Jocko Podcast - 303: Always Look for New Information. The Psychology of Military Incompetence.

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

0:00:00 - Opening0:04:44 - On The Psychology of Military Incompetence. Norman Dixon.2:28:21 - How to stay on THE PATH.2:51:59 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 303 with Carrie Helton and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Carrie. Good evening. Also joining us tonight is Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave. So Dave, I've been sitting on this for a while, sitting on this book for a while. I think I've been sitting on it for almost a year. Almost a year I've been sitting on this book and I've been waiting for the right time to cover this book.

and I don't think there's a better time than right now. The reason that I don't think there's a better time than right now, you'll figure out as soon as I say the title of the book. The title of the book is on the psychology of military incompetence, on the psychology of military incompetence. And what does that mean? Well, one thing it means is as we look at military leaders, a lot of times people think,

oh, this individual is in the military, they must be awesome. I mean, look, it happens 100% in the SEAL community. Oh, this guy was a SEAL, he must be of the highest character, must be an unbelievable leader, must be a great runner, right? Must be great at pull-ups and swimming.

Must be the best shot, right? So people make assumptions about the SEAL teams. Oh, if you were sealed, then you must be able to survive at a minimum of, 78 days with, you know, nothing but a loin cloth and a toothpick, right? That's kind of, you can, you, you, you're picking up what I'm putting down, right? Same thing happens with leadership.

You think, oh, those individuals in the military, they made life and death decisions. They must be incredible leaders. And we can also attribute that to leaders in the past, too. Oh, this person was a general. This person was, you know, a military leader in the, 1800s in the 1600s they must have military brilliance well this book disputes that not whole not not not as a whole and he makes a very important point and I had this discussion with Jason Gardner the other day after the Afghanistan podcast Jason's like well there's a lot of good

leaders and I said yeah they're absolutely are and I've worked for a lot of incredible leaders in the military. But to blanket all leaders in the military and say, oh, they're in the military, so they're awesome, is a bad move. And you can actually say, throughout history, there have been some really bad leaders, and it's relatively consistent that you get bad military leaders, bad senior military leaders. So this is something I was interested in. This book is written by a guy named Dr. Norman F. Dixon.

And I don't really remember where I originally heard about the book. It might have been one of the like algorithmic recommendations. Which do we hate the algorithm? Kind of, but sometimes we're a little bit stoked about the algorithm. So I might have been an algorithm. It might have been maybe somebody recommended it to me. But I look at it and obviously I like the military. That's what this podcast is.

We do all kinds of military subjects on this podcast. obviously I like psychology as well. And much of the Jocko Underground podcast, we've covered a bunch of psychology. But when it comes to military stuff, I like military books that are written by military people, not books that are written by theorists or even historians and academics that haven't been there.

So I don't normally like those kind of military books that are written by someone that wasn't a military. So I wasn't sure if this book would make the grade. Then I did some research and here's the deal the author dr. Norman Dixon MBE which is British like thing most excellent order of British Empire which you're given for your achievements in the arts and sciences he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1956 doctor of science 1972, 1976 he was awarded sorry 1956.

Did I say 1956 doctorate and philosophy? 1956 doctorate and philosophy. Doctor of science, 1972, 1976 awarded the University of London Carpenter Medal for quote, work of exceptional distinction in experimental psychology, right? So the guy has some clout.

Bringing home some hardware. He's bringing home some hardware. He's a professor, emeritus, of psychology at the University of University College of London. Author to other books besides this one. One's called Our Own Worst Enemy.

I've got to like that title. Another one called Unconscious Processing. Another one called Subliminal Perception. So that's all impressive. Still wasn't sure if it made the grade, but what tied it all together for me is that prior to all the stuff that he did, he was in the British Army from 1940 to 1950,

and that means he fought in World War II. Was wounded in World War II. Wounded. and this is a quote, according to him he was wounded, quote, largely through my own incompetence, which is,

we're coming out of the gate with some humility, which is nice. But it gives, it means his perspective is, he has that perspective of a soldier,

of someone that's fought, of someone that's been in combat, then he can overlay that on his academic knowledge. But the book is, I mean, you're going to see real quick that this book is pretty,

it's a pretty incredible, book and and I don't know how many podcasts will do on it. I'm assuming it'll be two, maybe three. I don't know how much we'll even be able to get through, get through today. But with that, I'm going to start off with the forward of the book, which is written by a guy named Jeffrey Walrow. Hope I'm saying that right. If not, I apologize to Jeffrey Wayrow.

Professor of Military History, University of North Texas, director of their military history And this is his His forward to the book Which the reason I wanted to read the forward is because it starts to lay out The themes inside this book And you start to get an understanding of where this guy's coming from Anything? Make sense so far?

This is a book that I was burning through highlighters It's almost one of the books where you might as well to stop highlighting because you're highlighting everything. So here we go. The forward to Norm Dixon's on the psychology of military incompetence. Norman Dixon's on the psychology of military incompetence is a classic that should be read not because it is true in every detail, but because it offers the military historian, analyst, or student an important method to discover and rank the manifold reason for military error and defeat. That's a bold statement coming out of the gate.

He's saying the manifold reasons for military error and defeat are found in this book. Coming out of the gate strong. And there's a couple notes in there, not true in every detail. The reason for that is the way the book is laid out. It covers a lot of historical battles and wars. And I think that Dixon was sensitive being an academic about the way historians would read it and be like, well, actually, that date is wrong. And so he covers that himself too. and says, look, ballpark, we're in there.

This is what happened. It's not, and I didn't go and fact check everything, but ballpark, this is what happened. So it's not a historical reference, and he says that later. Continuing on, Dixon deploys psychological theory in a lucid, accessible way and applies it in several case studies spanning the 19th century and 20th centuries. He is in some ways constrained by chronology. The British officer types he scrutinizes are creatures of their age. Boris conservative and authoritarian and this authoritarian piece that he's talking about

This may be the underlying theme of the book this authoritarian Attitude and and personality type and what it means and what it does to you and what it does to your people Continue on they went to stuffy boarding schools and endured tyrannical parents and school teachers They enlisted in a class system that expected snobbish conformity. And yet the deeper you read into the book, the more you realize that the specific circumstances of a Raglan, Haig, Montgomery are less important than their lifelong enlistment in the military hierarchy that constrains and often warps behavior. And you can see he's starting to throw out names, Raglan, Haye, Montgomery. So that's what this book is. He refers to individuals

and shows what they did well, what they did bad. And he does cover good leaders as well. at the heart of this book is a thesis that all can accept all human decision makers are victims of a chronic hazard that emotion and motivation unconsciously distort and bias all thought and perception right it's like crazy this is what we talk about all the time detach from your emotions you get distorted what are you right in ego clouds all decisions, right? That's what he's talking about. Man's needs, biological, social, or neurotic, act on his perception of the world around him

and the decisions he makes. No one, in other words, operates cleanly. What a good thing to remember. No one operates cleanly. You all have it going on. I did the underground podcast a while back and I talked about the fact that we're all insane. And that is something,

the definition of insanity is that your world doesn't match reality. And the fact of the matter is, my world doesn't match your reality, Dave. I know we're probably pretty freaking close because we work in the same job. We have a similar background, but there's no way that you see things exactly the way I see it. Carrie, you and I have a similar background,

but there's no way that we match up. Our realities don't match. So that means we're all insane. It's just a matter of what degree. And that means everyone you interact with is kind of insane. That means their reality is different than yours. So when you're in a leadership position, you're dealing with other people. Their reality is different than yours.

So when you're making a decision and they hear that decision, their reality is different than yours. No one. In other words, operates cleanly. Singleness of mind. A key ingredient of successful command is always under siege by doubt, worries, and distractions. We all churn through a sludge of life experiences that have formed us and left us with key strengths and weaknesses. The challenge for military commanders is all the greater because the stakes of their decisions are so high

and because they operate in stressful environments amid hunger, fatigue, heat or cold, sleep, deprivation. and the relentless ticking of the clock. Not for nothing did Napoleon call unforgiving time, the grand element in warfare, which is epic, because lately I've been talking about the leadership loop. And the number one thing I said you have to consider, the number one thing that's in the front of my mind all the time

in any leadership situation is time. What does he call? The grand element. Time is what you have to think about. And sometimes the thought is, oh, we got plenty of time, Which is cool. But you got to think about that.

People that don't keep time in front of mind, they're always behind. They're always behind. Bro, we're two paragraphs. Dude. I know. And I almost said something. Go ahead. Go ahead.

What do you got? I just, I always like hearing how these people write. And the word, like, this is a good writer. This guy writes well. And this is just the forward, bro. But the fact that he went through all those things, he was talking about heat, cold. And I don't remember all the words.

and when he got to time, he added the additional component of unrelenting. Unforgiving time. Because the heat, we can, it can relent. Or we've got maybe some technology that we're going to wear a coat or some cold weather. Like, we can mitigate all these other things. But time is unrelenting. There is no mitigation. And that will be forever.

Forever. Yeah. We're not going to technology our way out of the time issue. Like, oh, we'll just slow time down. Like we can manage the heat and all those other elements. I just like the way he adds that piece to it. And what's already like just a good, the way he writes is awesome. That's why as a leader and as a person, it has to be the number one thing you think about.

It's the only thing that will give you no slack whatsoever. No, zero. That's it. That clock is ticking. Dixon uses several case studies to elucidate military incompetence. He begins with the Crimean War, which Britain undertook in an era of rapid industrialization prosperity and commercial dominance. Wouldn't it, what do you think if you've got rapid industrialization, prosperity, and commercial

dominance, you just go crush everyone on the battlefield? What do you think that? Victorian Britain was the last word in efficiency, yet its military stumbled from one bloody disaster to the next piling up 21,000 mostly avoidable dead. How could this be in view of Britain's world leadership? Much of it, Dixon finds, had to do with the command performance of the command performance of 66-year-old Lord Raglan. An extreme introvert who died of severe depression during the campaign,

Ragland drifted like a rudderless ship. The officers under him suffered a familiar dilemma. If they took matters into their own hands, they could be accused of insubordination. If they let the rudderless ship drift further, they could be accused of incompetence. That's a catch-22. Ultimately, nothing was done.

And the British troops and taxpayers bore the brunt of their systemic and command incompetence of which the notorious charge of the light brigade was but the thin end of the wedge. Since authoritarian organizations, again, you're going to hear this word. And it took me a while to pick up on it. Even though it's really obvious for me right now, this authoritarian attitude is like this underlying, one of the underlying themes throughout this. since authoritarian organizations like the military are masters at shifting blame. The time-honored tactic of the cornered child. The British Army survived the fiasco of the Korean War unreformed. So they went through all that, 21,000 dead.

Who knows what the price tag was? No reforms. A major theme of this book is in the incorrigibility of military organizations. They must be removed from their pedestals cracked open and filled with daylight, which is another way of saying subjected to rigorous scrutiny and review. Unfortunately, they rarely are. Raglan's Folly, which made the Crimean War, in Dixon's judgment, the prototype for protracted military incompetence, was followed by the Boer War. Somehow, despite the similarities of the two campaigns fought far away for imperial interests, Britain applied no lessons learned from the Crimean.

London's performance in 1899 was even worse than 1855. It's quote, military incompetence straining credulently to the breaking point. Indeed, the British officers took pride in their amateurness, their clubby good fellowship, and their conviction that any effort at self-improvement were bad form. I'm going to say that again. Imagine you're in a group of people where self-improvement is considered bad. bad form. They clung to unhelpful routines like sand crabs clinging to seaweed in storm time.

They battled guerrillas on the South African belt with luxuriant baggage, including pianos, gramophones, chests of drawers, polo mallets, and mobile kitchens and bathrooms. They're fighting against the booers. Savages. Just getting it. Just horrible. Yeah. General Redvers Buller commanded the expedition like Raglan.

He was in over his head. He lacked command experience, imagination, and confidence. He was passive and defeatist. The booers swept over him like a turret. He never stopped retreating, and the press nicknamed him, reverse Buller. Field Marshal Douglas Hague's command in World War I is an obvious place to stop and relish the psychology of military incompetence. Since Dixon's book, there has been a vigorous debate about Hague,

for and against, but few would dispute that Hague psychology had much to do with his mediocre to abysmal performance as British Expeditionary Force Commander. He was an old cavalryman with an outmoded view of warfare. He'd been ruled as a boy by a stern religious mother. He was solitary, aloof, and inspired by an obsessive need for order. And this is another one of those things. That's sort of the authoritarian mindset. You want everything to be organized.

You want everything to be in order. And I'll say, and I'm not a super psychological nerd or a psychology nerd, but he definitely dips into like the childhood stuff, probably a little bit more than I would. And the reason I think I don't dip as much into the childhood stuff is I've known people that had authoritarian parents and didn't end up like this, right? had whatever hyper religious strict parents and ended up you know in every level every type of different person I've known people that had total hippies for parents and let the kids do whatever

they want and I've seen those kids end up in different places on the spectrum so I don't know if I don't know if I I don't know if I correlate these things as much or put as much weight on the upbringing as Dixon does but that's just me it's a interesting to know. It could be it's definitely a contributing factor depending on how your personality reacts to it because I mean we you and I have kids Dave the kids are different like the kids are different you could put them in a controlled environment with the exact same situation because you know oh the one's the middle child the one's the oldest and so oh this that means you treat them differently well even if you put them in a controlled environment

they got personalities and that personality is going to come out yeah um so obsessive need for word it took him too long to grasp just how radically technology like machine guns and heavy artillery had changed warfare and rendered most of what he'd learned at staff college in the 1890s obsolete incredibly haig insisted to the end of the war that the battles he was engaged in were not quote normal warfare which is just a bizarre mindset like this is that normal we'll get back to normal this is just happening right now this is normal that that's again that reality versus mindset or perception like this is reality this this is your normal yeah yeah then he hasn't figured that out negative he's insane insane insane worse he gave his

subordinates the singular gift of the authoritarian defined by Dixon as a terrible crippling obedience officers had to implement Hague's vague instructions he left much in doubt because he was so unsure of himself or be replaced and disgraced. Hague's influence was awful. British officers under him were expected to attack and show, quote, offensive spirit, even against the most invincible defensive fire. This was to demonstrate, quote, pluck and quote, dash and quote, optimism.

Can you even fathom that shit? You're in World War I, and my address to you, Dave, is like, Hey, Dave, all right, listen, mate. What I want you to do is just, I want you to charge with all your heart and show that, show the enemy that you've got some puck and some dash. By the way, yesterday you watch your entire battalion get mowed down or your friend's battalion get mowed down. To shelter in the trenches was to exhibit the disqualifying sin of pessimism. Dave, what's wrong, mate?

What are you doing down there in the trench? Why don't you get up there? Go on. Go on, son. It's the disqualifying. It isn't like, hey, hey, let's pull Dave out of his funk here. He's like, oh, he's incapable of doing this because his behavior reveals that he's pessimistic. Pessimistic about living.

And this is a guy who you said, I think the quote was, took too long to recognize the impact of the machine gun. How many engagements with a machine gun do you need before you go, oh, yeah, things are different now? You don't even need one complete engagement, by the way. Yeah. You get, you get one volley of fire. You go, oh, shit just changed. Everybody get back in the briefing room. We need a new plan.

