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Speaker 4: Special Operations, Cobert SPI and.
Speaker 5: The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David bark.
Speaker 4: Hey.
Speaker 6: Welcome to episode three hundred and forty one of the
Speaker 6: Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest
Speaker 6: on today's show. We're very happy to have in studio
Speaker 6: Frank Sobchak. He is a career Special Forces officer now retired,
Speaker 6: and he's the author of Training for Victory. This was
Speaker 6: a really great book. It has five case studies on
Speaker 6: El Salvador, the Philippines, Columbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, examining our partner
Speaker 6: force relationships and where do they go well, where do
Speaker 6: they go wrong? And we'll get into all of that.
Speaker 6: But Frank, thank you for joining us on the show.
Speaker 6: Thanks thanks for having me. I really appreciated this up
Speaker 6: over here.
Speaker 4: So let's start off a little bit talking about you.
Speaker 6: Can you tell us a little bit about, you know,
Speaker 6: sort of how you grew up and how that took
Speaker 6: you towards military service.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I did not come from a military family.
Speaker 5: When actually I went to West Point, or I got
Speaker 5: accepted west Point, my dad literally told me, why are
Speaker 5: you going into the army? The armies for stupid people?
Speaker 5: And schmucks and he.
Speaker 4: Was not entirely wrong.
Speaker 5: So so my dad the recent kind of I was
Speaker 5: attracted in a military service, and my dad was drafted
Speaker 5: for World War Two, but he served in.
Speaker 7: The Panama Canal.
Speaker 5: Both my dad and his brother were enlisted men. His
Speaker 5: brother was in seven nine Infantry Division, kind of fought
Speaker 5: his way across Europe Purple Heart CIB. Years later used
Speaker 5: his CIB when I earned this. So it's very cool.
Speaker 5: How I kind of got into it was my dad
Speaker 5: was an orphan and he went from literally nothing, you know,
Speaker 5: close on his back in a boys home to upper
Speaker 5: middle class electrical engineer sixteen patents, kind of the American dream, right,
Speaker 5: and you know, to me it was and he was
Speaker 5: patriotic and he appreciated, I mean, he just appreciated what
Speaker 5: America had done for him. And so to a degree,
Speaker 5: it was paying back. It was an appreciation of what.
Speaker 4: We have here.
Speaker 5: And that's that's what drew me to military service. It
Speaker 5: was it was definitely the black sheep for sure of
Speaker 5: the family.
Speaker 4: But you got accepted to West Point, So that's a
Speaker 4: what year is this?
Speaker 7: So it was I started in eighty eight, graduated.
Speaker 4: In ninety two. Gotcha.
Speaker 5: I actually went to enlisted as a reservist as a
Speaker 5: combat engineer before because you know, we had no military
Speaker 5: experience in our family. It's like no one to be like, hey,
Speaker 5: what's it like other than my dad who's drafted and
Speaker 5: is like.
Speaker 4: It's horrible. I want to do it, you know.
Speaker 7: So I did that kind of his little experiment to
Speaker 7: kind of test the waters.
Speaker 6: So how is West Point in the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 6: I mean, you.
Speaker 4: Know, West Point sucks. It's you know, it's it's organized torture.
Speaker 5: But it gives you, i mean great opportunities that you know,
Speaker 5: you have experiences that I mean, you're so fortunate. I
Speaker 5: did in exchange with the British Army, went to Sandhurst,
Speaker 5: who went.
Speaker 4: To the field.
Speaker 5: You know, my second year spent two weeks of the
Speaker 5: Britton Field. Things that you know, a lot of times
Speaker 5: you might spend a career in the army, like or
Speaker 5: a tour in the Army and just never have the
Speaker 5: chance to do.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, the other thing is is the.
Speaker 5: It and it's hard, but it really builds your the
Speaker 5: camaraderie and the closeness of your classmates and your friends,
Speaker 5: and you know, it's just lifelong friends that you know,
Speaker 5: you know, you can always count on.
Speaker 6: The last episode that we filmed earlier today. Actually, Lindsay
Speaker 6: was the.
Speaker 4: First captain I think is the very cool.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like the fourth woman to ever have that position
Speaker 6: at West Point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very cool. So she did pretty well for herself
Speaker 4: over there.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I didn't do that well.
Speaker 6: You were the guy that had to what it's the
Speaker 6: when you get the merits, you have to like walk around.
Speaker 4: The walk the area.
Speaker 5: You walk the area when you get demerits or punishment.
Speaker 4: I was not bad.
Speaker 5: I mean I only had eight hours, so I kind
Speaker 5: of kept my nose mostly clean, you know, matter truth
Speaker 5: be told, I just didn't get caught most of the time.
Speaker 4: But you know, it is so when you went to
Speaker 4: West Point.
Speaker 3: Before you went, did you have an idea of what
Speaker 3: you wanted to do in the army and did.
Speaker 4: That change or form while you were at West Point? Yeah?
Speaker 5: This is uh, that's this is part of the unfortunate thing,
Speaker 5: I think, coming from a non military family, not knowing
Speaker 5: anything about really service other than what my dad and
Speaker 5: my uncle had talked to me about, and you know, shocker,
Speaker 5: the West Point experience is not like the experience in
Speaker 5: the real army like nothing like it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and your your dad and was your uncle.
Speaker 6: I mean, they experience the massive global war drafted probably
Speaker 6: for like a year's period of time, a little bit
Speaker 6: different than what you were experienced completely do from.
Speaker 4: The you know, volunteer army.
Speaker 5: So I went to West Point, wasn't really sure what I,
Speaker 5: you know, was going to do. After graduating, I actually
Speaker 5: went in military intelligence for the first four years and
Speaker 5: found it was not a good fit for me.
Speaker 7: And I was really kind of fortunate though.
Speaker 5: One of my bosses, my company commander, it's one hundred
Speaker 5: first infature guy. You know, this is back in the day.
Speaker 5: There's a pre email, right, but they're sending notices through
Speaker 5: you through division mail.
Speaker 4: Like photocopies. And I had a photo.
Speaker 5: Copy that I was looking at my desk and it was,
Speaker 5: you know, try out for SF. And he looked at
Speaker 5: me and he's like, I know you, Frank. He's like,
Speaker 5: you're a good fit for it. And he's like, if
Speaker 5: you don't do it, he'll regret it the rest of
Speaker 5: your life.
Speaker 4: And that's one of the best piece of advice I've ever.
Speaker 5: Been given, and you know, went through made it.
Speaker 4: You know, so you get to group then what is
Speaker 4: it ninety.
Speaker 1: Six or so?
Speaker 7: No, I get to group ninety eight.
Speaker 5: Okay, so you know stopovers, Ranger School, Q course, you
Speaker 5: know Armor Advance Course, you know, kind of like the pathway.
Speaker 6: The Armor Advanced Course, So you have to go through
Speaker 6: that as like Captain's Career course.
Speaker 1: Scre course gotrip.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And at that point SF for officers was singing
Speaker 5: the decent amount of guys there because of like the
Speaker 5: FID mission, you know, Middle East, a lot of tanks,
Speaker 5: a lot of mechnized warfare, So there was kind of
Speaker 5: an emphasis on sending at least a good slew of
Speaker 5: the guys who would go to fifth group to THEOS.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very interesting. Cool, So you get to fifth group, tell.
Speaker 6: Us about landing on a team now mid to late
Speaker 6: nineteen nineties, what you guys were up to?
Speaker 5: You know, there's no better job in the Army than
Speaker 5: being anf team leader. Like, it's just not it's just
Speaker 5: a at least I was very fortunate. I had a
Speaker 5: good team. It was young, but still a couple enough
Speaker 5: experienced guys to you know, have strength there and.
Speaker 4: They're hungry.
Speaker 5: They wanted to deploy, they wanted to you know, go
Speaker 5: out and do things. So I got a you know,
Speaker 5: trip to Kosovo. During that time period, we did three
Speaker 5: JTF six missions.
Speaker 4: And then this is a lot on the border.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is all after the period where the Marine
Speaker 5: shot the Mexican kid on the Mexican side of the
Speaker 5: border and then they shot shut down the hide site
Speaker 5: operations and effectively we're doing FID with.
Speaker 4: Law enforcement agencies.
Speaker 5: Okay, but it was also kind of a cost effective
Speaker 5: because they would pay for our travel out there.
Speaker 4: We would pay for our trucks to get out there,
Speaker 4: and you're doing desert training basically.
Speaker 5: Exactly right, piggyback, like two three weeks of desert training
Speaker 5: out there, do just cool stuff, go out the Imperial
Speaker 5: Sand Dunes, you know, National Park in California and driving
Speaker 5: over three hundred foot dunes at night with nods.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's just it's awesome.
Speaker 3: You had the whole like ansabrego out there and yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: So and then Kosovo is interesting that you got that
Speaker 6: trip because that was mostly like tenth group guys, right, yep.
Speaker 5: They had a small contingent called the U A l
Speaker 5: CE again a fid SFA mission where there's a combined
Speaker 5: Amoradi and Jordanian soft presence, and so we were there
Speaker 5: to be their advisors, to connect with the you know,
Speaker 5: the AOB that was there as well as you know,
Speaker 5: there was some early kind of rumblings of you know,
Speaker 5: Islamic extremism was starting to pop up even then in
Speaker 5: Kosovo that we were some of our guys were plugged into.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the Iranian influence too Iranian.
Speaker 5: There was more Cindy threat at least when I was there.
Speaker 5: I mean I could have changed afterwards, but the threat
Speaker 5: was more a Q or you know pre AQ or
Speaker 5: you know, just Sydney extremists.
Speaker 6: And so then where were you guys at when nine
Speaker 6: to eleven happened?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was at Georgetown studying actually Arab studies.
Speaker 4: I was doing like five and a half.
Speaker 5: Hours Arabic a day as well as regular master's load.
Speaker 4: I was going to go teach at West Point.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I mean, you know, saw the Pentagon burning
Speaker 5: from the hill at Georgetown and here a bass mover,
Speaker 5: you know, sixteen flying over you know, US City, which
Speaker 5: is you know, at that point, it was just unimaginable.
Speaker 4: This is something that you.
Speaker 5: Know, you knew the world had kind of forever changed
Speaker 5: at that point.
Speaker 4: And yeah, and what was the next stop for you
Speaker 4: after Georgetown?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I went to teach at West Point for two years,
Speaker 5: and I went went to branch asked that.
Speaker 8: I was like, hey, Bosky, get me in the fight.
Speaker 8: You no like speak Arabic. I'm a you know two
Speaker 8: plus two plus three at that point. Yeah, so really
Speaker 8: like very.
Speaker 4: Functional, and you know it's like, look, you know, maybe.
Speaker 5: It's tragical reserve to have your chance. And I did
Speaker 5: have my chance. So yeah, I taught at West Point
Speaker 5: for two years teaching history. I got to do Best
Speaker 5: Ranger during that time period too, and eleven Worth two
Speaker 5: I say, did.
Speaker 4: It twice and then back to fifth group. After that,
Speaker 4: back to fifth group.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I had a brava company. Five twenty I
Speaker 5: took to Iraq just south of Moosol and Ninola Province,
Speaker 5: so Hantra to Mahmour to Hamama Alil and then uh
Speaker 5: Kayada also of a you know area that really went
Speaker 5: from bizarre because it included past the green line into
Speaker 5: you know, Kirstan all the way to the border up
Speaker 5: to the southern elements of the Soul.
Speaker 6: And so you're a company commander of this commander and
Speaker 6: what was So you have six teams over there, I
Speaker 6: have four teams, you fourteen. Yeah, this is what were
Speaker 6: your company's partner forces at the time.
Speaker 4: So the partner forces.
Speaker 5: The at Aki military had basically collapsed in November of
Speaker 5: I think it was November four and they hadn't really
Speaker 5: been fully reconstituted. So we deployed, if I remember correctly,
Speaker 5: in May, and it was like an off cycle where
Speaker 5: they deployed a conglomerate of like third Group, nineteenth Group,
Speaker 5: fifth Group under a fifth group battalion headquarters to like
Speaker 5: try to get the at Aki army in Ninia kind
Speaker 5: of back up the par and that was the core
Speaker 5: of it. So we had everything from a battalion that
Speaker 5: was mostly Shia that had stickers of look that so
Speaker 5: other on their a k you know, buttstocks too, you
Speaker 5: know Kurdish you know former Pesh America battalions that you go.
Speaker 4: Into their area guys, Yeah, you know, I.
Speaker 5: Think they were KDP actually on on the ones that
Speaker 5: we were with with you know, the the Kurdish flag
Speaker 5: as most the Iraqi flag, and you know they're well
Speaker 5: organized arms rooms as most of the general chaos two
Speaker 5: on the border a sunny former chick who everyone just referred.
Speaker 9: To as you know, uh tony soprano sacks of money
Speaker 9: down in the basement of the mosque.
Speaker 5: Would not surprise me. They were quite crazy stories that
Speaker 5: we'd hear. But and also he's kind of pretty thuggish.
Speaker 4: So so how did how.
Speaker 6: Did that deployment play out for you guys?
Speaker 5: You know, it was you know, it's not a high adventure.
Speaker 5: It's not like you know, Flujah Ramadi, you know, get
Speaker 5: shot out occasionally, but nothing like, you know, not high drama,
Speaker 5: so not in the thick of anything. Some of the teams,
Speaker 5: you know, other companies kind of had more you know,
Speaker 5: they're out at telef So it was kind of there's
Speaker 5: operation that ran.
Speaker 4: There was nuts back then.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but you know, it was a it was a
Speaker 5: mix because even by that point it was very clear
Speaker 5: that the Iraqis were really liminating what we were, at
Speaker 5: least with the regular army, what we could kind of
Speaker 5: do and reach into their units and kind of control,
Speaker 5: and you know, it'd be like, okay, you know, why
Speaker 5: are we having the same platoon you know, rotate through
Speaker 5: from different battalions. I thought we're supposed to partner with
Speaker 5: one battalion for the whole six months. You know, we're
Speaker 5: not like basic trainers where platform drill sergeants that the
Speaker 5: guys come in, we trained them for a month and
Speaker 5: they leave and then you're rotating your next unit in.
Speaker 5: Like that's not you know, what we signed up for,
Speaker 5: and that's not what we want you to do because
Speaker 5: it's wornless.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: But regardless of the complaining up the chain, you know,
Speaker 5: nothing ever happened.
Speaker 3: What was your you know, your you're fairly senior at
Speaker 3: this point in time, and you know you have more
Speaker 3: of a direct line to you know, command decisions and
Speaker 3: things like that, yeah, than you know then a guy
Speaker 3: on an eighteen for instance, what was your impression of
Speaker 3: the US management of the war.
Speaker 7: So that's a great question.
Speaker 5: I distinctly remember when General Casey, who is the MNFI commander,
Speaker 5: he flew up. We all went up, the most sold
Speaker 5: the whole battalion, uh, you know, team sergeants, team leaders,
Speaker 5: and team warrants and met with him as he briefed
Speaker 5: on the campaign plan and kind of how we fit
Speaker 5: into it. And at that point, the whole strategy was
Speaker 5: basically transition, and it was that within like a year
Speaker 5: or two we were going he shrunk down to like
Speaker 5: two bases, and we were going to minimize contact with
Speaker 5: the Atrocis because we were effectively creating antibodies.
Speaker 7: Where you know, there were more.
Speaker 5: We were creating more insurgents than we killed, just because
Speaker 5: we were the Americans being there, right, And you know,
Speaker 5: we sat through that brief. I remember another major and
Speaker 5: I and afterwards we looked at each other and I
Speaker 5: can't remember who it was. One of us said, we're
Speaker 5: really going to lose this thing, aren't we.
Speaker 7: And the other one of us said, yeah, we.
Speaker 5: Are, because I mean, if you know, the just basic
Speaker 5: precepts of counterinsurgency theory, like transition is particularly when the
Speaker 5: Arakis aren't nowhere near ready and you know, this is
Speaker 5: like a month or two into it, or we're like,
Speaker 5: holy smokes, we got like ten years of work with
Speaker 5: these guys to like get them to like where they
Speaker 5: need to be, right, and they're telling us we're gonna
Speaker 5: be transitioning in at four bases in like eighteen months,
Speaker 5: and we're backing up and leaving, like that's not gonna.
Speaker 4: Work, right?
Speaker 6: Did you think that's because they were just like on
Speaker 6: our side, just unseerious about the war or were they
Speaker 6: really so deluded that they believed that this was a possibility.
Speaker 7: So I think there's two factors going on.
Speaker 5: Is I do think Casey and General Avizade, who was
Speaker 5: the same comm commander at that point, I think they
Speaker 5: actually both believed in kind of the antibody theory and
Speaker 5: that we were creating more insurgents.
Speaker 4: By just being there.
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Speaker 5: And there, you know, the prescription for that was like, Okay,
Speaker 5: minimize presence, go to minimal footprint. And you know that
Speaker 5: works if a you know you're now having you don't have.
Speaker 7: A civil war to contend.
Speaker 5: With, be the political and military side of the Iraqis
Speaker 5: are capable of being transitioned to and see that if
Speaker 5: you really have beaten back the insurgency to the point
Speaker 5: where you don't have that kind of threat also, and
Speaker 5: none of those were viable at that point. So it's
Speaker 5: to me, it's it was madness. And I'll tell you so.
Speaker 5: My last job in the army was one of the writers,
Speaker 5: and then I took over the writing the operational history
Speaker 5: of the Rock War and going into it, my like
Speaker 5: core premise was like, no, these guys couldn't have believed that,
Speaker 5: Like it's nuts to believe.
Speaker 4: It, right, Like, and I sat.
Speaker 5: Down and I think I had twenty seven hours with
Speaker 5: General Casey of like person in person interviews, eighteen hours
Speaker 5: with General Sanchez who's the you know CJTF seven commander
Speaker 5: from like four to six, and General Abizaide interview Jenn
Speaker 5: Abozide also all sorts of others.
Speaker 4: And they actually really believed it.
Speaker 5: Wow, like I you know, it wasn't you know, and
Speaker 5: going through the documents, they really believed it. And in
Speaker 5: some ways, you know, afterwards they argue that how things
Speaker 5: turned out proved them right in effact that they wanted
Speaker 5: to transition because theoretically they didn't think it was ever
Speaker 5: possible in it ack. But yeah, I it's weird, I
Speaker 5: think there. You know, my original premise was that there's
Speaker 5: so much political pressure on them, you know, from the
Speaker 5: Bush administration who just wanted to move on, as well
Speaker 5: as from the title ten Army you know, the organized
Speaker 5: train equip and other marines, other elements of the Joint
Speaker 5: chiefs that were like whoa, like, we are.
Speaker 4: Way over committed here.
Speaker 5: We're going to lose transformation, We're going to lose all
Speaker 5: these weapons systems that we want to use to focus
Speaker 5: on the next you know, pure near peer competitor and
Speaker 5: we want to get out of I Rock. I thought
Speaker 5: that there was so much pressure on them from all
Speaker 5: these sources that they just decided, okay, yeah, we gave
Speaker 5: my best military advice and I moved on. But their
Speaker 5: best military advice was that transition.
Speaker 3: I'm curious because you know, I spent like three years
Speaker 3: in and out of there a lot, and I used
Speaker 3: to think about, like, what's going on because we see,
Speaker 3: you know, when you do sixty day trips at a time, but.
Speaker 4: You do three trips a year over you know, three years.
Speaker 3: And you see you see the same thing over and
Speaker 3: over again. I felt as though our government was too
Speaker 3: hung up on the the concept of liberation, right, we
Speaker 3: liberate these people from Saddam, and then it's done. Where
Speaker 3: when you see past World War two, for instance, you
Speaker 3: break it, you buy it. So we stayed in Germany,
Speaker 3: we stayed in Japan until those countries were rebuilt, and
Speaker 3: we didn't shy away from the word occupation where this
Speaker 3: is like it was such a.
Speaker 4: Nation building it's the other that we shot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is such a like it was such a
Speaker 3: politically sense. At no point in time did anybody ever
Speaker 3: want to say we are we are occupying Iraq, and
Speaker 3: so we basically, like I said, we went in there
Speaker 3: and we kicked it over and then we went okay,
Speaker 3: you know, well we're here to facilitate, but we're not
Speaker 3: doing it for you.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean there's there's a lot to unpacked there, and
Speaker 5: I agree with you completely.
Speaker 7: So like there was.
Speaker 5: It was crazy because like the Joint staffs, there are
Speaker 5: these interviews like beforehand that they are like unquoted members
Speaker 5: of the geos who wouldn't give their names, would say, hey,
Speaker 5: I want to pike a post a big sign on
Speaker 5: the pentagon that says we don't.
Speaker 4: Do nation building.
Speaker 5: And and it was a combination of the uniform services
Speaker 5: but also the civilian defense leaders, you know, whether it
Speaker 5: be Rumsfeld or others within the administration at that point
Speaker 5: who who were allergic.
Speaker 4: To it, like Somalia and things like that they'd seen in.
Speaker 5: The past, completely Somalia, Kosovo, you know, the Yugoslavia, all
Speaker 5: those they fought were a waste of resources. And I mean,
Speaker 5: I think you can make a viable strategic argument on
Speaker 5: the value or lack thereof of Kosovo or Balkans or Somalia.
Speaker 5: And I think there are arguments that can be made
Speaker 5: either way, but to then drag that into Okay, we're
Speaker 5: gonna you know, topple Iraq, which is the traditional counterbalance
Speaker 5: to Iran, which is our greatest threat in the region,
Speaker 5: and then just leave.
