The Team House - 5th Special Forces Group in Iraq | Rob Leach | Ep. 393

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

Robert Leach is a former 5th Special Forces Group Green Beret and the author of the military-inspired novel Wretched Descent. He retired from the Army in 2023 and now works in military innovation with CMI2, supporting soldier-driven rapid prototyping (maker spaces, 3D printing/CNC, and drone development) through the Army Research Lab’s Catalyst Pathfinder program.Get Robert's book "Wretched Descent" here: https://a.co/d/5O6GFa8Today's Sponsors:Blue Chew ⬇️https://bluechew.com/Get 10% off your first month of BlueChew Gold with code "HOUSECALL"Miracle Made Sheets ⬇️Go to https://TryMiracle.com/HOUSE to try Miracle Made sheets today. You’ll save over 40%, and when you use promo code HOUSE, you’ll get an extra 20% off plus a FREE 3-piece towel set.GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 25% off! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Start 01:21 Growing Up and Joining the Army02:20 First Deployment to Iraq08:05 The Surge and Second Deployment11:33 Selection and the Q Course19:13 Joining the Fifth Special Forces Group21:19 Operation New Dawn and Its Challenges28:01 The Challenges of Military Operations36:13 Experiences in Jordan and Regional Dynamics42:26 Life in the UAE: A Different Perspective45:01 Transitioning from Combat to Planning01:02:16 Imagining Future Conflicts01:09:33 Character Dynamics in Special Forces01:10:20 Geopolitical Tensions and Technological Advancements01:15:27 The Challenge of Information Assurance01:25:29 Countering Drone Technology01:27:21 Reception and Future of Wretched DescentBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, welcome to episode 393 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with today's guest, Robert Leach. Robert is a former Fifth Special Forces Group soldier. Currently works over there at the Innovation Lab. And he is also the author of, I got this here on my Kindle, Wretched Descent. I hope you can see that, those of you who are watching this. I read it. It's a novel that Rob wrote based on his military experience.

I read it, really enjoyed it. We'll get into the book a bit later on in this interview. But first off, Rob, thanks for joining us on the show tonight. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Appreciate it. So let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about how you grew up and how that sort of took you towards military service.

Yeah, sure. So I'm originally from Florida, born and raised. It's actually born down in Key West, so I actually born on the island. Not too many people can claim that. I think I'm fourth or fifth generation born down there between the island and Bahamas and then moved from Key West when I was probably about 10 up to central Florida, about an hour and a half north of Tampa, about an hour south of Gainesville. And, you know, stayed there throughout middle school, high school, left. As soon as I graduated high

school, I left for the Army. You know, four days later, I was out the door. I couldn't get out quick enough. That was in 2000 when I graduated high school. So that was pre-9-11, pre-any kind of real war since, you know, the Gulf War. And that was the only thing that most people had in their minds of what war looked like for the United States was a quick, you know, in and out overmatch and we're done. So, yeah, that was kind of where I think. thought this, you know, military track was going, signed up for the infantry as a lot of, you know, rural country-ish kids tend to go. But yeah, I went into the Army in 2000, ended up out at Fort Lewis, where I did my first four years in my very first deployment until Iraq in 2003.

So you were down at Fort Lewis, or I should say up at Fort Lewis when 9-11 had. And then you guys didn't do Afghanistan, but you got folded right into that big runoff for Iraq. That's right. We went and deployed in October of 03, so we weren't part of the initial invasion. We replaced the 101st up in northern Iraq. So it's still, you know, 2003 Iraq was still pretty austere. We were the first striker brigade. So we're the ones who brought strikers in.

We drove them all the way from Kuwait, all the way through the. the country, hung out in Blod for a little while, and then ended up in Missoule for the rest of the deployment. That was, you know, 2003, late 2003, mid-2004, that was kind of the beginning of the insurgency kind of popping up, you know, small ambushes, small arms fire, small IEDs, nothing too drastic. We did have some, you know, some contact, things like that, but most of it was just kind of hit and run tactics back then. And how did you guys like operating with strikers in Iraq? I love strikers.

So 2003 deployment with strikers, we'll get into it. But 2007 I deployed with the infantry again in strikers, and that was for the surge. And I mean, I've personally been in, say, three or four IED strikes on my vehicle that I was sitting in. And, you know, I've never gotten a scratch. Not everybody was as fortunate, you know, unfortunately, but, you know, for me, they were a game changer. Like the armor they carried, the firepower they could bring to the battlefield, like, strikers are unmatched, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, they're awesome.

Yeah, we used them in 2005, and, yeah, they were great. Yeah, I know they're, I think they've downsized a lot of the striker brigades that are out there because they were pushing real hard for them. but I mean, they don't stand up to, you know, kind of the large-scale combat that we're talking probably with, you know, tanks and big armor. But for the insurgency stuff, they were great. Yeah, yeah. They were awesome. So anything else you want to tell us about that first deployment to Iraq? No, so that one, like I said, it was a lot of, you know, small attack.

So we would get, you know, small armed fire ambushes here and there. we would do, you know, it was like 12-hour days of just driving. Just driving and kind of, you know, we used to call it fishing, driving and looking for someone to shoot at us so we can go get in contact and try to flush out who was Everside. Lots of small IEDs that we got hit by. That was the, when they were experimenting with the food gas. You remember the food gas stuff?

Yeah, like napalm. Yeah, it was like a napalm soap stuff. So we got hit by some of those, but they didn't really do anything to the striker. So, yeah, it was, you know, an eventful deployment, first look at combat, first look at, you know, what the Army life is overseas. And I was actually stop lost on that trip because I was trying to get out. So as soon as that trip got over, I got out of the Army. Went back to Florida, went through the Law Enforcement Academy, and was a sheriff's deputy down in central Florida for a really short period. It was probably six months, seven months as a sheriff's deputy, and I just, you know, I decided I couldn't do that anymore.

And not like being a police officer or just still didn't care for Central Florida that much. No, I think it was more the law enforcement side. You know, my hat's off to guys who do that and stick it out. I was just, you know, coming from four years in the Army and Iraq deployment and then going straight to law enforcement, I probably should have taken some time off because I got real jaded real quick. You know, my last training officer, he was a Marine, and he told me, he's like, man, you feel like you're like a 20-year veteran for the police force, how jaded you are with some of these people. And it was just frustrating how the system works a lot of the times, how, you know, people get, you arrest someone. That's a bad, bad dude.

And, you know, they're out. You see them on the street the next day or two days later, and they're doing the same stuff. all over again. It just got, you know, real repetitive real quick. And I was like, yeah, I can't do this for 25 years. I'm going to go back in the Army. I prefer that, you know, that route anyway. So, reenlisted after that. Yep. Reenlisted almost two years to the day that I got out. Kept my rank. So I came back in as an E5. And my goal when I was come back in was I wanted to go with special forces, right? That was my goal. My first. My first. I was my goal. My first, four years, but, you know, deployment and being a young infantry guy, just never kind of

materialized. So I said, hey, when I'm coming back in, I'm going SF. So I signed back up, infantry, E5, got sent back to Fort Lewis again. So right back out to Fort Lewis. And I want to say it was six months later, we deployed for the search. So as soon as we got there, everybody was locked in. You weren't allowed to go do any, any schools, you know, any SF selections. things like that. They locked us all down. And we deployed for the surge 2007 with fourth brigade, second infantry division. Yeah, for one of the long ones. That was very spicy during that time frame. What was that deployment like? Yeah. So that one was 2007. The surge, we got in and they put us just north of Baghdad and the Taji area.

and we started as part of a bigger operation, but our brigade basically had from Taji up to kind of the Bakuba area and kind of south, you know, just south of what would be considered northern Iraq, and then all the way east out to Iran. And we started in Taji, and it was kind of like hands across the desert coordinated clearing operation, and they moved from Taji, and we cleared all the way that whole corridor of the, nothing but nonstop operations throughout there.

I was kind of fortunate on that one. When I signed in at Fort Lewis, they're like, hey, you know, you got combat experience. We're looking for some NCOs to help set up this new platoon, infantry platoon that we're forming, and you're going to run the brigade PSD, the personal security detachment. I'm like, I don't even know what that is, but I guess I don't really have a choice. so I'm in. And we took, you know, we got handed 20, I think it was like 21, 22, brand new privates, straight out of basic training and like four or five of us NCOs.