All armies began the Great War like this, but only Hague kept it up until 1917, coldly firing officers who wouldn't follow his ghastly directives. Prudently dispatched from a chateau dozens of miles behind the lines. Dixon's brilliant description of the military authoritarian Fitzhague, like a Saville-Roe suit. superficial toughness and orderliness are quote a brittle crust of defense against feelings of weakness and inadequacy the authoritarian keeps up his spirits by whistling in the dark he is the frightened child who wears the armor of a giant his mind is a door locked and bolted shut against that which he fears most himself the imagery is outstanding here this guy's yeah he's sitting it on the head All readers will appreciate the drift of Dixon's book,

which might be summarized in George Bernard Shaw's wartime quip that, quote, the British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office. Micromanaging and stifling of initiative are byproducts of the hierarchical military system. A yearning for old certainties like the horse and the battleship, even when tanks and aircraft carriers made them obsolete, is understandable only when psychology is deployed.

There is unquestionably, in any military, in any epoch, a prevailing culture of obedience and group loyalty, a deliberate process of military socialization. As two esteemed psychologists wrote in their 1989 work on the social psychology of authority, once the military culture of obedience is established by training and service, men are, quote, governed not so much by motivational processes, what they want. as by perceptual ones what they see required of them. Dixon sees fear as the common denominator in the general psychopathology of military organizations.

And this is interesting. Fear of the bad performance review. Not fair of getting shot, not fear of a machine gun, but fear of a bad performance review. Not surprisingly then, fear of failure overshadows hope of success leading to complacency, group think, and bad decisions. So if I'm afraid of a bad performance review, I probably don't want to do anything, right? My go-to is like, I'm just going to sit here and we're not going to do anything.

At best, I'm saying, well, if that's what Dave's doing, I guess we'll all get in trouble. Dave will get in trouble first, so I'll do what he's doing. Status quo. Yeah, status quo all day. Attacking the flaws in a military plan was as dangerous to an officer's career in 2003 as in 1901. Officers around Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and U.S. Central Command Centcom leader General Tommy Franks had to bite their tongues when even the most preposterous plans were floated. The same went for officers in Vietnam.

Pushing for a low-intensity counterinsurgency war as opposed to a high-tempo conventional one was not the way to get ahead in an army that had made firepower and mobility its mantra. Military organizations Dixon tells us, can create incompetence, uniformity, and a graying hierarchy. The system all too often creates mediocrity, as bright officers adapt to the plan and institutional priorities, which are frequently at odds with reality and best practices. A recent example of this would be the U.S. Army's decision

not to deploy large numbers of ground troops to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 2001. He was trapped in eastern Afghanistan near the Khyber Pass. The army had only to cordon off his cave complex and escape routes with troops. But so insistent was Secretary Romsfeld on keeping the force small in order to demonstrate the stripped down power of the army and its expeditionary potential and to leave troops off-ramp for an invasion of Iraq that sentcom commander Tommy Franks didn't insist on reinforcements. Nor would he have anyway, nor would he have anyway for Franks took pride in never contradicting the famously cantankerous Rumsfeld. In the clinch, Franks lacked moral courage and common failing among ingratiating authoritarian's.

Bin Laden escaped and would remain at large for 10 more years. Cognitive dissidents is another danger of the military organization. Memoirs from Sentcom and Washington remind us that most clear-thinking officers recognize the failures of Rumsfeld and Franks, even in real time, but felt compelled to keep silent. The one who didn't, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who insisted that massive numbers of U.S. troops would be needed to stabilize a defeated Iraq, was ridiculed and driven into retirement for the crime of speaking truth to power. This reinforces Dixon's point that it is not stupidity that leads to incompetence, but rather the dead hand of the authoritarian personality. Which is an interesting take. So he has to say that throughout the book because it's really easy just to say, oh, these guys were stupid, but they're not stupid. In many cases, they're really freaking smart.

Military organizations all too often force their members to act incompetently. When asked by President George W. Bush to distinguish his views on the 9-11 wars from Ronsfelds, General Tommy Franks weirdly replied, Sir, I think exactly what my secretary thinks, what he's ever thought, what he will think, or whatever he thought he might think. Given the dreadful stakes in the wars, this was incompetence on stilts. Franks, like General William Westmoreland, is a fine example. of the Peter Principle, also referenced by Dixon, by which leaders are promoted beyond their capabilities to an unimagined level of incompetence and efficiency.

So the Peter Principle says that, oh, Dave, oh, Dave did a good job as a squad leader. Let's make him a platoon leader. Oh, okay, did a good job as a platoon leader. Let's make him a company commander. Oh, he did a good job as a company commander. Let's make him a battalion commander. But he's not capable. So he's not capable, but that's his position.

He's not competent in that position, but that's his position. And what you end up with is everybody promotes to, now you don't get promoted to brigade commander, but it doesn't matter. You're a battalion commander. Yeah. So now we have a bunch. Guess what all the other battalion commanders or most of them, all the same thing. They're all promoted to their level of incompetence. Right.

Of course, General Franks thought that he was being submissive and funny. He was speaking what Dixon calls throughout the book, bullshit. Keeping up appearances in this way is the essence of authoritarian structures, proving one's reliability, even in a bad, even in a bad, even in a bit. bad cause. The internal politics of bullshit in war or peace inexorably become a substitute for incisive thinking. This decreases initiative and increases dependency. There is a huge irony for the pattern of modern warfare from Dixon's period to our own has been to require more and more independence and initiative as information and intelligence pass more quickly and in greater volume down the chain of command. So even though we've gotten worse and we've been, we

become more authoritarian, the flow of information and the ability to maneuver and think for yourself has increased. So we're going in the wrong direction. Dixon forces us to reconsider the assumption that military organizations operate as effective teams. In fact, they are often anything but effective. The difficulties Britain's interwar reformers, JFC Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart, had an inducing the British Army establishment to, quote, thresh the grist from the chaff chaff in conventional theories of war, as Fuller reported, are legendary. Fuller in the 1920 saw new technologies like the tank

and the airplane as able to leap from the muscular warfare of the Great War to a faster, quicker, deadlier, less destructive mechanized warfare that would administer quick, relative bloodless, shot through the brain, not the interminable pounding with flesh and guns that had characterized World War I. So you had people after World War I that, and we've covered in great detail, B.H. Liddell-Hard in this podcast, hey, we don't need to do it that way.

That way didn't make much sense. Liddell Hart in 1926 considered the British Army's problems of institutional rigidity and stuffiness so great that he equated it with illness, arguing for the army's, quote, inoculation with the serum of mobility. The army was unmoved. forcing gadflies like Liddell Hart into early retirement. God. You know what?

We don't really like what you're saying. Why don't you retire? Dixon's account of Liddell Hart lacks the more recent scholarship on the rather slippery British theorist, but he rightly cites that the captain as just the sort of man a military organization finds intolerable.

Brash, bright, insightful, eloquent, and opinionated. That's who we don't like. That's who we don't want. We don't want someone that's bright, that's brash, that's insightful, that's eloquent and opinionated. We don't want that person. It's a potent human being right there. It's a potent human being.

It's got to watch out for. And it's interesting because, you know, maybe if Liddell Hart had read his own book and maybe taking a little bit more of an indirect approach on some of these things, he might have done a little bit better convincing the chain of command, right? 100%. He didn't get to read his own book. He didn't have that luxury, unfortunately, for him. Because he went hard and told them they needed to be inoculated with the serum of mobility. That's a rough thing to say up the chain of command. You're telling your leadership they need to get inoculate.

You need to completely change what you're doing. You need an inoculation. That's a bold attack. That's a frontal attack. That's a direct attack. Nothing indirect about that. He became what? He became a prophet.

He was a prophet. And what happens to prophet? He told us what happens to prophet. They get fired. They get stoned. They get crucified. That's what happens to prophets. And he was a prophet.

And what happened to him? Got drummed out of the army. There seems to be a place where there's a transformation that happens where these, I don't want to call them students, but these kind of rebels become the prophet, though, right? Like where it goes from a kind of. of a detached perspective to a no, this is what needs to happen. Why won't you listen, you know, putting that kind of thought forward. I feel like they become, you know.

If you start to get emotional, which can happen, especially when you've got lives at stake or you're, you know, you just pointed to Hackworth's book. Hackworth reached a point where he was trying to persuade people and talking about how we should do it and did it with his own battalion and showed with the results for. You know, we need to do a counterinsurgency. We need to be not going head to head. We need to act like guerrillas. Right. We need to fight like guerrillas. He was doing that.

He was showing the results. But at a certain point, like you just said, you are correct. At a certain point, they say, you know what? We got to stop doing this. And they become a prophet. And they become a martyr. And Liddell Hart became a martyr and got drummed out of the army. David Hackworth became a martyr, got drummed out of the army.

Whether that helped or not, didn't help immediately. Liddell Hart's last act in uniform was to submit an essay on the mechanization of the army for a military competition. Lidell Hart lost to an essay titled Limitations of the Tank. That's crazy, right? You can't make that up. You can't make that up. A little bit of irony there. And they about to get blitz-cragged like you read about.

You know what I'm saying? They got blitz-crugged straight up. That's what went down. On Britain's failure to embrace armored warfare in time to affect the fighting of 1940, Liddell Hart recalled, if a soldier advocates any new idea of real importance, he builds up such a wall of obstruction, compounded of resentment, suspicion, and inertia

that the idea only succeeds at the Southwerect. sacrifice of himself as the wall finally yields to the pressure of the new idea it falls and crushes him So he that's him saying he did become the margar right This is the process of military incompetence Vested interests bureaucratic turfs defensive services and uncertain leaders all contribute to a stifling of innovation and all too often a scapegoating of innovators inevitably Dixon cites the great French statement George Clemenceau in this context quote war is too serious a business to be left to the generals that's no joke fuller who had commanded Britain's tank corps in World War one later said fighting the Germans is a joke compared with fighting the British the blimpish generals, conservatives of a dead military epoch, simply would not be budged. To be fair, there was no easy

solution. Britain had to prepare for war simultaneously in Europe against the Germans and all across its empire against a range of potential enemies like Italy, Japan, and Indian or Palestinian nationalists tanks might work against the Germans, but they'd be acquired at the expense of the tools needed to fight the small wars around the fringes of the empire. That was no excuse for lethargy, yet lethargy is precisely what flourishes in the world of the authoritarian, where vigorous debate and reform are interpreted as a frontry. Can't even debate. Can't even debate.

We're not even having debates around here. And you can picture that authoritarian platoon commander, he doesn't want to hear a debate about the way we should do this mission. Doesn't want to debate about that. The authoritarian CEO of the company doesn't want to debate about how we're going to move into this new market area. He wants people to shut up and do what I told you to do. In France, Charles de Gaulle battled the same sort of establishment. He wanted a small professional army, highly mobile and leveraged with air power. His ideas broke against the power

of the old sweats like generals Maurice Gainlin and Philippe Petain, who looked back serenely on the victory of 1918 and saw the future as just an elaboration of that, not something new. Thanks Patain, characteristically snorted, are the Sancho Panza's, two weighted down to fight. Sancho Panza is a character in Don Quixote. He's like a comic relief, fat guy that can't really fight. That criticism from recalled Don Quixote himself, who told Sancho one fine day, too much sanity may be madness and maddest of all to see life as it is and not as it should be. And of course, there was no more twisted authoritarian than Joseph Stalin, who literally

destroyed the reforms of Marshal Mikhail Tukachevsky. Tukachevsky's deep battle idea might have made the Red Army as formidable as the Germans in time for World War II. It called for, quote, linked and simultaneous destructive operations and, quote, mechanized operational warfare carried on the backs of tanks. Stalin killed Turchewski and all of his acolytes in the purge of 1937. Got some good ideas? the general had studied the Germans too closely he appeared threatening and suspicious to Stalin to Stalin precisely because of his restless mind and broad professional circle the two things that should have made him a fine model officer not a criminal the army that survived the purges was a scarcely improved version of the clumsy peasant force of world war one it would perform about as well in its early campaigns imagine you're france and you get done with world war one and you're like

What do we need to change? We won. And, you know, the Germans were like, we lost. What can we change? Maybe if they would have won, they wouldn't have changed what they did. Wouldn't have come up with the Blitz, Craig. Speaking of which, for the victors of World War I,

the victory proved intellectually crippling. Old weapons mean old tactics. And whereas the Germans were plucked clean of weapons in 1919 and forced to begin anew with tanks and aircraft, the victorious allies clung to, what it worked infantry artillery and field fortifications which reached their apagy with the Maginot Line all of this reinforced a military tendency to do nothing nothing was safer in the crabbed minds of these men than the risk of

failed ventures to Dixon's mind is the military authoritarian's lack of emotional maturity that makes him or her so dangerous to the organization even one seated liberally with other authoritarian's passive dependent secure they are in Dixon's word frightened children in the army in the armor of men the worst mischief happens when they are promoted to supreme command not because they overreach but because they have risen to that rank by obeying orders suddenly with no one above them they become unmoored which is a scary thing right who gets promoted I'm promoting the person that obeyed me if I'm an authoritarian

Who's getting promoted? That's the way I should have framed that question. I'm promoting the person that obeyed me. I'm definitely not promoting Dave Burke that asked me a bunch of questions every time I put out some word. I'm definitely not promoting Kerry, who's, you know, got some comment at the end of my briefing. That seems a little bit undermining. You're not getting promoted. Neither you are.

I got a yes man over here getting promoted. They compensate for this weightlessness with procrastination, with more bullshit or busy work. and a retreat into familiar routines and habits in battle, they might waste their men or suffer a paralyzing compassion for them. And you're like, I don't know, in the Navy, or maybe I'm getting this from Hollywood. I don't know. No, I think it's from the Navy.

We called, you know, polishing your boots, chicken, chicken shit stuff, right? Do you guys have anything like that in the Marine Corps? definitely have that term Okay Would you apply the term Chicken shit To polishing boots To pressing your uniform

To starching your eight-sided cover Doing things that you know Mean nothing Okay Chicken shit Marine Corps? Carry confirmed So

Disconfirmed Negative We didn't use chicken shit In my era Yeah yeah New Corps Yeah You guys called it chicken poo

Chicken poo Chicken poultry But that's a real thing So what's interesting Is he goes into this and says You know if I don't know what to do with Dave Like I'm not sure what we

Guess what I do Yeah but you need to polish your boots Yeah That's the distinction Because as I'm saying that I was like hey the message isn't like You don't need to shine your boots Or have a good looking uniform

Because that stuff doesn't actually That stuff does matter But that stuff matters In a different much like when we hear what hackworth rules were, hey, here's we're going to do, here's why we're going to do it. Here's the reason why those things are important as opposed to if I got a dull out of punishment and I got to make you do stuff with your time that it's a complete and total waste of time. That's what the term, my recollection and maybe a generational thing is like, what are we doing?

We're sitting around. We're going to, uh, uh, um, what do we do the, strip the floors? Yeah, thank you. We're going to strip and wax the floors again. Why? You can tell I was in listed. There you go.

