The Unravelling 6: Trying to Win

With many political and military leaders pronouncing the Iraq War a failure, Jocko prepares to lead his SEAL Task Unit into a battle that will change the course of the conflict. 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 the Jocko Unravelling Podcast, Episode 6, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink.

• 0:10Jocko Willink?

  So, I'm coming home, leaving this place of turmoil and chaos that has escalated throughout my deployment in 2003, 2004. And on my way home, actually it was before I left, my commanding officer who I've referenced a bit, who I was friends with, you know, he told me that his last mission as the commander of SEAL Team 7 was going to be to make me the Admiral's aide. And the reason that he wanted to do it was a good reason, primarily because I

• 0:54Jocko Willink?

  was a platoon commander that was coming off the battlefield in Iraq. There was, for a six-month deployment, and so I was sort of the most combat experienced lieutenant in the Navy that was available for that type of billet. So it was a good move, you know, let's get the boss, let's get the Admiral, some guys that are, a guy that's fresh off the battlefield, that's done a bunch of missions, that can talk to him and explain to him what's happening and give him the support that he needs. And it was, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a move that he wanted to take care of me too, because when you're the Admiral's

• 1:38Jocko Willink?

  aide, you know, you develop a relationship with the Admiral and you meet every single other SEAL Admiral and every single SEAL Captain and every single SEAL Commander. And so, you know, you build a bunch of really good relationships, you get to know people in the community, and you get to see what the community's like. So, so...

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I imagine there was an element of, yeah, he wants to help you out in your career, but also next time you go back to Iraq, he wants you to charge more than a platoon.

• 2:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I'd say maybe, but I don't, I don't think that was really what it was. I think he really just, number one, primarily, he wanted to get me. You know, I'm a guy, and you know, I've sent you some things that we're not going to share, the kind of... I'm a direct, I will not hold back, right? I mean, if there's something that's happening that needs to change, I will state my opinion and I'll do it tactfully. And if you listen to me, that's great. And if you don't listen to me, I might not be so tactful. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I think, you know, you ever heard that cheesy expression speaks truth to power? It's a cheesy expression, right?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I have the receipts, you do do that.

• 2:46Jocko Willink?

  No, that, he wrote that in my evaluation, like speaks truth to power, right? Cause I would tell him with something if I didn't like something that he was doing. And, you know, we had a good relationship, I wasn't ever disrespectful about it, you know, we'd have good conversations and sometimes he'd tell me to shut up and I'd say, Roger that, sir, and that's the way it is. But I would, I would explain to him my viewpoint.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Treating him with enough respect to assume he wants the truth.

• 3:08Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, and so he knew I would do that with the Admiral and so he gets me that job. So I get home and take over as the Admiral's aide. And let's see, so I get home in April, it's like probably mid to late April when I get home, I take over the job. And almost immediately after I take over the job, a guy by the name of Brian Lett, who was a SEAL, was, was killed in, on May 29th, 2004 in Afghanistan.

• 3:46Jocko Willink?

  And so one of my first jobs as the Admiral's aide was to get the Admiral out to Brian Lett's funeral. And so I knew, I knew Brian Lett and actually at this point, there had been, Brian was, I think the fifth SEAL killed, so Neil Roberts. Fifi was the first SEAL killed in, in March of 02. And I knew Neil, I was at SEAL Team 2 with, with Neil.

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  And then Matt Bujhwa was the second SEAL killed also in Afghanistan and that was also in March of oh two. And it was, I was a team one with him. So I was like two for two or oh for two, depending on how you want to look at it. Um, and then Tom Retzer and, and Dave Tapper were, um, were also, were also killed and they were, they were killed in oh three. So, and I knew those guys, but I didn't know them as well. As I knew Neil Robertson and Matt Bujhwa. Only because I had been at a team with those guys and I hadn't been at a team with Retzer or Tapper, but I knew him just from being around.

• 5:08Jocko Willink?

  And I remember my parents asking me, you know, every time a SEAL would get killed, they'd say, did you know him? And, and I'd say, yes. And it was very strange that, well, then I knew Brian Lett as well. And I had gone, he was a couple of Bud's classes ahead of me. And so I knew him from that. And then we went through a comms, like a two month comm school. Together and we hung out a bunch during that. And he was just a, uh, just a straight up, um, you know, stereotypical New Englander from, from Needham, Massachusetts. And, you know, he had great accent and a great attitude and he was, you know, boisterous and funny and all those things. And

• 5:53Jocko Willink?

  when he got killed, so I knew him. And when he got killed, you know, on the Admiral's aid and we're going, you know, we're going to the, the funeral. And

• 6:06Jocko Willink?

  he had his mom, his dad, he had six brothers. I think he was six brothers and a sister and they were lined up like to shake hands with people. And you know, um, it was like you were looking at just clones, like the, his dad looked like Brian or Brian looked like his dad. And then his, all his brothers looked the same. You see him lined up and.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Almost got their, their own platoon.

• 6:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, almost got his own platoon and you just, you just could feel the, the, the just absolute, you know, heartbreak. Um, and I hadn't been to, I hadn't been to any other, you know, any other funerals like that.

• 6:50Jocko Willink?

  So that was kind of my welcome aboard to working with the Admiral was was helping him, supporting him as he was seen off, you know, the the first SEAL that he was gonna lose under his command, you know, as as the Admiral. So there was a couple of things too that that as we went forward, there was another

• 7:12Jocko Willink?

  prisoner abuse scandal that happened. Yeah. And it was with SEALs, actually. And what happened was SEALs had taken pictures and uh the some one of the guys in the platoon posted them on some kind of photo sharing site and the photo sharing site wasn't protected or got hacked or whatever, whatever happened, happened, but all of a sudden these pictures became public. And this is what this is when I thought about it was a good job for my commanding officer to have put me as the Admiral's aide because when this unfolded, there was a lot of these pictures that they actually, if you interpreted them correctly, then they actually made sense.

• 7:55Jocko Willink?

