School of War - Shot Down over Serbia: General Goldfein’s Incredible Story

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

The story of Air Force General David Goldfein, who miraculously survived after his plane was shot down over Serbia in 1999, has since become military legend. Today, he joins School of War to recount the harrowing rescue mission that saved him, how he stayed alive  behind enemy lines, and the lessons his remarkable career offers about leadership, airpower, and preparing America for the next war. 2:43 An Air Force Family 3:25 Rejected by the Air Force Academy 6:39 Becoming an F-16 Pilot 8:12 What Makes a Great Fighter Pilot? 12:36 Information Overload in Combat 15:28 Goldfein’s First Combat Mission 19:57 Training for Confidence Under Fire 21:37 A Leadership Lesson from the Gulf War 24:32 Shot Down Over Serbia 28:51 Surviving Behind Enemy Lines 31:48 The Race to Rescue Goldfein 36:22 Guiding the Rescue Helicopter 44:50 The Impact on His Family 48:53 Witnessing the Attack on the Pentagon 51:19 Digitizing the American Military This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications.

Build at the speed of war. This episode, sort of like my fighter pilot guest's career, has a little bit of everything. General Dave Goldfee and I discuss the cognitive demands of tactical leadership in air combat, what it's like to get shot down, as happened to him in 1999 over Serbia. And even better, what it's like to be rescued, albeit under fire. What effect all that had on his family and how his career continued for another 20 years after that. Dave Goldfein saw American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon with his own eyes. He commanded Central Command's airpower and attempted to drive the kind of digital transformation there that we've spent a lot of time on School of War talking

about, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, and he finished his career in uniform as chief of staff of the Air Force. It was a hell of a run. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war with Milwaukee invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation to grand. on the landing ground and he'll fight in the fields and in the streets

which will never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. General David L. Goldfein retired United States Air Force. General Goldfein was the chief of staff of the Air Force back in 1983. He graduated the U.S.

Air Force Academy. He did a tremendous number of important and fascinating things in between, many of which we'll get into. Today, he's the chair of the National Board of the U.S.O of Google's public sector enterprise, a bunch of other affiliations and activities. General Goldfeen, thank you so much for joining School of War. Hey, Aaron, thank you for having me. Looking forward to our conversation.

Tell me what it was like to grow up as Dave Goldfean. And tell me about your dad, who, as I understand, it was also a fighter pilot with combat experience over Vietnam. Yeah, so, you know, Air Force in someone is a family business. You know, my older brother has went to the Air Force Academy class of 78. My younger brother was a year behind me at the Air Force Academy. Steve flew F-15s. Mike and I flew F-16s. My dad was an F-4 pilot in Vietnam. So it's been an incredible journey, right, for the entire family to be part of this institution called the United States Air Force and a chance to give back. And tell me about, I understand when you went to the Naval Academy that at first, you were rejected, later accepted through a prep school program and that there was some friction

with your father about your decision making in this period, if you wouldn't mind telling that story. Yeah, so, you know, when I applied the Air Force Academy, that was before the age of internet, right? So when I got my rejection letter, I just remember seeing, you know, thank you for applying. You were not accepted because there was always all these boxes on the form and every box was checked, right? And so my best friend in high school was going off to the University of Wyoming. We were graduating from school in Germany because we were stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base.

And he was going to the University of Wyoming. And I thought, well, that sounds like a great idea. So I applied, got accepted, was going to study forest and forestry and pursue my passion of the outdoors. And I get a call while I'm bagging groceries one day at the commissary there at Ramstein. And they said, hey, I'm calling you from the Air Force Academy, and we haven't heard back from me on this prep school scholarship. And we, well, when are you going to take it? I said, well, look, I never heard anything about it.

Mail never got to me. And so I said, listen, I'm already going to University of Wyoming with my best friend. So thank you very much, but go ahead and give it away. And the guy on the other end, these lieutenant colonel said, well, have you talked to your folks yet? I said, no, I'll talk to them tonight, but, you know, no change. Go ahead and give it away. And we're at dinner, and I remember my dad reading the stars and stripes, you know, and I said,

I got this call from the academy, you know, offer me some kind of a prep school thing or anything, but I told them I'm going to, you know, WIO. And my dad, I remember looking at me saying, let me see if I got this right. You know, someone called you today and offered you money to go to school, and you told them that you'd rather use my money to go to school. You know, it's where they say that, you know, when you've lost a situation awareness, the moment you get it back. So let's just say we called the academy

and the guy just chuckled. He goes, yeah, I figured you'd call me back. So there you have it. And you mentioned your brother. Had he already been to the academy at that point or did he follow a different route into the service? He actually was a year ahead of me and was the cadet wing commander.

Oh boy. So when I showed up, you know, this is where it had been a lot more fun if I'd been Dave Smith, right, as opposed to Dave Goldfein because I, the upper class now that had been freshmen under Steve had their way. I had no idea.

My name was actually pronounced Goldfein, drop and give me 20. Yeah, I feel like from the outside, a lot of people would assume that's a big advantage having an older brother in that position, but as you just explained, quite the contrary, quite the contrary. Yeah, but he was a great cadet, you know, and a really, cadet wing commander. You know, you only get two of those a year, and he was the top. cadet in the entire wing. And so, you know, when you're following your brother that's perfect, you're only, if you want to make your own path, the only path available to you is anti-perfect.