Yeah. So that's stripped and wax and wax and flour. Yeah, that's the distinction right there. You know, and there's this famous, there's a meme out there now. It's this famous picture. It's a picture of a Marine with like a squeegee, like squeegeing the, you know, the parade deck in a rainstorm. Yeah. Got it.

Just get some. Yes. We did have a green weenie was the go-to. You're getting the green weenie there. It was what we'd call that. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

So, I mean, yeah. But another thing he was talking about kind of the hallmark or the, I don't know, freaking sentiment in this authoritarian regime. He said lethargy and paralyization. And there's this type of language that that kind of punishment doling out does to troops. That it's just this, I don't even care. Like, I just don't. I don't care.

You know, and that's kind of that chicken shit or green weenie vibe that you get when that's the kind of leadership. History is littered with such examples. General George McClellan was paralyzed by his vast responsibilities as Lincoln's general-in-chief. General Ludwig Benedict had excellent chance to destroy the Prussian army in 1866, but he didn't dare. General Bazain stood with a concentrated French army between widely separated German armies in 1870, but failed the strike in any direction effectively permitting the Prussians to unite their armies and win the Franco-Prussian war. One historian accurately described Hague's command in World War I as a, quote, floating helpless

whale. So slow was Hague to issue detailed direct instructions to his subordinate commanders and solve the problem of the German defensive fire. Officers with General Maurice Gamelin who commanded the French army in May 1940, when German panzers knifed across the muse, described Gamelin as, quote, stricken by a dull and pervasive fear, end quote. Instead of leading a counterattack against the Nazi invaders, the French general sat passively in army headquarters at Vincennes, a colleague there described him thus, quote, he was like a submarine without a periscope, end quote. U.S. General John Lucas landed on undefended beaches at Anzio, 1944, yet fearfully dug in instead of thrusting to Rome, giving the faraway Germans time to react and circle him and lengthen the war.

Man, that fear of making a call. That's every one of those examples is just, I'm afraid to make a call. The best generals, Dixon concludes, have been the Mavericks. Leaders like Irwin Rommel, Horatio Nelson, and Napoleon Bonaparte, men who had the intelligence and confidence to resist and roll back the negative psychology of the military organization. Unfortunately, the average general is not this sort of man. Dixon notes that military leaders are often chosen for their affability or appearance. Like General Buller, big-boned, square-jawed, or General Neil Ritchie at Tobruk, a great air of decisiveness. But the bluff appearance too often masks doubt and pessimism.

As T.E. Lawrence would say in the same context, too much body and too little head. You know what's interesting about this is I was talking to somebody at an event I was just at. And there's a certain military, like a military bearing, right? We use that term military bearing. People can utilize military bearing. and you see leaders do this in the military all the time. They utilize military bearing as a, it's like a defensive mechanism.

You know, you talk like this, you put the word out, you fur your brow a little bit, and you say, no, this is what we need to get done right now. And they get good at it. They become browbeaters, but they're so good at it that people are like, well, I mean, okay, I mean, that's, they kind of back off and becomes a technique.

So it's beyond just the way that they look, but they start to learn how to act that's going to just kind of allow them to sort of get away with either not doing something or doing something that doesn't make sense. They just kind of, you know, drop their voice a little bit and sort of, you know, stand up straight, get that posture going and look someone in the eyes and say, you need to stand down. So Dave Burke raised his hand and says, hey, boss, I'm wondering if we should worry about that high ground. Hey, Burke, you need to worry about what you need to worry. worry about and people get good enough at that little act that Burke submits right because you're asking an honest question but you're not quite it's an earnest question you're not even you're asking a real question and I come at you with the hey Burke you don't need to worry about that you need to stay in your lane I got this covered and your response is like oh okay you know roger that that plus seniority

oh yeah plus a little bit of rank or whatever on the collar there I mean that's that'll Shut down all kinds of pushback. Shut down. All kinds of pushback. Is that how you operated, Dave? Dude, you see that. I call that browbeating. Do you guys ever heard that term before?

Brow beating? Yeah, I call that browbeaters. And there's plenty of leaders that that that's their leadership style. That they, you know, they could write a book. If they were to try and write leadership strategy and tactics, it would just be called like leadership through brow beating. And they could go through, listen, when someone starts to ask you question, first of all, you know, elevate your voice a little bit. You need to elevate your voice just a little bit so they know. You need to furrow your brow, which I'm a pro at, right?

I was born with a furrow brow. You could fur your brow, elevate, you know, get your posture a little bit more rigid so they can see that you're not backing down, raise your voice, and speak in very direct tones. Burke, look, you need to worry about you're part of the mission. And that, like you said, that shuts stuff down. That's the frequency right there.

Just right in there. Yep. Right in there. Right in there. It's interesting. Just P-I-Ded. I just P-I-Ded a thing, right? I've been seeing that quite a bit lately, too.

Without a sharp and adaptable mind, the incompetent general succumbs to cognitive dissidents, rejecting or ignoring unpalatable news or intelligence. General Arthur Percival at Singapore was this type, simply refusing to credit that the Japanese attack his fortified island base. We ran through that on this podcast. That guy's getting reports.

Hey, the Japanese are literally surrounding us. He's like, eh, they're not going to attack. To explain the average general, Dixon has to resort to ego psychology. The average general, like so many average men and women, is trapped in the neurotic paradox. And here's the neurotic paradox. The need to be loved leads to twin quests for admiration. on the one hand and power and fame on the other. So you want to be liked, but you want to be powerful.

And you got this thing going on all the time. Naturally, the two quests collide violently. More power means that more people dislike or envy you. The great leaders rise above the paradox by performing competently and taking praise, promotion, and criticism in mature, measured stride. Like Kipling's ideal man, they, quote, meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same but most of Dixon subjects and the reason look Dixon concentrates on the bad so that's when he says most of Dixon subs he concentrates

on the bad he doesn't concentrate on the good leaders there plenty of books about good leaders out there most of Dixon subjects like most of our own are not great but merely ordinary weak and often petty hence the need to understand and apply the psychological component of history Dixon's book is in two parts the first presents the case studies the second the psychological behavior such as snobbery and anti-effeminacy which contribute to institutional languor in every man and earthy hungry id battles with an intelligent tactful ego overseen by a watchful super ego this is good man Dixon writes is basically a battlefield a dark seller in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex crazed monkey are forever engaged in mortal combat, the struggle being refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk. That's what's going on in your head.

This is the fate of every human. Excellence, mediocrity, or incompetence hinge on how smoothly the monkey, the spinster, and the bake clerk settle their differences. Reading about older wars, one might suppose that modern times deliver more modern officers. That the Victorian parenting and grim public schools that form Dixon's case studies are relics of an irrelevant past. Not true. American parenting and high schools have apparently contributed no less to military incompetence. Consider the record. In World War I, General John

Blackjack Pershing had to fire two American Corps commanders, six division commanders, and 1400 brigadiers, colonels, and other officers for incompetence. This was remarkable carnage, considering that America fought for just six months in that war. Damn. George C. Marshall, who served as a colonel on Pershing staff in World War I and then presided over the U.S. Army in World War II as chief of staff was anything but incompetent. Marshall was in many ways the model general. Sounded mind and body. He wrote in 1920 that an ideal officer was of, quote, the optimistic and resourceful type,

quick to estimate, with relentless determination, and possessed in addition a fund of sound common sense which operated to prevent gross errors due to rapidity of decision and action. For Hague, optimism, and that's the World War I general, for Hague optimism had been an abstract and silly concept, the spiritual willingness to always to attack. For Marshall, it was a human concept. The spiritual inclination to see a glass is half full to find a way around difficulties and win in spite of them. That's a big difference.

Hague thinks optimism as you just go. Marshall's optimism is you figure out a way to win. It's a big freaking difference. You've been warning people for a little while now, and I've been stealing this about the idea of lessons learned actually being a problem. There's some risk in there. As we fight against bias,

you've talked about bias on underground. You've talked about bias in a lot of different ways and certainly on the leadership consultancy side when we're talking to people about ways to make sure that you don't run into problems in the future. Lessons learned can actually contribute to making mistakes in the future because you will pull these lessons thinking somehow that it sort of predetermines the next outcome. If the situation is the same, we know what the lessons are.

We're going to apply those lessons. We're going to control the outcome. And there's a little part of me just really struggling hearing you read this. And yes, there's some hindsight being applied here. But how do you look at World War I in reflect on the, and say, we won. Yeah. When you, when you like barely didn't lose and you could play semantics all day long,

yes, I know we won compared to the Germans who lost, but in a sense that this is a, this is a validation of the tactics that we employed. This is a, this is the lesson learned of what we did work because we won. And the idea that we can take that and capture this as a, as a reinforcement that the things that we did, were the right things. That's why we were successful. And setting in stone, again, there's a lot of hindsight here.

I understand that. Looking forward of, nobody knew in 1919, what was going to happen in the 1940s. There was, we have that understanding now. But even in that time, how do you look at that war and reinforce that what we did was the right thing when you're on the quote winning side? It's insane. It's insane. We won.

Yeah, we won. let's do it again harder. That's one of my favorite sarcastic, favorite jiu-jitsu coaching calls is, oh, Kerry, that arm lock's not working? Do it harder. I've heard it. I've heard it. Marshall also insisted on flexibility of mind to nullify authoritarian tendencies.

He blocked the rise of time servers and other mediocrities. Marshall called them calamity, howlers for the way they exaggerated difficulties and spun excuses for their failures and noted that such leaders inexorably demoralized their units and infected them with negativity. Man, exaggerating your difficulties. Of the 42 senior generals who took part in the U.S. Army's last maneuvers before Pearl Harbor, only 11 would command units in combat in World War II. That's freaking savage.

That is savage. They were firing some people. The rest had to be fired or sidetracked as deadwood. Dozens of American generals would lose their posts in the course of the war. To officer an American army that expanded 35-fold in three years, Marshall put every candidate through his paces, shifting them into ever more burdensome and pressure-packed jobs, promoting those who excelled. Those who fail, Marshall, grimly noted, are out at the first sign of faltering. Which is interesting to me. I immediately thought to myself, oh, so that's zero defect, right?

So now we're scared. But then it doesn't say failing. It says faltering. It means when the time to step up came, you might have made a bad decision. Okay, well, you're okay. But if you faltered, I don't know what to do, you're out later. That's a huge difference. Maybe I'm reading a little bit too much into that, but I'll go with it.

It's a pretty specific word to choose there, the falter, right? Not fail. Not, you know. Marshall was the exception who proved the rule by 1944. In 1945, the United States enjoyed massive superiority over the Germans and men, tanks, guns, and aircraft yet plotted into Germany. The dynamism of 1941 to 1943 when Doit D. Eisenhower and Marshall had pruned the deadwood and shot younger officers up the ladder was replaced with an emphasis on methodical teamwork

that would harness America's material superiority. It was like war by General Motors, with a risk-averse corporate strategy, more concerned not to lose than to win swiftly. This was precisely the attitude that shaped the post-war U.S. Army and Korea and Vietnam. Officers could no longer be relieved for cause as that would generate embarrassing publicity and congressional inquiries so they were often left in their jobs. 70-year-old Douglas MacArthur, who commanded the Korean War from Tokyo, possessed every trait of Dixon's most encourageable, authoritarian, and committed every possible error, nearly precipitating

an American defeat and World War III. In Vietnam, General William Westmoreland's disastrous leadership was initially viewed with great hope. Westy succeeded a string of incompetence who had misconstrued the war and given the South Vietnamese relentlessly bad advice on how to win. First, Samuel hanging Sam Williams, then Lieutenant Colonel, or sorry, then Lionel, split head Magar then Paul has harkens the last derided by defense secretary Robert McNamara as quote not worth a damn Westmoreland was supposed to be different but he proved the perfect military incompetent dim blinkered unsure of himself lost and unmoored as a commander he had actually refused to hire Vince Lombardi as coach of the army football team when he was superintendent of

West Point in 1960 quote this was not the of man I wanted around cadets, Westy said of Lombardy. His game plan in Vietnam would be no shrewder. One might ask how it could be otherwise that Vietnam war was directed by a particularly vexing incompetent General Maxwell Taylor, the ultimate pleaser, who as presidential military advisor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then Ambassador South Vietnam, flattered first John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson into believing that they could eat their cake and have it too. That is, fight the Vietnam War with limited means.

and public support and still win it. And I read that not great. Limited means and public support. He's saying limited means and limited public support and still win it. Like the military and civilian advisors gathered around George W. Bush in 2003, Taylor was obsessed with White House access and was willing to suppress conflicting opinions to conceal stubborn facts to keep it that way. On the ground in Saigon, Westmoreland rather too eagerly brought Taylor's fraudulent talk

points to life and Westy after all was just the sort of average Joe who got his ticket punched in the US Army of the 1960s he'd never been to staff or war college only to a cooks and baker's school and then a 13-week management course at Harvard he never read so Harvard Business School formed him into a McNamara like organization man all charts and graphs the PowerPoint general avant la letter I didn't know it The letter, I had to look that up. Means he was a PowerPoint general, before there was such a thing as a PowerPoint general.

Literally means before the letter. His search and destroy strategy was an unmitigated disaster, not least because of the destroying went on in the South, not in the north of Vietnam. Westie doggedly shelled, bombed, burned, and poisoned hundreds of villages, succeeding mainly in increasing the number of insurgents and losing support of the South Vietnamese people. The United States dropped twice as many bombs on Allied South Vietnam as on the enemy north.

More bombs, in fact, that have been dropped in all theaters in World War II. Westmoreland's mantra was firepower. Like Dixon's incompetence, he hid in the only thing that he, an artillery man, knew. A man intending to lose a war could hardly have done it with more efficiency. That's a freaking rough assessment. the fact that his civilian commanders were no more acute in their judgment in no way excused his incompetent strategy. He was relieved in 1968. The Iraq War reprised the Vietnam incompetence with the incurious, unassertive Tommy Frank succeeded by General Ricardo Sanchez,

who, one historian labeled the William Westmoreland of the Iraq War, Sanchez had leaped from division to Army Command and was the embodiment of the Peter principle. As a State Department onlooker said of him, all trees, no forest, not a strategic or political thought. When General David Petraeus took over in 2007, he introduced effective counterinsurgency strategy, but too late to prevent the dissolution of Iraq into sectarian fragments or to buttress plummeting American support for the war. Senator Chuck Hagel asked the marvelously prophetic question about Petraeus's troop surge. Quote, what if the What is the point of bringing the violence down with U.S. troops if it will merely resume once the U.S. troops are withdrawn? Hegel had served as a grunt in Vietnam. He knew military folly when he saw it.

Nixon's detailed case study ends in 1944, but he has a go at more recent history in the last chapter, surveying the martial lunacy of Vietnam and the staggering irrationality of the Bay of Pigs invasion, clearly implying that there is no end of military incompetence. And indeed, the military ineptitude displayed in the decade since Vietnam most shatteringly in the Iraq war shows that military incompetence and its psychological roots cry out for continued study and application. This book is a template and deserves its classic representation. on the psychology of military incompetence is also a vital corrective to what we're experiencing today.