Speaker 6: Like seems sure there's a strategic.
Speaker 5: Lack of foresight there. That is, that's you know, where
Speaker 5: it's on criminal negligence. And and so there really was.
Speaker 5: I mean, the they the many of the civilian leaders.
Speaker 5: One of the civilian leaders actually had proposed that there
Speaker 5: was one brigade, right, I need to remember the there's
Speaker 5: intrinsic action or whatever they called it, the one brigade
Speaker 5: on the collect you know, doing not peacekeeping but deterrence
Speaker 5: in Kuwait. And the civilian leadership is like, we have
Speaker 5: a brigade there, we can launch now. And the military
Speaker 5: leaders were like, wait, no, you need like, you know,
Speaker 5: four or five divisions, you know. And there's the famous
Speaker 5: engagement where General Shinseki and then Secretary of White, Secretary
Speaker 5: of the Army White who actually gave testimony before Congress
Speaker 5: where they said, well, we would need several hundred thousand
Speaker 5: soldiers to be able to properly, you know, do nation
Speaker 5: building in Iraq. And I mean they got effectively, White
Speaker 5: got fired over it, Shinseki got his career terminated early,
Speaker 5: he didn't get extended, Brunsfeldt.
Speaker 4: Didn't go to his retirement.
Speaker 5: So clearly, you know, lost off the Christmas or holiday cards.
Speaker 5: And you know, they they thought that a single brigade
Speaker 5: kind of like on the Afghan model with soft terminal
Speaker 5: guidance jay tax et cetera, precision guide munitions would be
Speaker 5: able to topple Sadam. And there's also this bizarre notion
Speaker 5: like he said that you know, like almost like the
Speaker 5: liberation at Paris in World Ward two, that rather than
Speaker 5: you know, flowers are going to throw flaffels at us, right,
Speaker 5: you know, like to thank us. I mean, and you
Speaker 5: know obviously that was like totally like off.
Speaker 4: It was insane.
Speaker 5: But those are the notions that we kind of went
Speaker 5: into it with, and it in some ways, I mean,
Speaker 5: there are many. It was interesting because we also had
Speaker 5: access to all of the detaining interviews with all these
Speaker 5: insurgent leaders.
Speaker 4: And there was also another I don't know if you
Speaker 4: ever heard of Bill Naherr. He think he was a
Speaker 4: SF guy.
Speaker 5: He ended up going to j Sound, but one of
Speaker 5: the projects he did was he went into Jordan in
Speaker 5: the eleven to like thirteen time period and interviewed all
Speaker 5: these former Sunni insurgeon leaders.
Speaker 4: And so many of them, like it was like almost
Speaker 4: the same comments.
Speaker 5: They're like, yeah, you know, when you guys toppled Saddam,
Speaker 5: you know, we we had hope, Like we were thinking,
Speaker 5: like this is America. This is you know, the country
Speaker 5: that you know put a man on the moon that
Speaker 5: you know, blotted out the skies, or a Nazi Germany
Speaker 5: with you know, bombers to like blotted out the sun.
Speaker 4: There were so many but.
Speaker 10: You guys couldn't even get gas to the gas stations
Speaker 10: right in the third country with the most oil in
Speaker 10: the world, right, like they just it just they're like,
Speaker 10: you know, so we and I mean, you know, the
Speaker 10: conspiracy theorist are so much throughout the Middle.
Speaker 6: East, so they're like, well they think it's intentional, like oh,
Speaker 6: this is part of your plant, that's exactly right.
Speaker 5: They're like, well, what is this is it intentional? Are
Speaker 5: they trying to bring you know, the Persia over, you know,
Speaker 5: which is.
Speaker 6: The level of paranoid reaches the point to sometimes like
Speaker 6: not even exaggerating, more like it'll rain outside and be
Speaker 6: like see I ended that. And I think a lot
Speaker 6: of it does come from like American movies, like our culture,
Speaker 6: the way it projects into the.
Speaker 4: Like because I remember talking to people.
Speaker 6: And they'd be like, if you guys really wanted Asama
Speaker 6: bin Laden dead, you just sent Bruce Willison kill.
Speaker 4: Them and to be over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they there's death. They do believe the movies. They
Speaker 3: believe that America has this omnipodence.
Speaker 6: And we backflip over triple strand concertina wire and all
Speaker 6: that good stuff, and you know.
Speaker 3: Just just the war plans in general, Like when when
Speaker 3: we went in, I remember going through these bases, these
Speaker 3: empty Iraqi bases that had been stripped of, you know,
Speaker 3: all the copper and and everything, and I was like,
Speaker 3: where are the Iraqi forces? If we weren't fighting Iraq? Right,
Speaker 3: if we were, if we were, if we were getting
Speaker 3: rid of Saddam, why was there not a psyops company?
Speaker 3: Why were they not dropping flyers over these bases telling
Speaker 3: the Rocky Army, hey, put your weapons down, state, remain
Speaker 3: in place. We're taking over your payroll. Like like, where
Speaker 3: where did we come up with this idea of completely
Speaker 3: obliterating every aspect of a country And then not taking
Speaker 3: responsibility for building that country back up.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I mean there's so many just just crazy
Speaker 5: like when you you know, historically reviewed it, it's like
Speaker 5: madness because there's no logic to it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the.
Speaker 5: You know, we're fortunate we actually got four hours to
Speaker 5: interview President Bush kind of talk to him. There are
Speaker 5: three people who refused us to be interviewed Robby. One
Speaker 5: of them was Rumsfeld, and so unfortunately we didn't get
Speaker 5: his perspective. We got Bremer's perspective, we got Secretary Condo
Speaker 5: Liza Rice, this perspective. So many different people, and the
Speaker 5: core question of CPA Orders number one and two, which
Speaker 5: disbanded the Unarchy Army and then.
Speaker 7: Outlawed the Bath Party.
Speaker 5: It's gonna be one of the historical questions that I
Speaker 5: think it's gonna probably take.
Speaker 6: So I'll figure out the mild spoiler alert. And I
Speaker 6: can't tell this story because it's not really my story
Speaker 6: to tell. But Tim Winer knows a lot about how
Speaker 6: that unfolded with Ian Bremer and the Debathification, and I
Speaker 6: believe it's gonna be in his new book that's coming
Speaker 6: out cool. And he told it to me, But it
Speaker 6: was like over a drink in a bar. I don't
Speaker 6: want to get ahead of his work that hasn't been
Speaker 6: published yet, but so stay tuned for that.
Speaker 4: But it is an interesting subject. I would be curious.
Speaker 3: I've thrown a lot of shade Bremer's way since, you know,
Speaker 3: since that time, and I would be very curious, And
Speaker 3: maybe I'm completely wrong, but I would be curious how
Speaker 3: your interview with him went.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I was not in that interview with Bramerus okayself,
Speaker 5: I did Bush a bunch of others.
Speaker 6: Tell us about w I mean, I would be fascinating
Speaker 6: here his perspectives.
Speaker 5: So one of the things we did ask him about
Speaker 5: that question, and you know, he said, look, I'm hands
Speaker 5: off manager. I trust the people who are on the
Speaker 5: ground more than the people in Washington, and I'm going
Speaker 5: to let you know the people there call audibles and
Speaker 5: when if they want to make a decision based on
Speaker 5: what they're seeing, I'm going to let them make the
Speaker 5: decision based on what they're seeing.
Speaker 7: So his core premise was that, Okay, it happened in
Speaker 7: at Ock.
Speaker 5: We it was kind of conflicting guidance and it wasn't
Speaker 5: clear to us even from what we could because we
Speaker 5: didn't have access to the National Security Council, the White
Speaker 5: House all those kind of records, or we didn't you know,
Speaker 5: we've had sentcom, we had you know, MNFI C, JTF
Speaker 5: seven and all those, but not any you know, not
Speaker 5: the Joint Staff either. The there was a notion though
Speaker 5: from some within the Defense Department that there's this perception
Speaker 5: that the Bath Party equals the Nazi Party, and that
Speaker 5: so to reinvigorate Iraq and renew Iraq, that it had
Speaker 5: to be expunged, which is bizarre because it like totally
Speaker 5: is not historically accurate, right, Like we it's more.
Speaker 4: Like the CCP in a way or whatever. Right, it's
Speaker 4: more a.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I mean we we employed Nazis, you know,
Speaker 5: after the Nazi Party members in Germany and in our
Speaker 5: space program after the war. Part of it is because
Speaker 5: we wanted the trains to run time. And there's you know,
Speaker 5: there's there's a degree of there's you know, you know,
Speaker 5: perfectness to it, but there's also a practicality to it,
Speaker 5: like that there's you know, when they run.
Speaker 4: Your public works, when they run everything.
Speaker 5: Everything right, you know, to be about you know, if
Speaker 5: you're not about party member, you're going to be a janitor, right,
Speaker 5: It's it's just like you said, it's the CCP, you know,
Speaker 5: the Communist Party. You know, like if you're not a member,
Speaker 5: good luck.
Speaker 6: So where do you think the disconnect came about? Because
Speaker 6: what President Bush was describing there is, on its face
Speaker 6: of it, not really a bad thing. He's delegating decisions
Speaker 6: down to guys who are on the ground and saying,
Speaker 6: you have to address the terrain as you see it.
Speaker 6: But nonetheless, you know, all these other problems we've been mentioning.
Speaker 6: I mean, where did the thing did it start to
Speaker 6: come a part at the geo level? That's the popular
Speaker 6: answer perhaps, but maybe it's too obvious.
Speaker 5: So the Bush interview is very interesting because you know,
Speaker 5: in some ways, you know, politicians tell very little.
Speaker 7: You get very little out.
Speaker 5: Of the interviews because you're just not gonna they're not
Speaker 5: gonna bear their soul, particularly someone that they've never met before,
Speaker 5: who isn't from the same culture they are, you know,
Speaker 5: and not you know, some geos.
Speaker 7: Gave useless interviews.
Speaker 5: Others I had three geos breakdown like sobbing, like during
Speaker 5: the interviews, like I had to stop the recording and.
Speaker 4: Could Yeah, I mean and so there's it's a mix,
Speaker 4: you know. Bush. It was one of the most interesting
Speaker 4: things was you could almost.
Speaker 5: Tell by like his his body posture and how when
Speaker 5: we started talking about Rumsfeld it changed a little bit
Speaker 5: kind of from that jovial I mean, you know, I'm
Speaker 5: just gonna say, kind of goofballish almost like you know,
Speaker 5: he's a fun guy, right, he's you know two, I
Speaker 5: almost detected a little bit of anger, you know, and
Speaker 5: just that reading the.
Speaker 4: Reading him.
Speaker 5: So I think that particularly early on, there were a
Speaker 5: lot of mistakes made because of.
Speaker 4: Rumsfeld.
Speaker 7: But I think in parallel.
Speaker 5: At least my premise is that the uniformed services, the generals,
Speaker 5: the strategy of the transition strategy was completely wrong for
Speaker 5: the time period.
Speaker 4: And you know, if we'd done.
Speaker 5: The surge three years earlier, the whole thing might have
Speaker 5: turned out okay.
Speaker 7: But instead we.
Speaker 5: You know, try the transition strategy while a civil war
Speaker 5: basically a slow burns of wars.
Speaker 7: Was the surgeon seven surges and seven, yeah, because there was.
Speaker 3: A mini surgeon of four, right, I'm trying to remember,
Speaker 3: but I know there was a major surgeon of the
Speaker 3: big surgeons sevenct.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I want to come back to the Iraq War study.
Speaker 6: I mean there's a lot to talk about there, but
Speaker 6: also I want to talk about the controversy. But uh,
Speaker 6: continuing along your career, you spent some time as three operations, Yeah, as.
Speaker 7: The S three for first Battalion and fifth Group.
Speaker 4: And then legal at Tasha No.
Speaker 5: So I went to a Legislative AFFAIRRIS for SOCOM, and so.
Speaker 4: I actually like that job. That's up on the hill
Speaker 4: right it's the Congress.
Speaker 5: So yeah, you are the liaison between SOCOM and Congress
Speaker 5: and you're doing everything from budgets to authorizations to your
Speaker 5: like the travel guide for congressional members and staff when
Speaker 5: they're doing visits to the base codels and codels and
Speaker 5: staff dells. And I ended up mostly on the Senate side,
Speaker 5: mostly in the Arm Service Committee working with them, but
Speaker 5: a little bit on appropriators too, And I mean I
Speaker 5: like the job for a couple of reasons. You know,
Speaker 5: one of the authorities that we ended up fighting and
Speaker 5: protect thing was the Live Tissue Training Authority.
Speaker 7: There were there's a member PETA.
Speaker 4: There was a movement to shut that down.
Speaker 7: There was a movement to shut it down in.
Speaker 5: It's either ten or eleven where Pete had gotten something
Speaker 5: like forty seven members of Congress to sign onto a
Speaker 5: bill to terminate live tissue training.
Speaker 6: They did end up they contracted out. Now it's like
Speaker 6: kind of the workaround.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: So so then it was serious, and so we came
Speaker 5: up with a strategy and you know, like I'm like, look,
Speaker 5: let's bring wounded guys and like literally go into these
Speaker 5: guys who are We're gonna play hardball and going to
Speaker 5: the guys who signed onto this bill particularly find a constituent,
Speaker 5: one of their constituents from their district who's wounded, who
Speaker 5: can say, look, I'm alive because of live tissue training, right,
Speaker 5: And we literally had fifteen people on that bill take
Speaker 5: their name off the bill.
Speaker 4: It's amazing so for people.
Speaker 5: And so it collapsed and I was like, Okay, you
Speaker 5: guys can come back in five years and try it again,
Speaker 5: but we killed it.
Speaker 3: For people who are watching who might not know what
Speaker 3: we're talking about. Live tipshoe training is generally taking a
Speaker 3: goat or you know, some other farm animal, but and
Speaker 3: pumping them full of ketamine so they don't feel anything,
Speaker 3: and then inflicting gunshot wounds or some sort of wound
Speaker 3: on them so that the medics and other people, like
Speaker 3: anybody really on a team can do actual live tissue training,
Speaker 3: stabilizing life saving procedures, things like that, things that really
Speaker 3: matter in the field in these traumatic environments. And it's
Speaker 3: really priceless training for people who get it. And so
Speaker 3: Pete decided that, you know that it was cool, and.
Speaker 4: You guys managed to circumvent that.
Speaker 7: We killed the bill.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and another occasion, there were two years when the
Speaker 5: army and is bizarre like totally not understanding like how
Speaker 5: the system works. They came up they thought they had
Speaker 5: this principal approach that, Okay, we're not going to try
Speaker 5: for any ear marks or ads. We'm not gonna try
Speaker 5: for any correstional ads.
Speaker 4: No pork barrel politics. We're not gonna do any park
Speaker 4: barrel politics.
Speaker 5: We're not going to submit a up list and unfinancid
Speaker 5: requirements list. Man, I made like two hundred and fifty
Speaker 5: million dollars a year for so Com. I got additional helicopters,
Speaker 5: I got frees drive plasma, I got all sorts of
Speaker 5: I got you know, dog handling teams and uh, you know.
Speaker 4: All sorts of like the seal got boats.
Speaker 5: I mean we this cleared house those years because the
Speaker 5: way the game is played on the hill is that
Speaker 5: money's there, right, and it's gonna go to someone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you have to fight for it, and you have.
Speaker 5: To fight for it. The army takes themselves out of
Speaker 5: the competition. That money is still there for the taking, right,
Speaker 5: and you have to make a good argument for it.
Speaker 4: And that's why so calm has you up there, that's right,
Speaker 4: did you?
Speaker 3: I imagine you learned quite a bit about that side
Speaker 3: and how it interacts with the military, I mean, how
Speaker 3: it works in general, but particularly how it works with
Speaker 3: the military.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you see how poor you know, you see how
Speaker 5: sausage is made, and I mean there's good and bad,
Speaker 5: and you know, it's like anything, and many of the
Speaker 5: members have no clue. Yeah, the members meaning like senators
Speaker 5: or members of the House representative. But there's staffs that
Speaker 5: sometimes are like the you know, really good and decent
Speaker 5: and smart and hard working people that really care, particularly
Speaker 5: on the Armed services committees. And there's a lot of
Speaker 5: veterans on them too, and people who just really and
Speaker 5: this is in the era before like partisan politics. I
Speaker 5: mean it was seven to eleven, where like the people
Speaker 5: in the Armed Services Committee man.
Speaker 4: You know, they were trying.
Speaker 5: To do what's right for us, for those in the fight.
Speaker 5: And I mean, you know, one of the funny, well
Speaker 5: ironic things is, you know where drones came from, the
Speaker 5: Predator and the Reaper was a Congressional ad.
Speaker 7: The Air Force did not want to buy.
Speaker 5: Them because you know, it's not a pointy O's fighter
Speaker 5: pilot or a bomber pop right, So they totally opposed it.
Speaker 5: It was a forced ad where a California house member
Speaker 5: I believe, forced them to you know, support and buy
Speaker 5: the original Predators from General Atomics. And the Air Force
Speaker 5: fought it every step of the way.
Speaker 7: And they they're like, no, this is the way of
Speaker 7: the future.
Speaker 5: You're you, and you need an aircraft that can loiter
Speaker 5: over your ground.
Speaker 4: Guys for like hours. Right, Like I was in a.
Speaker 5: Sorry, I was in a one meeting where I went
Speaker 5: out to Vegas and was a.
Speaker 7: Creach and.
Speaker 5: It was a joint Air Force and SOCOM one and
Speaker 5: so they're seeing our stuff and the Air Force's stuff.
Speaker 5: And I literally had an Air Force two star where
Speaker 5: it's an appropriator and appropriators are like the gods of Congress.
Speaker 5: A real appropriator, a member and this air Force general says,
Speaker 5: the F twenty two is a coin aircraft, right, Like,
Speaker 5: I mean, it's got like fifteen minutes of playtime probably
Speaker 5: or twenty minutes, and it's not like what two three
Speaker 5: four bombs maybe max, no gun, nothing.
Speaker 4: And I literally laughed in front.
Speaker 5: Of him, like I laughed in front of him, which
Speaker 5: is you know, I I.
Speaker 4: Was not invited to a future Air Force tripts.
Speaker 5: I ended up mostly going with I found a guy
Speaker 5: on the army side that would take me on your rips,
Speaker 5: and you know then we had this discussion with him
Speaker 5: on you know how little value in F twenty two
Speaker 5: is to guys in the fight, right, It's no value whatsoever.
Speaker 5: And it's a you know that was to me why
Speaker 5: I enjoyed that job is because even if you doesn't
Speaker 5: result in any change, it puts a seed there right
Speaker 5: where they started thinking about it, and you know, you
Speaker 5: just never know what would may come come up it
Speaker 5: how how often?
Speaker 3: Because obviously the person who pushed for the drones and
Speaker 3: said this is the future warfare, I mean it. You know,
Speaker 3: it's very possible that it was General Dynamics who like
Speaker 3: pitched it.
Speaker 4: And you could say that you know, you could say.
Speaker 3: That you know that they were working commercial interests, but
Speaker 3: in that case they were one hundred correct. But then
Speaker 3: you have somebody who says that this is a coin aircraft. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: we see that since Vietnam they've tried to get rid
Speaker 3: of the AC one thirty, which is a coin aircraft.
Speaker 6: Or do we want to go on a big rant
Speaker 6: about the coin aircraft that we finally got the air
Speaker 6: tractor after all the gnashing of teeth about that.
Speaker 4: All the willing and gnashing of teeth.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I you know, I mean it's funny. I even
Speaker 5: harkened back to a time period when we were there
Speaker 5: where I mean, Congress is like anything else, it's been
Speaker 5: of human beings, sure, and there's the good, the bad,
Speaker 5: and the ugly right right then. And there are good people.
Speaker 5: And what I try to do is I try to
Speaker 5: find and work with the good people. There are other
Speaker 5: people who even in our office.
Speaker 4: Who would work with Frank Underwood would.
Speaker 5: Work with people who were a little you know, not
Speaker 5: exactly where I would like to work with, but you
Speaker 5: know they would.
Speaker 7: They would still get things.
Speaker 4: Done, you know.
Speaker 5: But so we had a occasion where the Silicon Commander
Speaker 5: wanted to buy a whole bunch of Uh. I think
Speaker 5: they're super Tocano aircraft made by Embryer, which is a
Speaker 5: Brazilian company and not a US company.
Speaker 7: And that's what SOCOM wanted to be.
Speaker 5: The coin aircraft, great loiter prop, you know, a prop,
Speaker 5: extended range, ship ton of stuff you can hang on it.
Speaker 5: And uh, you know, it came down and if I
Speaker 5: recall correctly, whether it was Beach or Cessna or both
Speaker 5: were up in arms and literally, you know, we had
Speaker 5: to bring I don't remember whether it's the deputy or
Speaker 5: the Vice down to like defend our position. And they're like,
Speaker 5: you know, and and they're working through the members from
Speaker 5: wherever you know, Beach and.
Speaker 4: Cesena are to which don and Seattle probably I think so.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think one is in Kansas and the other.
Speaker 5: Yeah, anyway, and uh, you know they're like a bio
Speaker 5: caracraft and so it comes like, no, it's got you know,
Speaker 5: half the later time, half the you know payload. You know,
Speaker 5: we don't want it. And and I don't know if
Speaker 5: we won that one. I think it ended up getting
Speaker 5: fought out and extended out, and it just that's one
Speaker 5: of those where Congress ends up posing it, you know,
Speaker 5: I mean.
