, kept slipping. To the left, closer and closer. So it became pretty obvious to me that, you know, these guys were not going to stick around to do a two brigade size operation. We'd probably have some elements of them, you know, they were, you know, detachment kind of guys, but, but the whole brigade wasn't going to be able to do this. And then we were going to get a,

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  uh, an Iraqi army division, then it was a brigade out of the fourth division, I guess, up around like Samarra or Tikrit or something like that. And they kind of mutinied when they were told they were going to Ramadi. They're like, Ramadi? Are you kidding me? We've heard about that place. So, um, you know, pretty soon, you know, really what we got was one tank company and a battalion of infantry where the battalion commander basically threatened his guys to come with him and, uh, but he only managed to get like, uh, a reinforced company's worth of jundis, you know, to come with them down there. So we had a battalion

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  of T70, or a company of T72 tanks, which, you know, always happy for that. And, and about 150 Iraqi army soldiers who, uh, when we said, okay, we want to put you guys out at one of our new combat outposts, once we seize it, Falcon, uh, he's like, all right, well, I can only keep a platoon at a time out there, you know, one third out, two thirds back, training, recovering, whatever. And of the one third, of course, you know, they're going to be pulling cycles, you know. So basically I got like a squad's worth of combat power out of the Iraqi army. I said, you know what? Go home. Uh, I'll keep the tank company though. And I attached them to one of my armor battalions. And, you know, and

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  then we had like, what, about 140 Iraqi Sherpa, or, or Surtu police on duty, mostly holed up on, you know, west Ramadi. Um, and yeah, most of the city was in enemy hands. Um, and the, the second of the 28th had done the first part of what HR did up in, uh, Tal Afar, done most of the first part, which was isolate. They, they had their entry control points and had kind of circled the city with, with their forces.

• 1:41:05Jocko Willink?

  You, there's a, there's a big list of who you showed up with and who, who remained there. I mean, first of the 506, 38 Marines, 17, 135, 16, 19, 1, the 16 comes and replaces the 38. That's the 16 Marines. The 19 comes and replaces the 1, first of 506. The 1, there's just a massive list of.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:28Jocko Willink?

  A, a group of people. You end up with, there was, because the, the first of 506 had, and there, there was elements of the first brigade, first Iraqi army division.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  There was.

• 1:41:40Jocko Willink?

  Elements of the first brigade, 7th Iraqi.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Jocko Willink?

  Uh, division. You had that tank company. You had the, and by the way, all those had these military transition teams, which were, you know.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  Steve, Steve Zadi, uh, Marine Colonel, you know.

• 1:41:55Jocko Willink?

  Incredible. Incredible. So the, the, the military transition teams were soldiers and Marines that would basically embed themselves with these Iraqi military units. And the same thing with. Police, police transition teams. Um, just a.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  And engineers. Uh, we had, uh, two extra engineer battalions there that were not, um, assigned to the, or attached to the brigade per se, the 54th, which is out of Bamberg, Germany.

• 1:42:23Jocko Willink?

  And the 321.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Well, well, first it was, uh, the 46th engineers out of Fort Polk, Louisiana, and then they replaced by a, uh,

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  um, yeah, they, they came in later. Then, then it was a CB battalion and then, then the, yeah, we had CBs there too. Uh, so we had a lot of engineers, like basically a brigade of engineers, because I had my own engineer battalion. And we needed every last one of them and still could have used more.

• 1:42:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, and, but we were really lucky. So we had Steve Neary, who went on to become a two star in Marine Corps with a 38. And then, uh, Bill Journey, who's now a three star in the Marine Corps with 16 Marines. We had 16 infantry of the US infantry, you know, so we had 16 Marines, 16 infantry, not confusing at all. We had 11 AD and. One one Iraqi Army Division, you know, so yeah, you you needed a kind of a score sheet to keep track. And then we had First of the Ninth Infantry, the Manchus.

• 1:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Uh, come in after First of the Five Oh Six, the Band of Brothers, uh, commanded by Ron Clark, who's now a three star. Uh, so, um, and and Chuck Ferry with one nine, you know, awesome guy. Uh, you know, a lot of experience with in soft world. Uh, so, uh, a lot of connections through him, uh, to, uh, uh, our, uh, you know, task force kind of friends. And, you know, and we had the, you know, our, you know, tier one folks operating there, you know, uh, you know, under Wyman Howard and the SEAL Team Six and, you know, they had that whole group down there.

• 1:44:06Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:44:06Speaker 01

  And so General McChrystal had his team in there and, uh, and and he called me in pretty early on and had, you know, had a nice talk in like two o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning, you know. Um, but yeah, so there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, lots of players. Um, and then right up the road, you know, we had, uh, you know, Larry Nicholson, uh, with the Fifth Marines and, uh, and Camp Fallujah.

• 1:44:35Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  General Zilmer, one of the best bosses I've ever had. Uh, his deputy there, uh, General, Brigadier General Bob Neller.

• 1:44:45Jocko Willink?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in and out west, Blake Crowell, Seventh Marines. So, uh, it was, it was a, it was, it was really good group of, uh, battle buddies that we had.

• 1:44:55Jocko Willink?

  And then you have the civilian populace of, you know, usually I hear a number around four hundred thousand, whether it was three hundred thousand or whether it was.

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  Well, the city, yeah, the AO, I think, had five to six hundred thousand, uh, AO Topeka. Uh, but the city itself was probably three to three, three fifty to four hundred, but was partially depopulated. It was probably about two hundred fifty thousand when we were there.

• 1:45:21Jocko Willink?

  Then you have the Iraqi government.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  Which by the way is still like three times more than Fallujah had. You know, I mean Fallujah was a neighborhood, it was the size of a neighborhood in Ramadi.

• 1:45:34Jocko Willink?

  You have the gov- you have the government there, like you had the governor Mahmoud who's.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sammy Mamoun uh was the governor of all of Ambar province, but really he was only the governor of his, the government center in central Ramadi. We didn't have a mayor. We got one.

• 1:45:53Jocko Willink?

  We got one eventually.

• 1:45:56Jocko Willink?

  And then there's, and we'll get into this, the tribal leadership, right? You got all these different tribes and what? Thirty, forty different tribes there, but some of them are more prominent than others.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  Depends on how you count, right? You know, I mean, I, I never really got a firm fix. There were probably about a dozen.

• 1:46:11Jocko Willink?

  Prominent ones.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  Prominent tribes and then there were, you know, sub tribes and.

• 1:46:17Jocko Willink?

  So the turnover, as this turnover is happening, you know, um, was there anything that you didn't expect? In the turnover?

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  With uh.

• 1:46:28Jocko Willink?

  Just in general, you know, you're kind of looking at Ramadi from afar. Did you have the, hey, can it really be that bad?

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  I told my, my, I, I, I told my uh,

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  you know, my little crew there, you know, my uh, what did we call them? Uh, the guys, my, my PSD.

• 1:46:48Jocko Willink?

  Your PSD?

• 1:46:50Speaker 01

  I told them, I said, you guys are gonna have to up your game. Cause uh, cause I was impressed really by John Gronski's PSD, you know, I mean, they were on it. You know, there was no nonsense. They were squared away. These are guardsmen, you know, but you know, they, very combat experienced guardsmen.

• 1:47:06Jocko Willink?

  Fourteen months of combat.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were, they were as good as anybody in the regular army. Um, and I told my guys, I said, you guys need to be like those guys. Um, or, you know, a lot of us aren't coming out of this alive, you know, and uh, and I made some changes, you know, I mean, I, I, I kind of had. You know, make some changes on my own PSD in order to make sure that I was

• 1:47:28Jocko Willink?

  PSD became a bit of a priority, huh?

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  It did, it did, yeah. It was, it wasn't a pickup crew. I mean, they became a, a regular, they were built around my MP platoon, you know, and and he was one of my best platoon leaders. He's now a brigade commander in the 18th Airborne Corps, MP Brigade. So, you know, I was fortunate in that, too.

• 1:47:50Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever work with SEALs before?

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  No, I'd worked with, uh, Green Berets, you know, uh, up in Tal Afar, and we did not have a great relationship.

• 1:48:02Jocko Willink?

  What, what caused that?

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  Them, uh, their attitude, uh, too cool for school, you know, uh, and I said, you know, we've got all these combat outposts in Tal Afar, you know, why is your safe house on the FOB? You know, why aren't you out living on these combat outposts where you can actually do things, you know, get to know the locals and do all those special forces, Green Beret things that, you know, you do. Uh, no, we don't need to do that. It's like, really? No. And, and they would just kind of roll in and roll out and do their thing and wouldn't tell me what they were doing, no, zero integration with me.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  I had done some work with some of the, the tier one guys up there in Tal Afar, and they're chasing guys around, you know? And they were much more inclusive in their planning, you know, but the, but the, now, people say, well, that was because it was, uh, first group and first group was Pacific oriented and they had never done this stuff before and they were just kind of new to it. I'm like, they've been running around the Philippines for a long time, but they weren't used to working with conventional forces, so, okay, I'll, I'll give them that. And then, you know, we had some more, uh, Green Berets out in heat, you know, and my battalion commander out there, Tom Graves, with First of the 36th Infantry, uh, Task Force 136, uh, he had trouble with them. I mean, they kept shooting at his tanks. I'm like,

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  what looks like an Abrams tank other than an Abrams tank? Why do you guys keep shooting at these guys? One of these days, one of those tank crews is going to get annoyed and shoot back, and that will be a bad day for you, you know, so, um, but, you know,

• 1:49:40Jocko Willink?

  Were you nervous when you met me? And I'm, you know?

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  So I had never worked with SEALs and, uh, I, I didn't know what to expect. I, I knew this. I knew that SEALs as a group, you know, as a whole, Were younger, you know, you're not built the same as special forces guys. Special forces guys are all NCOs and Green Berets particularly are all NCOs. You know, the, the Delta guys, you know, they're, I knew a lot of them, but they're like former Ranger Regiment guys. And they're, they're, I mean, they're good, they're, they're good square way guys. And I've worked with them in Bosnia quite a bit, Delta. So I, I knew tier one, you know, I didn't really know SEALs.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  But I knew that you were, you tended to be younger, a little bit more aggressive and that you had all these other skillsets that nobody else has. You know, like, you know, all the underwater stuff.

• 1:50:35Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, that diving was really gonna help you out.

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have gone knee deep into the Euphrates or the Habanea Canal. And you know, if my life depended on it, you know, God knows what's under the surface there, you know. So, but yeah, but, but I, so I, when I saw that we were gonna get SEALs. I said, well, there are some special, you know, forces, things that I would like them to help me do with, you know, the, kind of the irregular kind of stuff, you know. But, but that was gonna evolve over time. But what I really valued that your, in your skillset was your direct action capability. And close target reconnaissance and, and those kinds of skills.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  I said, because if we're gonna fight our way into a city, you know, I, I had a, one of my battalion sergeants major was a former Delta operator. You know, Sergeant Major Colossos, and he'd been like Ranger Recon and he's pretty well known as, as an operator, you know. And he had helped me a lot with marksmanship, with, you know, designated squad designated marksmen and all that kind of stuff. And I said, I, I need snipers and counter snipers. And he helped train some of my small kill teams and my brigade reconnaissance troop and things like that. And that was all good, but it wasn't going to be sufficient for an urban fight. So I knew I needed really good shooters. I needed snipers.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  I needed folks that could really help me with, you know, these kind of direct action kind of things. Cause you know, you know, conventional forces can do it. But special forces do it better. So, so, so I was glad that I had your guys. And then our first meeting, um, just set the tone. Cause, cause you said, hey, boss or whatever you called me, I forget, you know?

• 1:52:33Jocko Willink?

  Probably sir.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Probably sir. That's right. It's the tier one guys that call me boss. They call everybody boss, right? But, uh, I guess they always call me that. But you know, he said, hey, sir, you know, what do you need? What do you want us to do? You asked me. I didn't have to say, hey, would you mind doing something for me? You're like, sir, what do you need? I was like, this is gonna be great.

• 1:52:57Jocko Willink?

  Well, you're also very lucky and I was very lucky. So a normal SEAL task unit like we had, you probably have two snipers in each platoon, giving you a total of four snipers. But occasionally the sniper gets promoted and now he's the leading petty officer. And then another sniper might get promoted and be the chief officer. So in task unit bruiser, we had 13 snipers. I mean, just completely lucky, but both platoon chiefs were snipers. Both leading petty officers, snipers. And then we just happened to have a bunch of guys that snuck into sniper school and wore snipers.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  And, and we happened to be in a shooting gallery.

• 1:53:32Jocko Willink?

  We happened to be in a shooting gallery for sure.

• 1:53:37Jocko Willink?

  And you know, SEALs, we look, SEALs had definitely done joint missions, you know, in Fallujah. Clearly there was SEAL snipers there in Najaf, Mizzou, Bagdad, some other places. But as far as being that, uh, embedded and intimate with the conventional forces. You know, I hadn't really seen it before, but what I know is, you know, and as soon as we got there, you know, the first, when we, when we arrived in Ramadi, we're going to memorial services for guys.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:07Jocko Willink?

  And that's.

• 1:54:10Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I'm sitting there as as a SEAL, you know, we're supposed to be the the guys that are gonna go and and make things happen. And I'm seeing these soldiers and Marines get killed. And I I just thought to myself, what can we do to help them? How can we help them? Because they're in a terrible fight out there.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:31Jocko Willink?

  And I don't want to keep going to their memorial services.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:36Jocko Willink?

  So immediately, you know, with Colonel Gronski was the same thing. Sir, what can we do to help you guys out? And, you know, one of the first things he said was, well, we got, we just lost Marines up in Firecracker.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48Jocko Willink?

  They had a big ID, it was terrible, 38, got hit hard. You know, they said, can you help us with that? I said, well, and we put sniper team up there. And sure enough, killed ID and Plazars very quickly. And that was a great way to start building a relationship.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the great thing about the way I always look at special forces, and I did the same thing in Operation Inert Resolve is, you know, I want you to do the things that conventional forces can't do, you know, fill in the gaps. And and that's what I had you guys do. It's like, if I have a gap in my capabilities with my conventional forces, I'll turn to my special forces and say, can you fill this gap? I have a hard time getting there, you know, in and out, you know, with my small kill teams or whatever. I have, you know, I'm trying to train, you know, these indigenous forces to do something, you know, can you enable those indigenous forces? I mean, that's kind of in your toolkit, you

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  know, more than mine. And whenever I ask you to do something like that, you you found a way to do it, you know. And and I remember one time I was asking you to do some training for Iraqi police or something like that. And it was not, obviously, you know, one of your favorite jobs in your job jar. And you said, but you know, and Colin Green, I know him, he was a friend of mine, he was in charge of all you guys at the time, you know, and But I didn't know him at the time and you said, well, actually, sir, this is good because my boss has been after us to do some more of this, you know, secure, you know, security force assistance or whatever we call it, training assist. So the, the, the fact that

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  you're giving me a mission like that will kind of get him off my back a little bit.

• 1:56:33Jocko Willink?

  I said it in the nicest possible way there Admiral Green.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, but Colin's a great guy. I appreciate his support. But, but yeah, it was a different conversation with also a friend of mine, Kent Tovo at the time is Colonel, retired Army three star now. He is a friend, but I had to talk to Kent. I'm like, I'm, I'm having a hard time getting along with my Army Special Forces guys. And I thought I would have a better relationship with them than I do with the Navy SEALs. Was, you know, I was, you know, I went to West Point. I was raised to hate the Navy, you know, why, why am I having a better time with my SEALs than I am with my soldiers here?

• 1:57:14Jocko Willink?

  Colonel, or now a general, but Colonel Tovo is a huge supporter as well.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and you know, we'll start talking.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  By the way, he says hello. I ran into him at, outside of Fort Liberty, not too long ago.

• 1:57:28Jocko Willink?

  Well, it'd be great to have him.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  I said, I was gonna, I was gonna, I said, I was gonna be seeing you. And he said, oh, yeah.

• 1:57:32Jocko Willink?

  He was super supportive, especially, and I'm sure we'll get into this, but you know, when you take aggressive actions, there's gonna be, there's gonna be changes to the significant activities, enemy attacks, casualties, all those things are gonna go up. And people like Colonel Tovo that understood what was going on, understood the fight that was happening, and Admiral Green as well, that understood what was happening and go, okay, yeah, we get it. We, and look, did they ask me, did they ask me hard questions? Yeah, absolutely. And they should. But did they nod their head at the end of the day and say, yeah, we get what you're doing. We understand what you're doing. And appreciate it and that that was huge for us because otherwise we'd get shut down.

• 1:58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but no, so there were two really vital things that the SEALs did. That I can't emphasize enough. One was whenever we set up a combat outpost. You guys would go in first and do CTR, close target reconnaissance. Kind of clear it and then you would move out and set up, you know, Overwatch positions with snipers, small kill teams. And because within 24 hours, we we had our cop in the box routine, you know, we'd go in at nightfall and at dusk and by sunrise, we would have. Basically a rudimentary combat outpost in place and that we would just continuously improve it from there.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  And then you guys would, you know, be in a position to kind of, you know, catch the enemy as they try to counterattack.

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  And that was, that was huge. The other thing that you did that was really incredibly helpful was. When Sheikh Satar and the Awakening happened.

• 1:59:23Speaker 01

  You know, you kind of flipped on a dime a little bit for me here at my request. And Satar said, well, I can put like 4,000 guys in uniform like by, you know, day after tomorrow, like where are these guys coming from? You know, but they were tribal militia guys, you know? And I called them emergency response battalions or ERUs or something like that. And, and yeah, they just like materialized, you know, there's like. There they are. And I had no way to put my arms around, I didn't have transition teams for that, you know? So I said, turned to you and I said, hey, you know, what can you like?

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  You know, get your arms around these guys and like, give them, you know, radios that they can call you and, you know? You know, and help them set up some. You know, basic combat outposts and train them and help me screen, you know, all that kind of stuff. Give them some basic level of training. That was so helpful, you know, I mean, I, I don't know how we would have coped with the Awakening. If we didn't have Task Unit Bruiser because I had no forces to spare for that.

• 2:00:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, I think that's one of those things where, again, my goal was to help you do your job and help the rest of, you know, the Army and the Marines do their jobs and whatever we could help that out. So we wanted to do.

• 2:00:50Jocko Willink?

  As you're forming this plan, you know, you, you, you wrote an article with you and Major Neil Smith. I don't know where he is now, but he was the brigade.

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Actually, he wrote it and the military guy said, hey, sir, you really put your name on it too.

• 2:01:06Jocko Willink?

  It says in that article, "Developing the plan, we reckoned the task force had to isolate the insurgents, deny sanctuary, and build Iraqi security forces, especially police forces, to succeed. The staff developed a plan that centered on attacking Al Qaeda's safe havens and establishing a lasting presence there to directly challenge its dominance of the city, disrupting their operations, attriting their numbers, and gaining back confidence of the people. We intended to take the city and its environs back one neighborhood at a time by establishing combat outposts and developing a police force in the secured neighborhoods. The plan called for simultaneously engaging local leaders in an attempt to find those who had influence or wasta and get, and to get their support. We recognize this as a critical part of the plan because without their help, we would not be able to recruit enough people to take back the entire city."

• 2:01:53Jocko Willink?

  You were, you and I were talking before we hit record today of how much was going on and it seems to like separate in your mind over time, but cop iron. This was one of the first combat outposts that we put in. It was 18 June. It was over on the other side of the Habenia Canal. This is one of my memories where.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  It was in Springfield.

• 2:02:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little place we called Springfield, just south of the city.

• 2:02:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So this is one of those moments in my life where I was looking around going, is this for real? It's once again, it's you and I and the battalion commander, Colonel Tedesco, we're in the back of a 577, one of those mobile command centers. And what happened, and there's like 50 armor pieces ready to go over that bridge.

• 2:02:43Speaker 01

  It was a railroad bridge.

• 2:02:44Jocko Willink?

  Railroad bridge and set up this combat outpost. Well.

• 2:02:49Jocko Willink?

  We SEALs were gonna go in first and get some of those buildings secured and then set up Overwatch positions. And the bridge was fouled.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:59Jocko Willink?

  There was a bunch of like concrete.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  That's a Navy term.

• 2:03:01Jocko Willink?

  Okay, what's the, what's the Army term? What's the Army term?

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  Uh, covered with junk?

• 2:03:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:08Jocko Willink?

  So the bridge was covered with junk and we figure out that all of a sudden, we're not gonna, you're not gonna be able to send tanks or Bradleys or support over that bridge for a few hours. And that means my guys are gonna be over there without any support, direct support from armor, which we relied on heavily. So we're having this conversation.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  I think it was your guys that, that said that the, the 120 millimeter smoothbore cannon was the best counter sniper weapon.

• 2:03:37Jocko Willink?

  That's a hundred percent us that said that.

• 2:03:41Jocko Willink?

  You know, that's one of those, again, this for me is like, I was looking around going, is this really happening? We're sitting there in that back of that 577 and you ask me, hey, Jocko, if your guys go over now, we're not gonna be able to get any tanks over from like two or three hours. What do you want to do? And I talked to Leif, he was the platoon commander, said, hey, man, here's what's happening. If you go over, there's no support for this amount of time, maybe two, three hours. If you get contacted, then look, we had AC 130, we, we were good.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:06Jocko Willink?

  But that's what we're doing. And sure enough, the guys went over there and, um, and set up the Overwatch and I don't know if you remember this, blew up a bunch of trees. Do you remember that? These guys were, so there's trees, date trees that were obstructing their fields of fire. So they decide to blow, blow them up, which we always have some charges in case we're gonna blow. Well, date trees apparently are incredibly strong. So they're, they're trying to blow up these trees. They're not falling down. I'm looking at Colonel Tedesco, Tedesco saying, that was a controlled, that was a controlled detonation. That was a controlled detonation. That was a controlled detonation. Finally, I call up the guys like, hey, stop, work around the date trees.

• 2:04:49Jocko Willink?

  That's kind of the first combat outpost that we put in with you. But again, for me, it was this pretty monumental moment to watch all this coordination and planning and the, the, the pre-planning. I mean, all of us. And another thing I was thinking about.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  A bit of synchronization exercise there. Yeah. But, you know, before that, we had to seize the near side. We had to secure the near side of that bridge. And that was a fight. That, that corner of like Tamim, I think, was the name of the neighborhood there. And

• 2:05:24Jocko Willink?

  Tamim was that neighborhood.

• 2:05:25Speaker 01

  There was a

• 2:05:27Jocko Willink?

  Coordinated attack.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  There was a coordinated attack on it.

• 2:05:30Jocko Willink?

  ECP three was

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  Yes. And they took out the better part of an Iraqi army company there. Yeah.

• 2:05:37Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Yep. So what that was, so this was before we put in Combat Outpost Iron. There was a coordinated attack. And again, it's important to talk about this because this is how good the enemy was. The enemy was good. They start with machine gun fire, get the heads down. And then as that machine gun fires coming in, that allows them to, to come out from cover and fire RPGs and mortars. And then while that's happening, now, you know, the Iraqi soldiers are all got their heads down, of course, because they don't want to get shot. Well, in comes a vehicle borne IED, which are up armored, you know, Mad Max up armored vehicles that they

• 2:06:17Jocko Willink?

  drive right through the, right, right through the checkpoints into those compounds and explode themselves. And that happened, that happened a matter of days before

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:28Jocko Willink?

  Uh, we were down there because when we got down there, there was debris everywhere. You could see the carnage of what had happened. So, yeah, when we're going down there, we're anticipating everything's going to be a fight.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  It was Indian country, for sure. Yeah. I mean, we didn't control anything inside of the ECPs. We didn't really even control the ECPs very well at that point. Yeah.

• 2:06:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that one got over, I think it was two nine or three also got hit.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Jocko Willink?

  Where

• 2:06:57Speaker 01

  And that's on the east side. No, two nine three was

• 2:06:59Jocko Willink?

  The west side.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  No, that was, yeah, that's up by Hurricane Point, right?

• 2:07:03Jocko Willink?

  It was, it was

• 2:07:05Speaker 01

  There's a big traffic circle there, right?

• 2:07:06Jocko Willink?

  Oncoming MIT commander and an outgoing MIT leader were both killed. It was awful.

• 2:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Jocko Willink?

  So that's sort of like you just called that.

• 2:07:17Speaker 01

  But they were, they were good. Just to interrupt you, the Iraqi, the insurgents there were not pushovers. They, they, they were pretty experienced fighters. In fact, somebody told me that Camp Ramadi had been like the Fort Sill of the Iraqi army where, you know, Fort Sill is where the army trains all their artillery soldiers. And so they were very accurate with indirect fire too, with rockets and mortars and everything. I mean, and they were fast and they could adjust. So yeah, they were, no joke. And I'd read other intelligence

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  reports that said that the enemy, you know, considered Ramadi sort of their Super Bowl, you know, that that's where you kind of went. If you really wanted to make a name for yourself, you had to go to Ramadi, fight, kill, you know, fight the Americans. That's, that was the, that was the show for them.

• 2:08:16Jocko Willink?

  I would brief SEALs that when we got home, that the enemy would do what we would do. They would, they had communications, they'd talk on radios, they would call for casualty evacuation because we would watch them through ISR, pick up their casualties and bring them to Ramadi General Hospital. Or they'd bring in reinforcements, they'd bring in supplies, like they'd do cover and move. They would do what we would do. And so you can't think that this enemy is going to be a bunch of knuckleheads. Like they're going to do what we do and they're going to do it well and they're going to have more combat experience.

• 2:08:48Speaker 01

  Yes, right. Yeah. And they had accumulated a lot of that kind of, a lot of them had come from the fight in Fallujah. You know, after we secured Fallujah, they moved into Ramadi. So they knew how to conduct a conventional urban fight.

• 2:09:07Jocko Willink?

  Moving to.

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  Okay, one other thing, and our, my brigade has to kind of templated it. That the enemy had really built concentric defensive rings or belts in the city, you know. IEDs covered by fighting positions and, and, and buildings and strong points and things like that. And it, it, you know, it developed over time, but you know, they, they had a plan for the defense of that city. They thought that when our brigade came down there that we were going to attack. We heard, you know, reflections and signals intelligence that they were expecting a big attack that didn't really materialize. And the fact that our tanks were painted a different color than everybody else's, you know, they thought,

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  well, these, this must be the elite, you know, because they're all painted green because we came from Germany. And they said, well, you know, obviously the Americans would put their best forces to face the Soviet Union. So that the armor units coming out of Europe must be their best armor units. And, you know, I mean, it's, that, that was true when I was a captain, but it wasn't true anymore. You know, we were just, you know, an average armor unit. I mean, great people in it, but we didn't get any pick of the litter. But, but there was a narrative that the, out there that there was a big attack coming. And, and

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  we, to an extent, allowed that narrative to persist when we realized we couldn't launch an attack. But we were in the middle of our transition with our, you know, the second of the 28th. And of course, transitions are always high risk periods. So if the enemy was kind of in a defensive crouch while we were doing our transition, that would give us breathing space. So we allowed that narrative to, to go on for a little while. But in the end, we did have to launch offensive operations. We were going to take Ramadi back one neighborhood at a time. And I knew I didn't have enough forces to take it all back. Uh, and my, my, my thought was I'll take as much of it back as I have combat power to do.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  And then the unit that replaces me will, you know,

• 2:11:24Jocko Willink?

  Continue.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Continue that process. I never imagined us getting as far as we were going to get. The awakening is what enabled that. But, but that was, so the enemy began developing these defensive belts inside the city and we had to fight our, we didn't recognize it immediately, but we were fighting our way through that first defensive belt. At Cop Iron.

• 2:11:46Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, I, I did also want to bring this up because I remember it happening. It was, um, the 135, like it's almost as soon as they got out into, into their AO. Like, I think in the first 24 hours, they had a KIA, they had a PFC Brett Tribble. And four wounded and then through two or three days later, they lost three.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Scott Love.

• 2:12:18Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Scott Love, uh, David Crombie.

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:12:21Jocko Willink?

  They were killed.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:12:23Jocko Willink?

  And two more wounded and, you know, I, I remember going to see Colonel Dean after that happened.

• 2:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:30Jocko Willink?

  And like telling him, we'll go kill these guys that did this. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get in there. And him just being, I could see like on his face, he was thankful to hear that.

• 2:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, absolutely. So Tony, 135 armor and 16 infantry were attached from my sister brigade, second brigade, first armored division. Um, because I had to leave a battalion up in Tal Afar initially, second of the 237, 237 armor. And 136 infantry out in, in heat. So I was down two of my three maneuver battalions. So I picked up 135 armor and 16 infantry from, um, second brigade. Um, and I still have my own field artillery battalion and.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  Engineer and Support Battalion. But my only organic battalion was Tony or VJ Tedesco 137. And then I picked up Ron Clark and First 506 and Steve Neary 38 Marines. So it was a lot of battalions, but they, only one of the maneuver battalions was actually mine. That's crazy. So I just wanted to throw that in there. But, so Tony came to me from my sister brigade. You know, we were all First Armored Division, but different. He was in Baumholtzer, Germany. We were in Friedberg, Germany, where Elvis Presley served, coincidentally. And I said, you know, Tony, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to, you know, I'm gonna make VJ 137 Armor

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  the main effort and to fight my way into the city of Ramadi. And we're gonna start in the south and work our way up into the center. And what that means to you is I'm gonna take one of your companies away from you, you know, and you're gonna be an economy of force. And you're gonna be spread really thin in this area where Sheikh Satar was, west of Ramadi and the city of Tamim and all that. And, and so he was, he was spread thin. And being spread thin, lots of opportunities for IED teams to get in there and set up IEDs.

