INSIDE THE IRAQ WAR | Frank Sobchak | Ep. 341

Col. (Ret.) Frank Sobchak, PhD, has taught at the US Military Academy at West Point, the Joint Special Operations University, Tufts University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in military history from West Point, a MA in Arab studies from Georgetown University, and a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. During his twenty-six-year career in the US Army, he served in various Special Forces assignments including leading teams and companies in 5th Special Forces Group advising foreign militaries and representing US Special Operations Command as a congressional liaison. He served in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and in combat in Iraq. His final assignments included garrison command. He led the Army effort to publish an official history of the Iraq War. That effort spanned five years and included the declassification of over 30,000 pages of documents and several hundred interviews in addition to having access to a similar sized set of documents and interviews that had not yet been released. The project’s culmination resulted in the publication of the 1,500-page two-volume set, The U. S. Army in the Iraq War. https://www.amazon.com/Training-Victory-Advisory-Operations-Afghanistan/dp/B0DQ1LMSCK/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.wJVAKeIvE68lr8Yj4pztV0s_LiOWOPbvXbmZH8cm4cwXsoYt23Lc3Nd0zJEB_PBp1b7jHHi1vLtlGWT2XAii9w. T-AwlHVcvWYSvntI_hf0W_UwDfjwScXpzRHywMepd1k&dib_tag=se&qid=1745348538&refinements=p_27%3AFrank+Sobchak&s=books&sr=1-1 GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! LUCY⬇️ https://lucy.co/HOUSE Use the code "House" for 20% off your first order! The Perfect Jean ⬇️ http://theperfectjean.nyc/HOUSE15 for 15% off!! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolir should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolir is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolir.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolir. This is an advertisement for Zolir

• 0:58Speaker 01

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Yo, what's up, guys? Today's episode sponsored by Lucy Nicotine. It's 100% pure nicotine, always tobacco-free. Lucy Breakers are nicotine patches with an extra little surprise. Each pouch holds a capsule that can't be broken and opened to release extra flavor and hydration. Set yourself up with a subscription and have Lucy delivered straight to your door. I've been rocking these for the last couple of weeks. They sent us a bunch and it's pretty dope.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  I was screwing around with the mango, but now I've gone to the espresso. So I've been dabbling in a bunch of different flavors. So right now I'm super hot on the espresso one. It's really tasty and delicious. I'm a lightweight. I use 2%. Uh, you can get hardcore. They have a ton of, ton of different, uh, levels of nicotine. If you're a more hardcore person, you can go for the higher ones. I'm a, I'm a, my sis, my sis, I have a sensitive system. My mom always used to tell me that. So I go 2%. Um, and I rock it, you know, whenever I'm feeling a little stressed out, a little whatever, after a meal or something like that, I'll throw in a little pouch and it's, uh, it's freaking awesome. I love Lucy. You would love Lucy too. Do us a favor. Go to lucy.co slash house and use the promo code house to get 20% off your first order.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Lucy has a 30 day refund policy. If you change your mind, you can send it back. No sweat. Again, that's lucy.co. Use the code house to get 20% off. And here comes the fine print. Lucy products are only for adults of legal age and every order is age verified. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Thanks guys.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  If you sleep hot at night, you know just how disruptive it can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night or all the above. That's where Ghostbed can help. As the makers of the coolest beds in the world, Ghostbed is your go-to for cooling mattresses, cooling pillows, and even cooling bedding. From their signature Ghost Ice fabric to patented technology that adjusts with your body temperature. Every Ghostbed mattress is designed with cooling in mind. So whether you want to plush your mattress that cushions your shoulders and hips, or a firmer option with exceptional support, your Ghostbed will keep you cool and comfortable all night long. When you purchase a Ghostbed mattress, your comfort is guaranteed. You can try out your mattress for a 101 nights risk-free and make sure it's the right fit for you.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  Plus they offer free shipping and most items ship within 24 hours. If you're not sure which Ghostbed is for you, check out their mattress quiz. You'll answer a few questions and get your personalized recommendation. Or reach out to their friendly team of sleep experts for all the help you need. Even better. Team House listeners can get 50% off site wide for a limited time. Just visit ghostbed.com/ house and use code HOUSE at checkout. Again, that's ghostbed.com/ house with code HOUSE at checkout to save a whopping 50% off site wide. And if you're not in the market for a mattress, check out their pillows, their bedding. They have all kinds of great stuff there. So thanks to Ghostbed and check them out.

• 4:32Speaker 05

  Special operations.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 4:52Jack Murphy?

  Hey, welcome to episode 341 of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest on today's show, we're very happy to have in studio Frank Sobchak. He is a career special forces officer, now retired, and he's the author of Training for Victory. This was a really great book. It has five case studies on El Salvador, the Philippines, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq, examining our partner force relationships and where do they go well, where do they go wrong? And we'll get into all of that. But Frank, thank you for joining us on the show.

• 5:27Speaker 07

  Thanks, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 5:29Jack Murphy?

  I'll prop this up over here. So let's start off a little bit talking about you. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, sort of how you grew up and how that took you towards military service?

• 5:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I did not come from a military family. When actually I went to West Point or I got accepted to West Point, my dad literally told me, why are you going into the Army? The Army is for stupid people and schmucks. And he was not entirely wrong. So, so my dad, the reason kind of I was attracted into military service, and my dad was drafted for World War II, but he served in the Panama Canal. Both my dad and his brother were enlisted men. His brother was in 79th Infantry Division, kind of fought his way across Europe. Purple Heart, CIB. Years later, used his CIB when I earned the CIB. So it was very cool.

• 6:27Speaker 07

  How I kinda got into it was my dad was an orphan. And he went from literally nothing, you know, clothes on his back in a boys' home, to upper middle class, electrical engineer, 16 patents, kind of the American dream.

• 6:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 07

  Right? And, you know, to me, it was, and he was patriotic, and he appreciated, I mean, he just appreciated what America had done for him. And so to a degree, it was paying back, it was an appreciation of what we have here. And that's what drew me to military service. I was definitely the black sheep, for sure, of the family.

• 7:12Jack Murphy?

  But you got accepted to West Point, so that's a... And what year is this?

• 7:15Speaker 07

  So it was, I started in 88.

• 7:18Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 7:19Speaker 07

  Graduated in 92.

• 7:20Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 7:22Speaker 07

  I actually went to enlisted as a reservist, as a combat engineer before, because, you know, we had no military experience in our family. It's like no one to be like, hey, what's it like? Other than my dad, who's drafted and is like, it's horrible, you don't wanna do it. You know?

• 7:42Speaker 07

  So I did that kind of as a little experiment to kind of test the waters.

• 7:45Jack Murphy?

  So how was West Point in the late 1980s?

• 7:49Speaker 07

  I mean, you know, West Point sucks. It's, you know, it's organized torture, but it gives you, I mean, great opportunities. You know, you have experiences that, I mean, you're so fortunate. I did an exchange with the British Army, went to Sandhurst, we went to the field. You know, my second year, spent two weeks with the Brits in the field. Things that, you know, a lot of times, you might spend a career in the Army, like or a tour in the Army, and just never have the chance to do.

• 8:24Speaker 07

  I mean, you know, the other thing is, is the... It sucks and it's hard, but it really builds your camaraderie and the closeness of your classmates and your friends. And, you know, it's just lifelong friends that, you know, you know you can always count on.

• 8:43Jack Murphy?

  Last episode that we filmed earlier today, actually, Lindsay, was the first captain, I think, is the exact term.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, first captain.

• 8:52Speaker 07

  Very cool.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:53Jack Murphy?

  Like the fourth woman to ever have that.

• 8:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 8:56Jack Murphy?

  Position at West Point, yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 07

  Very cool.

• 8:58Jack Murphy?

  So she did pretty well for herself over there.

• 9:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 07

  I didn't do that well.

• 9:04Jack Murphy?

  You were the guy that had to, what, what, what is the, when you get demerits, you have to like walk around the.

• 9:09Speaker 07

  Walk the area, you walk the area, um, when you get demerits or punishment. I was not bad. I mean, I only had eight hours.

• 9:17Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 9:18Speaker 07

  Um, so I kinda kept my nose mostly clean, you know, matter, truth be told, I just didn't get caught most of the time.

• 9:27Speaker 07

  But, you know, it's.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  So when you went to West Point, before you went, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do in the army? And did that change or.

• 9:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Form while you were at West Point?

• 9:42Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, this is, uh, that's, this is part of the unfortunate thing, I think, coming from a non-military family, not knowing anything about really service, other than what my dad and my uncle had talked to me about. And, you know.

• 9:59Speaker 07

  Shocker, the West Point experience is not like the experience in the real army.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:03Speaker 07

  Like, nothing like it.

• 10:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and your, your dad and was your uncle, I mean, they experienced the massive global war drafted probably for like a year's period of time.

• 10:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:13Jack Murphy?

  A little bit different than what you were experiencing.

• 10:15Speaker 07

  Completely different from the, you know, volunteer army. So I went to West Point, wasn't really sure what I, you know, was gonna do after graduating. I actually went military intelligence, um, for the first four years and found it was not a good fit for me. And I was really kinda fortunate, though, one of my bosses, my company commander, it's 101st infantry guy. And this is back in the day, there's pre-email, right? And, but they're sending notices through you through division mail, like photocopies. And I had a photocopy that I was looking at on my desk and it was, you know, try out for SF. And he looked at me and he's like, I know you're frank, he's like, you're a good fit for it.

• 10:59Speaker 07

  And he's like, if you don't do it, you'll regret it the rest of your life.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 11:03Speaker 07

  And that was one of the best pieces of advice I've ever been given. And, you know.

• 11:10Speaker 07

  Went through, made it, you know.

• 11:13Jack Murphy?

  So you get to group then, what is it, ninety-six or so?

• 11:17Speaker 07

  No, I get to group ninety-eight.

• 11:19Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 11:19Speaker 07

  So, you know, stopovers, Ranger School, Q Course, you know, Armor Advanced Course, you know, kind of like the pathway.

• 11:28Jack Murphy?

  The Armor Advanced Course, do you have to go through that as like Captain's Career Course?

• 11:31Speaker 07

  Captain's Career Course.

• 11:32Jack Murphy?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 11:32Speaker 07

  Yeah. And at that point, SF for officers was sending a decent amount of guys there because of like the FID mission, you know, Middle East, a lot of tanks, a lot of mechanized warfare. So there was kind of an emphasis on sending at least a good slew of the guys who would go to Fifth Group to the Armor Course. Yeah.

• 11:56Jack Murphy?

  Very interesting. Cool, so you get to Fifth Group.

• 12:01Jack Murphy?

  Tell us about landing on a team in the now mid to late nineteen nineties, what you guys were up to.

• 12:08Speaker 07

  You know, there's no better job in the Army than being an SF Team Leader. Like, it is not. It's just, at least I was very fortunate, I had a good team. It was young, but still a couple, enough experienced guys to, you know, have strength there. And they're hungry, they wanted to deploy, they wanted to, you know, go out and do things. So I got a, you know, trip to Kosovo. And during that time period, we did three JTF Six missions. And then this is all-

• 12:45Jack Murphy?

  Down on the border?

• 12:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is all after the period where the Marines shot the Mexican kid on the Mexican side of the border, and then they shot, shut down the hide site operations. And effectively, we're doing FID with law enforcement agencies.

• 12:59Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 13:00Speaker 07

  But it was also kind of a cost effective because they would pay for our travel out there, we would pay for our trucks to get out there.

• 13:10Jack Murphy?

  And you're doing desert training, basically.

• 13:11Speaker 07

  Exactly right. Piggyback like two, three weeks of desert training out there. Do just cool stuff, go out to Imperial Sand Dunes, you know, National Park in California, and driving over three hundred foot dunes at night with nods, I mean, it's just- It's awesome. It's uh.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, you had the whole like Anzabarego out there and yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 07

  So.

• 13:35Jack Murphy?

  And then Kosovo is interesting that you got that trip because that was mostly like 10th group guys, right?

• 13:39Speaker 07

  Yep. They had a small contingent called the UAE LCE. Again, a FID SFA mission.

• 13:45Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 13:46Speaker 07

  Where there's a combined Amrati and Jordanian SOF presence. And so we were there to be their advisors to connect with the, you know, the AOB that was there. Um, as well as, you know, there were some early kind of rumblings of, you know, Islamic extremism.

• 14:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 07

  Was starting to pop up even then in Kosovo.

• 14:09Jack Murphy?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:09Speaker 07

  That we were, some of our guys were plugged into.

• 14:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, Iranian influence too.

• 14:14Speaker 07

  Iranian.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ashkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 14:30Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Work, freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 16:11Speaker 07

  There was more Cindy.

• 16:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 16:15Speaker 07

  Threat, at least when I was there. I mean, I could have changed afterwards, but the threat was more AQ or, you know, pre-AQ or, you know, just Cindy extremists.

• 16:28Jack Murphy?

  And so then where were you guys at when 9/11 happened?

• 16:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was at Georgetown studying actually Arab studies.

• 16:37Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 16:38Speaker 07

  I was doing like five and a half Arabic a day, as well as a regular master's load. I was gonna go teach at West Point. And yeah, I mean, you know, saw the Pentagon burning from the Hill at Georgetown and here a fast mover, you know, F-16 flying over, you know, US City, which is, you know, at that point it was just unimaginable. This is something that, you know, you knew the world had kind of forever changed to that point. And, yeah.

• 17:13Jack Murphy?

  And what was the next stop for you after Georgetown?

• 17:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, I went to teach at West Point for two years. And, you know, I went to Branch, asked, I was like, hey, Boss, can you get me in the fight, you know, like, speak Arabic. I'm a, you know, two plus, two plus three at that point.

• 17:31Jack Murphy?

  Okay, yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 07

  So really, like, very functional. And, you know, it's like, look, you know, if you get a strategic reserve, you'll have your chance. And I did have my chance.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  So, yeah, taught at West Point for two years, teaching history. I mean, I got to do Best Ranger during that time period too. And at Leavenworth too, so I did it twice.

• 17:57Jack Murphy?

  And then back to fifth group after that?

• 17:58Speaker 07

  Back to fifth group.

• 17:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, I had a Brava company in five twenty, took to Iraq, just south of Mosul and Nawa province.

• 18:06Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:07Speaker 07

  So, Hatra to Mahmur to Hamam al-Aliel and then Qayara also. Kind of a, you know, area that really went from, because it included past the, the green line into, you know, Kurdistan, all the way to the border, up to the southern elements of Mosul.

• 18:34Jack Murphy?

  And so you're a company commander at this point?

• 18:36Speaker 07

  Company commander.

• 18:36Jack Murphy?

  What was, so you have six teams over there?

• 18:39Speaker 07

  I have four teams.

• 18:40Jack Murphy?

  You have four teams, okay.

• 18:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 18:41Jack Murphy?

  What were your company's partner forces at the time?

• 18:46Speaker 07

  So the partner forces, this, the Iraqi military had basically collapsed in November of, I think it was November oh four, and they hadn't really been fully reconstituted. So we deployed, if I remember correctly, in May. And it was like an off cycle where they deployed a conglomerate, like third group, nineteenth group, fifth group, under a fifth group battalion headquarters to like try to get the Iraqi army in Nawa kind of back up to par. And that was the core of it. So we had everything from a battalion that was mostly Shia, that had stickers of Mokhtada Sadr on their AK, you know, butt stocks,

• 19:29Speaker 07

  to, you know, Kurdish, you know, former Peshmerga battalions that you'd go into their areas.

• 19:36Jack Murphy?

  PUK guys.

• 19:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, I think they were KDP actually, on, on the ones that we were with. With, you know, the Kurdish flag as opposed to Iraqi flag and, you know, their well organized arms rooms as opposed to the general chaos to on the border, a Sunni former sheikh, who everyone just referred to as, you know, Tony Soprano.

• 20:08Jack Murphy?

  Sacks of money down in the basement of the mosque?

• 20:11Speaker 07

  Uh, would not surprise me. They were quite crazy stories to hear. But, and also he's kind of pretty thuggish, so.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  So how did that deployment play out for you guys?

• 20:28Speaker 07

  Um, you know, it was, you know, it's not a high adventure. It was not like, you know, flew to Ramadi.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:36Speaker 07

  Um, you know, get shot at occasionally, but nothing like, you know, not high drama.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 07

  Um, so not in the thick of anything. Um, some of the teams, um, you know, other companies kind of had more, you know, they're out at Tel Afar, um, so it was kind of, there's operation that ran there.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  Tel Afar was nuts back then.

• 20:58Speaker 07

  Yeah. Um, but, you know, it was a,

• 21:04Speaker 07

  it was a mix because, you know, even by that point, it was very clear that the Iraqis were really eliminating what we were, at least with the regular army, what we could kind of do and, reach into their units and kind of control. And, you know, it'd be like, okay, you know, why are we having the same platoon, you know, rotate through from different battalions? I thought we're supposed to partner with one battalion for the whole six months. You know, we're not like basic trainers where platform drill sergeants, the guys come in, we train them for a month and they leave and then you're rotating your next unit in. Like, that's not, you know,

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 07

  what we signed up for. And that's not what we want you to do because it's pointless.

• 21:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:49Speaker 07

  Um, but regardless of the cleaning up the chain, you know, nothing ever happened.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  What was your, you know, you're fairly senior at this point in time and, you know, you have more of a direct line to, you know, command decisions and things like that.

• 22:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Uh, than, you know, than a guy on an A-team, for instance. What was your impression of the US management of the war?

• 22:18Speaker 07

  So that's a great question. I distinctly remember when General Casey, who is the MNFI commander, he flew up, we all went up to Mosul, the whole battalion, you know, team sergeants, team leaders and team warrants, and met with him as he briefed on the campaign plan and kind of how we fit into it. And at that point, the whole strategy was basically transition. And it was that within like a year or two, we were going to shrunk down to like two bases and we were going to minimize contact with the Iraqis because we were effectively creating antibodies, where, you know, there were more, we were creating more insurgents than we killed

• 23:03Speaker 07

  just because we were, the Americans being there.

• 23:05Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 23:06Speaker 07

  And, you know, we sat through that brief. I remember another major and I, and afterwards, we looked at each other, and I can't remember who it was. One of us said, "We're really gonna lose this thing, aren't we?" And the other one of us said, "Yeah, we are." Because, I mean, if you know the just basic precepts of counterinsurgency theory, like, transition, particularly when the Iraqis aren't nowhere near ready. And, you know, this is like a month or two into it, where we're like, "Holy smokes, we got like 10 years of work with these guys to like get them to like where they need to be."

• 23:42Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 23:43Speaker 07

  And they're telling us we're gonna be transitioning to four bases in like 18 months and we're packing up and leaving? Like, that's not gonna work.

• 23:52Jack Murphy?

  Right. Do you think that's because they were just, like, on our side, just unserious about the war? Or were they really so deluded that they believed that this was a possibility?

• 24:03Speaker 07

  So I think there's two factors going on. Is I do think Casey and General Abbasid, who was the CENTCOM commander at that point, I think they actually both believed in kind of the antibody theory. And that we were creating more insurgents by just being there.

• 24:21Jack Murphy?

  So I want to take a minute today to tell you guys about The Perfect Gene. I've been wearing them for a few weeks now and really enjoy them and I just want to share it with our audience. You know, sometimes jeans have this problem where, you know, you guys all have seen these skinny jeans that they like crush your balls and, you know, it's just not comfortable to wear. Or the other way around, jeans are like too baggy, you know, you have that sort of like diaper in your ass area, it looks like. So there are these problems that, you know, different fits of different types of jeans have. And The Perfect Gene strives to fix that. Both the fit, but also the mobility, the maneuverability. It has a stretchy fabric, like they say it's like

• 25:03Jack Murphy?

  yoga-ready, but you know, I would say it's athletics-ready. You know, moving furniture, doing things around the house, you're not going to have that like super tight, like constricted fit that you feel like you're not going to be able to move around in. And there are over 400,000 people out there wearing these jeans at this point, so not all of them can be wrong. I hope you guys will go and check them out. So a few scenarios where you can wear these jeans and where they really come together. Everything from, you know, doing yard work or doing things around your house, if you have to move furniture around, or you have to do handiwork, they're perfectly comfortable. But you can wear them, you know, getting your man spread on, on the subway, if

• 25:48Jack Murphy?

  that's your thing. So The Perfect Gene is great for all kinds of different environments, whether it's doing handiwork around the house, or on the job, or athletics. And we really hope you guys will go and check them out. For a limited time, our listeners get 15% off their first order plus free shipping at theperfectgene.nyc, or Google The Perfect Gene and use the code HOUSE15 for 15% off. That's 15% off for new customers at theperfectgene.nyc with promo code HOUSE15. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. So fuck your khakis and get The Perfect Gene.