  And so there were several, multiple times where, you know, I would be looking at these pictures that the public was seeing and they looked awful. And my boss, the Admiral, had to answer to, you know, the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations, and I was able to explain to him exactly what's going on in these pictures. So a couple of examples are, one of them is, you know, a SEAL holding a guy, holding, you know, an Iraqi guy by the jaw and, you know, kind of around the throat, around the jaw, and he's got his pistol pointed at at the guy's head. And, you know, my boss is, what's going on here? Well, you know, this is horrible. And I said, here's what's going on, sir. These insurgents do not want to have their pictures taken by us, so they won't look

• 8:40Jocko Willink?

  at the camera, they'll look away. So a lot of times you gotta hold their head in position so that someone can take a picture. And in order to take a picture, you gotta have lighting. And the quickest available light that we all use is our pistol. The lights on the pistol, you pull it out, you illuminate the guy, that's what's going on in this picture. Okay, got it. Next picture.

• 9:02Jocko Willink?

  Guy with a sandbag on his head, uh, blood dripping out of the sandbag. And you know, okay, what's going on in this picture? Sir, in this picture, you've got a insurgent that was probably captured four minutes or 10 minutes before this picture was taken. He resisted. That's what these insurgents do. They resist. According to the rules of engagement, you can kill them when they resist. And what we try not to do is kill people if we don't have to. So this guy was probably hit with a couple muzzle strikes. Got in, you know, they got him under control. They put a bag over his head and he's bleeding from his nose or from his whatever, his forehead from getting hit with a muzzle.

• 9:46Jocko Willink?

  That's what the blood is. This is actually, this, this picture actually demonstrates the restraint that SEALs show on target. Cause they didn't shoot and kill this guy. So those are the kind of questions that I was, you know, able to answer. Um, but nonetheless, you know, those pictures without context, they just look bad. And those added to, you know, they added to the Abu Ghraib photos. They weren't as bad, but they weren't good either.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  What was your impression of how Admiral McGuire responded to it? I mean, respond to it like a guy who was a, who was a SEAL or not, you know, politician?

• 10:26Jocko Willink?

  No, he was great. He was great. He was a, he was, you know, listened to what I had to say. He, you know, we had discussions about it. I heard him explain up the chain of command. You know, he was, he's a very, you know, he's, he's a, he's a great guy and he understood. And when I explained it to him, he's like, okay, you know, he was, he's a SEAL. He understood what I was talking about. And he was able to articulate it even better than me to, to his boss.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  I watched one of his congressional hearings when he was briefly the acting DNI and he just seemed like a straight shooting guy, just a direct.

• 10:57Jocko Willink?

  And, and he's a, you know, he's a guy that, he's a great relationship builder. Cause he's a nice guy, you know, he's a guy that always cared about SEAL platoons, you know, he always cared about SEALs, always the, the. One of the biggest lessons I learned from him is he's gonna, his mission was to take care of the SEAL platoons. And there's plenty of people in the military and civilian sector where they lose sight of what it is that they're actually supposed to be doing as a leader. And what he was trying to do was take care of SEAL platoons, which is exactly what he should have been doing and, and what we needed him to do.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  What did that, what did that mean?

• 11:31Jocko Willink?

  It means, instead of, it, it means that instead of trying to look out for, you know, um, some, in trying to look out, instead of trying to look out for the officer community and how it's going to compete against the fleet, it's like, no. How does this help a SEAL platoon? Instead of looking at, what about the acquisitions that are going to take place in the next four years? Can we get more money here or there? Hey, does it help a SEAL platoon? You know, he was constant, and if it helped the SEAL platoon to get that acquisition in four years, or to build this officer structure a certain way, he would do it. If it wasn't going to help the SEAL platoons, then he wasn't going to expend our resources on it. Cause there's all kinds of things you can expend resources on, you know, like, and, and he would look at it and say,

• 12:15Jocko Willink?

  how can this help a SEAL platoon? And by doing that, that's, that's what we do. That's what the SEAL teams is. SEAL teams boils down to a SEAL platoon. And the better supported they are, the better they can accomplish their mission.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people have a misapprehension. They think of like a naval officer and it's like a guy with a cigar on the bridge of a ship. You're talking about an admiral, that's just like a CEO.

• 12:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  You're, you're running a gigantic organization.

• 12:37Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Huge amounts of money in personnel, I mean.

• 12:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and, and if you think that because you're a Navy SEAL admiral, that you're out in the field with a machine gun, that's also not a good impression because that's not what's happening. And much of what the admiral was focused on was what's going to happen in eight years? You know, what, where are we going to be in 12 years? Where is our community, community going to be in three years? You know, it wasn't, you know, he, obviously he's dealing with stuff that's happening ongoing as well, but. In that position, you actually, you train, equip, and then send on deployment, the troops, right? You man train and equip, and then they go on deployment. They're not working for the Admiral when they're overseas. You're working for some, you know, special operations task force that's

• 13:23Jocko Willink?

  overseas, or you're getting chopped over to some conventional unit. So he's, he's not doing that. He's man trained and equipped. That was, that was his mission and he, and he did it great. And, you know, I was, I was very lucky to, to have that job and, and to work for a guy that was, you know, um, very willing to try and teach me as much as he could. Let me sit in every meeting, you know, I, I mean, I sat in meetings that, you know, the characters that, that we're talking about, you know, we're sitting in meetings with Rumsfeld, sitting, sitting, like I've been in, sitting in those meetings, you know, as the, not even close. I was the most junior guy by, you know, by five ranks and, and just sit there, you know, sit there in the back and, and listen.

• 14:06Jocko Willink?

  And those were, that was an awesome learning experience. And those are things that gave me, um, a much better understanding when I went to Ramadi, had a much better understanding of how these civilians interacted with our military. So, very lucky to learn a lot from that.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I want to hear about that. I mean, expand on that a little bit. What do you mean?

• 14:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, you know, when you're, when you're at the building, as they call it, which is what the military folks call the Pentagon, they call it the building. When you're in there, you start to understand the interoperability and the chain of command and the politics that go on.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Just broadens your.