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  Al Anbar University, all that was all part of his AO. So that's a hard thing, you know, when you have to tell somebody, I'm gonna disadvantage you so I can advantage somebody else. I can't be strong everywhere. I need to be strong here to get this operation going to set up our first three combat outposts in the city, which was Hawk, Falcon and Eagle, right? Hawk being Ramadi General Hospital, Eagle was the

• 2:15:13Speaker 01

  The stadium, first of the 50600, first airborne, so they were Eagle and Falcon with VJ and 137 armor. So Tony took that in stride, you know, but knew that he needed help. And I used my brigade reconnaissance troop to help him out as kind of a fire brigade, quick reaction force as best I could. The SEALs, whatever I could do to help Tony, I would do, but I couldn't give him more combat. I gave him that Iraqi tank company, you know. I mean, whatever I could do to help Tony, you know, I wanted to do. So, but they paid a price for it.

• 2:15:58Speaker 01

  They paid a very heavy price for that. And they were taking, I think, his attached infantry company out of 16, Alpha 16, I think was like, initially took the heaviest casualties for like three or four months, you know, as a result of that. He didn't complain about it. He let me know, but the rest of the story, though, is necessity is the mother of invention. If Tony had not been the supporting effort, if he hadn't been stretched super thin, I don't know that he would have established a relationship with Sheikh Zatar that he did,

• 2:16:40Speaker 01

  which probably, you know, created the relationships that we needed for the initiation of the Awakening movement, you know. You know, so, so, yeah, I think that, like I said earlier, you know, I was kind of lucky in some ways, you know. I mean, I didn't make 135 armor the economy of force effort in order to create an Awakening, in order to generate enough combat power for me to clear the city of Ramadi, you know. That was just a, you know, kind of a happy coincidence, but, you know, if you make the

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  right decisions for the right reasons, I think other good things will happen, you know, and I think that's kind of the way it played out. And you...

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  Being, you know, having the mindset that, hey, how can we help? You know, that was another incredibly important enabler. You know, I didn't ask for a task unit out of the Navy SEALs that was going to, you know, be willing to do things that were not in their normal wheelhouse, or look for ways, you know, because they were, you know, so taken by the fact that we were having memorial services two or three times a week in Ramadi for soldiers and Marines. And eventually, you, you know, had some of your own, lost some of your own that way, too. But, but that was, again, an example of somebody, you know,

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  doing the right things for the right reasons, and then good things happening as a result of that, you know. The, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts of what everybody was doing. You get synergy.

• 2:18:32Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm. Cop Falcon. Now, this is, again, in my mind, Cop Iron and Cop Falcon were, you know, seemed like they were weeks and weeks apart, but this is now like a week later. And it's June 25th and June 26th.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  Well, we wanted to keep the enemy on his heels. So we, we would try to conduct a major operation every three days or so. So the enemy never really kind of got his feet back under him.

• 2:19:02Jocko Willink?

  This is a even bigger operation, and, and I remember talking, we, we sent guys in to do the recon. There was an armored reconnaissance that took place as well, which...

• 2:19:14Speaker 01

  Came up out of Springfield, out of Cop Iron.

• 2:19:16Jocko Willink?

  Yep. They got hit. Tank, tank got hit in the street was, we had to bring out the wrecker to bring it back, and we set up an overwatch on it for a while. But those, we ended up, I remember, we ended up bringing pictures of kind of the whole area back, back to Colonel Tedesco, and you could see he was like, oh, this is, you know, we went in the buildings that we were going to take, we, that we're going to set up the combat outpost. And, and of course, my snipers get in there and figure out, okay, we can go to this building, we can support over there. And I was, I was talking about it before you got here with, with Echo, you know, we had, our snipers would look at a... At at the operation, right? And, you know, uh, snipers would look at it and go, okay,

• 2:19:58Jocko Willink?

  who's gonna have, okay, you new guy sniper, you're gonna be over here, you're gonna see about a block and a half. Um, you'll see this one intersection. Other new guy sniper, you're gonna be over here, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna be actually almost facing back towards friendlies, you know, good luck. Oh, meanwhile, the experienced sniper, he's gonna be set up on a long neck, long access road, he's gonna see nine city intersections out to whatever a thousand meters, which he can easily shoot. And that's where he's gonna be sitting, he's not gonna come off his gun for five or six hours. So that kind of, that kind of thing going into Cop Falcon was, was where we were starting to figure out how to really capitalize on what we were doing. Uh, and actually it was cool on that

• 2:20:43Jocko Willink?

  one, we, the Marine Corps, we came in on boats from the Marine Corps.

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. So, um, yeah, we had this, uh, it was called the Haditha Dam Unit. They had these three Cirks, uh, I forget what Cirks stands for, but, but they were like, uh, uh, what were they like? Uh, they were like gunboats out of Apocalypse Now, but on steroids, they had, uh, way more armor and they had a little, or way more armament, but they also, they had impellers in the back so they could like run up on sandbars instead of propellers. And they had a little, a little armored box in the front with a ramp. You could actually put like a squad or a fire team, maybe a big fire team in this little band, and they could run up on this beach and, and drop it off. And we, we

• 2:21:31Speaker 01

  inserted you guys around Cop Hawk, you know, small kill team to try to get after an indirect fire, uh, team, you know, mortar team and, you know, so, and, and the Habanea Canal was lined on both sides by these date bombs. And the soldiers called it Little Vietnam, you know, because they're going up and down that. That area there, you know, and those, uh, those, uh,

• 2:21:56Jocko Willink?

  We called it, we called it Vietnam.

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a little riverine patrol unit there, uh, but it was great for inserting and extracting. Yeah, that was, that was a neat little addition there, uh, to our suite of capabilities that you typically wouldn't associate with an armor brigade, right?

• 2:22:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's one that we were cautious about. We didn't want to overuse it because you're sitting in those boats, you really felt naked. I, I mean, as you're going down there, you really, it was definitely, you're, you're very exposed. You're very, very exposed, but we did it.

• 2:22:31Speaker 01

  I didn't like it for a different reason. I mean, I went on a couple of patrols with those guys too, and, uh, and they give you like this safety harness, you know, kind of snap link yourself in. I was like, if I fall off of this thing, the Euphrates or the, the canals may be six feet deep, you know? And I'm, I'm wearing like 40 pounds of body armor, so I'm probably gonna go in headfirst. And the only thing sticking up might be the soles of my boots. And I've got this harness around my waist. It's like 10 feet long, you know, so it's not gonna keep me from falling over, you know?

• 2:23:09Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna get you dragged.

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. What, what's the plan here? Have you guys really thought this through? Yeah.

• 2:23:17Speaker 01

  Not coast guard approved.

• 2:23:18Jocko Willink?

  No, the, the, going into Com Falcon, the, you, you know, you mentioned the engineers and the engineers. I remember I used to watch the engineers literally straddling a 12 foot tall concrete T barrier, you know, some private up there trying to hook the crane. I'm watching this and thinking, man, we gotta, we gotta do whatever we can to help these guys out.

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no, there was no safe way to do that. Um, and, uh, we did lose some engineers doing that, uh, or got some wounded. Um, one of them was a CB actually. We had some CBs building these, because I needed every engineer I could find. They were the coin of the realm, uh, and. We, the Seabees were building these barracks or huts on Camp Ramadi and that's all they were there to do. But I said to the Seabee commander, I was like, we need some of your guys to come out and help with the setup air conditioning units or what, you know, because that's a force multiplier. Because if you can cool off between patrols, you can do more patrols. It wasn't a

• 2:24:28Speaker 01

  luxury. And they're like, ah, we don't go outside the wire. It's not what we do. We were a vertical construction unit here. And I was like, wait a minute. I saw the fighting Seabees with John Wayne. I know you guys, you know, can go outside the wire and fight, you know, you know, pushing Japanese tanks off of cliffs with your bulldozers. I saw that. It's gotta be true. So they're, they said, well, we're not qualified on our weapons. I said, I can fix that.

• 2:25:00Jocko Willink?

  We can make that happen.

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  We can make that happen.

• 2:25:02Jocko Willink?

  I had a contingent of Seabees as well.

• 2:25:04Speaker 01

  We sent them out and it was, I think at Falcon, might have been Firecrack, I forget when, but we had a kid doing one of those kinds of things, you know, hooking up, you know, something to, you get lifted up onto the roof, you know, probably one of the crow's nests, you know, prefab fighting positions. And he was wounded in action, you know, you know, not very seriously wounded, like a through and through or something like that, you know, not to minimize it, but to say, see, you know, you guys can do this.

• 2:25:38Jocko Willink?

  Well, when we're, when those things are happening and this massive footprint shows up in enemy territory, they're 100% going to attack at Cop Falcon first morning. And there's all this chaos going on. I walked inside the cop building to, you know, check. I think I was, I was actually going to head up to the roof to make comms with my guys who had pushed out 400 meters down to a four-story building. And they, and you already mentioned that they, that the enemy was good with mortars. And it was like, they nailed us. Sergeant Terry, less 26-year-old from Fox Lake, Illinois, from 137.

• 2:26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that hap- those were 122 mortars, not 122 rockets that came in. And that was my Bradley. I had just pulled up in my Bradley when those hit. And it's just, you know, so Sergeant Lisk was standing right outside of my Bradley. Kind of like a little local security thing.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  And inside the Bradley turret, you can't really wear all your body armor. So I was just down to my little chicken vest, you know, the swall vest. So I dropped down inside the turret and I was putting on my body armor. Really hard to do and I got hung up on something, you know, a radio mount or something. And it just slowed me down. I had a hard time getting it on. And while I was, you know, hung up and, you know, trying to get out of the Bradley, that's when those two rockets hit right outside the Bradley. Sergeant Lisk was standing maybe five feet away from my Brad. If I hadn't gotten stuck inside of my Brad, I would have been there with him.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  So lots of, you know, I mean, that's a, you know, there it was war story or anything. But Sergeant Lisk, you know, got hit by a piece of shrapnel.

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  And, you know, didn't, you know, wasn't immediately killed in action. You know, they, the medics tried to help him out, but, you know, weren't able to save him, unfortunately. But that was day one on Cog Falcon and that's, you know, baptism by fire at Cog Falcon. You know, we knew we were in the right place. Or I knew we were in the right place because how much the enemy didn't want us to be there and how hard they were fighting back against us. So that kind of just underlined for me, okay, you know, this is working, you know, the enemy hates this, so I like it, you know,

• 2:28:18Speaker 01

  and we're gonna do more of this if we can. But you guys have done a great job clearing it out. Were able to occupy it well. And then I know that that became, you know, one of your team houses there.

• 2:28:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I remember I was outside, come in.

• 2:28:38Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, I remember seeing you come in when they brought in Lisk on a litter.

• 2:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28:44Jocko Willink?

  And you know, then they're spinning up the, the, trying to get a Kazovac down there. I don't know if he went up in your Bradley or I don't know how they got him back up.

• 2:28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think.

• 2:28:51Jocko Willink?

  It was all happening really fast.

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  I think he might have gone back in a 113, uh, but, um, yeah, we couldn't, we couldn't lift anybody out medevac, you know, everything was ground evac because it was too dangerous to fly.

• 2:29:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that was, that was, I think we had a, uh, New York Times reporter with us who wrote about Terry Lisk and, uh, you know, how he died. But he's a good soldier.

• 2:29:20Jocko Willink?

  And one of the, one of the things that I thought about is again, I'm standing there and looking at you and it's like, guess what we have to do. We, we have to go back and do our mission and that's what it is. And that's what you do. That's what, that's what everyone did. Um, and these attacks come, I got, I, you know, I found like, um, from notes, some SIGAX, these significant activities that happened. And like, these are the kind of things that come in. 137 was attacked with IDF resulting in one CFK, two CF wounded in action. No radar acquisitions. The unit did not observe the, the point of origin.

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  By the way, CF stands for Coalition Force.

• 2:29:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:29:59Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 2:30:02Jocko Willink?

  137 engaged, I forgot about this, RCIED Remote Controlled Vehicle while conducting operations at Cobb Falcon. The, the remote control vehicle, uh, traveling on Sunset towards the perimeter at an unknown speed engaged and exploded.

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sunset was the main road from Falcon up to the government center, checkpoint 293, the traffic circle there in West Ramadi. And, uh, and the enemy knew we liked that road. It was like our main supply route and we had. You know, uh, we, we lined the, the sides of the road with Jersey barriers, concrete barriers, but there were still little gaps. And that's where the enemy started using these, we call them pizza box IEDs. They were kind of flat, square or rectangular.

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  And the end of it would have a, a, like a little tail on the end of it, like a kite tail with pieces of, uh, pressure, uh, sensitive, um, pieces of glass or... And the idea was they would fling these things out in the dust intervals between vehicles driving down Sunset because Sunset quickly turned from a paved road into under the, you know, all the tanks and Bradleys and 113s into just a dirt road. And they would, they would, you know, between each vehicle, there'd be dust, you know, from the preceding vehicle. So they would wait for the second vehicle to go by or the third and they, they'd, they'd go in between, you know,

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  pop up from behind these, uh, concrete barriers and fling these IEDs out there with these long tails of pressure, um, plates. And, uh, and if you drove over the pressure plate and the box was on the outside of the Humvee, you were fine. If you drove over the pressure plate and the box was under the Humvee, you were cooked. But they, they were doing that on that road all the time and I'd forgotten about the RC IED on Sunset, yeah. But that was like shortly after we occupied, when they were throwing the kitchen sink at it, yeah.

• 2:32:08Jocko Willink?

  And, yeah, that's what their small arms attacks and mortar attacks and rocket attacks. And, and then, you know, you've got, we have the, my task unit out with Iraqi scouts. They're out in a building 400 meters away. And again, they've got long access. They've got, from their position that they get into, which they planned for, they can see all these different long access roads and it's very difficult for the enemy to maneuver. And then the reports start coming in. OP engaged two military age males armed AK-47s. OP engaged AIF, which is anti-Iraqi forces, conducting tactical reconnaissance with, of the OP, reporting it to another...

• 2:32:52Jocko Willink?

  Anti-Iraq Force, BDA, one anti-Iraq Force wounded in action. OP engaged two AIF carrying a mortar tube. Engaged two AIF armed with AK-47s moving tactically approximately 280 meters east of the of the OP. Engaged AIF and carrying RPG approximately 100 meters east of the OP. BDA, one AIF killed. Approximately one minute later, the OP engaged a second AIF was attempting to recover the RPG. BDA, one AIF wounded in action. So that's.

• 2:33:26Speaker 01

  They were racking them up and racking the sack on them. And that, that was really sort of like, you know, Cop Falcon became almost like a, you know, we're like moths to a flame. Yeah, and that was a, you, you told me about this, that, you know, the, the teams were catching these guys a block or two earlier than they thought they were going to make contact with us. So they were at shoulder arms. They're still positive ID as enemy, you know, but they weren't expecting to be engaged at that point. And I guess that's how Chris Kyle got a few of his, a number of his kills. But, but that, that was a great TTP.

• 2:34:10Speaker 01

  And, and that's one of the ones we passed along to General Petraeus when he came in. Cause he said, well, how are you doing this? And, and we showed him and he said, write all this up so that I can have everybody else do this in Baghdad and elsewhere, you know? So, so those TTPs were, were very valuable for the rest of the surge force as well. On the, you know, the whole, the positive ID, PID question, I remember General Corelli coming down and, and then we talked about this a little bit before we went live.

• 2:34:45Speaker 01

  Saying, you know, we were briefing him on, you know, the numbers of enemy killed, wounded, captured. Because I didn't like to just talk about my own casualties. You know, I mean, why are you here? You know, not just to absorb casualties, but to, you know, make progress. And of course, it's not all about enemy casualties. It's also about, you know, how much of the population are you securing and the city? And we laid all that out for him. But of course, the way you do that is by killing the enemy, you know, and moving forward. And he says, so, why are you killing, why are you shooting so many of the people in Ramadi? He says, have you declared everybody in Ramadi as

• 2:35:28Speaker 01

  hostile? And you're just shooting anybody you see? I was like, no, sir. Absolutely not. I said, that's, that's just that there are that many enemy combatants in the city that you cannot, we told this to General Mattis, you cannot go outside the wire and not get into a firefight. Were you there when General Mattis came to visit?

• 2:35:49Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  General Mattis came to visit when he was commanding first Marine Expeditionary Force. He was a three star at the time.

• 2:35:55Jocko Willink?

  Or maybe I was there and I didn't know.

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  Okay, all right. So he comes in and, and, you know, we had him, I think 38 was still there, 38 briefed him. And he goes, okay, now I want to go out and visit, or, you know, you know, go to the Gov. Center where Kilo Company was and.

• 2:36:12Jocko Willink?

  He's gonna definitely find some at the Gov.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, sir, if you go outside the wire, you're gonna get in a firefight. He goes, well, good. That's what I'm hoping for. And his Sergeant Major was a guy named Bataglia at the time. He went on to become the Senior Inlisted Advisor to the Chairman. And so they roll out. And they get into a firefight, as predicted. And he had a massive PSD with him from 38 Marines, you know, probably had like 60 Marines with him, you know, I'm not exaggerating at all. But they got in a firefight and they got pinned down. They could not self-extract. So the 38 blows out their quick reaction force, which happened to be two army tanks. You know, they gave them a tank platoon, you know, as their QRF, you know, which they were grateful for.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  So they, they blew out these two tanks and, you know, boom, boom, end of tick. And, you know, they're rolling back in the gate. So, uh, so I'm talking to this our major, but Tagli, and he goes, hey, sir, I gotta tell you this story. He says, uh, after this, he tells me all about the, the tick and get pinned down and all that stuff. And he says, so we're rolling back in and I asked my driver, I said, hey Lance Corporal, how do you feel about that? You know, 60 Marines pinned down in a firefight? And it takes like, you know, two army tanks to get us out of it, you know? And he says that Lance Corporal looked around at me and gave me a funny look.

• 2:37:39Speaker 01

  He goes, you know, Sergeant Major, you old guys just need to get over that shit. Um, and I said, wow, out of the mouths of babes, huh Sergeant Major? You know, true joint warrior at the rank of V3.

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  But that's, that, you know, was, uh, pretty indicative of the, the level of violence there. I mean, when Senator McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Lieberman are like, let's go out in the city. I'm like, absolutely not.

• 2:38:07Jocko Willink?

  Not happening.

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  No. Like, oh, it's fine. I was like, no, it's not fine. You know, I will not have that on my conscience.

• 2:38:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there was even guys in the SEAL teams that would, you know, how are you possibly killing this many people? Like, how is this possible? And again, you put Chris Kyle on a, on his gun, on a long access road, as a combat outpost is being built and actively attacked. You guess what you're gonna do? You're gonna kill a lot of bad guys.

• 2:38:35Speaker 01

  Well, that's how I met Chris. He was, you know, laying behind, you know, you know, his, his weapon, you know, looking through a loophole. I think it was a firecracker or someplace like that along a long, long axis, along the racetrack, the road there and, uh, And I think you or Leaf said, hey, that's, you know, one of our top snipers. And I think I kicked him on the bottom of his boot, you know, said, hey, thanks for what you're doing, or something like that. But, um, but, you know, at that point, it's probably like, you know, sun had been up a few hours. I don't know how long he'd been, you know, looking through that, uh, those sites, you know, but he'd been there for some hours. So you said if they were on the gun for five hours, he'd probably been on the gun for a number of hours at that point.

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  He never looked around, never lost his focus. He kept his eyes where they needed to be the whole time.

• 2:39:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, that was him. As we talk about all these enemy that were out there, obviously there's civilians out there as well. And, you know, we have to, I mean, the, the, the number one goal is to protect the local populace, right? So we have to be as discriminating as we possibly can when it comes to engaging, uh, because there's civilians out there and we're going to be in Iraq, we're going to meet those civilians in an hour. Like, we're gonna, when we go out there and shoot somebody, we're gonna be walking through that neighborhood in an hour.

• 2:40:07Jocko Willink?

  Or if we shoot someone that's innocent or a civilian, they're gonna be brought to the gate of the cop or the command in two hours. And it's terrible. Um, I, I've, I found an interesting note. This was from Lieutenant Colonel Rod Harush, who passed out pamphlets for Cop Falcon, like once we got into Cop Falcon. Dear noble people, this was a pamphlet sent out to the, you know, handed out to the, to the civilians that are there. Dear noble people, military necessity will force us to do things we don't want to do. But what we have to do is for the sake of your freedom, so you won't live in fear for the rest of your life. It is my utmost intention to bring peace to you.

• 2:40:52Jocko Willink?

  We will stay until the job is complete, until our children, until your children can play without fear and your families can walk the streets with honor. So this is what we're doing. We've got thousands of enemy fighters, intermingled with hundreds of thousands of civilians.

• 2:41:12Jocko Willink?

  How important is it to protect the local populace in these scenarios?

• 2:41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's the whole point of it, right? I mean, we were there. The theory of counterinsurgency is to separate the insurgents from the population and to protect the population. And that kind of dawns on me. I remember getting a briefing from a Marine major in 38 at Hurricane Point, which was their main combat outpost there. Reggie McLam was his name. He was a great kid, you know. He could do like a standing backflip in body armor, you know, like, you know, in the middle of a briefing, just emphasize a point.

• 2:41:57Speaker 01

  So, but Reggie was kind of showing me, he says, hey, you know, sir, that we don't really make enemy contact, you know, until we cross this street, you know, into Ramadi. And so, you know, we kind of assess this part of Ramadi is under control and, you know, based on recent operations that we've conducted, you know, moving towards the, what we call the racetrack area, you know, when I'm talking about the SOUC area, you know, we've moved the forward line of own troops, the flot, as we call it, like one block to the east or two blocks to the east over the past couple of weeks or something like that.

• 2:42:41Speaker 01

  And that's when I began to think of this as a more of a linear, conventional op, you know, instead of, you know, being just in this chaotic swirl, I began to see some patterns emerge and say, well, you know.

• 2:43:03Speaker 01

  If we really kind of apply that around the rest of Vermont, we really do begin to see the areas of enemy control, the areas that we control. And, you know, the combat outposts are designed to exert control in a new area. And where are the areas that we really need to exert control? And that will kind of inform the progress of the campaign. So, and that's where we began to understand the enemy's defensive mindset and how they were setting up their defensive belts and what their lines of communication or what we called rat lines, where they were and how they were operating and how we could deny

• 2:43:48Speaker 01

  the enemy's sources of revenue through, you know, gasoline, you know, theft and, you know, resale and black market operations and all these different things, how they all started to fit together into a pattern. And, yeah, the idea of the combat outpost was not just to defeat the enemy, but to be that transition from clearing, holding to building. So, one of the things at COP Falcon and every, and most of the, not all of them, but most of the major combat outposts featured a Civil Military Operations Center, CMOOC, or Information

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  Center, CMOOC. But we would put civil affairs officers at each of these locations and people could come in and they could say, hey, you know, you, you know, dropped a bomb on my roof or whatever.

• 2:44:51Jocko Willink?

  Ran a tank through my front wall.

• 2:44:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. All these things. Or, by the way, you occupied my house. You know, this combat outpost is where I used to live or my business used to be. Or whatever else the issue might be, you know, water mains or, you know, all the, what we call the sweaty mess, the sewage, water, electricity, all those different.

• 2:45:19Speaker 01

  Public services would come into the CMOC and we would then know about those. And then the patrols that we would send out, I would not allow anybody to go on what many called presence patrols. I'm like, we're not going out for presence. What's the purpose of a presence? So if we were going out on any patrol, they had to have a purpose, an objective to reconnoitre a location. One of the purposes of the patrols that the combat outpost began to do, and this came from a young soldier in 137 armor, was census patrols.

• 2:46:03Speaker 01

  He had begun to develop sort of a spreadsheet of the people that lived in the different buildings, you know, and how we had alphanumeric designators for every structure in the city. So he was like, you know, Alpha 11, you know, is a, you know, a family of three and, you know, so, so we developed a more systematized approach with, you know, certain questions that we wanted to know. Do you have a vehicle? What does it look like? What's the license plate number? You know, so if we see it someplace else, we know it's not where it should be. You know, do you have a weapon? Everybody's authorized, everybody was authorized in AK-47.

• 2:46:44Speaker 01

  You know, Iraq is very strong on the Second Amendment. And, you know, but you shouldn't have more than that, right? And so on and on, and we began to understand the, the population better. You know, what, do you belong to a tribe? You know, as you know, the tribal affiliations break down in urban areas, but in the area where the Marines were, Hurricane Point, the Owani tribe was still relatively strong.

• 2:47:15Speaker 01

  And these were, these were kind of the techniques that we began to employ in the clear hold and build. And then the other thing we tried to figure out is, okay, who are the people we can talk to about reconstruction? And that's why we had the reconstruction conference. While we were still fighting our way into the city, all the sheiks, every sheik owned a construction company, go figure, right? Kind of like the Sopranos or something.

• 2:47:45Jocko Willink?

  I remember you describing some of the sheiks as gangsters. Like, these guys are gangsters. That's what's happening.

• 2:47:53Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. I mean, there are Bedouins, so, you know, one man smuggling is another man's free trade, I suppose. And sheep, cigarettes, gasoline, whatever, you know, the, the traffic would bear, but sometimes it was weapons. And I remember Sheikh Satar getting stopped at the Al-Qaim border crossing, going into Abu Kamal in Syria. And the Marines out there stopped him because he ran through an ECP, probably because he was carrying something that he wasn't supposed to be carrying. And they shot at him and they detained him. And

• 2:48:35Speaker 01

  General Zilmer calls me and says, hey, you know, this is your boy, right? You know, Sheikh Satar? And he just kind of ran through a checkpoint and, you know. I was like, yeah, I said, well, what do you, maybe it was an L or I can't remember who, but what do you, you know, what's the deal? I was like, let him go. Why? Well, because he's like instrumental in us turning the battle around in Ramadi. And, and if he wants to smuggle whatever he's smuggling, you know, let him, you know, help him. I, you know, I don't.

• 2:49:12Speaker 01

  Whatever he's doing wrong is

• 2:49:15Jocko Willink?

  Make it right.

• 2:49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, is is more than made up for by what he's doing to help us win this war. We're not here to stop smuggling.

• 2:49:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:23Speaker 01

  It's not why we do, we came into Iraq. I don't remember George Bush standing up and saying, you know, we're going in Iraq and by God, we're going to shut down smuggling across the Syrian border. That was never part of the campaign, so why do we care? Uh, these people have been doing this for, you know, millennia, you know, and, uh, and it was also true of tribal justice and law west of the Payco's kind of a, you know, approach to rough, rough justice. And Sheikh Satar used to tell me that kind of stuff all the time. Oh, I did this, like, really? I kind of wish you hadn't told me that, but.

• 2:50:01Jocko Willink?

  That's, uh, you know, when we, when we started talking about Iraq and you were talking about going into Iraq and, you know, I started talking about they didn't put into the calculus the amount of casualties that were going to take place. And this is something that I've said to many people over the years is when we're, when you're going to war, you've got to have two wills, the will to kill and the will to die. And the will to kill is not just the enemy, because when you go into these, when you, when you're in war, civilians are going to get killed.

• 2:50:28Speaker 01

  Especially when the enemy hides among them.

• 2:50:30Jocko Willink?

  Especially when the enemy hides among them. Um, you know, there were, you know, clearly in a battle like Ramadi where there's all those civilians intermingled with, with the enemy, there's incidents where civilians get killed. Um, you know, I, I got some of the reports here, you know, a flare was used as an escalation of force at a vehicle that's approaching, warning shots fired, vehicle doesn't stop, engaged, one civilian killed, you know, and, and it's determined a civilian because they searched the vehicle and there's nothing to significant to report. The investigation take, takes place, you know, um,

• 2:51:10Jocko Willink?

  police station, uh, multi-personnel, civilian personnel bring in remains of a civilian in the police station that the guy's been beheaded. These things are happening out there.

• 2:51:20Speaker 01

  Well, obviously the beheading wasn't.

• 2:51:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, clearly that's not us, but I'm saying there's, um, there's civilians are being killed on, you know, the absolutely civilians were being killed by the enemy. Um, and, and there's, here's another one, uh.

• 2:51:37Jocko Willink?

  Anti-Iraqi forces digging in a previous shot hole. So this is an area, this is one of the tactics, techniques and procedures of the enemy. We called it reseating.

• 2:51:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, drop a rice bag in a, in a, in a, in a shot hole. That's practically PID.

• 2:51:51Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And in this particular situation, previous enemy was observed, engaged with 25mm. After the attack, people flee, dismounts, go out to assess BDA, and they're told that a female civilian was killed and a, and a civilian was wounded. Based on this information, initiated investigation and initiated condolence payment process. So.

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  Well, that was the other thing that the Civil Military Operations Centers used to do is condolence or salatia, as they call the payments. Yeah. Those are heartbreaking, absolutely heartbreaking incidents. And I can recall a number of others, both in Iraqi Freedom and Inherent Resolve, where you do everything you can to avoid or prevent civilian casualties, but they still happen. And sometimes it's just horrible, you know, the, you know, women or children, you know, it's just one of the ugly aspects of war and why it should never be undertaken lightly. I was just going to say one other thing. One of the ways we

• 2:52:59Speaker 01

  tried to mitigate that was get Iraqi tribesmen from that area, call them Kit Carson Scouts, to go on our patrols and, you know, say, you know, we know the people in that house are good. The people in that house, well, you know, not so good, you know, watch out for them. That was incredibly valuable. Obviously, it's a lesson that we lifted from our operations in Vietnam. It wasn't infallible. And even with that, we had some tragedies occur.

