Jocko Podcast - 255: Attack is the Key to Success. "Guidelines for the Leader and Commander" Pt. 5

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

0:00:0- - Opening 0:01:44 - Guidelines for the Leader and Commander 1:41:40 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 1:42:29 - How to stay on THE PATH. 2:07:02 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 255 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. And joining us again is Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. So we go on with guidelines for the leader and commander. And I think at this point, I'm not even sure that I'm just doing this purely out of my own joy of having search for,

for this book for more than a decade, finally have found a copy, and now I'm making everyone else enjoy it with me. We covered this book on 251, 252, 253, 254. But there's a reason. There's a reason to dig through the past to our roots, to my roots. The roots from this book,

from a man that served in World War I, World War II, Korea, General Bruce Clark, Bruce Clark, who then overlap that service in Korea with Colonel David Hackworth, who served in Korea and then Vietnam, and who wrote the book about Face. These are the lessons that I learned that I tried to pass on. And the DNA is so clear. It's so clear to read this book and see that DNA, to find the roots of knowledge. and in knowing it, we learn more. And that's the goal. The goal is to learn and improve and get better.

So guidelines for the leader and commander by General Bruce Clark. Here we go. Back to the book. This next section, and I'll be honest with you, the last section, I liked it. You know, there's some takeaways for sure. this one I started getting this one I had a good time with so and I was a little worried at first because the last section we were talking about was talking about training the individual soldier which to me

is like okay you know this is what we're doing we're talking about the individual soldier I thought that might have been a little bit of a peak a little bit of a peak where I started you know like this is it but then I got to this section chapter 10 which is called training the unit and I started saying Oh, okay, which makes sense, right? Which makes sense because certainly there's going to be parallels when you talk about training individual soldiers, but when you start talking about training teams and training units, this is where things really start to come to light from a leadership perspective. So, importance of unit training. The Army's investment in the soldier pays off only when the unit is combat ready. Proper training develops combat ready units by welding skills

skilled individuals into teams and combining teams into effective platoons, companies, and combined arms forces. It is my purpose in this chapter to highlight the application of principles and techniques that will contribute to improving a unit's combat readiness in less time at less cost, thus enabling the army to realize full measure from its investment in the soldier and his unit. So there you go. This is about training that team, getting them to work together. Theme of unit combat readiness.

It has often been said that battles are fought by squads and platoons and won by teamwork of small units supported by fire. Combat power is inflicted on the enemy by fire and movement. There you go. Cover and move. Welcome. It's been three paragraphs. We're talking about cover and move.

This is why I start getting it. fired up the purpose of movement is to get the fire in the most advantageous position to destroy the enemy that's a good little thing to think about that's why we cover and move we cover and move to close with and destroy the enemy to get in an advantageous position to destroy the enemy that's why we cover and move one must remember however that gasoline ammunition and other vital supplies are needed to sustain tactical operations accordingly emphasis on small unit training should habitually stress teamwork to the point that tactical execution is accomplished with the same precision as dismounted drill, that delivery of effective fire is as automatic as gun drill, and that supply to the tactical unit is as responsive in battle as it is in garrison. These battlefield reflections vividly point out the basic theme of small unit combat readiness.

No small unit training should be undertaken. in a vacuum. Why is he pointing this out? He's pointing this out because in the military, it's very easy to silo yourself. It's very easy to say, I want my platoon to be good, so I'm going to go train my platoon, or I want my company to be good, so I'm going to train my company, or I want my battalion to be good, so I'm just going to go train my battalion over here in a vacuum. And if you're doing that, you're wrong. In any organization, if you're a salesperson and you're not training alongside the operations people to make sure that you know how to communicate to them, you want and they know how to communicate to you what they can deliver what about the IT group

do they understand how to handle the threshold of emails that you're gonna be getting when you offer this new product there's all these things that need to you need to work together sometimes is it because of like internal competition as well like um wait that's why we wouldn't train together yeah maybe or maybe but I think it's I think it's just like the straight up silos. You know what I'm saying? Just like the straight up like, hey, this is my platoon, I'm going to take care of my platoon.

This is my division. I'm going to take care of my division. This is my department. I'm going to take care of my department. So like you're not thinking about necessarily the other guys or you're just like, leave me alone. I don't think it, I think it could be either a real like negative attitude, but it could also be just a positive attitude that's like, hey, I'm going to train my

platoon. Right, right. That's what you're focused on. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to train my platoon commander. I'm going to train my platoon. We're going to be ready. Yeah, yeah. Here's the problem.

You can be ready. But if you can't call for fire correctly, it doesn't matter. If you've never coordinated with a QRF before, it doesn't matter. When that QRF is needed, you don't know what you're doing. And it happens in business too. Hey, you know, we're, like I said, we're the sales team. We don't care. I'm not going to, I don't need to train the, the customer satisfaction group.

I don't need to train with them. That's not my deal, right? I don't care what happens when, you know, once I sell the product, I don't care what happens. Oh, really? You should care what happens because if the client calls customer satisfaction and looks for a solution to a problem that they've got as they're implementing the thing that you just sold them and the solution isn't there, guess what? You're not getting good reviews and you're not going to sell any more product to that company. Is the name customer satisfaction department? Is that it? Yeah. Yeah. Or sometimes they call it client implementation.

There's many, many organizations that are set up in such a way that there's someone that sells the product and then there's someone that helps them implement the product and that's customer satisfaction could be customer satisfaction client satisfaction what are some other names for it Dave do you think of any customer service tech support yeah stuff like that tech support that's a good one tech support you might think of like that's a broad based like hey I've had this computer yeah yeah two years and now it's not working we're talking I'm talking about companies where you buy a new system of software for your organization like a solar panel You know at home?

You buy a solar panel for your roof? Well, let's say you did that. Maybe you buy solar panels for your roof, right? And then great, you're the salesman, you sell them to me. Guess what you're done when you're done selling me my solar panels? You're on trying to sell the next pair. So when I call, because the installation I'm having a hard time with, I call customer satisfaction. It's Dave.

Dave picks up the phone. Hey, I just ordered this thing. And now he says, well, how many? And I say, look, we're having trouble installing this. It doesn't fit on my roof right. And you say, okay, well, how many panels did you get? And what size are they? And all of a sudden, he realizes that he needs to give you feedback that,

listen, if the roof is this angle, it fits a different way. And so now you can sell the product better, and that will keep people more satisfied. You can also do a follow-up call with me and say, hey, hey, sir, I'm really sorry. When I measured your roof, I thought it was this angle. And so I told you this thing. Here's what we're going to do. We're actually to come out and pick up three of the panels that you're not going to need anymore. And I'm going to give you a 10% rebate.

And we're also setting an installer out there to give you a hand. And boom, right? Now I'm taking care of. We're all happy. Now guess what I'm doing when somebody asked me, oh, you got solar panels. What company? And I said, oh, echoes solar panels. Is it a good company?

Yeah, you know, it was a little rough, but they got everything taken care of. You should definitely call them. You see where I'm going with this? Yeah, fully. And that's weird. Dang, you just took me down the rabbit hole of solar installation. That was good. Maybe not the best example, but you did good with it.

I'm over here to run with it. Yeah, yeah, it's good. I'm over here to make it happen. What do you got? But yeah, because you don't really think about that when you're at work, you know, where you kind of want to be the best worker and company, sure, you know, but the customer, like, experience is kind of the whole deal, you know? You know how like, man, when you leave your review, you're like, great product, bad customer service.

And that can be like, well, that sucks. I need some customer service kind of thing. So it's kind of a downer, you know? Yeah, because we're not thinking everything's going to work perfect every single time, right? Not necessarily. You see what I'm saying? But I'm saying like, you know, you have these elements of a product or service that are all to the customer. It's like it's all the same thing.

I'm not going to go to this person just for one thing. I mean, as far as one quality of their product, they're going to, they'll get turned off by other departments. So if you work there, if you're just focused on yours. brother that affects you that's what general Clark is saying you have to interact with other people inside your organization and if you're not doing that you're wrong you're wrong fast forward a little bit training philosophy the basic the basic philosophy of successful training is that of obtaining superior results with average personnel God I love that well the reason where training is to take

average people and make them exceptional superior results a unit to be truly outstanding should be excellent all undertakings and activities. Commanders must know and understand the capabilities and limitations of personnel and set high and exacting standards of capabilities of the high ability of a group's of a unit's personnel. This tends to give the low ability group a hopeless feeling because of having to compete against a standard which they cannot attain. A unit satisfactory in all things is better than one outstanding in some, excellent in others, and unsatisfactory. factory in a few.

That's a good thing to think about. You know, it's better to be good at a bunch, good at everything than outstanding at this one thing. Okay, at some other things and unsat in some final things. Next section. Fast forward a little bit. Emphasize fundamentals. The basic difference between well-trained unit and one that is not well-trained

is found in the attention paid to the fundamentals of marksmanship. chemical, biological, and radiological warfare, communications, maintenance, administration, and all other arts and skills that contribute to making the unit combat ready in the shortest possible time. A well-trained soldier is the only foundation upon which effective combat-ready units can be built. When the soldier fails to demonstrate proficiency in individual skills, the Army's investment is wasted and the combat readiness of the unit is diminished. Each commander should approach his problems of combat readiness with a sense of war time. urgency.

There is no magic formula, no sweatless solution to achieving a high state of combat readiness and a unit. Application of the fundamentals enumerated below, however, will help. So that, by the way, sweatless solution, you've heard that before, right? I love this. That's, that's hack. Well, hack took that actual phrase. And I was, I had tried to find it in about face.

And of course, about faces 836 pages. And I was like, oh, I know. it's in here somewhere. I've done it on the podcast. I've talked about the sweatless solution. There is no sweatless solution. We've covered that on the podcast. You may have wondered where he got. I always thought he made it up, right? Of course we thought he made it up. If you ever heard me say it? Maybe you thought I made it up. I didn't make it up. Neither did hack. There you go. I believe the source is General Clark. That's like that stuck with me for a long time. Still is with me really. And part of it is yes,

because I had to admit to myself, bro, that's me a lot of the time. I'm looking for that sweatless salute. This face it, man, if you can go and get like, you know the kind where the other day. Echo Charles going deep. Stand by. Get some. So I'm sitting on the couch, right? Big shocker.

There's a, there's a, so the remote control, I have the kind where, you know, like the remote control for the cable and then for the volume, they're two different. Okay. So I got the one for the. cable but I was like the volume one is the volume one is somewhere else so I'm like you know the kind of you're looking around has to be close to you right because it's not like it's you know in the next room or something like that

it doesn't have it's not going to go far it's but it's around here somewhere right this is what we train for bro we're talking about the solution so so you know you kind of look around your little vicinity or whatever I'm not getting up though I'm already sitting down. That might cause me to sweat a little bit, but whatever. So I'm looking around and I turn around and we have this ledge like behind the couch there. You know that ledge there? And I look and it's behind me.

But it's like in this weird spot where I can't like, I got to stand up. If I would have stood up when I first saw it, but I would have had the remote control enjoying some television at this point. But I'm like trying to contort my body like all weird. It was weird. It was almost like I was putting more effort into. my sweatless solution, then actual energy would have been expended if I went for the sweat solution. The real one, you know?

Put in, just stand up for a second. Yeah, man. Bro. But I'm saying, okay, okay. So the point is, the point is, no, no, no, no. The point is, you are easier than I thought. The point is, bro, I'm talking about Hackworth. I'm talking about General Clark.