And they're like, you have, you know, four months to deploy, get them ready to go. And it was a lot, you know, it was a lot of training, a lot real fast, trying to get these, you know, young kids up to par for what 2007 Iraq was going to look like. watching videos, you know, YouTube videos of Abrams tanks getting cut in half by deep buried IEDs and, you know, the large stuff that they had going on then. So we did the best we could and we got them ready. And then we deployed. That was a 15-month trip on that burn. Yeah, it was rough. But, you know, doing the PSD mission, it was going out every single. single day, taking the colonel and the brigade CSM out to go either do KLEs or to go out

and check out of the different fobs we had all over the place. So we were constantly on the road. So there was a lot of, you know, coordination to, you know, route clearance and everything else trying to make sure we weren't going to catch any of these IDs that were hitting everybody out there. We ended up splitting up because we were, you know, six strikers deep with the brigade commander and the CSM and, you know, all these antennas and looking like the biggest target in the world. So we ended up splitting up into three and three and I took the CSM. And he, you know, his whole goal in life was to go out and check on the boys. You know, he just wanted to go out and to the different fobs and he loved walking dismounted. So we're doing dismounted. Just me and the

PSD and him going through, you know, Bukuba and all these different areas in 2007 is not, you know, my idea of a picnic, but it was a rough trip. You know, we got hit a few times. We had some IED strikes. We had, you know, some EFP hits. And, you know, it was just a, it was a long trip to be dealing with that kind of stuff all the time. So as soon as I got back from that trip, I went to selection like two months, three months after I got back. I was like, I am not doing this again.

I was done. How did the brand new privates kind of adapt to their first deployment? Like you didn't probably realize this at the time. But like this is sort of like training to be a special forces NCO as well, right? Yeah, it's definitely, definitely wrangling the jundies up in there all the time. But yeah, they did really well. So it was a good group of kids, you know, guys. I hate to call them kids, but they were just a lot younger than me.

But they were a good group of guys. and they adapted pretty quick to the environment. You know, we were, like I said, we were out every single day out there in different areas, having to learn different routes and coordinate with different elements and units. And I never know, you know, where every morning I'd go into the CSM's office

and he'd be like, well, I don't know, maybe you or some of your viewers might know, command sergeant major John Troxel. He was the chairman of the Joint Chief, senior enlisted advisor. Yeah, yeah. He was the sergeant major of the Army, wasn't it?

I don't remember, but I know he ended up like the senior enlisted advisor of everything. Yeah, he was the brigade CSM. So he's got like this gravelly voice, you know, so I'd go in there every morning and he'd be like, leach, here's where we're going today. So I was like, all right, let's go figure out what that looks like, you know. And we were getting indirect fire, you know, on our fobs all the time. And we're just staying in an open air tents, basically. no hard structures and it was a rough trip you know they they adapted well um and i kind of hated

i felt bad you know we got back but going to selection i got picked up and i was gone you know months later so i didn't really get to stick around and help them detransition and kind of settled back in but you know they had some good nCOs to help them out so it worked out i think fellas you already know what time it is, it's time to level up. And Blue Chew just dropped something crazy. I'm talking about next level championship belt gold-plated energy. Blue Chewold is the newest innovation from the number one chewable ED brand. This ain't your grandpa's little blue pill. This is the four-and-one beast that's setting the gold standard for performance. We're talking two ingredients for blood flow that keep the rocket pumping. Mixed with apophomorphine.

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That's try miracle.com slash house code house at checkout. Thanks to Miracle Made for sponsoring this podcast. And so you went to Selection by now, by this time it must be 2008. It would have been late 2008. Yeah. And what was your experience like, you know, going through selection in the Q course? Yeah, so Selection, when I went through, I think we started with like 405, you know, roughly class size. and it was, I want to say it was like October and, you know, beautiful Fort Bragg, Camp McCall.

And we started and it was probably in the upper 80s. And then it rained for two days and then it was in the 20s. And then it rained and then it was in the 90s. So it was like an up and down roller coaster of weather, which I think broke a lot of people off. Like people were dropping left and right because we were constantly wet or freezing. or hot. But selection, so my biggest, you know, mistake going into selection for those out there that might be interested was just came back from a deployment and I bought new boots coming back

because my boots were so trashed from that 15-monther. So I got new boots and went to breaking them in. And these were just regular Army-issue boots back then. That's all you could wear. So my feet got destroyed like day two immediately. They were just trashed. So I had to deal with, you know, blisters and, you know, toenails falling off and all that good stuff from the miles and things were, you know, I wasn't performing as well as I thought I could, mostly because I couldn't hardly put my feet on the ground. You know, made it through the, I think it was three weeks back then.

And like I said, we started with a little over 400. I think at the end of the three weeks, there was like 150 people left. And out of that, it came out to be like 130-ish, got selected. You know, making it to the end is always a boon for your survival chances. But some people still didn't make it. Hopefully they went back and tried again. But, you know, I got picked up on my first go. You know, at the end of selection, you sit down with your counselor or whoever they are

and they tell you, hey, you did, you know, you have this GT score, you did this well on your language aptitude tests. And they're like, we want you to, you know, you did really well in your language test and you have a high GT score. We want you to be a delta. And we want you to do, I forget what they said, Arabic or Mandarin or something right off the gap. And I was like, if you put Delta down, I am not coming back. I got no desire to be a Delta. That's hard. I am not a medical guy.

I like guns. So I was like, I want to be a Bravo weapon sergeant. And the guy, I remember the guy looked at me. He's like, I'll give you weapon sergeant. Well, originally I said, I want weapon sergeant, and I want Spanish. And he looked at me. He's like, I'll give you weapon sergeant, but you are not doing Spanish. You don't get two or the easier side.

You want to do weapons sergeant? You got to do Arabic. And I was like, yeah, all right, whatever. Arabic it is. So then getting to the Q course in 2009, right? Yep. It would have been early 2009, spring of 2009, probably. Yeah.

And yeah, so back then it was structured. You started with language school. So we did language first. So that was six months of Arabic, which I sucked at, Arabic. I got better long. I stayed in the Army, but back then I was horrible at it. And then it was out to McCall for small unit tactics and Sears School and then weapons and then the final sage portion of it.

I think that's the order they did back then. I think it's all different now. Yeah, it changes like year to year almost. Yeah, I think they do language at the end now after they get their braes and tabs and everything. when I went through it in 2007 it was split up you'd have like two week blocks here and there of language in between the other phases and then I think you had like one four month block or something like that five month block before you took the test yeah I don't know it was weird yeah yeah that would be tough I don't think I could do it Arabic split up like that I had to just like head first in the deep end on that one yeah Yeah, a language like that, you really do need to be immersed in it. At least someone like me, I need to take some time to put my, wrap my head around that.

Yeah. Did you have Arabic? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I did, they teach you the modern standard Arabic in the Q course. And I stuck with that for a couple of years at group. And then I found dialect, you know, Levantine.

And I thought I just sucked at Arabic all these years on my deployments. until I switched to Levinteen. I'm like, they're speaking another language. You know, I don't even know why they teach the modern standard anymore. Like, just go Levinteen because it's what they actually understand and what they talk. That was a game program for me. The dialect itself has also has some unique words and phrases and stuff in there. It definitely does.

Yeah, the modern standard, they need to do away with that. So you graduate the Q course, get assigned a fifth group of course because you're an Arabic speaker. What team did you land on? So I would landed on 5-4-13. So that was when Fort Patillion had ODAs. I was an Alpha Company, four battalion. And when I got there, we were a mountain team. And then I want to say it was six months after that or something they took away.

They did away with a lot of the mountain statuses and kind of changed it. That's funny, Rob, because I was on the free fall team right down the hall there. Oh, are you? Yeah, you must have been getting there. as I left. It was a... I got out in 2010. Oh, yeah, I got there in late 2010.

Yep. So I got there and I want to say it was like October, November, 2010 I signed in. There were good guys on that team. Yep. Yeah, there was a... So when I got there, the team had been together for probably four years roughly. And like, right as I got there, a lot of them started switching out and going on and doing different things.

So, you know, it wasn't six months on the team and I'm the senior bravo. Like, I don't even know how to set up, you know, arrange or do any of the stuff. I'm like, yeah, all right, I'll figure it out. But, yeah, a lot of the guys switched out. I want to say a handful of the original stayed there throughout the time. I was on the team. So they were lucky and dodged a lot of the schools and whatever else that they get pulled for. What was, I mean, you mentioned it briefly.

but like what was fourth battalion kind of going through at that time as far as like its mission and how it was oriented? Yeah, I mean, so I got there late 2010. We deployed in 2011 to Iraq again. It was, you know, right when I got there that they had just come back from, I think, a trip to Iraq. I don't know if you were on that one. So because when I got there, everybody was on leave. and then we had, I forget when in 2011, but we took off again. And this time we were in Cal Sioux, so just south of Baghdad.

And this was, you know, Operation New Dawn. So Operation, we're not allowed to go do anything. But what was happening in Cal-Soo specifically, like we were getting hammered within direct fire. So, I mean, rockets, not really mortars them, but it was a lot of rockets, a lot of Coutushas and some of the bigger ones. But it was like a nightly event to the point where, like, I would, I remember I'd sit in my chew and our chews were lined up and there's bunkers in between the chews. So, like, right outside my door was a bunker. And you had, like, blasted blankets and sandbags and everything else on these bunkers.