• 2:53:37Jocko Willink?

  One of uh, one of my guys, we, they were in an um, observation post down by Cop Eagle. They're watching, they're observing, and they see a vehicle, it's painted like a taxi, it's moving west to east, it's, it's talking to people that are observing and watching and pointing and doing things that normal people don't do. Uh, vehicle then turns down the road towards, towards the outpost, and, and there's actually signs, big signs in Arabic on the road that say, "Don't pass here, danger, danger." Uh, vehicle goes past those signs.

• 2:54:20Jocko Willink?

  Uh, the platoon commander fires a warning shot into the, into the vehicle, into the engine block. Vehicle continues, and one of my snipers fired one round, kills the driver.

• 2:54:38Jocko Willink?

  Vehicle rolls to a stop, and as soon as the vehicle stops, out get, I think it was a, a woman and four kids.

• 2:54:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:47Jocko Willink?

  Um,

• 2:54:50Jocko Willink?

  you know, it's just terrible. I don't know why this individual was doing this. Could this individual been probing? Could they have been trying to see what they could get away with? Sure, it's possible. I don't know. But, these are the kind of things, when these things happen, you know, first of all, everybody knows about it. I mean, everybody knows when, when a civilian gets killed, it's immediately, you know, you've got the people out there in the civilian populace. You've got the sheiks that know, you've got the police, you've got the Iraqi army that sees this stuff happening. So, in a situation like this, um, these guys are doing their best in,

• 2:55:30Jocko Willink?

  and clearly within the rules of engagement, but, you know, one of the terms that, that I heard out there that I also used was, "Good shot, bad result," meaning like, "Hey, I can't say anything to that sniper that, that negative." He, he was watching this happen, this was a clear, that could have been an IED, uh, vehicle borne IED all day long. And so he, it's a good shot, the result is bad.

• 2:56:03Jocko Willink?

  When, when these kind of things happened, what was the reaction? What was the, um, you know, the procedures that we went through to, you know, in this particular case, it was like really quick. Uh, you know, cause the, the family's right there. We can immediately try and take care of them, get them, you know, pay them money, which I know that sounds callous and cold, but that's one of the things that happens. From your perspective.

• 2:56:28Speaker 01

  I would say culturally, that's important though.

• 2:56:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, in that culture. So obviously we, like you said, we investigated every escalation of force, even if it, you know, went, especially went to lethal force. Even if it didn't have a lethal result, we still had to do a, AR, Army Regulation 15 dash six, uh, investigation. Uh, and we did it for every KIA, uh, as well on our side. We did it for every fracture side or suspected fracture side. Uh, I mean, there were, there were, we were doing a lot of investigations all the time.

• 2:57:11Speaker 01

  But like I was saying earlier, I don't know if we were recording when I was talking about how you get numb to certain things. I don't know. We weren't recording.

• 2:57:22Jocko Willink?

  I don't think we were recording yet.

• 2:57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Ramadi was such a violent place that you, that at least I felt like I was becoming numb to the violence around there. And maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but in retrospect, I realized I had become numb. And I think everybody around me was cer- to a certain degree, varying degrees, probably, numb to the level and intensity of violence. And that's why.

• 2:57:54Speaker 01

  When somebody from outside of Ramadi came in, even from a place as violent as Baghdad, like General Corelli, he would be shocked. He's like, "Why is this place so violent? Surely it's something you're doing, Sean," you know, and I don't think it was. I think it was, yes, to an extent it was, because I was trying to take the city back, you know, and the enemy was reacting to our actions, and that was causing the violence to go up. And of course, after it reaches a tipping point, then it goes down. And it was interesting that when General Petraeus came in with the surge, and in Baghdad, it followed almost

• 2:58:35Speaker 01

  the exact trajectory of violence. You know, in Baghdad, it went up, peaked, and then dropped like a ski slope, and so did Ramadi. But at the time, we didn't know that, you know, we couldn't forecast that. We thought that's what would happen. We believed it would. But we were doing our best, and until we tried, you know, we couldn't be sure. One thing that was sure is that if we didn't try, these people would live under the terror of Al Qaeda, and it was Al Qaeda. I think that at that time, they'd rebranded themselves to the Islamic State in Iraq under Zarqawi, kind of broken from Osama bin Laden's, you

• 2:59:17Speaker 01

  know, mainline Al Qaeda. And of course, ISI became ISIS, you know, we kind of got a chance to take another bite at that apple later. And, you know, the movie about Chris Kyle, you know, opens, it's clearly Ramadi, right? I mean, to me, that's Ramadi, where he's laying in a sniper position, looking out on this dusty street, and there's a woman there, you know, in front of him. And it's one of these murky situations, shoot or don't shoot, I don't know, what's the right thing to do?

• 2:59:55Speaker 01

  And we had people, you know, junior people making those life and death, kill or don't kill decisions on a daily basis, privates, you know? And we just trusted them to do the right thing. We trained them, they, you know, they knew what the right thing was, you know? But in the stress of the moment, you know, we're all humans ultimately. And so when things like this would happen, you know, it would be sad, you know, I'd feel really bad about it, but I would kind of lock it away, compartmentalize it and move

• 3:00:36Speaker 01

  on because, you know, you had to keep the mission in mind and the civilian casualties unfortunately were part of it. I saw it again in Afghanistan, big time, as a two-star, you know, there and I saw it again in Operation Inherent Resolve. When the enemy hides among the people, like you said, there are going to be civilian casualties. You do everything you can to reduce that. People who complain about what the Israelis are doing in Gaza, and I don't pretend to be an expert on what the Israelis are doing there, I don't know what their exact TTPs are or anything, but I will say that, based on my own experience, even if you do everything right, you're going to get some things wrong.

• 3:01:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the ROE brief, so you know, of course, before we go out, every operation, we're getting an ROE brief and it's a, you know, very clear, very straightforward. I would make it even clearer, you know, what I would tell my guys is, you better make sure that the person you're killing is bad. That's what you have to make, you better make sure that they're bad. If we killing a mom, because there's Imams out there running around, there's teachers out there running around, there's doctors, there's moms, there's, there's people out there, and if you kill one of these people, everyone knows, we're dis, we're not going to operate anymore.

• 3:01:59Jocko Willink?

  I mean, if you go out there and kill civilians, like if a mistake happens and it's within the ROE and okay, it's going to get investigated.

• 3:02:08Jocko Willink?

  If you're not doing the right things for the right reasons, we're gonna, we're not doing this job. And then we can't go out there and protect, you know, help protect the army. We can't do our job. So we have to make sure that the people we are killing are bad.

• 3:02:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and to the extent that you can. And you know, like you were asked at the beginning of this, you know, what happens, how, you know, when it goes bad, you investigate it, you take the appropriate action, whether it's disciplinary or corrective, you know, training or modification of your procedures. And then you move on because you got a mission. It's, it's no different, in my mind, excuse me, from when you lose one of your own. You can't let that stop everything in its tracks, you know, and then, because then that death

• 3:03:00Speaker 01

  loses its meaning. You know, and, and you can't let that happen as a commander. And I felt the same way about the civilian casualties. Like, that was really unfortunate. But it'd be even more unfortunate if, you know, after that happened, the survivors still have to live under the reign of terror from al Qaeda. So we'll continue our, our mission to liberate the.

• 3:03:31Jocko Willink?

  How much, I was thinking about this as well. How, for lack of a better word, intimate the battle was. Because it's in this little tiny city. And so, like, if I, if I was, when I was in Baghdad, the number of times that I talked to a, a Colonel, a full bird Colonel, was, you know, I could probably count on the, on my hand. I would see you all the time. I would see the battalion commanders all the time and we had meetings that we would have and then I'd see you in the field and you'd ask me about this. We'd talk about this. There was such strong relationships because everyone was

• 3:04:13Jocko Willink?

  so close together. The proximity, the battle rhythm, like you said, I didn't know that you had that. I've probably forgot that you had this policy of we're going to do a major operation every three to four days. What does that mean? That means you, me, the battalion commanders, the company commanders, we're all sitting in a room or we're in the field, we're at a cop and we're talking to each other about what's happening right now. So it's, to me, it was very different to have that much direct interaction with the whole chain of command all the time. And of course, part of it is out of necessity because you can't leave the wire unless that company commander out there knows and briefed his

• 3:04:56Jocko Willink?

  platoon commanders that you've got guys patrolling through that area at this time, going to this, going to this place. You know, not coordinating was just suicide.

• 3:05:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, the level of synchronization of everything that had to happen, like you said, in a pretty densely populated, relatively small area, but with a lot of people in it, is really mind boggling and no one person can do that. I mean, that's every echelon in the chain of command. All I could do is try to, you know, set the standards and kind of give the broad direction. But then it was down to the field grade officers, the company grade officers, the senior and junior NCOs to really make it happen. And a lot of times, it wouldn't even be an NCO on the scene. It'd be the young private at the ECP

• 3:05:50Speaker 01

  or whatever. Doing what the right thing would be, and you know, you're wearing these shirts that say discipline. Definition of discipline is doing the right thing when nobody's looking, right? And that's what we counted on is disciplined American troops, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, doing what was right, even when nobody was around to check on them. And that's why we were successful, ultimately. And that's why we were able to hold ourselves together when we didn't know how to do counterinsurgency for about two or three years after we invaded Iraq. Is what, is we had disciplined troops on the ground with NCOs who were enforcing standards

• 3:06:34Speaker 01

  to make sure that, you know, we held it together until we officers figured out what the hell we wanted to do.

• 3:06:42Jocko Willink?

  When you were talking about the increase in enemy attacks, the increase in casualties, what kind of pushback were you getting from that, from your boss?

• 3:06:55Speaker 01

  So my boss was Major General at the time, Rick Zilmer, who I've said earlier was one of the best bosses I could ever have. We had one, the worst day we had was, I think it was December 6th of 2006. We had six KIA's and one died of wounds at Brooks Army Medical Center from burns received previously. And I don't even know how many wounded we had that day. So, among the six casualties, we had soldiers and marines.

• 3:07:40Speaker 01

  One of the marines, not the only one, but one, and they were all separate incidents. There were, three were killed in one incident, the other three were killed by indirect fire and sniper, but three were killed by an IED. And in that one IED en route on Sunset, there on the way to Cott Falcon, was my...

• 3:08:08Speaker 01

  One of my officers who was really central to the awakening movement on my staff, Captain Travis Patrick Quinn, left behind a wife and kids. A young soldier named Vincent Pamonte from our field artillery battalion. And I saw these kids right before they went out. And then Major, US Marine Corps, Megan McClung, who was my public affairs officer. Why did I have a major from the Marine Corps as my P A O? Because I'd asked for one. I had an infantry officer who wanted to get back into the line.

• 3:08:50Speaker 01

  He's, you know, God bless him, you know, he said, I want to go back to leading soldiers in combat, you know, I don't want to be your public affairs officer, sir, if you don't mind. He was a Rhodes Scholar from Princeton, but, you know, I was like, okay, you're pretty good at this, but, you know, you're an Army Ranger and you want to go back to fighting. I get it. So I went to General Zilmer and General Neller and I said, you know, the Army does a lot of things better than the Marines, but one of the things the Marines do better than anybody in the world is public affairs. And I would like, and I have a problem, because everybody thinks Ramadi's a lost cause. Right before we got there, we didn't mention it, but the Marine G2, who's a great guy,

• 3:09:33Speaker 01

  by the way, and a very smart guy, I have a lot of respect for him. But, you know, nobody's right all the time. And he said, Ann Barrow's a lost cause. That's as my brigade was arriving, you know, and the preceding brigade had lost 80 or 90 soldiers in Marines. And I knew I would probably lose a similar number. And I was resolved not to let that happen without having something to show for it. So my deputy commander, a guy named Jim Lechner, who had been at the Battle of Mogadishu, and, you know, he's a great guy, and he says, so what's the plan? And I said, you know, peace and prosperity in Ramadi, you know, we're going to do it,

• 3:10:18Speaker 01

  you know, we're going to make it matter, we're going to make our losses matter.

• 3:10:24Speaker 01

  So, uh, but it would only matter if people recognized the success that we were beginning to have by that point. The Awakening had occurred in September and, you know, now we're in December. So, I get, uh, you know, I was having a hard time getting reporters to come to Ramadi. Now, most commanders, the last thing they want is to see reporters, right? You know, but, but I wasn't breaking squats. You know, people weren't recognizing what was happening here, a great sacrifice that the progress we were making with the tribes and all that kind of stuff. So, I got some, so, so General Zomer said, "All right,

• 3:11:06Speaker 01

  I'll get you, I'll send you one of my public affairs officers." So, he sent me Major McClung, Naval Academy graduate, um, red-haired gal, you know, just, you know-

• 3:11:17Jocko Willink?

  Just outstanding.

• 3:11:18Speaker 01

  Just outstanding, you know, lights up the room, you know, kind of a personality. And, uh, you know, she was all over it, you know, and I used to say, you know, she said, "Sir, I put out this press release for you." I was like, "Thanks for my eloquence, Megan. Well done." Uh, so, um, so they were coming back from Sheikh Satar's house and, uh, and Travis, you know, he's a, he was a very funny, quirky guy, kind of a warrior scholar, poet, musician.

• 3:11:46Jocko Willink?

  Arabic speaker.

• 3:11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, maybe not as well as he claimed, but good enough, you know, I mean, he had really endeared himself to the tribes, himself to the tribes. They gave him a tribal name, "Weesam," you know, and all this. And they hit an IED, one of those pizza box IEDs and, uh, and, uh, you know, because of the incredibly bad design of our up-armored Humvees, as you know, the fuel tanks were underneath the crew. You had these armored shells that were super hard to get out of and a fuel tank underneath it. So, you had a fuel-enhanced IED pretty much every time it went off and- So it was bad. And so we lost Megan and Travis and Vincent in that one episode.

• 3:12:31Speaker 01

  And then we lost, Neil Smith was my Ops, Chief of Ops. And he's the one, "Hey, sir, we just had an ID event, 3 KIA, 1 WIA. We're at sunset." And I'm like, "What are the battle roster numbers?" You know? And he started reading them off. And he says, "This minute," you know, all computerized. He looks up who the battle roster numbers are. Sure enough, you know, he starts telling me, you know, "It's Travis, it's Megan, it's Pomonte." And I knew Pomonte because he was inside the headquarters element, so Brigade Headquarters. So, you know, my stomach, you know, dropped. It was just a horrible, horrible day. And the other events with the Marines and soldiers getting killed just lasted all through the day, through the night. And it finally ended around 10 or 11 o'clock at night.

• 3:13:16Speaker 01

  I didn't think that night would ever, that day would ever come to an end. And then somebody says, "Hey, sir, you know, Sergeant," you know, another guy, you know, "got a report, passed away of his wounds there at Brooks Medical Center." So I go back to my office and kind of slump down in my chair, you know, and behind my desk and, you know, start taking a look at all the actions I got to approve or whatever on my desk. And my admin, NCO, comes in and says, "Hey, sir, General Zilmer on the phone." I'm like, "Okay, now what's he gonna have to say?" And he says, "Hey, Sean," he says, "I know you had a really tough day today.

• 3:14:00Speaker 01

  I'm very sorry for your losses. Is there anything I can do to help?" At that moment, nobody could have said anything better to me. And from that time on, I would have followed General Zilmer anywhere because he just said the exact right thing to help me get to the day. He didn't say, he could have. He said, "Sean, what the hell's going on in Ramadi?" You know? "Why are you losing so many troops?" You know? He could have even asked that in a non-accusatory way. And it still would have kind of undermined my confidence, made me start to question myself. But he didn't. He asked me, "What can I do to help?"

• 3:14:41Speaker 01

  That is the model of combat leadership in my mind. You know, "What can I do to help you?"

• 3:14:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, um, August 2nd was a bad day for us in Tasking the Bruiser. So Ryan Jobe gets severely wounded. Um, and once he gets wounded, the guys evacuate him, bring him back to Cop Falcon, get him medevac up to Charlie Med. And at that point, the, I mean, 137, it's Bulldog down there. It's, um, Mike Byema, you know, they're like fully engaged. Main gun Mike. Main gun Mike. And at some point, they kind of think they know where the, where the enemy is located. And he, Main Gun Mike calls Leif, "Hey, can you help us out? Can you come and help us out and assault this building?"

• 3:15:36Jocko Willink?

  Um, "Well, I'll send Brad's for you." And Leif called me and, you know, I'm, I'm, um, up at Camp Ramadi, calls me, "Hey, this is what's going on. They need help." "W-what do you want me to do? Or can I go?" And I was like, "Yep, go." And clearly, um,

• 3:15:56Jocko Willink?

  go up there.

• 3:15:59Jocko Willink?

  And Brad's, um,

• 3:16:03Jocko Willink?

  did a great job, you know, lit up, lit up the building, softened the building, um,

• 3:16:10Jocko Willink?

  Mark gets killed, um, you know, crushing to all of us. You know, they extract, um, come back and, you know, Leif comes to me and, you know, he's obviously, you know, totally distraught, um, and, and one of the things he said to me, he says, "I don't know if I made the right decision."

• 3:16:35Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, what I told him at the time, and what I still believe to this day, what I told him was, there was no decision to make. It wasn't a decision to make. Your army brothers were being attacked. They needed help. That's not a decision. You, you don't say no to that. We step up. That's what we do. Uh, just like the 137 did for us, just like the first, the 506 did for us, just like the 135 did for us, the 38 Marines, the 166. Everyone in your brigade, when we needed help. They came.

• 3:17:02Speaker 01

  So that, but that was a violation of your protocol.

• 3:17:06Jocko Willink?

  Which part?

• 3:17:08Speaker 01

  You, as, you, you're, you were there for a specific task and purpose. And you were directed to do only those things that special forces can do. Or should do. And when you went to the assistance of my guys. You were exceeding your authority or your, or Leif did. And that's why. You are not a Navy SEAL in my eyes, but an Army SEAL.

• 3:17:47Speaker 01

  And you know, the brigade print. That commemorates our deployment. Is of the quick reaction force coming out of Cop Falcon. In response to, I forget it was Ryan or Mark.

• 3:18:01Jocko Willink?

  Ryan, yeah.

• 3:18:02Speaker 01

  Ryan, uh, yeah. And I'm proud of that because you know, that, that kind of shows the, the bonds that you guys made. You know, living side by side there at Falcon. Those guys would have done anything for you.

• 3:18:16Jocko Willink?

  And they did.

• 3:18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:17Jocko Willink?

  On multiple occasions.

• 3:18:19Speaker 01

  That, you know, that area around Falcon, my goodness, um, had, I mean. I think it was shortly thereafter. Uh, we had a couple, it might've even been the same incident where we had a couple of Bradleys. Knocked out.

• 3:18:36Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:18:37Speaker 01

  Um, I think it was the fight that kind of spun up after that.

• 3:18:41Jocko Willink?

  I think that spun up after that.

• 3:18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that fight kept on going. Um, we really kind of. Um, kicked over, uh.

• 3:18:52Speaker 01

  Hornets nest there and um couple of silver stars on you know in one three six infantry. Mike McCusker was the company commander. Outstanding. Mike had been my executive officer when I was the G three at fifth corps. I love Mike um big broad shouldered guy.

• 3:19:12Speaker 01

  And uh he'd he'd been wounded a couple of times, you know, he he had a couple of purple hearts in that deployment uh look cause he was always leading from the front. Well, his soldiers knew that and appreciated that. So a couple of them, Sergeants Anderson and Trump power get out there in in the midst of all this fight and uh one of these Bradleys uh takes a hit.

• 3:19:36Speaker 01

  And uh catches fire, actually, you know, and uh, well, I'm sorry, yeah.

• 3:19:43Speaker 01

  And another Bradley comes to his aid and the first Bradley commander is wounded, second Bradley commander climbs up on top of the Bradley, there's guys trapped in the back.

• 3:19:54Speaker 01

  They go inside, they managed to go in and get that Bradley open, one of the hatches open enough to get everybody out of the back of the Bradley. But there's wounded and the Bradley commander himself is is wounded. So the other Bradley commander says, you know, they, you know, he goes in, he clears a room, you know, in his building, gets all the wounded into that room, leaves the wounded Bradley commander in charge of the wounded and then goes out to get help from somebody else, has to run a quarter of a mile through enemy fire down these streets, these gauntlets

• 3:20:36Speaker 01

  to get the attention uh of uh somebody to help him. He runs up to a tank, you you can knock on the outside of a tank all day long, they will never hear you. But he's an infantry guy, he doesn't know this, you know, so he's banging on the tank, tanks like that could be small arms fire banging off me, they don't know, they don't care. You know, so so he has to run farther, he finds another Bradley, gets a, you know, gets in there and gets all these guys medevac. At this point, I'm at Charlie med. And these Bradley's come in and you remember like the Bugs Bunny cartoon, you know, Yosemite Sam, you know, you know, the Acme Dynamite blows up, you know, and his clothes

• 3:21:17Speaker 01

  are all like in tatters and, you know, charge strips of cloth just hanging off of them. That's what these guys' nomex uniforms look like on these Bradley commanders, you know, as they're, and one of the guys, I can't remember if it was Sergeant Trumpauer or Sergeant Anderson, one of them, two staff sergeants, you know, and they're bleeding, their uniforms in tatters, you know, smoke is literally coming off of their clothes. And now they're at Charlie Med. By the way, we had a Navy forward surgical team out of Balboa there. He was the commander of which was a Class 81 Naval Academy grads, same

• 3:22:00Speaker 01

  year I graduated from West Point. He felt, gave him permission to, you know, criticize everything I was doing, but well deserved. He was a good man. But anyway, we're, they're pulling all these guys out of there and the NCOs refuse to get on a stretcher, on a litter, until all of their soldiers are on litters. And the battalion Sergeant Major, Sergeant Major Schindler from 137, had to literally go pick one of these guys up and lay him on a litter, you know, to get medical attention. That's, you know, that was the teamwork, you know, the, you know, one of the things

• 3:22:41Speaker 01

  I say about the military, people don't understand, is there aren't, there are very few places in the world where people will willingly sacrifice their lives for a total stranger. Just because you're part of my team, you know, I mean, I don't know you, but you're part of the Ready First Combat Team, or you're supporting the Ready First Combat Team, or you're just wearing an American patch somewhere on your uniform, you know, that's enough for me to willingly lay down my life.

• 3:23:16Speaker 01

  It's a remarkable thing, and that's why whenever I think of Ramadi, I think of that Charles Dickens opening line in The Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." You never meet or see the kinds of heroic acts, selflessness, at the same time you see some of the worst things that you ever want to see, you know, dead children or something like that, you know, I mean, the contrasts are immense, but it's like nothing else in

• 3:23:56Speaker 01

  the world, you know, and that's, you guys, you know, rapidly became brothers to, you know, Bravo 137 armor, you know, and they would have done anything for you, anything.

• 3:24:13Jocko Willink?

  You know, we're talking about Mark Lee, and you're talking about the question that you got asked, well, I know you know Mark's mom, and we were, you know, once she was notified that Mark was killed, Leif comes into my office, you know, I have a phone in my office there, and he's making that first phone call, and, you know, here Leif was preparing to console her and, you know, try and provide comfort to her, she answered the phone and like, you know, I'm listening and, you know, her immediate response was, "How are you guys doing? What can I do to help you guys?" And this is from a mother that just lost her son.

• 3:24:58Speaker 01

  I know, it's incredible, and I, you know, Debbie is a remarkable lady, but I will say that more often than not, that was the response I got from the next of kin when I made my phone calls, when Travis Patrick Quinn died, and I talked to Amy Patrick Quinn, his wife, and we lost the first Sergeant Jagger who had, in 137, who had five or six kids, and by the way, the, you know, the family members.

• 3:25:35Speaker 01

  We were stationed in Germany in this little Kassern, the German word for camp, in Friedberg, and they didn't go home. They stayed in those little Kasserns with the other family members of those who were still deployed until the end of the deployment. You know, so my wife Linda and others, they took care of the Gold Star families that were living among them, never knowing if they were also going to become a Gold Star family next, you know. I mean, it was, you know, the home front of a four-deployed unit was very intense.

• 3:26:17Speaker 01

  But I found, talking to those parents, and then the Army would send a one, at least a one-star to every KIA's funeral. And when I was redeployed, I did a number of those, too. And I just marvel at their strength, you know. I mean, I don't know where it comes from. I would hope that I would have the same in a similar situation. I'll tell you, when my son was a second lieutenant, platoon leader deployed in Afghanistan, I was commanding a division of 20,000 soldiers, but I was mostly thinking about 30 soldiers in Afghanistan, especially their platoon leader, more than, you know, probably as much as I was thinking about the other 20,000 that I was responsible for.

• 3:27:02Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it's, I don't know how our, you know, families can be so strong in those moments, but it is a remarkable thing, and I'm grateful for it, because it's hard enough, you know, to break the news to people that their loved one isn't coming home alive. And, you know, then when they turn around and try to console you, that's almost like, I don't know, it's one of the things that I'll never get over.

• 3:27:47Jocko Willink?

  You know, you mentioned Travis Patrick Quinn and, uh, well, let me read a little something. This is, this is from the article that you ghost, that you had ghost written for you by, uh, by Neil Smith.

• 3:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I'm trying to give credit where it's due. I might've, I might've made a couple of edits, but I didn't have to do much.

• 3:28:08Jocko Willink?

  It says this, convincing the local sheikhs to join us and undertake another uprising was, was an immense challenge. Obtaining their support was the linchpin of the second part of our strategy. We knew it would be pivotal when we were pivotal when we arrived in Ramadi in June. The sheikhs' memory of their first failed attempt at establishing the Al Anbar's People's Council, which was late 2005, early 2006, was the main obstacle to our plan in this regard. And that's the one that I mentioned earlier where Al Qaeda just murdered. It was between six and eight of those, uh, people, those tribal leaders.

• 3:28:41Speaker 01

  It includes Satar's brother and father, I think.

• 3:28:47Jocko Willink?

  Um, the Sunni tribal alliance was fragmented and weak compared to the growing Al Qaeda forces that controlled Ramadi in those days. At the same time, area tribal sheikhs had no great love for US forces or the Iraqi army. Early in the insurgency, they had directly and indirectly supported former regime nationalist insurgents against US forces. And as a result, they had temporarily established an alliance of convenience with Al Qaeda in Iraq. Many tribal members were killed or captured combating coalition forces, which diminished the sheikhs' ability to provide income for their tribes. The, these conditions in turn enabled Al Qaeda to recruit from those families in need of money. Another aggravating factor was that

• 3:29:30Jocko Willink?

  Iraqi army forces initially stationed in Anbar consisted largely of southern Iraqi Shias. Ramadi area inhabitants regarded them as agents of the Sadr militia or Badr Corps with a covert agenda to kill off Sunni tribes and enable a Shia takeover of Anbar. Nevertheless, the tribal leaders were still fed up with Al Qaeda's violence and frustrated by their own loss of prestige and influence. Their traditional heartlands, the brigade staff believed that by offering convincing incentives, we could create a tribal alliance that could produce lasting security in Ramadi. To persuade the tribes to cooperate, we first needed to understand the human terrain in RAO,

• 3:30:10Jocko Willink?

  and that task fell to an outstanding and talented junior officer, Captain Travis Patrick.

• 3:30:16Speaker 01

  Yes, he have the mustache.

• 3:30:19Jocko Willink?

  The big mustache. That didn't look like an Army reg mustache. Did you give some leniency to him there?

• 3:30:23Speaker 01

  I cut him some slack. Relaxed grooming standards.

• 3:30:29Jocko Willink?

  He, he did this thing that you can find on the internet, um, the stick figure kind of coin manual of what we need to do, what mistakes we're making, what we see, what they see. It was fantastic.

• 3:30:42Speaker 01

  Well, it was called How to Win an Anbar by Captain Trav. It was, he made a mockery of Army PowerPoint Rangers. Um, he was a true Ranger. Yeah. So the origin of that PowerPoint thing was, uh, there was a conference in Fallujah, the MEF headquarters, uh, mostly for civil affairs folks. And, uh, you know, we were getting a lot of skepticism in some quarters, I will say, uh, over what we were trying to do with the awakening. You know, because these tribes were previously, um, not our friends.

• 3:31:23Speaker 01

  And so, uh, I said, you know, Travis, we gotta, we gotta break through to these folks, you know? We gotta explain what we're doing, you know? And, uh, I said, uh, I said, you'll have to explain it in terms that even a Marine can understand. It's no offense. And, uh, we got a Marine in the room. And, uh, and so, um, so Travis comes up with this stick figure PowerPoint presentation that reads like a Dick and Jane school book, you know, and everybody's happy, mustaches for everybody, kind of stuff. But it was brilliant, uh, went semi-viral a little bit there,

• 3:32:06Speaker 01

  but it explained perfectly what we were trying to do with the Anbar tribes. Um, and, uh, you know, that was just him in a nutshell. It was great.

• 3:32:20Speaker 01

  I want to, I gotta say, so the guy who wrote this article too, by the way, Neil Smith, I want to say something about him. Neil was one of my company commanders up in Tal Afar, Tank Company Commander, and then his time was up and, you know, he moved up to Brigade Staff, lucky him. But while he was a company commander, and this goes back to my earlier point about the kind of people that we have in uniform.

• 3:32:46Speaker 01

  They were clearing a building and there was, they were taking fire from the building and an NCO grabbed Neil and said, "Sir, let me go in first through this door." And, you know, and went first and took a round to the chest and was killed in action.