He served in World War I, World War II, Korea. Hackworth was in nonmost decorated. soldier, you couldn't get your remote? I could. What I'm saying is sometimes we, us, the people, sometimes we put so much effort into looking for a sweatless solution. See what I'm saying? Like as a philosophy, you know, and how General Clark is saying subsequently hackworth,

subsequently jocco, what they're saying, stop looking for the sweatless solution. Stop, like straight up. Brad just do the work stand up Get the remote control That's the case may be Whatever this may be You see what I'm saying though This may be the apex of the Echo Charles

Examples I'm just saying there's a lot of those You know kind of like when you're vacuuming And you see the little thing It does want to get sucked up by the vacuum Bend down and pick it up You just bend down and pick it up You should

I don't want to do that So you'll like kick it to try to get it loose or whatever I'm just saying these lessons Are kind of everywhere When you think about it. You know what I'm saying? All right, man. General Clark would agree.

No, he definitely would. When he wasn't like on the line. Yes, of course. Fighting the Nazis. Yeah. Or fighting the communists. Yeah. These guys didn't even have remote controls, bro.

They have TVs or couches. Bro, I'm over here just trying to understand. All right. Well, there you go. All right. So back to the book. He's talking about the things that you can. you can do to keep a unit trained up number one do essential things first there's not

enough time for the commander to do everything each commander will have to determine wisely what is essential and assign responsibilities for accomplishment he should spend the remaining time on near essentials this is especially true of training non-essentials should not take up required time required for essentials what do we call that we call that prioritized next year next thing do things right the first time the commander should not consider his unit ready for battle until it can carry out a plan well the first time too often commanders hold rehearsals of things their unit should be able to do well without rehearsal i like this because this is like a little bit you know there's this mantra in the dames about you should do one third one third planning one third gear prep one third rehearsal we put all this emphasis in the rehearsal which is awesome and i 100% believe that but you there's things that you shouldn't have to do you to rehearse, right? And that's what he said.

There's something you should just know. Should have some standard operating procedures that you should know. Look, are we gonna rehearse them? Yes, we are. But you should know them. You shouldn't need, you should rehearse them. You shouldn't have to rehearse them.

But you should rehearse. I rehearse everything. This practice causes officers and men expecting a dry run or two to pay little attention to initial instructions and to make inadequate preparations. There will be no dry runs in combat. It is good to issue adequate instructions and hold officers and men to them the first time.

That's something that I wish I would have learned. Imagine saying, hey, look, hey, look, I'm going to tell you guys this one time that we're going to go execute. No rehearsals. Just to see, just to get people in the mindset of paying attention and figuring out where your directions and your planning is a shortfall. Because if I can't say, okay, Dave, here's what we're going to do. You're going to go in this building. I'm going to go in this building. You're going to take your squad.

going to move to here, you're going to move to there. Does everyone understand? All right, we're going to go do it right now in this training exercise with no rehearsals. That will show us the shortfalls of our planning and our communication. It will also show the team shortfalls. And when they don't know what to do, they should raise their hand and say, hey boss, that doesn't make sense to me right now. Hold on a second. Let me hear that again. I don't understand that part. Practice more than one thing at a time. Okay. So wait a second. Are we going against Is that what's happening? No, actually whenever I see a unit practicing only one thing at a time I'm reminded of the history paper my son brought home one day the grammar construction and spelling were not good

This is very poor English. I told him but dad, he said I was only being tested in in history Sound training requires that many subjects be skillfully integrated and taught concurrently This is an excellent time saver in training and he goes through this and any what he's saying is look, you've got to do multiple things at the same time. And even though prioritize and execute, when you've got multiple problems and you can't try and solve them all at the same time, that doesn't mean that you're going to say,

hold on a second, we need to move towards the target, but we also need to make communications. We can only do one at a time. No, there's things that you have to do concurrently. And that can include, hey, we've got to move wounded people and we've got to fight a firefight. If we only ever practice just getting in a firefight and just moving people,

how do we know how to do both those things at the same time, which you may have to do. So do you have to prioritize and execute? Yes, you do. But guess what? You also have to learn how to do things concurrently. He says a paper integration in training schedule is not efficient. So just like talking about it.

Well, you know, if we have to move a wounded guy while we're in a firefight, well then we'll just do this, X, Y, Z. No, you have to try it. which is contradictory to rehearsals, right? Don't do rehearsals. Yes, do rehearsals. A commander should take every opportunity to exploit the effects of integrated training. It is the key to accelerated and intensified unit combat training. In effect, it increases the amount of available training time.

Good. Eliminate the administrative habit in training. I am convinced that all commanders should take maximum advantage of field training time to develop correct tactical practices and procedures. We talked about that one last time. Practice dispersion, concealment, and camouflage. The penalty for bad habits and passive measures in air defense warrants special mention the day when American soldier could be lax about dispersion, concealment, and camouflage is in the past. So, again, how does this apply to everyday life and business?

Train how you fight. Train how you fight. Know the status of men and equipment. Check up on those that are absentee from training. Practice maintenance in the field. And he's got little sections about each one of these. Practice sound troop leading procedures. The subject of troop leading procedures and allied techniques requires increased emphasis on tactical exercises.

Fundamentals found in field manuals and related publications are worthy of stress. Sound command procedures diligently practiced in all. All field training will form good habits in the unit commander. Form the checklist habit. Meticulous planning and reconnaissance are required to make sure that every minute in the field will be expended profitably. Checklist for this purpose are a necessary command and staff tool just as they are for supervising and testing the conduct of training. What do you got? I got the same thing.

I keep thinking about every time I hear what he has to say. He keeps repeating. fundamental sound realistic. Fundamentals. These are the fundamentals, the basic things, all the basic things associated with their job. And being good at those things and training in a realistic scenario, there's a lot, obviously, General Clark is talking about war. He's recounting his experiences of war. I hear this, I hear what he's saying is connecting it to war. But the application of these things is I keep hearing it in my head, hearing what you're saying and thinking about the things I'm thinking about now, if you are in the

private sector, anywhere in the private sector, unless you happen to be in one of the rare sectors that's not competitive, and there are almost none, if you were in the, if you were in the American capitalist private sector, you are at war. Your competitors don't want to share space with you, they don't want to cooperate with you to work in harmony, to, to, They want to run you over. They want to take all of your clients, all of your market share, and all of your product. They want to take all that from you.

And the way you are successful is the exact same things. Your people have to be trained on the fundamentals, on everything that applies to them. And the only way to do that is to find a way to train them realistically that replicates what they're going to deal with in their real world. It's just kind of crazy how, while it seems difficult to make the connection to his world,

The connection is so straightforward to any world that you're operating in. You know, I've broached this subject before, and I'm sure there's got to be some kind of scientific or psychological experiment or whatever. But the improvement of your response from a time when you don't know what's going to happen and you haven't practiced it to a time when you do know what's going to happen you have practiced it is exponential. It is absolutely exponential.

And we see this all the time at Eselon Front when we roll play with people. We put someone in a role playing scenario and they say, well, you know, I've got to go talk to this. I've got to go talk to my subordinate leader who's got a giant ego. And okay, roll in there and just talk to him. See how that goes.

It's going to be a disaster. So you role play. And guess what? The first time you roll play, it's a disaster. The second time, It's 10 times better. Yeah. And then the third time, it's 15 times better.

And then the fourth time, it's 17 times better. But that first look, that first look that you get, when you know a little bit of what to expect, man, you are just, you're exponentially more prepared for that situation. And we know when you're in a leadership position, you're going to roll into a meeting where you've got to deliver some bad news to the troops. You know what they're going to say. you know there's eight responses you're going to get. Why not think through those things? Why not think through those things? You're going to talk to a client that you've disappointed, you've let down, you've made a mistake.

You know they're going to have one of six different reactions. Why not work through those? Why not have a contingency plan for each one of those six things? This will take you four minutes to do. It'll take you and I four minutes to roll play. Maybe it'll take us five, ten minutes to roll play the six different responses. when I roll into you and I say, hey Dave, listen, I know we promised you this product on this date.

We ran into some hiccups. Here's the mistakes that I made. Here's what we're going to try and do to resolve it. You're only going to be able to say so many different things back to me. And depending on how I respond, I could either salvage that relationship or I could destroy it. So why would we not train to be prepared for this? There's no reason.

There's no excuse for it. It doesn't take a week to train for that situation. It takes 10 minutes. It does. It takes 10 minutes. If your own brain is the only place where you consider the potential outcomes of that conversation, you are going to miss so many things. If I get one other person sit across from me to answer in any way that they want how I'm going to interact with them, I actually now a reveal the, wow, I didn't expect that. I didn't see that coming. I don't know what to say here. And you also have that other person to just interact with you,

in a way that helps you anticipate a real response that you won't consider if you do it in your own brain, which is a vacuum. Because what you convince yourself is, oh, this isn't going to be that hard of a conversation. I'm just going to say this. He's going to say that and everything's going to be fine. The role play scenarios we do,

just to add one more thing to that, when we do role play, it usually comes right after we've done the initial training where we explain it. And he talked about this. That is, that is, That is paper training. Hey, this is what we're going to do.

And it makes sense. We think we understand it. In our heads, it resonates. And we can explain these principles and we say, okay, let's roll model this. The first role play, the first role play is always a disaster even when we just talked about it. Because on paper isn't enough. It's not enough. And three role plays later, five minutes later, they've gone from here to way up here.

and they can actually go have that conversation in real life, in real time, with the real person they need to talk to. That five minutes of live, realistic fundamental training is the difference. This brings up another topic. So I said, hey, look, this individual is only going to have six different responses, right? There's a seventh. And the seventh is one that you didn't predict, you didn't understand, and you didn't think could come.

And guess what? you can actually train your response for the thing that you just came that came completely out of left field. And it might be as simple as when Dave, if Dave says something to me that I had no anticipation and it doesn't make any sense to me, what am I going to do? You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to say, if Dave says to me, well, I'll tell you what, not only do we want our money back, I want to take you guys to court. I didn't expect him to say that. Our relationship wasn't that bad. And I, you know, my response to him, if, if, if.

If I don't know what else to say, I'm going to say, Dave, you know what? I need to think about this for a minute. Let me just think about what you're saying because I want to make sure I understand. That right there. That right there is a response. And if I'm prepared for it, you know, here's a funny one. It used to be back in the day in the dames when you would go to get your seal trident. You had to, you got done with buds, you went to a team, you went through more training,

and then you were on probation for six months. And then you had to go do an oral board for all the different departments. And you had to go and program the radios and break down the weapons and build demolition charges and, you know, show how to put on a parachute rig and set up a diver. You had to do all these different things, answer all these questions. And one of the things that you learned was, or you better have learned, was when someone asked you a question that you don't know, you better have a response for it. And the response is, you know, Master Chief, I'm not exactly sure of the answer to that question,

but I know that it is in the dive manual that I can find down in the dive locker. That's great. That's a response that the Master Chief says, all right, fair enough. We'll go, you better get, you better start learning a little bit deeper. But if you go, uh, uh, uh, is it 30 feet for 30 minutes? No, it's not 30 feet for 30 minutes. You try and BS the Master Chief, and you're going to end up getting your ass kicked. So what you do is you, and we did this, we role played the oral board, me and my friends that

had showed up at SEAL Team 1, and we'd gone through this training, and now we were getting ready for that oral, but we crushed each other in those oral boards. And one of the things that we figured out was, which we got, you know, some of the senior guys said, hey, listen, if you don't know the answer, it's okay, here's the response. but rehearsing that and being ready for it is infinitely better than no rehearsal, go in there blind and get smacked upside the head with something you didn't expect. That you will talk yourself into that you've got it covered if you're doing this alone. You'll tell yourself, like, this isn't going to be that hard. I got this covered.

And you go in there solo, you're going to get crushed. Yeah. Because you just, you don't have that other person to put you in a spine and go, wow, hang on a second. Training is important. He breaks down here, organization for unit training. Training plans, comprehensible and workable plans are indispensable and should be formulated with consideration of the following four essentials, establish training goals. That's number one.

