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Speaker 1: Spiona.
Speaker 2: The Team House with your hosts, Jack Burphy and David
Speaker 2: Bark to a Christmas edition of the Team House. This
Speaker 2: is a pre recorded episode so we can all be
Speaker 2: with our families around the holidays. Hope everyone's having a
Speaker 2: good one out there, as you know. I'm Jack, This
Speaker 2: is Dave, and our guest on tonight's show is Jason Davis.
Speaker 2: Jason served in a number of infantry assignments, a number
Speaker 2: of seventy fifth rangeer Regimen assignments and then a few
Speaker 2: assignments with the Asymmetrical Warfare Group and Special Operations Command.
Speaker 2: Thank you for coming and joining us in studio today.
Speaker 2: Jason works with Ventus developing resproberratory respiratory respiratory protection for soldiers,
Speaker 2: and we'll get into all of that as well. So, Jason,
Speaker 2: thank you for joining us tonight.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: So let's start at the beginning. We usually start off
Speaker 2: talking about the guest's origin story, and I think yours
Speaker 2: is definitely worth going down memory lane. Alit because your grandfather,
Speaker 2: your father, and your uncle were all rangers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a family, Laura.
Speaker 1: My mom likes to say that she's the wife, daughter, sister,
Speaker 1: mother of a ranger. And so my grandfather was a
Speaker 1: fifth Ranger battalion and World War Two ranger. He says
Speaker 1: he joined the Rangers as opposed to the paratroopers because
Speaker 1: those paratroopers were crazy, which you look at what they did,
Speaker 1: point to hawk, Now that's kind of crazy itself. And
Speaker 1: then my father got told go to war, go to jail,
Speaker 1: not not as a draftee, but because he got into
Speaker 1: so much trouble as a kid, and so he likes
Speaker 1: to say it, I enlisted in the Army because nobody
Speaker 1: was going to tell me what to do. And then
Speaker 1: you fast forward in nineteen seventy four and he's an
Speaker 1: airborne Ranger medic, you know, plank owner of one seventy
Speaker 1: five when he stands that up at Fort Stewart in
Speaker 1: those days before we moved over to a Hunter Army. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so my dad met my uncle inside of first Ranger Battalion.
Speaker 1: My uncle was a beconger in those days. My dad
Speaker 1: was in HHC and my uncle took my dad, who
Speaker 1: was from the Washington, Oregon area, and my uncle's from Hollywood, Florida.
Speaker 1: And so my uncle took my dad home for Christmas,
Speaker 1: met my mom, and you know, a couple of years later,
Speaker 1: next generation is born. That's fantastic. So it never never
Speaker 1: had any designs for me to go into the military,
Speaker 1: never pushed me into the military, but was always proud
Speaker 1: and you know, kind of accidental the family business. I guess.
Speaker 1: So where did you grow up.
Speaker 2: I mean, if your folks were in the military, I mean,
Speaker 2: presumably you moved around a lot. Obviously, you must have
Speaker 2: grown up here in all these ranger stories too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know you weren't a ranger if you
Speaker 1: were in the army. I thought everybody in the Army
Speaker 1: was a ranger. It's all I lived around. So I
Speaker 1: was born in Alaska actually in nineteen seventy seven, which
Speaker 1: on my dad's file it says he was an Arctic
Speaker 1: Warfare instructor through most of Vietnam, and so it's a
Speaker 1: really cool kind of you know, he was up there
Speaker 1: for about six months when I was born, went to Texas,
Speaker 1: where my sister was born, and my dad went to
Speaker 1: PA school, which in those days they were you know,
Speaker 1: became warrant officers at the end of that, and then
Speaker 1: spent most of the rest of my life bouncing around
Speaker 1: the Southeast Georgia and North Carolina, the usual places that
Speaker 1: you know, rangers go to, and infantry guys in particular.
Speaker 1: And then my dad was assigned back to Ninth Man Chew.
Speaker 1: Some of us old guys the Ninth Man Chew up
Speaker 1: in Alaska. Fairbanks were basically my formative years until I
Speaker 1: was about ten or ten or twelve, and then moved
Speaker 1: my dad retired in nineteen eighty eight and we moved
Speaker 1: to a little town in Oregon called Ontario, Oregon, and
Speaker 1: so right on the Oregon Idaho border.
Speaker 3: In fact, you guys know Orrida Fries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Oregon Idaho border, that's Rita and so that
Speaker 1: plants right there. So that's what we're famous for. So
Speaker 1: now we're famous for prisons and Rita fries. And so
Speaker 1: our big city was Boise, Idaho. And then yeah, from there,
Speaker 1: I went to college in New York. So at New
Speaker 1: York University, where I met my wife and ended up
Speaker 1: going to ROTC at Fordham University. I thought I wanted
Speaker 1: to get away from the military when I left the house,
Speaker 1: and then realized I gravitated right back towards those people.
Speaker 2: Yeah you were, you were on track to be a
Speaker 2: pinko liberal comedy.
Speaker 1: What happened?
Speaker 3: Okay, so let me back this up just a second.
Speaker 1: So I applied to two colleges from my little town
Speaker 1: in Ontario, Oregon, right, I think graduating sixty people or something.
Speaker 1: I applied to West Point and I applied to n
Speaker 1: y U skip Tish School of the Arts. Yeah, Stella Adler.
Speaker 1: I want to be an actor.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I loved the theater. I still love the theater. I
Speaker 1: love Shakespeare and my dad. I got accepted to both,
Speaker 1: so I was hoping. I was hoping one would you know,
Speaker 1: you know, reject me and kind of choose my life
Speaker 1: track for me, right, because I either want to be
Speaker 1: an actor or in the army, Like.
Speaker 3: Did you feel pressure to go in the army?
Speaker 4: Like was there a party that wanted West Point to
Speaker 4: reject you so you could know?
Speaker 3: Okay, I felt no pressure whatsoever.
Speaker 1: And in fact, it was my dad who said, you
Speaker 1: can always join the army whenever you want, but when
Speaker 1: can you be a poor actor in New York City? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: And I took that advice, and I was always very thankful,
Speaker 1: and to be honest, I thank my dad a lot
Speaker 1: for this.
Speaker 3: I think it really you know, put my outlook into perspective.
Speaker 1: The reason why I have my daughter here right now
Speaker 1: is so that we can have this life experience together.
Speaker 1: YEA cool trip, right, And so he set me on
Speaker 1: the path for that life experience. I went there, and
Speaker 1: within about six weeks I joined a Greek fraternity. I
Speaker 1: stopped showing up to school, I started hanging out with
Speaker 1: the ROTC kids, and by December I learned that I
Speaker 1: really didn't.
Speaker 3: Like the acting.
Speaker 1: Community at NYU, and it really wasn't the people that
Speaker 1: I wanted to be around.
Speaker 3: It not that they weren't.
Speaker 1: Great people, they were. It just I had different interests, right,
Speaker 1: and the fraternity tended to fill that a little bit
Speaker 1: more than Stella Adler did, and I think.
Speaker 3: We were both happy for the break of each other.
Speaker 1: And so I ended up spending most of my time
Speaker 1: with my fraternity brothers. And you know, the rot SCENES
Speaker 1: sounds so dated now, like twenty four years later, just
Speaker 1: to say fraternity brothers and the RFTC guys and ROTC
Speaker 1: for New York City in those days, I think it's
Speaker 1: still the same now. Was run out of Fordham University,
Speaker 1: so that's where the detachment was. And then if you
Speaker 1: went to Columbia or NYU or Lincoln Center, Fordham or
Speaker 1: any of the local SUNNI schools.
Speaker 2: Columbia didn't have ROTC until they repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Speaker 1: Well, we used to have the Columbia students, and so
Speaker 1: I don't remember the timeline for that, but so they
Speaker 1: would come to Fordham to do ROTC if they wanted
Speaker 1: to make sense, And so I ended up kind of
Speaker 1: falling in love with the military from a user experience
Speaker 1: as opposed to from a brat experience, and so I
Speaker 1: grew up as a brat and I tried to break
Speaker 1: away from it, and then realized that it was actually
Speaker 1: what I loved. So I went right back to.
Speaker 2: It and commissioned in two thousand and one, bit of
Speaker 2: a pivotal year for this country and especially for somebody
Speaker 2: commissioning into the military.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I got married and commissioned on the same day.
Speaker 1: So Megan and I, who we'd met at NYU or
Speaker 1: freshman year, stayed together basically most of college and then
Speaker 1: got literally officially married like the week before my commissioning ceremony.
Speaker 1: And I remember getting out of the car. Nobody knows
Speaker 1: we're married yet, Like it's just just she and I
Speaker 1: and getting out of the car, and it was kind
Speaker 1: of a drizzly, cold May day, you know, in New York.
Speaker 1: And I remember one of the guys going, you know,
Speaker 1: they say, if it rains on your commissioning, you're going
Speaker 1: to war. So that guy was right. And about three
Speaker 1: months later I found myself in IOBC, and nine to
Speaker 1: eleven occurred. While I was at the urban phase of IOBC.
Speaker 1: My wife had just moved down from Fourteenth Street between
Speaker 1: B and C and Lower Manhattan, where we'd had our
Speaker 1: apartment for a couple of years. The week before the
Speaker 1: towers went down. Would she was she did?
Speaker 3: She have military members and her family. What did she
Speaker 3: think about, I'm her family's nightmare.
Speaker 1: So her so her her mom and dad are our hippies. Yeah, Uh, well,
Speaker 1: her mom's a reformed hippie, her her dad is not.
Speaker 1: And it's funny the older I get, the more I
Speaker 1: connect with, you know, my my father in law than
Speaker 1: than anybody else, I think.
Speaker 3: But he was you know, like literally followed, you know,
Speaker 3: followed a cult.
Speaker 1: In India for a little while and came back and
Speaker 1: had a commune very Garcia.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And and and you know in in the Ozarks,
Speaker 1: you know, like living in the oars with four hundred
Speaker 1: acre apple farm like my father in law literally hand
Speaker 1: makes his cab and like lives off the grid, like
Speaker 1: you know, living living his values for sure. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: uh I met, Yeah, she she kind of. She was
Speaker 1: born in Arkansas, lived in that lifestyle for quite some time.
Speaker 1: When she was you know, about ten or so, her
Speaker 1: mom and dad divorced. Her mom wanted a different lifestyle,
Speaker 1: ended up going very conservative with her lifestyle to the
Speaker 1: point where you know who she married. I was like, man,
Speaker 1: you're a little bit right for me at this point,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where
Speaker 1: she did her high school years and then went to
Speaker 1: NYUS as a film major in fact, and we both decided.
Speaker 3: We didn't fit into that community.
Speaker 1: Pretty yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So my father in law is now an organic farmer
Speaker 1: in Kawaii, on the island of Hawaii. He's been here
Speaker 1: for or in Hawaii. He's been out there for about
Speaker 1: twenty some odd years. He's uncle ned now And when
Speaker 1: we lived on Hawaii, was always nice to be able
Speaker 1: to spend some time on there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, like these massive life changes that happened in such
Speaker 2: a short span of time, Yeah, is incredible. And then
Speaker 2: you get assigned to the one hundred and first third of
Speaker 2: the five o second Yeah, tell us about that. I
Speaker 2: mean it sounds like by the time you get there,
Speaker 2: you're kind of getting into the run up to the
Speaker 2: Iraq invasion.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So if I don't know if you guys know this,
Speaker 1: So when you when you're in IOBC as an infantry
Speaker 1: officer in those days, it's expected you're going to ranger school,
Speaker 1: like that's not really an option, right, And in the
Speaker 1: last couple of weeks of that, we're all getting ready
Speaker 1: to go to ranger school. Hours come down, and you know,
Speaker 1: word comes in that if you're in the eighteenth Airborne Corps,
Speaker 1: you know, so one hundred and first Airborne, eighty second,
Speaker 1: tenth Mountain Division, all the dr you deployed for combat
Speaker 1: ready brigades, you get one shot at this that's it.
Speaker 1: Period end. And so we all went to ranger school
Speaker 1: like two weeks later as fast as we could. I
Speaker 1: ended up breaking my foot that first week and so, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, another great lesson. So I still believe
Speaker 1: to this day, if I'd been tougher, I could have
Speaker 1: toughed it out. I broke a couple of metacarpals or
Speaker 1: meta tarsal, don't know what they're called. In the foot.
Speaker 1: I broke a couple of those things stress fracture. And
Speaker 1: I still believe that if I could have been just
Speaker 1: a little bit mentally tougher, I could have toughed that out.
Speaker 1: It was my first taste of failure and I hated it.
Speaker 4: It's interesting and you say, you still believe that, And
Speaker 4: so it's sort of like that, that's I believe I
Speaker 4: can fight five.
Speaker 3: Guys with the same.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, right, because somebody's always got it harder, right, And.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I get that.
Speaker 1: It was a defining moment in my life coming back
Speaker 1: from ranger School without my tab and with my story.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, defining moment And I didn't want to feel
Speaker 1: like that ever again, right, And so went to my
Speaker 1: unit without my tab, with my story.
Speaker 3: I showed up to my battalion commander.
Speaker 1: You know, luckily he put me into adultiple tune to
Speaker 1: you know, kind of earn my way back into in
Speaker 1: those days, you know, you had you earn your way
Speaker 1: back into your tab. Had a great experience as a
Speaker 1: Deltiple team leader that really learned a lot in those
Speaker 1: in those gun trucks in those days about how to
Speaker 1: how to lead small teams and how to move you know,
Speaker 1: guns around big guns. But really what it did for
Speaker 1: me is it it gave me an appreciation of why
Speaker 1: ranger School was important. And I really started to understand
Speaker 1: now it wasn't about the tab, it was about the
Speaker 1: mental toughness. It was about understanding how to lead yourself
Speaker 1: in those times of you know, real turmoil, and then
Speaker 1: how do you lead others when you yourself or just
Speaker 1: want to cry rest of the time. And so that
Speaker 1: was a defining moment for me when I understood how
Speaker 1: important that training was. And when I went back, it
Speaker 1: was a very different mentality. I was no longer interested
Speaker 1: in surviving. I was interested in learning and getting better
Speaker 1: at my craft because I knew we were going to war,
Speaker 1: and so we thought we were going to war in
Speaker 1: that first like ninety days, and we all thought we
Speaker 1: were going to miss it if we didn't get to
Speaker 1: our unit and so have a little stress fracture was
Speaker 1: a great excuse, you know, to get to the unit
Speaker 1: that had to go to war. But really it taught
Speaker 1: me what I needed to learn, which was how important
Speaker 1: that training was. And so I went back. I got
Speaker 1: that tab I would encourage everyone to try hard things
Speaker 1: to the best of their ability. I was successful this
Speaker 1: time because of the people who surrounded me and cared
Speaker 1: for me. And then the hundred and first deployed to
Speaker 1: combat for the invasion of Iraq, and I was fortunate
Speaker 1: enough to be assigned as a rifle platoon leader in
Speaker 1: Baker Cumber b Company. Then with a ranger, former arranger
Speaker 1: of platoon leaders, the company commander.
Speaker 2: And this is sort of like I mean, it sounds
Speaker 2: counterintuitive to some people watching this maybe, but if you're
Speaker 2: an infantry platoon leader, I mean, this is the dream, right,
Speaker 2: this is your dream. Yeah, you're gonna You're gonna lead
Speaker 2: soldiers in combat right now.
Speaker 1: That's all I wanted to do.
Speaker 4: Had one hundred first already been to Afghanistan, had they
Speaker 4: had they done any rotations.
Speaker 1: I believe that Rocaissans, the Rokassan Brigade had had done
Speaker 1: an initial some initial work in Afghanistan. I had friends
Speaker 1: of mine in eighty second that had gone in and
Speaker 1: of course obviously the rangers at Rhino.
Speaker 3: You know that I ended up learning later, but I
Speaker 3: think they had some elements, especially in Afghanism. I would
Speaker 3: have to double.
Speaker 1: But hey, thank you go Speds.
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Speaker 4: But when you were, when you guys were uh, sort
Speaker 4: of working up towards Iraq, there weren't just a whole
Speaker 4: bunch of Afghanistan guys rolling around with combat pat you know,
Speaker 4: combat pats, no.
Speaker 1: No, very new, and we all thought we were going
Speaker 1: to miss it. Yeah, like we all thought that if
Speaker 1: we don't get into a unit that's going to war, yes,
Speaker 1: this is our this is our mogadishi, this is our opportunity. Right,
Speaker 1: were thinking a desert storm, right, I think in Vietnam? Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: So in the work up for that for Iraq, what
Speaker 1: what were your what did you think it was going
Speaker 1: to be? What were you training for?
Speaker 3: And then were any of those things kind of wrong?
Speaker 1: That's a great question. We knew that there was going
Speaker 1: to be a lot of urban fighting, we didn't really
Speaker 1: understand what that was in those days. And so I
Speaker 1: can remember we would have kind of opd's officer professional development,
Speaker 1: you know, with I had smoking. Joe Anderson was my
Speaker 1: brigade commander. So I don't know if you guys know,
Speaker 1: General Joe Anderson retired as a three star phenomenal commander one.
Speaker 1: I have amazing stories about smoking Joe Anderson just being bulletproof.
Speaker 1: I mean, he taught me what combat leadership looks like
Speaker 1: at the senior leader level. He set that example almost
Speaker 1: immediately for me. Anyway, I can remember Smoking Joe Anderson
Speaker 1: bringing in these different kind of OPD opportunities to hear
Speaker 1: from the experts at urban warfare. And we were talking
Speaker 1: to the police in Northern Ireland, and we were talking
Speaker 1: to the cops in London. You know, we were the
Speaker 1: IDF every once in a while getting in you know,
Speaker 1: with the tunnels and some under subterranean like, we were
Speaker 1: taking the best that we could and we were training
Speaker 1: that in trenches. And so a trench is a hallway,
Speaker 1: a bunker is a room, and that's the way we
Speaker 1: trained urban warfare in those days was on trench systems, right,
Speaker 1: and so we I think in my mind I imagined
Speaker 1: it was going to look like Vietnam where you you
Speaker 1: know what we saw in movies where you helicopter in,
Speaker 1: because I'm in the uttern first, and clearly we're going
Speaker 1: to helicopter in and We're only a ninety day force
Speaker 1: by the way, too, We're only supposed to be there
Speaker 1: ninety days and then we recover because then the big
Speaker 1: infantry divisions and you know, come in. And I remember
Speaker 1: thinking that we're going to have kind of a we're
Speaker 1: gonna Hilo in aerosolt and then when we get there,
Speaker 1: we're going to be doing urban warfare through these buildings.
Speaker 1: And it was very much like that when we got
Speaker 1: to the city centers. So you know, the the Karbala's,
Speaker 1: the mosls.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I wasn't in Fallujah, but I've heard it was very similar.
Speaker 1: But also I think what was striking was all of
Speaker 1: the outskirts fighting for key terrain. It's where I really
Speaker 1: started to understand the importance of what key terrain meant
Speaker 1: at the level when there's you know, one or two
Speaker 1: roads and you're fighting for a couple of key intersections. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the the fog of war of I need
Speaker 1: you to move your people here, and then you know,
Speaker 1: I forced road marched my platoon on the first day
Speaker 1: of combat for like twenty miles to get to this
Speaker 1: anti armor blocking position and there's a tank company there,
Speaker 1: so we felt kind of useless. So they literally just
Speaker 1: got us into the shooting, like the hell, you know,
Speaker 1: let let us get our shoot on is basically it
Speaker 1: was it. So it was a very It was very
Speaker 1: much I think what we were expecting, at least in
Speaker 1: the in the infantry side of it. It definitely met
Speaker 1: my expectations. I mean it was it was full kinetic, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was.
Speaker 3: It was scary and fun all at the same time.
Speaker 4: Right, So on this showing, many like it, Like we
Speaker 4: often have people from Special Operations from rangers and you know,
Speaker 4: and we've said this before that the special Operations mission
Speaker 4: was very sort of gucci, right, you know, you had
Speaker 4: the support, you usually the transportation, you're it was generally
Speaker 4: like in and out type of ops for a specific target.
Speaker 4: What what don't people understand? What stories aren't told about
Speaker 4: conventional military who were out there hooking Jabbin with a
Speaker 4: tenth of the resources. Yeah, and for prolonged periods.
Speaker 3: What are some of the stories or things that you
Speaker 3: think people should know about the conventional military. I think
Speaker 3: it's exceptionally hard.
Speaker 1: I think we look at you know, we don't make
Speaker 1: a lot of movies about the you know, like the
Speaker 1: one hundred and.
Speaker 3: First story, I mean third Infantry Division.
Speaker 1: Or like when I was a kid growing up, there
Speaker 1: was you know audio Murphy movies and you know, things
Speaker 1: like that were going on at World War Two. What
Speaker 1: you see these days is primarily the Special Operations community,
Speaker 1: so seals and lots of seals, you know, rangers and
Speaker 1: other units that are that are their stories are getting told.
Speaker 1: What's not getting told is how separating the enemy from
Speaker 1: the populace while at nighttime affair and very dangerous work
Speaker 1: when you're going after you very dangerous people, high profile
Speaker 1: targets that day in and day out with the people
Speaker 1: and feeling the empathy for the small child and for
Speaker 1: you know, the animals, and you just living amongst that
Speaker 1: war and that kind of atrocity in some cases of
Speaker 1: what you're watching people have to survive through. I think
Speaker 1: they don't understand the toll that that ultimately takes on.
Speaker 1: Just these are humans, These are people, and we are
Speaker 1: really the most caring and I think discriminatory military and history,
Speaker 1: that's arguable, I suppose, but you know, the American soldier
Speaker 1: in and of themselves is highly trained, highly empathetic, really
Speaker 1: wants to do well and to do good, and we
Speaker 1: put them in these situations where it's extremely dangerous, there's
Speaker 1: no right answer for what you're.
Speaker 3: Doing, and we're asking them to figure it out.
Speaker 1: Right, they do for the most part, And typically all
Speaker 1: we hear about is the mistakes. But what you don't
Speaker 1: see is the amazing things those guys and gals are
Speaker 1: doing every single day out there to keep the lights
Speaker 1: on and the people safe. And I think it is an.
Speaker 3: Untold story for the most part.
Speaker 1: But when I talked to, you know, my brothers and
Speaker 1: sisters who spent you know, I did, you know, a
Speaker 1: good portion five or six years of my career fully
Speaker 1: conventional at the beginning, and then had a solid, you know,
Speaker 1: two or three years of conventional right in between it again,
Speaker 1: and those were the hardest and the most rewarding jobs
Speaker 1: that I really.
Speaker 3: Had in the military.
Speaker 1: I loved everything I did inside of the special operations
Speaker 1: community or the asymmetric warfare community. I loved all of it,
Speaker 1: but it was they were very different. It felt like
Speaker 1: this was this was leadership right at its base level.
Speaker 1: And when you talk about leading rangers, for example, I mean,
Speaker 1: I used to laugh, Rangers don't need leadership like that.
Speaker 1: You know, leadership is providing purpose, direction, and motivation, and
Speaker 1: they need almost none of those things. They're better ranger.
Speaker 2: PL say that was it, Ray McFadden, he's a two
Speaker 2: seven five Yeah, MCPAD and two seven five PL.
Speaker 1: You said very much the same thing. Yeah. If you
Speaker 1: think about you know that these are guys you can
Speaker 1: I had to explain to me once. Imagine the best
Speaker 1: non commissioned officer, the best sergeant in your mind. You
Speaker 1: know that you're just the caricature of this is the
Speaker 1: guy that I want with me. Uh and imagine everybody
Speaker 1: is that guy, right, And and so it's a very
Speaker 1: unique culture and it's a very you know, we're we'reth
Speaker 1: the summer help right, like we're coming in to help you.
Speaker 1: We're not really a part of that internal n CEO community,
Speaker 1: although we try to be, and that core of non
Speaker 1: commissioned officers drives the special operations community deeply. And then
Speaker 1: you go out into the conventional ranks and we're raising
Speaker 1: those n c O s. What you're gonna do? PL? Right, yeah, right, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: well yeah, and the rangers they're not gonna ask, right,
Speaker 1: They're just gonna do it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's again, the conventional story is one that is
Speaker 4: very important to me, and again did because you were
Speaker 4: an auser and you grew up, you know, seeing you know,
Speaker 4: you went through the ranks as officer. One of the
Speaker 4: things is an outsider looking at that and then talking
Speaker 4: to guys who were stationed out these.
Speaker 3: Little cops with no support or you know, in.
Speaker 4: These places that it's like somebody looked at that and said,
Speaker 4: let's put twenty guys there to draw fire, but not
Speaker 4: give them any resources, any assets to actually do anything.
Speaker 4: At any point, were you frustrated by by senior leadership,
Speaker 4: by what seemed to be disconnected decision making.