• 3:33:09Speaker 01

  That guy who was killed in action, his name was Staff Sergeant Legaspi, he was an Olympic boxer. He boxed in the Olympics. And he sacrificed himself for his company commander.

• 3:33:23Speaker 01

  Just think about that, you know?

• 3:33:28Speaker 01

  We had, you know, Mike Mansour, you know, Mark Lee.

• 3:33:35Speaker 01

  We had a distinguished service cross for a young officer, brand new. He'd only been out of West Point a matter of months. Earned a distinguished service cross in heat, you know?

• 3:33:50Speaker 01

  The Silver Stars for the incident I was just talking about. Some guys didn't get Silver Stars, but we had an NCO in 19th Infantry, the Mantus, 1st of the 9th Infantry, out in Korygador. He was Ukrainian. Evgeny Rinditch, I believe his name was. He was a squad leader. And 1st of the 9th Infantry had been in Korygador for a year, went home to Fort Carson and came, they were re-flagged, they weren't 1st of the 9th in Korygador previously, went home to Fort Carson, Colorado for a year and redeployed right back to Korygador.

• 3:34:32Speaker 01

  Severely undermanned because a lot of those soldiers were still, you know, not, you know, present for duty, not returned to duty yet. They were still walking wounded in that battalion on their books. That's why when the chief of staff of the army came through, I explained this to him. I said, "Look, 1-9 infantry is like 80% strength and then they're doing R and R." You know, because we're there for a year, so take 10% a month off of that. You know, they're barely able to do, to hold their fob, let alone conduct offensive operations. So that's why they created these warrior transition units in the army. That's an aside.

• 3:35:12Speaker 01

  But, but Rindich, you know, had been a squad leader in Corrigidor, knew what his guys were going back to. He was on orders to go do something else. He said, "No, I want to go back. If we're going back to Corrigidor, I want to go back with my squad because I'll be able to make sure that they come home." He was leading a squad in the Mulab district on the east side and was killed in action by a sniper. So, those are the kinds of people that were in Ramadi that made such a difference.

• 3:35:51Speaker 01

  I don't know that, you know, that was, you know, the average level of dedication, professionalism, competence, willingness to sacrifice of every unit in our military at that point. But, it was definitely common, that's why I say the Iwo Jima memorial, uncommon valor was a common virtue in Ramadi, you know, it was very common there.

• 3:36:26Speaker 01

  Those guys, every squad leader, I gave an Army Commendation Medal for Valor. Because it took courage to be a squad leader, just to lead your soldiers outside the wire. Cause you knew you were gonna be in contact. And they were all looking at the squad leader, like, what are we doing? You know, so, so those guys had to be the adult in the room and say, it's okay.

• 3:36:48Jocko Willink?

  And how old are those guys?

• 3:36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, not old, you know, Staff Sergeant, I don't know, 28, 27. So, I mean, it was really remarkable. You know, out in heat, you know, the, you know, the kid who earned the Distinguished Service Cross was shot twice, kept, you know, his, when we, when our brigade got extended, I went out to heat and said, hey, sorry, guys, you know, we're all, we're all gonna get to spend an extra month and a half in combat, you know? And as you described earlier, you know, fairly intense combat at that. Good luck to us all.

• 3:37:29Speaker 01

  And I went home, or as I was, you know, after, after the discussion, I'm talking to the battalion commander, and the radios start crackling, there's a firefight out in heat, and one of the company commanders and his first sergeant are down. And his fire support officer was with them, big kid, you know, like I said, in, you know, a mid tour replacement lieutenant, goes out there, cause the first sergeant is Samoan, and the other, one of the platoon leaders is Vietnamese, and the company commander was not a big guy. So, DM Vo was the name of this lieutenant.

• 3:38:14Speaker 01

  He goes and tries to get the, rescue the company commander, and Lieutenant Jackson tries to get the first sergeant up. Lieutenant Jackson, they're on the wrong side of the Humvee from where the enemy is. They're, you know, right there getting shot at. Lieutenant Jackson gets shot almost immediately, loses consciousness, regains consciousness, and alternates between returning fire and rendering first aid. Finally gets the first sergeant up, keeps himself between the enemy and the Bradley he's trying to get him to, he's trying to get him to DM's Brad.

• 3:38:48Speaker 01

  Gets shot again, falls down, gets back up, gets everybody into the Bradley. Now, you know, other people have entered the fight, you know, platoon sergeant taking command of the platoon, maneuvering against the enemy, you know, putting his Bradley between everything that's going on, you know, and he gets a Silver Star. Lieutenant Voe gets a Silver Star. Lieutenant Jackson refuses medical attention while the other folks are being, getting treated by the medics. It's a 30-minute ride back to Camp Heat. You know, Lieutenant Jackson nearly bleeds out because he hasn't been looked at because

• 3:39:32Speaker 01

  he claims he's okay. But the other guys make it. One of the reasons they make it is the battalion sergeant major, former Delta operator. The medic couldn't find the artery that was bleeding in this one guy's thigh. He reaches in with his bare hand and clamps off the artery with his bare hands and holds it closed for the entire Bradley ride back. You know, and all this is going on, they get back to Camp Heat. Battalion commander goes to see the company commander and the company commander just says, "I am so sorry, sir, that, you know, this is..." And the battalion commander, Tom Graves, is like, "What are you talking about?" You know.

• 3:40:17Speaker 01

  You know, "So proud of all of you guys." So, that's, that's the kind of, you know, team that we had and many others probably had too, but I think it was at Travis and Megan's memorial service, our Anglico Marine, big Marine major, was crying really hard at the end. And we remember we had the shakes there for the memorial service.

• 3:40:45Speaker 01

  And Mike was his name, and I was like, you know, kinda gave him a little bit of a hug, you know, and it was him or somebody else that said, you know, why is it always seem like it was the really good ones, you know, that we lose? And he wasn't the first to say it, a lot of people had, and it occurred to me that it seems like we only lost really good people because those were the only kind of people we had over there, or they wouldn't have been there. Everybody we lost was a good person. They may not have been a great soldier, but, you know, they stepped up, they volunteered for something dangerous, for something bigger than themselves.

• 3:41:30Speaker 01

  And, and they may not have belonged to the greatest generation, but I believe they were the greatest members of their generation. And I put a lot of those nineteen-year-olds into body bags and helped lift them into the back of CH46s, and, you know, it was just, my daughter was about that age at the time, you know, my oldest, and I just couldn't get my head around the fact that that was it for these kids, you know, that was their whole life, right there. And all their nineteen-year-old buddies are standing around, probably never even had a grandparent die by that point in their life, and now they're seeing their buddies killed, and they're trying to cope with it.

• 3:42:15Speaker 01

  It's such an extraordinary experience, and people, you know, coming back from war, Vietnam, World War II, whatever, they say they don't really talk a lot about it. It's kind of, because who could understand that unless you've seen it, right? You know, unless you've been there, like you have, you've seen it. You saw Mark and his buddies, and Ryan and his buddies, and Mike, I mean, the way that those folks would ruck up and move out to the next mission after losing one of their closest buddies is just so awe-inspiring.

• 3:42:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it is, and, you know, for us, you know, we would see...

• 3:43:04Jocko Willink?

  The turret gunner on a lead turret on a army patrol rolling out the gate. And you know, what's that, what's that kid rolling into? You know, you're in the lead turret gunner on a Humvee in a logistics patrol that's gonna go down to Cop Falcon and drop off some mermite or whatever. And he's gonna come back and he's gonna go back and go, come back and go back and go. And there's IEDs all over those streets. There's snipers out there. And they get up and they get in that turret over and over and over again. And the guys patrolling. You know, oh, what are we gonna do? We're gonna go do census operations. We're gonna, yep, well, that's what I'm doing. What are you doing tomorrow? Same thing. What are you doing tonight? I'll stand and watch up on the roof of this building.

• 3:43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:43:46Jocko Willink?

  And just to see that kind of dedication and selfless sacrifice every day from thousands and thousands of men and women that are continually stepping into the fray, stepping into the breach just over and over again.

• 3:44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, you know, when you redeploy,

• 3:44:06Speaker 01

  to this day, you know, I'll see an old movie will come on that I, I missed when it came out because it came out in 2006 or 2007, you know?

• 3:44:16Speaker 01

  And I'll say, this is what people were focused on. Nobody knew. That's why one of those reporters come out. People were unaware of the tremendous sacrifice, the courage, the things that were happening every day. Where uncommon valor was a common virtue.

• 3:44:36Speaker 01

  And they were watching or listening to things that were just so trivial and silly.

• 3:44:43Speaker 01

  It's, it's hard to reconcile for me sometimes.

• 3:44:50Jocko Willink?

  The, the, the Abar Awakening, Sheikh Sadar Bazia Abu Risha. I, I originally knew him as Sheikh Satar Bazia. That's what I originally knew him as. And I don't know, I don't, I forget the whole complexities around the, the names. I had a, I had a lieutenant, junior grade, prior enlisted Navy guy. Who was, I don't really act, I'm not even a hundred percent sure what his skill set was. He was married to a Japanese woman and he was a Buddhist. You know, he was raised in Ohio or something like this.

• 3:45:29Jocko Willink?

  Super nice guy and I think he had something to do with computers, you know, some kind of, you know, some kind of information technology like that's what he was there to support. I'm not even 100% sure.

• 3:45:40Speaker 01

  Was he your intel guy?

• 3:45:42Jocko Willink?

  He kind of posed as an intel guy.

• 3:45:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember this kid. Yeah, right. Yeah.

• 3:45:46Jocko Willink?

  I, so I needed somebody to do tribal engagement. That was one of our lines of operation. I said, hey, all right, you're gonna go work with these tribal people. And the first report I got back was he, cause he went out with Colonel Dean and he just basically did ride alongs and reported back to me what was going on. That was kind of the first I heard. He said, hey, we met this guy and he, he seems like he wants to get on board. He wants to do this desert protector program and I had to look that up. The desert protector program was out in Al Qa'im and the Marines started it and, and Maliki got rid of it because then you had a bunch of mercenary groups or militia groups running around the country. But then very quickly Colonel Dean, you know, just set up the recruiting and

• 3:46:27Jocko Willink?

  made that stuff happen. Um, and then, you know, we did start to see that, that kind of turnaround happen, you know, and, and one of the things that, that I remember that really stood out to me was we were putting in cop sword and, and, and I think it was also called OP sword, but it was.

• 3:46:52Speaker 01

  Can you remind me where that was?

• 3:46:53Jocko Willink?

  Like north of Cop Grant. So Cop Grant went in.

• 3:46:57Speaker 01

  By the way, we, we picked the name Grant in honor of, you know, the Army Navy Cooperation in Vicksburg.

• 3:47:05Jocko Willink?

  I remember that clearly. That was outstanding. Um, I remember this. So 20th Street and we had all this intel that the, the Al Qaeda was saying they're gonna fight for 10th Street. They're gonna keep 20th Street. There's no way. And I talked to you about it and you're like, well, let's put a cop in there. Put a, put a combat outpost right in there. And that's what we did. And actually it was. Yeah, so we, again, the big planning cycle went up there.

• 3:47:29Speaker 01

  That was near Women and Children's Hospital, pretty close to that?

• 3:47:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it's, so it's south of Route Michigan.

• 3:47:35Speaker 01

  Okay, I know, I know exactly where you're talking about. There was like a, it was the south side of the government center area.

• 3:47:41Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 3:47:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, I know where you're, okay.

• 3:47:43Jocko Willink?

  What surprised me about it is, we went up there, I, did, we did what we normally did. You and I were somehow united on, like, we were probably, we were very, like, there was no one there. It was like you, me, like, seven or eight soldiers were holding security. And I immediately pushed my guys out. They went out and set up, you know, a couple Overwatch positions. And, the, you know, this, the building started, but what, there was like, almost no attacks.

• 3:48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:48:12Jocko Willink?

  So we're up there, and my guys didn't kill anybody.

• 3:48:17Jocko Willink?

  Apaches came in, I don't know if you remember, Apaches came in and like, they took a lot of fire from the entire city.

• 3:48:24Speaker 01

  I don't remember that.

• 3:48:25Jocko Willink?

  Which was shocking to see. They flew in, there was massive gunfire and they flew away.

• 3:48:29Speaker 01

  The good thing is Apaches can take a lot of hits, yeah. Like B-17s, yeah.

• 3:48:33Jocko Willink?

  Um, but, but, it was like, that was the first time that we went in and I kinda said, oh, that was different. There wasn't these big mortar attacks, there wasn't enemy maneuvering. And again, this was now in pretty late, you know, this is maybe late August.

• 3:48:51Jocko Willink?

  And, it seemed to me like maybe things were gonna change.

• 3:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I, you know, I think at that point, we had punched the enemy hard enough in the face, you know, that they were maybe back on their heels a little bit. So the timing, I don't think it had anything to do with the awakening at that point. I think the awakening had something to do with the way the enemy was reacting to our aggressiveness. And they, I believe, saw that they could really partner with us. As long as we were going to take the fight to the enemy, they would not have to worry about retribution, you know? If we were really gonna crush the enemy, and that's what we were all about.

• 3:49:38Speaker 01

  Great, because they had scores to settle themselves. And you probably remember that, you know, they kind of got a little over their skis on some of the score settling there, going into mosques and just, you know, you, you, you and you, you're Al Qaeda, come with us. And nobody ever saw them again, right? You know? But then enemy activity would drop in that area. So they were probably right. They knew who was who in the zoo. I mean, it was extrajudicial and we certainly didn't sanction it or encourage it in any way. But they had their ways of doing things. And, and that was the power of that, you know, relationship that we had with the tribes.

• 3:50:19Jocko Willink?

  In your incredible article, on 9 September 2006, Sheikh Satar organized a tribal council attended by over 50 sheikhs and the brigade commander, at which he declared the Anbar Awakening officially underway. The Awakening Council that emerged from the meeting agreed to first drive Al Qaeda from Ramadi, then reestablish rule of law and a local government to help support the people. The creation of the Awakening Council, combined with the ongoing recruitment of local security forces, began a snowball effect that resulted in a growing number of tribes either openly supporting the awakening or withdrawing their support from Al Qaeda.

• 3:50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, game changer.

• 3:51:03Jocko Willink?

  Even though, so, so I end up going home in October. And even though, like, I saw a little glimpse of maybe some changing, and you already mentioned December was a very tough month.

• 3:51:18Speaker 01

  That was, that was, December, I think, was when the fever broke.

• 3:51:23Jocko Willink?

  There is, in between, you know, in between September and, and February, like, there was another 50 soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines were killed in those six months, you know, after the, the Awakening Council, that first tribal council.

• 3:51:44Jocko Willink?

  You know, for me, September 29th, you know, you mentioned Mikey Monsour, that's, that's when, when he was killed, you know, jumped on a grenade to, to save three of our other teammates. And, and again, the, the support that we got from the first of the 506, they drove down IED infested road to evacuate the wounded, casevac them, brought an element back out into the field to go recover the Iraqis that they left behind. And Colonel Clark, you know, he's personally called me and, and told me what was happening, told me what was going on. And, and you know, here's Colonel Clark, I don't know how many, you know, he had lost a significant number of soldiers himself and taken mass, massive casualties, just like everybody else. And, but he wasn't jaded, he

• 3:52:27Jocko Willink?

  wasn't callous, he wasn't desensitized at all. He, you know, he cared, cared about Mikey, cared about the guys, cared about Seth, the platoon commander, cared about me. And just that, that unity, same thing, like when he called me, hey, this is what's going on, what do you need from me? Battalion commander that's in significant combat on a regular basis, asking the random SEAL that's over on the other side of Ramadi, what can he do to help?

• 3:52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, Ron, Ron is an extraordinary officer, still serving as a three star now. And, uh, yeah, I've always been proud of having him and his battalion as part of our brigade. Yeah.

• 3:53:11Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's, um, he's as good as they get. I was, we, I'd been in Ramadi for maybe like two weeks and I was over there and we had a combined, a joint combined element out in the field, SEALs, Iraqis and, and Army soldiers. And I'm in the tactical operations center with him. And while that's happening, there's something else going on. And I was watching him and he was handling things like a complete boss. I think he used that word earlier. And I was thinking to myself, this guy is outstanding.

• 3:53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, yeah, we're lucky to have him.

• 3:53:47Jocko Willink?

  And like I said, that was kind of when my deployment was coming to an end. Uh, and we continued to operate. We did, we soon started our turnover.

• 3:53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:53:56Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 3:53:57Speaker 01

  Five came in.

• 3:53:58Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Team five came in and um, what we felt like was we felt like we're leaving early. Like we're, we're abandoning our friends.

• 3:54:09Speaker 01

  Well, the good news is, you know, SEAL Team Five fell right in on what you guys were doing and, you know, they, they, they carried forward everything. I, I didn't really detect any sort of variance, you know, and, you know, they, they didn't try to walk anything back. I mean, they were really good at following the early.

• 3:54:30Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, we had a really good turnover with them and we were all friends with those guys. So when they're coming over, we're talking to them. I know the platoon chiefs were talking and the, the senior enlisted were talking and the officers were all doing good turnover. So they knew what to expect. Um.

• 3:54:45Speaker 01

  No, but I gotta say, you know, having the SEALs as part of our team of teams was tremendous, you know? We had Marines and SEALs and we had some Air Force, uh, and, uh, guys, you know, and obviously our ALO team, you know, Air Force on the staff. When I walk into the brigade morning updates, the battle update briefs, you know, you never knew if it was going to be, you know, an army, a soldier announcing, you know, the brigade commander, you know, everybody come to attention. Or attention on deck, you know, from one of our, you know, naval, uh, officers. But yeah, it was, it was great. I mean, it was not by design and, but, but it worked out nicely that way.

• 3:55:30Speaker 01

  Um, yeah. So SEAL Team Five, well, while they were there, they, uh, they really helped us kind of.

• 3:55:39Speaker 01

  Take on all of those ERUs, those thousands of recruits that came out of the woodwork and turned them into some sort of a force to be reckoned with and they kind of were up there in the Jaziras, Angora areas, you know, and really kind of ran Al Qaeda out of town.

• 3:56:03Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. When I was leaving, you gave me this tank here that's sitting on this table, this wooden tank.

• 3:56:11Speaker 01

  I have one just like it on my desk. By the way, for anybody who can't see this, you know, we're sitting at a square table and Jocko has sort of a fighting position in front of him with stacks of books, you know, around him that he's written and in the center, you know, facing outward, the gun tube isn't pointing at me fortunately, but...

• 3:56:39Jocko Willink?

  I'm smarter than that.

• 3:56:41Speaker 01

  There's a wooden Abrams tank that we used to give to our very important teammates there like Jocko and SEAL Team Three and then on the outer perimeter where I'm sitting, there's a bunch of vicious looking knives. But again, you know, thankfully, they're pointing more towards you Jocko, you know, so I don't know.

• 3:57:06Jocko Willink?

  I keep myself in check.

• 3:57:07Speaker 01

  A psychologist could probably, you know, look at this and say something about it, I don't know, but...

• 3:57:15Jocko Willink?

  The Feng Shui of the room is very interesting.

• 3:57:18Speaker 01

  It is, and we're in a completely black room and everybody's wearing black but me, so all I see are these disembodied heads and tattooed arms, you know, and then this in front of me.

• 3:57:31Jocko Willink?

  You know, when you gave me that tank, you told me something I'll never forget. You told me, and it's something that I was able to then tell the families of Markley, tell the families of Mikey Montsor, tell the families of Ryan Jobe, you told me that our SEALs from Task Unit Bruiser had kept hundreds of your soldiers and Marines alive.

• 3:57:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely true.

• 3:57:58Jocko Willink?

  And that, you know, regardless of the outcome of the war, the reasons for the war, or the fall of Ramadi back to ISIS, or the questions, the reasons we went in there to this day, when people question what we did, why we did it, how we did it, um, those words meant everything and mean everything. That

• 3:58:26Jocko Willink?

  the sacrifice was not in vain. Because we were able to keep your soldiers and Marines, our comrades in arms, our brothers and sisters in the Army and the Marine Corps and the Navy and the Air Force alive.

• 3:58:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely true. And we gave the Iraqis an opportunity for a better life. You know, maybe they didn't take full advantage of that because Malaki came back in and did what Malaki did, which probably directly contributed to the rise of ISIS later, um, or the reemergence of ISI that we had defeated in Ramadi once. But, um, that doesn't take anything away from what was accomplished in Ramadi through the blood, sweat and tears of the, all the people who served there, you know, the second of the 28th, first of the first armored, or the first of the third infantry who came in behind us.

• 3:59:34Jocko Willink?

  You, you know, like I said, I went home, October, November, there's significant fighting. Um, there's a guy from SEAL Team Five, great guy, was severely wounded, um, in late November. You get 2,200 Marines from the Mew? Is that right?

• 3:59:53Speaker 01

  Well, the Mew was 2200. So General Casey came out and said, hey, I'm starting to see the progress that you were talking about. Could you use another battalion of Marines? It was 2-4 was the battalion landing team for that Mew. And I was like, I don't need another battalion. You already have like eight or nine battalions here, you know? It's like the size of a division almost, and I'm a Colonel. I said, but I could sure use another couple of companies of infantry because, like I told you, 1st and 9th Infantry was badly depleted and we were extended and all of us were, you know, undermanned at

• 4:00:32Speaker 01

  that point. And through casualties, you know, 86 killed, 485 wounded, and like 95% of those happened in Ramadi in a nine-month period, 5% up until Afar. I mean, that's the intensity that we're talking about, you know? Think about it, you know? Out of 6,000 troops of all services, 500 were casualties? What's that casualty rate? I don't want to do that math right here. 10%. Over 10? Or almost 10, yeah. So, I mean, that is a, that's a pretty, you know, intense

• 4:01:17Speaker 01

  environment. So, yeah, I said, I'll take a couple of infantry companies. And so I got two, Echo and Fox of 2-4. And a Marine rifle company is something to behold. It's 250 Marines. My rifle companies have been attrited down to about a little over 100 soldiers at that point. That's what I was operating with. And then comes these, you know...

• 4:01:47Speaker 01

  You know, and I gave both of them to 1-9 infantry out in Corregidor. And they almost outnumbered the battalion I attached them to.

• 4:01:56Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 4:01:57Speaker 01

  But the amazing thing about the Marine rifle companies is they're all so junior, you know? There's one E7 in that whole company, the one company gunny. And in an Army company with 100 and at full strength, 135 soldiers, there's four E7s. You know, squads are led by staff sergeants, not in the Marines, buck sergeants, you know? And so on down, right? And, um, and it was, uh, you know, an interesting, you know, difference between the two services. I mean, we had combat outposts side by side, Army and Marine, that we were like established within days of one another.

• 4:02:41Speaker 01

  And within 72 hours, the Army was running hot chow and had showers set up and all this kind of stuff. And like, two weeks later, the Marines have nothing going other, you know, they're eating MREs, but they got a prison gym, you know, that's about all they got. And I was like, you know, you guys don't have to live in squalor. I mean, you know, actually, General Corelli came out and visited me, goes, why, why is this so different? I was like, you'd have to ask the Marines. I don't know, it's a thing, you know, it's like, you know? But, um, anyway, yeah, it was, it was interesting, uh, with the, the two services operating side by side, and then with the SEALs in there, a third service, kind of like with a

• 4:03:23Speaker 01

  foot in each canoe almost, you know, trying to, it was really a unique command, uh, that I was privileged, uh, to lead.

• 4:03:34Jocko Willink?

  Um, you.

• 4:03:38Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't, I almost forgot, the riverine guys.

• 4:03:40Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah, the riverine guys, yeah, no doubt. Actually, remember that you were, you were, you wanted to shut down the rat lines coming across the river?

• 4:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:03:49Jocko Willink?

  And you couldn't quite, you're, you couldn't quite figure out how to do it. You came to me and said, hey, John, can you like, help me? Like, there's these, all these boats over here, they're all being used, we're watching them, we can't stop them, can you help? And I was like. Well, I'm a frog man. That's water. Let me go. And I started running up the chain of command and we were worried to bring the Iraqis with us because they couldn't swim.

• 4:04:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:04:13Jocko Willink?

  And we didn't want one of them falling out of boat drowning. So, and but we wanted to take them with us because we did all of our operations with Iraqi soldiers. So what we did was we put massive life jackets on them and we had them hold security from inside the boats, which they were caribeaner into. So, uh, February 18th, 2007, you get relieved by, uh, by.

• 4:04:40Speaker 01

  John Charlton and First of the Third.

• 4:04:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, First of the Third ID. Um, during my time in, when I was there, this is kind of like the aftermath from my perspective. Enemy attacks were 30 to 50 a day. Um, I get home and I'm watching, you know, I'm watching time tick by and they go down to 10, 10 a day and then five a day and then one a day and then one a week. And August 2007, Ramadi goes 80 days without a single attack on US forces, which was like insane to be hearing.

• 4:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, that's when I, I, I was on the joint staff then. I was a Colonel in the Iraq, I was chief of the Iraq division in the J5, um, working for another Marine, great Marine named John Sadler. And, uh, and Admiral Mullin was the chairman and he says, well, we're going to Iraq, you know, bring the chief of the Iraq division and, you know, John, you come along too, you know, obviously. And, and so Sadler and I were like, well, we both want to go to Anbar and Admiral Mullin's schedule was, you know, it was all Baghdad centric. So we went on an excursion, uh, out to our old stomping ground and walked around

• 4:05:53Speaker 01

  the racetrack where so many of our soldiers and Marines had been killed and wounded, Katana District. Um, and, uh, and they had previously recently had a 5K run around there. A 5K run.

• 4:06:11Jocko Willink?

  Um, crazy.

• 4:06:12Speaker 01

  The only shot fired was the starting pistol. It was, and I said, if only, as I walked around there in a soft cap, not even wearing any body armor. And this was August 2007. We redeployed in February. It's like six months later.

• 4:06:31Speaker 01

  That I wish that every soldier who had been wounded or served there and every family member who'd lost a son or daughter there could have walked that racetrack with me that day to see what their sacrifices were all about. Cause we did give the people of Ramadi, you know, a, a chance at a completely new life and, uh, and hope.

• 4:06:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. We got pictures sent back to us, like the SEALs that relieved us, sent us pictures of like what it was like for them. And we were reading the reports, but it was, I, I have the pic, I have a picture of that 5K fun.

• 4:07:10Speaker 01

  Really? I would like, I have never seen.

• 4:07:12Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah. It, I mean, I was looking at that thing and we got a picture.

• 4:07:15Speaker 01

  And when we were, when you were there, I think that's when Al Qaeda did a fun run around the, you know, they loaded up a pickup trucks and drove around there. Yeah.

• 4:07:25Jocko Willink?

  Uh, from that article, key lessons learned. The most enduring lessons of Ramadi are ones that are most easily lost in technical and tactical discussions, the least tangible one, ones. The most important lessons we learned are accept risk in order to achieve results. Now, what's interesting about that one is for me in the nineties, uh, you know, the, the idea of risk averse aversion, I, I don't know if that actually came from the military, but I thought it might've come from the military. Like the, the easiest and best way to get promoted and move up the chain and is just to go and not do anything.

• 4:08:06Jocko Willink?

  And so this one, if you're inside the military, well, as a military person, when I read that, I go, I know exactly what that's aimed at. The fact that you have to accept risk in order to achieve results. There is a whole, uh, uh, culture of people that don't think that. And one of the, if you don't take risks, you're not going to achieve anything, except for maybe getting promoted. You can get promoted if you don't take any risks. And I know this isn't about promotion. This is about the battle, but the reason that you, it might seem strange to somebody that's not in the military. Why would you have to say that? Of course you can take risks. You're in the military, but there definitely was a culture

• 4:08:46Jocko Willink?

  that I saw a lot growing up pre-war that we are going to mitigate all risks.

• 4:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:08:58Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's interesting that I know a number of people who are risk averse in terms of budget, or, you know, saying the wrong thing, things that might be harmful to them professionally, but would have jumped on a grenade for me, you know, or you, or anybody they don't know but happen to be wearing the same camouflage pattern. Right?

• 4:09:27Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:09:28Speaker 01

  Why are we so willing to sacrifice ourselves physically, but not professionally? You know, we have a lot of physical courage, but we seem to lack moral courage sometimes. Yeah, you have to take risks to make progress. You have to have an economy of force in order to create, you know, mass elsewhere. And that means risk. And the other thing I'd say, I mean, when we got there, the mantra was, as you stand, as the Iraqis stand up, we stand down.

• 4:10:12Speaker 01

  You know, the idea was we're going to pull out of the cities, but we were going into the city of Ramadi. And I explained to General Casey, I'm like, I can't pull out of a city I've never been into. You know, we've got to get control of the city before we can turn it over to somebody. And the Iraqi army wasn't enthusiastic about that. You know, who came in behind us was the tribes, you know? So, yeah, risk is part of the, you know, everything everybody ever talks about in war. I mean, if you can't accept risk, you're in the wrong line of work. The other thing I'd say, I don't know if it was in that article or not, but perseverance. I mean, you talked about it, you know, we were battling headwinds.

• 4:10:57Speaker 01

  Enemy was fighting back hard, especially initially.

• 4:11:02Speaker 01

  If you, you know, stack arms, you know, when the enemy pushes back, you're never gonna win. War is a contest of wills. When we lost, when, after that really bad day that I had there and that I had, I said the brigade had, you know, I was just one of the people that had a bad day, certainly not anywhere approaching how bad it was for those who are wounded and certainly not as bad as the family members who lost their loved ones. But the next morning, I go into the bub, Battle Update Brief for the brigade there and our little headquarters at Camp Ramadi. And everybody's kinda looking down at the tops of their boots, you know? They feel bad because we'd lost two staff officers in one day.

