School of War - The Rise of the Navy SEALs, with Ben Milligan

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Ben Milligan, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, Bronze Star recipient, and author of By Water Beneath the Walls: The Rise of the Navy SEALs, joins School of War to discuss the origins and evolution of one of America's most storied special operations forces. How did the Navy SEALs grow out of the Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II? What does it take to become a SEAL? How did the Vietnam War shape the institution into the force we know today? And what role should the SEALs play as the U.S. military shifts its focus from the war on terror to great power competition? 02:10 – Why Ben Became a SEAL 03:34 – Joining Before 9/11 05:17 – Inside BUD/S 09:17 – Who Makes It Through? 11:26 – What Elite Training Builds 14:29 – The Origins of the SEALs 23:18 – The Origins of UDT 27:10 – Korea Changes the Mission 38:06 – Birth of the SEALs 43:36 – Vietnam Transforms the SEALs 47:33 – The Capture-Kill Raid 49:50 – Lessons for the War on Terror 54:36 – Great Power Competition 56:13 – What Makes Special Operations "Special"? 59:31 – The Future of the SEALs 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.

The Navy SEALs are one of America's most storied special operations organizations, and today we're going to talk about how they got their start, Their origins with the underwater demolition teams of World War II, their missions in Vietnam, and how they did during the War on Terror, with Navy SEAL veteran and historian Ben Milligan. Let's get into it. It is for a war. The Lockhean invasion of away.

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 grave situations around. People are not seen you. We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in those streets. We shall never surrender.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Ben Milligan. Ben served in the United States Navy as a seal from 2001 until 2009. And he is a historian, an author of By Water, Benevolve, the wall, the rise of the Navy Seals. Ben, thank you so much for coming on School of War. Thanks, Aaron. Great to be here. Why does a nice, seemingly well-adjusted young man such as yourself

do a thing like join the Navy Seals? How did that come about? Oh, that's a good question. That's probably the same reason that I wrote the book. I had a very close relationship with my mom's dad, and he had been a World War II Marine. And when combat stopped, on Okinawa, they put out a canvas for anybody who could swim to join a unit that he didn't know about. And he joined a version of the underwater demolition team. So I knew about the UDTs as a young guy and just kind of got fascinated with it. And so the seals were on my radar from probably 12 years old on. And I always just wanted to do it.

I was, you know, I was a pretty good runner. I was good at endurance sports. I wasn't a good athlete. There's never been a ball that I haven't thrown badly or caught or not caught at all. But I could run and I could swim, and it just seemed like a good fit for me. So when I got out of the SEAL teams, though, that's when all the questions started happening. First, all the questions about, you know, what the SEAL teams were and where they came from and all the rest. Well, obviously, we're going to get to your fascinating history of the rise

of the SEALs, but just to stick with you for a minute, describe the experience of joining the Navy and going this route. I'm judging, I'm guessing by your bio, it was pre-9-11 that you made those decisions, though maybe you'll correct me on that detail, but joining the Navy under those circumstances and then being right at the start of your career as 9-11 happens. Yeah, we're We were the last class to graduate before 9-11. So I had just graduated from Buds. The bombing of the coal happened while I was in boot camp. And then I was just home from Airborne School when 9-11 happened.

I was on my post-Buds break before we started SEAL qualification training or SQT. And yeah, that was an interesting time to be in for sure. And it was, you know, especially interesting because, well, long, we were, you know, we were still students at the time. We didn't know if they were going to fast track or a training or what they were going to do if we were just going to send us, you know, to our teams. They didn't, you know, ultimately, we stayed in the pipeline, stayed in training. But, you know, I, yeah, it was a, it was a weird, it was definitely a weird day, you know, having just graduated and, you know, now suddenly you realize, you know, we're going, we're going to war. I had, you know, at that point, all I had was, I think I came home from from Buds with, with a Navy Sea bag. And I, you know,

I had that packed by the end of the day ready for, ready for the call. Yeah, definitely, definitely a weird time to be in, in that institution. Yeah. Oh, I'm curious as, you know, a veteran of that institution and then somebody who's now, you know, formerly a student of the seals and their history, you know, what your experiences were going through Buzz, and then that training pipeline, which maybe you'll tell us a little bit about how long that is and what it consists of.

And your sense of how it's evolved between then and now is the consequences of the experiences of SEALs in combat in what's been a very, very intense couple of decades for the institution. What was it like for you and how do you think it's changed?

I didn't have any perspective on how it had changed until I wrote the book. I knew that it was, you know, everybody who goes to buds goes to buds, you know, for a couple of reasons. One, they want to be, you know, a frogman or a commando. And two, they want to, you know, test their metals, you know, to some degree.