And I would sit there and I have a little TV, you know, and I'd be playing video games or watching TV at night. and I would set my footflops up at a runner's stance so I could hit them in stride and not even have to slow down because that alarm would go off like every single night and they were coming in close, like hitting in the compound to the point that, you know, we finally got the green light and tough to do in 2011, but we got the green light to go unilateral without partners, without anybody and we were able to go roll up. I think most of those cells pretty quick. I mean, we knew who they were. We just weren't allowed to go on doing anything about it.

So I think, I don't know if someone got wounded on the base or if the command had enough and they got approval. But, yeah, we had a couple, you know, a month or two month period where we were doing ops like every night and just rolling guys up until that area settled down for a while, which was great because I had enough of, you know, the rockets every night. How did you guys go about that as far as, like, rolling up these. indirect fire networks. So it's hard for me to remember because I was just the Bravo at the time and I was kind of inundated with like trying to be, you know, Bravo stuff. So keeping all the guns ready and all the stuff. So I wasn't part of any of like the network exploration or development.

I just know, you know, we got, we'd go out. We did, you know, just standard vehicle hits and we'd pull in some other sister teams in the area to come help us on some of the bigger targets. We'd go out and set up, you know, sniper operations to kind of do like train denial stuff, watch for any of these teams that were coming in and trying to set up their rockets. It was a mixed bag of things. We ended up, we did go out a few times with some partner forces. We're able to find some partner forces that wanted to work and went out and kind of

rolled up some of the bad folks out there in the areas. But it was a little mixed bag of different types of looks. just to even get out there and doing present patrols, you know, at some point, just to let them know we were allowed outside the wire, even though the big army folks weren't at the time. So it was just us. Yeah, do you want to explain that for the viewers a little bit about, you know, what it was like in Iraq at that time.

You joked about it being Operation Do Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. So Operation New Dawn was the finals, you know, things were shutting down in Iraq in 2011. we were getting told, hey, you know, start decluttering your fobs and bases, start turning excess equipment in, get ready, we're going to shut this thing down at the end of this deployment. Your team house is going away. So we start, you know, inventorying and turning things in. And, you know, like I said, every day we're still getting rocketed while we're doing all this like administrative tasks and stuff.

And kind of the bigger pictures, like we were trying to hand. over Iraq back to the Iraqis at the time. And what a lot of people don't know what that looks like is it's a lot of state department back and forth of, you know, how many U.S. soldiers are even loud in the country at the time. Like that was like a real issue is we couldn't even bring in certain enablers. If, you know, that added to the total number of the U.S. footprint because they didn't want any more numbers. Like they had a cap. They couldn't go past it. So we were constantly, you know, back against the wall of we're tearing everything down, we're turning everything in. This team house had been there probably since the invasion. So it was packed full of junk and

gear and confiscated weapons and like all, you name it. And we had to get it all out of there. So it was a lot of, a lot of, you know, packing things up and then, you know, getting told, hey, never mind, you're not, you're not closing this one down. This one's staying. You know, open it back up. They're like, okay. And then a month later, be like, like, no, you're closing down. We changed our mind. You got to close it up. But on the political side, it was, you know, U.S. forces were on these bases, but they didn't want to see U.S. vehicles out on the streets anymore. You weren't allowed to go out unless you were with a partner. And the partners weren't trying to do a whole lot of operations. They were trying to stay, you know, safe on their

end also. So there was a lot of a kind of lethargic feeling of not wanted to continue to do missions and operations. You know, like I said, these rockets were legit problems because they got big. You know, the Ketouches were like the smaller ones. And I forget what those are, you know, bad Bravo that I am, but, you know, 150s or whatever they are. And they just kept going up until we were getting like the 200 millimeter size rockets coming in. And those are large, large explosions that you feel, you know, even when it's on the other side

the fob. So it's, you know, we're lucky, you know, on our side in the fob to not get any of our folks hurt. You know, I think some of the, the big Army unit that was there, I think it might have been first cab. I think they took some injuries. And I think that's what freed us up, you know, to let us go out there and do the operations. So, you know, I don't know. If they wouldn't have had anybody hit, they might, we might have just kept sucking them up and having to wait. But luckily it worked out that you know i don't think anybody was killed but we were able to go out there and clean up the area for a while yeah i know that was really frustrating times for all the guys that were over there um because of exactly that dynamic that you described that there's also this

like weird thing where we were trying to prepare the iraqis to take over the country as you say and so the special forces guys were like really trying to push that hard like you guys go out and do ops and we'll support you and this and that. Whereas the conventional military was kind of like our mission here is to just not die. Yeah. So we're not going to go anywhere. We're not going to do anything. Keep the Iraqis off our base.

When you bring them on, you have to take their guns because we don't want them to shoot out. It was like really like conflicting missions that felt like. Yeah. Yeah. I remember on one, we were getting dropped off by the first Cav guy. and their MRAPs. They were going to drop us off. We were going to go perch out in the woods somewhere.

And they pulled up and opened the door, and we got out. And one of the piece of equipment or something fell out of the back of the truck onto the ground. And we're getting ready to walk out. And to go into the woods, we're getting infilled, right? And I remember one of the first cab guys like, hey, hey, can you pick that up and hand it to me? And I'm like, what the hell? You pick it up. And he's like, I'm not allowed to put my feet on the ground.

So what happens if you have to change a tire? Yeah. How's that going to work? Hang upside down. I don't know. They're out of luck. Yeah, it was a 2011 was a rough time. It was a shorter trip compared to my last one.

You know, I think it was only like four months. No, it was, it might have been six months. Might have been a six month trip. But either way, once the rocket settled down, things settled down, we was focused on closing down the fobs and the operations. and getting everything ready to handovers. Less eventful other than getting rocketed. And, you know, I was glad to see that one done. So now that was Iraq trip number three for me

and hoped I had never, ever have to go back. It was not to be so. But that was my last, like, combat operation. So that had been 2011, 2012, was the last, like, actual combat. So then you're back at fifth group continuing, with your special forces career. Yep. So we're back.

You know, lots of training. You know, SOTIC, the sniper course, the Special Operations Target Interdiction course. I did the level two there at Fort Campbell, Safawak, the Advanced Urban Operations course there with Fifth Group. You know, I ended up going to the 18 Foxhrock Corps. So I was an intelligence sergeant for the team. lots of training opportunities kind of bounce around. And then we had, you know, deployments every year or twice a year to J-SETs, joint combined exercise training events with partner nations over there in the Middle East for me.

So I did trips to Lebanon. I think I've been to Jordan probably four or five times. Got to do UAE for a while, which was nice. that included Bahrain on that trip. You know, spent some time in Kuwait back in the day. So I feel like I've been to almost all of them in the Middle East. I don't know there's many left to pin on my map. But lots of short trips for those.

So those are two months, four months, you know, here and there, once a year, twice a year, depending on what's going on. And that was from, you know, we got back in 2012 from Iraq. And then the team as the Fourth Battalion started changing their strength. structure. So the team got disbanded in 2015, late 2015, I think, early 2016, somewhere around there. So, you know, everything changed in the fourth Italians then and they weren't doing straight ODAs anymore. And then everybody had to kind of go their own ways. Yeah, before we get into that, I mean, I'd love to hit you up about, you know, some of the J-sets that you went on.

I'm not sure where to start exactly, but like Lebanon, I think the first MTT that special forces did in Lebanon was like in 1982 or 1983. And so we've had kind of like a low-key presence there off and on. What was your experience like? Yeah, so I went to Lebanon as a, you know, a singleton from my team. So I was the only one for my team that went. I linked up with the AOB that was there. the company level headquarters for special operations that was running all the partner force training and stuff in the region. And I went there and I had just done the sniper course.

So I went there and helped do a designated marksmanship course for the Lebanese special operations. It was kind of a mixed bag of their marine special operations and they have their Navy seal equivalent types and some of their Rangers. So ran a target interdiction, designated marksmanship course for them. That was my first exposure to Lebanon and Lebanese. So it's definitely an interesting country, if you've never been. You know, you'll drive down. I was up in the Hamat area, so north of Beirut. It's an air base training area up there.

But, you know, you're driving through the city, small town, whatever you want to call it. And it's like one city block you drive down, it's what you would. would think of the Middle East as, you know, traditional Middle East attire and the women are wearing, you know, the full head-to-to-to-co coverings, and then you turn a corner, and it looks like you're on a beach in California, and women are wearing, you know, fairly anything, and the men are in, you know, board shorts and flip-flops, and it's like, I don't know what's happening here right now, but, you know, the neighborhoods are so, like, you know, Muslim to Christian, to, you know, Drew's, like, they're just right on top of each other, and everyone has its own flavor.