The uncritical adoration of veterans, troops, and their officers by the American public and more ominously by presidential candidates in Congress. Living as we do in an age of nonstop semi-war, the need for clear, unsentimental thinking is more important than ever. It has become routine for candidates running for. for Commander-in-Chief to describe their global strategies thus, quote, I would check with my generals and follow their advice, end quote. Dixon jerks us back to reality with our civic responsibilities.

What if the general or admiral is an incompetent authoritarian, blind to the true situation leading the country into a ditch? What if the general is a well-massed authoritarian type who cannot learn from experience, who denies, rationalizes, deflects blame, and creates scapegoats, the last usually, quote, the folks in Washington. Indeed, what deficient American commander has not made, this is Swan Song, quote, At least in blank, I knew who the enemy was. Here in Washington, I don't, end quote.

A failed Iraq war commander was the last to try that wheeze, an old perennial that bloom during Korea and Vietnam too. Read this book, absorb its lessons, and you will be on your guard against this infantilization. to revere the uniform without first peering inside. Indeed, Dixon cites a path-breaking Swiss child psychologist in this regard, quote, the adult who is under the dominion of unilateral respect for the elders and for tradition is really behaving like a child. That was just the foreword of this book. That's Jeffrey Walrow.

And this, he wrote that in 2016, or that's when this edition is. I got an older edition too. You know, I got the old school hardcover one. Because, you know, that's how I roll. Because I know when we, when this podcast comes out, people can go out and buy those old school once. I already got mine.

I tried to get as many as I could off the market. We roll into now into Dixon's preface. And he starts this off. And I probably could have, I probably could have and probably should have started off this whole podcast with this note that he makes out of the gate. He says, this book is not an attack upon the armed forces, no upon the,

nor upon the vast majority of senior military commanders who, in time of war, succeed in tasks, which would make the running of a large commercial enterprise seem like child's play by comparison. So I should have started the podcast with that. Because let's face it, they're going to go hard in the paint. We're already feeling that. And it can be very easy to think that any critique

of the leadership of these wars or people in leadership positions specifically, it can be very easy to interpret this as shots at those people. But really, and I think this is what's going to be done in the book too, is it's going to be more a breaking down of these leadership, you know, failing leadership tactics and, you know, leadership roles or, you know, how these guys are doing it more so than these guys themselves. You know what I mean? Am I close there? Unfortunately not.

No. Dixon goes hard. Dixon goes hard than paint. He's just straight calling these guys out. These guys are going to get called out. Okay. Well, based on his note there in the preface, it sounded like he was going to go a little different.

But he's going hard. Yeah, he goes hard. It goes hard. There's no punches. Roger that. And but he, but, and he doesn't spend as much time. He does, he does talk about some of the good military leaders. Uh, but he spends.

Most of his time talking about the bad military leaders and how just bad they were and why they were bad and the mistakes that they made. And it wasn't like, well, you know, he was really making a good decision based on the information he had sick. No, no, he wasn't. Right.

He was, you know, we're gonna get to some stories that would make you sick to your stomach. Oh shit. Some of these stories will make you sick to your stomach. And, you know, Dixon served in World War II. Dixon was wounded. Right, this guy knows what's up. He's probably had some incompetent leaders.

So he's gonna go hard. But, and look, I served with incredible leaders in the military. Incredible leaders. Incredible. Individual, I don't know if there could be better leaders than some of the leaders I served with the military. So this book isn't an attack on the armed forces or all leaders, neither am I. And that's not what we're doing here. But there are some bad seats.

And we need to learn from that. Because there's some legit things you can do to take corrective measures and watch out for this. Especially if, just like everything else, if you aim this book at yourself, if you aim this book at yourself and you, every time I hear a four, every time I say authoritarian theme, instead of thinking like about your boss or about some subordinate leader that you have, if you instead think, oh, how am I authoritarian? Because that doesn't, oh, I do that. Oh, I lean in that direction. If you start thinking like that right now, that's the benefit. That's what you should be trying to do. Pretty much wiped out half my page of notes here.

Did I just, did I just reject your notes? No, that's legit, man. I kept, you know, like I said this a thousand times, I get to the coolest part about being on this podcast is I hear the stuff in person live for the first time. Did you order this book when I told you ordered it like a year ago? Yes. But you've been sending me screenshots of, like, you've been dabbling with this thing for a, I've known this thing's coming, so it's cool. But it's still mostly brand new.

Like this is all new and I get to write stuff down. And part of it is trying to think about how this makes sense in my own head. And I wrote down like five minutes ago. There's a lot of risk with this book. And the risk as I'm listening to you is that it's going to be a validation for the listeners that there's a bunch of other screwed up people out there. And they're the problem. Oh, the other people.

The other people. Yeah. And when I wrote down, I go, you mitigate that risk by this, by assuming this guy is talking to you. Not about other people.

He's talking about you. And the risk that you are a reflection of those behaviors. And the only thing I wrote down that, that I was thinking about it sort of anticipation of this, is that it's not just these individuals as flawed as they are. And I'm glad that we are, I'm glad all of us are taking a minute to go, hey, listen,

this is not just us taking shots at all these people in the military to be, be critical of them because leading is hard, the military is hard, and there's a whole bunch of reasons. But there are flawed individuals. The other piece that compounds that for this, which is, again, something we can all think about is that there is a system that promotes that, that validates that, that reinforces that. It helps create and take the worst of these behaviors and magnify them. And does your company, does your team, does your family, does your household, does your business do the exact same thing. Yeah.

And just to add one more little thing that, that you said, which is 100% right, you're right. The military can in many ways take these people with these tendencies and promote them. It can do that. It also, even prior to that, attracts these people. Because, you know, the authoritarian person likes things to be controlled, likes uniformity. You know, if you're in college,

And you like uniformity and you're looking at your dorm room going, gosh, I wish everyone would just be quiet at night. You're like, oh, you know, I'm going to join the military. Yeah. The idea of rank to that person? Exciting. You mean, you mean to tell me. Yeah. I put this on and people will listen to me.

People will listen to me. They'd have to do what I say. I'm in. Oh. The idea of uniformity is not a bad thing. It's an attractive isn't that we literally wear a uniform. That attribute is a positive. in so many ways for those of us interested in the military.

So just to both of what you're saying, that idea like, oh, those things you go, man, I don't want a bunch of yes-man uniform thinking, you know, uh, uh, group think. Actually, uniformity is hailed as a positive attribute in many ways across the military. So much so like, 100% the more you look like the person next to you, the better you are. Yes. And that uniform looks exactly like this regulation.

You're my guy. Yeah, you think about who's getting attracted to this. Look, do you get guys, men and women that are patriotic, men and women that want to challenge, men and women that want to take care of their people and lead? Absolutely. Yeah.

Absolutely. You do. Like you get all kinds of people. Do you get someone that just wants to put that rank on and finally get listened to? Lieutenant Callie, right? Totally. In Nam.

You know, you do read the backstory on Lieutenant Callie from the, from the Milai Masker. It's like, oh, he was, no one respected him in his life. He had to go through OCS a bunch of times. He wanted that freaking rank so bad. It was probably like,

the most rewarding thing he ever got was to get that finally get that rank and people will just shut up and listen to me so that's what you that's what you're tracking so we are you doing that in your company what kind of people you're tracking into your company scary it is however an attempt to explain how I'm a minority of individuals come to inflict upon their fellow men depths of misery and pain virtually unknown in other walks of life that's a freaking heavy sentence like that's true like you hey if you're in business and you're in a authoritarian okay cool you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna drive some people crazy whatever right when you're in the military you're causing

Depths of misery and pain virtually unknown in all the other walks of life This book involves the putting together of contributions from a great many people historian sociologists psychologists and of course soldiers and sailors It is hope that none of these will feel misrepresented in the final picture which their contributions make for errors of fact and for the opinions expressed I alone take full of Okay, he's taking some ownership. In the writing of this book, I also owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who gave generously of their time to reading and discussing earlier drafts, their encouragement, criticisms, and advice have been invaluable. And he goes on to think about a freaking page and a half of people. Names, names, names, names. And then finally he gets to this port.

And by the way, one thing that's interesting that you couldn't have predicted is this guy's Really funny. He's got that dry British humor throughout the entire book, and he's awesome. So he brings the heat. Carrie's like, I'm sure he's not, you know, take his, oh, he's taking shots. Not only taking shots, but some of them are pretty damn funny. So he says this. He says, finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to that handful of people who would probably

prefer to remain nameless whose hostility and dismay that anyone should write a book on military incompetence provided considerable, if unlooked for confirmation of the relationship between militarism and human psychopathology. So like all you didn't write a book, exactly, you're the reason why. I love that. You are the reason why.

So that's his opening. Now we get into chapter one. Like I said, this is going to be a slow role with this book. He starts off with a quote. At least it's a really short. book. Klauswitz. We only wish to represent things

as they are and to expose the error of believing that a mere bravo without intellect can make himself distinguished in war. And Bravo can be used as a noun, I found out after reading that quote. It means someone that's like a daring man.

Daring man isn't good enough. By now most people have been, have become accustomed to one might almost say, blase, about military incompetence like the common cold flat feet or the British climate it is accepted as part of life faintly ludicrous but quite unavoidable surely there can be nothing left to say about the subject these coming out of the gate look like yeah military incompetence whatever so way it is it's like flat feet some people got it in fact

military incompetence is largely preventable tragically expensive and quite absorbing segment of human behavior it also follows certain laws statement the first intimation of this came to the writer during desultory reading about notorious military disasters these moving often horrific accounts evoked a curious deja vu experience for there was something about these apparently senseless goings on which sent one's thoughts along new channels making contact with phenomena from quite other hitherto unrelated context and then back again to the senseless facts not now

quite so senseless until gradually a theme continuous as a hairline crack could be discerned throughout the stirring tales of daring do those big sentence what's he saying in that what he's saying is he started reading about all these military disasters and as he read them he would think about another one and you think about another one and what he started to see was a thread that connected them all together if this pattern was real and it meant what it seemed to mean certain predictions would follow these were tested and found correct. Yet other pieces began falling into place until gradually the mosaic of elements took on the semblance of a theory. This book is about that theory. It is concerned with placing aspects of military behavior in the context of general psychological principles.

This sounds fine, a cheerful marriage of history and psychology. Unfortunately, however, such a union may not be entirely agreeable to some of potential in-laws. Judging from the attitude of some historians putting together of psychology and history is to say the least bad form while putting together of psychology and military history is positively indecent. There are at least two reasons for this anxiety. The first is that since there are few things more annoying than having one's behavior explained, there exists a natural distaste for explanations of historical figures with whom one perhaps identifies. So he's saying, look, I'm going to write this book. It's about psychology and it's about military history. And that's not.

not going to be popular because a lot of people relate to those military figures, those historical military figures. And when you start talking about why they made those decisions, some people are going to get offended by that. So that's the first reason why this is a risky book. The second reason is a distrust of reductionism, of the idea that anything so complex as a military disaster could possibly be reduced to explanations in terms of the workings of the human mind and this by a psychologist of all people.

So, oh, you're going to tell me all this stuff took place? And it was because this dude, you know, had a weird psychology about something. That's what we're going to say. In answer, one can only say that has, of course, historians know more about history than do psychologists. Of course, historical events are determined by a complex set of variables.

Political, economic, geographical, climactic, sociological, but ultimately history is made by human beings. And whatever other factors may have contributed to a military disaster, one of these was the minds of those who were there. And another, the behavior to which these minds gave rise. So there's all kinds of things that are playing into these disasters. And yes, the climate and the geography and the economics. All the things are playing into it.

But you also had these human beings, minds and how did their minds end up that way now these are complex variables hence it has been necessary to play down the other factors in order to focus more clearly upon the psychological determinants consider the enogalous case of aircraft accidents Dave Burke glad you're here nobody would deny that aeroplanes crash for a number of different reasons sometimes working independently sometimes in unison but this does not mean that the selecting out for particular study of a single factor such as metal fatigue necessitates dwelling on other such variables as bad weather in different navigation or too much alcohol in the bloodstream of the pilot.

So just because the pilot was drunk doesn't mean you can't look at the metal fatigue that it put on the wings. The case for a reductionist approach, however, also rests upon other considerations, namely that the nature of military incompetence and those characteristics which distinguish competent from incompetent senior commanders have shown a significant lack of variation over the years despite changes in other factors which shape the course of history. So you see failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, all these different failures. And there's been a lack of variation of what caused the failures from a psychological perspective, even though the factors, the environment has totally changed.

So it's not like, well, you know, you had horses. And so, but you failed and you had tanks and you failed. Wait a second. What's the common thread? Oh, the mind. Whether they are well equipped or ill-equipped, whether they are in control of men who are armed with spears or tanks or rockets, whether they are English, Russian, German, Zulu, American, or French, good commanders pretty much remain the same.

Likewise, bad commanders have much in common with the other, which is what we say all the time. Sometimes we'll get asked a question. Well, you know, what makes this type of person a good leader? It's like, it doesn't matter what. It doesn't matter if they're a frontline infantry leader or a financial consultant company or a construction company. The leadership characteristics that make the good leaders are all the same. Yeah. Humble leaders usually do better no matter of the situation.

It's ridiculous. One rewarding byproduct of writing this book has been the many enjoyable conversations I've had with people in the armed services. Here again, however, a small minority viewed the enterprise with dismay as something lacking in taste, if not actually boarding on sacrilegious. So he's having conversations with people tell he's going to write this book, and they're like, whoa, why are you going to do that? He's got a little footnote here. It says it is fair to add that certain common characteristics of those civilians and servicemen who took extreme view provided a very useful clue as to the possible origins of military incompetence. It's true. Yes.

Sacrilege. You should not write a book like that. Okay. To this understandable sensitivity, I can only say that no insult is intended. In point of fact, for the devotees of the military to take exception to a study of military incompetence is as unjustified as it would be for admirers of teeth to complain about a book on dental carries, which means decay. in an imperfect world the activities of professional fighters are presumably as necessary to society as those of police prostitutes sewage disposers and psychologists it is just because we cannot do without these callings except possibly the last that any serious attempt to understand their peculiarities should be welcomed and indeed taken as a compliment for it is a token of their importance that we should merit such attention so we're freaking it You've got to be kidding me. Why wasn't there just like decades of these books being written for every situation,

every war that's taken place? Moreover, there's only by contemplation of the incompetent that we can appreciate the difficulties and accomplishment of the competent. If there were no incompetent generals, it might appear that the direction of armies and the waging of war were easy, task well within the compass of all who had the good fortune to reach the highest levels of military organizations. However, it is not only when contrasted with the inept that great commanders look their best, but also when seen in context of the organizations to which they belong.

The thesis will be developed that the possibility of incompetence springs in large measure from the unfortunate, if unavoidable, side effects of creating armies and navies. This is to your point earlier, Dave. We create these things, and they kind of produce or at least have a tendency to produce incompetence. And therefore, when you're a good leader inside of a organization that produces incompetence, You're actually doing double good. You get two gold stars.

