The Team House - From the Ranger Regiment to Asymmetric Warfare | Jason Davis | Ep. 319

Episode Date: December 28, 2024

Jason is a 3rd generation Army Ranger, he served in 1/75 and later in Asymmetrical Warfare Group &  Special Operations Command.https://ventusrespiratory.com/Order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSubscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social 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/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to and we really appreciate that so go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your host jack murphy and david park to a christmas edition of the team house this is a pre-recorded episode so we can all be with our families around the holidays. Hope everyone's having a good one out there. As you know, I'm Jack. This is Dave. And our guest on tonight's show is Jason Davis. Jason served in a number of infantry assignments, a number of 75th Ranger Regiment assignments, and then a few assignments with the asymmetrical warfare group and special operations command.

Thank you for coming and joining us in studio. Today, Jason works with Ventus, developing respiratory respiratory respiratory protection for soldiers and we'll get into all that as well. So Jason, thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you so much for having it. I really appreciate it. So let's start at the beginning. We usually start off talking about the guest's origin story

and I think yours is definitely worth going down memory lane a little bit because your grandfather, your father, and your uncle were all Rangers. Yeah, that's a family, family. me Laura, my mom likes to say that she's the wife, daughter, sister, mother of a ranger. So my grandfather was a fifth Ranger battalion in World War II Ranger. He says he joined the Rangers as opposed to the paratroopers because those paratroopers were crazy, which you look at what they did, point to Hawk now, that's kind of crazy itself. And then my father got told, go to war, go to jail, not as a draftee, but because he got into

so much trouble as a kid. And so he, as he likes to say it, I enlisted in the Army because nobody was going to tell me what to do. And then you fast forward in 1974, and he's an airborne Ranger medic, you know, Plank owner of 175. And he stands that up at Fort Stewart in those days before the W. Hunter Army. Yeah, so my dad met my uncle inside of First Ranger Battalion. My uncle was a B-Co Ranger in those days. My dad was in H.HC. and my uncle took my dad who was from the Washington, Oregon area,

and my uncle's from Hollywood, Florida. And so my uncle took my dad home for Christmas, met my mom, and a couple years later, next generation is born. That's fantastic. Never had any designs for me to go into the military, never pushed me into the military, but I was always proud and kind of accidental in the family business, I guess.

So where did you grow up? I mean, if your folks were in the military, I mean, presumably you moved around a lot, Yeah. Obviously, you must have grown up here in all these ranger stories, too. Yeah, I didn't know you weren't a ranger if you were in the Army. I thought everybody in the Army was a Ranger. It's all I lived around. So I was born in Alaska, actually, in 1977, which on my dad's file, it says he was an Arctic Warfare instructor through most of Vietnam. And so it's a really cool kind of, you know, he was up there for about six months when I was born, went to, you know, Texas, where my sister was born, and my dad went to PA school.

which in those days they became warrant officers at the end of that. And then spent most of the rest of my life bouncing around the southeast, Georgia and North Carolina, the usual places that, you know, Rangers go to and infantry guys in particular. And then my dad was assigned back to Ninth Manchu. Some of us old guys, the Ninth Manchu up in Alaska, Fairbanks, were basically my formative years until I was about 10 or, you know, 10 or 12. And then moved, my dad retired in 1988. and we moved to a little town in Oregon called Ontario, Oregon. So right on the Oregon- Idaho border, in fact, you guys know orida fries. Uh-huh.

Yeah, so Oregon- Idaho border, that's orida. And so that plant right there. So that's what we're famous for. Yeah. Now we're famous for prisons and ore-a fries. And so our big city was Boise, Idaho. And then, yeah, from there, went to college in New York. So at New York University where I met my wife and ended up going to ROTC at Ford in University.

I thought I wanted to get away from the military when I left the house and then realized I gravitated right back towards those people. Yeah, I mean, you were on track to be a pinko-liberal commie. 100%. Well, let me one up you, man. What happened? What happened? Yeah, okay, so let me back this up just a second. So I applied to two colleges from my little town in Ontario, Oregon, right?

I think I'm graduating 60 people or something. I applied to West Point, and I applied to NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Yeah. Stella Adler. I wanted to be an actor. Yeah. I love the theater. I still love the theater.

I love Shakespeare. And my dad, I got accepted to both. So I was hoping, I was hoping one would, you know, reject me and kind of choose my life track for me, right? Because I either want to be an actor

or in the Army. Did you feel pressure to go in the Army? Like, was there a party that wanted West Point to reject you so you could? No. Okay. I felt no pressure whatsoever.

And in fact, it was my dad who said you can always join the army whenever you want but when can you be a poor actor in New York City right right and and I took that advice and I was always very thankful and to be honest I thank my dad a lot for this I think it really you know put my outlook in the perspective the reason why I have my daughter here right now is so that we can have this life experience together this cool trip right and so he set me on the path for that life experience I went there and within about six weeks I joined a Greek fraternity. I stopped showing up to school. I started hanging out with the ROTC kids.

And by December, I learned that I really didn't like the acting community at NYU. And it really wasn't the people that I wanted to be around. Not that they weren't great people. They were. Just I had different interests. And the fraternity tended to fill that a little bit more than Stella Adler did. And I think we were both happy for the break of each other. And so I ended up spending most of my time with my fraternity brothers and, you know, the ROTC, and it sounds so dated now, like 24 years later, just to say fraternity brothers. And the ROTC guys, and ROTC for New York City in those days, I think it's still the same now, was run out of Fordham University.

So that's where the detachment was. And then if you went to Columbia or, you know, NYU or Lincoln Center, Fordham, or any of the local SUNY schools. Columbia didn't have ROTC until they repealed, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Well, we used to have the Columbia students, and so I don't remember the timeline for that. But so they would come to Ford them to do ROTC if they wanted to do that. Yeah. And so I ended up kind of falling in love with the military from a, you know, a user experience.

Right. As opposed to from a brat experience. And so I grew up as a brat. I tried to break away from it and then realized that it was actually what I loved. Yeah. So I went right back to it. And commissioned in 2001, a bit of a. pivotal year for this country and especially for somebody commissioning into the military yeah yeah so i

got married and commissioned on the same day uh so so meg and i who we met in yu our freshman year um stayed together basically most of college uh and then um got literally officially married like the week before my commissioning ceremony and i remember getting out of the car nobody knows we're married yet like it's just just she and i and getting out of the car and it was kind of a drizzly cold May Day, you know, in New York. And I remember one of the guys going, you know, they say if it rains on your commissioning, you're going to war. So that guy was right. And about three months later, I found myself in Iobc. And 9-11 occurred while I was at the urban phase of Iobc. And my wife had just moved down from 14th Street between B and C and Lower Manhattan, where we'd had

our apartment for a couple of years, the week before the towers were. went down. Would she, did she have military members in her family? What did she think about the military? No, no, I'm her family's nightmare. So her, so her mom and dad are, are hippies. Yeah. Well, her mom's a reformed hippie. Her dad is not. And it's funny, the older I get, the more I connect with, you know, my father-in-law than anybody else, I think. But he was, you know, like literally followed, you know, followed a cult in India for a little while and came back and, had a commune. Jerry Garcia. Yeah. Oh yeah. And you know, in Ozarks, you know, like lived in the Ozarks with 400 acre Apple Farm. Like my father-in-law literally hand makes his cabin, like lives off

the grid, like, you know, living, living his values for sure. Yeah. And I met, yeah, she, she kind of, she was born in Arkansas, lived in that lifestyle for quite some time when she was, you know, about 10 or so. Her mom and dad divorced. Her mom wanted a different lifestyle. ended up going very conservative with her lifestyle to the point where, you know, who she married. I was like, man, you're a little bit right for me at this point, you know. Yeah. And moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where she did her high school years and then went to NYU as a film major, in fact. And we both decided we didn't fit into that community pretty quick.

Yeah, yeah. So my father-in-law is now an organic farmer in Kauai on the island of Hawaii. He's been here for, or in Hawaii. He's been out there for about 20-someodd years. He's Uncle Ned now, and when we lived on Hawaii, it was always nice to be able to spend some time on there. Yeah. So, like, these massive life changes that happen in such a short span of time is incredible. And then you get assigned to the 101st, third of the 502nd.

Tell us about that. I mean, it sounds like by the time you get there, you're kind of getting into the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Yeah, so if I don't know if you guys know this. So when you're in IobC as an infantry officer in those days, it's expected. you're going to Ranger School. Like that's not really an option, right? And in the last, the last couple weeks of that, we're all getting ready to go to Ranger School.

The towers come down and word comes in that if you're in the 18th Airborne Corps, so 101st Airborne, 82nd, 10th Mountain Division, all the DR deployed for combat ready brigades, you get one shot at this. That's it, period of the end. And so we all went to Ranger School like two weeks later as fast as we could. I ended up breaking my foot that first week. And so, which, by the way, another great lesson.

So I still believe to this day, if I'd been tougher, I could have toughed it out. I broke a couple metacarpals or metatarsal, I don't know what they're called me for it. I broke a couple of those things, stress fracture. And I still believe that if I could have been just a little bit mentally tougher, I could have tough that out. It was my first taste of failure. And I hated it. It's interesting. And you say you still believe that.

And so it's sort of like that. Yeah, that's like I believe I can fight five guys at the same. No matter what. A broken knee go, right. Yeah, right. Because somebody's always got it harder. Right. And, yeah, no, I get that.

It was a defining moment in my life coming back from Ranger's School without my tab and with my story. Yeah, right. Defining moment. And I didn't want to feel like that ever again. Right. And so went to my unit without my tab with my story. I showed up to my battalion commander, you know. Luckily, he put me into a Delta platoon to kind of earn my way back into, in those days.

You know, you earn your way back into your tab. Had a great experience as a Delta platoon leader that really learned a lot in those gun trucks in those days about how to lead small teams and how to move guns around big guns. But really what it did for me is it gave me an appreciation of why Ranger School was important. And I really started to understand. It wasn't about the tab. It was about the mental toughness. It was about understanding how to lead yourself in those times of real turmoil. Right.

And then how do you lead others when you yourself were just wanting to cry the most of the time? And so that was a defining moment for me when I understood how important that training was. And when I went back, it was a very different mentality. I was no longer interested in surviving. I was interested in learning and getting better at my craft because I knew we were going to war. Right. And so we thought we were going to war. that first like 90 days and we all thought we were going to miss it if we didn't get to our unit.

And so having a little stress fracture was a great excuse, you know, to get to the unit that had to go to war. But really, it taught me what I needed to learn, which was how important that training was. And so I went back, I got that tab. I would encourage everyone to try hard things to the best of their ability. I was successful this time because of the people who surrounded me and cared for me. and then the 101st deployed to combat for the invasion of Iraq. And I was fortunate enough to be assigned as a rifle platoon leader in Baker B Company then, with a ranger, former ranger platoon leader is the company commander.

And this is sort of like, I mean, it sounds counterintuitive to some people watching this maybe, but if you're an infantry platoon leader, I mean, this is the dream, right? This was your dream. Yeah. You're going to lead soldiers in combat. Right. This is all I wanted to do. Had the 101st already been to Afghanistan, had they done any rotation? I believe that Rakhassans, the Rakhistan Brigade, had done some initial work in Afghanistan.

I had friends of mine in the 82nd that had gone in, and of course, obviously, the Rangers at Rino that I ended up learning later. But I think they had some elements initially in Afghanistan. I would have to double-jured. Hey, thank you, Go Speds. Everybody knows I love this product. If you sleep hot at night like me, you know. just how disruptive it can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of night or all the above. And look, there's no easier way to

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Just visit ghostbed.com slash house and use codehouse at checkout. Again, that's ghostbed.com slash house. We code house at checkout. Code house, H-O-U-S-E, and to say whopping 50%. Yeah, man, if you're a hot sleeper. But when you guys were sort of working up towards Iraq, There weren't just a whole bunch of Afghanistan guys rolling around with combat, you know, combat patches. No, no, very new.

And we all thought we were going to miss it. Yeah. Like we all thought that if we don't get into a unit that's going to war, this is our, this is our Mogadishu. Yeah. This is our opportunity. Right. We're thinking desert storm. Right.

I think in Vietnam. Yeah. Absolutely. So in the workup for that, for Iraq, what were your, what were your, you know, What did you think it was going to be? What were you training for? And then were any of those things kind of wrong? That's a great question.

We knew there was going to be a lot of urban fighting. We didn't really understand what that was in those days. And so I can remember we would have kind of OPDs, officer professional development. I had, smoke and Joe Anderson was my brigade commander. So I don't know if you guys know, General Joe Anderson. Retired as a three-star. Phenomenal commander. I have amazing stories about Smoking Joe Anderson

just being bulletproof. I mean, he taught me what combat leadership looks like at the senior leader level. He set that example almost immediately for me. Anyway, I can remember smoking Joe Anderson bringing in these different kind of OPD opportunities to hear from the experts at urban warfare. And we were talking to the police in Northern Ireland,

And we were talking to the cops in London. You know, we were the IDF every once in a while getting in, you know, with the tunnels and some under subterranean. Like we were taking the best that we could, and we were training it in trenches. And so a trench is a hallway, a bunker is a room. And that's the way we trained urban warfare in those days was on trench systems, right? And so I think in my mind, I imagined it was going to look like Vietnam, where you, you know, what we saw in movies, where you helicopter in because I'm in the 101 first. And clearly we're going to helicopter in.

And so we're only a 90-day force, by the way, too. We're only supposed to be there 90 days. And then we recover because then the big infantry divisions and, you know, come in. And I remember thinking that we're going to have kind of a, we're going to helo in aerosol. And then when we get there, we're going to be doing urban warfare through these buildings. And it was very much like that when we got to the city center. So, you know, the Krabahs, the Mosles, you know, I wasn't in Fallujah, but I've heard it was very similar.

But also, I think what was striking was all of the outskirts fighting for key terrain. It's where I really started to understand the importance of what key terrain meant at the strategic level. When there's, you know, one or two roads and you're fighting for a couple of key intersections. Right. you know, the fog of war of, I need you to move your people here. And then, you know, I force road march my platoon on the first day of combat for like 20 miles to get to this anti-armor blocking position. And there's a tank company there. So we felt kind of useless.

Right. So they literally just got us into the shooting. Like to let us get our shoot on. Yeah. It was a very, it was very much, I think, what we were expecting, at least in the infantry side of it. it definitely met my expectations. I mean, it was full kinetic. Yeah, it was, it was scary and fun all at the same time, right?

So on this show and many like it, like we often have people from special operations, from Rangers, and we've said this before, that the special operations mission was very sort of Gucci, right? You know, you had the support, you usually had the transportation. it was generally like in and out type of ops for a specific target what what don't people understand what stories aren't told about conventional military who were out there hooking and jabbing with

a tenth of the resources yeah um and for prolonged periods what are some of the stories or things that you think people should know about the conventional military i think it's exceptionally hard I think we look at, you know, we don't make a lot of movies about, you know, like the 101st or, I mean, third infantry division. Like when I was a kid growing up, there was, you know, Audie Murphy movies and, you know, things like that were going on in World War II. What you see these days is primarily the special operations community. So, seals and lots of seals, you know, Rangers and, you know, other units that are, that are, their stories are getting told. what's not getting told is how separating the enemy from the populace while a nighttime affair and very dangerous work when you're going after

very dangerous people high-profile targets that day in and day out with the people and feeling the empathy for the small child and for the animals and just living amongst that war and that kind of atrocity in some cases of what you're watching people have to survive through. I think they don't understand the toll that that ultimately takes on just, these are humans, these are people, and we are really the most caring and,

I think, discriminatory military and history. That's arguable, I suppose, but, you know, the American soldier in and of themselves is highly trained, highly empathetic,

really wants to do well and to do good. And we put them in these situations where it's extremely dangerous, there's no right answer for what you're doing, and we're asking them to figure it out. And they do, for the most part. And typically all we hear about is the mistakes, but what you don't see is the amazing things those guys and gals are doing every single day out there

to keep the lights on and the people safe. I think it is an untold story for the most part, but when I talk to my brothers and sisters who spent, I did a good portion, five or six years of my career, you know, fully conventional at the beginning, and then had a solid, you know, two or three years of conventional right in between it again. And those were the hardest and the most rewarding jobs that I really had in the military.

I loved everything I did inside of the special operations community or the asymmetric warfare community. I loved all of it. But it was, they were very different, it felt like. This was, this was leadership. Right. At its base level. And when you talk about leading rangers, for example, I mean, I used to laugh.

Rangers don't need leadership. Like, you know, leadership is providing purpose, direction, and motivation. And they need almost none of those things. They're better. Ranger PL say that. Was it Ray McFadden? He was a 275. Yeah, McPadden and 275 PL.

