The Unravelling 7: The Sword of Destruction

Three years onto the Iraq War, the country is in flames and American support for the war is waning. Jocko leads Task Unit Bruiser into Ramadi, the capital of the al Qaeda caliphate, as a part of an effort to engage with local leaders and prove that a counter-insurgency strategy can turn things around. 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 7, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. Let's go ahead and follow the thread. So where we at?

• 0:11Speaker 01

  We left everybody hanging last time. We cut it off right as you were about to kick it off in Ramadi. And, I mean, I think this is, there's so much stuff I want to talk about in this one. You know, we could start off talking about the stakes at play in Ramadi. How there were so many people on the domestic side that were saying this war is lost. People even in the military who were saying this thing is over, Anbar at least is done. There were people all along, from Petraeus up north in Mosul at the beginning with the 101st, other people in Tal Afar, McMaster and so forth, who were saying this thing can be won, but you gotta change your mentality. And so when you get to Ramadi, you mentioned that you picked up the counterinsurgency manual,

• 0:56Speaker 01

  and I don't know where you got it, because it wasn't published until December of 06.

• 1:00Jocko Willink?

  It wasn't out yet, but I got the latest copy on the internet. It was a draft copy, and that's, I mean, on the, not on, notice I said internet, not on the sipper net. It wasn't on the classified side. It was a draft copy that I got, and I just went and Google searched it, and they had just put it out there. And it's kind of like, the Marine Corps just released a document called "Learning", and it's the first one that's been released in 20-something years, well, since 2001. And, you know, the draft of that document, you know, you could find it way earlier than what was actually released. So, yeah, that, and this is in April. So, when did you say it actually got formally released?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  December.

• 1:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, I had the-

• 1:45Speaker 01

  You must have been one of the early adopters, for sure.

• 1:47Jocko Willink?

  I was definitely an early adopter. I know that I was, the first person that I knew that had read it was me. Like, I didn't meet anybody else that said, "Oh, yeah, here's the new manual." And it was weird for me, too, to like, dive into a manual and just say, "Okay, I gotta have an open mind here, looking at this." But seeing, again, seeing the, "Hey, here we're all going after all these bad guys, but it doesn't really seem to have a long-term sustaining impact, because it's been three years of us doing this." Made me say, we've got to look some other way. There's got to be some other way that this is unfolding for sure.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  What did you get out of it? Because I mean, you just sat down and read the thing basically straight through, right?

• 2:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I sat down and read the thing straight through and I'll tell you what I got. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you the main, one of the main things that I stole from it was security for the populace. And that's the first thing that kind of made sense to me. I said, okay, right. How do we provide security for the populace? Which is different than I'm going to remove people, right? I'm going to take bad guys. Providing security for the populace and the idea that the decisive, the decisive element in this war was not an airfield. It was not a mountaintop. It was not a beachhead. The decisive, the decisive terrain in this war was the people, and I'm going to say it.

• 3:12Jocko Willink?

  It was the hearts and minds of the local populace. So that was the main takeaway for me. And then, you know, you just read through it and you realize that in order to do the kind of, the kind of, when you think of counter insurgency, well, at least at the time, I think a lot of people, when they thought of counter insurgency, what they thought of was hearts and minds, which is, hey, we're going to go out, we're going to build schools. We're going to give away food. We're going to, we're going to give med caps, you know, and, and go out and help people medically. And it sounds so hunky dory and you think, well, that sounds great, but then you look at Ramadi and you go, how can this possibly happen here? And in the counter insurgency manual, it explains that in order for those things to take place,

• 3:57Jocko Willink?

  you, you have to have control over the battlefield and we didn't have control yet. So the first step in counter insurgency is you've got to get some kind of control in that situation. So that's another thing I realized and the fact that, and this was, I think Petraeus said this later. He paraphrased it later and it made sense and I don't know. I got the idea, I understood it from the counter insurgency manual, even though I don't think these words are actually in there. But he said, this can't be a drive by counter insurgency, meaning, hey, you can't just drive into a neighborhood, say hi and then leave. You gotta go in there and you gotta stay. So that made a lot of sense to me. So there was some, some things that I just had to open my mind and seen a different light and seeing that target board and knowing that.

• 4:44Jocko Willink?

  For lack of a better way of saying this,

• 4:48Jocko Willink?

  we were losing. And a lot of this comes back again to The Book About Face by David Hackworth. Because

• 4:59Jocko Willink?

  he's the guy that said we're losing, like in Vietnam. He's the first kind of legitimate guy that said we're losing. And it wasn't that, I don't know if the thought we're losing would have entered my mind had I not read that book. But A, I'd read that book and I read that book a lot. But B, as you just said, there was, the populace in America was turning against the war. I mean, this is 2006. This is nasty. And there's no end in sight. And there's Americans coming home, you know, in caskets all the time. And so, so we've got much of the American populace saying, hey, we've had enough of this. We've got government officials saying we're not going to win.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  It's an election year.

• 5:42Jocko Willink?

  It's an election year. It's just nasty. So the fact that I had a little bit of, you know, I have a natural rebellious streak in me. And that's very beneficial sometimes from a leadership position because you're questioning what's happening as opposed to just accepting what's happening. So for me to say, for me to question what we were doing and how we were doing it was very good. And very lucky and also from a leadership perspective, I'm coming in there, I'm detached. Right? I hadn't been to Iraq in two years. So I'm, I'm, I'm detached from it. Guys that are in the fight, they're, they're in the fight. They're worried about the op they're doing tonight, tomorrow night. That's what they're worried about. They got a bad guy. Good. They're, they're planning for another op. They're not even looking at where it goes.

• 6:26Jocko Willink?

  I'm coming in it from a de facto detached position where I'm looking at it from 30,000 feet going. So I come from the States where everyone's saying, well, not everyone, but where a lot of people are saying we're losing, we can't win. I show up there, I see this target board, it looks like we're not making any progress. I think we've got to do something different. And that cracks me into the, the counter insurgency manual three, what is it, three tac 24? That's the new one.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  The insurgents, it took us a while to understand counter insurgency. The insurgents understood their part of it real well. Talked about how we need to go and we need to build a school, we need to open a pump station or whatever. They knew that, they needed to go blow up the ribbon cutting. US troops would be out there giving candy to Iraqi kids and they would drive a suicide bomb into the crowd of kids. And after a while, we realized none of this stuff that we're doing matters if we can't provide security for these.

• 7:20Jocko Willink?

  Security for the purpose. And you know, there's, there's something that you said on the last podcast and I re listened to it. And it's funny because you said something along the lines of the insurgents realized that they had, they, they realized, I think you said a weapon or,

• 7:37Jocko Willink?

  but you ended up saying they had, they, they knew what they needed, they knew what they had on their side. And I thought what they needed to get on their side or something like that. And I thought you were gonna, you said, you said people, right? And what I thought you were gonna say was time. Because that really is the ultimate weapon of an insurgency is look, hey, hey, American, hey, gringo. You want to stay here and you know, lose, you know, 10 guys a week or 20 guys a week? Cool, we'll be here, we can, we can outlast you. And we, we don't want to go home, we are home. You know, are you Americans? You want to go home. I don't care what American you are, you want to go home. We don't want to go home, we are home and so we can outlast you. And, and that's, that really is time is the ultimate weapon in insurgency. That's another thing and I, here's a good conversation I had.

• 8:22Jocko Willink?

  So this was pressing into. Combat actually starting in Ramadi. This is something I completely took from the counter insurgency manual. So we started doing these Overwatch operations where we were going out and providing security for the populace via killing bad guys. And so we started conducting these operations. There's a couple of things I got from the counter insurgency. Number one, when you start a counter insurgency, enemy activity is not going to go down, it's going to go up. Friendly casualties are not going to go down, they are going to go up. So, so right there, right there, it already feels wrong. When you start a counter insurgency, it feels wrong and it looked, looks wrong.

• 9:06Jocko Willink?

  So the, the people that are tracking SIGAX, which is a term for significant activity, which, which, which was a word that had its own meaning and its own life. You know, how many SIGAX were there today? Meaning how many enemy activities, enemy attacks were there? And the, that would get tracked, it was a metric. And so when we started this counter insurgency, guess what happens to the enemy attacks? The enemy contacts, they go up. What happens to the US casualties? They go up. So probably three weeks into this, we had conducted maybe 10 Overwatch operations, probably killed X amount of guys, I don't know, X amount of enemy, 10, 20.

• 9:51Jocko Willink?

  And I get a, an email from like one of the guys up the chain of command. It wasn't, it wasn't my commanding officer, it was someone up the chain of command for me. And it was something along the lines of, hey, here you are conducting these operations to take out IED emplacers and insurgents and we're actually seeing an increase in enemy activity. What, what, what metrics are you going off of that makes you think that this is even remotely effective?

• 10:19Jocko Willink?