For the most part, these tend to produce a leveling down of human capability at once, encouraging to the mediocre but cramping to the gifted, but cramping to the gifted. Viewed in this light, those who have performed brilliantly in the carrying of arms may be considered twice blessed. I guess I just stole that from him. For they achieved success despite bad features of the organization to which they happened to belong. This alone would seem to justify an unabashed excursion

to the realms of military incompetence, but there are additional grounds, if anything, more pressing. They concern the related issues of cost and probability. While few would dispute that the cost grows exponentially with the growth of technology so that the price of wrong decisions must now be reckoned in mega deaths, the chance of military incompetence remains a matter. for debate. We might hope that this would be a declining function for better education, more

realistic values, greater fear of immeasurably worse consequences, and an decrease in jingoism. But there are strong grounds for taking the pessimistic view that the chance like the cost continues to increase with positive acceleration. This is getting worse, what he's saying. Hey, don't you think, hey, look, if you were going to go out and you're going to fight with swords and you're a bad leader, you're probably going to get 50 guys killed. Now you're going to go out and fight with artillery and machine guns. Now you're going to get 1,000 people killed. We must be making improvement.

We're not. In fact, it's getting worse. Several reasons may be advanced for this depressing hypothesis. Firstly, the gap between the capabilities of the human mind and the intellectual demands of modern warfare continues that expansion, which started in the 18th century. It is probably opening from both sides, while modern war becomes increasingly swift and deadly,

and the means by which it is waged increasingly complex, the intellectual level of those entering the armed services as officers could well be on the wane. Ouch. He wrote this in 1976, just saying. He's like, hey, if you go to the military right now, you know. This tentative supposition is based on the fact that fewer and fewer of the young consider the military,

to be a worthwhile career. Again, this is post-nom, he's writing this. One is only to look at the contemporary recruiting advertisements to realize the evident difficulties of finding officer material. They spare nothing in their efforts to convince an unresponsive youth. The services are depicted as glittering toy

shops where handsome young men enjoy themselves with tanks and missiles while basking in the respect of lower ranks, hardly less godlike than themselves. In their eagerness to drum up applicants, these calls to arms attempt the mental contortion of presenting the services as a classless society in which officers nevertheless remain gentlemen. The clear implication of such expensive pleading can surely be that the market for a military career is shrinking, to say the least. To meet this

fall off an officer recruitment, insufficient has been done in the writer's opinion to improve the real as opposed to the advertised incentive value of military career. Again, Again, this is written in the 70s, so you didn't have long lines at the recruiting offices in 1973 when he was writing this. You can see how one might have this outlook on the military during that time, for sure. Yeah. Skip a little bit here. In short, possibly less able people are being called upon to carry out a more difficult cost task with a heavier price tag and the highest levels of responsibility. which are staggering.

In the Vietnam War alone, the military commanders were responsible for executing policies which cost the United States $300 billion. Seems cheap now coming out of Afghanistan

at a $2 trillion price tag. They were responsible for releasing 13 million tons of high explosives, more than six times the weight of bombs dropped by the United States in all theaters

during the whole of the Second World War. They were responsible for the delivery of 90,000 tons of gas and herbicides. And they were responsible for the deaths of between one and two million people. These are great responsibilities. Errors of generalship on this scale would be very costly.

Of course, many of the arguments put forward in this book are equally applicable to other human enterprises. Hmm. That's why we're freaking interested in this stuff. Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that incompetence occurs more frequently in military subcultures than it does in politics, commerce, or the universities. There are, however, apart from the heavy cost. of military disasters, special reasons for studying cases of military ineptitude. So this applies to everywhere.

That's why, I mean, this is what we do for a living in the National Front. This is what we do for a living. But he's going to call out the reasons why he's going to focus on the military. The first is that military organizations have a particularly propensity for attracting a minority of individuals who might prove a menace at high levels of command. And the second is that the nature of militarism serves to accentuate those very traits, which might ultimately prove disastrous, which is what we just talked about.

Dave Burke likes people to listen to him, and he realizes there's a place he can go. He can put a freaking gold bar on his collar, and he becomes the man. In theory, then, errors of generalship could be prevented by attention to these causes, you would think. Thirdly, the public has, at least in the democracies,

some real say as to who should make its political decisions. This does not apply to generals. So you look, we get to vote you out. If you're a president or you're a senator or you're a representative, we can vote you out. Can't vote out of general. Chairman of a board. You look at business, you know, anything like that. Not the case here. Yeah, we can fire you from your position. 100%. Even the worst government and the most inept prime minister could come up for possible dismissal every so often. This is not true of armies and navies. We have, we may have the government We deserve but sometimes had the military minds which we did not.

Fourthly, if one of the main differences between military and political organizations is the degree of public control that between the military and commerce lies in decision payoffs And he's got this note here so relatively trivial and unimportant our most academic decisions that it would be arrogant to discuss them in the same breath This guy takes shots at the academia quite a bit for a guy that's a freaking professor, or he was a professor. A wrong decision by a company chairman or board of directors may cost a great deal of money and depress a sizable population of shareholders, but military errors have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and untold misery to civilians and soldiers alike. But the case for a study of military incompetence rests upon other issues. Not the least of these is the need to examine a view of military behavior diametrically opposed to, though in no way less extreme than that of people who would vehemently defend senior commanders against even the faintest breath of criticism. Well, this is what I was talking about earlier.

We think, oh, this guy was in the military. So he must be squared away. No, this other hypocritical stance seems remarkably widespread. Thus, for many people with whom the author discussed a central topic of this book, the notion of military incompetence struck as an immediate and responsive chord. Rejoinders range from you will have no shortage of data to surely that's the whole of military history. So when he told people who's going to write this book, they go, oh yeah, you got plenty of

data on incompetence and isn't that just the entire military history? But when pressed for details, there was a tendency to become vague and retire behind a 1066 and all that attitude to the same. subject, psychological causes were usually reduced to a single factor, low intelligence, or, as one historian put it, the bloody fool theory of military history. So look, you got people that made bad decisions, they were stupid. Doubtless this view has been contributed to by such books on military ineptitude as Alan Clark's The Donkeys, an abrasive critique of the generals of the First World War. Certainly, it's title taken from the famous conversational.

between Ludenherf, Ludendorf and Hoffman, and such captions as donkey decorates a lion. So this book, The Donkeys, this is a quote, you guys ever heard to quote, lions led by lambs? So here's the original quote, according to the memoirs of Field Marshal von Falkenheim, cited by Alan Clark, Field Marshal Van Ludendorf's comment, The English soldiers fight like lions was greeted by his friend, Major General. Max Hoffman with true, but don't we know they are lions led by donkeys? And they got a picture in this book of, you know, some general giving a young soldier an award. And the caption is, donkey decorates lion.

The contents of this book imply, however, that while stupidity may have possibly played apart, limited intelligence was certainly not the cause of the behavior for which the generals have been criticized, judging from the spate of books among which the donkey, the donkeys appeared it looked as if the taboo had been lifted on peering into the military woodshed but mixing our rural metaphors the ernst while sacred cows were once more being transmorgified into nothing more than very unsacred asses transmorgified had to look that word of what is that it means magically change that magically changed so transmorgified the Thus, one historian has ascribed a series of military mishaps to boneheaded leadership.

Another spoke of, quote, the long gallery of military imbecility, while a third has said of British soldiers that their fate was decided for them by idiots. So that's what they're normally, you know, this guy was just stupid. And as you read this, as you read this book, you realize these are smart people in many cases. And that's such a dismissive take on that. You know, it's just like, oh, that guy was. dumb, you know. Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly the point he's making. Right. Is, oh, yeah, the guy was just stupid. You, you, and, and you know what's funny is how often do you, how often did you hear throughout your life? Oh, yeah, that guy's smart has no common sense, right? That's like a common thing. Oh, that guy's, oh, they'll say, oh, he's really book smart, which is a, a dig.

Right. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't make good decisions. And these people are actually smart in many cases. The view taken here is that besides being unkind, these views are probably invalid. The hypothesis of intellectual incapacity leaves two questions quite unanswered. How, if they are so lacking intelligence, do people become senior military commanders, which is an accurate same man. I mean, you can't be a senior military commander if you're stupid. Maybe occasionally.

And what is it about military organizations that they should attract, promote, and ultimately tolerate those whose performance at the highest levels may destroy the organizations that they represent. To answer these questions, however, it is first necessary to discover what the job of generalship entails and how it could be done so badly or so well. This, the bare bones of good and bad generalship is examined in the next chapter in terms of information theory.

Okay, you know, as I was going through this book trying to decide what I'm going to read, I just had to go hard in these first couple chapters to lay down the background, the context. And so it's almost like all that right there is starting head towards what we're talking about. The main part of this book is divided into two halves.

The first is concerned with case history's examples of military ineptitude over a period of some hundred years or so. Much of this material will no doubt be all too familiar to the reader. It is included here and the selections made with two main purposes in mind to provide an aid memoria. And because it is believed that common denominators of military competence emerge most clearly when looked at in a longitudinal study one special virtue of this approach is that the highlights it highlights the influence or more

often regret regrettable lack of influence of earlier upon later events so throughout he's covering these histories and as you cover these histories you can see that there's just nothing learned you know it's even I guess maybe worse or at least the same ballpark as you're talking about Dave oh they took these lessons learned and they made them rigid. And just as bad as that as we just didn't learn anything. For the most part, cases of incompetence have been taken from British military history. Far from being unpatriotic, this apparently one-sided approach springs from a sentimental

regard for the forces of the crown whose record of valor and fighting ability is second to none and whose ability to rise above the most intense provocation, either from a civilian population as in Northern Ireland today or from the lapses of their top leadership in days gone by must surely occupy unique position in the history of warfare. So he's like, hey, I'm going to talk about the Brits. Nothing against the Brits. In fact, the Brits have the unbelievable history, but that's what we're going to look at. The second half of the book is devoted to discussion and explanation.

It is subdivided into two parts. The first concerned with the social psychology of military organizations and the second with the psychopathology of individual commanders. And what's, I'm telling you, I was like, oh, well, maybe I'll just do this. Maybe I'll just do that. May I'll just do one part. The context is so strong.

And he doesn't play around. He doesn't wait until the end to start explaining things. He's doing it throughout the book. So, and as you said, and as I said, you know, you got to aim this book at yourself. Man, it's uncomfortable sometimes. You're reading this thing and you're like, oh, oh, man. Like, oh, I did that.

I did this. You know, you can feel it. The approach here is essentially eclectic, drawing upon ethological, psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories. It attempts to explain military ineptitude in light of five inescapable, if unfortunate features of human psychology. These are. One, man shares with lower animals certain powerful instincts. And again, these are like the root of what he's talking about, these five inescapable parts of our brains. So we share with lower animals certain powerful instincts.

Two, unlike lower animals, most men learn to control, frustrate, direct, and sublimate these instinctual energies. So, right, we got control over some of these things. At least we're supposed to. We can at least frustrate them. That's a good word, right? We can at least frustrate them. Three, while by far the largest part of this learning occurs in early childhood, its effects upon adult personality are profound and long-lasting. Again, this is where, you know, you get into like, you know, Freud and how you're raised and all these little things that are in your child.

And I don't know if that's right or wrong. I don't know if that's right or wrong because I think I've seen people that have been raised all kinds of different ways and end up all kinds of different ways. but I think the end result is you end up with a personality, regardless of where it comes from, you end up with a certain personality or certain personality aspects that we can PID, we can identify him. For residues of this early learning, and in particular unresolved conflicts between infantile desires and the demands of punitive morality may remain wholly unconscious, yet provide a canker of inexhaustible anxiety. Again, really tying our behaviors to how we got treated when we were kids.

And if you got, you know, the room had to be clean. You had to clean your plate, like all those little things. And again, chiming if you guys think I'm wrong, I've known people that were raised in a totally strict environment and they end up on one end of the spectrum and I've known people that raised in a totally strict environment, and they end up in a totally different person. Are there some root things that are overlapping? Sure.

But I think we have to look, and maybe it's just the way psychologically things play out, you know, but they're there. Does he say unresolved? Yes. So I think that has, I think that word jumps out at me, the unresolved part. I think, I think a lot of times people are able to come to terms with something from their childhood and then own it, right, move past it. I think it's the unresolved part that lingers, right?

Where there's a bit of broken something there that hasn't been addressed. And because of that, it continues to plague the individual as they try to move forward. So maybe if I know you two and you both were raised, you know, in this super strict way, and yet Kerry was like, you know what? You know, my mom was just a little bit crazy

and that's cool. But Dave was like, they couldn't let it go. Maybe that's what makes Dave, you know, a little bit harder in that respect. Or maybe you're both raised by, you know,

the hippie parents that didn't care. And, you know, Kerry was like, yeah, I don't need to care about anything. It's all good. And Dave was like,

you know, I don't want to end up like that. And you end up with a more militaristic mindset. Or a trauma. Hippie mom wrecks the van. Johnny moves on. You know, Dave doesn't. Dave, Dave, Dave bears the scar, right?

Is this thing hitting close to home to you, man? What's going on here? I'm just saying, I'm just saying, hey dog. Yeah, I really do. I think he comes down to the van. All right. The last one, when this anxiety becomes the driving force in life's endeavors,

the fragile edifices of reason and competence are placed in jeopardy. So that's scary. Again, for me, regardless of the source of this personality trait that you end up with, if that be, it doesn't matter where it came from. If you have it and it becomes the driving force in your endeavors, that's where we run into a problem. And I don't want to say it doesn't matter where it came from, but regardless of what you think of that, we know someone that's hyper, their ego is out of control. Like it doesn't really matter what I shouldn't say it doesn't matter where it came from But there's nothing we can do about where it came from but if I understand that Dave has a massive ego I'm not sitting there going well, you know do I need to have him sit down on the couch? You know, and like let's go go

Hypnotism and break down where he got this giant ego from or my smear okay, he's got a big giant ego How do I work through this? How do I get this? You know, how do I approach him with ideas? So We can we can dwell on that a little bit where these people how these people end up like this and And I think that is important to an extent is if you can understand somebody a little bit better. You can maneuver better. But regardless, you end up with these personalities, different personalities. I knew a guy. I mean, I know you know there was a whole slew because when I got in the Navy, so it's 1990.

This had to be similar for you. There's a whole slew of my friends in the SEAL teams who parents were just straight hippies. just freaking hippies like conceived at Woodstock and whatever like just straight up hippies and yet they took the most militaristic life that they could

being a commando right so how's that work yeah maybe it's a reaction to that you know and vice versa have you ever known someone that had that hardcore strict religious upbringing and how do they end up wild freaking maniac you know I feel like that's the

generic go-to right where it's like the rebel, you know, came from that strict Catholic school, you know, whatever. They just go the other way. And it's weird because that's not, neither one of these things is, oh, you went to a strict Catholic school, now you're a rebel. No, there's plenty of people that went to a strict Catholic school and they become strict Catholics. So that's, I think this is why, and again, I'm not a psychologist and I don't even know enough

about psychology, but I'm saying regardless of my opinion, because that's all it is in opinion. The result that you get is, oh, this person has a very rebellious attitude and he's in my platoon. How do I deal with him? Or this person has a massive ego. He's in my platoon. How do I deal with him? It says here in due course, we shall examine the scientific basis for these propositions and their relevance to a theory of military incompetence.