• 14:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it just broadens your scope, you know, when you're out there, you know, when I was a platoon commander, you know, my chain of command, you know, kind of stopped at my boss, maybe the Siege of Sotaf commander. So my boss's boss is like, okay, I, I, I can kind of, I can kind of grasp what's going on there. Then once you see the, the other end, the, the, the most senior, you know, when you're sitting in a room with the, we know, the Secretary of Defense, you're starting to see the top down. And you start to see where, what kind of things are, are being thought about at that level. And the other thing was, and this was, this was purposeful. You know, when I came back, I was a guy fresh off the battlefield.

• 15:34Jocko Willink?

  So I was a kind of a little bit of a zoo animal, right? For the Admiral and not just for the Admiral. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, but he had the opportunity to take a guy. Cause you know, going to brief,

• 15:55Jocko Willink?

  you know, the, the, the, whatever level of senior leadership you want to talk about, I've briefed him. Other than the president, I never briefed the president. But everyone else, like I sat in the room and briefed those people and explained to them what was going on in Baghdad and what it seemed like to me and what we did and what our mission was. And there were some of those meetings that, you know, I'd walk away from those meetings feeling not too excited about some of the attitudes and some of the, some of the questions that I'd be asked. There were some. So it was good. It was good for me to see that. It was good for me to have the opportunity to do that. And I ended up doing it again when, you know, years later, when I got back from Ramadi.

• 16:38Jocko Willink?

  But I was very, I got a great education from that job. And

• 16:47Jocko Willink?

  he, he had an attitude of, you know, not only getting me educated, but using me to educate other people in the chain of command, you know, about what we were doing and what was going on over there. So

• 17:04Jocko Willink?

  you know, the, the job is, I think I was there for 13 months. I was like getting ready to transfer and go be a task unit commander SEAL Team Three. And I, you know, the, the new guy shows up and you know, he's another, you know, junior or another lieutenant and he, I forget where he was coming from, it was the same thing. You know, he had combat experience and coming back off the battlefield and he was taking over from me and a really great guy. And you know, he, he, he says to me, um, what do you, how does the Admiral, how does the Admiral react if you make a mistake?

• 17:44Jocko Willink?

  And I looked at him, I said, I don't know, because I really hadn't dropped the ball, luckily. And he just laughed and said, oh, man, you know, so, so. As we're completing the turnover, I think it's like literally the day that I say, you know, you got it. I'm out of here. As this is unfolding, there's an operation that was taking place in Afghanistan. And we're right as we're wrapping up this turnover, you know, we have.

• 18:23Jocko Willink?

  Operation Red Wings happened and, you know, we got guys on the ground. The, um, the QRF comes in on the helicopter. The, the, the helicopter, you know, gets hit, goes down. We lose.

• 18:42Jocko Willink?

  We lose 11 SEALs, um, eight night stalkers on the aircraft as well. And, yeah, like, just, just absolutely horrible. And, you know, and I was, I was there right as this was happening, like, right as I was leaving. We were getting reports that they were getting radio, they were getting radio transmission. It was Marcus, it was Marcus Lutrell. Like, I was hearing, you know, and I'm sitting in the room where they're telling the Admiral, hey, we've got, we've got radio traffic. We think, we, we think one of the guys might be alive.

• 19:20Jocko Willink?

  And, um, and I, to be honest with you, I, I was thinking to myself, you know, it had been, it had been like a day or two. And I'm thinking, yeah, well, obviously some enemy has captured his radio and they're doing whatever to, to make us think a guy's still alive. And by the grace of God, I mean, Marcus, you know, survived that and made it out. And that was, that was like right, that was right as I turned over and, and I remember the poor guy that took over for me as the aide, you know, the. It's kind of like the first major thing I did was one funeral. Well, his first major thing was just a, a complete. The biggest disaster. It's, it's, it's a nightmare. And, um.

• 20:03Jocko Willink?

  And and then you couple that with the fact that at that time, so now I'm checking into SEAL Team Three to take over as a task unit commander. And one of the first things that we did as a task unit was go to the memorial service for these guys over in Coronado. And, you know, it was um just a total

• 20:34Jocko Willink?

  it was crazy to it was crazy to go to that. It was, you know, obviously, we are all now completely focused. That was in Afghanistan. We weren't really sure where we were going, but we still we the the writing on the wall. It looked like we were going to Iraq, you know, that most likely well, either Iraq or some like like some non combat deployment to PACOM or something like that, but it looked like we would be going to Iraq, but definitely the way to that was a that was a way to start a training cycle with task unit bruiser that was very

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  we were focused, you know, we were focused and like, you know, you talk about not watching videos. Well, like our we watched videos like our training cadre would show us videos of, you know, Mujahideen fighters going through our brother SEALs gear. And, you know, it's it was sickening and it's one of those things that I think mentally really got us, you know, focused on what we were had to do, not that we weren't focused anyways, but trust me that that ups the game.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  When did you find out what your mission would be?

• 21:44Jocko Willink?

  So we formed up, we start our workup. And once we started our workup, there was actually some debate over who what task unit was going to go to Iraq. And the debate was some guys hadn't been to Iraq yet. And some guys had been to Iraq. There was one task unit that had not been to Iraq. And they said, OK, those guys are they needed to two task units in Iraq. They took one of them and said, You guys didn't go last time. You guys are going this time. So now there was two task units left that We needed to decide which one of these two task units would go to Iraq. We, my commanding officer actually called us back and said, okay, called me.

• 22:29Jocko Willink?

  I had to go back for a meeting and said, listen, here's the courses of action we're thinking about. One of them is we kind of split up the task unit. We take guys that haven't been to Iraq before. We build a new task unit and those guys go to Iraq. And then the other guys that have been to Iraq already can just go to, you know, one of these non-combat deployments to PACOM, to the Pacific. And, or we just go and see who performs better and whoever performs better goes to Iraq. And, um, you know, obviously my immediate thought was, yeah, we, whoever performs better, we go. And if my task unit doesn't perform better than the other task unit, we don't deserve to go to Iraq and let them go. You know, that's may the best man win.

• 23:11Jocko Willink?