  And I just said it a little bit more hostile, wasn't as hostile as that. But from the counterinsurgency manual that I had read, I replied, hey, appreciate the feedback. The average counterinsurgency lasts seven years. It's been three weeks. Can I get some more time to measure the metrics? And, and they were like, okay, you know, fair enough. But that was me having read this book and, and, and pulled things out of it that were actually completely accurate to what we were living. So the, watching those SIGACs go up was, was rough. And I remember the, the brigade commander, Colonel Sean McFarland, you know, he was answering the mail on this kind of thing.

• 11:02Jocko Willink?

  And we'd be sitting in the brigade meeting and he'd say, yeah, the division is, is looking at us saying, hey, how, how, how are we supposed to think you're doing a good job here when enemy activity is increasing? And, you know, he probably gave a similar answer to what I did. We're taking the fight to the enemy and there's going to be, there's going to be casualties. There's going to be blood, but that's the, that's the pathway to victory.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  When the people become the ground that you're trying to win as opposed to an airfield or something like that, and the counterinsurgency, that means that everything you do has got to be measured for, for lack of a better term, political effect as well as like tactical effect, right? And this is why this battle, it, it, it just has fascinated me for a long time because taking what I just said about everything you do has got to be measured for political effect. And you guys are going into a city that probably much of it hasn't seen an American who was sort of holding their ground in a year, maybe in some of these places. And you're going into a Sunni city with Iraqi security forces that are mostly, if not all Shia, right?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  You've got to convince those Shia soldiers to treat the Sunni civilians that they're going to be encountering with respect.

• 12:10Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  You've got to, you've got to convince the Sunni populace there that, hey, we're coming in here with, this is, this is for everybody else out there. If you don't remember what 2006 was like, the very, very beginning of the year, Al Qaeda in Iraq. Massive car bomb at the Samara Mosque, which is like one of the holiest sites in the entire Shia world. And the Shia went insane. They're burning down Sunni mosques, they're, you know, sectarian cleansing Baghdad neighborhoods, running Sunnis out. And it's at a point where the Shia militias have, you know, totally infiltrated a lot of the Iraqi police. People are getting arrested by the Iraqi police and two days later their families get a phone call from the Shia militia that now has that person.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  And they're demanding ransom. And so you're bringing Shia soldiers into this Sunni city that hadn't seen an American, has no reason to trust us at all. In a long time, and you gotta convince both of those sides to play nice, that nobody's doing anything here, we're in control. And when you guys start talking to the tribes, which is really what I'm super interested in hearing about how you guys approach this. You know, 2005, just another aspect of like the political side of this. And by that I just mean intergroup, you know, group interaction. The tribes had tried to unite and fight against Al Qaeda back in 2005. And they got annihilated and all their leaders ran to Jordan and everywhere else.

• 13:30Jocko Willink?

  The leaders ran to Jordan, the ones that survived, because I want to say there was a 24 hour period or 48 hour period where eight of the tribal leaders were killed.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yep, eight of them.

• 13:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, so I mean, that's, that's like saying, you know, if you picture the, the New York crime families in the, in the 60s, right? Saying that, oh yeah, all the heads of the families got killed. That's, that's what, and then the ones that were left, yeah, they, they ran.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  And they were junior too. I mean, a lot of them were younger, right? Because a lot of people got killed and people got kind of bumped up.

• 14:01Jocko Willink?

  Some people bumped up, some people fled, some people just faded. Yeah, all those things happened.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  You had the glass factory, I think in February of 06, I think.

• 14:13Jocko Willink?

  January of, January.

• 14:17Jocko Willink?

  January of 06, there's a, there's a police recruiting drive, let's call it a recruiting drive, for the young Iraqi men to come and join the Iraqi police where they can now get control of their city. There's a massive suicide bomb there. There was a guy by the name of Lieutenant Colonel McLaughlin, who was apparently, and this happened before I got there, so I didn't know him, but he was with the 228 out of Pennsylvania, so he's a reservist. They called him the sheik of sheiks, because he was, you know, just a great guy that had this great attitude, that was trying to make things happen, and got along with all the

• 15:00Jocko Willink?

  different sheiks, and understood what we were trying to make happen. So he's actually, and this is what proves what kind of a leader he was, you know, this is a risky operation to have this big recruiting drive, but they set security up, and now they have several hundred young Iraqi men that are thinking, okay, well, it looks like we're gonna take back our city from these insurgents, you know, and my sheik and some of the other sheiks have said to come down here and join up with this Iraqi police. And the glass factory is an old glass factory, and it's right outside of Camp Ramadi, so it's a good place to do it, Camp Ramadi being an all-American, you know, base with thousands of troops on there and a lot of firepower, the glass factory's just outside.

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  So, they run this recruiting meeting, and suicide bomber, there's 55 or 60 of the recruits are killed. McLaughlin, McLaughlin is killed, a marine that was on security. Adam Khan, Sergeant Adam Khan, he was on security, he was also killed. There's another 55 or 60 Iraqis, friendly Iraqis, that were there to get recruited that were wounded. So, I mean, you picture what, just imagine that. You're a young kid, you show up, we're gonna take back Ramadi, you show up, the Americans

• 16:25Jocko Willink?

  are providing security, the Americans are gonna make everything nice again, the Americans are aligned with my sheik, my sheik has sent me down here. And then the insurgents kill everyone that you know and wound everyone else. And if you made it out of there unscathed, you were never going to think about doing anything like that again, as far as you could, you could tell.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  This is a couple of months before you guys got there and started this.

• 16:46Jocko Willink?

  This is in January. Yep. This is in January of oh six.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  So just all of those challenges stacked on top of each other, you know, convincing the Sunni that A, we're going to protect you from Al Qaeda.

• 16:56Jocko Willink?

  You know, let, let me interject. Hold on. So

• 17:01Jocko Willink?

  one thing, when you were talking about the Shias, the Shia soldiers and some of them, I mean, who, what's the, what's the profile of someone that joins the she, the, the Iraqi army in 2006? What's that profile look like? Well, yes. Guess what? It's a, it's a lower class person. We're talking about the frontline grunts because there's, there's the whole officer thing and it's a, it's just like any, well, it's not, it's, it's the officer thing where these guys pay to get in position. They come from a family or whatever, but the, the, the soldiers, who joins the Iraqi army in 2006? Who's, who's a Shia? Yep. They're, they're Shia. They need money. They're not educated. They are looking for a job. And

• 17:46Jocko Willink?

  here you go. That's the same exact profile of who is joining the, the Mahdi army to go and fight for the Shias, you know, kind of that, that's the exact, it's the exact same profile. So in the barracks room of, so Leif, Leif Babin, who was one of the platoon commanders, he was running a troop of, of Iraqi soldiers in their barracks on the American base. They had a giant poster on the wall of Muqtada al-Sadr, on their wall, in the clear, like, hey, we're, we're here to fight. And yeah, that's a picture of Muqtada al-Sadr, you know,

• 18:24Jocko Willink?

  the sort of most vocal and rebellious leader of the Shia sect at this point. So that's, that's what you're looking at. It's crazy. And the, the picture, I've tried to find it. You, you, you've seen on picture, the picture of Muqtada al-Sadr with his kind of finger raised up and. I mean, he's a very, he's a very, he's a caricature, right? He's, he fits the exact image of what you would expect. This fiery guy, charismatic guy. You know, he's got like a little crazy eyes to him. He fits that exact image. And so they got this giant poster and it has like lightning around it.

• 19:05Jocko Willink?

  So that's what, that's what we're dealing with.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Not much for subtlety in the Middle East.

• 19:08Jocko Willink?

  That's what we're dealing with.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  One of my, one of my favorite things ever is, uh, one of the insurgent groups that's been operating out in Iraq. They were until a year or two ago. Called themselves Euphrates volcano. I'm like, that's awesome.

• 19:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, wait, we're not sure if we're.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  I'm giving you guys slack for a couple beheadings for that good name.

• 19:26Jocko Willink?

  We're, we're not sure if we're a, like a roller derby team. Or an insurgent group, but we're, we're feeling it.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Having that, that poster up there points to, I mean, another one, right? So you've got to get the Sunni and Shia to play nice together. You've got to convince the Sunni in the city that we can protect you from Al Qaeda after we haven't done that at all for years now. And Al Qaeda's been the law of the land as long as you've been here. And when we recently failed to protect you, you know, at the glass factory attack. Uh, but another one, uh, is that you've got to convince, I imagine it wasn't hard with your guys maybe, but, um, do you have any issues where, when you started to talk to the tribes? With Americans, really, these guys were shooting at us last year and you want us to, like, give them amnesty, work with them? Or these guys got a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr in their barracks and we're supposed to trust these guys? Like, how was that?

• 20:14Jocko Willink?