He said very much the same thing. Yeah. If you think about, you know, that these are guys you can, I had to explain to me once. Imagine the best non-commissioned officer, the best sergeant in your mom. mind, you know, that you're just the caricature of this is the guy that I want with me. And imagine everybody is that guy. Right. And so it's a very unique culture and it's a very, you know, we're the summer help, right? Like we're coming in to help you. We're not really a part of that internal, you know, NCO community, although we try to be. And that core of non-commissioned

officers drives the special operations community deeply. And then you go out into the conventional ranks and we're raising those NCOs. What you're going to do, people? yell. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Well, yeah, in the Rangers, they're not going to ask. Right. Right. They're just going to do it. Yeah. Yeah, it's, again, the conventional story is one that is very important to me. And again, did, because you were an officer and you grew up, you know, seeing, you know, you went through the ranks as officer. One of the things is an outsider looking at that. And then talking to guys who were stationed out these little cops. with no support or you know these places that it's like somebody looked at that and said let's put 20 guys there to draw fire but not give them any resources any assets to actually do anything were at any point were you frustrated by by senior leadership by by what seemed to be disconnected decision making that's a really complicated question I'm going to try to give you a simple answer. Okay. We were trying to enact a new doctrine. You know, so coin, counterinsurgency. And,

you know, I, I was fortunate enough to be on the periphery of some of the, you know, General Petraeus kind of building this in the 101st while I was, you know, in his command and the 101st. Yeah. He was in command of 101st in those days. And I believe his doctrine was the best available at the time. And I still do to a respect. I think counterinsurgency. is ridiculously hard. And I think the tactic of placing those small outposts was designed to get, you know, in those days we talked about it as a cop on every corner, right? Get, you know, the rule of law and order out into the hinterlands so that we can control those

spaces or at least compete for them, right? And so when you see things like, you know, cop Keating or, you know, and I had, you know, in my 82nd airborne days, you know, I had two outposts with a company headquarters that I shared with a Polish company, a Polish airborne company. It's a whole different story, a whole different leadership lessons there. Right. So you've got two platoon outposts and then a platoon plus company headquarters that shares a forward operating base with a Polish airborne company. And then I've got these rifle platoons that literally, you know, nine months out of the year, you can't drive to them. Right. You know, the wadis fill up and you can't get these, you know,

10,000 pound humvees, up armored humvees down these dirt paths that are flooded. And so these guys can get stuck there with only aircraft able to touch them. Right. And so if you're asking me to argue the doctrine, I would say, I think the idea was correct, which was we assume more risk in order to connect more deeply with the population so that we can compete with that population or for that population. Right, right. With the enemy, with the Taliban in those days. I think that was the right approach.

The application of it was not always the result that we want. Right. And so I would say that, you know, Colonel Bill Osland, I don't know if you know him, but he, you know, he pushed back on some of that, you know, when people started arguing that the coin doctrine, you know, was a mistake and that he as a commander should have changed those things. And that was the only doctrine we had at that point to separate the enemy from the people. Right. So I think it was the right answer if you're nation building. Now the different

question might be should we have been nation building? Right. And so there I don't know the right answer, but that's what we did. Yeah. Fascinating. Did that answer your question? It did. It did. Yeah. It did. And tell us about during the, I guess maybe the tail end of this deployment brushing across the IED task force. Yeah. Yeah. So we, in 101st, we, we, we basically went berm to Mosul. And so for the old timers, we crossed the berm from, you know, Kuwait to Iraq and then did the thunder runs. And we were air-assaulting in on top of third ID and jumping from, you know, city to city or urban center

to urban center and fighting those urban fights and getting on helicopters and flying to the next one, right? And we end up in Mosul as kind of the end of it. And so now we're in this fob, you know, which is really, it was like a, it was like Camp Zed is what we called it because somebody was trying to steal copper wire out of the, you know, the lights before we got there and he got fried. And so there's literally a burnt corpse where my platoon is supposed to bed down, like hanging up in the wires, right? So our first task is to, you know, kind of clean up our living space.

So we called it Camp Zed because Zed's dead. That's the kind of dark humor you get, you know, in the military, particularly in those days. And I can remember doing things like gator patrols. Do you remember the gaiters, the little, like a little, look like little lawnmowers, you know, with a trunk in the back? And I can remember three, two, three o'clock in the morning. pulling my shift, right? So

platoon leader with an RTO and a saw in the front of this thing, driving through the streets of Mosul at 2 o'clock on a gator? On a gator. You know, keeping the piece. Just making sure everything's okay. Yeah, so gator is like an industrial, like slow ATV in a way, I guess. It's the best way to.

It's more like a golf car. Yeah, that's a better way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was all we had in the infantry these days. We didn't have any vehicles. Yeah. And so we were trying to, you know, to patrol, cop on every corner, can you separate the enemy from the populace. And I can remember we were starting to hear of this thing called the improvised explosive device. And I honestly didn't really appreciate it or understand it in those days. We were driving around and, you know, no skin vehicles, you know, inside.

Yeah. Every, every rifle company had one, you know, cargo humvee. Yeah. And so we'd just be in the back of that, you know, squads at a time moving around. and we started seeing new units that were starting to rotate in to rip us out, right? After 13 months in theater, ripping us out, having these like welded plates coming with their hungies. And we were like, that's not a bad idea. You know, stopping the bullets. It's good, you know. And I can remember in that period, this small team, you know, walked into Camp Zed. And they were in civilian clothes, you know, clearly packing pistols on their hip.

And the look about them was they just look different. And those of us that have seen really competent, intelligent operators, which when you start working inside of the special operations community, just become almost a character, just a dime a dozen everywhere you look. But they're different. And the confidence that they had when they walked in as a 23-year-old platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division, I immediately knew I wanted to be a leader like that.

Like whatever that was that they had, like I needed to earn that, whatever that is. And so I was kind of fan-bullying a little bit as these three, you know, guys walk in and, you know, they're wearing like safari land holsters, you know, and they got, you know, Columbia shirts on. And one of them had a 45 cult cocked. Like, that was insane to me. Like a cocked, like a hot weapon that was just roaming around, you know. We're standing around kind of the terrain model that we have of our battle space, which aren't know if we called it battle space in those days, the area that we were responsible for.

And they were just asking us questions about what we've been seeing with, you know, trigger wires and, you know, improvised explosive devices. And we had started to have some of these initial kind of like pop blasts that would go off, take a tire, you know, maybe give you some fragmentation, you know, injuries. But nothing really all that interesting. It was kind of like a claim or whether you would hit us, which, you just, let's be careful. and having this conversation with them, and they were picking our brains about how we were seeing the operational environment

and how we were seeing the threat. And I don't know if we gave them any valuable information at all because we had no idea who they were, what they were talking about. And I remember as they were talking and as I'm being T-Qed, which we learned to think of it as T-Q like 15 years later by this incredibly impressive dude. who I just wanted to be like when I grow up. And he said, well, what are you doing after this?

And I was like, I'm going to the captain's career course. He's like, well, if you're interested and you know, kind of trying this out, you'll give us a call, right? I didn't think much about it. He gave out that card. I heard to, you know, about a dozen or so guys as he roamed around and saw people that, you know, just were interested in what he was thinking, you know, what he was working on. One of my buddies ended up calling that card and ended up inside the Aesome

Warfare group back in the old task force IED at IED days and I don't know how true the story is except I've heard it from a couple of different guys now but um I said what was it like and he goes well the vast part of you know the greater part of selection in those days was trying to find the unit you got a call you said yeah show up at this you know this pay phone on this corner at this place you know and and this guy will come and pick you up and so the hardest part about finding the unit was finding the unit yeah and it was in the old prison on on Fort Meade and so it already looked like you could get there. So it was just this really interesting first contact that I had.

I'd run into ODAs in my ground war experience with the 101st. I'd run into Rangers. I got the opportunity to see our special operations community employed as they were intended to be employed. So I got to see what a special forces officer as an ODA team leader was doing on the ground. I got to see what a Ranger platoon leader was doing on the ground. I got to see, you know, these select special mission units that are, you know, and how they're operating.

And what I noticed was there's just a different caliber of individual that ends up, you know, getting into those units. It's a different mentality. And I don't know what it is in particular, but I've been chasing it and fanboying it since 2001. Yeah. They just look different. After the invasion, you spent some time as an IOBC instructor.

And then it's off to the 82nd. In another deployment, tell us about getting to the 80 deuce and deploying to Afghanistan. Yeah, so it was a whirlwind. First of all, I don't want to blanch over the IOBC experience. I wanted to ask you about that. You go back as an instructor. Now you have combat experience. So Afghanistan's been going on for about a year and

half when you and when you go into Iraq or about a year when you or two years 2001 mark 2003 you go into a rock how long was your tour in Iraq 13 months 13 months which is an exceptionally long time to spend it wasn't those days so now you go to iobc is iobc changing because of people like you coming back with experience yes the short answer is yes and so we we had to redesign how we were training our lieutenants you know and so you got to pick and choose it's always trade all So do you want to have a two-week, large, dug-in defensive operation like we used to do in large ground combat? Or do you want to spend two weeks in an urban center teaching them how to survive in the fight they're in? Right.

Right. And so we started to transition the military from more of a large-scale ground combat operational force to, you know, much more that coin CT footing that we saw throughout the GWAT for the next 20 years or so. some amazing experiences that I got there and as a leader, some of the most humbling experiences for me to understand, you know, who was volunteering at this time. I kind of felt like I'm a bit of the pre-GWAT generation. I joined the military before all this happened and just kind of thought this is exciting. I like what I'm doing, whereas these guys were a little bit different.

These were lieutenants, you know, a lot of them were senior non-commissioned officers that were going green to gold in my unit that I got to work with. And these were dedicated people. These were believers in what we were doing and why we were there and the importance of it. And that was a formative experience for me. But what I really wanted to comment there was I wanted that assignment because in those days, you came out of your platoon leader job, which most of us did 13 months of combat. And it was about, you know, the 18th Airborne Corps at least did that.

And then you went to the captain's career course for, you know, six to nine months. And then you were immediately getting turned to another brigade and going right back for another year. Right. And so we wanted to have a child at that point. And so we took that assignment, you know, we actually fought for it, tried out for it, so that I could be home when she was born because not many people were able to do that in those days. You were gone. That was it.

And so I got to be there for the birth of my child and then showed up at the age. 82nd Airborne. You know, she's 15 months old at this point. Another showed up on her Friday, took command on a Monday, you know, did inventories over the weekend, didn't really do good inventories, I might add. It was all going to combat and it was all going to be a combat loss, you know, at some point. And so it was the get accountability, you know, the last company commander had, you know, fired, unfortunately. There was 32 UCMJ packets sitting on my desk when I took the job and we're going to JRTC the next week, you know, to train up for this 15-month deployment. amazing experience because we had amazing leadership.

And so that Martin Schweitzer, Colonel Martin Schweitzer was the brigade commander there, ended up being one of the senior officers in the 82nd Airborne Division, but kind of a legend in the infantry himself. And he took that brigade of newly formed leaders. I mean, really, that fourth brigade, 82nd Airborne Division was just getting formed, being pulled off of different brigades inside the 82nd. And he did a train up with all these twond these new leaders and all these new soldiers and he walked us through that pipeline and then we went and did a 15-month

rotation into Afghanistan. Can you say why the former captain was relieved? If I remember correctly, there was a pornography ring in the 82nd. Oh, yes. You remember that? Yes, I do. Did that happen when they were overseas or did was that just a general? That was a brag. Oh, it was a brag. Yeah, it was a gay porn ring. Yeah, there was it was a it was a it was a it was a it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a I don't even know if it would be illegal these days. I'd have to look at it, I guess. It was like the notorious, like, man in the pink hat. And he was, like, approaching soldiers just around the Fayetteville area and recruited a bunch of dudes to do gay porn.

Okay. So I had, I, here's what I knew about it. So I report to, I didn't, and I didn't want to know anymore because I, there could be more than what porn ring. Yeah. And Fort Bragg. Yeah, it's true. I have to point that out. That's fair.

That's fair. So, you know, Colonel Schweitzer, as I take over this company, he goes, he goes, the organization has some troubles that is going to require some good leadership. And so, you know, once you get your hands around it, come back and talk to me and let's hear your plan, right? I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea what I was walking into. I didn't even really understand the full story until, you know, a year or so later.

But it, to me, the hallmark, and I think, you know, Colonel Schweitzer, General Schweitzer, you tired as I think he nailed it. They needed good leadership. And I don't know if I was that good leadership, but I know there were some amazing non-commissioned officers that circled around me and really, you know, grabbed those young platoon leaders. And we formed a quick cadre, you know, just really tight. And it was interesting because, you know, really that E6 and above, we'd all been the war at this point, you know, some of us a couple of times. I hadn't been. I'd only been once. but we'd spent enough time at war that, you know, squad live fires had a different feel to them. You know, doing your train up going out.

And I can remember at one point walking up on a squad leader, you know, and his team leader had just, you know, thrown a temper tantrum and, you know, chewing guys out, you know. And I watched this squad leader just cool and calm walk up to this squad and go, did you hear sergeant? I don't even remember his name now. Did you hear sergeant so-and-so when he keeps telling you to get cut? covering concealment and and they're like you know yes sergeant and he goes we're never going to tell you that again we're telling you to get covering concealment so that you come home yeah if you

don't want to do that we'll have to write a letter but we're not going to yell about it anymore we don't have any more time and the boys took that to heart and so that that non-commissioned officer corps in those days was unreal yeah that's one of the differences i think that you were alluding to between special operations and conventional. I'm not saying these are like bad soldiers per se, but you're going overseas with them regardless, you know. And so you have to figure out how to use your leadership and make do with what you have because you're not getting new guys.

Yeah. Right. And you can't RFS them. You can't, you know. Yeah. Well, to your point, you know, I had 32 UCMJ packets sitting on my desk. Yeah. And I don't know if it was the right approach, but, you know, me and my first sergeant,

you know, Derek Gondick, who ended up being my command sergeant. major in the 25th Infantry Division, which you know, poor him. But we decided that we'd rather only have who we wanted in the line than have to be forced to deal with people who didn't want to be there. Right. And so you could join my headquarters platoon anytime you wanted. So, okay, so you were giving guys an out if they didn't want to be on the line. I would tell them, I would tell platoon sergeants that if you'd rather go without him, you're not going to get a replacement, but if you're

If it's a disruption and it's disrupting you from preparing your team to go to war, bring them to headquarters, we'll have plenty of stuff to do, and they will earn their way into another squad or another platoon. It ended up being, I think, a success story for us because what we found was that when the guys started getting put on that headquarters team and being given the opportunity to earn their way back into the line, And we used to say, you know, living in a rifle platoon is a privilege. It's not a right.

Right. And so you've got to earn your way back down there. And only a platoon sergeant can walk into the first sergeant and say, I want to take that guy and put them in my platoon. And so every one of their NCOs would rotate through who had, you know, headquarters platoon that day doing all the details. So whatever the detail was that needed to be done, the rifle platoons are out training. And if you want to go out and train and you want to get ready to go to war with those guys,

we want you to. but we can't force you to want that. And so as your NCOs were rotating through that headquarters platoon, they would find talent. And they would find people that they were connecting with and leadership that they were responding to. And they would say, you know, they would walk into Derek and say,

hey, I want this guy down in my squad. And suddenly that guy would get removed and be an amazing soldier, amazing paratrooper. You said something that I think is kind of funny right now where people, like there's a lot of mythology built around. the number of times somebody's been to war or how many deployments they've been on and the idea that you know a lot of the conventional units were doing 12 plus 16 sometimes 18 month deployments and it's like well i've been to war one time or two times and then somebody from the soft community

has been like well i've been 12 times it's like yeah those were three to six month trips compared to this 18 month trip so you know the whole idea of you know talking about experience based on number of deployments, it's such a fallacy right now. Yeah, to your point, in my opinion, I never felt one was easier or harder than the other, although I struggled more in the special operations community than I did in the conventional community just because of the talent that you're just surrounded with. Right. I'm average on my best day inside the special operations community.

Just being able to keep my job and stay on the roster, that was a pretty successful week. right um but the operational tempo in those special operations units it feels like a 15 month tour went down sure four months sure and high intense jobs i mean again not taking anything away from special operations it's dangerous job right you know um it's just it's sometimes it's like comparing apples and oranges it is it's uh but i would say the effect i think is is is somewhat more kin, then we give it credit, at least from my experiences. Doing 15 months in a leadership position in the 82nd Airborne division with dispersed cops on the Pakistani border and, you know, dealing with a Polish counterpart who gets promoted three days before he shows up so he can outrank me

on the fob, right? Like that kind of, of an operational tempo, it's a little bit slower. And yet the challenges were just as exhausting. Right. You know, and, you know, and, you know, and, And then you transition to now you're, let's say, a Ranger team commander, and you're doing a four-month DFC, a four-month train-up, a four-month ready unit. You're constantly on an 18-hour sequence. It feels like you're always deployed. Right. And so even when you're home, I know I'm rotating back into generally that same battle space,

and I'm going to be ripping my second or third Ranger Battalion brother up there. and we all kind of get into our rotation with our classmates, right? And so you come back from that deployed for combat with task force, and it's not like you take two weeks of leave, and then you go right back to your computer Monday morning, and you're tracking the same targets, you're tracking the same intelligence, you're going through the same ideas,

except you're doing individual training, and then you do ready training, and then you're two weeks leave, and then you're right back in it. Right. And so I think the comparison is, in the early days of GWAT conventional units, the leadership would deploy 12, 15, 18 months, who knows, right?