Speaker 1: That's a really complicated question. I'm going to try to
Speaker 1: give you a simple answer. Okay, we we were trying
Speaker 1: to enact a new doctrine, you know, so coin kind
Speaker 1: of insurgency, and you know, I was fortunate enough to
Speaker 1: be on the periphery of some of the General Petraeus
Speaker 1: kind of building this in one hundred and first while
Speaker 1: I was in his command in the hundred and first.
Speaker 3: It was in command one hundred first in.
Speaker 1: Those days, and I believe his doctrine was the best
Speaker 1: available at the time, and I still do to a respect.
Speaker 1: I think counterinsurgency is ridiculously hard. And I think the
Speaker 1: tactic of placing those small outposts was designed to get
Speaker 1: you know, in those days, we talked about it as
Speaker 1: a cop on every corner, right, get get you know,
Speaker 1: the rule of law and order out into the hinter lens,
Speaker 1: so that we can control those spaces, or at least
Speaker 1: compete for them. Right. And so when you see things
Speaker 1: like you know, cop keeting or you know, and I had,
Speaker 1: you know, in my eighty second airborne days, you know,
Speaker 1: I had two outposts with a company headquarters that I
Speaker 1: shared with a Polish company, Polish Airborne Company. It's a
Speaker 1: whole different story and a whole different leadership lessons there.
Speaker 3: Right, So you've got.
Speaker 1: Two platoon outposts and then a platoon plus company headquarters
Speaker 1: that shares a forward operating base with a Polish Airborne company.
Speaker 1: And then I've got these rifle platoons that literally, you know,
Speaker 1: nine months out of the year, you can't drive to them, right,
Speaker 1: you know, the wadies fill up, you can't get these
Speaker 1: you know, ten thousand pound humvys up armored humb's down
Speaker 1: these dirt paths that are flooded, and so these guys
Speaker 1: can get stuck there with only aircraft able to touch them, right,
Speaker 1: And so if you're asking me to argue the doctrine,
Speaker 1: I would say, I think the idea was correct, which
Speaker 1: was we assume more risk in order to connect more
Speaker 1: deeply with the population so that we can compete with
Speaker 1: that populate or for that popularly right with the enemy.
Speaker 3: With the Taliban in those days. I think that was
Speaker 3: the right approach.
Speaker 1: The application of it was not always the result that
Speaker 1: we want, right, Okay, And so I would say that
Speaker 1: you know Colonel Bill Ausland, if you know him, but
Speaker 1: he uh, he he, you know, he pushed back on
Speaker 1: on some of that, you know, when when people started
Speaker 1: arguing that the coin doctrine you know, was a mistake
Speaker 1: and that he is a commander should have changed those things.
Speaker 1: And you know that that was the only doctrine we
Speaker 1: had at that point to separate the enemy from the people.
Speaker 3: So I think it was the right answer of your
Speaker 3: nation building.
Speaker 1: Now, the different question might be should we have been
Speaker 1: nation building right? Uh?
Speaker 3: And and so there I don't know the right answer, but.
Speaker 1: That's what we did. Yeah, fascinating did that answer? It did?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: It did?
Speaker 2: And tell us about during the I guess maybe the
Speaker 2: tail end of this deployment brushing across.
Speaker 1: The I E. D. Task Force. Yeah, yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: so we in one hundred and first we we basically
Speaker 1: went burmed to Mosl and so for you know, for
Speaker 1: the old timers, we crossed the berm from you know,
Speaker 1: Kuwait and to Iraq and then did the thunder runs
Speaker 1: and we were a assaulting in on top of third
Speaker 1: idea and jumping from you know, city to city, urban
Speaker 1: center to urban center and fighting those urban fights and
Speaker 1: getting on helicopters and flying to the next one, right,
Speaker 1: and we end up in Mosol is kind of the
Speaker 1: end of it. And so now we're in this fob,
Speaker 1: you know, which is really it was like a it
Speaker 1: was like CAMPZ is what we called it, because somebody
Speaker 1: was trying to steal copper wire out of the you know,
Speaker 1: the lights before we got there, and he got fried.
Speaker 1: And so there's a you know, there's literally a burnt
Speaker 1: corpse where my platoon is supposed to bed down like
Speaker 1: hanging up in the wires. Right, and so our first
Speaker 1: task is to you know kind of clean up our
Speaker 1: living space. So we called it Camp Z because Z's dead.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of dark humor yeah, you know, in
Speaker 1: the military, particularly in those days, and I can remember
Speaker 1: doing things like gator patrols, remember the gators, the little
Speaker 1: like a little look like little lawnmowers, you know, with
Speaker 1: with the trunk in the back. And I can remember
Speaker 1: three two, three o'clock in the morning pulling my shift
Speaker 1: right so platoon later with an RTO and a saw
Speaker 1: in the front of this thing, driving through the streets
Speaker 1: a mosl at two o'clock on a.
Speaker 3: Gator on a gate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, keeping the peace, Yeah, just making sure
Speaker 1: everything's okay.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so gators, I can industrial like slow ATV in
Speaker 4: a way I guess the way it's.
Speaker 1: More like a golf car. Yeah, that's the way to
Speaker 1: put yea yeah. Yeah, but it was it was all
Speaker 1: we had in the infantry in these days. We didn't
Speaker 1: have any vehicles. Yeah, and so we were trying to,
Speaker 1: you know, to patrol cop on every corner.
Speaker 3: Could you separate the enemy from the populace?
Speaker 1: And I can remember we were starting to hear this
Speaker 1: thing called the improvised explosive device, and I honestly didn't
Speaker 1: really appreciate it or understand it. In those days. We
Speaker 1: were driving around and you know, no skin vehicles, you know,
Speaker 1: inside every every air rifle company had one, you know,
Speaker 1: cargo humdy and so we'd just be in the back
Speaker 1: of that, you know, squads at a time, moving around,
Speaker 1: and we started seeing new units that were starting to
Speaker 1: rotate in to rip us out, right after thirteen months
Speaker 1: in theater, ripping us out, having these like welded plates
Speaker 1: coming with their humbies, and we were like, that's not
Speaker 1: a bad idea, you.
Speaker 3: Know, stopping the bullets.
Speaker 1: It's good, you know. And I can remember in that period,
Speaker 1: this this small team you know, walked into you know,
Speaker 1: camp's d and they were in civilian clothes, you know,
Speaker 1: clearly packing pistols on their hips. And I and the
Speaker 1: look about them was they just looked different and and
Speaker 1: and and those of us that have seen you know,
Speaker 1: really competent, intelligent, you know operators, which you know, when
Speaker 1: you start working inside of the special Operations community just
Speaker 1: become almost a character, just a dime a dozen everywhere
Speaker 1: you look.
Speaker 3: But they they're different.
Speaker 1: And the confidence that they had when they walked in
Speaker 1: as a you know, a twenty three year old platoon
Speaker 1: leader in one hundred and first Airborne Division, I immediately
Speaker 1: knew I wanted to be a leader like that, like
Speaker 1: whatever that was that they had, like I needed to
Speaker 1: earn that whatever that is. And so I was kind
Speaker 1: of fanboy in a little bit as these three you
Speaker 1: know guys walk in and you know, they weren't like
Speaker 1: Safari Land holsters, you know, and they got you know,
Speaker 1: Columbia shirts on, and one of them had a forty
Speaker 1: five cult cocked like.
Speaker 3: That was insane to me, like a cocked like a
Speaker 3: hot weapon homing around, you know.
Speaker 1: And we're standing around the kind of the terrain model
Speaker 1: that we have of our battle space, which I don't
Speaker 1: even know if we called it battlespace in those days,
Speaker 1: you know, the area that we were responsible for, and
Speaker 1: they were just asking us questions about what we've been
Speaker 1: seeing with you know, trigger wires and you know, improvise
Speaker 1: explosive devices. And we had started to have some of
Speaker 1: these initial kind of like pop blasts that would go
Speaker 1: off ticket tire, you know, maybe maybe give you some
Speaker 1: frag fragmentation injuries, but nothing really all that interesting. It
Speaker 1: was kind of like a claim war where you would
Speaker 1: hit us, which you know, just let's be careful. And
Speaker 1: having this conversation with them and they were picking our
Speaker 1: brains about how we were seeing the operational environment and
Speaker 1: how we were seeing the threat. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if we gave them any valuable information at all, because
Speaker 1: we were we had no idea who they were, what
Speaker 1: they were talking about. And I remember as they were
Speaker 1: talking and as I'm being tq'ed, which we learned to
Speaker 1: think of it as TQ like fifteen years later by
Speaker 1: this incredibly impressive dude who I just wanted to be
Speaker 1: like when I grow up, and he said, well, what
Speaker 1: are you doing after this? And I was like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to the cabin's career course. He's like, well, if
Speaker 1: you're interested in, you know, kind of trying this out,
Speaker 1: you'll give us a call.
Speaker 3: Right. I didn't think much about it. He gave out
Speaker 3: that card.
Speaker 1: I heard it, you know, about a dozen or so
Speaker 1: guys as he roamed around and saw people that just
Speaker 1: were interested in what he was thinking, you know, what
Speaker 1: he was working on. One of my buddies ended up
Speaker 1: calling that card and ended up inside the Asymmetric Warfare
Speaker 1: Group back in the old Task Force ID at I
Speaker 1: d days And I don't know how true the story is,
Speaker 1: except when I've heard it from a couple of different
Speaker 1: guys now, but I said, what was it like? And
Speaker 1: he goes, well, the vast part of, you know, the
Speaker 1: greater part of selection in those days, was trying to
Speaker 1: find the unit that you got to call. He said, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I show up at this you know, this payphone on
Speaker 1: this corner at this place, you know, and and then
Speaker 1: this guy I'll come and pick you up. And so
Speaker 1: the hardest part about finding the unit was finding the unit.
Speaker 1: And it was in the old prison on Fort Meade,
Speaker 1: so it already looked like you were you could get there.
Speaker 1: So it was just this really interesting first contact that
Speaker 1: I had. You know, I'd run into O das in
Speaker 1: my ground war experience with one hundred and first i'd
Speaker 1: run into rangers. I got the opportunity to see our
Speaker 1: Special Operations community employed as they were intended to be employed.
Speaker 1: So I got to see what a Special Forces officer
Speaker 1: as an ODA team leader was doing on the ground.
Speaker 1: I got to see what a Ranger platoon leader was
Speaker 1: doing on the ground. I got to see, you know,
Speaker 1: these select special mission units that are how they're operating.
Speaker 1: And what I noticed was there's just a different caliber
Speaker 1: of individual that ends up getting into those units. It's
Speaker 1: a different mentality, and I don't know what it is particular,
Speaker 1: but I've been chasing it and fan boying it since
Speaker 1: two thousand and one. They just looked different.
Speaker 2: After the invasion, You've spent some time as an IOBC.
Speaker 3: Instructor and then it's off to the eighty second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in another deployment, tell us about getting to the
Speaker 2: eighty deuce and deployt in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that was it was a whirlwind. First of all,
Speaker 1: I don't want to blanch over the IOBC experience.
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask about that. You go back as
Speaker 3: an instructor.
Speaker 4: Now you have combat experience, right, and you know after
Speaker 4: so Afghanistan has.
Speaker 3: Been going on for about a year and a half.
Speaker 4: When you and when you go into Iraq or about
Speaker 4: a year or two years two one March two thousand
Speaker 4: and three, you go into a rock. How long was
Speaker 4: your tour in I Rock thirteen months? Thirteen months, which
Speaker 4: is an exceptionally long time to spend it.
Speaker 3: It wasn't those days. So now you go to IOBC.
Speaker 4: Is IOBC changing because of people like you coming back
Speaker 4: with experience?
Speaker 1: Yes? The short answers yes, And so we we had
Speaker 1: to redesign how we were training our lieutenants, you know, and
Speaker 1: so you got to pick and choose.
Speaker 3: It's always trade offs.
Speaker 1: So do you want to have a you know, a
Speaker 1: two week large dug in defensive operation like we used
Speaker 1: to do in large ground combat, or do you want
Speaker 1: to spend two weeks in an urban center teaching them
Speaker 1: how to survive in the fight they're in right, right,
Speaker 1: And so we started to transition the military from more
Speaker 1: of a large scale ground combat operational force to you know,
Speaker 1: much more that coin cet footing that we saw throughout
Speaker 1: the g WATT for the next twenty years or so.
Speaker 1: Some amazing experiences that I that I got there and
Speaker 1: as a leader, you know, some of the most humbling
Speaker 1: experiences for me to understand, you know, who was volunteering
Speaker 1: at this time.
Speaker 3: You know, I kind of.
Speaker 1: Felt like I'm a bit of the pre g Watt generation,
Speaker 1: you know, I joined the military before all this happened,
Speaker 1: and just kind of thought, this is exciting. I like
Speaker 1: what I'm doing. Whereas these guys were a little bit different.
Speaker 1: You know, these are lieutenants, you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: them were senior non commissioned officers that were going green
Speaker 1: to gold in my unit that I got to work with,
Speaker 1: and these were dedicated people like these were believers and
Speaker 1: what we were doing and why we were there and
Speaker 1: the importance of it, and that was a formative experience
Speaker 1: for me. But what I really wanted to comment there
Speaker 1: was I wanted that assignment because in those days, you
Speaker 1: came out of your platoon leader job, which most of
Speaker 1: us did thirteen months of combat and it was about
Speaker 1: you know, the eighteenth Airborne Corp At least did that,
Speaker 1: and then you went to the captain's career course for
Speaker 1: you know, six to nine months, and then you were
Speaker 1: immediately getting turned to another brigade and going right back
Speaker 1: for another year. And so we wanted to have a
Speaker 1: child at that point, and so we took that assignment.
Speaker 1: You know, we actually fought for it, tried out for
Speaker 1: it so that I could be home when she was born,
Speaker 1: because many people were able to do that in those days.
Speaker 1: You were gone, that was it. And so I got
Speaker 1: to be there for the birth of my child, and
Speaker 1: then showed up at the eighty second Airborne you know,
Speaker 1: she's fifteen months old at this point. Another showed up
Speaker 1: on a Friday, took command on a Monday, you know,
Speaker 1: did inventories over the weekend. Didn't really do good inventories
Speaker 1: on my dad. It was all going to combat and
Speaker 1: it was all going to be a combat loss, you know,
Speaker 1: at some point, and so it was the good accountability
Speaker 1: of end items.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: The last company commander had been fired. Unfortunately, there was
Speaker 1: thirty two UCM. J. Packett sitting on my desk, and
Speaker 1: I took the job. And we're going to j RTC
Speaker 1: the next week, you know, to train up for this
Speaker 1: fifteen month deployment. Amazing experience because we had amazing leadership.
Speaker 1: And so that Martin Schweitzer, Colonel Martin Schweitzer was the
Speaker 1: brigade commander there ended up being one of the you know,
Speaker 1: senior officers in the eighty second Airborn Division, but kind
Speaker 1: of a legend in the infantry himself, and he took
Speaker 1: that brigade of newly formed leaders. I mean really just
Speaker 1: the fourth brigade eighty second Airborne Division was just getting formed,
Speaker 1: you know, being pulled off of different brigades inside the
Speaker 1: eighty second, and he did a train up with all
Speaker 1: these new leaders and all these new soldiers and he
Speaker 1: walked us through that pipeline, and then we went and
Speaker 1: did a fifteen month rotation in Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: Can you can you say why the former captain was relieved?
Speaker 1: If I remember correctly, there was a pornography ring in
Speaker 1: the eighty second Oh yes remember that? Yes I do.
Speaker 4: Did that happen when they were overseas or did it?
Speaker 4: Was that just that was a brag?
Speaker 1: Yeah? It was a gay porn ring. Yeah, there was,
Speaker 1: it was. There was a it was a pronogue. It
Speaker 1: was a I don't even know if it would be
Speaker 1: legal these days. I'd have to look at it.
Speaker 2: I guess it was like the notorious like man in
Speaker 2: the pink hat. Uh and he was like approaching soldiers
Speaker 2: just around the Fayetteville area and recruited a bunch of
Speaker 2: dudes to do gay porn.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so I had I here, here's here's what
Speaker 1: I knew about it.
Speaker 3: So I report I didn't and I didn't want to
Speaker 3: know anymore because.
Speaker 1: There could be more than one porn ring. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's sure. I have to point that out.
Speaker 3: That's fair.
Speaker 1: That's fair. So you know, Colonel Schweitzer, as I as
Speaker 1: I take over you know this company, he goes the
Speaker 1: organization has some troubles that is going to require some
Speaker 1: good leadership, and so you know, at once you get
Speaker 1: your hands around it, come back and talk to me,
Speaker 1: and let's hear your plan. Right. I had no idea
Speaker 1: what was happening. I had no idea what I was
Speaker 1: walking into. I didn't even really understand the full story
Speaker 1: until you know, a year or so later. But it
Speaker 1: it to me the hallmark, and I think, you know,
Speaker 1: Colonel Schweitz or General Schweitzer retired as I think he
Speaker 1: nailed it.
Speaker 3: They needed good leadership.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if I was that good leadership,
Speaker 1: but I know there were some amazing non commissioned officers
Speaker 1: that circled around me and really you know, grabbed those
Speaker 1: young platoon leaders and we formed a quick cadre, you know,
Speaker 1: just really tight. And it was interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: really that E six and above we'd all been the
Speaker 1: war at this point, you know, sometimes some of us
Speaker 1: a couple of times. I hadn't been. I don't even once,
Speaker 1: but we'd spent enough time at war that you know,
Speaker 1: squad live fires had a different feel to them, you know,
Speaker 1: doing your train up, going out, and I can remember
Speaker 1: at one point walking up on a squad leader and
Speaker 1: his team leader had just you know, thrown a temper
Speaker 1: tantrum and you know, chewing guys out, you know. And
Speaker 1: I watched this squad leader, just cool and calm, walk
Speaker 1: up to this squad and go, did you hear sergeant
Speaker 1: I don't even remember his name, now, did you hear
Speaker 1: Sergeant so and so? But he keeps telling you to
Speaker 1: get cover and concealment, and they're like, you know, yes, sergeant,
Speaker 1: and he goes, We're never going to tell you that again.
Speaker 1: We're telling you to get cover and concealment so that
Speaker 1: you come home. If you don't want to do that,
Speaker 1: we'll have to write a letter. But we're not going
Speaker 1: to yell about it anymore. We don't have any more time.
Speaker 1: And the boys took that to heart, and so that
Speaker 1: that non commissioned Officer Corps in those days was unreal.
Speaker 2: That's one of the differences I think that you were
Speaker 2: alluding to between special operations and conventional I'm not saying
Speaker 2: these are like bad soldiers per se, but you're going
Speaker 2: overseas with them regardless, you know, And so you have
Speaker 2: to figure out how to use your leadership and make
Speaker 2: do with what you have.
Speaker 1: Because you're not getting new guys.
Speaker 3: Right, and you can't rfs some you can't, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well to your point, you know, I had thirty
Speaker 1: two U sum jpack. It's sitting on my desk and
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was the right approach, but
Speaker 1: you know, me and my first sergeant, Derek Gondik, who
Speaker 1: ended up being my command sergeant major in the twenty
Speaker 1: fifth Infantry Division, which you know you pour him, but
Speaker 1: we decided that we'd rather only have who we wanted
Speaker 1: in the line then have to be forced to deal
Speaker 1: with people who didn't want to be there, right, And
Speaker 1: so you could join my headquarters platoon any time you wanted.
Speaker 4: So, okay, So you were giving guys an out if
Speaker 4: they didn't want to be on the line.
Speaker 1: I would tell them. I would tell platoon sergeants that
Speaker 1: if you'd rather go without him, you're not going to
Speaker 1: get a replacement. But if it's a disruption and it's
Speaker 1: disrupting you from preparing your team to go to war,
Speaker 1: bring him to headquarters. Will have plenty of stuff to do,
Speaker 1: and they will earn their way into another squad or
Speaker 1: another platoon. And it ended up up being I think
Speaker 1: a success story for us, because what we found was
Speaker 1: that when the guys started getting put on that headquarters
Speaker 1: team and then being given the opportunity to earn their
Speaker 1: way back into the line, and we used to say,
Speaker 1: you know, living in a rifle platoon is a privilege.
Speaker 1: It it's not it's not a right. And so you
Speaker 1: got to earn your way back down there. And only
Speaker 1: a platoon sergeant can walk into the first sergeant and
Speaker 1: say I want to take that guy and put them
Speaker 1: in my platoon. And so every one of their NCOs
Speaker 1: would rotate through who had, you know, headquarters platoon that
Speaker 1: day doing all the details.
Speaker 3: So whatever the detail was that needed to be done.
Speaker 1: The rifle platoons are out training, and if you want
Speaker 1: to go out and train and you want to get
Speaker 1: ready to go to war with those guys, we want
Speaker 1: you to, but we can't force you to want that.
Speaker 1: And so as your NCOs were rotating through that headquarters platoon,
Speaker 1: they would find talent, and they would find people that
Speaker 1: they were connecting with and leadership that they were responding to,
Speaker 1: and they would say, you know, they would walk into
Speaker 1: Derek and hey, I want this guy down in my squad,
Speaker 1: and suddenly that guy would get removed and be an
Speaker 1: amazing soldier, amazing paratrooper.
Speaker 4: You said something that I think is kind of funny
Speaker 4: right now, where people like, there's a lot of mythology
Speaker 4: built around the number of times somebody's been to war
Speaker 4: or how many deployments they've been on, and the idea
Speaker 4: that you know, a lot of the conventional units were
Speaker 4: doing twelve plus sixteen, sometimes eighteen month deployments and it's like, well,
Speaker 4: I've been to war one time or two times, and
Speaker 4: then somebody from the soft community has been like, well
Speaker 4: I've been twelve times, and it's like, yeah, those were
Speaker 4: three to six month trips compared to this eighteen month trip. So,
Speaker 4: you know, the whole idea of you know, talking about
Speaker 4: experience based on number.
Speaker 3: Of deployments, it's such a ballacy right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to your point, in my opinion, I never felt
Speaker 1: one was easier or harder than the other, although I
Speaker 1: struggled more in the special operations community than I did
Speaker 1: in the conventional community, just because of the talent that
Speaker 1: you're just surrounded with, right you know, I mean I'm
Speaker 1: average on my best day inside of the Special operations community.
Speaker 1: Just being able to keep my job and stay on
Speaker 1: the roster. That was a pretty successful week, right, But
Speaker 1: the operational tempo in those special operations units, it feels
Speaker 1: like a fifteen month tour went down four months.
Speaker 4: Sure, and the high intense jobs I mean again, not
Speaker 4: taking anything away from the special operations. It's a dangerous job,
Speaker 4: you know. It's just it's sometimes just like comparing apples
Speaker 4: and oranges.
Speaker 1: It is. It's but I would say the effect I
Speaker 1: think is somewhat more akin than we give it credit,
Speaker 1: at least from my experiences doing fifteen months in a
Speaker 1: leadership position in the eighty second Airborne Division with dispersed
Speaker 1: cops on the Pakistani border, and you know, dealing with
Speaker 1: a Polish counterpart who gets promoted three days before he
Speaker 1: shows up so he can outrank me on the fob. Right,
Speaker 1: like that kind of of of an operational tempo, it's
Speaker 1: a little bit slower, and yet the challenges were just
Speaker 1: as exhausting, right, you know. And then you transition to
Speaker 1: now you're a let's say a Ranger team commander and
Speaker 1: you're doing a four month DFC, a four month train up,
Speaker 1: a four month ready you know unit. You're you're constantly
Speaker 1: on an eighteen hour sequence.
Speaker 3: It feels like you're always deployed.
Speaker 1: And so even when you're home, I know, I'm rotating
Speaker 1: back into the generally that same battle space, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to be ripping my you know, second or third
Speaker 1: range of battalion, you know, brother up there, and we
Speaker 1: all kind of get into a rotation with our classmates, right.
Speaker 1: And so you come back from that deployed for combat
Speaker 1: with task force, and it's not like, you know, you
Speaker 1: take two weeks to leave and then you go right
Speaker 1: back to your computer Monday morning, and you're tracking the
Speaker 1: same targets. You're tracking the same into eligence, you're going
Speaker 1: through the same ideas, except you're doing individual training and
Speaker 1: then you do ready training and then you're two weeks
Speaker 1: leave and then you're right back in gay And so
Speaker 1: I think there the comparison is in the early days
Speaker 1: of g WATT conventional units, the leadership would deploy twelve, fifteen,
Speaker 1: eighteen months, who knows right, The officers and the senior
Speaker 1: non commissioned officers would come back, get dispersed to the
Speaker 1: next unit, train them right up, and then go do
Speaker 1: another fifteen So it's basically y're on year off for
Speaker 1: those conventionals, but they don't have that year off, right,
Speaker 1: they're training the next unit that they're going to take
Speaker 1: to war, rit them through a JRTC and an NTC
Speaker 1: and so you know, going through an m LAT or
Speaker 1: going you know, going through a JORT cycle inside of
Speaker 1: the task force feels like a twelve month you know,
Speaker 1: high intensity op run for the entire time you're inside
Speaker 1: the units, right, And it feels the same way to
Speaker 1: me as a company commander in the eighties second Airbrine Division.