  The other task unit commander was more like, hey, maybe it's the fairest thing to mix up the task units. I went back and went back out to the desert because we were in the middle of training. And I told my guys what the options were and I told them what I thought. And they were like, we're sticking together, of course. So we pushed back to just stick together. And the commanding officer said, Roger that best, whichever task unit is, you know, performs best, we'll, we'll send them to Iraq. And so we did, we performed really well.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  And the other option was a non-combat.

• 23:42Jocko Willink?

  It was a non-combat deployment.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  So I imagine both those task units are competing hard.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely a hardcore competition. Every SEAL wants to go to war. Well, a solid 90% of SEALs want to go to war.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  By 06, every SEAL wants to go to war.

• 23:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And that's the interesting thing. So we're forming this up as this is 05 and you still have, just by the nature of that very decision, you have, you have, um, uh, some SEALs that hadn't been to Iraq yet. In fact, a lot of SEALs hadn't been to Iraq yet, you know? So.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  I told you when I was deploying with the Navy, I was doing independent deployments, supporting SWIC and SEAL operations, fighting Islamic insurgents down in the Philippines. A lot of people don't know this, there's a lot of stuff going on all over the world.

• 24:26Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And, and those deployments, those, you know, nothing against those deployments. Those are necessary deployments. They're doing good work, as you just said, but, you know, doing, doing what those guys were doing there, there, which again. Outstanding, you know, thank you. Necessary and important missions for freedom and democracy. But

• 24:51Jocko Willink?

  we all wanted to go to Iraq. We wanted, we wanted to do more and as much as we possibly could. So we wanted to go to Iraq. So yep, we get to Iraq. I actually did a pre-deployment. So we do our workup. We get selected to go to Iraq. We

• 25:06Jocko Willink?

  go on, I go on a pre-deployment site survey, PDSS. And when I go over, we go to Baghdad. I meet the, the task unit commander that's over there in Baghdad. They're doing almost the exact same thing that I did on my first deployment, which was direct action missions. They were, the big difference was they were working with a partner force. You know, I didn't do any partner force with Iraqi soldiers in oh, three, oh, four. These guys are doing everything with these highly trained Iraqi soldiers called the ICTF. So they're running operations. They're doing direct action. They're capturing bad guys. They're, I went over there, went on a couple of missions with them.

• 25:50Jocko Willink?

  You know, it was straightforward. I'm like, oh, yeah, we got this. This is, this is good to go. They had good assets. They had, you know, it was nice. They had a ton of Iraqi soldiers. So you had a pretty good footprint to get out there.

• 26:04Jocko Willink?

  Look solid. So that was probably, you know, whatever, a month before deployment. So I come back, kind of give everyone the gouge. So what we're doing, you know, it's what we've been training for. We're going to Baghdad. We're going to work with this partner force. We'll be doing direct action missions. So cool. High five. Everyone's pumped. Everyone's psyched. And everyone goes on leave, pre-deployment leave. And I didn't go on leave, but I'm going into work and one day my boss comes in and says, hey, there might be a change. And I say, this is interesting.

• 26:37Jocko Willink?

  Ramadi had backpedaled a little bit. Ramadi had been, it was now the new hotbed. Like I, it had been the new hotbed since Fallujah ended. When Fallujah, when the Fallujah takedown was over, the big Marine Corps.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  November 04.

• 26:53Jocko Willink?

  When, when that was over, it took about another month where everyone said, oof, okay, I guess it's Ramadi now. So Ramadi started heating up and the intel reports and the after actions reports and the incident reports were, and the SIGINT reports, they were all now looking at Ramadi. So.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  The capital of Anbar province.

• 27:08Jocko Willink?

  The capital of Anbar province. So now, at some point, I put on the task unit bruiser door for three or four days, there was a little sign that said, you know, mayor of Ramadi or something like that. Like I was gonna go be the mayor of Ramadi. I wanted to go to Ramadi. But, but that, that was early. It was early on. And then, you know, it was a joke that lasted five minutes and then it didn't talk about it again. Matter of fact, it was Leif who reminded me of that later. Like, do you remember saying that you were gonna be the mayor of Ramadi? And I was like, oh yeah, yeah. We had a little sign up or whatever. So, so now, what had happened was, there was a, they wanted to align, there

• 27:47Jocko Willink?

  was, so now there's two SEAL teams in Iraq and they wanted to align geographically, more geographically aligned, the two SEAL teams that are in Iraq. And that meant the west of Iraq, so Fallujah, Habenia, Ramadi would be west coast SEALs and then like Baghdad and wherever else, the eastern, eastern Iraq was gonna be a different SEAL team. So, the only switch that it took to make that happen was Ramadi. That was the only one. That was, for some reason, however it got sorted out before, you had Ramadi and that was, that was a, an east coast SEAL team and, and the other Fallujah and Habenia were west coast,

• 28:32Jocko Willink?

  I think. But anyways, I don't, I don't remember it 100%, but I know that there was, Ramadi was the key component that needed to switch. And so, my boss said, hey, what would you think about, instead of going to Baghdad, you went to Ramadi? And I was like, you know, I'm like, yes, so absolutely. It was my immediate thought.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And was it clear at this point that this is a whole different type of mission?

• 28:53Jocko Willink?

  No. So.

• 28:56Jocko Willink?

  I'm but I just know that there's more bad guys and there's a lot of bad shit going on there. And what I want in my life is bad shit to be going on.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Ramadi already had a new mayor at that point. I mean, this is the capital, not only of Anbar province. This was the capital of.

• 29:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's supposed to be the the capital of the caliphate. That's what it was. That's what it was hoping to be. So I remember I I utilized this request to make some deals with my boss to get, you know, I said, I need this, this, and this. I said, I'll go to Ramadi. I need this, this, and this. And it was like, random things like I needed some like you. Well, you may or may not know. So there was some there was some satellite, internet system that we didn't have allotted to us. And I was like, I need that. I need this other thing. I need more people. I need this. And my boss kind of laid it out and used that as bargaining chips with the the other commander and sorted it out.

• 29:54Jocko Willink?

  And I got basically everything that I wanted, and I got to go to Ramadi. So.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  So you're why the Fifth Fleet Navy lost all its Inmarsat connections.

• 30:04Jocko Willink?