  Are, are you talking about me with the SEALs in Task Unit Bruiser?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  I would, I would imagine that wasn't a problem.

• 20:21Jocko Willink?

  The, the, it was a little, the, the hardest challenge with the SEALs in Task Unit Bruiser was, hey, guys, we're going to be working with Iraqi soldiers pretty much all the time.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Are they going to watch our back?

• 20:31Jocko Willink?

  Are they going to watch our back? Can we trust them? And the answer is no and no. So what do you do? You mitigate risk, you figure out how you can train them up enough, you figure out what, how you operate with them where you're. You've got four of those guys that are supposed to be doing something and you need two SEALs there to make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. So this was really before there hadn't been a lot of, of, you know, um, what do they end up calling it? Green on, green on blue, meaning a, a bad, like a, like an Iraqi soldier turns and starts shooting. That happened more in Afghanistan. It happened some in Iraq, but at this point it wasn't a huge threat. We thought about it, of course. Like you just don't feel comfortable when

• 21:12Jocko Willink?

  you've got a guy that's got a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr in his bedroom and now he's standing next to you with an AK-47. Uh, you know, there's, there's definitely some trust issues. And then there was different types of guys, you know, if there, there's, there's Kurdish, some Kurdish soldiers that would be in some of these units and they would be very trustworthy and very squared away, but like almost a different, different level. Actually, they, they were straight up a different level. So if you had a couple Kurdish guys, you'd be pretty stoked on that. Uh, but yeah, it was, it was so, so as far as telling my guys, we're going to use, we're going to be working with Iraqis. That was a little bit of a struggle, but then when they understood why we're doing it,

• 21:53Jocko Willink?

  then they realized, okay. And, and even if, even if they didn't agree with why we were doing it, because the, the, what I told them was, hey,

• 22:04Jocko Willink?

  we either get them up to speed where they can handle security in their own country, or we're going to be here forever and we're going to lose. Or we can get these guys trained up, get them out there so they can handle security and then we're good. If that didn't convince my guys, here's the other half of it. And this is the, this is the slam dunk for a SEAL. By the way, we have two choices. We either take Iraqis with us or we don't work. Who wants to work? You know, SEALs want to work and they want to get after it. And if that means we got to take Iraqi soldiers, cool, we'll take Iraqi soldiers. So I probably got their, I probably got, you know, their hearts 60% there, just talking about the big strategic picture, but you got to tie it back

• 22:49Jocko Willink?

  to why it's good for them. And what's good for a SEAL is I get to go out and kill bad guys. And so, hey, this is what, this is what's going to allow us to do that. Okay, cool. We're on board. Let's make it happen.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Were you guys operating pretty much from the moment you got there?

• 23:02Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  They had missions for you and ready to go?

• 23:04Jocko Willink?

  When you say they had missions for us, we had, we developed missions. So the tasking that we turned over with, you know, they were tracking targets. We picked up some of those targets and within, we were doing operations very quickly.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  When did the, you know, I mean, when did the actual operation to take the city back really start? Where you start setting up the cops around the city and really pushing in?

• 23:27Jocko Willink?

  So there was a, there was a-

• 23:28Speaker 01

  It was like June or so, maybe?

• 23:30Jocko Willink?

  But there was a, there was a, I guess I would, might call it a false start, which was when we got there, the first briefs that I gave my guys were, hey, we're gonna go, we're gonna do a Fallujah on this. We're gonna do what they did in Fallujah, we're gonna do here, because that's kind of where the planning was at. The 228 had done a great job surrounding the city. And now you've got both the 228 and the 111 AD on station for turnover, and that means we've got double the combat power. That means we're gonna go through the city and crush it.

• 24:02Jocko Willink?

  Maliki, to his credit, who had just been elected prime minister as a Shia, said, hey, if, he knew what would happen. If, if he directed that to happen, it would be all the Sunnis saying, looking at what the Shia is doing to us, they're killing us, and it would have caused a problem. He said, you need to figure out another way to do it, a less kinetic way of doing it. That's the word we got. We actually got the word. So we had, we were planning massive, massive multi, multi-battalion operations. So the word comes down, actually, we were in the process of planning a battalion-sized operation. We were gonna support the first of the 506, and the-

• 24:47Speaker 01

  You're real quick, this is fascinating, because it's been written up in articles, and I think even in Tom Rick's book, that, that this was done intentionally, that it was a head fake, that we loaded up a whole bunch of men of material, like we were gonna come in like Fallujah, in order to get some of the insurgents that had been nested in the city to back out before we started moving into neighborhoods. But we were actually planning on doing that, it sounds like.

• 25:11Jocko Willink?

  If that was the head fake, then they faked me out too.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 25:14Jocko Willink?

  And they faked out everybody that I talked to and worked with, including, up to and including-

• 25:22Jocko Willink?

  Planning a battalion sized operation that we were going to execute. So if it was a head fake, it head faked the brigade commander and the battalion commanders as well. Cause we were all ready to execute that. We get the word, we're planning a battalion sized operation. We get the word. No battalion sized operations are to take place in the city. That's what word comes down. Okay. So we change our battle plan a little bit. The first, the 506 makes a change their battle plan. And they do like a two company plus sized operation, which, which is pretty close to a battalion sized operation and that, but that was our first push into

• 26:03Jocko Willink?

  in, in, into start establishing. We didn't establish a cop on that, but that was the first, hey, we're going to come and we're going to stay. That one was only going to be staying for a few days, but that was a plan of staying. And then as far as I'd have to check the dates, I don't remember the dates of when we did the very first operation to go and seize ground where people were going to stay. But there was in the time, in a couple of weeks, there was these, there was some turnover operations that happened. Where we tried to, where we being American coalition forces tried to turn over certain, certain control points out inside the city and the enemy would attack them and just

• 26:46Jocko Willink?

  cause complete mayhem and they overran several positions. Which again, when people ask about what the enemy was like.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I was going to say, what was your sense of them as far as like, how were they as light infantry?

• 26:58Jocko Willink?

  They used radio communications. They had maneuver elements. They would extract their casualties. They would bring in reinforcements. They, they did what, what a military unit is expected to do.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  You figure other than Americans at that point, they probably had more combat experience than just about any force in the world at the time.

• 27:21Jocko Willink?

  For sure. Even, even Americans, right? I mean, the 228 when we showed up there had been on the ground for 14 months, but guess what? The people that lived in Ramadi had been in there for 22 years, 28 years. They'd been in Ramadi since the war started in 2003. So they had years and years of experience and a lot of them were former, you know, former regime military personnel. So that, that helped as well.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  I was reading a book, um, I was talking about the very, very early days of the war and somebody was up in. I think here's what it was, is we were basically going around in those early days looking for a fight, looking for somebody from the Iraqi armed forces to actually stand and fight us, but they were always just melting away, melting away. So we said, well, we're gonna go after De Kreet. That's where Saddam's from. It's like the last place we haven't really gone into. If they're gonna stand and fight anywhere, for sure, they're gonna stand and fight there. And this journalist, I think it was Dexter Filkins' book, he followed the US forces into De Kreet. They just melted away. Nobody fought us. And we go in there, and he's talking to people, Iraqis on the ground with his translator, and he finds a guy who's Revolutionary Guard. And he's like, really? Wow, you're Revolutionary Guard?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  He's like, yeah. So is he. He's like, really? He said, yeah, look around. It's like, that's my buddy, and such and such. They're everywhere, right? But we don't know who these people are at this point. This is like, you know, fall of 2003, maybe late summer. And it almost, you know, it makes me wonder if, in a situation like that, where even if you don't necessarily know you're gonna have a big insurgency, right? You know, we have like the General Colin Powell mentality, if you go in with overwhelming force, if you have it available, right? But in a situation where the enemy's not gonna stand and fight you like that, where just the presence of your air power alone is enough for them to be like, hell with this, right?

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Is it almost, it's so hard to justify this politically. But if we were gonna go into Iraq, to try to sell it to the American people that here's what we actually need to do. We need to go in there with 80,000 ground troops, very limited air power, and challenge these people to do a fight, and say, come out and fight us. Draw them out and say, make them think like, you know, maybe we can actually go out here and fight these guys, in order to draw them out and fight them. Because, you know, in a situation where everybody just melts into the civilian population, the minute you show up with, you know, just a whole corps and air power and everything like that, it's really hard to nail anybody down. And then you end up with an insurgency. And I, and it's, I don't know if it's ever

• 29:47Speaker 01

  possible to sell to the American public that we need to go in here lighter than we actually could, but...

• 29:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess we did it in Ramadi, right?

• 29:57Jocko Willink?