I really enjoyed that trip. You know, the Lebanon's beautiful. The history is amazing. The culture and everything they have going on there. You know, the soldiers that we worked with were, they were quality. You know, I don't think there's enough of them to kind of go around on the quality side. But, you know, they were pretty good shots and they caught on pretty quick.

I remember we're up, so when you're up in the Hamad, it's at kind of the top of like a hill mountain area. And if you go all the way down, you're down at the beach. And that's where the shooting range was with the beach. And we would drive down there every day. Some days we'd walk down with the soldiers as kind of a road march. And one day we had the idea of, hey, let's do a, you know, a stalk. Let's have them stock down.

And we're going to try to see them coming towards the beach with binos and stuff. And I tell the Lebanese captain, I'm like, hey, I'm going to walk with the boys down there. I want to follow him and see how they do. And he just kind of laughed. He's like, all right, good luck. He's like, they're part mountain goat. I'm just warning you. And he wasn't kidding.

Those guys, like, I've never seen, like, mountain movement like that before. They had rucks on. They had long rifles. They had all their gear. And they were just hopping foot to foot from, like, you know, boulder to boulder all the way down. You know, one wrong step is, you know, a broken leg or they didn't, they didn't seem to care. So they left me in the dust. I had to end up getting on the road as a barrens.

it is, but I don't know how they got down that quick. I think probably because they've used that route, you know, 100 times and I've never done it. But, yeah, it was an interesting trip. Learned a lot from those guys and hopefully taught a lot. I made some good memories and some friends over there that, you know, last a while. And then it sounds like you're bouncing back and forth to Jordan quite a bit. And Jordan features in your novel a good deal also. Yep. No, Jordan's, you know, the made it into the novel as the location because I spent probably, other than Iraq, I spent more time in Jordan than anywhere else. I do think I've probably been there four or five times.

A lot of time in Northern Jordan, most of the time in Northern Jordan, uh, training with, you know, the Jordanian Special Operations guys, the 101st and a couple of the other units. I can't think of now. but a lot of time of Jordan, a lot of downtime in Jordan. I've seen all there is, I think, to see in that country at this point and spent a lot of time there. But I was doing Jordan trips. We did a J-SET. I think was the J-SET to Jordan was before I went to Lebanon. It was my first trip to the Middle East when it wasn't like a combat deployment. So it was kind of a cultural shock for me.

You know, we get a rental car and we leave the airport. airport and we're driving through, you know, Amman. And when you're in some of the outskirts of Amman, like it looks like Iraq. You know, it's the same kind of buildings and writing and everything is, and you're like, you know, it wasn't six months ago. I was fully kidded up with a gun in a place like this. And now I'm wearing civilian clothes going through the same neighborhoods. And, you know, kind of makes you a little nervous first time experiencing that from the other side. So it was a good, good trip and, you know, eye-opening and seeing that there's more to, you know, special forces than just combat operations and, you know, working with partners. And I know I've been fortunate enough to travel out to a lot of countries and meet a lot of interesting people over there.

And Jordan was definitely high on the list. And they have, like, pretty extensive training facilities over there, too, don't they? Yeah, they do. So they're, you know, the main training facility. Cassatic. That's what King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center in Northern Jordan has, you know, all the bells and whistles, shoot houses, shoot villages, you know, Mount City villages, sniper ranges, machine gun ranges, all the, all the bells and whistles you need out there for doing any kind of training you want to do. Then you can, you know, head out from the city and you have

open desert, open terrain, you can drive around, do vehicle maneuvers, live fires, all sorts, of stuff out there. You just have to watch out for the bedouins. That also came up in the book. Yeah, yeah. How, uh, what did you think about the Jordanian special ops guys? Yeah, so they're, you know, they're, uh, I cannot remember the nomenclature of their kind of premier special operations unit now. And I apologize for those out there listening. But, uh, we did a lot with the 101st. Uh, so that was like a mixed bag of, um, you know, know, entry level to more senior special operators. So, you know, we come in, we get handed a lot of the entry level folks who need to learn

how to shoot better and to move and communicate and, you know, move through building. So, but even them, they're, you know, they're motivated and they're trying and, you know, they want to be more proficient at it. And then their premier one, you know, those guys are top-notch counterterrorism operator, operators. We had nothing but respect for them. This time of year, the pace doesn't slow down, but you still need to. The calendar's packed, the weather's changing, and your body's reminding you that it's time to rest and reset.

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house. Upgrade your sleep with Ghostbed, the makers of the coolest beds in the world. Some exclusions apply, see site for details. And thank you, Ghostbed for sponsoring the show. Please check out the link down in the description and support our sponsor. And around this time frame, I'm just sort of imagining in the back of my mind here. Are we starting getting into like the rise of ISIS and the Syrian Civil War? And is that sort of stuff starting to play into these deployments at all? Yeah, that's starting to hit. And, you know, there's a 18 Fox for a lot of these you know, Jordan trips and some of the other ones, you know, I'm keeping an eye on things that are going up in Syria and, you know, Egypt and Libya.

You know, it's kind of, you know, Yemen was hot at the time, you know, so there's a lot going on in the whole region with that whole Arab Spring kind of movement pushing around and all the riots and protests and, you know, seeing what was going on in Syria with the, you know, the Civil War. war hit the southern Syria first, right? So that's where it kind of started in the Dara government down there in the south. And, you know, that's right on the border with Jordan. It's really, you know, a stone's throw from where we're at in northern Jordan if we're at that Kasotic location. And, you know, the Jordanians definitely worry about it, you know, because that their country can't handle a whole lot of refugee, you know, crisis at, you know, any given time. They just don't have the capabilities or the resources to handle a bunch of refugees and absorb a bunch of refugees. So I know they were setting up and trying to push like refugee camps on the Syrian

side of the border of Jordan, but just near Jordan so they could funnel resources and food and water to them, but keep them in Syria because Jordan didn't want that influx down in their own territory. So there was a lot of border stuff going on up there. You know, drones. you know, those kind of technologies weren't really prevalent yet. I mean, large scale, ISR-type birds were up there, but nothing small, nothing that's nothing that we would use or that we would teach them how to use to keep eyes on their border. Because their border for, you know, for most of the whole stretch of it, it's just a dirt burn, right? There's nothing to it.

So anybody can get over it. They do have border guards and border patrols and all that stuff, but it's just such a large border to patrol and keep everybody. out. So that was definitely, you know, happening. We weren't seeing ISIS at the time yet. You know, that was more starting to see some of the beginnings of Neusra front, so Al-Qaeda type stuff, but, you know, it wasn't seeing a whole lot of like, I don't remember when ISIS finally emerged. I forget what year that was now, but. 13, maybe. Yeah, 13, 14. So, yeah, that was. Yeah, I'm trying to remember now, but I don't remember seeing a lot of ISIS stuff on the Jordan trips.

I think we kind of disbanded as a team right as ISIS was starting to get going, starting to emerge, like as a real threat in the area. And then tell us about the trip to the UAE, spending time over there. Yeah, I'd like to, you know, give a sob story and say it was horrible. but it was not. So I was my position there. I was there by myself. My team was spread out doing different missions, but we were working for the joint headquarters in Bahrain.

And I was the liaison to the Emirati Special Operations Command. So my job was to, you know, sit in there with them and liaise with them and set up training for, you know, SME events and other units to come down and work with them. If there was VIPs or guests coming in, I'd have to meet them at the airport and get them in and get them to a hotel and kind of show them the lay of land. But, yeah, that was a four-month trip. Living by myself in UAE, I was definitely not rough in it. You know, they had us put up in a very nice hotel for those four months. So I cannot complain about that one.

Well, it's, I know, I'm glad that you're telling some of these stories about some of these experiences because people think special forces is about, you know, rocking through the swamp with a knife in your teeth or something like that. And really so much of the job is about being a coordinator, isn't it? Yeah, it is. You know, you got to be the, you got to go from one hand, you know, one trip, you might be the guy with the knife in your teeth. And then, you know, four months later, you're, you know, wearing a suit. talking to, you know, a three or four star general and picking them up from the airport and then introducing him to an Emirati general who doesn't speak much English and you're trying to help out so they could at least say hi to each other, you know. So it is definitely, you know, in the special

forces side, and I talked about this on a different show as on, but, you know, special operations writ large. Everybody has a specialty, you know, seals, you know, have the water, you know, Marsock is, you know, Marine Corps, you know, in the Navy, and you have, you know, everyone has their little piece of the pie. But I think, obviously I'm biased, but special forces, I think has the largest piece of the pie because we have to be, you know, so good at so many unexpected things. You just have to be a thinker and a problem solver. And then you get put into the problems and you have to decide is the solution, you know, violence or is the solution diplomacy? and you have to be able to balance those equally and apply each one equally, you know, on a moment's notice.