Because this is a book about incompetence rather than competence about disasters rather than successes, these chapters may appear to take an unnecessarily jaundiced view of the, military profession and to dwell more upon what is bad rather than what is good in man's attempts to professionalize violence but without teasing out and enlarging upon the less pleasant features of a multifaceted phenomenon there could be no theory to account for those human aberrations which have caused so much unnecessary suffering as war as klaus wits wrote of war this is the way in which the matter must be viewed and it is is to no purpose. It is even against one's better interest to turn away from the consideration of the real

nature of the affair because of the horror of its elements excites repungence. So we shouldn't not look at war just because it's freaking savage. To the reader who recoils and disgust from these chapters, I can only say that the theory they advance is based upon the emergence of a pattern of which each small piece may in its seem trivial, possibly ludicrous, even obnoxious, but which, when put together with other pieces, begins to make sense. This interdependence between the parts necessitates keeping an open mind, and, however, much one may dislike or disbelieve the existence of individual trees postponing judgment

until the wood is seen in its entirety. For the reader who is obsessed with trees and thinks that history should be left to historians, ideas about soldiering to soldiers, and that psychological theorizing should never go, the belt this is the moment to stop reading and save yourself some irritation we're rolling into chapter two which is generalship war is the province of uncertainty three force of those things upon which action and war must be calculated are hidden more or less in the crowd clouds of great uncertainty Clauswitz in a situation where the consequences of wrong

decisions are so awesome where a single bit of irrationality can set a whole train of traumatic events in motion I do not think that we can be satisfied with the assurance that, quote, most people behave rationally most of the time, end quote. This is a quote that I say to clients all the time. Hey, people are crazy, including you. You've got to deal with all these crazy people. So assuming that people are going to behave rationally is a dumb thing to assume.

And the additional layer that you already talked about earlier is what's rational to me is not rational to you. Yeah. So even my expectations of what I think you would do as. you consider rationally like this is a totally rational thing for me to do and it's exactly opposite of what I would do which is crazy that you and I can have those two opposite views yep but that's the reality war is primarily concerned with two sorts of activity the delivering of energy and the communication of information this is a crazy thing to think about the delivering of energy in war

each side is kept busy by turning its wealth into energy which is then delivered free gratis and for nothing to the other side. Such energy may be muscular, thermal, kinetic, or chemical. Wars are only possible because the recipients of this energy are ill-prepared to receive it and convert it into useful form for their own economy. If, by means, of, say, impossibly large funnels and gigantic reservoirs, they could capture and store the energy flung at them by the other side,

the recipients of this unsolicited gift would soon be rich and the other side so poor that further warfare would be unnecessary for them and impossible for their opponents. It's a very interesting way to... I've never heard it put that way. It's the truth, right? Yeah, it is. Creating energy and hucking it at the other side. For free.

For free. And only because they can't handle it. Unfortunately, such levels of technology have not been reached in the Vietnam War alone. The United States delivered to Indochina enough energy to displace 3.4 billion cubic yards of earth 10 times the amount dug out for the canals of Suez and Panama combined and enough raw materials in the shape of fuels metals and other chemicals to keep several major industries supplied for years in fact apart from a little slum clearance this abundance of energy was wasted consumed in the making of 26 million craters and laying waste of 20,000 square kilometers of

forest and the destruction of enough crops to feed two million people for a year However, while the reception of energy is still totally uncontrolled, this is certainly not true of its direction and delivery. Indeed, these have become a matter of some sophistication and the prime concern of the military and naval commanders. There's the job of deciding how, when, and where to dispose of the energy, which their side makes available. They do this by occupying nodal points on a complex communication network.

In other words, the ideal senior commander may be viewed as a device for receiving, processing, and transmitting information in a way which will yield maximum gain for the a minimum cost whatever else he may be he is part of a telephone exchange and part computer these the common denominators of generalship are depicted in figure one and now he's got this figure here and this is a we're gonna go like a little bit of uda activity so Dave can get all excited he's got this first section which is input this is what this is the input that you're getting you've got the program that you're on the broad strategy the directives from the government the

orders from higher military authority, etc. You got information about the enemy, about your own troops. This includes strength, disposition, morale, intentions, supplies, capabilities. You got miscellaneous information, weather forecast, time a year, moon tides, limitations of staff, communication, now. So you got all these things that are, you got your input. Now, the input that you get as a leader gets pre-processed by the staff. What the staff is doing is they're receiving it.

They're putting it through a decision process. They're running it through a program of their own previous experience. They got their memories. How good is their memory? And then you get this output, which eventually brings you results. And by the way, that's a loop the whole time. So that's the decision thing that's happening. You got information.

You're processing it. You're bouncing it off your experiences. You're bouncing it off your staff. you run that loop until you figure out what you should do, which is pretty straight, which seems complicated and you already tell it'd be hard, it's going to be hard to make a really, like a solid decision. And then you've got this other section here,

which is called noise. And this is what, this is what screws you up. External. Enemy action, inadequate intelligence sources, deluded chief of staff, et cetera, et cetera. Internal.

defective senses or memory so those are like you got all kinds we could list a million things that are external that are distractions and noise internal you got defective senses emotion rigidity stretched stress dissonance alcoholism neurosis there's all kinds of things freaking you're a disaster you're a disaster is what you are so he says so so i just kind of like described what this diagram looks like for those who don't relish in flow diagrams let it suffice to say that on the of a vast conglomerate of facts to do with the enemy his own side geography weather etc coupled with his own long-term store of past experience and specialist knowledge the senior commander makes decisions that ideally

accord with the directives with which he has been programmed ideally but these ideals are hard to meet for there are two main reasons the first of the senior commanders often have often to fill a number of incompatible roles according to Morris Janowitz these include a heroic lead military manager and technocrat so that's what you got to do if you're a leader in the military heroic leader military manager and technocrat to these we would add politician public relations man and father figure and psychotherapist because that's what you're doing the second reason for a breakdown is what communication engineers

call noise in the system noise is what interferes with the smooth flow of information its destructive power hinges on the fact that senior commanders like any other device for processing information are channels of limited capacity If they want to deal with more information, they will tend to take longer about it. If they don't take longer, they will make mistakes. Here we are using the term information in a special and perhaps its most important sense as the that which reduces uncertainty. So that's what information is.

Information is that which reduces uncertainty. Let me expand on this a little. acquiring knowledge involves the reduction of ignorance through the acquisition of facts, but ignorance is rarely absolute and its reduction rarely total. Doesn't matter. You're not going to know everything. And you're not going to know nothing. Hence, reducing ignorance can be regarded as reducing uncertainty about a given state of affairs.

It follows that an unlikely or unexpected fact contains more information, i.e. reduces more uncertainty than one which is already expected. He's going to go into that hard. That what I just said, it follows that an unlikely or unexpected fact contains more information, i.e. reduces more uncertainty than one which is already expected. We already expected it. Well, it doesn't really help me that much. But an unexpected fact is less readily absorbed than one which was expected. Ooh.

I wasn't expecting this to happen, so I'm going to kind of reject it. If this is less than crystal clear, consider the following example cast in a suitable suitable military context. The message in this case consists of an intelligence report which states, quote, enemy preparing for counter-attack, attack, end quote. It goes on to detail, strength, disposition, date, and likely sector for attack. Now, this message factually so simple contains amount of information which differ greatly from commander to commander.

To General A, who anticipated such a counterattack, it conveys very little. It merely confirms a hypothesis which he already held. In fact, since he had already made extensive preparation for a counterattack, the intelligence report when it came was largely redundant. So that's General A. Hey, I was expecting this. Cool. Got it.

In the case of General B, however, the same message was quite unexpected. So little had he anticipated an enemy counterattack. that the news was charged with information. It reduced a great deal of ignorance and uncertainty. It gave him plenty to occupy his mind and much to do. And I'm going to dive into that part right there because this is really important. Finally, we have General C for whom the message was so totally unexpected

that he chose to ignore it with disastrous results. It conflicted with his preconceptions. It clashed with his wishes. It emanated so he thought from an unreliable source. Since his mind was closed to its reception, he found plenty of reasons for refusing to believe it, like British generals after the Battle of Cambrai or American generals before the German counter-effect offensive in the Ardans of 1944. He ignored it at his cost. Its information content was just too high for his channel of limited capacity.

And so those three examples. And when I first read this, I thought, general A, it doesn't contain much information because he was already expecting it. General B got a lot of information from it because he wasn't expecting it. And it seems like General B might be in a better situation because he was, he got more information, but that's not true. And it all boils down to this last thing. Its information content was too high for his limited channel of capacity of his limited, channel of limited capacity. I think an advantage that I have and that I try and teach other people is to have an open mind and to not, when new information arises, to absorb it and accept it and be like, okay, this is new information. I take it with a grain of salt, of course, but I'm not, and go even further than that.

It's not just that my mind is open. It's that I'm actually trying to anticipate what's going on. I'm actually thinking, well, what are they probably going to do? You know, they're probably going to do this. But I don't dig in on that. You know, the enemy could probably get an attack from the West. But I don't go, no, the enemy is going to attack. The enemy's probably going to attack from the West, but they could also come from the South.

And you know what? They could come for these north. It doesn't matter. I think that when you said the word anticipation was the piece, as I'm hearing you talk about it. You hear those three generals and you think, oh, B's the right guy. Oh, even you thought that too. No, no, no, I don't. I actually, I'm trying to explain the logic as it seems at face value.

As it unfolded in my head. Yeah. Like, oh, I could see people going, oh, B's the best example because he got the most information. Oh, man, this changes everything. Holy cow. And clearly sees the worst because he's like, I can't accept that in my brain. So we're not doing that. I don't acknowledge it.

And to his folly, like it's going to get, the whole team's getting to get wiped out. But when you said anticipation, because I think of it as you, as we talk about it, as we teach it and as you've discussed it, which is I'm going to do these things. I'm going to make these moves. I'm going to try to create a situation that unfold a certain way. But I know, I know it doesn't go the way that I expect, which is I am anticipating a bunch of other potential options. Now, I don't necessarily know which one it's going to be, but when you come back and say it didn't go, let me say it differently, it went this way. And no matter what this way is, you go, okay, I can see that. I can see how our moves created this outcome.

and maybe not even what you want, or maybe not even what you expected, but the other ones aren't unexpected, which makes it so much easier to go, okay, cool, now I've got other information, here's the adjustments we're going to make, or hey, we'll continue down the path if it's the way we wanted, but the anticipation that the outcome is not what you want,

that word, that's the piece for me that resonates, which is the best situation to be in is, oh, it was different than I wanted, even a little different than I expected, and I'm not surprised by that. I don't get caught mentally off balance very often. Because you don't predetermine the outcome. Because I don't lean too hard.

I'm not saying I don't lean so much that when that resistance isn't there, I just fall in my face. Yeah. And I steal a comment that you made from your second platoon commander over and over again. The context he was using, it was someone on your team doing something wasn't really smart. And it's just the simple saying of you got to expect these things to happen. But I overlay that on to everything I can think of, which is, oh, that didn't really go as expected, but I'm not that surprised by it. Like, yeah, I kind of expect these things to happen.

And just the idea of saying, you got to expect those things to happen. Other people thinking, holy cow, this is a level 10 emergency. This is an unsolvable tragedy. He's like, no, I kind of am used to these type of things going the way that people don't expect. And we can actually solve this. I can absorb it and make some changes, no factor. Yeah. Yeah.

Don't over commit to your brain. Over-commit the outcome. The other thing about this example is with this mechanical, like, dissection he's doing of all this stuff, he talks a lot about the capacity. And with General A, you've got very little capacity left over from what you were expecting, right? So you've got your expectation of what's going to happen,

and you've got some capacity left over to, to dedicate to what's actually happening. Guy B, or the General B, let's say, it takes him by surprise. So now he has to do so much more back-end work that General A is already done and he's got all this free capacity that now he can dedicate to what's actually happening.

And the third guy has got so little that he just, he chooses to willfully ignore what's happening rather than take on the challenge of, you know. Yeah, if you did one of those games where you have to look at something for a short period of time and remember as much as you can,

if I said, okay, Dave, I'm going to show you a car in this next picture. It's a Ford Bronco, and I want you to remember as much about it as you could. You'd be like, okay, here's the caller, here's the license, but if I said, hey, Carrie, I want you to go and I'm going to show you a picture,

tell me as much about it as you can. You'd be like, get half, a quarter of the information because you just don't have that much, your capacity's already taken. It's overflowing. Right. With stuff.

Trying to make sense of the picture. Like you're trying to figure all this out and you're just overwhelmed. So that's what we're trying not to do. Right. And I think also too, just from a leadership standpoint, you're thinking about people, there aren't three versions of people out there. There's seven billion versions of that. So this is a, this is a dial across all those spectrums.

And certainly you can categorize that. And those examples are good examples. But even inside there, you don't just. get three. Yeah. If you got a team at 26, you're not, don't bin them into three categories and presume they sit in those, those bins. I bet you that you could probably break it down into weight classes though and not end up with seven billion, but end up with like nine weight classes. You know? And it's really just, there's a spectrum inside there. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, you, you're, you're, you're, you're between, you know, 170 pounds and 185 pounds. Like, we know what kind of

we know you're, you're like, you're like leaning really hard. You know, we know what you're going to do. This continues. One particularly hazardous aspect of the relationship between information and decision processes concerns the revising of decisions. It seems that having gradually and perhaps painfully accumulated information in support of a decision, people become progressively more loathe to accept contrary evidence. So this is everything we're just talking about. You make a decision. You've got some information. And now we're not one to accept anything different.

As Ed's words and his colleagues have shown, the greater the impact of new information, the more strenuously it will be resisted, which is actually crazy. It's actually crazy. Dave's like, I'm heading north. Hey, I'm heading north. We're heading north right now. We made the call. And I'm like, hey, actually, bro, there's like enemy up there.

And you're like, we already made the call. Like, are you sure? Total resistance. There are several reasons for this dangerous. Conservatism. New information has, by definition, high informational content, and therefore, firstly, it will require greater processing capacity. Secondly, it threatens a return to an earlier state of gnawing uncertainty.

And thirdly, it confronts the decision maker with the nasty thought that he may have been wrong. No wonder he tends to turn a blind eye. I mean, I talk about this in one way or another all the time. All the time. Isn't it scary to think I'd rather just be wrong than go back? to just being uncertain. Look, we're going north.

Bro, there's enemy up there. Yeah, but at least I know where I'm going. Disaster.com. Dude. So much for a broad description of this most vital dimension of knowledge, its prior improbability. Let us return now to the other side of the coin,

the problem of noise. Noise, as we saw, is the enemy of information. Noise takes up channel space and thereby disrupts the flow of information. The more limited the channel capacity the greater disrupting effects of noise. The more noise, the less information can be handled.

And again, as I read this, I look for some of the things that I do wrong, some of the things I do good. Man, I am a noise eliminator. I am a freaking noise eliminator. There's stuff going on around me that doesn't matter. I give it no, no, I don't give it a second of my energy. Just to be able to recognize what is noise. and go, hey, that's noise. We're going to filter that out as opposed to the overreaction that most people have.

And I keep in my own head going back to things that I recall. As you're reading this, I've been thinking a lot about Band of Brothers. And there's a character in there. If you haven't heard it, the book is awesome. The TV series is like incredibly good. It's very rare that I take a book and see the TV version. I'm going, that was really, really good. the TV version is awesome.