They want to see if they could do, you know, what's, what folks say is the toughest training that the U.S. military offers. It, I expected hard training. I went through boot camp. And they, you know, every morning at boot camp, they, uh, they would send us to, seal PT, you know, so all the guys that were going to be going off to seal training, you know, would do a, you know, a version of what we thought, you know, Buds was going to be, or basic underwater demolition seal training. And I never had any trouble with any of that. So my expectations of what Buds was going to be was this is all probably a lot of hype. And, you know, there was nothing,

no race and boot camp that I had lost or no pull up contest or push up contest. And then I got to Buds. And I was, I was shock at how mediocre I was. Not just that. I was, I was kind of blown away by how difficult training, how difficult training was. Like we, at the time, they had, there was a six-week indoctrination block, you know, before you even started Buds. And, and I was the last guy to arrive at Buds before our class formed up. So once I showed up, they cut the class off. Everybody who showed up after me was going into the subsequent class. So I didn't have a lot of time to kind of get my bearings, you know, where I didn't even

know where I was staying before, you know, my class really started. And then Indoc was supposed to be, I think, four hours of training every day just so you can acclimate your legs to the soft sand and acclimate, you know, to the cold water. And I was, I was shocked. I thought those four hours, every day that we did that four hour block of training, I was, I was like, how can you do this for, for eight hours? And then when we got into first phase, when first phase started and, you know, your first day of, you know, you've got two weeks to go before you even, you know, hit Hellweek. You know, I thought that that first day, that first week, I didn't know how it was possible to keep to keep doing it.

It was, there were times when I was, you know, we were, you know, we come out of like a surf torture or something like that and we'd be running to go, you know, this is before the sun has come up and you're running to the pool to go do a pool workout or something like that. And I just remember being, well, I've never been this cold and I'm about to get into more water. and I don't yeah this isn't great yeah and I think that's the trick I mean they always talk about how you gotta you know adjust your adjust your expectations and you know and you know adjust

you know how far you look ahead in training if you look if you try and you know bite that that six months off all at once you're just you're not going to make it you just really just have to take things one one evolution at a time sometimes one you know one one part of an evolution at the time based on your observations both self observations but but you know looking at your peers and those who made it and those who did not

what were the most important qualities or what was the most important quality that distinguished those who made it and those who didn't I mean I obviously there's a baseline of physical fitness but I'm I'm guessing that that was that was insufficient there were probably some some pretty fit guys who didn't cross the line in the end yeah that's true everybody talks about, you know, the Olympic swimmer or the Olympic, you know, level caliber runner that doesn't make it or the, you know, the wrestler from Iowa or something like that. You know, everybody has has those stories. I think the difference, the guys that that we had after Hell Week that were in the class and our class have began after Hell Week. But the guys that kind of made it through Hell Week and then made it, you know, through that other, you know, calling or whatever, they tended to be, um, they tended to have a pretty good sense of humor. I don't know if that's a level of optimism that each guy has, or they tended to not treat, you know, injuries as if they were catastrophic, you know,

happenings. Like if you get a cold, they didn't care about the cold, if they had a, you know, a broken bone or something like that, that they were hiding from the instructors. They didn't, you know, they didn't make a big deal out of it or anything like that. It was just a level of optimism, I guess, maybe just to, and a sense of humor. I mean, if you can, if you can laugh about yourself, laugh about, you know, the guys around you,

but, you know, and they were all, you know, everybody was a good teammate. Aside from just a couple of guys, everybody was a good, you know, a good teammate. They all kind of, you know, looked out for the guys in the boat crew. If you were willing to put out, if you were willing to, you know, carry your fair share of the log or the boat or whatever

and be a good teammate, you know, your teammates were going to rally around you. and protect you. So before too long, you know, once you've been in that environment, you know, for long enough, you're not going to, you're not going to quit. Yeah. You're like the guys that you're with are just, you know, they matter too much to you. My own, you know, theory on intense military training, you know, the sort of limited experience

I had of it, half of it was the Marine Corps' infantry officer's course, which did a lot to shape me, not just as a Marine, but honestly, as a human being. If I can interrupt, I mean, one thing that I've learned about, you know, all these various programs is, you know, the, I mean, Ranger School is very difficult. You know, the Q course is very difficult. The Delta Force selection very difficult. I, I've never been more impressed with the guys that come out of basic infantry officer course. I just, I'm always blown away at the caliber of guys that make it through that training. Please, please continue, though. No, no, well, Ben, I mean, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, I will say, you know, I was lucky in my education to go to some good schools and then the Marine Corps has a bunch of good schools. I think the single best school in my life I've ever been to was the Marine Corps' Infantry Officers course. It just left a huge impression on me. And, you know, as somebody who did that, but then, you know, I've been curious about, you know, what you did and these other schools you just cited my whole life and have read about them.

And my theory is that important to all of these kinds of training to include the super intense kind that you experienced is, is taking people to their limits and then sort of seeing what they do and how they live there and also giving them the experience of living there at their limits. Because the fact that people have limits is not super interesting. Everybody's got limits. Everybody can be broken depending on what you subject them to. But just evaluating their performance when they really are on the edge and then giving them that experience prior to combat of being repeatedly on the edge.

being repeatedly, you know, you were sort of humorously describing like, gosh, I'm really cold. Like being, being in like bad places in advance of like the true tests of combat and letting them develop. That that seems to me to be the kind of key universal ingredient to all this stuff, which obviously comes in various flavors and various sort of degrees of intensity. I don't know if you, if you agree with that or if you think there's other important commonalities. No, I wouldn't add anything to that. And the, I mean, the one thing that I heard a, a Bud's, he was an officer, but he had spent a lot of time studying training, studying the guys that get through training. One of the things that he talked about was, you know, training doesn't just evaluate people who can get through this. It doesn't, we're not just looking for, you know, the best people.

This training is going to make you the best people. it's going to make you a better, a better version of yourself. You know, once you realize that you can make it through, you know, these various thresholds of endurance and do it with, with optimism and a smile on your face and, you know, kind of, you know, shaking your fist at the gods, you know, you're going to be better than what you were when you started. Let me propose, let's go back in time.