So we get up to 2016, and you mentioned that the team gets disbanded. And I mean, I'm sorry to even ask because I sort of know the answer. I mean, what was that like to be on the team for so long, put so much work into it and then kind of get told like, yeah, you guys don't exist anymore? Yeah, it was rough. You know, we were the last standing ODA and fourth battalion. So we have that to our title. But eventually they all had to go away.

You know, fourth battalion got restructured. Everyone had to kind of make decisions. Where do they want to go next? Do they want to go find another ODA? Do they want to go to a specialty team? They want to go to SWIC. You know, what do we, what do you want to do? Some guys chose, you know, a little mix of everything.

And everybody kind of went their own ways. we're still stay in touch. You know, we were on a team, close team for quite a while. We still talk pretty regularly. Yeah, everybody just had to pick what their next adventure was going to be. For me, I went, I was ready for a break. You know, I had been going pretty heavy for most of my career. So I went and joined up with the Special Warfare Planning Detachment at a fourth time.

We're responsible for, you know, doing operational level. kind of planning for fifth group predominantly, but really special operations writ large. So I went down to Special Operations Command Central, Soxent, down in Tampa, took a break down there for about two years, doing, you know, larger scale planning, got to see behind the curtain a little bit, got to learn what, you know, strategy and, you know, operational tactics and maneuverability and, you know, logistics and how all this comes into play on the big scale and the big picture piece of it. It was before my wheelhouse was very small, very niche.

I was the 18 Bravo. I was the 18 Fox. I knew my little area of operations. I paid attention to what was happening in the region. But, you know, my time at Soxon, I was able to see what's happening in Centcom, you know, central area of responsibility and how, you know, an action in Jordan, effects in action in UAE and Iraq and how it's all kind of interplayed and tied together. So it was a really good time broadening, definitely broadening for me to kind of learn some of

the big picture stuff. Yeah, I did that for two years and then came back to Fort Campbell and I took over the Fort Campbell side of the planning detachment as the senior enlisted advisor. So it's technically a company, but there's only about 16 of us. So I took over that position and then did that for the next three-ish four years, I guess, until I retired, 2023. Was this like mostly contingency planning that you guys were working on? Contingency planning, kind of theater, you know, annual theater composition planning, like, you name it. We would get called to, hey, you know, this is coming up.

some contingency plans for this in case, you know, something kicks off. We need to know what that looks like. And they would bring us up to wherever that planning operation was happening and we'd get involved with it and help out and bring our, you know, expertise to it. Because, you know, you got a lot of these headquarters aren't always staffed by special operations people. So, you know, they would be doing planning and they would say, hey, we want, you know, five ODAs next year for this. And we'd be like, that's never going to happen. You're not getting that many. But let us come help you plan it and we'll give you what's actually realistic and will

help you meet the same objectives that you're trying to get. So there's a lot of that type stuff. But it was fun. I got to learn a lot, kind of big picture stuff like I mentioned. I got to learn a lot about, you know, operational design. I got to learn a little bit about, you know, the higher level of military planning. got to do a trip to Israel and hang out with the Israeli General Officer College for a couple weeks. One of the instructors there is a retired general named Shimon Nebe.

Some people, you either love them or hate him. Apparently, he's a contentious guy over there, but he's kind of the actual architect of the Army design methodology that we use right now. So he came up with that when he worked at Socom for a while. So he's very brilliant guy, real creative thinker. So I really got to see kind of behind the curtain on some of these things where it's like, we don't have to follow the military decision making process when we do these plans. Because if you do, nine times out of ten, we all come to the same conclusion. So how do we apply creativity to planning as opposed to just follow in a checklist and

getting it done and then just going over there and trying to solve it on the ground, right? How do we get the right resources? MDMP is all about, like, at its heart, really. It's like risk mitigation, right? Yeah, it is. It is. It's risk mitigation and then setting up the structure so you can have appropriate logistics to go with whatever elements now getting put into theater. But some of the design stuff that I really got into was, you know, how do you, if you do action

X, how is that going to affect, you know, the other side of the equation? And then trying to play with, okay, well, if we do action X on purpose, what is that second order effect actually going to be? You know, and, you know, maybe we need to do action Y instead in order to cause that second order effect, not just the first order effect we wanted. So it was really, you know, a couple layers deep, higher level thinking that, you know, I just really enjoyed the heck out of it. I think really that that set the foundation for me on, you know, wanting to go down the pipeline of writing a book, especially like the book that I wrote. But we'll get into, you know, why I did it and what the intent is. But I wanted to be able to show what that, you know, new scenario could be because I see so many people are just washing and repeating, you know, the same stuff that they're being told over and over again.

and they're not applying that critical, creative thought to how, you know, the future could change very quickly. And so you retire at a fifth group. And where do you go next? Yeah, so I retired in 2023 and immediately found a position with the company I'm with now. I just happened to meet a guy in Nashville at a soft, you know, special operations gathering that we do, you know, quarterly at one brewer here or another. And I was like, hey, I'm retiring. I'm open for work, looking for a job. And another guy introduced himself, said, you know, I work for a military innovation company. And I was like, well, that sounds interesting. And like I said,

you know, at this point, I'm all in on this, like, creative thinking and like looking at things differently. And when I heard the word innovation, I said, well, I need to see what this is all about. So talk to this, you know, guy for a while found out that, you know, what he's doing is something right up the alley of what I would love to get involved with. So I applied for the company and took a position. The company is Civil Military Innovation Institute or CMI 2. And we work different government contracts. The one that I'm currently focused on is a Army Research Labs program called Catalyst Pathfinder. Catalyst Pathfinder, what it is is, you know, we, you see so much on the, you know, when you hear like innovation or big army requirements and new technologies, it's all top down driven stuff.

So you got the F-35s and, you know, new tanks and, you know, whatever new vehicle or new weapon system that's getting fielded out there. But for me, like, I'm more interested in what's coming from the soldiers. and their ideas. So when I heard about this program, I jumped all over it. So Catalyst Pathfinder is soldier-driven tactical innovation. So we partner at the unit level and we'll set up what we call like dirt labs or maker spaces. So we put in 3D printers, CNC machines, fab, you know, textiles, whatever it is. And we'll set up these makerspaces that the unit runs with us.

And then, you know, soldiers come in, they have an idea for something and we'll help them try to build it. You know, we have the CAD files, you know, the CAD expertise. We have the engineers support. And we'll try to help them solve whatever problem they have, whether that's a new piece of equipment, a different type of rucksack, a new pouch or, you know, a new drone. You know, we tried to figure out how we can get them the solutions they need at the tactical level. So there's no like long Army requirements process. It's just here's what they want. We're going to put them under, you know, a contract to get this done as quick as possible.

And we do that either down or hands getting dirty in the shop or if it's something that, hey, we can't, you know, we don't have the expertise or it's too time consuming to do ourselves here in the house. Then I can contract out through partnerships with universities or with small industry. So, you know, a smaller business, not the big prime vendors that I'll never get anything done with, but a small, you know, young company that's, yeah, somebody who's eager, you know, or a small drone company or whatever. And I'm like, hey, this is what the unit wants. I'm willing to pay you, you know, to knock this out for us and get the answers and get the capability to the soldier as quick as possible. So that's essentially what I do now. I work again at Fifth Group again. I didn't go far.

I'm still in Fort Italian. And we set up a innovation shop. Fifth Group's been all in on the innovation work. And, you know, we've been just knocking project after project out down there. And they've been eating it up. They've been doing amazing stuff. So really pushing the limit on capabilities. I don't know how much you're allowed to say.

but I mean, I'd love to hear if you can about, like, what are some of the cooler things that guys have, you know, cooler projects that the guys have come to you with that you were able to help with? Yeah, so I'll say one of them that we could definitely talk about because it's, you know, there's articles out there about it now. But had a fifth group soldier come in and say, hey, you know, we have all these program of record, expensive drones that we get issued. But we can't do much with them because if we break them, we can't fix them. we can't fix them. And two, we work with partners overseas. We can't let them technically fly them because they're program of record equipment, so you're not supposed to allow that. So they wanted a repairable drone that they could build and teach partner forces how to use so they can get their hands on some equipment. So I found a company out of Knoxville called Echo Mav.

technologies and I came to him and said, hey, you know, this is what they want. We would love to see a 3D printed, you know, SRR, so a short-range reconnaissance type bird, not like a first-person view thing you see in Ukraine all the time, but like an actual like reconnaissance quadcopter. We want a 3D-pended. We want the soldiers to be able to build it themselves and we want it to be, you know, as capable as some of the bigger named things, but with cheaper components, so it doesn't cost so much. And, you know, within six months, we had a working finished, you know, almost

finished prototype that, you know, Fifth Group has started using and fielding. The 101st bought a hand, you know, a hundred of them, I think, and they put a bunch out there and I've been testing it. So it's still a prototype, you know, at the time. So it's still getting evolved and changing and, you know, the soldiers try it. They like something. They don't like something. I give feedback to the company. They make the changes. And then the soldiers, gets the new version, right? So it's like, I'm the go between, that usually doesn't exist between soldiers and the industry because I'm able to get those answers and those changes back to them quick.