And I pursued that quite aggressively. How does one go from anti-perfect to flying F-16s then? How does that actually work? I mean, that's a serious question. Yeah. Well, you know, I didn't have a passion for flying going into it. I actually developed that passion, getting my private license as a, as a freshman at the academy,

it was the only thing I could do while you're on restriction, and I spent a lot of time on restriction, pursuing the anti-perfect path. And so I got my private license at the Aeroclub and just fell in love with flying. And if you had a, you know, 2.6 or greater GPA, you could apply for this place called Shepard Air Force Base, which is where they did Euro-NATOR joint jet pilot training.

And I had a 2.4 or lower at the time. And so I had a chance to meet with the commandant of cadets, Anthony Bershenick at the time. And he said, Goldfein, goldfing, he goes, I think I remember you. He said, weren't you the senior cadet at airborne training at Fort Benning? that got a bag of rock salt and wrote usafa on the parade ground that burned the grass

that caused the chief of the army to call me. Wasn't that you? Yes, sir. He goes, hmm, okay, I'll think about it. Let's just say he helped me get into Shepherd. That's great. That's great. What is it about flying that you fell in love with?

You know, it's funny. You know, I learned early on that the stick and rudder, part of flying, right? Just the hands-on. That's a very important part of the game, but especially in the fighter business, but I think it's across all of the military aviation. It's actually the mental challenge that separates the good from the great. You know, good pilots can manipulate an airplane and put it in position and do great things with it. The great pilots that I got a chance to flew with were the ones that could have a mental image of a hundred, air claims doing different things as part of a large package reacting and responding to enemy

things that were going on, whether in the air or from the ground, right, and being able to get back to the debrief after the mission. And if somebody, when I was at the top of my game, if somebody asked me, well, tell me what happened in your cockpit. My answer was, I had no idea. I just did everything naturally. I was focused on a 100 different airplanes. So it was the mental challenge I found that was really exciting about flying, especially as a mission commander, because there's just no better role than that when you're leading a 100 aircraft into combat.

And the beauty of it was, and my timing was very fortuitous because I got a chance to lead in several campaigns. Well, I want to talk to you about some of those in a minute, But before we move on, I'm fascinated by your answer here. You know, as a Marine, I was raised of my generation. I was raised in the church of John Boyd, which my impression has always been that the Marines actually embrace Boyd a bit more than the Air Force has, despite his, obviously, his Air Force record. So when you tell that, when you give that account of what makes a great pilot as opposed to a good pilot,

my mind immediately goes to him in his discussion of orientation and how orientation works, what's your account of, you know, if you were talking to somebody who was training to be a fighter pilot, how would you advise them to develop that capacity that you just, or strengthen that capacity that you just described of sort of the higher situational awareness, if you will? Well, you know, I don't want to anybody listening to underestimate the importance of the sticking butter skills because it starts there, right? So you've got to be able to put that aircraft in the position it needs to be as part of a formation, to be able to deliver what the mission requires. That's absolutely job one. But then once you master that,

you start moving into different locations. I don't know what the Marine Corps equivalent would be, but you go from wingman to flight lead. And then you go from flight lead to flight commander, and then flight commander to mission commander, to mission commander to instructor pilot, where you're teaching others, right? And in that evolution of growth,

while you're moving your way through the ranks, if you will, but higher levels of responsibility, at some point you've got this formation of what could be upwards of 100 aircraft, all doing a number of different things, some in supporting rules, some in support dead roles. And you're taking that entire formation into enemy territory, and the enemy gets a vote. and when you're at the top of your game,

you're able to respond and react very quickly. And you brief that formation to the point where everyone understands their role and how they fit in, and you're able to just orchestrate this mission and get the job done and then get everybody home, everybody home safely.

To be able to develop that skill, it's a matter of repetition, it's a matter of exposure, It's a matter of study. It's a matter of listening and learning. It's a matter of failing and learning from those failures. All of that is involved. And, you know, you never stop learning and you never stop growing in any leadership position,

let alone just flying. And I imagine as technology improves and, you know, your career sort of tracks with the arrival of the digital revolution in war fighting. And I know this is an issue you worked on in many ways as a more senior officer setting policy. But I imagine one of the challenges being a commander in air combat is too much information

and sorting through just massive amounts of data and indicators to figure out what's significant. Is that right? And if so, how do you think about that? I remember when I was in pilot training getting my wings, I had a German instructor And I remember one time he asked me, he says, Dave, in a debrief, he said, if you were alone on an island stranded and you had to know what time it was every day, what is the minimum number of watches you would need?

And I remember thinking, what does this have to do with flying? Where is he going with this? And I said, I don't know. I guess I need two. He goes, well, if you have two, how do you know which one is right, but they don't agree. And I said, well, I guess I need three. He goes, yeah, you always need a minimum of three pieces of information to be able to triangulate your information, compare your information, and then historically, if one is off, the other two are going to be on, and you're going to be able to make your best decisions. That's not a bad way of describing,

and I used to use that story when I became an instructor to teach young pilots. Look, always triangulate your information, right? never rely on a single source of information, because if that source of information ever goes, you know, bad on you, then if you're not triangulating, if you're not comparing that information, then you're going to end up making potentially bad decisions. And as I, you know, progressed into the point where I was now,