Speaker 3: And you know, and yeah, it's tough because from a
Speaker 3: military perspective, you're like, well that you know, congress person
Speaker 3: is is fucked up.
Speaker 4: But sorry for the language.
Speaker 3: But from a constituent perspective, that's right. They are right.
Speaker 3: They're doing what they were elected to do.
Speaker 5: That's absolutely right. And so you know, I mean, it's
Speaker 5: it's to me. One of the things that I tried
Speaker 5: to advise was, you know, it's like this first soft imperative,
Speaker 5: understand your operational environment, figure out how the game is played,
Speaker 5: and then play the game to win. And so what
Speaker 5: I would always try to do is I would try
Speaker 5: to triangulate a visit or a u fur an unfinancial requirement,
Speaker 5: like something that we genuinely needed.
Speaker 7: And sometimes, I mean I would go to the you know, the.
Speaker 5: Guys I think he was an easy seven down at
Speaker 5: you know, Delta, who was working stuff like freeze drive plasma,
Speaker 5: and you know, like, hey, what do you guys need
Speaker 5: and it was approved to the chain of command, and
Speaker 5: we would align that need with a visit to the
Speaker 5: district where it was made or where it would benefit.
Speaker 5: And that's what you kind of had to triangulate. You
Speaker 5: know to like to try to get the treaties.
Speaker 6: That was a big break through too, to get that
Speaker 6: into the field. I and afterwards you had a garrison deployment.
Speaker 4: There were garrison deployment command. Yeah. Far from a deployment. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I you know, I competed for a tactical command. I
Speaker 5: did not get a tactical command. And this is back
Speaker 5: in the day where you like, the first time I
Speaker 5: actually only put tactical. I was like, no, I just
Speaker 5: want a tactical command. And then I didn't get a command.
Speaker 5: The second year, They're like, look, if you only put
Speaker 5: tactical again, you are.
Speaker 7: Not going to get a battalion command. Like just read
Speaker 7: the tea Lelyes buddy.
Speaker 5: So okay, put in a garrison and then got the
Speaker 5: Natick Garrison in Massachusetts, which is the Soldier System Center testing.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 5: They do you know, uniform testing, they do fire retardant clothing,
Speaker 5: they do mrs.
Speaker 7: All sorts of kind of cool.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 6: That kind of dovetailed with your time at Congress a
Speaker 6: little bit.
Speaker 5: There was there was a small also so CAM detachment there.
Speaker 4: Interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Now are they working I mean so yes, I
Speaker 3: think are they working with DARPA much and things like that, or.
Speaker 4: Is it it's all integrated.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, DARPA is is even more cutting edge.
Speaker 4: NATICK is more boots and uniforms.
Speaker 5: Yeah, boot boots, uniforms, MRIs. There's actually a parachute detachment there.
Speaker 5: There's civilians who jump.
Speaker 4: There, who the.
Speaker 5: Steerable parachutes, you know, the ones with like the GPS
Speaker 5: hanger on it. They would fly the in Afghanistan that
Speaker 5: came out and ate it too. So interesting are these
Speaker 5: small detaishments of you know, like thirty pound brain dudes
Speaker 5: and dude ads.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, just thinking about that the other day for
Speaker 6: some reason. I don't know why I popped in there
Speaker 6: that I heard about how like we actually have classified
Speaker 6: parachute projects.
Speaker 4: It's like it's kind of cool.
Speaker 6: Yeah, not if you were the test jumper, of course,
Speaker 6: but otherwise it's pretty cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, uh okay.
Speaker 6: And then how did you end up getting selected for
Speaker 6: the Iraq War study?
Speaker 4: How did that come about? Yeah?
Speaker 5: So I was most likely thinking, hey, I'm going to
Speaker 5: get out of the army. I didn't want to go
Speaker 5: to USA, soak or it's even worse to Installation Management Command,
Speaker 5: you know, like changing colors on slides and happy to glad.
Speaker 5: But at the last minute, my office mate from West
Speaker 5: Point called and was like, hey, Jenna Odierno, who's the
Speaker 5: chief of Staff of the Army, was putting together a
Speaker 5: team to write the official operational history of the Rock
Speaker 5: War for the Army and they need an eighteen series
Speaker 5: guy who is read on to you know, both sides
Speaker 5: because one of Odino's specified tasks because he's like, hey,
Speaker 5: I need to capture the soft story because of this
Speaker 5: soft story is not told.
Speaker 4: We're not telling the story of the Iraq War.
Speaker 5: And so they wanted an eighteen series of must fill
Speaker 5: eighteen series Alpha, eighteen Alpha plus.
Speaker 7: They needed somebody who spoke real right Arabic.
Speaker 5: And you know, my friend knew me and he's like, hey,
Speaker 5: you want to do it, And I'm like sure, so.
Speaker 4: Tell us about it.
Speaker 6: Kind of like you mentioned a little bit before we
Speaker 6: started recording, like the research process and how it was
Speaker 6: all digitized, but it was completely unorganized.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So I mean that was wow.
Speaker 5: You know, we had such a great opportunity because we
Speaker 5: did both oral history interviews but also archival research and
Speaker 5: our team did you know, thousands of hours of interviews
Speaker 5: with everyone from President Bush down to you know, E
Speaker 5: seven's in key positions. On the archival side, almost everything's digitized.
Speaker 5: And so we were fortunate in the General Odierno, who's
Speaker 5: the chief staff of the time.
Speaker 7: Had worked with.
Speaker 5: Scottie miller No, the sent Comm commander at the time.
Speaker 5: I'm drawing a buying for some reason Austin and they
Speaker 5: were tight, and so he called him and it was like, look,
Speaker 5: can I'm putting it the other team to write the
Speaker 5: first kind of draft of history for this? Can I
Speaker 5: send a team down? Will you give them access to
Speaker 5: all the Sentcom archives? And Austin is like, sure, whatever
Speaker 5: you want. And so we literally got access to all
Speaker 5: of the archives at scent Com, all the archives at
Speaker 5: the Center Military History in DC, all the archives at
Speaker 5: Levenworth and at Carlisle. There's archives like all over the place.
Speaker 5: It's really weird.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: Some of them like literally are the hard drives of
Speaker 5: the multi National Force of Rock headquarters and we would
Speaker 5: have to plug into it and you know there's like
Speaker 5: we're terrible data on that one drive, not organized at all,
Speaker 5: and there's everything on there from like porn to like dudes,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 4: iTunes, music to movies, to.
Speaker 5: Photos of an accident and accidental discharge with a gate guard.
Speaker 7: You know, whatever, fob It.
Speaker 5: Just madness, just like how much data is out there,
Speaker 5: and so it's just like sifting through all that trying
Speaker 5: to find the needle in the haystack.
Speaker 4: That was. It was a process.
Speaker 6: How many years did it take to complete the study?
Speaker 5: So I was on the study from twenty thirteen to
Speaker 5: twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4: And we were and I'm being a.
Speaker 5: Little evasive here because it depends how you ask, it's
Speaker 5: five years till it actually got published. We were forced
Speaker 5: to change our publisher from the Center Military History, which
Speaker 5: does the official history, to the Tregetic Studies Institute at
Speaker 5: the War College to Carlisle because that was an academic
Speaker 5: institution and we could be more controversial there. Interesting what
Speaker 5: had happened was Gen Odierno had retired and his guidance
Speaker 5: was like, look, if you have to kill sacred cows,
Speaker 5: kill sacred cows.
Speaker 7: I don't care whose feelings get hurt.
Speaker 5: We lost people. We made the same mistakes of the
Speaker 5: Vietnam War. And you know, part of the reason we
Speaker 5: made those same mistakes is we never really tried to
Speaker 5: learn from it. You know, we never really wrote or
Speaker 5: never finished writing the history of the Vietnam War with
Speaker 5: the Army, and so we didn't have any institutional learning
Speaker 5: on it.
Speaker 7: And so he's like, I want.
Speaker 5: You to do it, and you hurt people's feelings, that's
Speaker 5: totally okay.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 5: One of the reasons why I was shifted was that
Speaker 5: commander's guidance, and you know, just delayed on forever because
Speaker 5: Channel Milly was appointed the Chief staff of the Army.
Speaker 5: He the chief of public Affairs for the Army, and
Speaker 5: then Secretary to Esper, who's the Secretary of the Army,
Speaker 5: all opposed publication because through three grounds one controversial, which.
Speaker 7: You know, a lot of.
Speaker 5: Army publications are as boring as a refrigerator repair manual.
Speaker 4: You know, they're just like, there's no controversy because they
Speaker 4: don't want to hurt anyone's feeling.
Speaker 6: It's like the same argument that was made against publishing
Speaker 6: the Pentagon papers.
Speaker 5: That's exactly right. And so we we tried to do
Speaker 5: our best to explain why we thought things went wrong,
Speaker 5: who made decisions, what their logic was behind those decisions,
Speaker 5: and then you know, kind of let the cars fall
Speaker 5: where they may. And so it was controversial, there's no question,
Speaker 5: and you know, like a couple examples.
Speaker 7: I'm just gonna be a blunt here.
Speaker 5: One of the things that General Odierno told us was
Speaker 5: he's like, look, we need to have a honest conversation
Speaker 5: about what the Garden reserves brings to the fight. And
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, the Army, there's this big talk
Speaker 5: of the total force and everyone being equal.
Speaker 4: And it's bullshit, right.
Speaker 5: I mean, someone who trains forty or fifty days a
Speaker 5: year just is not going to be the same as
Speaker 5: someone who does it year round.
Speaker 7: With the budgets that the active force.
Speaker 5: Has granted, the reserving guard are going to bring other
Speaker 5: skill sets to the fight that are good and valuable,
Speaker 5: but in terms of fighting, they're not equal.
Speaker 4: And you know, so.
Speaker 5: The Guard went crazy, like and there were people who
Speaker 5: literally tried to One individual wrote to the Vice Chief
Speaker 5: of Staff of the arm me making accusations about that
Speaker 5: we used too much oral history interviews rather than archival,
Speaker 5: which is not accurate, and you know, other accusations about
Speaker 5: how controversial it was to try to get them to
Speaker 5: kill the project.
Speaker 7: And so you know that was like the controversial is
Speaker 7: who's one of it?
Speaker 5: A second component of it was this weird notion where
Speaker 5: you know, in the army, at the general officer level,
Speaker 5: there's this sense that we're supposed to be a pul right,
Speaker 5: and that you know, you're not supposed to I'll take
Speaker 5: a little yeah, I'll have a nice please, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 5: And you know, there was this sense, that weird sense
Speaker 5: where that we in the military were not theoretically supposed
Speaker 5: to add any sort of political advice for political guidance,
Speaker 5: right to to stay out.
Speaker 6: Of it, Demitri, you just want to grab the check
Speaker 6: trey out of the.
Speaker 4: Sorry, go ahead, It's all good.
Speaker 5: But so there was this sense where they believe that
Speaker 5: we should that the senior general shouldn't have been like
Speaker 5: having a back and forth with the president or the
Speaker 5: secular defense on how the war should be conducted. Like
Speaker 5: they thought that it was like, okay, they give us
Speaker 5: guidance and then we translate that guidance and make it happen.
Speaker 5: And these are generals who are like giving us this
Speaker 5: like premise and it's like, no, that's not how it happened.
Speaker 5: There was like a back and forth, you know, like
Speaker 5: the senior commander would be like, you know, no, boss,
Speaker 5: I don't think that's a good idea.
Speaker 7: I think maybe we should try this.
Speaker 5: Instead, or you know, And so there was this weird
Speaker 5: just a pushback that that came from like senior officers
Speaker 5: giving their best military advice was they were allergic to it.
Speaker 7: They were like, oh, like, we don't want to talk.
Speaker 4: To you, do you. I'm out of curiosity.
Speaker 3: To me, I would take that as that as that
Speaker 3: they want the failure of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they
Speaker 3: want the failure of those wars to rest solely on
Speaker 3: the president, like, hey, we were just following orders. They
Speaker 3: want to pretend that they had no say in how
Speaker 3: things went.
Speaker 5: So you know, to me as a historian, it's it's
Speaker 5: harder for me to speculate.
Speaker 4: Sure, I'll speculate all day. Yeah, yeah, totally fair.
Speaker 7: And it's totally fair to do that.
Speaker 4: And there's a there's a public notion.
Speaker 6: I think all we've all espoused this at some point,
Speaker 6: like you know, it's not the military's fault, it's the politicians.
Speaker 6: But it's like, well, the military lost the war. We
Speaker 6: have some responsibility.
Speaker 5: We absolutely share in the responsibility, and I think really
Speaker 5: in and Afghanistan, in many ways, we set the conditions
Speaker 5: for losing it, particularly early on when Bush was so
Speaker 5: hands off. I mean Bush doesn't really grab the throttle
Speaker 5: again until six o seven. Yeah, when he's like, holy smokes,
Speaker 5: this is a dumpster fire.
Speaker 4: Like you military people, get out of the way.
Speaker 5: Like I'm going to tell you, you're gonna search, You're
Speaker 5: gonna send more people because and that came out about
Speaker 5: as academics and other strategists for coming and seeing him
Speaker 5: and providing other options, you know, and he's like, these
Speaker 5: military people are given me totally opposite, like they still
Speaker 5: want to transition and leave.
Speaker 3: I I honestly though, whether it was Bush or Obama
Speaker 3: or even Trump in the latter part, I think that
Speaker 3: I believe they were all light too. I believe that
Speaker 3: none of them ever had a true situational awareness that
Speaker 3: they were always they were always given like the good news.
Speaker 3: You know, it's you know, it's like a twenty year war,
Speaker 3: one year at a time, that next year will.
Speaker 4: Be the year we'll turn in a corner. Yeah that
Speaker 4: yeah story, Yeah, that's the turning in a corner.
Speaker 5: There certainly was a lot of that of a very
Speaker 5: bad assessments of kind of where the enemy situation was,
Speaker 5: and in particular where the host nation forces were, where
Speaker 5: their capabilities were, and a lot of that, frankly, was
Speaker 5: from the military side, and that it was self induced
Speaker 5: because all the metrics we tried to pick that we
Speaker 5: thought were effective were useless. Right, you know, we're trying
Speaker 5: to say, oh, well, you know, are these infangy battalions
Speaker 5: fully manned?
Speaker 7: Do they have all their equipment?
Speaker 11: That means nothing, right, we were drinking the stats too, though, Yeah, yes, absolutely,
Speaker 11: And the whole notion of you know, they weren't putting
Speaker 11: the premise.
Speaker 5: Of ghost soldiers or of you know, people not showing
Speaker 5: up for duty, or the corruption that's going on right there.
Speaker 4: None of that I don't think was.
Speaker 5: At least we did not find any record of that
Speaker 5: really making its way back on the Uttox side, I
Speaker 5: will say. At the very end, though, there was a
Speaker 5: friction in the Obama presidency where the military leaders were
Speaker 5: actually saying like, wait a minute, the Iraqi army is
Speaker 5: not ready really yes, positivity at the very end, and
Speaker 5: we need not X number of soldiers to stay in Iraq,
Speaker 5: we need why. And you know, the one of the
Speaker 5: very interesting things about the very end of it was that,
Speaker 5: particularly during that period, the military I think was presenting
Speaker 5: a pretty accurate picture because they're reporting back of the corruption,
Speaker 5: of the problems with the political system. When Malachi for
Speaker 5: the twenty ten election, when he basically circumvented the democratic
Speaker 5: process in Iraq, and the theater commander wrote back and
Speaker 5: like it's in the records where basically said, yeah, Melanche
Speaker 5: is running conducting a running who like quote end quote,
Speaker 5: and that yeah, the lowie who won the election, who
Speaker 5: should be allowed to form a government first, is being
Speaker 5: pushed into the corner and blocked from doing that, and
Speaker 5: his supporters are being threatened, killed or hopped up charges
Speaker 5: of oh they're a Baptist at one point, so they
Speaker 5: can't be part of the system that prevented them from,
Speaker 5: you know, despite that they won forming a government.
Speaker 4: Now, would you say at the very.
Speaker 5: End, like twenty ten, like before the som.
Speaker 4: Are right before we withdrew.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we went to twenty fourteen, but the twenty
Speaker 5: eleven to twenty fourteen period was like a chapter out
Speaker 5: of like you know, like thirty or something. The end,
Speaker 5: our primary end is twenty eleven of it, because we've
Speaker 5: o three to eleven was are that's where a heavy
Speaker 5: lifting on.
Speaker 3: So I guess what I'm curious about, and I don't
Speaker 3: want you to speculate if you don't know. Do you
Speaker 3: think do you feel as though the reporting got honest
Speaker 3: because they knew it was the end and they wanted
Speaker 3: to say this shouldn't be the end? I like, I
Speaker 3: don't want this on my record as whatever, or or
Speaker 3: were they reporting in good faith regardless of whether it
Speaker 3: was the end?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think I know what you're saying.
Speaker 5: I think some of it is the individuals involved, right,
Speaker 5: There are different individuals just a higher.
Speaker 4: Level of like integrity or whatever whatever. I think part
Speaker 4: of that is the case.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think part of it is what you say.
Speaker 5: I mean to me, I'm always multi causality. Sure, none
Speaker 5: of us function by a single like right determinant.
Speaker 4: Right. There's a sort of things.
Speaker 5: Right, and there's all sorts of calculus going on in
Speaker 5: our brains that they're driving us to make a decision
Speaker 5: one way or the other, right, And so I think
Speaker 5: kind of both of those factors are really playing playing out.
Speaker 4: Is is you have.
Speaker 5: Individuals with more integrity at that they're involved in the process.
Speaker 5: You have a sense of perhaps you know, like, hey,
Speaker 5: I don't want to be left with the the albatross. Well,
Speaker 5: I was gonna say burning bag of ship. Yeah, can
Speaker 5: I say that you can't? Okay, you know, don't want
Speaker 5: to be left with the albatross? Or you know that
Speaker 5: they actually did realize like, hey, like this is going
Speaker 5: to be a disaster and very interesting the actual final withdrawal, though,
Speaker 5: like the go to zero decision under Obama, there are
Speaker 5: only three individuals who actually supported the go to zero
Speaker 5: and that was Vice President Biden and then the National
Speaker 5: Security Advisor. Everyone else was unified that we should not
Speaker 5: leave and that we should leave. Between five to eight thousand,
Speaker 5: the Sentcom commander, the chairman, adjoint chiefs, the sector, the
Speaker 5: CIA director, and the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all
Speaker 5: said we shouldn't leave, with Clinton actually making one of
Speaker 5: the most powerful arguments, basically saying something to the extent
Speaker 5: of like, you know, we've been in Germany and Korea
Speaker 5: for you know, sixty seventy years, right, you know, we
Speaker 5: lost five six thousand Americans in this fight, and hundreds
Speaker 5: of thousands of our rockiser died. Are we really just
Speaker 5: going to leave? And yet we just left with kind
Speaker 5: of unshocking results years later, you know.
Speaker 6: And then tell us about the drama around the publication
Speaker 6: of this.
Speaker 4: There was a third one, right, because yah.
Speaker 5: So the third the third element of why it was
Speaker 5: blocked from from publishing was the And it was interesting.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, being you know, once you get
Speaker 5: to a certain point in the army, you spent enough
Speaker 5: time around people, you have friends everywhere, right, And so
Speaker 5: I had friends in the Vice chief's office, in the
Speaker 5: chief's office who had filter me back.
Speaker 4: You know, it's like run of my own network, right,
Speaker 4: and so like I think, you know, on a burner
Speaker 4: phone like.
Speaker 5: That is when it went down in the meeting, like
Speaker 5: you won't believe this. And so one of it was
Speaker 5: that they basically were like, Okay, we want to forget
Speaker 5: about coin and insurgency. We are pivoting to at that point,
Speaker 5: I think it was called decisive Action, but basically large
Speaker 5: scale combat operation.
Speaker 4: Let's go. Let's go.
Speaker 5: We're pivoting to exactly what Vietnam, exactly what happened.
Speaker 6: I don't want to hear about that coin shit no more.
Speaker 5: Exactly and literally that you know, they're like I was
Speaker 5: getting reacs for they like.
Speaker 4: They said, this is what they said.
Speaker 5: They said that this doesn't match with our public affairs messaging,
Speaker 5: our messaging on the hill, and.
Speaker 7: Our budget priorities.
Speaker 5: So we don't want it's distracting, we don't want it
Speaker 5: to be published.
Speaker 4: Wow. Yeah, And so how did it finally come out?
Speaker 5: So it finally came out in that we were we
Speaker 5: were fortunate you know, usually your GS civilian GS employees or.
Speaker 4: Not well respected.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, there's this is you know, uh stereotype right
Speaker 5: of your GS employee that never does anything. Well, there
Speaker 5: was a just fifteen who after we had been shifted
Speaker 5: from the Center Military History to the Strating Studies Institute
Speaker 5: at Carlisle, who he made a decision, you know, effectively,
Speaker 5: you know, laterally to provide a draft copy to Michael Gordon,
Speaker 5: who is the senior defense correspondent for the Wall Street Drip.
Speaker 7: And he did it on the premise that and.
Speaker 5: I mean this is just like this is the Army
Speaker 5: in a nutshell, right, because it's like just public.
Speaker 4: Affairs, just like negligence. Right.