• 26:30Speaker 07

  And there, you know, the prescription for that was like, okay, minimize presence, go to minimal footprint. And, you know, that works if A, you know, you don't have a civil war to contend with. B, the political and military side of the Iraqis are capable of being transitioned to. And C, that if you really have beaten back the insurgency to the point where you don't have that kind of threat also. And none of those were viable at that point. So to me, it was madness.

• 27:11Speaker 07

  And I'll tell you, so my last job in the army was one of the writers, and I took over the, you know, writing the operational history of the Iraq war. And going into it,

• 27:28Speaker 07

  my, like, core premise was like, no, these guys couldn't have believed that. Like, it's nuts to believe. Right. Like, and I sat down, and I think I had 27 hours with General Casey of like, person-to-person interviews. 18 hours with General Sanchez, who's the, you know, CTF 7 commander from like, 04 to 06. And Colonel Abizadeh, interviewed General Abizadeh also, all sorts of others. And they actually really believed it. Wow. Like, I, you know, it wasn't, you know, and going through the documents, they really believed it.

• 28:09Speaker 07

  And

• 28:11Speaker 07

  in some ways, you know, afterwards, they argued that how things turned out proved them right. In effect, that they wanted to transition because theoretically, they didn't think it was ever possible in Iraq.

• 28:26Speaker 07

  But yeah, I, it's weird. I think there, you know, my original premise was that there's so much political pressure on them, you know, from the Bush administration who just wanted to move on, as well as from the Title X Army, you know, the organized, trained, equipped, and other Marines, other elements of the Joint Chiefs that were like, whoa, like, we are way overcommitted here. We're gonna lose transformation, we're gonna lose all these weapons systems that we wanted to use to focus on the next, you know, peer, near-peer competitor, and we want to get out of Iraq. I thought that there was so much pressure on them from all these sources that they just decided, okay, yeah, well, gave my best

• 29:10Speaker 07

  military advice and I moved on. But their best military advice was that transition.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  I'm curious because, you know, I spent like three years in and out of there a lot, and I used to think about like, what's going on? Because we see, you know, when you do sixty day trips at a time, but you do three trips a year over, you know, three years, and you see, you see the same thing over and over again. I felt as though our government was too hung up on the concept of liberation, right? We liberate these people from Saddam, and then it's done. Where when you see past World War II, for instance, you break it,

• 30:00Speaker 04

  you buy it. So, we stayed in Germany, we stayed in Japan, until those countries were rebuilt, and we didn't shy away from the word occupation, where this is like, it was such a-

• 30:11Speaker 07

  Or nation building is the other that we shied away from.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. It is such a like, it was such a politically sense, at no point in time did anybody ever want to say, we are, we are occupying Iraq. And so, we basically, like I said, we went in there and we kicked it over, and then we went, okay, you know, we're here to facilitate, but we're not doing it for you.

• 30:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, and I agree with you completely. So like, there was, it was crazy because like, the joint staffs, there are these interviews like beforehand that there are like unquoted members of the, you know, GOs who wouldn't give their names, who'd say, hey, I want to post a big sign on the Pentagon that says, "We don't do nation building." And it was a combination of the uniformed services, but also the civilian defense leaders, you know, whether it be Rumsfeld or others within the administration at that point, who were allergic to it.

• 31:13Jack Murphy?

  Like Somalia and things like that, they'd seen in the past.

• 31:15Speaker 07

  Completely. Somalia, Kosovo, you know, Yugoslavia, all those they thought were a waste of resources. And I mean, I think you can make a viable strategic argument on the value or lack thereof of Kosovo or Balkans or Somalia, and I think there are arguments that can be made either way. But to then drag that into, okay, we're gonna, you know, topple Iraq, which is the traditional counterbalance to Iran, which is our greatest threat in the region, and then just leave, like...

• 31:57Jack Murphy?

  Seems suboptimal.

• 31:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's some strategic lack of foresight there that is, that's, you know, where it's on criminal negligence. And so there really was, I mean, the, many of the civilian leaders, one of the civilian leaders actually had proposed that there was one brigade, right? I need to remember the, there was intrinsic action or whatever they called it, the one brigade on the, like, you know, doing not peacekeeping, but deterrence in Kuwait.

• 32:33Speaker 07

  And the civilian leadership is like, we have a brigade there. We can launch now. And the military leaders were like, wait, no, we need like, you know, four or five divisions. You know, and there's the famous engagement where General Shinseki and then Secretary White, Secretary of the Army White, who actually gave testimony before Congress where they said, well, we would need several hundred thousand soldiers to be able to properly, you know, do nation building in Iraq.

• 33:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 07

  And they got, effectively, White got fired over it. Shinseki got his career terminated early. He didn't get extended.

• 33:13Speaker 07

  Rumsfeld didn't go to his retirement. So clearly, you know, lost off the Christmas or holiday cards. And, you know, they, they, they thought that a single brigade, kind of like on the Afghan model, with SOF, terminal guidance, JTACs, et cetera, precision guided munitions, would be able to topple Saddam. And there was also this bizarre notion, like you said, that, you know, like, almost like the liberation of Paris in World War II, that rather than, you know, flowers, they're gonna throw falafels at us.

• 33:47Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 33:47Speaker 07

  You know, like to thank us. I mean, and, you know, obviously, that was like totally like off, it was insane. But those were the notions that we kind of went into it with. And it, it, in some ways, I mean, there are many, it was interesting because we also had access to all of the detainee interviews with, with all these insurgent leaders. And there was also another, I don't know if you've ever heard of Bill Nahr? He, I think he was an SF guy. He ended up going to JSOW. But one of the projects he did was, he went into Jordan in like the 11 to like 13 time period,

• 34:31Speaker 07

  and interviewed all these former Sunni insurgent leaders. And so many of them, like, it was like almost the same comments. They're like, yeah, you know? When you guys toppled Saddam, you know, we, we had hope. Like, we were, we were thinking like, this is America, this is, you know, the country that, you know, put a man on the moon, that, you know, blotted out the skies of Nazi Germany with, you know, bombers to like blotted out the sun, there were so many. But you guys couldn't even get gas to the gas stations in the third country with the most oil in the world. Like, they, they just, it just, they're like, you know, so we, and I mean, you know, the conspiracy theories are so much throughout the Middle East.

• 35:16Speaker 07

  So they were like, well, you know.

• 35:18Jack Murphy?

  They think it's intentional, like, oh, this is part of your plan.

• 35:21Speaker 07

  That's exactly right. They're like, well, what is this, is it intentional? Are they trying to bring, you know, the Persians over, you know, which is.

• 35:28Jack Murphy?

  The, the level of paranoia reaches the point to sometimes like, not even exaggerating, where like, it'll rain outside and then be like, CIA did that.

• 35:38Jack Murphy?

  But, and I think a lot of it does come from like, American movies, like, our, our culture, the way it projects into the, like, because I remember talking to people and they'd be like, if you guys really wanted Osama bin Laden dead, you'd just send Bruce Willis and kill him and it'd be over.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  They, they, they, there's depth, they do believe the movies. They believe that America has this omnipotence.

• 35:57Jack Murphy?

  And we backflip over triple strand concertina wire and all that good stuff.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  And, you know, just, just the war plans in general, like, when, when we went in, I, I, I remember going through these bases, these empty Iraqi bases that had been stripped of, you know, all the copper and, and everything. And I was like, where are the Iraqi forces? Like, if we weren't fighting Iraq, right? If we were, if we were, if we were getting rid of Saddam, why was there not a psyops campaign? Why were they not dropping flyers over these bases telling the Iraqi army, hey, put your weapons down, stay, remain in place, we're taking over your payroll? Like, where, like, where, where did we come up with this idea of completely

• 36:46Speaker 04

  obliterating every aspect of a country? And then not taking responsibility for building that country back up?

• 36:52Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I mean, there, there's so many just, just crazy, like, when you, you know, historically review it, it's like madness, because there's no logic to it.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 07

  And the.

• 37:05Speaker 07

  You know, we were fortunate, we actually got four hours to interview President Bush, kind of talk to him. There are three people who refused us to be interviewed.

• 37:16Jack Murphy?

  Rummy?

• 37:17Speaker 07

  One of them was Rumsfeld. And so unfortunately, we didn't get his perspective, we got Bremer's perspective, we got Secretary Condoleezza Rice's perspective, so many different people. And the core question of CPA orders, number one and two, which disbanded the Iraqi army, and then outlawed the Baath Party, it's gonna be one of the historical questions that I think it's gonna probably take years to figure out.

• 37:47Jack Murphy?

  So I'll, mild spoiler alert, and I can't tell this story because it's not really my story to tell, but Tim Weiner knows a lot about how that unfolded with Ian Bremer and the de-Bathification, and I believe it's gonna be in his new book that's coming out.

• 38:03Speaker 07

  Cool.

• 38:04Jack Murphy?

  He told it to me, but it was like over a drink in a bar, I don't want to get ahead of his work that hasn't been published yet, but, so stay tuned for that, but it is an interesting subject.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  I would be curious, I've thrown a lot of shade Bremer's way since, you know, since that time, and I would be very curious, and maybe I'm completely wrong, but I would be curious how your interview with him went.

• 38:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I was not in that interview with Bremer myself, I did Bush, got a bunch of others.

• 38:36Jack Murphy?

  Tell us about W., I mean, I would be fascinated to hear his perspective.

• 38:40Speaker 07

  So, so one of the things we did ask him about that question, and you know, he said, "Look, I'm a hands-off manager, I trust the people who are on the ground more than the people in Washington, and I'm gonna let, you know, the people there call audibles. And when, if they want to make a decision based on what they're seeing, I'm gonna let them make the decision based on what they're seeing." So his core premise was that, okay, it happened in Iraq. We, it was kind of conflicting guidance, and it wasn't clear to us even from what we could, because we didn't have access to the National Security Council, the White House, all those kind of records are, we

• 39:21Speaker 07

  didn't, you know, we had CENTCOM, we had, you know, MNFI, we had CJTF-7, all those, but not, and you know, not the Joint Staff either.

• 39:33Speaker 07

  The, there was a notion though, from some within the Defense Department, that there's this perception that the Baath Party equals the Nazi Party. And that so to reinvigorate Iraq and renew Iraq, that it had to be expunged. Which is bizarre because it like, totally is not historically accurate.

• 39:58Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 39:59Speaker 07

  Like, we-

• 40:00Jack Murphy?

  It's more like the CCP in a way, or whatever, right? It's more a-

• 40:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, and, and I mean, we, we employed Nazis, you know, after-

• 40:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, right.

• 40:10Speaker 07

  Nazi Party members in Germany and in our space program after the war.

• 40:17Speaker 07

  Part of it is because we wanted the trains to run on time. And there's, you know, there's, there's a degree of, there's, you know,

• 40:27Speaker 07

  you know, horrificness to it, but there's also a practicality to it, that there's, you know-

• 40:31Jack Murphy?

  When they run your public works, when they run everything-

• 40:34Speaker 07

  Everything.

• 40:34Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 40:35Speaker 07

  You know, to be a Baath, you know, if you're not a Baath Party member, you're gonna be a janitor.

• 40:40Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 40:41Speaker 07

  It's, it's just, like you said, it's the CCP, you know, the Communist Party, you know? Like, if you're not a member, good luck.

• 40:48Jack Murphy?

  So, where, uh, do you think the disconnect came about? Because what President Bush was describing there is, on its face of it, not really a bad thing. He was delegating decisions down to guys who are on the ground and saying, "You have to address the terrain as you see it." But nonetheless, you know, all these other problems we've been mentioning, I mean, where did the thing, did it start to come apart at the GO level? That's the popular-

• 41:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:12Jack Murphy?

  -answer perhaps, but maybe it's too obvious.

• 41:15Speaker 07

  So, the Bush interview is very interesting because, you know, in some ways, you know, politicians tell very little, you get very little out of interviews. Because you're just not gonna, they're not gonna bare their souls. Particularly to someone that they've never met before, who isn't from the same culture they are, you know? And, and, you know, some GOs gave useless interviews, others, I had three GOs break down like sobbing, like during the interviews, like I had to stop the recording.

• 41:45Jack Murphy?

  Good. No, I'm just kidding.

• 41:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, and, and, so there's, is a mix, you know? Bush, it was, one of the most interesting things was, you could almost tell by like his- His body posture and how when we started talking about Rumsfeld, it changed a little bit, kind of from that jovial, I mean, you know, I'm just gonna say it, kind of goofballish almost, like, you know,

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:11Speaker 07

  He's a fun guy, right? He's, you know, um, to, I almost detected a little bit of anger, you know, and just reading the, the,

• 42:23Speaker 07

  reading him. Um, so I think that particularly early on, there were a lot of mistakes made because of Rumsfeld. But I think in parallel, at least my premise is that the uniformed services, the generals, the strategy, the transition strategy was completely wrong for, for the time period.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 07

  And, and, you know,

• 42:53Speaker 07

  if we'd done the surge three years earlier, the whole thing might have turned out okay. Um, but instead, we, you know, tried the transition strategy while a civil war, basically a slow burn of wars.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Was the surge in oh seven?

• 43:10Speaker 07

  Surge is in oh seven.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Cause there was a mini surge in oh four, right? Uh, I'm trying to remember. But I know there was a, a major surge in oh seven.

• 43:18Speaker 07

  The big surge is oh seven.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:20Jack Murphy?

  So I want to come back to the Iraq war study. I mean, there's a lot to talk about there, but also I want to talk about the controversy, but, continuing along your career, you spent some time, uh, S3 operations?

• 43:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was the S3 for first battalion.

• 43:34Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 43:35Speaker 07

  And fifth group.

• 43:36Jack Murphy?

  And then, uh, legal at Tasha?

• 43:38Speaker 07

  No, so I went to Legislative Affairs for SOCOM.

• 43:42Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 43:42Speaker 07

  And so, I actually liked that job.

• 43:45Jack Murphy?

  That's up on the hill, right?

• 43:46Speaker 07

  It's on the hill.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Congress.

• 43:47Speaker 07

  So yeah, you, you are the liaison between SOCOM and Congress. And you're doing everything from budgets to authorizations to your, like, the travel guide for congressional members and staff when they're doing.

• 44:05Jack Murphy?

  Visits to the base.

• 44:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, CODELs.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  CODELs.

• 44:07Speaker 07

  CODELs and staff Dells. And I ended up mostly on the Senate side, mostly in the Armed Services Committee, working with them, but a little bit on appropriators too. And, I mean, I, I like the job for a couple of reasons. You know, one of the authorities that we ended up fighting and. Protecting was the live tissue training authority. There were, there was a member, PETA.

• 44:33Jack Murphy?

  There was a movement to shut that down.

• 44:34Speaker 07

  There was a movement to shut it down in, it was either 10 or 11.

• 44:39Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 44:40Speaker 07

  Where PETA had gotten something like.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 44:57Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 46:08Speaker 07

  Forty-seven members of Congress to sign on to a bill to terminate live tissue training.

• 46:13Jack Murphy?

  Wild. They did end up, they contracted out now. It's like kind of the workaround.

• 46:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 07

  So, so then it was, it was serious. And so we came up with a strategy and, you know, like, I'm like, look, let's bring wounded guys and like literally go into these guys who are, we're going to play hardball and go into the guys who've signed on to this bill. Predictably find a constituent, one of their constituents from their district who's wounded, who can say, "Look, I'm alive because of live tissue training."

• 46:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:44Speaker 07

  And we literally had fifteen people on that bill take their name off the bill.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  That's amazing. So for people who-

• 46:51Speaker 07

  And so it collapsed. And it was like, "Okay, you guys can come back in five years and try it again." But we killed it. Dead.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  For people who are watching who might not know what we're talking about, live tissue training is generally taking a goat or, you know, some other farm animal, but, and pumping them full of ketamine so they don't feel anything. And then inflicting gunshot wounds or some sort of wound on them so that the medics and other people, like anybody really, on a team, can do actual live tissue training, stabilizing, lifesaving procedures, things like that. Things that really matter.

• 47:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Uh, in the field, in these traumatic environments. Uh, and it's, it's really priceless training for people who get it. And so PETA decided that, you know, that it was cool.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  And you guys managed to circumvent that.

• 47:52Speaker 07

  We killed the bill.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 07

  And another occasion, there were two years when the Army, and it's bizarre, like totally not understanding like how the system works. They came up, they thought they had this principled approach that, "Okay, we're not going to try for any earmarks or ads. We're not going to try for any correctional ads."

• 48:13Speaker 04

  No pork barrel politics?

• 48:15Speaker 07

  We're not going to do any pork barrel politics. We're not going to submit a UFR list, an unfinanced requirements list. Man.

• 48:24Speaker 07

  I made like two hundred fifty million dollars a year for SOCOM. I got additional helicopters, I got freeze dried plasma, I got all sorts. I got, you know, dog handling teams and, and, uh, you know, all sorts of like, the SEAL got boats. I mean, we just cleared house those years because the way the game is played on the Hill is- That money's there.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:48Speaker 07

  And it's gonna go to someone.

• 48:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you have to fight for it.

• 48:51Speaker 07

  You have to fight for it. And if the army takes themselves out of the competition, that money is still there for the taking.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:00Speaker 07

  And you have to make a good argument for it.

• 49:02Jack Murphy?

  Hence why SOCOM has you up there.

• 49:04Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Did you, I imagine you learned quite a bit about that side and how it interacts with the military. I mean, how it works in general, but particularly how it works with the military.

• 49:16Speaker 07

  Yeah. You see how pork, you know, you see how sausage is made.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 07

  And I mean, there's good and bad and, you know, it's like anything. And many of the members have no clue. Yeah, the members meaning like senators or members of the House representative. But their staffs that sometimes are like the, you know, really good and decent and smart and hardworking people that really care, particularly on the Armed Services Committees.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 07

  And there's a lot of veterans on them too.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:51Speaker 07

  Um, and people who just really,

• 49:55Speaker 07

  and this is in the era before like partisan politics, I mean, it was oh seven to eleven, where like the people on the Armed Services Committee, man, you know, they were trying to do what's right for us, for those in the fight. And I mean, you know, one of the funny, well, ironic things is, you know where drones came from, the Predator and the Reaper? It was a congressional ad. The Air Force did not want to buy them because, you know, it's not a pointy-nosed fighter pilot or a bomber pilot.

• 50:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:31Speaker 07

  So they totally opposed it. It was a forced ad where a California, uh, House member, I believe, forced them to, you know, support and buy the, the original Predators from General Atomics. And the Air Force fought it every step of the way. And they, they're like, no, this is the wave of the future. You're, you, and you need an aircraft that can loiter over your ground guys for like hours.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:01Speaker 07

  Like, I, I was in a, sorry, I was in a one meeting where I went out to Vegas and was at Creech and... It was a joint Air Force and SOCOM one. And so they're seeing our stuff and the Air Force's stuff. And I literally had an Air Force two-star where it's an appropriator. And appropriators are like the gods of Congress. A real appropriator, a member. And this Air Force general says the F-22 is a coin aircraft. Right? Like, I mean, it's got like 15 minutes of playtime probably, or 20 minutes. And it's got like, what, two, three, four bombs maybe max? No gun, nothing. And I literally laughed in front of him.

• 51:45Speaker 07

  Like, I laughed in front of him, which is, you know, I was not invited to a future Air Force ones. Trips I ended up mostly going with, I found a guy on the Army side that would take me on trips. And, you know, then we had this discussion with him on, you know, how little value an F-22 is to guys in the fight.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:07Speaker 07

  It's no value whatsoever. And it's, you know, that was, to me, why I enjoyed that job is because even if you, doesn't result in any change, it puts a seed there, right? Where they start thinking about it. And, you know, you just never know what may come of it.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  How, how often? Because obviously the person who pushed for the drones and said this is the future of warfare. I mean, it, you know, it's very possible that it was General Dynamics who like pitched it. And, and you could say that,

• 52:44Speaker 07

  Could be.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  You know, you could say that, you know, that they were working commercial interest. But in that case, they were 100% correct. But then you have somebody who says that this is a coin aircraft. Meanwhile, we see that since Vietnam, they've tried to get rid of the AC-130, which is a coin aircraft.

• 53:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:05Jack Murphy?

  Oh, do we want to go on a big rant about the coin aircraft that we finally got? The air tractor after all the?