Let's talk through the history that you've documented and maybe we'll come back to your operational experience at the end because I'm interested in both things, but I'm also interested in how, you know, the history of the organization sort of goes on to form and shape the experiences that you actually lived. And your book is really, really fascinating.

I'm told that it's taken off within your community and that SEALs, you know, are grateful for this account of the origins of their institution. It's really interesting for anyone who's interested in special operations or military history. I recommend it to listeners. Talk about, you know, So all of this originally, I mean, this is sort of prior to the formal foundation of the seals,

but the precursors to the seals and then really all of these different competing visions of special operations seem to more or less have their origins in the Second World War. Just give us kind of an overview or orientation of the different demands that were being made on the armed forces and the sort of different American strategic needs that led to the creation of these different organizations to include the UDTs and the precursors to the seals. Yeah, the Navy in that sense is distinct from all the other branches of service. So the Naval Special Warfare is distinct from the Marine Corps' experience, distinct from the Army's experience. The Air Force doesn't really count until the Air Force becomes a thing on its own.

But the Navy's, you can't really understand the Navy's entrance into the sphere of special operations without kind of understanding how the Marine Corps and the Army got into it. And the Army and the Marine Corps, you know, they sort of, when World War II begins or when World War II is on the horizon, there are some folks within the Marine Corps and the Army who are kind of envisioning units that can do something similar to what the British are doing with their reconnaissance and the rating capabilities after Dunkirk. So there are folks within those branches who sort of have an entrepreneurial sense and they want to create something similar. They ultimately go to the British for advice on how to stand those units up. The Navy is interesting because it doesn't do anything like that. There's no unit especially in the British Army, British Navy that the American Navy is trying to recreate. The Navy, when World War II starts, really just identifies a series of problems,

and they don't really know how to solve them, and they turn those problems over to a couple of innovative folks that, you know, how to know how to problem solve and create these sort of mini institutions to solve those problems. First problem is, you know, they know that they're going to have to land troops on enemy beaches, and, you know, that, you know, they kind of backtrack, what do we need to do to land troops on enemy beaches? Well, We need to be able to have troops that can identify the beaches to land on. They need to be able to go ashore and not only find, you know, the right beach and signal, you know, to the troops that are out and see, you know, how to get to that right beach. But they've got to be able to be gotten off of.

You know, they've got to know how to find, you know, roads or, or gaps in bluff so they can get through it. So they've got to develop units that are able to scout beaches, mark beaches, and get off beaches. So that's how the Navy Scouts and Raiders come to be. And then the next kind of evolution is, well, we know that we're going to have to get on beaches that the enemy is putting lots and lots of various obstacles on. And a lot of these obstacles are supported by, you know, very complicated series of defenses, whether the machine guns, artillery mortars, all these things, all the stuff that we see, you know, on Omaha Beach at D-Day. So they create a unit that is able to go in and destroy all these obstacles to create. create gaps for tanks and for infantry units to get through. And then we've got a completely different problem than the Pacific.

So the Navy is just, you know, sort of the Navy in World War II doesn't envision that it's ultimately going to create, you know, a naval special warfare. The term naval special warfare doesn't happen until the 1980s. They're just creating very, very small units to handle very, very small problems, or maybe not very, very small problems, but problems. And then those units are kind of, they last for a little bit of time. and they roll into another unit. So some guys that serve in the scouts and raiders ultimately go and they serve in the UDTs.

Some guys that serve in the NCDUs ultimately go into the UDTs. And the UDTs kind of become the repository for, you know, all of those experiences, you know, when World War II ends. And they're the only, they're literally the only special operations or quote unquote special operations unit to exist when World War II ends. They get rid of the Raiders, excuse me, for your listeners, they get rid of the Marine Corps Raiders, they get rid of the Army Rangers. So the UDTs are really, there is. Yeah, it's totally fascinating.

And, you know, I'm struck by, especially since we sort of started this conversation by talking about buds and this sort of storied, you know, institution and the culture that it's shaped and it's, you know, really a factor in popular culture. You go back to the origins, and it really is about problem solving. I am curious about how the training and selection

worked in World War II for the UDT. if you want to go into a little bit more detail, just because, I mean, for example, the Raiders, who you're kind of tough on in the book, we did an episode on Carlson and Carlson's Raiders maybe a year ago now was super interesting. He's a super quirky, even crazy person. But as you know, and as you talk about in the book, you know, he sort of imports this combat culture really from the Chinese Communist Party. It's sort of its truth. The Chinese Red Army is the People's Liberation Army is the truest source of, that culture and like very deliberately shapes a world for these guys before they go into combat.

What are the origins of the UDT training and culture? Is it really sort of thoroughly pragmatic or is there sort of an effort at like culture building or world building like that at all? That's a great question. But let me first address what you brought up Evans Carlsome. And I think that's a real challenge for most writers. or particularly writers who are going to write about people like Evans Carlson. Now, you said that I was hard on Evans Carlson.

I was. I had to understand why the Marine Corps ultimately decided to get rid of this unit. This unit was, you know, the Marine Corps raiders for folks that know. It's really the first attempt that the U.S. military has or makes to create a special operations or a special rating capability. But it's not a capability that the Marine Corps wants. It's a capability that the U.S. Navy wants. The U.S. Navy wants it so they can spread the Japanese out.