  We, we did do it in Ramadi and that's, that's part of it. I wouldn't say we went in lighter, but here's the deal. When you move into someone's neighborhood, they're either gonna fight you or they're gonna leave or they're gonna comply. And so it has the same effect. What doesn't have the effect is, hey, we're here. Where are you? They go, oh, we'll stay until you leave. As I said earlier, that we have all the time in the world. You want to hang out here for six months? Cool, you're American, you're going back to America. I live here. So, so if you go, hey, I'm here and I'm gonna stay. That's why putting a timeline on a war doesn't work. Doesn't work because they'll just hold up for a while. And the other thing that-

• 30:37Speaker 01

  It's key to recruiting allies too. They gotta know that you're gonna stay because the other people are definitely gonna-

• 30:42Jocko Willink?

  For sure, they're definitely, the, the enemy is definitely gonna stay. So if you have a timeline on the end of your, you know, my, my fight card expires in 18 months. Cool, 18 months to an insurgent is a joke.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Right, but he's in his house.

• 30:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, he's in his house. It's like, it's like being on, you know, lockdown. Oh, cool, you're gonna be here for 18 months? Cool, I can do that. I can do, hold my breath. I'll go work in my auto mechanic store down the street. I'll make money, I'll save up, I'll throw some IDs your way occasionally just to piss you off and, and make sure that you want to leave. And other than that, I'll wait 18 months, no factor.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, uh, you know, the insurgents too, it really adapted to trying to bring down the institutions and functioning of civil society, right? I mean, they, they got to the point where they were killing garbage men, they were killing teachers, anybody who was necessary to make things work.

• 31:32Jocko Willink?

  Yep. And that's, that's a, that's a great point to, to bring up. And, you know, there's been a couple of people that have commented, uh, I saw on social media and otherwise about this podcast and, you know, of course, people were, uh-

• 31:47Jocko Willink?

  Painting me as sort of pro-American, patriotic and other completely 100% accurate things. So, I get it. Uh, one thing though, that I see a lot of is people will say, there was X amount of civilians that were killed in the Iraq war. And it's a, it's a horrible number. It's a horrible number. It's, I don't know if it's in the millions, but it's, it's, it's, I've heard the millions get thrown around all the time. Hey, the civilians, there was millions of, you know, whatever that number is, killed during the Iraq war. And hey, if that number's 10, it's awful. If it's millions, it's, it's, it's exponentially more awful, but it's...

• 32:32Jocko Willink?

  The, the fact of the matter is, those millions of civilians were not killed by American troops. Were some of them? Yes. They absolutely, some civilians died at the hands of Americans, whether it was, um, in crossfire, whether it was in errant bomb droppings, whether it was in mistaken identity, like, hey, I, I say this all the time, if you think going to war and you're gonna spare civilians and they're gonna get a, uh, get out of death free card, it doesn't happen. Civilians are gonna die. The percentage of Iraqi civilians that were killed by Americans is miniscule compared to the amount of Iraqi civilians

• 33:17Jocko Willink?

  that were killed by Al Qaeda insurg- Al Qaeda insurgents, Sunni insurgents, and, and Shia insurgents. Like, that's where the killing was. Now, if you wanna take a, if you wanna take a very anti-American stance, you can say, yeah, but those conditions that allowed that to happen were because of America. And to that, I'd say, yeah, well, it's, it's tough to argue about that, and we could have done some things better to... To prevent that from happening, absolutely. And I'm, you know, looking back hindsight's 2020. Here's some things that we would have done different. We already covered some of them. You know, let the, let the military stay intact. There's a bunch of, let the Iraqi military.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  I think we bear some responsibility. I mean, not.

• 34:00Jocko Willink?

  No, I fully.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  We didn't kill those people, but you know, a lot of the, the, the fact is there was a state structure intact and we destroyed the state structure without having a, a plan in place. We bear some responsibility for what happens after that. The same way as, uh, you know, you, what you hear, uh,

• 34:18Speaker 01

  what you have, you have an overcrowded, uh, military prison or something and the place runs out of food and they're starving. You're not killing those people. You're not putting them in gas ovens or something like that, but you're responsible for, you know, what's going on there to, you know, to a degree.

• 34:33Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And what you really to take your metaphor, make it even more accurate is, let's say there's a prison, a military prison and it's overcrowded and there's not much food. And look, but then what happens is now there's a riot and they kill each other. Right? Because that's what happened. That's basically what happened in Iraq. That's a more accurate picture. Hey, there's not much food. There's not much water. We're not just dying of starvation. What they do is they start killing each other. So that being said,

• 35:01Jocko Willink?

  when,

• 35:04Jocko Willink?

  sure, America can take ownership of that.

• 35:10Jocko Willink?

  The people that are out there

• 35:14Jocko Willink?

  cutting off each other's heads, they have to bear some responsibility too.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  I would say it's 90 10. Sure. Yeah. Um, but as an American, I don't take it like, I don't mind bearing some of that responsibility, you know, on our side. And I think, uh, you know, a lot of the decisions that we talked about in the first few episodes that were, that were, ended up being very bad decisions, things that are going to be lessons learned for the next hundred years in the American military, hopefully.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Were kind of made because we were imposing a certain view of how society works, kind of a naive view of how human groups work as we went in. And Ramadi kind of represents the point where we started to say, we got to work with this country as it is.

• 35:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  You know, it.

• 35:55Jocko Willink?

  I, I just released a heavy sigh, which also people commented about. They said, whenever I disagree with you, I sigh heavily. And actually it's not that I disagree with you. Sometimes it's I'm, I'm actually in agreement with you and I just. Just have additional information about whatever it is that you just said. So some of those things that, that when we watch them unfold and we think, well, we could have done this different. We could have done that different. There certainly was things, you know, that, that if we could go back, we do them different. No doubt.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  And like, so let me put it this way, actually, like, um, when we think of how government works, how civil society works here in America.

• 36:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  We think of something like, um, what tribal patronage systems like they have out in Iraq. To us, that's corruption, that's nepotism. That should be illegal, right? You have a whole social system that's built on this kind of stuff out there. And you guys finally went into Ramadi and said, you know what, we need to, we need to deal with this society as it is. If we're ever actually going to have a chance of winning this war.

• 36:59Jocko Willink?

  This is, you're, you're making a statement that's accurate, is completely accurate. And I have some examples for you.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:05Jocko Willink?

  Number one, when we got to Ramadi, some of the elements, some of the Iraqi army units that we were working with, they, the guys that turned over with us, they're like, hey, listen, there's a real problem with these, this Iraqi army unit. Okay, what's the problem? The officers are skimming pay from the enlisted guys. They're taking some of their money every month. So we, you know, that's a travesty and we need to fix this. We started pulling that thread and our, you know, some of our interpreters, who were either of Iraqi descent or, you know, or other, other countries over there, but had spent time. They're like, yeah, uh, hey, Jocko, that's the way the world works here.

• 37:49Jocko Willink?

  You're the boss man, your guys get paid money, you take your cut. There's no one, look, they're going to complain about it, sure, but this is a cultural thing that we're not going to change. So that was a big one. The whole way that we went about gathering intelligence and, and actioning intelligence. When we started letting those guys kind of take lead and figure out how they wanted to do it in their own way. All of a sudden, we started getting much, much better results from them. And then you can carry that all the way up the chain of command. I think that's actually what my original sigh was about when you told, when you said, hey, they're, they're a different culture. And when we try and impose our culture on them, it's not gonna match up. It's just not gonna match up and you can get some of it. You can force it.

• 38:34Jocko Willink?

  You can force something to match up here and there. But you're not going to get it to align 100%. Then you gotta ask where you're going to focus your efforts. Because if I'm trying to get this Iraqi army unit to be able to handle security in their own country, and I waste a bunch of time and piss off the officers because I'm inciting a mutiny from their troops, because that guy's taking a pay cut, which is what happened to him when he was a young guy in the army. And that's just the way things are. Then you're gonna waste your time, do a lot of things that you shouldn't be wasting your time. They weren't gonna be on time for some stuff. They were gonna say yes to things that they couldn't support. You know, that was kind of a cultural thing that I had to learn.

• 39:15Jocko Willink?

  You might say to, you know, an Iraqi platoon commander, hey, can you have 30 guys for this operation? And he's gonna say, yep, we are, you know? He's, what he's really gonna say is, Inshallah, you know, God willing, but he's nodding his head, yes. That doesn't, that doesn't mean yes. It just means if God willing, we will. So you can't plan on God's will. You need to plan with the numbers that you are actually gonna have. So yes, we spend a lot of time as a country. And I, I think, you know, my vision, well, my attitude, my mentality was to not, I think it's sort of a jujitsu mentality, right? Hey, these guys don't want to do this, but they want to do that. And it looks like it's pretty close. I'm good, let's roll with it.

• 40:00Jocko Willink?