Speaker 5: He gives it to him on the premise that the
Speaker 5: Army is going to get a good news story out
Speaker 5: of it. Because the Army is a learning institution, We're
Speaker 5: willing to be self critical, We're willing to like name
Speaker 5: names and have controversial stuff published about us. We're willing to, like,
Speaker 5: you know, semi crucify ourselves over the mistakes we've made. Right,
Speaker 5: that's gonna be the good news story. And Gordon gets
Speaker 5: all these scoops because all this stuff that's been declassified,
Speaker 5: you know, we declassified thirty thousand pages of documents, We've
Speaker 5: got all these interviews. He gets to sift throughout all
Speaker 5: of that before anyone else. And so he's got all
Speaker 5: these stories, all these scoops ready to drop, right, like
Speaker 5: the story about bombing the Damascus he reported five the
Speaker 5: idea that never came to fruition, and you know, it's it's.
Speaker 7: A bargain, right, you scratch my back, I scratch yours.
Speaker 7: Is kind of the way the world works.
Speaker 5: Well, because the Army isn't willing to publish it. You know,
Speaker 5: Gordon's starting to get pissed. He's got it, and he's
Speaker 5: being forced to sit on it. And it's not like
Speaker 5: you know, the Leaf Chronicle outside Fort Campbell.
Speaker 4: It's like the Wall Street Journal. And so finally he
Speaker 4: gets so.
Speaker 5: Frustrated that and this is what I was told, and
Speaker 5: I believe this is accurate, that he sits down with
Speaker 5: General Milly, who then is the chief staff of the Army,
Speaker 5: and starts a recording and basically says, General Milly, why
Speaker 5: are you blocking the publication of your own Iraq?
Speaker 3: Wards ambushed him after, I mean, and.
Speaker 5: In his defense, he did it only after the Army
Speaker 5: basically drug him for the.
Speaker 4: Fuck off every which way, ye for like a year,
Speaker 4: year and a half. I don't think he needs any difference.
Speaker 4: I mean, he totally did.
Speaker 5: I mean, and you know, he'd expended time and effort
Speaker 5: to write these stories ready to drop and and you know,
Speaker 5: so the Army had opted in bad faith, and he
Speaker 5: called them on it, and immediately, of course, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: he generally goes, oh, you know.
Speaker 4: Sure, I'm publishing it. I'm gonna publish.
Speaker 5: I'm going to write a forward to it, which I'd
Speaker 5: had like emails from other people who had written like
Speaker 5: General only will never write a ford to this. You know,
Speaker 5: they were considering it actually at one point that several
Speaker 5: the options were to put it on Sipper, which is
Speaker 5: one of the things that Odierno has said, we will
Speaker 5: never put this on Sipper because of it goes there,
Speaker 5: it'll be like the Lost Arc of the Covenant at
Speaker 5: the end of Indiana Jones will be hidden this month,
Speaker 5: whereas where nobody'll.
Speaker 4: Ever learn from it show real quick.
Speaker 3: YAP is like the secret Internet of the classified classified
Speaker 3: side of like government or at least the military Internet.
Speaker 3: So basically, once you put it there, it's immediately classified information.
Speaker 4: Then in order to.
Speaker 3: Affoid it, you have to know it exists in order
Speaker 3: to affoid it, so.
Speaker 4: It basically goes to die disappears.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and this is after we had already gone through
Speaker 5: an office that you know, I didn't even know existed.
Speaker 5: It was called the Defense Officer Publication Security Review. Yes,
Speaker 5: so it had passed the Dopster review, and I mean, man,
Speaker 5: they were so detailed that they actually one of the
Speaker 5: photos that was like on the Centcom website had detainees
Speaker 5: in it, and they actually caught They're like, oh, you
Speaker 5: can't post photos of de dainees. Were like, okay, the
Speaker 5: documents had already been declassified by sent COOM and like,
Speaker 5: you know, they're stamped declassified by Sentcom, So we were clear.
Speaker 5: So this is just like vindictiveness to put it right.
Speaker 5: The other option was they were going to publish it
Speaker 5: as an independent publication in that.
Speaker 4: Like I guess newsletter or something like a high school newsletter.
Speaker 5: Like we published it like you know above our mom's
Speaker 5: garage on weekends right right, like doing it in her
Speaker 5: part time, ither than being commissioned by the Amazon creates completely.
Speaker 7: That was their other option.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so you know it was only because of
Speaker 5: you know, Michael Gordon basically throwing down the gauntlet.
Speaker 6: And so general Millie of course writes the forward and
Speaker 6: gets up published.
Speaker 4: What my phone blows up that day.
Speaker 5: There's like it's like ten I'm the meeting I think
Speaker 5: with my kids teacher or something. I come out of
Speaker 5: it and there's like ten voicemails, like fifty emails like
Speaker 5: I see.
Speaker 4: When can you publish this? You know?
Speaker 6: Well, yeah, I'm curious. What was the response when it
Speaker 6: was published? I mean, not to use a term that
Speaker 6: is loaded for a round, but was a mission accomplished?
Speaker 6: I mean, I mean, but seriously, I mean, did you
Speaker 6: feel like, you know, you guys.
Speaker 4: Did what you set out to do and that I
Speaker 4: had an impact? So, I mean, I don't know, it's
Speaker 4: who knows if it had an impact.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think one of the challenges that I think,
Speaker 5: other than for a lot of the g Y veterans.
Speaker 5: I think the army has like turned the corner, and
Speaker 5: I think they want to forget coin. And I think
Speaker 5: a lot of counterinsurgency or insurgency, and I think a
Speaker 5: lot of the American public wants to forget it. I
Speaker 5: would say at the time it made, it made international
Speaker 5: news and like because it was front page above the
Speaker 5: full Wall Street Journal, like I was on NPR All
Speaker 5: Things Considered, like West Coast, East Coast, CNN, you know,
Speaker 5: like did multiple interviews over it. And the one like
Speaker 5: bumper sticker, which this one was actually when I wrote
Speaker 5: that everyone took out of it was that the only
Speaker 5: winner of it, that Iran was the only winner.
Speaker 4: Of the Iraq War. Yeah, for sure, that was the
Speaker 4: bumper sticker that came out of it.
Speaker 5: And that that was for I mean, you know, as
Speaker 5: long as the new cycle alouts fifteen seconds of fame
Speaker 5: or whatever, that that that that was the bumper sticker
Speaker 5: that a lot of.
Speaker 3: People both when you know, you go on and you
Speaker 3: do these interviews like even here we do art of
Speaker 3: viewers are two to three hours their long form, and
Speaker 3: people get an opportunity to talk about things that normally
Speaker 3: when they go on these other shows, it's like five
Speaker 3: minutes sound and how do you condense a fifteen page report?
Speaker 3: Like what do what do they? What were their burning questions?
Speaker 3: What did they want to know? And depending on the outlet,
Speaker 3: did they did they want they want to focus on
Speaker 3: one part that supported something that they wanted to.
Speaker 5: That became a lot of like, you know, almost the
Speaker 5: self licking ice cream pone where different outlets would anchor
Speaker 5: onto a certain premise or area or you know where
Speaker 5: we lied to about wmd uh, you know, like you
Speaker 5: know what was the you know, like, okay, we're we
Speaker 5: looked at an operational level history, so we were not
Speaker 5: looking at the causes of the reasons for the war.
Speaker 5: We in the military don't really get to make those policies.
Speaker 5: We don't get to make those policy decisions. We get
Speaker 5: told we're invading a rock, and then we provide our
Speaker 5: best military advice and then we move on, right, and
Speaker 5: then we start planning if if the civilian authorities say
Speaker 5: that's cute, then we start to you know, put things
Speaker 5: in motion.
Speaker 4: And so it was it was.
Speaker 5: Hard, and to be honest, I mean, I'm very thankful
Speaker 5: that we're doing such a like long form because you
Speaker 5: can really do deep dive into stuff, and it was.
Speaker 4: It was hard to be able to.
Speaker 5: You know, distill all that into such a short interview.
Speaker 5: I was fortunate in that some people did center on
Speaker 5: that bumper sticker and I.
Speaker 7: Could talk about that.
Speaker 5: Others would talk about the withdrawal, you know, like more
Speaker 5: oriented against politically Obama and they had a you know,
Speaker 5: extra grind. Others would focus on the decision to go
Speaker 5: to war, the lack of preparation, the you know, the plant,
Speaker 5: the invasion without a plan or a you know phase
Speaker 5: four post conflict plan quote unquote, which you know there's
Speaker 5: lots of asterisks there, you know, again focused on kind
Speaker 5: of astra grind against Bush.
Speaker 4: So you know you.
Speaker 6: Have have you ever read Leonard Wong's paper Lying to Ourselves?
Speaker 4: I think I have, but I I I don't. You know, recall.
Speaker 6: If I were to have a hot take about all this,
Speaker 6: like that would kind of be mine about Iraq that
Speaker 6: we g lied to ourselves and we institutionalized the line, right,
Speaker 6: it became institutionalized that and accepted that you can send
Speaker 6: false reports up to hire about the readiness of these
Speaker 6: units and so on.
Speaker 3: Well, and I mean not just rough, but Afghanistan too,
Speaker 3: And so you know, I'm curious because when did the
Speaker 3: report finally get published and when did you start doing
Speaker 3: the interviews? Twenty eighteen, so we were still in Afghanistan
Speaker 3: and were people asking you based on what you learned
Speaker 3: from Iraq.
Speaker 4: Like applied to Afghanistan?
Speaker 1: Yeah? How is it applied to Afghanistan?
Speaker 7: Very few would even take that.
Speaker 5: I mean I recall a couple questions along that line,
Speaker 5: but most, you know, just exclusively focused on on.
Speaker 4: And did anybody ever ask you how smart.
Speaker 3: It was to attempt to overthrow Assad after what we
Speaker 3: learned about Saddam?
Speaker 4: I don't think. I don't think Asad came up.
Speaker 5: I don't remember the time frame, but you know, I
Speaker 5: mean this is I mean, you know how things go
Speaker 5: in our I mean it's like, yeah, the weeks and
Speaker 5: then it's gone.
Speaker 4: I mean like this is just nothing. It like falls
Speaker 4: off the cliff.
Speaker 6: All of this leads us into your book, Training for
Speaker 6: Victory that I want to make sure we have plenty
Speaker 6: of time to talk about here. Tell us first, to
Speaker 6: kick it off, I mean, how did this book come about?
Speaker 5: Was this your dissertation or yeah, yeah, so is my
Speaker 5: dissertation and then to me, you know, it was kind
Speaker 5: of came ou about because of the mystery and in
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 7: The whole the general effort.
Speaker 5: To build the Iraqi Army is a train wreck. It's
Speaker 5: a dumpster fire, it's you know, Churchillian, it's an epic
Speaker 5: military disaster, except for the ice Off, the ICTF and
Speaker 5: the commandos, and some describe the ice off is the
Speaker 5: best thing we built in a rock.
Speaker 4: And in fact, in twenty fourteen we kind of see
Speaker 4: it play out.
Speaker 5: We see the ice off fighting against that is isis
Speaker 5: kind of every step of the way. Right they're at
Speaker 5: the critical oil refinery at Beiji. They actually get surrounded
Speaker 5: and they fight for a week, which.
Speaker 4: You know, I mean, yeah, there's an epic battle over there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's an epic battle, and it's it's a you know,
Speaker 5: the the conventional wisdom, the conventional narrative, and much of
Speaker 5: this story, which is true, is that the Iraqi Army
Speaker 5: dissolves large almost. I mean, they're they're pockets, but the
Speaker 5: ice off they're fighting and like fighting hard at you know, Beiji.
Speaker 5: They get an opportunity to surrender. The ISIS says, hey,
Speaker 5: look we'll let you you know, you can even keep
Speaker 5: your weapons.
Speaker 4: We'll let you go.
Speaker 5: You know, you won't get slaughtered. You can fight another day.
Speaker 5: We just want the crossroads to be able to move
Speaker 5: on and what you live. And they all to pound
Speaker 5: sand and kept fighting. And then on the way back,
Speaker 5: you know, on the once things shifted and the counter offensive.
Speaker 5: They're the head of almost every battle. Mostly they take
Speaker 5: forty percent casualties and then keep fighting. And so to me,
Speaker 5: it was like, what gives, right, what made this unit
Speaker 5: different while all the rest of the rocky army mostly collapses?
Speaker 5: And now it is like the riddle that I wanted
Speaker 5: to solve. And you know, we see pockets of other
Speaker 5: successful units too, and you know, the commandos are definitely
Speaker 5: more successful than other General Afghan Army. And we see
Speaker 5: other pockets as successful of the units built, whether it
Speaker 5: be in Colombia or El Salvador or the Philippines.
Speaker 4: And I wanted to.
Speaker 5: Look at, you know, what, what was it what made
Speaker 5: those units successful while the rest of the efforts really
Speaker 5: were not.
Speaker 4: So let's start with your first case study.
Speaker 6: Then El Salvador nineteen eighty one and nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 4: This was really interesting. I mean there's a few things.
Speaker 6: Obviously you'll key on them much better than I will.
Speaker 4: But there are some unique aspects of it.
Speaker 6: Communist insurgency in the context of the Cold War in
Speaker 6: Central America, and Congress had a cap on how many
Speaker 6: advisors were even allowed in country. It was like fifty
Speaker 6: five fifty five, So a very light footprint, to say
Speaker 6: the least. Not nothing comparable to Iraq or Afghanistan at all.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what went right in El Salvador? What went right?
Speaker 4: What went wrong? What were kind of your observations from that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I think one of the big things that
Speaker 5: went right in Al Salvador, that that is a theme
Speaker 5: kind of across all five of the case studies, is
Speaker 5: that in many cases you have the same advisors returning
Speaker 5: rotation after rotation after rotation.
Speaker 7: And it happened for a couple reasons.
Speaker 5: And I mean, I was so fortunate to have like
Speaker 5: just a bunch of s f legends from that time
Speaker 5: period like talk to me like time and time again,
Speaker 5: like tell me their stories and then give me documents
Speaker 5: sometimes or give me, you know, diaries.
Speaker 7: And stuff that I could still go through.
Speaker 5: And you know, it happened because one, as one said,
Speaker 5: it was the only war they had, you know, the
Speaker 5: Cold War, you know, Vietnam had ended.
Speaker 4: Those three seven three seven guys.
Speaker 7: That's that was another component.
Speaker 5: So the I mean, they're crazy stories of individuals who
Speaker 5: literally because then Spanish was a hard requirement for NCOs
Speaker 5: you had to be a two to two on the
Speaker 5: language proficiency test, and for officers you had to be
Speaker 5: a one to one. And if you didn't have that,
Speaker 5: like you didn't pass go, like you didn't get on
Speaker 5: the bus, they didn't.
Speaker 4: Bring it down.
Speaker 5: And so there are people wanted to go to this
Speaker 5: mission so badly that they're literally in their spare time
Speaker 5: teaching themselves Spanish, yeah, like and studying Spanish because they
Speaker 5: know that that the Vietnam War you know ended you know,
Speaker 5: like almost a decade before, and this is their chance
Speaker 5: and their chance to lead indigenous forces in some ways
Speaker 5: in combat because there are multiple occasions of units getting
Speaker 5: overrun of you know, battles occurring, or helicopters, advisors getting
Speaker 5: shot down on helicopters even though they're supposed to not
Speaker 5: be in combat.
Speaker 4: But I mean, you know, it's it's insurgency. There's no
Speaker 4: front line.
Speaker 3: It's funny when you think about you know, prior to
Speaker 3: the GAT, you know, after Vietnam when any combat action
Speaker 3: was you know, you have Somalia, like Panama, like you
Speaker 3: have these very short So the idea that guys go
Speaker 3: through these hard ass selections and training processes and then
Speaker 3: the chance to get in war in war, it's like
Speaker 3: learning All I have to do is learn Spanish to
Speaker 3: go to war.
Speaker 4: That's I'm down for it. I'm down, I'm down.
Speaker 6: I thought one of the interesting observations you had in
Speaker 6: the book was about the difference between some of our
Speaker 6: Latino American Special Forces members as opposed to some of
Speaker 6: these like redneck dudes from Alabama, and that there were
Speaker 6: actually some circumstances where the El Salvadorans, one of the
Speaker 6: rednecks who speak with a redneck accent in Spanish because
Speaker 6: they don't have like cultural assumptions about them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know, in some ways, one of the
Speaker 5: things that surprised me was I kind assumed that language
Speaker 5: was going to be a really important factor across all
Speaker 5: the case studies, and granted, for Al Salvador and Colombia,
Speaker 5: speaking Spanish was kind of a prerequisite and it was important.
Speaker 5: But even in those case studies, you know, as you
Speaker 5: point out, what was almost more important was that the
Speaker 5: advisors had the right mindset to be a good advisor,
Speaker 5: that they were patient, that they had you know, teaching skills.
Speaker 4: Some people just can't teach right, they're just not cut
Speaker 4: out to be an advisor.
Speaker 5: And and these individuals they could build and maintain rapport.
Speaker 5: And it was like those you know that West Virginia.
Speaker 5: That guy was speaking you know, Spanish with the best
Speaker 5: West Virginia, the southern accent.
Speaker 4: You know that just is talks and can make friends
Speaker 4: with anyone.
Speaker 5: That some of the Al Salvador and officers just you
Speaker 5: know stock too, like glue, because he built and maintained
Speaker 5: rapport consistently, and in some cases that way what was
Speaker 5: more important even in the language.
Speaker 3: Another thing I've found is that like courage, like just
Speaker 3: straight up courage that if they see you throwing yourself
Speaker 3: out there for them, even though whether a person is
Speaker 3: doing it for them or just because they just are
Speaker 3: in the in the heat, you know, in the throat
Speaker 3: of the fight, that that means everything to them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's another huge component. And in all Salva or
Speaker 5: other proved particularly valuable because you know, there are occasions
Speaker 5: in cases where multiple times where an Al salvad On
Speaker 5: officer either crumbled or collapsed and couldn't like, you know,
Speaker 5: people collapse in the fight. Some people do, and they'll
Speaker 5: salve an officer turns an American and says, hey, you
Speaker 5: take his place, And when the American goes there and
Speaker 5: does that, man, that guy is golden, Like there's anything
Speaker 5: he says after that point, and after that battle he's
Speaker 5: getting listened to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and leading from the front becomes it's a whole
Speaker 3: new world in another culture when they see in America
Speaker 3: a you know, somebody who could sit back and tell
Speaker 3: people what to do or advise the way they're told to.
Speaker 3: But when they lead from the front, like those indigenous
Speaker 3: indigenous forces glom onto that.
Speaker 6: So when you looked at it, El Salvador, do you
Speaker 6: give our partner force relationships over there a passing grade?
Speaker 6: I mean, how do you think that turned out?
Speaker 5: So I think what's important El Salvador to kind of
Speaker 5: look at is that is the US strategically at the
Speaker 5: beginning of the war there they studied like, okay, what's
Speaker 5: the situation? And the situation was really bad. It was
Speaker 5: a ship show and it looked like the government was
Speaker 5: going to fold. So US military comes up with three options,
Speaker 5: like a win option, an offensive option, and then like
Speaker 5: the lowest cost scenario of like hold the line, but
Speaker 5: we prevent them from from losing. That was the option
Speaker 5: that the Reagan administration shows was option.
Speaker 7: Three, the least cost, you know.
Speaker 5: And so the force we built, we built a force
Speaker 5: to that specification. The the berries the battalions battalionis infantiria.
Speaker 5: The reaction in media demente where there like immediate reaction
Speaker 5: infantry battalions were they were okay.
Speaker 7: And I think one of the best ways to describe it.
Speaker 5: Is is there was like a discussion between two two
Speaker 5: American advisors, one who'd been a Vietnam veteran and one
Speaker 5: who wasn't, and the Vietnam veteran basically said.
Speaker 4: Man, these L. Salvadoran guys, like if they had to
Speaker 4: fight the viet Cong, they would be massacred. We lose
Speaker 4: in a day.
Speaker 5: But then the other guy, I looked at him and goes, look,
Speaker 5: they don't have to fight the viet Cong.
Speaker 4: They're not fighting the viet Cong. They're fighting other L.
Speaker 4: Salad Orans.
Speaker 5: And that's that's the only level that we have to
Speaker 5: get them right.
Speaker 4: Train them to do that one thing you want them
Speaker 4: to train them do to that level.
Speaker 5: And they successfully got them to that level, and they survived.
Speaker 5: And at the end of the conflict, the one of
Speaker 5: the fml EN leaders during the peace Box the Chibultepec Accords,
Speaker 5: he walked over to the head of the US mill group,
Speaker 5: the advisor group, kind of poked him in the chest
Speaker 5: and said, you know what, if not for your advisors,
Speaker 5: we would have won this war.
Speaker 4: The second case study in your book, the Light Reaction
Speaker 4: Regiment in the Philippines, the LRR.
Speaker 6: So now totally different context, just after nine to eleven.
Speaker 4: We obviously have a long relationship with the Philippines. The complicated,
Speaker 4: too complicated, a little colonial a little bit. You go
Speaker 4: to their museums, they have like paintings of them shooting
Speaker 4: cannons at us and stuff. It's okay, we get it.
Speaker 5: The motto for the Light Reaction Regiment, the Shooters of Death,
Speaker 5: actually came from the unit that killed the senior American
Speaker 5: during the American War.
Speaker 4: Yes, there's a little weird, like you said, exactly.
Speaker 6: I mean, some people don't realize we developed the forty
Speaker 6: five caliber round for the Filipinos because they were so
Speaker 6: crazy and combat So post nine to eleven, right after
Speaker 6: nine to eleven, we have this relationship with the Philippines.