Speaker 1: It's just I've got a little bit of a different focus.
Speaker 1: Maybe more coin here, more CT right there.
Speaker 2: Right, So tell us a bit about that deployment to
Speaker 2: Afghanistan with eighty second.
Speaker 3: Honestly one of my quieter deployments. So we were What
Speaker 3: sticks out is I had my first suicide on that deployment.
Speaker 1: In your unit. Yeah, employment, Yeah, that's terrible. Stick sticks
Speaker 1: out And I'll tell you what tears me apart to
Speaker 1: this day about that. We were in Goasmy at the time,
Speaker 1: so we really hadn't moved out to Wazi Quah yet,
Speaker 1: which is where our FOB would our our FROB would
Speaker 1: be located, you know, our company FOB, which can really
Speaker 1: circle at Hasco is in a.
Speaker 3: Burn pit in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: He's on guard tower, seeming suicide, you know, rifle underneath
Speaker 1: the rifle underneath the throat, right, and a guy comes
Speaker 1: into the tent that you know Derek and I, you know,
Speaker 1: first sergeant commander and you know, my my clerk, right,
Speaker 1: and basically I hear him waking up, you know, Derek
Speaker 1: with you know, you know so and so shot himself
Speaker 1: and I'm just I'm gonna leave names out of this,
Speaker 1: but you know, so and so shot himself and I
Speaker 1: hear it, and we all kind of like what like,
Speaker 1: you know, an ind like you know, what happened here?
Speaker 1: Now he committed suicide on the you know, in a
Speaker 1: guard tower, on guard watch. And you know, to this day,
Speaker 1: you know, it strikes me that, you know, I was
Speaker 1: in contact with his mother for a number of years
Speaker 1: and she doesn't really understand what happened. And it was
Speaker 1: I felt so empty and I felt so helpless because
Speaker 1: I don't know what he didn't have answers. And I
Speaker 1: look back on you know, you think about those crazy stories,
Speaker 1: those crazy Vietnam stories, right that we hear growing up
Speaker 1: in this community of of you know the stuff that happened,
Speaker 1: and you know, really what happened there is you know,
Speaker 1: and so I feel like or I'm afraid that she
Speaker 1: thinks we were trying to cover something up, right, that
Speaker 1: you know, something terrible happened and we tried to cover
Speaker 1: that up and and the reality couldn't be any farther
Speaker 1: from the truth. But I couldn't convince that I don't
Speaker 1: know what happened. I don't think that's all that uncommon.
Speaker 2: I mean, the survivors are always left with these unsettling questions,
Speaker 2: right that just can't be answered. You know, that's like God,
Speaker 2: literally God knows and that's probably the only person.
Speaker 1: That can answer some of those things.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: And then you go through as the command team, you know,
Speaker 1: so taking this back to a leadership perspective, you go
Speaker 1: to the Okay, do you do you give full honors? Right?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: Like, how does that work?
Speaker 1: Right? You know? Do you do you have a eulogy?
Speaker 1: Do you give a twenty one gun salute? Do you
Speaker 1: get do you get buried at Arlington?
Speaker 3: Like this?
Speaker 1: You know, this paratrooper gave great service to his nation,
Speaker 1: and we didn't understand in those days that maybe this
Speaker 1: was beyond control. Right, Maybe this was beyond his control.
Speaker 1: Maybe we had you know, we don't know what happened,
Speaker 1: and that's going to haunt us for the rest of
Speaker 1: our lives. But it was an eye opening and awaking.
Speaker 2: So it really was like even like his close teammates
Speaker 2: and his squad, this came as a shock.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow, that's rough. It's from my observation, yeah, and
Speaker 1: my conversation.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: And you can't blame the family either, because there are
Speaker 4: enough military cover ups that get exposed, right then everything
Speaker 4: starts to look.
Speaker 1: Like a cover up. It's it's it's hard not to
Speaker 1: seek meaning when it seems meaningless, right, And you know,
Speaker 1: as a as a parent now, of I mean, you
Speaker 1: know that that that young paratrooper wasn't much younger than
Speaker 1: my daughter who sits here with me right now, And
Speaker 1: as a parent, I can only I can't honestly imagine
Speaker 1: what that was like. And it was the first time
Speaker 1: in my life as a as a leader that I
Speaker 1: felt empty and helpless, and I didn't really know how
Speaker 1: to deal with that now, because how do you lead
Speaker 1: your organization through that.
Speaker 3: Which we've been on. We've been in theater like three weeks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, like we haven't even really moved into our
Speaker 1: you know, to our FOB yet, and we know that
Speaker 1: this is probably this is at least a twelve month
Speaker 1: or probably going to fifteen. Like we were getting word
Speaker 1: of that almost immediately, and so this is how we
Speaker 1: start that rotation right so that that that puts an
Speaker 1: immediate on it. But what it did for me is
Speaker 1: it really perked my ears up to you know, how
Speaker 1: how do you how do you keep your pulse right
Speaker 1: on your people right up? And this is what I think.
Speaker 1: You know, conventional command teams in particular, you know, really
Speaker 1: spend a lot of their, thank goodness, a lot of
Speaker 1: their time on it. You've got a platoon in a
Speaker 1: cop where they're just getting shot at or ordered or
Speaker 1: you know, they're just sitting there. There's not much they
Speaker 1: can do to protect themselves from that, right and they're
Speaker 1: there for nine months twelve months. And what I started
Speaker 1: to internalize is we now know this thing called post
Speaker 1: traumatic stress disorder PTSD. And I will constantly tell you
Speaker 1: that just because we all have post traumatic stress, and
Speaker 1: I do believe that every single service member who served
Speaker 1: overseas or trained to go overseas probably has post traumatic stress.
Speaker 1: Whether it's a disorder is a a question of degrees
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, but it's our post traumatic
Speaker 1: stress is the reason why I think we're alive. You know,
Speaker 1: when I hear the car backfire, it's the immediate action
Speaker 1: that I took that saved my life in the life
Speaker 1: of my friends, right, And so there's goodness in that
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress. But then you watch that play out
Speaker 1: when you are helpless to do anything about it, right,
Speaker 1: And I started to recognize that rotation that those who
Speaker 1: were able to go out and be proactive and patrol
Speaker 1: and hunt and you know, fight the enemy and do
Speaker 1: the things they came there to do, their level of disorder,
Speaker 1: and my observations is lessened. Right, those who are you know,
Speaker 1: we used to jokingly call them the fobbits, right, you know,
Speaker 1: the folks who never left Kandahar are never left Bogger. Well,
Speaker 1: I spent a couple of weeks on those places, and
Speaker 1: it was terrifying to me. You know that all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you know, the front gate gets detonated by
Speaker 1: a v B I ed and you and you get
Speaker 1: turned into pink mist like you know that that the
Speaker 1: mortar comes down in the middle of your chew, right,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing.
Speaker 3: It's just all random, right right?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Uh? And so that that post traumatic stress really started
Speaker 1: to highlight itself for me on that rotation And how
Speaker 1: do you confront that? Right? You know that as a
Speaker 1: leadership team, what do do you rotate your people around?
Speaker 1: Do you go see them? How does that work? I
Speaker 1: struggled with that a lot.
Speaker 3: I think, you know.
Speaker 4: One of the other things, like I have a theory
Speaker 4: that like suicide ideation is sort of the medic right,
Speaker 4: It's it's viral, It's mentally viral that once one, once
Speaker 4: one person in a in a group uses it, it.
Speaker 1: It sort of gives it gives permission.
Speaker 4: Puts the thought in people's head that maybe this is
Speaker 4: a solution.
Speaker 3: Were you guys concerned with that at all?
Speaker 4: Was there like are there means that the command can
Speaker 4: use attempt to like inoculate their soldiers?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like I said, catching, I can tell you the
Speaker 1: non traditional things we did, and then I can I
Speaker 1: can maybe speak a little bit about from the leadership perspective,
Speaker 1: how I think we thought through that. So the USO, right,
Speaker 1: things rotate around, And something that I always laugh about
Speaker 1: is we lived in a place where only a ring
Speaker 1: route could hit you once a week, and then of
Speaker 1: course it's red air like ninety percent of the time,
Speaker 1: and so when an aircraft comes through, it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, Christmas is coming and everyone's there, and one
Speaker 1: day I can remember it's Christmas and birds are landing,
Speaker 1: mails coming off, you know, and outcomes you know, five
Speaker 1: or six. And they were ring card girls from the UFC, right,
Speaker 1: and they were they were coming down to hang out
Speaker 1: with you know, paratroopers on and we were definitely in
Speaker 1: the hinterlands, yeah, you know, And and all of them
Speaker 1: were wearing white T shirts and body armor in one
Speaker 1: hundred and ten degree you know, Afghan summer. And so
Speaker 1: when they took off their body armor, they were very
Speaker 1: popular and everybody wanted to get pictures and hang out.
Speaker 1: So there's that kind of just touching home a little bit.
Speaker 1: And I know that's a little off color, right, but
Speaker 1: that that's that's war. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And those are the you know.
Speaker 1: And and oh, by the way, all that's happening around
Speaker 1: one hundred by one hundred foot burn pit that's been
Speaker 1: smoldering for the last you know chance, right, which will
Speaker 1: hopefully get into that a little bit. So there's all
Speaker 1: those USO opportunities there. There was the psychologists that I
Speaker 1: thought were very helpful. That and uh and and once again,
Speaker 1: you know, very attractive psychologists showed up, and everybody wanted to.
Speaker 3: Go talk to the psychologists.
Speaker 1: Right, it's and and we're absolutely go talk to psychologists.
Speaker 1: They just wanted to talk to an American woman at
Speaker 1: that point. I think, so those types of you know,
Speaker 1: kind of morale boosting things occurred getting ice cream down
Speaker 1: to the guys, right, But I think the most important
Speaker 1: thing that we could do is leadership, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: I had one way between starts use my call signed
Speaker 1: to call in a bird to get ice cream, and
Speaker 1: I thought was amazing use of power. It was awesome,
Speaker 1: good choice. And I thought the best thing leadership could do, though,
Speaker 1: was keep the guys proactive. I never liked the term
Speaker 1: presence patrol. I never liked the idea that you're just
Speaker 1: going to go out and wait for someone to shoot
Speaker 1: at you and react to it or blow you up,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to deal with that. That made
Speaker 1: no sense to me. Even if you're telling them go
Speaker 1: get a six pack of coke at the local bazaar.
Speaker 1: Like go find me something that you know, gives them
Speaker 1: a mission and a purpose and a task that allows
Speaker 1: them to go out and do the thing they volunteered
Speaker 1: typically three or four times to do. If you let
Speaker 1: that dog hunt what it's supposed to do, you will
Speaker 1: be shocked with American ingenuity. And I found that those
Speaker 1: who were able to actively go out and perform the
Speaker 1: duties that they wanted to do that they volunteered do,
Speaker 1: those were the guys that, or at least that's the
Speaker 1: way I thought that leadership could do its best to
Speaker 1: increase morality or deal with post traumatic stress.
Speaker 2: So let's transition into going to rope, which I believe
Speaker 2: what Ranger Orientation program today called RASP two.
Speaker 1: RASP one, RASP one, No, no, you're right. RASP one
Speaker 1: is the rip rip you're right, you're right, And now
Speaker 1: there's a RASP biola. So enlisted go to RIP now,
Speaker 1: RASP officers and NCOs go to ropes now, RASP two, sir, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: right on.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So when I was in Afghanistan for those fifteen months, uh,
Speaker 1: I had to make the decision of whether I wanted
Speaker 1: to go to SFAs or whether I wanted to, you know,
Speaker 1: try the Ranger regiment or whether I wanted to stay
Speaker 1: you know, where I was, which I was having an
Speaker 1: absolute blast, and I decided that after having watched those
Speaker 1: communities in action, what I felt I wanted to apply
Speaker 1: myself to the most was that Ranger experience. And so
Speaker 1: you know, if it absolutely positively must be destroyed in
Speaker 1: one period of darkness, you know, these are the guys
Speaker 1: to do it.
Speaker 3: And so that that's what I wanted to get involved with.
Speaker 1: And so I was fortunate enough to earn a slot
Speaker 1: in rope and I can remember it was the first
Speaker 1: time you realized you weren't that special, Like when you
Speaker 1: go to a you know, to get selected for that
Speaker 1: kind of an orientation program. You're you're you're clearly in
Speaker 1: the top, you know, ten percent of your of your
Speaker 1: peer group. And so you've been running, you know, pretty
Speaker 1: comfortably in those organizations. You've been doing fairly well, you know,
Speaker 1: playing eighteen ball, you know, every single day, and then
Speaker 1: you show up and you suddenly realize that just being
Speaker 1: average here is a great day, right. And I'm not
Speaker 1: the fastest runner, I'm not the best road marcher, I'm
Speaker 1: not the best rope climber.
Speaker 3: I can't shoot the best. I can't.
Speaker 1: Whatever it is, there is somebody sit it, seated right
Speaker 1: next to you that can do it ten times better
Speaker 1: than you. And the professionalism of the ranger non commissioned.
Speaker 3: Officer just struck me.
Speaker 1: The professionalism, the competence, and the thing about the Ranger
Speaker 1: regiment that I find most special is everybody's a ranger first.
Speaker 1: You know, your your cook is a five star Michelin trained,
Speaker 1: you know, chef, and he jumps out of planes with
Speaker 1: a gun and he seizes the objective first, and then
Speaker 1: he starts cooking up dinner for everybody. Like the fact
Speaker 1: that you're a ranger first. There is no second class
Speaker 1: citizen inside of the regiment. Everybody has a tambaret. Everyone
Speaker 1: goes through the same selection process, everyone goes through the
Speaker 1: same training evolutions. And watching that cadre of I mean
Speaker 1: said Adam Nash was a was a Ribbons structor.
Speaker 2: Adam Nash was, Oh he might. I'm a little afraid
Speaker 2: to say this out loud. He was a holacious Ribbon
Speaker 2: and only he was.
Speaker 1: He was he was. He was a great first Sergey.
Speaker 1: He was good at his job. Don't get me wrong,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's their job. Is to put you through
Speaker 1: your paces right well, and for those for those in
Speaker 1: the audience who don't know, Adam Nash's like eight feet
Speaker 1: tall Best Ranger competition, you know, literally made it look
Speaker 1: like you know, you know Mike and Ike. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm like this tall, you know, balde, I can't run
Speaker 1: for ship. You know, you got Adam Nash who's like,
Speaker 1: I'm like a Clydesdale. But everything works. I had Alex Capratti,
Speaker 1: So Alex Capratti was my was my rope, my rope
Speaker 1: senior and CEO that that core of non commissioned officers
Speaker 1: just set the tone of what this organization expects out
Speaker 1: of you. And the immediate emotion that gets, you know,
Speaker 1: raised at least with me, is I'll sweep the floors
Speaker 1: like whatever job you'll offer me, just to be around
Speaker 1: these guys. I mean, these guys are literally my heroes,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 1: These are guys who you know Mogadishu, These are guys
Speaker 1: who jumped into Rhino. These, I mean, these are guys
Speaker 1: who went after what was her name, Jessica, Jessica Lynch,
Speaker 1: thank you apologize for you know, Jessica Inch's faily, for
Speaker 1: forgetting that I have friends who are on that mission, right, like,
Speaker 1: these are literally my heroes.
Speaker 3: And I'm standing.
Speaker 1: I'm in the barracks, you know, RIP Barracks, which wrote
Speaker 1: barracks is just a room down the street from RIP Barracks, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm in this room with three or four other
Speaker 1: officers who are clearly better than me. They're clearly smarter,
Speaker 1: they're clearly better looking, they're clearly faster, I mean just
Speaker 1: everything about them, you know. I know, I'm already on
Speaker 1: the B team just getting in the door. And to
Speaker 1: be around that caliber of person, it forces you to
Speaker 1: either give your best or get out of the way.
Speaker 1: You just can't even come into work that day without
Speaker 1: giving it your all. And so that rope experience I
Speaker 1: thought was one of the best introductions to a special
Speaker 1: Operations organization. And I've seen a few different selections now
Speaker 1: and I've helped, you know, build a couple of them
Speaker 1: at this point, and I felt that the RASP, you know,
Speaker 1: with the rope that then became RASP and RASP was
Speaker 1: even better, was such a great culture inculcation for everybody
Speaker 1: that you bring into the regiment and you are a
Speaker 1: ranger first, That's why they called it indoctrination is right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. And so at the end of that selection
Speaker 1: when they're like, you know, well, hey, I know you
Speaker 1: came here to be a Ranger company commander and to
Speaker 1: go down to a ranger battalion, but we don't have
Speaker 1: room in one of those battalions for about nine or
Speaker 1: twelve months, would you be willing to serve on regimental staff?
Speaker 1: And the answer is just, of course, yeah, whatever you
Speaker 1: want me to do to stand in this door.
Speaker 2: I mean, in a sense, it's like good that you
Speaker 2: get learn a lot about the organization from like a
Speaker 2: top down level, maybe before you take a position at
Speaker 2: the battalion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I I that was probably the effect.
Speaker 3: But you know, for me, what I remember of it was.
Speaker 1: Being around guys like you know, Rich Clark, Colin Tooley,
Speaker 1: Marcus Evans.
Speaker 3: I mean, just these these legends of the community when.
Speaker 1: They're you know, Majors, you know, Ray Devins, and I
Speaker 1: mean just these guys that raised me as a young
Speaker 1: officer inside the regiment to the best of their ability,
Speaker 1: no fault of their own that I'm all fucked up,
Speaker 1: it's they did their best. But I also started to
Speaker 1: learn that I had different interests in the regiment. So
Speaker 1: when you put you know, you put someone on RHQ
Speaker 1: on Regimental headquarters staff, it's like a nightmare for an
Speaker 1: infantry officer, Right, you want to be in the three shot.
Speaker 1: That's where everybody wants to yeah, do ops, everybody wants
Speaker 1: to be there. I was the assistant S one. Nobody
Speaker 1: wants to be the assistant S one at Ranger Regiment.
Speaker 1: And I suddenly found I really liked it, Like I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed the manning and the talent and understanding how
Speaker 1: to get that talent and how to align that talent
Speaker 1: and then how to put that talent with the right
Speaker 1: teammates to get the most out of the team. And
Speaker 1: you know, understanding how the senior officers and n c
Speaker 1: o s and those types of organizations, that's what they
Speaker 1: consider to be one of their primary responsibilities is getting
Speaker 1: the right leadership dynamic for that team. You know, when
Speaker 1: a commander breaks his leg on a jump and you've
Speaker 1: got to bring in a new you know, a new
Speaker 1: major to command that team for Afghanistan, for or Fallujah,
Speaker 1: and you know for four month rotation at high op tempo,
Speaker 1: Like who's the right guy? And that's the answer that
Speaker 1: they'll always give, well, who's the right guy. They don't
Speaker 1: care who's supposed to do it, they don't care who's
Speaker 1: next in line. It's who's the right guy to lead
Speaker 1: these rangers in combat. And they build teams around that,
Speaker 1: and those teams get I mean we've we've heard about
Speaker 1: it from Standard Crystal.
Speaker 3: Now you know, teams of teams of teams, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that style of focused leadership is what you know
Speaker 1: from the Solutions twenty one perspective. Now, as a leadership consultant,
Speaker 1: I really harked on with you know, the CEOs and
Speaker 1: presidents that I work on all these private organizations. You
Speaker 1: need to spend the most most of your time talking
Speaker 1: to your people and understanding how to align teams and
Speaker 1: how to get leaders bought into the vision right you've
Speaker 1: got for where this needs to go. It's not in
Speaker 1: front of your computer sending emails. It's not in the boardroom,
Speaker 1: you know, making those decisions. If you've built your staff
Speaker 1: the way you should, they will do those things for you.
Speaker 1: I learned that from watching senior non commissioned officers and
Speaker 1: officers in the Ranger Regiment build task forces.
Speaker 4: It's interesting because and speaking purely from a pregot ranger perspective.
Speaker 4: You know, you would see for the people don't know,
Speaker 4: like when you first become an officer, you cannot go
Speaker 4: to range of Attalian, right, you have to have a
Speaker 4: command someplace else and uh, you.
Speaker 3: Know, and then and then you come come in.
Speaker 1: You've got to prove you can do it in the
Speaker 1: conventional force before you get the opportunity to try out
Speaker 1: for it in the special operations community.
Speaker 4: And it's very interesting seeing different platoon leaders and and
Speaker 4: how they either adapt or don't adapt once they get
Speaker 4: to Ranger battalion, you know, and they've got this platoon
Speaker 4: of you know, highly motivated you know, a bunch of
Speaker 4: kind of knucklehead privates, but also you know your team
Speaker 4: leaders or squad leaders, you're a.
Speaker 3: Platoon certain and.
Speaker 4: Whether whether they could stand back because every because everybody
Speaker 4: wants to look good, right, you want if that's your
Speaker 4: time to shine when you go to Ranger battalion and
Speaker 4: you want to look good. But it was the guys
Speaker 4: who learned that if they step back and facilitated, right,
Speaker 4: they facilitated these rangers doing what they're doing, they were
Speaker 4: going to look good. The rangers were going to make
Speaker 4: them look good, compared to the guys who felt that
Speaker 4: they need to needed to imprint their vision onto these
Speaker 4: guys who had been who've been doing this job NonStop, yeah,
Speaker 4: since before they got there. Yeah, And how they adapted
Speaker 4: and and if they could accept that they weren't they
Speaker 4: weren't really the star of the show.
Speaker 1: Right. Well, it's kind of I don't know if you
Speaker 1: guys know this, but the Dodgers beat the Yankees a
Speaker 1: little bit ago in a World Series. I didn't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it kind of.
Speaker 1: Pissed me off because I was a Yankees span for
Speaker 1: a long time. I was telling Race to go to
Speaker 1: the old Bronx Stadium here a while back. I don't
Speaker 1: remember the dude's name, but he hit a Grand Slam
Speaker 1: home run in the first inning of what not first name,
Speaker 1: but in Game one. And that's an A team player
Speaker 1: on the Dodgers, right. That means most of that roster
Speaker 1: is B team players, right, and then you got four
Speaker 1: or five A team players and the Yankees have the
Speaker 1: same thing, right, and officers in particular that go into
Speaker 1: a special operations organization, the REGI. In my experiences, the
Speaker 1: first thing they're confronted with is they're accustomed to being
Speaker 1: the star quarterback. Wherever they were at, they run a
Speaker 1: star quarterback. They were definitively top three in their division,
Speaker 1: you know. So for those who don't what a division is,
Speaker 1: you know about twenty thousand personnel, which means that's a
Speaker 1: whole lot of platoon leaders and company commanders. They were
Speaker 1: a top three of that division to get the tryout, right,
Speaker 1: And so you get to that unit knowing that you're
Speaker 1: elite and you're select and suddenly you're on a team
Speaker 1: of all guys who hit Grand Slam home runs every
Speaker 1: single day. And I'd love to even talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: those crazy knucklehead privates, because there's no crazy knucklehead private
Speaker 1: in the Ranger regimen.
Speaker 3: By the time you hit a team, you're a tab
Speaker 3: spec for.
Speaker 1: You're a tab specialist for generally by the time you're
Speaker 1: really rotating on the aircraft. I don't know if that
Speaker 1: was your experiences, but mine was. You show up as
Speaker 1: a PFC, you go immediately into Ranger school preparation. You
Speaker 1: then go to Ranger school preparation while going through all
Speaker 1: your A T and finishing schools and holy schools and
Speaker 1: all that other good stuff. That's going on, and then
Speaker 1: by the time you come back and then go on
Speaker 1: a rotation where you're probably working backside support inside the
Speaker 1: targeting cell, you know, running errands until you get your
Speaker 1: chance to go on a couple of missions that we
Speaker 1: know are going to be good for you to.
Speaker 3: Break in on.
Speaker 1: Right by the time that guy is going out the
Speaker 1: back of an aircraft, he's probably a tabspec for It
Speaker 1: was that your experiences.
Speaker 2: I mean by the time guys are going out of
Speaker 2: the aircraft, I mean we had guys.
Speaker 1: Graduate from RIP and go out of the back of
Speaker 1: the aircraft later.
Speaker 4: It used to it used to be that it was
Speaker 4: like you had to you had to spend your time.
Speaker 3: You were probably going to be on the line.
Speaker 4: For eight months to a year before you before you
Speaker 4: were allowed to go to ranger school.
Speaker 2: I went, and I mean, this isn't because that's closer
Speaker 2: to my experience, not because I was anything special, just
Speaker 2: because I passed a PT test they sent me to
Speaker 2: ranger school like right away, which was good and bad.