like, the A3 of Air Combat Command, I remember talking to young pilots and saying, look, having your screens go blank is actually not a challenge. Because we train for that, and you know the moment they go blank, what's going on? A far harder challenge that we have to think our way through is, what if the screens are still working, but the data is being manipulated and you no longer trust it? That is going to be the challenge of our future. And if you've got three watches and you're triangulating your information,

the chances are that you're going to be able to continue to make good decisions as you go forward. Taking that kind of information in, to your point of being overloaded with information, absolutely can happen. But I think you learn as you grow what information is the primary and what is secondary, and how do you keep that information flowing so you can continue to be ahead of the game as you're leading? So you graduate Air Force Academy in 83. You're coming up the more junior ranks of being a combat pilot through the 80s. And then am I right in taking from this timeline that your first experience of combat would have been the Gulf War, the first goal for? Yes. Tell me what happened and tell me what it was like as a young man transitioning from what at this point was the better part of a, well, if you count your academy years, a decade of preparation to,

fighting in the skies. So we were the second squadron to deploy after Saddam rolled south into Kuwait. First squadron being an F-15s from Langley, we were the second squadron to deploy. When we took off our squadron commander, one of my heroes, a guy named Billy Deal, he said, look, we don't know our destination because the Secretary of Defense is negotiating for that right now, ahead of us. So we're going to take off with all of the approach plates, which are the, you know, the, the, it's how you get into an airport, right?

It's the instrument procedures and all those kind of things. So we're going to have to have approach plates for the entire Middle East in your cockpit. And oh, by the way, we don't think the engine, having talked to talk to, you know, Lockheed Martin, we don't think the engine has ever been flown as long as we're going to fly. So we're not actually sure the oil is going on.

So periodically we want you to check your oil. And so I led the fourth fourth, the fourth flight is a flight commander, and we did 17 hours, and eventually deployed into the UAE at Abu Dhabing. And one of the things I'll never forget is my first ever combat mission. And I'm a believer that most combat veterans, I don't think the Marines or an army or the Navy is any different. You know, there's sort of one question and one prayer that everyone has before they go into their first day of combat, right? The question is, how am I going to do? and am I trained properly?

When I really see the enemy for the first time, how am I going to really react? Because so far all I've done it is this in training. And the second is a prayer, which is, please God, don't let me let my buddies down. Right? And you go into combat that first way. So my first combat mission,

we're going to an Iraq. And I remember the only combat veteran we had in the entire formation of 40 airplanes was our squadron commander, who was a Vietnam vet mid-killer. And he's talking to us like it's a walk in the park. There's AAA right 2 o'clock, right? And all of us are staring at this, you know, anti-aircraft artillery popcorn smoking. Wow, that's AAA. And then I remember him calling out

SA2s, you know, surfster missiles, telephone poles coming at the formation. And we're watching this at left 10 o'clock and there's a couple that explode above the formation. And I just remember thinking, my God, that's a surf stair missile. And then I hear splash, MiG-29. And a buddy of mine actually was in the front of the formation, shot down a mig 29, and I was close enough to actually see it, hit the set desert floor and explode. I will always remember that moment because I realized in my cockpit

that nothing I was seeing was new. Everything I'd experienced at Nellus Air Force Base in a red flag experience, right? I'd seen AAA simulators. I'd listened to the radio calls. I'd looked out and seen the same formations and I remember the confidence that came over me in the cockpit saying, okay, I can do this, I got this.

This is not new. And actually, Nellus was harder than Iraq. That confidence I'm a fire is what drove me all the way through my time as chief to do everything possible to create the exact same moment for the next generation as the Vietnam generation created for me because it was Boyd, It was, you know, a certain number of folks who came back from Vietnam and said, you know, if we can put pilots through the ringer in their first 10 missions and make it so hard that after 10 missions, if they can survive that, they're going to survive in combat. And when they did for me what I believe we, the leaders of today, owe to the next generation, you know, the kids and the grandkids who will go fight our nation.

nations wars. Can you say more about that? What are the sort of challenges in the pipeline for those first 10 missions as you put it? And what are the rigors that you're being put through as part of your preparation? They're generally when you go out to red flag. I don't know if you've ever been out there when you're in Marines, but I was I was an infantry guy. So I got to cheer you guys on from a dot on the desert four. No, we would because we would bring infantry out. It was a joint, very often a joint operation. And you had the different kinds of emissions because, you know, on one day you could be doing an interdiction mission where you're going out for a specific target. The next day you're doing a suppression of enemy or defenses mission where you're taking out, you know, SAM systems. The next thing

you're doing is, you know, providing combat search and rescue for a downed aviator. And the next one, maybe you're doing humanitarian relief operations to deliver supplies and, you know, life-saving, you know, goods to, you know, our allies or partner. or our teammates, right? We're doing close air support for our, you know, teammates on the ground. So what Red Flag is designed to do is to expose you to the highest possible threat array to be able to accomplish those missions. And what you want out of it, what we always want out of it,

is create the confidence under fire that I experienced on my first combat mission. Because we want everybody to do when they ask that question, and how am I going to do? And please God, don't let me down. We want to have that the same moment in combat where they look around and go, man, I got this. This ain't new. I am trained and ready for this.