Number two, continuous evaluation. This process must go on throughout the training cycle and as an integral part of it. Only by continuous evaluation can deficiencies be discovered early enough to make immediate correction possible. Number three, testing closely related to evaluation is the more formal testing that is given to an individual or unit at the conclusion of a phase of training or block of instruction. It's here that we determine whether our training goals have been met. Number four, remedial training.

I must emphasize here the value of remedial or make up training. evaluation and testing have identified the areas of deficiency, remedial training must be used to correct them. It should be an integral part of every training schedule. Of course, the instruction will be designed to overcome specific weaknesses that have been exposed by the testing program and will have to be keyed to the specific needs of your unit. It is essential, however, that remedial training be regularly scheduled. Gosh, that makes sense. So those are the four things. Established training goals, continuous evaluation, testing, and remedial training. What were the, was there a test, were there tests at each phase of Top Gunn as you were going

through the training? Yeah, absolutely. What was an example of a test? The most common test that we give is that we'd want to make sure the students understood the mechanics of a system. So how a missile system worked, how the targeting system worked, how the radar system work. We wanted to make sure they understood the mechanics of it before they used. it in practical terms.

It probably isn't too much different than your experience of understanding how the radios worked before you were using them in the field. Right. You had to understand HF propagation. Yeah, you did. You had to understand the ionosphere. You absolutely did because what happened is

you were gonna find yourself in a position, and this is me, I don't know, I wasn't in that position, is if you're in a particular geography, a particular place and talking to a particular other person, some radio's gonna work better than other radios. And you might need to do that. know, hey, you know what? We're like in the bushes here, in the, in the wilderness, in the jungle. This radio doesn't work here. It doesn't penetrate through this. This thing. So there's a million

different examples of that. If you get that out of order and you just work, you, you learn how to maneuver the system. Like, my, my cursor moves at the here. And I move my, my cursor on the display here. And you don't actually know what's happening to the mechanics behind that. You're going to start making mistakes inside in specific settings. Oh, it work here. So it must work everywhere. We're like, no, it doesn't work everywhere. This environment is optimized here. This environment, it doesn't work at all. And if all you know is the mechanics and not what's happening behind it,

you actually can't apply it when it matters the most. You know what that made me think of? The book Leadership Strategy and Tactics. By me. Because I say that exact same thing. When I'm talking, I compare a leader to a woodworker. And talk about the fact that, you know, when you're a leader, you've got to know the different tools,

but then you got to, if you're a leader, woodworker, you got to know the different tools. And then you got to know the different types of wood. And then you got to know how to apply those different tools to different types of wood. And then you've got to realize that even each individual piece of wood, a piece of pine is super soft. A piece of oak is super hard. You got to use those tools differently with those different types of wood. And then on top of that, each individual piece of pine is different. It has a knot. It has a rift. It has a cut. It has a split. And you've got to know how to deal with that. So you've got to understand the principles of the tools.

I may regularly plagiarize the hell out of that book, by the way. Check. Talks about assignment of administrative tasks. He talks about when a unit is under strength. Reduced strengths must be offset by more efficient utilization of men and equipment. I got to ask this question today by a client. Yeah, but, you know, we need more people. Guess what?

Everybody needs more people. we got visited by a senior ranking officer in the SEAL teams when we were in Ramadi and Laif likes to tell the story the the you know great great officer huge supporter says hey what else do you need out here is there anything else you need and I said I need two more task units worth of men you know like we need we had enough missions to to get everybody busy but guess what we didn't get anybody we didn't you know like that's the way it works Next little section, inject realism. The experienced commander knows that soldiers do in combat exactly what they have been taught and have practiced in training.

Therefore, each training situation and problem must be as valid and realistic as possible with unreal or artificial aspects eliminated. Training must reflect as many of the conditions, scenes, noises, and situations of the battlefield as ingenuity can conceive and safety rules will permit. And I remember I'd put on we'd be doing when I got back from my last deployment When we got back from Ramadi and I took over training a few months into that when you would put on your nods at night You would you might as well be in Iraq You might as well have been in Iraq we had we had the the speakers playing gun battles and and called a prayer We had tires burning we had people dressed up like you know local Iraqi citizens walking around It was freaking awesome.

It was freaking awesome. That's what you're supposed to do. Damn, I remember that. The first time we were rolling into the Moolab, and it was early in the morning. It was actually when the blue-on-blue happened in extreme ownership, but when we were rolling in there, I remember rolling in and like there's tires burning in the streets.

And yeah, I was like, okay, because what does that do? That screws up your nods. And luckily the sun was coming up, but it was still dark outside, But I'm thinking these Mujah Hadin fighters know what they're doing. These guys know what they're doing. And then guess what? So it messes up your night vision when you're staring at these burning fires.

And then the sun comes up. Well, now there's just black soot smoke everywhere. And you can guarantee you that when I got back and I was running training, you rolled out in the street, we're burning tires. Your night vision's going to be all jacked up. And when you're done with the night vision being all jacked up and the sun comes up, guess what? it's going to be black smoke everywhere. One of the best ways to emphasize realism is to assess personnel casualties for improper use of cover.

Or in the case of night exercises, vehicles can be knocked out for unauthorized use of nights. What does that mean? You're putting people down. This is like trade debt instructions. I might as well have written this for tray debt to use. This is exactly what we did. Oh, you're not standing my cover? Cool.

You're dead. Oh, you're going to move out. cross an open street without any cover fire. Roger that. You're dead. You're down, man. Now let's get this thing figured out. Oh, by the way, your buddy wants to come help you immediately without putting down

suppress a fire. Cool, he's dead too. Let's rock and roll. Who wants to figure this out? Who wants to put the cover in cover and move? Dude, you're literally like, I wrote that thing down, fundamental, sound, and realistic. Oh, cool.

You're not applying the fundamentals? Good. You're dead. Oh, your tactics aren't sound? Cool. He's gone. Now what are you going to do? I mean, I should have a tracker.

I should literally just be marking how many times he and you were referring back to the realism that's required. And the beauty of that, especially when you have experiences, it completely takes away that ammunition of, this would never happen. Or this is unrealistic. You know, them, the, the sitch, the unwinnable scenario, we go, well, this would never happen. Oh, really? Oh, cool. This would never happen. Watch this. And the easier the training is, the more acclimated people get to things being easy. And the more unwilling they are to believe how difficult they can be and when your training is realistic, how many times have you told me and everybody the story of Seth's first firefight? And the guy's like, wow, how many firefights

have you been in? You must be. And he's like, it was my first one. That was my first one. That comes from fundamental sound realistic training. Yeah. And putting that guy in a position, I might not be able to, I don't know what the same. I can't recreate this scenario. I don't know exactly how it's going to play out, but I do know what it's going to be. I do understand how this is going reveal itself and the only way to prepare for that is fundamental sound realistic training over and over and over again emphasis on night training self-sufficiency and confidence are key factors in developing a unit's capability for night operations and this was just you know not going to spend a bunch of time on this because now we've got night vision but what is

more important what are we talking about I'm not talking about night vision versus night not night vision what I'm talking about is put your troops into hard training situations that's what you need to do. Put your troops into the most difficult of situations because when you're used to fighting at night, pre-night vision, if you're used to fighting at night, number one, yes, you get used to it.

Number two, fighting at the day becomes easy. It makes fighting at the day become easy, and it also gives you a potential advantage if it just so happens that your competition isn't willing to put in the hard training at night, good, you're going to dominate. Same thing here, inclement weather training. I got to read this one though because it's funny.

Adverse weather will inevitably be encountered in combat and will give rise to problems that can best be solved by experience. It will have an impact on mobility on maintenance of vehicle and equipment, on observation on the availability of tactical air support, and in fact will hinder tactical operations in every conceivable way. Adverse weather conditions can be turned into an asset during battle, however. Boom, there you go. So we're already, look, bad weather, good. commanders should take every advantage of training under such conditions.

Troops who have mastered the problems of operating effectively in spite of the weather can turn low visibility, extreme hot heat, biting cold or heavy rain into tactical advantage against an enemy not so well adapted to these adverse conditions. So that's everything you just said. And then it's this. The solution of rainy day schedule is to put on the raincoat and take full advantage of the adverse conditions. for profitable field training and experience. Totally legit.

You know what's fun? In the teams, when there's giant waves, like when a massive storm comes and there's massive just destroyer waves, it's like time to go out and do surf passage with the zodiacs and just get annihilated. It's so fun.

And they do that with Bud students. Oh, the waves are freaking just giant. Cool. Get your boats. You're going to do surf passage or sometimes get to swim. In the teams, it was, hey, rig up the zodiacs. We're going to go get some experience in this stuff. That's which absolutely you have to do.

If you're in the teams and there's big waves in Coronado or Virginia Beach and you're not getting jocched up to go get some, you're wrong. Get your platoon together and get them out there getting after it. Cross training for flexibility. Cross training is vital to any organization. When your personnel are trained in several jobs, you have achieved depth and capability that may well split the difference between success and failure in combat. Of course, needless switching a personnel from one job to another is harmful.

So cross-trained, but that doesn't mean you switch them completely. Training personnel and duties other than their primary MOS, however, will increase your peacetime efficiency and subsequent combat effectiveness. It will also make the individual a more valuable asset to the Army, increase his pride and self-confidence, and may well help him qualify for promotion. Boom. A little time spent cross-training will be amply a way. rewarded in the increased overall effectiveness of your unit.

Everyone will benefit. Not the least, he was the commander. He throws that in there. Every once in a while he's got a little eagle that sucks out. Every once in a while, we hear it. Got to be something driving this guy to do 45 years in the Army, I reckon. But he likes that. Taking care of the troops also.

Little Benny, little side Benny for the man. Chaining, chain of command, a good organization always has a smoothly functioning chain. to command a sound training program properly supervised can be the primary means of developing the proper functioning of the chain of command, which is also essential in combat. A good commander will guide the development of his unit to ensure that subordinate commanders retain and use their authority and responsibility in any unit. The non-commissional officer plays a leading role. That's your frontline managers.

He must be carefully instructed, given responsibility, and then held accountable. I frequently find squad leaders ignoring their team leaders by issuing orders giving fire commands and taking other actions directly with the individual members of the squads. Even worse, I found responsible officers who were condoning these mistakes. The squad leader should use his team leaders to exercise control over the squad at all times. Commander should supervise an assault battle drill and squad exercise to ensure that squad leaders understand and apply the principle of exercising command over the rifle squad through designated team leaders. So don't jump through the chain of command. Let your subordinate leaders lead.

Self-sufficiency and confidence. Confidence to fight semi-independently under conditions of decentralized control is developed by training exercises. Current concepts of warfare. Visualizing greater dispersion on the battlefield, so we're more spread out. Dictate the necessity for units to acquire self-confidence and self-sufficiency. These aspects can be developed in most tactical exercises and can be furthered through realistic use of active aggressor forces. force on force training that's what we want to do ranger type operations also instill confidence and show the need for self-sufficiency when out of physical contact with friendly forces

or beyond the range of mutual fire support so we're not covering and moving anymore the isolated unit becomes a problem in our training commander should recognize the plight of the isolated unit not by simulating it but by actually demonstrating it. When the small unit is confronted with an isolated mission, confidence can always be instilled by ensuring that procedures are established for maintaining communications and for rallying to its support if required. Training should be aimed at developing integrated procedures for the employment of Army

Aviation and Air Force troop carrier troop movements for resupply and medical evacuation. So we have to learn to work independently, but we always have to be able to support each If we're alone out on the battlefield, we die. You mean there's a balance there? There's a balance. There is a little dichotomy. But cover move, there's another doctrinal term that I love, is supporting distance. I'm not allowed to be further away from Dave.