• 4:11:47Speaker 01

  By the way, the guy who bought all these wooden tanks and made, designed our coin, he had been killed in action previously. Uh, he's my S1, Jason West. Um, and so it was the third, three, you know, our third staff officer killed in action. And so the staff officer was really, staff was feeling it too. I mean, people talk about those idiots up at platoon headquarters and don't get it. And we were taking fire on Camp Ramadi. We were losing people on Camp Ramadi, plus we were losing staff officers outside the wire. So, you know, one of my heroes is a guy that we named a cop after, Ulysses S. Grant. And one of the things I admired most about him was his ability to persevere.

• 4:12:32Speaker 01

  You know, the Wilderness Camp, Campaign, you know, certainly comes to mind, Vicksburg and others. Um, but the most salient example of perseverance by Grant and the one most inspiring to me was the Battle of Shiloh, where on day one, the Confederates caught the Union forces by surprise and almost pushed them into the river. I mean, the Union guys were literally in their sleeping bags or eating breakfast when the Confederates came out of the woods. And, uh, you know, if not for the heroic stand of a few, uh, units, you know, the Union Army would have been wiped out that day. Grant was not with the...

• 4:13:14Speaker 01

  The unit that day with his army, he was elsewhere, but he heard the sound of the guns and he rode back to it. And he got back there and it was nightfall and one of the units that had fought back was Sherman's division. You know, of course, when things, you know, when it rains, it pours and when things go bad, it rains, you know. So of course it starts raining. So Grant gets under a tree to light a cigar and think about what's gonna happen. And Sherman comes up to him and says, "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day today, haven't we?" And Grant says, "Yep, lick 'em tomorrow, though." So I told that story that morning to my staff. So we had a really bad day yesterday, but we're gonna lick 'em tomorrow.

• 4:13:58Speaker 01

  Perseverance is an underrated virtue. And I can't say enough about its importance in combat.

• 4:14:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and there's a side of that. I mean, the pressure that you're getting from up the chain of command when you're not producing results. Or the results that you're producing are negative because casualties are going up, enemy interactions going up. And if someone's on the outside, they don't see the broader strategy. It's, you've got to resist, you've got to persevere up the chain of command. I know I had a call, you know, we were probably, I don't think you'd arrived yet. We were like maybe three weeks, four weeks on the ground, but we'd already realized like we can kill these bad guys. And so I start putting these sniper teams out, they're killing IED emplacers. We're getting some good numbers. We're also getting heavily scrutinized because same thing, people are saying, "Wait, how are you killing all these people?"

• 4:14:53Jocko Willink?

  And I'm like, "Please come and look, please come and come and come out with us." But my, one of my officers from the task group staff, you know, called me and said, "Listen, it's been three weeks. You're killing these people and we haven't even seen a downturn in the number of enemy attacks." And I said, thankfully I had read the new counter insurgency manual. I had a, it was out online. It was the one that Petraeus wrote. And I had read of like a draft version of it online. And I said, "Sir, the average counter insurgency lasts seven years. It's been three weeks. Can I get a little more time?"

• 4:15:34Jocko Willink?

  And he said Roger that, but uh, yeah, that perseverance day after day, getting up and, and moving forward. And again, I want to point out that you made adjustments. There was times where you were trying something, it wasn't working. You didn't say, oh, we're just gonna keep doing this thing that's not working. No, you'd say, oh, that's not really doing what we thought it was gonna do. I'm gonna take a step back and go in this other direction.

• 4:15:56Speaker 01

  So the best adjustment that my brigade, that our brigade made, I wasn't even there. I was, I was the last person in the brigade to take R and R. Um, cause we were there for 14 months and it was like the 12 month point or 11 month point. And I was like, okay, now's my turn. So I went home for Thanksgiving. Worst, weirdest Thanksgiving I've ever had, I will say. Uh, cause I've still got 6,000 Americans, you know, in harm's way that I'm responsible for. Um, anyway, so I, I'm on my way back and I started to hear indications that I had left a plan in place when I was gone. You know, I said, here's the next operation,

• 4:16:38Speaker 01

  couple of operations every three or four days, you know, we're gonna do another operation, right? We kept that going. And, um, and we had really reduced the enemy control in the city of Ramadi to the northeast part of, you know, Malab around, you know, south of the hospital, that area. And that was where, you know, we were gonna like drive the final stake through the heart. And, uh, and while I was gone, um, this, uh, the key rat line into that part of the city ran through this area, you'll know it called Sophia or the Sharkfin, right? Just east of the city. Cause it looked like a shark fin. And there was

• 4:17:21Speaker 01

  a tribe up there that had not joined the awakening yet. They were kinda on the fence. They were afraid, they were intimidated by Al Qaeda's presence in the area. We got it. So, um, one day, you know, a bunch of Toyota pickup trucks, you know, white pickup trucks roll in there, Al Qaeda's gonna, you know, drop the hammer on this one sheik who's kinda waffling, you know, whether or not he's gonna join the awakening, they were gonna make sure that he did not. And, um, and so this big fight, uh, blows up, and I think one of your SEAL Team Five buddies- Yeah, SEAL Team Five. -had given him a Thiraya satellite phone.

• 4:18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he, he, he calls, the only numbers he has, and he gets Travis Patricklin, Captain Patricklin, on the phone, and he says, "We're under attack," you know, "and so we put a UAV overhead, and all we see is a bunch of Arabs shooting at each other," you know, I mean, how, you can't tell who's on what side. So Travis says, "Have all of your guys wave towels over their heads, uh, so we know which side, you know, is, you know, isn't waving the towels, that's who will attack." And that's what they did, and we started attacking them, and then, at the same time, uh, two companies, a tank company and an infantry

• 4:18:47Speaker 01

  company out of Carrigador start pushing up toward them. Um, and, uh, and the enemy breaks and starts to run, and we start, you know, strafing them, you know, their pickup trucks, you know, their, their technicals, their guns on, and, you know, we just, I'm sorry, we, we hit a whole bunch, we took out a whole bunch of Al Qaeda guys, really broke the back of the insurgency on that side of the city, which, but it wasn't the plan. I mean, this was completely ad lib, right? And, uh, I get back, and I'm in Kuwait, and I'm hearing about all this, I'm like, "What?" you know, so- I finally get back to Ramadi and all of my battalion commanders, my deputy and my XO are

• 4:19:32Speaker 01

  like really nervous. And like, sir, we know that you, you know, we were supposed to do this, but this seemed like a really important thing to do. So we decided to do this instead, you know, kind of, we hope you're not mad. I was like, are you kidding me? I am so proud of you guys. Probably the best battle this brigade fought and I wasn't even there. You know, I, all I can hope is if I had been here, I wouldn't have screwed it up. You know, I mean, you guys did perfectly because you took the initiative and you did what needed to be done. So that's the third thing I would say, you know, other than taking risk and perseverance, I would say another important thing is trusting your subordinates to do the right thing,

• 4:20:17Speaker 01

  building that trust. I trusted them. They made the right decision. They all kind of huddled, all these lieutenant colonels, you know, I can just see their cute little faces around the table and they, they, they did the right thing. They came up with the right solution and they did a magnificent job. And, you know, I am not at all ashamed of the fact that the best, probably the most important battle my brigade fought was fought without me.

• 4:20:41Jocko Willink?

  You're proud of it.

• 4:20:42Speaker 01

  I am proud of it.

• 4:20:42Jocko Willink?

  That's decentralized command.

• 4:20:43Speaker 01

  I know. It's exactly what everybody should hope for. It's like when your kid goes off to college and, you know, does better than you did, which mine did, you know, so you, you don't envy them. You're, you're proud of them. Right? So that's kind of where I am on that. And so those, I would say those would be the three things.

• 4:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Once you gain the initiative, never give the enemy respite or refuge.

• 4:21:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:21:08Jocko Willink?

  You absolutely did that when you're conducting a major operation every three or four days.

• 4:21:13Speaker 01

  Tried to do the same in inherent resolve.

• 4:21:17Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever been on a Navy ship before?

• 4:21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:21:20Jocko Willink?

  Have you ever seen an, a, an underway replenishment before?

• 4:21:24Speaker 01

  Didn't do an unwrap. I was on the Truman when the Truman was working, the Truman Group was working for me when I was commanding inherent resolve.

• 4:21:31Jocko Willink?

  Nice.

• 4:21:32Speaker 01

  Uh, they got to launch and recover on an F-18. It was a lot of fun.

• 4:21:36Jocko Willink?

  I was a young, uh, SEAL.

• 4:21:39Speaker 01

  But I know how crazy unwraps can be, especially in, in tough weather.

• 4:21:44Jocko Willink?

  It's insane. You watch an under, so the, for, for those of you that are listening, it's, it's actually in some cases, three giant Navy ships. Cause there'll be the battleship or whatever, the warship in the middle. And there'll be a, a, a supply ship on the, on the port side and a, uh, one on the starboard side. I almost said left or right. I would've got my sailor card revoked. And they're going, they have a speed that works. They're going to 10 or 12 knots or something like this. And they're only 20 feet apart. These are massive ships and there's lines being thrown across. There's pulley systems. It's total mayhem. The first time I saw it, I, I was just, and I was a new guy in the SEAL teams, but I had parachuted and fast roped and rappelled.

• 4:22:28Jocko Willink?

  I was like, this is the most hazardous thing I have ever seen happen in the military.

• 4:22:32Speaker 01

  And they do it in heavy seas sometimes too, cause.

• 4:22:35Jocko Willink?

  I've seen it in heavy seas. It's even more insane. When I think of you saying, like, if you didn't know what that was, if I got, uh, spawned from, from outer space and they said, okay, you got this ship. You're going to have to resupply it. How do you want to do it? I'd be like, okay, we'll pull into a port and we'll unload everything that we need. I wouldn't in a million years think that it was possible to do what they do. And so for you, that's what I think of when I think of doing one of these missions, the logistics of the missions that were going on for you to be like, yeah, we're going to do one of those every three or four days. I remember this is, I, I, I was talking to someone about this the other day, filling up sandbags to go and eat chow.

• 4:23:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:23:13Jocko Willink?

  Who thought of that? That was brilliant.

• 4:23:15Speaker 01

  So that was one of, that was a, a Marine, uh, came up with that. Uh, it was at Hurricane Point, um, that they, you know, three, eight, Steve Neary's guys were doing that. And I said, we're going to do that on Camp Ramona. Cause this is like. Thousands of people on Camp Ramadi and we're building a cop every few days.

• 4:23:33Jocko Willink?

  And it takes 20 to 30,000 sandbags.

• 4:23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, if you say like 3,000 people aboard Camp Ramadi, three meals a day, that's 9,000 sandbags you'd put on a, on a flat rack and on a PLS and off it goes that, with the Combat Logistics Patrol going out that night. So my S3, a guy named Andy Schaffner came up with a name for it called Operation Jamestown. No work, no food. And so, but you know what? Everybody loved it.

• 4:24:04Jocko Willink?

  It was awesome.

• 4:24:05Speaker 01

  And they didn't just fill up one sandbag. They're like, I'll do two or three, you know? I'm over here, I got the shovel.

• 4:24:09Jocko Willink?

  But that, to me, doing three, four, doing one of those massive operations every three or four days is like, you had to almost have been spawned from another world to think that that was even possible. I can tell you like, in some Army logistics school, if they posted that up like, here's the mission, everyone's like, oh, we can't do this because of the following 29 reasons. But for you to say, oh no, we're gonna make this happen, that's impressive.

• 4:24:33Speaker 01

  Well, so, okay, this goes to another leadership point that I'd like to make to commanders, and that is Newton's Law of Inertia, right? Which is that an object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an external force. You know, an Army unit, a staff, anything, is going to want to remain at rest unless a commander puts it in motion. You have to be that external force that impels it forward. And, you know, that is the essence of command.

• 4:25:18Speaker 01

  If you cannot do that, you know, then you really have no business being a commander. And you have to listen to reasonable concerns and objections, say, well, we can't do it in three days, but we can do it in four. And I used to say, if you, if the answer's no, tell me why not, or how you can fix it, you know? Don't just say no. And if it's a reasonable pushback, I'm, I'm all ears. You know, I don't want to ask you to do something dumb. You know, one of my key policy letters was if it's, if it's a bad policy, it's not my policy. So let me, you know, let me get the feedback. We'll have a discussion. But at the end of the day, you're gonna always have to make somebody do something that they would rather not do.

• 4:26:03Speaker 01

  Right? Right?

• 4:26:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:26:06Speaker 01

  And, and so that means you can't be Mr. Nice Guy all the time, you know? Remember that's, you probably don't, you, there's a Star Trek episode one time.

• 4:26:18Jocko Willink?

  Echo might know this. He might be, you might be getting to his world.

• 4:26:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:26:21Jocko Willink?

  Star Trek, sorry.

• 4:26:22Speaker 01

  This is, this is the original show, so you may not know this one, might be before your time, but, but Captain Kirk gets, um, split into two personalities by the transporter beam, you know, he's got the nice Kirk and the bad Kirk, you know? And then the nice Kirk, everybody likes him and everything, but he can't make a decision, you know? The bad Kirk is just like malevolent, he's like crush anybody in his path, you know, to get whatever he wants. He's like pure id, you know?

• 4:26:53Speaker 01

  And, uh, but you know, the, the ship's in danger because the nice Kirk won't make a decision. So they have to like force the two back together and then he can balance, you know, the two and, and make the right decision. And so it's always a balance, you know, Robert E. Lee, I'm no fan of his, but he did say something profound once, which is, as a commander, in order to accomplish your mission, you have to hazard the thing that you love the most. And the thing I miss most about the army is being around soldiers. In order to, but to be a good commander, I have to risk my soldiers' lives to accomplish a mission. I do everything I can

• 4:27:37Speaker 01

  to reduce the risk, but you're never gonna completely eliminate it, right?

• 4:27:43Speaker 01

  And, uh, and then at the end of the day, you also have to say, was the risk worth it? You know, was, was the sacrifice worth it? Um, and, and can you live with that? And, and that's where the trust piece comes in. So I tell people all the time, I slept well at night as a commander, even knowing that I had soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in harm's way constantly.

• 4:28:08Speaker 01

  And people were below me were making decisions that were moving them in and out of harms way. Because I knew that as in my job, I had the right people in the right place and I trusted them to make the right decision with the information that they had. And if they didn't have all the information and they made the best decision they could under the circumstances. And it turned out to be wrong, like you said, good shot, bad result. I'd back them up, you know, that's that is, you know, a really important aspect of combat command. But I think it's applies to almost any line of work, but maybe a little less so.

• 4:28:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, believe it or not, I wrote a book with Leif Babbin called The Dichotomy of Leadership.

• 4:28:49Speaker 01

  I know.

• 4:28:50Jocko Willink?

  And it's like, hey, um, can you?

• 4:28:53Speaker 01

  But you didn't use the Star Trek episode.

• 4:28:55Jocko Willink?

  No.

• 4:28:56Speaker 01

  You you've missed a golden opportunity.

• 4:28:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, obviously I missed that episode, otherwise I probably would have written that a lot earlier. Uh, but you know, we know it's like, hey, can you plan too much? Yes, you can. Can you plan too little? Yes, you can. You want to be balanced. Can you communicate too much? Yes, you can. Can you communicate too little? Yes, you can. But you know, the the opening chapter, the ultimate dichotomy I talk about is like, well, you love your guys. And you're going to put them at risk. Every time they go outside the wire, something can happen to them. And that's what you're dealing with as a leader and it's not going to go away.

• 4:29:27Speaker 01

  Well, as long as they and if they know that you love your guys, they're more willing to go into harms way.

• 4:29:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:29:34Speaker 01

  You know?

• 4:29:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Another one of your bullet points, never stop looking for another way to attack the enemy. And what's interesting about this, and you you mentioned it, it was a huge part for me, like when we came home from Ramadi. You know, what did all the, what did everyone know about us? We killed a bunch of bad guys. So I had to talk about the tribal engagement that we did, the civil affairs piece that we did, and the training of the Iraqi soldiers and the Iraqi police. Cause no one knew about any of that. But, but what you talked about earlier, that, you know, I would hear you talking about in the brigade meetings was like, oh yeah, what, oh, they're selling black market fuel? How can we stop that? Oh, they're paying because they're smuggling this? How can we stop that? So it wasn't just, oh, we're gonna find different ways to kill them.

• 4:30:19Jocko Willink?

  It's like, how can we disrupt their economics? How can we disrupt their relationships that they have with these? How can we disrupt their interference with the local populace? I mean, it's, uh, taking the Ramadi General Hospital away from Al Qaeda, because that was a major command and control element for them. But, the, I mentioned it earlier, they would casualty evacuate their wounded to the Ramadi General Hospital, and you could watch it on ISR.

• 4:30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we couldn't allow that, yeah.

• 4:30:47Jocko Willink?

  And so, when that got shut down, and all of a sudden, they're bringing wounded back, and they're being arrested, being detained immediately, that was an epic scenario.

• 4:30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, yeah. So absolutely, I call it the kitchen sink scenario, or approach, you know, I'm gonna throw everything at the enemy I possibly can, as hard as I can, as often as I can. And, you know, until they break. I've got more troops than they have, mine are better trained, better equipped, eventually I'm gonna win, you know? I'm not gonna take my foot off their neck, you know, at any point, and I'm gonna find new ways to make their day miserable. That's what I wake up every morning, that's my job, is saying, how can I make life harder for the enemy today? You know, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year, depending on your echelon.

• 4:31:41Jocko Willink?

  One more of these. The tribes represent the people of Iraq, and the populace represents the key terrain of the conflict. The force that supports the population by taking the moral high ground has as sure of an advantage in counterinsurgency as a maneuver commander who occupies the dominant terrain in a conventional battle.

• 4:32:02Speaker 01

  And that was definitely written by Neil Smith. I mean, he took my, my point about the human population, but he, he put it much more poetically than I could have. But that's absolutely true. Why do you fight a counterinsurg- you know, how do you fight a counterinsurgency? The key terrain is the human terrain. And when we arrived in Ramadi, we did not have a good appreciation for the human terrain. That's what Travis and others, you guys, you know, helped a lot with that, actually. Chart that and track it. And even though SIGACs might have, you know, gone up, we saw more and more green human terrain. And

• 4:32:45Speaker 01

  that was the true measure of effectiveness. You know, if you're measuring the wrong things, you're not going to come out with the right result. You know, you have to measure the correct things. And for us, it was human terrain.

• 4:33:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, that was a huge piece of it for me. And again, I got very lucky because I got this, the counterinsurgency manual, which made me seem like I was a little smarter than I actually am when I was talking to my chain of command. And me saying, "Secure the populace." This is what we're, you know, this is what we need to do. Secure the populace. And one of the ways that we were secure in populace was, "We're going to kill as many bad guys as we can. We are going to rack them up. And we're going to do it without harming the civilians and letting them see." I mean, we had, and I don't know if you got to see this, but there would be locals that would cheer when there was a body of an insurgent

• 4:33:45Jocko Willink?

  laying in the street. They'd be happy. They'd be celebrating.

• 4:33:48Speaker 01

  They probably knew who that guy was and didn't like him anyway, right?

• 4:33:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:33:53Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of these guys were the dregs to begin with.

• 4:33:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. But so that, that idea of taking and keeping the moral high ground, make sure that you're doing the right things for the right reasons, is just so critical in this scenario. And it would have been an abject failure. Had we, and this is the big we, all of us not had that attitude?

• 4:34:16Speaker 01

  So, I don't know if that was in the back of my mind, but I got asked that question once as a three-star when I was leading the campaign against ISIS. And I was in Baghdad, it was Pentagon news. Candy Crowley asked me, you know, and I don't know, you know, because I'm looking at a camera. They're looking at my, my, my face, my picture on the screen in the Pentagon briefing room. But, you know, I can't see who's asking me, but Candy Crowley, though, in this case. And she says, "Hey, General, how do you feel about carpet bombing in Syria against ISIS?"

• 4:34:56Speaker 01

  And I was sitting in Baghdad where, you know, over about 90% of the local news media was controlled by some Iranian entity or other. And they were lambasting the coalition for not being as aggressive as the Russians were in Syria. Why can't you be more like the Russians?

• 4:35:22Speaker 01

  And, and so that was my context for my response when I said, "Look, I represent the United States of America. We fight in accordance with the law of armed conflict, you know, Geneva Convention, you know, rules of engagement." I said, "At the end of the day, it doesn't just matter if you win a war, it matters how you win the war." And right now, you know, we occupy the moral high ground. That's where we need to stay. So, no, we're not going to carpet bomb. That's what the Russians do. In fact, they deliberately attack hospitals and other protected places, you know, with ground penetrating, bunker penetrating bombs.

• 4:36:05Speaker 01

  That's not us, and we don't want to be that. And not only that, it's not even effective what they're doing. You know, we'll continue to mitigate civilian casualties to the best of our ability, and that's how we're going to win the war.

• 4:36:20Speaker 01

  So, little life lesson here, you know, I look at my public affairs officer, spokesman, who's a full Colonel, public affairs guy. "Hey, how'd we do?" And like all colonels will tell every general officer, three-star general who asks them that question, "Sir, you did great. You knocked it out of the park." I said, "I didn't step on any landmines." "No, sir. Sir, you're clean. You're good." I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to bed because it's like 1 o'clock in the morning our time." I get up in the morning and I get an email from my wife, "Sean, you're trending on Twitter, Facebook, all these social media."

• 4:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Uh-oh.

• 4:36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like, "Oh, yeah." So I pull up my computer screen and there it is, "Top General Slams Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, you know, over carpet bombing." I was like, "What in the hell are they talking about?" So I start reading this article. Turns out that day or the night before, there had been a presidential primary debate where Donald Trump and Ted Cruz had been talking about, "Oh, you know, we'll just carpet bomb all these ISIS guys in Syria." And I don't think that they really understood, you know, the definition of carpet bombing. You know, I think they were thinking more along the lines of...

• 4:37:36Jocko Willink?

  We're going to aggressively pursue destroying them.

• 4:37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it was, you know, not the best application of that term, you know? And if I had known the context for that, I would have made clear that, you know, I'm not impugning anybody here, you know, by my response because I just don't think they understand the doctrinal, you know, concept here, you know, because they're not military guys. So let me, as a military person, explain to you the difference between carpet bombing and, you know, being aggressive with a bombing campaign, which is what I think they really were asking for, you know, not just like level everybody, kill everybody. That's not at all what they meant, you know? But I didn't know that that was the context, so I wasn't able to, you know, make that,

• 4:38:23Speaker 01

  you know, clear. So as I'm reading this and my, you know, you know, I'm just kind of sinking into my chair, looking at, you know, with this growing realization that I've somehow inserted myself into a presidential campaign, the, you know, my aide comes in and says, sir, the chairman's on the phone for you, you know, and General Dunford, who's, you know, I'd worked for in Afghanistan and knew him, but, you know, it's never good when the chairman's calling you. Well, you, I shouldn't say that, you know, you know, General Dunford is a great boss. So, but I, I kind of knew why he was calling me in this case, you know. I was like, yes, sir. He's like, hey, uh, so what's the deal with this carpet bombing thing? I was

• 4:39:04Speaker 01

  like, uh, well, you know, this is, uh, what I really was talking about and I didn't understand that there would have been a presidential debate. Nobody said that to me. He says, okay, I'm looking at the transcript. I can see how this all kind of happened. So, so you're good. Don't worry about it, but just, you know, make sure you understand the context a little bit better. Somebody preps you a little bit better before, because we are in a, an election year. I was like, sir, absolutely, you know, point taken. Um, but, you know, I said, really though, there's nothing wrong with what I said, you know, I just didn't put it art very politically or, you know, tactfully. He said, that's right. You know,

• 4:39:48Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously we're not going to be indiscriminate in our attacks like the Russians are. So, that was true in Operation Harris Hall was true in Iraqi Freedom and it was true in Afghanistan. We're not perfect, but we try as hard as we can to be perfect. And take great risks. And sometimes risk to ourselves. That's what I. In order to spare the lives of a civilian. I mean, I don't know of a single soldier, sailor, or marine who wouldn't willingly allow himself to come to personal harm to

• 4:40:32Speaker 01

  spare the life of a child, you know, an innocent child, right? I mean, it's just not in our DNA.

• 4:40:39Speaker 01

  And, uh, and I think everybody understands that, you know, but it bears repeating as often as possible, I think, you know, and, uh, and that's why that's comments in there.

• 4:40:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, um, that, that attitude of, of taking risk and, you know, like, again, even in the SEAL teams, guys be like, oh, you, you know, you're going out these sniper overwatch positions and, and killing people.

• 4:41:06Jocko Willink?

  The risk to go out into those sniper overwatch positions where by, you know, an hour after the first call to prayer and now the enemy knows we're there and they're going to attack in force.

• 4:41:19Speaker 01

  Well, remember what the enemy tactic was. They would send out kids to look for the snipers. You know, the small kill teams or the observation team, whatever it was, they would send little kids out because they knew Americans wouldn't harm little kids.

• 4:41:38Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 4:41:38Speaker 01

  If there were a bunch of guys in, you know, black pajamas or whatever, you know, carrying AKs, different story.

• 4:41:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 4:41:45Speaker 01

  But they sent out little kids and you knew that when the kids found you within an hour grenades were coming your way.

• 4:41:53Jocko Willink?

  The kids would be nervous, like these aren't kids that are like, like lollygagging around. That was, you know, another big indicator, like the streets would clear and you're like, okay, well, it's a matter of time.

• 4:42:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're blown.

• 4:42:06Jocko Willink?

  Yep. But yeah, the, the amount of risk that my guys would take to go out there and get set up in a position and then there was no leaving too. Uh, the Marines got hit, uh, leaving an overwatch position. Now, look, did we leave the overwatch position sometimes? Yes, we did. Sometimes it was like, yeah, we better get out of here. But a lot of times it's like, well, we're just going to stay here and wait till night and we have Bradleys if we need them. But yes, American forces going through great lengths and taking great risks in order to protect the civilian populace.

• 4:42:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 4:42:39Jocko Willink?

  Is the norm.

• 4:42:40Speaker 01

  It's the same as taking risks to seize a hill. You're trying to seize the moral high ground, the key terrain is the population. You would, you know, at Iwo Jima or a place like that, you know, soldiers, Marines would risk their lives to seize the key terrain. We risk our lives to seize the key terrain in a counter-surfing and it just happens to be population instead of geographic. Indeed. So, we're in the month of Memorial Day weekend, you know, and a couple of weeks is Memorial Day. And we've talked about Mark Lee and his mom, Debbie, who's got an awesome 501(c)(3) nonprofit

• 4:43:25Speaker 01

  called America's Mighty Warriors. And they do wonderful things. And by the way, if people are concerned about where their money's going, it's got a platinum rating for, you know, financial transparency. But they do what their, her son, Mark, who was an extraordinary young man, I didn't know him very well, you know, I barely knew him, you knew him, I didn't. Random acts of kindness, you know, and he wanted to pass it forward, he wanted to do good things for people. And, you know, we're kind of talking about doing for others. And Mark Lee was one of those kind of people and his mom, I can see where he gets it from,

• 4:44:09Speaker 01

  she wants to do it for others. And so, so America's Mighty Warriors is a, is a great place to put your money if you want to help veterans or Gold Star families who need help. And there are a lot of them out there.

• 4:44:33Speaker 01

  One of those groups of people that America's Mighty Warriors is helping are the veterans of the Ready First Combat Team. We have a memorial plaque that was created after our deployment back to Germany, and it lists all 86 soldiers, sailors, and airmen who made the ultimate sacrifice in Ramadi, and then the 485 who were wounded, are, you know, recognized as well, but by name are our KIA's. And those include the names of our SEAL, fallen SEAL brothers.

• 4:45:16Speaker 01

  So that plaque, because it has so many names on it, it's big. It's bronze, it's heavy, and when the brigade was reactivated in El Paso at Fort Pliss, Texas, there was nothing sturdy enough to mount it on, so it just kind of leaned up against the brigade headquarters and exposed to the weather. And copper, you know, exposed to the weather, gets something on it called amber green, which kind of turns it into kind of a greenish color, or bronze does, I mean. So we're raising money to fix that.

• 4:45:54Speaker 01

  And Debbie Lee will accept donations for that purpose on her website, America's Mighty Warriors. All you have to do is say in the comments section for your donation, Ready First, or something to that effect, Ready First Memorial, and it'll get into the right account. But it's gonna cost about $30,000 to get this fixed. So anybody who wants to recognize the sacrifice of the soldiers, sailors, and Marines who

• 4:46:33Speaker 01

  were killed in Ramadi, to make a better, you know, create a better life for the people of Ramadi, and for each other, can make a contribution through America's Mighty Warriors.

• 4:46:51Speaker 01

  Ready first in the comments block and, and we hope to have that fixed and, and unveiled in time for us to have a 20th reunion at Fort Bliss in El Paso and get as many of our, our fellow veterans together there to, to reminisce and, and to help each other out.

• 4:47:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's, that's awesome and I'm a huge supporter of America's Mighty Warriors. It's AmericasMightyWarriors.org and we will definitely make that happen. We will definitely make that happen. Um, before I, I, we, we move on to past Ramadi here and, you know, as I was trying to parse down what to talk about in Ramadi, I mean, it, you know, again, we could do an entire series of podcasts and, and, you know, how many other people to come on and talk and tell their story. Again, you mentioned like there's heroism everywhere, all over that battlefield, it's filled with heroism and the soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines that were out there that went back, carried on with their lives and...