Speaker 2: But prior to that, yeah, I think there was a
Speaker 2: thought that you'd, depending on the first sergeant's philosophy, that
Speaker 2: you're going to stay there, like a year to two
Speaker 2: years before you go to ranger school, and that's why
Speaker 2: we had a deficiency of ranger tab guys in the
Speaker 2: company at that time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no tab, no slab. I don't know, I don't
Speaker 1: know if they still do that anymore, but as the
Speaker 1: old days. But yeah, so that so the greatest thing
Speaker 1: that I really pulled from that experience is you have
Speaker 1: to eat a whole lot of humble pie immediately, and
Speaker 1: you're coming in with an eighty second I walked in
Speaker 1: there with an eighty second combat patch, one hundred and
Speaker 1: first combat patch, you know, twenty seven twenty eight months
Speaker 1: of deployed combat time at that point, right, I'm feeling
Speaker 1: pretty confident in my abilities. Yeah, ce team player day one, Like,
Speaker 1: don't even know how to don't even know what the
Speaker 1: accuracy if you didn't wear an assault patch when you
Speaker 1: show that. My first introduction, right was it was a
Speaker 1: senior non commissioned officer? Can at me going? We got
Speaker 1: to get that in stereo before you talk to me.
Speaker 1: So yeah, of course I had a result there, but
Speaker 1: not on top, on the bottom where it belonged in
Speaker 1: that unit.
Speaker 2: And then so you mentioned you really enjoyed S one
Speaker 2: you're learning about the regiment, but then you had this
Speaker 2: rear D job that you said was just horrific.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was the worst job in my career. And
Speaker 1: so and I say worse because think about your My
Speaker 1: job is to be the voice of the command, you know,
Speaker 1: rear literally, and the times that they really need me
Speaker 1: are when we have killed and wounded rangers. And so
Speaker 1: it's caring for those families, it's connecting those families to
Speaker 1: the resources, and the special operations community really lays it
Speaker 1: out right. And some of the most you know, heartbreaking
Speaker 1: events are funerals.
Speaker 3: And you go to these funerals and you or.
Speaker 1: The escort for a general officer who's presenting the flag,
Speaker 1: which in those days General Votel did almost all of
Speaker 1: the ones that I was on for whatever, I don't
Speaker 1: know if that was just the rotation or that was
Speaker 1: his decision. And you're dealing with these parents that are
Speaker 1: in one step so proud of what their son has done,
Speaker 1: and on the other just we've just devastated a family, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, they're never going to recover a change from this.
Speaker 1: And the toll that just the emotional toll that that
Speaker 1: took on the rear detachment. I really got to understand it,
Speaker 1: and I really got to see it, and it was compressed.
Speaker 1: And so in the eighty second or in one hundred
Speaker 1: and first, you know, a conventional unit, those you know,
Speaker 1: those five KIA those thirty I think it was thirty
Speaker 1: two vs.
Speaker 3: I very serious, seriously wounded.
Speaker 1: So when Walter rued, we're in San Antonio, I'm flying
Speaker 1: to visit those rangers who have life altering in injuries
Speaker 1: like will never you know, live without care kind of injuries. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're working with the wife who has
Speaker 1: small children, who you know, with the parents and the
Speaker 1: emotional toll. I watched that take on our rangers going
Speaker 1: through that, and I only started to understand the emotional
Speaker 1: toll that was taking on me years later, right and
Speaker 1: and and that is, uh, you know, when when you
Speaker 1: think back to the things that really trigger my you know,
Speaker 1: like my post traumatic stress disorder, the thing it's it's children, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, kids getting hurt and watching children, you know,
Speaker 1: at a coffin, and you know, and and it's probably
Speaker 1: because of my own children, right, but it's a it's
Speaker 1: a very much my my nightmares are always about kids.
Speaker 1: Something happens to a kid, and and to be with
Speaker 1: someone's kid, you know, to escort that body home, which
Speaker 1: literally you're talking about your ranger buddy, and you know
Speaker 1: how it works. It's your ranger buddy that's going to
Speaker 1: escort you home, going to make sure of that if
Speaker 1: we can. And then to surround yourself with the family
Speaker 1: that is so proud like I literally, you know, Jason Dalky,
Speaker 1: I'll just give this one. Jason Dalkey were in Jacksonville
Speaker 1: for his funeral. I remember correctly, Jacksonville, that Naval Air
Speaker 1: Station and beautiful chapel.
Speaker 3: Jason's remains come in.
Speaker 1: The naval commander had everyone in dress whites from disembarkment
Speaker 1: of the plane all the way to.
Speaker 3: The chapel and then all the way off of the installation.
Speaker 1: And then when you got off the installation, I'm in
Speaker 1: the lead vehicle with you know, the police and the
Speaker 1: fire department. They shut down the Interstate I seventy five
Speaker 1: North was shut down and they were escorting us with
Speaker 1: I was, and I'm in the lead vehicle, and I
Speaker 1: can remember coming up this little hill and looking in
Speaker 1: the rear view and General Votel is sitting behind me,
Speaker 1: and all I see is Patriot Riders. So just hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of motorcycle riders and then behind them this
Speaker 1: endless convoy of Jackson Naval Air Station. These these are
Speaker 1: these are our Navy brothers and sisters, right and just
Speaker 1: I'm getting a little emotional just think about it right now,
Speaker 1: Jason Dalky was this amazing? I mean I didn't know Jason.
Speaker 1: I know, I unfortunately only got the stories of Jason.
Speaker 1: And when you listen to his wife, go, I mean,
Speaker 1: look at him. I remember this plain as day, his
Speaker 1: picture in full gear. You know, we all take the
Speaker 1: operator picture when you get into the theater, right, so
Speaker 1: we're in our full kit, in the talk and in
Speaker 1: the jock and someone tick snaps that picture. Well, Jason
Speaker 1: literally looked like a poster child, like this is the
Speaker 1: ranger of you know, this is our modern day ranger
Speaker 1: on the battlefield. He looks like he'll tear you apart
Speaker 1: from there. And he died doing what he loved doing.
Speaker 1: And she knows that how heartbreaking for them and for
Speaker 1: the family, and that that was the worst job ever.
Speaker 1: And yet it probably made me a better commander.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you understand the gravity of all this, That's
Speaker 2: what it sounds like you took away from.
Speaker 1: It when when we make mistakes in our business, it
Speaker 1: can result in life altering, right changes.
Speaker 2: Right, So after this, uh, this ordeal, you become a
Speaker 2: company commander at one seven five, HC went some fun.
Speaker 2: We're happily representing all three battalions here on the show today.
Speaker 1: Yeah we are. We're getting together for a second and
Speaker 1: third we're getting we're Uh. I'll tell you, I always
Speaker 1: feel as an impostor inside of the Ranger community. I
Speaker 1: always feel like, you know, I never quite became one
Speaker 1: of you, Like you guys are just so my heroes,
Speaker 1: and so I look at you guys, and and you're
Speaker 1: what I wanted to be when I grow up. And
Speaker 1: so it's a it's been just a humbling miss. It's
Speaker 1: the I have very much the same sort.
Speaker 2: Of feeling that you do that I was just lucky
Speaker 2: to be a part of this like storied historical unit
Speaker 2: for a short period of time, you know.
Speaker 3: And well, I feel like the unit revolved around me.
Speaker 1: It probably did.
Speaker 3: No, No, I was I was average everywhere I went.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell us about becoming HHC company committeder in one
Speaker 2: seven five.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I was the Candaharfusion Cell director. So we're
Speaker 1: overseas and the Cannaharfusion Cell director. I remember, I worked
Speaker 1: really hard for like three or four months to make
Speaker 1: this a useful thing. And so for the you know,
Speaker 1: for the people who don't know what the canaharf Fusion
Speaker 1: Cell director, candrahearfusion cell was. It was where all the
Speaker 1: NATO soft elements, you know, white and black were supposed
Speaker 1: to be synchronizing their efforts inside of the Candahar you know,
Speaker 1: battle space, the Candle Canahar aar and I was the
Speaker 1: Candorharfusion Cell director from you know, from Task Force, and
Speaker 1: so my job was to coordinate and synchronize all of
Speaker 1: these with the with the battle space owner, which in
Speaker 1: those days was the tenth Mountain Division. I was really
Speaker 1: proud of myself because I was able to coordinate one
Speaker 1: or two somewhat synchronized operations of delivery of humanitarian systems.
Speaker 1: I mean just ridiculously you know, low output, right, And
Speaker 1: I was really proud of my ability just to put
Speaker 1: that together. And I can remember, you know, Mike Foster,
Speaker 1: the Battani commander, went seventy five. He's like, you've run
Speaker 1: how many missions? And I was like I've done two
Speaker 1: missions something like that, and he's like, sounds like we
Speaker 1: need to find another job for you. He called me
Speaker 1: to congratulate me that he just selected me to be
Speaker 1: the HAC one seventy five commander. And I put a
Speaker 1: good face on it because I was disappointed that I
Speaker 1: didn't get a rifle right, right. I wanted a rifle
Speaker 1: company right. And I put a good face on it.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, I think to, you know,
Speaker 1: Mike Foster's credit, you know, he he he wasn't letting
Speaker 1: me get away with that. He continued to, you know,
Speaker 1: this is you know, rare opportunity, and blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: And I knew it was. I knew intellectually.
Speaker 1: I knew this was a lifetime opportunity, right, but I
Speaker 1: was still a little disappointed. I wanted a writing.
Speaker 2: So for for viewers out there who are a little confused.
Speaker 2: Headquarters and headquarters company is where the mortars are located,
Speaker 2: and the snipers the RECKI guys. And then you had
Speaker 2: all this like burgeoning intelligence capability, technical yeah, technical support
Speaker 2: element yeah, what I called it t S. And so
Speaker 2: it became I lovingly nicknamed it the Dark Arts. And
Speaker 2: I remember Mike Foster, and I think you and I
Speaker 2: were chatting about this before the show. But Mike Foster,
Speaker 2: he always had this uh, this kind of you know,
Speaker 2: bloom wher you're planted, And I always hated him for
Speaker 2: it because he planted.
Speaker 3: Me in a place.
Speaker 1: And and lo and behold, and I probably owe Mike
Speaker 1: a call at this point, you know, but he was right,
Speaker 1: you know, I think what he recognized is I wasn't
Speaker 1: quite you know, I was just as good. I could
Speaker 1: do it as good as them, but that wasn't where
Speaker 1: my talents lied. You know, there was lots of people
Speaker 1: who to do that just as well, if not better
Speaker 1: than me. In fact, I know at least you know,
Speaker 1: five guys who can do it better than me. And
Speaker 1: here was a place that needed something a little bit different.
Speaker 1: He wanted something a little bit different, and he saw,
Speaker 1: I think something in me that he said you can
Speaker 1: go and do this. And so it ended up being
Speaker 1: almost a life altering moment or experience for me where
Speaker 1: I suddenly realized you fast forward now, you know, almost
Speaker 1: ten years later and I'm on a range and with
Speaker 1: the Asymmetric Warfare Group doing nonstandard shooting through a rental
Speaker 1: car which that's a whole fun story. And a guy
Speaker 1: asks me, are you you know your battalion command selections
Speaker 1: coming up? Or you go into the eighty second, one
Speaker 1: hundred and first, one seventy third, the usual places that
Speaker 1: we go to before we try out for a ranger battalion, right,
Speaker 1: And I was like, no, there's about fifty other guys
Speaker 1: in the back of my head that can command a
Speaker 1: paratroop battalion better than I can. But I think this
Speaker 1: is where my talent was is here, and I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed it, and I really loved it, and I fell
Speaker 1: in love with HHC. I mean to the point where
Speaker 1: I almost tried to rebrand it, right, whereas just I
Speaker 1: just had h instead of you know, HHC. Because Adam
Speaker 1: Nash was my see, my senior and listening advisor. And
Speaker 1: I was like, nobody listens to me in the headquarters.
Speaker 1: Nobody cares what Major Davis says in the headquarters. No
Speaker 1: NCR officers listening to me, but they will listen to
Speaker 1: Adam Nash. And so Adam, I need you to command
Speaker 1: headquarters because I can't walk into the battalion commander and go, hey, sir,
Speaker 1: is what you're going to do today Adam nash Can
Speaker 1: as a ranger, non commissioned officer and hotel company was
Speaker 1: where I put my emphasis, which was the dogs, the
Speaker 1: Rekie Platoon, TSC, and how do we start changing the
Speaker 1: way that our organization connects to other intelligence organizations out
Speaker 1: there in order to give a strategic through tactical uh
Speaker 1: picture that then we can put strike forces on target.
Speaker 4: Which is very important because one of the challenges I
Speaker 4: think with whether it's work with other units or whether
Speaker 4: it's even working with the line is a lot of
Speaker 4: times people don't know how to employ their snipers, they
Speaker 4: don't know how to employ their records, they don't know
Speaker 4: what their capabilities are, you know, and so a lot
Speaker 4: of times those elements if they aren't there to like
Speaker 4: sell themselves. If they aren't there, you know, they the
Speaker 4: planning is just like a lot of times the most
Speaker 4: unimaginative right there after effect, right like this is the
Speaker 4: big show. You're enabled either that or to imaginive like, Okay,
Speaker 4: the sniper is going to infill you know, three hours
Speaker 4: plus they're going to eliminate this guy and do this,
Speaker 4: and it's like that, I'm sorry, that's you know, you
Speaker 4: we appreciate that you think that we're all that, but
Speaker 4: that might not work, right, So we're of duty, right,
Speaker 4: So and you know, and even I think for a
Speaker 4: long time preach you at even the commander of h
Speaker 4: AC didn't really understand the capabilities of the people who
Speaker 4: worked for him because he was more focused on the
Speaker 4: headquarters aspect.
Speaker 3: Right, we just the the the people.
Speaker 4: Who got put into h AC is like, well, we
Speaker 4: don't know where else, you know that we try them
Speaker 4: on the line.
Speaker 3: You're in the you know, in line companies will put
Speaker 3: them in AHAC.
Speaker 4: But for you to take such an interest in and
Speaker 4: and it grew right because you had the TSC and
Speaker 4: the dogs, and somebody has to understand what they were
Speaker 4: capable of sometimes what they're not capable of, and then
Speaker 4: proselytize right and and sell them and and teach.
Speaker 1: And fight for them and fight for them as for them,
Speaker 1: because it's interesting to mention it that way, because you
Speaker 1: have to interface up and down the change in that regard, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and with my you know, with my fellow company commanders,
Speaker 1: who are the priority, you know. And so when you've
Speaker 1: got a rifle company that's doing you know, a calfax
Speaker 1: or you know, a large combined arms live fire exercise
Speaker 1: as a team. You know, well, they need their mortars,
Speaker 1: they need their snipers, they eat their dogs. And training
Speaker 1: those guys and getting those guys selected because their psychological
Speaker 1: profiles are a little bit different than other rangers, right right,
Speaker 1: And so just finding the guys that psychologically fit into
Speaker 1: those teams. I got to spend so much time with
Speaker 1: the you know, the task for psychologists and learning about
Speaker 1: you know, human uh, human needs and human interactions and
Speaker 1: personality styles and understanding how and I which, by the way,
Speaker 1: if you guys don't use DISC at this point, you know,
Speaker 1: DISC personality styles like, I'll teach you to you because
Speaker 1: once once you do it, you can't unsee it.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's just I can see the personality style,
Speaker 1: which means I can understand and how you like to
Speaker 1: be engaged with, how you like to be talked to,
Speaker 1: and learning all of that from the psychologists. And then,
Speaker 1: by the way, the reason why I joined this company,
Speaker 1: Solutions twenty one is they employ a lot of those
Speaker 1: same understanding and ideas of how to build and align
Speaker 1: leaders as we learned inside the Special Operations community. And
Speaker 1: so seeing that and understanding what we could be doing
Speaker 1: with these teams and how we could be connecting to
Speaker 1: the ranger reconnaissance detachments, and how that could be connecting
Speaker 1: to TFO, and how that could be connecting to different
Speaker 1: intelligence organizations that are all trying to gain targetable fidelity
Speaker 1: on X whatever it is. And that, ultimately, I think
Speaker 1: is what grows me into the AWG, where I get
Speaker 1: into strategic studies and strategic understandings.
Speaker 2: So as you finish off your time at HHC, you're
Speaker 2: going to staff College, and I think you were saying that,
Speaker 2: like a waiver had to be signed because what was
Speaker 2: going on in the war at the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So.
Speaker 1: It was it was it was timeline management of officers.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to get too deep into it,
Speaker 1: but I was fortunate enough to get hired very young
Speaker 1: as an officer, So you know, I had like three
Speaker 1: years before my major selection and then was retained you
Speaker 1: know for two years after that, and so there was
Speaker 1: about three or four of us in my class years
Speaker 1: I did okay at the regiment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so one year run, it was, it's a long run.
Speaker 1: I was the longest standing officer at that point when
Speaker 1: I left. Yeah, Chris Vannick, who you know, long standing
Speaker 1: officer in the end of the five year run of Davis,
Speaker 1: which was probably a blessing for some and a curse
Speaker 1: for others, I hope. But yeah, that there was about
Speaker 1: five of us, or so for four or five of
Speaker 1: us that came out of that same regiment class that
Speaker 1: we had to get waivers because we were too old
Speaker 1: to go to the Command in General Staff College, because
Speaker 1: we were getting we were already majors, right, and and
Speaker 1: so General Botel reached in again to my life and
Speaker 1: you know, signed a letter to get us into the
Speaker 1: Command of General Staff College. And I was fortunate enough
Speaker 1: to also be offered the SOCOM Interagency Studies Program, where
Speaker 1: I got to spend you know, really a year in
Speaker 1: the basement with some truly impressive you know special operators,
Speaker 1: Green Berets, Seals, you know, rangers, you know, a couple
Speaker 1: of Special Mission Unit guys, only twenty of them in
Speaker 1: the cohort, and we lived together trying to understand how
Speaker 1: best to interface with all of these three and four
Speaker 1: letter agencies while conducting overseas operations.
Speaker 4: And that was you know, the g WAT was really
Speaker 4: the first time that there was a lose relationships right times.
Speaker 4: But really the gyt put put jasock and so used
Speaker 4: to sock whatever in ned with the agent because they
Speaker 4: both realized how much they needed each other.
Speaker 1: Lots of lots of and I hate to use the
Speaker 1: word synergies, but but yeah, there was a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of venn diagramming of what we were working
Speaker 1: on and how we could help each other there. And
Speaker 1: we were starting in those days to understand how technology
Speaker 1: can tear us apart and bring us together. And that's
Speaker 1: the days when we started building you know, so us
Speaker 1: NEETs and Socrates and you know, coming off the giants
Speaker 1: and you know, stuff like that, and so it was
Speaker 1: really interesting to watch those different organizations try to tear
Speaker 1: down those barriers in order to integrate the intelligence picture,
Speaker 1: in order to optimize the effects on the ground.
Speaker 4: I know, we kind of skipped we're at the college
Speaker 4: now that I wanted those five years that you are
Speaker 4: and remen especially in headquarters as so a lot of
Speaker 4: things you're talking about did not exist when I was
Speaker 4: free done right, they they were We had mortars and snipers, right,
Speaker 4: and so.
Speaker 1: That's plenty to keep you busy, by the way, But
Speaker 1: what I mean.
Speaker 4: Is is that the regiment very much like professionalized very much,
Speaker 4: you realize the things that it needed and grew up
Speaker 4: to be more than just the light infantry. We lead
Speaker 4: into the best night entery in the world, the shock
Speaker 4: troops right for airfield seizures. What what were some of
Speaker 4: the things when you were there, What were some things.
Speaker 1: That you were impressed by?
Speaker 4: What were some of the biggest growths you saw where
Speaker 4: regiment really came into it.
Speaker 1: Sound yeah, so I think you know, the eight hundred
Speaker 1: pound gorilla is what it's commonly referred to, right, so,
Speaker 1: Range a regiment, the eight hundred pound gorilla of the
Speaker 1: Special Operations community. Because the GAT and the op tempo
Speaker 1: and the area that we were at, we couldn't just
Speaker 1: have you know, unit platoons out there, you know, three
Speaker 1: or four of them, you know, we needed thirty of them,
Speaker 1: and well you can't grow you know, a special operations
Speaker 1: team overnight. And we were even trying to grow the
Speaker 1: regiment in those days. Delta companies you know, started coming
Speaker 1: online in the days that I was there, and we
Speaker 1: were trying to grow Ranger.
Speaker 3: Well, what we were were.
Speaker 1: Doing was essentially taking a platoon from the three companies
Speaker 1: and you know taking you know, just baking, basically making
Speaker 1: two platoon companies to make a D squadron and then trying.
Speaker 3: To bring in more ranger and build them.
Speaker 1: And the soft truth is you just can't make them
Speaker 1: fast enough, right, which is why I'm really interested in
Speaker 1: the longevity of the operator, which is why I'm really
Speaker 1: interested in respiratory care. But that was I think that
Speaker 1: the transition is wasn't a like Mission Creep. It wasn't
Speaker 1: the regiment trying to get a little bit more like
Speaker 1: an SMU. It was more the regiment was asked to
Speaker 1: perform more of those functions, and so the regiment did
Speaker 1: what the regiment does, It responds to its nation's call,
Speaker 1: and it started to professionalize those teams to do those
Speaker 1: particular functions and thus multiplied the effect. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: not be too specific on there, and I think I know.
Speaker 2: A little bit about like what you're the road you're
Speaker 2: going down, And I think something that's really impressive about
Speaker 2: the ranger regiment, you know, that you're alluding to, is
Speaker 2: like when there's a problem, when there's a task, they
Speaker 2: really can and will throw a bunch of highly motivated
Speaker 2: rangers onto a problem, and sure we can be knuckleheads
Speaker 2: at times, but eventually they get to the right answer.
Speaker 2: You know, they really do put themselves into it and
Speaker 2: fix the glitch, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1: Whatever tribe you come out of, you know, before you
Speaker 1: go into an SMU, I find that the same caliber
Speaker 1: that's in the SMU is just the same caliber you've
Speaker 1: got in the tribe you came from. There's just more
Speaker 1: concentration right at the SMU. And so to your point,
Speaker 1: that level of competency and that level of proficiency in
Speaker 1: those functions, that which you know is basically direct rate.
Speaker 1: I mean, these are direct raids in urban environments and
Speaker 1: wherever it needs to be. So this is the world's
Speaker 1: premiere rainforce, the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment. We come in
Speaker 1: and we come out yeah fast.
Speaker 2: But then as time goes on, I mean you have
Speaker 2: rangers with beards and you know, cruising around doing intel
Speaker 2: stuff that the public doesn't really associate the Ranger Regiment with.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the the relaxed grooming standards, which in those days
Speaker 1: we would tell you it wasn't a relaxed grooming standard.
Speaker 1: We were just meeting the Army standard, right, we just
Speaker 1: weren't didn't have high yet, you didn't have to have
Speaker 1: the high entire four inch in landing strip on the top,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the you know what I thought
Speaker 1: of as rangers for you get four inches for those
Speaker 1: who don't know, you know, which is high and tight
Speaker 1: basically relaxed grooming standards. Well, they weren't relaxed grooming standards.
Speaker 1: We just met the army standard, right uh. And then
Speaker 1: the types of missions that the rangers needed to do
Speaker 1: in order to gain the fidelity on the target required
Speaker 1: that we grow some of those capabilities. Now like r
Speaker 1: r D has always been you know, the Range of
Speaker 1: Reconstance Detachment has always been a thing. It was r
Speaker 1: r C, you know, the Range of Reconstance Company for
Speaker 1: the years before I got there, but that has always
Speaker 1: been there for the regimental commander. And then we started
Speaker 1: to then professionalize those forces and make them even more
Speaker 1: competent at the battalion level to tie into those ideas.
Speaker 1: And then technology just forces us to you know, get
Speaker 1: away from green face reki for a while, you know,
Speaker 1: camouflage in the woods. And and what was interesting about
Speaker 1: that is by the time I now you know, take
Speaker 1: command with you know, Adam Nash and h AC one
Speaker 1: seventy five. When I come through there, you know, Adam
Speaker 1: and I have these hilarious conversations about we're having to
Speaker 1: teach rangers how to put on camouflage right and do
Speaker 1: patrol based activities right, Like how do you put up
Speaker 1: a poncho hoo?
Speaker 3: You know, how do you stay?
Speaker 1: How do you sustain yourself in a hole in a
Speaker 1: hide sight for two or three days?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: These were things we had been raised. His guys have
Speaker 1: been doing urban warfare for these guys have been doing CQB,
Speaker 1: you know, running and gun in and assaultman shirts and
Speaker 1: so more college and then you make your way to
Speaker 1: Commanded General Staff College. Ye, thank you, major school and
Speaker 1: then twenty fifth Infantry. Oh why yeah? How do how
Speaker 1: do you end up there?
Speaker 3: What's uh? What assignment do you land in there?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So I did not want to go back to the
Speaker 3: conventional army.