If I can't defend Dave's position or cover for Dave because he's out of the range of my weapon systems, he's too far away. That's a perfect example of the cross-training he's talking about. I could be an infantryman. Do I need to be an expert on indirect fires? No, I probably don't need to know how to field strip every little, but you don't need to know how far that thing can shoot. Because if I get too far away from that supporting element, and I go, well, the reason I got too far away is I didn't know how mortars worked.

Cool. The outcome is your team gets annihilated. So do I need to know every single thing that the mortar platoon commander knows? No, you don't. But you got to know a little bit. You got to know how you and here interact together. And so even that idea of cross-training is, if you don't have a sort of a functional understanding inside your company, you use the example

before of the salespeople and the customer satisfaction people, if you're a sales lead, and the only metric you measure for success is how much you sell, and you don't realize that in the return department, that number is the same, you're losing. You're losing because there's a piece that you don't. Do you have to know everything they know? You don't. And actually, you don't have time to know everything they know, but you got to know enough. You got to have enough understanding what's going on there to measure the success of the entire organization to include your team, and that requires a little bit of cross-training. And that is a perfect example of how come you need to know something about everybody. Small unit tactical exercises. Tactical exercises should be as well

prepared as training tests. As often as possible, the tactical situation for a field exercise should be laid in the framework of an echelon one or two levels higher than the participating unit. This is desirable to bring into play the necessary intelligence, supply, evacuation, and similar roles of supporting forces that have a bearing on the specific tactical operation. Don't confuse the squad leader, however, by giving him everything that was in the battalion and company commander's orders.

That's an interesting little point to bring up is that, well, they're saying that you need to test the subordinate units, you know, subordinate leadership. You can't just, I can't, and this is true in the SEAL teams, I can't test myself. if I'm relying on me as the platoon leader to test my platoon, it's very difficult to do that. Look, and it can happen,

and there's some great platoon leaders that'll be able to do that, but there's platoon leaders that will, they'll pass every test for some reason with flying colors because they're not really being tested. So it's good when you are utilizing the chain of command and some of the elements above to test the elements below. So that makes sense. Again, he always emphasizes all exercises to be conducted under simulated combat conditions.

I think we've covered that one enough. Despite limitations on our capabilities to conduct field exercises and combined arms training, I am convinced that commanders can always devise ways and means of achieving essential training objectives. I'll give you an example of that. We would want to have close air support in our urban environment for training. We'd want to have an AC130 overhead. We'd want to have F-18s overhead. We'd want to have a Marine Corps fighter squadron ready to come and drop bombs for us.

That doesn't always happen. In fact, it's very rare that we would get those live assets. So what would we do? We would either bring a pilot or we'd bring a J-TAC, a person that was qualified to call, and we'd put them up on one of the buildings in our Mount facility and we'd give them a radio. And look, it's almost the same thing. You know, you've got a guy that understands how pilots talk and he imitates a pilot, talking on the radio.

And then we would put up simulated explosions to go off. If they dropped the bomb in the right spot, we would blow something up and they'd get that, they'd get that satisfaction. In fact, there was a company we were using that had little model airplanes. They were actually big model airplanes, but the model airplanes would fly over. And then explosions would happen.

We kind of went the distance to make the training realistic, launching these, you know, F-18s that would come down and strafe the city and explosions would go off. It's pretty good. But that's a great way to do it. And what does it cost for me to give the radio to one of my J-Tax and stay in a building?

It costs $0.0. What does it cost to get an F-18 to give me, or a section of F-18s to give me a few hours of support? It costs, what, $100,000? Yeah. How much fuel do you burn in an F-18 in an hour. 10,000 pounds.

Yes. Check. So there's always ways. Figure ways out. Training exercise should be concluded with a critique to provide the basis for reviewing the action and to indicate areas requiring additional training emphasis. Boom. Debrief.

Yes, we have to do that. The use of live ammunition is not authorized. When the use of live ammunition is not authorized or practical, or when its use violate safety requirements, maximum utilization should be made of various simulators. Boom, again, I basically could have written that. You heard what I just said. Simulators can duplicate the sound of artillery,

machine gun, smoke, flash, and most other effects associated with the noise and conditions of the battlefield, including just tires burning. Habitual use of aggressor in the field exercises is desirable to develop interest in realism. The training value to the unit functioning in an aggressor role should not be overlooked. The adherence to establish tactical principles and techniques

by the aggressor forces will aid the friendly force in forming sound tactical habits. This is why we, we, in the SEAL teams, picked up so much emphasis on force on force training using sim munition or these high-speed laser tag systems that we had. This is why. And that's basically all you guys did at Top Gun, right? It's 100% aggressor.

And as an aggressor, what do you fly in F-16? Yeah. How long does it take you to learn to fly an F-16? Not long. It's a couple months. If that, you know, that part of it is not that hard. Are you worried when you go back to an F-18 that you're going to be, have bad habits? There's something called negative transfer.

So there's a couple of things that you got to, you got to pay attention to. You got to know that there are some differences that if you get those wrong, those can be really bad. But most of it transfers over pretty easily. The larger issue like you were talking about And my first kind of real job at Top Gun Was what's called the adversary officer So my responsibility was to make sure that all the training Scenarios that we developed a Top Gun on the red side

To give some of the people that we work with Like you're working with a company and you're like Oh you know what? Maybe we'll just call you the adversarial officer The adversarial officer because there's certainly people that that we work with We were thinking man go you know you're working with a company You think, hey, when I bring you in to where I bring up your name, all I hear is like, bad things. This is not a good idea. Yeah.

What are you doing? What's going on over here? Are you the adversarial officer here? So, sorry, cut you off. No, no. I was just saying, you know, we were talking about the challenge of that is the adversary's officer, adversary's job is to make sure that the training scenarios that we built on the adversary side. So the opposing force was realistic and reflected the capability of the enemy.

so we provided real training for the for the blue students for the the friendly fighters going out to fight because if they went out and fought an enemy that wasn't performing the way a real enemy would they were going to be unprepared we had an entire you know cell inside of top gun designed just to learn and study enemy tactics to make art training more realistic how what is you have did you have to fly the f-16 a certain way to simulate normally when we replicated a force on force so there was some in common incremental training. So at the beginning of some phases of flight training, we limit the capability of the enemy aircraft to get some building blocks and fundamentals. But once we get to force on force training and most of Top Gun is straight up, just your best game, my best game as the adversary,

I'm flying the F-16 to the max performance capability. And how did the max performance of the F-16 compare to the max performance of the SU-27 or whichever aircraft? Not exactly, but close. And better than a similar aircraft, F-18 against F-18, me trying to replicate a different airplane. Look, at the end of their machines. Now, a different machine, even if it doesn't fully replicate the enemy, it does things differently.

And that alone is a really powerful tool to practice against because it shows you things that, oh, I can't do that in my machine. My machine won't do that. This airplane can and have to have a tactic to respond to that. Am I mistaken in that the early 90s when I went up to Fallon and I would go through some air wing training? Would it be mistaken to think that there were aircraft up there besides the F-16 that were acting as adversaries? No, I think you're, you'd be correct. Did you have any other aircraft besides the F-16? What would you guys fly?

Or what other adversary aircraft were available to your opposing force? Yeah, the ones that the Navy furnished, the most common ones for the Navy were the F-5 and the F-16. But we also had contract errors. So we had, you know, Marraud. F-5 Freedom Fighter? Yes. You're, you've got it absolutely. There was a squadron of F-5s in, in, in, as adversaries in Fallon, painted like enemy aircraft designed just to replicate an enemy threat.

I remember those. Dude, absolutely. Did they have red stars on them? They totally did. On the tails, yes, absolutely. I actually, they might, they probably still have them. and we would outsource to, you know, we, we get the Air Force to come bring up some F-15s to fly with us for a class. We'd get, you know, a contract company to fly, you know, French mirages and Israeli Kaffirs,

just whatever was out there to give you, the student, what we call it, a dissimilar look. F-18s against F-18s is not a great way to replicate real training. So you want to give something that's different. Sometimes it's better. Sometimes it's worse. But the fact that it's different creates much. more realistic training. Why is it when I read about like old school fighter and like test pilots?

Like reading when we had Dan Pedersen on, they're just getting in different aircraft. They're just flying out to area 51 and just getting in random alien aircraft and just flying those things. Is that because those old school aircraft were more similar in terms of the way you fly them? No, man. I just think that those guys weren't afraid of anything. Like, I can fly that thing. Like, whatever.

Whatever. No, I think it was, you know, one of the coolest things that Dan Pedersen talked about here on the podcast and just in general was the idea that, hey, we need to go figure out how this stuff works. We need to get in these machines and figure out how they work. And if we don't, we're going to go across to Vietnam and we're going to lose because we don't know how those machines work.

And regulations and restrictions and safety and all these things, were forces were counterweights to doing that. They're all reasons not to do it. Was there a risk? Yeah, there's a ton of risk. That risk didn't outweigh going to Vietnam and losing. And they believed that. And they pushed hard against the institution to be able to do that.

Yeah. And you know, the last podcast, we were talking about, I was talking about the 80s and the 90s. And look, when you're in, when it's the 80s and the 90s and you've been tasked to, you know, do the best you can to maintain the, the spirit of going to war. But think of how hard the pushback is against pushing the envelope and training.

When you're saying, listen, when you've got, listen, we better push the envelope. Otherwise, we're going to go get killed in Vietnam. Yep. If it's 1994,

it's like, we better push the envelope. Otherwise, then they come back and you say, just, hey, don't really push the envelope. Yeah. And it makes,

you know, you're like, you know, got it. Dude, that was a tough time. And if you look at kind of our, what we call the baseline adversary,

if you think about countries that would be our adversaries now, China, Russia, those countries were not a threat in 1994. The institution had a really hard time being convinced that we needed to train hard. It was really, it was a much harder sell. Now it's a very different environment. And, you know, selling the training and demonstrating why we need to do this is actually easier.

Because back then, there was, It was hard to make a compelling case why we needed to push the envelope. For what? When you guys would look at doing a mission back then, what were you thinking the big mission would be? The big mission in 1996, when you were thinking, all right, there may be a big mission that I need to be ready for. I mean, I guess we could look at the Bockelands at this time. Yeah. So the things in near memory were Desert Storm.

and, you know, multiple, you know, the Kosovo, former Yugoslavia, those, there was, there was enough of those in there. And there was always this, believe it or not, it held over. There was always this specter of, of, of, like, you know, great competition, you know, Russia and America, those type of things. So they, those were always there. And there was enough holdover from the kind of the Cold War era of leadership, which was the 80s and, you know, very early 90s was. Hey, this stuff all travels in sine waves and sooner or later what's going to happen is that their ability, which obviously we know that. And so that specter of that was always there and the proliferation of their stuff all throughout Europe and, you know, great, great war competition type stuff was always part of what we did. That makes sense. And I guess it probably makes sense to think that what it was leaning towards in the teams back in those days and probably in the greater ground troops, the ground forces, was that this idea of like going into a sustained ground combat was really, that really seemed like a less likely thing all the time.

Less and less likely that we're gonna actually, hey, we're gonna, if you would have told me in 1995, hey, the US, you're, the frog men of the 2000s and the 2000s, And the 2010s are going to do deployment after deployment after deployment after deployment after deployment after deployment to the desert. And they're going to be fighting in ground combat sustained for two decades. It would have been it would have been very it would have been hard to predict. Yeah. But we trained.