• 4:48:04Speaker 01

  Heroism and ingenuity, you know, I mean, at all echelons.

• 4:48:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, indeed. Um, so, you know, well, I had to select what we were going to talk about. Obviously I talked about some of what we did, but tasking a Bruiser was a tiny, tiny fraction of the effort that happened. Um, you know, this is...

• 4:48:23Speaker 01

  Although you punched above your weight though.

• 4:48:26Jocko Willink?

  We got after it, that's for sure, but still, you know, there was thousands and thousands of, of personnel there. They did the bulk of the heavy fighting. They did the bulk of the heavy lifting. We were, we were doing what we wanted to do. You know, we were doing and, and making as much effort as we could. We wanted to make a difference, but we were a small fraction of the effort that took place. This was, this was the soldiers and marines that made this happen.

• 4:48:57Jocko Willink?

  That being said, you wrote something, you wrote an addendum to the original article that I think really expresses what this team consisted of. And it says this, "One of the great legacies of the fight for Al Anbar Province will be enduring, that will be enduring, is the mutual respect earned by the various service members who fought side by side. This respect was more evident than in Ramadi, or sorry, nowhere is this respect more evident than in Ramadi where our Brigade Combat Team, the Ready First Combat Team fought under the command of one MEF, one Marine Expeditionary Force. The Ready First was not a pure Army BCT.

• 4:49:39Jocko Willink?

  It contained Marine Corps elements, including a reinforced rifle battalion comprised of elements from the 38 Marines and 16 Marines, two rifle companies from a Marine Expeditionary Unit, two 4 Marines, a riverine patrol unit, an air and naval gunfire liaison platoon, and a civil affairs detachment. The Air Force supported the Ready First with an air liaison team embedded in the BCT. The Brigade staff itself was a de facto joint organization. It had Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine officers and NCOs throughout. The electronic warfare officer, a Catholic chaplain, and the head surgeon were all Navy commanders. The civil affairs and public affairs officers were Marines.

• 4:50:21Jocko Willink?

  Outside the Brigade, the support came from a Marine logistics group and one MEF's air combat element. Numerous other external USMC units, including a platoon from a radio battalion, a postal unit, explosive ordnance disposal teams, firefighting teams, air traffic controllers, and military transition teams also provided support. So did the Navy in the form of surgical teams and corpsmen, CB battalions, electronic warfare experts, and SEAL platoons from SEAL Teams 3 and 5. The Ready First enjoyed a particularly good working relationship with the Special Forces and other special operations forces in and around Ramadi.

• 4:51:02Jocko Willink?

  Soldiers bestowed the affectionate nickname of Army SEALs on the members of SEAL Team 3 in Ramadi who fought and died alongside them. The brigade is particularly proud of its association with SEAL MA2 Mike Monsour, who, while supporting an operation in Ramadi, won the Medal of Honor. The soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen in Ramadi were deeply grateful for the lifesaving heroics of their Navy doctors and corpsmen. The spiritual aid given by Navy chaplains to all services, all services will never be forgotten. The skill and courage of Marine Corps pilots who attack targets to assist troops in contact will likewise never fade from memory.

• 4:51:43Jocko Willink?

  In return, the Army's Apache pilots won the respect of Marines and sailors who, in the mix, also came to rely on the Army paladins for timely and accurate fire support. A command could not have asked for a better, higher headquarters. The one MEF staff was dedicated to ensuring that there were no haves and have-nots among the units in Al-Lanbar. Often, the Army received first priority, ahead of the MEF's own Marines. The MEF commander at the time, Major General Richard Zilmer, ensured the Ready First had the resources it needed to fulfill his intent, and he never questioned or second-guessed us, even during the darkest hours.

• 4:52:27Jocko Willink?

  His forbearance demonstrated his trust in and respect for the professionalism and competence of the soldiers under his command. Altogether, the joint effort in Ramadi worked because, no matter what service uniforms they wore, professionals dedicated to the mission performed as expected. The professional dedication invinsed itself in shared values and shared understanding. It was not uncommon to see soldiers and Marines march forward side by side in final honors at memorial services for their lost comrades. At times, the helmets atop inverted M4 carbines reflected a mix of Army and Marine Corps camouflage.

• 4:53:15Jocko Willink?

  The US Army and the US Marine Corps, each today without peer in its dominion of, in its domain of land warfare, have not shared such a strong bond of common experience and understanding since the island campaigns of World War II. The services should nurture those bonds and sustain them over time. Too many people to mention, I think you did a pretty good job of getting most of them, but I, you can't express, I can't express this incredible team that we had and that it was an honor to be a part of, for sure.

• 4:53:54Speaker 01

  Thanks Jocko, likewise. I, you know, if I had a chance to write that again, I would have highlighted the contributions of our National Guard and Reserve brothers and sisters as well, you know, that some of those Apaches were out of the Texas Army National Guard. Some of those guys flew Cobras in Vietnam, that flew Apaches over Vermont. And they would take a lick in and keep, I think, I remember going out to the landing zone, a little distinguished visitor landing zone outside the Brigade Headquarters, and, you know, seeing an Apache out there and some, you know, warrant officer older than

• 4:54:35Speaker 01

  me, walking around, looking at the holes in the Apache and making the decision, yeah, I can get back in the fight with this, and off he would go. And, you know, those guys, I think the world of them, they, after we left, Sheikh Zatar was, you probably know, was killed. But prior to that, you know, a reconnaissance patrol, a scout, a group of scouts, four Humvees, ran into about 70 Al Qaeda fighters near the Habenia Canal in a place called, we called it Donkey Island, you know, the old fairy tale there, but, from Pinocchio,

• 4:55:17Speaker 01

  but Donkey Island, that's where they were hunkered down, and the, you know, 16 scouts against 70 Al Qaeda fighters, and, you know, it wasn't going well for the scouts, but as scouts are supposed to do, good cavalrymen, they maintain contact with the enemy. And so they stayed in there and, despite their casualties, so they called for the Quick Reaction Force, and I gotta say, it was not an easy lift. To get permission to bring Army Apaches to operate with an Army Brigade in the Marine AO. The Marines are very jealously protective of their air combat element and rightfully

• 4:55:58Speaker 01

  so, but it was kind of, you know, we just do these things differently, you know, and trying to get those things, work through all those differences was a not inconsiderable challenge and our Anglico team was instrumental in making that occur. But those Apaches came in and immediately started hosing down the enemy on Donkey Island, but started taking return fire themselves. And because they were so far away from Camp Ramadi that we couldn't, they wouldn't be able to medevac the, or casevac the wounded soldiers who were VSI, very seriously injured.

• 4:56:41Speaker 01

  So the Apaches landed, one of the Apaches landed while the other one kept up the fire. And they call this a spur rifer, like a down aviator. The, the front seater jumps out of the helicopter, puts the wounded soldier into the front seat of the helicopter, and then he snap links himself to the outside of the helicopter, which then takes off and flies back to base. Distinguished flying crosses earned that day by our National Guard support, you know, and it was not uncommon, I had, I think there's a picture in that article of one of our Riverine Patrol Boats.

• 4:57:22Jocko Willink?

  With an Apache in the background.

• 4:57:24Speaker 01

  With a National Guard Apache supporting a Riverine Patrol Boat. It's flipped from Marine to Navy, I'm not sure when that picture was taken, but you know, probably, you know, Marines and sailors both aboard that patrol boat with Army National Guard soldiers over watching them. It was, uh, it was quite a, and probably some Iraqis aboard as well, you know, probably, you know, less than enthusiastically, but they're nevertheless.

• 4:57:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we, we owed so much to the 228 soldiers because when we got there, they told us how to stay alive. They told us where to go. They told us what to do and what not to do. And same things with the 38 Marines. We, you know, we sent our snipers over to talk to their snipers and get the gouge on what to watch out for, what to do, what not to do. And yeah, we just, we owed so much. Those guys saved so many of our lives just by knowledge transfer, just by telling us how they were operating and what to watch out for. So, yeah.

• 4:58:30Speaker 01

  Certainly 228 helped us out of line on our transition. Yeah, absolutely.

• 4:58:34Jocko Willink?

  The, um, the pass down was, was great and it saved a lot of lives.

• 4:58:41Speaker 01

  You know, one thing about that epilogue that I wanted to point out, when it says that we couldn't have asked for a better, higher headquarters, and I mentioned the support from General Zilmer. Uh, one of the things that we struggled with was, uh, post-blast fires after IEDs. Um, and we lost some soldiers and had some really bad burn victims. And my Navy chief surgeon had commented on how difficult it is even for the surgeons, you know, to, to deal with that, um, emotionally. Uh, so I was mentioning that to General Neller,

• 4:59:24Speaker 01

  who was Brigadier General Neller at the time, that, you know, working for General Zilmer. Uh, and I said, uh, you know, that was one of the problems that we were facing. He said, what, what can I do for you? I said, well, I have noticed that all the Marines are running around in nomex and, uh, most of my soldiers don't have nomex. My tank crewman.

• 4:59:47Speaker 01

  Bradley crewmen have nomex, but that's about it. I'm an armored brigade, but you know, the nomex suits are only for the combat vehicle crewmen and not all the dismounted supporting types. And because of the post blast fires, you know, I could really use some. And he said, well, how many? And I said, geez, I don't know, maybe 4,000 sets. You know, we had about 6,000 troops there and reminded me, maybe more. And he said, well, Sean, again, you know, the Marines don't have a lot that the Army doesn't have, but one thing we do have a lot of is nomex flight suits out at Al Asad Air Base with

• 5:00:31Speaker 01

  the 3rd Marine Air Wing. And he took all the spare flight suits from the aviators from the 3rd Marine Air Wing and gave them to our soldiers. So I tell people that, I said, a Marine general literally took the clothes off his Marines backs to give to our soldiers. Is there a better example of inter-service cooperation and support than that? If there is, I can't think of it. And after that, you know, General Neller always

• 5:01:11Speaker 01

  had this reputation, you know, his nickname was Grumpy Bob, you know, tough exterior, but you know, heart of gold, kind of a guy. I tell you, General Neller, at that moment, became my absolute hero and I would have followed him anywhere. We were so blessed to have the 1st Marine Expeditionary Forces, our higher headquarters. I don't know if the awakening might have happened without them.

• 5:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were a bit skeptical, you know, are we running with the bad crowd, you know, with these sheikhs, but they gave us a flyer on it. They let us, you know, see how it would go and experiment.

• 5:01:50Jocko Willink?

  I remember in a brigade meeting, you were talking about this plan and you were talking about the fact that you had told higher headquarters that you think you got a guy that can kind of help with this, move it forward. And their reply to you, they kind of like, I don't know if it's the next meeting, but they said, hey, we were targeting that guy. We've been targeting this guy for six months. What are you talking about? You want to work with him? And he said, well, that's what you, that's, I think, what you were explaining, the, the mobster thing about, hey, well, you know, he's a, he's a gangster. And if a gangster needs to make money to feed his gang, he's gonna sell some stuff and trade some stuff and make some things happen. And, and, you know, this is also where I started hearing that, that, I guess it's

• 5:02:32Jocko Willink?

  an Arab expression of they're gonna bet on the winning horse.

• 5:02:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the strongest tribe.

• 5:02:39Jocko Willink?

  The strongest tribe. Yeah, that's right.

• 5:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and I use another thing to explain it to General Zilmer and Neller, who are both Catholics. I said, when I was in Catholic school, the nun, one of the nuns taught us that every saint had a past, but every sinner has a future. And so these sheikhs, they have pasts, you know, they're not white sheets of paper, but who's to say they can't be going forward? So let's take them at their word and work for them, trust but verify,

• 5:03:18Speaker 01

  right? But, you know, let's give them the chance for a better future. So that, that bought me enough time and, you know, credibility there to give the awakening a chance to grow. The one thing about the awakening meeting that you didn't mention was Sheikh Satar did not like.

• 5:03:44Speaker 01

  Governor Sammy Mamoun. He was from the Iraqi Islamic Party, which the sheikhs considered to be indistinguishable from al Qaeda. Kind of the political wing of al Qaeda, Sinn Fein and, you know. So they had some pretty

• 5:04:07Speaker 01

  tough language in there about getting rid of the governor and, you know, replacing him with somebody from the awakening movement. I said, let's soften that a little bit and say, you know, through the democratic process, because I had seen how tribal justices worked and I was afraid I was giving them sort of a, you know, license to kill, you know, so, so we, we, we made that a bit more politically correct and and, and so the 12 points were all good 12 points. If I could have written them myself, I would have written the first 11 the way they were. The 12th one, they, they modified at my request, so.

• 5:04:51Speaker 01

  They were, they were savvy guys. And Sheikh Zatar was like right out of Central Casting. You met him.

• 5:04:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:04:57Speaker 01

  Kind of very photogenic guy and we like, we had a photographer with me, journalist, and I can I get a picture? And he goes, well, wait a minute. So I can get my better gun here and gets the right, well, put on a different robe and here's my good side and all this kind of stuff. He, he knew what he was doing.

• 5:05:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he was a, he,

• 5:05:18Speaker 01

  He was a character.

• 5:05:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he said, he was a character.

• 5:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:05:21Jocko Willink?

  And, and a courageous human being.

• 5:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:05:24Jocko Willink?

  Because he had to have known, you know, what was gonna, what, how hard they were gonna come after him.

• 5:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:05:31Jocko Willink?

  And he might have been confident enough to think that he could overcome that, but you know, there's risk.

• 5:05:37Speaker 01

  He, yeah, yeah. And we were talking about the Apaches a little earlier and, you know, well, that was one of his requests. Could I get some of those? I was like, Apaches? He's like, yeah, yeah, they're really good. I'd like some of those. Like, you know, you're not gonna get any Apaches.

• 5:05:53Jocko Willink?

  Um, so.

• 5:05:56Jocko Willink?

  Like I said, 2007, February 2007, you're done.

• 5:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:06:01Jocko Willink?

  You turn over.

• 5:06:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 5:06:03Jocko Willink?

  You go home.

• 5:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:06:05Jocko Willink?

  For me, look, I was in charge of 100 people, 40 SEALs. Uh, I was there for a little over six months or seven months. And I came home and I, um, went back to doing what you're doing in the SEAL teams when you're not at war. About a month goes by and I woke up in the morning and I kinda just had a whole different, I had a, I had a, a, a, a lightning, a lightning feeling in my, in my being, right? Like, I kind of thought to myself like, why do I feel kinda like better today? And better isn't even the right word, but I just felt like some big pressure had been alleviated.

• 5:06:48Jocko Willink?

  And I realized, oh, I'm not worried about one of my guys getting wounded or killed right now. Oh, and I didn't even realize that it kind of was an afterthought. How much I was thinking about that on deployment of every day is like, yep, today could be a day. We could, you hit a roadside bomb, you hit a triple stack IED and I'm gonna lose six of my friends today. Or tomorrow, or the next day. So, you know, like, you know, I was like, okay, cool. I don't have to worry about that stuff. I, you know, can carry on and, and move forward. What kind of pressure relief did you feel? Did you feel any? Did you, what was it like for you coming home?

• 5:07:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think I had that experience. Uh, you know, I came back, I was still brigade commander. Uh, still kinda fighting for my brigade as we were inactivating it, uh, in this remote corner of Germany. Um, we were kind of a bit lost in the shuffle because US Army Europe was drawing down and, uh, you know, we were informed on the way home that I'm sorry, you know, sorry by our higher division headquarters that, sorry, but we expended all of our welcome home money on your sister brigade. There's none for you.

• 5:08:07Speaker 01

  Uh, and then, uh, you know, they had a division memorial plaque made with all of the fallen from the division. From the deployment, the vast majority of which were under the Ready First Combat Team. And somehow or another, they forgot to invite anybody from our brigade to attend the memorial ceremony or the unveiling ceremony. The excuse was, "Well, we deleted all of you from the global address list because, you know, you were deployed." And it's like, that's pretty weak. So...

• 5:08:41Jocko Willink?

  The hits just keep on coming.

• 5:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we were able to, fortunately, we had a USO troop come through and we were able to get a performer to come gratis and perform. And we raised money. I forget even how we managed to pull this rabbit out of the hat, but we managed to put on our own welcome home ceremony. Nobody welcomed us home. We welcomed ourselves home. We got notified, like, you know, we're in Friedberg and Gießen and this unveiling is in Wiesbaden. If you're not familiar with Germany, trust me, you know, these are not close together locations. And, you know, like, "Hey, we're unveiling this memorial. Why aren't you guys here?"

• 5:09:28Speaker 01

  I'm like, "What are you talking about? You didn't get the emails?" It's like, "No." "Oh, yeah. Yeah, we didn't send any to you. So, can you get all your battalion commanders and sergeants major down here in an hour for this event?" I was like, "Well, out of respect for the names on there, yes, I'll do it." You know? So, we get down there. They didn't even have any seats for us. We had to stand behind the bleachers. And so, you know, and then, and then for our, you know, the kind of the final thing was our inactivation ceremony for the brigade, because it's gonna be stood down and then

• 5:10:10Speaker 01

  stood back up at Fort Bliss, Texas. You know, we're at the rehearsal and it's like, "Where's the band?" And like, "Oh, we forgot to put that on their calendar." I'm like, "Well, you got 24 hours, you know? You're only an hour away from us, you know? Tell the band that, oh, we put them on block leave, so they're not available." So, we had to have, like, you know, canned music for our, you know, ceremony.

• 5:10:41Speaker 01

  So I mean, you know, rubbing insult into injury and then thanks to General Odiano, I had a good job. When I got back to the States, I went to the Joint Staff. He had been the former director of the Joint Staff and was looking after me a little bit.

• 5:10:56Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:10:57Speaker 01

  Because clearly my division wasn't back in Germany. And so we get back to the States and I'm the chief of the Iraq Division. General Petraeus is ramping up the surge and it was game on. So I just jumped from one treadmill to another. But I will say this, that when I was, you know, learning my new job and just focused on that, when I would park my car in south parking lot of the Pentagon, the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up because I was in an open area in an urban environment until I could get undercover.

• 5:11:37Speaker 01

  Because you remember when we'd go to the government center in Ramadi, you'd have to, before you got out of your Humvee, you'd have to throw a smoke grenade and like zigzag from the Humvee into the door of the government center. I mean, that's how bad it was when I first got there. And, and I was like, I just, being in the open with lots of windows around me, multi-story buildings, it took me a while to get used to that. I can, I'm okay with it now. But, you know, that, that took me a little bit of...

• 5:12:15Jocko Willink?

  So it did leave a little bit of a mark.

• 5:12:17Speaker 01

  It did, I think, yeah. And my wife will tell you that, you know, I have undiagnosed PTSD, you know. But, I don't know.

• 5:12:27Jocko Willink?

  I would get a few. So I took over training when I got back for the, advanced training for the SEALs, getting ready to deploy. And I would be out, we'd run these big urban combat drills and I, I would be standing there watching, you know, these guys. And if there was a guy that was like standing in the street, standing in the open, I would get that knot in my stomach like for a split second of like, you're gonna get shot. What are you doing? And I'd be like, okay, he's gonna get hit with paintball.

• 5:12:51Speaker 01

  I was the same way after Bosnia, cuz there was all about mine awareness, there were so many mines. And I just never would get off hard stand if I could help it. And when I got back to the States, if I saw a little kid out in like a soccer field, you know, I was like, oh my god, you know, he's gonna step on a mine. So, I mean, it was, you know, all these things kinda leave a mark, I think. I can't, to this day, I can't watch realistic war movies. I just can't, you know? Especially if there's like civilian casualties involved, you know? It's like, no, it's too real. I can watch the old World War II, 1950s, Yul Brynner, you know, those kinda guys, you know, where, you know, there's no blood, you know, they just put their hand over their, you know, chest

• 5:13:36Speaker 01

  and they fall over, one shot, they're down, that's it, you know, they never move again. The kinda the bloodless war movies, I can watch those. They're so hokey, you know, Guns of Navarone or whatever. But, you know, the more realistic, Saving Private Ryan, I can't, I can't watch that.

• 5:13:53Jocko Willink?

  I was watching The Pacific. Which, if you're

• 5:13:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:13:58Jocko Willink?

  And I was, it was, it came out sometime after we got back.

• 5:14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:14:01Jocko Willink?

  But I was on a, I was on an airplane and I was like watching it with headphones on in the dark airplane from, you know, five inches in front of my face on my computer. And about halfway through this, and it was whatever episode, they, they land and there's no attacks and they're patrolling through the jungle and you're like, you know they're gonna get attacked. And I remember that feeling of walking down the street in Ramadi, you're like, we are 100% gonna start getting attacked at any moment here. And I'm watching this thing and all of a sudden I, you know, kinda had a shudder of like, oh, you're really, really, really into this right now, aren't you? You need to take a little breather.

• 5:14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, knowing Ramadi was like, you know, if I haven't been shot at for 10 minutes, I'm 10 minutes closer to getting shot at again, you know, so, yeah.

• 5:14:46Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you were around when they're putting the surge together?

• 5:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in the Pentagon. Well, the surge was put together. My job was to kind of shepherd the surge through the, you know, interagency process, you know, as it was occurring. And we had all the big hearings, the famous Petraeus Crocker hearings on the Capitol Hill and preparing everybody for all of that. And what are the benchmarks for success of the surge? I mean, we got the surge approved, but you know, you know, how do we know if it's working and all those kinds of things? So it was a bit of a pressure cooker job. And then I went from there down to, I got promoted to one star. Went down to take command of a joint task force in charge of military support.

• 5:15:31Jocko Willink?

  Did you get promoted to one star because of Ramadi? Did that help? Was it like, was it recognized at this point now we're getting into 2008? It's been a couple of years. Are people like, oh yeah, this guy did a good job?

• 5:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the-

• 5:15:45Jocko Willink?

  Despite his multiple write-ups that he had as a young, as a young officer?

• 5:15:51Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. So the president of my selection board was a guy named David Petraeus, who came back specifically to, they brought him back to make sure that, you know, the folks that, you know, he, he saw and wanted to move up, you know, were, were recognized. So HR and I were on the same one star list, you know? Although I was, I'm two years older than HR, you know, I was, he was class of 83, I was class of 81. And once again Candy Crowley comes up to me in the halls of the Pentagon when I'm a Colonel there, you know, and, but this was before, you know, my, you know,

• 5:16:35Speaker 01

  issue with her at Operation Inherent Resolve. And she says, hey Colonel McFarland, she says, do you know HR McMaster? I'm like, yeah, of course. We've known each other for a long time and both cavalry guys. And she says, well, don't you think it's, you know, strange that he hasn't been promoted to Brigadier General yet? I said, you know, I'm two years senior to him and I haven't been promoted Brigadier General yet. So why don't you ask me how I feel about me not being promoted? She goes, oh, I didn't realize. I was like, yeah, you know, just because I have hair and he doesn't, doesn't mean I'm older than he, or he's older than me, you know, so. She said, "Well, okay. Well, tell me about both of them." No, never mind. You ruined it. You know, I'm not, I'm not going to share that with you. But, no, HR certainly deserved

• 5:17:18Speaker 01

  it. And I was proud to be on the same list as him. And a lot of us who served as Brigade Combat Team commanders in Iraq together, around the same time, all ended up as brigadiers together on the Joint Staff and Army Staff. And then throughout our careers, and kind of a band of brothers type of a thing, you know, where... And in my time in Afghanistan, I've served with some, as the DCOs Ops Deputy Commander, US Forces.

• 5:17:44Jocko Willink?

  When did you go to Afghanistan?

• 5:17:45Speaker 01

  Eleven to thirteen. Sixteen glorious months. During the surge there, actually. You know, actually, the back end of the surge. And I got the opportunity to work with so many great, you know, Brits and Aussies and Canadians and French officers and on down the list, plus multiple other services that, you know, I, by the time I became a three-star commander in Iraq for Operation Inherent Resolve, every single component commander in CENTCOM I had served with in Iraq or Afghanistan previously, you know, Special Ops, you know, Tony Thomas and Scotty Miller I knew, you know, and, you know, all the other folks on

• 5:18:29Speaker 01

  down, you know, the, you know, Smoke Biderler, Kid Donigan, CQ Brown, all these guys I'd worked with before in combat. How rare is that, right? And, and even, you know, I had the same, I had an Australian deputy in Afghanistan, and he was, he worked for me again in Iraq. So it was like the usual suspects. Round up, another war, round up the usual suspects, you know. And General Neller even said that to me, you know, and he was a three-star, and I was a two-star, and goes, "Doesn't the Army have more than five generals? Why do I keep running into the same guys over and over again in every, you know, war?" I'd say, "I don't know. I guess we're, they got their go-tos," you know.

• 5:19:16Jocko Willink?

  You get done with this process of getting the surge to happen over Iraq, and then you said 13 and 14, you're in Afghanistan.

• 5:19:24Speaker 01

  No, 11 through 12.

• 5:19:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, sorry, 11 through 12.

• 5:19:27Speaker 01

  11 through 13.

• 5:19:28Jocko Willink?

  11 through 13, you're in Afghanistan. This is your first time going to Afghanistan, right?

• 5:19:32Speaker 01

  It was. I had to learn all new place names.

• 5:19:37Speaker 01

  And they all sounded like Klingon names to me, but I got it. I learned it pretty quickly, yeah.

• 5:19:42Jocko Willink?

  And how did you compare? What were the differences? What were the lessons learned that applied? And which ones didn't apply?

• 5:19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, obviously, everybody, you know, General Petraeus had been there prior to my arrival. And everybody said, well, you know, let's do another awakening here in Afghanistan.

• 5:20:04Jocko Willink?

  This is like when they tell the one-hit wonder, can you write another hit song for us? Just do the same beat or whatever, let's go.

• 5:20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I don't know if it was like lightning and a bottle or something, but, you know, General Allen was my boss. And he played an important part in the awakening too, as a one-star with two MEF. When they came in behind one MEF, General Allen really kind of spread what was a Ramadi phenomena across Anbar. And then General Zoderno and Petraeus made it an Iraq-wide thing with the Sons of Iraq, right? But General Allen and General Gergenius and these guys, you know, they understood that, you know, the different tribal groupings and how to get them to, you know, come together and join this movement.

• 5:20:56Speaker 01

  And I always say about the awakening that I was saliary to General Allen's Mozart. Because it would have been a ship in a bottle type of phenomena if General Allen hadn't spread it province-wide and then into Baghdad with General Petraeus. So...

• 5:21:18Speaker 01

  So when we were looking in Afghanistan, I mean, the dynamics were just completely different. It's a much more fragmented society because of terrain. You know, the big valleys and, you know, and unlike Iraq, the enemy had this safe haven in the federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan, the Fatah, with Ziristan, that they would go to every winter. There was no campaign season in Iraq. It was game on, 365. In Afghanistan, the snow would come in, Taliban would go to the Fatah, you know, and then

• 5:22:00Speaker 01

  when the snow melted in the mountain passes, they'd come back and we'd have a fighting season. Which was one of the biggest mistakes we made in our withdrawal, is we did it in the middle of the fighting season. You know, we could have done it in the winter.

• 5:22:14Jocko Willink?

  Been no factor.

• 5:22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:22:16Jocko Willink?

  Much less factor.

• 5:22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, but anyway, and, so there were a lot of differences, but there were also a lot of similarities. You know, I mean, it's counterinsurgency, you're trying to build up the indigenous forces to... The problem is, in Iraq, Maliki hadn't gone off the rails yet on us, he was working mostly with us, right? In Afghanistan, Karzai just hated us. So when you have the government that you're trying to support actively fighting against you, not all of it, not at the cabinet level necessarily, but the head of it, the president,

• 5:23:01Speaker 01

  and the way we created the constitution for Afghanistan made the president, the executive, incredibly powerful, much more powerful than in America, you know?

• 5:23:12Speaker 01

  An Afghan province isn't like an American state. A lot of people think it is, but it's not. An American state is a sovereign entity, you know. We are the United States. The states decided to create a federal government. In Afghanistan, the president appoints the provincial governors, you know. It's an administrative distinction, you know, and I mean, everybody derives their power not from their local population, but from the central government. So if you got the central government against you, you know, and all the provincial governors are against you, and then you have corruption in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but it was on another whole level in Afghanistan.

• 5:23:57Jocko Willink?

  Wow, that's saying a lot.

• 5:23:58Speaker 01

  It had the opium things going on down there in the south, but a much more fragmented, you know, there was no large tribe, little sheik kind of loyalty in Afghanistan where that's what really turned it for us in Iraq. If the sheik said, okay, we're flipping, ninety percent of the tribe would go with them, you know. That didn't happen in Afghanistan. So, we had all these things. We did not have control of the border, not in the least. And yeah, this, Iran influenced the Shia militia groups in the south, but that was just a part

• 5:24:39Speaker 01

  of the country. It wasn't, you know, the most critical part. It wasn't Baghdad necessarily. Although the Shias were in Baghdad and they were going on their campaign against the Sunni neighborhoods and everything, but we were able to, you know, split the different Shia militia groups in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the Pashtuns were, you know...