The officers and the senior non-commissioned officers would come back, get dispersed to the next unit, train them right up, and then go do another 15, so it was basically year-on, year-off for those conventionals. But they don't have that year off. They're training the next unit that they're going to take to war, putting them through a JRTC. and an NTC. And so, you know, going through an M-LAT or going, you know, going through a jort cycle inside

of the task force feels like a 12-month, you know, high-intensity op run for the entire time you're inside the units. Right. And it feels the same way to me as a company commander in the 80-second Airborne Division. It's just I've got a little bit of a different focus. Maybe more coin here, more CT there. Right.

So tell us a bit about that deployment to Afghanistan with 82nd. Honestly, one of my quieter deployments. So we were, what sticks out is I had my first suicide on that deployment. In your unit on deployment. Yeah. That's terrible. Sticks out. And I'll tell you what tears me apart to this day about that.

We were in Gosme at the time. So we really hadn't moved out to Waziqa yet, which is where our fob would, our, our would be located my you know our company five we can really you know circle of hesko's in a burn pit in the middle of it he's on guard tower um seeming suicide you know rifle underneath the rifle underneath the the throat right and a guy comes in to the tent that you know Derek and I and the first sergeant commander and you know my my clerk right and basically I hear him waking up you know Derek with, you know, so-and-so shot himself, and I'm just going to leave names out of this, but, you know, so-and-so

shot himself, and I hear it, and we all kind of like, what? Like, you know, an ND? Like, you know, what happened here? No, he committed suicide on the, you know, in a guard tower, on guard watch. And, you know, to this day, you know, it strikes me that, you know, I was in contact with his mother for a number of years. And she doesn't really understand what happened. And, you know, and, you know, It was, I felt so empty and I felt so helpless because I don't know what happened. You didn't have some answers. And I look back on, you think about those crazy stories, those crazy Vietnam stories, right, that we hear growing up in this community of, you know, the stuff that happened and, you know,

that really what happened there is, you know. And so I feel like, or I'm afraid that she thinks we were trying to cover something up. Right. That, you know, something terrible happened. and we tried to cover that up. And the reality couldn't be any farther from the truth, but I couldn't convince that I don't know what happened. I don't think that's all that uncommon.

I mean, the survivors are always left with these unsettling questions that just can't be answered. You know, that's like literally God knows, and that's probably the only person that can answer some of those things. Well, and then you go through as the command team, you know, so taking this back to a leadership perspective, you go to the, okay, do you give full honest? honors. Right. You know, like, how does that work? Right. Do you have a eulogy? Do you give a 21

gun salute? Do you get married? Do you get buried at Arlington? Like this, you know, this paratrooper gave great service to his nation. And we didn't understand in those days that maybe this was beyond control. Right. Maybe this was beyond his control. Maybe we had, you know, we don't know what happened, and that's going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. But it was a eye-opening. and awakening. So it really was, like, even like his close teammates and his squad, this came as a shock. Yeah. Wow.

That's rough. At least from my observation. Yeah. And my conversation. And, you know, and you can't blame the family either because there are enough military cover-ups that get exposed, right? Then everything starts to look like a cover-up. It's hard not to seek meaning when it seems meaningless.

Right. And, you know, as a parent now of, I mean, that that young paratrooper wasn't much younger than my daughter who sits here with me right now. Right. As a parent, I can only, I can't honestly imagine what that was like. And it was the first time in my life as a leader that I felt empty and helpless. And I didn't really know how to deal with that now because how do you lead your organization through that? Which we've been in theater for like three weeks.

Yeah. Right? Like we haven't even really moved into our, you know, to our FOB yet. we know that this is probably, this is at least a 12-month or probably going to 15. Like we were getting word of that almost immediately. And so this is how we start that rotation, right? So that puts an immediate on it. But what it did for me is it really perked my ears up to, you know,

how do you keep your pulse, right, on your people? Right. And this is what I think, you know, conventional command teams in particular, you know, really spend a lot of their, you know, thank goodness, a lot of their time on. You've got a platoon in a cop where they're just getting shot at or mortared or, you know, they're just sitting there. Right. There's not much they can do to protect themselves from that. Right.

And they're there for nine months, 12 months. And what I started to internalize is we now know this thing called post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. And I will constantly tell you that just because we all have post-traumatic stress, and I do believe that every single service, member who served overseas or trained to go overseas probably has post-traumatic stress. Whether it's a disorder is a question of degrees in a lot of cases. But it's our post-traumatic stress is the reason why I think we're alive. You know, when I hear the car backfire, it's the immediate action that I took that saved my life and the life of my friends, right?

And so there's goodness in that post-traumatic stress. but then you watch that play out when you are helpless to do anything about it. And I started to recognize that rotation that those who were able to go out and be proactive and patrol and hunt and fight the enemy and do the things they came there to do, their level of disorder in my observations is lessened. Those who are, you know, we used to jokingly call them the Fobbits, right? you know the folks who never left candahar never left boggerm well i spent a couple of weeks on those places and it was terrifying to me you know that all of a sudden you know the front gate gets

detonated by a vb i and you and you get turned into pink mist like you know that the mortar comes down in the middle of your chew right and there's nothing it's just all random right right and so that that post-traumatic stress really started to highlight itself for me on that rotation and how do you confront that right you know that as a leadership team what do you rotate your people around do you go see them how does that work i struggled with that a lot i think you know one of the other things like i have a theory that like suicide ideation is sort of memetic right it's it's viral it's mentally viral that once one once one person in a in a group uses it it sort It puts the

It puts the thought in people's head that maybe this is a solution. Were you guys concerned with that at all? Was there, like, are there means that the command can use attempt to, like, inoculate their soldiers? Yeah, like, is it catching?

I can tell you the non-traditional things we did, and then I can maybe speak a little bit about from the leadership perspective about how I think we thought through that. So the USO, right, things rotate around and something that I always laugh about is we lived in a place where only a ring route could hit you once a week and then of course it's red air like 90% of the time and so when an aircraft comes through it's kind of like you know Christmas is coming and everyone's there and one day I

can remember it's Christmas and birds are landing males coming off you know and outcomes you know five or six and they were ring card girls from the UFC right and they were they were They were coming down to hang out with, you know, paratroopers on, and we were definitely in the hinterlands. Yeah. You know, and all of them were wearing white T-shirts and body armor in 110-degree, you know, Afghan summer. And so when they took off their body armor, they were very popular. And everybody wanted to get pictures and hang out. So there's that kind of just touching home a little bit.

And I know that's a little off color, right? But that's war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And those are the, and oh, by the way, all that's happening around 100 by 100 foot burn pit. That's been smoldering for the last, you know, nine months, right? Which will hopefully get into that a little bit.

So there's all those USO opportunities. There was the psychologists that I thought were very helpful that. And once again, you know, very attractive psychologist showed up and everybody wanted to go talk to the psychologist, right? And we're, absolutely. go talk to the psychologist. They just wanted to talk to an American woman. Yeah, at that point, I think. So those types of, you know, kind of morale boosting things occurred,

getting ice cream down to the guys, right? But I think the most important thing that we could do is leadership, which, by the way, I had one with a platoon starting to use my call sign to call in a bird to get ice cream. I thought it was amazing use of power. It was awesome. Good choice. And I thought the best thing leadership could do, though, was keep the guys proactive.

I never liked the term presence patrol. I never liked the idea that you're just going to go out and wait for someone to shoot at you and react to it or blow you up and then we're going to deal with that. That makes no sense to me. Even if you're telling them, go get a six pack of Coke at the local bazaar, like go find me something that gives them a mission and a purpose and a task that allows them to go out and do the thing they volunteered, typically three or four times. to do. If you let that dog hunt what it's supposed to do, you will be shocked with American

ingenuity. And I found that those who are able to actively go out and perform the duties that they wanted to do, that they volunteered to do, those were the guys that, or at least that's the way I thought that leadership could do its best to increase morale. Yeah. Or deal with post-traumatic stress. So let's transition into going to rope, which I believe, what Ranger orientation program today called RASP 2. RASP 1. RASP 1. No, no, RASP 2, you're right.

RASP 1 is the RIPORIP. You're right, you're right. And now there's a RASP ILA. So enlisted go to RIP now RASP. Yep. Officers and NCOs go to ROTS now RASP 2. Yes, sir. Yeah, yeah, right on.

Yeah, so when I was in Afghanistan for those 15 months, I had to make the decision of whether I wanted to, go to SFAS or whether I wanted to, you know, try the Ranger Regiment or whether I wanted to stay, you know, where I was, which I was having an absolute blast. And I decided that after having watched those communities in action, what I felt I wanted to apply myself to the most was that Ranger experience. And so, you know, if it absolutely positively must be destroyed in one period of darkness, you know, these are the guys to do it. And so that's what I wanted to get involved with. And so I was fortunate enough to earn a slot in rope. And I can remember it was the first time you realized

you weren't that special. Like when you go to a, you know, to get selected for that kind of an orientation program, you're, you're clearly in the top, you know, 10% of your peer group. And so you've been running, you know, pretty comfortably. Right. In those organizations, you've been doing fairly well. Right. you know, playing a team ball, you know, every single day. And then you show up and you suddenly realize that just being average here is a great day. Right. And I'm not the fastest runner.

I'm not the best road marcher. I'm not the best rope climber. I can't shoot the best. I can't, whatever it is, there is somebody seated, you know, sit it seated right next to you. Yeah. That can do it 10 times better than you. And the professionalism of the Ranger non-commission. officer just struck me. The professionalism, the competence, and the thing about the Ranger

Regiment that I find most special is everybody's a Ranger first. You know, your cook is a five-star Michelin-trained, you know, chef. Yeah. And he jumps out of planes with a gun, and he seizes the objective first. And then he starts cooking up dinner for everybody. Like, the fact that you're a Ranger first, there is no second-class citizen inside of the regiment. Everybody has a tambouret. Everyone goes through the same selection process. Everyone goes through the same training evolutions. And watching that cadre of, I mean, said Adam Nash was a rip instructor.

Adam Nash was, oh, he's, I'm a little afraid to say this out loud. He was a halacious rip instructor. I can only imagine. Yes. He was, he was a great first sergeant. He was good at his job. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying, I mean, that's their job is to put you through your paces, right?

And for those in the audience who don't know, Adam Nash, he's like eight feet tall Best Ranger competition, you know, literally made it look like, you know, Mike and Ike, you know, I'm about like this tall, you know, bald better, can't run for shit. You know, you got Adam Nash who's like, I'm like a Clydesdale, but everything works. I had Alex Capradi. So Alex Capradi was my, was my rope, my rope senior in CEO. That core of non-commissioned officers just set the tone of what this organization. expects out of you and the immediate emotion that gets you know raised at least with me is i'll sweep the floors like whatever job you'll offer me just to be around these guys i mean these guys are literally my heroes you know these are these are guys who you know mogadish you

these are guys who jumped into rhino these are i mean these are guys who went after uh uh what was her name jessica lynch thank you apologize for you know jessica lynch's family for forgetting that. I have friends who were on that mission, right? Like, these are literally my heroes. And I'm standing, I'm in the barracks, you know, ripped barracks, which broke barracks is just a room down the street from ripped barracks, right? And I'm in this room with three or four other officers who are clearly better than me. They're clearly smarter. They're clearly better looking. They're clearly faster. I mean, just everything about them, you know, I know I'm already on the BT just getting in the door. And to be around that caliber of person,

it forces you to either give your best or get out of the way. You just can't even come into work that day without giving it your all. And so that rope experience, I thought, was one of the best introductions to a special operations organization. And I've seen a few different selections now. And I've helped build a couple of them at this point. And I felt that the, the, the, the rope that then became rams, and Rasp was even better, was such a great culture inculcation for everybody that you bring into the regiment and you are a ranger first.

That's why they called it indoctrination. That's right. Yeah. That's right. And so at the end of that selection when they're like, you know, well, hey, I know you came here to be a ranger company commander and to go down to a ranger battalion. But we don't have room in one of those battalions for about nine or 12 months. Would you be willing to serve on regimental staff? And the answer is just, of course, yeah, whatever you want me to do to stand in this door, I'm in.

In a sense, it's like good that you get to learn a lot about the organization from like a top-down level, maybe before you take a position at the battalion. Yeah, you know, that was probably the effect. But, you know, for me, what I remember of it was being around guys like, you know, Rich Clark, Colin Tooley, Marcus Evans, I mean, just these, these legends of the community when they're you know majors you know Ray Devons and I mean just these guys that raised me as a young officer inside the regiment to the best of their ability right no fault of their own that I'm all fucked up it's they did their best but I also started to learn that I had different interests

in the regiment so when you put you know you put someone on RHQ on Reginald headquarters staff it's like a nightmare for an infantry officer right you want to be in the three shop that's where everybody wants to do ops yeah yeah do ops everybody wants to be there. I was the assistant S-1. Nobody wants to be the assistant S-1 at Ranger Regiment. And I suddenly found I really liked it. Right. Like I really enjoyed the manning and the talent and understanding how to get that talent and how to align that talent and how to put that talent with the right teammates to get the most out of the team and, you know, understanding how the senior officers and NCOs and those types of organizations, that's what they consider to be one of their

primary responsibilities is getting the right leadership dynamic for that team. You know, when a commander breaks his leg on a jump and you've got to bring in a new, you know, a new major to command that team for Afghanistan, or Fallujah, for a four-month rotation at high-op tempo, like, who's the right guy? Right. And that's the answer that they'll always give. Well, who's the right guy. Right. They don't care who's supposed to do it. They don't care who's next in line. It's who's the right guy to lead these rangers in combat. And they build teams around that. And those teams get, I mean, we've heard about it from Stan McChrystal now and, you know, teams of teams, right?

That style of focused leadership is what, you know, from the Solutions 21 perspective now as a leadership consultant, I really hark on with, you know, the CEOs and presidents that I work on in all these private organizations, you need to spend the most of your time talking to your people and understanding how to align teams and how to get leaders bought into the vision that you've got for where this needs to go. It's not in front of your computer sending emails. It's not in the boardroom making those decisions. If you've built your staff the way you should, they will do those things for you. I learned that from watching senior non-commissioned officers and officers in the Ranger Regiment build task forces.

It's interesting because, and speaking purely from a pre-GWRanger perspective, you know, you would see, for the people don't know, like when you first become an officer, you cannot go to Ranger Vitagel. Like, you have to have a command someplace else. Right. You know, and then you come in. You've got to prove you can do it in the conventional force before you get the opportunity to try out for it in those special operations community. And it's very interesting seeing different.

platoon leaders and how they either adapt or don't adapt once they get to Ranger Battalion, you know, and they've got this platoon of, you know, highly motivated, you know, a bunch of kind of knucklehead privates, but also, you know, your team leaders, your squad leaders, you're a platoon sergeant. And whether, whether they could stand back, because everybody wants to look good, right? You want, that's your time to shine when you go to a Ranger battalion and you want to look good. But it was the guys who learned that if they step back and facilitate it, right? They facilitated these Rangers doing what they're doing.

They were going to look good. The Rangers were going to make them look good compared to the guys who felt that they needed to imprint their vision onto these guys who had been doing this job nonstop. Yeah. Since before they got there. Yeah. And how they adapted and if they could accept that they weren't really the start of the show. Right. Well, it's kind of, I don't know if you guys know this, but the Dodgers beat the Yankees a little bit of going a world series.

I didn't know. Yeah, it kind of pissed me off because I was a Yankees fan for a long time. I was telling her I used to go to the old Bronx Stadium here a while back. I don't remember the dude's name, but he hit a Grand Slam home run in the first inning, not first name, but in game one. And that's an A-team player on the Dodgers, right? That means most of that roster is B-team players. Right. And then you've got four or five A-team players.

And the Yankees have the same thing, right? And officers in particular that go into a special operations organization, the regiment in my experiences, the first thing they're confronted with is they're accustomed to being the stark quarterback. Wherever they were at, They were a star quarterback. They were definitively top three in their division. You know, so for those who don't know what a division is, you know, about 20,000 personnel,

which means that's a whole lot of platoon leaders and company commanders. They were top three of that division to get the tryout, right? And so you get to that unit knowing that you're elite and your select and suddenly you're on a team of all guys who hit Grand Slam home runs every single day. And I'd love to even talk about, you know, those critical. crazy knucklehead privates because there's no crazy knucklehead private in the Ranger Regiment. By the time you hit a team, you're a Tab Spec 4. You're a Tab Specialist 4 generally by the time you're really rotating on the aircraft. I don't know if that was your experiences, but mine was you show up as a PFC.

You go immediately into Ranger School preparation. You then go to Ranger School preparation while going through all your AIT and finishing schools and Huli schools and all that other good stuff that's going on. And then by the time you come back and then go on a rotation where you're probably working backside support inside the targeting cell, you know, run an errands until you get your chance to go on a couple of missions that we know are going to be good for you to break in on, right? By the time that guy is going out the back of an aircraft, he's probably a tab spec for it. Was that your experiences?

I mean, by the time guys are going out of the aircraft, I mean, we had guys graduate from Rip and go out of the back of the aircraft. A week later. It used to be that it was like you had to spend your time. You were probably going to be on the line for eight months to a year before you were allowed to go to ranger school. I want, and I mean, this isn't because that's closer to my experience. Not because I was anything special just because I passed a PT test. They sent me to Ranger's school right away, which was good and bad.