  That is a, having an open mind is very important. Thinking that you're gonna train an Iraqi soldier to think, operate and believe the same as an American soldier is not, is not accurate. And the thinking that their platoon is gonna function the same way that a SEAL platoon is gonna function, or that an assault force, thinking that you're gonna be able to teach them and have them buy into decentralized command out of the gate, it's gonna take a long, you can't just expect them to do decentralized command when they have been living under a centralized regime from the top down, where you can be beheaded for making a mistake. They're not super open to decentralized command.

• 40:42Jocko Willink?

  So you have to work with the leadership a little bit more to start to. E, A, move in that direction, but more important, B, how do we take what your culture is? And how do we make it work? And that's a very important lesson to learn about any insurgency and working with people from other cultures. You, you, you're not gonna, well, you can change people's cultures, but it takes generations. It's not gonna happen in three months, it's not gonna happen in six months, it's not gonna happen in a year. It's gonna take a long time and it's gonna take deep, it's gonna take deep effort and it's gonna be costly. But, you know, we were able to change the culture of Imperial Japan.

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  They changed their culture, the, the culture, and not all of it, but that, you know, yes, we did change some of it. We, we sure as hell didn't change all of it. I mean, Japan still has a culture that is rooted the same. You could, you could trace threads of the Japanese culture that exists today, all the way back through World War II to, to, all the way back to the Samurai days. You can do that, no problem. So, thinking that you're gonna change a culture during a six-month deployment in a SEAL task unit? Not a good, not a good place to put your effort. What you can do is look at the culture, see how it operates, and see how you can get to the end state you want. And just like decentralized command, hey, look, here's what we wanna get done.

• 42:09Jocko Willink?

  I'm not, I'm not too concerned about how we get there. I just wanna get there.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  In Japan, at least, we had a long-running national identity and culture we could work with, where, you know, the over, the elites in Japan, the bureaucracy that more or less stayed intact over the course of our conquest of the islands, like, you know, you can make changes at the top and it kinda trickled down. The state had been in place for a long time, and Japanese identity and culture had been in place for a long time. You're dealing with a place over here where that is not really in existence, especially out in the, you know, out in Anbar and eastern Syria and the desert there. You know, I sent you a quote, um, as we were leading up to this episode, from a book where a guy, a journalist was over in the Middle East and he had a Jordanian driver, an interpreter. And this Jordanian is from Oman, he's, he loves the king over there, he loves him specifically

• 42:57Speaker 01

  because he's such a modernizer and a liberal, and he, this guy is very proud that Jordan is the most Western of all the Arab countries. And then this journalist got surprised because he said, as I'm talking to this guy, the most cosmopolitan guy you can imagine, like, from, from Jordan. And he said, uh, they're talking about tribal dynamics in Arab countries and how it makes it harder to kind of form up state structures and overall national identities. And he said, yeah, it's terrible. And he said, I'm not proud to say this, but you know, if it came down to it and my tribe went against the king, I love the king, but I'm going with my tribe. That's just, he said, it's not even a matter of choice. So just of course I would do that. This is a guy who loved the king, loved the, you know, the country of Jordan. So you're dealing with people who are much more disconnected from this fledgling little, you know, part

• 43:41Speaker 01

  thing we're calling Iraq, you know, post circa 2006. I mean, how, what was he, when you guys started going to the tribal leaders that summer, I guess, probably start talking to them?

• 43:52Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  And what was their initial reaction? I mean, it had to have been skepticism at first.

• 43:56Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely. And there's, well, first of all, I'll say this, there's a, when I was off the coast of Somalia in like 94 and we were standing by to go help, but so we were, it was, it was the closest I had ever been to doing something for real. We had our gear loaded. We had operational plans. We had briefed our plans. We had our magazines loaded. We were on standby. And we, so obviously we had done a lot of intel briefing. And one of the things that I will always remember is they had this saying that they told us to try and explain to us what we were dealing with. That there is a Somali saying, at least I think it's Somali, it might, it might just be that region. But it was me against my brother.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:38Jocko Willink?

  Me and my brother against my family, my family against my tribe, my tribe against Somalia, Somalia against the world. So, so you have that kind of thing. And I've always said that that's very much like a SEAL, a SEAL team, which is me and my, me against my swim buddy, me and my swim buddy against my fire team, my fire team against my squad, my squad against my platoon, my platoon against the world, or my, my platoon against my task unit, my task unit against my team, my team against the world. So they, they absolutely have that. And it is a

• 45:11Jocko Willink?

  It is a deep

• 45:15Jocko Willink?

  cultural identity that you are part of this tribe.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I mean, whole empires have come and gone over millennia and their tribal identities have stayed intact. That's gotten them through, you know? I mean, and it's probably one of the reasons that the jihadists are so effective in these areas is jihadists actually have, you know, at least it's an ethos, they have an overarching, uh, you know, kind of cause that unites them all together. And they don't have all these little, I mean, well, that's not true. They have plenty of internecine conflicts and everything, but you know, they do have an overarching ideology. It's bringing together like a larger group of people. And when they're going against tribes that can, you know, the thing about tribes, like you said, me against my brother and so on. That's a lot of little, uh, lines of approach that you can go in to drive little wedges and break things apart.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  And, um, I mean, so, yeah, you said, I asked you, um, if they were skeptical when you first showed up. I mean, especially of the idea that we were going to stick around. I mean, they had to have been like, they had to have been skeptical after what they'd suffered recently.

• 46:15Jocko Willink?

  So I had a guy, so for a couple of things here. First of all, there is violent battles happening every day and every night in Ramadi. Violent, there's 30 to 50 enemy attacks a day. Many of these attacks are dynamic, complex attacks from, you know, with multiple units, enemy units attacking strong points that government centered in downtown Ramadi, which the Marines that were down there were just heroic out there for months on end. And that place would get attacked all the time. I could see, we could see from the rooftop of my building, which was on the other side of the Afridi River.

• 46:57Jocko Willink?

  You could see these firefights taking place and all over downtown Ramadi all the time. So this is completely violent.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  So all the residents can hear it probably is going on. It's not a huge city, right?

• 47:07Jocko Willink?

  So no, it's only like three, three or four miles across from one. So yes, you can.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  So they're hiding in their houses, listening to gun battles.

• 47:15Jocko Willink?

  Tracer fires everywhere. It's, it, it, it's, it's like that, right? So this idea. For me, so I've got various lines of operation that I'm supposed to be conducting. I'm supposed to be, you know, doing the hearts and minds thing. I'm supposed to be doing civil affairs, so outbuilding. I'm supposed to be doing direct action missions to get rid of bad guys. And the one that I kind of added was like, hey, we're going to support and do these overwatch positions. And one of the lines of operation was tribal engagement. T E tribal engagement, go out and meet the tribes. So I'm looking at this and I'm a, I'm trying to be a good SEAL. Trying to be a, trying to carry my load.

• 47:58Jocko Willink?

  And I'm supposed to assign a small element of SEALs to be in charge of tribal engagement. I don't have the manpower to do it. I don't, I can't, who am I going to take? One of my, one of my combat leaders that's out running operations, that's out, you know, leading troops. I'm going to take one of my senior enlisted guys that is making tactical calls on the battlefield. So I'm not going to sacrifice, and by the way, from a prioritize and execute standpoint, we aren't even close to making these people feel like we're, they're safe and secure. So this is no time to say, all right, I'm going to take away my firepower, which is in support of these massive operations that are now happening.

• 48:39Jocko Willink?

  And I'm going to instead assign SEALs to do tribal engagement. But I still needed to do tribal engagement. I happened to have a guy who was, and I, and I believe you might know this. He's a fleet Navy guy. He's a prior enlisted guy and his, his officer specialty, his MOS was like information operations or something like that. It wasn't PSYOPS, but I forget what it actually was, but he's not a SEAL. He's a, and I, someday I'm sure I'll have him on the podcast because I'm sure it'd be great to hear this from his perspective. Cause you've got a picture, this guy's a regular fleet Navy guy.

• 49:19Jocko Willink?

  He shows up, he's part of my, so the task unit is made up of, depending on when and where, there's between 35 and 45 SEALs. The other people, the other 60 or 70 people that bring this task unit up to a hundred people is all support people. So radio men and weapons guys and a bunch of CBs.

• 49:42Jocko Willink?

  And then I got this random kind of information operations officer. I don't remember what his actual job was. And he is a, he's a really nice guy. He's tall, which, and I just remember he's tall because when you see people getting in a Humvee, they're tall. It's kind of, it's kind of awkward. He has very limited combat training. He'd probably done some, some training before we deployed, you know, hey, sight in your weapon. Learned some basic medical stuff, but, but, but very untrained. And so I'm looking at him and he's also, interestingly enough, he's married to, I want to say he's married to a Japanese woman and he's,

• 50:26Jocko Willink?

  because I think he was maybe stationed in Japan, marries a Japanese woman and he's a Buddhist. So he's a Buddhist. And he's a, he's a, like a white guy from, from Ohio or something. Really nice guy. So I said, hey, here's what's going on, man. I said, and I, you know, I called him by his first name, but I'll just call him JG for now. Cause that's, you know, he was a lieutenant JG. So I go, hey, JG. This is what's going on, man. We got these tribes out here and we want to get them on our side and we want to talk to them. I want you to start going out with the army when they go out and start trying to talk to some of these tribal leaders. And he's like, yeah, yes, sir. So he starts going out and I'm not thinking too much of it at the time. Not thinking very much of it.