There's this character, Captain Sobel, who is kind of like this tyrant of a leader, and there's a scene where he's leading this platoon, and he runs into, like, I think it's like he's maneuvering to get to some objective, and he ends up against, like, a barbed wire fence. This fence isn't supposed to be here. It's not on the map, and his guy's like,

sir, we can just go, we could just cut the fence. And he's like, yeah, but it's not supposed to be. And he spends all this time reacting to the idea that this fence was not on the map, and the people around, like, sir, it's like a barbed wire fence. We could get through this thing in literally five seconds. But that noise of the fence that's not supposed to be here,

and he was incapable of responding to what appeared to be this. And it's the inability to go, oh, oh, hey, this is a distractor. Hey, this is noise. We need to filter this out. I would say that's actually a better example of this isn't what I expected and therefore I can't accept it. Well, part of that. It's beyond noise because noise is like, well, there's other stuff going on. But here's what he's seeing something with his own two eyes.

And he's like, hey, the. This isn't supposed to be. The map doesn't have this. Well, it's funny you said that because I've been thinking about him for about 30 minutes. And I chose this as the example, but where it really indexed for me was when you gave those three examples. And I'm like, dude, that's Captain Sobel, man. And the character that he talks about in this book to reveal what this character was like.

And it brought me back to authoritarian. You know, he'd do uniform inspectors. If you had one thing off, you lose your weekend. He was just such a follow to the detriment of himself and everybody around him. But you know what the military loves? A uniform platoon. They all look the same. It's just a character, but it's that idea that the incapacity to acknowledge those things

and be able to deal with them in happening real time and go, hey, this is no factor. And everybody goes, oh, okay, cool. It's just a character, but it's also a complete and utter caricature of this authoritarian leader. We can probably just start referring back to him throughout the rest of this book. It's so strong. A glance back at figure one suggests that not only does a senior military commander receive more than more than his fair share of information, but the communication system of which he forms a part is a peculiar, peculiar, susceptible to noise. This may be external in origin ranging from

the static on a radio link to the delusions of the chief of staff. Or it may be internal, ranging from such peripheral sources as poor eyesight, a common feature of the generals of the Crimean more to such central and usually more disastrous causes as defective memory, brain disease, neurosis, and alcoholism. Noise from all these sources may act upon the flow of information through a general's head and eventuate in decisions varying in gravity from the mildly inept to the utterly catastrophic. But decisions hinge upon more than available information.

They also depend upon, quote, payoff. the anticipated consequences of choosing one course of action rather than another. Payoffs may be positive or negative, beneficial, or costly. They are the criteria according to which decisions are made. Obviously, if a commander gets his criteria wrong, if the possible loss of self-esteem or social approval or fear of offending a superior authority is given greater weighting than more rational considerations,

the scene is set for colloquial. So there you are trying to make a decision and you're weighing if you're going to lose self-esteem or if you're going to lose social approval, which is crazy. But we know that happens. The possibility of this happening is increased by the fact that the fog of war, unlike uncertainties, which attach to most civilian enterprises, extends not only to the input but also to the payoffs. Not only does the general have to make decisions on the basis of a great volume of dubious information and meet a program of perhaps questionable validity, he may also not know the cost and benefits of what he does propose. He is like a man who places a bet without knowing the odds or where the bookie might be found once the race is over. This is a freaking hard job. As well as those problems which are inherent in any communication system, the human decision maker is the victim of an.

another hazard namely that attention perception memory and thinking are all liable to distortion or bias by emotion and motivation as needs arise whether they be social or biological neurotic or adaptive so they act upon a way man perceives his external world what he attends to the sort of memories which he conjures up and the decisions which he makes he is like a computer which has not only to receive, store, process, and deliver information, but also has to postpone sleep, cope with hunger, resist fear, control anger, sublimate sex, and keep up with the Joneses. When it is considered that the capacity for perception and response for memory and thought

presumably evolved for the satisfaction of needs, it is a remarkable achievement at the best of times to keep these informational processes of mind free from bias by the needs which they were originally designed to serve. So you got all the stuff going on in your head. You're genetically built this way to have these thoughts and have these pulls and have these biases. And it's like it's hard as hell to keep that stuff and make your operating system as clean as possible. And then he says, in war, such an achievement borders on the miraculous. And this for very one simple reason, the effects or needs, the effects of needs upon cognition are maximized when the needs are very strong and external reality is ambiguous or confused it is under such conditions that need and

emotion have the greatest freedom of maneuver the greatest capacity for imposing themselves upon the uncertainties of thought these are the conditions which obtain in war and that is freaking important this whole idea that emotion has the greatest freedom of maneuver and the greatest capacity for imposing itself on you during times of uncertainty. And this is why people get crazy. This is why people get crazy when you go on deployment in a combat zone.

This is why somebody that's acting normal and seems to be good to go and all of a sudden you get on deployment and they get crazy because that emotion starts to come out. I remember I wrote a note to my buddy, a good friend of mine. Just to recount this idea,

I was lucky enough that I was one of the first units to deploy after 9-11 to go to Afghanistan and start dropping bombs out there, which was at the time, like, the best thing ever was like what I wanted to be doing. Oh, 9-11 happened, and everybody was sort of scrambling to go. It came back, and then Iraq was, we knew that Iraq was going to happen relatively shortly after we came back within the year. And I remember writing a note to a buddy mine who was getting ready to go to his first combat deployment. And I just said, the people around you are going to do crazy things.

People that you think you know are going to do things that totally catch you off guard. That was like my first lesson from just, and that's a very small degree compared to what he experienced World War II. And the biggest takeaway when he's asking, hey, hey, what can I expect? It had nothing to do with the tactics. I said, the people around you are going to do things that catch you off guard. They're going to surprise you because the situation is going to, their circuit breakers are going to pop and it's going to blow their minds. Yep. Yep. And that's a warning I've given people as well of you get right on deployment I remember explaining to someone hey it's gonna get wild and meaning people are gonna start acting crazy and and you

know having people say no they're not okay you know fast forward two months it's like bro what's happening with this dude I'm like remember what I told you people were gonna get crazy there you go contemplation of what is involved in generalship may well may well occasion surprise that incompetence is not absolutely inevitable that anyone can do the job at all. Particularly, is this so when one considers that military decisions are often made under conditions of enormous stress when actual noise, fatigue, lack of sleep, poor food, and grinding responsibility add their quotas to the ever-present threat of total annihilation.

He's like, hey, bro, it's a miracle. Anyone can pull this shit off. I love the sentence. Actual noise. Actual noise. And that's an italics. Totally, man. I hope I said it in italics because it's in italics.

Indeed, the foregoing analysis of generalship prompts the thought that it might be better to scrap generals and leave decision-making aspects of war to computers. A similar argument has been advanced in connection with medicine. Why leave diagnosis and therapeutic decisions to fallible human brains when a computer could make them with far less chance of error? The answer, of course, and this no doubt contributes much to the, the relief of generals and doctors that computers make poor leaders and indifferent father figures. They may be quick and efficient, unprejudiced, sober and alert, but with all remain cold fish. They do not inspire affection with its consequent desire to please, nor do they exude a bedside manner. Paradoxically, they are also perhaps just a little too infallible.

They are, moreover, as far as we know, devoid of feelings, what is worse, quite indifferent to outcomes of their decisions. But while all this militates against computers as leaders of men, so-called leadership qualities in military commanders are just as dependent upon the various factors outlined in our flowchart as are any of the other responses, which a general makes. Prejudice, ignorance, fear of failure, overconformity, and sheer stupidity may disrupt leadership decisions as surely as they interfere with planning or technical decisions. All are products of the same brain.

Man, there's a lot going on. One last point. A senior military or naval commander does not, indeed cannot act in lonely isolation, but is fettered by the organization to which he belongs. He is like a computer or telephone exchange whose modus operandi is based on rules which may have little relevance to the tasks it is called upon to perform. Imagine a telephone exchange that, for the honor of the post office, has to follow the rule that all telephonists should have red hair,

38-inch busts, and heavily litted eyes, and one has some idea of the restricting effects which an organization may have upon its own functioning. In these chapters that follow, we shall be examining some well-known cases of military and competence to discover if possible the precise reasons for and the common denominators of these events. For the moment, however, let us consider one brief and less well-known incident which illustrates how the smooth flow of information through the brains of senior commanders may be so distorted

that their decisions prove catastrophic. The culprits in this instance are naval, not military commanders. The place is Samoa. And the date 1889, seven warships, three American, three German, and one British are lying at acre in the harbor of Apia. They are there as naval and military presence to watch over the interests of their various governments in the political upheavals that are taking place ashore. Accordingly, they anchor in what has been described as one of the most dangerous anchorages in the world. for to call Apia a harbor at all is at best an unfortunate euphemism. Largely occupied by coral reefs, this saucer-shaped indentation lies wide open to the north

whence the great Pacific rollers come sweeping in. In fair weather, Apia provides an uneasy resting place for no more than four medium-sized ships. For seven large ships and numerous smaller craft, under adverse conditions, it is a death trap. This was the situation in which the seven men of war witnessed the first bleak portents of an approaching typhoon. So we've got seven ships inside this little harbor, which this little harbor actually has an open mouth to the sea. Full of reefs. Full of reefs.

And it's big enough for four ships. There's seven in there. Even to a landsman, a rapidly darkening sky. and falling glass squally gusts of wind and then a lull would bode ill for seven naval captains the signs were unmistakable they knew they were in a region of the world particularly subject to typhoons which in a matter of minutes could lash the sea into a furious hell of boiling water they knew that such storms generate winds traveling at upwards of a hundred knots gusts that could snap masks like carrots reduce deck fittings to match wood and throw ships on their beam ends. They knew that this was the worst month of the year. And they also knew that only three years before every ship in Appia had been sunk by such

a storm. In short and in terms and in the terms of our flow chart, their stored information coupled with present input pointed to only one decision to get up and get out. as if this was not enough, the urgency of weighing anchor and putting to sea was respectively suggested by subordinate officers. So you got a freaking massive storm approaching. By the way, what was it, three years before every ship in the harbor had been sunk. We've got subordinate officers that are saying, hey, captain, we should get out of here.

But the captains of the warships were also naval officers. and so they denied the undeniable and stayed where they were. Their behavior has been described as an, quote, error of judgment that will forever remain a paradox in human psychology, end quote. When the typhoon struck, its effects were tragic and inevitable. Without sea room, their anchors dragging under the pressure of the mountainous seas, their holes and rigging crushed by the fury of the wind, three of the warships collided before being swept onto the jagged reefs of coral. Another sank in deep water. Two more were wrecked upon the beach.

Of all the ships in the harbor, the only survivor was a British Corvette, which, thanks to its powerful engines and superb seamanship, squeaked through to the open sea. Why did the naval commanders versed in the ways of the sea and provided with ample warning, thus hazard their ships and their lives of their men? A superficial answer might be pride, or fear of appearing cowardly, or fear of criticism from their superiors. These matters are to be pursued in later chapters.

For the moment, the apparently incorrigible behavior of these men illustrates how decision process can be thrown into disarray by noise of internal origin. And how, in this instance anyway, incompetence cannot be attributed to ignorance or ordinary stupidity. The focus of that is this is an internal noise. It's internal. They knew what was coming.

They could see what was coming. There's no lack of communication. They're watching the storm come. They have the history. They know what's happened in this harbor forward. Everything is clear. And yet the decision by seven captains, I guess. six one of them made it out sounds like he squeaked out though they all make the wrong decision

how does that happen no external factors can be blamed in the situation it's internal it's internal noise that comes from our own psychology so um i say we call it for today uh this book is going to be There's so much in this book and I'll start to speed up a little bit I think as we as we push into the next podcast Hit some of the high waves for the section where they cover the historical disasters, but like I said, it's not like he just Talks about the historical that disasters and explain what happens he starts to explain why decisions are getting made Where the ego comes into play who's who's offending one another what these internal decision disasters are caused by and and I'm telling you it is a great warning for all of us military civilian business family and you can probably already see the the this is what we talk about all the

time this book these these topics are what we talk about all the time and the examples bring them to even clearer light. We'll get into it on the next podcast. Until then, Kerry, we are trying to prevent our own incompetence as much as possible in every aspect of our lives. We are. What can you recommend to us to try and mitigate our own incompetence? That's not a very high goal, is it?

Mitigating our own incompetence. What do you got? So we want to battle incompetence. We want to be more capable, not less capable. We want a clean operating system. Oh, I like where you're going to this. Operate clean, right? So how can we do that?

We're going to do that with a little bit of jaco fuel. A little discipline go. A little RTD in a can, possibly some afterburner orange or mango mayhem from the big dog echo charles who the big dog echo charles the Hawaiian that name rings a bell oh the guy whose job you took oh yeah oh yeah I forgot his name the big dog echo charles oh people are going to freak out

oh man K dogs on here they're like wait a second what happened to echo Charles cover move yeah okay about that so he couldn't make it today Echo Charles was otherwise detained. Right on. So K dog had to step up to the plate. How did it feel in the hot seat over there? Because you've been behind the scenes. I've been behind the scenes a little bit.

I've been in the background. You've been on the other side of the camera. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now you're front and center. Now we're in here. And maybe Echoes like he's on the ropes. Echo is an institution as far as I'm concerned.

That makes one of us. I am happy to fill in though, man. Honestly, it's super cool to sit at the table. I've said this to you and probably Dave, too, man, hollowed ground. The people who've sat around this table, man, it's something special. So super cool to be able to do it today for sure. Right on. So we're getting some jacofuil.

joccofuel.com. Joccofuel.com. We're getting some discipline go going to Wawa and just clearing shelves. That's where we're at. If you go to Wawa and you clear a shelf, Let me tell you what you're doing. You're helping every other trooper in America. That's what you're doing.

Because as other convenience chains see what's going on at Wawa, they're like, oh, oh, okay, we got it. So roll into Wawa and just get some, just clear shelves. Wawa's got something going on right now, right? With discipline good. If it's October, when you're listening to this, yeah. Right on. You buy one and you get another one for a buck. Maybe missed it.

Which is kind of dope. We didn't miss anything. This comes out tonight, tomorrow night. Right on. K-Dog's just going to roll right in. Hey, hot. Get out to Wawa for that bogo action. Oh, look at you.

That's not got one, though. Because it's a buck. Buy one, get one for a dollar, right? Yeah. Joint warfare. Super krill. These things are all battle against that noise we're talking about. Body.

Body noise. Physical noise. That elbow noise. You got some elbow noise? bro always well not you know i got some shoulder noise if i'm telling you if i don't go if i if i if i miss out on joint warfare it's a problem joint warfare and super cruel that's my that's my that's my go-to man get rid of that noise how about that mulk dave you get on that malt train are you still on strawberry yeah did you've been on strawberry for a while i don't know what's gonna ever i mean i i have them all

I got a lineup in my closet or my pantry, but it's like, you know, it's like afterburner orange for me. That's what I'm going to. It's strawberry is the best. Do you, so right now you're drinking what, Dack Savage? What do you got over there? I got a Dack right in front of me. So at the gym here, we were out of after burner orange, which I know is no big surprise to you.