But prior to that, yeah, I think there was a thought that you'd, depending on the first sergeant's philosophy, that you're going to stay there like a year to two years before you go to Ranger's school. And that's why we had a deficiency of Ranger tabbed guys in the company at that time. Yeah. No tab, no slab. I don't know if they still do that anymore, but that was the old days. But yeah, so the greatest thing that I really pulled from that experience is you have to eat a whole lot of humble pie. immediately. You're coming in with an 80-second combat patch. I walked in there with an 80-second combat patch, 1001st combat patch. Yeah. I mean, 27, 28 months of deployed combat time at that

point, right? I'm feeling pretty confident in my abilities. Yeah. See team player, day one. Like, don't even know how to, don't even know what the acronym is on. I hope you didn't wear an assault badge when you showed up. My first introduction, right, was a senior non-commissioned officer looking at me going, to get that in stereo before you talk to me. So, yeah, of course I had a result there, but not on top, on the bottom, where it belonged, in that unit. And then, so you mentioned you really enjoyed S-1, you're learning about the regiment,

but then you had this rear-D job that you said was just horrific. Yeah, that was the worst job in my career. And so, and I say worse because think about your, you know, my job. is to be the voice of the command, you know, rear, literally. And the times that they really need me are when we have killed and wounded rangers. Right. And so it's caring for those families,

it's connecting those families to the resources and the special operations community really lays it out, right? And some of the most, you know, heartbreaking events are funerals. And you go to these funerals, and you're the escorts, the escort for a general officer who's presenting the flag,

which in those days, General Votel did almost all of the ones that I was on for whatever, I don't know if that was just the rotation or that was his decision. And you're dealing with these parents that are in one step so proud of what their son has done. And on the other, just, we've just devastated a family. Right.

I mean, they're never going to recover a change from this. And the toll, just the emotional toll that that took on the rear detachment, I really got to understand it. And I really got to see it. And it was compressed. And so in the 82nd or in the 101st, you know, a conventional unit, those, you know, those 5 KIA, those 30, I think it was 32 VSI, very seriously wounded. So we're in Walter Reed. We're in San Antonio. I'm flying to visit those rangers who have life-altering injuries,

like we'll never live without care kind of injuries. You're working with the wife who has small children, the parents, and the emotional toll I watched that take on our rangers going through that, and I only started to understand the emotional toll that was taking on me years later. Right. And that is, you know, when you think back, to the things that really trigger my, you know, like my post-traumatic stress disorder, the thing, it's children. Yeah. You know, kids getting hurt and watching children,

you know, at a coffin and, you know, and it's probably because of my own children, right? Yeah, yeah. But it's a, it's a very much my, my nightmares are always about kids. Something happens to a kid and, and to be with someone's kid, you know, to escort that body home, which literally you're talking about your Ranger buddy, and you know, It's your Ranger Buddy that's going to escort you home. We're going to make sure of that if we can. And then to surround yourself with the family that is so proud. Like I literally, you know, Jason Dalke, I'll just, you know, give this one.

Jason Dalke, we're in Jacksonville for his funeral, but I remember correctly, Jacksonville Naval Air Station. And beautiful chapel. Jason's remains come in. The naval commander had everyone in dress, whites from disembarkment of the plane all the way to the chapel and then all the way off of the installation. And then when you got off the installation, I'm in the lead vehicle with, you know, the police and the fire department. They shut down the interstate. I-75 North was

shut down and they were escorting us with, I was, and I'm in the lead vehicle and I can remember coming up this little hill and looking in the rear view and General Votel is sitting behind me and all I see is Patriot riders. So just hundreds and hundreds of motorcycle riders. And then behind them this endless convoy of Jackson Naval Air Station. These are our Navy brothers and sisters. And just I'm getting a little emotional just thinking about right now. Jason Dalke was this amazing, I mean, I didn't know Jason. I, you know, I, I unfortunately only got the stories of Jason. And when you listen to his wife, go, I mean, look at him. I remember this plain as day, his picture in full gear. You know, we all take the operator picture. We can get into theater, right? So we're in our

full kit in the talk, and in the jock, and someone snaps that picture. Well, Jason literally looked like a poster child. Like, this is the ranger. This is our modern day ranger on the battle He looks like he'll tear you apart from there. And he died doing what he loved doing. And she knows that. And how heartbreaking for them and for the family. And that was the worst job ever. And yet it probably made me a better commander.

Yeah, because you understand the gravity of all this. That's what it sounds like you took away from it. When we make mistakes in our business, it can result. in life altering, right, changes. Right. So after this ordeal, you become a company commander in 175. Yeah, HHC 175. We're happily representing all three battalions here on the show today.

We are, we are. And we're getting together for a second and third. We're getting. I'll tell you, I always feel as an imposter inside of the Ranger community. I always feel like, you know, I never quite became one of you. like you guys are just so my heroes. And so I look at you guys and you're what I wanted to be when I grow up. And so it's been just a humbling experience.

I have very much the same sort of feeling that you do that I was just lucky to be a part of this like storied historical unit for a short period of time. Well, I feel like the unit revolved around me. They probably did. No, no. I was average everywhere I went. Yeah. Tell us about becoming HHC. company commander in 175. Yeah, so I was the Canterhaar Fusion Cell Director. So we were overseas.

I'm the Canterhaar Fusion Cell Director. I remember I worked really hard for like three or four months to make this a useful thing. And so for the, you know, for the people who don't know what the Canada Her Fusion Cell direct, the Canterhaar Fusion Cell was, it was where all the NATO soft elements, you know, white and black, were supposed to be synchronizing their efforts inside of the Kandahar, you know, battle space. The Kandahar, you know, AOR. And I was the Kanderthur fusion cell director from, you know, from task force. And so my job was to coordinate and synchronize all of these with the, with the battle space owner, which in those days was the 10th Mountain Division. I was really proud of myself because I was able to coordinate one or two

somewhat synchronized operations of delivery of humanitarian assistance. I mean, just ridiculously, you know, low output, right? And I was really proud of my ability just to put that together. And I can I remember, you know, Mike Foster, the battalion commander 175, he's like, you've run how many missions? And I was like, I've done two missions over there, you know, something like that. And he's like, sounds like, we need to find another job for you. He called me to congratulate me that he just selected me to be the HAC 175 commander. And I put a good face on it because I was disappointed that I can get a rifle. Right, right.

I wanted a rifle company. Right. And I put a good face on it. And I think, you know, I think to, you know, Mike Foster's credit, you know, he, he, he, he, he, he, He wasn't letting me get away with that. He continued to, you know, this is, you know, rare opportunity and blah, blah, blah. And I knew it was. I knew, and intellectually, I knew this was a lifetime opportunity, right?

But I was still a little disappointed. I wanted a rife. So for viewers out there who are a little confused, headquarters and headquarters company is where the mortars are located, the snipers, the wrecky guys. And then you had all this like burgeoning intelligence capability. Technical, yeah, technical support element is what we called it. TSE.

And so it became, I lovingly nicknamed the Dark Arts. And I remember Mike Foster, I think you and I were chatting about this before the show. But Mike Foster, he always had this kind of, you know, bloom where you're planted. And I always hated him for it because he planted me in a place. Right. And lo and behold, and I probably owe Mike a call at this point, you know, but he was right. You know, I think what he recognized is I wasn't quite, you know, I was just as good.

I could do it as good as them, but that wasn't where my talents lied. There was lots of people who could do that just as well, if not better than me. And in fact, I know at least five guys who can do it better than me. And here was a place that needed something a little bit different. He wanted something a little bit different. And he saw, I think, something in me that he said,

you can go and do this. Right. And so it ended up being almost a life-altering moment or experience for me where I suddenly realized you fast forward now, you know, almost 10 years later and I'm on a range and with the asymmetric warfare group doing non-standard shooting through a rental car, which that's a whole fun story. And a guy asks me, are you know, your battalion command selections coming up, are you going to the 82nd, 1001st, 173rd, the usual places that we go to before we try out for a Ranger battalion, right? And I was like, no, there's about 50 other guys in the back of my head that can command a paratroop battalion better than I can. But I think this is where my talent lies is here. And I really enjoyed it.

Right. And I really loved it. And I fell in love with H-HC. I mean, to the point where I almost tried to rebrand it, right? Whereas I just had H. Instead of, you know, H-HC. Yeah. Because Adam Nash was my C.

my senior enlisted advisor, and I was like, nobody listens to me in the headquarters. Nobody cares what Major Davis says in the headquarters. No NCR officers listening to me, but they will listen to Adam Nash. And so, Adam, I need you to command headquarters because I can't walk in the battalion commander and go, hey, sir, is what you're going to do today.

Adam Nash can as a ranger non-commissioned officer. And hotel company was where I put my emphasis, which was the dogs, the recic platoon. TSC, and how do we start changing the way that our organization connects to other intelligence organizations out there in order to give a strategic through tactical picture that then we can put strike forces on target? Which is very important because one of the challenges, I think, with whether it's work with other units or whether even working with the line is a lot of things.

times people don't know how to employ their snipers. They don't know how to employ their reckies. They don't know what their capabilities are. You know, and so a lot of times those elements, if they aren't there to like sell themselves, if they aren't there, you know, the planning is just like a lot of times the most unimaginative, right? Can be. Yeah, can be. They're after effect, right? Like this is the big show, you're the enabling. Yeah. Either that or to imagine it. Like, like, okay, the sniper's going to infill, you know, three hours plus. They're going to eliminate this guy and do this. And it's like, I'm sorry that's, you know, we appreciate that you think that we're all that.

But that might not work, right? Yeah, we're still on call of duty, right? And, you know, and even, I think for a long time, pre-Giwatt, even the commander of HAC didn't really understand the capabilities of the people who, worked for him because he was more focused on the headquarters aspect of it. Right. We just, the people who got put into HAC is like, well, we don't know where else, you know, they try them on the line or in the, you know, in line companies, we'll put them in HACC. But for you to take such an interest in, and it grew, right, because you had the TSC and

the dogs and somebody has to understand what they're capable of, sometimes what they're not capable of, and then proselytize, right, and sell them and and teach. And fight for them. And fight for them. Absolutely. It's interesting to mention it that way because you have to interface up and down the chain of command in that regard, right? Yeah.

And with my fellow company commanders who are the priority, you know, and so when you've got a rifle company that's doing, you know, a Calfax or, you know, a large combined arms live fire exercise as a team, you know, well, they need their mortars, they need their snipers, they need their dogs and training those guys and getting those guys selected because their psychological profiles are a little bit different than other Rangers. Right. Right. And so just finding the guys that psychologically fit into those teams, I got to spend so much time with the, you know, the task force psychologists and learning about, you know, human, human needs and human interactions and personality styles and understanding how,

which by the way, if you guys don't use disk at this point, you know, disc personality styles, like, I'll teach you to you because once you do it, you can't unsee it. Really? Oh, yeah, it's just I can see the personality style, which means I can understand how you like to be engaged with, how you like to be talked to, and learning all of that from the psychologists. And then, by the way, the reason why I joined this company Solutions 21 is they employ a lot of those same understanding and ideas of how to build and align leaders as we learned inside the special operations community.

So seeing that and understanding what we could be doing with these teams and how we could be connecting to the range of reconnaissance detachments and how that could be connecting to, you know, TFO and how that could be connecting to different, you know, intelligence organizations that are all trying to gain targetable fidelity on X, whatever it is. Right. And that ultimately, I think, is what grows me into the AWG where I get into strategic studies and strategic understandings. So as you finish off your time at HHC, you're going to staff college. And I think you were saying that like a waiver had to be signed because of what was going on in the war at the time. Yeah. So it was timeline management of officers and I don't want to get too deep into it. But I was fortunate enough to get hired very young. young as an officer. So I, you know, I had like three years before my major selection and then

was retained, you know, for two years after that. And so there was about three or four of us in my class. She spent five years. I did. Okay. At the regiment. Yeah. So one year. It's a good run. It was a good run. It's a longestanding officer at that point when I left. Yeah. So, you know, Chris Vanek, you know, longstanding officer. At that point, it's the end of the five year run of Davis, which was probably a blessing for some and a curse for others, I hope. But yeah, there was about five of us or so, four or five of us that came out of that same regiment class that we had to get waivers because we were too old

to go to the command and general staff college because we were already majors. Right. And so General Botel reached in again to my life and signed a letter to get us into the command of general staff college. And I was fortunate enough to also be offered the SOCOM Inter-Agencies Studies Program. where I got to spend, you know, really a year in the basement with some truly impressive, you know,

special operators, green berets, seals, you know, Rangers, you know, a couple of special mission unit guys, only 20 of them in the cohort. And we lived together trying to understand how best to interface with all of these three and four letter agencies while conducting overseas operations. And that was, you know, the GWAT was really the first time that there was a loose relationship sometimes. But really the GWAT put J-Soc and SOC, use the sock, whatever, in bed with the, because they both realized how much they needed each other. Lots of, and I hate to use the word synergies, but yeah, there was a lot of, a lot of Venn diagramming of what we were working on and how we could help each other. And we were starting in those days to understand how technology can tear us apart and bring us together.

Yeah. And that's the days when we started building, you know, Soist Nets and Socrates and coming on. off the giants and stuff like that. And so it was really interesting to watch those different organizations try to tear down those barriers in order to integrate the intelligence picture in order to optimize the effects on the ground. I know we kind of skip, we're at the college now, but I want to, those five years that you are right now, especially in headquarters.

So a lot of things you're talking about did not exist last week done, right? They were, we had mortars and snipers. Okay. Right. And so many. That's plenty to keep you busy, by the way. But what I mean is, is that the regiment very much, like, professionalized. Very much realized the things that it needed and grew up to be more than just the

light infantry. The lead in the best light infantry in the world. The shock troops, right, for airfield seizures. What were some of the things? things when you were there, what were some things that you were impressed by? What were some of the biggest growths you saw where regiment really came into it selling? Yeah, so I think, you know, the 800-pound gorilla is what it's commonly referred to, right? So, Ranger Regiment, the 800-pound gorilla of the special operations community. Because the G-WAT and the opt-tempo and the area that

we were at, we couldn't just have, you know, unit platoons out there, you know, three or four of them. You know, we needed 30 of them. And so, well, you can't grow, you know, a special operations team overnight. And we were even trying to grow the regiment in those days. Delta companies, you know, started coming online in the days that I was there. And we were trying to grow Ranger. Well, what we were doing was essentially taking a platoon from the three companies. and, you know, taking, you know, just basically making two platoon companies to make a D-squadron

and then trying to bring in more Ranger and build them. And the soft truth is you just can't make them fast enough, right? Which is why I'm really interested in the longevity of the operator, which is why I'm really interested in respiratory care. But that was, I think, the transition is wasn't a, like, mission creep. It wasn't the regiment trying to get a little bit more like an SMU. it was more the regiment was asked to perform more of those functions. And so the regiment did what the regiment does.

It responds to its nation's call. And it started to professionalize those teams to do those particular functions and thus multiplied the effect. I'm trying to not be too specific on there. I think I know a little bit about the road you're going down. And I think something that's really impressive about the Ranger, regiment, you know, that you're alluding to is, like, when there's a problem, when there's a task, they really can and will throw a bunch of highly motivated rangers onto a problem.

And sure, we can be knuckleheads at times, but eventually they get to the right answer. You know, they really do put themselves into it and fix the glitch, whatever it may be. Whatever tribe you come out of, you know, before you go into an SMU, I find that the same caliber that's in the SMU is just the same caliber you've got in the tribe you came from. There's just more concentration with the SMU. And so to your point, that level of competency and that level of proficiency in those functions that we, which is basically direct raid. I mean, these are direct raids in urban environments and wherever it needs to be.

So this is the world's premier raid force, the 75th Ranger Regiment. We come in and we come out. Yeah. Fast. But then as time goes on, I mean, you have. Rangers with beards and, you know, cruising around doing Intel stuff that the public doesn't really associate the Ranger Regiment with. Yeah.

So the relaxed grooming standards, which in those days, we would tell you it wasn't a relaxed grooming standard. We were just meeting the Army standard. Right, right. We just weren't. Right. You didn't have the high and tight. Your four inch, right.

You're four inch landing strip on the top, which is kind of the, you know, what I think you thought of is Rangers 4, you know, get four inches for those who don't know, you know, which is high and tight, basically. Yeah. Relax grooming standards. Well, they weren't relaxed grooming standards. We just met the Army standard. Right.

And then the types of missions that the Rangers needed to do in order to gain fidelity on the target required that we grow some of those capabilities. Now, like RRD has always been, you know, the Ranger reconnaissance attachment has always been a thing. It was RRC, you know, the Ranger reconnaissance company for the years before I, got there, but that has always been there for the regimental commander. And then we started to then professionalize those forces and make them even more competent at the battalion level to tie into those ideas. Yeah. And then technology just forces us to, you know, get away from green face recie for a while. Right. Right. You know, so the camouflage in the woods. And, and what was interesting

about that is by the time I now, you know, take command with, you know, Adam Nash and H.H.C. 175 when I come through there. You know, Adam and I have these hilarious conversations about we're having to teach rangers how to put on camouflage. Right, right. And do patrol-based activities. Right. Like, how do you put up a poncho hooch? Yeah. You know, how do you stay, how do you sustain yourself in a hole in a hide site for two or three days? These were things we had been raised in. Right. But this guys have been doing urban warfare. These guys have been doing CQB, you know, running and gunning in an assault man shirts. And yeah. So war college and then you make your way to But command and general staff college.