• 5:25:06Speaker 01

  You know, there, there was no, there were no levers, you know, like tribal elders, unless you got down to the very low village level, you know, and so if you're gonna go village by village, you know, it's gonna be a problem. The other big problem is the levels of advancement, you know, what, you know, the Iraqi society was basically a 1970s society frozen in amber, you know, for 20 or 30 years, right? But they had a lot of the institutions of a modern state. You know, they had universities, they had infrastructure, they had industry, they had all this. Afghanistan had none of

• 5:25:51Speaker 01

  that. General Abbasid famously said Afghanistan is a 14th century country, not a 1970s, 14th century. And if we stay in Afghanistan for 100 years and do everything right, it'll be a 15th century country. You know, I mean, that was the magnitude of the challenge in Afghanistan. So, you know, there are a lot of good people over there, I know a lot of them, but, you know, everybody tried really hard. But it was probably, you know, more than, we probably set our sights too high. Not to say we should have withdrawn the way we did. I think we could have continued to manage that, you know, but it wasn't a one

• 5:26:34Speaker 01

  generational issue in Afghanistan, it was multi-generational. And we would have had to keep our hands on the back of that bicycle seat for another 30 to 40 years. But we weren't taking any casualties. For 18 months, we had no US servicemen or women killed in Afghanistan. You know, would that have been worth it versus allowing ISIS Corazon to, you know, form and gel and now project threats around the world again? You know, above my pay grade, but I would submit that we could have maintained that force over there, and it wouldn't have broken the bank.

• 5:27:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it certainly seemed like we had reached a, if nothing else, a steady state of somewhat stable scenario.

• 5:27:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, stability and support operations. Yeah, absolutely.

• 5:27:31Jocko Willink?

  After that, we're getting into 2014, you take over, uh, what, in Fort Hood for?

• 5:27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, first I commanded the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss. And after I came back from Afghanistan,

• 5:27:48Speaker 01

  and my son was graduating from West Point, and he said, Dad, what are you gonna do next? I said, I'm gonna command a division. He said, which one? I said, either 1st Infantry at Fort Riley or 1st Armored at Fort Bliss. He goes, okay. I said, why? He says, well, I think then I'll apply for 1st Cav at Fort Hood. I was like, I get it, buddy, you know, no hard feelings. You don't want to be that guy, you know? So, um, so I went to Fort Bliss 1st Armored Division, which was great. Uh, I'd been stationed there several times before, it's where I met my wife as a lieutenant and everything. So I love Fort Bliss, I love El Paso, and I had a great time. Great people, you know, I mean,

• 5:28:31Speaker 01

  just a wonderful team of teams there, uh, both on the installation size and the division. And the best thing in the world is to be both the division commander and the installation commander, because then, you know, you're...

• 5:28:42Jocko Willink?

  You own it all, huh?

• 5:28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it was brand new, I mean, it'd been around since the 1800s as an old cavalry post. So it had the old charming tree-lined, uh, you know, Colonel's Row around the parade field and the chapels and all that really nice old west stuff. But it also had several billion dollars of recent military construction. So, you know, the new part of Fort Bliss was state of the art, I mean, there was nothing better. So we were, I was very fortunate. But, uh, General Odierno was now Chief of Staff in the Army, and he said, Sean, I want you to go take command of 3rd Corps at Fort Hood. Trying to move you along here, you know, don't want you to, you know, get stagnated.

• 5:29:27Jocko Willink?

  So how long did you do division command for?

• 5:29:29Speaker 01

  I was only a little over a year, and then I...

• 5:29:31Jocko Willink?

  So they're definitely moving you along.

• 5:29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so they moved me up to 3rd Corps, took over from General Mark Milley. And, uh, and then shortly thereafter, you know, we were slated to go to Afghanistan, but, you know, change of mission, um, we got the, uh, told that, you know, we're gonna go take over the war against ISIS in Iraq. And, you know, headquartered in Kuwait, Iraq and Syria would be our area of operations.

• 5:30:00Jocko Willink?

  How did you feel watching the rise of ISIS as it was, as it was coming back?

• 5:30:05Speaker 01

  Déjà vu all over again. You know, not only was that, excuse me.

• 5:30:12Speaker 01

  Not only was the rise of ISIS predictable, it was predicted. When we withdrew from Iraq in 2011, everybody who had been there said, "This is gonna be bad."

• 5:30:26Jocko Willink?

  How do we fail to convey that message up the chain of command? Or is it just?

• 5:30:30Speaker 01

  It was conveyed, it was ignored.

• 5:30:33Jocko Willink?

  Then that's it. That's like, just how it is?

• 5:30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, our friends in Ramadi and the Abu Nima tribes and folks like that who stood with us against Al Qaeda were butchered by ISIS when they came back into the, down the Euphrates River Valley. And so, when I got back in Operation Inherent Resolve, people said, "Well, you know, can you get the Awakening Band back together?" I'm like, "They're dead or run off." No. You know, that, that ship has sailed. But, you know, that's not to say that there aren't military aged men and the tribes out there who won't join the police forces

• 5:31:19Speaker 01

  to, once again, police themselves so they don't have to rely on predominantly Shia, external folks that they don't trust to do it.

• 5:31:28Jocko Willink?

  I was very excited to see giant convoys of ISIS, flying ISIS flags across the open desert, because I thought to myself, "They are all going to be killed." Like, as opposed to what we were dealing with, these, you know, hiding in the shadows and mixing in with the civilians. When you're in the open desert, driving in convoys with big, giant, black ISIS flags on your vehicles, I thought to myself, "Oh, this is gonna be, that you, you wanna engage in a conventional war with us? Uh, this is gonna, this is gonna be good for us."

• 5:32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and eventually it was, but initially not, because we...

• 5:32:16Speaker 01

  Went into that fight not optimally configured. First of all, it was two countries, Iraq and Syria. In Syria, we were not fighting one war against ISIS. We were fighting two wars. We were fighting a war against ISIS and a war against the Assad regime. And the Venn diagram of those overlap in good and bad ways. We had different authorities in Iraq and Syria, but both were in my area of operations. We had multiple commands, special ops and conventional ops banging around. So Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said, well, I want to put it all under Sean McFarland. He knew me, you know, but he said, I want

• 5:32:58Speaker 01

  to give Sean control over all the special ops, include Tier One, which I talked to Tony Thomas and I said, I don't really need that, you know, as long as I have red card, you know, we can work around that. But we created a combined joint task force. Really, it was set up by my, by the US Army Central Command, you know, because they were sort of like the contact force, you know, we have contact force, blunt force, decisive force. They were kind of the contact force and their job is to set up a temporary command post until, you know, a warfighting headquarters, like a corps headquarters comes in and that's

• 5:33:41Speaker 01

  what happened and we took that over. And then, once we're kind of on the ground, it quickly became apparent to me that we were fighting a little, almost conventional force, you know, hybrid at least, with largely, forces largely trained and equipped to conduct counterinsurgency.

• 5:34:08Speaker 01

  And we were supporting them under basically counterterrorism authorities, you know. So we had a misalignment there. And I could retrain and re-equip the Syrian and Iraqi forces with my own resources. But I had to convince my bosses to change the authorities we were fighting under. Things like the noncombatant casualty value was set at zero, which means you can't drop a bomb if you think there's going to be a civilian casualty. If you're fighting in an urban area, as we discussed earlier, you need to relax that. And ISIS was largely in urban areas. We had other challenges.

• 5:34:50Speaker 01

  A week after we got there, the Russians arrived in Syria, along with their SA-17s and their SU-27s and things like that. We had challenges with the Iranians, Qassem Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guards, trying to create inroads through Iraq to Syria. There's a Shia militia group in Iraq called the Khatib Hezbollah. They were trying to link them up with the Lebanese Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon. So the Iranians, when we pulled out of Iraq in 2011, the Iranians filled the vacuum that we left behind, the power vacuum.

• 5:35:35Speaker 01

  And so we had to deal with that. And there were hundreds of Shia militia groups on the battlefield, fighting ISIS, fighting each other, fighting all kinds of things. Some of them were good. Grand Ayatollah Sustani raised them, the Fatwa, to fight ISIS. Some of them were Khatib Hezbollah, Asabul Haq, groups like that, which were extensions, proxies really, for the Revolutionary Guards from Iran under Qassem Soleimani. Others were somewhere in between, Bader organization, and others were semi-independent of Iran, not fully. So you had this whole spectrum.

• 5:36:19Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, the more aligned with Iran, the more effective and lethal, the less, you know, the Sustani guys were barely getting enough calories to stay alive, let alone fight the enemy. So, um, so we had a lot of challenges there. And then in Syria, we had the Syrian Kurds, and of course, in Northern Iraq, we had the Iraqi Kurds, who don't like each other, as you know. The PUK, the PKK, you know, um, they'd buried the hatchet to, to fight ISIS, but, you know, neither of them liked the YPG in Northern Syria. And the Turks claimed the YPG were an extension of the PKK, which they were actively fighting in Turkey.

• 5:37:04Speaker 01

  And the YPG were communists, are communists, but they were also the most effective ISIS force. And then you've got to remember, all the, the opposition in Iraq, or in Syria, was raised in opposition to the Assad regime, not in opposition to ISIS, because ISIS was fighting the Assad regime, too. So, uh, you know, this expression, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Really? Because ISIS and the Assad regime don't like each other. Which one of them is my friend? Could you help me out? Uh, and then the Jordanians were very nervous, and they had that fighter pilot captured and burned alive. You know, so there were a lot of, you know, things going on.

• 5:37:44Speaker 01

  A lot, I had forces in Turkey, forces in Jordan, forces in Iraq, forces in Kuwait. Um, I was trying to bring all my special ops guys together under one hat, so Special Ops Joint Task Force, Operation Inherent Resolve, OR. Couldn't get permission from the, uh, US Army Central Command Fire Marshal to put them in one of the, uh, empty warehouses, um, in, uh, next to my headquarters in, uh, Arif Chon, Kuwait. So, you know, I, being a corps headquarters, I had lots of, you know, these big drash command post tents, so I set up a, you know, a headquarters for them out, out of drash tents.

• 5:38:26Speaker 01

  You know how many, and, and the Fire Marshal wouldn't let them occupy the warehouse because there weren't enough sprinkler heads in there for the number of people they wanted. Guess how many sprinkler heads are in a tent? I'm going to guess zero. Yeah, pretty close. So, uh, but that's okay, you know, it wasn't his deal. I mean, what a way to fight a war, right? But anyway, we got command and control arranged.

• 5:38:48Speaker 01

  I, you know, identified the problem, which was, you know, our, how we were organized and the authorities that we had. You know, Clausewitz, everybody talks about war as an extension of politics. Another great thing that he said is, the most, the first and most important that a statesman or commander must make, or decision that a statesman or commander must make is to understand the type of war that he is about to embark upon, neither mistaking it for, nor attempting to turn it into that which is alien to its nature. In other words, you can't fight a conventional force like a counterinsurgency

• 5:39:31Speaker 01

  just because you want it to be a counterinsurgency. You have to change the noncombatant casualty value. You gotta lift that, you know. You gotta tell your guys, no, you don't, you know, find IEDs and disarm them. You know, you have complex obstacle belts that look like something out of El Alamein in the Second World War. You're gonna get all your EOD techs killed that way. You gotta do combined arms breaching, you know, and, and train and equip them to do all that. And I had about a billion and a half dollars of, you know, money that I could use for that. And, and so I, you know, we set about to, to change things. And, you know, we had Mosul and Raqqa. Raqqa in Syria was their capital.

• 5:40:15Speaker 01

  Mosul was their biggest city. And we had to get those two back. And, you know, so we had to organize the campaign, visualize it, right? A commander has to understand the environment, right? Then visualize, and what's the problem is, after understanding the environment, and then visualize a solution, and then communicate that, and then control it, right? You know, so.

• 5:40:42Speaker 01

  So I understood the problem. I visualized the solution. I communicated it with varying degrees of success, up the chain of command, what authorities I would require. Like we had in Iraq, the ability to accompany indigenous forces on the ground, that was not initially allowed, you know. We got that permission, but it took time. I had to convince them, you know, that it's okay for us to be outside the wire with these guys. We had to figure out how to provide, how to conduct airstrikes against ISIS folks who were in contact with Iranian-backed militias, because we didn't want to support Iranian-backed militias, but we did want to kill ISIS, you know. So we had, we developed all these solutions, but

• 5:41:26Speaker 01

  it took a little time, but we got there. We, we had to get the Iraqi army up off its back, dust it off, put it, you know, clean it up, point it in the right direction, give it what it needed, and then we had to kind of be next to them. We had to convince the Prime Minister and everybody that this was a valid way to go, and, and I had to, I had to develop my own campaign plan with lines of operation and battle rhythm events and decision points and all that kind of stuff, you know, and all that was in about 30 to 60 days.

• 5:41:58Jocko Willink?

  So it's a busy, it's a busy 30 to 60 days.

• 5:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, it's what you're trained to do. And, you know, the army had prepared me for that well by the time I'd spent on the joint staff, working the interagency processes, my time as a joint task force commander doing border security, learning about, you know, law enforcement and civil agencies, my time as working with cabinet level ministers in Afghanistan as a two-star, as the deputy chief of staff for operations over there, working the NATO chain of command. I was, I wore a NATO hat and a US hat, so I understood how the NATO chain of command worked and how it sourced forces. And we

• 5:42:41Speaker 01

  had 29 troop contributing nations, some of them from NATO, some not, on my staff. So I had to figure out how to bring them all together. And my time as having a combined joint staff of several hundred in Afghanistan was great training for that, right? My time as an insert, you know, fighting in Iraq, a lot of these guys were still around that I knew from those days, you know, I mean. Uh, the 7th Division Commander, General Murthy, remember him? He was now like their Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics and, you know, uh, some of the sheiks were still around, still knew me, um, you know, um, the mayor from Tal Afar

• 5:43:24Speaker 01

  was around still, you know, so I knew, I knew a lot of people and I just kinda knew how the Iraqi government and everything functioned. So, um, but I gotta say this, cause I'm talking to a SEAL. The war winner was when we pulled out of Iraq, we left behind, uh, an ODA, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, um, and they had to turn that over to a SEAL team when I got there. And what they did, even while we were gone, under Chief of Mission Authority, under the

• 5:44:06Speaker 01

  Ambassador, they continued to work with the Iraqi Special Forces, remember Iraqi ISOP, Iraqi Special Forces? Yeah, ISOP. And they evolved into the CTS, the Counterterrorism Service. The Counterterrorism Service, bar none, were the most effective force, indigenous force, also not more effective than us, but most effective indigenous force in Iraq or Syria, better than the Russians by far, you know? Cause we had picked and trained every one of their leaders and they were a truly national force, they were not Shia, they weren't Sunni, they weren't Kurd, they were Iraqi. They were led by, uh, folks that we had, all of them were picked and trained, um, and

• 5:44:49Speaker 01

  they were led by, by good leaders who understood leadership and leadership from the front. There were 14 battalions in the CTS and two brigades. Within a year of the ISIS invasion of Iraq, all 14 of those battalion commanders had been killed in action. Think about that. But no Iraqi security force would make a move against ISIS if they weren't led by a Counterterrorism Service unit. The CTS had to leave every tech, they became shock troops, that's not what they were trained for, they were trained to do counterterrorism. But the need for them, they had to adapt and become the shock troops, the lead echelon, and that, or else nobody else would follow, just like...

• 5:45:36Speaker 01

  SEAL Team Three, you know, I mean, you had to adapt, right? So, non-traditional roles, but that's, the key to winning is adapting.

• 5:45:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the guys that were over there, you know, when Mosul went down, they were super impressed with the Iraqi soldiers that went in there and fought and took massive casualties going in there.

• 5:45:59Speaker 01

  Well, they took massive casualties because they're not particularly good, you know. You know, the average, you know, private jundee, you know, got like maybe fifteen rounds of, you know, marksmanship training before they put them out in the field. A lot of it was OJT. But the CTS guys, absolutely. Be impressed by them because those guys are the real deal. In fact, one of the first casualties we had was a Navy SEAL up there, Kevin Keating Jr.

• 5:46:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's C4. It's C4. It's Charles Keating.

• 5:46:38Speaker 01

  Charles Keating.

• 5:46:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:46:39Speaker 01

  Charles Keating.

• 5:46:40Jocko Willink?

  Chuck Keating and, yeah, from SEAL Team One. And, yeah.

• 5:46:44Speaker 01

  That was on my watch. I mean, that was a, there was an explosion of ISIS guys out of Mosul, you know, as we were starting to put the pressure on them around Ramadi and we took Ramadi back and we were taking Fallujah back and we're starting, we're moving, we were working with the Syrian Kurds and starting to put pressure in Syria and closing the Manbij Gap where all the foreign fighters were coming through. And, and at the same time, we're beginning to put pressure on them up around Mosul. And so they did a counterattack. Happened to be while I think the Secretary of Defense was visiting. But like 500 of these Maldunes came boiling out of Mosul and, and, you know, this whole.

• 5:47:30Speaker 01

  You know, pleasant fiction, they were telling ourselves that, well, we're one terrain feature back, you know, well, you know, the enemy wouldn't let us be one terrain. They were on top of our guys before we knew it. And it was a, it was a tough fight, and that's how Charles Keating, you know, lost his life. But, yeah, it was, it was pretty intense fighting. And of course, you've seen the pictures of Mosul, and Ramadi was, looks even worse, probably, you know, I mean, it was really, you know, block by block.

• 5:48:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it looked like they dropped a lot of bombs in Ramadi.

• 5:48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, we didn't drop a ton of bombs in Ramadi.

• 5:48:14Jocko Willink?

  When I saw like, I saw pictures of Tamim.

• 5:48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:48:19Jocko Willink?

  And it was like rubble.

• 5:48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of that was ISIS did that.

• 5:48:25Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 5:48:26Speaker 01

  A lot of ISIS rumbled a lot of, now, we did some of it, to be sure. But ISIS really brought a lot of it on themselves. But Mosul, we did a lot of that, I did a lot of that, Mosul University, where they were making chemical weapons and things like that, you know. Yeah, absolutely, we, we, we did our share of damage. But, part of the problem is, also, the Iraqi army, when they go into an urban fight, the way they do that is to rubble, you know, what's in front of them, and then occupy the rubble. It's kind of a Soviet technique, you're seeing the Russians doing it in Ukraine right now. So, because we weren't necessarily with them at Ramadi, you know, side by side, we were

• 5:49:11Speaker 01

  like, back from them, they were using artillery to just pound those cities. And by the way, most of the Iraqi army is who? What, what sect?

• 5:49:23Jocko Willink?

  Oh, Shia.

• 5:49:24Speaker 01

  Shia, and most of the people in Ramadi were?

• 5:49:27Jocko Willink?

  Sunni, yeah.

• 5:49:28Speaker 01

  Sunni, so?

• 5:49:29Jocko Willink?

  They didn't care.

• 5:49:30Speaker 01

  They didn't really care. So, you know, ISIS did some of it, coalition, yeah, we did some of it, but a lot of it was the Iraqi army just going in there, just, you know, you know, steamrolling it. And same thing happened in Mosul. I mean, that's how they're gonna do it. And it's hard to criticize them, because at their level of training and sophistication, what else, how else they gonna operate?

• 5:49:54Jocko Willink?

  You with the what is it like something like 25 or 30,000 estimated enemy were killed in this timeframe?

• 5:50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:50:04Jocko Willink?

  Like it's a massive number.

• 5:50:05Speaker 01

  It was about that, yeah.

• 5:50:06Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 5:50:07Speaker 01

  In a year, yeah.

• 5:50:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and I mean, very limited casualties for us, obviously Charles Keating, he talked about C4.

• 5:50:14Speaker 01

  Joshua Wheeler and we had a Marine Sergeant.

• 5:50:20Jocko Willink?

  Carden.

• 5:50:21Speaker 01

  Carden killed at Firebase Bell, yeah.

• 5:50:25Jocko Willink?

  Which is still, for all the progress that got made, that's amazing for ISIS being, you know, destroyed to that level. It was pretty amazing to see.

• 5:50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's because the Counterterrorism Service were so well-trained and equipped by us that they absorbed the bulk of the casualties that we would have had to absorb had there been no CTS.

• 5:50:50Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well thankfully we did, did train them.

• 5:50:54Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely, and I mean, that was one smart thing that we did. The other thing is we went after like deep targets. You know, in a counterterrorism, you don't really think deep, close and rear, you know, but we had a deep battle against the caliphate and we went after their sources of revenue, banks and oil refineries and all that kind of stuff with deep strikes.

• 5:51:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was, I was reading, reading some interview with you and you had, you were talking about the fact that you were just literally blowing up banks where they had their money.

• 5:51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:51:32Jocko Willink?

  So they couldn't pay their soldiers.

• 5:51:34Speaker 01

  Like a billion dollars in one strike one time, a billion with a B. Yeah.

• 5:51:40Jocko Willink?

  That's gotta be quite annoying if you're ISIS, right? A billion dollars getting blown up.

• 5:51:47Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, the impact on them was measurable.

• 5:51:52Speaker 01

  I mean, it was after those bank strikes that we began to see, you know, a decline in morale and capacity by the, you know, the foreign fighters and all the other folks. By the time we got to Mosul, the enemy was saying, "Well, you know, the Battle of Kiara is going to be decisive for the Battle of Mosul. We cannot lose Kiara West Airfield." And they, we captured it almost without a fight. They couldn't resist us at that point, you know, because of the effect of the deep battle and targeting. And I mean, it was, it was a real eye-opener on the effectiveness.

• 5:52:32Speaker 01

  And of course, you have to take a lot of ISR away from HVI hunting, from the special ops guys, let's say, didn't like, and from, you know, dynamic targeting, close support, you know, of the advisory teams working with the Iraqi divisions on the ground to, you know, do your target development. But, you know, I made it pretty clear where my priorities were and, you know, was able to get what I needed to do that. And I think it paid off in the long run.

• 5:53:05Jocko Willink?

  That's some of those principles that you talked about earlier, about finding different ways to hurt the enemy. That's definitely hit them in their pocketbook.

• 5:53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I don't say that HVI hunting was a complete waste of time, but it was a...

• 5:53:20Jocko Willink?

  Just a lower priority at the time.

• 5:53:23Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was an inordinate drain on resources for ISR. I was like, "We can't afford to have 90% of our ISR looking for needles and haystacks." As a conventional warfighter, my approach is, instead of finding the needle in a haystack, to just burn the haystack down. And then we'll get the needle that way. And, and so we did a mix of that, yeah.

• 5:53:49Jocko Willink?

  You wrap up there in 2016.

• 5:53:54Jocko Willink?

  I did see in my research that you were named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in 2016.

• 5:54:01Speaker 01

  I don't know how that happened. To this day, it's a mystery, but I was honored that Senator John McCain wrote my, uh, did the write-up for that. That was an embarrassing phone call, by the way, to my boss. I was like, hey, this is gonna, my public affairs officer found out about it, told me. And so I said, well, I better, you know, tip off General Austin.

• 5:54:21Jocko Willink?

  Who was it that found you? Who was it that figured out that you should be recognized that way?

• 5:54:25Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 5:54:26Jocko Willink?

  Just randomly, someone found you?

• 5:54:28Speaker 01

  I, it might have been the dust-up that I had, uh, over my, um, you know, press conference.

• 5:54:39Jocko Willink?

  The press conference?

• 5:54:40Speaker 01

  Cause the fallout, the blowback on that, you know, all kinds of people that, you know, not necessarily of my ilk, you know, were cheering, you know, and it's like, I, you know, okay, I said what I said, you know, people are gonna make of it what they're gonna make of it. And, uh, I became something of a folk hero for some folks out there. Maybe that's what it was. I can't, again, I do not know, but I was honored that Senator McCain did the write-up. That's to me, the most meaningful.

• 5:55:11Jocko Willink?

  Who'd you catch blowback from? Well, I mean, okay, I get it, you get it from your boss, like, hey, you kinda made the president's, like, you're coming, you're, you're in, you're in the wrong lane, accidentally. But like, was there people saying-

• 5:55:23Speaker 01

  Well, I told everybody, I said, I don't know how this happened, you know, I'm embarrassed, you know, to be even telling you this. Uh, and, you know, just FYI, I'm not going to go to the big gala in New York City, or any of that kinda stuff. There will be no press availabilities as a result.

• 5:55:39Jocko Willink?

  Was, was there people in the Army that didn't like the way you did things?

• 5:55:44Speaker 01

  No, no, I'd just say, um, I didn't get a lot of, uh, direct, because people knew me and I was like, out in front of this, telling everybody, hey, I don't know how this happened, and everybody believed it, you know, so, nobody said, oh, there's MacFarland out there self-promoting or anything. So, it wasn't that, it was just, um, it's, for me, it was just awkward, you know, uh, because people- I think might have makes, some people might have assumed otherwise.

• 5:56:14Jocko Willink?

  In a broader sense of like you're in Ramadi, you're doing this counter insurgency stuff and wait, why isn't it? Why is an armor guy doing counter insurgency and now you're in Iraq and we've been doing counter insurgency and you're saying, no, we should be doing conventional war? Was there people that were, you know, inside the army going, oh, it's MacFarland, this guy's going in the other direction again? Did you have kind of, uh, for lack of a better word, uh, haters?

• 5:56:41Speaker 01

  Uh, skeptics.

• 5:56:42Jocko Willink?

  Skeptics?

• 5:56:43Speaker 01

  Skeptics. Um, and in both cases, you know, uh, you're the person on the ground as commander, who has to make an assessment of the situation and, uh, come up with a plan of attack. And then you have to convince whoever you need to convince to make that attack succeed. And in some cases that was up my own chain of command, you know, back to, uh, you know, Washington DC or through CENTCOM or, um, sometimes it was, you know, the CHAD conference in Madrid for NATO, you know, I had to fly over there and talk to them about that. Some of it was Congress, some of it was, uh, a lot of it was right there in Baghdad.

• 5:57:27Speaker 01

  Um, trying to get the prime minister and his folks aligned with what I was trying to do. Um, and also Tehran. Uh, now I didn't talk directly to the Iranians, but I knew who I could talk to, who did talk to the Iranians. And I would make crystal clear to them what I was trying to do, what I was not trying to do. You know, kind of reassure. And then there were the Russians, you know, and I had interlocutors for the Russians as well. To make sure that we didn't get, you know, nose to nose too often. It still happened.

• 5:58:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 5:58:06Speaker 01

  But, uh, you know, they always came off the worst for it.

• 5:58:10Jocko Willink?

  Man, that is a, um, just a crazy, complicated scenario that you were

• 5:58:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:58:17Jocko Willink?

  just kind of

• 5:58:18Speaker 01

  Well, the

• 5:58:18Jocko Willink?

  moseying through.

• 5:58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, uh, the, uh, National Security Council called it marbled, you know?

• 5:58:27Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 5:58:28Speaker 01

  I thought that was pretty clever. I mean, it's better than dog's breakfast or, you know, shit show or whatever, you know, but, uh, yeah.

• 5:58:37Jocko Willink?

  So you get done with that, now you're, like I said, we want to reiterate that you are one of Time's, Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. You get done with that, your next, your next duty station is trade doc, the US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

• 5:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I came back, I commanded Third Corps for better part of another year.

• 5:58:56Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 5:58:57Speaker 01

  And, yeah, the Army wanted me to go to Europe, take command over there. And at that point, you know, I was kind of a spent force largely. I needed to recuperate. And I didn't know that I had enough energy right then and there to go take command of US Army Europe. So I requested not to do that, which at a senior level, you don't, typically when you turn down the next step, that's pretty much the last thing you do. But I will say

• 5:59:38Speaker 01

  this, that General Milley and General Dan Allen, the Vice Chiefs of the Army, were very understanding. And they gave me a couple of options. And I chose trade doc to work for an old battle buddy, Dave Perkins there, you know, and kind of, you know, decide what I want to do next. Do I want to hang around, hang around, you know, for the fourth star? I'm still in my 50s. Do I want to retire? But, but I was a trade doc, had a great time, you know, working for General Perkins was an absolute pleasure. You know, he was one

• 6:00:19Speaker 01

  of the smartest guys I know. It was during the whole multi-domain battle operations kind of rollout, you know, got to learn a lot. And I'd been a trade doc, one star. In charge of leader development and education, so you know, I was in it. I'm a doctrine nerd because I went to SAM's and a leadership nerd because I was a one star. And you know, so I just really, and I got to work on my direct reports for the recruiting command, the ROTC cadet command, and the basic training guys, you know, and a couple other asymmetric warfare group, which is kind of like special forces, but not.

• 6:00:58Speaker 01

  So it was, I loved it. I absolutely loved my time at TRADOC, but you know, I decided that I did have this master's degree in aerospace engineering. I wasn't getting any younger, you know, I was going to get promoted or I wasn't going to get promoted, you know, wasn't a hundred percent one way or the other. So decided to retire on my terms. I thank General Milley very much for the opportunity to continue to serve, but you know, it was time for me to go do something else, I think, you know. So that's why I, that's why and when I left. And I think it's important for everybody to kind of know when you've kind

• 6:01:41Speaker 01

  of reached the end of the line. And you know, everybody reaches it sooner or later, you know, you can ride it all the way to the last station, you know, or get off at other stations along the way. And there's no one right answer, you know, and I felt that, you know, the folks that, you know, were around me were great folks and, you know, the army didn't depend on Sean MacFarland, you know, necessarily.

• 6:02:11Jocko Willink?

  So that was it?

• 6:02:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:02:13Jocko Willink?

  You called it after thirty-seven years?

• 6:02:16Speaker 01

  I did, yeah. And, you know, I don't regret it, but there are parts of the military that I do miss. But hanging up my uniform for the last time was, that was a surreal experience. Like, surely I'm going to have to put this on again sometime. But yeah, I mean, it hung there for a while in the closet until I realized, oh, nobody's going to ask me to suit up again. But

• 6:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I taught for a semester at Georgetown, enjoyed that. They were very nice. They were, you know, willing to let me, you know, continue to be there, stay there as a professor, but I got an offer to go do my aerospace thing, you know, out here in San Diego and flew out here and walked around. Can I say the name of the company?