  It might be. It might be. Yeah, like that kind of thing. It was beautiful. And so I, I, when I said I was super excited, I didn't show my cards. I just was like, well, you know, we could do it. Let me look at, you know, well, let me look at what I've got. Let me look at what's on the ground over there. Let me see what I need.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  I like Jocko, you have a boner.

• 30:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yep, yep. So I, so that's what happened. So I actually, I don't remember if I called the guys and let them know. I mean, I know I called the key leaders and said, hey, guys, we're not going to Baghdad anymore. We're going to Ramadi. But I don't think I even called the the E dogs, you know, they were they were on leave, man. They don't care. They don't care. They didn't discriminate. They're kind of like me, you know, you asked me if I knew what the mission was going to be totally different. I didn't think the mission was going to be totally different. I just thought it would be more action. I didn't know that we would do something completely different.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  And you didn't know what would be riding on it. Like, did you have an idea of that?

• 30:55Jocko Willink?

  No, no, I just knew there was more bad guys there, and that's where I wanted to be. And that's where I wanted. That's where I know everyone would in my task unit wanted to be. So that's where it kicks off. We, we.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Were there about thirty, thirty-five of you guys?

• 31:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there's, so there's technically, there's thirty-six guys in the task unit, you know, two sixteen-man SEAL platoons and a headquarters element. But then, so that's the, that's the SEALs. And then there's another, uh, I think my, my camp, my count normally in camp was around a hundred. So the support personnel, so.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:32Jocko Willink?

  Radioman, CBs, um, uh, armory guys, supply guys. Uh, we had, we, we ended up having a couple Marines that ran radio, like we, so we end up with about a hundred guys. You know, forty or so support, or no, sorry, sixty or so support, forty or so SEALs. Something like that is generally what it looked like.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Did you understand at least that this was a city that, it's not quite right to say we had no presence in, but I mean, we were,

• 32:02Speaker 01

  as I've heard it from some journalists and from people who were over there, we were, you were going into a city that there were parts of it where the civilians may not have seen an American uniform in eight, ten, twelve months.

• 32:13Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely, I knew that.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And our people were basically sitting in static defense positions, occasionally running out on patrols and getting shot at the entire time. I mean, this was a city where, that the insurgents largely controlled.

• 32:26Jocko Willink?

  The insurgents controlled a lot of it. Um, and when we got there, it was the two-two-eight, it was the Pennsylvania National Guard that was on the ground and, and to say that they were sitting behind, no, they, they were out getting after it. And they were, they were pushing hard, they were pushing really hard and they were very experienced. You know, they'd been on the ground, I, I think the number's fourteen months, I always say fourteen months. I heard it from one of them at some point, but they'd been on the ground for a long time, fighting hard.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:55Jocko Willink?

  So all of us SEALs that had been through Navy SEAL training or whatever, these guys had way more combat experience than we had.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:02Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, we knew that as soon as we got on the ground, that it was really obvious as soon as you get on the ground that this was not, I mean, even, even in comparison to Baghdad, I mean, you go out of the, like I, we ended up in this little, um, Little Saddam vacation house, I guess is what it'd be. It was like a small mansion on the Afraidis River. And you'd go out at night, onto the, onto the deck and look at the city. In the city, you're gonna see, you're seeing explosions and you're seeing, you know, tracer fire. Like, you know, like a, like a war movie. That's what it looked like.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  I mean, in Baghdad, you're getting a target and you're going after them. In Ramadi, they're coming for you. I mean, this is a, this is a city that they expect, the insurgents expect to control, and they are mounting attacks on our fortified positions.

• 33:50Jocko Willink?

  Yes, absolutely. They are mounting attacks on our fortified positions. They have maneuver elements. They have QRF. They are using combined arms. They are using communications. They are on the attack. No doubt.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  So you get your guys ready?

• 34:10Jocko Willink?

  Well, we show up there and the first thing we're doing is we're turning over with the guys that are there and they're giving us a good solid turnover of what they've been doing, how they've been doing it. They had been continuing to focus on doing, trying to do direct action missions, working with some of the Iraqi soldiers. That's what they had kind of been focused on. They had been trying to still do unilateral operations, meaning operations where it's just SEALs, and they were getting shut down on that. It took me three minutes to decide, okay, well, we're not gonna try and do any unilateral operations because this was a time of by with and through, right? So the, the, the

• 34:51Jocko Willink?

  attitude had shifted that what we're trying to do is get the Iraqis able to handle security in their own country. So if you go on a mission, you're taking Iraqis with you. So that, that's...

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Where were these Iraqis coming from at the beginning?

• 35:06Jocko Willink?

  In the beginning, they were, they were, they were army soldiers.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  But I mean, were they...

• 35:09Jocko Willink?

  Iraqi army soldiers.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  From the area, coming from Baghdad?

• 35:12Jocko Willink?

  Almost all Shia.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, vast majority Shia, occasional Sunni, some Kurds, but vast majority.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  I mean, the Sunnis were in a position by this point in large parts of the country where if they showed up to a recruiting station, their family's dead. If they show up to a polling station to vote in one of these elections in oh five, they're dead. If you run for office, you're dead. I mean, AQI had consolidated control over the, in the oh five election, I think there was two percent Sunni turnout. I mean, people just couldn't do it. You couldn't show up to work for the police. You couldn't be seen speaking to an American, right? And there were a lot of people on the political side by this point who were like, this is over. You know, Ramadi is lost, Anbar is lost, and there is nothing we can do short of turning that place into a parking lot to get it back. I remember there was, I remember because it

• 36:05Speaker 01

  was on September 11th, and it was the fifth anniversary of September 11th, 2006, a report that had been going around, generated by the head of intelligence for the Marine Corps, I'm sure you remember it.

• 36:17Jocko Willink?

  Colonel Peter Devlin?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And this is the fifth anniversary of September 11th, and you know, the 10th anniversary, 15th anniversary, we always have like, this is going to be kind of, the articles that come out in the Washington Post and places like that, which is where this is kind of setting the conditions. Where are we, right? And Tom Ricks put out, he didn't have, he couldn't publish the report, it was classified, but he put out part of it. It said, "The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the US military can do to improve the political and social situation there," said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents. "One army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, we haven't

• 37:03Speaker 01

  been defeated militarily, but we have been defeated politically, and that's where wars are won and lost." Devlin reports that "there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force," said the army officer who has read the report. Another person familiar with the report said that it describes Anbar as "beyond repair." A third said that it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar. These people said, he reported that "military operations are at a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases."