• 51:09Jocko Willink?

  And he's, so he starts going out and, and again, you see this guy, he's got like, you know, the, the stereotypical brand new web gear. You know, his weapon, he, he looks uncomfortable holding it. And, and, and by the way, he's going out on IED laden streets. Like he is taking a massive risk of being blown up and killed. You know, one of the groups that he was going out with though, I think it was the 136. In their first 36 hours on the ground, they took mass casualties. I think they lost five soldiers to a couple IEDs. I mean, these guys are hanging it out there.

• 51:45Jocko Willink?

  And so he's going with these guys. So when I'm, when I'm jesting a little bit about the way he looked, don't, don't mistake that for me questioning his courage in any way, shape or form. Cause he was loading up and going out into these unknown neighborhoods, trying to interact with these, with the tribes. So that is.

• 52:08Jocko Willink?

  That is where this tribal engagement began for me. I'm not giving anyone up. If you know how to shoot a machine gun well, you're going to shoot machine guns. Who do I got that I can send to talk to tribes? Hey, how about a, how about a prior enlisted Lieutenant JG Information Operations Buddhist?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  That way, when they say Crusader Americans, you'd be like Crusaders got nothing to do with me, man.

• 52:36Jocko Willink?

  So.

• 52:39Jocko Willink?

  He starts going out and he comes back from one of these operations. And he says, hey, I, I think I, I think I got something for you. And I said, well, what do you got? He says, I met this guy today. And he says he wants to be part of Desert Protector. And I said, okay, and desert, so, so Desert Protector was a program. And, and I really hope that I'm remembering this right. And for anyone that I mess this up, please just let me know and I'm sorry. When the Marine Corps pushed through Al Qaeda.

• 53:16Jocko Willink?

  They, as they moved from building to building. Some of the locals started saying, hey, Marine, over there in that building down the street, there's a bunch of bad guys in there. You should go kill them. And we're just, we're just locals and we live here, but there's bad guys over there. And they'd go and check it out. And guess what? There's bad guys. And so what, whatever Marine element was in charge, and I apologize for not being able to give them the credit by name, but they said, wait, wait a second. There's a bunch of local people that don't want Al Qaeda here. Maybe we should join forces with them. Maybe we should help them. Maybe they can help us. So they started this program called Desert Protector. Which was, hey, we'll help you get arms. Well, you know, we'll work together. And we'll start cleaning up the desert, getting rid of all these bad guys.

• 54:01Jocko Willink?

  Well. When Malik, so these are all Sunni tribes, now Sunni tribal leaders that are like, okay, cool. You're going to give us guns and ammo and, and we'll help you and we'll get rid of these people that are trying to terrorize us? Awesome. So we, they start this Desert Protector program. So this, and you know, I just had read about this from after actions report. That's how I knew about it. So JG comes back to me. This makes me want to get JG on the Jocko podcast to hear his side of the story. Cause can you imagine what he was thinking? He comes back to me.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  It takes a certain kind of personality to be able to do something like that.

• 54:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And the good thing is, is he was older, you know, he was, he was a JGB. He was a prior enlisted guy. So he was like, we were probably about the same age. So we, we, we, you know, we had a good, very good relationship. So he comes back to me, he's like, Hey Jocko, I, I think I thought I got somebody for you. And he'd met this guy, it was shakes. It ended up being a guy named Sheikh Satarbazia, which the name net, meant nothing to me when I heard it. He said, I met this shake. He wants to be a part of Desert Protector. And I said, okay. Desert Protector, when Maliki, the Shia had been elected. He looked out west and said, wait a second, we got these desert protectors? That's a bunch of Sunni militias running around the country out of, out of my control. Maybe not out of control, but definitely not in my control.

• 55:18Jocko Willink?

  We, and he disbanded the program, stopped them. So now Desert Protector is gone. Now rewind, we just had the glass factory blow up in January, which meant we had no Iraqi police. But the Iraqi police were, was what was going to be a government organization that would be supported by the Iraqi government that was blessed by the Iraqi government to help fight the insurgents. So I said to JG, I said, well, Desert Protector is done. It's been canceled. I said, I'll tell you what, go back and tell him that the new Desert Protector program is called the Iraqi police. And if he wants to get his troops and his tribesmen to join the Iraqi police,

• 56:02Jocko Willink?

  we'll give them training, we'll give them ammunition, we'll give them weapons and we'll give them uniforms. I said, because also tell him that if he's got his guys running around in neighborhoods with machine guns and tracksuits on, we're, we will kill them.

• 56:21Jocko Willink?

  He needs to know that. So, JG goes out, comes back, and it may, and I wish I could remember this accurately, within two, and so he goes back and, and I get the report back, he's in. That's the report. He's in. He's in. I said, okay. At that point, and we had been doing this, you know, holding hands, doing this with the, with a, with a conventional force. That's who, that's who JG had been going out with. And I believe this was also the 136, um, great crew, and a guy by the name of Colonel Dean, he was with them. And so it turned into, okay,

• 57:01Jocko Willink?

  he said okay to this. And I'm like, oh, okay. So we ran, and, and this is when we said, okay, we've done what we can do. Cause you know, I got 30 seals, like we can't run a big recruiting thing. And we did volunteer to train them though. We said, okay, if we can get these guys here, we'll train them. Get, start getting them wearing a similar uniform. And so this all happened. And within a very short period of time, JG went to these, one of these meetings and came back and said, hey, sir, you know, you can get this translated, but this is a document, there's a bunch of tribal leaders that are gonna work together with us. And that was, that was what became known as the, the, the Anbar Awakening.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  For everybody out there that doesn't know, this, this guy Satar, this tribal leader, he's a younger guy. He's one of the guys that came up after, you know, the, the Godfathers all got wiped out the year before. I mean, this is the central guy who got all the tribes together and kicked off the Anbar Awakening.

• 57:58Jocko Willink?

  He was, he was, uh, very pro-American.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  We were after him like the year before, right?

• 58:05Jocko Willink?

  And the year before, we had got, like, actually, the, not even a year, the task unit before us had, we had a target package on this guy, meaning this guy's a bad guy, and we need to go get him.

• 58:17Jocko Willink?

  So we had a target package on him. Why was he a bad guy? Why did they consider him a bad guy? Cause he was running guns, cause he was a gangster. And how do you become a, how do you maintain your position as a shake? How do you get money? You need money? You need power? How do you do that? Well, it looks like smuggling is gonna work right now. Cool. We're smuggling. That's what he's doing. Smuggling guns and making things happen. And we immediately, obviously pulled him from the target. Let's like, okay, this guy's on board. And this goes back to the quote that I talked about in one of the earlier podcasts of the, we're gonna vote, we're gonna, we're gonna bet on the winning horse. So that's what he kinda did. He said, okay, here's the winning horse. And, and General McFarland, who was a Colonel at the time, went through the same thing with his chain of command. They said, what are you talking about?

• 58:58Jocko Willink?

  This guy is gonna lead a coalition. We have a target package on this guy. And he, he, he was telling the story, Colonel McFarland, you know, he's, he was telling the story, you know, at the, at the table. At the table for, for, at one of these brigade meetings, he's telling the story, this, you know, to have lived through this, I'm so lucky to have been sitting at these tables and sitting at these meetings and know, seeing this stuff unfold. But he's sitting at this meeting and, and you know, he says, you know, the, the general's wondering why we're gonna work with a guy that's, that, that, that we were targeting. And has run guns and is a smuggler. And you know, and, and the Colonel said, you know, I told him, hey, boss,

• 59:41Jocko Willink?

  the guy's a mobster. He's a gangster. That's what gangsters do. And now he wants to work with us and we need to, we need to move forward. And you know, he convinced him, cause that's what we ended up doing.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Even if you think about what we mean by a mobster, when we think of the mob, we think of the Italian mob, the Irish mob, the Jewish mob, ethnic mafias, right? These groups that come over here that have some external reason to be tight knit. You know, they're all from Sicily, or they got the family, whatever it is. And again, we've got a society over here that we've got bureaucratized and kinda all the rules are in place. And anybody that's doing anything kinda off the grid, that's a criminal activity. That's corruption or whatever. That's something that we've worked through only over time, though, and there's a lot of little more local informal ways of social, you know, means of social regulation that are still at play in tribal societies like that. You think about something like in the US where if you have a, let's say, uh, the, the Truck Drivers Union or the, you know, the Longshoreman's

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Union, right? And back in the day, like, a couple cases of steaks and a couple cases of whiskey would go missing off the docks or whatever. And we've got all these things in place now to make sure that doesn't happen. Everything is stamped and tracked with RFID chips and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I suppose that's fine. It's more efficient. There's, you know, it's not that you should be able to steal things, but if you think about the little, the, the, the, the more local level things that that used to facilitate. A guy's not taking those things home and eating them all himself, right? Those things would be, a barbecue's gonna be given at the union hall for all the union guys. And he's gonna go to one of the local restaurants, it's not some big chain, and give them a discount on some of the, uh, stuff that he took off of there. And it's kind of, it's providing these little sinews in that local community and making things work and giving

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  that guy what they call in Iraq, wasta, right? He's got that, he's got the juice now, which means that what it does is, now, if he's just a wild criminal, that's not a good thing. But it does mean that you got somebody to go to if you need to, who has some authority, who has some juice in a community. And, you know, again, in America, we just don't think of things like that. Everything's corporatized and bureaucratized and we don't, we look at those things as almost an unnatural outgrowth, when that's the natural state of things. You know, we've got this, like, very complex machine put together, together over here. Everything's handled much more local and formally over there. And, you know, you guys had to start learning how to think like that and learning how to work with that.