I can get this done. Yeah. You've written about your squadron commander in the Gulf War. This is Lieutenant Colonel Deal, if I'm not mistaken. And how he would do this thing where he would run check rides or fly check rides for the pilots in his squadron. but on combat missions. Talk a bit about that and what that meant,

what the significance of that was. So he told us one time, we were about 20, 30 days into the war, and he said, look, you know, there'll be a lot of medals and other kind of recognition when this is all said and done. He goes, but what I'm going to do for you

is something my boss did for me in Vietnam. I'm going to fly with each of you on your wing, and that ride is going to be a check ride. And you're going to have a Formate, which is the form that pilots used to, you know, put a check ride. And he says, so in your flying record, I want each of you to have, like I have from Vietnam,

a record of you flying in combat with me as your check pilot as a squaring commander. And he circled to the squadron and did that for every one of us. So I have a check record. For the non-pilots, why is that important? Because your flying record is one of the things that, I think for your flying record is one of the things that you always look back on with great pride. And to have the squadron commander

have confidence enough in each one of his pilots to go through and have that check ride, meant a lot. It was just, I thought, a great leadership lesson. And so 10 years later, when I was squaring commander leading my squadron into combat over Kosovo and Serbia, I gave the same speech and did the same thing. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSW CDAO, powered by the Palantir platform.

Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the joint force, thousands of uniformed service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, intel products, battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no wait. The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. And one of those knights took kind of a turn. Let's talk about 1999 in flying in combat. This is the NATO campaign against Slobodan Milosevic. You're doing exactly what your squadron commander did for you. Back over Iraq, you're flying a check ride for one of the pilots that you're in command of.

And that night you were hunting, as you put it, well, this is, this is quoting me, the night you became somebody with more takeoffs than landings. You were hunting Sam's, right? Tell us about that night. So it was a check ride for one of my young pilots that I was, so I was actually flying as number four in a four ship. And we had developed tactics together with one of the other squadrons that was deployed to the same location down from Spangdala.

We were flying out of Aviano Air Base in Italy. And we had developed a tactic to be able to use our new sensors and equipment, mostly infrared sensors to night vision goggles, but also infrared sensors that were on pods, to be able to highlight and find surface-star missile sites, especially when they shot. So once they shot a missile, then the hottest thing in your screen was going to be that launcher. because it was still glowing from the heat of the launch.

And so the idea was to stimulate these folks, did them to actually shoot but be outside of any kind of lethal range. And then once you have this IR, this infrared signature, to go in and rain down munitions on them so that there was a cost to shooting at NATO aircraft. Because throughout the campaign, we had achieved air superiority over Kosovo, but we hadn't truly achieved it over Serbia.

And so the night that I was hip, we were out there to do that. And what we didn't know was that the commander of the battalion, the surface-air missiles had actually moved his site, his launch site directly underneath our flight path. So while our intelligence put us well outside the lethal range, we were directly directly over the top. And so when the missiles started firing, we were actually doing exactly what we expected to do,

which was to stimulate them, get them to fire. And then we were going to roll in with weapons. And the one that I didn't see, of course, is the one that got me. It's pretty historical. You can go back to Vietnam and others. They'll tell you the same thing. And from the folks that were back farther into formation, and I watched it, said it was about five to seven seconds from launch to impact.

Wow. And luckily for me, you know, my guardian angels were in full force that night because it had hit far enough back in the airplane that it took out the motor but didn't take out me. And you had recently been struck by lightning, right? I mean, just before. So did you at first think that that's what had happened? Or what was the actual experience of being hit like? It was very similar to being. I'd gotten hit by lightning on my way back into Aviano Air Base a couple weeks prior. and the lightning strike, you know, it basically was a loud explosion I could hear, bright white light in the cockpit. And then as soon as I, because I knew I was flying through and around some weather, and so I knew what had happened. And now was a matter of quickly assessing, okay, do I have an engine, single engine airplane, right?

Am I glider or am I still a, you know, F-16, right? Do I have everything? What have I lost? What's the potential damage, right? And then you go through your checklist procedures. So I'd had this happen a couple weeks prior So when I got hit by the missile It was in many ways very similar

A lot of explosion, bright white Smoke and fumes in the cockpit A lot of shaking of the cockpit Very very difficult to read any of the gauges Because they were all shaking so violently And the difference of course was When I assessed after the lightning strike I had a still had a motor

So had navigation could still fly the airplane got her on the ground safely. Right. In the case of the missile strike, I lost the engine, tried a couple of restarts, and then started communicating with my flight mates to let them know that I was about to jump out

because I knew that once you get out of the airplane, you know, races on, right? And it's between the enemy and the rescue team and determines who gets you first. And I wasn't a young captain. I was squad and commander. So I would have been a, I would run a nice catch for the Serbians that night. Pilots get a fair amount of training in escape and evasion.

There's a certain set of gear that you have. There's tactics, you know, you're going to go look for the high ground. Compared to the, considering the preparation that you had, how valuable was it? How prepared were you versus how much improvisation and problem solving did you have to, you know, as it were innovate in the moment? Well, one of my favorite songs that came out of that night is George Brooks, you know, thank God for unanswered prayers, right? Yeah. So you'll appreciate this from your Marine Corps time.

So if I had a 2.6 GPA, I would have been out gone through free fall training at the academy, which is when you jump out, you get to pull your own rip cord, get a square sheet, right? If you got a 2.4 or less, you get to go to Fort Benning and get your wings with the Army. and so I went through Ford Benning, but here's the beauty of it. The fourth jump at Ford Benning is a night, low altitude, full combat gear, mass exit jump, minimal time in the shoot, and then once you hit the ground, you have to spread to the buses to pass the ride, meaning you have to collect all your gear and then run to the buses that are in the tree line.