Command. Thank you. Major school. And then 25th infantry, Hawaii. Yeah. How do you end up there? What assignment do you land in there? Yeah, so I did not want to go back to the conventional army.

I did not. I was doing everything humanly possible to, you know, keep touching the dragon and riding it. I went to Rasp 2 or Rasp ILE is what they call it now. So it's where majors go at ILE to compete to go back as a field grade inside of the regiment. made it to the final four and wasn't selected. And because I wasn't selected, I walked out of that room and, you know, I was fortunate enough to get offered a job by Marcus Evans

to go to 2nd Brigade 25th ID and be in his team, which was truly humbling. And so I took that opportunity as, you know, if I can't be in the Ranger Regiment, well, actually what I should say is my plan was to then go to the long walk the spring if I couldn't be in the Ranger Regiment. And so I got my age waiver. And I remember coming home from not being selected and from, you know, having a quick phone

call with Colonel Marcus or Colonel Evans at, you know, two o'clock in the morning, my time, right, you know, like noon his time. And, and sitting on the stairs in my, you know, Fort Leavenworth, you know, B OQ with my wife, you know, there. And she goes, well, all right, what's next? And I was like, well, long walk in the spring, you know. and she goes, okay, now may not be the right time to have this conversation, but you're a little bit older than most majors here.

You know, you've got 18 years or not like 16 years or something like that then, you know. Just to clarify for people out there, when we say like a little older. Not exactly an old man. What's considered a little bit older? Yeah, that's a great point. So in 2013, I would have been 36, yeah, one foot. the grave. Yeah, dead. Yeah. Dead in special operations kind, right? Two years from retirement. Right. Yeah, really. I mean, really. Yeah. Right? For an 18 year old. I had to get a waiver even to go

to selection because I was older and I don't know, maybe 38 is the break off point or something now. So we got the waiver and everyone, most guys coming out of the regiment get the waiver. And I remember her, you know, her saying, okay, so you've got a lot of buddies who have now done this and, you know, had the same experiences you have, you know, we're, we're, some of them a lot more successfully than you have. What happens if you go to selection? Not that you fail, but you get selected. And then you wash out of OTC, which is what was happening to most of my peers, right? Like, just because you get the opportunity to go and try out for the big leagues, it doesn't mean that you're going to make it. And I watched a lot of, you know, of my peers who are way better than me, get selected, go to OTC, wash out in OTC.

Well, when you've got a few years in your timeline to play with, that's okay. But I was at the point where if I didn't KD, if I didn't get a key development job as a major, meaning a battalion XO or S3 job in some unit, I wasn't going to be eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel, which means I was going to miss my window for colonel, which means I wasn't going to get a battalion command, which means you just start seeing the downward trajectory of I'm going to be exiting this career very quickly. Right. A lot of stress being an officer. Yeah.

Well, it can be if you mismanage your career as badly as I have. So I always did what I want, not what is I supposed to do. And so she goes, hey, how about, she goes, so if you go to selection and you get selected and you wash out of OTC, what happens? And I said, I'm probably being rift, you know, forced, retired as a major at 18 years. And she looked at me and she said, how about you take one for the family? Yeah. And I was like, that's a fair ask.

It's a fair ask. And so I then looked at every, you know, all kinds of other organizations to see if it was going to be a better idea. But in the end, I begrudgingly went back to the light infantry, not airborne, not aerosol. Right. I'd never been in a straight leg infantry unit in my entire career. And it was the best experience of my career, of my entire career being a battalion XO in the 25th Infantry. division was my favorite job. How come? It was the first, that's a great question. It was the first time, I think, it was the first time that I knew what to do. I had been trained in how to do it,

and I was given the authority to make it happen. Right. You have to motor ship over this. Right. And so, you know, for those who may not have served at a, you know, a senior legal level in the battalion or brigade, you know, the battalion commander is the boss, right? right, but he doesn't want to do the job of the Battalion XO or the Battalion Operations Officer, the Battalion S3. And so those two are intended to be, you know, autonomous making decisions in, you know, within the intent of their commander, right? And so it was the first time. So I'm a two-I-C, second in command of a rifle battalion in the 25th Infantry Division. I know how to be a better S-1 than my S-1 because she's been in the Army.

me for 12 months. Right. Literally. Right. 18 months by the time she gets here. You know, she's learning her role. I've done that for a long time. I know how to do target packages better than my S2, who's fresh out of, you know, his military

intelligence captain's career course. And so as you walk through a battalion level staff, you're walking through the growth of leadership occurring at every door. And I really found that I loved it. that I truly loved, you know, mentoring and teaching these younger officers, the things that I didn't need them to learn, right? Like, I learned these lessons. Please don't relearn them. Let me help you get through this. And it was a pivotal moment in my leadership growth as an officer because I had kind of grown up in a pretty high pressure, you know, high intensity environment. You know, the term toxic

leadership probably comes from our community, right? And we know that it's effective, not necessarily the right way, but it can be effective. Right. And really high performing teams can also be terrible to be on, right? But that experience, I decided I don't think you have to do it that way. I don't think it has to be that way. I think you can do it differently. And I got the opportunity to really test that idea because I just didn't want to be that person. to my people. And so, you know, when I was getting, you know, beat down by my majors, rightfully so, by the way, I was a cluster fuck.

And so when I'm getting beat down by my majors, I didn't want to beat down my captain. I wanted to build my captain. And so I wanted to have a different approach to that. And it changed my leadership style forever. I wanted to teach you everything that I knew, not beat you over the things you were supposed to know. So did you have a good time out there in Hawaii? I had a blast. Other than just the job, which sounds like you had a good time.

Found it rewarding. Most of what I did was the job. From there, you go to the Brigade XO. We do Pacific Pathways, right? You do Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia. Yeah, yeah. So I was fortunate enough after being a Battalion XO to then get the opportunity to be a brigade XO in that same brigade. Not as much fun because you don't spend as much time with the young officers and the NCOs down on the line.

line doing the deed, but another really rewarding experience because now I'm leading a staff of my peers. You know, and so I've got, you know, now the S-1 is one of the best S-1s in the Army. You know, now the S-2 is, this is their KD job, their key development job is a major, right? And so now I get to learn the lesson that leading down and mentoring down, it's actually kind of easy, right? Like, people will do what you pay them to do in the end. And so leading down can be pretty simple. Leading up, you know, getting your boss to 100% align with your vision and said, like, that can be hard.

Yeah. But getting your peers to come online with you and to, you know, drive together as a team, like that is the hardest form of leadership I think you can imagine. And as a brigade, you know, field grade, you have to be able to lead your peers. And I failed so many times and I had so many successes. but all of that really grew into us going to this Pacific Pathways experience where we deploy the brigade into the theater to conduct mutual training exercises with these other partner nations.

How did you accomplish that, I mean, as far as getting your peers, as we'd say in the military, on the same sheet of music? Yeah, so I think the way that it is, I learned, I think, because it definitely didn't happen the first couple of times. if you can get everyone to envision what it looks like when you've successfully completed the task. So the effect I'm trying to achieve is X. And the more detailed you can be with what success looks like, and I would get as, you know, my ADHD brain would get as focused as when you hit that corner,

take a knee and pull security and then call set position one, you have personally achieved my decisive point. Like that kind of, I need you to envision what this looks like, what success is. And when you can paint that vision and then surround yourself with people that you trust, that you've built and empowered to make every decision within the limits of their comfort, another Mike Fosterism, I got to call him. You know, so, you know, when you give them that trust and they have the authority to make those decisions and they agree to the vision.

and they've bought into that, they'll do it better than you ever could. Right. So did the 25th, did they do a deployment during this time while you were there? So we did the Pacific Pathways was considered a deployment. This was getting a little post-GWAT now. Right. Yeah, we did a JRTC rotation, which I did not get to do because I blew my knee out.

Also another leadership experience. First time Scott Kelly, the brigade commander there, a former unit member, he walked up and he said, you're never going to be the same again. you're breakable now. And he was 100% correct. Yeah. Yeah, once one thing goes,

it all starts going down hill. Do you think, because you did have a combat scroll. Yeah. And, you know, in addition to 1-1 in the 8th second, did you wear your combat scroll? Do you remember? Yeah, no, no, I did.

I wore combat scroll. I wore, well, it's not an apostate. Well, no. It depended on where I was at. But the reason I'm asking is, obviously there's whether it's real or not there there is a presumed i think authority and expertise right that goes along with having a combat scroll or a combat sff or you know what i mean yeah that that when you when you were in a conventional unit does that help you when you are

talking to people where they they're they're automatically giving you uh like credibility yes and i think it's a double-edged sword But yes. So one, I would say my personal rule was I wore the last patch of the unit that I went, that I deployed with, unless I was assigned to a unit that I had a combat patch from. Okay. So if I was to be reassigned to the 82nd, I would wear 82nd in stereo. Like, I'm very proud of my 802nd combat patch. Right.

If I was in the 101st, I would wear 101st in stereo. I'm very proud of that combat patch. The last unit I deployed to combat with and that I saw combat with was the first Ranger battalion. You didn't have a 25th ID patch. And in the AWG, I never heard a shot fired and anger, thank God. So, yeah, I didn't get that opportunity. Tell us about that starting to, you know, you, I believe the trajectory here is that

you had a job and then that got changed kind of, there's a rug pull, unfortunately. You were trying to find a way to stay in Hawaii. But tell us about how the asymmetrical warfare group came about for you. Yeah. So thank you for tying that back together from you. So I run into Task Force IED in 2003 in Iraq, right? And then they grow throughout the years. I actually have them assigned to one of my patrols in Afghanistan as a company commander.

You know, two guys come out of Iraq. And so I get to kind of touch them again a little bit and kind of see what they're doing. And then I was leaving my, I left my brigade XO time and I was fortunate enough to get a follow-on assignment as the brigade operations officer for the 196th, JPMRC. So Joint Pacific, I'm going to screw this one up, Readiness Center. But it basically, it's a deployable, sure, I'll take one, yeah. It's a deployable training center or NTC, JRTC package that goes to the units that are signed to Indopacom. So Indopacom literally a place of tyranny of distance. And so instead of moving those units to a national training center, we go to them.

Thank you, sir. I appreciate you. And I was in that unit as the brigade operations officer, which I was very thankful for the opportunity because I hadn't had any ops experience. as a field grade officer. I'd been an exo in a battalion, and I'd actually wanted to be the exo in the brigade. I didn't want to be the three. And so I got the opportunity now to kind of round out my experiences

and go be a brigade operations officer. And I was supposed to be a two-year assignment that would keep me on island, on Hawaii, so my family would be stable. I didn't want to move my kids any more than I had to. And we loved the islands that we didn't want to leave. Yeah. I learned how to, I really, I really learned how to surf there, you know. Like, I really enjoyed it.

And about, I was in Indonesia at the time with the 196, then we were with the 25th, actually, at that point. And my branch manager called me and said, hey, the code on your billet has been changed from an infantry officer to an armor officer. And so we're going to need you to find another job next year. And I was like, well, find another job means those jobs are closed right now because we've already filled them out. Right. And so to find another job, I'm going to have to leave Hawaii. And he was like more than likely, bad news, right? For a short tour somewhere.

So in essence, and I'll just truncate this so we don't have to belabor officer timelines. But in the end, you know, when you're trying to get a battalion command, your window, gets real short and people start driving you to positions. So you've got to go to pre-command course. You've got to go to pre-po to the organization. Ideally, you've been in that organization before. You know, usually the chief of staff, at least from my understanding, likes to place commanders who have lots of experience in those units as battalion commanders

because we want you to be successful day one on the job, right? We don't want you to learn the proclivities of, you know, training in Hawaii, which is really hard to train in. Right. You know, we want you to understand those things inside now. And so I just did my reverse career when I applied for Battalion Command. And there was that one year that I was supposed to be stable before I did that PCC, Battalion Command, et cetera, well, now I lose that year.

And he goes, I'll tell you what, Jay, and this is a guy I was in the 101st with, as my branch commander or branch manager. He goes, I'll tell you what, if you can find anything on island, anything on island with an 11-alpha, 04, you know, billet, Phil, an infantry officer at the major level, I'll give it to you just for stability. And so I immediately went and started to look for something that was nominative or had a selection involved in it so that I could lock it in with branch, right? Because if you get invited to a selection or you get nominated, I don't have to go through

this, you know, submitting my packet and, you know, kind of a resume selection. And so I went down what was available and the only thing that I could find on Island that had a selection that would, you know, make it where I could go compete was this asymmetric warfare group, you know, senior strategy advisor to Indo-Pacom, I have no idea what this job means. I have no idea what the unit does. I've heard of it before. I've sent guys, I've approved guys packets to go and try out for it. Most of them are returned, you know, without being selected.

And it's this weird little corner of the world that I've never seen except once or twice. And I was like, fine. It's got a selection that keeps me on island. I'll go for it. And so submitted my packet and then followed it right up with the recruiter and said, hey, did you get my packet? Did you get my ORB? He was like, I did. And I was like, are you interested?

And he's like, we are. And I was like, would you be willing to call Branch and tell them that if I don't shit the bet on the selection that you want me? And he was like, I would. Let me talk to a couple of people, right? It's hard to get a staff guy that, you know, that has some of those experiences to go want to do a staff. job and for me to be on island that worked for me and so i i kind of accidentally fell into going to selection for the asymmetric warfare group and so i went to support selections so as we we talked about already you really didn't know what the hell this unit did nope so before we get into what it does

tell us about selection yeah yeah so um i i i'm not going to talk a whole lot about it uh because it's It is designed to allow you to work through those things in the moment. Like problem solving. A lot of problem solving. But also how will you think through problems? And I'm going to not do this justice because there are guys who absolutely know this better than me. So I forgive. I'm thinking about the guys down at AWTC that built that thing,

Asimetric Warfare Training Center. Forgive me as I butcher your baby here. But I believe the distinction is it's slightly less physical, but it's extremely intellectual and it's extremely mental and so we want to see how you're going to make decisions we want to see why you're going to make decisions

we want to see if you can connect the dots you know so you get a piece of information here you get a product there you get an idea here can you connect the dots and then can you take that problem that you've just identified connect the dots on the effect that will have on an organization that's confronting that and then develop a solution for that problem and then

go get it in through the training and doctrine element so that by the time you know sons and daughters are showing up to contend with that asymmetric threat they've been trained prepared armed to deal with that's actually a pretty heavy lift getting an institution the size of the army to change you know identifying problem through and uh forcing new doctrine Especially before it's like 10 years after the fact. Right, right. You know, like before it's like a lesson's learned, okay, let's change things. Right, right.

And so the, the easy way to explain the asymmetric warfare group is it's the Army's scouts. And so they want to make sure, and these guys do it. They did do it better than anyone. And most of them are still out there doing different stuff. But their job is to ensure the United States military is not surprised again. Right, by whatever it is. And so IEDs, electronic warfare, information warfare, you know, UGVs and UAVs, you know, all of these technologies that we take for granted can be, they're dual technologies

and they can be weaponized against us. And so we go to where conflict is occurring and we observe how, as I used to say, you know, how we're using the kitchen sink in order to solve problems. Right. Right. So just tactical problems are occurring. how are the experts on the ground who are dealing with that problem daily, dealing with that problem?

Right. And what lessons can we extract from that? And then what dot milf, plp, you know, doctrine, training, leadership, facilities, the whole system that builds a service member from, you know, a civilian to a warrior with the tools they need to be able to shoot, move, and communicate on that battlefield. It's interesting too because just from an outsider point of view, you know, like they started out, like you say, as task force IED, which is, you know, they're out there in early part of the GWAT collecting up samples, creating products of like this is what to watch out for. These are some of the TTPs. They were going out and collecting up the individual like everything they could and then trying to disperse it.

to the wide. And then a little bit later in the G-WAT, you know, you see these guys come in who are all like former operators or former, you know, former soft guys or whatever. Sure. Who are now like going out with these conventional units. It's almost like an SF, almost like an assistant advisor. Right. And literally the title of those guys is operational advisor. Right.

And they go on the ground and they say these are the lessons that we've learned in other places that are applicable here and these are the things that we're going to take from this and apply elsewhere yeah it's it's one of the most humbling collections of experts and and when i say my heroes i mean like guys who did the Pablo eskabar hits yeah you know guys who are in some of the most storied operations of the special operations community does it bring in obviously active duty but also contractors yes so yeah half almost so you have a blending of sf ranger J-Soc guys. Who else was in the mix?

So to make it simple, there was literally no tribe or no color unrepresented. Yeah. None. Like, even though we didn't pull seals on the M-to, we had seals as contractors. Do you know how that evolution happened?

I know it was before your time, but do you know how that evolution happened from TFI, to somebody going, this deserves more clarity and more attention. I believe, you know, General Votel for sure, but General Cody also took an active interest in this and his time. I think, and I should, if I ever get the opportunity to talk to General Votel again, I'll probably ask him this at this point.