• 6:03:08Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 6:03:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I won't. I'll just say.

• 6:03:11Jocko Willink?

  A company.

• 6:03:12Speaker 01

  A company. It was a great company with very patriotic leadership, with a great ethos, doing amazing, cutting-edge technology. And, and I was so excited. I called my wife because we thought we were going to retire in the DC area like most people do. And I said, we've got to come out here to San Diego and do this. And I loved it. But then after doing that for about four years, you know, I decided to kind of, you know, drop into a lower gear,

• 6:03:52Speaker 01

  semi-retire, so I have time to talk to folks like you and spend more time with grandkids who are up to five.

• 6:03:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we, we, we talked a little bit when you were in San Diego and, you know, I was going to try and get you on here. But yeah, like you said, it was, it seemed like you were busier than you should have been as a retired guy. Well, I guess a semi-retired guy.

• 6:04:13Speaker 01

  Well, after 37 years of defending capitalism, you know, I spent four years practicing it, you know, and there was a big learning curve there. So at first, anyway. But, you know, I still do a little bit of consulting. I still do mentoring for senior officers, which I enjoy. While I was here in San Diego, I'd go drive down to Miramar and get on the, you know, on their classified VTCs and talk to folks at Carlisle Barracks or Maxwell Air Force Base, you know, about warfighting. And as I was driving, they did that pro bono, you know, gratis. And as I was driving back to my office, I said, you know, I think that

• 6:04:54Speaker 01

  was the highlight of my day, maybe my week, you know, it kind of like more time to do that.

• 6:05:01Speaker 01

  And we're up to four, now five, grandkids and, you know, my wife wanted to be closer to grandkids and none of them are in California, so, so, yeah, so we, uh, we, now we're, you know, I do the things that I like doing, like talk to you.

• 6:05:16Jocko Willink?

  So you're currently Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University?

• 6:05:24Speaker 01

  Yes, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, uh, asked me to come join them doing that. I'm kind of in an inactive status on that now, I mean, I was more active initially, I don't really do that much.

• 6:05:36Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Senior Fellow, Institute of Land Warfare Association, the US Army?

• 6:05:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still do that, yeah.

• 6:05:42Jocko Willink?

  Uh, member of the Army Science Board?

• 6:05:45Speaker 01

  Yes, right.

• 6:05:46Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Senior Mentor, Highly Qualified Expert at the US Army War College?

• 6:05:52Speaker 01

  That's, that's how I do my mentorship for up and coming General Officer Warfighters, yeah, a- actually, General Officer and Flag Officer, yes, yeah.

• 6:06:01Jocko Willink?

  Outstanding. And Senior Fellow, Association of the United States Army, so that's kind of what you're up to right now.

• 6:06:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's, uh, that keeps me from, you know, vegetating, trying to stay relevant or informed, but I have skin in the game, you know, my son-in-law and my son are both on active duty majors and, uh, you know, I wanna, I want the best for them, not, you know, in terms of promotions or anything, I mean, they, they, they earn what they get, you know, but, uh, in terms of making sure that the Army, uh, and our joint force is, uh, the configured, uh, properly for the threats that are out there.

• 6:06:46Jocko Willink?

  How do you think we are, where do we sit right now, what does the Army and the military at large need to watch out for?

• 6:06:52Speaker 01

  Well-

• 6:06:53Jocko Willink?

  In the coming years?

• 6:06:54Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, you, you won't be surprised, you know, the number one threat on the horizon is, uh, China, um, however, China is an asymmetric threat, you know, I don't think China wants to- You know, get into a shooting war with us. I think that they definitely want what they want in the South China Sea and Taiwan. And if they can figure out a way to kind of bluff their way or intimidate their way out there to get it, they will. The other threats, obviously, are Russia, resurgent Russia. The threat that it posed to Eastern Europe is, we're seeing

• 6:07:39Speaker 01

  that every day in Ukraine. And then, of course, we got North Korea, which is really an extension of China and China threat, you know, they're, he's, that's like a bad cop, worse cop type of a thing that they're trying to do. I'm crazy, but this little guy over here, he's extra crazy. So, talk to me, the crazy one.

• 6:08:04Jocko Willink?

  How about the military culture?

• 6:08:05Speaker 01

  And then Iran, obviously. The military culture, so I truly believe our biggest threat is internal, though. I mean, those are our external threats. Our biggest threat is internal.

• 6:08:15Jocko Willink?

  I was talking to someone the other day, and they were talking about China and Taiwan, and what do you think China's gonna do, what do you think, and I said, if I was China, I would sit there and watch America just kind of like get less and less, lose, get more and more weak, and in another 20 years, we'll just have Taiwan, because no one will be there to defend it.

• 6:08:32Speaker 01

  No, that's, that's kind of the concern, is you see reflected in our recruiting crisis, where fewer and fewer Americans feel called to serve. How much longer are we going to be able to sustain an all-volunteer force or afford it? You know, the, we can't man our ships, can't man our planes, everything gets more, more expensive. We have supply chain vulnerabilities overseas, you know, that we have to, you know, become aware of and figure out how to secure, so that our defense industrial base can, as a former member of the defense industrial base, can produce the weapons and the systems that

• 6:09:17Speaker 01

  our warfighters need in a timely manner. Look at what Russia's doing in Ukraine. They, they invaded, they got their teeth kicked in. They spent about six months to a year reconstituting, and now they're back.

• 6:09:37Speaker 01

  Could we do that? Could we reconstitute? I know that they're driving around in older tanks and all this kind of stuff. But they bounced back. Not unlike, you know, in World War II, you know, Germany had it all their way at first and then the Russians, you know, finally got their act together. Now, this is something that America needs to pay attention to. You know, how resilient are we as a nation? Look at what we did after Pearl Harbor, you know? And then we continued to lose aircraft carriers, you know? We only had a handful in the Pacific and we continued to lose them.

• 6:10:22Speaker 01

  But, you know, within four years, we had, what, like, a hundred of them? You know, I mean, it's amazing, but we don't have that kind of industrial base anymore. So, what's the solution? What are we gonna do? How could we recruit a million soldiers? We can't recruit them, is the short answer. How could we induct a million soldiers? And how could you train them? How could you equip them? How could you transport them? I mean, these are all hard questions that worry me somewhat, but not as much as the question as, do we even want to try? You know?

• 6:11:06Speaker 01

  Is there a will? Is there a national will for us to even try? I mean, open borders. I spent two years doing border security, you know? I can tell you, the things happening on that border are horrendous. The things coming across the border are even worse. So, you know, eight million Americans? I mean, our unemployment rate statistics don't count the eight million that crossed the border this year. What are they doing? You know, where are they? You know, drive around San Diego, you can see some of them. But, you know, these are questions. Does America want to keep on being America? And if it isn't, who's gonna take our place?

• 6:11:49Speaker 01

  You know, it's like when the United Kingdom said, you know, "We're tired of being the world's policeman, we're gonna lay that burden down. America, you got it."

• 6:12:00Speaker 01

  Right? Mm-hmm. We did. I mean, they had the East of Suez Agreement where the UK said, "You know what? If it's east of the Suez Canal, we're just not gonna worry about it anymore. America, you take it." You know, that was an example of, you know, the UK, you know, kinda ratcheting down its imperial...

• 6:12:20Speaker 01

  Will. Will, right? "We're an empire." Okay, could we, if we had an East of Suez, you know, Iran is just such a pain in our neck, the Houthis and all that stuff. "Over to you." Who? Mm-hmm. NATO? NATO's not really, or EU, they're, they aren't necessarily set up to be that, you know, strong of a unified partner, especially outside of their own geographic area of operations. I mean, look, I mean, they're, they're still buying natural gas from Russia and oil and stuff like that.

• 6:13:01Speaker 01

  You know, so I mean, it's, it's hard to envision, you know, you got, you got some countries that, that do try to help out there with France and the UK and countries like that, but there is no alternative to the United States unless it's China and you don't want them to take over the world's policeman role, you know, the guarantor of international, of the international order, right? They're not. And the UN isn't. I mean, look at the ridiculous things the UN is doing right now with respect to, you know, the Israel Hamas. Hamas? We fought Hamas, Jocko. You know, they just flew a different flag, but it's the same crew, right?

• 6:13:45Speaker 01

  And now the United States, "Yeah, Hamas, you know, aren't they that bad? You know, what's 1,200 rapes and murders in one day after all, right?" Holy cow, where have we come to? This is what scares me, you know? I mean, it's not just the United States, it's the entire West. There's like a malaise. We have a declining birth rate, you know? We don't wanna have kids anymore. We don't wanna repopulate. You know, are we just commit, committing national suicide? Slow suicide. Of course, China's bedeviled by some of these same problems, don't get me wrong. I mean, China's got more problems. I'd rather be in America looking at China than China looking at America. You know, make no mistake, but we have...

• 6:14:27Speaker 01

  To rediscover, you know, what it is about America that's worth fighting for.

• 6:14:35Speaker 01

  And, and we need to inculcate that in our young people, our policymakers, everybody. That's what scares me. That's the biggest threat to the United States, I think. I mean, we still sit on top of the richest natural resources in the world. We just choose not to take advantage of them. That could change. That's a policy issue, you know? We haven't lost anything strategically there, except time.

• 6:15:02Jocko Willink?

  It seems like, I mean, it's just real obvious that we are just really bad with this whole information warfare thing and what, what people are being taught, what they're seeing, what they're, what the kids are being taught. What, what's being taught in universities, like it's-

• 6:15:18Speaker 01

  Marxism.

• 6:15:19Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:15:19Speaker 01

  That, that seems to be getting across very well, you know, but I, yeah, I do, I'm concerned, you know, I mean, even, even the people on, you know, that don't like America. Even the Americans who don't like America are weak, you know, I mean, right? I mean, it's like, we're gonna have a hunger strike until we're hungry.

• 6:15:42Speaker 01

  Can you bring us vegan? I mean, really, it's, you're not, you're not impressing me, you know? You're no Nelson Mandela's out there, you know, you don't have the courage of your convictions.

• 6:15:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's pretty pathetic. You know, there's that expression that, you know, hard times make strong men. Strong men make soft times. Soft times make soft men. Soft men make hard times. I think soft men are making hard times right now.

• 6:16:22Jocko Willink?

  Or they're about to.

• 6:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I say, man, in the generic sense, you know?

• 6:16:28Jocko Willink?

  What, what gives you hope then, in when, in when you look at all this?

• 6:16:34Speaker 01

  Every time I get the opportunity to talk to firefighters, policemen, first responders, soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, guardians now.

• 6:16:44Speaker 01

  And see the kind of people that are out there, you know, or walk around the floor of a factory.

• 6:16:54Speaker 01

  Talk to the people on those assembly lines, you know, not assembly lines, but production lines, you know, the people that work in the five axes mills and the lathes and all that machinery, that industrial machinery, the people who know how to fix it, right? When I walk around and I talk to those folks, I, you know, I, I'm hopeful, I wish that they were younger, a lot of them are our age.

• 6:17:22Jocko Willink?

  We got a whole crew, I got, I got a clothing company called Origin USA, we got a whole generation of younger people, and I'm talking 22, 23 years old that are, that have learned how to maintain that equipment, fix that equipment, weave material, like it's, it's, we're doing it.

• 6:17:41Speaker 01

  And what's important about what you're doing is you're passing generational knowledge to the next generation. My fear, you asked me about hope, I'll just give you one more thing that concerns me is that, you know, that torch is gonna drop, you know, because the next generation isn't there to grab it, you know, that, you know, the, the current, you know, there are things that we can't do anymore because we've lost the institutional knowledge, all the people that knew how to do it have retired or died, you know, our, our nuclear industry is a good example of that, you know, we stopped making reactors and bombs a long time ago.

• 6:18:23Speaker 01

  And then we try to, if we try to do that again, we'd be, you know.

• 6:18:27Jocko Willink?

  Don't count out the US Navy over here, we're still running all kinds of nuclear reactors.

• 6:18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true, I mean, that, that is a source, although a little different than commercial, but absolutely, you're right, the Navy is, you know, gives us hope, and those young Navy nukes, you know, when you talk to them, it's like, wow, that's so impressive. When I was working in industry, we'd get these interns out of these colleges, the same one with the crazy demonstrators and all that stuff, but I'd be so impressed by how smart these kids were, they were like way smarter than I was when I was their age, about engineering things, you know, it's like, wow, how do you know how to do that already? So.

• 6:19:08Speaker 01

  There are smart folks out there. We're not challenging them. We're not pulling them up to, you know, or pushing them to be all they can be, to quote a recruiting slogan that we finally have rediscovered. And I hope we rediscover some other important things that have worked for so long in the United States and that, you know, we abandoned because, you know, something easier came along, but, you know, not always the right thing to do. Social media and all this other crazy stuff.

• 6:19:41Jocko Willink?

  Well, I always find hope when I, like you, when I go out and I talk to people when I go out, because, listen, those, those young men and women that are in the military right now, that are in police, law enforcement, that are in factories, that are building, that are making things, that are going into construction, that are, I mean, I talk to all kinds of construction companies and energy companies, and there's 22-year-old young men out there getting after it. Power lines, digging trenches, building things. Like, there is, the good thing is, the people that we kind of see a lot, that we see the most of, this is through social media and on TV, and right now they're in the news at colleges, we see them more. But, like you said, they're doing, you know, 12-hour hunger strikes. You don't get credit

• 6:20:24Jocko Willink?

  for that. And those people, they're gonna, they're gonna do whatever they're gonna do, but it's not gonna have any impact. And I think that this next generation that's coming up, that is tough, that is hardworking, that does love America, I think they're just gonna, eventually, when the light shine, when, when, when they come out, they're gonna just overrun these people that have been, um, you know, on 12-hour hunger strikes before they request their vegan meal to show up.

• 6:20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it, you know, I'm not-

• 6:20:54Jocko Willink?

  So my hope is strong, sir.

• 6:20:56Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, you, you probably interact with more than I do, and I'm glad that you have that hope, and that gives me hope.

• 6:21:07Jocko Willink?

  That did not sound convincing.

• 6:21:10Speaker 01

  I worry.

• 6:21:12Jocko Willink?

  How about your son and your son-in-law, the soldiers that they have, they must be reporting back that they've got good troops.

• 6:21:18Speaker 01

  They have good troops, but like always, you know, you know, they're in the conventional forces. So it's a bell curve.

• 6:21:25Jocko Willink?

  But let's not forget about you losing, you know, whatever it was. More than half of your troops in 1983 to drug problems.

• 6:21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly. There, we have good folks coming in. The problem is,

• 6:21:44Speaker 01

  you know, we have an obesity problem in America, you know, so the folks that we're getting in today.

• 6:21:52Speaker 01

  You know, require, they're a little more fragile and we can get them there. But it takes more to do it. Uh, the army now has like a pre-basic training course.

• 6:22:06Jocko Willink?

  I saw that.

• 6:22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's working really, really well. You know, instead of saying, sorry, you don't cut it. It's like, well, you could cut it with time. Come in here, we'll teach you what you need to know. We'll get you in shape. And then they do very well in basic training. They actually end up in a lot of times in leadership positions. So, so the problem is, you know, they're, they're arriving at our doorstep fragile.

• 6:22:36Speaker 01

  And they're not, they're not arriving, you know, tough and ready to go, right?

• 6:22:42Speaker 01

  And that's, that just means we need to change the way we look at all of this. But we need to encourage people to do hard things. We need to challenge them and we're not. We're not, you know, and I'm really concerned about our young men in particular.

• 6:23:03Speaker 01

  I have a daughter, I have granddaughters, and I want the best for them. I want them to be whatever they want to be.

• 6:23:11Speaker 01

  But it's not a zero-sum game, you know, that it's not, well, women can't be what they, all they can be only if men are less than they are, you know? We want both sexes, and I'll say, use the term sexes instead of genders, advisedly. We want both sexes to be all they can be. And so, we do a lot to encourage our young women, as we should.

• 6:23:40Speaker 01

  We need to really get serious about encouraging our young men. And there's people like you and Jordan Peterson and other people like that out there that are trying to do that Mark Wahlberg.

• 6:23:52Speaker 01

  And that movement needs to spread. You know, we really need to focus on our young men, because we can't do this just on the shoulders of our young women. If we're going to restore America to great, you know, and I shouldn't say restore America to greatness, to keep America great. I will say it that way. To keep America the great shining beacon that it has always been. We need both men and women to do that. And we've got to stop, I mean, when's the last time you saw a commercial where the guy is like a smart, is acting intelligently, you know?

• 6:24:32Speaker 01

  Usually on commercials, the guy is a doofus, right? You know, he's like the butt of the joke, right? Okay, I get it, you know, it's funny, guys can be dumb, you know? And I'm not saying get rid of all those, but how about giving people somebody to look up to and, you know, and say, oh, okay? And not at the expense of women either, but just, you know, the guy can be smart too, you know? That's kind of where I'm at. It's like a rising tide lifting all boats, you know? And, and, and we really need to invest in our young men in particular, because they do the dangerous jobs out there. Ninety percent of workplace accidents, more than ninety percent of workplace accidents, men.

• 6:25:15Speaker 01

  That's not an accident, or I mean, that's not, you know, coincidence, I should say. That's because men are drawn towards more challenging work. And because in some cases, because of physical strength, they're better suited to it. Okay, let's recognize that, let's celebrate that, let's not say that's toxic. Oh, it's a toxic work environment because only men, you know, are doing certain things. Our Navy SEALs or something like that. Well, maybe that's because they need to be, you know? And that's okay, in some examples, you know, I mean, maybe not at the corporate board level, but maybe in certain highly physical areas, it is, it does matter, you know?

• 6:25:59Speaker 01

  And, and I just, I worry about that. And, and I know there's cause for hope out there, but, you know, we have to, we have to actively reach out to those folks. Because if we leave it up to the young people to find their own way, it's going to take them a long time to get there, longer than it should.

• 6:26:20Jocko Willink?

  And they may get lost along the way as well.

• 6:26:21Speaker 01

  They could, yeah, I mean, it's happened before, you know, in history, so, let's not let them do that. I mean, the Middle East, they kind of allowed their younger generation to, a lot of, you know, Arab Muslim cultures, you know, they're like, I don't understand my kid anymore. You know, they're these radical, you know, belonging to these jihadi groups, you know? That's not how they were raised, but somebody got to them, you know? And, and I point the finger right at our generation, you know? It's like, it's up to us to make sure this doesn't go off the, this next generation doesn't go off the rails.

• 6:27:01Speaker 01

  We've got to reach out and grab them and start guiding them in a positive, productive direction. And, and I don't know that we've really done a good job of that.

• 6:27:16Jocko Willink?

  Certainly is a tall task for all of us and I can tell you, I talk to young men all the time that are out there getting after it. They're definitely doing hard things.

• 6:27:25Speaker 01

  They are. Well, I mean, this country would-

• 6:27:27Jocko Willink?

  They're out there for sure.

• 6:27:27Speaker 01

  This country could not function without them.

• 6:27:29Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 6:27:30Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, and it is functioning. We have to give them the opportunity though to, you know, continue to let this country function or make it function.

• 6:27:44Jocko Willink?

  Well, hopefully today, some people will hear this and hear some of these stories that you've told about these, you know, about the heroics that we saw on the battlefield and hopefully get inspired and recognize that there is a higher calling of duty that's out there if one chooses to step up.

• 6:28:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, probably, do we get, are we up to speed? That's kind of where we're at now? That's life?

• 6:28:13Speaker 01

  I've got nothing to add to that. I think that's really good, Jocko. Thank you. You are doing the Lord's work. Keep it up. Keep up the fire.

• 6:28:25Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles, any questions?

• 6:28:26Speaker 02

  Echo one question.

• 6:28:27Jocko Willink?

  One question.

• 6:28:27Speaker 02

  The hard hitting question. What's a mermite?

• 6:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 6:28:31Speaker 02

  Guys talking about mermite all casually and whatever. I don't want to interrupt the whole flow, but what's a mermite?

• 6:28:37Speaker 01

  A mermite is a, it's like a big thermos for food and you have these typically three inserts and it's sort of a, maybe about two and a half feet tall, eight, 10 inches wide and-

• 6:28:53Speaker 02

  Like a lunchbox.

• 6:28:54Jocko Willink?

  You know what an MRE is, right?

• 6:28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:28:56Jocko Willink?

  So, an MRE is like a one-person individual food.

• 6:29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:29:01Jocko Willink?

  Not that great.

• 6:29:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:29:02Jocko Willink?

  Mermite is like, okay, we have the capability to heat some food, but we're going to give it to a lot of people and so we bring in these mermites.

• 6:29:11Speaker 01

  So, what, so what they do is they take these, like they're usually like green, you know, army green containers and, and they fill them with hot water and they stick three of these metal can, you know, containers in there and it'll be eggs, scrambled eggs, bacon and, you know, probably cream chopped chip beef or something in the other one. And then they put the lid on it and the first sergeant throws them in the back of his Humvee. And you know, with a coffee bullet, you know, you know, and that's breakfast and a few loaves of bread in a box or something.

• 6:29:47Speaker 02

  So it's more than for more than one person?

• 6:29:48Speaker 01

  It's hot rations for units.

• 6:29:50Jocko Willink?

  Okay, mass produced.

• 6:29:52Speaker 02

  So it's like a little catering setup.

• 6:29:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's a real strong word you're using right now.

• 6:29:56Speaker 02

  I'm trying to draw a parallel with like other stuff.

• 6:29:59Speaker 01

  And then for whatever reason, a lot of times inside the mermite, you know, when they reopen it, the the eggs will have turned green. I don't know why.

• 6:30:07Jocko Willink?

  I remember getting mermite and it had spaghetti noodles and gravy. So that was the mix that we got, you know?

• 6:30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:30:16Jocko Willink?

  It's one of those things.

• 6:30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it depends on, you know, if your cooks are half awake or half asleep when they're making your food, but they're never fully awake.

• 6:30:24Speaker 02

  Actually, I have an experience with MREs. Actually, I ate MREs like for a few months.

• 6:30:29Jocko Willink?

  How come?

• 6:30:30Speaker 02

  After Hurricane Iniki. So we had a hurricane in Hawaii.

• 6:30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:30:33Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, like the Red Cross came in.

• 6:30:36Jocko Willink?

  How old were you?

• 6:30:37Speaker 02

  Uh, 10th grade. So I don't know, 14, 15 years old.

• 6:30:40Jocko Willink?

  How were the games?

• 6:30:41Speaker 02

  The games were fine. Actually, I enjoyed the MREs.

• 6:30:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 6:30:44Speaker 01

  They've come a long way. They're not as bad as they used to be. They're, you know, uh, but you you can go too long on MREs. During Desert Shield, we had nothing but MREs for like three months. And we're sitting out in the desert and the 18th Airborne Corps, uh, G4, the logistics officer says, uh, well, you know, we're gonna have to go to three hot A's a day here at the Corps headquarters to free up the MREs for those guys out there in the desert. I'm like, thanks for your sacrifice. But, um, but then they they came out with their called T rations, which are tray rations, which are kind of like, almost like, uh, mermite, you know, you know, which is, you know, actually made by cooks, the

• 6:31:29Speaker 01

  T rations, it's like pre-made and it's like they're in these like trays and they just heat them up and you come out and you pull the foil off it.

• 6:31:37Jocko Willink?

  Get it.

• 6:31:38Speaker 01

  And we got like a month of nothing but chicken cacciatore.

• 6:31:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 6:31:44Speaker 01

  Which I liked the chicken cacciatore as much as the next guy.

• 6:31:47Jocko Willink?

  For a few weeks.

• 6:31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it got to be old.

• 6:31:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had a lot of stew and it comes with like, uh, what I like. It's kind of random stuff it comes with, right?

• 6:31:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:31:56Speaker 02

  Like little napkins and this and that. I don't know, I thought it was kind of cool. It was about the same time, 1992-ish.

• 6:32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, yeah, that would have been it.

• 6:32:04Jocko Willink?

  There you go.

• 6:32:05Speaker 02

  Cool, so I'm in the game.

• 6:32:06Speaker 01

  You're in the game.

• 6:32:08Speaker 02

  Good to meet you.

• 6:32:09Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Any other questions, Echo Charles?

• 6:32:11Speaker 02

  That's it, thank you.

• 6:32:12Jocko Willink?

  General, sir, any other, any closing thoughts?

• 6:32:16Speaker 01

  Uh, my only closing thought, like I said, is, um, Memorial Day is almost upon us. If you wanted to donate for the Ready First Memorial, I told you how, through AmericasMightyWarriors.org. You know, please annotate Ready First in the comments box. But there are a lot of cemeteries around our country, uh, where our, uh, service members, men and women, are in their final resting places. Take the time and go out there. Here in San Diego, you have a beautiful one up there in Point Loma, uh, where Mark Lee is.

• 6:32:54Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 6:32:54Speaker 01

  And I found myself, yeah, I found myself, I was standing there one day and said, this is one of the most beautiful places on the Point Loma, in the Rosa Crans Cemetery, because you're looking at both sides, uh, on the water, and I turned around and there was Mark Lee's grave, you know? Uh, Section 60 at Arlington, uh, where a lot of our most recent fallen are buried. Any place where there are cemeteries on Memorial Day, please make sure that you don't forget about the service and the sacrifice of those veterans who've, you know, gone on, uh, to the next, uh, to their reward.

• 6:33:40Speaker 01

  Go lay some flowers on them, on their graves, uh, just show, uh, that you care about what they did, because this country wouldn't be here without them. I wouldn't be here without them. I wouldn't be here without Jocko and his crew. I've told Jocko the story. I said, whenever I think of Jocko, I think of the time we were standing on a rooftop together and we had just secured a building in Ramadi. And Jocko's like, sir, would you mind if you went to this more secure part of the roof? Because I'd really hate to get my brigade commander killed like, you know, before his tour's over. And I was like, I appreciate that. So, a lot of our folks didn't have a Jocko

• 6:34:21Speaker 01

  there to, you know, keep them out of harms way and paid the ultimate sacrifice. And they're worth thinking about this, this month. So, and to all of you out there who listen to Jocko's podcast, thanks for doing that. He's a great American. I'm proud to know him. And I think I'm probably the second most famous person that served in Ramadi after Jocko. And proud to be.

• 6:34:48Jocko Willink?

  Definitely and certainly should not be that way. Sir, thanks for joining us.

• 6:34:54Speaker 01

  You should be in the top 100 in Time Magazine. Some of the guys that were, some of the people in that top 100, I don't even know if I even want to be associated with them.

• 6:35:04Jocko Willink?

  That honor is all yours.

• 6:35:05Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, I think Vladimir Putin was in the list with me, you know.

• 6:35:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Thank, thank you for joining us, obviously. And more important, thank, thanks for your leadership. And yes, thanks for your leadership throughout your career. Maybe accepting the early days when you were getting written up a lot, but.

• 6:35:25Speaker 01

  Deservedly. As I look back, if I had a lieutenant like me, I probably wouldn't have liked me very much either.

• 6:35:31Jocko Willink?

  Well, throughout your career, but specifically from me and from my guys and the men that we had the honor of serving alongside in Ramadi, thank you. You gave hope to a hopeless situation. You unified all our military branches and the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and the tribes and the people. And you showed that we could achieve victory. And you proved something that I have never forgotten and that I pass on all the time. And that is that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. And you led.

• 6:36:08Jocko Willink?

  So, thank you. And, most important, a solemn salute to the brave soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who fought and died on that brutal battlefield to protect their friends and further the cause of freedom and liberty for the world. We will never forget them. Thank you.

• 6:36:33Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 6:36:36Jocko Willink?

  And with that, General Sean McFarland has left the building.

• 6:36:42Jocko Willink?

  So much sacrifice made. What can we do?

• 6:36:49Jocko Willink?

  Live good lives. Help people. Work hard. Take care of your friends. Take care of your family.

• 6:36:58Jocko Willink?

  And be good people. And I want to close out by reading a quote from General McFarland.

• 6:37:05Jocko Willink?

  "Americans should remember that more things unite us than divide us. We have shed blood, sweat, and tears together on battlefields around the world. I've had the sad privilege of comforting young soldiers who've lost their buddies in combat, listening as they referred to their fallen comrades as their brothers, despite their differences in color, creed, or socioeconomic background, and meaning it. I've seen men risk their lives without a second thought for another, simply because he wore the same flag on the shoulder of his uniform, especially if he had been wounded in action."

• 6:37:49Jocko Willink?

  In an iconic photo from Vietnam, at the height of racial unrest in America, there are four soldiers pictured carrying a wounded comrade.

• 6:38:02Jocko Willink?

  Two of the litter bearers are white, two are black.

• 6:38:07Jocko Willink?

  We can't see the color of the wounded man. It doesn't matter.

• 6:38:13Jocko Willink?

  They are all Americans.

• 6:38:17Jocko Willink?

  In the words of a song from that era, quote, "His welfare is of my concern. No burden is he to bear. We'll get there. For I know, he ain't heavy. He's my brother."

• 6:38:40Jocko Willink?

  So, thanks for joining us, everyone. We appreciate it. If you want to support the podcast and support yourself and support America, you can go to JacoFuel.com for supplements, Origin USA for American-made clothing, JacoStore.com for podcast gear and apparel, EchelonFront.com for leadership consulting, and ExtremeOwnership.com for online leadership training. Thanks once again to General Sean McFarland for joining us, and thanks to all our military around the world

• 6:39:20Jocko Willink?

  trooping the line right now and here at home. Thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all other first responders for your daily service. Finally, thanks to all of you for listening and for the support. Now, take these lessons, go out there, get after it, and lead.

• 6:39:50Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko. Out.