We trained and then we kept training. Next little section testing a unit's proficiency. The chief objective of readiness training is to ensure that all units are maintained at a high rate of operations. operational readiness throughout the year. That is that every unit is prepared to carry out its combat mission at any time. Operational readiness testing to determine your units operational readiness, you must provide testing. And he kind of talks about what to cover as a minimum. He talks about you've got these various abilities, the ability to rendezvous, the ability to shoot, move and communicate all good.

And he talks about for best results, readiness test should be. announced, which I totally agree with. These tests should be practical demonstrations of how successfully a unit can be expected to execute all or any part of its emergency mission. Totally get. Now, here's where testing can concern me. When we do a test, we kind of have to give, hey, here's the task condition and standard, right? Here's what you're going to be told to do. here's the standard and here's what you need to do it right or sorry here's the task right this is what you have to do here's the conditions of that task and here's this standard that you have to meet i was working with a a government agency and one of the tasks of this government agency

was they had to be able to interdict vessels small vessels and so in order to interdect these vessels they may have to disable the motor of that vessel. And so they had to be able to shoot a weapon from a moving vessel that they're in at another moving vessel to disable an engine. Okay, got it. So over time, that became a qualification that you had to get. And over time, it became a test that you had to,

you had to be able to successfully complete this test in order to maintain this qualification to do it. And here's the thing. One of the guys that had this standard was telling me about the test, and he was complaining about the test. And what had happened was this test, the task condition and standards were so controlled that there was no realism to it whatsoever. And it was, okay, the target vessel will have a target on that vessel that is whatever, three feet by three feet. the vessel will be moving in X C state, which was no waves. They basically would only do it if there was no waves happening whatsoever.

And it will be moving at five knots. And the assault vessel will also be moving at five knots. The distance will be 14 feet. And it was just this whole thing. And so basically, you know, it took zero skill to do it. It took zero skill. It was basically a 20 foot shot at a nice big target. and it didn't prove anything.

The reality of shooting an engine to get an engine to go down on an outboard motor is a pretty tough thing. It's C-State at night. There's a lot of things going on. And by the way, what weapons do you have? Because if you have, if you know, if you've got a laser on your weapon

and it's at night and you've got night vision on and you can train your laser on that and you're at a C-State and you can keep it steady, you can fire a few rounds. Cool. I worry about testing sometimes because when you put test, when you put task conditions and standards

so that you can provide a test, oftentimes those restrict the environment and they make it canned. Yeah. And when things become canned, you're not you're not testing on what you want to test on. So I would always, you know, sort of have testing things. Then I'd have the real test, you know, which is going to be mayhem. It's going to be mayhem. And that's what we want to see. How do you handle the mayhem? when you have night vision on and a laser if you don't have night vision on can you still see that laser there's lasers that you can see and there's lasers that you cannot see

so you could have a laser without night vision that's a red laser it's like what you see in the movies yeah yeah are you familiar with movies oh yeah Terminator one so you get you get laser where you can see the little red dot that's a visible laser there's also IRRA lasers infrared lasers that you can't see without night vision on but with night vision on

it's it's actually insanely bright and clear and then they have something that's an IR flood which so you can actually are lighting up the entire target area with so it's illuminated and then there's a laser right in the center of it and you can see that

without goggles nope you need goggles the equivalent to that would be just a regular flashlight which we also have where you press a button and a flashlight comes on and in the center of that flashlight there's a red laser. Gotcha. Okay. So,

okay, you have all of that in play. You have all that. You have all that on your weapon all the time. Oh, dang. Okay. The whole deal. That's why when you see guys weapons now, it gets pretty out of control.

There's a lot of stuff going on to weapons. And it's getting better, you know, because all these little pieces are getting small and they're, they're consolidating some of these pieces. So it's one piece instead of three different pieces. You know, now you can get like a grip that has a, has a white light and a red laser in it.

and the batteries. There was a time where you had the battery thing and then you had the laser thing and then you had a battery for the flashlight thing and your wires going all over the place. It was a total gut check. Nowadays, people are making stuff more square away, bottom line. What about that one?

You know, the ones that, like, you can see the laser through the little lens almost kind of thing, you know? Like, or you can see the dot. You can see a red dot, yeah, yeah. That's just another type of system and the enemy is not going to be able to see that. Yeah, but you guys don't have those. No, we have those.

Those two. On the deal. Bro, and the teams you got everything. Everything. Actually, what guys are doing now that's really cool because it's sort of getting next level the way that the technology is just really getting so much better right now. High speed. Yeah, it's getting way more high speed and the guys' systems are much better than they were,

you know. I mean, the changes that took place from Vietnam to 1995, is is Tiny compared to the changes that took place last year. You know it's just exponentially better weapon systems and and not so much the the weapon system but the the the accoutrements that you put on the weapon systems are way better I mean I get kind of crazy when I'm watching like some of the new technologies coming out is awesome awesome to see Next little section is and by the way just

I skip the, you were wondering, Dave, I told you I was going to skip some stuff. The stuff that I skip, it really goes into like the details of each and every type of unit that you can be working with. And it goes into just some very granular detail. Good for a military leader, but a little bit too granular for general public consumption. And, you know, I haven't actually started the execution of publishing this thing on my own. Obviously I need to. This needs to be a Jocko publishing book. So I guess I got to figure out the legality that.

I think the legality is none. I think it's more than 50 years old, which means it's public domain. So I'll write a little forward to it. And we'll go from there. And I'm sure now a bunch of people are going to go and publish this. You know what's interesting? So the name of this, and I brought this up already, but it's a stackpole, publications and by the way

Stackpole publications you're welcome because I know I've read books from you that you publish one of them I know is other Clay Pidge in St. Low which we covered a long time ago Glover Johns which by the way is another connection back to Hackworth and I talked about it

I'm pretty sure some of copies of Clay Pidge's St. Low sold I wrote Stackpole books in an email and said hey I'm here here's a book I'm trying to find I haven't been able to try it Haven't been able to find it. Love to, you know, do something, write a forward,

you know, republish this thing. Whatever. Never heard back from them, unfortunately. You know, I probably, I don't think I was persistent enough. I probably said him one, maybe two emails. So I probably should have done a better job and explained to them maybe better where I was coming from. Didn't do a good enough job. But hopefully we'll do something with it.

So back to this training for contingency operations. In addition to being prepared to execute combat missions as part of a combined force, units overseas must be trained and ready to perform a wide variety of contingency operations. It is not possible to identify all contingencies which may face Army units stationed overseas. Generally, a unit that is well trained for its basic combat mission will be capable of supporting contingency operations. Commanders must be aware, however, that their troops may be important. in areas where the weather and terrain differ greatly from that found in areas in which they are stationed Combat ready elements should be air transportable for movement on short notice to potential trouble areas

They should be trained to quell civil disturbances control riots Guard to recover critical installations bolster civil authorities and police provide Emergency relief from natural disasters and handle numerous other related tasks And imagine commander can visualize appropriate and feasible conditions contingency missions for his unit and present it with appropriate training situations. Now here's something that I'll throw in there. It says such training will provide variety but must be based on logical conditions and be realistic. The thing that I'll throw in there is since you don't know what these contingencies are,

you have to train people on what to do and they don't know what to do. How do you assess a situation? How do you look at it? How do you look at it with an open mind? And that's one of the real benefits of I had of growing up in the SEAL teams is we lacked doctrine. We have more now. Man, when I grew, when I was gotten the teams, there was no, there was almost no doctrine. It's all word of mouth.

And so when you got told, hey, you're going to do this type of mission, you just got told word of mouth of how you're going to do it. And if it was a type of mission that no one had ever done before, we were going to sit there and make up how to do it. There was no book to refer to. We didn't, and we didn't have, I'll tell you what, we didn't have in 1995 no one ever said to me hey we're doing an assault here's the army manual of what they do no one ever said that i never saw an army manual you know uh in the teams in the 90s it was all word of mouth so you had to you got you have to put people in situations where you go hey he's a random mission figure out how you're going to do this figure out how you're going to

do this and then you see what they do and there are protocols for what to do and you don't know what to do um then it gets into this section right here which is you know I was like oh maybe I'll skip this and then I read like four lines I'm like all right this is freaking awesome so guidelines for planning brigade and battalion attacks training regardless of size of unit has but one purpose. That is to teach effectively the techniques of combat. The attack is the key to success. The defense is merely a temporary expedient to conserve forces for an attack elsewhere or to prepare for an attack at a future date. So the only reason you're going on defense is so that you can go back on the attack. That's the only reason you're going. Everything is to attack. That's all you're doing.

You're going to attack. Oh, we got to hesitate. Cool. We're hesitating. We're hesitant. so that we can attack later. That's what we're doing. We're going to attack. The consequences of having an attack grind to a halt are great. The effort required for it to bounce back is tremendous. Once an attack is launched, its momentum must be maintained until the objective or objectives are seized and secured.

Battle losses received due to poor planning and faulty execution are inexcusable and will result in a loss of respect for and confidence in the commander. The best reputation a commander can have is that he accomplishes his missions with few losses. The end sought in planning and executing an attack is brought about by deliberate planning and violent execution. The opposite is fatal. Speed and planning is often needed, but haste should be avoided. Remember that in combat, there is no second opportunity and seldom opportunity for a

This deliberate planning is accomplished in five phases. Phase one, basic factors, principal factors which must be considered by a commander in deliberate planning are mission enemy situation troops available terrain and weather. This is something we all learn basic mission enemy troops available terrain and weather. Phase two, tentative plan of attack. How much time do my subordinates and I have for reconnaissance planning and the issuance of order? What general scheme of maneuver do I want to employ? What formations are feasible?

What is the mobility of my command? How much dispersion can I achieve and still accomplish my mission with speed and violence? What's supporting nuclear fires are planned for or are available to me and for adjacent units? When I got to that, I'm like thinking, wow, wow.

This is, I think this book is 1962, 1963. This is like, it's on Cold War. And we're thinking if we're going to do an attack, you know what we may bring in some tactical nukes that's where we're at so these guys are planning and thinking and thinking through using nuclear weapons on the battlefield how can i employ my conventional fire support that's a secondary thought by the way my primary is going nuke what logistical problems will i have can i support the operation logistically what is the status of personnel and equipment how can i best use my supporting elements to include armor per armor personnel carriers

and helicopters. Are communication facilities adequate? Can I communicate with my supporting units? Do their radio is net with mine? What flank security problems do I have? How can I best control of the attack? From where? What control measures?

What must I be ready to do next when I have seized and secured the objective? So that's that right there. That was the tentative plan of attack. And then it goes detailed plan of attack, having analyzed these factors and having developed the tentative plan based on this analysis, the commanders, ready to get down to details. These things must then be considered. What is the formation that will be initially used?

Mounted, dismounted or by helicopter. What units will be in the initial attack? What units be in the supporting or in reserve? What will constitute my base of fire? Because it's all cover and move. We're going to have a base of fire and we're going to have an element maneuvering. Will forward assembly areas or attack positions

be used for my attacking troops? If so, where? When will my components of my fire support start. When will we shift fire and stop? How will I arrange for this to happen? How can I exploit the effects of my supporting nuclear fires?

Bro, it's so crazy to think about. From what position will each of my attacking elements start their attacking by fire and maneuver? It's covered and move. This is the true line of departure and should be considered as such. That's an LD. there may be other coordinating lines or points in the rear how and from what distance will I start a coordinated assault what command signal and contingent will I use to start it what reports will I expect for my subordinate units what reports will I give to my superiors with whom should I establish liaison how when and where should I issue my attack order what arrangements should I make for this and then it gets into the war gaming so the reason I'm going through this is like think of the level of detail think of the

You know, I got that section of Discipline equals Freedom Field Manual. I was like, question everything. This is it, man. What are we doing? How are we doing it? Having a checklist like this to think about before you conduct an operation, I don't care if you're at a business, I don't care if you're going to the grocery store, thinking about what you're going to be facing.