We have kind of a storied connection to Once an Eagle as an officer. for corps particularly in the ranger regiment so you know once an eagle is just this book that's almost required reading right next to starship troopers for any infantry officer right the book not the movie the book's awesome and and inside of once in eagle sad sam damon the lead character he he literally goes to communist china before the war before war two embeds with these as as it says in the book you know these guys are eating a handful of rice and and living you know wearing wearing slippers and running through the mountains and 20 degree below weather with, you know, t-shirts on, and they're winning. Like, how is that possible?

And Sad Sam Damon, who's, you know, this pre-war, you know, captain in the Philippines, you know, an infantry captain gets told to go and embed with that organization and understand that we are seeing a different kind of warfare here than we are prepared to fight as an American institutional army. And it's got this new thing called guerrilla warfare. Right. And so Sad Sam goes and he embeds with that organization and he extracts all the lessons that if we are ever going to be successful against a guerrilla warfare campaign, these are the things we're going to have to train differently and that we have different equipment, different ideas, different doctrine. And he writes this huge book about it, right? And the character, Sad Sam, comes back to the Philippines to his commanding officer and he hands him all the lessons of the big after-action review, right? And the commanding officer shoves it in a desk and close the door and we all move on. World War II. It's never seen again. Right. Right. And so what I believe General Votel and General Cody were trying to really codify was a learning organization for the Army. Right. You know, the Army is a

learning organization. It's a speed it up too. Right. And so some people called it the Army's consultants, but I think that was a little bit, you know, a little bit tongue in cheek. But what he wanted to do is he wanted to increase the deployment or the rapid deployment of capability that we needed to fight this breathing, living war that was occurring in multiple countries in the Middle East at that point, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Just one more question about that because you said that when you, accompanied commander right with 101st, when you... I was a platoon leader. And that these, you know, these two AWG guys were with you. Yeah.

How does that... In the 82nd, I did have two... Oh, sorry, in the 80 second. How do these guys out on a combat patrol who are advising but also learning? They're also like there to take in what's going on. Right. But they're also advising.

How does that work? It's really hard. Yeah. So how do you as a, let's say, master sergeant or sergeant major, operational advisor from the AWG, how do you embed into a company or platoon without assuming command? Right, right, without or without undermining the command. Right.

And it's a really tricky position. And, you know, graybeards do it best, which is why I love some of those contractors that can come in and do that. But it's a very slippery slope of understanding when you're advising the young captain and you're mentoring the young captain and never getting on his command mic. Right. Things like that. So just little tricks to the trade of giving suggestions to the leadership

while leading by example with the soldiers. Right. That would be, I think, the best way I would answer. Fascinating. It really is. Really hard.

Really hard. Yeah. I screwed it up a couple times. Tell us about Baker Squadron. So I was selected for the AWG position, which, you know, it felt like kind of a, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, go out there and be a staff officer, man.

Well, in my board at the AWG, the last question I was telling you guys before, and the last question on the packet was, you know, who do you know? And I was like, I don't know anybody in this organization. I had no idea. I knew everybody in the board. I knew the commander. I knew the command sergeant major. I just knew everybody by reputation, if not personally. And in fact, the DCO was a personal friend of mine. And at the end of that, the commander who I had known for about 10 years, you know, from previous stuff, he said, hey, Jay, I want you to pick up, I don't remember what they call it now, but it's like, you know, one package, package one or something like that. And I was like, okay, whatever, package one. Good to see you, sir, walking out of here. And I hit my buddy and I was like, hey, you know, the boss said to draw package one. What do you want? What does that mean? You know, and he goes, it's operator kit.

He wants you in full load, not computers. He wants you with, you know, draw your kit. And I was like, I thought he said I was going to be in bed at night when I go. And he was like, I don't know, man. He wants you to have operator kit. Get operator kid. So I went down and it was like, you know, kid in a candy store because the asymmetric warfare group had every bit of experimentation and testing whatever you can think about. And so when you walk in and say, you know, I need to pick up cry. They're like, well, do you want cry or do you want Patagonia?

Right. Do you want Patagonia? You want Arcterics. Like it comes in different camos if you want it. Right. And so you get to choose the things you want, which you're like, you want. that was a lot of fun for me. I hadn't done that in a while.

And then I go out to Hawaii, where I'm supposed to be in meetings during the day, being the eyes in the years of the command, and then basically reporting back and saying, you should put guys here, you should put guys there, we should get teams in these locations, right? And I got a phone call maybe a week or so later,

and one of the team sergeants was like, one of the troop sergeants, I'm sorry, was like, hey, would you be willing to go to the Philippines with us? We need an officer who knows how to do, you know like a live fire planning exercise and so that you know and i was like oh i'd love to go to the philippines i've never been to the philippines and the next thing you know i'm getting broken in by a troop sergeant major you know going through korea and thailand and the philippines and malaysia and indonesia and so i became the chief of strategy for the asymmetric warfare group which was

my official title but really i was reporting to baker squad during asymmetric warfare group because they owned the Indo-Pacific area of operations. And so the asymmetric warfare group wasn't broken down necessarily by region. It was broken down by threat. And so Baker Squadron was PRC, you know, China focused, right? Abel Squadron was Russia focused. And so different squadrons have different threat focus. And they build on those threats with those interested parties.

That was going to be my next question, actually, because the way I usually think of asymmetrical warfare group is, you know, the IEDs, all the coin and counterinsurgency stuff, that that's what they were really invested in. But tell us a little bit about what they were doing in the Pacific. I think that's interesting. Yeah. So, yes, the AWG, the asymmetric warfare group was very much known because almost everybody who rotated through the global war on terror into Afghanistan, Iraq or Iraq or Syria probably had an encounter with an operational advisor at some point. and Baker Squadron. And so in some ways, the organization did supplement that was C Squadron, Charlie's squad, or I forgot what they call now, but yeah, C Squadron.

They owned that threat, the counter VEO CT threat. And so that was their box that they typically rotated into that made sense. That's where the threat is. And then Abel and Baker were often augmenting and supporting them for a number of years. And so as you transition from task force IED through a direct report to, you know, the J357 and the Pentagon, through now an m-toed unit that starts to report to Tradoc in 2013, which you want to talk about a culture shift in an organization. Yeah, me, massive. So that was that decision.

I'm going to come back to your Baker point, but I want to tell this too. So that decision to report to Tradoc, you know, it wasn't that the organization changed. So the AWG was still the collection of the same dudes and dudettes. It had always been the same experiences, the same special operations expertise, the same culture of, you know, wearing civilian clothes and, you know, not showing up with, you know, we don't go to a whole lot of meetings and uniforms and stuff like that because we're always traveling and doing stuff. and then to have a trade-doc style of institution and bureaucracy laid on top of that. So imagine as a squadron commander where I'm like dropping, you know, like vouchers for my trip to Yukon or to Ukraine where I'm like, you know, at a hotel, you know, off the, yeah.

So dropping those vouchers into trade-ox bureaucracy and watching their money managers go, wait, wait a minute. Why are you in the four seasons? Right. It's the only hotel in Indonesia where I may not get kidnapped. Right. I mean, just like things like that. And so the culture, you know, shock was a little hard for the organization I'm told to work through because I wasn't there in those days. But I felt like they did a really good job of it.

And I think it was the right decision. It was hard for the guys to, you know, kind of move under Trey Dox socially, right? But it was a really good decision because it connected the eyes and ears of the army, the ones that were out there, seeing and understanding the threat to the people that actually built those solutions for the long term, right? And so it was a brilliant move as an institution. It was difficult for us to manage, but it worked really well. And so Baker Squadron then, as we start to transition in that 2013, 2014 days, we're starting

to understand that, okay, the global war on terror and counterterrorism is still a thing. And it will always be a thing as long as, you know, we are a huge, large military that you can't fight us head to head. Right. So that's always going to be a thing. But we need to start looking at the next horizon. We need to start looking at the next threat. And in those days, if I remember correctly, we believed that, you know, while Russia was the most likely to kickstart a regional war, it was China that we were most concerned with as a competitor. And I was very fortunate in those days to be the chiefest strategy for with Baker and, and, you know,

Abel and the asymmetrical warfare group out there because we had General Brown, who was the, one, the Usterpac commander, United States Army Pacific, that his mentality with how to compete with China was that word. We're going to compete with China. They're not our enemy. At that time, no one would really identify, no, publicly the military or the government would not identify China as a threat or refer to them as an adversary. it was always near pure competition. It's a pacing challenge. It's a pacing.

You speak office really well, man. I have to listen to you guys a lot more than I really want to. There's a lot of synergy in your pacing column. Yeah, so it's good. Yeah, that was exactly it. And so, you know, Baker Squadron in those days in particular, we're spending a lot of their time trying to help, you know, into Paycom and Usur Pack in particular, understand where to

compete and where the competition should occur. And the picture that started to develop for us was, you know, terrain doesn't change. It's the same thing that we learned as young, you know, platoon leaders and non-commissioned officers inside of any unit, you know, well, here's the great story. So I'm a company commander in Waziqwa in the 82nd Airborne Division in, you know, southern Afghanistan. And I'm looking at the map like a good officer does and doing my map reconnaissance before I drive down this thing for the first time. IED Alley is what the guys are calling it. And I noticed that there are two high points

that command IED Alley on the left side of the Wadi and the right side. This Wadi is 20 miles wide, right? And I went, you know, that would be a great place. For a TRP. Right? And it would be a great place for, you know, from maybe a reconnaissance element to do some Overwatch.

You know, we can think about that, right? And so I drive out there with my convoy. I mean, I'm brilliant, clearly. Like, I've looked at a map. know exactly where these high points are and we need to command these things and I get out there and I kid you not there's a castle on the left and there's a castle on the right and I turned to my interpreter and I was like who built those and he's like that one's Russian and that one's British and I don't mean from this century yeah yeah like we have been fighting the same war in the same

location for the same terrain for different reasons for literally hundreds of years and generations. And the lesson that I took from that was terrain doesn't change. And so when we went out to the Pacific and we were thinking through how to help, where should we compete with China? Well, let's look at the terrain. Right. And so the Malacca Strait became very important for trade. You know, obviously Taiwan becomes very important. And when you really start breaking down the geography of the Pacific, there becomes locations that you need to own. to be able to project combat power into it. And so when you look at like the Marshall Plan or the MacArthur, right,

so when MacArthur moved through there in World War II, the island hopping campaign that we all know, right? If you look at the map, you can see how, well, okay, we went to Fiji because in the old days we needed a water refill for our sail ships, and then we needed coal for our coal-burning ships, and then you needed a resource to resupply from crossing the Pacific Ocean from the continent. And then you get there and you island hop to work your way into the Philippines and the Malacca

Straits right there. Well, when you start to look at island hopping that MacArthur did, you can see what's happening is we need to get from island A to island B. And on the way to island B, the enemy has a vote in this conversation. And we have Iwojima. Yeah. And we have Pela-Lu. And we have these places that they're not street.

strategically important, except they give us strategic access to resources that we have to use in order to project combat power into the mainland. And so the Malacca Strait became really important to understanding how do you compete for the Malacca Strait when Malaysia is trying to develop and China is building the rail system that's connecting from the Malacca Strait to the opposite port and you've got terrorism in the Sabah, and you've got, I mean, and you just start looking at the Thai separatists above it, and you realize that Malaysia, we drew an arbitrary line. Right. And the Thai separatists are actually Malaysian, they're melee.

And that's why they're separatists from Thailand. Right. And that's why you have that fight there. And that, and you start to truly understand, you know, why we've been fighting over some of these pieces of terrain. Right. It's not hard to extrapolate. Right.

That we will again. that we will again. Yeah. And so now you look at it from the perspective of, well, let's just update the technology at play. So now we need satellites. And now we need aircraft. And now we need flotillas.

And if you're crossing the ocean, and I challenge everyone to look at a map of the Pacific, and it is a daunting exercise when you look at the time it takes to get to Australia. And that's not even the start point for most of us to get in the United States. the Pacific, right? So you're talking about how do you sequence these really exquisite assets in order to conduct a bounding fight into the Pacific, like literally army-bounding Navy and Navy Bounding Air Force, like World War II style, with modern technology, and you start to see, oh, we're going to need to own Guam. out of curiosity why

I understand why AWG like what the benefit of being under trade doc in the theoretical term but trade doc in my mind is not a quick moving organization it seems like belabored by a lot of bureaucracy and it's training right how why is AWG

not under or INSCOM or the US soccer, somebody that understands the need to move quickly on certain things. Yeah, I think I'll challenge that just a little bit. Okay. Because I think the reason why AWG was fought for by Treydoc. And Treydoc wanted the AWG. Oh, really? Okay. is because they wanted to be able to increase that cycle.

Okay. And they knew that to do that, they needed to bring in, and, you know, General Funk, who was the last Trey-Doc commander that I served under, he used to call us the 75th Ranger Regiment of Trey-Doc. And, you know, in some ways that was a compliment. And in some ways, that was a shot, right? Because he's an armor officer. There you go.

So he, but he was a phenomenal commander. So I think it was fought for by trade doc because if our job is to go out and ensure that the United States Army is never surprised again, we have to be able to increase our ability to rapidly prototype and disseminate and train and get those tools into the inventory. And a lot of what we're talking about doesn't have like a hard product to it. Sure. It's not like we're going out and we built drones and we built. you know, underground, you know, vehicle or, you know, ground vehicles. And we did all kinds of techy stuff, but we also did a lot of stuff about, like, decision-making. Right.

And leadership, you know, under stress and, you know, and that. TTPs. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, sniper TTPs. Right. Like, that's the tactical stuff, right? But I think what really was important about us being under trade doc.

And the reason why I think it was the right move for the institution. Yeah. is it allowed us to help the army move faster to provide those services to our service members. So Traydok wanted that and they were able to, they were able to shed or change evolved based on like what you guys were providing. I'm not here to tell you that the asymmetric warfare group, you know, revolutionized Traydock. That did not happen. Sure. That we were a small part of that conversation.

I would just say the leadership of Traydock understood the value of having that organization underneath their guide on, and they employed us to the fullest. That's fantastic to hear. Tell us about Abel Squadron and the Russia focus. That was sort of your follow-on to become the squadron commander there, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I was fortunate enough that I think I mentioned it to you guys. I was at a pre-mission training, a PMT with Baker Squadron. And it was the first time I'd gone through a real PMT with the asymmetric.

Warfare Group. So I've done PMTs with other teams and units, but I've never done this one. And I was just humbled. So let me paint an egotistical picture and then show you how humbled I got. So I'm a senior major. I'm literally, you know, a breath away from being a lieutenant colonel. I'm going to get a command. It's the question is what kind of command is it's going to be. and I've been a ground force commander in some amazing special operations units multiple times and in fact I've just come off being a ground force commander like three or four years ago I understand how fighting works at the tactical and operational level I think and I've employed it in an environment that not many leaders get to do in their careers where you've got you

know, anywhere from five to 15 aircraft stacked in the airspace above you with maneuver units on the ground and, you know, and you're doing a high value target, you know, X to the X strikes. And just these amazing synchronizations of these assets in dynamic space occurring and you're trying to control that ball all at once. I feel pretty confident in my ability to do that. I finish it off with, you know, a couple of master's degrees in how. how to deal with people that, you know, in three-letter agencies and build coalitions. And I prefer your personality over your personality.

And I finish that off. And then I go become an exo in a large organization where I'm doing logistics support across the Pacific while I'm in Australia and Malaysia. Like I feel like I kind of know what I'm doing at this point. And I show up to this AWG PMT. and the first thing they have us do is we called it multi-domain battle. And now, of course, we know that as multi-domain operations.

But in those days, there was just this concept of multi-domain battle. And multi-domain battle is the integration of cyber and space and air and land and sea and understanding that the environment cannot be bifurcated as it was in the old days and that the Navy does the Navy stuff and the Army does the Army. Right. Well, it's no longer true. We got to be able to do a little bit of everything. We have to do it as a cohesive team to really be able to project that effect

that the only United States military can do. And so, sorry, I lost my thing. Oh, you were saying like this was a really humbling moment for you. Thank you. And so the first exercise is we go through kind of a tabletop exercise of what is multi-domain battle and what are the potentials. And then we follow that up with, I am a ground force. commander playing a ground force commander at the asymmetric warfare training unit or training center,

which has amazing subterranean subway systems and high rises and just all this. It's this, you can go full cyber range down there in those days. So you could do full multi-domain battle on this site. And I've got five of the most impressive sergeants majors who have taken off their wreath to do this job, right, around me as like my RTO, my radio telephone operator. So it's not like I've got, you know, myself on a radio playing like a JT and a CCT and so, like I have legit the best in the business who train the best in the business on how to do that function surrounding me as a headquarters.

And we had social media play, like doing social media reconnaissance. We had underground unmanned vehicles with subterranean maneuvers with, you know, oxygen, no oxygen, hazardous particulate, the whole nine underneath there. We had drones when in those days drones was a brand new concept and we were talking swarms of drones and we're doing all of this in one exercise where I've got three teams on the ground conducting deep reconnaissance in order to bring in combat power. And at the after-action review of that event, I stood up and I said if one bullet had been fired, I would have been overwhelmed. Because of the amount of things you're managing at the same time?