But yeah, 3D printed drones have become big. That one was a big success story. And then, you know, I'd say with a lot of the units now, a lot of them are focused on, you know, aerial technology. Drones is what they want. And that's, you know, the nature of current conflicts. That's the nature of technology, you know, evolving. And that's just where it is right now.

Everybody wants drones. Everybody wants every kind of drone you can think of. That's all they want. Yeah, no, we'll talk about that, too, I think, a little bit more in depth. Let's start to get into the book. And where did this idea first come to mind that, hey, I want to write a book about this? Yeah, so I'd never like had the vision of I'm going to be an author. You know, I've always been a prolific reader.

I love reading. I've always enjoyed fiction. You know, I'll read the nonfiction. I read the military history books, but I love a good fiction book. I love just getting into a story and just kind of jamming with it, losing yourself in it. And I've always been a fan of that. It was right close to when I was retiring, I was, I think I was like jotting down some notes or some ideas I had.

And my wife, you know, it was all credit to her. She's like, you should write a book. You should try to write a book. And I'm like, I don't know anything about writing a book. But I started just, you know, just typing away and playing around. It was horrible. It was really bad. I found one of my original copies of the book that I started like when I was getting

out of the army and it was real bad to read. But one of the things I didn't talk about when I was getting out of the Army, I did my skill bridge program with a retired Sergeant Major, S-F-Sarge Major named Randall S-U-R-L-E-S-U-R-E-S, but he's a editor and author himself. And he basically let me do a skill bridge with him, you know, remotely online. And he helped me kind of understand how the structures of books work. you know, specifically on the fiction side, like, how do you structure it? What are the different acts? You know, how does the character development, character arcs, like all these words that I never even heard of before. And I just thought, you know, good books for good books and bad books sucked. But there's a whole rhyme or reason why some of them suck and why some of them are really good. And you can kind of follow along. And there's, you know, there's some good books out there that literally are written to talk about how books are structured. So I work. worked with him for probably two months and, you know, got to help him do some developmental

editing and go through his process and really helped me set a foundation for how do you write a book. So I, you know, took that and then I took the original kind of manuscript that I had been playing around with and just started over again and took some of the same ideas and started going with it. But the basic idea of the book was really kind of came to life. of frustration. So I see, you know, at the last year in the Army, like I said, I was focused on all the creativity, creative thinking, pushing people to get out of the box and to think of and look at things differently.

Or I was, you know, real concerned what you're seeing, you know, with ISIS and everyone else is like, if we keep thinking that the same old ways of doing things are going to work in the next conflict, I think we're going to get caught, you know, unfortunately. like we tend to do and, you know, militaries across the world tend to do as they fight the last war. And that's really what, you know, frustrated me because I was pushing on, you know, in these planning sessions and everything else, trying to get people to think a little harder about issues and how do we do stuff differently than we did last time. And it was just like running into a brick wall over and over again. the idea got born there and I started working on, hey, what if I wrote a book about, you know, what the next conflict's going to look like, right?

There's lots of them, lots, but there's books out there that are like that, but usually they're like 30 years in the future, you know, whatever. I'm like, I want to know what five years from the future is going to look like because technology is moving so fast right now. How is it going to look in just five years? So I started writing it in that kind of context in mind was, you know, five years from now, you know, I'm writing about an ODA because that's what I know. And I want to see them in an environment that I know, you know, just doing a J-set, doing training over in Jordan. And then, you know, all hell breaks loose. So everything that you don't want to see happen happens all at once. and new technologies that I think are going to be readily available,

probably within the next five years. And it took some creative license on some of it because it is a fiction book. But I wanted to be able to showcase like, hey, this is where it could go pretty quickly. And this is where, you know, on our side could go. And there's, you know, an enemy type force could put in. And like, here's the different ideas that I had of, hey, this is what I think it might be. And I wanted to write that out in a fiction because I think fiction does a fantastic job of, you know, bringing it to reality and helping readers kind of immerse themselves in that world so they can kind of actually see what that looks like, right?

I can write a white paper on the future of drone technology. And people will read it and they'll be like, yep, that's probably true. but they're not going to like really live it, you know. So if you write it in a fiction book and you build characters and you, you know, people read it and they identify with a character and they feel like, yeah, I, you know, I was never in that situation, but I feel what this guy's feeling right now, you know, and then all this bad stuff starts happening. And then it becomes real. You know, it becomes very real to them. And that's what I was aiming for. You know, what I really liked about the book was that you brought your special forces experience into it.

And you said the setting of the book is basically Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. And it's felt, it felt very fresh. It felt like this was not, you know, I read a lot of these books, a lot of them, even for this podcast. This was different. It was not a rehash of all the stuff I had read before. And I really liked that about it. And I really liked you bringing your own experiences into it. And the protagonist, the team sergeant, was an interesting character because you kind of capture that

person at that time in his life that he's been doing this for a while and he's kind of jaded, kind of cynical about, you know, this part of the world and about his job. And also there's like this aspect of like he's getting older and he doesn't necessarily understand the technology that the younger guys on the team take to. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, you know, I took the, you know, the main team sergeant character and I based him off of, you know, other team sergeants I've known, my own team sergeants, other just leaders I've known and kind of morphed them all into one, you know, sprinkle on a little my own personality in there. Because that's the question I get is like, you know, are you the team sergeant?

Are you the weapon sergeant? Like, which character are you? And I'm like, I'm every single one of them, unfortunately. You get a little piece of everything. I love the 18 Bravo on the team. Like you nailed that, like this meathead. Yeah. With his movie quotes.

Yeah. Yeah, I was really, so I was wanted to, because I, you know, I read a lot too, and you see like people go over the top when they're trying to do like that. What is the military behind closed doors, you know, brotherhood feel like? And I feel like sometimes they go over the top. You know, I'm not going to name any names, but there's some Navy SEALs out there. I like to say the word brother a lot. So I wanted to make it like, this is what it was like on a team. Like, this is the mentality.

You know, it's a bunch of dudes that will die for each other, but man, they're never going to stop fighting. They're never going to stop picking at each other. And it's just, you know, the, you know, if the walls had ears sort of situation, some of the team room chats that you'll never talk about are probably some of the funniest moments you've ever been in, you know, in your life. So one of my, one of my favorite quotes about that was from Jim Morris, who he was a fifth group, uh, team. team leader, ODA leader in, in Vietnam. I don't think they even called them ODAs. I think they called them A teams in Vietnam. And he said being a team leader on a special forces A team,

it's basically trying to learn how to manage 11 pre-Madonnas. Yeah, yeah, that's it. The egos, I don't remember if I, so I'm writing book two right now, so I'm blending them together and I don't want to let anything out. but I do talk about at some point of like, how do you manage, you know, 12, you know, 11 personalities minus yourself. You probably include yourself in that too, but like you're managing all these different personalities and, man, and SF types, special operations types for sure, you know, you get a mixed bag of, you know, who thinks they're, you know, God's gift to the special operations mantra and who's just here to work and who's, you know, in between. So you get a little bit of everything, you know, good, bad, or indifferent. And I try to kind of show that mentality in the book.

So hopefully it sits well. Yeah, I know. I thought it was great that, you know, you captured that team sergeant experience and like made it clear that. Yeah, exactly. He's trying to manage these different personalities, including his captain. You know, he has to kind of keep him going too and, you know, help him do his job. But also, you know, be like, okay, sir, relax. Yeah, yeah, I think, so he's based off of, you know, a lot of different officers I've known.

You know, I've worked with some great officers. I've worked with some poor officers. Same on the NCO side. You know, you got good and bad. And, you know, ODA captains, I think, have one of the most difficult jobs as an officer because they're usually the least experienced guy. And they have to still be in charge because they're the captain. You know, they have to maintain that level of respect while learning and understanding and being a part of a team. So it's hard for, you know, officers in special forces world for sure.

You know, my hat's off to the good ones. You know, I've had some great ones out there. But trying to show that the captain's in charge while still listening to the team sergeant's advice and having to deal with the knuckleheads on the team who think, you know, they're in charge most of the time. but trying to put that dynamic, that family dynamic together was fun on paper, but yeah, difficult in real life. And so the, I don't know how deep you want to get into the plot of the book, but I mean, the main action of it, I guess, it has a lot to do with Turkey's regional ambitions, sort of neo-Ottoman mentality that they've gotten into.