Speaker 1: I did not. I was. I was doing everything humanly
Speaker 1: possible to you know, keep touching the dragon and riding it.
Speaker 1: I went to rasp too, or rasp Il is what
Speaker 1: they call it now. So it's where majors go at
Speaker 1: Il to compete to go back as a field grade
Speaker 1: inside of the regiment, made it to the final four
Speaker 1: and and and wasn't selected. Uh and and because I
Speaker 1: wasn't selected, I walked out of that room. And you know,
Speaker 1: I was fortunate enough to get offered a job by
Speaker 1: Marcus Evans to go to second Brigade twenty fifth I
Speaker 1: d and and and being his team, which was truly
Speaker 1: humbling and and so I took that opportunity, as you know,
Speaker 1: if I, if I can't be in the Ranger regiment,
Speaker 1: Uh well, actually what I should say is my plan
Speaker 1: was to then go to the Long Walk in the
Speaker 1: Spring if I couldn't be in the Ranger regimen.
Speaker 3: And so I got my age waiver.
Speaker 1: And I remember coming home from not being selected and
Speaker 1: from you know, having a quick phone call with Colonel
Speaker 1: Marcus or Colonel Evans at two o'clock in the morning
Speaker 1: my time, right, you know, like noon his time, and
Speaker 1: sitting on the stairs in my in my you know,
Speaker 1: Fort Leavenworth, you know BOQ with my wife you know there, and.
Speaker 3: She goes, well, all right, what's next?
Speaker 1: And I was like long Walk in the Spring, you know,
Speaker 1: and she goes, okay, now may not be the right
Speaker 1: time to have this conversation. But you're a little bit
Speaker 1: older than most majors here, you know, you've got eighteen
Speaker 1: years or not like sixteen years or something like that.
Speaker 3: Then, you know, just to clarify for people.
Speaker 1: Out there when we say like a little old.
Speaker 2: Not exactly an old man, what's considered a little bit older.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point. So in twenty thirteen, I
Speaker 1: would have been thirty six, one foot in the grave, yeah, debt, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: dead and special operations down right?
Speaker 3: Two retirement right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, really, I mean really yeah, right for an eighteen
Speaker 1: year old. I had to get a waiver even to
Speaker 1: go to selection because I was older, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe thirty eight is the breakoff point or something. Now,
Speaker 1: so we got the waiver and everyone, most guys coming
Speaker 1: out of the regiment at the waiver and I remember her,
Speaker 1: you know, her saying, Okay, So you've got a lot
Speaker 1: of buddies who have now done this and you know,
Speaker 1: had the same experiences you have. You know, we're some
Speaker 1: of them a lot more successfully than you have. H
Speaker 1: What happens if you go to selection, not that you fail,
Speaker 1: but you get selected and then you wash out of OTC,
Speaker 1: which is what was happening to most of my peers, right, Like,
Speaker 1: just because you get the opportunity to go and try
Speaker 1: out for the big leagues, it doesn't mean that you're
Speaker 1: going to make it. And I watched a lot of
Speaker 1: you know, of my peers who are way better than
Speaker 1: me get selected go to OTC, wash out and OTC. Well,
Speaker 1: when you've got a few years in your timeline to
Speaker 1: play with, that's okay. But I was at the point
Speaker 1: where if I didn't KD, if I didn't get a
Speaker 1: key development job as a major, meaning a battalion XO
Speaker 1: or S three job in some unit, I wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel, which means
Speaker 1: I was going to miss my window for colonel, which
Speaker 1: means I wasn't going to get a battalian command, which
Speaker 1: means and you just start seeing the downward trajectory of
Speaker 1: I'm going to be exiting this career very quickly.
Speaker 3: Right, I'm a stress being an officer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it can be if you mismanage your career
Speaker 1: as badly as I.
Speaker 3: I always did what I want, and now what was
Speaker 3: I supposed to do?
Speaker 1: And so she goes, Hey, how about she goes so
Speaker 1: if you go to selection and you get selected and
Speaker 1: you wash out of OTC, what happens? And I said,
Speaker 1: I'm probably being riffed. You know, Force retired as a
Speaker 1: major at eighteen years And she looked at me and
Speaker 1: she said, how about you take one for the family? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I was like, that's that's a fair ask, right, right,
Speaker 1: It's a fair ask. And so I then looked at
Speaker 1: every you know, all kinds of other organizations to see
Speaker 1: if it was going to be a better idea. But
Speaker 1: in the end, I begrudgingly went back to the light infantry,
Speaker 1: not airborne, not aerosolt.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: I'd never been in a straight leg infantry unit in
Speaker 1: my entire career, and it was the best experience of
Speaker 1: my career, of my entire career. Being a battalion XO
Speaker 1: in the twenty fifth Infantry Division was my favorite job.
Speaker 3: It was the first to AS's a great question.
Speaker 1: It was the first time, I think it was the
Speaker 1: first time that I knew what to do. I had
Speaker 1: been trained in how to do it, and I was
Speaker 1: given the authority to make it happen. Right, you have
Speaker 1: some motorship over this, right, and so you know, for
Speaker 1: those who may not have served at a know, a
Speaker 1: senior league level in the battalion or brigade. You know,
Speaker 1: the battalion commander is the boss, right, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: want to do the job of the battalion XO or
Speaker 1: the Italian operations officer to the battalion S three, And
Speaker 1: so those two are intended to be, you know, autonomous
Speaker 1: making decisions, you know, within the intent of their commander, right.
Speaker 3: And so it was the first time.
Speaker 1: So I'm a two IC second in command of a
Speaker 1: rifle battalion in the twenty fifth Infantry Division.
Speaker 3: I know how to be.
Speaker 1: A better S one than my S one because she's
Speaker 1: been in the army for twelve months, right, literally eighteen
Speaker 1: months by the time she gets here.
Speaker 3: You know, she's learning her role.
Speaker 1: I've done that for a long time. I know how
Speaker 1: to do target packages better than my S two, who's
Speaker 1: fresh out of his Military Intelligence captain's career course.
Speaker 3: And so as you walk through a battalion level staff.
Speaker 1: You're walking through the growth of leadership occurring at every door.
Speaker 1: And I really found that I loved it, that I
Speaker 1: truly loved, you know, mentoring and teaching these younger officers
Speaker 1: the things that I didn't need them to learn right,
Speaker 1: like I learned these lessons, Please don't relearn them. Let
Speaker 1: me help you get through this. And it was a
Speaker 1: pivotal moment in my leadership growth as an officer because
Speaker 1: I had kind of grown up in a pretty high pressure,
Speaker 1: you know, high intensity environment. You know, the term toxic
Speaker 1: leadership probably comes from our community, right, and we know
Speaker 1: that it's effective, not necessarily the right way, but it
Speaker 1: can be effective right, and really high performing teams can
Speaker 1: also be terrible to be on right. But that experience,
Speaker 1: I decided, I don't think you have to do it
Speaker 1: that way.
Speaker 3: I don't think it has to be that way.
Speaker 1: I think you can do it differently. And I got
Speaker 1: the opportunity to really test that idea because I just
Speaker 1: didn't want to be that.
Speaker 3: Person to my people.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, when I was getting you know,
Speaker 1: you know, beat down by my majors rightfully, so by
Speaker 1: the way, I was a cluster fuck. And so when
Speaker 1: I'm getting beat down by my majors, I didn't want
Speaker 1: to beat down captain. I wanted to build my captain,
Speaker 1: and so I wanted to have a different approach to that.
Speaker 1: And it changed my leadership style forever. I wanted to
Speaker 1: teach you everything that I knew, not beat you over
Speaker 1: the things you were supposed to know. So did you
Speaker 1: have a good time out there in Hawaii?
Speaker 2: I had a blast, other than just the job, of
Speaker 2: which sounds like you had a good time, sort of rewarding.
Speaker 1: Most of what I did was the job. From there,
Speaker 1: I did go to the Brigade XO. We do Pacific pathways, right,
Speaker 1: did Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia. Yeah? Yeah, So I was fortunate enough,
Speaker 1: after being a Battalion XO to then get the opportunity
Speaker 1: to be a Brigade XO in that same brigade. Not
Speaker 1: as much fun because you don't spend as much time
Speaker 1: with the you know, the young officers and the NCOs
Speaker 1: down on the line doing the deed, but another really
Speaker 1: rewarding experience because now I'm leading a staff of my peers,
Speaker 1: you know, and so I've got you know, now, the
Speaker 1: S one is one of the best S ones in
Speaker 1: the army, you know. Now the S two is this
Speaker 1: is their k D job, their key development job is
Speaker 1: a major right, and so now I get to learn
Speaker 1: the lesson that leading down and mentoring down. It's actually
Speaker 1: kind of easy right, Like, people will do what you
Speaker 1: pay them to do in the end. And so leading
Speaker 1: down can be pretty simple, right. Leading up, you know,
Speaker 1: getting your boss to one hundred percent align with your
Speaker 1: vision and said like, that can be hard, right, But
Speaker 1: getting your peers to come online with you and to
Speaker 1: you know, drive together as a team like that, that
Speaker 1: is the hardest form of leadership. I think you can
Speaker 1: imagine and and and As a brigade, you know, field grade,
Speaker 1: you have to be able to lead your peers. And
Speaker 1: I filled so many times, and I had so many successes,
Speaker 1: but all of that really grew into us going to
Speaker 1: this Pacific Pathways experience where we deploy the brigade into
Speaker 1: the theater to conduct mutual training exercises with these other
Speaker 1: partner nations. How did you accomplish that?
Speaker 2: I mean as far as getting your peers, as we'd
Speaker 2: say in the military, on the same sheet of music.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think the way that it is I learned,
Speaker 1: I think because it definitely didn't happen the first couple
Speaker 1: couple of times.
Speaker 3: If you can get everyone.
Speaker 1: To envision what it looks like when you've successfully completed
Speaker 1: the task. So the effect I'm trying to achieve is X.
Speaker 1: And the more detailed you can be with what success
Speaker 1: looks like. And I would get as you know, my
Speaker 1: ADHD brain would get as focused as when you hit
Speaker 1: that corner, take a knee and pull security and then
Speaker 1: call set position one. You have personally achieved my decisive
Speaker 1: point like that kind of I need you to do it.
Speaker 1: I need you do in vision what this looks like,
Speaker 1: what success is and when you can paint that vision
Speaker 1: and then surround yourself with people that you trust, that
Speaker 1: you've you've built and empowered to make every decision within
Speaker 1: the limits of their comfort. Another Mike fosterism. I got
Speaker 1: to call him, you know, so you know, when you
Speaker 1: give them that trust and and they have the authority
Speaker 1: to make those decisions and they agree to the vision
Speaker 1: and they've bought into that, they'll do it better than
Speaker 1: you ever could.
Speaker 4: Right, And so did the twenty fifth? Did they do
Speaker 4: a deployment during this time while you were there?
Speaker 1: So we did the Pacific Pathways was considered a deployment
Speaker 1: that this was almost getting a little post gyt now right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did a JR TC rotation which I did not
Speaker 1: get to do because I blew my knee out. Also,
Speaker 1: another leadership experience, first time Scott Kelly, the brigade commander.
Speaker 1: They're a former unit member. He walked up and he said,
Speaker 1: you're never going to be the same again. You're breakable now,
Speaker 1: and he was one hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, once one
Speaker 1: thing goes and it all starts going down.
Speaker 4: Do you do you think because you did have a
Speaker 4: combat scroll and you know, in addition to.
Speaker 3: One on one in the eight second, did you wear
Speaker 3: your combat scroll?
Speaker 1: Do you know? Do you remember? No?
Speaker 3: No, I did I wore combat scroll.
Speaker 1: I wore Well it's as well no.
Speaker 3: It depended on where I was at. But but the.
Speaker 4: Reason I'm asking is obviously there's whether it's real or not.
Speaker 4: There there is a presumed i think authority and expertise,
Speaker 4: right that goes along with having a combat scroll or
Speaker 4: a combat SF or you.
Speaker 3: Know what I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that that when you when you were in a
Speaker 4: conventional unit. Does that help you when you are talking
Speaker 4: to people, were they they're they're automatically giving you, uh
Speaker 4: like credibility?
Speaker 1: Yes, and I think it's a double edged sword, but yes,
Speaker 1: so one I would say my my personal rule was
Speaker 1: I wore the last patch of the unit that I
Speaker 1: went that I deployed with, right, unless I was assigned
Speaker 1: to a unit that I had a combat patch from. Okay,
Speaker 1: So if I was to be reassigned to the eighty second,
Speaker 1: I would wear eighty second in stereo. Like I'm very
Speaker 1: proud of my eighty second combat patch.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If I was in the one hundred and first, I
Speaker 1: would wear one hundred first in stereo. I'm very proud
Speaker 1: of that combat patch. The last unit I deployed to
Speaker 1: combat with and that I saw combat with was the
Speaker 1: first Ranger between you didn't have a twenty fifth ID
Speaker 1: patch and the Yeah, and in the AWG. I never
Speaker 1: heard a shot fired in anger, thank god. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't get that opportunity.
Speaker 2: Tell us, tell us about that starting to you know you,
Speaker 2: I believe the trajectory here is that you had a
Speaker 2: job and then that got changed. Kind of there's a
Speaker 2: rug pull unfortunately. Yeah, you were trying to find a
Speaker 2: way to stay in Hawaii. But tell us about how
Speaker 2: the Asymmetrical Warfare Group came about for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so thank you for tying that back together for me.
Speaker 1: So I run into Task Force IED in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three in Iraq, Right, and then they grow throughout
Speaker 1: the years. I actually have them assigned to one of
Speaker 1: my patrols in Afghanistan as a company commander. You know,
Speaker 1: two guys come out of Iraq and so I get
Speaker 1: to kind of touch them again a little bit and
Speaker 1: kind of see what they're doing. And then I was
Speaker 1: leaving my brig I left my brigade XO time and
Speaker 1: I was fortunate enough to get a follow on assignment
Speaker 1: as the Brigade Operations Officer for the one ninety six
Speaker 1: JP M r C SO Joint Pacific. I'm gonna screw
Speaker 1: this one up Readiness center, but it basically it's a
Speaker 1: deployable Sure, I'll take one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a Deployable.
Speaker 1: Training Center or NTC j RTC package that goes to
Speaker 1: the units that are signed to INDO PACON and so
Speaker 1: into Paycon literally a place of tyranny of distance, and
Speaker 1: so instead of moving those units to a national training.
Speaker 3: Center, we go to them. Thank you, sir, I appreciate you.
Speaker 1: And I was in that unit as the Brigade Operations Officer,
Speaker 1: which I was very thankful for the opportunity because I
Speaker 1: hadn't had any OPS experience as a field grade officer.
Speaker 1: I'd been alarm. I'd been an EXO in a battalion,
Speaker 1: and I'd actually wanted to be the EXO in the brigade.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be the three. And so I
Speaker 1: got the opportunity now to kind of round out my
Speaker 1: experiences and go be a brigade operations officer. And I
Speaker 1: was supposed to be a two year assignment that would
Speaker 1: keep me on island on Hawaii, so my family would
Speaker 1: be stable. I didn't want to move my kids, you know,
Speaker 1: anymore than I had to, and we loved the islands
Speaker 1: that we didn't want to live. Yeah, I learned how
Speaker 1: to I learned. I really I really learned how to
Speaker 1: surf there, you know, like I really enjoyed it. And
Speaker 1: about I was in Indonesia at the time with the
Speaker 1: one ninety six. Then we were with the twenty fifth
Speaker 1: actually at that point, and my branch manager called me
Speaker 1: and said, hey, the code on your billet has been
Speaker 1: changed from an infantry officer to an armor officer and
Speaker 1: we're going to need you to find another job next year.
Speaker 1: And I was like, well, find another job means those
Speaker 1: jobs are closed right now because we've already filled them out.
Speaker 1: And so to find another job I'm gonna have to
Speaker 1: leave Hawaii, and he was like, more than likely bad news, right,
Speaker 1: and so so in essence, and I'll just truncate this so.
Speaker 3: We don't have to belabor officer timelines.
Speaker 1: But you know, in the end, you know, when when
Speaker 1: you're trying to get a battalion command, your window gets
Speaker 1: real short and people start driving you to positions. So
Speaker 1: you've got to go to pre command. Course, you've got
Speaker 1: to go to pre coote in the organization. You know,
Speaker 1: ideally you've been in that organization before. You know, Usually
Speaker 1: the chief of Staff, at least from my understanding, likes
Speaker 1: to place commanders who have lots of experience in those
Speaker 1: units as battalion commanders because we want you to be
Speaker 1: successful day one on the job, right. We don't want
Speaker 1: you to learn the proclivities of you know, training in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: which is really hard to train in, right, you know,
Speaker 1: we I want you to understand those things inside now.
Speaker 1: And so I just did my reverse career when I
Speaker 1: applied for a battalion command, and there was that one
Speaker 1: year that I was supposed to be stable before I
Speaker 1: did that PCC battalion command, et cetera. Well, now I
Speaker 1: lose that year, and he goes, I'll tell you what, Jay,
Speaker 1: And this is a guy I was in the one
Speaker 1: hundred and first with as my branch commander or branch
Speaker 1: branch manager.
Speaker 3: He goes, I'll tell you what. If you can find
Speaker 3: anything on island, anything on.
Speaker 1: Island with a you know, an eleven Alpha four, you know,
Speaker 1: bill it pill an infantry officer at the major level,
Speaker 1: I'll give it to you just for stability. And so
Speaker 1: I immediately went and started to look for something that
Speaker 1: was nominative or had a selection involved in it, so
Speaker 1: that I could lock it in with branch right, because
Speaker 1: if you get invited to a selection or you get nominated,
Speaker 1: I don't have to go through this, you know, submitting
Speaker 1: my packet and you know, kind of a resume selection.
Speaker 1: And so I went down what was available, and the
Speaker 1: only thing that I could find on island that had
Speaker 1: a selection that would you know, make it where I
Speaker 1: could go compete was this Asymmetric Warfare Group, you know,
Speaker 1: senior strategy advisor to Indo pay Com. I have no
Speaker 1: idea what this job means. I have no idea what
Speaker 1: the unit does. I've heard of it before. I've sent
Speaker 1: guys I've approved guy's packets to go and try out
Speaker 1: for it. Most of them were returned, you know, without
Speaker 1: being selected, and it just this, it's this weird little
Speaker 1: corner of the world that I've never seen except once
Speaker 1: or twice. And I was like, fine, it's got a
Speaker 1: selection that keeps me on island, I'll go for it.
Speaker 1: And so submitted my packet and then followed it right
Speaker 1: up with the recruiter and said, hey, did you get
Speaker 1: my package? Did you get my RB? He was like
Speaker 1: I did, And I was like, are you interested? And
Speaker 1: he's like, we are. And I was like, would you
Speaker 1: be willing to call branch and tell them that if
Speaker 1: I don't shit the bet on the on selection that
Speaker 1: you want me And he was like, I would let
Speaker 1: me talk to a couple of people. Right, it's hard
Speaker 1: to get a staff guy that you know, that has
Speaker 1: some of those experiences to go want to do aft job,
Speaker 1: and for me to be on island. That worked for me,
Speaker 1: and so I kind of accidentally fell into going to
Speaker 1: selection for the Asymmetric Warfare Group and so I went
Speaker 1: to support selections.
Speaker 2: So after that, as we talked about already, you really
Speaker 2: didn't know what the hell this unit did so before
Speaker 2: we get into what it does, Yeah, tell us about selection.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so I'll Yeah, I'm not gonna talk a
Speaker 1: whole lot about it because it is it is designed
Speaker 1: to allow you to work through those things in the moment,
Speaker 1: like solving a lot of problems, solving, but also how
Speaker 1: you think through problems. And I'm gonna do not do
Speaker 1: this justice because there are guys who absolutely know this
Speaker 1: better than me. So I forgive, I forget. I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about the guys down at a A A WTC that
Speaker 1: built that thing a smash warfare training center, forgive me,
Speaker 1: as I butcher your your your baby here. But I
Speaker 1: believe the distinction is it's it's slightly less physical, but
Speaker 1: it's extremely intellectual and it's extremely mental. And so we
Speaker 1: want to see how you're going to make decisions. We
Speaker 1: want to see why you're going to make decisions we're
Speaker 1: going to We want to see if you can connect
Speaker 1: the dots, you know, So you get a piece of
Speaker 1: information here, you get a product there, you get an
Speaker 1: idea here. Can you connect the dots and then can
Speaker 1: you take that problem that you've just identified connect the
Speaker 1: dots on the effect that we'll have on an organization
Speaker 1: that's confronting that and then develop a solution for that problem,
Speaker 1: and then go get it in through the training and
Speaker 1: doctrine elements so that by the time you know, sons
Speaker 1: and daughters are showing up to contend with that asymmetric threat,
Speaker 1: they've been trained, prepared, armed to deal with.
Speaker 2: That's actually a pretty heavy lift getting an institution the
Speaker 2: size of the Army to change, you know, identifying problem
Speaker 2: through and forcing new.
Speaker 4: Doctrines, especially before it's like ten years after the fact, right,
Speaker 4: you know, like it before it's like a lessons learned.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's change.
Speaker 1: Things right, right, And so the the easy way to
Speaker 1: explain the Asymmetric Warfare Group is it's it's the Army's scouts,
Speaker 1: and so they want to make sure and these guys
Speaker 1: do it. They did do it better than anyone and
Speaker 1: most of them are still out there doing different stuff.
Speaker 1: But their job is to ensure the United States military
Speaker 1: is not surprised again, right by whatever it is. And
Speaker 1: so IEDs, electronic warfare, information warfare, you know, UGVs and UAVs,
Speaker 1: you know, all of these technologies that we take for
Speaker 1: granted can be their dual technologies and they can be
Speaker 1: weaponized against us. And so we go to where conflict
Speaker 1: is occurring and we observe how as I used to say,
Speaker 1: you know how we're using the kitchen sink in order
Speaker 1: to solve problems, right, right, so just tactical problems are occurring,
Speaker 1: how are the x berts on the ground who are
Speaker 1: dealing with that problem daily dealing with that problem? Right?
Speaker 3: And what lessons can we extract from that?
Speaker 1: And then what dot milk PLP, you know, doctrine, training,
Speaker 1: leadership facilities, the whole system that builds a service member
Speaker 1: from you know, a civilian to a warrior with the
Speaker 1: tools they need to be able to shoot, move and
Speaker 1: communicate on that battlefield.
Speaker 4: It's interesting too because just from an from an outsider
Speaker 4: point of view, you know, like they started out like
Speaker 4: you say, as Task Force ID, which is you know,
Speaker 4: they're out there in the early part of the GAT
Speaker 4: collecting up samples, creating products of like this is what
Speaker 4: to watch out for.
Speaker 3: These are some of the TTPs they were.
Speaker 4: They were going out and collecting up the individual like
Speaker 4: everything they could and then trying to disperse it to
Speaker 4: the white and then then a little bit later in
Speaker 4: the gut, you know, you see these guys come in
Speaker 4: who are all like former operators or former you know,
Speaker 4: former former soft guys or whatever.
Speaker 3: Sure, who are now like going out with.
Speaker 4: These conventional units and almost like an almost like an
Speaker 4: assistant advisor, right.
Speaker 1: Well, and and literally the title of those guys is
Speaker 1: operational advisor, right. And they go on the ground and
Speaker 1: they say, these are the lessons that we've learned in
Speaker 1: other places that are applicable here, and these are the
Speaker 1: things that we're going to take from this and apply elsewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of the most humbling collections of experts.
Speaker 1: And when I say my heroes, I mean like guys
Speaker 1: who did the Pablo Escobar hits. Yeah, you know, guys
Speaker 1: who are in some of the most storied operations of
Speaker 1: the special Operations communities.
Speaker 2: Does it bring in obviously active duty, but also contractors
Speaker 2: and almost so you have a blending of SF ranger
Speaker 2: uh jasok guys.
Speaker 1: Who else was in the mix? So to make it simple,
Speaker 1: there was literally no tribe or no color unrepresented. Yeah.
Speaker 3: None, Like even though we didn't.
Speaker 1: Pull seals on the m too, we had seals as contractor.
Speaker 3: Do do you know how that evolution happened?
Speaker 4: I know it was before your time, but you know
Speaker 4: how that evolution happened from T F I A D
Speaker 4: to somebody going this this deserve more clarity and more attention.
Speaker 1: I believe, you know, General Votel for sure, but General
Speaker 1: Cody also took an active interest in this in his time,
Speaker 1: I think, and I should if I ever get the
Speaker 1: opportunity to talk to General Botel again, I'll probably ask
Speaker 1: him this. At this point, we have kind of a
Speaker 1: storied connection to Once an Eagle as an officer corp,
Speaker 1: particularly in the range of regiment. So you know, Once
Speaker 1: in Eagle is just this book that it's almost require
Speaker 1: reading right next to Starship Troopers for any infantry officer.