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Nashing of teeth about that.

• 53:14Speaker 07

  All the willing and gnashing of teeth.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, you know, I mean, it's funny, I even harken back to a time period.

• 53:25Speaker 07

  When we were there, where, I mean, Congress is like anything else, it's a brain of human beings.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 53:31Speaker 07

  And, and there's the good, the bad, and the ugly.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:34Speaker 07

  Right, and there, and there are good people, and what I try to do is I try to find and work with the good people. There are other people who, even in our office, who would.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Work with Frank Underwood?

• 53:46Speaker 07

  Would work with people who were a little, you know, not exactly where I would like to work with. But, you know, they would.

• 53:56Speaker 07

  They would still get things done, you know.

• 54:00Speaker 07

  But, so we had an occasion where the SOCOM commander wanted to buy a whole bunch of, I think they're super tucano aircraft made by Embraer. Which is a Brazilian company and not a US company, and that's what SOCOM wanted to be, the coin aircraft.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 54:16Speaker 07

  Great loiter, prop, you know, turboprop, extended range, shit ton of stuff, you can hang on it. And, you know, it came down, and I, if I recall correctly, whether it was Beach or Cessna or both. Were up in arms and literally, you know, we had to bring, I don't know, whether it's the deputy or the vice. Down to like defend our position, and they're like, you know, and, and they're working through the members from wherever, you know, Beach and Cessna are. To.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Wichita and Seattle, probably.

• 54:54Speaker 07

  I, I think so, yeah, I think one's from Kansas and the other, yeah.

• 54:58Speaker 07

  Anyway, and, you know, they're like, oh, buy our aircraft, and, and SOCOM's like, no, they, you, it's got, you know, half the loiter time. Half the, you know, payload, you know, we don't want it. And, and I don't know if we won that one, I think it, it ended up getting fought out and extended out. And it just, that's one of those where Congress ends up hosing it, you know, I mean.

• 55:24Speaker 04

  And, you know, and it's tough because from a military perspective. You're like, well, that, you know, congressperson is, is fucked up, but, sorry for the language, but.

• 55:40Jack Murphy?

  From a constituent perspective.

• 55:41Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 55:42Jack Murphy?

  They are, they're doing their job, right? They're doing what they were elected to do.

• 55:47Speaker 07

  That's absolutely right. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, to me, one of the things that I tried to advise was, you know, I mean, it's like, this first off imperative, understand your operational environment. Figure out how the game is played and then play the game to win. And so what I would always try to do is I would try to triangulate a visit or a euphoric, a, an unfinance requirement, like something that we genuinely needed. Um, and sometimes, I mean, I would go to, you know, the guys,

• 56:19Speaker 07

  I think he was in E7, um, down at, you know, Delta, who was working stuff like freeze dried plasma. Um, and, you know, I'm like, hey, what do you guys need? And it was approved through the chain of command. And we would align that need with a visit to the district where it was made. Or where it would benefit. And that's what you kind of had to triangulate.

• 56:46Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 56:46Speaker 07

  You know, to like, to try to get the, the true needs met.

• 56:51Jack Murphy?

  That was a big breakthrough too, to get that into the field. Uh, and afterwards, uh, you got a garrison?

• 56:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 56:59Jack Murphy?

  Deployment or not deployment, command?

• 57:02Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, far from a deployment. Um, yeah, I, you know, uh, I competed for, uh, tactical command. I did not get a tactical command. And this is back in the day where you, like, the first time I actually only put tactical. I was like, no, I just want a tactical command. And then I didn't get a command. The second year, uh, they're like, look, if you only put tactical again, you are not going to get a battalion command. Uh, like, just read the tea leaves, buddy. Um, so I'm, okay, uh, put in a garrison and I got the Natick Garrison in Massachusetts, which is the Soldier Systems Center.

• 57:37Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, testing.

• 57:37Speaker 07

  Yep, they do, uh, you know, uniform testing, they do fire retardant clothing, they do, uh, MREs, um, all sorts of kind of cool.

• 57:49Jack Murphy?

  Okay, that kind of dovetailed with your time at Congress.

• 57:51Speaker 07

  A little bit. There was, there was a small also SOCOM detachment there.

• 57:55Jack Murphy?

  Interesting.

• 57:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:56Jack Murphy?

  Now, do, are, are they working?

• 57:58Speaker 07

  PM SOF, yes, I think.

• 57:59Jack Murphy?

  Are, are they working with DARPA much?

• 58:01Speaker 07

  And and things like that, or is it? It's all integrated. Yeah. You know, DARPA is is even more cutting edge. Yeah. Um.

• 58:12Speaker 07

  Natick is more.

• 58:13Jack Murphy?

  Boots and uniforms and stuff.

• 58:15Speaker 07

  Yeah. Okay. Boot boots, uniforms, MREs. There's actually a parachute detachment there. There's civilians who jump there. Um, who the the steerable parachutes, you know, the ones with like the GPS hanger on it that would gut fly the.

• 58:29Jack Murphy?

  Yep.

• 58:29Speaker 07

  In Afghanistan, um, that came out of Natick too. So. Interesting. There are these small detachments of, you know, like thirty pound brain dudes and dudettes. Yeah. Just. Yeah.

• 58:40Jack Murphy?

  I was thinking about that the other day for some reason. I don't know why it popped in there that I heard about how like we actually have classified parachute projects. It's like, it's kind of cool.

• 58:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:53Jack Murphy?

  Not if you're the test jumper, of course, but otherwise it's pretty cool.

• 58:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:59Jack Murphy?

  Uh, okay. And then how did you end up getting selected for the Iraq war study? How did that come about?

• 59:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I was most likely thinking, hey, I'm gonna get out of the army. I didn't want to go to USASOC or it's even worse to Installation Management Command. Um, you know, like changing colors on slides and happy to glad. And but at the last minute, my office mate from West Point called. Uh, and was like, hey, uh, Jonah Odierno, who's the chief of staff of the army, is putting together a team to write the official operational history of the Iraq war for the army. And they need an eighteen series guy who is read on to, you know, both sides. Um, because one of Odierno's specified tasks is he's like, hey.

• 59:45Speaker 07

  I need to capture the soft story because if the soft story is not told, we're not telling the story of the Iraq war. And so they wanted an eighteen series, a must fill eighteen series, Alpha, eighteen Alpha. Plus, they needed somebody who spoke real bright Arabic. And, you know, my friend knew me and he's like, hey, you wanna do it? And I'm like, sure.

• 1:00:10Jack Murphy?

  So tell us about, kinda like, you mentioned a little bit before we started recording, like, the research process and how it was all digitized, but it was completely unorganized.

• 1:00:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, I mean, that was, wow. You know, we had such a great opportunity because we did both oral history interviews, but also archival research. And our team did, you know, thousands of hours of interviews with everyone from President Bush down to, you know, E7s in key positions. On the archival side, almost everything's digitized. And so we were fortunate in that General Odierno, who is the chief staff at the time, had worked with, uh, um...

• 1:00:57Jack Murphy?

  Scotty Miller?

• 1:00:59Speaker 07

  No, the CENTCOM commander at the time. I'm drawing a blank for some reason. Um, General Austin.

• 1:01:05Jack Murphy?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 07

  Um, and they were tight. And so he called him and was like, look, can, I'm putting it, they're the team to write the first kind of draft of history for this. Um, can I send a team down? Will you give them access to all of the CENTCOM archives? And Austin was like, sure, whatever you want. Um, and so we literally got access to all of the archives at CENTCOM, all the archives at the Center of Military History in DC, all the archives at Leavenworth and at Carlyle. There's archives like all over the place. It's really weird. You know, some of them, like, literally are the hard drives of the multinational force Iraq headquarters. And we would have to plug into it.

• 1:01:51Speaker 07

  And, you know, there's like four terabytes of data on that one drive.

• 1:01:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 07

  Not organized at all. And there's everything on there from like porn to like dudes, you know, iTunes music to... Movies to photos of an accident, an accidental discharge with a gate guard at, you know, whatever FOB, it's just madness, just like how much data is out there. And so it's just like sifting through all that, trying to find the needle in the haystack. Um, that was, it was a process.

• 1:02:22Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. How many years did it take to complete the study?

• 1:02:27Speaker 07

  So, uh, I was on the study from 2013 to 2018. And we were, and I'm, I'm being a little evasive here because it depends how you, you ask. It's five years till it actually got published. We were forced to change our publisher from the Center of Military History, which does the official history, to the Tragic Studies Institute at the War College at Carlisle, because that was an academic institution and we could be more controversial there.

• 1:02:58Jack Murphy?

  Interesting.

• 1:02:59Speaker 07

  What had happened was General Odierno had retired and his guidance was like, look, if you have to kill sacred cows, kill sacred cows. I don't care whose feelings get hurt. We've lost people. We made the same mistakes of the Vietnam War. Um, and, you know, part of the reason we made those same mistakes is we never really tried to learn from it. You know, we never really wrote or never finished writing histories of the Vietnam War with the army. And so we didn't have any institutional learning on it. And so he's like, I want you to do it. And, and if you hurt people's feelings, that's totally okay.

• 1:03:39Speaker 07

  And so one of the reasons why I was shifted was that commander's guidance. And, you know, it just delayed on forever because after General Milley was appointed, the chief staff of the army, he, the chief of public affairs for the army, and then Secretary Esper, who's the secretary of the army, all opposed publication. Because? Through three grounds. One, controversial, um, which.

• 1:04:11Speaker 07

  You know, a lot of Army publications are as boring as a refrigerator repair manual. You know, they're just like, there's no controversy in them because they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

• 1:04:22Jack Murphy?

  It's like the same argument that was made against publishing the Pentagon Papers.

• 1:04:25Speaker 07

  That's exactly right. And so, we, we tried to do our best to explain why we thought things went wrong, who made the decisions, what their logic was behind those decisions. Um, and then, you know, kind of let the cards fall where they may. And so, it was controversial. There's no question. And, you know, like, a couple of examples.

• 1:04:57Speaker 07

  I'm just gonna be blunt here. One of the things that General Odierno told us was, he's like, "Look, we need to have a honest conversation about what the Guard and Reserves brings to the fight." Um, and I mean, you know, the Army, there's this big talk of the total force and everyone being equal. And it's bullshit, right? I mean, someone who trains forty or fifty days a year just is not going to be the same as someone who does it year-round with the budgets that the active force has. Granted, the Reserving Guard are gonna bring other skillsets to the fight that are good and valuable, but in terms of fighting, they're not equal.

• 1:05:37Speaker 07

  And, you know, so, the Guard went crazy. Like, and, and there were people who literally tried to... One individual wrote to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, making accusations about that we used too much oral history interviews rather than archival, which was not accurate. Um, and, you know, other accusations about how controversial it was to try to get them to kill the project. And so, you know, that was like, the controversial issue's one of it. A second component of it was this weird notion where, you know, in the Army,

• 1:06:18Speaker 07

  at the general officer level, there's this sense that we're supposed to be equal, right? And that, you know, you're not supposed to... I'll take a little. You want? Yeah, please. Um, have an ice, please. Yeah, thank you.

• 1:06:36Speaker 07

  And, you know, there was this sense that, weird sense, where that we in the military were not theoretically supposed to add any sort of political advice or political guidance

• 1:06:48Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:06:49Speaker 07

  To stay out of it.

• 1:06:50Jack Murphy?

  Dmitri, you just wanna grab the tray out of the... I got it. He lost it. Sorry, go ahead.

• 1:06:57Speaker 07

  Oh, it's all good. But, so there was this sense where they believed that we should, that the senior generals shouldn't have been, like, having a back and forth with the president or the secretary of defense on how the war should be conducted. Like, they thought that it was like, okay, they give us guidance, and then we translate that guidance and make it happen. And these were generals who were, like, giving us this, like, premise. And it's like, no, that's not how it happened. There was, like, a back and forth, you know? Like, the senior commander would be like, you know, "No, boss, I don't think that's a good idea. I think maybe we should try this instead," or, you know? And so there was this weird, just a pushback that that came from, like, senior officers

• 1:07:42Speaker 07

  giving their best military advice was that they were allergic to it. They were like, "Ooh, like, we don't wanna talk about that."

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  Do you, I'm, out of curiosity, to me, I would take that as that...

• 1:07:54Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  As that they want the failure of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they want the failure of those wars to rest solely on the president. Like, hey, we were just following orders. They wanna pretend that they had no say in how things went.

• 1:08:10Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, you know, to me, as a historian, it's harder for me to speculate.

• 1:08:16Speaker 04

  Sure. I'll speculate all day.

• 1:08:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, no, fair, fair, fair, totally fair. And it's totally fair to do that.

• 1:08:22Jack Murphy?

  And there's a, there's a public notion, I think, all, we've all expoused this at some point, like, you know, it's not the military's fault, it's the politicians, but it's like, "Well, the military lost the war."

• 1:08:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Jack Murphy?

  I mean, we have some responsibility too.

• 1:08:35Speaker 07

  We absolutely share in the responsibility.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:08:39Speaker 07

  And I think, really, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in many ways, we, we set the conditions for losing. Really early on when Bush was so hands off.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 07

  I mean, Bush doesn't really grab the throttle again until oh six oh seven.

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Speaker 07

  When he's like, holy smokes, this is a dumpster fire.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 07

  Like, you military people get out of the way.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 07

  Like, I'm gonna tell you, you're gonna search, you're gonna send more people because, and that came about as academics and other strategists were coming and seeing him. And providing other options, you know, and he's like, these military people are giving me totally opposite. Like, they still wanna transition and leave.

• 1:09:17Speaker 04

  I, I honestly, though, whether it was Bush or Obama or even Trump in, in the latter part.

• 1:09:25Speaker 04

  I think that, I believe they were all lied to. I believe that none of them ever had a true situational awareness. That they were always, they were always given like the good news. You know, it's, you know, it's like a twenty year war fought one year at a time, that next year will be the year.

• 1:09:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we're turning a corner.

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:45Speaker 07

  That, yeah, story.

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 07

  That's, the, the turning of a corner, there certainly was a lot of that. Um, of, of very bad assessments of kinda where the enemy situation was, and in particular where the host nation forces were, where their capabilities were. And, and a lot of that frankly was from the military side in that it was self-induced. Because all the metrics we tried to pick that we thought were effective were useless.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:10:13Speaker 07

  You know, we're trying to say, oh, well, you know, are these infantry battalions fully manned? Do they have all their equipment? That means nothing.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:10:22Jack Murphy?

  We were duking the stats too, though.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Speaker 07

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, the whole notion of, you know, they weren't putting the premise of ghost soldiers or of, you know, people not showing up for duty or the corruption that's going on there.

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:10:37Speaker 07

  None of that, I don't think was.

• 1:10:41Speaker 07

  At least we did not find any record of that really making its way back on the Iraq side. I will say, at the very end, though, there was a friction in the Obama presidency where the military leaders were actually saying like, oh, wait a minute. The Iraqi army is not ready.

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:11:03Speaker 07

  Yes, positively at the very end. And we need not X number of soldiers to stay in Iraq. We need Y. And, you know, the, one of the very interesting things about the very end of it was that

• 1:11:19Speaker 07

  particularly during that period, the military, I think, was presenting a pretty accurate picture because they're reporting back of the corruption, of the problems with the political system. When Maliki, for the 2010 election, when he basically circumvented the democratic process in Iraq. And the theater commander wrote back and, like, it's in the records where he basically said, yeah, Maliki is running, conducting a running coup, like quote, end quote. And that Yedda Lawi, who won the election, who should be allowed to form a government first,

• 1:12:02Speaker 07

  is being pushed into the corner and blocked from doing that. And his supporters are being threatened, killed, or hopped up charges of, oh, they're a Ba'athist at one point, so they can't be part of the system that prevented them from, you know, despite that they won, forming a government.

• 1:12:29Speaker 04

  Now, would, when you say at the very end...

• 1:12:33Speaker 07

  Like 2010, like before the, so my, our...

• 1:12:38Jack Murphy?

  Right before we withdrew.

• 1:12:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we went to 2014, but the 2011 to 2014 period was like a chapter out of like, you know, like 30 or something. The end, our primary end is 2011 because we, 03 to 11 was our, that's where our heavy lifting was.

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  So, I guess what I'm curious about, and I don't want you to speculate if you don't know.

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

  Do you think, do you feel as though the reporting got honest because they knew it was the end? And they wanted to say this shouldn't be the end? I like, I don't want this on my record as whatever? Or, um, or were they reporting in good faith?

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  Regardless of whether it was the end, do you see what I'm saying?

• 1:13:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think I know what you're saying. I think some of it is the individuals involved.

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:13:36Speaker 07

  There are different individuals.

• 1:13:37Speaker 04

  Just a higher level of like integrity or whatever.

• 1:13:40Speaker 07

  I, I think, I think part of that is the case.

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:43Speaker 07

  I, I think part of it is what you say. I mean, to me, I'm always multi-causality, right?

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  Sure, sure.

• 1:13:48Speaker 07

  None of us function by a single like.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:13:52Speaker 07

  Determinant, right? There's all sorts of things.

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  Nobody's all good or all bad or like all dishonest, right?

• 1:13:56Speaker 07

  And there's all sorts of calculus going on in our brains that are, that they're driving us to make a decision one way or the other.

• 1:14:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:14:02Speaker 07

  And so I think kind of both of those factors are really playing, playing out is, is you have individuals with more integrity at that, they're involved in the process. You have a sense of perhaps, you know, like, hey, I don't want to be left with the.

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  The albatross.

• 1:14:20Speaker 07

  Well, I was gonna say burning bag of shit.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Speaker 07

  Can I say that?

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  You can.

• 1:14:25Speaker 07

  Okay, um, you know, don't want to be left with the albatross. Or, you know, that they actually did realize like, hey, like, this is gonna be a disaster. And very interesting, the actual final withdrawal, the like, the go to zero decision under Obama. There are only three individuals who actually supported the go to zero. And that was Obama, Vice President Biden, and then the National Security Advisor. Everyone else was unified that we should not leave and that we should leave between five to eight thousand. The CENTCOM commander, the Chairman of Joint Chiefs.

• 1:15:07Speaker 07

  The SecDef, the CIA Director and the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, all said we shouldn't leave with Clinton actually.

• 1:15:17Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:15:31Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:16:13Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star trust pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:16:41Speaker 07

  Making one of the most powerful arguments, basically saying something to the extent of like, you know, we've been in Germany and Korea for, you know, 60, 70 years. Right. You know, we lost five, 6,000 Americans in this fight. And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are died. Are we really just going to leave? And yet we just left. Yeah. With kind of unshocking results in three years later. Yeah. And then tell us about the drama around the publication of this.

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  Well, there was, there was a third one, right?

• 1:17:20Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. So the third, the third element of why it was blocked from, from publishing was the, and it's interesting, I mean, you know.

• 1:17:31Speaker 07

  You know, once you get to a certain point in the army, you spend enough time around people. You have friends everywhere, right? And so I had friends in the vice chief's office and the chief's office who would filter me back. You know, I was like running my own.

• 1:17:44Jack Murphy?

  Source network.

• 1:17:45Speaker 07

  Source network, right? And so like, hey, you know, on a burner phone, you're like, this is what went down in the meeting. Like, you won't believe this. And so one of it was that they basically were like, okay, we want to forget about coin and insurgency. We are pivoting to, at that point, I think it was called decisive action. But basically, large-scale combat operations.

• 1:18:10Jack Murphy?

  Let's go.

• 1:18:11Speaker 07

  Let's go. We're pivoting to.

• 1:18:14Jack Murphy?

  Exactly what we did after Vietnam.

• 1:18:16Speaker 07

  Exactly what happened.

• 1:18:18Jack Murphy?

  I don't want to hear about that coin shit no more.

• 1:18:20Speaker 07

  Exactly. And, and, and literally that, you know, they're like, I was getting readouts where they're like, they said, this is what they said. They said that this doesn't match with our public affairs messaging, our messaging on the Hill, and our budget priorities. So we don't want, it's distracting. We don't want it to be published.

• 1:18:40Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:18:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:18:41Jack Murphy?

  And so how did it finally come out?