• 1:01:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. He, here's an example, and I'm so glad you brought this up. So, we got a guy that's a gangster. He was running guns and doing whatever he was doing. Maybe he was even conducting or directing attacks against coalition forces. I don't know that. I don't really think so. This guy had, this guy had, his house kinda looked like the White House purposefully. I wanna say he had a, I wanna say he had a life-size picture of John Wayne. Uh, in his, in his house. I think I've read that, yeah. I think I've read that. So, so he's a real, like, he's a courageous guy, too. They murdered, um. His brother ran off, right? His brother ran off, but you know, his grandfather was like one of the people that led,

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  his grandfather led rebellions against the British, right? So this guy, he's, he's, he's a guy that, he's not playing around, you know? He's a, he's a gangster, he's a tough guy, but he's, he's very pro coalition at this point. And so one of the things that I did is we had, uh, you know, I mentioned that we were supposed to do civil affairs. So we start giving this guy civil affairs projects. And what does that mean? That, that means we're giving him money. Let him distribute the benefits. So, so I remember we did some project with him and it was, it was a really big sum. I was, I want to say it was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was a road pavement or whatever, something like that.

• 1:03:26Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and again, I, I remember, I don't want to say I got pushed back, but I got some questions about like, hey, who, you know, is it really worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to pave this road and couldn't the engineers do it? And so, you know, along that line of questioning. Totally missed the point, yeah. And I was like, no, this is money to prop this, to give this, to prop this guy up, but more importantly, to give this guy wasta, to give this guy, hey, he's going to feed that hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you know, he's going to buy. Iraqi army are getting like three hundred bucks a month at the time. He's going to buy two thousand dollars worth of, worth of, uh, uh, uh, stuff to repair the road. And then the rest of that money is going to pay his people and he's going to, he's going to gain wasta.

• 1:04:09Jocko Willink?

  And that's the kind of thing where that, where it really helped. It made him more powerful and which is what we wanted, because. Other people see it, you hook up with the Americans and, you know. And this guy, the cool thing was, and the point I want to make clear here. This guy wasn't like some puppet. This guy wasn't some, you know, this guy, we didn't insert, we, America didn't, this guy's not a Manchurian candidate that we put in here. Hey, here's, here's a guy that, no, this guy is from Ramadi. He grew up there. His family is rooted there. This is what, this is his world. And he's not a plant. He's not some person that America's

• 1:04:54Jocko Willink?

  using as a puppet. No, he's a guy that is gonna be powerful in this part of Iraq. And he's not following American orders. What he's doing is he's trying to build his country back. So I just wanna make sure that that is clear. Because I could see people thinking, oh, they just got some shill to throw in there. No, this guy-

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  A tribal leader, a sheik is almost a sovereign entity.

• 1:05:18Jocko Willink?

  Absolutely, absolutely. This, and you can't, you can't just insert a tribal leader. It doesn't work.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Because everything's built on legitimacy when it comes to the tribes.

• 1:05:28Jocko Willink?

  And I also have to say this.

• 1:05:32Jocko Willink?

  When you want people to bet on the winning horse, you have to be the winning horse. And one of the things that, that took place that allowed these tribal leaders to come on board was they started to see that we were going to win. They started to see that we were going to win. And you know, I, I had many conversations when we got home from Ramadi about this. And one of the things that I would say is that these, these, the hearts and minds and the civil affairs operations, those things can only

• 1:06:15Jocko Willink?

  take place after the sword has been unleashed. And the enemy realizes that we will defeat them. But more importantly, the local populace realizes that we will defeat the enemy. That's what allows- Why would you, look, you're, you're in a lifeboat that's sinking and there's two boats you can get on. One of them is has a leak in it. The other one looks like it's going strong. Which one are you going to get in? So you what you have to do is you have to go to that other boat. You have to put us you have to hack at it until it's going to go down. And then the people are going to get inside your boat. And that's this is a classic example of what happened. And you

• 1:06:58Jocko Willink?

  know, it's interesting. I was talking to Leif the other day. When we got done with this, Leif went and took over the junior officer training course and for SEALs. So the young SEALs are coming through this course. And one of the things that they had to do was they they get different people come and talk about different conflicts. And they wanted someone to talk about counterinsurgency. And you know, Leif was up his chain of command and said, hey, you know, I can talk about counterinsurgency if you want, we can talk about the Battle of Ramadi. And they're kind of, you know, Leif's a young lieutenant and and, you know, just from Ramadi. And it's almost like, oh, yeah, I get it. You want to tell your story. But, you know, we need to get

• 1:07:41Jocko Willink?

  a counterinsurgency. We need to get someone that's got a little bit more experience. And I guess it was and again, I'm sorry if I'm telling this wrong, but it's something close. The officer in charge, the overall guy was like, you know what, we're going to get a Green Beret because that's sort of the Green Berets bread and butter, right? The bread and butter of the Green Berets is counterinsurgency. You know, that's what they base their training on. And so he wanted to get a Green Beret to come to the junior officer training course and teach, teach counterinsurgency. So they finally find a Green Beret. And the Green Beret comes and I think he actually ended up working there. And so Leif, you know, comes into his counterinsurgency class, and the guy teaches

• 1:08:22Jocko Willink?

  the Battle of Ramadi and said, this is the best example that we have of a counterinsurgency is what happened in the Battle of Ramadi. And as this progressed, you know, this this as this was all taking place, this this sort of tribal engagement, again, in all the different lines of operations. So as this is taking place, this is sort of, it's sort of an a slow cooker that's happening. Because in the front, front line and front and center of this whole thing, there was sustained urban combat operations that were happening all over the city of Ramadi.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  High pace. Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:03Jocko Willink?

  You had to put them on their back foot. I mean, did you start to notice like?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Was there something that let you know you were making progress, like a decrease in the complexity of enemy attacks?

• 1:09:12Jocko Willink?

  This is what made it so hard was at first, for months, you're not, you're not feeling the progress. You can hear about it a little bit. So the closest thing I would say was we would get the intel from the sheiks and their tribesmen like that progress was being made, that bad guys were leaving, that, you know, they, the, the tribesmen would conduct operations. We'd hear about that. They'd be like, oh, we killed these guys. And it would get reported up the chain of command as a, as a red on red, they'd call it, meaning, oh, there's infighting between tribes. And we'd be going, no, that's not, that's not red on red. That's good guys. That's good guys. That's our people out there killing bad guys.

• 1:09:56Jocko Willink?

  So we got, so that would, there was no-

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Who were you getting those, like that word from? Who was calling it red on red? Like what level were they-

• 1:10:03Jocko Willink?

  You know, I would have to dig in, but at some point, you know, you'd get a report back that there was a red on red killing between this tribe and that tribe. And you'd be like, no, it wasn't between two tribes. That was between this tribe that we know that's on board and a bunch of bad guys. And that's what just happened. And so, you know, we'd try and clarify it and they'd understand. But, but, so we'd start to hear that, but there was no discernible reduction in the level of violence for the first, I mean, it was like five out of six months. I mean, actually, and I don't even know if at the end, it, look, it just didn't, it didn't get better. It really didn't get better. There was, there was one, the last operation, the last big combat outpost that we put in,

• 1:10:48Jocko Willink?

  we put in, in, right in the middle of Ramadi. And when we put that, when we put that last combat outpost in, I went, I remember, I actually have a picture, there's, I think it might be in one of these books, the picture of myself and General Mc, or Colonel McFarlane at the time, standing in this combat outpost. And it was smack dab in the middle of Ramadi.

• 1:11:12Jocko Willink?