This is a smart way to operate. Phase four, wargaming the plan. The commander now having come to a pretty firm idea of what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. now war games it in his mind and asks himself the following questions. This is when you're trying to punch holes in your own plan. To the maximum extent possible, have I based my plan on knowledge gain through active ground, map, and aerial reconnaissance and knowledge of the enemy situation? Have I analyzed the enemy defense thoroughly, thereby locating and taking advantage of weaknesses in enemy disposition or terrain where the defender cannot use his weapons or obstacles to advantage?

Have I given adequate consideration to terrain and weather? What effects do they have on the accomplishment of my mission? Have I planned for maximum exploitation of available nuclear fires? Have I considered troop safety in the planning of my nuclear fires and scheme of maneuver? Have I considered the use of armored personnel carriers? Have I considered the effects of nuclear weapons upon the terrain over which I am attacking? Blow down, contaminated areas, secondary fires. I didn't know what blowdown was.

I had to look it up. Guess where I went. I went to FM 100, TAC 30, nuclear operations. What is it? Blowdown is when trees get blown down and they're splintered and they create just obstacles everywhere. They're very hard to move through. So you got to account for that in your assault. You got to account for the blowdown of the nuclear weapons you use to prep the area for assault.

Man, have I provided for full shock effect on the enemy? This comes from surprise, tanks and strengths, attacks from several directions, simultaneously intensity of supporting fires during the assault, and the speed of the assault by use of armored personnel carriers and helicopters. Does my plan provide for the waiting of the main effort? Have I used attacking units as a base of fire when I have artillery, heavy weapons, and mortars for this purpose? Isn't it crazy that everything is covered and move? Everything is covered and move.

The use of tanks for this purpose is especially faulty if the tanks can be used in the attack roll to close with the enemy and overrun them. Has the excessive use of attack troops as a base of fire as reserves or as reconnaissance and security elements cause me to have too little strength in the attack? Have I selected unnecessary intermediate objectives? which district, I'm going to go back to number 10 here. Have I used too much of the attack troops in the base of fire? So when you have, we'd be doing assaults,

like let's say it's a basic seal platoon in the 90s. And we'd be doing an assault. And so you have a base of fire, and then you have an assault element. And you could say, okay, squad one, you're going to be the base element. Squad two, you're going to be the assault. element.

So squad one, you're going to lay down this base of fire. And while you're laying down that base of fire, in comes the maneuver element. The assault element is going to move into position. And then they're going to start going through the target. And then the base of fire is going to shift off the target. But they've suppressed the enemy fire. Now you can go through pretty clean. So there's a tendency to think, well, you know, I've got this base of fire.

Why don't I take my machine gunners from squad two and put them in the base element. So then they have massive firepower. And plus that means the assault element's a little bit lighter. They can move a little bit quicker and we're good. And I remember, you know, sitting in a platoon brief and we were going to do that. It wasn't my plan. You know, I was like a new guy, literally a new guy. I was just sitting there going, okay, tell me what to do.

And the plan got briefed, hey, okay, this is how we're going to task organize for this assault. We're going to put all the machine gunners. So four machine gunners in the base element. And so we're going to have this massive firepower. And then these other guys, the point man from the from squad one and the rear security from squad one, one of the corpsmen from squad, they're going to go down and they're going to go through the assault element. And so then the whole master chief says, well, what if what if the assault element gets compromised?

They got no machine guns. What if the base element, once the assault element gets compromised and starts to engage the target, what happens if now they have to go on the assault? And now the base of fire is weak from the former assault element. So what did that tell me? I remember sitting there thinking, okay, you've got to be, that's a contingency. And what you're really doing is you're, you're changing away so much tactical advantage. Because not only that, a seal platoon squad is meant to work a certain way.

There's a reason it's designed that way. And all of a sudden you mix it all up. Now it's not really a seal squad anymore. There are no freaking machine gunners in it. What's a seal freaking squad without machine gunners? But you've taken those machine gunners away. And then you've overly burdened the other one with too many machine gunners. So that idea of, hey, I'm going to make these adjustments for this particular situation.

And if everything goes perfect, it's good. But if anything changes. It's bad. One of the chances things are going to go a little bit different. The chances are freaking too high. And you don't really gain that much. There's not really that much of an advantage anyways. So that reminded me of that.

Next, have I selected unnecessary intermediate objectives which distract from the attainment of the final objective? Intermediate objectives facilitate control and maintain direction. However, too many such objectives destroy flexibility and initiative and tend to slow up the attack, man, man, that's good. You know what's good about that? I like that because it's contrary to what we all say, I say. And I'm saying we not, I'm not just talking about Eschonfront.

You know people, and it makes sense. We know it makes sense. Hey, we got this big project due. Okay, let's figure out some intermediate steps so that we have some short-term goals and we can move in that direction and it feels good. We get gratification. We make sure we're on track.

There's a dichotomy. Can we go too far with that? Yes, we absolutely can. Now all of a sudden we've got goals that we're trying to achieve and we're doing reports on goals that don't even freaking matter Don't let that happen Have I determined the time and space factors of attacking units from the light of departure back to the assembly area? Have I set the stage for the assault? Have I set the lot limited or the light of departure too far back? Have I used my forward air controller supporting artillery commander supporting battery mortar commander

engineer platoon leader, communications officer, assault gun platoon leader, reconnaissance platoon leader, surgeon, and my planning, and my staff in planning, checking, and completing the detailed plans. And I'm kind of breezing through, but that one right there, I'm going to pause. So he names off all these different people, all these different professionals. And then he says, have I used them in planning, checking, and completing the details of my plans? And the reason I want to focus on that, because a bunch of times he talks about,

hey, I gotta give my plan. Have I given my plan clearly? And what he's saying here is, it's not my plan. It's the plan of the artillery guy, the mortar guy, the engineer guy, the communications guy, the assault guy, the reconnaissance guy, the surgeon and my stuff.

It's their plan. Have I used them to come up with this plan? And if I haven't, then I'm wrong. Have I considered the ammunition available? to my fire support units? Are my supporting fires plans so that there will be no lulls during critical phase of the attack?

Have I given consideration to the use of nuclear fires? To time fire over my tanks if the tanks are available, to smoke, to having my infantry follow closely as supporting fires, does my plan require holding up any elements during the attack

to clear barriers or obstacles? Does my plan of attack foresee and provide for the next step in case of success, partial success, or failure? This planning should in no way influence the violence with which the attack is to be executed. But think about that. Do I have a plan for success?

Partial success or failure. Do I know what I'm going to do? Have I given some unit the mission of watching and securing my flanks? Have I ensured that after the seizure of the objective, my units have a detailed plan for consolidation, reorganization, and continuing the attack so they will not rest on their laurels, thus exposing themselves to a surprise counterattack and losses from enemy fires or the loss of the initiative. Just imagine sitting down with your leadership as you assess something that you're going to do and try and come up with this many holes to punch in your own plan.

If you're not doing this, the holes don't get filled in. Having next phase is the attack order. Having war game the plan in his mind and being satisfied as to his condition. I know I'll say this it's not in his mind as far as I'm concerned I'm getting the staff together We're gonna sit there I'm gonna have everyone beat this plan up We're gonna go through these questions. We're gonna come up with more questions Having war game the plan in his mind and being satisfied as to his solution The commander then proceeds to the actual issuing of his order it can be assumed that sometime during the foregoing phases

He has in addition considered the following he's not even done considering yet I must I must not take so much time in making my plans and announce my orders that my subordinates have inadequate time before H-hour. In case of doubt, I will send a staff officer forward to a subordinate commander rather than calling him back or hold my conference for issuing orders well forward. What does that mean? We're taking care of the frontline commander. Dude, hey, Dave, I know you're preparing for this right now, but I want you to come back

to my location so I can brief you. No. I'll send a guy out to get you, make sure you know what you need to know. In order to avoid misunderstandings and overlooking important things, I must issue my orders in the standard sequence. I must make sure that every commander knows what he is to do and when. I must impress all with the need for vigorous execution of my plans. If the answers to all these are satisfactory, you and your units are off to a good start.

What? What do you like about that? If you do all these things, all these things, you're off to a good start. You've made the first step in the right direction. Do not later second guess your decisions and change your orders. Now, this is one to talk about at least a little bit. Are there times when you need to change your orders? Absolutely.

Are there times where new intelligence comes to light and you say to yourself, You know what? The plan that I came up with is no longer optimal. I need to change it. Does that happen? Yes. Are there times where some micro change occurs on the battlefield and you decide to change plans that's already been rehearsed, thought through, and everyone's been briefed,

and now you're going to throw a curveball at everybody, I can almost guarantee you that you should Just as we used to say in the teams, plan your dive and then dive your plan, plan your dive and dive. So you come up with the plan and then go and execute your plan. When you start throwing curveballs and trying to change things on the fly, it was actually Evan, Evan Heifer from Black Rifle Coffee. I was out doing some archery with him. And we were talking about something. He goes, yeah, yeah, we'll just figure it out underwater, which is actually a hilarious thing. Because when you're diving, obviously you can't talk.

You can't figure anything out underwater. And surprisingly, I'd never heard that expression before. But it's freaking awesome. It's freaking awesome. Hey, we'll just figure it out underwater. Meaning if we let this go, we are screwed. We're screwed. So you don't want to figure things out underwater.

What you do is you dive your plan. This is such a, this is why leadership is hard. Because there are absolutely times where you go, you know what? Bad plan. We need to change it. We need to change it right now. We need to change the plan right now. Now, that's fine.

There's also times where you say, you know what, we're close. And what we will gain from trying to adjust this plan right now will be the adjustments will be so hard to make at this juncture that it's going to counter any positives that will come from trying to change these plan right now. So you have to be careful of that. Don't harass the subordinate commanders while they are planning. issue their orders and getting ready to carry out their assignments. You and your staff should make such checks as are needed without violating this.

So I'll bother the frontline troops. Once the attack starts, you can influence the battle by shifting of supporting fires maneuver and use of your reserves. You should be prepared to do this. You should now anticipate what may happen so that you will be at the critical spot, at the critical time to give that command push necessary to keep the attack. Going. Commanders should make planning the attack a subject for schools and table exercises and tactical walks or rides for the appropriate officers and man I know you didn't get a chance to do EF Battlefield, which we went out to Gettysburg, but that tactical walk that we did is just it's freaking awesome. It is awesome walking the battlefield and understanding the terrain and seeing it on the ground is absolutely phenomenal.

Lessons learned are incredible. I'm going to have Jason and Steve on. We're going to talk about that. And this is really the last piece and we'll hold off for one more. I think we're going to get one more episode. One more episode for me to fulfill. My own personal satisfaction of this book. A commander who prepares a checklist from these guidelines will have a great aid in time of pressure.

It will enable him to plan thoroughly with speed instead of haste. So speed instead of haste. Do essential things first. Do things right the first time. practice more than one thing at a time. So many just quotes to think about. I think one of the first quotes I sent you in a little picture. The attack is the key to success.

The defense is merely a temporary expedient to conserve forces for an attack elsewhere or to prepare for an attack at a future date. So many good quotes. And look, I'm not saying, that you should blindly follow the thoughts and ideas in this book. And I would never say that. And we've gone back and forth and we've hinted at areas where we disagree with

what the general has to say. But I'll tell you what, at a minimum, you should consider them. You should consider those thoughts. You should understand where they came from. You should understand what they meant. You should. I should keep them in front of mind because these are lessons that will, were written in blood and they were proved on the battlefield.