Speaker 1: Right the book, not the movie. The book's awesome. And
Speaker 1: inside of Once an Eagle, Sad Sam Damon, the lead character,
Speaker 1: he literally goes to communist China before the war, before
Speaker 1: World War two, embeds with these, as it says in
Speaker 1: the book, you know, these guys are eating a handful
Speaker 1: of rice and living, you know, wearing slippers and running
Speaker 1: through the mountains in twenty degree below weather with you know,
Speaker 1: T shirts on, and they're winning. Like how is that possible?
Speaker 1: And Sad Sam damon, who's you know this pre war
Speaker 1: you know captain in the Philippines, you know, an infantry
Speaker 1: captain gets told to go and in bed with that
Speaker 1: organization and understand that we are seeing a different kind
Speaker 1: of warfare here than we are prepared to fight as
Speaker 1: an American institutional army. And it's got this new thing
Speaker 1: called guerrilla warfare, right, And so sad Sam goes and
Speaker 1: he embeds with that organization and he extracts all the
Speaker 1: lessons that if we are are going to be successful
Speaker 1: against a guerrilla warfare campaign, these are the things we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to train differently, and that we have different equipment,
Speaker 1: you know, different ideas, different doctrine, and he writes this
Speaker 1: huge book about it, right, And the character Sad Sam
Speaker 1: comes back to the Philippines to his commanding officer and
Speaker 1: he hands him all the lessons of the big after
Speaker 1: action review, right, and the commanding officer shoves it in and
Speaker 1: a desk and close the door and we all move
Speaker 1: on to World War two.
Speaker 3: That's never seen again, right, right.
Speaker 1: And so what I believe General Votel in General Cody,
Speaker 1: we're trying to you know, really CODIFY was a learning
Speaker 1: organization for the Army, right, you know, the army is
Speaker 1: a learning organization, right, and so some people called it
Speaker 1: the Army's consultants. But I think that was a little bit,
Speaker 1: you know, a little bit tongue in cheek. But what
Speaker 1: he wanted to do was he wanted to increase the
Speaker 1: deployment or the rapid deployment of capability that we needed
Speaker 1: to fight this breathing, living war that was occurring.
Speaker 3: In multiple countries.
Speaker 1: He's in the Middle East at that point, you know, Iraq, Syria,
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: Just one more question about that, because you said that
Speaker 4: when you a company commander, right with one O. First, Uh,
Speaker 4: when I was a platoon and that these that you know,
Speaker 4: these two A A w G guys were with you,
Speaker 4: how how does that that?
Speaker 3: In the eighty second? I did they have? Yeah? Sorry
Speaker 3: in the second?
Speaker 4: How do these guys out on a combat patrol who
Speaker 4: are advising but also learning. They're also like there to
Speaker 4: take in what's going on, right, but they're also advising.
Speaker 3: How how does that work?
Speaker 1: You know, Uh, it's it's really hard. So how do you,
Speaker 1: as a let's say Master sergeant or or sergeant major
Speaker 1: operational advisor from the aw G how do you embed
Speaker 1: into a company or platoon without assuming command right right,
Speaker 1: without or without undermined right the command. And it's a
Speaker 1: really tricky position, and you know, gray beards do it best,
Speaker 1: which is why I love some of those contractors that
Speaker 1: can come in and do that. But it's a very
Speaker 1: slippery slope of understanding when you're advising the young captain
Speaker 1: and you're mentoring the young captain and never getting on
Speaker 1: his command mic right, things like that. So I just
Speaker 1: little tricks to the trade of giving suggestions to the
Speaker 1: leadership while leading by example with the soldiers right, That
Speaker 1: would be I think the best way I would answer
Speaker 1: is fascinating. It really is really hard, really hard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I screwed it up a couple of times. Tell us
Speaker 1: about Baker Squadron. So I was selected for the AWG position,
Speaker 1: which you know, it felt like kind of a you know, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I go out there and be a staff officer man. Well,
Speaker 3: in my.
Speaker 1: Board at the aw G, the last question I was
Speaker 1: telling you guys before and the last question on the
Speaker 1: packet was you know, who do you know? And I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know anybody in this organization. I
Speaker 1: had no idea I knew everybody in the board, you know.
Speaker 1: I knew the commander, I knew the commander major. I
Speaker 1: knew it like I just knew everybody by reputation, if
Speaker 1: not personally. And in fact, the DCO is a personal
Speaker 1: friend of mine. And at the end of that, the commander,
Speaker 1: who I had known for about ten years, you know
Speaker 1: from previous stuff, he said, a j I want you
Speaker 1: to pick up I don't remember what they call it now,
Speaker 1: but it's like, you know, one package, package one or
Speaker 1: something like that. And I was like, okay, whatever, package one.
Speaker 1: Good to see us her walking out of here. And
Speaker 1: I hit my buddy and I was like, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: the boss said to draw package one. What do you want?
Speaker 1: What does that mean? You know? And he goes, it's
Speaker 1: operator kit. He wants you in full load, not computers.
Speaker 1: He wants you with you know, draw your kit. And
Speaker 1: I was like, I thought he said I was going
Speaker 1: to be in bed at night when I and he
Speaker 1: was like, I don't know, man, he wants you to
Speaker 1: have operator kit. Get operator kid. So I went down
Speaker 1: and it was like you know, kid in a candy store.
Speaker 1: Because the Asymmetric Warfare Group had every bit of experimentation
Speaker 1: and testing whatever you can think about. And so when
Speaker 1: you walk in and say, you know, I need to
Speaker 1: pick up CRY, They're like, well, do you want cry
Speaker 1: or do you want Patagonia? Do you want Patagonia or
Speaker 1: want our tariks like it comes in different camos if
Speaker 1: you want it, you know, so you get to choose
Speaker 1: the things you want, which that was a lot of
Speaker 1: fun for me. I hadn't done that in a while.
Speaker 1: And then I go out to Hawaii where I'm supposed
Speaker 1: to be, you know, in meetings during the day, being
Speaker 1: the eyes in the years of the command and then
Speaker 1: basically reporting back and saying you should put guys here,
Speaker 1: you should put guys there, we should get teams in
Speaker 1: these locations, right. And I got a phone call maybe
Speaker 1: a week or so later, and one of the team
Speaker 1: sergeants was like, you know, one of the troop sergeants,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, It was like, hey, would you be will
Speaker 1: to go to the Philippines with us? We need an
Speaker 1: officer who knows how to do you know, like a
Speaker 1: live fire planning exercise and so that, you know, I.
Speaker 3: Was like, I'd love to go to the Philippines.
Speaker 1: I've never been to the Philippines and the next thing,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm getting broken in by a troop sergeant major,
Speaker 1: you know, going through Korea and Thailand and the Philippines
Speaker 1: and Malaysia and Indonesia. And so I became the Chief
Speaker 1: of Strategy for the Asymmetric Warfare Group, which was my
Speaker 1: official title, but really I was reporting to Baker Squadron
Speaker 1: Asymmetric Warfare Group because they owned the Indo Pacific Area
Speaker 1: of operations. And so the Asymmetric Warfare Group wasn't broken
Speaker 1: down necessarily by region, it was broken down by threat
Speaker 1: and so Baker Squadron was PRC, you know, China focused, right,
Speaker 1: Able Squadron was Russia focused, and so different squadrons have
Speaker 1: different threat focus and they build on those threats with
Speaker 1: those interested parties.
Speaker 2: That was gonna be my next question actually, because the
Speaker 2: way I usually think of Asymmetrical Warfare Group is, yeah,
Speaker 2: the IEDs all the coin encounter insurgents and stuff that
Speaker 2: that's what they were really invested in. But tell us
Speaker 2: a little bit about what they were doing in the Pacific.
Speaker 2: I think that's interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, yes, the ABG, the Asymmetric Warfare Group was very
Speaker 1: much known because almost everybody who rotated through the GLO
Speaker 1: wear on terror into Afghanistan, Iraq or Iraq or Syria,
Speaker 1: probably had an encounter with an operational advisor at some
Speaker 1: point and Baker Squadron while and so in some ways
Speaker 1: the organization did supplement that was you know C Squadron,
Speaker 1: Charlie squad or.
Speaker 3: I forget they're called now, but yeah, C Squadron.
Speaker 1: They they owned that threat, the counter veeo CT threat,
Speaker 1: and so that was their box that they typically rotated into.
Speaker 1: That made sense, that's where the threat is. And then
Speaker 1: Able and Baker were often augmenting and supporting them for
Speaker 1: a number of years. And so as you transition from
Speaker 1: Task Force I D through a direct report to you know,
Speaker 1: the J three five seven in the Pentagon through it
Speaker 1: you know, now an m towed unit that starts to
Speaker 1: report to Tradeock in twenty thirteen, which you want to
Speaker 1: talk about a culture shift in an organization. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So that that was that decision. I'm going to come
Speaker 1: back to your Baker point, but I want to tell
Speaker 1: this too. So that decision to report to trade Dock,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't that the organization change. So the
Speaker 1: AWG was still the collection of the same dudes and
Speaker 1: due debts. It had always been the same experiences, the
Speaker 1: same special operations expertise, the same culture of you know,
Speaker 1: we'ren't civilian clothes and you know, not showing up with
Speaker 1: you know, we don't we don't go to a whole
Speaker 1: lot of meetings and uniforms and stuff like that because
Speaker 1: we're always traveling and doing stuff. And then to have
Speaker 1: a trade doc you know, style of institution and bureaucracy
Speaker 1: laid on top of that. And so imagine as a
Speaker 1: squadron commander where I'm like dropping you know, like a
Speaker 1: vouchers my trip to Yukon or to the Ukraine, where
Speaker 1: I'm like, you know, at a hotel, you know, off
Speaker 1: the so dropping those vouchers into Tradeock's bureaucracy and watching
Speaker 1: their money managers go wait, wait, wait a minute, why
Speaker 1: are you in the four seasons? It's the only hotel
Speaker 1: in Indonesia where I may not get kidnapped, right, And
Speaker 1: just like things like that, And so the culture, you know,
Speaker 1: SHOCK was a little hard for the organization I'm told
Speaker 1: to work through because I wasn't there in those days.
Speaker 1: But I felt like they did a really good job
Speaker 1: of it, and I think it was the right decision.
Speaker 1: It was hard for the guys to you know, kind
Speaker 1: of move under trade OC socially right, But it was
Speaker 1: a really good decision because it connected the eyes and
Speaker 1: ears of the army, the ones that were out there
Speaker 1: seeing and understanding the threat, to the people that actually
Speaker 1: built those solutions for the long term.
Speaker 3: And so it was a brilliant move. As an institution.
Speaker 1: It was difficult for us to manage, but it worked
Speaker 1: really well, and so Baker Squadron. Then as we start
Speaker 1: to transition in at twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen days, we're
Speaker 1: starting to understand that, Okay, the global war on terror
Speaker 1: and counter terrorism is still a thing, and it will
Speaker 1: always be a thing as long as you know, we
Speaker 1: are a huge, large military that you can't fight us
Speaker 1: head to head. So that's always going to be a thing.
Speaker 1: But we need to start looking at the next horizon.
Speaker 1: We need to start looking at the next threat. And
Speaker 1: in those days, if I remember correctly, we believed that,
Speaker 1: you know, while Russia was the most likely to kickstart
Speaker 1: a regional war, it was China that we were most
Speaker 1: concerned with as a competitor. And I was very fortunate
Speaker 1: in those days to be the chief of strategy with
Speaker 1: Baker and Able and the Asymmetric Warfare group out there.
Speaker 3: Because we had General.
Speaker 1: Brown, who was the one the User pac commander the
Speaker 1: United States Army Pacific that his mentality with how to
Speaker 1: compete with China was that word, we're going to compete
Speaker 1: with China.
Speaker 3: They're not our enemy.
Speaker 2: At that time, no one would really identify publicly, the
Speaker 2: military or the government would not identify China as a
Speaker 2: threat or refer to them as an adversary.
Speaker 1: It was always europere competition, right, It's a pacing challenge.
Speaker 3: You speak, officer really well, man, I have.
Speaker 1: To listen to you guys a lot more than I
Speaker 1: really want to. There's a lot of synergy in your
Speaker 1: pacing commumn. Yeah, so it's good. Uh yeah, that was that.
Speaker 1: That was exactly it. And so we you know, Baker
Speaker 1: Squadron in those days in particular, we're spending a lot
Speaker 1: of their time trying to help, you know, into a
Speaker 1: pay comm and user pack in particular, understand where to
Speaker 1: compete and where the competition should occur. And the picture
Speaker 1: that started to develop for us was, you know, terrain
Speaker 1: doesn't change. It's the same thing that we learned as
Speaker 1: young you know, platoon leaders and noncommissioned officers inside of
Speaker 1: any unit, you know the Well, here's the great story.
Speaker 1: So I'm a company commander in Wasi Quah in the
Speaker 1: eighty second Airborne Division in you know, southern Afghanistan, and
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the map like a good officer does
Speaker 1: and doing my map reconnaissance before I drive down this
Speaker 1: thing for the first time, I ed alley is what
Speaker 1: the guys are calling it, and I noticed that there
Speaker 1: are two high points that command iedally on the left
Speaker 1: side of the wadi in the right side, and this
Speaker 1: waddy's near twenty miles wide right, and I went, you know,
Speaker 1: that would be a great place for at TRP right,
Speaker 1: and it would be a great place for you know,
Speaker 1: from maybe a reconnaissance element to do some overwatch. You know,
Speaker 1: we can think about that, right, And so I drive
Speaker 1: out there with my convoy. I mean, I'm brilliant, clearly,
Speaker 1: like I've looked at a map. I know exactly where
Speaker 1: these high points are, and we need to command these things.
Speaker 3: And I get out there and that, I kid you not.
Speaker 1: There's a castle on the left and there's a castle
Speaker 1: on the right. And I turned to my interpreter, and
Speaker 1: I was like, who built those? And he's like, that
Speaker 1: one's Russian and that one's British, And I don't mean
Speaker 1: from this century. Like, we have been fighting the same
Speaker 1: war in the same location for the same terrain, for
Speaker 1: different reasons, for literally hundreds of years, in generations. And
Speaker 1: the lesson that I took from that was terrain doesn't change.
Speaker 1: And so when we went out to the Pacific and
Speaker 1: we were thinking through how to help where should we
Speaker 1: compete with China, Well, let's look at the terrain, right,
Speaker 1: And so the Malacca Strait became very important for trade.
Speaker 1: You know, obviously Taiwan becomes very important. And when you
Speaker 1: really start breaking down the geography of the Pacific, there
Speaker 1: becomes locations that you need to own to be able
Speaker 1: to project combat power into it. And so when you
Speaker 1: look at like the Marshall Plan or the MacArthur right,
Speaker 1: so when MacArthur moved through there in World War two,
Speaker 1: the island hopping campaign that we all know, right, if
Speaker 1: you look at the map, you can see how well, okay,
Speaker 1: we went to Fiji because in the old days we
Speaker 1: needed a water refill for our sale ships, and then
Speaker 1: we needed coal for our coal burning ships, and then
Speaker 1: you needed a resource to resupply from crossing the Pacific
Speaker 1: Ocean from the continent. And then you get there and
Speaker 1: you island hop to work your way into the Philippines
Speaker 1: and the Malacca Straits right there. Well, when you start
Speaker 1: to look at island hopping that MacArthur did, you can
Speaker 1: see what's happening is we need to get from island
Speaker 1: A to island B. And on the way to island B,
Speaker 1: the enemy has a vote in this conversation.
Speaker 3: And we have Ewajima, yeah.
Speaker 1: And we have Peleelu, and we have these places that
Speaker 1: they're not strategically important except they give us strategic access
Speaker 1: to resources that we have to use in order to
Speaker 1: project combat power to the mainland. And so the Malacca
Speaker 1: Strait became really important to understanding how do you compete
Speaker 1: for the Malacca Strait when Malaysia is trying to develop
Speaker 1: and China is building the rail system that's connecting from
Speaker 1: the Malacca Strait to the opposite port, and you've got
Speaker 1: terrorism in the Sabah and you've got I mean, and
Speaker 1: you just start looking at the tie separatists above it,
Speaker 1: and you realize is that Malaysia. We drew an arbitrary line,
Speaker 1: and the Thai separatists are actually Malaysian. They're melee and
Speaker 1: that's why they're separatists from Thailand, and that's why you
Speaker 1: have that fight there, and you start to truly understand,
Speaker 1: you know, why we've been fighting over some of these
Speaker 1: pieces of terrain. It's not hard to extrapolate again that
Speaker 1: we will again. And so now you look at it
Speaker 1: from the perspective of, well, let's just update the technology
Speaker 1: at play. So now we need satellites, and now we
Speaker 1: need aircraft, and now we need flotillas. And if you're
Speaker 1: crossing the ocean, and I challenge everyone to look at
Speaker 1: a map of the Pacific, and it is a daunting
Speaker 1: exercise when you look at the time it takes to
Speaker 1: get to Australia, and that's not even the start point
Speaker 1: for most of us to get into the Pacific.
Speaker 3: Right, So you're.
Speaker 1: Talking about how do you sequence these really exquisite assets
Speaker 1: in order to conduct a bounding fight into the Pacific
Speaker 1: like literally army bounding Navy and navy bounding Air Force
Speaker 1: like World War two style with modern technology, and you
Speaker 1: start to see, oh, we're gonna need to own GUAM.
Speaker 4: Out of curiosity why I understand why AWG, like what
Speaker 4: the benefit of being under trade DOC and in the
Speaker 4: theoretical terms, but trade DOC in my mind, is not
Speaker 4: a quick moving organization. It seems like belabored by a
Speaker 4: lot of bureaucracy and it's training.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: How why is AWG uh not under inscom or or
Speaker 4: USU or somebody that that understands the need to move
Speaker 4: quickly on certain things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I'll challenge that just a little bit, okay,
Speaker 1: because I think the reason why a w G was
Speaker 1: fought for by Trade Dock and Tradeock wanted the a
Speaker 1: w oh really okay, is because they wanted to be
Speaker 1: able to increase that cycle, okay, And and they knew
Speaker 1: that to do that they needed to bring in and
Speaker 1: and you know General Funk, who was the last Trade
Speaker 1: Dock commander that I served under. He you know, he
Speaker 1: used to call us the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment of
Speaker 1: Trade Dock, and you know, and in some ways that
Speaker 1: was a compliment and in some ways that was a shot,
Speaker 1: right because he's an armor officer, so he but he
Speaker 1: was a phenomenal, phenomenal commander. So I think I think
Speaker 1: it was fought for by trade DOC because if our
Speaker 1: job is to go out and ensure that the United
Speaker 1: States Army is never surprised again, right, we have to
Speaker 1: be able to increase our ability to rapidly prototype and
Speaker 1: disseminate and train and get those tools into the inventory.
Speaker 1: And a lot of what we're talking about doesn't have
Speaker 1: like a hard product to it.
Speaker 3: Like it's not like we're going out and you know.
Speaker 1: We built drones and we build underground you know vehicle
Speaker 1: or you know ground vehicles, and we did all kinds
Speaker 1: of techie stuff, but we also did a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff about like decision making and leadership on you know,
Speaker 1: under stress and you know AVPs. Yeah, yeah, you know
Speaker 1: sniper sniper TTPs. Like that's the tactical stuff, right. But
Speaker 1: I think what what really was important about us being
Speaker 1: under trade DOC and the reason why I think it
Speaker 1: was the right move for the institution is it allowed
Speaker 1: us to help the organize the Army move faster to
Speaker 1: provide those services to our service.
Speaker 4: So trade out wanted that and they they were able to, uh,
Speaker 4: they were able to shd or change evolved based on
Speaker 4: like what you guys were providing.
Speaker 1: I'm not here to tell you that the am Warfare Group,
Speaker 1: you know, revolutionized trade DOC. That not happened. Sure, we
Speaker 1: were a small part of that conversation. I would just
Speaker 1: say the leadership of Trade DOC understood the value of
Speaker 1: having that organization underneath their guide on and they employed
Speaker 1: us to the fullest.
Speaker 3: So that's fantastic to hear us.
Speaker 2: About able squadron in the Russia focus. That was sort
Speaker 2: of your follow up, right to become.
Speaker 1: The squadron commander there, right, Yeah, yeah, So I was
Speaker 1: fortunate enough that I think I mentioned it to you guys.
Speaker 1: I was at a premission training a PMT with Baker Squadron,
Speaker 1: and it was the first time I'd gone through a
Speaker 1: real PMT with, you know, the Asymmetric Warfare Group. So
Speaker 1: I've done PMTs with other teams and units, but I've
Speaker 1: never done this one. And I was just humbled. So
Speaker 1: let me paint an egotistical picture and then show you
Speaker 1: how humbled I got.
Speaker 3: So I'm a senior major.
Speaker 1: I'm literally, you know, a breath away from being a
Speaker 1: lieutenant colonel. I'm going to get a command. It's the
Speaker 1: question is what kind of command is it's going to be.
Speaker 1: And I've been a ground force commander and you know,
Speaker 1: some amazing special operations units multiple times. And in fact,
Speaker 1: I've just come off being a ground force commander like
Speaker 1: three or four years ago, Like I'm I understand how
Speaker 1: fighting works at the tactical and operational level, I think,
Speaker 1: and I've employed it in an environment that not many
Speaker 1: leaders get to do in their careers, where you've got,
Speaker 1: you know, anywhere from five to fifteen aircraft stacked in
Speaker 1: the airspace above you, with maneuver units on the ground,
Speaker 1: and you know, and you're doing a high value target
Speaker 1: you know X to the X strikes and just these
Speaker 1: amazing synchronizations of these assets in dynamic space occurring and
Speaker 1: you're trying to control that ball all at once. I
Speaker 1: feel pretty confident in my ability to do that. I
Speaker 1: finish it off with you know, a couple of master's
Speaker 1: degrees and how to you know, deal with people that
Speaker 1: you know in three letter agencies and build coalitions and
Speaker 1: I prefer your personality over your personality. And I finish
Speaker 1: that off, and then I go become an XO in
Speaker 1: a large organization where I'm doing logistics support across the
Speaker 1: Pacific while I'm in Australia and Malaysia, Like, I feel
Speaker 1: like I kind of know what I'm doing at this point,
Speaker 1: and I show up to this AWGPMT and the first
Speaker 1: thing they have us do is we called it multi
Speaker 1: domain battle. And now, of course we know that as
Speaker 1: multi domain operations, but in those days, there was just
Speaker 1: this concept of multi domain battle. And multi domain battle
Speaker 1: is the integration of cyber and space and air and
Speaker 1: land and sea, and understanding that the environment cannot be
Speaker 1: bifurcated as it was in the old days, and that
Speaker 1: the Navy does the Navy stuff and the Army does
Speaker 1: the Army stuff. It's no longer true. We got to
Speaker 1: be able to do a little bit everything. We have
Speaker 1: to do it as a co piece of team to
Speaker 1: really be able to project that effect that the only
Speaker 1: United States military can do. And so.
Speaker 4: Sorry, I lost my things. Oh you're saying like this
Speaker 4: was a really humbling moment for you.
Speaker 1: Thank you. And so the first exercise is we go
Speaker 1: through kind of a tabletop exercise of what is multi
Speaker 1: domain battle and what are the potentials? And then we
Speaker 1: follow that up with I am a Ground Force commander
Speaker 1: playing a ground force commander at the Asymmetric Warfare Training
Speaker 1: Unit or training center which has amazing subterranean you know,
Speaker 1: subway systems and you know high rises and just all this.
Speaker 3: It's this.
Speaker 1: You can go full cyber range down there in those days,
Speaker 1: you know, so you could do full multi domain battle
Speaker 1: on this site. And I've got five of the most
Speaker 1: impressive sergeants majors who have taken off their wreath to
Speaker 1: do this job right around me, as like my rto
Speaker 1: my radio telephone operator. So it's not like I've got
Speaker 1: you know, myself on a radio playing like a JTACH
Speaker 1: and a CCT and like I have legit the best
Speaker 1: in the business who train the best in the business
Speaker 1: on how to do that function surrounding me as a headquarters.
Speaker 1: And we had social media play like doing social media reconnaissance.
Speaker 1: We had underground unmanned vehicles with subterranean maneuvers with you know,
Speaker 1: low oxygen, no oxygen, hazardous particulate, the whole nine underneath there.
Speaker 1: We had drones when in those days drones was a
Speaker 1: brand new concept, and we were talking swarms of drones.
Speaker 1: And We're doing all of this in one exercise where
Speaker 1: I've got three teams on the ground conducting deep reconnaissance
Speaker 1: in order to bring in combat power. And at the
Speaker 1: after action review of that event, I stood up and
Speaker 1: I said, if one bullet had been fired, I would
Speaker 1: have been overwhelmed.
Speaker 2: Because of the amount of things you're managing at the
Speaker 2: same time, because.