  And I had actually, I think I actually cleared this with a couple army guys. And as the, as the platoon guys, Leif's platoon was out setting up some overwatch positions. The overwatch positions, normally in these situations, there would be just, you know, Leif and his guys would probably kill, you know, between five and 20 bad guys. And on this particular, last one that we did, there was no, there was no bad guys killed. Now, that, this is by no stretch, meaning that it's over because it was hard fighting that was gonna happen. But if you had to ask me if there was anything where, oh, there's less violence. That was, that was the first indication that we got that maybe things might get better here. But, you know, that was, you know, we were, we were fighting and, and, you know, Mikey, Mikey Mansour,

• 1:11:58Jocko Willink?

  um, you know, that he, he was killed on September 29th. And so, that's, you know, we're, we're weeks from going home at that point. And believe me, that whole, that, that, that day was a fight. And so, there was no real discernible, and that's one of the things, there's no real discernible reduction in the level of violence. But when we got home, that's when we, that's when it's changed and it changed so dramatically. It was hard to believe.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  I remember there was the Sophia incident, I think it was Sophia, right? In December, when there was one of the holdout tribes that had been slow to come over to our side. And he came under attack by Al Qaeda, big massive attack at McFarland. General McFarland made the decision, he's not technically on our side yet, let's go back him up. And that was in December, right? And then after that, it was like the tide broke.

• 1:12:47Jocko Willink?

  It, it's, that's a classic example of, you know, just great leadership from General McFarland, right? Hey, this guy's been causing us problems, but now we can help him. And let's see what that gets us for loyalty in the long run and what do we have to lose? Well, if he, he hates us, he, or he's, he doesn't like us now. If we help him and he still doesn't like us, okay, we're still where we're at. But if we help him and he likes us, well, then maybe we've made some, maybe we've made some progress.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, by, I think, got articles from people who were, who were there visiting, journalists who were there visiting in early 06, spring of 06, right around the time you were getting there, who came back a year later in the summer of 07. And they said, American soldiers are walking around, uh, with no body armor. In the middle of town, there's markets open and it just... It's crazy to me, what, the courage of the Iraqis who actually went out there and opened their businesses again and got their lives going blows me away. And it just shows you how, how quickly things can change, you know, once people and how quickly people can adapt to a situation once they feel safe. And once they feel like there's something to look forward to tomorrow.

• 1:13:56Jocko Willink?

  And that's why that tentative counter insurgency is security of the populace, security for the populace is so important because until they have that. They're going to hole up, they're going to give passive support to whoever they think is gonna not kill them, which it doesn't take long to feel that it doesn't take long to figure out that the Americans. Are not going to kill you, but the insurgents will. So who are you going to help? You're going to help the people that will kill you if you don't help them. And, and that's, it's, it's horrible. And that's why the sword of destruction has to be wielded with a heavy hand. When you show up there against those insurgents and at the same time, it has to be wielded with an accurate hand.

• 1:14:36Jocko Willink?

  Because if you, when you kill civilians, even unintentionally, it's still, it can cause backlash. Now I'll be perfectly frank with you and say that these people have been at war for so long that they actually understood. You know, they, they, they actually would understand when something bad happened. They, they would understand and they wanted us to be there. You know, there was, um, I guess I would say.

• 1:15:05Jocko Willink?

  There was, you know, the, the, the guys would always come back. Oh yeah. There was people cheering when we, when we killed these bad guys. And that was, um, I think that was powerful.

• 1:15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was powerful. Um, we gotta wrap this up. There's one thing I want to leave us with. Uh, there's this quote from an army first lieutenant in one of Rick's books. He's talking about this period. It was, it was right about this period that he made this quote and he said, uh, that all the Shiites have to do is tell everyone to lay low, wait for the Americans to leave. And then when they leave, you have a target list and within a day they'll kill every Sunni leader in the country. There's an argument, or is there, maybe we'll cover this more as we go to the next episode, but something to leave you with is, were we, there's some people that say, by arming the Sunni tribes, call them Iraqi police if we want to, tell them they're only

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  gonna operate in their own little areas, however we handle it, that we were trading, we were gaining short-term security, but planting the seeds for like, longer-term instability, because there's no way that the Shia were ever gonna be okay with that.

• 1:16:18Jocko Willink?

  No. Well, let me say this. When you take the people of Ramadi from a vicious, war-torn situation, and you put them in a scenario where there's peace and there's prosperity, people get, I'll use the word addicted, right? When life is good, people start saying, "Wow, we don't have to live the way we used to live." And when I came home and saw that there had been success, because like I said, we didn't get to see

• 1:17:02Jocko Willink?

  it with our own eyes, but when I came home and saw that the markets were open, and there was kids playing in the streets, and there was kids playing soccer, and there was girls' school, girls being taught, and that there was peace and prosperity, when I saw that, two things. Number one, the sacrifices that were made by the, first off, the American troops, because it's not, it's not our country, they're going over there and doing it.

• 1:17:40Jocko Willink?

  It's a hundred percent sacrifice. So the guys, yeah, the guys from Task Unit Bruiser, knowing that their sacrifice that they made, that they sacrificed their lives, that there was an absolute victory there, knowing the Army soldiers, the Marines, that laid down their lives to try and protect that civilian populace. And, and just knowing this, I mean, every, every, you know, when you're, when you're walking around with, with these soldiers, with these Marines, with your own guys, and, and they get killed, you know that every one of those individuals that gets killed is a fucking travesty. It's a travesty. And

• 1:18:22Jocko Willink?

  there's, you know, from, from our time period there, there was, you know, for the 111 AD, it was like a hundred, a hundred soldiers killed. For the 228, it was about the same. So every one of these guys is a travesty. And the, the, the only thing that can make you feel better is when you look and you say, you know what, what those sacrifices that were made, look at these kids playing soccer. Look at this young girl going to school and being educated. Look at this family being able to live in peace. So that's part one. Part two is, when you see it, we know, when we got sent pictures home from what Ramadi

• 1:19:07Jocko Willink?

  was like, and you'd see it on CNN, or you'd see it on the news, you'd see what was happening. The other thing I would think to myself is, this might work. This, this, I, I actually thought this will work. This, that's what I started thinking. This is going to work. Because these people that live there, look, we, they'd now shown that they had the kind of grit to stand up and fight. And, and not so much, you know, the Iraqi army, yes, a little bit, but the local populace, that they, if they got together, they would stand up and they weren't going to put up with these insurgents. And that meant...

• 1:19:50Jocko Willink?

  This could work. And I thought, you know what? Who's going to allow, look, like I said, Sheikh Satar Bazir? He's a gangster. He's a badass. And if he's there, he's not going to let this happen again. Why would they? And now we've got all these tribal guys working together? Why would they ever let their, their now prosperous and peaceful city? Why would they ever let it slide back? I think we're gonna win. And by we, I mean, I think the Iraqi people are going to win and be, I think it's gonna work. And so those two things, knowing the sacrifices and then seeing the results was, was the, you know, it was...

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  So it was enough to convince a critical mass of people in the American government that it could work. I mean, because we were on our way out the door with our tail between our legs when you guys went into Ramadi. And by the end of it, the people who were saying, this is a winnable fight, you know, had enough juice in the government, the Bush administration to push that argument. And they got their chance after the 06 election to, you know, we got the surge in 07. I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say that, I mean, all of that was riding on the outcome of Ramadi.

• 1:21:04Jocko Willink?

  Yes, had we lost Ramadi in that, there's no way anything else would have happened. There's no way the surge would have happened, absolutely. And the surge really was enough to, to, was a good tipping point to start really moving the rest of the country in the right direction. With the same type of strategy that was used in Ramadi. We're not going to do drive-by, you know, counterinsurgency. We're going to get in there. We're going to take control. We're going to show the, we're going to protect the local populace. And then, well, I'm sure we'll get into it next time, but you know, when a plant, when a tree first starts to grow, its roots aren't very deep and it doesn't take much of a windstorm or much rain to uproot that thing and send it down the river.

• 1:21:47Jocko Willink?

  And although this, this tree was looking green and was starting to grow roots, it wasn't there yet.

• 1:21:58Jocko Willink?

  Probably a good time to wrap it up for this one. Um, if you're listening to this podcast,

• 1:22:04Jocko Willink?

  then, well, we appreciate you listening to it. You can also check out our other podcasts. I got a podcast called Jocko Podcast. Got a podcast called The Warrior Kid Podcast, and I got a podcast called Grounded. Daryl has got a podcast called Martyr Made. You can support all these podcasts by getting some gear from Jocko's store or Origin Maine. So jacostore.com or originmaine.com. I also have a consulting company. It's called AshleOnFront.com. We help people learn leadership and align leadership inside companies.

• 1:22:42Jocko Willink?

  And with that,

• 1:22:44Jocko Willink?

  thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl. Out.