The Team House - History of U.S. Special Operations

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

The history of U.S. Special operations from 1632-present. (Abridged)  This video can be far longer we (Jack) tried his best to capture some of the highlights. If you like this kind of content let us know by liking, subscribing, and sharing. Subscribe to our Patreon👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Check out Jack’s books👇 https://www.amazon.com/Jack-Murphy/e/B00501K130/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 Intro music👇 https://youtu.be/Zv83c0RLxnk #specialoperations #history #theteamhouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents,

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. This is dirtback history. I'm Dee. This is Jack Murphy. Jack is an Army, former Army Ranger, former Green Beret in the U.S. Army. current journalist and author.

He has a podcast called The Team House. It's a great podcast. I work on it. Good production. Good production values there, Dee. I mean, I didn't want to say it. I wanted you to be the one to say it. But I agree with you.

And what else? Dungeons and Dragons fan. Yeah. Fan of... Do you like rainbow cookies? I like rainbow cookies. I love food dye. Red dye number three,

blue dye number seven. That's my favorite, too. I hear the hipsters talking, man, shit about food die. What about it? It's bad for you? It's bad for you, apparently. I love food die because I'm not a communist.

Exactly. Me neither. I love America. What's food die do to you? Nothing. It just makes you happy. Yeah. Because you're eating colorful food. Right.

It livens up what you're eating. Yeah. And I didn't know this, but some Italian brother, I know, she made me aware of it. That rainbow cookies were made to look like their Italian flag. Oh, the tricolor. Yeah. Yeah, I was like the original, like how it was. And then I started looking up rainbow cookies to send them, like, pictures of them.

And I found a red, white and blue one, which is hilarious, which is just perfect. But, like, they're not always red white and red, white, the Italian flag. What is it? Red, white, and green. Red white and green, yeah. Italians are gross. Anyway, this is dirtback history. I actually have, you're kind of like a historian.

No, not a historian. That's that pretentious way of saying it. Historian, I think you're supposed to have a PhD to be a historian. Right, to make it worth, like, you know, make your fucking $500,000 a student loan's worth it. It still won't be worth it. No shit. You're going to, what do you, if you're a Ph.D. in history, if you're lucky and you're Dan Carlin, he's probably not even a Ph.D. You're teaching history.

Yeah, and he's good at what he does. You know, I actually started off as a, well, I started off as an international business major, but then when I got to Columbia, I changed my major to history. That's my first major there. Oh, okay. And I was very frustrated with it, honestly. Really? Yeah. Yeah, really frustrated.

Why? They silo off a lot of the information I felt like, and they're very particular about what you're allowed to look at, what you're allowed to reference. Really? Like a lot of the stuff, or not a lot, but some of the stuff we'll even talk about today, like a history course. Yeah. A history teacher, they would not be cool with because it's too contemporary for them. What? It's getting too close into contemporary times.

What's interesting about that is like they silo. shit off. It's like, bro, you're not in the 20s. Like, we can get all the information and more on the internet. Yeah. And it's interesting because you have these different fields and you could see it in college. You have political science, which I did end up majoring in,

history and then journalism. And they all cover these different kinds of fields, but they all sort of fail to marry up with one another. You know, I think a lot of it intertwines. Yeah, a lot of journalists operate with a historical worldview. I'm sorry to say that. Not all of them. Sure. But many. They see this one thing

happening right now. Historians are the other way around. They look at things that happen a long time ago, but they're oftentimes, again, not always, but oftentimes unable to tell us, why does this information matter now? That's so interesting how they can't like do that. In my opinion. Or they they don't want to do that. I mean, you went to caught and go anywhere. In my opinion, that was just an observation I made. And political science is a whole other thing that maybe fails to look at both. I think, I don't know if it was a podcast I heard with you on or whatever. You're talking about like in one of your classes, like in Columbia for political science,

they teach you about like intelligence and shit? Like you have classes like that? Not as a part of political science per se, but there were classes. I took a class on special operations of low intensity conflict and another class that's sick. Intelligence operations taught by. by Austin Long, who I'm not sure where he is right now. He's a Rand Corporation guy.