Speaker 6: There's an Islamic insurgency in the south, there is a
Speaker 6: communist insurgency in the north, and then we have missionaries
Speaker 6: being held hostis that feels like it was the bigger
Speaker 6: it is bybe.
Speaker 5: That was, So it actually starts before Sevenmber eleventh a
Speaker 5: little bit in that the you know, the US, there
Speaker 5: have been this period where we drifted apart, right, and
Speaker 5: so military leaders on both sides we're kind of looking
Speaker 5: for a way to get us back together because they,
Speaker 5: you know, the divorce was we never met anyone else, right,
Speaker 5: we want to We're like that, we'll give it another shot.
Speaker 4: So both military leaders on.
Speaker 5: Both sides want to try to get the situation to
Speaker 5: to to start again, to like reignite things, and particularly
Speaker 5: after the I don't know if you remember the I
Speaker 5: think I'm pronouncing this correctly, the Boyghinka plot where they
Speaker 5: were going to bomb.
Speaker 4: Something like twelve or a dozen.
Speaker 5: Or somewhere in that range airc airliners, civilian airliners at
Speaker 5: the same time period, including possibly I think they're going
Speaker 5: to try to target the Pope also at the same
Speaker 5: time period, and this is pre September eleventh, that originated
Speaker 5: in the Philippines, that plot, and so the Philippines comes
Speaker 5: to us in there as a former First Group officer
Speaker 5: who is now as part of the Defense attache there
Speaker 5: in the Mill Group, Joe Felter, Yes, yep, who were like, hey,
Speaker 5: this sounds like a great opportunity. We'll stand you up
Speaker 5: a national level counter terrorism force and you know that
Speaker 5: that'll be a kind of way that we can kind
Speaker 5: of re flower this relationship that is, you know, kind
Speaker 5: of sat fallow for a while. And you know, then
Speaker 5: September eleventh happens, and then the Burnhams and the other hostages,
Speaker 5: and after those two it goes from.
Speaker 4: Being like an idea to do it, and.
Speaker 5: Not only I think the idea is that it started
Speaker 5: even a little bit before. But what happens is all
Speaker 5: the guat funds and firts and troops, i mean money
Speaker 5: comes start flying out of that.
Speaker 4: You know it was terrorism.
Speaker 5: So there you go, it's a combination not only terrorism,
Speaker 5: but you know, as Americans, we have this thing after
Speaker 5: the running a hostage crisis of if you an Americans
Speaker 5: sell the hostages. It's like Rome, We're coming for you. Right,
Speaker 5: So money starts, you know, falling out of the sky
Speaker 5: for it, as well as additional forces being deployed for it,
Speaker 5: and it goes actually from being a single company. The
Speaker 5: original plan was to create a company that over time
Speaker 5: but becomes a regiment.
Speaker 4: Yeah. It went from an l r C to l
Speaker 4: r B to l r R.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So it's it's it's a long term effort and it
Speaker 5: is is the Burnhams, it is the ties to September eleventh.
Speaker 5: It's the terrorism, the uh you know, and associated groups
Speaker 5: that results in you know, hey, this that spark becomes
Speaker 5: a fire.
Speaker 4: So talk to us about the partner relationship.
Speaker 6: There first Special Forces group in the lead, I think
Speaker 6: the guys from Okinawa, right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was similar to three seven, yeah right, because it's
Speaker 5: the Ford deployed battalion and during the Cold War three
Speaker 5: seven was in Panama.
Speaker 7: So it made it a lot easier for them.
Speaker 5: To deploy that and consistently deploy it because that's the
Speaker 5: theater commander's force, right, and the theater commander he doesn't
Speaker 5: have to go to the Joint staff to get that
Speaker 5: force deployed.
Speaker 4: It's just you make them go.
Speaker 5: And so there were some parallels actually to Al Saladar
Speaker 5: where and they were also fortunate because the First Group leadership,
Speaker 5: for its part, saw consistency is important in returning the
Speaker 5: same advisors to work with the l r R or
Speaker 5: l RC or whatever it was.
Speaker 4: At that point.
Speaker 5: They saw it as important. They saw it as you know,
Speaker 5: they tried to. They actually had names for them, and
Speaker 5: they called it u Sorry I'm drawing a blank here
Speaker 5: for a second. They called them as individuals that basically
Speaker 5: would return. They made a strong effort to try to
Speaker 5: redeploy the same individuals to the mission. And you saw
Speaker 5: parallels with Al Salvador where individuals would go five six,
Speaker 5: seven rotations working with the l r R, l r C.
Speaker 3: And that's easy to do in countries where people can
Speaker 3: have second families.
Speaker 6: I'm a Fifth Group guy, so that's not a Western
Speaker 6: Union checks the First Group going back and forth, Seventh.
Speaker 3: Empire, the parallels, but that yeah, yeah, but that, but
Speaker 3: that is I think vitally important that.
Speaker 4: One, you know, you build that rapport because you're there.
Speaker 3: It's not just a rotation of you know, Americans coming through.
Speaker 3: Everybody trying to imprint their idea of how things should
Speaker 3: be done right.
Speaker 4: It's the same people.
Speaker 3: There's that trust that's built, it's the consistency that's built.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was in that I finally remembered the word
Speaker 5: that I was looking for is they called them repeat
Speaker 5: offenders or OAFP alumni. And so there was a command
Speaker 5: effort also to like return the same people.
Speaker 4: They recognized its values, that.
Speaker 5: Individuals they would build rapport with leaders and that that
Speaker 5: it made a difference in the quality of the unit.
Speaker 5: There's this one great story of an E seven who
Speaker 5: are actually I think he was an E eight at
Speaker 5: that point, but at the very initial stand up of
Speaker 5: the Light Reaction Company, at this very inception, you know,
Speaker 5: Paycom you have specific command wants to like put together
Speaker 5: a big dog and pony show with all the senior
Speaker 5: leadership with the Armed Forces the Philippines. Of course, the
Speaker 5: four star admiral from pay Com is going to be there,
Speaker 5: and so uh sock pack the US Special Operations specific
Speaker 5: on their list of individuals they're bringing, they have a
Speaker 5: E eight on the list, and pay Com is like,
Speaker 5: why are you bringing an eight? You know, like the
Speaker 5: least ranking person other than that is like a lieutenant
Speaker 5: colonel or maybe a you know, a major, and they're like,
Speaker 5: you know, coffee makers, you're bringing an eight why is that?
Speaker 7: And they like tried to kill.
Speaker 5: Him from going on to this, you know, this planning
Speaker 5: session to create the Light Reaction Company. UH sock Pack
Speaker 5: held its ground, and you know, the master sergeant arrives
Speaker 5: and when the senior Philippine military officers arrived there, you know,
Speaker 5: their chief of staff at their army equivalent, walks in.
Speaker 5: He sees this master sergeant and literally bypasses everyone else
Speaker 5: in the receiving line, gives him a giant bar a hug,
Speaker 5: starts talking to him about his family. And it's because
Speaker 5: this individual had worked so many times in the Philippines that,
Speaker 5: like you know, the old premise of a roll decks.
Speaker 5: He knew everyone in the senior leadership like everyone, and
Speaker 5: they had been like lieutenants when he had first deployed
Speaker 5: as an East six over his joining year career. And
Speaker 5: now he is you know, the you know, the commander
Speaker 5: of the army. And it was when they're you know,
Speaker 5: building the you know, starting to have the planning conference,
Speaker 5: it's like, oh, fust start adn't know now I want
Speaker 5: to listen to what the master sergeant has to say.
Speaker 6: One more reason why SF doesn't always go so well.
Speaker 6: It doesn't always land well with.
Speaker 4: The conventional army.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I had a great occasion. Can I give you
Speaker 5: one of my stories from a trip out weft y.
Speaker 5: So we were training at Naval Station El Centro, which
Speaker 5: is a Navy base, and you know, the Navy is
Speaker 5: really big on their ranks, and so you know, I'm
Speaker 5: we're taking a day off for eating a third you know,
Speaker 5: dying hall, and I'm eating in I guess whatever.
Speaker 7: It's the Chiefs section, the chiefs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the Navy.
Speaker 3: Has the enlisted mess, the chief's mess, and the officers mess,
Speaker 3: like they have three different Yes you do.
Speaker 5: And I'm there, you know, with my guys, right and
Speaker 5: so uh and so one of the chiefs notices me
Speaker 5: and comes over. He's like, heyce Or, I think you're
Speaker 5: in the wrong area. And I'm like, hey man, I'm
Speaker 5: with my guys. Like I'm gonna be with my guys.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to go eat somewhere else period, Like
Speaker 5: that's not happening.
Speaker 4: This is with your team. Yeah, this is my team. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And of course one of my guys. One of east
Speaker 4: up is like, hey, Frank, we have passed the assault.
Speaker 4: Watching his head kind of explode that.
Speaker 5: You know, my guys called me by my first name,
Speaker 5: is like, anyways, the Navy is the.
Speaker 3: Closest thing to a few system I think we have
Speaker 3: in America in the sense of because on a ship
Speaker 3: it is very segregated in terms of rank.
Speaker 4: So yeah, yeah, anyway, so yeah, you hit that.
Speaker 5: I apologize for that little story there, but it's I
Speaker 5: think it's reflective of how sometimes soft we can rub people.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: So that l r R as it gets stand up
Speaker 6: in its evolution versus what it was maybe initially designed to.
Speaker 4: Do, versus what it became and what it began to do.
Speaker 4: How did you kind of chart that out?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, you know, and again all these cases, I
Speaker 5: was so fortunate to have so many SF guys, you know,
Speaker 5: and then also host nation individuals talk to me and
Speaker 5: tell me their stories, and you.
Speaker 4: Know, it was one of the challenge.
Speaker 5: There were challenges in particular in the Philippines because the
Speaker 5: Light Reaction Regiment. Soon after it was formed, while it
Speaker 5: was still a company, there.
Speaker 4: Was a.
Speaker 5: Coup plot the oak Wood The oak Wood plot against
Speaker 5: the president. The President Arroyo and some of the leadership
Speaker 5: of the Light Reaction Company were involved in the plot.
Speaker 4: They always get a little kooi over there. Yeah, it
Speaker 4: happens all the time where it gets very interesting. There's
Speaker 4: a lot of ins and outs.
Speaker 6: Like I was at Fort Meg Say say once, and
Speaker 6: I was having just hanging out with a major their
Speaker 6: version of SOCOM and we're just sitting there bullshit and
Speaker 6: I think, like drinking a coke or something like that,
Speaker 6: and he just like kind of as a blue tells
Speaker 6: me like, yeah, I got some trouble because I was
Speaker 6: involved in a coup plot.
Speaker 4: You know, my unit never.
Speaker 6: Moved because of some miscommunications, so I didn't get in
Speaker 6: as much trouble as the other guys did. Uh, So
Speaker 6: you know, they just kind of hid me out over here.
Speaker 6: And now it's kind of okay, and I'm just like, wow, Okay,
Speaker 6: this is a different kind of military here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I feel like Thomas Jefferson would approve a little rebellion.
Speaker 6: Sometimes those those coups happened for or attempts happened for
Speaker 6: different reasons.
Speaker 4: But sometimes there's a lot of.
Speaker 6: You have to understand, Like amongst the soldiers like if
Speaker 6: their officers are like stealing their food for example. Oh yeah,
Speaker 6: that lends units towards these sorts of attempts.
Speaker 4: Yeah oh yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that that created some real initial frictions that
Speaker 5: hurt the unit's progress initially. And this is before you know,
Speaker 5: the make say say it became become of the headquarters
Speaker 5: of the Philippine equivalent of SoCon. They didn't have a
Speaker 5: soft headquarters and so when the unit is first stood up, arguably.
Speaker 4: They didn't until a few years ago. Right, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: So it took years before they really had a soft headquarters.
Speaker 5: So they experienced kind of some of the same challenges
Speaker 5: that we experienced in the US when soft didn't have
Speaker 5: apparent headquarters looking have for us, they're used improperly, they're
Speaker 5: used for you know, uh, you know, personal protection detail.
Speaker 6: They still were they they brought in a whole l
Speaker 6: r C just to protect them.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But but you know, and the thing is is
Speaker 3: like what President and if even if it was just
Speaker 3: a couple of people, like that's what you can prove, right,
Speaker 3: and what president wants their Tier one unit right there
Speaker 3: there crack guys to be like.
Speaker 4: Are they against me? Yeah?
Speaker 5: And that's that's really what caused a lot of the
Speaker 5: problems is that accommodation there. They the conventional forces used
Speaker 5: them like like an hammer anvil approach, just not like
Speaker 5: infantry operations, like an infantry like you know anyway you know,
Speaker 5: a movement to contact basically like battle jill too, right,
Speaker 5: and like there's to use a small.
Speaker 7: Elite soft force like that is just madness.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So there's a lot of challenge early on, and
Speaker 5: it wasn't until battles later on where you know, in
Speaker 5: Samboanga and where they were kind of thrown into the
Speaker 5: situation because the situation was so dire and there were
Speaker 5: hostages that were taken. So they needed you know that
Speaker 5: kind of national counter terrorism capability due to hostage rescue missions.
Speaker 7: And they get thrown into the.
Speaker 4: Fight and they are it's a mixed you know kind of.
Speaker 5: Results between you know, two critical battles that they have,
Speaker 5: but they after some initial kind of missteps, they you know,
Speaker 5: generally are.
Speaker 7: Successful and they are able to.
Speaker 5: Rescue you know, dozens of hostages successfully, which is I
Speaker 5: mean you know that was Ted Yamas.
Speaker 6: Yeah right, yes, man, that is the coolest dude ever. Please, yes,
Speaker 6: you get to have a mirror with that guy. He's
Speaker 6: such a cool guy and he's very low key, very humble,
Speaker 6: and you wouldn't know it from talking to him. But
Speaker 6: like later on I met some of the guys who
Speaker 6: were like his lieutenants at the time for the Zambo
Speaker 6: siege and they're like, yeah, that dude was like went
Speaker 6: right into the battle.
Speaker 4: Was like, we're taking our o arp by force.
Speaker 6: We're putting our ops in right there in that abandoned
Speaker 6: school in the middle of the city. Let's go take
Speaker 6: it and just start like running ops out of it.
Speaker 6: He was like that was nuts, and like I had
Speaker 6: to like fight this battle, but at the same time,
Speaker 6: like try to stop my colonel from getting shot in
Speaker 6: the because he was leading that from out front.
Speaker 4: He was he was out there getting it done. Nice. Yeah,
Speaker 4: ted Yamas is a really cool guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: They are really fortunate that they have a bunch of
Speaker 5: really good leaders, particularly during the battle Zamblanga and other
Speaker 5: conflicts in that that time period that there's there's success
Speaker 5: some of their sniper shots there.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, uh.
Speaker 6: And I think it's Zambo and also Morrow week Yeah uh,
Speaker 6: the l r R snipers like did God's work.
Speaker 4: They did. Yeah, they you know, they if.
Speaker 5: I recall correctly, like one day they wiped out like
Speaker 5: half of the senior leadership of the Papsilon's organization.
Speaker 4: I think they smoked HVT number one.
Speaker 5: They did, they got number one also, and you know,
Speaker 5: it just it created a situation where it enabled the
Speaker 5: rest of the conventionals to do the job, to be
Speaker 5: able to really do the job.
Speaker 4: Which is I mean, that's what's soft.
Speaker 5: We're an enabler for the conventional forces in some in
Speaker 5: most missions, and the conventional type.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Sorry, so so yeah, you know, they're they're pretty successful
Speaker 5: in the Philippines despite the early challenges from the oak Wood.
Speaker 6: Plot and uh, lessons learn from our partnership with the
Speaker 6: l r R. What are the big takeaways? Yeah, you know,
Speaker 6: in some ways they're parallel with some of them from
Speaker 6: El Salvare. That consistency is absolutely critical, and that those
Speaker 6: interpersonal relationships, you know, I mean in America, sometimes we're
Speaker 6: so fixated on just the job at hand that we
Speaker 6: forget how important interpersonal relationships are and the rest of
Speaker 6: the world those relationships are everything. And so having you
Speaker 6: know those oif OFP alumni or you know, individuals who
Speaker 6: come back mission after mission after mission. That those pay
Speaker 6: huge dividends because they can kind of short yep their continuity.
Speaker 6: They help the unit train better because it's not the
Speaker 6: every year fighting to war twenty years one year at
Speaker 6: a time, it's the same individuals coming back and in
Speaker 6: some cases it's.
Speaker 4: Back to that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that has a huge impact. The Philippines also
Speaker 5: is another case where language was interesting in that you know,
Speaker 5: again were we spend SF spends about fifty million dollars
Speaker 5: a year on language training. There's this whole premise that
Speaker 5: you know, you can't be effective if you don't speak
Speaker 5: the most nation language. And at least in the case
Speaker 5: of building you know, a battalion size unit like the
Speaker 5: light Reaction regiment or regimental size that it.
Speaker 4: Didn't matter as much.
Speaker 5: And there are multiple occasions where individuals would start speaking
Speaker 5: in Filipino or Tagalog or whatever of the hundreds of
Speaker 5: local dialects there are, and they either had situations where
Speaker 5: half the individuals were like, I don't speak that dialect,
Speaker 5: I have no idea what you're saying, or they're like,
Speaker 5: you know, like almost like the scene from Inglorious Bastards
Speaker 5: where it's like, do you Americans speak any language other
Speaker 5: than English, you know, where it's like my English is
Speaker 5: better than your to golle, So can you please speak
Speaker 5: in English?
Speaker 4: We'll understand you better.
Speaker 6: One thing that I mean is not in your book,
Speaker 6: I don't think. But I've been told that the main
Speaker 6: partner force for the LRR in recent years has transitioned
Speaker 6: from American Special Forces to Australian sas interesting and I
Speaker 6: don't know if you have any thoughts about you know,
Speaker 6: the partner force is actually kind of changing hands from
Speaker 6: one Western soft unit to another.
Speaker 4: And what that means if anything.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, so relationships do matter, and in some
Speaker 5: cases it is you know, if their relationship is deep enough,
Speaker 5: you can go a couple of years and.
Speaker 4: Pick it back up.
Speaker 5: But if that relationship is allowed to kind of like
Speaker 5: evolve to the point where no one knows anyone in the.
Speaker 4: Leadership, again, it's starting over again. You're starting over.
Speaker 5: You know, I did not work with the Australian sas,
Speaker 5: so I you know, it's difficult for me to know
Speaker 5: how good they're fit.
Speaker 4: You know, advisory skills are.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 7: I mean, you know it's interesting.
Speaker 5: We you know, as a nation, we keep talking about
Speaker 5: wanting to shift our focus to the Pacific, but we
Speaker 5: keep getting drugged back into sentcom time after time. I
Speaker 5: would kind of premise that, you know, particularly given the
Speaker 5: Philippines position, you know, with regards to China and the
Speaker 5: conflicts and frictions that already exist between them, we would
Speaker 5: be well served to maintain a strong relationships with them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's jump into Colombia. Columbia twenty two to twenty sixteen.
Speaker 6: So again, now we're in South coom totally different fight,
Speaker 6: totally different terrain.
Speaker 4: Jungle Mountainous are still.
Speaker 3: Down there with their second families there, so there's there's
Speaker 3: some similarity.
Speaker 4: And fighting narco terrorism at this time with FARC. You know.
Speaker 6: I recall when we had Frankie on the show asking
Speaker 6: him about about this. This subject came up, like why
Speaker 6: did Colombia work when so many of our other partnerships didn't,
Speaker 6: And the Colombian officer told them something like, well, we're
Speaker 6: closer to you, and we're much closer, have much more
Speaker 6: in common culturally, and that was that's it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think that's there's I think there's
Speaker 5: a component of that, but I think there are other
Speaker 5: factors and I think the So the Colombians.
Speaker 7: Went through a period where.
Speaker 5: You know, President and Simpler his his presidency was racked
Speaker 5: with corruption to the point where the US and I
Speaker 5: believe this is under Clinton, literally shuts off AID and
Speaker 5: there is so much corruption that we can't and I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, we're in the drug war, right, and this
Speaker 5: is like the greatest place where the drug war is
Speaker 5: coming from. And yet we actually went hardcore and said, hey, yeah,
Speaker 5: no more candy from you, because you guys are so corrupt.
Speaker 5: We are shutting off the money spigot, right, And that
Speaker 5: created a lot of things impacts within Colombia because after Sampler,
Speaker 5: the next president who basically pushed forth planned Columbia cleaned house.
Speaker 4: Ob Yeah, and I believe it was Adibam.
Speaker 5: I apologize, my little deaf dump details right now. I apologize.
Speaker 5: He basically cleans house, takes off almost all the three
Speaker 5: and four stards in the army, reappoints individuals who are
Speaker 5: you know, upstanding, not corrupt, who want to win, who
Speaker 5: are capable, and then they in turn appoint a whole
Speaker 5: series of individuals below them who are also capable. And
Speaker 5: so it's like this entire virtuous cycle where it's like
Speaker 5: cascading levels where everyone is appointing, like cleaning under them
Speaker 5: and appointing new individuals under them.
Speaker 7: That has a huge impact because all those.
Speaker 4: New Colombian officers who come in.