Speaker 1: Of the amount of information I'm trying to digest the
Speaker 1: picture I'm trying to understand in a live combat situation,
Speaker 1: and I've got the best of the best of the
Speaker 1: best performing a role that would be done by someone
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty years younger.
Speaker 2: With us, it's a real issue. I mean, when you
Speaker 2: think about the way we're trying to integrate some sort
Speaker 2: of reality plus goggles, which I think that's like the
Speaker 2: wave of the future. But you can easily see how
Speaker 2: much information is too much information more than is able
Speaker 2: that they can process and know what to do with.
Speaker 1: I think one of the best things we did for
Speaker 1: multi domain operations was to have a conversation about echelon, right,
Speaker 1: and so there's certain yeah, so there's In those days,
Speaker 1: it was all about let's get the enabler as lowd
Speaker 1: as possible, so let's get everything to the squad level,
Speaker 1: the team level.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: That's because that's what our experience is, what we're overseas,
Speaker 1: so every lethal enabler goes to the line, right. And
Speaker 1: what we quickly started to learn is if this you know,
Speaker 1: senior major with all of this experience surrounded by this,
Speaker 1: you know, literally team of sergeants majors can't do this. Okay,
Speaker 1: we got to figure this out, and so we started
Speaker 1: eche lining those capabilities based upon where those tools were
Speaker 1: arrayed inside of the Army's system. And so some things,
Speaker 1: for space do not exist below the brigade level. You've
Speaker 1: got to go to division to get them. You've got
Speaker 1: to go to corp to get them, you've got to
Speaker 1: go to army to get them. Right. And so let's
Speaker 1: let them manage those things, and let's find a way
Speaker 1: to have connective tissue between those echelons so that commanders
Speaker 1: can choose how to employ those effects together, but the
Speaker 1: responsibility for managing them can be withheld at a location
Speaker 1: that could properly do it or nationally.
Speaker 4: I'm curious because when you start talking about multi multi
Speaker 4: domain and how all these things go together, how, especially
Speaker 4: like at an aw G level, I imagine that obviously
Speaker 4: army cyber or military cyber like you guys can get
Speaker 4: a decent read on what capabilities are. And and yet
Speaker 4: you know, when we're talking about like the NSA or
Speaker 4: maybe the n r O or or these other organizations,
Speaker 4: how do they play into this because I imagine at.
Speaker 3: Some point they're like, well, like they.
Speaker 4: Don't want to give up, they don't want to give
Speaker 4: up the you know, give up the goods. Sure necessarily, right,
Speaker 4: So somebody at some level, Yeah, it has to know
Speaker 4: what are all these capabilities are.
Speaker 3: But does that person who knows what all these capabilities are,
Speaker 3: are they like qualified or competent to manage all these
Speaker 3: capabilities or do they just know that they exist?
Speaker 1: So I'll try to That's a really tough question, and
Speaker 1: so I'm going to try to answer that the best
Speaker 1: I can by giving an analogy. Yeah, so, if you
Speaker 1: walk into any company on the planet right now, looking
Speaker 1: at yours, right, you've probably got an Apple computer, an
Speaker 1: HP computer. You know, one of you's on Microsoft, some
Speaker 1: of you have Zoom. You know, you've got one guy
Speaker 1: who has that weird like alien computer and his software
Speaker 1: doesn't matching of your software. And so what we find
Speaker 1: in large organizations that have been around for a long
Speaker 1: time is we have layers of understanding and capability that
Speaker 1: have been that some are you grown a little bit
Speaker 1: better and some are a little bit less developed, less mature, right,
Speaker 1: And what's important is if we can understand how to
Speaker 1: layer them all together to achieve the best effect. And
Speaker 1: so ideally, if you're on all Apple hardware with an
Speaker 1: M one chip running Microsoft you know, Microsoft teams that
Speaker 1: is incorporating Copilot from open Ai, and your team now
Speaker 1: only uses Apple computers, Microsoft stops Microsoft software and an
Speaker 1: l M from open Ai, that's it. And you just
Speaker 1: train on that persistently and consistently you're going to get
Speaker 1: really good at those things. Right. We find the same
Speaker 1: when you start talking about che lining capabilities in multi
Speaker 1: domain battle.
Speaker 3: There are operations.
Speaker 1: There are some that are you know, really mature and
Speaker 1: and lots of people understand how to play with them,
Speaker 1: like drones and you know, unmanned aerial is really starting
Speaker 1: to get something that you know, these kids are growing
Speaker 1: up playing right stuff, right, and so now as they
Speaker 1: come in the the ability to employ that effectively is
Speaker 1: really mature. And then there are some that will under
Speaker 1: water autonomous vehicles. We don't have a lot of experience
Speaker 1: with that in the army. We're gonna have to go
Speaker 1: to the Navy to do that, right, have we ever
Speaker 1: done those things in conjunction? And so understanding where the
Speaker 1: possible you know, venda is for that capability and that
Speaker 1: need and then building an exercise or something that exercises
Speaker 1: right that that capability does that help answer that?
Speaker 3: Does it does?
Speaker 4: And how willing are some of the organizations out there
Speaker 4: to share their capabilities in these types.
Speaker 1: Of environment My experience has been varied, that's varied. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: very very very very very willing. I I have run
Speaker 1: into you know, protecting my rice bowl and making sure
Speaker 1: that no, this is what I do. But to be
Speaker 1: honest in my experience, I just haven't had a lot
Speaker 1: of those a lot of those run ins, right, And Yeah,
Speaker 1: Generally what I find is when you show up, you know,
Speaker 1: like a multi domain task force or something like that,
Speaker 1: and you go, hey, I know how to build water bottles,
Speaker 1: and they're like, we don't know if we need water
Speaker 1: bottles yet, but go over there and start building water bottles.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining the team. So I don't see that
Speaker 1: in the military, for sure. Three letter agencies a little bit.
Speaker 1: I saw a little bit of that, Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: didn't have armies has more of like a can do
Speaker 1: kind of attitude. Right, it's a little bit like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't know what you do here, but you're one
Speaker 1: of us. Yeah, you know, jump on, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll figure out where you figure right, Yeah, get on
Speaker 1: the bus and fit in.
Speaker 2: And so you went on to one more assignment before
Speaker 2: retirement at a special Operations Command.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, well we didn't even talk about Able Squadron there.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, wait, did we go right over that? We did? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I was fortunate enough after that to go to
Speaker 1: Able Squadron, which was you know, Russia focused, and so
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen to twenty twenty one that was my that
Speaker 1: was my assignment there. Built an amazing team and we
Speaker 1: were working deeply with US Army Europe and you know,
Speaker 1: the team over there to you know, figure out what
Speaker 1: does it look like if you're going to deploy a
Speaker 1: package like in World War Two style, like a large
Speaker 1: ground scale combat operation Normandy Beach, right, what does that
Speaker 1: look like in modern day? And the premise that we
Speaker 1: operate within is contact with the enemy starts at our
Speaker 1: home base.
Speaker 3: It's happening right now.
Speaker 1: You're in contact with the enemy either electronically, informationally whatever
Speaker 1: it might be with the adversary right now. And so,
Speaker 1: how do you move the one hundred and first Airborne
Speaker 1: Division from Fort campbl Kentucky's at so Fort campbl, Kentucky.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure Fort Campbell, Kentucky to let's say, you know, Paris,
Speaker 1: how do you get there undetected? How does that happen?
Speaker 1: And so I would say almost not possible at this point.
Speaker 3: So then do you make it an information campaign? Okay?
Speaker 1: So then you get to the port and you've all
Speaker 1: seen port ops right because we've all been to NTC
Speaker 1: and JRTC and you're downloading all of this equipment. So clearly,
Speaker 1: now in the age of social media, you're under reconnaissance
Speaker 1: active reconnaissance, which means as I'm watching things come off
Speaker 1: the boat, I'm able to understand echelon unit, you know
Speaker 1: where they're coming from, with their capability are because most
Speaker 1: of that's open source. And then you start turning on
Speaker 1: all of your electronics and a really interesting things happens
Speaker 1: in the electromagnetic spectrum. When Americans start turning stuff on,
Speaker 1: we look like Americans because you get you know, six
Speaker 1: to nine, you know, dudes and dudets in the back
Speaker 1: of a Blackhawk, and all of them have Apple Washes
Speaker 1: and iPhones and Samsung's and one five two Harrises and
Speaker 1: all the communications equipment that only the United States of
Speaker 1: America only can possibly do. And then I can give
Speaker 1: you chlanning, meaning I can tell that's a division headquarters.
Speaker 3: I can tell that's a brigade headquarters, guys, right.
Speaker 1: And so we started building this understanding of what the
Speaker 1: multi domain battle space looked like from an adversarial, large
Speaker 1: scale ground combat position, right. And we take those lessons
Speaker 1: back from working you know, within Poland and Ukraine and
Speaker 1: the Baltics and the Balkans and looking at where you
Speaker 1: know conflict is happening and what lessons we can take
Speaker 1: from that, and we bring it back to our training
Speaker 1: centers and then we rep it and develop it into
Speaker 1: something that can then go into tradeock that can then
Speaker 1: start being disseminated throughout the team. This culminated for us
Speaker 1: in an NTC rotation. I think it was the first
Speaker 1: time an AWG squadron had ever gone to NTC. We
Speaker 1: painted a rock by the way still out there. I
Speaker 1: had my squadron do it. It was fun.
Speaker 3: I made them do it.
Speaker 1: I helped, but I made them so they painted a
Speaker 1: rock out there first time. And what we were doing
Speaker 1: was helping the unit that was in the box think
Speaker 1: through how to employ these multi domain, large scale ground
Speaker 1: combat techniques that we had been repping and practicing in
Speaker 1: the European theater. And so some really fun stuff started
Speaker 1: to happen. Where I think the lesson that I took
Speaker 1: from that entire exercise was in the modern day, modern
Speaker 1: day battlefield, the commander who's willing to turn off the
Speaker 1: lights first is going to win.
Speaker 3: It's really interesting.
Speaker 4: You know, we hear about singin and human all the time,
Speaker 4: but you know, you're talking a lot about like mass
Speaker 4: and like elents things like that.
Speaker 1: That I don't.
Speaker 3: They don't. They don't. Really they weren't.
Speaker 4: They didn't used to really be a thing, right that
Speaker 4: you needed to worry about, right, but now but now
Speaker 4: they're almost everything.
Speaker 1: So think about uh uh, you know ambush protocol, right,
Speaker 1: So silence violence, silence right, right? This is standard you know,
Speaker 1: grunt stuff. I'm walking through the woods, make contact.
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not quiet anymore, right, I'm yelling and I'm shooting
Speaker 1: and everything. It's explosions, it's violence. And then as soon
Speaker 1: as we're clear, right back down to silence. Right, think
Speaker 1: about that electronically now, yeah, yeah, all of your systems
Speaker 1: are up. You are literally on the electromagnetic spectrum. You're
Speaker 1: glowing like you were just a glowing beam a target.
Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, all those go off,
Speaker 1: and then you disperse and infiltrate, and then you have
Speaker 1: decisions about when to do calm windows just submarines do
Speaker 1: so that you are giving a picture to the enemy,
Speaker 1: a battlefield arrayment that you want them to digest, and
Speaker 1: you want them to counter array towards. And as soon
Speaker 1: as you can confirm the composition, disposition, and strength of
Speaker 1: that counter arrayment, and then you can give your final
Speaker 1: intent based orders because only the Americans can run on
Speaker 1: intent based orders. And your boys deploy, and then you
Speaker 1: turn off all the lights. And what I mean by
Speaker 1: that is you jam everything. Nothing electronic works. You can't
Speaker 1: see them, they can't see you, you can't talk to you,
Speaker 1: you can't talk to anybody. And the commander who's willing
Speaker 1: to do that, first confirm battlefield arrayment and then turn
Speaker 1: off the lights. After he set his team, they're gonna
Speaker 1: win that fight. That's what I think we learned that
Speaker 1: a little bit interesting. I mean, first off, you know
Speaker 1: from what you're talking about. I mean we think about
Speaker 1: back in the old days, signature production you know in
Speaker 1: Vietnam was like taping down right stuff so you don't
Speaker 1: have metal on that, you know, all that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Today's signature reduction is the IR spectrum, it's electromagnetic, all
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff. But also during the g WATT,
Speaker 1: I think there's this real propensity to use modern day
Speaker 1: information technology for a general to basically reach all the
Speaker 1: way down the chain of command to the posability right.
Speaker 1: But with you know, if we're facing a electronic warfare
Speaker 1: environment in future fights, that we may be going back
Speaker 1: to the old days. Like I'm reading it's in my
Speaker 1: bag book.
Speaker 2: Frank Subcheck wrote a book about special forces and partnership
Speaker 2: relations in El Salvador in the nineteen eighties. It's like
Speaker 2: some of these seventh Special Forces Group NCOs would be
Speaker 2: out in the bush country in El Salvador and not
Speaker 2: have any communication with their commanders for weeks, if not months, Right.
Speaker 1: I would compliment that thinking with I believe, and I'm
Speaker 1: a little outdated, so you know, four or five years
Speaker 1: out of date, so it may have changed, I hope
Speaker 1: a little bit. The future battlefield is a megacity. It
Speaker 1: is a it is a littoral mega city. So it's
Speaker 1: a megacity with water deep water access, you know, New
Speaker 1: York City, Taipei, you know, yeah, there you go. And
Speaker 1: so that means that you're going to have subterranean spaces
Speaker 1: ten stories down easy, Like just think of the subway
Speaker 1: system in New York City and the way I typically
Speaker 1: paint this picture to folks in New York City is
Speaker 1: imagine ten nine to elevens a day. Right, That's what
Speaker 1: megacity warfare is going to look like against a pure
Speaker 1: threat in a large scale ground combat engagement. That means
Speaker 1: that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines and now space
Speaker 1: cadets are going down into ten story deep subterranean where
Speaker 1: right now we're still having to pump oxygen because we
Speaker 1: don't have pappers, right, Okay, how do you communicate down there? Right?
Speaker 3: And so we.
Speaker 1: Played with mesh systems, we've played with right GPS. So
Speaker 1: now take that you know, team out of ten stories
Speaker 1: deep and now they come up to the surface and
Speaker 1: now they go into a ten story high rise Think
Speaker 1: about the equipment changes you would want to make right now,
Speaker 1: think about the communication changes. Think, I mean, just everything
Speaker 1: that we do to shoot, move and communicate. We're literally
Speaker 1: talking gets combined into you know, a ten by ten
Speaker 1: square island that's just full of this dense urban terrain.
Speaker 1: And then when you get outside into the countryside, you're
Speaker 1: back into a whole different Now you're back into camouflage. Right, yes, right,
Speaker 1: And so we have to build an expert team. This
Speaker 1: is what America has always done best is we have
Speaker 1: built a all volunteer which quite frankly looks like a
Speaker 1: special operations military to everyone else.
Speaker 4: It's fascin you know, it's fascinating when when you're talking
Speaker 4: about like going dark and the you know, the signature
Speaker 4: and things like that. I remember back in dl I,
Speaker 4: one of the guys there was a civil affairs or
Speaker 4: not civil for h a syops guy, and he would
Speaker 4: joke and say, you know, like they're commanding officer to say, hey,
Speaker 4: go to this top of this hill and pretend that
Speaker 4: you're a tank. And he'd be like, hey, sir, how
Speaker 4: about we send a tank up there and pretend it's like,
Speaker 4: you know, nobody sure, And and the idea is that
Speaker 4: you know, pyops. Obviously syops has evolved and it's like
Speaker 4: social media and a lot of other stuff now too.
Speaker 4: But when we start talking about these signatures and how
Speaker 4: the enemy responds to sims, reminds me of like the
Speaker 4: tank on the hill, right, or or cardboard tanks made
Speaker 4: to look up World War.
Speaker 1: That.
Speaker 4: Now, now, how is like psyops going to you know,
Speaker 4: be involved when it comes to tell that story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to these electronic signature Now you get into missing
Speaker 1: disinformation and information warfare. Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely, it's absolutely
Speaker 1: yet and so that that was another thing that we
Speaker 1: clearly started working on was information warfare, and that's what
Speaker 1: we called it in those days. And one of the
Speaker 1: first things that we started to recognize was that, you know,
Speaker 1: there's two types of information that we're being confronted with.
Speaker 1: There's information that is from friendly sources but it's just inaccurate,
Speaker 1: which is what we would call a first report. I mean,
Speaker 1: every first report is always inaccurate. And then there's information
Speaker 1: that is from an adversary that is intended to disrupt
Speaker 1: your decision making cycle. And how do you distinguish between
Speaker 1: the two. In the modern world where I go on X,
Speaker 1: I go on Facebook, I go on threads. I don't
Speaker 1: go on threads because I just have too many at
Speaker 1: this point. But you go on those platforms and you
Speaker 1: can literally find the opposite of whatever it is that
Speaker 1: you found anywhere else at any given time. And so
Speaker 1: miss and disinformation is something that our military has been
Speaker 1: to contend with for the last you know, at least
Speaker 1: five or six years, I would say, since the early
Speaker 1: COVID days.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that, you know, they've also because of
Speaker 4: social media that whether it's political operatives or foreign you know,
Speaker 4: thread actors, foreign nations, whatever, have gotten very good at
Speaker 4: poisoning the well in the sense of when there is
Speaker 4: a true report, they've been getting very good at They're
Speaker 4: they're very good at getting out ahead of it and
Speaker 4: throwing false information things that can be debunked as part
Speaker 4: of that true information, so that when those things are debunked,
Speaker 4: everybody ignores the true information by saying, oh, it's already
Speaker 4: been debunked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we started calling that information overmatch. Where you're you're
Speaker 1: you're just being confronted with so much information you just
Speaker 1: cognitively cannot process what is true, what is fiction, what
Speaker 1: is important, what isn't important, and it is absolutely something
Speaker 1: that we've built some systems. I know of some teams
Speaker 1: that have built some targeting idea theologies. Because it's not
Speaker 1: a technical solution, it's a human cognition understanding the source,
Speaker 1: the intent, and then the applicability to that particular moment
Speaker 1: that is really really hard.
Speaker 4: So let me ask you a controversial opinion in that
Speaker 4: you know, we have seen our government at times and.
Speaker 3: We see it.
Speaker 4: I think that like in special operations, these ideas that
Speaker 4: social media things like that need to.
Speaker 3: Be restricted, or.
Speaker 4: That they're that you know, we need to protect against
Speaker 4: foreign influence things like that, and you run into one
Speaker 4: a issues like where where do you think the military
Speaker 4: and the government in general should be on the on
Speaker 4: those types of topics.
Speaker 1: My personal opinion is we should use information to our advantage.
Speaker 1: And so that means just like I can walk down
Speaker 1: the street and I can choose that deli or that bodega,
Speaker 1: or that pizza hut or that McDonald's. I can choose
Speaker 1: where I'm going to pull my information from that I
Speaker 1: think is going to be most probably most probably to
Speaker 1: be right. I can then look at a track record
Speaker 1: of that information to verify that this one has been
Speaker 1: probabilistically more correct than those others, and I can choose
Speaker 1: to go to a different location if I don't like
Speaker 1: the source there. I can then choose which points of
Speaker 1: those information I am going to incorporate for an effect.
Speaker 1: And so this is the same idea of well, I
Speaker 1: can just choose which information I want. And so my
Speaker 1: response to it is, I think we're post truth in
Speaker 1: a post truth era. I think there is no longer
Speaker 1: a truth. I think there is a version of truth
Speaker 1: based on that moment in time, and that applicability can
Speaker 1: be pulled away and can be extracted to be useful.
Speaker 1: But we're so overwhelmed with information. Our natural bias as
Speaker 1: humans is to short circuit that and to say I
Speaker 1: like this information because it fits into the narrative that
Speaker 1: I'm telling, and so I can easily draw the conclusions
Speaker 1: for it. And so I think we, as particularly American
Speaker 1: service members and you know, in Americans in general, we
Speaker 1: have to become more discriminatory about the types of information
Speaker 1: that we're allowing to be connected to our narratives, and
Speaker 1: we have to be deliberate about verifying that that is
Speaker 1: a source that we are choosing to trust on this,
Speaker 1: and I think it's really important these days to listen
Speaker 1: to the source itself.
Speaker 3: It's why I think that.
Speaker 1: In the modern era where we are right now, human
Speaker 1: touch and authenticity are going to win.
Speaker 3: Every single time.
Speaker 1: You know, the sound bites, the thirty second, you know
Speaker 1: elevator speeches, you know you've got one minute to describe
Speaker 1: what's wrong in Afghanistan. I mean like those types of
Speaker 1: engagements are no longer satisfying because I think we as
Speaker 1: a population have started to become aware that we can
Speaker 1: pick and choose which truth we want to align with,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't mean it's always going to be true,
Speaker 1: and we have the ability to interrogate that continuously, but
Speaker 1: only if we're willing to do so as an individual.
Speaker 3: My example for this is COVID.
Speaker 1: COVID was the first time in human history that I
Speaker 1: believe that I'm aware of that we not only knew
Speaker 1: what we wanted to do, we knew how to disseminate it,
Speaker 1: and then we knew how to socially enforce it on
Speaker 1: almost global scale like that has never occurred. We've never
Speaker 1: had the ability to inform the globe at once and
Speaker 1: then to have to now go through a learning process,
Speaker 1: which we all know from our military experiences. When you
Speaker 1: hear that first report. We know that first reports are
Speaker 1: always wrong. We know that, but we had to learn
Speaker 1: that over decades of experience in decision making. And something
Speaker 1: that I tell you private companies these days that I
Speaker 1: get to work with with Solutions twenty one is because
Speaker 1: in the military we're constantly rotating into leadership positions. We're
Speaker 1: constantly learning those lessons over and over and over again
Speaker 1: at higher levels, and we become more comfortable with that's
Speaker 1: a first report.
Speaker 3: Let's let it develop.
Speaker 1: And so I think the distinction that I find between
Speaker 1: what I would like myself to do better job at
Speaker 1: and what I see as an example of what I
Speaker 1: don't want to do is I think we as a
Speaker 1: society can just go Okay.
Speaker 3: First report, could be bad, could be good.
Speaker 1: Let's let it develop with all sources of information enlightening
Speaker 1: us of what they believe the truth is, and then
Speaker 1: we will figure out the truth that we need to
Speaker 1: move forward. I don't know if that sounds too mystic
Speaker 1: or you know, squishy, no, no, no no, but I
Speaker 1: think we have to make that decision. And so it's
Speaker 1: there's no longer a truth. There is a way that
Speaker 1: we can incorporate information to achieve our ends.
Speaker 2: So take us through the last the SOCOM assignment and
Speaker 2: into your retirement.
Speaker 1: So we we knew that, you know, the window was
Speaker 1: going to open. So my last year with able Squadron
Speaker 1: was you know, within COVID, and I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of my time at Tradeock headquarters actually, which in and
Speaker 1: of itself is an interesting story because I don't know
Speaker 1: if you know this, but we were having trouble getting
Speaker 1: basic recruits to go to basic training, and so like
Speaker 1: I was down at this, you know, at Tradeock advising
Speaker 1: a four star general, Sir, I don't think we should
Speaker 1: get haircuts at basic training anymore, and at least until
Speaker 1: we can figure out how to deal with what we're
Speaker 1: dealing with.
Speaker 3: The Marine Corps got.
Speaker 1: Shut down for their basic training, and so I did
Speaker 1: that at the conclusion, which was an education in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, because then I spent about three months
Speaker 1: in the Pentagon, and I really knew I didn't want
Speaker 1: to go into the Pentagon after that, mainly because I
Speaker 1: just wasn't happy, Like I appreciated the work great Americans
Speaker 1: and really important experiences that I know that I probably
Speaker 1: should have had if I was going to be a
Speaker 1: senior officer inside the military.
Speaker 3: I just wasn't happy there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's where I need and I wasn't happy
Speaker 1: there when nobody was really there. So I don't think
Speaker 1: it was going to be better when people were telling
Speaker 1: me what to do there. And so I decided that,
Speaker 1: you know, this next move could be our last because
Speaker 1: if I don't get that one good piece of paper
Speaker 1: in this next assignment, which I mean you're at the
Speaker 1: level you know, five to six transition where you know
Speaker 1: the paperwork, you know, you.
Speaker 3: Can stay there for a long time.