• 1:18:43Speaker 07

  So it finally came out in that we were, we were fortunate. Um, you know, usually your civilian GS employees are not well-respected, right? Yeah, there's this, you know, stereotype, right, of your GS employee that never does anything. Well, there was a GS 15 who, after we had been shifted from the Center of Military History to the Strategic Studies Institute at Carlisle, who, he made a decision, you know, effectively unilaterally, to provide a draft copy to Michael Gordon, who is the senior defense correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:19:24Speaker 07

  And he did it on the premise that, and I mean, this is just like, this is the army in a nutshell, right? Because it's like, just public affairs, just like negligence, right? He gives it to him on the premise that the army is gonna get a good news story out of it, because the army is a learning institution. We're willing to be self-critical. We're willing to like, name names and have controversial stuff published about us. We're willing to like, you know, semi-crucify ourselves over the mistakes we've made, right? That's gonna be the good news story. And Gordon gets all these scoops because all this stuff that's been declassified, you know, we declassified thirty thousand pages of documents. We've got all these interviews.

• 1:20:08Speaker 07

  He gets to sift throughout all of that before anyone else. And so he's got all these stories, all these scoops, ready to drop, right? Like the, the story about bombing the Damascus airport in oh five. The, the idea that never came to fruition. And, you know, it's this, it's a bargain, right? You scratch my back, I scratch yours, it's kind of the way the world works. Well, because the army isn't willing to publish it, you know, Gordon's starting to get pissed. He's got it, and he's being forced to sit on it. And it's not like, you know, the leaf chronicle outside Fort Campbell. It's like, the Wall Street Journal. And so finally, he gets so frustrated that, and this is what I was told, and I believe this is accurate,

• 1:20:53Speaker 07

  that he sits down with General Milley, who then is the chief staff of the army, and starts a recording and basically says, "General Milley, why are you blocking the publication of your own Iraq war study?"

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  So he ambushed him.

• 1:21:06Speaker 07

  Ambushed him.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 1:21:07Speaker 07

  After, I mean, and, and, in, in his defense, he did it only after the army basically drug him for-

• 1:21:17Jack Murphy?

  Pulled him the fuck off every which way.

• 1:21:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, for like, a year, year and a half.

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  I, I don't think he needs any defense.

• 1:21:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, he totally, I mean, and, and, you know, he'd expended time and effort to write these stories, ready to drop.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Speaker 07

  And, and, you know, so the army had opted in bad- Faith.

• 1:21:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:34Speaker 07

  And he called them on it. And immediately, of course, uh, you know, General Milley goes, oh, you know, sure. I'm publishing it. I'm gonna publish it. I'm gonna write a foreword to it, which I'd had like emails from other people. Who had written like, General Milley will never write a foreword to this. You know, they were considering actually at one point that several of the options were to put it on Sipper, which is one of the things that Odierno has said. We will never put this on Sipper because if it goes there, it'll be like the lost Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones. It'll be hidden in this warehouse somewhere. Nobody will ever learn from it.

• 1:22:14Speaker 04

  So real quick, uh, Sipper is, yeah, Sipper is like the, the secret internet of, of.

• 1:22:20Speaker 07

  The classified.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

  Classified side of, uh, like government, uh, or at least the military internet. So basically, once you put it there, it's immediately classified information. Then in order to FOIA, you have to know it exists in order to FOIA it. So it basically goes to die.

• 1:22:40Speaker 07

  Disappears.

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Speaker 07

  Yeah. And this is after we'd already gone through an office that, you know, I didn't even know existed. It was called the Defense Office of Pre-Publishments Security Review.

• 1:22:49Speaker 04

  Yes, I know all about them.

• 1:22:50Speaker 07

  So it had passed the Dobster review. Um, and I mean, man, they were so detailed that they actually, one of the photos that was like on the CENTCOM website, had detainees in it and they actually caught, they're like, oh, you can't post photos of detainees. We're like, ooh, okay. Um, the, the documents had already been declassified by CENTCOM and like, you know, they're stamped to declassify by CENTCOM. So we were clear. So this is just like vindictiveness by, to put it.

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 1:23:19Speaker 07

  Um, the other option was they were going to publish it as an independent publication. In that like, I, I guess.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  High school newsletter or something?

• 1:23:29Speaker 07

  Like a high school newsletter. Like we published it like, you know, above our mom's garage on weekends or something, right? Like doing it in our part time rather than being commissioned by the army.

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  Amazon creates space completely.

• 1:23:40Speaker 07

  Um, that was their other option.

• 1:23:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Speaker 07

  And so, you know.

• 1:23:45Speaker 07

  It was only because of, you know, Michael Gordon, basically throwing down the gauntlet.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  And so General Milley, of course, writes the foreword and gets it published.

• 1:23:54Speaker 07

  Yep. My phone blows up that day. There's like, there's like ten, I'm in a meeting, I think with my kid's teacher or some, something. I come out of it and there's like ten voicemails, like fifty emails, like, how soon can you publish this? You know?

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  Well, um, yeah, I'm curious, what was the response when it was published? I mean, not to use a, the term that is loaded for Iraq, but was it mission accomplished? I mean, did you, I mean, but seriously, I mean, did you feel like, you know, you guys did what you set out to do and that it had an impact?

• 1:24:25Speaker 07

  Uh, so, I mean, I don't know, it's, who knows if it had an impact? I mean, I think one of the challenges that I think, other than for a lot of the GWAT veterans, I think the army has like turned the corner and I think they want to forget coin. And I think a lot of counterinsurgency or insurgency, and I think a lot of the American public wants to forget it. I, I would say at the time, it made, it made international news. And like, because it was front page, bubble full, Wall Street Journal, like I was on NPR, All Things Considered, like West Coast, East Coast, uh, CNN, you know, like I did multiple interviews over it.

• 1:25:09Speaker 07

  And the, the one like bumper sticker, which this one was actually one I wrote, um, that, that everyone took out of it was that the only winner of the, that Iran was the only winner of the Iraq war.

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:25:26Speaker 07

  Um, that was the bumper sticker that came out of it and that, that was for, I mean, you know, as long as a news cycle lasts, fifteen seconds of fame or whatever, that, that, that, that was the bumper sticker that a lot of people published.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  When, you know, you go on and you do these interviews, like even here, we do, Art of Years are two to three hours, they're long form, and people get an opportunity to talk about things that normally when they go on these other shows, it's like five minutes of sound vibes. And, and how do you condense a fifteen hundred page report? Like what do, what do they, what were their burning questions? What did they want to know?

• 1:26:06Speaker 04

  And depending on the outlet, did they, did they want?

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  They wanna focus on one part that supported something that they wanted to.

• 1:26:17Speaker 07

  That became a lot of like, you know, almost the self licking ice cream.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:21Speaker 07

  Where different outlets would anchor onto a certain premise or area. Or, you know, where we lied to about WMD. Uh, you know, and like, you know, what was the, you know, like, okay, we were, we looked at an operational level history. So we were not looking at the causes or the reasons for the war. We in the military don't really get to make those policy, we don't get to make those policy decisions. We get told we're invading Iraq and then we provide our best military advice and then we move on.

• 1:26:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:26:56Speaker 07

  And then we start planning. If, if the civilian authorities say execute, then we start to, you know, put things in motion. And so it was, it was hard and to be honest, I mean, I'm very thankful that we're doing such as like long form. Because you can really do deep dive into stuff and, and it was, it was hard to be able to. You know, distill all that into such a short interview.

• 1:27:24Speaker 07

  I was fortunate in that some people did center on that bumper sticker.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Speaker 07

  And, and I could talk about that.

• 1:27:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Speaker 07

  Um, others would talk about the withdrawal, you know, like more oriented against politically Obama. They had a, you know, axe to grind.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:27:43Speaker 07

  Others would focus on the decision to go to war.

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:27:46Speaker 07

  Lack of preparation, the, you know, the plan, the invasion without a plan or a, you know, phase four post conflict plan. Quote unquote, um, which, you know, there's lots of asterisks there. And, and you know, again, focused on kind of axe to grind against Bush.

• 1:28:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:28:02Speaker 07

  So, you know, you.

• 1:28:03Speaker 04

  Navigate that.

• 1:28:05Speaker 07

  Navigate.

• 1:28:05Jack Murphy?

  Have, uh, have you ever, uh, read, um? Leonard Wong's paper, Lying to Ourselves?

• 1:28:11Speaker 07

  I ha- I think I have, but I, I, I don't, you know, recall immediately.

• 1:28:18Jack Murphy?

  If I were to have a hot take about all of this, like, that would kind of be mine about Iraq, that we lied to ourselves and we institutionalized the lying, right? It became institutionalized that and accepted that you can send false reports up to hire about the readiness of these units and so on.

• 1:28:34Speaker 04

  Well, and I mean, not just Iraq, but Afghanistan too. And so, you know, I'm curious because when did the report finally get published? And when did you start doing the interviews?

• 1:28:45Speaker 07

  Twenty eighteen.

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  So, we were still in Afghanistan.

• 1:28:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:28:51Speaker 04

  And were, were people asking you based on what you learned from Iraq, like?

• 1:28:59Speaker 07

  Applied to Afghanistan?

• 1:29:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, how was it applied to Afghanistan?

• 1:29:02Speaker 07

  Very few would even take that stretch. Um, I mean, I recall a couple of questions along that line, but most, you know, just exclusively focused on, on Iraq.

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  And did anybody ever ask you how smart it was to attempt to overthrow Assad after what we learned about Saddam?

• 1:29:26Speaker 07

  I don't think, I don't think Assad came up. Um, I don't remember the timeframe, but you know, I mean, this is, I mean, you know how things go in our media cycle? I mean, it's like, yeah.

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a flash in the pan.

• 1:29:39Speaker 07

  Two weeks and then it's, oof, gone. I mean, like, this is just nothing. It like, falls off a cliff.

• 1:29:44Jack Murphy?

  All of this leads us into your book, Training for Victory, that I want to make sure we have plenty of time to talk about here.

• 1:29:52Jack Murphy?

  Tell us first to, to kick it off, I mean, how did this book come about? Was this your dissertation originally?

• 1:29:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. So, it's my dissertation and to me, the bit, you know, it was kind of came about because of a mystery. And in Iraq, the whole, the, the general effort to build the Iraqi army is, is a train wreck. It's a dumpster fire. It's, you know, Churchillian, it's an epic military disaster. Except for the ISOF, the ICTF and the Commandos. And some describe the ISOF as the best thing we built in Iraq. And, and in fact, in twenty fourteen, we kind of see it play out. We see. The ISOF fighting against Daesh ISIS kind of every step of the way.

• 1:30:42Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:30:43Speaker 07

  They're at the the critical oil refinery at Beijing. They actually get surrounded and and they fight for a week, which, you know, I mean.

• 1:30:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it was an epic battle over there.

• 1:30:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's it's an epic battle and it's it's a, you know, the the conventional wisdom, the conventional narrative and and much of the story, which is true, is that the Iraqi army dissolves. Large almost, I mean, they're they're pockets, but the ISOF, they're fighting and like fighting hard. At, you know, Beijing, they get an opportunity to surrender. The ISIS says, hey, look, we'll let you, you know, you can even keep your weapons, we'll let you go, you know. You won't get slaughtered, you can fight another day, we just want the crossroads to be able to move on and we'll let you live. And they told a pound sand and kept fighting.

• 1:31:34Speaker 07

  And then on the way back, you know, on the once things shifted and the counteroffensive, they're the head of almost, you know, every battle. Mosul, they take forty percent casualties and they keep fighting. And so to me, it was like, what gives?

• 1:31:50Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:31:50Speaker 07

  What made this unit different while all the rest of the Iraqi army mostly collapses? And and that was like the riddle that that I wanted to solve and and, you know, we see pockets of other successful units too. And, you know, the commandos are are definitely more successful than other, the general, you know, Afghan army.

• 1:32:18Speaker 07

  And we see other pockets of successful elite units built, whether it be in Colombia or El Salvador or the Philippines. And I wanted to look at, you know, what what was it? What made those units successful while the rest of the efforts really were not?

• 1:32:35Jack Murphy?

  So let's start with your first case study then, El Salvador, nineteen eighty one and nineteen ninety one. I, this was really interesting, and I mean, there's a few things, obviously, you'll. On them much better than I will. Um, but there are some unique aspects of it communist insurgency in the context of the cold war in Central America. And Congress had a cap on how many advisors were even allowed in country. It was like fifty five.

• 1:33:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, fifty five.

• 1:33:01Jack Murphy?

  Um, so a very light footprint, to say the least, not, not, nothing comparable to Iraq or Afghanistan at all.

• 1:33:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Jack Murphy?

  Um, what went right in El Salvador? What went right? What went wrong? What were kind of your observations from that?

• 1:33:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think one of the big things that went right in El Salvador that is a theme kind of across all five of the case studies. Is that in many cases, you have the same advisors returning rotation after rotation after rotation. And, and it happened for a couple of reasons and man, I was so fortunate to have like just a bunch of SF legends from that time period. Like, talk to me like time and time again, like tell me their stories. And then give me documents sometimes, give me, you know, diaries and stuff that I could go through.

• 1:33:55Speaker 07

  And it, you know, it happened because one, as one said, it was the only war they had. You know, the Cold War, you know, Vietnam had ended.

• 1:34:06Jack Murphy?

  Those three seven fi- uh, three seven guys in Panama.

• 1:34:09Speaker 07

  That's, that was another component.

• 1:34:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Speaker 07

  Um, so the, I mean, there, there were crazy stories of individuals who literally, because then. Spanish was a hard requirement. Uh, for NCOs, you had to be a two-two on the language proficiency test. And for officers, you had to be a one-one. And, and if you didn't have that, like, you didn't pass go.

• 1:34:31Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:34:32Speaker 07

  Like, you didn't get on the bus. They didn't bring you down. And so there are, people wanted to go to this mission so badly that they're literally in their spare time teaching themselves Spanish.

• 1:34:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:42Speaker 07

  Like, and studying Spanish because they know that, that the Vietnam War, you know, ended. You know, like almost a decade before. And this is their chance.

• 1:34:53Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Speaker 07

  And then their chance to lead indigenous forces. In some ways, in combat, because there are multiple occasions of of units getting overrun, of, you know, battles occurring or helicopters, I mean, advisors getting shot down on helicopters, even though they're supposed to not be in combat.

• 1:35:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:35:13Speaker 07

  But, I mean, you know, it's insurgency. There's no frontline.

• 1:35:18Speaker 04

  It's funny when you think about, you know, prior to the GWAT, you know, after Vietnam, when any combat action was, you know, you have Somalia, like Panama, like you have these very short, so the idea that guys go through these hard-ass selections and and training processes, and then the chance to get in war, in war, it's like, learning, all I have to do is learn Spanish to go to war? That's, I'm I'm down for it.

• 1:35:47Speaker 07

  I'm down.

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  I'm down.

• 1:35:48Jack Murphy?

  I thought one of the interesting observations you had in the book was about the difference between some of our Latino-American special forces members, as opposed to some of these like redneck dudes from Alabama, and that there were actually some circumstances where the El Salvadorians wanted the rednecks who speak with a redneck accent in Spanish.

• 1:36:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Jack Murphy?

  Because they don't have like cultural assumptions about about them.

• 1:36:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, and, you know, in in some ways, one of the things that surprised me was I kind of assumed that language was going to be a really important factor across all of the case studies. And granted, for El Salvador and Colombia, speaking Spanish was kind of a prerequisite, and it was important. But even in those case studies, you know, as you point out, what was almost more important was that the advisors had the right mindset to be a good advisor.

• 1:36:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:40Speaker 07

  That they were patient, that they had, you know, teaching skills.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:45Speaker 07

  Some people just can't teach.

• 1:36:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:47Speaker 07

  Right? They're just not cut out to be an advisor. And and these individuals, they could build and maintain rapport, and it was like those, you know, that West Virginia, like I was speaking, you know, Spanish with the West Virginia southern accent.

• 1:37:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01Speaker 07

  You know, that just is, talks and can make friends with anyone that some of the El Salvadoran officers just. You know, stuck to like glue.

• 1:37:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:12Speaker 07

  Cause he built and maintained rapport consistently.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Speaker 07

  And in in some cases, that was what was more important even than language.

• 1:37:19Speaker 04

  I I another thing I I've found is that like courage, like just straight up courage. That if they see you throwing yourself out there for them. Uh, even though whether a person is doing it for them or just because they just are in the in the heat, you know, in the thrill of the fight. That that means everything to them.

• 1:37:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's another huge component and in El Salvador that proved particularly valuable. Because, you know, there were occasions and cases where multiple times. Where an El Salvadoran officer either crumbled or collapsed and couldn't like, you know. People collapse in in the fight. Some people do. And the El Salvadoran officer turns to the American and says, hey, you take his place. And when the American goes there and does that, man, that guy is golden.

• 1:38:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:22Speaker 07

  Like there's anything he says after that point and after that battle, he's getting listened to.

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, and leading from the front becomes, uh, it's a whole new world in in another culture.

• 1:38:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 04

  When they see an American, I a a, you know, somebody could sit back and tell people what to do. Or advise the way they're told to, but when they lead from the front. Like those indigenous indigenous forces glom onto that.

• 1:38:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So when you looked at it, uh, El Salvador, do you give our partner force relationships over there a passing grade? I mean, how do you think that turned out?

• 1:39:01Speaker 07

  So I think what's important in El Salvador to kind of look at is that is is.

• 1:39:07Speaker 07

  The US strategically, at the beginning of the war, they're, they studied like, okay, what's the situation? And the situation was really bad. It was a shit show. And it looked like the government was gonna fold. So, US military comes up with three options, like a win option, an offensive option, and then the like, the lowest cost scenario of like, hold the line, but we prevent them from losing. That was the option that the Reagan administration chose, was option three, the least cost, you know, inclusive. And so, the force we built, we built a force to, to that specification.

• 1:39:52Speaker 07

  The, the beries, the battalions, uh, battaliones, infanteria, the reaction inmediatamente, um, or the like, immediate reaction infantry battalions, were, they were okay. And I think the, one of the best ways to describe it is, is there was like a, a discussion between two, two American advisors, one who'd been a Vietnam veteran and one who wasn't. And the Vietnam veteran basically said, man, these El Salvadoran guys, like, if they had to fight the Vietcong, they would be massacred. We'd lose in a day. But then the other guy looked at him and goes, look, they don't have to fight the Vietcong. They're not fighting the Vietcong, they're fighting other El Salvadorans.

• 1:40:35Speaker 07

  And that's the, that's the only level that we have to get them to.

• 1:40:39Jack Murphy?

  Right. Train them to do that one thing you want them to do.

• 1:40:42Speaker 07

  Train them to do that level, and, and they successfully got them to that level. And they survived. And at the end of the conflict, the, one of the FMLN leaders during the, the peace talks, the Chabot de Pec accords, he walked over to the head of the US Mil Group, the advisor group, kind of poked him in the chest and said, you know what? If not for your advisors, we would've won this war.

• 1:41:10Jack Murphy?

  The second case study in your book, the Light Reaction Regiment in the Philippines, the LRR, so now totally different context, just after 9/11. We obviously have a long relationship with the Philippines.

• 1:41:24Speaker 07

  Complicated, too.

• 1:41:26Jack Murphy?

  Complicated, a little colonialism going on.

• 1:41:29Speaker 07

  A little bit.

• 1:41:30Jack Murphy?

  If you go to their museums, they have like paintings of them shooting cannons at us and stuff. It's okay. We get it.

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

  The motto for the Light Reaction Regiment, the shooters of death, actually came from the unit that killed the senior American during the Philippine-American War.

• 1:41:48Jack Murphy?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:41:49Speaker 07

  There's a little weird, like you said, exactly.

• 1:41:52Jack Murphy?

  I mean, some people don't realize, we developed the .45 caliber round for the Filipinos because they were so crazy in combat. So, post 9/11, right after 9/11, we have this relationship with the Philippines. There's an Islamic insurgency in the south, there is a communist insurgency in the north, and then we have missionaries being held hostage. That feels like it was the bigger impetus, maybe.

• 1:42:18Speaker 07

  That was, so it actually starts before September 11th, a little bit, in that the, you know, the US, there'd been this, a period where we drifted apart, right? And so, military leaders on both sides were kind of looking for a way to get us back together. Because they, you know, the divorce was, we never met anyone else, right? We wanted, we're like, we'll give it another shot. So, military leaders on both sides want to try to get the situation to start again, to like reignite things. And particularly after the, I don't know if you remember the...

• 1:42:59Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you are not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear the

• 1:43:37Speaker 00

  Their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 1:43:56Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:44:24Speaker 07

  I think I'm pronouncing this correctly, the Bojinka plot, where they were going to bomb something like 12 or a dozen or somewhere in that range.

• 1:44:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, aircraft.