So here I am, you know, many years later, and I'm punching out of an F-16 at night, low altitude, full combat gear. As soon as I hit the deck, I got to grab all my gear and sprint to the free line so the enemy couldn't find me. I was trained that night by the United States Army to do what I needed to do. And if I had a better GPA, I don't think I would have been as ready. So I'll always be indebted. Let that be a lesson to the students.

Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that's interesting is, you know, I go back to the Nellis producing that confidence. One of the things that's amazing, and again, I think you probably have similar experience. You know, sometimes you get training years prior and you park that information and it's sort of compartmentalized and then you pull it forward when you need it. And in that moment when you need it, it's amazing how fresh it is. So I went through survival evasion, resistance, escape. I went through Siri training in 1979. I was shot down in 1999.

I let you, the listeners, do the math, right? But you know what? Here I was in my parachute, and it all came back. Check your shoot. Drop your mask, right? Four line, boom, all those things came right back. And then right before, as the ground's coming up, I'm visualizing the black cats at Ford Ben.

and they're screaming at me, right, yelling, feeding these together, don't look down. Feeding these together, don't look down, right? And that's what comes back in your head. And so it all came back. You were ultimately rescued that night by the Air Force Parakemen, the PGAs. I have some experience myself in Afghanistan.

They supplemented the Medevac capabilities where I was in Helmand Province back in 2010, and I found them to be just incredible, incredible human beings, just truly remarkable Americans. You're on the ground, it's dark, you're thankfully not seriously injured. You get in touch. I guess you're in touch at first with your own guys. Like your own guys are still up there.

You can talk to them. Talk about the process of evading and ultimately coming into contact with the rescuers themselves. Well, it goes back to that, you know, that prayer, please God don't let me let me love my buddies down. So in Desert Storm, a buddy of mine had gotten shot down and during the rescue, there was a helicopter that got shot down and lost several of the folks that were in the helicopter. Others were taken captive. So a lot of my focus was on how do I not screw this up and place this rescue team at risk?

because a slow, you know, lumbering helicopter flying at low altitude on a full moon night into enemy territory where we already know they've got the equipment to shoot somebody down, my job was to make sure that I had minimized their exposure. And so I spent minimal time on the radio because when the enemy's out searching for you, right, the last thing you want to give them is azimuth. Right.

Because they're going to start at the wreckage and they're going to start working their way out words from that. And if they were able to get a beat on me because I talked too much on the radio or did too much or highlighted myself in any way, so my job was to get to, you know, secure ground, minimize communications, and then talk that team in when the time was right. And we learned a lot about some rather new equipment. And I'll be a little careful about what I talk about here, right, but we had some new equipment that allowed some non-voice communication that didn't work that well that night. So my rescue tended out to be very similar to most of Vietnam rescues, right, which was I talked them to my location.

And then as soon as the H-60 touched down, because of the slope, they only put one wheel down. And so, you know, they always teach us, right, okay, do not, do not look. don't hold out a weapon, be submissive, be ready for them to authenticate you because they got to know that you're not the enemy, creating an ambush. The sun is within an hour of coming up and already starting to get light on a full moon night,

so their exposure was even worse. But these guys were not going home without me, and I'll forever be indebted to them, you know, for sitting here with you today as a proud grandfather of five, right? I wouldn't have done it had not been for these guys. So when they threw me into the helicopter, our total authentication, by the way,

because the enemy, once the helicopter landed, they knew exactly where we were, and they were opening fire and putting bullets. We took five bullets in the helo that night. And these guys all piled on top of me because they had body armor on and pushed me to the deck. And then we took off and evaded the enemy as we then cruised out of Serbia into Bosnia. And I always, I joke with him and give them a hard time because I said, you know, I thought you guys were really protecting me, you know, until I realized, hey, we're getting shut up from below.

Maybe I'm body armor for you. But in reality. We've got a lot of armor in the bottom of those ELOs. Yeah. But in honesty, though, you know, I send, I deliver three bottles of single malt scotch every year on the anniversary of the rescue to the two squadrons that picked me up, the 55th Rescue Squadron and the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron. And I send one bottle to the PGA schoolhouse. And as you might imagine, they're praying I live a long and healthy life. Just one more question about the actual rescue itself.

But one of the fascinating parts of the story to me is we can talk about low-tech versus high-tech. You've written at one point you close your eyes just to listen to the sound of the engines of the helicopters to vector them in. And I'm imagining myself in your shoes. You know, you're somebody who just as a human experience, you've gone over the course of a few hours to being thousands of feet in the air, traveling at high. speed, you know, you're going from Italy to the former Yugoslavia and back again in a relatively short period of time to now, comparatively speaking, crawling on the ground in the dark and incredibly low speed, the navigational tools that you're used to are not available. It's a totally different context, totally different experience.

How are you able to, you know, to orient your shell? You're going to tell, no, no, you need to come south, seem to come east. Well, that, that suggests that you've, like, mentally figured out. where you are in which ways, which, I mean, I guess you've got a compass and whatnot, but just the psychological experience of it and the enormity of going from being this, to borrow a phrase, this master of the air, to being somebody quite vulnerable and disoriented and you must be feeling very human at that moment on the ground just strikes me as, it must be a very dramatic transition.