Speaker 1: If you don't get that one paperwork that moves you
Speaker 1: to the next level for the next job, then just
Speaker 1: don't move on. And so we knew that just by
Speaker 1: you know, the top gets tighter as you move up
Speaker 1: this this could be our last, you know, our last move,
Speaker 1: or at least our last command. And so if it
Speaker 1: was going to be our last command, it was probably
Speaker 1: going to be my last assignment, and so we wanted
Speaker 1: to move to a place that you know, one I
Speaker 1: was excited by the work, you know, I was, I
Speaker 1: got my blood boiling, you know, to go into work
Speaker 1: every day to work on something that I thought was important,
Speaker 1: but also to put my family in a position where
Speaker 1: I could have some stability for you know, one of
Speaker 1: my daughters right here, who was, you know, a sophomore
Speaker 1: in high school who I only get to ruin her
Speaker 1: life once. Patiently, right, you can't say I ruined your
Speaker 1: life twice. I can only ruin your life once. I
Speaker 1: wanted stability for her, and I wanted stability for her
Speaker 1: younger sister, you know, in those formative years. And we
Speaker 1: also realized that we just I hadn't seen my girls
Speaker 1: as much as I wanted to. I'd been gone a lot,
Speaker 1: particularly you know this one. And I told you guys beforehand,
Speaker 1: I don't think we talk enough about the trauma that
Speaker 1: occurs to our you know, our brats or our military children.
Speaker 1: I think they go through a lot of post traumatic
Speaker 1: stress just like we do, and and they and they
Speaker 1: need just as much attention, I think as our service members,
Speaker 1: and we don't give it yet, but I think we're
Speaker 1: getting there. And so I wanted to focus on my
Speaker 1: family if that was going to happen, And so we
Speaker 1: went to SOCOM because I was just blood boiling. I'd
Speaker 1: love to go back to you know, something like that
Speaker 1: and touch that again and stay in it. Love Tampa,
Speaker 1: So we moved there. I was fortunate enough to get
Speaker 1: a job inside of Silcam Headquarters. General Clark was the commander,
Speaker 1: you know, General Evans came in while I was after it,
Speaker 1: so it kind of felt like, you know, the right
Speaker 1: culmination of my career, you know, there and they you know,
Speaker 1: within the first week of being there in that job,
Speaker 1: you know, President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, and with that
Speaker 1: withdrew a lot of the ways that we had been
Speaker 1: confronting the global war and terror you know, traditionally speaking,
Speaker 1: because now it's been twenty twenty five years, and that
Speaker 1: resulted in US you know, having to find new ways
Speaker 1: to confront those threats and new ways and quite frankly,
Speaker 1: I think in some ways good you know, we did
Speaker 1: have a lot of you know, inventiveness and creativity and
Speaker 1: lots of you know, collaboration between all of your inner
Speaker 1: agencies and the military, and it was a very humbling
Speaker 1: experience again to watch you know, this team come together
Speaker 1: over the course of the year and solve a really
Speaker 1: hard national problem. You know, for whatever, you know, whatever
Speaker 1: you think about it. And it was about that time
Speaker 1: that I realized that I wanted to go chase my
Speaker 1: own shiny objects. I've been chasing other people's dreams. And
Speaker 1: while I believe I, I, you know, could be a
Speaker 1: good brigade commander. I could be a good group commander,
Speaker 1: I could do those things, well there's fifty other people
Speaker 1: you could do that better than me, and and maybe
Speaker 1: that's not where my talent lies, you know. And so
Speaker 1: I decided that I, while I probably had a future there,
Speaker 1: did I care enough to go to that next level?
Speaker 1: And I don't think I did. And so I did
Speaker 1: what I thought was right for the service and for
Speaker 1: my family, which was I don't care enough to go
Speaker 1: to that level.
Speaker 3: It's probably time for me to leave.
Speaker 1: And so I started to retire, and I started to
Speaker 1: think about what does it look like to exit? And
Speaker 1: then you start doing what everybody does, you know, What
Speaker 1: do I want to be when I grow up? Right?
Speaker 1: You know? And and well, all I've ever wanted to
Speaker 1: do is jump out of planes and blow stuff up
Speaker 1: and hang out with guys, and you know, and so
Speaker 1: what does that mean? And so I started looking for
Speaker 1: what purpose? I started looking for what was what was
Speaker 1: the thing that I loved the most about my career,
Speaker 1: and so kind of to rewind, I loved teaching, and
Speaker 1: I loved coaching, and I loved mentoring, and I loved
Speaker 1: taking every lesson that I'd learned and giving it to
Speaker 1: someone so they don't have to learn those things. They
Speaker 1: can just catapult beyond me. I loved finding the talent
Speaker 1: that was capable of doing that far beyond my capabilities.
Speaker 1: You know, the guys who I know that if I
Speaker 1: can just give you thirty minutes of this, you'll take
Speaker 1: it to another level that I never could. And so
Speaker 1: I started looking at, you know, consulting, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: working for me. So like the McKenzie's and you know
Speaker 1: where I was going to go in to write a
Speaker 1: three hundred page book report. I didn't want to be
Speaker 1: sad Sam who went in there and wrote a story
Speaker 1: about what the things we needed to change and then
Speaker 1: the boss goes, hey, thanks for doing that and shoves
Speaker 1: it in desk. I wanted to get dirty and to
Speaker 1: fix things, and and so I started saying I want
Speaker 1: to build companies. And people would say, well, what kind
Speaker 1: of companies? And I would go, I don't care what
Speaker 1: kind of company do you have. I want to build leaders, right,
Speaker 1: I want to build a leader who is building a
Speaker 1: really important company to solve really hard problems. And I
Speaker 1: was fortunate enough to be connected through an AWG former
Speaker 1: operator who was working for a small consulting firm called
Speaker 1: Solutions twenty one, and so I was introduced to the
Speaker 1: Solutions twenty one team. They are a leadership development team
Speaker 1: and they focus purely on that kind of We come
Speaker 1: in and we build elite leaders, and then we teach
Speaker 1: alignment to the organization so that as they are growing
Speaker 1: that vision, the organization's resources are aligned to achieve that vision,
Speaker 1: and the execution is then feedback looping into that vision
Speaker 1: so that they're adjusting to meet the competitive market that
Speaker 1: they're in. It sounds like building a task force, you know.
Speaker 1: It sounds like training a team for a specialized mission.
Speaker 1: And I just fell in love with these guys, and
Speaker 1: so I started going into these companies and learning from
Speaker 1: these amazing CEOs and presidents, and yes, I was getting
Speaker 1: satisfaction for, you know, being able to teach, coach, and
Speaker 1: mentor and use the things that I had learned in
Speaker 1: my career. And I believe Solutions twenty one does it
Speaker 1: better than anyone, which is why I still love working
Speaker 1: with them. Uh And Solutions twenty one has this amazing
Speaker 1: culture where we encourage you to pursue your passions for
Speaker 1: your community, whatever that might mean. You know, if you
Speaker 1: really food drives or you know, hurricane recoveries or you
Speaker 1: know whatever that whatever it is that gets you back
Speaker 1: into your community in order to support your local community,
Speaker 1: we really want you to do that. And I suddenly
Speaker 1: realized that I don't have a local community. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't have a hometown. I don't have a place
Speaker 1: that I can you know, go to church and that's
Speaker 1: my bar and this is my you know, I don't
Speaker 1: have that right, And so I started looking for what
Speaker 1: is my community?
Speaker 3: It's us right, this is my community.
Speaker 1: This is the people that I so, Okay, well, what's
Speaker 1: the problem that we're dealing with. And right about that
Speaker 1: time is when I started to you know, hear about
Speaker 1: the Pack dect and and and if you guys haven't
Speaker 1: read the Pack Deck yet, you know really Rosy and
Speaker 1: Leroy Torres, you know from burn Pit three sixty if
Speaker 1: you've ever heard of that organization, they lobbied for what
Speaker 1: we all dealt with for the last twenty five years,
Speaker 1: which is how do you deal with trash in a
Speaker 1: combat zone? You know, persistent and consistent for the last
Speaker 1: twenty five years, we have trash and it's everything from
Speaker 1: JP eight you know, jet fuel, to human hair to
Speaker 1: animals and whatever it is and needs to go on
Speaker 1: the pile.
Speaker 3: YEA, most of us have turned to stick at.
Speaker 1: Some point in a you know, in a I don't
Speaker 1: know what they call now, the outhouses with the burn drums,
Speaker 1: you know, like a lot of that plastic mri.
Speaker 3: Yeah, every everything.
Speaker 1: You every one of us has been in a built
Speaker 1: up outhouse, you know, four by four wood on the
Speaker 1: outside with a half you know oil drum with JP
Speaker 1: eight and it burning it off literally, you know, burning
Speaker 1: human waste with with with oil.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: And we sucked that in right over and over and
Speaker 1: over again. And the way I typically explain this to
Speaker 1: people is we went on a drive in this country
Speaker 1: to remove smoking. So literally smoking a cigarette, you know
Speaker 1: packa day, turns into cancer. We get it, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: Now stand over one hundred by hundred burn pit and
Speaker 1: suck it in for fifteen months. You know, it's not
Speaker 1: surprising that we're seeing these strange cancers and injuries in
Speaker 1: these pockets of teams. And when you're talking about special operators,
Speaker 1: I have a different problem. And so now burn Pit
Speaker 1: three sixty starts lobbying on behalf of our service members.
Speaker 1: And in November of twenty twenty two, the Packed Act
Speaker 1: is signed by the Biden administration. Phenomenal job by the
Speaker 1: Biden administration, we will add, and that Packed Act. I
Speaker 1: was skeptical because I was like, I don't understand how
Speaker 1: we're connecting. You know, bo Biden's brain cancer. I mean
Speaker 1: to burn Pits, don't. I don't get it. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't until I read the Packed Act in two hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty three billion dollars over five years for respiratory
Speaker 1: related illness and injuries that I started to recognize my
Speaker 1: own danger, my own threats, and I started reaching out
Speaker 1: to buddies that I've been you know, I've known for
Speaker 1: twenty thirty years, and I feel like I'm the only
Speaker 1: one that hasn't had cancer yet, right, And I mean honestly, Meg,
Speaker 1: my wife and I we spend we kind of darkly
Speaker 1: laugh about we're just kind of waiting for the shoe
Speaker 1: to drop, right, like we've been in all those places,
Speaker 1: We've done all those same things, and harder men than
Speaker 1: me are going down for really tough stuff.
Speaker 2: One of my former teammates, guy I worked with, we
Speaker 2: got back in touch after fifteen years and had him
Speaker 2: on the show. Yeah, and I told him afterwards. I
Speaker 2: was like, man, don't wait another fifteen years, because those
Speaker 2: burn bits are.
Speaker 1: Going to get one of us. Well, yeah, go get tested, yea,
Speaker 1: even before the burn pits.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you think about like all the range
Speaker 4: time we spent and then what do you do You
Speaker 4: go collect up brass and put it in your hat, right,
Speaker 4: and all the shoe houses with all the like the
Speaker 4: lead dust like like, so there's so much that that
Speaker 4: we were exposed to on a constant basis. You know,
Speaker 4: we talk about TBIs or blast related illnesses that they're
Speaker 4: just now And how many times were you on the
Speaker 4: range when you had to do a spendex with gustas
Speaker 4: and after like three or four rounds you're like, like,
Speaker 4: I don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker 1: Right, because your head's banging. One sixtieth pilots one sixtieth gunners.
Speaker 1: Those guys sucking off the mini gun and they walk
Speaker 1: out of those colfaxes with you know, just booming headaches,
Speaker 1: and they wonder why. Okay, So I started to have
Speaker 1: those same encounters, right, and I started to put the
Speaker 1: pieces together, and I started looking at, you know, the data,
Speaker 1: and what I realized is, we have this M fifty
Speaker 1: gas mask that we've been carrying around in our pocket
Speaker 1: for twenty five years. I've worn it legitimately once, you know,
Speaker 1: in Iraq when we when we had scuds on the
Speaker 1: invasion coming and we thought all of them had chemical rights, right,
Speaker 1: and so I legitimately wore my full MOP gear, you know.
Speaker 1: And for those of you who don't understand the MOP system,
Speaker 1: so you know MOP zero to four four being nuclear
Speaker 1: biological chemical imminency, right, And so we were in this
Speaker 1: gear fighting for three months. And then I look back
Speaker 1: at the rest of my career and I wonder, when
Speaker 1: was the last time that we had a service member
Speaker 1: die of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack? And the
Speaker 1: answers world War one, World War two, maybe, And so
Speaker 1: then it's well, wait a minute, when I look at
Speaker 1: the PACDAC data, what it tells me is in the
Speaker 1: civil I love telling this story, so please forgive me
Speaker 1: in this in the Civil War in the eighteen sixties,
Speaker 1: we decided we should probably start wearing helmets, right, and
Speaker 1: we got those issued around World War One, And so
Speaker 1: in World War One we started wearing helmets, and then
Speaker 1: we realized we should probably have hearing protection, and we
Speaker 1: started getting that out in like Vietnam Korea area. And
Speaker 1: then we decided in you know, probably the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: we should start wearing eye protection for our eyes, and
Speaker 1: we re got that issued inside of the Global Warrant Terror.
Speaker 3: It's why I wanted to go to a special operations unit.
Speaker 1: I get the cool Oakley m frames and I get
Speaker 1: to have my hands in my pockets, right, And we
Speaker 1: missed the fact that the last piece of real estate,
Speaker 1: potentially the most important, is the nose in the mouth.
Speaker 1: And we're sucking in lead and antimony and aluminum and
Speaker 1: all of the things that we know to be carcinogenic, right,
Speaker 1: and that we know we are going into shoot houses
Speaker 1: day in and day out without lung protection. And so
Speaker 1: I know this sucks. Like I'm the guy who's like,
Speaker 1: I don't want more body armor. I don't want more
Speaker 1: you know, I need to be lethal. But now, as
Speaker 1: looking back on it, I go, I don't just want
Speaker 1: you lethal, I want you long, I want longevity. I
Speaker 1: cannot afford to have a guy trained for twenty years
Speaker 1: and then to go down for something like this that
Speaker 1: is preventable. So we then went and found a company
Speaker 1: that was working on this innovative platform and it's called
Speaker 1: Vent Respiratory Technologies, and on behalf of Solutions twenty one.
Speaker 1: We've been working with that startup where Who's the CTO
Speaker 1: is one of the key designers of the M fifty
Speaker 1: gas mask of a low burden, low cost particulate respirator
Speaker 1: for the operator, by the operator that protects you from
Speaker 1: all those hazardous particulates that you suck in day in
Speaker 1: and day out, and then you go. And we now
Speaker 1: connect that with the House Armed Service Committee and the
Speaker 1: Senate Armed Service Committee, and we did this last January.
Speaker 1: We were very fortunate to work with some members of
Speaker 1: the House and the Senate in order to get language
Speaker 1: inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act that asks the
Speaker 1: DoD to conduct a study and determine do we have
Speaker 1: the right respiratory protection for our service members in accordance
Speaker 1: with what we think we know from the PACKED Act.
Speaker 1: Rather than spending two hundred and eighty three billion dollars
Speaker 1: over five years and injury and illness. Can we provide
Speaker 1: a three hundred dollars tactical respirator in everybody's pocket as
Speaker 1: preventive mating?
Speaker 3: You want to show us this thing? Yeah, I do
Speaker 3: want to show it to you, and you.
Speaker 4: Know, and asking you since you know what it's like
Speaker 4: to be.
Speaker 3: On the objective.
Speaker 4: One of the challenges with a gas mask is your
Speaker 4: ability to breathe, right, your ability to breathe because you
Speaker 4: are moving at a very high you know output, that's right,
Speaker 4: and so like when when they were building this, were
Speaker 4: they taking that into consideration.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, so this.
Speaker 1: Was designed in order to not impede the way we shoot,
Speaker 1: move and communicate. And so it is literally a quarter mask,
Speaker 1: which is why it's not you know, absolutely, so it's
Speaker 1: literally a quarter mask, and it's designed to fit atop
Speaker 1: the chin so that your chin strap properly seats, okay,
Speaker 1: which that that was the first issue, right. The hole
Speaker 1: on the filter is purely for particulate, so it's just
Speaker 1: for the dirt, the dust, the aluminum, the lead, those
Speaker 1: things that are it is not it's not a gas mask.
Speaker 3: Filtering down to the smallest micron or whatever.
Speaker 1: Right, So when you when you start going after gases
Speaker 1: and vapors, you start needing to get activated charcoal in this.
Speaker 1: When you start getting more material into this filter, it
Speaker 1: starts becoming more of a burden to breathe right, So
Speaker 1: by breathing heavy, we now can't perform optimally. So this
Speaker 1: is the lightest pull on the market. It's the only
Speaker 1: CE certified system out there. That's the European version of
Speaker 1: niosh right, and it's designed so that when you breathe,
Speaker 1: you don't get the whole per hole per because the
Speaker 1: MIC is actually offset from the breathe port and so
Speaker 1: you're breathing over the filter to protect your lungs, but
Speaker 1: your MIC connects directly to the outside and a push
Speaker 1: to talk so that it's not being impacted.
Speaker 3: And so we have some teams.
Speaker 1: That were these for helicopter operations, like you know off
Speaker 1: little bird platforms, because they can get assured comms because
Speaker 1: they can simply talk into it without the wind getting them.
Speaker 1: It's meant to be used when you want it, so
Speaker 1: like a fighter pilot's mask, I put it on when
Speaker 1: I'm coming off the X and I've got muddust and
Speaker 1: rust going everywhere. And then when I get back into
Speaker 1: a cleaner environment or I need less pull, I take
Speaker 1: it off. I'm on the catwalk. I can wear it
Speaker 1: to protect myself below from the particulates that are coming
Speaker 1: from explosions and nine bangers and lots of ammunition not
Speaker 1: even talking about simmunition yet. All of that is protecting me.
Speaker 1: But I don't want to wear my helmet. Okay, you
Speaker 1: can do that. And so it's designed to be integrated
Speaker 1: with how the soldier or the operator shoots right now,
Speaker 1: so a good chee cheek. The weld is allowable communication.
Speaker 1: It's asshured communications through whatever you know system we're using,
Speaker 1: and it's clear, uh, and then your ability to move
Speaker 1: in it is. It's the lightest burden or pull on
Speaker 1: the market for sure. And the trade off is it's
Speaker 1: not a MOP three and four system. It's meant for
Speaker 1: MOP zero to two, which is where we find ourselves
Speaker 1: at least in my career ninety nine point.
Speaker 3: Nine percent of the time, right I mean, and I.
Speaker 4: Mean even outside of the preventive measures of it. The
Speaker 4: communication ability when like you say, in a helo, when
Speaker 4: nobody can hear what's going on, you know, you know,
Speaker 4: in an open air vehicle run across the desert where
Speaker 4: there's dust flying and he's trying to yell about what's happening.
Speaker 1: It's like it works in a number of environments exactly.
Speaker 1: And we and we have, you know, some some additives
Speaker 1: to this. We were just at SOCOM's Research Development Acquisitions
Speaker 1: experiment this last week and we have a voice projection
Speaker 1: unit that goes onto this It's about an eighth of
Speaker 1: an inche thick, so that when you speak, it'll project
Speaker 1: like a bullhorn, so that you don't have I can't
Speaker 1: communicate with right, I can control a room, I don't
Speaker 1: have muffled. It comes out like a bullhorn. And then
Speaker 1: I can connect it to my atac yes with a
Speaker 1: downloaded language program, and when I speak into the mic
Speaker 1: in English, what comes out the speaker is whatever language
Speaker 1: you've selected, that's incredible, Mandarin, Russian, pick the language and
Speaker 1: you can also there's two ways you can do it
Speaker 1: now on the return and we haven't built this prototype yet,
Speaker 1: but you can either have your silens in which means
Speaker 1: the return gets translated right back into your SILENX your earpiece,
Speaker 1: or there I've seen some heads up displays now some
Speaker 1: ARVR stuff that you could do text so that I
Speaker 1: would just read just like a subtitle if I'm talking
Speaker 1: to someone in a different language, if you wanted to
Speaker 1: do an ARVR gone, And that is incredible.
Speaker 3: It's impressive.
Speaker 1: And so what I keep saying is all of the
Speaker 1: technology to change the way we protect our service members'
Speaker 1: respiratory systems is there. We sim need to decide how
Speaker 1: to deploy it. And so instead of simply presenting a
Speaker 1: problem to the United States Military Solutions twenty one, in
Speaker 1: conjunction with VENTIS Respiratory Technologies is building the solution, and
Speaker 1: whether you want to adopt it or not, that's up
Speaker 1: to the military. Right We're using these right now with
Speaker 1: a lot of first responders, a lot of SWAT teams.
Speaker 3: Fentanyl is an issue, a.
Speaker 1: Lot of you know, customs and Border patrol agents are
Speaker 1: starting to look at this because they can speak fluently
Speaker 1: with anyone they encounter, odas and seal teams that are
Speaker 1: doing j sets. This is the perfect tool for you
Speaker 1: to protect yourself from those environments that are not as
Speaker 1: environmentally clean as we might be in in the United
Speaker 1: States or another developed country and still be able to
Speaker 1: cleanly communicate that's with somebody else.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: It's there's an amazing team that's been working on this,
Speaker 1: and I'm simply an advocate for it.
Speaker 2: Where can people go to find vent this and Solutions
Speaker 2: twenty one on if they're interested in this STA So
Speaker 2: if you're interested in you know, leadership development and US
Speaker 2: coming in and teaching the way that we build teams
Speaker 2: inside of the military in particular, and you know how
Speaker 2: we align vision to execution, then Solutions twenty one dot
Speaker 2: com ww dot Solutions twenty one dot.
Speaker 1: Com, you know, tell them Jason Sention and then Ventus
Speaker 1: Respiratory Technologies, so Ventus RT dot com and you can
Speaker 1: just Google into that, put it in perplexity, put it
Speaker 1: in chat GPT and it'll bring up the links.
Speaker 2: Any final thoughts before we get going anything, We filled
Speaker 2: the cover that you'd like to hit up.
Speaker 3: I think the only.
Speaker 1: Thing that I do want to reinforce is this was
Speaker 1: a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, and so
Speaker 1: you know, thank pleasure to having me.
Speaker 3: Thank you gentlemen for letting me come in.
Speaker 1: And thank you tell the story of you know, some
Speaker 1: of the amazing heroes that I got to work with.
Speaker 1: I was simply standing amongst giants. I definitely was not one,
Speaker 1: and I'm only five nine with my shoes on. So
Speaker 1: when you're standing next to some of these guys, they
Speaker 1: are definitely the giants, and deservedly so. But more importantly,
Speaker 1: this was a really unique opportunity to have my nineteen
Speaker 1: year old daughter, who grew up in the Global War
Speaker 1: on Terror, who I deployed when she was fifteen months old.
Speaker 1: I really didn't come back until she was about sixteen,
Speaker 1: maybe seventeen, and giving me the opportunity to have this
Speaker 1: experience with her to just tell her why maybe we
Speaker 1: did this or why it was important at least to
Speaker 1: hear the story the things that I don't think we
Speaker 1: do a great job of. And so I think I'd
Speaker 1: love to raise some awareness around our military brats and
Speaker 1: what they went through and the support that they need.
Speaker 1: And I hope that this is the beginning of that conversation.
Speaker 1: And it was a pleasure for me to be able
Speaker 1: to sit here with my daughter, who I know is
Speaker 1: partly paying attention and partly talking to her friends at
Speaker 1: college about what they're going to do tonight. But maybe
Speaker 1: one day she'll think back to one of these stories
Speaker 1: and it'll mean something to it.
Speaker 2: It means We were talking a little bit before the
Speaker 2: show and telling you about how I hear a lot
Speaker 2: from the children of Vietnam veterans and their dad has
Speaker 2: been dead now for ten twenty years in some cases,
Speaker 2: and they come to me asking, you know, how can
Speaker 2: I find out about what my dad did? And you know,
Speaker 2: you can foia some documents, but it's not going to
Speaker 2: give them the experiential information that you know you shared
Speaker 2: with us today. And that's why I know going on
Speaker 2: a podcast ism for everyone, but I really encourage veterans
Speaker 2: to at least pen ten to twenty pages, put it
Speaker 2: in a shoebox for their for their kids and grandkids.
Speaker 2: Doesn't have to be public for the family, right, because
Speaker 2: your kids and grandkids will have these questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Captain Joe Thomas Special Forces E seven, who became
Speaker 1: a lieutenant in the one hundred first Airborne with me,
Speaker 1: told me to keep a journal at every combat tour,
Speaker 1: and I have followed his advice to this day.
Speaker 4: I wish I had, I really wish I had, you know,
Speaker 4: kept like it's all just.
Speaker 3: One big blur to me.
Speaker 4: Now, you know, one big green right experience that I
Speaker 4: have a hard time separating things.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, it was a powerful, powerful mentorship from me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, guys, thanks for joining us for this Christmas episode.
Speaker 1: Our next one is gonna be our yearine review.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about all the shows we had in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four. It'll be nuts and we're looking forward to
Speaker 2: going in at twenty twenty five. We're scheduling, We're done,
Speaker 2: January is filled, February is almost filled. We're looking at
Speaker 2: March now. So are we gonna talk about a new format.
Speaker 1: On this one?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll talk about on the next one, next one cool.
Speaker 2: So yeah, thank you, Jason, I appreciate it. Thank you
Speaker 2: for coming in being here in studio, and we'll see
Speaker 2: all you guys next time.
Speaker 3: Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.