Because of the amount of information I'm trying to digest the picture. I'm trying to understand in a live combat situation. And I've got the best of the best of the best performing a role that would be done by someone 15, 20 years younger with less experience. It's a real issue. I mean, when you think about the way we're trying to integrate some sort of reality plus goggles, which I think that's like the wave of the future, but you can easily see how much information is too much information. It's more than is able that they can process and know what to do with.

I think one of the best things we did for multi-domain operations was to have a conversation about echelon. Right. And so there's certain, yeah. So there are certain in those days, it was all about let's get the enabler as load as possible. So let's get everything to the squad level, the team level, That's because that's what our experiences were overseas. So every lethal enabler goes to the line, right? And what we quickly started to learn is if this, you know, senior major with all of this experience surrounded by this, you know, literally team of sergeant's majors can't do this, okay.

Yeah. We got to figure this out. And so we started echeloning those capabilities based upon where those tools were arrayed inside of the. Army's system. And so some things for space do not exist below the brigade level. Right. Right. You've got to go to division to get them. You've got to go to core to get them. You've got to go to Army to get them, right? And so let's let them manage those things and let's find a way to have connective tissue between those echelons so that commanders can choose how to employ those

effects together. But the responsibility for managing them can be withheld. at a location that can properly do it or national. I'm curious because when you start talking about multi-domain and how all these things go together, especially like at an AWG level, I imagine that obviously Army cyber or military cyber, like you guys can get a decent read on what capabilities are. And yet, you know, when we're talking about like the NSA

or maybe the NRO or these other organizations, how do they play into this? Because I imagine at some point they're like, well, like, they don't want to give up, they don't want to give up the, you know, give up the goods necessarily, right? So somebody at some level. Rice pots? Yeah, has to know what all these capabilities are.

But does that person who knows what all these capabilities are, are they like qualified or competent? to manage all these capabilities, or do they just know that they exist? So I'll try to, that's a really tough question. And so I'm going to try to answer that the best I can by giving an analogy. Yeah. So if you walk into any company on the planet right now, looking at yours, right, you've probably got an Apple computer, an HP computer, you know, one of these on Microsoft.

Some of you have Zoom. You know, you've got one guy who has that weird, like, alien computer and his software doesn't match any of your software. Right. And so what we find in large organizations that have been around for a long time is we have layers of understanding and capability that have been that some are, you know, grown a little bit better and some are a little bit less developed, less mature, right? And what's important is if we can understand how to layer them all together to achieve the best effect. And so ideally, if you're on all Apple hardware with an M1 chip running Microsoft, you know, Microsoft Teams that is in. incorporating co-pilot from OpenAI, and your team now only uses Apple computers

Microsoft Software and an LLM from OpenAI, that's it. Right. And you just train on that persistently and consistently. You're going to get really good at those things. Right. We find the same when you start talking about echelonting capabilities in multi-domain battle, or operations, there are, or operations, there are, some that are, you know, really mature and lots of people understand how to play with them,

like drones and, you know, unmanned aerial is really starting to get something that, you know, these kids are growing up playing. Right. Right. And so now as they come in, the ability to employ that effectively is really mature. And then there are some that will underwater autonomous vehicles, we don't have a lot of experience with that in the Army. We're going to have to go to the Navy to do that. Right. Have we ever done those things in conjunction? Right. And so understanding where the possible Venn diagram is for that capability and that need, and then building an exercise or something that exercises that capability.

Does that help answer that question? It does. It does. And how willing are some of the organizations out there to share their capabilities in these types of environment? My experience has been very. That's great. Very. Yeah.

No, very. Very. Very. Very, very willing. I have run into, you know, protecting my rice bowl and making sure that, no, this is what I do. But to be honest, in my experience, I just haven't had a lot of those run-ins. Right. And siloing.

Yeah, yeah. Generally, what I find is when you show up, you know, like a multi-domain task force or something like that and you go, hey, I know how to build water bottles. And they're like, we don't know if we need water bottles yet, but go over there and start building water bottles. Thanks for joining the team. Right. So I don't see that in the military for sure. Three-letter agencies a little bit. I saw a little bit of that.

Yeah. But I didn't have as much experience. The Army has more of like a can-do kind of attitude, right? It's a little bit like, yeah, we don't know what you do here, but you're one of us. Yeah. You know, jump on. Yeah. We'll figure out where you fit in.

Right, right. Yeah. Get on the bus and fit in. And so you went on to one more assignment before retirement at a special operations command. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we didn't even talk about ABLE squad. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Did we go right over that? We did, yeah. Yeah, so I was fortunate enough after that to go to Abel Squadron, which was, you know, Russia focused. And so 2019 to 2021, that was my assignment there, built an amazing team. And we were working deeply with U.S. Army, Europe and, you know, the team over there to, you know, figure out what does it look like if you're going to deploy a package, like in World War II style,

like a large ground scale combat operation, Normandy Beach, right? What does that look like in modern day? And the premise that we operate within is contact with the enemy starts at our home base. It's happening right now. You're in contact with the enemy, either electronically, informationally, whatever it might be, with the adversary right now. And so how do you move the 101st Airborne? born division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Is it still Fort Campbell, Kentucky?

I'm not sure. From Fort Campbell, Kentucky to, let's say, you know, Paris. How do you get there undetected? How does that happen? I would say almost not possible at this point. So then do you make it an information campaign? Okay. So then you get to the port and you've all seen port ops, right?

Because we've all been to NTC and GRRTC and you're downloading all of this equipment. So clearly now in the age of social media, you're under-recognition. you're under reconnaissance, active reconnaissance, which means as I'm watching things come off the boat, I'm able to understand echelon, unit, you know, where they're coming from, what their capabilities are, because most of that's open source. And then you start turning on all of your electronics. And a really interesting thing happens in the electromagnetic spectrum when Americans start turning stuff on. We look like Americans because you get, you know, six to nine, you know, dudes and dudettes in the back of a Black Hawk. and all of them have Apple watches and iPhones and Samsung's and 152 Harris's

and all the communications equipment that only the United States of America. Only that blend can possibly do. And then I can give you echlanning, meaning I can tell that's a division headquarters. Right, right. I can tell that's a brigade headquarters. Those are 160th guys. Right. And so we started building this understanding of what the multi-domain battle space

looked like from an adversarial large. scale ground combat position, right? And we take those lessons back from working, you know, within Poland and Ukraine and the politics and the Balkans and looking at where, you know, conflict is happening and what lessons we can take from that. And we bring it back to our training centers. And then we rep it and develop it into something that can then go into trade dock that can then start being disseminated throughout the team. This culminated for us in an NTC rotation. I think it was the first time an AWG. squadron had ever gone to NTC. We painted a rock, by the way, still out there. I had my squadron do it.

It was fun. I made them do it. I helped, but I made them. So they painted a rock out there first time. And what we were doing was helping the unit that was in the box think through how to employ these multi-domain, large-scale ground combat techniques that we had been reppping and practicing in the European theater. And so some really fun stuff started to have. where I think the lesson that I took from that entire exercise was in the modern day battlefield, the commander who's willing to turn off the lights first is going to win. It's really interesting. You know, we hear about Sagan and Humant all the time.

But, you know, you're talking a lot about like Madison and like Elin's, things like that. I don't, they don't really, they weren't, they didn't used to really be a thing. Right. That you needed to worry about. Right. But now they're almost everything. So think about, you know, ambush protocol, right? So silence, violence, violence.

Right. This is standard, you know, grunt stuff. I'm walking through the woods, make contact. I don't, I'm not quiet anymore. Right. I'm yelling and I'm shooting everything. It's explosions, it's violence. And then as soon as we're clear, right back down to silence, right?

Right. Think about that electronically now. Yeah, yeah. All of your systems are up. You are literally on the electromagnetic spectrum. You're glowing. Like you were just a glowing beam, a target. And then all of a sudden, all those go off, and then you disperse and infiltrate,

and then you have decisions about when to do calm windows, just like submarines do, so that you are giving a picture to the enemy, a battlefield arrayment, that you want them to digest and you want them to counter array towards. And as soon as you can confirm the composition, disposition, and strength of that counter arraignment and then you can give your final intent-based orders because only the Americans can run on intent-based orders and your boys deploy and then you turn off all the lights. And what I mean by that is you jam everything. Nothing electronic works.

You can't see them. They can't see you. You can't talk to you. You can't talk to anybody. And the commander who's willing to do that first, confirm battlefield arraignment and then turn off the lights after he set his team, they're going to win that. fight. That's what I think we learned. So a little bit interesting to, I mean, first off, you know, from what you're talking about, I mean, we think about back to the old days, signature

reduction, you know, in Vietnam was like taping down stuff so you don't have metal on metal, you know, all that kind of thing. Today's signature reduction is the IR spectrum. It's electromagnetic, all this sort of stuff. But also the, during the GWAT, I think there's this real propensity to use modern day information technology for a general to basically reach all the way down the chain of command to the private. As a ability, right? But with, you know, if we're facing a electronic warfare environment in future fights, that we may be going back to the old days.

Like I'm reading, it's in my bag, book Frank Subcheck, wrote a book about special forces and partnership relations in El Salvador in the 1980s. He was like some of these seventh special forces group NCOs would be out in the Bush country. in El Salvador and not have any communication with their commanders for weeks, if not months. Right. I would compliment that thinking with, I believe, and I'm a little outdated, so four or five years out of date, so it may have changed, I hope, a little bit. The future battlefield is a megacity. It is a littoral megacity, so it's a megacity with water, deep water access, you know, New York City, a Taipei.

Lagos. Yep, there you go. And so that means that you're going to have subterranean spaces, 10 stories down, easy. Like, just think of the subway system in New York City. And the way I typically paint this picture to folks in New York City is imagine 10, 9-11s a day. Right. That's what megacity warfare is going to look like against a peer threat in a large-scale ground combat engagement. That means that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, and now space cadets are going down into 10,

story deep subterranean where right now we're still you know having to pump oxygen because we don't have papers right okay how do you communicate down there right and so we played with mesh systems yeah played with right GPS and there you go yeah so now take that you know team out of 10 stories deep and now they come up to the surface and now they go into a 10 story high rise yeah think about the equipment changes you would want to make right now right think about the communication changes think i mean just Everything that we do, to shoot, move, and communicate, we're literally talking, gets combined into, you know, a 10 by 10 square island that's just full of this dense urban terrain. Right. And then when you get outside into the countryside, you're back into...

It's a whole different mission. Now you're back into camouflage. That's right. Yeah. That's right. And so we have to build an expert team. This is what America has always done best. Yeah.

Is we have built a all-volunteer, which quite frankly looks like a special operations military. to everyone else. It's fascinating. You know, it's fascinating when you're talking about like going dark and the, you know, the signature and things like that. I remember back in DLI, one of the guys there was a civil affairs, or not civil affairs, a sciops guy. Yeah.

And he would joke and he'd say, you know, like they're commanding officers to say, hey, go to this top of this hill and pretend that you're a tank. And he'd be like, hey, sir, how about we send a tank up there and pretend. it's like, you know, a nobody. Sure. And the idea is it, you know, sciops, obviously sciops has evolved and it's like social media and a lot of other stuff now too. But when we start talking about these signatures and how the enemy response and signatures,

it reminds me of like the tank on the hill. Right. Right. Or cardboard tanks made to look up. World War II? Right. 100%. That now. At its army.

Now how is like sciops going to. you know, be involved when it comes to... And tell that story. Yeah. To these electronic signatures. And now you get into mis and disinformation. Yeah. And information warfare.

Yeah. It's absolutely. It's absolutely it. And so that was another thing that we clearly started working on was information warfare. And that's what we called it in those days. And one of the first things that we started to recognize was that, you know, there's two types of information that we're being confronted with. Yeah.

There's information that is... from friendly sources, but it's just inaccurate. Right. Which is what we would call a first report. I mean, every first report is always inaccurate. And then there's information that is from an adversary that is intended to disrupt your decision-making cycle. Right. And how do you distinguish between the two in the modern world where I go on X, I go on Facebook, I go on threads?

I don't go on threads because I just have too many at this point. but you go on those platforms and you can literally find the opposite of whatever it is that you found anywhere else at any given time. Right. And so mis and disinformation is something that our military has been forced to contend with for the last, you know, at least five or six years, I would say, since the early COVID days. Yeah. I think that, you know, they've also, because of social media, that whether it's political operatives or, you know, threat actors, foreign nations, whatever, have gotten very good at poisoning the well in the sense of when there is a true report, they've been getting very good at, they're very good at getting out ahead of it and throwing

false information, things that can be debunked as part of that true information. So that when those things are debunked, everybody ignores the true information by saying, oh, it's already been debunked. Yeah, we started calling that information overmatch where you're just being confronted with so much information, you just cognitively cannot process what is true, what is fiction, what is important, what isn't important. And it is absolutely something that we've built some systems. I know of some teams that have built some targeting ideologies.

Yeah. Because it's not a technical solution. Yeah. It's a human cognition understanding the source, the intent, and then the applicability to that particular moment. That is really, really hard. So let me ask you a. controversial opinion in that, you know, we have seen our government at times and we see it, I think that like in special operations, these ideas that social media, things like that,

need to be restricted or that they're that, you know, we need to protect against foreign influence, things like that, and you run into 1A issues. Like, where do you think the military and the government in general should be on those types of topics? My personal opinion is we should use information to our advantage. And so that means just like I can walk down the street and I can choose that deli or that bodega or that pizza hut or that McDonald's, I can choose where I'm going to pull my information from that I think is going to be most probable most probably to be right I can then look at

a track record of that information to verify that you know this one has been probabilistically more correct than those others and I can choose to go to a different location if I don't like the source there I can then choose which points of those information I am going to incorporate for an effect And so this is the same idea of, well, I can just choose which information I want. Right. And so my response to it is I think we're post-truth in a post-truth era. I think there is no longer a truth. I think there is a version of truth based on that moment in time.

And that applicability can be pulled away and can be extracted to be useful. But we're so overwhelmed with information. our natural bias as humans is to short circuit that and to say, I like this information because it fits into the narrative that I'm telling and so I can easily draw the conclusions for it. And so I think we as particularly American service members and Americans in general, we have to become more discriminatory about the types of information that we're allowing to be connected to our narratives. and we have to be deliberate about verifying that that is a source that we are choosing to trust on this.

And I think it's really important these days to listen to the source itself. It's why I think that in the modern era where we are right now, human touch and authenticity are going to win every single time. You know, the sound bites, the 32nd elevator speeches. you've got one minute to describe what's wrong in Afghanistan. I mean, like those types of engagements are no longer satisfying. Right. Because I think we as a population have started to become aware that we can pick and choose which truth we want to align with, but it doesn't mean it's always going to be true.

Right. And we have the ability to interrogate that continuously, but only if we're willing to do so as an individual. My example for this is COVID. COVID was the first time in human history that I believe, that I'm aware of, that we not only knew what we wanted to do, we knew how to disseminate it, and then we knew how to socially enforce it on almost global scale. Like that has never occurred.

We've never had the ability to inform the globe at once. and then to have to now go through a learning process, which we all know from our military experiences, when you hear that first report, we know that first reports are always wrong. We know that, but we had to learn that over decades of experience in decision making. And something that I tell private companies these days

that I get to work with with Solutions 21 is because in the military we're constantly rotating into leadership positions, we're constantly learning those lessons over and over and over again at higher levels and we become more comfortable with that's a first report let's let it develop right and so I think the distinction that I find between what I would like myself to do better job at and what I see as an example of what I don't want to do is I think we as a society can just go okay first report could be bad could be good let's let it develop with all sources of information enlightening us of what they believe the truth is and then we will figure out the truth

that we need to move forward yeah i don't know if that sounds too mystic or you know uh squishy no no no no it's good stuff but i think we have to make that decision and so it's there's no longer a truth right there is a way that we can incorporate information to achieve our ends right so take us through the last uh the socom assignment and into your retirement so we uh we uh We knew that the window was going to open. So my last year with ABLE Squadron was within COVID, and I spent a lot of my time at Trey Dock headquarters, actually, which in and of itself is an interesting story

because I don't know if you know this, but we were having trouble getting basic recruits to go to basic training. And so, like, I was down at this, you know, at Treydoc advising a four-star general, sir, I don't think we should get haircuts at basic training anymore, at least until we can figure out had to deal with what we're dealing with.

The Marine Corps just got shut down for their basic training. And so I did that at the conclusion, which was an education in a lot of ways because then I spent about three months in the Pentagon. And I really knew I didn't want to go into the Pentagon after that, mainly because I just wasn't happy. I appreciated the work, great Americans and really important experiences that I know that I probably should have had if I was going to be a senior officer inside the military. I just wasn't happy there. Yeah. And it's where I need, and I wasn't happy there when nobody was really there. So I don't

think it was going to be better when people were telling me what to do there. And so I, I decided that, you know, this next move could be our last, because if I don't get that one good piece of paper in this next assignment, which, I mean, you're at the level, you know, 05 to 06 transition where, you know, the paperwork, you can stay there for a long time. So if you don't get that one paperwork that moves you to the next level for the next job, then you just don't move on. And so we knew that just by, you know, the top gets tighter as you move up. This could be our last, you know, our last move or at least our last command.