• 1:44:34Speaker 07

  Aircraft airliners, civilian airliners at the same time period, including possibly, I think they're going to try to target the Pope also at the same time period. And this is pre-September 11th. That originated in the Philippines, that plot. And so the Philippines comes to us and there is a former first group officer who is now as part of the defense attaché there in the middle group.

• 1:44:58Jack Murphy?

  Joe Felter?

• 1:44:59Speaker 07

  Yes. Yep. Who were like, hey, this is sounds like a great opportunity. We'll stand you up a national level counterterrorism force. And, you know, that'll be a way that we can kind of re-flower this relationship that is, you know, kind of sat fallow for a while. And, you know, then September 11th happens and then the Burnhams and the other hostages. And after those two, it goes from being like.

• 1:45:31Jack Murphy?

  An idea to do it.

• 1:45:32Speaker 07

  And not only, I think the idea was that it started even a little bit before, but what happens is. All the GWAT funds and efforts and troops, I mean, money comes start flying out of it.

• 1:45:45Speaker 04

  It was terrorism, so there you go.

• 1:45:48Speaker 07

  It's a combination, not only terrorism, but you know, as Americans, we have this thing after the Iranian hostage crisis of, you got Americans sell the hostages, it's like Rome, we're coming for you.

• 1:45:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:45:59Speaker 07

  Um, so money starts, you know, falling out of the sky for it as well as additional forces being deployed for it. And it goes actually from being a single company, the original plan was to create a company that over time that becomes a regiment.

• 1:46:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it went from a LRC to LRB to LRR.

• 1:46:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, so it's, it's, it's a long-term effort and it is, is the burnings, it is the, the ties to September 11th. It's the terrorism, the al-Qaeda, you know, and associated groups.

• 1:46:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:46:35Speaker 07

  Um, that results in, you know, hey, this, that spark becomes a fire.

• 1:46:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:46:41Jack Murphy?

  So talk to us about the partner relationship there, uh, first special forces group in the lead.

• 1:46:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:46:46Jack Murphy?

  I think the guys from Okinawa, right?

• 1:46:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. Almost similar to three, seven.

• 1:46:51Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:51Speaker 07

  Right, because it's the four deployed battalion, um, and during the Cold War, three, seven was in Panama. So it made it a lot easier for them to deploy that and consistently deploy it because that's the theater commander's force.

• 1:47:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:47:05Speaker 07

  And the theater commander, he doesn't have to go to the joint staff to get that force deployed.

• 1:47:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:47:11Speaker 07

  It's just, you make, you make them go. And so there were some parallels actually to El Salvador where, and, and they were also fortunate because the first group leadership for, for its part, saw consistency as important in returning the same advisors to work with the, the LRR or LRC or whatever it was at that point.

• 1:47:34Speaker 07

  They saw it as important, they saw it as, you know, they tried to, they actually had names for them and they called it, uh,

• 1:47:43Speaker 07

  Sorry, I'm drawing a blank here for a second. They called them as, uh, individuals that basically would return, um, they made a strong effort to try to redeploy the same individuals to the mission. And you saw parallels with El Salvador, where individuals would go five, six, seven rotations working with the LRR, LRC.

• 1:48:07Speaker 04

  And that's easy to do in countries where people can have second families.

• 1:48:14Speaker 07

  I'm a fifth group guy, so...

• 1:48:17Jack Murphy?

  Lot of Western Union checks, first group, going back and forth.

• 1:48:21Speaker 07

  Seventh Empire, there's parallels there too.

• 1:48:24Speaker 04

  Familia. Yeah, but that is, I think, vitally important that, um, one, you know, you build that rapport because you're there. It's not just a rotation of, you know, Americans coming through, everybody trying to imprint their idea of how things should be done, right? It's the same people, there's that trust that's built, it's the consistency that's built, um, you know?

• 1:48:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was in, I finally remembered the word that I was looking for, is they call them repeat offenders or OAFP alumni. And so there was a command effort also to like, return the same people. They recognized its value.

• 1:49:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:05Speaker 07

  That individuals, they would build rapport with leaders and that that, it made a difference in the quality of the unit. There's this one great story of, of an E7, who, or actually, I think he was an E8 at that point, but at the very initial stand-up of the Light Reaction Company, at its very inception, you know, PACOM, US Pacific Command, wants to like, put together a big dog and pony show, meet with all the senior leadership of the Armed Forces of Philippines, of course, the four-star admiral from PACOM is gonna be there, and so SOC PAC, the US Special Operations Pacific, um...

• 1:49:52Speaker 07

  On their list of individuals they're bringing, they have a E8 on the list. And PACOM is like, why are you bringing an E8? You know, like the least ranking person other than that is like a lieutenant colonel or maybe a, you know, a major and they're like, you know, coffee makers. You're bringing an E8, why is that? And they like tried to kill him from going on to this, you know, this planning session to create the light reaction company. Uh, SOC PAC held its ground and, you know, the master sergeant arrives and when the senior Philippine military officers arrive, their, you know, their chief of staff of their army equivalent

• 1:50:35Speaker 07

  walks in, he sees this master sergeant and literally bypasses everyone else in the receiving line, gives him a giant bear hug, starts talking to him about his family. And it's because this individual had worked so many times in the Philippines that like, you know, the old premise of a rolodex, he knew everyone in the senior leadership.

• 1:50:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Speaker 07

  Like everyone. And they had been like lieutenants when he had first deployed as an E6 over his 20 year career and now he is, you know, the, you know, the commander of the army. Um, and, and it was when they're, you know, building the, you know, starting to have the planning conference, it's like, oh, four star admiral, now I want to listen to what the, the master sergeant has to say.

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  One more reason why SF doesn't always go so well, doesn't always land, uh, well with the...

• 1:51:27Speaker 07

  Conventional army.

• 1:51:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. I had a great, uh, occasion, uh, can I give you one of my stories from a trip out west?

• 1:51:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:35Speaker 07

  So we were training at, uh, Naval Air Station El Centro, which is a Navy base and you know, the Navy is really big on their ranks.

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:44Speaker 07

  And so, you know, I'm a, we're taking a day off, reading at their, you know, dying hall and I'm eating in, I guess whatever is the chief's section.

• 1:51:53Speaker 04

  The chief's mess?

• 1:51:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:51:54Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so the Navy has the enlisted mess, the chief's mess and the officers' mess. Like they have three different...

• 1:52:01Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, they do. And I'm there, you know, with my guys, right? And so, uh, and so one of the, uh, Chiefs notices me and comes over. He's like, hey, sir, I think you're in the wrong area. And like, hey, man, I'm with my guys. Like, I'm gonna be with my guys. I'm not gonna go eat somewhere else, period. Like, that's not happening.

• 1:52:22Jack Murphy?

  Oh, this is with your team?

• 1:52:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is my, my team. This is like ninety-nine. And of course, one of my guys, one of my E-seventh, is like, "Hey, Frank, will you pass the salt?" Watching his head kind of explode, that, you know, my guy is calling me by my first name is like,

• 1:52:37Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:38Speaker 07

  Anyway, it's just a-

• 1:52:39Jack Murphy?

  The Navy is, is the closest thing to a feudal system, I think, we have in America, in the sense of, because on a ship, it is very segregated in terms of rank, so.

• 1:52:49Speaker 07

  Completely, yeah.

• 1:52:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Speaker 07

  Anyway, so, yeah, you hit the, I apologize for that little story there, but it's, I think it's reflective of how sometimes soft we can rub people.

• 1:52:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. So the LRR, as it gets stand-up and, and its evolution, uh, versus what it was maybe initially designed to do versus what it became and what it began to do, um, how, how did you kind of chart that out?

• 1:53:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, you know, and again, all these cases, I was so fortunate to have so many SF guys, you know, and then also host nation individuals talk to me and tell me their stories. And, you know, it was one of the challenges, there were challenges in particular in the Philippines because the Light Reaction Regiment, soon after it was formed, while it was still a company,

• 1:53:47Speaker 07

  there was a, a coup plot.

• 1:53:51Jack Murphy?

  The Oakwood?

• 1:53:52Speaker 07

  The Oakwood plot against the, the president, President Orio, Oroyo. And some of the leadership of the Light Reaction Company were involved in the plot.

• 1:54:02Jack Murphy?

  They always get a little kooey over there.

• 1:54:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:54:05Jack Murphy?

  It happens all the time. Where it gets very interesting, there's a lot of ins and outs. Like, I was at Fort Megsasee once, and I was having, uh, just hanging out with a, a major, their, their version of SOCOM. And we're just sitting there bullshitting, I think like drinking a coke or something like that. And he just like kind of out of the blue tells me like, yeah, I got in some trouble because I was involved in a coup plot. Uh, you know, my unit never moved because of some miscommunications. So I didn't get in as much trouble as the other guys did. Uh, so you know, they just kind of hid me out over here and now it's kind of okay. And I'm just like, wow, okay, this is a different kind of military.

• 1:54:42Speaker 04

  I feel like Thomas Jefferson would approve.

• 1:54:47Speaker 04

  A little rebellion is good.

• 1:54:50Jack Murphy?

  Sometimes those, those coups happen for, or attempts happen for different reasons. But some, there's a lot of, you have to understand like amongst the soldiers, like if their officers are like stealing their food. For example, that lends units towards these sorts of attempts.

• 1:55:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, so that, that created some real initial frictions that hurt the unit's progress. Initially, and this is before, you know, the, makes I say became kind of the headquarters of the Philippine equivalent of SOCOM. They didn't have a SOF headquarters. And so when the unit has first stood up.

• 1:55:28Jack Murphy?

  Arguably they didn't until a few years ago.

• 1:55:30Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 1:55:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Speaker 07

  That's right. So it, it took years before they really had a SOF headquarters. So they experienced kind of some of the same challenges that we experienced in the US. When SOF didn't have a parent headquarters looking out for us.

• 1:55:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:55:46Speaker 07

  They're used improperly, they're used for, you know, uh, you know, personal protection details.

• 1:55:53Jack Murphy?

  They still were. They, sure. Duterte brought in a whole LRC just to protect them.

• 1:55:58Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 1:55:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Speaker 04

  But, but you know, and, and the thing is, is like what president, it, and if, even if it was just a couple of people, like that's what you can prove. Right? And what president wants their tier one unit, right? Their, their crack guys to be like.

• 1:56:17Jack Murphy?

  Are they against me?

• 1:56:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that's that's really what caused a lot of the problems is is is that combination there. They the conventional forces used them like like in a hammer anvil approach.

• 1:56:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:56:33Speaker 07

  Just nuts.

• 1:56:33Jack Murphy?

  Like infantry operation.

• 1:56:34Speaker 07

  Like an infantry like, you know, uh, anyway, you know, a movement to contact, basically, like battle drill two, right? And like there's to use a small elite soft force like that is just madness.

• 1:56:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Speaker 07

  Um, so there was a lot of challenge early on and it wasn't until battles later on where, you know, in Zambalanga and where they were kind of thrown into the situation because the situation was so dire. And there were hostages that were taken.

• 1:57:08Jack Murphy?

  Yep.

• 1:57:08Speaker 07

  So they needed, you know, that kind of national counterterrorism capability to do hostage rescue missions. And they get thrown into the fight and they're it's a mixed, you know, kind of results between, you know, two critical battles that they have, but they after some initial kind of missteps, they, you know, generally are successful and they they are able to rescue, you know, dozens of hostages successfully, which is, I mean, you know.

• 1:57:40Jack Murphy?

  That was Ted Yamas.

• 1:57:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, right, yes.

• 1:57:45Jack Murphy?

  Man, that is the coolest dude ever.

• 1:57:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, please.

• 1:57:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you get to have a beer with that guy. He's such a cool guy and he's very low key, very humble and you wouldn't know it from talking to him. But like later on, I met some of the guys who were like his lieutenants at the time for the Zambos siege.

• 1:58:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00Jack Murphy?

  And they were like, yeah, that dude was like, went right into the battle was like, we're taking our ORP by force, we're putting our ops in right there in that abandoned school in the middle of the city. Let's go take it and just start like running ops out of it. He was like, that was nuts and like, I had to like fight this battle, but at the same time, like try to stop my colonel from getting shot.

• 1:58:21Jack Murphy?

  In the middle because he was leading that from out front, he was he was out there getting it done.

• 1:58:25Speaker 07

  Nice.

• 1:58:25Jack Murphy?

  Um, yeah, Ted Yamas is a really cool guy.

• 1:58:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, they they are really fortunate in that they have a a bunch of really good leaders, um, particularly during the battles in Belanga and then other conflicts in that that time period, that there's there's success, some of their sniper shots, they're.

• 1:58:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and I think Zanbo and also Marowee.

• 1:58:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Jack Murphy?

  Uh, the LRR snipers like did God's work.

• 1:58:54Speaker 07

  They did.

• 1:58:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:55Speaker 07

  They, you know, they, if I recall correctly, like one day, they wiped out like half of the senior leadership of the

• 1:59:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:04Speaker 07

  Hapsalons organization.

• 1:59:06Jack Murphy?

  I think they smoked HVT number one.

• 1:59:07Speaker 07

  They did.

• 1:59:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:08Speaker 07

  They got number one also. And, you know, it just, it created a situation where it enabled the rest of the conventional forces

• 1:59:15Jack Murphy?

  To do the job.

• 1:59:16Speaker 07

  To be able to really do the job, which is, I mean, that's what SOF does.

• 1:59:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:20Speaker 07

  We're an enabler for the conventional forces, um, in some, in, in most missions.

• 1:59:25Jack Murphy?

  Right. Conventional.

• 1:59:26Speaker 07

  Conventional.

• 1:59:27Jack Murphy?

  Sort of the forceful employer type, yeah.

• 1:59:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, sorry. Um, so, so, yeah, I, I, you know, they're, they're pretty successful in the Philippines despite the early challenges from the, the Okwud plot.

• 1:59:40Jack Murphy?

  And, uh, lessons learned from our partnership with the LRR, uh, what, what are the big takeaways?

• 1:59:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, uh, in some ways, they're parallel with some of them from El Salvador, that consistency is absolutely critical, um, and that those interpersonal relationships, you know, I mean, in, in America, sometimes we're so fixated on just the job at hand that we forget how important interpersonal relationships are. And the rest of the world, those relationships are everything.

• 2:00:12Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:00:13Speaker 07

  And so having, you know, those OIFP, OEFP alumni, or, you know, uh, individuals who come back mission after mission after mission, that those pay huge dividends because they can kind of short circuit.

• 2:00:28Jack Murphy?

  Continuity.

• 2:00:29Speaker 07

  Yep, their continuity, they help the unit train better because it's not the every year fighting the war 20 years, one year at a time.

• 2:00:37Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:00:37Speaker 07

  It's the same individuals.

• 2:00:39Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:00:40Speaker 07

  They're coming back, and in some cases, it's back to back.

• 2:00:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:42Speaker 07

  Um, so that has a huge impact. The, the Philippines also is another case where language was interesting in that, you know, again, we're, we spend, SF spends about $50 million a year on language training. There's this whole premise that, you know, you can't be effective if you don't speak the host nation's language. And at least in the case of building, you know, a battalion size unit like the Light Reaction Regiment or regimental size.

• 2:01:11Speaker 07

  That it didn't matter as much. And there are multiple occasions where individuals would start speaking in Filipino or Tagalog or whatever of the hundreds of local dialects there are. And they either had situations where half the individuals were like, I don't speak that dialect, I have no idea what you're saying. Or they're like, you know, like, almost like the scene from Inglourious Basterds, where it's like, do you Americans speak any language other than English? You know, where it's like, my English is better than your Tagalog. So, can you please speak in English? Because we will understand you better.

• 2:01:52Jack Murphy?

  One thing that, I mean, is not in your book, I don't think, but I've been told that the main partner force for the LRR in recent years has transitioned from American Special Forces to Australian SAS.

• 2:02:04Speaker 07

  Interesting.

• 2:02:05Jack Murphy?

  And I don't know if you have any thoughts about, you know, the partner forces actually kind of changing hands from one Western soft unit to another, and what that means, if anything.

• 2:02:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, so, relationships do matter.

• 2:02:22Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:02:23Speaker 07

  And in some cases, it is, you know, if their relationship is deep enough, you can go a couple of years and pick it back up. But if that relationship is allowed to kind of like devolve to the point where no one knows anyone in the leadership again.

• 2:02:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:40Speaker 07

  Starting over. Then you're starting over.

• 2:02:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Speaker 07

  You know, I did not work with the Australian SAS, so I, you know, it's difficult for me to know how good their fid, you know, advisory skills are. So, I mean, you know, it's interesting, we, you know, as a nation, we keep talking about wanting to shift our focus to the Pacific, but we keep getting dragged back into CENTCOM time after time. I would kind of premise that, you know, particularly given the Philippines' position, you know, with regards to China and the conflicts and frictions that already exist between them,

• 2:03:26Speaker 07

  we would be well-served to maintain a strong relationships with them.

• 2:03:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Let's jump into Colombia. Colombia 2002 to 2016, so again, now we're in Southcom. Totally different fight, totally different terrain, jungle, mountainous.

• 2:03:46Speaker 04

  Guys are still down there with their second families though, so.

• 2:03:48Jack Murphy?

  There's some, there's some, yeah, some similarities.

• 2:03:51Speaker 07

  Seven through.

• 2:03:53Jack Murphy?

  And fighting narco-terrorism at this time with FARC.

• 2:03:58Jack Murphy?

  You know, I recall when we had Frankie on the show, asking him about, about this, this subject came up, like, why did Colombia work when so many of our other partnerships didn't? And the Colombian officer told him something like, "Well, we're closer to you, and we're much closer, have much more in common culturally," and that was, that's it.

• 2:04:17Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, I think that's, there's, I think there's a component of that. But I think there are other factors, and I think the, so the Colombians went through a period where,

• 2:04:33Speaker 07

  you know, President Ernesto Sempler, his, his presidency was racked with corruption. To the point where the US, and I believe this is under Clinton, literally shuts off aid. And there's so much corruption that we can't, and I mean, you know, we're, we're in the drug war, right? And this is like the greatest place where the drug war is coming from. And yet, we actually went hardcore and said, "Hey, yeah, no more candy from you because you guys are so corrupt, we are shutting off the money spigot."

• 2:05:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:05:07Speaker 07

  And that created a lot of things, impacts within Colombia. Because after Sempler, the next president, who basically pushed forth Plan Colombia,

• 2:05:21Speaker 07

  cleaned house.

• 2:05:22Jack Murphy?

  So, Euribé?

• 2:05:23Speaker 07

  Uh, Euribé, yeah. Um, and then, I believe it's Euribé, I apologize, my little, um...

• 2:05:32Speaker 07

  Deft on details right now, I apologize. Um, he, he basically cleans house, takes off almost all the three and four stars in the army, reappoints individuals who are, you know, upstanding, not corrupt, who want to win, who are capable. And then they in turn appoint a whole series of individuals below them who are also capable. And so it's like this entire virtuous cycle where it's like cascading levels, where everyone is appointing like cleaning under them and appointing new individuals under them. That has a huge impact because all those new Colombian officers who come in, a lot of them have been trained in US

• 2:06:13Speaker 07

  programs and they are really capable. And so they come in with a totally different perspective. And they want to win. And so when, when we start working to partner with them, there are some of the old hands, I mean it's.

• 2:06:30Jack Murphy?

  We, we should point out too, uh, in that regard, that our relationship with Colombia also goes back to like what the Korean War, I think is what they traced it to.

• 2:06:37Speaker 07

  Yeah. Uh, and the, one of the units, the agrupación de lanceros, or the lancero group, is formed after the, the lanceros. And lanceros is kind of a Colombian version of Ranger School. But, you know.

• 2:06:54Jack Murphy?

  Without the safety restrictions.

• 2:06:56Speaker 07

  Without any safety restrictions. And, and I think, I mean, I, you know, been to Ranger School, but didn't go to a lancero. But my friends who have been is like, it's harder than Ranger School.

• 2:07:07Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:08Speaker 07

  Like.

• 2:07:08Jack Murphy?

  And you do combat patrols.

• 2:07:10Speaker 04

  Like real combat patrols.

• 2:07:12Speaker 07

  Yeah. Your, your graduation.

• 2:07:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 07

  As a Colombian.

• 2:07:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07:15Speaker 07

  Not for the Americans, but the Colombians, yeah.

• 2:07:17Jack Murphy?

  I know a seventh group guy that went to lancero and like his Ranger buddy got smoked on patrol.

• 2:07:23Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 2:07:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:24Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 2:07:25Jack Murphy?