Speaker 5: A lot of them have trained in US programs and
Speaker 5: they are really capable, and so they come in with
Speaker 5: a totally different perspective and they want to win. And
Speaker 5: so when you know, we start working to partner with them,
Speaker 5: there are some of the old hands.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's we should point out too in that
Speaker 6: regard that our relationship with Columbia also goes back to
Speaker 6: like what the Korean War I think is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the one of the units, the Alan a
Speaker 5: group of ascilland Lencero Lancero group is formed after the
Speaker 5: the Lancero's. The Lancero's is kind of a Colombian version
Speaker 5: of Ranger School, but you know, without the safety restrictions,
Speaker 5: without any safety restrictions.
Speaker 4: And I think, I mean, I, you know, been in
Speaker 4: the Ranger School.
Speaker 5: But didn't go to Lancero, but my friends who have been,
Speaker 5: is like, it's harder the Ranger school.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like and you do combat patrols, like real combat patrol. Yeah,
Speaker 4: your graduation as a Colombian. Nothing else but the Colombians.
Speaker 6: Yes, I know a seventh Group guy that went to
Speaker 6: Lanceero and like his ranger buddy.
Speaker 4: Got smoked on patrol. Wow. Wow, it was a Colombian officer.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And so you know, Lancero School was something that the
Speaker 5: US actually started in the fifties. They came to from like, hey,
Speaker 5: we'd like a ranger school type course.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 5: I think the second advisor who is standing a the
Speaker 5: Lancero program actually ended up being the southcom commander in
Speaker 5: the eighties in El Salvador.
Speaker 4: And there's these all weird.
Speaker 5: Connections where like a bunch of the individuals who are
Speaker 5: really junior advisors in El Salvador are now like group
Speaker 5: sergeant majors or like group commanders or you know, SoC
Speaker 5: South commanders. They're all senior leaders and this they have
Speaker 5: this experience from Al Salvador, and they're kind of trying
Speaker 5: to compare the you know, the different situations. But you know,
Speaker 5: the relationship is strong. The Colombians really want to they
Speaker 5: want to succeed, and they kind of want to please
Speaker 5: the Americans.
Speaker 7: So there is this.
Speaker 5: Really good relationship where they when we ask them to
Speaker 5: do something unless it's like really stupid.
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 5: It's not like in Afghanistan or Iraq where there's a
Speaker 5: lot of foot dragging. Like the Colombians were like, okay.
Speaker 6: The Colombian people, I sense, are also like kind of
Speaker 6: sick of FARC at this point.
Speaker 4: They're sick of the FARC.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's been you know, they've been at war
Speaker 5: for decades, yes, like fifty years, and so it's it's
Speaker 5: not just you know that there's pressure from the US
Speaker 5: that convinces you know, that go when it goes from
Speaker 5: Saint Pler to Oriba. But there's also the Columbian electorate
Speaker 5: is like, look, we've had it, you know, and they
Speaker 5: I believe they doubled like the percentage GP going to
Speaker 5: the to the defense to military. They supported transition from
Speaker 5: a draft to a professional army, all these like series
Speaker 5: of reforms that you know, improved their military capabilities domestically
Speaker 5: that they took on themselves.
Speaker 6: So from the Colombian soft perspective and the US Special
Speaker 6: Forces partnership, same question, I mean, what went right?
Speaker 4: What went wrong there? Yeah? I mean the Colombian soft.
Speaker 7: Is literally the.
Speaker 5: The poster child of like the best example of a
Speaker 5: soft result. I think we could hope for they they
Speaker 5: you know, Columbia goes from exporting coca to a country
Speaker 5: that's exporting security forces assistance where they're literally doing FID
Speaker 5: missions throughout southcom and like they're working so closely they're
Speaker 5: with us, Like they're like, Hey, we're going to go
Speaker 5: to I don't know, I don't know that, I can't
Speaker 5: remember the nation, but Trinidad or two Barbados, and we're
Speaker 5: going to do a FID mission there.
Speaker 7: What would you like us to train them on?
Speaker 5: And that's literally working yourself out of a job, literally
Speaker 5: working yourself out of a job, not only in the
Speaker 5: country but across the theater.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, which which is you know, which is a
Speaker 3: testament to what you accomplished there?
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And the long term, you know, playing Columbia and all that,
Speaker 6: I mean, there's some long term you know thinking that
Speaker 6: went into that for.
Speaker 5: Sure, and the you know, a lot of the successes
Speaker 5: there is that there is consistency and that there's actually
Speaker 5: more consistency on the Colombian side than there is on
Speaker 5: the American side.
Speaker 4: Right the.
Speaker 5: In the mission in Columbia, they're their challenges because you know,
Speaker 5: I mean, it's in the middle of the Gyt and
Speaker 5: and there are these demands in Afghanistan, their demands in
Speaker 5: at Ac. There's you know, everyone's getting pulled every which way.
Speaker 6: That was a big thing in Colombia at that time,
Speaker 6: with like all the like willing spirit and everything like that.
Speaker 4: They're kind of having to compete for resources.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know it's one of the individuals said,
Speaker 5: you know, we're we're supporting theater, and so you know,
Speaker 5: we would get what we got and we just had
Speaker 5: to live with it, and that they were just fortunate
Speaker 5: that the Colombian partners were so dedicated and that in
Speaker 5: particular those soft units, unlike most of the other soft units,
Speaker 5: you know, it became like ours.
Speaker 7: They created a.
Speaker 5: So calm, a use of sock, a national you know force,
Speaker 5: and individuals would spend twenty year careers in that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and so those relationships would just help tremendously as well
Speaker 5: as the Colombians, you know, not resisting reform.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: You know, when we would.
Speaker 5: Suggest something, the colombiansoud be like okay, sure, like unless
Speaker 5: it was stupid, and even if it was stupid, sometimes
Speaker 5: they would do it to like placate us, right, but
Speaker 5: then not like follow.
Speaker 7: Through the whole way.
Speaker 5: We were really blessed to have great partners in Colombia and.
Speaker 6: So fark collapsed, that conflict is over. But I mean,
Speaker 6: correct me if I'm wrong. My impression of it is
Speaker 6: that a lot of the drug violence got pushed into Ecuador,
Speaker 6: and we have a lot of Ecuadorian mostly illegal immigrants
Speaker 6: here in the city. I understand, like they're here because
Speaker 6: of the violence and the poverty.
Speaker 4: In their country. I mean, what do you think about that?
Speaker 6: About that that like there's always these insurgent elements in
Speaker 6: South America, and like, are we ever going to be
Speaker 6: able to really as long as there's an American demand
Speaker 6: for drugs, are we really going to be able to
Speaker 6: end that?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, it goes back to the movie Traffic,
Speaker 5: and then you know the movie Traffic, one of the
Speaker 5: guys who's turned against the narco traffickers, you know, is
Speaker 5: talking with one of the individuals that's guarding him and says, look,
Speaker 5: you guys are never going to win this because you're
Speaker 5: fighting this war on both sides. Yeah, you're you know,
Speaker 5: you're fighting by it because you want to get there's
Speaker 5: such a demand for drugs that you're fighting you know,
Speaker 5: to get the drugs, so you fight the drug war there,
Speaker 5: but you're fighting the drug war by getting it shipped
Speaker 5: to you. So you're never gonna win until you resolve
Speaker 5: that challenge and.
Speaker 4: Fight the war on drugs and drugs won. Yeah, that's
Speaker 4: a man especially, you know. I mean, you know, it's
Speaker 4: it's just a huge it's it's the Gordian not right, No,
Speaker 4: I mean it's I mean, but you deal with it.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think you deal with the way you
Speaker 3: deal with prohibition or anything else. You legalize it and
Speaker 3: tax the hell out of it. You know, Once you
Speaker 3: do that and give it legitimacy.
Speaker 4: It kills It kills the black market, It.
Speaker 5: Kills one course of action. I mean, I I don't know.
Speaker 5: I you know, drugs is unfortunately not my uh you
Speaker 5: know that the drug war is not my kind of specialty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I don't well, I don't advocate.
Speaker 3: I think I think drugs are horrible, you know, like
Speaker 3: most drugs or a lot of drugs are horrible and
Speaker 3: destroy people in families and communities.
Speaker 4: However, he's always going to be demand if there's.
Speaker 3: The demand, like you know, war on drugs, like before
Speaker 3: the gy, like the war on drugs was where all
Speaker 3: the money went to, right, It's just it's everybody wanted
Speaker 3: to be part of that.
Speaker 5: That's why I did JTS six mission, Yeah, because there
Speaker 5: was tons of money there and then get our vehicles
Speaker 5: out to the West train for Yeah.
Speaker 3: Everybody makes fun of the Coast Guard, but the Coast
Speaker 3: Guard was stacking bodies because they wore on drugs time.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: So it's one of those things of you know, do
Speaker 3: you keep sort of with the self flagellation saying this
Speaker 3: is the moral course or deal with the practicality of it.
Speaker 4: I don't know what the right answer is.
Speaker 6: But yeah, so as we come to a RAQ, I'm
Speaker 6: not going to harp on it too much. We talked
Speaker 6: a lot about Iraq, but just through the soft perspective
Speaker 6: and the partnerships with the i CTF.
Speaker 4: And the commando. Yeah, just talk to us about how
Speaker 4: that partnership played out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And it was similar to the others in that
Speaker 5: everyone recognized that relationships matter, and the same individuals kept
Speaker 5: coming back time after time after time to the point where,
Speaker 5: particularly with the ice off, they got to a point
Speaker 5: where one unit would deploy, the next unit would be
Speaker 5: in garrison and then they would flip lump and it
Speaker 5: would be just you know, one punch after another for
Speaker 5: almost like two or three years. So the first two
Speaker 5: or three years were just two units, and then they
Speaker 5: got to the point where they're starting to hit burnout.
Speaker 5: So they're like, okay, well we'll do three punches where
Speaker 5: we'll do one two and then another unit. Every other
Speaker 5: rotation will bring somebody else in. But even then that
Speaker 5: was you know, like one in four rotations it ended
Speaker 5: up being.
Speaker 4: So there's huge just consistency.
Speaker 5: Where even while they're in garrison they're using WhatsApp or
Speaker 5: whatever to communicate you know, too forward and find where
Speaker 5: what the unit is doing, where it's at, what its
Speaker 5: skill levels at, and so that they're in touch with
Speaker 5: that they can return and pick right back up where
Speaker 5: they were last time.
Speaker 4: There's I mean, there's there's ownership of the unit. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they acted as the paymasters for the unit. They came
Speaker 4: up with the to and the like.
Speaker 6: The Americans really were running those units at that time.
Speaker 5: One of the themes really kind of across many of
Speaker 5: the case studies was that in some cases the US
Speaker 5: has a reluctance to in almost are you know, our
Speaker 5: like liberalism from like a Jeffersonian like liberalism right ideal
Speaker 5: that like we we don't want to be a colonialist
Speaker 5: and like run things.
Speaker 4: But a theme kind of became was that there's sometimes
Speaker 4: that you have to step back.
Speaker 12: It's the responsible thing to do, the responsible thing to do,
Speaker 12: and not from a colonial perspective, but just to prevent corruption,
Speaker 12: to enforce standards.
Speaker 4: To take care of the soldiers, to take care of.
Speaker 5: The soldiers, and and if you do that at the
Speaker 5: beginning and then you trans position, they can be more
Speaker 5: successful than if you didn't do it at all. And
Speaker 5: for example, in the ice off, you know, the US
Speaker 5: held a selection and if the guy didn't pass selection,
Speaker 5: they didn't go to the ice off. And it was
Speaker 5: a real selection. It wasn't like everyone passes. You know,
Speaker 5: they're taking off half to a third of the individuals.
Speaker 5: They selected the leadership also, which is really the most important.
Speaker 5: You know, father Jel Barawi, who is the you know,
Speaker 5: second brigade commander, really won't be a kind of core
Speaker 5: driving force of the iesoft who you know, not perfect,
Speaker 5: but he was brave. You know, it was like the
Speaker 5: individual in the Philippines. You know that you're talking about
Speaker 5: he was brave, he was a dynamic leader.
Speaker 7: He led from the front.
Speaker 4: He's a Kurdish dude.
Speaker 7: He was a Kurdish dude, and he you know, in Iraq.
Speaker 5: He was a little corrupt, but he wasn't really badly right, right,
Speaker 5: And so it was enough where because we had picked
Speaker 5: these people who we knew were going to be decent leaders,
Speaker 5: the unit was successful.
Speaker 6: It was also interesting how you point out how it
Speaker 6: was like mandated that the demographics of the unit represent
Speaker 6: the ethnicity you know, percentages you know, across Iraq.
Speaker 4: So there's like what six different.
Speaker 5: Groups of Yeah, that was another thing that they really
Speaker 5: mandated again and it wasn't the iraqis that, you know,
Speaker 5: it was like, okay, from squad level to battalion level,
Speaker 5: you know, everything is going to represent Rock's demo demographics.
Speaker 5: They're going to be roughly twenty percent Kords, roughly you know,
Speaker 5: twenty percent Sydney, and then roughly sixty percent you know,
Speaker 5: Shia and then handful of other minorities to comment and
Speaker 5: it like.
Speaker 6: Gave them the reputation over time, right that they're not
Speaker 6: like a partisan force of like Sun He's going after
Speaker 6: Shias or vice versa.
Speaker 4: That they are a national force.
Speaker 5: It became a national force, and individuals within the unit,
Speaker 5: you know, interviewing them, they'd be like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: at first, it was really hard for me to like
Speaker 5: trust like the dude, the sun dude that I thought
Speaker 5: was like you know, and we thought they were like
Speaker 5: al kaeda. You know, I've been raised to think Sunnis
Speaker 5: were gonna murder us, and the Suniors.
Speaker 7: Are like, I've been raised, you know that you know
Speaker 7: all a Shio were.
Speaker 5: Apostates and that they were devil worshipers, you know, and
Speaker 5: but you know, you fight alongside of them for months
Speaker 5: at a time and you kind of realize, like, this
Speaker 5: guy saved my life more than once, and like it
Speaker 5: builds these bonds or the unit become the national unit.
Speaker 6: Was that that quote in your book where they did
Speaker 6: some op that had all this political fallout and the
Speaker 6: Iraqi was like, yeah, we don't care about that.
Speaker 4: We worked for President Bush. Yeah, there was, I think
Speaker 4: it was I can't remember.
Speaker 5: There was six or seven is the tenth reup rotation
Speaker 5: and it was a hit on a mosque where in
Speaker 5: one of these typical cases the insurgents, I think it
Speaker 5: was a sodrest as a Shia mosque, I believe where afterwards,
Speaker 5: you know, they re arranged in the bodies, they take
Speaker 5: all the weapons away, they shoot a couple of civilians
Speaker 5: and women and children in the streets, drag their bodies in,
Speaker 5: and all the Americans have mastered all these people at prayer,
Speaker 5: you know, they put out prayer rugs and everything, so
Speaker 5: it looks like fortunately they had also had a combat
Speaker 5: cameraman on that mission, so it like on the US side.
Speaker 7: It helped us for a little bit.
Speaker 5: But on the Iraqi side, the Iraqis were like, and
Speaker 5: this is one of those examples of where at some point,
Speaker 5: you know, you can't play nice when the host nation
Speaker 5: is being corrupt and incompetent, you have to step in.
Speaker 5: And you know, we stepped in enough that you know,
Speaker 5: like you had said, we were paying the Iraqi Is
Speaker 5: like directly to make sure that the soldiers that the
Speaker 5: commander wasn't right stealing money, like the American soldiers were
Speaker 5: paying them to make sure that there there's no corruption,
Speaker 5: that they were getting paid.
Speaker 4: And they're like, man, like I'm getting paid.
Speaker 5: My chow is good because nobody's skimming money off the
Speaker 5: chow fund. Like I'm getting fed you know, my family's
Speaker 5: here on base too, because they are worried that, you
Speaker 5: know that if my family was off base, they'd get killed.
Speaker 4: So I'm willing to.
Speaker 5: Fight because we've arranged all these things to be successful.
Speaker 5: And then over time you slowly start stepping back and
Speaker 5: then you get to a point where they're actually standing.
Speaker 1: On their own.
Speaker 6: But in this case, it turned out Malachi ended up
Speaker 6: using them for his own political purposes and that really
Speaker 6: ruined the unit's reputation.
Speaker 7: It did for a while for you know, a couple
Speaker 7: of years.
Speaker 5: Melachi, who really helped, in my opinion, is one of
Speaker 5: these central causes of the second what I would call
Speaker 5: the second Idaki Civil War. This is the civil war
Speaker 5: that not from like six to nine. It's really from
Speaker 5: about you know, twelve to you know, ISIS is really
Speaker 5: part of it because everyone buys into ISIS because they're like,
Speaker 5: you know, yeah, fuck this guy, fuck this guy.
Speaker 4: And you know, the Shia.
Speaker 5: Malichi was literally going down the list of the sons
Speaker 5: of Iraq of you know, the Sahua individuals and arresting
Speaker 5: them off their list because you know, he's like, oh, well,
Speaker 5: you know they're al Kada, and because you know, when
Speaker 5: Malachi came in, he he flooded the ice off with
Speaker 5: more Shia candidates and it was it's this weird dynamic
Speaker 5: where the unit would push back a little bit, but
Speaker 5: they couldn't push back completely because if they did, then
Speaker 5: they'd get fired, right, So it's this weird dynamic where
Speaker 5: they're trying to pick what is the amount that I
Speaker 5: can push back without and they've been you know, some
Speaker 5: jail somewhere, and eventually, you know, they it comes to
Speaker 5: the point where the ICEO off is being used to
Speaker 5: like arrest political opponents for a couple of years while
Speaker 5: Malachi's in power, and they get this reputation as Fedaene Malachi,
Speaker 5: which is you know, like fadin is like fighters, guirrill, fighters, resistors,
Speaker 5: and the Fedaine were originally Saddam's fadeen and so they
Speaker 5: had this reputation. But then like when the whole twenty
Speaker 5: fourteen dash isis blew up and they saved the nation
Speaker 5: and Maliki got punted out, you know, find and some
Speaker 5: of that was the US stepping in and saying like, look,
Speaker 5: you're gone, man, We're not going to support.
Speaker 4: You being you know, the PM anymore. When as soon
Speaker 4: as he's gone. The I saw many of those.
Speaker 5: Cultural habits that they had been trained with, they defaulted
Speaker 5: back to them. They expunged a bunch of the incompetency officers,
Speaker 5: they brought back in a more balance, and so like
Speaker 5: by like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, when they're starting to
Speaker 5: do assessments again of like, okay, well what is the
Speaker 5: breakdown now, it's almost back to like, you know, the
Speaker 5: two thousand. What's no, that's awesome, it's almost back to
Speaker 5: the same democratic I.
Speaker 6: Want to ask you because so I wrote in this
Speaker 6: book the whole chapter about the SIF, and we haven't
Speaker 6: really mentioned them in this discussion thus far. But you mentioned,
Speaker 6: for instance that IOF continued to fight while the rest
Speaker 6: of the Iraqi Army basically dissolved.
Speaker 4: The SIF was involved in training the LRR.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they were down in Columbia training their hostage rescue
Speaker 6: you know, national asset down there. What do you think
Speaker 6: about the SIF being kind of disbanded and turned into
Speaker 6: a different sort of capability, Like, I mean, I'm just curious,
Speaker 6: you know, based on your research and your experience as
Speaker 6: an s F officer, like, was.
Speaker 4: That the right decision was that a bad decision. Did
Speaker 4: the SIF have a lot of value added that we've lost?
Speaker 4: I mean, what do you think about that? So?
Speaker 5: You know, so I had a lot of friends in
Speaker 5: A one to five because obviously you know I was
Speaker 5: right downstairs, and even when I was a team leader,
Speaker 5: there are two stairs downstairs, right so Joe Canella, Rick
Speaker 5: Frazier and all these you know, great dudes, Dean Franks
Speaker 5: who who ran A one five and.
Speaker 7: Ran a great organization.
Speaker 5: I think disbanding the SITH you you lose a really
Speaker 5: good capability. But the challenge, I think is that and
Speaker 5: this may be controversial, and it may piss off some
Speaker 5: of the old A one to five or other stiff guys.
Speaker 5: The the SIFT probably was never going to be used
Speaker 5: for traditional for its intended function right right, to be
Speaker 5: a backup to the US National Mission Force to do
Speaker 5: hostage rescue when they weren't available. The chances of them
Speaker 5: doing that mission is highly unlikely. But what they were
Speaker 5: amazing at was building these National Mission Forces doing ct FED,
Speaker 5: exactly doing ct FIT And if you look at it,
Speaker 5: you know, time after time, the CIS fingerprints are all
Speaker 5: over these high end units that are successful and successful
Speaker 5: at being host nation national mission forces capable of doing
Speaker 5: hostage rescue missions like the RUT Like Reaction Regiment does,
Speaker 5: like the IESOFT.
Speaker 4: Does on occasion.
Speaker 5: You know, these the skills that they had, they rarely
Speaker 5: actually use them other than transferring them to host nation forces.
Speaker 7: Right, and that's what they're really good at.
Speaker 3: Out of curiosity, you know, you mentioned like ICEOFT and
Speaker 3: this massive battle with Daisha isis you know, we talk
Speaker 3: about Alsavador and Colombia and these units.
Speaker 4: What is it about?
Speaker 3: Because it's one thing for them to behave and perform
Speaker 3: in a certain way when American advisors are.
Speaker 13: Attached, right, very true, but you're talking about the advisors
Speaker 13: have left YEA, and these units sometimes not necessarily with
Speaker 13: like Columbia, but maybe with you know, the ice offt In.