They can pull the Japanese away from beaches or from islands that they want to assault. And they want to marry this force to its submarine capability. It's the concept of what the Navy had had to do this. It's fascinating. It's one of the more genius ideas that the Navy has at the time. The problem is, you know, the mission in Macon, you know, goes so badly that it ultimately leaves Navy planners to turn away from the idea. And part of the reason that the Navy turns away from the idea is because of how Evans Carlson behaved on the Macon Island raid. And once the Navy sort of lost interest in doing more missions like,

that, well, the Marine Corps never liked Evans Carlson to begin with. So I'm not the one that really dislikes Evan Carlson. It's the Marine Corps that dislikes Evan Carlson. They couldn't have gotten rid of him fast enough. But it also brings up another point. Like, if you're going to write about people like this, like, who am I? Like, you know, I did seven years in the SEAL teams. Who am I to write critically about, you know, a guy like Evans Carlson? Evans Carlson was in some of the most consequential battles of the Pacific War. Not only that, he has. He had a whole experience in China before that. But that's the point.

If you're not going, if you are going to get into this business, if you're going to get into, you know, writing history, you have to, you have to, you know, be willing to, to take those sorts of issues on and be willing to not necessarily hold your fire. But the same time, you've got to be empathetic and understand, you know, this is, this is a real person working in a real time. And if you're not empathetic, you just want to take cheap shots, well, that's, that, that's gross. So yeah, that's a side issue.

But yes, just to quickly address what you said about Evans. The UDT training pipeline was a bit of a hodgepodge. You know, when the UDTs are created initially as a composite unit of Army, Marine Corps, and Navy, you know, people altogether. So UDTs one and two are joint units. There's really no training curriculum to create them. They just kind of lash these guys together. They give them the assignment and they send them into the marshals for the first operation. It's not until after the marshal's campaign that they come back and make the UDTs an all-Navy unit.

At that point, Draper Kaufman has come from the NCDU Schoolhouse in Fort Pierce. And with him comes the curriculum. that Draper Kaufman had come up, come up with to train the guys for the, the D-Day landings. Part of the thing that comes with Draper is Hell Week. And so this, this curriculum is kind of picked up. Initially, you know, the Scouts and Raiders are the first unit

that starts doing training and it starts doing what we would call special or commando type training. And that, a lot of that training comes from the, Army. They take bits and pieces that the Army and the Marine Corps come up with, they come up with some sort of, you know, landing type things. And they, you know, a lot of the original instructors in the Scouts and Raiders course were, you know, NFL veterans. So they brought in a lot of their NFL type exercise and they're working out with, you know, the telephone poles and small boats and doing boat races and lots of team competitions and things like that. When they finally, you know,

all of that gets lifted from the Scouts and Raiders and the NRAD. NCUs and it ultimately makes it out to Oahu and then ultimately to Maui. It's a, it's kind of a hodgepodge. They never stopped tinkering with the training in Oahu, or excuse me, in Maui. So the guys that were coming out,

they were coming from various things. Some of them were coming from the NCDs. Some of them were coming from the CBs. Some of them were just coming from the fleet guys that were just volunteering and they had to be able to put these guys through some sort of selection process. And so some of them were going through a version of Hell Week. Some of them weren't. But ultimately, you know, by the time that World War II ends, there's some sort of consensus around the underwater demolition teams that if you haven't

gone through Hell Week or some version of this thing called Hell Week, then you don't really count as a Frogman. That's actually really interesting. So why? Is it that commanders in combat are getting, you know, replacement proto-seals, replacement underwater demolition command? and they're noticing a qualitative difference between those who have and those who haven't, or is it more just sort of institutional territory marking? Help me understand why. I don't know the answer to it. I never found anything that would suggest that the guys who hadn't gone through Hellweek

were any less competent after a few missions than the guys who had. We just didn't have the records on it. Now, most guys, you know, towards the tail end of the war, they were going to Fort Pierce, and they were going through the NCDU schoolhouse before they were going off to Maui. So the vast majority of guys were going through the NCD Pike Line at Fort Pierce before they were going out to join the UDTs. So, you know, there's, we should, I want to fast forward a bit, but I don't want to cut too much out. And then we're going to linger in Vietnam, which is, of course, you know, the real origins of all of what you're ready. about sort of a fascinating story in its own right. But these UDTs, which are developed to solve

a particular set of problems, obviously the seals by Vietnam will take on a much wider set of missions today, obviously, you know, a wide, wide run of possible missions. How to, you know, as the World War II turns to the Cold War, these units in some form survive, how do you start to get different uses for them, what institutional threats sort of exist to this organization, like help us understand a bit of the evolution as we get to Korea and beyond. Korea is probably the perfect example of not, you know, a unit who's demonstrated a capability or a unit that's demonstrated it can do something as opposed to they just didn't have anybody else to do anything. The U.S. military,

after World War II had downsized so much. I mentioned before, you know, all of those special units that had existed in World War II, you know, the Rangers, or excuse me, the Marine Corps raiders were disbanded in the early parts of 1944. Most of the Army Rangers are disbanded after Cisterna in early 1944. The remainder are disbanded at the very tail end of 1945, very early 1946. the NCDs are disbanded, the scouts and raiders are disbanded, the amphibious Rogers are disbanded, the only unit that survives World War II are the underwater demolition teams, but only in a very, very skeletal form.

There's only two teams, one on each coast, and the, you know, the UDTs in World War II are 100-man teams. Now they're 50-man teams with a couple of officers. But when the Korean War starts, there's a detachment that just happens to be. be in the theater. And because of the geography of Korea, planners know that in order to, you know, blunt the supplies that are coming down to support the North Koreans outside the Prousan perimeter, they need to cut these supply lines.