And so if it was going to be our last command, it was probably going to be my last assignment. And so we wanted to move to a place that, you know, one, I was excited by the work. I got my blood boiling, you know, to go into work every day to work on something that I thought was important. But also to put my family in a position where I could have some stability for, you know, one of my daughters right here who was, you know, a sophomore in high school who I only get to ruin her life once. Patiently. Right? You can't say I ruined your life twice. I can only ruin your life once.

I wanted stability for her and I wanted stability for her younger sister, you know, and that was form. of years. And we also realized that we just, I hadn't seen my girls as much as I wanted to. I'd been gone a lot, particularly, you know, this one. And I told you guys beforehand, I don't think we talk enough about the trauma that occurs to our, you know, our brats, our military children. I think they go through a lot of post-traumatic stress, just like we do. And they need just as much attention, I think, as our service members. And we don't give it yet, but I think we're getting there. And so I wanted to focus on my family if that was going to happen. So we went to Socom because I was just blood boiling. I'd love to go back to, you know, something like that and touch that again and stay in

it. Love Tampa. So we moved there. I was fortunate enough to get a job inside of Socom head where his general Clark was the commander, you know, General Evans came in while I was after it. So it kind of felt like, you know, the right culmination of my career, you know, there. And day, you know, within the first week of being there in that job, you know, President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. And with that, withdrew a lot of the ways that we had been confronting the global war and terror, you know, traditionally speaking, because now it's been 20, 25 years. And that resulted in us, you know, having to find new ways to confront those threats and new ways. And quite frankly, I think in some ways good, you know, we did have a lot of, you know, inventiveness and creativity

and lots of, you know, collaboration between all of your interagencies and the military. And it was a very humbling experience, again, to watch, you know, this team come together over the course of the year and solve a really hard national problem, you know, for whatever, you know, whatever you think about it. And it was about that time that I realized that I wanted to go chase my own shiny objects. I've been chasing other people's dreams. and while I believe I, you know, could be a good brigade commander, I could be a good group commander, I could do those things well, there's 50 other people who could do that better than me.

And maybe that's not where my talent lies. You know, and so I decided that I, while I probably had a future there, did I care enough to go to that next level? And I don't think I did. And so I did what I thought was right for the service and for my family, which was I don't care enough. to go to that level, it's probably time for me to leave. And so I started to retire and I started to think about what does it look like to exit and then you start doing what everybody does. You know, what do I want to be when I grow up?

Right. You know, and well, all I've ever wanted to do is jump out of planes and blow stuff up and hang out with guys. And so what does that mean? And so I started looking for purpose. I started looking for what was the thing that I loved the most about my career. And so kind of to rewind, I loved teaching and I loved coaching and I loved mentoring and I loved taking every lesson that I'd learned and giving it to someone so they don't have to learn those

things. They can just catapult beyond me. Right. I loved finding the talent that was capable of doing that far beyond my capabilities. You know, the guys who I know that if I can just give you 30 minutes of this, you'll take it to another level that I never could. Right. And so I started looking at, you know, consulting. but it wasn't working for me.

So like the McKenzie's and where I was going to go and write a 300-page book report, I don't want to be Sad Sam, who went in there and wrote a story about the things we needed to change, and then the boss goes, hey, thanks for doing that, and shoves it in desk. I wanted to get dirty and to fix things. And so I started saying, I want to build companies. And people would say, well, what kind of companies? And I would go, I don't care.

What kind of company do you have? I want to build leaders. Out of traps. I want to build a leader who is building a really important company to solve really hard problems. And I was fortunate enough to be connected through an AWG former operator who was working for a small consulting firm called Solutions 21. And so I was introduced to the Solutions 21 team. They were a leadership development team and they focus purely on that kind of. We come in and we build elite leaders and then we teach alignment to the organization.

so that as they are growing that vision, the organization's resources are aligned to achieve that vision, and the execution is then feedback looping into that vision so that they're adjusting to meet the competitive market that they're in. It sounds like building a task force. Right. You know, it sounds like training a team for a specialized, you know, mission. And I just fell in love with these guys. And so I started going into these companies and learning from these amazing CEOs and presidents. And yes, I was getting satisfaction for being able to teach, coach, and mentor and use the things

that I had learned in my career. And I believe Solutions 21 does it better than anyone, which is why I still love working with them. And Solutions 21 has this amazing culture where we encourage you to pursue your passions for your community, whatever that might mean. You know, if you really, food drives or, you know, hurricane recoveries or, you know, whatever that, whatever it is that gets you back into your community in order to support your local community, we really want you to do that. And I suddenly realized that I don't have a local community. I don't have a hometown. I don't have a place that I can, you know, go to church and that's my bar.

And this is my, you know, I don't have that. Right. And so I started looking for, well, what is my community? What's us? Right. This is my community. This is the people that I, so, okay, well, what's the problem that we're dealing with. And right about that time is when I started to, you know, hear about the PACT Act. And if you guys haven't read the Pact Act yet, you know, really, Rosie and Leroy Torres, you know, from Burn Pit 360, if you've ever heard of that organization, they lobbied for what we all dealt with for the last 25 years, which is how do you deal with trash in a combat zone, you know, persistent and consistent for the last 25 years, we have trash and it's everything from jp8 you know jet fuel to human hair to animals to whatever it is

that needs to go on the pile yeah most of us have turned to stick at some point in a you know in a i don't know what they call them now the outhouses with the burn drums you know like a lot of that plastic mRE shit yeah yeah everything you you every one of us has been in a built up outhouse you know four by four wood on the outside with a half you know oil drum with with jp8 and it burning it off literally you know burning human waste with with with with oil. And we sucked that in right over and over and over again. And the way I typically explain this to people is we went on a a drive in this country to remove smoking. So literally smoking a cigarette, you know, a pack a day turns into cancer.

We get it. Right. Okay. Now stand over a hundred by hundred burn pit and suck it in for 15 months. Right. You know, it's not surprising that we're seeing these strange cancers and injuries in these pockets of teams. And when you're talking about special operators, I have a different problem. And so now Burn Pit 360 starts lobbying on behalf of our service members. And in November of 2022, the PACT Act is signed by the Biden administration, phenomenal job by the Biden administration, we'll add. And that PACT Act, I was skeptical because I was like, I don't understand how we're connecting, you know, Bo Biden's brain cancer to, I mean, to burn pits. I don't get it.

And it wasn't until I read the Pact Act in $283 billion over five years for respiratory-related illnesses and injuries that I started to recognize my own danger. Right. The, my own threats. And I started reaching out to buddies that I've been, you know, I've known for 20, 30 years. And I feel like I'm the only one that hasn't had. cancer yet. Right. And I mean, honestly, Meg, my wife and I, we spend, we kind of darkly laugh about, we're just kind of waiting for the shoe to drop, right? Like, we've been in all those places. We've done all those same things and harder men than me are going down for really tough stuff.

One of my former teammates guy I worked with, we got back in touch after 15 years and had him on the show. Yeah. And I told him afterwards, I was like, man, don't wait another 15 years because those burn pits are going to get one of us. Well, go get tested. And even before the burn bits, I mean, if you think about, like, all the range time we spent. And then what do you do? You go collect up brass and put it in your hat, right?

And all shoot houses with all the, like, the lead dust. Like, like, there's so, there's so much that that we were exposed to on a constant basis. You know, we talk about TBIs or blast-related illnesses. Yeah. That they're just now. And how many times were you on the range when you had to do a spendex with Gustavs? And after like three or four rounds, you're like, I don't want to do this anymore. Right.

Because your head's banging. Yeah. 160th pilots. 160th gunners. Those guys sucking off the mini gun. Yeah. And they walk out of those calfaxes with, you know, just booming headaches. Yeah.

And I started to have those same encounters, right? And I started to put the pieces together. Yeah. And I started looking at, you know, the data. And what I realized is we have this M50 gas mask that we've been carrying around in our pocket for 25 years. I've worn it legitimately once, you know, in Iraq when we had scuds on the invasion coming and we thought all of them had chemical warheads. Right, right. And so I legitimately wore my full mop gear, you know.

And for those who you don't understand the mop system, so, you know, mop zero to four for being nuclear biological chemical eminency. Yeah. Right. And so we're in this gear fighting for three months. And then I look back at the rest of my career and I wonder, when was the last time that we had a service member die of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack? And the answer is World War I, World War I, World War II, maybe. Yeah. And so then it's, well, wait a minute.

When I look at the PACT Act data, what it tells me is in the civil, I love telling the story. So please forgive me, in the Civil War in the 1860s, we decided we should probably start wearing helmets. And we got those issued around World War I. And so in World War I, we started wearing helmets and we realized we should probably have hearing protection. And we started getting that out in like Vietnam, Korea area. And then we decided in, you know, probably the 80s and 90s we should start wearing eye protection for our eyes. And we really got that issued inside of the global warrant terror. It's why I wanted to go to a special operations unit.

I get the cool Oakley M frames and I get to have my hands in my pockets. Right. And we missed the fact that. the last piece of real estate, potentially the most important, is the nose in the mouth. And we're sucking in lead and antimony and aluminum and all of the things that we know to be carcinogenic. Right. And that we know we are going into shoot houses day in and day out without lung protection. And so I know this sucks.

Yeah. Like I, like, I'm the guy who's like, I don't want more body armor. I don't want more, you know, I need to be lethal. Right. But now as looking back on it, I go, I don't just want you lethal. I want you long. Right. I want longevity.

I cannot afford to have a guy trained for 20 years and then to go down for something like this that is preventable. So we then went and found a company that was working on this innovative platform. And it's called Ventus Respiratory Technologies. And on behalf of Solutions 21, we've been working with that startup who's the CTO is one of the key design. of the M50 gas mask, of a low burden, low cost particulate respirator for the operator, by the operator that protects you from all those hazardous particulates that you suck in, day in and day out. And then you go, and we now connect that with the House Armed Service Committee and the

Senate Armed Service Committee. And we did this last January. We were very fortunate to work with some members of the House and the Senate in order to language inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act that asks the DOD to conduct a study and determine do we have the right respiratory protection for our service members in accordance with what we think we know from the PACT Act. Rather than spending $283 billion over five years in injury and illness, can we provide a $300 tactical respirator in everybody's pocket as preventive You want to show us this thing?

Yeah. I do want to show it to you. And, you know, and ask you, since you know what it's like to be on the objective, one of the challenges with a gas mask is your ability to breathe. Yeah. Right? Your ability to breathe because you are moving at a very high, you know, output. That's right.

And so like when they were building this, were they taking that into consideration? Yeah, absolutely. So this was designed in order to not impede the way we shoot, move, and communicate. And so it is literally a quarter mask, which is why it's not. Can you hold that up? Yeah, absolutely. So it's literally a quarter mask and it's designed to fit atop the chin so that your chin strap properly seats. Okay.

Which that was the first issue. Right. The pull on the filter is purely for particulate. So it's just for the dirt, the dust, the aluminum, the lead, those things that are cut, it is not It's not a gas mass like filtering it down to the smallest micron or whatever. Right. So when you start going after gases and vapors, you start needing to get activated charcoal. Right. When you start getting more material into this filter, it starts becoming more of a burden to breathe.

Right. So by breathing heavy, we now can't perform optimally. Right. So this is the lightest pull on the market. It's the only CE certified system out there. That's the European version of NIOSH. And it's designed so that when you breathe, you don't get the whole per hole per because the mic is actually offset from the breathe port.

And so you're breathing over the filter to protect your lungs, but your mic connects directly to the outside and a push to talk so that it's not being impact. And so we have some teams that wear these for helicopter operations like off Little Bird platforms because they can get assured comms because they can simply talk into it without the wind getting them. It's meant to be used when you want it. So like a fighter pilot's mask, I put it on when I'm coming off the X and I've got mud dust and rust going everywhere. And then when I get back into a cleaner environment or I need less pull, I take it off. I'm on the catwalk.

I can wear it to protect myself below from the particulates that are coming from explosions and nine bangers and lots of ammunition, not even talking about sim munition yet. Right. All of that is protecting me, but I don't want to wear my helmet. Right. Okay, you can do that. Right. And so it's designed to be integrated with how the soldier or the operator shoots right now,

so a good cheek to weld is allowable. Communication, it's assured communications through whatever, you know, system you're using. and it's clear. And then your ability to move in it is it's the lightest burden pull on the market for sure. And the tradeoff is it's not a mop three and four system. Right. It's meant for mop zero to two, which is where we find ourselves, at least in my career,

99.99% of the time. Right. I mean, even outside of the preventive measures of it, the communication ability, when, like you say, in a helo, when nobody can hear what's going on. Right. You know, in an open air vehicle run across the desert where there's dust flying, and everybody's trying to yell about what's happening.

Exactly. It works in a number of environments. Exactly. And we have, you know, some additives to this. We were just at Socom's research development acquisitions experiment this last week. And we have a voice projection unit that goes on to this. it's about an eighth of an inch thick so that when you speak, it'll project like a bullhorn so that you don't have...

I can't communicate with you. I can control a room. I don't have muffled. It comes out like a bullhorn. And then I can connect it to my ATAC with a downloaded language program. And when I speak into the mic in English, what comes out the speaker is whatever language you've selected. That's incredible. Mandarin or Russian, pick the language.

And you can also, there's two ways you can do it now on the... return, and we haven't built this prototype yet, but you can either have your silinks in, which means the return gets translated right back into your silenks, your earpiece, or I've seen some heads-up displays now, some ARVR stuff that you could do text so that I would just read just like a subtitle if I'm talking to someone in a different language if you wanted to do an ARVR gone. Man, that is incredible. It's impressive.

And so what I keep saying is all of the technology to change the way we protect our service members' respiratory systems is there. we simply need to decide how to deploy it. Right. And so instead of simply presenting a problem to the United States military, Solutions 21, in conjunction with Ventus Respiratory Technologies, is building the solution. And whether you want to adopt it or not, that's up to the military.

Right. We're using these right now with a lot of first responders, a lot of SWAT teams. Fentanyl is an issue. A lot of, you know, Customs and Border Patrol agents are starting to, to look at this because they can speak fluently. Right. With anyone they encounter, ODAs and SEAL teams that are doing J-Sets.

Yeah. This is the perfect tool for you to protect yourself from those environments that are not as environmentally clean as we might be in the United States or another developed country and still be able to cleanly communicate. That's incredible. Thank you. There's an amazing team that's been working on this and I'm simply an advocate for it. Where can people go to find Ventes?

and Solutions 21 if they're interested in this technology. Yeah, so if you're interested in, you know, leadership development and us coming in and teaching the way that we build teams inside of the military in particular and how we align vision to execution, then Solutions21.com, www.w.Solutions21.com, you know, tell them Jason sent you.

And then Ventis respiratory technologies. So VentisRT.com. And you can just Google any of that, put it in perplexity, put it in chat, GPT, and it will bring up the links. Any final thoughts before we get going? Anything we failed to cover that you'd like to hit up? I think the only thing that I do want to reinforce

is this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you, gentlemen, for letting me come in and tell the story of some of the amazing heroes that I got to work with. I was simply standing amongst giants. I definitely was not one, and I'm only 5'9 with my shoes on.

So when you're standing next to some of these guys, they are definitely the giants. and deservedly so. But more importantly, this was a really unique opportunity to have my 19-year-old daughter who grew up in the Global War on Terror, who I deployed when she was 15 months old. I really didn't come back until she was about 16, maybe 17,

and giving me the opportunity to have this experience with her to just tell her why, maybe. We did this, or why it was important, at least to hear the story, the things that I don't think we do a great job of. And so I think I'd love to raise some awareness around our military brats and what they went through and the support that they need. And I hope that this is the beginning of that conversation. And it was a pleasure for me to be able to sit here with my daughter who I know is partly paying attention and partly talking to her friends at college about what they're going to do tonight.

But maybe one day she'll think back to one of these stories and it'll mean something to it. It means we were talking a little bit before the show, and I was telling you about how I hear a lot from the children of Vietnam veterans and their dad has been dead now for 10, 20 years in some cases. And they come to me asking, you know, how can I find out about what my dad did? And, you know, you can FOIA some documents, but it's not going to give them the experiential information that, you know,

you shared with us today. And that's why I know going on a podcast isn't for everyone, but I really encourage veterans to at least pen 10 to 20 pages, put it in a shoebox for their kids and grandkids. It doesn't have to be public for the family, right? Because your kids and grandkids will have these questions. Yeah. Captain Joe Thomas, Special Forces E7,

who became a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne with me, told me to keep a journal at every combat tour, and I have followed his advice to this day. I wish I had. I really wish I had you know, kept, like, it's all just one big blur to me now. You know, one big green experience that I have a hard time separating things. Yeah.

No, it was a powerful, powerful mentorship from June. Guys, thanks for joining us for this Christmas episode. Our next one is going to be our year in review. We'll talk about all the shows we had in 2024. It would be nuts. And we're looking forward to going into 2025. We're scheduling. We're done.

January is filled. February is almost filled. We're looking at March now. Are we going to talk about a new format? On this one? We'll talk about it on the next one. Next one. Cool.

So, yeah, thank you, Jason. Appreciate it. Thank you for coming in, being here in studio. And we'll see all you guys next time. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.