  It was a Colombian officer.

• 2:07:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, a- and so, you know, Lancer School was something that the US actually started in the 50s. They came to us and were like, hey, we'd like a Ranger School type course. And so, I think the second advisor who was standing up the Lancer Program actually ended up being the Southcom Commander in the 80s in El Salvador. And there's these all weird connections where like, a bunch of the individuals who were really junior advisors in El Salvador are now like, group sergeant majors, or like, group commanders, or, you know, SOCC South commanders. They're all senior leaders and they have this experience from El Salvador.

• 2:08:09Speaker 07

  And they're kind of trying to compare the, you know, the different situations. But, you know, the relationship is strong, the Colombians really want to, they want to succeed. And they kind of want to please the Americans. So there is this really good relationship where they, when we ask them to do something, unless it's like, really stupid, you know, it's not like in Afghanistan or Iraq where there's a lot of foot dragging. Like, the Colombians were like, okay.

• 2:08:42Jack Murphy?

  The Colombian people, I sense, are also like, kind of sick of FARC at this point.

• 2:08:46Speaker 07

  They're sick of the FARC.

• 2:08:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:48Speaker 07

  And it's been, you know, they've been at war for decades.

• 2:08:51Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:52Speaker 07

  Like 50 years. And so, it's, it's not just, you know, that the, there's pressure from the US that convinces, you know, when it goes from Sempler to Oribet. But there's also the Colombian electorate is like, look, we've, we've had it, you know? And they, I believe they doubled like the percentage GDP going to, uh, the, uh, to the defense, to military. They supported transition from a draft to a professional army. All these like series of reforms that, you know, improved their military capabilities domestically that they took on themselves.

• 2:09:35Jack Murphy?

  So from the Colombian SOF perspective and the US Special Forces partnership, same question, I mean, what went right, what went wrong there?

• 2:09:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the Colombian SOF is literally the the poster child of like the best example of a SOF result I think we could hope for. They, you know, Colombia goes from exporting coca to a country that's exporting security force assistance, where they're literally doing FID missions throughout Southcom. And like, they're working so closely, they're with us, like, they're like, hey, we're gonna go to, I don't know, I don't know, I can't remember the nation, but Trinidad or Barbados, and we're gonna do a FID mission there. What would you like us to train them on?

• 2:10:22Jack Murphy?

  And that's literally working yourself out of a job.

• 2:10:24Speaker 07

  Literally working yourself out of a job, not only in the country, but across the theater.

• 2:10:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:29Speaker 07

  Right?

• 2:10:30Speaker 04

  Which is, you know, which is a testament to what you accomplished there, I think.

• 2:10:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:10:36Jack Murphy?

  And the long-term, you know, playing Colombia and all of that, I mean, there's some long-term, you know, thinking that went into that.

• 2:10:42Speaker 07

  For sure. And the, you know, a lot of the successes there is that there is consistency. The, and that, there's actually more consistency on the Colombian side than there is on the American side.

• 2:10:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:10:57Speaker 07

  The, in the mission in Colombia, there are challenges, because, you know, I mean, it's in the middle of the GWI. And then there are these demands in Afghanistan, there are demands in Iraq, there's, you know, everyone's getting pulled every which way.

• 2:11:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that was a big thing in Colombia at that time, with like all the, like, willing spirit and everything like that, they're kind of having to compete for resources.

• 2:11:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. Um, and, you know, as one of the individuals said, you know, we're, we're supporting theater. Um, and so, you know, we would get what we got, and we just had to live with it. Um, and that they were just fortunate that the Colombian partners were so dedicated, and that in particular, those SOF units, unlike most of the other SOF units, you know, it became like our SOF. They created a SOCOM, a USASOC, a national, you know, force, and individuals would spend 20-year careers in that.

• 2:11:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:11:52Speaker 07

  Um, and, and so those relationships would just help tremendously. As well as the, the Colombians, uh, you know, not resisting reform.

• 2:12:03Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:12:03Speaker 07

  You know, when we would suggest something, the Colombians would be like, okay, sure. Like, unless it was stupid, and even if it was stupid, sometimes they would do it to like placate us.

• 2:12:13Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:12:13Speaker 07

  But then not like follow through the whole way. We were, we were really blessed to have great partners in Colombia.

• 2:12:21Jack Murphy?

  And so FARC collapsed, uh, that conflict is over.

• 2:12:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:12:25Jack Murphy?

  Um, but, and I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, my impression of it is that a lot of the drug violence got pushed into Ecuador. And we have a lot of Ecuadorian, mostly illegal immigrants here in the city. I underst- like, they're here because of the violence and the poverty in their country. I mean, what do you think about tha- uh, about that, that, like, there's always these insurgent elements in South America? And like, are we ever gonna be able to really, as long as there's an American demand for drugs, are we really gonna be able to end that?

• 2:12:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, you know, to me, it goes back to the movie Traffic. And, and, you know, the movie Traffic, one of the, the guys who's turned, uh, against the narcotraffickers, you know, is talking with one of the, um, individuals that's guarding him and says, look, you guys are never gonna win this because you're fighting this war on both sides.

• 2:13:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:13Speaker 07

  You're, you know, you're fighting by, because you wanna get, there's such a demand for drugs, that you're fighting, you know, to get the drugs. So you fight the drug war there, but you're fighting the drug war by getting it shipped to you. So you're never gonna win until you resolve that challenge and.

• 2:13:30Jack Murphy?

  Fight the war on drugs and drugs won.

• 2:13:32Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, so, man. Especially, you know, I mean, it, you know, it's, it's just a huge.

• 2:13:43Speaker 07

  It, it's, it's the Gordian knot.

• 2:13:45Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:13:45Speaker 07

  No, I mean, it's.

• 2:13:46Jack Murphy?

  I mean, but, but you deal with it, I mean, I think you deal with, the way you deal with prohibition or anything else. You legalize it and tax the hell out of it, you know? It, it, it, once you do that and give it legitimacy.

• 2:14:01Speaker 07

  It kills the black market.

• 2:14:02Speaker 04

  It kills the black market. It kills.

• 2:14:04Speaker 07

  That is one course of action. I mean, I, I don't know. I, you know, drugs is unfortunately not my, you know, the drug war is not my kind of specialty.

• 2:14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:14:16Speaker 07

  So I don't.

• 2:14:18Speaker 04

  Well, I don't advocate. I think, I think drugs are horrible, you know, like most drugs are, a lot of drugs are horrible and, and destroy people and families and communities. However.

• 2:14:30Speaker 07

  There's always gonna be demand.

• 2:14:31Speaker 04

  If there's the demand, like, you know.

• 2:14:35Speaker 05

  They're getting them anyway.

• 2:14:36Speaker 04

  The war on drugs, like before the GWAT, like the war on drugs was where all the money went to, right?

• 2:14:42Speaker 04

  It's, everybody wanted to be part of that.

• 2:14:44Speaker 07

  That's why I did JTS six missions, because there was tons of money there and it'd get our vehicles out to the west. So we could train.

• 2:14:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, everybody makes fun of the Coast Guard, but the Coast Guard was stacking bodies because of the war on drugs.

• 2:14:55Speaker 07

  Big time.

• 2:14:55Speaker 04

  You know, so it's one of those things of, you know, do you keep sort of with this self-flagellation saying, this is the moral course? Or deal with the practicality of it? And I don't know what the right answer is, but.

• 2:15:12Jack Murphy?

  So, as we come to Iraq, I'm not gonna harp on it too much. We talked a lot about Iraq, but.

• 2:15:19Jack Murphy?

  Just through the, the soft perspective and the partnerships with the ICTF and the.

• 2:15:25Speaker 07

  Commandos.

• 2:15:25Jack Murphy?

  The Commandos.

• 2:15:26Speaker 07

  Commandos, yeah.

• 2:15:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, just talk to us about how that partnership played out.

• 2:15:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, and it was, it was similar to the others in that. Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments.

• 2:16:03Speaker 05

  Does that remind you you're not alone? One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star

• 2:16:46Speaker 05

  TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:16:59Speaker 07

  Everyone recognized that relationships matter and the same individuals kept coming back time after time after time to the point where particularly with the ice off, they got to a point where one unit would deploy, the next unit would be in garrison, and then they would flip flop. And it would be just, you know, one punch after another for almost like two or three years. For the first two or three years were just two units. And then they got to the point where they're starting to hit burnout. So they're like, okay, well, we'll do three punches where we'll do one, two, and then another unit, every other rotation,

• 2:17:42Speaker 07

  we'll bring somebody else in. But even then, that was, you know, like one in four rotations it ended up being. So there's huge just consistency where even while they're in garrison, they're using WhatsApp or whatever to communicate. You know, to forward and find what the unit is doing, where it's at, what its skill level's at. And so that they're in touch with it. They can return and pick right back up where they were last time. There's, I mean, there's, there's ownership of a unit.

• 2:18:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they acted as the paymasters for the unit. They came up with the T O N E. Like, the Americans really were running those units at that time.

• 2:18:22Speaker 07

  One of the themes really, kind of across many of the case studies, was that in some cases, the US has a reluctance to, in almost our, you know, our like, liberalism from like a Jeffersonian like liberalism, right, ideal, that like, we, we don't want to be colonialist and like run things. But a theme kind of became was that there are some times that you have to step in.

• 2:18:49Jack Murphy?

  It's a responsible thing to do.

• 2:18:51Speaker 07

  The responsible thing to do. And, and not from a colonial perspective, but just to prevent corruption, to enforce standards.

• 2:18:59Jack Murphy?

  To take care of the soldiers.

• 2:19:00Speaker 07

  Take care of the soldiers. And, and if you do that at the beginning and then you transition, they can be more successful than if you didn't do it at all. And, and for example, in the ISOF, you know, the US held a selection. And if the guy didn't pass election, they didn't go to the ISOF. And it was a real selection. It wasn't like, oh, everyone passes.

• 2:19:27Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:19:27Speaker 07

  You know, they're taking off half to a third of the individuals. They selected the leadership also, which is really the most important. Um, you know, Fadl, uh, Jalil Al Barawi, who was the, you know, second brigade commander, really a, a, a kind of core driving force of, of the ISOF, who, you know, not perfect, but he was brave. You know, it was like the, uh, individual in the Philippines, you know, that you're, you're talking about. He was brave. He was a dynamic leader. He led from the front.

• 2:20:02Jack Murphy?

  He's a Kurdish dude.

• 2:20:03Speaker 07

  He was a Kurdish dude. Um, and he. You know, in Iraq, he was a little corrupt, but he wasn't really badly corrupt.

• 2:20:11Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 2:20:12Speaker 07

  And so it was enough where, because we had picked these people, who we knew were going to be decent leaders, the unit was successful.

• 2:20:21Jack Murphy?

  It was also interesting how you point out how it was like mandated that the demographics of the unit represent the ethnicity, you know, percentages, you know, across Iraq. So there's like, what, six different groups of?

• 2:20:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, that was another thing that they really mandated, again, and it wasn't the Iraqis that, you know, it was like, okay, from squad level to battalion level, you know, everything is going to represent Iraq's demographics. They're going to be roughly 20% Kurds, roughly, you know, 20% Sunni, and then roughly 60% Shia, and then handful of other minorities, Turkmen.

• 2:21:00Jack Murphy?

  And it like gave them the reputation over time, right, that they're not a partisan force of like Sunnis going after Shias or vice versa, that they are a national force.

• 2:21:11Speaker 07

  It became a national force, and individuals within the unit, you know, interviewing them, they'd be like, yeah, you know, at first it was really hard for me to like, trust like...

• 2:21:22Jack Murphy?

  The Sunni dude.

• 2:21:23Speaker 07

  The Sunni dude that I thought was like, you know, we thought they were like Al Qaeda, you know, I've been raised to think Sunnis were going to murder us. And the Sunnis are like, I've been raised, you know, that, you know, all the Shia were apostates and that they were devil worshippers, you know? And but, you know, you fight alongside of them for months at a time, and you come to realize like, this guy saved my life more than once. And like, it builds these bonds with the unit, becoming a national unit.

• 2:21:51Jack Murphy?

  What was that quote in your book where they did some op that had all this political fallout, and the Iraqi was like, yeah, we don't care about that, we work for President Bush?

• 2:22:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, there was a, I think it was, I can't remember whether it was 06 or 07, it was a 10th group rotation, and it was a hit on a mosque where, in one of these typical cases, the insurgents, I think it was a Saudi or it was a Shia mosque, I believe, where afterwards, you know, they...

• 2:22:21Speaker 07

  Rearrange the bodies, they take all the weapons away. They shoot a couple civilians and women and children in the streets. Drag their bodies in and all the Americans have massacred all these people at prayer. You know, they put out prayer rugs and everything, so it looks like. Fortunately, they had also had a combat cameraman on that mission. So it like on the US side, it helped us a little bit. But on the Iraqi side, the Iraqis were like, and this is one of those examples of where at some point, you know, you can't play nice when the host nation is being corrupt and incompetent. You have to step in. And, and you know, we had stepped in enough that, you know, like you had said,

• 2:23:05Speaker 07

  we were paying the Iraqis like directly to make sure that the soldiers, that the commander wasn't stealing money. Like the American soldiers were paying them to make sure that there, there's no corruption, that they were getting paid. And they're like, man, like, I'm getting paid. My chow is good because nobody's skimming money off the chow fund. Like I'm getting fed, you know? My family's here on base too, because they were worried that, you know, that if my family was off base, they'd get killed. So I'm willing to fight because we've arranged all these things to be successful. And then over time, you slowly start stepping back. And then you get to a point where they're actually standing on their own.

• 2:23:48Jack Murphy?

  And yeah, but in this case, it turned out Malachi ended up using them for his own political purposes. And, and that really ruined the unit's reputation.

• 2:23:57Speaker 07

  It did for a while. For, you know, a couple of years, Malachi, who really helped, in my opinion, is one of the central causes of the, the second, what I would call the second Iraqi civil war. And this is the civil war, not from like oh six to oh nine. It's really from about, you know,

• 2:24:23Speaker 07

  Twelve to, you know ISIS is really part of it. Because everyone buys into ISIS because they're like, you know.

• 2:24:31Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, fuck this guy.

• 2:24:32Speaker 07

  Fuck this guy and, and you know, the, the Shia. Maliki was literally going down the list of the sons of Iraq of, you know, the Sahwa individuals. And arresting them off their list because, you know, he's like, oh, well, you know, they're Al Qaeda.

• 2:24:53Speaker 07

  And because, you know, when Maliki came in, he. You, he flooded the ISOF with more Shia candidates. And it was this weird dynamic where the unit would push back a little bit. But they couldn't push back completely because if they did, then they'd get fired. Right? So it's this weird dynamic where they're trying to pick, what is the amount that I can push back without? And they have been, you know, some jail somewhere. And eventually, you know, they, it comes to the point where the ISOF is being used to like. Arrest political opponents for a couple of years while Maliki's in power.

• 2:25:34Speaker 07

  And they get this reputation as a Fedayeen Maliki.

• 2:25:39Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:25:39Speaker 07

  Um, which is, you know, like Fedayeen is like fighters, guerrilla fighters, resistors. Um, and the Fedayeen were originally Saddam's Fedayeen.

• 2:25:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:50Speaker 07

  Um, and so.

• 2:25:53Speaker 07

  They had this reputation, but then like when the whole 2014, ISIS blew up. And they saved the nation. And Maliki got punted out, you know, finally, and some of that was the US stepping in and saying like, look. You're gone, man. We're not going to support you being, you know, the PM anymore.

• 2:26:16Speaker 07

  When as soon as he's gone, the ISOF, many of those cultural habits that they had been trained with, they defaulted back to them.

• 2:26:25Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:26:25Speaker 07

  They expunged a bunch of the incompetency officers. They brought back in a more balance. And so like by like 2017, 2018, when they're starting to do assessments again of like, okay, well, what is the breakdown now? It's almost back to like, you know, the 2000, what's that?

• 2:26:43Jack Murphy?

  No, it's awesome.

• 2:26:44Speaker 07

  It's almost back to the, the same demographics.

• 2:26:47Jack Murphy?

  I, I want to ask you, um, because so I wrote in, in this book, the whole, a whole chapter about the CIF. And we haven't really mentioned them in, in this discussion thus far. But you mentioned, for instance, that ISOF continued to fight while the rest of the Iraqi army basically dissolved. Uh, the CIF was involved in training the LRR. They were down in Colombia, training their hostage rescue, you know, national asset down there. What do you think about the CIF being kind of disbanded and turned into a different sort of capability? Like, I, I mean, I'm just curious, you know, based on your research and your experience as an SF officer, like, was that the right decision? Was that a bad decision? Did the CIF have a lot of value added that we've lost? I mean, what do you think about that?

• 2:27:32Speaker 07

  So, you know, so I had a lot of friends in, in A15, um, because obviously I was right downstairs. And even when I was a team leader, there are two stairs downstairs, right? Um, so Joe Ganella, Rick Fraser, and all these, you know, great dudes, um, Dean Franks, um, who, who ran A15 and, and ran a great organization.

• 2:27:58Speaker 07

  I think disbanding the CIF, you, you lose a really good capability. But the challenge, I think, is that, and this may be controversial and it may piss off some of the old A15 or other CIF guys.

• 2:28:15Speaker 07

  The the SIF probably was never going to be used for its original or its intended function.

• 2:28:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:28:21Speaker 07

  Right, to to be a backup to the US National Mission Force to do hostage rescue when they weren't available. The the chances of them doing that mission is highly unlikely. But what they're amazing at was building these national mission forces.

• 2:28:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, doing CT FID.

• 2:28:38Speaker 07

  Exactly, doing CT FID. And and and if you look at it, you know, time after time, the SIF's fingerprints are all over these high-end units that are successful and is successful at being host nation national mission forces, capable of doing hostage rescue missions like the like Reaction Regiment does, like the ISOF does on occasion. You know, these, the skills that they had,

• 2:29:06Speaker 07

  they rarely actually use them other than transferring them to host nation forces.

• 2:29:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:29:10Speaker 07

  And that's what they're really good at.

• 2:29:12Speaker 04

  Out of curiosity, you know, you you mentioned like ISOF and and this massive battle with Daesh, ISIS, you know, we talked about El Salvador and Colombia and and these units, what what is it about?

• 2:29:31Speaker 04

  Because it's one thing for them to behave and perform in a certain way when American advisors are attached.

• 2:29:39Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:29:40Speaker 04

  Right?

• 2:29:40Speaker 07

  Very true.

• 2:29:41Speaker 04

  But but you're talking about the advisors have left.

• 2:29:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:29:47Speaker 04

  And these units, sometimes, not necessarily with like Colombia, but maybe with, you know, the ISOF, in spite of cultural norms.

• 2:29:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:29:57Speaker 04

  In spite of what happens with the rest of the military, in spite of, they still maintain, I want to say sort of that American esprit de corps, right? They still.

• 2:30:07Speaker 07

  Culture.

• 2:30:08Speaker 04

  They still like have that that culture that that binds them together and and gives them a sense of right and wrong and and

• 2:30:15Speaker 07

  warrior ethos.

• 2:30:16Speaker 04

  A sense of mission, right?

• 2:30:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:30:17Speaker 04

  What what is it, how is that passed on? How is that germinated and and fostered? And then even when Americans leave, these units are still.

• 2:30:30Speaker 04

  An echo of those American ideals.

• 2:30:34Speaker 07

  I think it's in some ways it's a transference of culture. And and how it happens, I think there's a there's a couple factors. One is that there's a long term partnership. And it's not like particularly what we did with a lot of Iraqi Afghan units. Where we would show up, we work with them for six months and then they'd be trained.

• 2:30:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:30:56Speaker 07

  And they wouldn't need advisors again. You don't pass culture on in six months. Like, you know, that's that's a decade or more project. So that's one component of it is it's it's a long term, consistent, you know, connections. Second is leadership matters most. And and helping pick the right host nation leadership either directly as we did in the ISOF. Or indirectly as we maybe help nudge things along or help individuals careers or whatever.

• 2:31:35Speaker 07

  That makes a huge impact because, you know, those individuals then pass on that culture to the units. And rather than a corrupt culture, they're passing on a culture that we have selected that we think is closer to ours, I think. And and not culture meaning like American culture, but just like viable military cultural norms of the warrior ethos.

• 2:31:59Speaker 04

  How you get promoted.

• 2:32:00Speaker 07

  How you get promoted, professionalism, you know, proper civil multirerelations respect. Lack of corruption, you know, taking care of your soldiers, leading from the front, all that stuff. Um, you you kind of have leadership, you've got to pick the right leaders for that.