• 37:43Speaker 01

  That's where you guys are going. And you aren't being given a mission to go get us through the next six months. We've had a strategic shift where some of the people who are arguing for a more aggressive policy to actually try to turn things around are being given an opportunity to show that they can do it.

• 38:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and that was some of the meetings that I went, that I was in, in the building when I was an admiral's aide. That's where I started hearing talk and, and I started seeing, I started seeing two sides of, of the story and two opposing viewpoints of what was happening.

• 38:25Jocko Willink?

  There was a side that was trying to figure out how to win. And there was a side that was trying to figure out how not to lose.

• 38:35Jocko Willink?

  And, and, you know, trying to, by, by, by saying, trying to figure out how not to lose, it's like how to get out of there, how to shut this thing down. How do we, how do we get out of this without just, you know, without egg on our face?

• 38:49Jocko Willink?

  And the other side of saying, how are we going to win? And, and there was, surprisingly, there was military and civilian people on both sides of, of that, of those two divergent opinions of how we should move forward. The, the obvious one is President Bush. President Bush wanted to win. He, he wanted to win. And you could, you, you could sense that, you knew that, you actually knew that he wanted to win. You also could sense that there were people on civilian and military side that believed that report right there, which was, we cannot win this thing. It's a quagmire.

• 39:33Jocko Willink?

  Not, not just Ramadi, we're talking Iraq. Ramadi was the, was the, was the exclamation point, was the example of why we cannot, this is impossible. This isn't going to work. That, that, that's, that's the way it is. So you definitely, I definitely heard both sides of that, of, of, of those opinions sitting in the Pentagon, in, in meetings as a junior guy, sitting in the back of a room, hearing discussions between high level people.

• 40:07Jocko Willink?

  And yeah, so when we got out there, you know, we definitely knew that it was going to be bad. And, and for the most part, you know, what SEALs are looking at is like, you know, okay, how are we going to win? You know, our opinion is how are we going to win? And it's, it's even tighter than that. It's how are we going to win tonight? How are we going to win? What are we going to do today to make an impact, to make a difference? And unfortunately, what that can lead to, and it's not just SEALs, so you talk about any, you know, any company and below sized element, you know, whether it's a task unit, whether it's a company, you know, any, any small unit led by an O3 or, or below a platoon, they're looking at like, okay, what do I do today? How can I improve today and tomorrow? What can I do

• 40:48Jocko Willink?

  to fix this immediate problem? That's what you're looking at. So when we show up there, there's, you can, you immediately know, I mean, there's, there's memorial services almost every day. And we're going, you know, we almost immediately, we're going to memorial services for soldiers and Marines that are being killed. Um, the, you know, there's, like I said, there's more, there's mortar, you know, we're getting mortared on base. And that's a pretty regular occurrence. There's firefights out in the city all the time. And, you know, when you were in Baghdad, like in Baghdad, first of all, Baghdad's huge. I mean, it's huge geographically. It's more like LA, right? Ramadi is a little tiny

• 41:30Jocko Willink?

  city. It's, it's not a big place. So when there's a firefight going on, you, and you're in an elevated position, if there's a firefight going on in Ramadi, you can see it. Like, you can see any tracer, you, you can, you're going to be able to see it from an elevated position. So that means that anytime you get on a rooftop at nighttime, you can see gunfire going on. Especially when we first got there, um, there was a lot, it seemed like the enemy was fighting during the night a little bit more. Um, we, we, they started to adjust their tactics, I think, and fight more during the day. And then we adjusted our tactics to fight during the day as well. But we get there.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  You go to, you, you started your deployment in March, right? When did you get to Ramadi?

• 42:11Jocko Willink?

  Um, well, I got, we, we started in April, I went right to, right, right to Ramadi. Yeah. Right to Ramadi and I never left.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  And started prepping for, I believe the operation began in earnest in June.

• 42:21Jocko Willink?

  Um, you know, my goal was to start doing operations as soon as we got there and we did.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I was like, as soon as Leif showed up and Stoner, um, it was like, strap it on, boys. And, you know, I, I had, I had told both those guys, the two platoon commanders that worked for me. Um, I will get, um, my goal is to, you know, make you quit, get you so much combat that you come to me and say, Jocko, I can't take anymore.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  And they said, bring it.

• 42:47Jocko Willink?

  And they said, bring it. And, uh,

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Were you personally, like, are you working for Colonel McFarlane?

• 42:52Jocko Willink?

  I'm working for, so when I get there, it's Colonel Gronski,

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:55Jocko Willink?

  who was the 228 commander and he was, um, so I'm working for the special operations chain of command. Which means, you know, there's my boss, who's an O5 commander of SEAL Team 3, and he's working for the CJ Sodoff commander, who's the Colonel in charge of all the special operations i- i- in the AO. So, so that's my actual chain of command. My relationship chain of command, which I have a relationship, obviously, with my boss, but I made a relationship with, uh, with the conventional commanders, because it's their battle space and I want to help them win. That's my goal.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  I mean, Ramadi's kind of spoken of as a pretty, um, as an important battle and showing, I mean, very innovative in how special operations forces and conventional forces work together.

• 43:41Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  In, in a way that hadn't really been achieved with that level of success before.

• 43:46Jocko Willink?

  Relationships and, and humility, because, you know, when you, when you roll in and you're going to, uh, going in, you're seeing these, these kids getting killed, you are gonna think, okay, what can I do to help? And the last thing you're thinking of is, hey, I, you know, you guys should listen to me. You're like, what can I do to help you guys in any way? What, what can we do? And that was the attitude that I had, um, to, to try and move forward and try and help the situation on the ground. Now, a few episodes ago, we talked about this, um, this beautiful mind wall that I had built with all these targets on it, these link diagrams.

• 44:32Jocko Willink?