And the only way to cut these supply lines is to sneak guys in, you know, bombing capability at that point, naval gunfire capability at that point, are not sufficient, you know, to destroy the rail lines that are supporting the North Korean Army. So they have to send troops ashore to blow these train tracks up. And there just doesn't exist anyone else that has the capability to do it. Guys that can come ashore that know how to get through surf zone, particularly high tidal ranges and things like that, and then sneak ashore and have the knowledge of demolition to be able to do it.

The problem with the UDTs is they don't really know anything else. They don't know how to use small arms or anything like that. They go to gunners' mates, you know, around the fleet. And so the first guys that go ashore to do these first demolition or inland demolition missions, they get a quick class on how to use tommy guns and pistols before the mission. They take them in. Most of them, you know, they start swimming in a handful of them, you know, realize that these, you know, these Tommy guns. are too heavy and they throw them back in the boat

so they go ashore with just a knife and a pistol. So it was very, there wasn't, yeah, there wasn't anything special about the UDTs or, you know, they hadn't really been thinking about moving in that direction. And I think it was this myth in the seal teams that we sort of created ourselves, that we were, you know, the authors of our own

evolution. That's not true. I was awakened to this by going through some of the reports in Korea. You know, you have commanders, UDT commanders who are you know, they're bulking.

They don't want to do these sorts of missions. They want to get back to, you know, the sorts of, you know, UDT missions that became famous at the tail end of World War II. They want to do the hydro recons. They want to, you know, do the underwater explosive type missions. They don't want to be sneaking ashore. It's the UDT that actually pulls back from those sorts of missions,

and they give that mission up to other units. So in some sense, you know, there is some, there is evidence that a handful of UDT Frogman, UDT officers were trying to push that envelope. They were trying to, you know, extend their operational relevance beyond the beachhead into the Hintagland. But the vast majority of folks that were in UDT were trying to pull it back. They were trying to, you know, preserve the integrity or preserve the operational history of the UDTs. That's really, really interesting. Yeah, the Mets is wrong.

No, I mean, Nets are like that. I mean, we, you know, they, we sustain them. they are they sustain us um you know we have this idea that uh americans uh defeated the british because we were smart enough to hide behind trees and everything like that while they were stupid enough to you know march uh up against us in red coats and in line you know the reason we won the revolutionary war is because washington stayed in the field and he you know raised a european style army and we were able to outlast the british um it wasn't be it certainly wasn't all because of that now but we do have evidence that americans did that

And there's lots of, there's lots of stuff, you know, that support that. But that's not the real reason. Now, there are, there's lots of evidence that UDT, you know, frogmen, you know, got into arguments with Navy. They did try to push the envelope, but the vast majority, the opposite was true. Just because you mentioned it, and you spoke of your own grandfather's World War II experience, I just have to mention that my dad, strangely enough, for somebody my age, it's actually a veteran of the Battle of Sisterna. Thankfully not in one of the Ranger battalions because there would probably be no me if that were the case. But he would have been at the moment of that battle in NCO in the 30th Infantry Regiment, which if you look on the diagrams of the day, would have been maybe a mile, two miles or so away. And, you know, as you know, that engagement happened amidst a much, you know, is an incredibly bloody series of really weeks of fighting up and down that line. So for him, it was sort of one day amongst many. but he remembered, I got to walk that battlefield with the Medanzeo when I was a teenager. He remembered calling for fire in support of the Rangers that day. Kind of, kind of crazy, huh?

My God, that's incredible. Yeah, yeah. If you ever get a chance, and someone should just do this. Someone should go to the National Archives and publish the transcript, Darby's Radio transcript is there. It's in the National Archives. you can read it, you know, line by line, you know, what's happening. Now, when I do my research trips, I make a policy, never read anything at the archive. The time is too valuable.

You know, you'll get sucked into something. And, you know, before you know, 30 minutes is wasted. You know, every minute at an archive is valuable because you're staying at a hotel, you're renting a car, all the rest. You know, your time is valuable. But when I was there for my research trip for the sisterna battle, I found these, I found the transcript. And I just, you know, made the mistake of reading a few lines. And before I knew it, I was, you know, turning page after page. And, you know, you like in a novel or like in a history of like a D-Day, you know, history, you know, you're, you know, you think another possible outcome could happen.

You just keep, you know, turning the page. And before you know, you know, I had to take a minute. I had to take, I had to leave, physically leave, you know, take a few minutes and then come back because it was, you know, it's very real. It's right there. It occurs to me that as a favor to listeners who we shouldn't expect to be as deep in the weeds of this one particular fight in Roebork. Do we just say a word about what we're talking about, which is this is an engagement within the broader Battle of Anzio in 1944, famously catastrophic. dark day for the Rangers where two battalions are

basically wiped out having been sent forward in an infiltration attack into a very well-prepared German defense and kind of a classic story really of the misuse of special operations units sort of over-ambitious employment

they're matched up against panzers that they really don't have you know if if push comes to shove and the brakes don't go their way, which is basically what happens. They're just not in a position to slug it out. And indeed they fail, as anyone would have failed with the equipment they had

once the slugging out starts. So it's, you know, it's an incredibly important day for special operations history as you document in the book. And yeah, I mean, I've not read that transcript. I have some familiarity with Darby and just his experiences that day,

but I've never read the transcript. I can only imagine what it would be like to read it as you're as you're there or like you know it's just this sort of dusty crossroads now i have you know i actually was was back there just recently um and it's it's wild to to sort of stand there and and picture this you know enormous operational defeat for the u.s army yeah i couldn't have said it better that was a great description this episode of school of war is brought to you by maven smart system, administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the joint force,

thousands of uniform 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. So let's keep pushing here. Take us forward to Vietnam. You know, post-Korea, obviously, we're in the midst of the Cold War. We, irregular warfare, I suppose, you know, you supply the language that we should be using. But this notion that the demands of the Cold War are imposing a variety of missions that the U.S. military should be fulfilling but maybe lacks the forces to fulfill. This becomes a topic of wide discretion.