• 2:32:19Speaker 04

  So outside of, you know, special forces and and, you know, eh eh anybody else who's doing, you know, FID, SEALs when they, you know, when the money's, you know, when they want the money or whatever.

• 2:32:32Speaker 07

  Don't get me started.

• 2:32:34Speaker 04

  But but outside of, you know, special forces going in and teaching these commando skills. Has the army overlooked the idea of senior leaders, uh, whether senior enlisted or senior or or not senior officers, but senior enlisted and officers. Creating.

• 2:32:55Speaker 04

  That sort of fit capability from a leadership point of view with with like the Iraqi army or with armies with trying to teach that culture at the top so that it filters down.

• 2:33:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there is one quote from the Iraq war study that really stood out to me. And it went something along the lines of in Iraq, you know, we had all the guns and money to influence the Iraqi military. Its creation, its leadership, its ethos, and we used neither. And for some weird reason, you know, like the money trough kept going mostly.

• 2:33:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:33:43Speaker 07

  And the the weapons trough kept going. And in that we very rarely really threw down and said, no. Like, this guy is a sectarian thug and he's not going to be. He should not be leading any units whatsoever.

• 2:34:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:34:04Speaker 07

  I mean, I could even give you a personal account of my time there. Um, where the one

• 2:34:14Speaker 07

  Tony Soprano, the Sheikh of out at Mahmoud.

• 2:34:19Speaker 04

  The Sheikh of Sheiks.

• 2:34:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, who I don't know what happened to him, actually, he posed, you know, 2014.

• 2:34:27Speaker 07

  The previous unit that had worked with him. I mean, in a, on a positive note, you know, he is Tony Soprano, he's a thug, so he fights. But he was horribly corrupt.

• 2:34:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:34:40Speaker 07

  And skimmed huge amounts from his soldiers. He was and he was a thug to the point of dangerous to the civilian population.

• 2:34:52Speaker 07

  And to the point where.

• 2:34:56Speaker 07

  You know, he had

• 2:35:00Speaker 07

  hooked ratchet straps up to a Iraqi insurgent that they had captured, who was still alive, and then drug him behind. This is the rotation before us.

• 2:35:14Speaker 07

  Drug him behind till he died.

• 2:35:19Speaker 07

  You know, I tried to get him replaced. Because I was like, this guy is, we do not want to work with this guy. And our, the team leader, the team sergeant, the whole team was like, this dude is bad. We do not want to work with this guy. We need to find someone else. And so, we had even worked through, and, and all this, so much had happened before in like that November oh four period, where he had fought, he'd been one of the few that fought, that they'd kind of gotten Stockholm syndrome with him. And so, my team, I representing them, I put together the packet to try to get rid of this guy. We even had the point where

• 2:36:00Speaker 07

  we had talked to this guy, buttering him up, you know, like, oh, man, you are so brave, you're so awesome. And we've heard these stories about you dragging, you know, the dude behind. We heard there were photos. You know, do you have photos? Oh, yes, I have photos. Here, let me show you. You know, and then there's photos like, have a copies of those? We'd love to show them to our friends, you know, and so we literally had photos of him doing this.

• 2:36:25Jack Murphy?

  So, did you try to do this through, uh, the Leahy vetting?

• 2:36:30Speaker 07

  No, I just tried to do it through the regular chain of command. So like, company command or team leader to company commander.

• 2:36:36Jack Murphy?

  Right, right, through the chain of command.

• 2:36:38Speaker 07

  Goes up somewhere to the ethos. Conventional guys get very angry at the soft guys.

• 2:36:43Jack Murphy?

  Goes up to the death star.

• 2:36:44Speaker 07

  Goes up to the death star somewhere, and then it comes pouring back down of.

• 2:36:48Jack Murphy?

  Hey Frank, what the fuck are you doing down there?

• 2:36:50Speaker 07

  Why are you pissing off the conventional guys you're working with? Um, the artillery guys. And I mean, it was even to the point where, when, with the photo that we had gotten from the team guys from the rotation before us, I actually posted that next to, you know, the infamous photo of the and there is definitely a backstory to the Vietnam, you know, where he's executing the prisoner.

• 2:37:12Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:12Speaker 07

  But my point was the political impact of that, right, on, on the war. I was like, what happens when this comes out?

• 2:37:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:20Speaker 07

  Right?

• 2:37:20Jack Murphy?

  Totally fair point.

• 2:37:21Speaker 07

  And, and, and my battalion commander totally to his Great credit. He absolutely supported me. He's like, Frank, you're totally right. I'm gonna support you. I'm gonna support your team. He took the fight up somewhere into the ethos. And came back like, nope, dude's gonna stay in. Uh, with, if I recall correctly, kind of the, it's basically that they kind of become almost like Stockholm syndrome. They've been through this, like, November 04 was a really, really bad time, like, they're dropping JDAM, like,

• 2:37:52Jack Murphy?

  The word, the word that always gets used to, uh, avoid or excuse why you can't do the right thing is equities. We have equities.

• 2:38:02Speaker 04

  Which is so weird, uh, sorry, which is so weird because in, in other countries, when it's a soft, pure mission, they'll be like, like, they'll come down on you guys for the smallest

• 2:38:15Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:38:16Speaker 04

  human rights, uh, uh, human rights violation that, that guys that you didn't even go out with

• 2:38:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:38:22Speaker 04

  commit.

• 2:38:23Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. It's crazy. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, so it was just like,

• 2:38:31Jack Murphy?

  Well, let's, uh, you know, to, I don't want to keep you all night. No, it's okay. This is a great conversation. Um,

• 2:38:37Speaker 07

  Thank you for diving so deep into it and taking the time.

• 2:38:40Jack Murphy?

  I'm just trying to, you know, make sure that we, uh, we cover it all. Um, so the last case study in your book, Afghanistan. Again, widely different culture, terrain, uh, the auspices under which we're there are very different. Um, and also the auspices under which we stood up the Afghan special operations capability was quite different than Iraq.

• 2:39:01Speaker 07

  Very different.

• 2:39:02Jack Murphy?

  Um, start talking to us about the Kandak Commandos, how that comes about and how that partner relationship develops.

• 2:39:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. So it comes about, unlike Iraq, where the ISOF with the Commandos and the ICTF, you know, the invasion, it's,

• 2:39:20Speaker 07

  Seven, eight months after the invasion, that the, the, the initial seeds of the ISOF are being, you know, starting to be created. In Afghanistan, it's like four years after. And after the, the, you know, that the Taliban had been kicked out of power in Kabul. And by that point, the whole premise of like host nation sovereignty and that there are like, there are things we can and can't do, you know, as Americans and this is their, you know, kind of area and this is our area. So like, we're not going to overstep our bounds because this is their host nation sovereignty had, had developed.

• 2:40:03Speaker 07

  And so it became very difficult to kind of like really push or force things. And so unlike with the ISOF, with the Afghan commandos, when they have a selection, almost everyone passes. You know, their little ability to select leaders for it. They don't have the ability to kind of command it and battle. Pay is different. Their pay is more than the rest of the, the army, but they're not generally like going it out like the situation in, in Iraq, where you literally, the paymaster is an American at the beginning.

• 2:40:43Speaker 07

  Um, to kind of like treat, teach them almost the right way to do it and then transition. By the time, you know, it starts, we're, you know, quarter of the, you know, war is over almost already, or, you know, 20% of the war is over already. And so it really limits our ability to make changes within the unit, to kind of like, you know, force the unit to be created in our image.

• 2:41:12Speaker 07

  At the same time, there are challenges on the US side with consistency. In that, one of the Afghan guys, advisors, SF guys, described it as we were chasing bright and shiny objects. Where even on the SOF side, we basically replicated the conventional side. Where, as you said, we're fighting one-year wars, 20 of them. And every two years, on the SOF side, we have this weird change on our partner force, where we go from the commandos to the Afghan National Army Special Forces, to the police force, to the Afghan local police,

• 2:41:57Speaker 07

  to the village stability operations, and it keeps changing.

• 2:42:01Jack Murphy?

  Would you look at Afghanistan, just look at the Afghanistan Special Ops and paramilitary and on all these weird SAPs and stuff. My impression of it is that it's about 10 times more confusing than what we did in South Vietnam.

• 2:42:15Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:42:16Jack Murphy?

  Which is a little confusing.

• 2:42:17Speaker 07

  Yes, which is very confusing in itself.

• 2:42:19Jack Murphy?

  But the stuff in Afghanistan is like, it's mind-boggling.

• 2:42:22Speaker 07

  It's crazy.

• 2:42:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:23Speaker 07

  Like, there's no unity of effort, because we keep changing things. It's like someone with ADHD is in charge of picking a partner force.

• 2:42:30Jack Murphy?

  That's a good point, that's why it came about like that.

• 2:42:32Speaker 07

  It's nuts.

• 2:42:34Speaker 04

  But where was that coming from? Was that coming from theater, like the theater commander? Was that coming from the theater SOF commanders? Because obviously, no E7 is making that decision.

• 2:42:48Speaker 07

  No way.

• 2:42:48Speaker 04

  Right?

• 2:42:49Speaker 07

  The E7s are pulling their hair out, because they can't believe how stupid the decisions are.

• 2:42:55Speaker 07

  The general sense was that, in many cases, it came from either the group that was rotating as the Shuji-Sotof headquarters, or as the theater SOF headquarters. As the point when a theater SOF headquarters was stood up over the group headquarters. Those, because it was weird. In many ways, it was almost like, weird, there's a two-year time period?

• 2:43:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:43:27Speaker 07

  Is it done? And now we've got a new partner force. I wonder what the correlation is there.

• 2:43:35Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 2:43:35Speaker 07

  Meaning basically that's somebody's command tenure.

• 2:43:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:43:39Speaker 07

  They've now rotated out.

• 2:43:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:43:41Speaker 07

  Somebody else rotates in and.

• 2:43:43Speaker 04

  They gotta leave their mark on it.

• 2:43:44Speaker 07

  They wanna leave their mark, they've got a new pet rock.

• 2:43:47Speaker 04

  Do you, you know, we talked a little bit about GWAT veterans contempt for general officers and why that is. Do you feel as though there is an argument, it's kind of impractical because of how, you know, that they gain rank and stuff. But do you feel there is an argument for when you start a war, it's your war until it's over?

• 2:44:16Speaker 07

  That was actually one of our challenging conclusions in the Iraq war study. In that, you know, the World War II veterans, that it was the war from beginning to end. The challenge with that is the all-volunteer force.

• 2:44:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:44:36Speaker 07

  And I mean, there are ways that you can kind of perhaps get away or get around it, where if you actually return the same units to the same theater. I mean, we did this bizarre stuff in Afghanistan. We did the same thing in SOF, where their NCOs were like, it was insane. Like, I requested to go back to the same commando Kandak. And I never did. Like, you know, but the conventional force was just as bad or even worse, where they didn't even return the same division to the same theater. They'd put a division that, you know, been to Afghanistan, and they'd throw it into Iraq, and they're relearning everything from scratch, because it's a totally different environment.

• 2:45:16Speaker 04

  But what about on a geo level, to say, if you want ownership of this war, you have ownership of this war, and it's all on you.

• 2:45:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:45:26Speaker 04

  Like, you don't get out, you don't get out after two years and say, well, they just failed to carry on my vision.

• 2:45:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. General Casey actually commanded from June 04 until.

• 2:45:42Speaker 07

  I think it was like February of oh seven. And, you know, so it's a pretty long tenure. It's not a year tenure. It's, I think it's three and a half years. Three years, yeah, yeah. And the challenge was, is he was one of the ones who was pushing the transition.

• 2:45:59Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:46:13Speaker 02

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:46:24Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:46:29Speaker 02

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:46:35Speaker 00

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 2:46:55Speaker 05

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover, seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 2:47:25Speaker 07

  ... strategy. And he, I think he really was a true believer. But, I mean, I went in like thinking like, oh, this, when I interview these guys, they're going to be like, yeah, uh, you know, I gave my best military advice and then the politicians told me to do it and I saluted and drove on. No, they were like, this is the right idea. We should have done this all along. We should have just totally left. And it proved me right, you know, that the Iraqi army collapsed. And I was like, wow.

• 2:47:53Speaker 04

  So much denial.

• 2:47:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the the the flip side of that, the challenge is if you get the right geo.

• 2:48:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:48:02Speaker 07

  You're great.

• 2:48:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:48:03Speaker 07

  If you don't get the right geo, you're totally screwed. And one of the challenges, to be very honest, I think in civil military relations and post volunteer army is we don't fire a lot of generals.

• 2:48:17Speaker 04

  Right, we don't fire enough generals.

• 2:48:19Speaker 07

  We don't fire, well, you almost fire no generals.

• 2:48:21Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 2:48:22Jack Murphy?

  We have this sort of like cultural inclination towards like worship of this like unique singular individual who's gonna save us with his brilliance.

• 2:48:31Speaker 07

  All of us, yeah.

• 2:48:32Jack Murphy?

  It's not really how it works.

• 2:48:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:48:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:48:34Speaker 07

  And I think in some ways it's also worse when your senior civilian leaders.

• 2:48:41Jack Murphy?

  Believe it.

• 2:48:42Speaker 07

  Believe it, but also have little or no military experience.

• 2:48:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:46Speaker 07

  Like when they've never served or if they've been, you know, they're National Guard for, what, like six months or whatever, or or zero, like zero. It takes a really strong person like an FDR or a Lincoln to be like, hey, McClellan, guess what? You're fired. Next commander.

• 2:49:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:49:07Speaker 07

  I mean, think about like the number of senior commanders who went through in the Civil War.

• 2:49:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:49:10Speaker 07

  Till we found a good one.

• 2:49:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:49:12Jack Murphy?

  Uh, so.

• 2:49:13Speaker 07

  That's the model. Sorry.

• 2:49:14Jack Murphy?

  The, uh, Kandak Commandos, I mean, despite our very many failings in Afghanistan, uh, it's interesting again that it seems that SF essentially accomplished their job.

• 2:49:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:49:27Jack Murphy?

  And even as Afghanistan was collapsing, the Commandos fought until their logistics lines just crapped out on them.

• 2:49:34Speaker 07

  Completely.

• 2:49:34Jack Murphy?

  And that's a military failure.

• 2:49:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:49:36Jack Murphy?

  You know, to be clear, the military logistics failed to get them the fuel, the ammunition, water, whatever, whatever they needed. Um, but they did fight.

• 2:49:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, they they did fight. In many cases, they're WhatsApping or sending notes to their, posting on Facebook, I need ammo, I need fuel, I'm willing to fight, somebody get me ammo.

• 2:49:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:49:57Speaker 07

  Like, this crazy stuff, like social media, right? Like Twitter, like, I'm at this location, send me ammo, I'll fight. Um, we'll fight for ammo, right? You know? Uh, where they they did fight and, you know, in many cases, some of them were executed, you know, they they fought till they ran out of ammunition and then the Taliban executed every single one of them to like prove a point.

• 2:50:21Speaker 07

  And I mean, despite our frictions and our challenges and our mistakes, you know, we still ended up with a partner force that performed far better than the rest of the African military. And and the irony is that this is not a small force, right? It's a division sized force. There's like sixteen thousand people in the commandos by the time it's done. So it's huge. It's not this small force.

• 2:50:44Jack Murphy?

  You said it's like a fifth of the overall ANA.

• 2:50:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like a fifty of overall overall ANA, but they're doing like seventy percent of the fighting. They're larger than like six NATO countries militaries.

• 2:50:57Speaker 07

  Like the commandos. So it's a big force. But writ large, there was enough time and impact, even though it was with different individuals, to create enough of a culture that they fought.

• 2:51:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:14Jack Murphy?

  I so.

• 2:51:17Jack Murphy?

  Any final thoughts about the book before we move on? I mean, I know there's a lot in here.

• 2:51:23Speaker 07

  You know, I guess the biggest thing I would just say is, you know, thanks to all of like the SF guys and host nation forces and and everyone that just like poured out their, you know, life stories and sometimes their worst days that they of their life.

• 2:51:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:43Speaker 07

  You know, to that spent time with me. I mean, time is our most precious resource and they spent a lot of time with me. And so I'm just super thankful that so many people gave me so much time. And let me and let me tell their stories because there are some fucking amazing stories out there.

• 2:52:03Jack Murphy?

  So Training for Victory, it's available now. You guys can go out and find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Tell us about life after the book. What are you up to nowadays?

• 2:52:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, so um. So I am kind of a gig economy for education. So I do, I'm the Chair of Regular Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, which means I research and write.

• 2:52:34Speaker 07

  I'm fortunate. I do everything from insurgency to.

• 2:52:39Speaker 07

  Uh, you know, security force assistance, kind of everything in between. Um, so it's fun. To be very honest, I would far prefer to teach. Um, and, and, and this is gonna sound maybe a little weird, but I would almost rather teach like civilians, like undergrads, like particularly ROTC kids than, than military.

• 2:53:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:03Speaker 07

  Um, because, man, they are so, so like I, I teach as an adjunct at Tufts University. I teach a class called War Film and Politics, which uses war films to kind of help understand the military ethos and to understand how politics is inserted into films we watch. Um, I've taught a couple of other courses there. I'm also teaching a class in civil military relations, the master's level there in the fall. Um, and I taught other classes, like a class in intelligence and technology. Taught that at JSOW. I taught at Rehman University at Herzliya, uh, in Israel. Um, so, you know, I, I get around, I kind of, whatever is available to me.

• 2:53:43Speaker 07

  I would much prefer kind of a more stable, kind of like particularly civilian, it would be my dream, um, opportunity.

• 2:53:55Speaker 07

  But it's, it's challenging. Um, it's challenging being fifty-five, um, because people look at you differently, um, particularly in the academic world. Um, and in the academic world,

• 2:54:08Jack Murphy?

  aren't you supposed to be like a seventy-year-old professor that you just stay there forever and collect a, collect a paycheck until they kick you out?

• 2:54:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, the, the, that is the most accurate thing about the latest Indiana Jones movie with the Harrison Ford playing the, that's still the professor who's still teaching.

• 2:54:24Jack Murphy?

  Putting the transparencies up on the projector like, eh, yeah, this is, uh.

• 2:54:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, so you know, get, getting into it late is, is hard because in many cases, they see it as publisher parish, you know, as we were talking about before. And they want you to. Publish a lot and research a lot. And it's almost like a timeline. They're like, oh, well, you got twenty years left, maybe. Um, if that fifteen, whereas if we hire somebody who's thirty, we can kind of mold them in our image. Or her in our image. And we have a lot more years um of research and etc.

• 2:55:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, what the crap? I wrote this fifteen hundred page Iraq report. What do you want?

• 2:55:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, there is also, um. I think there is uh in in some cases, some universities are very military friendly. Um, you know, I when I got my PhD at Fletcher School Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. When I was going there to like try to decide where I was gonna pick for my program. Got in the elevator to go up to do an interview. And there was like a flyer like, come celebrate the Marine Corps birthday. And I was like, wow, this place is like pretty military friendly that they're like, you know, come have cake for the Marine Corps birthday and they're celebrating it, right? And so it was a really good fit for me because they're like pretty military friendly.

• 2:55:54Speaker 07

  But there are other institutions out there that are not very military friendly. That, you know, look at you like, you know, you're some sort of barbarian.

• 2:56:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:56:07Speaker 07

  Cro-Magnon.

• 2:56:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, you were over there killing brown people for Uncle Sam.

• 2:56:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:56:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:11Speaker 07

  And which is total misunderstanding of what we were doing.

• 2:56:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:17Speaker 07

  Total misunderstanding of what our ethos is.

• 2:56:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:20Speaker 07

  Total misunderstanding of like why many of us joined the military.

• 2:56:23Speaker 04

  It's it I think, I mean, if you're twenty two and saying that, okay.

• 2:56:27Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:56:28Speaker 04

  If you're like forty and saying that, it's an intentional misunderstanding. Like it's you you you.

• 2:56:34Speaker 07

  Right. You haven't interacted with many military.

• 2:56:36Speaker 04

  Intentionally.

• 2:56:37Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:56:38Speaker 04

  Like you have no intellectual curiosity whatsoever at that point in time.

• 2:56:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:56:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:42Speaker 07

  And and there there are some schools that have that problem.

• 2:56:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:47Speaker 07

  Um, I'm this, yeah, so I uh.