  So, when I got to Ramadi, I, there was another SEAL element in Ramadi. And they were, um,

• 44:45Jocko Willink?

  they,

• 44:53Jocko Willink?

  They were set up there, but they, they, they had a like a small command center there and they had guys working out of other areas. And I knew the, I knew the commander. He was a friend of mine. And so he had been in Ramadi for a while. And I went down and you know, like, you know, linked up with him and was, uh, just, you know, he, you know, we were, we're friends, you know, he was telling me what they'd been doing and I was, you know, he was giving me like a brief of what was happening, what to watch out for all standard kind of turnover stuff. And his intel officer was actually the same intel officer that I had had at SEAL Team Seven. You know, it was like, awesome. So, and, uh, she was a female. And so, you know, I saw her and we started talking and she started kind of

• 45:36Jocko Willink?

  going through, you know, what they'd been doing. And then she says, well, why don't you come and, you know, come to the intel shop and I'll show you what we're doing. And so I walk into the intel shop and on the wall is this big giant link diagram. And it was basically the same thing that I had left, you know, two years earlier in oh, four. Same big giant group of people, some little red lines through them, some little green lines through them, meaning they'd been captured or killed.

• 46:06Jocko Willink?

  And I thought to myself, this is not a good sign because it's been two years. And even though there's some red lines and green lines here, this, this thing hasn't gotten any smaller.

• 46:19Jocko Willink?

  And that was my wake up call that we were gonna lose. Like what we were doing is like a Hackworth situation for me where, you know, I'm, I'm looking at this going, this is what Hackworth was thinking when he's coming to Vietnam and he sees the same battles being fought over and over again with nothing changing. So I was looking at this going, wait a second, it's been two years and I'm just looking at a big link diagram that has the same number of people on it as it was.

• 46:54Jocko Willink?

  As it was when I left. This is not a good sign. I went back to my, to my tactical operations center. I pulled up the internet and I downloaded the new, brand new, I didn't even think it was out yet. It was a draft version of the counter insurgency manual that had just been written by Petraeus and all his crew. He's got a whole crew of really, yeah, the whole crew. McMaster, this whole crew of guys that had written this, this FM3TAC24. I downloaded it and read it, sat there and read it. And I just thought, okay, what, how can we change what we're doing?

• 47:38Jocko Willink?

  Because this is, this is not, this is, what we're doing is not working. This is a different situation than it was when I left. This is an insurgency.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  So you realize it's gonna take more than kicking people's asses to win this thing.

• 47:51Jocko Willink?

  This is when I realized that we were in a counter insurgency, that we needed to fight a counter insurgency. And

• 48:00Jocko Willink?

  that's what I started doing.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Colonel McFarland knew that.

• 48:03Jocko Willink?

  So Colonel McFarland had come from Tal Afar. So, so shortly after we got there,

• 48:11Jocko Willink?

  it was time for the 228 to go home. Colonel Gronski and all those brave souls from the National Guard and their adjacent units, awesome guys, and they gave us incredible turnover. You know, they, they, they, they did great. They were just amazing. They were amazing soldiers.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  I think most people can't even wrap their head around that. When they think National Guard, they think like weekend stints and a little bit of college money. The idea that they're National Guard, people holding the line in Ramadi for however long, 13, 14 months is out of control.

• 48:42Jocko Willink?

  Yep, and total professionals. And saved our lives. Like, they saved our lives with the information they gave us, with the lessons that they taught us. You know, our, our guys were like, listening, you know? Yeah, it's like, and, and props to my guys, you know, like, all, all my guys.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  For not just saying, ah, we're SEALs, we know what we're doing.

• 49:04Jocko Willink?

  No, it was none of that. It was, hey, what, what do you guys think of this? You know, what do you think of that? How do you, how would you do this? What do you think of this route? Like, we're ready to listen.

• 49:14Jocko Willink?

  But it was time for them to go home. They've been there for 14 months. So now the 11 AD comes in. The 11 AD armored division comes in Colonel Sean McFarland at the time. Now he's a general retired, but. So he'd come from Talafar. And up in Talafar, he had relieved. McMaster. So McMaster had run. The. The counter insurgency model. The seize clear, hold and build. The go out into the neighborhoods. Form relationships. He'd run that model in Talafar and it worked. It worked so well that by the time McFarland got there. They didn't need a brigade up there anymore. All they needed was a battalion. And so I, and again, I might be a little bit off on these, but.

• 49:58Jocko Willink?

  You know, so they said, okay, you're going to leave a battalion up there to handle Talafar. Cause it's all but good.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Which was a nasty place.

• 50:06Jocko Willink?

  Was a nasty place. And now it's all but tame. It's all but peaceful. And.

• 50:14Jocko Willink?

  McFarland comes down and is. Is like he's, he understands the plan that needs to be executed. He's going to mimic what happened up in Talafar. Cause he got the good turnover. And. McFarland is just a smart. Open minded, humble guy that would look at problems and. Come up with an idea. And if someone gave him a better idea, he'd say, that's a better idea. Let's do that instead. And so he had that attitude coming down and, and that's why, you know, when you, when in the earlier episodes, when you're talking about. You know, Bremer and there's nothing that makes me sicker than egos driving decisions. And. And people that don't listen.

• 50:56Jocko Willink?

  It just, it's the worst possible thing, you know? Well, that's why I always say when we'd fire a SEAL leader later on in my career, when we were running. When I was running SEAL training. For, for advanced. You know, for SEAL platoons and SEAL task units. When we would fire a SEAL leader. The thing that we would fire the SEAL leader for is because he would have a big ego and was arrogant and wouldn't listen to people. Cause that right there is what gets people killed when you don't listen. And so McFarland was. Smart and looked at what. McMaster done and said, that looked like it worked to me. And now you want, we'll go do it down in Ramadi. And this is where we get to the point with what you were talking about. Where people were saying.

• 51:39Jocko Willink?

  This isn't gonna work. Hey, it might have worked in Tal Afar, but this is different. This is Ramadi.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  They've had years to consolidate this place.

• 51:46Jocko Willink?