In the Kennedy administration, in particular, there's real openness to this idea of more specialized units to do more specialized kinds of war below the threshold of major combat operations. tell us a bit about that atmosphere and how does this affect naval special warfare and lead you know essentially to the seals as we know them yeah i think everybody knew that uh this was a um this was an area that we were going to be moving into whether kennedy was president or not the navy you know arley burke uh is uh is i'm asked you know who the most important uh person is and the creation of the seals and i would say you know give the same same name, it's Arlie Burke. Arly Burke is, he's the CNO, he's the longest serving C&O in American history.

He served six years. And even before Kennedy comes into office, he's thinking, he's asking, you know, his staff to present ideas to him about how the Navy can more support operations in a guerrilla. environment. There is a, and the, you know, the reports that you find or the, the memos that you find, you know, going back and forth, there's a unspecific language about what, what they're talking about. So we have lots of definitions now, you know, regular warfare, guerrilla warfare, all sorts of things. And we all know that these things are distinct in our heads, if you were in, in the business of special operations. But at the time, you know, they're just sort of coming up of various

things that they think might be able to help. And at the time, the Army had just anticipated that we were going to need some sort of force to be able to jump in behind the minds like we did, you know, with the Jedbergs and the operational groups to link up with some sort of existing guerrilla force, offer them training, offer them equipment, offer them advice, and then lead them. a spectrum of operations, whether those were, you know, reconnaissance missions or sabotage missions or full-scale, fifth column type operations.

So the Army has, you know, its special forces to do just that. You know, the Green Berets are created to be those guys to jump in. The problem with that, you know, idea is that, you know, the Soviets were much better than the Nazis were at eliminating the opportunities for groups like that to form. So it very much becomes a, well, how do we deny future armies from the Soviets? So the way to do that, you know, link up with tribes, you know, offer them, you know, better assistance than our adversaries can, give them medical support, help them dig wells, and give them some sort of rudimentary training.

So this whole concept of counterinsurgency, you know, sort of becomes the watchword of the day. And so when the seals are initially created, we're not sure what they're going to be. The Navy, you know, the Navy very, gives them the acronym, you know, the acronym SEAL, C, Air, Land, because they want to have some sort of universal capability. with them. They want this unit to be able to sort of act like the harpoon, you know, to be able

to, you know, pull the rest of the fleet inland. They want the, they want the seal teams to be some sort of extension of the Navy's power or, you know, give the Navy an opportunity to expand its, um, its influence. Um, but they don't know how that influence is going to be. They don't know what, uh, what's going to be needed from the Navy. Um, and so that first batch, of seals that are created, they very much think that they're going to be a sort of maritime version of the Army's special forces. They think they're going to be doing counterinsurgency type missions. They think they're going to be linking up with coastal tribes and they think they're going to have to, you know, do medical missions and help them teach well. So guys are going to

a version of the Army's special warfare course. They're getting, you know, educated and all those sorts of things. It's not until later that the Navy really pushes away from counterinsurgency and goes back to this idea of we're not going to be counterinsurgency experts. We're not going to be the Army's Green Berets or the Navy's version of the Green Berets. We're going to focus on coastal rating. And that's the, that's how they enter Vietnam. And then as it turns out, the missions proliferate. How did the seals evolve during this war, which really defines them. I mean, really puts the stamp on seal culture. Well, like I said, they came into Vietnam as coastal raiders. Now, there had been individual

seals that had operated in a joint environment in the north that had been doing, you know, those sort of counterinsurgency type missions. They'd been working with the regulars or tribesmen. They had, you know, been leading some sort of, you know, some coastal rating or advising and coastal raiding. But the first, you know, full CO unit that comes in is, you know, they fully expect that they're going to be, you know, launching coastal raids, you know, sneaking ashore, setting ambushes, and then sneaking back out to sea. The problem is they, it's a very unproductive mission.

They, they become almost useless. They don't know how to operate in this environment. In fact, the first detachment commander after they've been there for, after they've been in country for about three months, and after they've realized how unforgiving the environment is and how miserable it is to set up, you know, 12 hours on a canal, you know, with crocodiles and snakes and all the rest, they don't want to keep doing this sort of mission. And not only that, but they have, you know, very, very unproductive. You know, they might shoot a midnight sam pan, but that's it. So they, that first deck commander, he says this war is not for us.

He essentially confines his men to base, and he goes off and he shacks up with a nurse in Saigon. As you would. It's one approach to winning the Cold War. And so, and that leads to, you know, all sorts of, you know, liberty problems or, or, or discipline problems with the guys that he brought over there with him. And before long, you know, he's, he's fit to be tied. And the Navy, the Navy higher-ups that have brought the SEALs over, you know, into this war, they're frustrated too. You know, they don't know what to do with these guys.