Do you want to talk? What do you want to say about what's going on? on this book. Yeah, so kind of the basic premise is you got an ODA doing a training mission in Jordan. They have a, you know, short-lived but exciting encounter with an unknown drone that kind of crashes around their area. Then, you know, regionally, you start to see things heating up in the north. Turkey is, you know, posturing and staging on northern Syria.

and on their border. And then you have a flashpoint and you have, you know, without going into too much detail, you have, you know, Turkey invasion of Syria with some, you know, pretty futuristic technologies that no one expected. And, you know, when I've made those technologies, some of that stuff is already around, right? So, you know, using a large drone, now just throw these teasers out there to mess with people until they buy the book. But, you know, using a large drone as a signal relay or a mothership, you know, that's happening in Ukraine right now, right? Obviously, I take some license with it. And what I think is actually going to be where it could go where you have these larger drones and, you know, automation or artificially intelligent systems or whatever,

are controlling smaller drones on mission sets, I do think that's where it could end up, where you have, you know, not necessarily like completely autonomous, but, you know, if your parameters are so big on the left and right limits of what their mission is and they're operating within them, you know, are they still autonomous? Or are they autonomous or are they still in control of, you know, the guy who wrote the software in the first place? So that's a question that, you know, see comes up in the book. times and really trying to get trying to explore that kind of concept of when does you know actual

artificial intelligence or autonomous systems become that autonomous if you're giving them such a big parameter to operate in in the first place you know so it's a tough question I don't know I've heard lots of different people talk about it but I don't think anybody's got the real answer yet I think uh I think this book also sort of alludes to this I idea that, you know, when we think of these like high-tech, high-end defense items, we think of, you know, we're going to be the ones that field that. Or maybe, you know, the Chinese, maybe the Russians. But your book is really pointing towards, you know, the multipolarity that we're moving into in the world. And I mean, Turkey isn't like an irrelevant, you know,

small country. They're a regional player. But I, I, I, I, I, I mean, I think that that was one of the interesting things about your book as it points to one of these other countries really getting the drop on us in a way that we wouldn't have expected. Yeah. And I kind of chose that, you know, intentionally. And that's because I wanted to write in that region, right? So I'm being that I don't say exactly like what year this is supposed to be. I allude to, you know, a couple geopolitical comments in there that make you think it's, you know, five or ten years in the future. I, you know, as I mentioned briefly, the Russian Ukraine conflict in there and a conclusion to that. I talk, I think I talk briefly about China in there. That's going to come more in book two.

But, yeah, I wanted to show, you know, the ability for, you know, a country like Turkey is not a small country. It is a powerhouse in the region. And they're doing some pretty advanced stuff with, you know, unmanned technology. technologies, you know, aside from Israel, I would put Turkey at, you know, the number two spot right behind them for technology and unmanned systems capabilities. So picking, you know, a out of left field, you know, NATO partner essentially, because now it adds a whole other layer of, you know, what would the U.S. do?

What would our response be if, you know, a NATO ally invades. Syria, you know, are we going to intervene? Are we going to stop? Are we going to let it go? How far do we let it go? You know, how much would we let them take, you know, as a world order kind of maintainer before we step in? And obviously some more stuff happens in the book that I don't want to let out too much, but, you know, there's complications that that would arise when that happens. And there's U.S. forces scattered around the region. Like, you know, what does that, what does that look like? What does it look like worst case scenario. That's what I was really trying to show how precarious our position could be if something like this were to happen. I think that, I believe we talked to Anthony Vinci

about this recently about sort of how you know that the information you're being told as a soldier is authentic. It's coming from, you know, it's a lawful order from your commander. And it does play into your book. I mean, there's a pretty big rugpole on the protagonist at one point. what do you think about that sort of like information assuredness? I'm not sure what the correct doctrinal term is, but that you know that you know that what you're being told is in fact legitimate. Yeah, yeah, I think that is, you know, I played around with that obviously in the book of, you know,

who's who kind of conflict that the characters and the protagonist has to go through of, you know, trusting sources and talking with, you know, different levels of leadership. And I think, you know, the ability that's coming, and I think a lot of it's already here, I mean, you could look just scrolling through my phone before we started on Instagram. I'm like, I don't know, half of these videos are real. You know, which ones are fake? Which ones are real? So they're only going to get better, you know, and the systems are only going to get more advanced. maybe they'll hit a wall at some point.

But, you know, what happens if they don't? What happens if they don't hit a stopping point? And they get so advanced that you can't tell the difference anymore. Like, how would I know right now or how would you know that we're actually, you know, you're actually talking to a person. Right. We're digital images on a screen. And that's kind of what I try to like, you know, get into a little bit into the book.

And, you know, I want people to start thinking about that is the dangers of, you know, how far this could go without any handrails. You know, I'm not going to get into the argument of whether or not we should put limits, you know, on, you know, is it First Amendment rights at that point or like, whatever it is. I'm not getting into that. But, you know, how do you, how can you tell what's real and what's not on the Internet now and what's that going to look like in 10 years from now? Like, how does that play into the evolution of just everyday life, much less, you know, deployed soldiers in a combat zone? You mentioned earlier how, like, right now everything is about drones. And I sense there's a little bit of, like, a techno skepticism within you that I'd like to probe the wire a bit on. everyone thinks that the future of war right now is quad-copter drones because of what they're seeing in Ukraine.

But I mean, if we go to war with China tomorrow, theoretically, quad-copter drones are going to be completely irrelevant for that flight. Yeah, yeah, you hit that one. You're going to get me, I might as well pull out my soapbox real quick and get standing up there. You know, like I said, with my current job doing these innovation stuff, I have, you know, soldiers, come in from all kinds of units or they email me or they heard about the work I'm doing. They reach out and they're like, I want an FPV drone that can carry or drop a grenade or I want an FPV drone that can have a, you know, a shape charge or like an RPG on it or something.

And my response always to them is, you know, why? What are you going to do with that? And they're like, well, I saw this video. That's how they usually start. And I'm like, all right, let's talk about the video. real quick because, you know, what's happening in Russia and Ukraine is shaping everyone's vision of where or what drones in combat are going to look like, right? And it should, right, that what the Ukrainians have been able to do against the Russians is, you know, was shocking.

I, when I heard about the Russian staging on the border, I was, you know, I was all in on, man, they're going to roll up the Ukrainians in a week, you know, a month maybe. I did not think that this was going to be the future of where it was going. Probably shouldn't put that bad, you know, guests out there since I wrote a book about the future of war, but that's what, you know, I thought they were done for. You know, the Ukrainians have done amazing things with that technology. However, the doctrine that Russia uses and the doctrine that Ukraine uses is completely different

than a doctrine that the United States would use in a military conflict. You know, we don't have. a, you know, battle drill for digging and then placing trench works as infantry soldiers. Like, we don't do that. We don't fight defensively. We're a maneuver, you know, army. We're a combined arms, large-scale maneuver. We overwhelm the airspace, and then we move in through the ground and take everything out.

That's how we've done it since, you know, the Gulf War, since before it's, you know, shaped off the Blitzkrieg. like that is how we do our military maneuvers. The war in Ukraine right now, when you watch a lot of these YouTube videos, one, you've got to be, you know, cautious of the propaganda value that you're being fed, right? Because that's a big part of it.

Again, I'm not taking anything away from what the Ukrainians are doing. It's amazing that they're, you know, I think the invasions jacked up and I think the Ukrainians are doing a hell of a job. But when you watch these videos, you have a single drone flying along or two drones usually.

And it's a small group of Russians or Ukrainians or it's like one guy hiding in a hole or you see like a single vehicle driving down the road. And if you stop and like zoom out and you think about what you're looking at, what you're seeing is like harassing attacks. Right. They're harassing to in order to keep the Russians from massing any kind of force anywhere near the border in order to stop them from advancing. Right. And the Russians are still advancing right now. They're still steadily advancing. It's slow going.

They're losing, you know, a crazy amount of casualties. I think the 2025 CSIS report was like a million Russian total casualties and like 300 killed, like 700 wounded. It's crazy. It's absolutely bonkers. But, you know, the United States, if we were to go in and help Ukraine tomorrow, we wouldn't just go take and plus up their positions along the front. Like, that's not how we do it. So when these guys come in, they say, hey, I want this drone that does this because I saw this video. I'm like, all right, if you had that drone and you're an infantry platoon leader, right, and you're moving and you get contact to your front, tell me how you're going to integrate that drone into your battle drill without slowing it down, like without stopping what you're doing.

Like the drones in Ukraine have only become, you know, the top of the kill chain in the last like two years because they ran out of artillery. That's why they're using them right now. If they had artillery, they'd probably prefer that. But they don't. They're out. I get it. So I do think drones are going to be, you know, the future of conflict. I don't know what it's going to look like yet.