And they were meant as the book states, you know, I'm sitting here saying, hey, don't follow blindly. Guess what the book is called? The book is called guidelines. It's called guidelines. Guidelines are supposed to steer us. They're supposed to get us going in the right direction.

They're not supposed to be followed blindly. They're not supposed to be obeyed. with with no deviation whatsoever they're supposed to steer us it's supposed to steer the people that we lead in the right direction what do you think Dave it's kind of crazy right dude it's crazy that I'm scribbling I'm writing notes on this you know my feet hearing what he's saying and I'm just kind of thinking about almost trying to put myself in in general Clark's shoes as if I could do that But that's page after page after page of what appears to be all this kind of minutia,

these little details he's bringing out. But they're all things, just like you just said, these are all things that he has probably seen over and over again, be the reason why teams don't succeed. And I was trying to summarize what he was saying in my mind is, how much of your plan, how much of this thing that you've created, you build the strategy. this is what we're going to go do.

Then you build a plan. How much of that plan, as you go through these other phases to test it and pressure, test it, and consider the errors in it, how much of that is really based in reality? How much of it is based in truth? And how much is just what you conjure up in your own brain thinking, this is all going to work out, my idea is brilliant, I know what's going to happen, I put it all together in my head, and this is how it's going to play out, this perfect scenario that I create.

and he's basically saying don't do that bring in all these other people to annihilate and poke holes and dig and pick and and pull every possible error and omission and all the things you haven't done in your plan and in the same breath he's saying and oh by the way we're going to stick to the plan and the reason we're going to stick to the plan is because actually it's not my plan anymore it hasn't been my plan for a long time because all these people came in and understand understand what we're trying to do, pick it apart, and they're the ones are going to go execute. And you, you talked about humility before, the humility of, of a, of a leader to say, I built the strategy, I'll put the plan.

You know why you guys are all here to figure out everything wrong with it so you can go execute when the scenario completely falls apart because there's no way I can predict what's going to happen. I mean, that is, that is crazy. The application to that in life. is, especially since this is a guideline, it is universal because that's what you need to do. I don't know all the tactic.

I don't know how the thing is going to play out. I don't. But hearing what he's saying and the risk of creating it in your own mind and saying this is what's going to go happen, go execute, and setting your team up to fail for not being prepared for the thousands of contingencies that are absolutely going to happen with your plan, that finish was, and I know it's not the finish the whole thing, but that finish was crazy.

And then he likes to, he concludes with an, oh, by the way, if you do all these things, you're off to a good start. You're off to a good start. That's, that's, man. I think I talked about an EF online. I think I might have even talked about the debrief podcast of planning with a negative attitude. Like, when you're coming up with a plan, you should be looking at that thing as a total pessimist. This isn't going to work.

We're not going to have enough people. The enemy's going to be there. That's how you want to plan. And then the other thing you got to be careful of, you know, you just said thousands of contingencies. And there are thousands of contingencies. And there's no possible way you can plan for thousands of contingencies. What you can do is you can have decentralized command. You can have a plan that's adaptable.

You can give people the freedom to maneuver to adapt to those contingencies, which are unforeseen. As long as they understand why they're doing what they're doing. They understand what the intent of the operation is. They can make a thousand decisions and never even talk to you. Never talk to you one time. And that's the goal. The plan has to be flexible enough. The command needs to be decentralized down to the lowest possible level.

And as long as everybody understands what it is that we're trying to accomplish, they understand why they're doing what they're doing. They understand the intent of the operation. They can make a thousand decisions. by themselves and get the mission done. And that is a powerful thing to think about. So like I said, I think we got, I think we got one more podcast with this book

and then we'll be done and we'll get it out there to the world, we'll get some version of it out there to the troops. And that way we can use this book to guide us, to steer us in the right direction. So Echo Charles, speaking of steering us and guiding us. Sure. Yep.

In the right direction? In the right direction. Yeah. Maybe in that right direction where we're going to, when we need that remote. Yeah. We're going to get up and we're going to do the right thing. We're going to get the sweat full solution or the solution with some sweat, we'll say. Yeah.

Potentially. Check. Either way. Yes. So a path, really. Direction. The path? The path, yes, exactly.

Not all that right now, but I'm going to hook that up. Okay, yes, we're all on this path. And a wise man once said, path is not easy. The path is hard. Anyway, so, okay, so on this path, we do need supplementation. Okay, and supplementation, and I kind of sometimes forget about this,

where you know how like you're okay you probably will never have this problem maybe do maybe don't know but Dave Burke maybe so you know how like you're real used to taking okay so I'm really used to taking discipline right before workouts and if I start running low or run out panic yeah like it no well for lack of a better term we'll say yeah panic but it's the kind like bro if I run out I don't know if I can work out of course I'm not thinking that specifically but that's the feeling I get you know but that Then I got to remind myself, no, no, this is all supplementation. It's help on this path.

That's what all this stuff is. So just keep that in mind, okay? Right. So anyway, with that and the reason I thought about that also, another reason was, uh, this, the path is hard, right? Like I just said, okay, so the other day, my wife got injured, right? So I took on some of the duties. Not serious, by the way, because I'm, I mean, it's not, not serious, but I'm saying I just,

I don't want people worried about your life. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right. So no. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, some fractures on the feet, you know, whatever. You know, I had to slide in.

Injuries that are not life changing in any negative way. Fully recoverable. They're an inconvenience, but we're pushing through it. We're going to recover. We're going to shift some resources, you know, some sliding into various roles, right? One of them is required a little bit earlier of a morning for me, a lot earlier. You know, right? 9.30, 10 o'clock.

We were not going to go into those details, you know. but I wound up with, if I'm not mistaken, two hours of sleep, a little bit more than two hours, like under three hours of sleep, right? So, of course, you know what that means? The workout becomes questionable, you see what I'm saying? But so I started thinking, and it has to do with what we were talking about last time, where you kind of think about it, like, what does it take to get this workout done? And my default is, well, obviously a long nap.

first, but let's say that's not available to us. Wouldn't you rather just get it done? Well, you know, I'd rather it be done for sure, but I don't know about the getting it part. You see what I'm saying? When you're only on two half hours of sleep, whatever. Anyway, so I'm like, what would it take? Okay, so what if, and this is just going on in my mind, what would it be like, like what's holding me back from actually just doing it, you know?

Like, what would, is there anything that would keep me? from achieving that, you know, getting the workout done. Sounds small, like such a small deal when I'm saying it out loud. But nonetheless. I saw a video the other day of Joe Rogan, and they had Joe Rogan, somebody was talking to him, and they just were like, they were showing his face while the person was talking. He was thinking about, like, some other totally random thing.

He just wasn't paying attention. Is that how you're feeling random? I was so just in that motor. I was just like, dude, what are you talking about? Brad, trust me. Trust me. Let's bring it home. It's going to have some value.

Let's bring it home. No, bro, I'm telling you this will have some value. Okay. So I wind up just concluding that, I wind up concluding that, okay. Dave's got to look at the scary thing is, Dave, I just look at Dave's face. No, he's got a look at his face. Like, he's really trying to, he's trying to stay with you. Yeah, he's staying with me because he knows that, like, he's going to be able to use this.

Okay. All right. Let me get the game. All right. So anyway. I'm like, okay, technically there's nothing keeping me from getting this workout done, even though it seems like a real painful idea right now. Is there anything keeping you for getting this story done?

The actual content of the story. So bear with me. You should incorporate this mindset into right now. Okay. Hey, I can't finish it if I don't start it. Okay. Anyway, the answer ended up to be nothing aside from me very much not being in the mood, too. I had convinced myself that I need a certain amount of sleep to get away.

workout done on an individual level it's not true not true so it's kind of like okay it's kind of a form of realizing that you kind of have mental toughness in a way okay like realizing it not invoking it just realizing it and then you can use it so I got the workout done okay all right what also what that what that did what that did also is set the precedent there I was thinking it was going nowhere it set the precedent for if that happened again, you just automatically know. You see what I'm saying? Okay.

Rather than trying to dig deep. You don't have to dig deep. You just got to realize some stuff sometimes, is what I'm saying. Roger. Anyway. Okay, cool. Back to the supplementation. When you're doing these things, right, whether you're out of discipline or not,

this is all supplementation. You do the workout, you take the supplementation. It's like, you ever play that game super off-road? No, bro. No. It's like a game like you race in the truck for, It makes sense. You race in a truck and then if you win, you get credits where you can buy like acceleration or speed or traction or whatever, right?

That's what every one of these supplements is. You see what I'm saying? Got the discipline for your mind, for your body, got more for the protein, you know, all these things. So if you get them all, like you have the full decked out routine for the path is what I'm saying. So a bunch of things, joint warfare, super krill, discipline. discipline. Vitamin D. Cold War. Mulk.

Yeah, but... Smashing pumpkin milk, which has to be just brought up because... Yeah, it's good. But you got to include what Munk is, that Mulk is, though. Mm-hmm. It's protein. Doesn't everyone know that now? Kind of.

I mean, let's face it, maybe this is the first one. If they just listen to your story, bro, they know everything, man. I think you're factually incorrect on that. I think that your opinion is factually incorrect on that. I feel like there was some value there. Okay. Dave, was there some value there or no? Do you think there was some value?

Yes, sir, I do. I'm, I got to be honest with you. I'm kind of over here thinking there's a little bit of a conflict in what you're saying. Okay. Because what I would think is if I was on two hours of sleep, man, I'm like, look, the sooner I get this, as sooner I get in, the sooner I get out. And you are in complete control of that situation. And it's kind of the situation we're in right now is like, bro,

if there's anybody in control of getting through the support phase, it's you. I'm like, bro, you can jam through this. Well, much like you did that workout. Well, respectfully, I don't think this phase is the part you just jam through, as it were. You know, this is important information. I don't know. I think it is.

Do you think it is? Fair enough. All right. Well, let's not jam through it. How about that guy? Cool. Can we get through it at all? All right.

Thanks everyone that's about to press stop. Thank you for listening. Appreciate it. Right. Okay. All right. Thanks for the support. Okay.

Hey, look, Jacco, if you want to be invited back onto this podcast, you're going to bear with me, okay? Anyway, supplements, joint stuff, joint warfare, super cruel oil, this is for your joints, okay? Vitamin D3, Cold War, immunity. Also other benefits. Discipline, discipline, go for your mind and your body. Every day, take down one.

It'll help you. Trust me. It'll help you. Energy drink. Discipline go. R.T. Energy drink healthy, legitimately factually healthy. Real energy.

Real energy. Not like, hey, I'm hyped up for two hours. And now I'm just like, no, real energy. Clean energy. And this sounds kind of like odd, but there's no poisonous elements in there. Yeah. Seems odd, right? To have to say that.

Until you look at some other energy drinks. Things out there that do have poisonous elements. That may or may not have poisonous elements in it. Or things that can be considered poisonous. Yeah. So, you know, there's that. So it's a big deal. All right.

Boom. Continuing on the list. Mulk, dessert in the form of a protein. All kinds of flavors, including but not limited to smashing pumpkin, which is inspired by pumpkin spice. Yeah. It is fall at the moment. Hey, listen, we, we, just real quick, when you talked about maybe some other, let's call them,

energy drinks broadly. Right now we're experiencing some conflict. Some people might even say acts of war. Sure. Have been, have transpired in this category. So we may need to go. Well, we will retaliate. We are retaliating the best way.

If you want to help retaliate and you happen to at this time, when is it? If you're alive right now, if you're, It is November 2020. We are rolling, we are in Wawa stores in Florida. If you're there and you want to help win the war that we are engaged in at this time, go to Wawa in Florida and you get yourself a bunch of jaco discipline go to help us defeat the enemy. Thank you. You can also get it at a vitamin shop if you're not.

in Florida. You can also get it at origin, main.com. You can also get it on Amazon, straight up. Yep. Also, I forgot to mention Jocko White Tea, tea bags and cans. By the way, again, this is supplementation, right? You're on the path with or without this. Now you got the supplementation.