They expected the SEALs to, you know, perform in some sort of way, you know, some sort of or make themselves useful somehow. And they, and they haven't. And it's only, you know, because they involve. you know, Phil Bucklew, a World War II veteran of the Scouts and Raiders and the amphibious Rogers and the Navy's experience in China, that the Navy gives the SEALs another shot. And when they, when the next group comes in, you know, the commander that comes in who replaces the commander who hadn't done very well, you know, he, when they're doing their handoff, you know, the outgoing commander tells the incoming commander, don't even unpack your bags, this war isn't for us.

But the incoming commander, he has a completely different view. He takes the guys aside and he says, hey, this is the only war in town. We're not going to let it go to waste. And they come up with a way of working. They just, initially, it's just, you know, it's miserable. They're going out every night or every other night. and they're setting those ambushes and they're patrolling to contact and they're doing the very thankless job of trying to figure out, you know, how to do this. It takes about a year before other platoons come in,

guys who have experienced that, you know, night after night, you know, patrolling routine, those guys, you know, kind of think there might be a better way and they start to reach out to other units and they start to, you know, pull as much intelligence as they can and that's when they really start to come up with this concept of, you know, the capture kill rate. They don't have a name for it. You know, they just start doing it.

They're ransacking, you know, various places for intelligence. They're finding, you know, the names of Viet Cong higher-ups. They're figuring out where these guys live. They're going. They're sneaking into a village in the middle of the night. They're not destroying the village. They're capturing the person they want to catch. And then they're, you know, shaking that guy down for information.

It's very similar to what. what, you know, law enforcement is doing to, uh, to get rid of the mafia or something like that, you know, it's a, or, or, or, or, or, uh, or, uh, you know, that the, to the, to the, to the, to the, to the counterterror operations, um, uh, you know, that the seals will be engaged in, or, or, or the, that's absolutely, in the, in the, in the, in the, that's where we, that's where we, that's where we, that's where we came up with it. And, and, and because the, the, the seals are the first to come up with this in part because, you know, there's no higher-ups. There's no expectation that the seals are going to lead other troops to contact. Now, most of the special operations troops that are

working in Vietnam at that time are, they're small units. They're kind of like what we call like bird dog units. They send them out to recon an area, figure out where the enemy is, then they call back, you know, to higher-ups to bring in the real troops. There's a, there's a lot of the real troops. there's no expectation. There's no one to call back to for the seals. So they're just going in and they're making contact or they're going toe to toe with small units or even smaller units than they are. And they're coming back and they're just they're coming up with this cycle of operations. And in part because they're also in the area of the country that has the most people in it.

You know, it's not I-core, two-core or three-core. They're down in fourth-core in the Mekong Delta. 60 plus 60 plus percent of the population and all of Vietnam is located in the MECOM Delta. They've got a lot more to work with. And it's the one area of the country where there's the least amount of military presence. So there's going to be, there's sort of a rapid fast forwarding this question. So take it in any direction you want because there's so much to discuss here. And, you know, unfortunately we can't talk all day as much as I would like to.

you know, you then are a veteran of the SEAL teams in a period where this kind of intelligence-driven rating is a dominant form of operations. I don't know if that's what you did. You'll tell us. But that certainly defines a lot of the special operations activity in the post-9-11 era, sort of developed by these teams in part back in Vietnam. As a student of the history of that period, and so somebody who's just been immersed after the fact of your own service, in what went right for those teams, what went wrong for them, what they learned, the problems that they faced. Did you, looking back on your operational experience now, how good of a job did the institution do at bringing forward those lessons of its past generations into the war on terror? period. Does that question make sense? It's a big question. I'm curious what you're thinking on. It's a fantastic question. I've never been asked it before. The seal teams so the reason that I wanted to, the reason that I structured

the book, the way that I structured it, because it's not a comprehensive history. It's a history that just answers the question, how did the Navy create an institution and never should have? You know, I'd go anywhere, capture, kill, commando force. I knew, I knew I had to take the book to the point where the SEAL teams became what they are today. And that happened in Vietnam. So I mentioned, you know, the various, you know, operational expectations that SEALs had, you know, in the beginning, they thought that they were going to be a version of the Army's Green Berets.

And later, they were going to be coastal raiders. But then when they actually started being successful in Vietnam, they become this capture kill unit. Now, the SEAL teams that I joined in 2001, that was very much the operational expectation of what we were going to do if there was ever a war. You know, there was no major military conflict between, you know, Vietnam and 9-11. We had, you know, the experiences in Grenada and Panama and SEAL Team 6 had some various other, you know, operational experiences along the way. But very much the culture of the SEAL teams were created by that Vietnam period. So, you know, we, most of the training that we did, you know, was all geared toward, you know,

the Capture Kill mission. So the whole organization was sort of, you know, built for that. So I think there was probably no institution that was better. prepared to exploit that or take advantage of that than the seal teams, which is interesting because the seal teams were probably the last of the battle. You know, my first platoon, we weren't, you know, we sent one, when the whole team deployed in 2003, we only sent one platoon to Afghanistan. Now, both Iraq and Afghanistan are going at that point, and we fully expected the whole team to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq. Only one platoon out of six platoons went to

Afghanistan. You know, we were very much felt like at that point, we were being shut out of the war and we were not being able to do the things that we, you know, wanted to do or trained to do or expected to do. But when we finally, when those, when those, you know, flood, or when the doors finally opened, you know, to seals, I think the seal team did an excellent job. There were, you know, hiccups along the way. And I don't, I don't have, you know, the, um, the comprehensive knowledge.

of what we did during that period. You know, my experience was very much, you know, the soda straw view. And I didn't understand, you know, where any of that expectation came from. There was one advantage that I had in writing the book. Now, I've often said anybody could have written the same book. It didn't have to be a prior seal to write this book. But the one advantage that I did have was I knew the, what do you say, like the cultural center of gravity of the SEAL teams.