  This is gonna be, it's not gonna work.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  There were high level people who thought that not only was, were we gonna fail, but we were gonna go in there and get a bunch of our guys killed for nothing.

• 51:58Jocko Willink?

  No doubt, no doubt. And Colonel McFarland had a different attitude, which is like, okay, well, we're gonna try and win. And he, I don't, you know, I wouldn't say that he looked at it, here's our exact plan that we're gonna execute. And I can tell, I wish I could think of all the times I saw that guy pivot and change his mind and make an adjustment and, and, and take input from his battalion commanders or take input from a company commander out there in the field and talk to him and say, what do you need? And the guy'd say, I need this, or we should do that. And he'd say, that sounds like a good idea. And he'd execute on it. I mean, he had it, he had that kind of mind, but the mind was.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Why do you mean to interrupt?

• 52:34Jocko Willink?

  The mind was, we're, we're gonna try and we're gonna try and stabilize Ramadi.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  When did the ready first take over? When did this happen? You got there in April?

• 52:43Jocko Willink?

  I'd have to, it was, it was about, it was about three weeks to a month then.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  So you got there, was there, was there a shift that came down all the way to the troop level that people realized like, okay, we're not, we're, we're gonna start, we're gonna take this city?

• 52:58Jocko Willink?

  Well, so there were some, there were some units that stayed. So the first of the 506 was there and they, they had been scrapping it out. The 38 Marines were there in downtown. They'd been scrapping out. The first of 506 was over on Eastern Ramadi. They'd been scrapping out. Those guys had been just in a dogfight.

• 53:21Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, it took a little bit of time to come up with a, like, okay, hey, we understand what we're gonna do. How, how, what is this actually gonna look like? And, and so it wasn't a shock to anybody. No one was like, wait, what's happening right now? No, it was like, hey, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna start, we're gonna start putting some, some combat outposts in and throughout Ramadi.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people have, you know, from the outside. Have this, it's really easy to get this idea that the US military is just so advanced and everything is in place that once we decide we're gonna take a city, it's like alright, reach into the, reach into the file, pull out Plan 2 Alpha, and now execute. We had to, you know, think about a city with a half a million people in it that's been in control of the enemy for maybe up to two years, and now you gotta go figure out how to take that city. I mean, that is a vast undertaking and a complicated one. It's not just military in nature.

• 54:07Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so let me, let me, let me go into a little bit more detail on this. So, we did know, and as soon as I got there, you know, I knew that Ramadi was important, but when I got there, I realized that it was a strategic, it was a strategic decisive element of this war, and we needed to win. So, what did that look like? When we showed up there, this was going to be a, this was going to be a Fallujah-style kinetic push through the city of Ramadi. That's what was gonna happen, and we were gonna

• 54:47Jocko Willink?

  do it during the, kinda during the turnover between the 228 and the 11AD, so we have double the forces that we need. We're gonna, and, and for me, I'm like, awesome. Hey, awesome. We're gonna go, hey guys, get ready. We're getting ready to, we're getting ready to smash this city. We're getting ready to do a Fallujah. You know, it's gonna be a nasty two months. Get ready. You know, that's what, that's what everyone was thinking.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:18Jocko Willink?

  Well, in this timeframe, and we'd have to check the notes on this one, but Maleki takes over.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:27Jocko Willink?

  As Prime Minister. Do you have the dates on that? Do you know when that was?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  April 22nd, was right when you chopped in.

• 55:31Jocko Willink?

  So, he takes over, we're planning this big kinetic smash, and he comes out and says, "No."

• 55:42Jocko Willink?

  We're not doing it that way. And this was a very politically savvy move. Politically savvy move because what it would have looked like had we done it that way. It would have been the Shia government going out and destroying a Sunni city. And killing a bunch of Sunnis. And he didn't want to do that. He was smart. And so he said, listen. You need to secure Ramadi. You need to do it.

• 56:13Jocko Willink?

  With more, with a scalpel, not with a hammer. That's what needs to happen. And, okay. So, we, we, one of the first missions that we did. Was. And this is just kind of tell you where things do get political sometimes. So we, we chopped over to, and this was, this was when it was still Colonel Gronski in the 228. We chopped over to, or we went over to the east side of Ramadi. We're going to do a big push, like a three day push through this area called the Malab district. And we were, you know, going to go in. Take a bunch of, take a bunch of city blocks, hold up for the night.

• 56:56Jocko Willink?

  Move, you know, stay there the next night, take a bunch of more city blocks, stay there until we got this whole area secure. And almost like a Fallujah style type thing, right? So.

• 57:07Jocko Willink?

  The battalion commander gets like basically shut down. And gets told, hey, listen, we're not doing any, this was sort of the limitations that got put on. We're not doing any. We're not going to do any battalion sized operations. No battalion sized operations. That was the instructions. And he was like, okay, Roger that. So like he put whatever it was, four companies plus. Like we had all the combat power we needed, but we didn't, you know, we weren't under battalion command or whatever. So those are the kind of adjustments that got made and, and. But that was sort of one of the initial operations that we did, but it wasn't the concerted strategy to hold. It was going to be a clear. And then, and that was actually, you know,

• 57:51Jocko Willink?

  that's the, um, the blue on blue from Extreme Ownership is that first big giant clearance operation. So, once we did that, um, and then that's kind of when the 111 AD showed up, and that's when this idea said, was, hey, you're not doing this, we're going to do it a different way. And McFarland had, McFarland had the plan.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  You start setting up cops around the city.

• 58:14Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's the plan. If only it were that easy.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, I say we just let this one run. I want to hear about this. I mean, what are we at?

• 58:25Jocko Willink?

  An hour.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  You guys are gonna have to wait.

• 58:28Jocko Willink?

  Check. Yeah, like I said, if only it was that easy. Stand by. You can also check out our other podcasts. I got a podcast called Jocko Podcast. I got a podcast called The Warrior Kid Podcast, and I got a podcast called Grounded. And Daryl has a podcast, which is called Marger Made. Then you can support all these podcasts by getting some gear from either the Jocko Store, JacoStore.com, or from OriginMaine, OriginMaine.com. Until next time, this is Jocko and Daryl, out.