Speaker 3: Spite of cultural norms, in spite of what happens with
Speaker 3: the rest of the military, in spite of they still
Speaker 3: maintain I want to say sort of that American is
Speaker 3: spree accor right, They still culture. They still like have
Speaker 3: that that culture that that binds them together and and
Speaker 3: gives them a sense of right and wrong and and.
Speaker 4: Sense of mission. Right, what what is it? How is
Speaker 4: that passed on. How is that germinated and and fostered,
Speaker 4: and then.
Speaker 3: Even when Americans leave, these units are still an echo
Speaker 3: of those American ideals.
Speaker 5: I think it's in some ways it's a transference of culture.
Speaker 5: And how it happens. I think there's there's a couple factors.
Speaker 5: One is that there's a long term partnership. And it's
Speaker 5: not like particularly what we did with a lot of Iraqi,
Speaker 5: Africa African units, where we would show up, we work
Speaker 5: with them for six months and then they'd be trained
Speaker 5: right and they wouldn't need advisors. Again, you don't pass
Speaker 5: culture on in six months like you know, that's that's
Speaker 5: a decade or more.
Speaker 4: Project.
Speaker 5: So that's one component of it is it's a long term, consistent,
Speaker 5: you know connections.
Speaker 7: Second is leadership matters most.
Speaker 5: And helping pick the right host nation leadership, either directly
Speaker 5: as we did in the ICEOFT or indirectly as we
Speaker 5: maybe help nudge things along or helped individual's.
Speaker 7: Careers or whatever.
Speaker 5: That makes a huge impact because you know, those individuals
Speaker 5: then pass on that culture to the units, and rather
Speaker 5: than a corrupt culture, they're passing on a culture that
Speaker 5: we have selected that we think is closer to ours,
Speaker 5: I think, and not culture meaning like American culture, but
Speaker 5: just like viable military cultural norms of the warrior ethos.
Speaker 5: How you get promoted, How you get promoted, professionalism, you know,
Speaker 5: proper civil multi relations or spect lack of corruption, you know,
Speaker 5: taking care of your soldiers, leading.
Speaker 4: From the front, all that stuff.
Speaker 7: You kind of have leadership.
Speaker 4: You've got to kick the right leaders.
Speaker 3: So outside of you know, special forces and you know
Speaker 3: anybody else who's doing you know, FID seals when they
Speaker 3: you know, when the money is, you know, when they
Speaker 3: want the money or whatever.
Speaker 5: But don't get me started.
Speaker 3: But outside of you know, special forces going in and
Speaker 3: teaching these commando skills, has the army overlooked the idea
Speaker 3: of senior leaders, whether senior enlisted or senior or not
Speaker 3: senior officers, but senior enlisted and officers creating that sort
Speaker 3: of FID capability from a leadership point of view, with
Speaker 3: with like the Iraqi Army or with armies with trying
Speaker 3: to teach that culture at the top so that it
Speaker 3: filters down.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So there is one quote from the Iraq War study
Speaker 5: that really stood out to me, and it went something
Speaker 5: along the lines of in Iraq.
Speaker 4: You know, we had all of the.
Speaker 5: Guns and money to influence the Iraqi military, its creation,
Speaker 5: it's leadership, it's ethos, and we used neither. And for
Speaker 5: some weird reason, you know, like the money troth kept
Speaker 5: going mostly right, and the weapons troth kept going in
Speaker 5: that we very rarely really threw down and said no, like,
Speaker 5: this guy is a sectarian thug and he's not going
Speaker 5: to be He should not be leading any units whatsoever.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: I mean, I could even give you a personal account
Speaker 5: of my time there.
Speaker 4: Where the one.
Speaker 5: Uh Tony Soprano, the Sikh.
Speaker 4: At Mamour, the shake of Shakespeare. Yeah, who, I don't.
Speaker 5: Know what happened to him. Actually he posts you know
Speaker 5: twenty fourteen the previous unit that had worked with him.
Speaker 5: I mean, in a on a positive note, you know,
Speaker 5: he is Tony Soprano. He's a thug, so he fights.
Speaker 5: But he was horribly corrupt, right, and skimmed huge amounts
Speaker 5: from his soldiers.
Speaker 7: He was and he was a thug to the point of.
Speaker 5: Dangerous to the civilian population, and to the point where.
Speaker 4: You know, he had hooked ratchet straps up to.
Speaker 5: A Iraqi insurgent that they had captured, who was still
Speaker 5: alive and then drug him behind. This is rotation before
Speaker 5: us drug him behind till he died. You know, I
Speaker 5: tried to get him replaced because I was like, this
Speaker 5: guy is we do not want to work with this guy.
Speaker 5: And are the team leader, the team sergeant, the whole
Speaker 5: team is like, this dude is bad.
Speaker 4: We do not want to work with this guy. We
Speaker 4: need to find someone else.
Speaker 5: And so we'd even worked through and all this so
Speaker 5: much had happened before, in like that November four period,
Speaker 5: or he had fought, he'd been one of the few
Speaker 5: that fought that they'd kind of gotten Stockholm syndrome. With
Speaker 5: me and so my team I representing them, I put
Speaker 5: together the packet to try to get rid of this guy.
Speaker 5: We even had the point where we had talked to
Speaker 5: this guy buttering him up, you know, like a man.
Speaker 5: You are so brave, you're so awesome, and we've heard
Speaker 5: these stories about you dragon, you know, the dude behind
Speaker 5: We heard there were photos.
Speaker 4: You know, do you have photos? Oh? Yes, I have photos.
Speaker 7: Here, let me show you.
Speaker 5: You know, I mean there's photos, like have copies of those.
Speaker 5: Whould love to show them to our friends, you know,
Speaker 5: And so we literally had photos of him doing this.
Speaker 4: So did you try to do this through the laky bedding?
Speaker 5: No, I just tried to do it through the regular
Speaker 5: chain of command. So like company command, our team leader
Speaker 5: to company commander, tiling commander goes up somewhere to the ethos.
Speaker 5: Conventional guys get very angry at the soft guy goes
Speaker 5: up to the death star, goes up to the death.
Speaker 4: Star somewhere, and then it comes pouring back down of Hey, Frank,
Speaker 4: what are you doing there pissing off the conventional guys.
Speaker 7: You're working with the artillery guys.
Speaker 5: And I mean it was even to the point where
Speaker 5: when with the photo that we had gotten from the
Speaker 5: team guys from the rotation before us, I actually posted
Speaker 5: that next to you know, the infamous photo of the
Speaker 5: and there is definitely a backstory to the Vietnam you
Speaker 5: know where he's executing the prisoner.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 5: But my point was the political impact of that right
Speaker 5: on the war. I was like, what happens when this
Speaker 5: comes out?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: Totally fair port And and my battalion commander, totally, to
Speaker 5: his great credit, he absolutely supported me. He's like, Frank,
Speaker 5: you're totally right. I am going to support you. I'm
Speaker 5: going to support your team. He took the fight up
Speaker 5: somewhere into the ethos and came back like, no, dude's
Speaker 5: going to stay in with If I recall correctly, kind
Speaker 5: of the it was basically that they kind of become
Speaker 5: almost like Stockholm syndrome that they've been through this, Like
Speaker 5: November four was a really really bad time, like they're
Speaker 5: dropping jade down.
Speaker 6: Like the word the word that always gets used to
Speaker 6: avoid or excuse why you.
Speaker 4: Can't do the right thing is equities have equities, which
Speaker 4: is so weird.
Speaker 3: Which is so weird because in other countries, when it's
Speaker 3: a soft, pure mission, they'll be like, like they'll come
Speaker 3: down on you guys for the smallest human rights human
Speaker 3: rights violation that the guys that you didn't even go
Speaker 3: out with commit.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, it's crazy, absolutely absolutely, And you know, so
Speaker 5: it was just like, well, let's uh, you know, I
Speaker 5: don't want to keep all night.
Speaker 4: No, it's okay, this is a great conversation.
Speaker 7: Thank you for so deep into it.
Speaker 4: I'm just trying to, you know, make sure that we
Speaker 4: we cover it all.
Speaker 6: So the last case study in your book, Afghanistan, again
Speaker 6: widely different culture terrain, the auspices under which were there
Speaker 6: very different. And also the auspices under which we stood
Speaker 6: up the Afghan Special Operations capability was quite different than Iraq,
Speaker 6: very different. Start talking to us about the KANDACT commandos,
Speaker 6: how that comes about and how that partner relationship develops.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it.
Speaker 5: Comes about unlike at Ack where the ICEOFT with the
Speaker 5: commandos and the ICTF, you know, the invasion, it's.
Speaker 7: Seven eight months after the invasion.
Speaker 5: That the the the initial seeds of the ICEOFT are
Speaker 5: being started to be created. In Afghanistan, it's like four
Speaker 5: years after and after the the you know that the
Speaker 5: Taliban had been kicked out of power and couple and
Speaker 5: by that point, the whole premise of like host nation
Speaker 5: sovereignty and that they're like there are things we can
Speaker 5: and can't do, you know, as Americans, and this is
Speaker 5: their you know kind of area, and this is our area,
Speaker 5: so like we're not going to overstep our bounds because
Speaker 5: this is their host nation sovereignty had developed and so
Speaker 5: it became very difficult to kind of like really push
Speaker 5: or force things. And so unlike with the ice OFF,
Speaker 5: with the Afghan commandos, when they have a selection, almost everyone.
Speaker 7: Passes you know, their.
Speaker 5: Little ability to select leaders for it. They don't have
Speaker 5: the ability to kind of command it. And battle pay
Speaker 5: is different. Their pay is more than the rest of
Speaker 5: the army, but they're not generally like doing it out
Speaker 5: like the situation in Iraq where you literally the paymaster
Speaker 5: is an American at the beginning to kind of like
Speaker 5: treat teach them almost the right way to do it,
Speaker 5: and then transition.
Speaker 7: By the time you know it starts.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, quarter of the war is over almost already,
Speaker 5: or you know, twenty percent of the war is over already,
Speaker 5: and so it really limits our ability to make changes
Speaker 5: within the unit to kind of like a lot, you know,
Speaker 5: force the unit to be created in our image. At
Speaker 5: the same time, there are challenges on the US side
Speaker 5: with consistency in that one of the you know, Afghan
Speaker 5: guys advisors SF guys described it as we were chasing
Speaker 5: bright and shiny objects where even on the soft side
Speaker 5: we basically replicated the conventional side, where you know, as
Speaker 5: you said, we're fighting one year wars twenty of them
Speaker 5: and every two years. On the soft side, we have
Speaker 5: this weird change on our partner force where we go
Speaker 5: from the commandos to the Afghan National Army special forces,
Speaker 5: to the police force, to the Afghan local police, to
Speaker 5: the village stability operations, you know, and it keeps change.
Speaker 6: When you look at the like Afghanistan, just look at
Speaker 6: like the Afghanistan Special and Paramilitary and on all these
Speaker 6: like weird SAPs and stuff. My impression of it is
Speaker 6: that it's about ten times more confusing than.
Speaker 4: What we did in South Vietnam. Yes, which is a
Speaker 4: little confusing, Yes, which is very confusing in itself, But.
Speaker 6: The stuff in Afghanistan is like, it's mind boggling.
Speaker 4: It's crazy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like there's no unity of effort because we keep
Speaker 5: changing things. It's like it's like someone with ADHD is
Speaker 5: like in charge.
Speaker 4: Like, no, that's that's a good point. That's why I
Speaker 4: think about like that. It's nuts.
Speaker 3: But where where was that coming from? Was that coming
Speaker 3: from theater the like the theater commander. Was that coming
Speaker 3: from the theater soft commanders? Because obviously No. E seven
Speaker 3: is making that decision?
Speaker 5: No way, right, these sevens are picking pulling their hair
Speaker 5: out right, They can't believe how stupid the decisions are.
Speaker 5: The the general sense was that in many cases it
Speaker 5: came from either the group that was rotating as the
Speaker 5: jujitsta had or as the theater soft headquarters as you know,
Speaker 5: as the point when a theater soft headquarters was stood
Speaker 5: up over the group headquarters that those because it was
Speaker 5: weird in many ways. It's almost like weird, there's a
Speaker 5: two year time period is done, and now we've got
Speaker 5: a new partner for us.
Speaker 4: Wonder what the.
Speaker 5: Correlation is there, you know, meaning basically that somebody's command tenure,
Speaker 5: they've now rotated out, somebody else rotates.
Speaker 4: In, and they got to leave their mark on it.
Speaker 7: They want to leave their mark. They've got a new pet.
Speaker 4: Rock, do you you know?
Speaker 3: We talked a little bit about GAT veterans contempt for
Speaker 3: general officers and why that is. Do you feel as
Speaker 3: though there's an argument it's kind of impractical because of
Speaker 3: how you know that they gain rankers eff, but do
Speaker 3: you feel there is an argument for when you start
Speaker 3: a war, it's your war until it's over.
Speaker 5: That was actually one of our challenging conclusions in the
Speaker 5: Iraq War study in that you know, there war two veterans,
Speaker 5: that it was the war from the beginning to end.
Speaker 5: The challenge with that is the all volunteer force, right
Speaker 5: and I mean there are ways that you can kind
Speaker 5: of perhaps get away or get around it where if
Speaker 5: you actually return the same units to the same theater.
Speaker 5: I mean, we did this bizarre stuff in Afghanistean. We
Speaker 5: did the same thing in soft where their NCOs were
Speaker 5: like it was insane, Like I requested to go back
Speaker 5: to the same commando KANDAC and I never did, like
Speaker 5: you know, but the conventional Force was just as bad
Speaker 5: or even worse, where they didn't return the same division
Speaker 5: to the same theater. They put a division that had
Speaker 5: you know, been to Afghanistan, they throw it into a
Speaker 5: rock and they're relearning everything from scratch.
Speaker 4: Because this is totally different environment.
Speaker 3: What about on a geo level to say, hey, if
Speaker 3: you want ownership of this war, you have ownership of
Speaker 3: this war and it's all on you. Yeah, like you
Speaker 3: don't get out, you don't get out after two years
Speaker 3: and say, well they just failed to carry on my vision.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: General Casey actually commanded from June oh four until I
Speaker 5: think it was like February of seven. And you know,
Speaker 5: it's a pretty long tenure. It's not a year tenure,
Speaker 5: it's I think it's three hund years.
Speaker 14: Yeah, yeah, and The challenge was is he was one
Speaker 14: of the ones who was pushing the transition strategy, and
Speaker 14: I think he.
Speaker 7: Really was a true believer. But I mean I went
Speaker 7: in like thinking like.
Speaker 5: Oh this, When I interview these guys, they're going to
Speaker 5: be like, yeah, uh, you know. I gave my best
Speaker 5: military advice and then the politicians told me to do
Speaker 5: it and I saluted and drove on.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 7: They were like, this is.
Speaker 4: The right idea.
Speaker 5: We should have done this all along, We should have
Speaker 5: just totally left. And it proved me right, you know
Speaker 5: that the wrecking army collapsed and I was like, wow,
Speaker 5: oh so much.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So the flip side of that, the challenge is
Speaker 4: if you get the right geo right, great.
Speaker 5: If you don't get the right geo, you are totally screwed.
Speaker 5: And one of the challenges, to be very honest, I
Speaker 5: think in civil military relations and post volunteer army is
Speaker 5: we don't fire a lot.
Speaker 4: Of generals, right, we don't fire enough generals. We don't
Speaker 4: fire we almost fire no jump right right.
Speaker 6: We have this sort of like cultural inclination towards like
Speaker 6: worship of this like unique singular individual who's going to
Speaker 6: save us with his brilliance.
Speaker 4: That's not really how.
Speaker 5: It we're Yeah, I think in some ways it's also
Speaker 5: worse when your senior civilian leaders believe it, believe it,
Speaker 5: but also have little or no military experience, like when
Speaker 5: they've never served, or if they've been you know, their
Speaker 5: National Guard for what six months or whatever or zero
Speaker 5: like zero. It takes a really strong person like an
Speaker 5: FDR or a Lincoln to be like, hey, McClellan, guess
Speaker 5: what you're fired next, commander. I mean, think about like
Speaker 5: the number of senior commanders who went through in the
Speaker 5: Civil War.
Speaker 7: Until we found a good one.
Speaker 4: So that's the model.
Speaker 6: Sorry, the Kandak commandos, I mean, despite our very many
Speaker 6: failings in Afghanistan, it's interesting again that it seems that
Speaker 6: SF essentially accomplished their job, and even as Afghanistan was collapsing,
Speaker 6: the commandos fought until their logistics lines.
Speaker 4: Just crapped out out on them completely. And that's a.
Speaker 6: Military failure, you know, to be clear, the military logistics
Speaker 6: failed to get them the fuel, the ammunition, water, whatever
Speaker 6: they needed.
Speaker 4: But they did fight. Yeah, they did fight.
Speaker 5: In many cases, they're what's happening or sending notes to
Speaker 5: their posting on Facebook I need AMMO. I need fuel.
Speaker 5: I'm willing to fight. Somebody get me ammo. Like this
Speaker 5: crazy stuff like social media, right, like Twitter, Like I'm
Speaker 5: at this location, send me AMMO.
Speaker 4: I'll fight. We'll fight for AMO, right.
Speaker 5: You know, uh where they did fight, and you know,
Speaker 5: in many cases some of them were executed.
Speaker 4: You know, they they.
Speaker 5: Fought till they ran an ammunition and then the Taliban.
Speaker 7: Executed every single one of them to like prove a point.
Speaker 5: And I mean, despite our frictions and our challenges and
Speaker 5: our mistakes, you know, we still ended up with a
Speaker 5: partner for us.
Speaker 4: That performed far better than the rest of the after military.
Speaker 5: And the irony is that this is not a small force, right,
Speaker 5: It's a division sized force.
Speaker 4: There's like sixteen.
Speaker 5: Thousand people in the Commandos by the time it's done,
Speaker 5: so it's huge.
Speaker 7: It's not this small force.
Speaker 4: It's said it's like a fifth of the overall ANA.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like a fifty overall ANA. But they're doing
Speaker 5: like seventy percent of the fighting. They're larger than like
Speaker 5: six NATO countries militaries like the commandos. So it's a
Speaker 5: big force, but rit large. There was enough time and
Speaker 5: impact even though it was with different individuals to create
Speaker 5: enough of a culture that they fought.
Speaker 6: So any final thoughts about the book before we move on.
Speaker 4: I mean, I know there's a lot in here, you know.
Speaker 5: I guess the biggest thing I would just say is,
Speaker 5: you know, thanks to all of like the SSEF guys
Speaker 5: and host nation forces and everyone, they just like poured
Speaker 5: out their you know, life stories and sometimes there are
Speaker 5: worse days that they of their life.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know that spent time with me.
Speaker 5: I mean, time is our most precious resource, and they
Speaker 5: spent a lot of time with me. And so I'm
Speaker 5: just super thankful that so many people gave me so
Speaker 5: much time and to let me and let me tell
Speaker 5: their stories. Because there is some fucking amazing stories out there.
Speaker 6: So Training for Victory it's available now. You guys can
Speaker 6: go out and find it on Amazon or wherever books
Speaker 6: are sold. Tell us about life after the book. What
Speaker 6: are you up to nowadays?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 14: So, so I am kind of a gig.
Speaker 7: Economy for education.
Speaker 5: So I do in the chair of a regular Warfare
Speaker 5: studies at the Modern War Institute West Point, which means
Speaker 5: I research and write. I'm fortunate I do everything from
Speaker 5: insurgency to uh, you know, security, force assistance kind of
Speaker 5: everything in between.
Speaker 7: So it's fun.
Speaker 5: To be very honest, I would far prefer to teach,
Speaker 5: and this is gonna sound maybe a little weird, but
Speaker 5: I would almost rather teach like civilians, like undergrads, like
Speaker 5: particularly RTC kids, than military because man, they are so
Speaker 5: so like I teach as an adjunct at Tufts University.
Speaker 5: I teach a class called War Film and Politics, which
Speaker 5: uses war films to kind of help understand the military
Speaker 5: ethos and to understand how politics is inserted into films
Speaker 5: we watch. I've taught a couple other courses there. I'm
Speaker 5: also teaching a class in civil Military Relations the master's level.
Speaker 7: They are in the fall, and.
Speaker 5: I taught other classes like the class and Intelligence and Technology.
Speaker 7: Taught that at JASOW. I thought it right in university.
Speaker 5: It Urtzelia in Israel, so you know, I get around
Speaker 5: kind of whatever is available to me. I much prefer
Speaker 5: kind of a more stable kind of like particularly civilian.
Speaker 5: It would be my dream opportunity, but it's it's challenging.
Speaker 4: It's challenging being.
Speaker 5: Fifty five because people look at you differently, particularly in
Speaker 5: the academic world.
Speaker 7: In the academic world.
Speaker 6: Aren't you supposed to be like a seventy year old
Speaker 6: professor that you just stay there forever and collect the
Speaker 6: collect the paycheck.
Speaker 4: Until they kick you out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, is the most accurate thing about the latest Indiana
Speaker 5: Jones movie with the Harrison Ford playing that still the
Speaker 5: professor is still teaching, putting the transparencies up on the projector.
Speaker 4: Like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: So you know, getting into it late is hard because
Speaker 5: in many cases they see it as publisher paris, you know,
Speaker 5: as we were talking about before, and they want you
Speaker 5: to publish a lot, in research a lot, and it's.
Speaker 7: Almost like a timeline.