I knew what the SEALs expected of the SEAL teams as an institution. So that was just, you know, in the back of my head. I just knew, you know, what the SEALs wanted to do and expect it to do. Last question for you. Here we are. It's 2026. The post-9-11 wars are, for better or for worse, done. and the name of the game for years now in the military

has been preparation for slash execution of great power competition and within the special operations world, I don't have to tell you, this has led to a rethink of all kinds of different things. This seal culture, which is, as you put it, and just institutional legacy, which is sort of so well suited to the mission sets demanded by the global war on terror,

what is your impression as an, observer now of the adjustment of this institution to the kinds of missions either either asked of it in a limited way now, but certainly in preparatory fashion that the institution has to be prepared for, if, for example, there is a big war in the Western Pacific. Yeah. I mean, there's a real, there's a real dilemma going or a real argument going on right now between, you know, guys that want to, you know, kind of clutch, you know, to that, that operational expectation. And, And another, you know, a group of guys that, you know, are more willing to think about what this institution is from, you know, probably the earlier period, you know, like we... UDTs.

Yeah, the UDTs. Like the, not just the UDTs going back to the water, but this institution is, is a problem-solving institution. I see. And, you know, you have to sort of, you know, maybe wipe the whiteboard clean and maybe bring it back to, you know, what else can we do? And that leads to other questions about, you know, what does special operations do? What should it do? You know, I, when I was, you know, writing the book and I had to, like, understand, you know, the misapplication of a special operations here. because so often when you were trying to understand why an Army unit or a Marine Corps unit was disbanded,

you know, I was, you know, why did this mission go so badly? Why did, you know, planners think that this mission would succeed? And normally, the problem or the misapplication happened because they just didn't, they weren't able to articulate what a special operation was. Now, I always say, you know, special operations is either, it's either more with less or it's not special. You're either promising commanders and planners a strategic impact, a disproportionate strategic impact with a very, very low risk or low investment force

with low risk, you know, opportunity or low risk chances. So, you know, the, and low risk now, I mean, low risk has a different meaning that probably did in World War II. If we lose a helicopter full of guys, you know, that's a, that's a national tragedy. But we, in World War II, we lost whole submarines full of guys. The loss of a single helicopter wouldn't make the news. But yeah, if we're, if our expectation is that we're going to create, you know, a SEAL team or a SOCOM that is just as big as a conventional branch of service, then what does special operations do at this point?

you know, we've done something that nobody else has done with special operation, which is we've corporatized it. We've made, you know, SOCOM. I'm not saying we shouldn't have SOCOM. 100% not. But if SOCOM is just saying that we're going to provide more with more,

you give us the same amount of resources that you give, you know, a conventional branch and we'll promise you commensurate impacts on the battlefield, then what are we doing? If you aren't, you know, thinking about how to make those disproportionate impacts with a much reduced force, and we're probably not special. The other thing I think about it is like bring it back to, you know,

what operations we've done in the past. Special operations units have typically done one of three missions, recon, wrecking and raiding. Recon, you know, you're finding where the enemy is, or you're placing some sort of surveillance capability and you're reading that area without the end. enemy even knowing that you were there. You were wrecking something, some form of sabotage. And that's, you know, starting with, you know, Navy and Marine Corps sailors, you know, sneaking into

Tripoli Harbor and burning the USS Philadelphia all the way, you know, up to things that we're doing now, blowing up trains or whatever. And then, you know, the more traditional, you know, rating, you know, behind the lines, you know, sort of, you know, a rating, whether, you know, you're trying to go after a target that bullets and bombs can't get to, or you're trying to pull something out of a hardened target that you don't want to risk with bullets and bombs. And if it's not one of those three categories, not necessarily, you know, maybe it's not...

There's numerous instances where special operations units are used in conventional-type missions. I'm not saying that you can't use special or elite units to do conventional. type things, but you should know when that is happening. You should know that this is outside of what we do well, if that makes sense. Ben Milligan, this has been a super interesting conversation. It's also a super interesting book. It's called By Water Beneath the Wall, The Rise of the Navy Seals. I really appreciate you making the time to come on School of War. Thank you so much. I have to say, I don't do any of these. I've done a number of podcasts, but I don't

I'm terrible because I'm writing another book right now. I don't do a ton of research about requests for when I get a request to do a podcast or anything like that. It was only a couple days ago that I realized what school of war was and also realized that I'm a huge fan of yours. I follow you on Instagram and everything like that. Sometimes I don't know what to think until I've heard you say it. Oh, that's very kind, man. That's dangerous, too. I don't know if my family feels that way, but you're doing a great thing.

job so keep keep it up i'm a i'm a huge fan so great to be so much man you as well we'll look for is is the book the continuation of the story oh i'm not saying nothing you're not going to get it out of me very well very well we'll have to save that for the enhanced interrogation round ben milligan thank you so much man thanks all right bye