And like to your point, if we were to go fight China in the Pacific, you know, the FPV drones don't have the range to do a whole lot of damage. You know, I worry more about, you know, like FPVs and the, small-scale drones for insurgencies. And, you know, imagine if the drone technology now was out in 2007 in Iraq, you know, that would have been tough to counter. I worry about the drones and, you know, like the Ukrainian operation, what was it called, spider web, when they put those, you know, snuck all those drones way, way deep into Russia

and then remotely launch them at targets. Like I worry more about that stuff for FPVs and their implications for it. Unless, you know, something scenario like the book and that technology comes to that because I haven't talked in the book, I don't talk about battery capability because that's a tough, you know,

batteries are tough. Battery life is tough. So I do have book two is going to get into the batteries, but I don't want to ruin that. But so like I think what we think it's going to be is probably incorrect. I think it's going to be different and something that we're not

really sure of yet. And that's the good thing about soldiers wanting to test and play with them because that's how you get creative and you come up with what that next solution looks like. But I just, you know, people that just rely on YouTube for their tactical acumen

is usually incorrect. Yeah, I think to your point about how the American military fights is like sometimes we forget that, you know, the Kurds in northern Syria or the Ukrainians in their own country, they're fighting with what they have. And so they're relying, the Ukrainians are relying a lot on these drones because that's what they have access to.

And if the United States went to war, we bring all of our military hardware with us. If the Ukrainians had all of our fighter capabilities and bomber capabilities and all this other stuff that we bring to the table, they would be using that instead. Yeah, yeah, they would. And that's to my point is like, I think for the large-scale military application, the FPV is going to be very limited. I think for special operations side, we need to be really focused on it because where you can be, you know, using partner forces. Yeah, partner forces, you know, to devastating effect. And we really need to know how to counter it.

That's, you know, more important to me is right now is the arming and the speed and the, you know, cost is going faster and the technology is moving faster than we know how to stop it. So that's more what I'm worried about is. How do we counter these things? Yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask you about that next because if you look at the official military publications, counter UAS is like a huge thing. Like they seem to have a huge emphasis on that right now. And everything from, you know, how does a squad of infantry protect themselves to how does the company headquarters protect itself from these things. What's sort of your view on this?

Yeah, so countering these drones is very difficult, right? So what you don't see in the videos most of the time over in Ukraine is how many drones get knocked out of the sky from electronic jamming, right? So that is a definite way to stop them. So most of these drones, for my drone people out there, you know, most of the ones being used in Ukraine are operating on simple, 2.4 gigahertz bands, and that's the radio signal that they use to control it, right? And that's essentially the same band as Wi-Fi, right? So if you flew it in a major metropolitan

area with Wi-Fi all over the place, you would get jammed just by the signals that are out there. So you see a lot of the jamming happen right now, and then that's where, you know, for those that are following it, you start to see some of the fiber optic drones that are coming out. So essentially that's just a fly-by-wire drone that can't be jammed by a signal, by a radio signal jammer. It actually has a control wire that runs it all the way through and they can fly them for 5K, 10K, 20K. I think they're getting up there in length now. They have these huge canisters that they mount on the bottom of them and it's just full of fiber optic, you know, thin hair-like wire. and they can go everywhere and not have to get jammed.

So that's another thing because now you have to have a kinetic stop for that. You've got to be able to shoot it down somehow. I mean, that's basically how the tow missile works, right? It's a tow missile. Yeah, it's much cheaper. Not as effective, but much cheaper tow missile. I'm sure that's where they got the idea. And so the book is out now.

People can go and find it on Amazon. what has been sort of the reception of this book? Yeah, I mean, it's been great. So, you know, I self-published, you know, publishing is a whole other conversation. But I self-published the book, you know, found an editor, found all the, you know, the artwork. It did all that and got it out. It came out in September, I believe it was, doing all my own marketing, you know, getting out there. it, but I haven't had anybody say anything negative yet.

So that's, maybe they like me or maybe they like the book. I don't know. But everyone seems to be really interested in it and the concept of it. Kind of like to your point that you alluded to is like, it is different. And I wrote it differently on purpose because, you know, there's so many big, you know, name like military thrillers out there or military action groups or books. And it's, you know, they kind of run a similar script, I'd say in all of them. not putting any names out there.

I'm not doing that, but a lot of them run kind of similar scripts where you have like this action, you know, hero type. And he's in horrible situations. He does all the great, you know, things. And then you're like switches to scene two. And it's like situation rooms. And like, I don't, I don't want to know what's going on in the situation room. I'm not trying to go that high of my books.

There will be some higher headquarters stuff in book two. But really, I want to show like that tactical nitty group. really like when you're the team on the ground, you see stuff on the news or you make speculations, but you don't know what's happening, you know, with the president and, you know,

what sec-def is doing over there? You're just like, what the hell are they thinking? Sort of conversation. So it's been, the reception's been really, you know, great.

Been, you know, selling books and getting them out there and, you know, getting on platforms like this and talking about it. I appreciate you having me on. Let me chat about it. just there's no other way to get it out there to the right type of people that I think will enjoy it. And most of all, like I want them to, you know, enjoy the book, but I want to take it, think about it and start trying to like come up with your own ideas of like, here's where this could be going.

Like if you're a still active duty military or your law enforcement or, you know, first responders, like all of this is applicable. You know, these technologies are going to change the way we do things, whether it's because we're on the receiving end of them or because we know how to counter them and we've come up with the next best thing after this. So that's what I'm trying to do with the book is like, hey, here's where it's going. Here's what I want to show about it. You know, let's have a conversation. And, you know, I hope anybody's out there, you know, hit me up on social media and we can we can chat about it. Read the book and let me know what you think. and for our viewers or listeners there will be links down the description of this podcast to

Rob's book, Wretched Descent. You can go and take a look. And you said there's a, is it a sequel on the way? There is, yeah. So the intent is three books. So last thing I'll probably get into about the book, but I've framed the book off of the Iliad. So Homer is the Iliad. So in the Iliad, you got, you know, the Greeks and the Trojans. So, and they're in a 10-year struggle. And they're kind of at a stalemate. And the only time when

one side wins and pushes, you know, the Trojans back to the wall or the Trojans push the Greeks to the water is when their gods show up and fight on their behalf. Right. So I tried to reimagine that as the technologies that you see in the book. And when the technologies, are there, you got, you know, overwhelming, you know, fire superiority or force, and you start to see that side winning. I tried to kind of tailor it off of the Iliad. I thought that was kind of a unique way to kind of play with it. You'll see there are some Easter eggs hidden throughout the book, maybe some people's names or some different ideas that might help you kind of figure that out. But when I wrote it about the Iliad, you know, the Iliad stops when Achilles' cousin is killed.

And that's it. So the whole Trojan horse thing and all of that, that's actually in a different book. But I'm roping all that into one. And I'm taking three books as my vision to get to the end of this, this particular scenario. And don't know yet if it'll go beyond that. I have some couple of different endings in mind of where it may go. It's just going to depend on, you know, what readers think. And if the storyline should continue or if I should, you know, be three and done with that and then move on to my next project.

Do we have a title or anything for the second book? I don't have the title yet. I had a title, but I pushed it off right now. So I don't want to get into that one yet. When about do you think it'll get out there? So I release this one in September. My goal is at the latest September of 26, if not sooner. So I'm already working on it about a quarter of the way in.

This one's moving much quicker than my first one. So that's a good lessons learned, I guess, with outlining and how to do it properly. And a lot of less weight. wasted words. I think I have a throwaway file from book one. That's 100,000 words of scenes and chapters I've deleted. I'm hoping to not have that again. Yeah, it's a learning experience. I find anyway. Cool. Anything else you want to mention before we get going here tonight, Rob? No, I think that's it. Again, I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate all the listeners and viewers out there, you know, if this is interesting to you, go ahead and grab me a copy.

You can find me on X and Instagram and TikTok, R. Leach underscore author. Feel free to connect. Let me know what you think about the book. Let me know what ideas you have, technology ideas. You can help shape this. You know, I'm not sad on anything. I know where the, you know, the overall story is going, but I'm happy to, you know, if you come up with some cool ideas, you want me to throw it in there, let me know,

and I'm happy to try to jam that into the book somehow. Whatever I can do to make it more realistic and more eye-opening for people is kind of the goal. So the book is Wretched Descent by Robert Leach. Go check it out. We'll have links down in the description. I see the hard copy behind you. I read mine on my Kindle was great on the e-book version.

It was awesome. And otherwise, thank you, everyone, for joining us tonight and we will see you on the next episode. So take care out there. Thank you. Hey guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House podcast, the Ais-On podcast, and the Highside News outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Ais-on and the Team House. And and whatever's topical or current on the high side.

So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once-a-week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have the greatest hits of that week. It's really good. Checking it out.

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