You know, again, the focus on not screwing up my part and placing them at risk, when I was waiting you know given time to the rescue team to assemble minimizing my comm saving battery in case I'd spend the whole night there or a couple days there I'd taken out the compass from my vest and I'd taken a beat on the moon

again full moon night and I was about 210 from the moon and so the first radio call I made was hey put the moon at your back and fly 210 And then once they did that, I just closed my eyes and listened to see if the sound was getting louder. And it was. And then I just listened for drift, right?

And you can start listening to C.O.K. It's drifting this. Okay. Come further east. Okay. And then I had 810 Sandys who were relaying the communications, right? And, you know, I didn't want to, I didn't want to, you know, we had an authentication cards with, appropriate codes and what have you. But I didn't want to turn my flashlight on

because the enemy was in close-knup proximity that I couldn't see them, but I could hear of their activity. And so, you know, at the Air Force Academy, we have this saying that was sort of drilled into us. Every night at Mitchell Hall, when you're eating, at the end of the meal, you get to rate the server and the meal. And the answers for every rating

was fast-need average, friendly, good, good, right? So I'd jump on the radio and said, I could use a fast need and average rescue and not knowing whether there was an academy grad in the formation. And within a second, the radio call came back, said, friendly good, good is on the way. That was the total authentication we had that night. That's amazing. Yeah, just reflecting on the valor of these guys, of the, you know, the Sandy pilots and the pararescumen, this was much of my mind, I'm sure it was on yours, earlier this year in April, just as, you know, I woke up to footage circulating on the internet that morning of, you know, A-10s and other aircraft in broad daylight, flying at low altitude

over Iran, which in one respect was sort of an amazing testament to the success of the suppression of enemy air defenses, you know, underway, but also throughout March leading up to that moment. In another respect, I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just, speaks to what these guys do, that the pilots who got shot down or yourself back in 1999, at least you had the advantage. They didn't know exactly what in from what direction and so forth you were coming. If you're flying these rescue missions in whatever capacity and we lost an A10, the crew thankfully survived, but we lost an A10 in this Iran mission, they know where you're going. They know that you're coming. And you got to fly right into the teeth of it.

It really is a remarkable thing for someone to sign up for and then to execute with such incredible zealousness. It blows me away. You know, there's a, it's an, it's an incredible part, an incredible part of our culture that you know when you go up flying a combat mission, that your nation is not going to sleep until they get you home. If something goes bad, we don't leave people behind. And I knew I was getting home that night.

I mean, it's, it's easy to perhaps be sitting here today, right, and say, oh, of course, I knew of. But honestly, I'm telling you at the moment, there was no question in my mind that I was getting out that night, that the nation was not going to sleep until they got me home to my family so I could fly again the next night. But what's interesting about the dude 4-4 rescue, and I don't know all the details.

I have had a chance to talk to both Alpha and Bravo. who reached out, unbelievable courage, unbelievable commitment by not only those two, but also the team that came to rescue. And I believe history will hopefully record that one of the roles of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is to be a team builder and to build trust and confidence across the interagency from intelligence agencies to the State Department to all of the other agencies so that when it comes time to pull together an interagency mission that has so many folks involved, you're not building trust, you're building on trust, right? And I think history will show that we are incredibly blessed to have Chairman Dan Cain as our chairman, because when the story is actually written,

for what can be shared. I think the American people will be incredibly proud of the interagency endeavor that all came together to pull these folks out. And the risk that was taken to pull one person, two,

but Bravo out after, you know, days on Easter morning, that's a story for the ages. Yeah, and I remember General Kane being detected, emotional at the press conference after after everything had finally succeeded in talking about the mission and and the the folks who were who were flying it um i was i was going to ask you i mean you already spoke to it but i was going to ask you if you'd had a chance to talk to these two

uh aircrew must be a must be a very small fraternity um the uh the more takeoffs than landings club it's it must it's more than you three right but it's not many more hit you know what's interesting in combat in combat Yeah, what's interesting is it happened a lot in Vietnam. It hasn't happened a lot since. But what's amazing about the Vietnam generation is that, you know, it just wasn't that big a deal, right? I don't know how many times I talked to folks who had been shot down not once but two and three times. And you know what they did the next day when they got home?

They got back up in the air, right? It's just no big deal, right? It's part of combat. And so part of for me getting back up in the air so quickly after I was rescued, and I basically won't, I flew the next night and every night after that, was a way of quietly honoring the Vietnam generation and how they handled themselves during these shootdowns. And I was really privileged both my wife and I had a chance. to talk to Alfa and Bravo and their spouses to sort of compare notes and then share what we'd

learned and how we handled ourselves afterwards. You mentioned your wife. An extraordinary dimension of this story that we've not spoken about is that you flew out of Aviano where you and your family were living, which for American pilots, American service members in general, fighting from where you live is not a common experience. If you're an Israeli pilot or a Ukrainian pilot, it's probably how you live. But for Americans, not so much. So you were taking off at night and flying your missions and going home and, you know, seeing your family and your children every day.