• 2:56:53Speaker 07

  I'm on a kind of a hiring freeze at another position, so really excited about it. I'm really looking forward to potentially start there. It looks like it will happen, but

• 2:57:03Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 2:57:05Speaker 07

  Hard to tell, um, so, you know, but, you know, anything could happen. I mean, it's, it's a very dynamic environment these days is, you know, uh.

• 2:57:20Speaker 04

  Putting the screws to the, uh, college.

• 2:57:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, with, I mean, you know, uh, within government and outside government, it's a very dynamic, uh, environment. And, you know, the entire ecosystem, education ecosystem, whether it's within the military system, teaching at military schools, or whether it's at a civilian school, there's government dollars.

• 2:57:46Speaker 04

  You're gonna have a party member in your office pretty soon supervising. Making sure you're doing the right thing.

• 2:57:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, so there's, you know, there's so much government dollars involved that, uh, we're in a very dynamic. And, and, and I'm kind of waiting on, you know, something to see how it turns out.

• 2:58:06Speaker 04

  Outside of academia, I mean, you are arguably one of the leading experts on, like, what happened, what went wrong in Iraq. You know, your book shows that, you know, I mean, before, before a book like this, I mean, what did we have? We had learn to eat soup with a knife.

• 2:58:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:58:29Speaker 04

  Like, we, there were very few resources on unconventional warfare.

• 2:58:34Speaker 07

  Unconventional warfare, yeah.

• 2:58:35Speaker 04

  Um, but now we, we have, you know, you're like, you're generating new documents, uh, historical documents, um, on that. Outside of academia, are, are there places in the government and the military where anybody's saying, look, we need to retain, not only do we need to retain the knowledge, but we need somebody with the ability to look back. And when we're making these military decisions, give us a historical perspective as to how this might go. Because if they had had anybody.

• 2:59:11Speaker 07

  From Vietnam.

• 2:59:12Speaker 04

  From Vietnam, they, or, or, or, look at Yugoslavia, obviously that wasn't a military decision, Tito just decided to die. But, we saw what happened. And they would have gone, well, you know, this happened in Yugoslavia, maybe ta- maybe taking Saddam out isn't the best idea.

• 2:59:30Speaker 07

  Produce a similar result, it's demographically similar.

• 2:59:33Speaker 04

  He's a shithead, but he's a stable shithead.

• 2:59:35Jack Murphy?

  I think it's, there's this interesting thing where, where the politics are happening right in the moment. My sense is that like, they don't wanna know what the history is.

• 2:59:46Speaker 07

  I agree.

• 2:59:46Jack Murphy?

  Like, that's not something they're even interested in because they've made a decision, right? And so now.

• 2:59:52Speaker 04

  Well, it's like, it's, it, it, like, there's, there's some information coming out of Syria right now, but not a lot about, you know, sort of the ethnic cleansing of Christians and Alawite, you know, i- it's like, nobody, nobody saw, nobody thought that if we get rid of Assad, that things might go sideways.

• 3:00:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:00:16Speaker 04

  And they'll be taken over by a extremist regime. Nobody, nobody thought that.

• 3:00:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think, there, there are two, to me, there are two factors at play. One is, you know, the, the old adage that success has a thousand fathers and, you know, defeat has none.

• 3:00:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:00:41Speaker 07

  And, and, taking that a step further is, you know, when you lose or you don't do well, you try to wanna forget about it.

• 3:00:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:00:50Speaker 07

  And, and I think that's played out, and is playing out kind of in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably even your experience in Syria, et cetera, where

• 3:01:02Speaker 07

  we, I mean, you look at, on, on the army is, you know, where, where we gravitate. You know, you look at the last two uniforms that we've, we, we wear, it's the World War II and the Civil War uniform. Both wars that were clear cut.

• 3:01:18Speaker 07

  Like good guys, bad guys, you know, both wars that were massive, you know, moving not divisions, but corps and armies, right? And, you know, conflicts that were very kind of straightforward. And frankly, we won, pretty much. The second dynamic, I think, that's kind of going on a little bit is

• 3:01:44Speaker 07

  being an American. And one of the most beautiful things about an American that I think is good, that we are very different than so many other countries of the world, is we are always forward looking. We are always looking for the future. We are, what is next, what is the next big thing? How am I going to change the future? We, we are so focused on the future. And it's great, and I think it creates our national culture to being a very successful culture, to being a culture that, that is, that is, just wants to change, to move forward, to, to improve things. But on the flip side of that, we don't know history. Like, we're really bad at history. And, you know, teaching history at West Point for two years?

• 3:02:29Speaker 07

  There were some hongdingers where we would, you know, keep records of essay responses of, you know, the most shocking responses that future second lieutenants would have to historical questions of, you know.

• 3:02:43Jack Murphy?

  Our high school education system is falling a bit short.

• 3:02:46Speaker 07

  Yes, of the, the lack of success of our high school education system. And again, at a top university.

• 3:02:53Jack Murphy?

  Right, right. These are Ivy League kids, basically.

• 3:02:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:02:57Jack Murphy?

  Okay, so Frank, tell us where people can go to find you on the interwebs. What's the place to go?

• 3:03:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, interwebs, I mean, and, you know, I.

• 3:03:14Speaker 07

  I publish Small Wars Journal, I publish, I mean, if you, if you go to my LinkedIn, you'll see all my publications.

• 3:03:21Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 3:03:22Speaker 07

  That's probably the best place, because that's where I kinda, that's the, and I write a lot, I write a lot, I write for the Miriam Institute, which is Israeli-American kind of think tank, and so I've written a lot about the Palestinian-Israeli-Iranian conflict, multidirectional, both October 7th, pre-October 7th and post-October 7th. You know, I've written for War on the Rocks, written for Jerusalem's Tribune, a pretty good amount of shorter pieces, if you're interested, and, you know, something you can finish in five, 10 minutes.

• 3:04:02Jack Murphy?

  And we will have a link to that in the description for this podcast for folks that want to go check it out. Frank, we covered a huge array of topics in this interview, and I'm sorry if I kept you a little late, but I mean, it was-

• 3:04:16Speaker 07

  Thank you so much for taking so much time.

• 3:04:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it was very good, and I mean, this is very important information that I hope people will take some time to reflect on. Before we get going tonight, I mean, is there anything else that you want to talk about that I didn't ask, that you'd really like to shine a light on?

• 3:04:29Speaker 07

  No, I mean, thank you so much for being so patient, taking time.

• 3:04:33Jack Murphy?

  No, we appreciate it.

• 3:04:34Speaker 07

  I sometimes I talk too much.

• 3:04:35Jack Murphy?

  No, not at all.

• 3:04:36Speaker 07

  But-

• 3:04:37Jack Murphy?

  No, nobody, no guest ever has to come on the show and apologize to us, because I, and like Jack's being very like McNamara's by saying, "I'm sorry I kept you so long", when we all know, we all know why you're here so long.

• 3:04:54Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 3:04:56Jack Murphy?

  Well, no, there legit was a lot of content to cover in the book, and I'm glad that we were able to get to it, so, yeah, thanks for joining us, thanks for coming out.

• 3:05:05Speaker 07

  I really appreciate you hosting me, and especially with such an awesome, you know, channel and podcast.

• 3:05:10Jack Murphy?

  And check it out, Training for Victory is the book, I actually finished reading it this morning.

• 3:05:16Speaker 07

  Oh, cool.

• 3:05:17Jack Murphy?

  I read the first three chapters when it first came out, and then when you were coming on the show, I was like, "Oh, I gotta really finish it now." I really enjoyed it, I hope you guys will go and check it out, it's out now, find it on Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or wherever.

• 3:05:28Speaker 04

  Oh, Dee, do we have any questions?

• 3:05:32Jack Murphy?

  Good point.

• 3:05:34Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:05:35Jack Murphy?

  I almost forgot about that.

• 3:05:42Speaker 03

  Uh, from M. Corbin. Uh. Coin from my civvy dumbass point of view seems to work best when done with a long-term more multi-generational goal in mind. How important are women in achieving coin goals in that respect?

• 3:05:59Speaker 07

  So, multi-generational, I think, is critical. Um, that is really the outlook that you have to take from it. And one of the biggest challenges, I think, we talked, I don't remember if it was before the interview or after, but the, you know, there's this premise that like, it was just over the horizon, the next year is all gonna be over.

• 3:06:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:06:17Speaker 07

  Um, I think the second part of the question was

• 3:06:20Speaker 03

  Women.

• 3:06:20Speaker 07

  How important are women in it? So, I think women are a really important factor in it. Um, if you, and, so there's a challenge, there's, there's, there's a balance, right? Certain cultures do not appreciate women. And, and do not value them like we do in the United States. Well, okay, maybe I'm, that's maybe a little harsh, but I think, and I'm just gonna say it. I, the challenge is, is pushing, you don't wanna push too hard, too fast, but you also don't wanna push too slow. Because there's a tremendous value there in, you know, if fifty percent of the population

• 3:07:05Speaker 07

  that could be producing economically, that could be producing new ideas, i- is out of the workforce, you're automatically stymied.

• 3:07:15Jack Murphy?

  The Afghans had like the, what was it, female tactical unit and

• 3:07:18Speaker 03

  The CST, the FET.

• 3:07:21Jack Murphy?

  Well, that was American.

• 3:07:21Speaker 03

  Oh, for, for the, yeah.

• 3:07:23Jack Murphy?

  Uh, and, and you point out in the book, the ICTF used women for recce.

• 3:07:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:07:29Speaker 07

  Uh, you know, for

• 3:07:33Speaker 07

  Just say for, because I'm trying to forget, the best way to say this. For, you know, human intelligence, oftentimes, women make superb, uh,

• 3:07:45Speaker 04

  Sources.

• 3:07:46Speaker 07

  Sources.

• 3:07:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:07:47Speaker 07

  And, you know, and, and there is tremendous value there. And I think particularly on the human intelligence side, if, if that is overlooked, it, it's, you know, a, a huge resource that is being not tapped.

• 3:08:03Speaker 04

  Well, in, in a lot of times, you know, and whether it's in a Latin American country where, you know, the women are, are free to speak, but, you know, are tired of losing their sons, are tired of the bullshit. Or, you know, you go to Afghanistan, where, you know, the FET and CST, uh, uh, teams, or even a, a, a med cap, or a PRT or whatever, where all the guys are like, I'm not saying shit, and the women are like, yeah, they built the well, and then these motherfuckers came in and blew up the well, and now I have to walk, you know, two clicks, you know, I have to walk to the river to get the water. Yeah, I want to tell you who blew up the well.

• 3:08:45Speaker 07

  Right.

• 3:08:46Speaker 04

  Right? Um, to be able to leverage that and, and have, you know, US or, or indigenous intelligence,

• 3:08:56Speaker 04

  or information gatherers, even if they're not like intelligence, but being able to interact with those women.

• 3:09:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:09:03Speaker 04

  It, it, it's, like, it's a massive.

• 3:09:05Speaker 07

  Advantage.

• 3:09:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, advantage, yeah.

• 3:09:07Speaker 07

  There is one last thing I wanted to throw out, is that is oftentimes,

• 3:09:12Speaker 07

  when women are more included in the defense forces, there's a statistical correlation with less corruption. And, you know, Whether it's that, you know, they're the outsiders. And so by being outsiders, they're more willing to kind of call out stuff and willing to be whistleblowers or whatever. But they, there is a correlation there in that in organizations and armies that have women in the services, the corruption often is less.

• 3:09:47Speaker 04

  I wonder if that is, I wonder if the corruption is less because there are women who will call it out? Or if a culture that is progressive enough to have women is just

• 3:09:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:09:58Speaker 04

  a less corrupt culture by nature. I don't, I don't know. I'd be curious.

• 3:10:02Speaker 07

  That's a valid point.

• 3:10:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:04Speaker 07

  That's a valid point. It's the causation versus correlation.

• 3:10:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:08Speaker 07

  Any other questions?

• 3:10:11Speaker 03

  From Ryan P. Training for Victor was a pretty informative read. I learned a lot, particularly about Af- about the Afghans and Iraqis and their advisors. However, I kind of wondered why an uncritical take was given to the Colombians. Can we get an explanation?

• 3:10:27Speaker 07

  Um, so, I don't know. Uh.

• 3:10:31Speaker 04

  Uncritical?

• 3:10:32Speaker 07

  Uncritical. Yeah.

• 3:10:36Speaker 07

  I think, I mean, my perception of the Colombians and I, okay, so I'm gonna back up. When I went into this, if I was gonna rank order the most successful units before I started my research, I thought it was gonna be I saw. Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 3:11:19Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that

• 3:11:22Speaker 02

  Remind you, you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. Cash flow crunch on deck. Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat.

• 3:12:03Speaker 02

  With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:12:21Speaker 07

  Afghan commandos, LRR, Colombians, El Salvador. Like my perception not having worked in Latin America and perhaps, you know, just the stereotype, you know, I thought, oh, they're, they're going to be a mass corruption, et cetera. Man, like everyone I talked to, like everyone, and I talked to civilians, I talked to people in the intelligence community, I talked to a journalist, I talked to Host Nation, I talked to everyone from, you know, E7 to Lieutenant General and in every rank in between.

• 3:13:03Speaker 07

  I talked to State Department people, I talked to Army people who were not SOF but who were in the embassy in, you know, the attache or the advisory group. And like across the board, it was, this is the best partner for us. And so if it comes across as perhaps is the least critical, I think that's just a reflection of mostly of the research of, and frankly, my surprise that I had them ranked fourth initially and they came out the best. If anything, you know,

• 3:13:43Speaker 07

  You know, a critical comment about the Colombians was, or let me rephrase that. A way to understand perhaps why Training for Victory isn't critical of the Colombians is if you look at the time periods that is involved, it is after the Sampler presidency. And that is a big turning point. Colombia in the 90s is a mess. It's a disaster. Everyone is predicting it's going to be a failed state, or that large tracts of the country are going to be overrun by the FARC. The FARC is going to run parts of the country. They're going to become their own country.

• 3:14:19Speaker 03

  They already did. They had like their autonomous zone.

• 3:14:20Speaker 07

  They did. They had an autonomous zone.

• 3:14:22Speaker 04

  Farklandia.

• 3:14:23Speaker 07

  Farklandia, completely. There were more kidnappings and murders in Colombia than in Afghanistan in the late 90s. It was like the number one per capita in the world. It was a disaster.

• 3:14:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:14:40Speaker 07

  The Training for Victory comes after that period, partially. I start after the Sampler has ended because the Baco and Aglán don't start getting really stood up until post-September 11th.

• 3:15:00Speaker 04

  Who made that comment?

• 3:15:06Speaker 03

  Brian P.

• 3:15:07Speaker 04

  So if Ryan, if you're still watching right now, just throw up in the chat or in the thing, like if you had criticisms of it, I'd be curious, obviously you saw it as uncritical. I'd be curious what criticisms you may have expected that didn't land.

• 3:15:26Speaker 03

  All right, we got one more from Matt G. What's the best advice you've received? And thank you for your time.

• 3:15:35Speaker 07

  Best advice I ever received?

• 3:15:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:15:39Speaker 07

  Great question.

• 3:15:43Speaker 07

  I mean, the best advice I ever received was from Captain Cunliffe, who is my company commander and who told me to try out for SF. I mean, that was the best advice I ever received. But, you know, he said, "Look, if you don't do it, you'll regret it the rest of your life." And there are certain things that, kind of turning points in your life, where, you know, I didn't come from a military family. I certainly didn't come from a, you know, a soft or elite family. You know, my dad was an orphan.

• 3:16:19Speaker 07

  You've got to jump into deep end.

• 3:16:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:16:22Speaker 07

  And, you know, having the right mentor or right person at the right time in your life to help push you a little bit off or to tell you like, "Hey, jump, it's gonna be okay." That, taking that jump is okay.

• 3:16:40Speaker 04

  Do you, had, were you aware of SF prior to him saying that?

• 3:16:47Speaker 07

  I mean, I was aware of it, but I, you know, I was not one of these guys that was like at West Point, like, "I'm going SF," you know?

• 3:16:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:16:54Speaker 07

  Like, I was in the infantry tactics club. And so, like, I spent my spring breaks, like, overseas, training with foreign militaries, like the Brits mostly. I spent my weekends in the field doing cool, you know, patrols, basically pre-range or almost like patrols, but without getting hazed. It was like, it was fun.

• 3:17:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:17:12Speaker 07

  It's just like, you know, doing, training all the time with ammo and, anyway.

• 3:17:18Speaker 07

  But, yeah, so.

• 3:17:21Speaker 04

  Do you think, I'm sorry.

• 3:17:22Jack Murphy?

  I was just gonna say.

• 3:17:24Speaker 07

  It wasn't like something that I knew that I was going into.

• 3:17:26Speaker 04

  Do you think that you ever would have had he not said, "Do it"?

• 3:17:32Speaker 07

  I gotta tell you, I don't know.

• 3:17:34Jack Murphy?

  It's interesting, like, the.

• 3:17:35Speaker 07

  Fate.

• 3:17:36Jack Murphy?

  It's on my mind because we just did it. But when we interviewed Lindsay earlier today, and she went and assessed for 160th because her commander told her, "You'll never be a Little Bird pilot. There's no way you'll ever get selected." And she was like, "I'll fucking show you." It's just, it's interesting how like, different people need to hear different things at different periods of their life, right?

• 3:17:59Speaker 07

  So I will add, one of the other company commanders, I overheard him talking to another commander, saying, "Oh, Sobchak's never gonna make it." And I was like, "Oh, motherfucker, you know, just wait."

• 3:18:14Speaker 07

  So, so yeah, so I had that, I had actually on both kind of, both poles, right?

• 3:18:20Jack Murphy?

  Going around, yeah.

• 3:18:21Speaker 07

  But pushing me, kind of like magnetically, like, push and pull, right? But to answer the question, I don't know.

• 3:18:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:29Speaker 07

  And, and I, I've become kind of more of a believer in like, fate and like, just like, shit kind of happens? Like, without almost, like, there's gravity in our lives and, and we get pulled certain ways, just people in our lives, you know, whether there are connections from previous lives, or, or what, or...

• 3:18:54Speaker 07

  If, if, if that, you know, I think back to it, like, if that flyer, if it had gotten lost in the mail.

• 3:18:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:00Speaker 07

  Right? Like...

• 3:19:01Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 3:19:03Speaker 07

  If, if Captain Kuntliff hadn't been there, looking over me when I was his XO, was, was looking at it, and he hadn't remarked? I don't know, I might have had a, I might have gotten out of the army at the six-year mark.

• 3:19:16Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:19Speaker 07

  I probably would have, because I was not happy.

• 3:19:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:22Speaker 04

  Fascinating.

• 3:19:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:19:24Speaker 04

  Uh, did Ryan P. respond? No. Okay.

• 3:19:27Jack Murphy?

  So, I think that's about a wrap for tonight, Frank, uh, at least until you write your next book, Publish or Perish.

• 3:19:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:19:34Jack Murphy?

  You know, we'll see you here again sometime, I hope.

• 3:19:37Speaker 07

  Inshallah.

• 3:19:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:41Jack Murphy?

  Uh, so then, thank you for joining us, thanks for giving us this interview.

• 3:19:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, we really appreciate it. I really appreciate you having me, thanks so much.

• 3:19:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you're welcome anytime, man. And, uh, we'll see all of you guys out there next time, thanks for joining us. Hey guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show, if you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this, you can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the team house. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of the team house ad free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast Eyes On with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, McMulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad free. And you support the channel and the show and we really appreciate it.

• 3:20:28Jack Murphy?

  The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers. And we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well.

• 3:21:08Jack Murphy?

  So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop. And additionally, they got t-shirts up there, water bottles, a tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show.

• 3:21:24Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 3:21:38Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 3:21:49Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you are not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast.

• 3:22:13Speaker 02

  On America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:22:50Jack Murphy?

  Oh, we really appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

• 3:22:56Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 3:23:11Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 3:23:22Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat, it's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:23:53Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:24:27Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 3:24:42Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 3:24:53Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:25:24Speaker 05

  Cash Flow Crunch on Deck. Small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:26:00Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 3:26:14Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 3:26:25Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone. Remind you, you're not alone.

• 3:26:31Speaker 02

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 3:26:36Speaker 00

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:26:56Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:27:33Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 3:27:47Speaker 07

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 3:27:58Speaker 00

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.

• 3:28:04Speaker 02

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 3:28:09Speaker 00

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 3:28:29Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 3:28:59Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 3:29:12Speaker 01

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair.

• 3:29:55Speaker 01

  This is an advertisement for Zolair paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 3:29:59Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.