You've got the full decked out vehicle on the path. Good to go. You do all these things. You're off to a good start. Hey, speaking of flavors, by the way, you mentioned smashing pumpkin. Yeah. We have another flavor that's been released into the wild. Yeah, okay.

Dave Burke, what's the new flavor? Why don't you tell us? The Discipline Go flavor. After burner orange. And this is Dave Burke's signature flavor. Indeed it is. So this came from when you were a child. You liked to drink orange soda of some kind.

We're not talking about brands. You have replicated that flavor. Now, it was a little bit because Discipline glow traditionally is not syrupy sweet, right? It's not sugar. It doesn't have that taste. So did you, is it a lighter form of one of these former orange drinks that you used to drink? Yes, by design. It's actually supposed to kind of make you remember what it tastes like without it tasting like you're drinking a pile of sugar.

Cool. And that's exactly what it does. So it's a little more refreshing. It is refreshing. It is cleaner. But dude, it is, it is good. So there you go. If you want to support, well, if you want to support after Burner Orange, if you want to support

Dave Burke. Good deal, too. Yes, that's the one. Does it say Good Deal Dave on the can? It does. Does it say Good Deal Dave? Man, you're off to good stuff. It's cool that anyone can go back in time and witness the creation of the nickname Good Deal Dave.

It's pretty, that's kind of cool, right? Very cool, yes, sir. I think it's kind of cool. All right, so, yep, what else? You kind of jammed through that, man. It was really good. Thank you. Yeah, it kind of is my jam, one might say.

All right, yeah, additionally, origin, main. You mentioned origin, mane.com, you can get the stuff. That's one of the places you can get, get all this great stuff, great stuff. You can also get jiu-jitsu stuff, geese, rash guards, all made in America, by the way. So, you know, some hoodies and whatnot. But also American-made denim jeans and boots. For work. You might want to check out the Delta 68 jeans.

Yeah. They are being produced as fast as we can make them right now. We had a little, we had a Delta to make. There was a gap. We had a little stand down during COVID and we're back up and running. And there is a little bit of a redesign. And the new version of Delta 68's are just freaking awesome. They're awesome.

You don't have any yet, do you, Dave? I do. Oh, you do? You got the new ones? I got one pair. That's cool. Yes. They're sick.

They're awesome. All right. So Delta Gene, you can check those out. And obviously, we're training jujitsu. Yes. So there's some jujitsu stuff on this. Gis. Yes.

Rash cards. Boots. Boots. Belts. Oh, damn. Yeah. And wallet. Belts.

Wallets. Yeah. I saw that. I saw this tune. And, bro, I don't look at C. Wallet. and be like, ooh, cool, wallet. You know, you know how you get marketed to, right?

You know, it's like, oh, check out our new X, Y, Z. I'm not the kind. Well, usually wallets don't like, what do you see? They don't, they don't land. They don't light your fire. They don't light my fire. Got it. Exactly right.

But the origin wallet, it's basically kind of lit my fire. It's actually, unless it's on there, origin,orgain. Dot com. Also, Jocko is a store. It's called Jocko store. And this is where you can rip. You want to get off to a good start. Boom, here you go, right here.

Discipline equals freedom, shirts, hoodies, hats, some rash guards on there. Other stuff, too, get after it. Good. It's an important, how should I say, approach to life, good, the good philosophy. Also, big deal. That's kind of an announcement in a way.

There's a T-shirt club happening. You can get one shirt every month for a little subscription. situation. These aren't the Charles with the subscription situation. This is not shirt.

These are not shirts that you can get on Jocco store. By the way, they're what's called exclusive. Look at you. To the subscription

T-shirt club. This is not for everybody. Or maybe it is for everybody. I don't know. You got to look. But nonetheless, yeah, it's on there. So yeah,

jocco store.com. Look, if you like something, subscription t-shirt club or not, get something. Good way to to Support and represent while you're on the path.

Here's some other things you can do. Subscribe to the podcast if you want to. This isn't the only podcast. By the way, we've got a podcast called Jocko unraveling with myself and Daryl Cooper. We got the grounded podcast. We got the Warrior Kid podcast,

and I know, I know I owe you. Some Warrior Kid podcasts and some grounded podcasts, really. Yeah. Unravelling echoes. He's just rolling those out now. He's going hot on those things.

Hot. We throw the debrief in there too, right? We got the debrief podcast. Yeah. Which Dave and I've been doing, Leif and I have done a couple. So that's just, that's inside the Jockle podcast. Feed. Feed.

Sure, the feed. RSS feed. It's true. Also, YouTube channel, video version, this podcast. Some people like to watch video rather than just audio. Maybe more immersive. You know, we got our smart TVs, projectors, whatever the case may be. Anyway, we do have a use.

YouTube channel. Also some excerpts on there. If you need these messages in smaller, what do you say, doses? Not doses. That's not the correct word. Seems to work. Smaller cut up clips. Anyway, there's some excerpts on there. I think doses work better than cut up clips.

Okay, there you go. Boom, there you go. Doses, according to Jocco. Anyway, yeah, it's on there. Real easy to find YouTube. There it is. Boom. YouTube channel subscribe on that one. Also, psychological warfare. If you're having moments of weakness, two hours of sleep or otherwise. if you're just in the mood to skip a workout.

I got three hours of sleep last night. Yeah, but you don't count with the sleep thing. Sorry, bro. I said it. I said what I said. Yeah, check. You're like, yeah, you need 5.5. What's insomnia?

Here's the insomnia. Here's what insomnia is like for me. My mind is in a roller coaster. Well, it's not I was a roller coaster, but I'm going down tracks. And every, like, every thought I have is just a right turn, left turn. And I'm just I it's just my mind is just racing and I'm going this thinking that thinking the other thing and there's no possible way I can go to sleep. There's no possible way I can go to sleep. Yeah. And so I was up until one around it was like it was like one oh eight the last time I looked at the clock. And then the alarm clock went off. So like you fell asleep didn't realize you fell asleep in by the time you were just up somewhere after 108 a.m. I am. I. fell asleep and then the alarm clock went off and got after it. I'll get that sometimes that that's actually a pretty good description. I'll get that sometimes. But not before I go to sleep. It'll be like,

I'll wake up and not quote unquote middle of the night and that'll happen and I can't go back sleep. And it gets to the point where I'm like, bro, I just got like 25 more minutes. I almost got up. I almost got up at midnight and just went and worked out. I probably should have. In fact, I should have. But I kept thinking it's right there. Like maybe over the brown, maybe around this next. corner is late. Yeah, yeah. Even if it's only gonna be a little while, maybe it's just there.

So I'm waiting for it, waiting for it. And the longer you're trying to wait for it, the harder it is to come around. So yeah, yeah, it's a debate for sure. And then I had a bad, no, I had a dream the other night, a bad dream. Had a dream the other night. I'm in like somewhere, some foreign country,

and something happens. And we like get the call like, hey, we gotta go right now. And so I run to get my gear. I pick up my gear and my magazines are not loaded. And the helicopter's coming in to like take us to do whatever we got to do. There's guys in trouble. The helicopter comes in and I'm sitting there loading mags as fast as I can.

And then I'm running and I see the helicopter leaving with like my guys on board and that it's leaving. And I missed it. Like they had to go. And bro, I mean, I was just like feeling sick and I woke up and it took me, you know, whatever. 10 seconds to realize that it didn't really happen. And so I had the worst feeling ever. And then five seconds later, I'm like super thankful. And then I'm bummed out again because it happened.

And it, you might be right. That makes sense. I was going to like kind of tease you or whatever. You're like, but I used to have that kind of dream. Not with that kind of stuff, obviously, but it was with football games. Like I'm like trying to make it to the football game or whatever. And then I can like hear on the radio, it's like half time. You know, that's the end of the first quarter.

and I'm like not even at the game yet. And it's like, you know, it's third quarter and I get there and the game is like finishing. I never would have anticipated in one million years that you had some kind of anxiety about being late for anything. All right. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, me, you know, maybe there's some circular, like thing that kind of makes it all make sense, you know? I don't know. Nonetheless, no, psychological warfare. This was good. Okay, we got to, I got to,

Explain what it what it is again back to the one no no no no some people they don't know Anyway get two hours sleep you get eight hours sleep get 12 hours sleep I don't know sometimes You're in the mood or you're not in the mood to do whether it be a workout whether it be a Maintain the diet situation boom psychological warfare jaco telling you why you don't want to do these things That support your moment of weakness boom get through it easy money jaco's help There you go flipside canvas Dakota Meyer making really awesome things to hang on your wall Go to flipsidecampus.com for that. A bunch of books to talk about,

about face, hackworth, leadership strategy, and tactics, field manual. We got the code, the evaluations, the protocols. We got discipline equals freedom, field manual, brand new version out. People are asking what's the difference. There's like 40 more pages, 35, 40 more pages of words in there. Way the Warrior Kid, four, field manual also out sitting right here on the desk. These are the first batch.

These are like legit first a dish So You can check that book out Get it for your kids Get it for the kids that you know To get them on the path Warrior Kid 1, 2 and 3 Mikey and the Dragons

Recently selected as a teacher's pick So thanks to all the teachers out there That picked it And thanks for the teachers out there That said it's the best children's book That they've ever read. A lot of those teachers appreciate it And then finally

Extreme Ownership and the Nicotomy Leadership the original books that I wrote with my brother Laif Babin. Also, we have Eschalonfront Leadership Consultancy where we solve problems through leadership. We got EFonline. EFonline.com. If you want to ask me a question, you want to ask Dave a question,

you want to ask Leif a question, you want to ask any of the Eschlonfront instructors a question. Go to EFonline.com. We will be there. We will be there to answer your question. You don't have to submit it through Twitter and hope that I see it. You can go on there

and ask it. So go to eFonline.com for that. We have the muster, which is a live event, leadership training, December 3rd and 4th. If you want to come to it, go to extremeownership.com for details. Every gig we've done has sold out.

This is going to sell out too. We got compressed space. Well, not compressed space. We got compressed seats in big space because of social distancing. So there's less tickets to sell. So it's going to sell out early. So be advised on that.

Go to extreme ownership.com for details. EFoverwatch.com. If you need leaders in your organization that have the experience, the military experience and leadership that we talk about, that understand the principles we talk about, go to EFoverwatch.com to find those leaders. And if you want to help service members, you want to help active duty,

you want to help retired, you want to help their families, gold star families, then check out America's Mighty Warriors.org. That is Mark Lee's mom's charity organization. Mama Lee, she's out there helping our veterans. And if you are into, if you want to torture yourself and you want more of my some words or you need more of Echo's certifiable sermon.

of which there were plentiful today. Oh, you can't wait to hear just a few more of Dave's jubilant judgments. Then you can find us on the interwebs. On Twitter, on Instagram, which, according to Echo Charles, should only be known as The Graham. And on Facebook, Dave is at David R. Burke. Echo is at Echo Charles. And I am at Jockle-Wilink. And once again, thanks to General Bruce Clark and Colonel David Hackworth

for continuing to serve our great nation with the lessons you have passed on to us and thanks to all the military troops out there. On the sea, air and land that maintain vigilance at all times for our security and thanks to the police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers,

Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all the other first responders who also remain vigilant to keep us safe here at home and to everyone else out there once again from General Bruce C. Clark, quote, the attack is the key to success. The defense is merely a temporary expedient to conserve forces for an attack elsewhere. Or to prepare for an attack at a future date, end quote. You know what to do.

Go out on the attack. And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jocko. Out.