What was that night and morning like for your wife? So she, we woke up about 1.30 in the morning and felt like something was amiss at the house. And so wandered around the house and just made sure everything was secure. and then didn't go back to sleep and then that morning about 5 a.m. After they knew that I was safe and coming home, she had a call from the Wing Commander. And as a squad of commander spouse,

Don thought, well, okay, they're calling me to pick me up so I can go, you know, be part of the notification process. She did not think it was me. And so when everyone showed up at the front door, immediately she realized, okay, it was me. and they knew that I was on my way back, but they didn't know my condition. And again, we'd lost, we had a friend got shot down in Iraq

that then became a POW during the Gulf War. And when he was brought home, Bill Andrews, he was brought out of the aircraft on a stretcher. So she had no idea whether, you know, I was going to walk off the airplane or be carried off the airplane. So when I walked off, you know, is a big mom. moment. But it was also sort of unique because our, you know, I had a, I talked with my wing commander fig leaf, you know, who was waiting for me with the rest of the crowd. And pretty emotional

moment because the folks that had been up there, you know, were on the rescue, were on the deck and were surrounding me. And they'd had in many ways the worst experience than I did. Because they didn't know, you know, if I was going to be okay or not. And our oldest daughter, who was about eight years old at the time, was struggling a little bit with this whole daddy just got shot down. And so I have this, now I have two responsibilities. I've got to get back in the air as a squadron commander. And my plan was to get back in the air that same night after getting some, you know,

a few hours of sleep. Or do I wait a night? And I chose to wait a night to make sure that she was over. Okay, so it's a, you know, that, that, or okay, I've got a responsibility as a squadron commander. I got a responsibility as a dad, right? And so that was a unique part of flying from home that was not in the brochure. My goodness. I'm sorry, you said it, but I didn't quite catch it. How old was your oldest daughter? I think she was about eight years old at the time. How does an eight-year-old understand daddy got shot down? Like, what does, what does that even mentally seem like to her?

It's kind of a hard question to answer, I grant, but it's still, yeah. You know, I mean, I think we have, you know, two daughters, eight-year-old, and they're two years apart, so eight and six. And I think more than anything, it was probably the emotion of the, you know, think about it, right, she's woken up, he's got all these strangers in her house, she's driven to the flight line if they know that I'm on my way back, you know, mom is, you know, nobody knows, okay, they're not probably talking that much in the car. you know, so I think it was probably more of the emotion of the entire experience that for an eight-year-old had to be a little bit hard to take.

And then the idea that I was going to go right back out that night, you know, after putting her to bed, was just a little bit hard to take. So I took one night to make sure she's going to be okay. Yep, bless. And then Mrs. Goldfein, two years later, you're now in a staff role at the Pentagon on 9-11, and she has to go. go through a similar, at least, psychological experience all over again. And thank goodness you and your colleagues were okay. I guess your office was on the far side. And you had left for a meeting, but your office was on the far side of the Pentagon anyway.

But that was another sort of enormous day for your family. Yeah. Again, I think my guardian angels are upstairs suing for a transfer. You know, enough with this guy. You know, but they were there because I was, you know, the 9-11 attack, I actually was in a position where I watched the airplane hit the Pentagon. From Roslyn, right? Tell me, tell me to the extent you remember where you were and what you actually saw.

So what I saw was the airplane that very quickly sort of disappeared behind the buildings on his final flight path and then the large explosion, plume of smoke and fire. and then ran to jump on the nearest metro I could because I wanted to get back and see if my team was still okay. And they had, they must have an emergency switch of some kind because as soon as this happened, all of the metro lines went away from the Pentagon, not toward. So I find myself on a metro headed towards Falls Church where Dawn was a teacher and both girls were in school. and in the meantime, you know, I'm thinking about my team and, okay, how do I get back to the Pentagon and make sure okay, no cell phone coverage, you know, because there's no way to call anybody. So I've actually got to the school, and when I walked in, it first hit me when I saw Don's reaction that, oh, you know, she's been dealing with the unknown, right? that the Pentagon just got attacked.

And it took me a good, you know, 45 minutes to an hour to get there. And then the rest of it was, you know, sort of a fascinating experience about trying to help lead the recovery effort at the Pentagon for the next several weeks. Before we wrap here, I want to ask you a couple questions about war fighting and some of the things you worked on as a more senior officer. to include as ultimately as chief of staff. But for a few years there, I guess this is sort of 2011, 2012, 13 time frame. You were in command of the Air Force arm of Central Command, if I have that right.

And a big focus of your work at that time was integrating the command and control arrangements of that combatant command. And really the kind of stuff, honestly, we're still talking about. Because it's not totally clear to me that we are where we need to be in terms of fully integrating. And I'm just trying to stick to layman's language here and avoid jargon as much as I can, which is always a challenge in talking about these subjects. But, you know, the digital revolution, everyone's familiar with it. It's transformed everyone's lives.

It's transformed how we work. It's transformed. If you look at dating apps, it's transformed love. You know, it's transformed every aspect of human life. and has absolutely transformed the business of war. In 2026, I think few would agree that we have fully and most efficiently incorporated the capabilities made available by the digital revolution

into our various war fighting, trying to avoid the word function, but I don't think I can't, our various ways of waging war. You were thinking about this over a decade ago. What were you most worried about then? and where do you think we are today? So as the air component commander for Central Command,

I was a supporting commander to my joint teammates, but there was one mission I had that I was the support head commander, and that was the collective defense of the Arabian Gulf. So pulling together all of the assets that were required to defend the GCC, right, against attacks from Iran. and I had Navy ships, carrier strike groups. I had space. I was the space coordinating of authorities,

so I had constellations that were working for me. I had brigade combat teams, Marine Corps, you know, brigades, fighter pilots or fighters from each of the countries, right? So I had this incredible joint array and the most sophisticated headquarters on the planet. They're in Al-U-D. And I remember standing on the catwalk, you know, with my boss, then General Jim Mattis, and looking down on the floor of this headquarters, and I said, sir, here's what I've learned about this mission. There is no I, an IAMD.