Speaker 5: They're like, oh, well, you got twenty years left maybe
Speaker 5: if that fifteen, whereas if we hire somebody who's thirty,
Speaker 5: we can kind.
Speaker 7: Of mold them in our image or are in our image.
Speaker 5: And we have a lot.
Speaker 7: More years of research and et cetera.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what the crap? I wrote this fifteen hundred page
Speaker 6: I RACK report.
Speaker 4: What do you want?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: There is also.
Speaker 5: I think there is in some cases, some universities are
Speaker 5: very most very friendly. You know, when I got my
Speaker 5: PhD at Fletcher's School, Long Diplomacey at Tufts University, Medford Massachusetts.
Speaker 5: When I was going there to like try to decide
Speaker 5: where I was going to pick for my program, got
Speaker 5: any elevator to go up to do an interview, and
Speaker 5: there's like a flyer like.
Speaker 7: Kind of celebrate the Marine Corps birthday. And I was like, Wow,
Speaker 7: this place is like.
Speaker 5: Pretty military friendly that they're like, you know, come out
Speaker 5: cake for the Marine Corps birthday and they're celebrating it, right,
Speaker 5: And so it was a really good fit for me
Speaker 5: because they're like pretty military friendly. But there are other
Speaker 5: institutions out there that are not very multi friendly that
Speaker 5: you know, look at you like, you know, you're some
Speaker 5: sort of barbarian, right chromagnon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you were over there killing brown people from Uncle Sam. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and which is.
Speaker 5: Who misunderstanding of what we were doing? Yeah, total misunderstanding
Speaker 5: of what our ethos is. Yeah, total misunderstanding is like
Speaker 5: why many of us joined the military.
Speaker 3: It's I think, I mean, if you're twenty two in
Speaker 3: saying that, okay, if you're like forty in saying that,
Speaker 3: it's an intentional misunderstanding, Like.
Speaker 7: It's you, right, you haven't interacted with many military.
Speaker 4: Intentionally, like you have no intellectual curiosity whatsoever.
Speaker 7: Yes, Yeah, and and there there are some schools.
Speaker 5: That have that problem. Yeah, I'm this is yeah, so
Speaker 5: I uh, I'm on a kind of a hiring freeze
Speaker 5: at another position, so really excited about it. I'm really
Speaker 5: looking forward to potentially start there. It looks like it
Speaker 5: will happen, but hard to tell, so, you know, but
Speaker 5: you know, anything could happen. I mean, it's it's a
Speaker 5: very dynamic environment these days.
Speaker 4: Is you know, uh putting the screws to the college.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, within government and outside government,
Speaker 5: it's a very dynamic environment. And you know, the entire
Speaker 5: eCos some education ecosystem, whether it's within the military system,
Speaker 5: teaching a military schools, or whether it's at a civilian school,
Speaker 5: there's government dollars.
Speaker 6: You're going to have a party member in your office
Speaker 6: pretty soon supervising making sure you're doing the right thing.
Speaker 5: So there's there's so much government dollars involved that.
Speaker 7: We're in a very dynamic.
Speaker 5: And I'm kind of waiting on, you know, something, to
Speaker 5: see how it turns out.
Speaker 4: Outside of academy. I mean, you are.
Speaker 3: Arguably one of the leading experts on like what happened,
Speaker 3: what went wrong in Iraq. You know, your book shows that,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean, before before a book like this,
Speaker 3: I mean, what did we have, we had learning to
Speaker 3: eat soup with a knife, like we there were very
Speaker 3: few resources on conventional warfare. Yeah, but now we we have.
Speaker 3: You know, you're like, you're generating new documents, historical documents.
Speaker 4: On that.
Speaker 3: Outside of academia, are there places in the government, in
Speaker 3: the military where anybody's saying, look, we need to retake
Speaker 3: Not only do we need to retain the knowledge, but
Speaker 3: we need somebody with the ability to look back and
Speaker 3: when we're making these military decisions, give us a historical
Speaker 3: perspective as to how.
Speaker 4: This might go. Because if they had had.
Speaker 3: Anybody from Vietnam, from Vietnam, they or look at Yugoslavia.
Speaker 3: Obviously that wasn't a military dissolution. Tito just decided to die.
Speaker 3: But we saw what happened, and they would have gone, well,
Speaker 3: you know, this happened in Yugoslavia.
Speaker 4: Maybe take maybe taking Saddam Ow isn't the best idea.
Speaker 4: He'sphically he's a shithead.
Speaker 6: But he's a stable shit It's there's this interesting thing
Speaker 6: where the politics are happening right in the moment. My
Speaker 6: sense is that like they don't want to know what
Speaker 6: the history is, like, that's not something they're even interested
Speaker 6: in because they've made a decision, right, and so now well.
Speaker 3: It's it's like there's there's some information coming out of
Speaker 3: Syria right now, but not a lot about you know,
Speaker 3: sort of the ethnic cleansing of Christians and alay.
Speaker 4: You know, it's like.
Speaker 3: Nobody nobody saw, nobody thought that if we get rid
Speaker 3: of a sad that things might go sideways and they'll
Speaker 3: be taken over by a extremist regime.
Speaker 4: Nobody nobody thought that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I think there are two To me, there
Speaker 5: are two factors at play.
Speaker 4: One is, you know, the.
Speaker 5: Old adage that success has a thousand fathers and you know,
Speaker 5: defeat has none, right, and taking that a step further is,
Speaker 5: you know, when you lose or you don't do well,
Speaker 5: you try to want to forget about it, right, And
Speaker 5: and I think that's played out and it's playing out
Speaker 5: kind of in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably even dark experienced.
Speaker 7: At Syria, et cetera. Where we I mean.
Speaker 5: You look at on the army is you know where
Speaker 5: we gravitate, you know, you look at the last two
Speaker 5: uniforms that we've had.
Speaker 4: We wear it's the World War Two and the Civil
Speaker 4: War uniform.
Speaker 5: Both wars that were clear cut like good guys, bad guys,
Speaker 5: you know, both wars that were massive, you know, moving
Speaker 5: not divisions but cors and armies, right, and you know,
Speaker 5: conflicts that were very kind of straightforward, and we, frankly,
Speaker 5: we won pretty much. The second dynamic. I think that's
Speaker 5: kind of going on a little bit is.
Speaker 4: Being an American.
Speaker 5: And one of the most beautiful things about an American
Speaker 5: that I think is good that we are very different
Speaker 5: than so many other countries of the world, is we
Speaker 5: are always forward looking. We are always looking for the future.
Speaker 5: What is next, what is the next big thing? Howming
Speaker 5: to change the future. We are so focused on the future,
Speaker 5: and it's great and I think it creates our national
Speaker 5: culture to being a very successful culture, to being a
Speaker 5: culture that is just wants to change, to move forward,
Speaker 5: to improve things.
Speaker 4: But on the flip side of that, we don't know.
Speaker 7: History, like we're really bad at history.
Speaker 5: And you know, teaching history at West Point for two years,
Speaker 5: there is among thingers where we would you know, keep
Speaker 5: records of essay responses of you know, the most shocking
Speaker 5: responses that future second lieutenants that have two historical questions
Speaker 5: of you.
Speaker 6: Know, our high school education system is following a.
Speaker 5: Bit short, yes, of the the lack of success of
Speaker 5: our high school education system.
Speaker 7: And again at a top university.
Speaker 4: Right right, these are Ivy League kids basically equivalent.
Speaker 6: Yeah, okay, So Frank, tell us where people can go
Speaker 6: to find you on the interwebs.
Speaker 4: What's the poise to go?
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook, interwebs. I mean,
Speaker 5: and you know, I I publish Small Wars Journal. I publish.
Speaker 5: I mean, if you if you go to my LinkedIn,
Speaker 5: you'll see all my publications. That's probably the best place
Speaker 5: because that's this where I kind of that's the.
Speaker 4: And I write a lot. I write a lot.
Speaker 5: I write for the Miriam Institute, which is a Israeli
Speaker 5: American kind of thing tank. And so I've written a
Speaker 5: lot about the you know, Palestinian Israeli Iranian conflict, multidirectional
Speaker 5: both October seventh, pre October seventh and post October seventh.
Speaker 5: You know, I've written for One on the Rocks, written
Speaker 5: for Jerusalem's Tribute Tribune. I'm pretty good amount of shorter pieces.
Speaker 5: If you're interested and you know something you can finish
Speaker 5: in five ten minutes.
Speaker 6: And we will have a link to that in the
Speaker 6: description for this podcast for folks that'll want to go
Speaker 6: check it out. Frank, we covered a huge array of
Speaker 6: topics in this interview, and I'm sorry if I kept
Speaker 6: you a.
Speaker 4: Little late, but I mean it was for taking so
Speaker 4: much time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was very good, and I mean this is
Speaker 6: very important information that I hope people will take some
Speaker 6: time to reflect on before we get going tonight. I mean,
Speaker 6: is there anything else that you want to talk about
Speaker 6: that I didn't ask that you'd really like to shine
Speaker 6: a light on.
Speaker 5: No, I mean, thank you so much for being so
Speaker 5: patient taking time.
Speaker 4: We appreciate it. Talk too much. No, not at all.
Speaker 3: Nobody, no guest ever has to come on the show
Speaker 3: and apologize to us because I and and like Jack's
Speaker 3: being very like Magnanums by saying I'm sorry I kept
Speaker 3: you so.
Speaker 4: Long when we all know, we all know why you're
Speaker 4: here so long. Thank you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, no, really, they're Legit was a lot of
Speaker 6: content to cover in the book, and I'm glad that
Speaker 6: we were able to get to it.
Speaker 4: So thanks for joining us. Thanks coming out.
Speaker 5: I really appreciate you hosting me, and especially with such
Speaker 5: an awesome you know, channel and podcast.
Speaker 6: And check it out. Training for Victory is the book.
Speaker 6: I actually finished reading it this morning. I read the
Speaker 6: first three chapters when it first came out, and then
Speaker 6: when you were coming on the show, I was like, oh,
Speaker 6: I got to really finish it now.
Speaker 4: I really enjoyed it. I hope you guys will go
Speaker 4: and check it out.
Speaker 6: It's out now, find it on Amazon or Barnes and
Speaker 6: Noble or wherever.
Speaker 4: Oh d do we have any questions? Good point, I
Speaker 4: almost forgot about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 15: From m corbin, uh, coin from my city dumbass point
Speaker 15: of view seems to work best when done with a
Speaker 15: long term, more multi generational goal in mind. How important
Speaker 15: are women in achieving coin goals in that respect?
Speaker 7: So multi generational I think is critical.
Speaker 5: That is really the outlook that you have to take
Speaker 5: from it and one of the biggest challenges.
Speaker 7: I think we talked.
Speaker 5: I don't remember it was before the interview or after,
Speaker 5: but you know there's this premise that like it was
Speaker 5: just over the horizon, the next year was.
Speaker 1: All going to be over right.
Speaker 4: I think the second part of the question was women
Speaker 4: how important are women in it?
Speaker 7: So, I think women are a really important factor.
Speaker 5: In it, if you and so there's a challenge, there's
Speaker 5: there's there's a balance, right, certain cultures do not appreciate
Speaker 5: women and do not value them like we do in
Speaker 5: the United States. Well, okay, maybe I'm that's maybe.
Speaker 7: A little harsh, but I think I'm just gonna say it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I the challenges is pushing.
Speaker 5: You don't want to push too hard, too fast, but
Speaker 5: you also don't want to push too slow because there's
Speaker 5: a tremendous value there in you know, of the population
Speaker 5: that could be producing economically, they could be producing new ideas.
Speaker 5: It is out of the workforce, you're automatically stemy.
Speaker 6: The Afghans had like the was female tactical unit.
Speaker 4: And the cstet for the Yeah.
Speaker 6: And you point out in the book the ICTF used
Speaker 6: women for reki.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, for just say for because I'm trying
Speaker 5: to forget the best way to say this. For you know,
Speaker 5: human intelligence, oftentimes women make superb sources sources. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: you know, and and there is tremendous value there. And
Speaker 5: I think particularly on the human intelligence side, if that
Speaker 5: has overlooked it it's you know, a huge resource that
Speaker 5: is being not tapped.
Speaker 3: Well in a lot of times, you know, and whether
Speaker 3: it's in a Latin American country where you know, the
Speaker 3: women are free to speak, but you know, are tired
Speaker 3: of losing their sons or tired of the bullshit, or
Speaker 3: you know, you go to Afghanistan where you know, the
Speaker 3: FAT and CST teams or even a medcap or a
Speaker 3: PRT or whatever, where all them guys are like, I'm
Speaker 3: not saying ship and the women are like, yeah, they
Speaker 3: built a well and then these motherfuckers came in and
Speaker 3: blew up the well. And now I have to walk,
Speaker 3: you know, two clicks. You know, I have to walk
Speaker 3: to the river to get the water. Yeah, I want
Speaker 3: to tell you who blew up the well? Right to
Speaker 3: be able to leverage that and and have you know
Speaker 3: US or or indigenous intelligence or information gatherers even if
Speaker 3: they're not like intelligence, but being able to interact with
Speaker 3: those women.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like it's a massive advantage. Yeah, advantage. Yeah.
Speaker 5: There's one last thing I wanted to throw is that
Speaker 5: is oftentimes when women are more included in the defense forces,
Speaker 5: there's a statistical correlation with less corruption. And you know,
Speaker 5: whether it's that, you know, they're the outsiders, and so
Speaker 5: by being outsiders they're more willing to kind of call
Speaker 5: out stuff and willing to be both whistleblowers or whatever.
Speaker 5: But there is a correlation there in that in organizations
Speaker 5: and armies that have women in the services, the corruption
Speaker 5: often is less.
Speaker 4: I wonder if that is.
Speaker 3: I wonder if the corruption is less because there are
Speaker 3: women who will call it out, or if a culture
Speaker 3: that is progressive enough to have women is just a
Speaker 3: less corrupt culture by nature, don't I don't know'd be curious.
Speaker 5: That's a valid point. Yeah, that's a valid point. It's
Speaker 5: the causation versus correlation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know the questions.
Speaker 15: From what Ryan p Training for Victor was a pretty
Speaker 15: informative read. I learned a lot, particularly about about the
Speaker 15: Afghans and Iraqis and their advisors. However, I kind of
Speaker 15: wondered why an uncritical take was given to the Colombians.
Speaker 1: Can we get an explanation?
Speaker 5: So, I don't know, uh, uncritical, uncritical? Yeah, I think,
Speaker 5: I mean my perception of the Colombians and I okay,
Speaker 5: so I'm gonna back up when I went into this.
Speaker 7: If I was gonna rank.
Speaker 5: Order the most successful units. Before I started my research,
Speaker 5: I thought it was going to be I saw off
Speaker 5: Afghan commandos, LRR, Colombians Alsalvadar.
Speaker 4: Like my perception, not having worked.
Speaker 5: In Latin America and perhaps you know, just the stereotype,
Speaker 5: you know, I thought, oh, there's gonna be a mass corruption,
Speaker 5: et cetera. Man Like everyone I talked to like everyone,
Speaker 5: and I talked to civilians. I talked to people in
Speaker 5: the intelligence community. I talked to a journalist. I talked
Speaker 5: to host Nation. I talked to everyone from you know,
Speaker 5: East seven to lieutenant general and every rank in between.
Speaker 5: I talked to State Department people. I talked to army
Speaker 5: people who were not soft but who are in the
Speaker 5: embassy in you know, the attach or the advisory group,
Speaker 5: and like across the board, it was this is the
Speaker 5: best partner for us, and so if it comes across
Speaker 5: perhaps is the least critical. I think that's just a
Speaker 5: reflection of mostly of the research of and frankly my
Speaker 5: surprise that I had a ranked fourth initially and they
Speaker 5: came out the best. If anything, you know, you know,
Speaker 5: a critical comment about the Colombians was, or let me
Speaker 5: rephrase that, a way to understand perhaps why Training for
Speaker 5: Victory isn't critical of the Colombians is if you look
Speaker 5: at the time periods that is involved, it is after
Speaker 5: the sam Blur presidency, and that is a big turning point.
Speaker 4: Like Colombia in.
Speaker 5: The nineties is a mess, it's a disaster. Everyone is
Speaker 5: predicting it's going to be a failed state, or that
Speaker 5: large tracts of the country are going to be overrun
Speaker 5: by the farc. The fark is going to run parts
Speaker 5: of the country. They've become their own already did. Like
Speaker 5: Theomous stated in Atomis though Farklandia completely that there were there.
Speaker 4: Were more.
Speaker 5: Kidnappings and murders in Colombia than in Afghanistan in the
Speaker 5: late nineties. It was like the number one per capita
Speaker 5: in the world. It was a disaster. Yeah, the training
Speaker 5: for Victory comes.
Speaker 4: After that period.
Speaker 5: Partially, I start after the Sampler has ended, because the
Speaker 5: Bokoa and Aglan don't start getting really stood up until
Speaker 5: post September eleventh.
Speaker 3: Do you who made that content, Brian p So if
Speaker 3: Ryan Ryan, if you're still watching right now, just throw
Speaker 3: up in the chatter and the thing like if you
Speaker 3: had criticisms of it, I'd be curious.
Speaker 4: Obviously you saw it as as uncritical.
Speaker 3: I'd be curious what criticisms you may have expected that
Speaker 3: didn't didn't land.
Speaker 1: All right, we got one more from Matt.
Speaker 15: Gu what's the best advice you've received?
Speaker 1: And thank you for your time?
Speaker 7: Best advice I ever received? Yep, great question.
Speaker 5: I mean the best advice I ever received was from
Speaker 5: Captain Cunliffe, who is my company commander and who told
Speaker 5: me to try out for us out.
Speaker 4: I mean that was the best advice.
Speaker 5: I ever received because and he you know, he said, look,
Speaker 5: if you know you, if you don't do it, you'll
Speaker 5: regret at the rest of life.
Speaker 7: And there are certain things that kind of turning.
Speaker 5: Points in your life where you know, I didn't come
Speaker 5: from a military family. I certainly didn't come from a
Speaker 5: you know, a software elite family. You know, my dad
Speaker 5: was an orphan. You got to jump into deep end,
Speaker 5: and you know, having the right mentor or right person
Speaker 5: at the right time in your life to help push
Speaker 5: you a little bit off or to tell you, like, hey, jump,
Speaker 5: it's gonna be okay, that taking that jump is okay.
Speaker 4: Do you had were you aware of a SF prior
Speaker 4: to him? Saying that.
Speaker 5: I mean, I was aware of it, but I you know,
Speaker 5: I was not one of these guys that was like
Speaker 5: at west Point like I'm going SF you know, like
Speaker 5: I was in the Infangy Tactics Club and so like
Speaker 5: I spent my spring breaks like overseas training with form
Speaker 5: military like the Brits. Mostly I spent my weekends in
Speaker 5: the field doing cool you know patrols basically pre ranger
Speaker 5: almost like patrols, but without getting hazed.
Speaker 7: It was like it was fun.
Speaker 5: It's just like you know, doing training all the time
Speaker 5: with Amlo and anyway.
Speaker 7: But yeah, so it's you think, I'm sure.
Speaker 5: I was just gonna say it wasn't like something that
Speaker 5: I knew that I was going think that you.
Speaker 4: Ever would have it had he not said do it.
Speaker 4: I gotta tell you, I don't know's I mean, like
Speaker 4: the fate, it's it's on my mind. But if we
Speaker 4: just did it.
Speaker 6: But when we interviewed Lindsay earlier today and she went
Speaker 6: and assessed for one hundred and sixtieth because her commander
Speaker 6: told her you'll never be a little Bird pilot, there's
Speaker 6: no way you'll ever get selected, and she was like,
Speaker 6: I'll fucking show you. And it's just it's interesting how
Speaker 6: like different people need to hear different things at different
Speaker 6: periods of their life.
Speaker 5: Right, So I will add one of the other company commanders.
Speaker 5: I overheard him talking to another commander saying, a sub
Speaker 5: check is never going to.
Speaker 4: Make it, like you so so yeah, so I had that.
Speaker 5: I had actually on both kind of both poles, right,
Speaker 5: going around ye, but pushing me kind of like magnetically
Speaker 5: like pushing pull right. But to answer the question, I
Speaker 5: don't know, and I I've become kind of more of
Speaker 5: a believer in like fate and like just like shit
Speaker 5: kind of happens like without almost like there's gravity in
Speaker 5: our lives and we get pulled certain ways, just people
Speaker 5: in our lives, you know, whether they're connections from previous
Speaker 5: lives or or what or if if that, you know,
Speaker 5: I think back to it, like if that flyer, if
Speaker 5: it got lost in the mail, right, like right, if
Speaker 5: Captain Cunliff hadn't been there looking over me when I
Speaker 5: was his XO was looking at it and he hadn't remarked,
Speaker 5: I don't know. I might had I might have gotten
Speaker 5: out of the army at the six year mark. I
Speaker 5: probably would have because I was not happy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, fascinating. Yeah did Ryan Pire respond?
Speaker 6: Okay, So I think that's about a wrap for tonight, Frank,
Speaker 6: at least until you write your next book publisher perish.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: You know, we'll see you here again sometime, I hope. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So then, thank you for joining us. Thanks for Yeah,
Speaker 4: we really appreciate it.
Speaker 7: I really appreciate you having me.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're welcome anytime, man, and we'll see all of
Speaker 6: you guys out there next time.
Speaker 4: Thanks for joining us. Hey, guys, it's Jack.
Speaker 6: I just want to talk to you for a moment
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