But do you ever think, eh, I almost wavered today on Jocco Palmer. I was like, you know, maybe I'll go Tropic Thunder. because Tropic Thunder, especially when it's cold, it's freaking legit. But you're still strawberry. Yes. And milk, strawberry, that's it. Dude, I'd mix nothing in that. It's strawberry and milk.

And that's it. I don't like, and hey, no criticism of that's your game, but like in the stuff that people put in there and like I put in a shaker cup, I shake it up and I drink it. And there's nothing I want to add to it to it. Echo Charles over here. He's got to go to the grocery store. What? You know what I'm saying?

Frozen banana game changer all day, all day. That frozen banana, something about that consistency. Tell us you putting out word, huh? Oh, man. She's nailed it. When you, you got to blend it then too. Yeah. That's a whole issue.

Here's the thing with me. I like to eat, sure. But you know some people, they have like a whole, it's a ritual, right? And they're going to get, they go to the store and they're like picking stuff up. And then they fire up the grill. And, you know, I got a nice grill and everything. I, I'll put in the mic. microwave. Like I'm not, I'm not firing that thing up. I'm one of those people. We're looking for

efficiencies. Yeah. Oh, I will, I will open up a can of chicken from Costco and just, that's dinner. If my wife didn't make good food, I would just be eating, you know, a, a can of, of, of, of chicken. You'd be on that K dog. Yeah, I'd be on the K dog routine. It's the single life, you're just full on in it. Yeah, two cups of green beans, some Hawaiian rolls. good to go. You're ready to rock and roll. So, but you know what is good. That's why I'm not exploring the freaking half-frozen,

well-ripe banana or whatever it is we're doing. Right, I'm over here. I'm with Dave. I'm like milk, milk, we're good. But here's the thing for me, that milk-mulk combo,

my scale, you know what I'm giving it? I'd give it a 10. Yeah. I'm giving it a 10. It's like, oh, I'm just suffering through the 7, 6 point negative. No, it's a 10.

That's where all this other stuff you're doing, you know what's going to get you to? A 10. Yeah. That's where I'm at right now. I don't need it. Yeah, I'm the same way. Now, I will say I'm not solo on one flavor right now.

I'm bouncing around. I bounced around. I used to go like one month on a flavor. And then I go in three weeks on another flavor. Then I go back to another flavor for a month. I'm kind of getting crazy right now. I'll be, you know, I'd be even doing, you know, mix it up during the day.

You know, lunch is going to be some peanut butter. Dinner's going to be some mint, right? Got some variety going on. I'm over here closed-minded, not free thinking. I got strawberry. I'm going to stick with strawberry for about 25 years. We'll adjust some other time down the road. Wall-law for the drinks.

Vitamin shop. Get all the stuff at the vitamin shop. And joccofuel.com. What? Commissary. Oh, that's right. Navy commissary. That's right.

That's right. Good call. K dog. 100%. We're in there, man. We're in there. Jocofuel.com. Yeah, also.

Subscribe. If you subscribe, you get the shipping for free. What up? Just where do we stand on greens? Okay, we have we have greens. Yeah, Jocko Greens. Um, they're amazing.

Dude. They, they're amazing. They really, truly are amazing. Yes. They are, they are,

they're hard to make. Um, if you look at the ingredients list, it's all organic. The whole product together is not certified organic because we haven't gone through that process yet, but every ingredient in there is, I,

I think every ingredient is organic, so it's hard to make it. So that's why I'm not talking about it a ton, because people that are kind of in the know, like, I'm not trying to screw them and just tell everyone that this is the greatest beverage. Yeah. It certainly is the greatest greens, but not even close. It's not even close. It tastes delicious.

Go look at the ingredients list, too. It is the best quality, sweetened with monk fruit. You know what I've been doing is I've been having that. Like let's because sometimes, you know, I get done with a steak at night and I want dessert, but I'm full. So that mulk is sort of looking like a little bit much. Out comes the green. Out comes the greens. It's like what like wine people, they drink whatever it is, a port, right?

A port. Can I get a glass of port? When I'm feeling that way, since I'm a freaking savage, I'm just ordering up a glass of greens. Shaking up the greens. Shaking up some greens. I brought it up and I don't want to alienate the listeners who maybe don't have access. And you can edit all the stuff out. No, people have access, but here's the deal on the greens.

You want to go back to the three categories of leaders, which is the fully anticipates the outcome, shocked by the outcome and can't process the outcome. When I drank my first container of greens, I was squarely in category C. What is happening? The delta between one. What I expected and what I got, it was insane.

Those things are, it is unbelievable how good they taste for what you think it's going to taste like because it's greens. It was an absolute mind-blowing experience. Well, I've been doing it in the morning. And it does give you like a little bit of kick, right? That other kick. It's just good to go. So yeah, listen, if you go online, you order the greens, awesome. If we're out, we're making them more as fast as we can.

I apologize. Logistics wins award. We're working it We're losing that war right now We're in the game and we'll try and get you some more That's like the kind of thing you want to subscribe to it too Because you want that order getting filled So good

Don't want to be waiting When are you drinking it Dave? Every morning It's like so just immediately into my habit pattern I haven't since I got it I haven't missed a day It was It's everything you just said I just want people to realize like

What you think you're getting with greens Like everybody knows what greens are cool they're healthy, sort of need to stomach them and just kind of like hold your nose and get to them because they're good for you. Yeah, go to your lawnmower, get the clippings out. Put in a blender. That's what you think you're getting, right? And you're not.

The origin media team did this like double blind video, like double blind study video from the immersion cap. And it's awesome. And people are just like all day. Oh my gosh. This is greens. It doesn't even, it doesn't even compute that it can be that good for it. Category C.

There you go. Category C. Speaking of origin, we got a geese, rash guards apparel coming out of Origin USA. Right. Doing boots up there now. Yeah, we're doing it all. Kidding. I'm going to, we're going to make everything that we use in life.

That's the goal. The goal is to make everything that we use in life and we're going to make it in America. And let me tell you what, that's a, that's no small task. And we're getting it done. Jeans, boots. We got work pants. coming out I saw those old McBrass I'll tell you what man that's another thing like we're gonna make them as fast as we can as soon as people get a pair or see a pair they're

they're gonna be gone and you know what we're up in our capacity again logistics wins wars I know that and we are working it and it's we're in a good place because the rest of people that do this they got to rely on a foreign supply chain even in some cases a communist supply chain with literally fabrics that are made by communists who you know have a dictatorship in their country and they're paying people you know one dollar a week to make the material so this is like a strategic for America strategic for America that's why we're doing it could we hey could we freaking cut some corners and up that profit margin by whatever sure we could but we're freaking

and not going to. So if you want some, if you wear clothes, then you might want to get your clothes from a strategic partner of yourself. And that is us at Origin USA. What up? I got nothing else for that, man. Dirt to the shirt, baby.

We, if you're also looking for clothes to say represent the path, you can find those on jaco store, Junko store.com. We got discipline equals freedom. We got take the high ground on there still. I like how you're co-opting some of Echo's phrases. You're kind of like you're utilizing them, you know,

not totally copying them 100%, but you're catching the vibe and you're putting your K dog spin on it. Hey, it's been watching the master work from the corner of them, bro. Shout out Echo, Charles. Yeah, man. So got all that going on at jaco store.com. Also have a T-shirt subscription from the big dog Echo Charles called The Shirt Locker,

where he makes rad shirts with layers from the podcast. So if you're about those layers, if you listen to the podcast, you're like, yes, like I'm about the layers. Check out the Shirt Locker. Echo's cranking out a new shirt every month with a different layer from the podcast presented on them. Both of you are wearing a shirt-forker shirt right now. Check it out.

The SOG, the SOG T-shirt. We represent, right? We come here to get after it and we're representing that, right? And so me and Echo will, like, sometimes show up wearing the same shirt today. Me, Dave Bart showed up rocking the SOG shirt, which is legit. The SOG support. So Echo showed it to me.

He's like, hey, he's approved for, and I said, hey, man, we can't be running around just throwing sog onto a t-shirt and being good with that any more than you can just throw a trident on a shirt and be like oh yeah i'll just represent so the way we got around that is by putting support on there so it's like you know like when if you're if you're maybe you support a local biker gang but you're not in the biker gang but you got friends you can wear that biker gang stuff, but you've got to have support on there. Because you're not trying to claim at all. We're not trying to claim SOG.

Nope. But we freaking support SOG 100%. 100%. Absolutely. So all that's going on at jocco store.com. Yeah. Subscribe to this podcast. Wherever you subscribe to a podcast, we also have Jocko unraveling.

And that's with D.C. We just did one about Afghanistan. That was kind of the lead up to this one a little bit just because we were debriefing what happened on Afghanistan and clearly there's some military incompetence that has risen up in the ranks. And we started to address that on Jocko unraveling with Daryl Cooper. Got the grounded podcast, which we haven't done a while.

And Warrior Kid podcast, I know I've got to get back on that one. So subscribe to those, check them out. Also, we have Jocko Underground. Jocco Underground.com. We have a secondary podcast where, like I started off talking today about how we talk about psychology on that one quite a bit because that stuff interests me and that stuff also helps you understand the world. And if you understand the world and you understand people, you can be a better leader.

You can be a better person. You can be a better mom, dad, whatever. Yet it didn't quite, some of those subjects don't quite fit into this podcast. So we made Jock Underground, Jocco Underground.com. And that podcast is like a little reward for support because we wanted to create an alternative platform in case of these platforms, which they haven't caused any problems yet. Hey, we're on board. We're here.

We appreciate it. We appreciate the platforms. But you can't put all your reliance on something that you have no control over. And we don't really have any control over these large platforms. So we wanted to make something just a case, hey, we'll be here. But just in case things get wild, we got the jaco underground.com. So thanks. If you want to subscribe to that, it costs $8.18 a month.

If you can't afford that, look, we still want you in the game. Email assistance at jocco underground.com. Appreciate that. We got a YouTube channel where we put up this video. You can see the new Sog Underground or Sog shirt locker T-shirts on there, which is cool. Subscribe to that. and also Origin USA if you want to watch what's going on

at Origin, strategic partner of America you can go to Origin USA check that out. Psychological warfare made an album telling Echo helping Echo Charles get through some moments of weakness maybe he needs one for

you know coming to work definitely check out psychological warfare very legit though Flipside Canvas Dakota Meyer If you want to hang cool stuff on your wall, check that out. Books, new book coming out, final spin.

Dave, what's your assessment? Read it. It's so good. And standby for the audiobook. There's some, oh yeah. So on the audio, if you get the audiobook of that, I read the audiobook. And then we did, Dave and I did a, it was about an hour conversation about just a review, talking about the characters, the character development, the lack of character development,

the plot development, the lack of plot development, the words used, the lack of words used, just all these things that will definitely be interesting. And it's been amazing so far. The books coming out. You should do like a virtual book signing or something would be cool to get that out there. I think I am doing a virtual book signing

and I'm not 100% sure where. And actually, check this out. Speaking of virtual book signing in November, I'm going to do two Jocko Lives. Jocko Lives. Ready 1 in, it looks like San Diego, California, November, and then Austin, Texas, in November. I think those are the only dates.

Look, things are wild right now with the COVID and the protocols and all this stuff, and people are really sketched out, especially some of the places you can do these events. Some of them have whatever. They're freaked out about it. So we found some places that are down for the cause. So we're going to do a gig. I'm going to do a gig, Jocko Live, November in San Diego.

and November in Austin, Texas. So keep an eye out for that. It'll be an intro to final spin. It gives you time to read it. The book does not take long to read. So you'll be able to get the book. Get the book when it comes out, November 9th. And then by the time, November 13th or November 20th,

which I think are the dates on those two, I'll be there. And you can ask me questions about it. I'll talk about some of where all that came from. The darkness in my brain. That's final spin. Leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocols Discipline equals freedom field manual Way the Warrior kid one two three four micing the dragons about faced by Hackworth

Extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership check out these books if you like books If you don't like books get the audio books that's my recommendation Eschlon front we have a leadership consultancy leadership is the solution What's the problem the leadership is the solution What's the problem leadership is the solution? What's the problem leadership is? the solution that's what I'm trying to tell you and that's what we will tell you and that's what we will teach you at Eshalonfront go to Ashlamfront.com look if you want to come to one of our live events the next live event that we have is in Las Vegas the

muster October 28th and 29th two days it was a deep dive into this information we also have field training exercises and we have a thing called EF Battlefield where we go and tour battlefields check out all that stuff go to events at echelonfront.com if you want us to come work with your company the same thing um we also have an online training academy called extreme ownership academy extreme ownership.com this is this stuff is not easy and you don't get good at it by reading a book and be oh cool I'm good to go it doesn't work that way you need to work at it continually go to extreme ownership dot com come and ask me a question on there I'm literally live how long we're on there for

today an hour and a half yeah hour and 20 minutes I guess yeah Dave and I are responding to your questions Laif is on there Jamie's on there like we are there JPs on there you want to ask us a question come and ask a question live and is not crowded you will get your question answered how's that extreme ownership.com if you want to help service members active and retired their families Gold Star families check out Mark Lee's mom mama Lee she's got a charity organization she is helping all kinds of people get through all kinds of struggles. Go to America's mighty warriors.org if you want to check that out.

And if you want more of my lengthy lectures, which today was absolutely one of them, you want to hear Kerry's chiming in. You want to hear Dave's analytical appraisals. You can find us on the inner webs. on Twitter, on the gram, on Facebook. Echo, is that Echo Charles? But he's not here today, so don't follow him. Instead, check out KDog.

What is it, KDock? Kerry Hilton. Carrie underscore Hilton. You couldn't get Carrie, no underscore Hilton? I tried. I hit the guy up and everything. No response. He denied you.

Oh, you were trying to make that social media move. 100%, man. Give me my name, bro. Is his name, Kerry Hilton, too? Yeah, yeah. All one word. And, yeah, I shot a message. I was like, you know, very civil.

Hey, dude. You know, interested in your handle. Is that something I could get off you? He's like, that's my name, bro. No response, dude. Yeah. Seen, left me on red. It hurts.

But you can find me at Carrie underscore. Left me on red. Left me on red. So had read the message and just no response. So my kids harassed me because I do that in real life. Like they're talking and I just don't respond and walk away. and they say, oh, you're going to leave me on red. Wow.

Yeah. And I think I do that fairly regularly. I mean, you've done it to me. Oh, there you go, 100%. Dave, can you relate to this? No. Dave, I left you on red before? I try not to interact too much.

But sure. Actually, you just sent me, I was like stupid busy over the last few days. And I just remember that you sent me some texts that were absolutely left on red. And then Dave Burke at David R. Burke. And look, thanks to all the men and women out there right now in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, who are competent leaders who are holding the line in a violent and unpredictable world. and also thanks to our competent police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders. You have an incredibly difficult job, but you keep us safe and we appreciate it.

And everyone else out there, open up your mind. Don't be the person that is loathe to accept contrary evidence to what you already believe. Don't be that person. Don't get stuck in that rut. open your mind free your mind and become better by to always absorb new information in fact look for it seek it out and keep getting after it and until next time this is dave and carry and jaco out