There is no integrated and integrated air and missile defense because I started pointing, I started pointing to the floor and I said, that's the space cell. That space cell does not communicate with the combat search and rescue cell, which, is right next to it, because the data is not shareable, it's proprietary, it's built by different industry companies, right, and they can't share data. And they don't talk to the Army cell that I have here, which was not a small group. It was 60 soldiers that were integrating air and land operations. My naval cell, I said, so the only way I can integrate all of this is with that cell phone, or that telephone I have over there. That's the only universal translator I had.

So that was a formative experience for me that led to my advocacy for join all domain command and control, which is how do we ensure that what we procure and what we put in place can connect, can share, and learn? How do we connect through common architecture? How do we share data from all different areas, all different domains, right? And how do we place artificial intelligence at the edge to be able to ensure that we are a learning machine at machine speeds? That was the essence.

It was my experience as a supported commander for joint operations and the lack of integration that led to this. passion for digitizing the military. And by the way, you know, to your point of, well, we're probably now where we should be, I will tell you that we're never going to be where we should be because it's a journey that never ends. And that's a hard thing to get your mind around culturally when, you know, as I told, you know, my Silicon Valley folks, when I went out, I said, look, you know, I'm the only service chief of a garage startup. They said, what are you talking about? I looked at my Google guy,

and I said, well, you know, you got Larry and Sergei. I got Orville and Wilbur, right? Yeah. Two bikes, bicycle mechanics tinkering in a garage, and the rest is history. But I said, I'm also the chief of a hardware company that has focused culturally on platforms, sensors, and weapons. But my future, The future of my service is not in hardware instead of software. And I can't take the service where it needs to go without you, my industry teammates. So this all comes around to the passion for digitizing the military came from an experience as a supported commander that had an anything but integrated architecture. So in this journey that we're still on, as you put it, what do you think the biggest obstacles are today? You know, more than anything, I think it's the ability to adapt technology on a journey that is never ending and placing the financial incentives to industry so they can deliver what we want.

Because if your incentives are, I am focused on platforms, sensors, and weapons, then you're never really going to get to the amount of eye. IT information technology that you need to incorporate going forward. But I will tell you that, you know, in the time frame that I was chief from 16 to 20 and working with first Chairman Joe Dunford and then Chairman Mark Millie, I think we were successful in taking the conversation from weather to how. Because at the beginning of the conversation of trying to digitize and start military, and connect it, and get sharing and learning, we didn't have complete buy-in across the services

because we had to build trust and we had to build a common problem statement of what we were trying to solve. And that took years of dialogue, and we got beyond the whether it was no longer do we need to do this. Now the conversation is how. that's a significant, I think that's a significant improvement in terms of where the discussion started to where it is today.

Yeah. I promise to let you go after this. I want to be respectful of your time, but it's that to me, you know, if you tried to have this talk with me as a young infantry officer, my eyes would have glazed over because I would have had no real idea of why it sounds like something that might be important to someone, but it's not very important to me. But the more time I spend, you know, focused on these issues, the more I'm with you, the more I'm with you, and how central this question is to the future of America's ability to defend itself. And I guess, I don't know if you'd agree with this formulation. I'm curious about your formula. The problem we're trying to solve is it takes. It takes, takes us back to you standing in that operation center as the air commander and realizing that there could be somebody sitting over here who has data that could save lives over there, but it relies on you or someone getting on the phone and as it were manually putting the pieces together, whereas in 2012, the technology exists to make that communication instantaneous and just, plus it's the wrong word, but it shouldn't require a human plugging the two things together in the time that involves. Is that the best way to describe the problem, or how would you describe the problem that all this solves? We want to stay, you know, at the end of the day, I always felt like as chief.

One of my major roles was to arm the Secretary of State to be able to negotiate with a credible military option so that he and his diplomats can negotiate to a better state of peace. and if that in fact is still the case today, what we want is for potential adversaries to wake up, look at the world, and look at themselves in the mirror and say, not today. We want that to happen every day. And we want enough uncertainty that we've created,

that they're not going to accomplish their political objectives through military means because they don't exactly know how good we are. and they don't know understand the full capabilities of the United States military that operates jointly in ways that no other country on the planet can even come close right let's go back to the rescue of dude four four there ain't no country on the planet i know of that could ever pull that off let's talk about the operation in venezuela there there ain't many countries in the in the world that could pull that off We want adversaries to look at us and say,

not today. General Dave Goldfein, this conversation's kind of had everything, from digital policy to stories of you being alone and unafraid on the ground there in Serbia. Sort of like your remarkable career, which has also sort of had everything. I'm very grateful to you for taking this amount of time

with us today here on School of War. Thanks for joining. Oh, but thanks for having me. This episode of School of War is also presented by Strato Launch. a leading pure play Hypersonics company. Hypersonic weapons systems travel five times faster than the speed of sound, making them difficult to predict, track, and defeat. America's advantage in Hypersonics depends on delivering testing, targets, data, and systems at pace.

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