Very smart guy, very good classes. You know, I had a good experience taking them. Yeah, those sound like actually interesting classes. Oh, yeah, they were. Absolutely. So, yeah, nice way to shoehorn that you went to Columbia. That's smooth. I'm going to call it out.

That having a degree matters more to other people than it does to me. Like, I know, like, people attack me for it. And I don't really? I don't, yeah, I don't normally bring it up. Why do they attack you for it? Because anything that's like educated, that's like equated to being like elitist or globalists. And they really attack you? Like I'm like I'm busting balls.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are people out there get really upset about it. It's like, well, this is more important to you than it is to me. I mean, for me, it was school, it's education. You take away from it what you can and you go about your life. And you got it for free, right? Because you served? I wouldn't go quite that far.

Free-ish? I mean, I had it much better than other students because I had the, I had the, the post-911 GI Bill, the Yellow Ribbon Program, because I'm a New York state resident, have been my whole life. I had state tuition assistance. Then there's the Pell Grant. There's a few other little things we can apply for here and there. But I still 30 grand a year? I still, I still went like 20,000 something dollars in debt. Okay, so that's not free. So it could have been much worse. I mean, think about somebody who doesn't have all of that, they really went into debt. So you better have gotten like a, you better be going into finance and working for Chase or Black Rock or something.

You've got to make that money back. Become a corporate piece of shit so you can at least pay your fucking loans back. Yeah, for it's true. Bro, I got a cousin. I always bring us up about how ridiculous education costs are. He went to Villanova. Smart dude, smart kid. Went to Villanova for four years.

It was like 50 grand a year, $45,000 a year. Then he went to Fordham Law, which is like $55,000 a year. He got out and got offered like $45,000 a year in his salary starting, which, you know, eventually sure. I mean, right now, let's say 10 years down the road, he's making $150,000. How much is he really making $1,000? He's not making $1,000 a $1,000. So, 45 Gs, and that was like whatever that number was if he actually had loans. He doesn't have loans because luckily his family paid for it and stuff.

like that, which is awesome. But imagine some Jamok, some fucking regular kid, just taking out loans like this. He's in the bag, $350,000. And he's making $45 grand a year. The math just doesn't add up. What the fuck? How does that make sense?

Oh, by the way, you can't go bankrupt on it. It's literally like taxes. Like, if you owe taxes, you can't go bankrupt on it. Like, they're going to get their money because the government is like the biggest mafia in the world. It's the same thing with student loans. It's a fucking joke. You got me crazy, but we're talking about other stuff.

Our shows, what's our? show about. What this show? Yeah. I'm going to put a time stamp to let people know, like, all right, past D's therapy session ends at this time. Well, great that you asked D. Because this show, we will also talk about some catastrophic failures. You know, something that people in contemporary society, they think about U.S. military special operations as, you know, these hardcore alpha male badasses and which, they are. But that all grew out of a whole series of failures, some really painful, difficult failures that happened in our history that led to, you know, reform. It led to our military asking itself

some really difficult questions and fixing itself and improving things. And so today we're going to talk a little bit about the history of special operations, American special operations, if that's still what you want me to speak to. No, yeah, let's talk. I'm in. I'm in, brother. I like the segue, too, about failures and stuff like that. It's true. That was extremely... I was very smooth. Hey, you see, I'm getting the hang of this whole podcast host thing. This broadcast stuff. Yeah, broadcasting. Did you ever think you'd be a broadcast? No. No. And I have, like, very little to know technical background and audio, video, streaming, all the software. That's not really my thing. You know, my thing is being a writer. being a researcher and a journalist and so on and so forth. I have been in podcasting since about 2012, but honestly, it was other people setting all that shit up for me. It was Ian Scotto I worked with for many years.

He's an awesome producer. Starting to do it on my own, starting to up the team house. I'll say this. I did have to lean, and I think this is something that you can take away from the military, is having that sort of like inner self-confidence, like I can teach myself to do this. Right on, yeah. And I can pull out all the manuals

and just slog through them until I understand what the hell I'm doing. And so just through brute force, I was able to kind of get it to a point that... Yeah, you're pretty proficient in it. I'm not saying you're not. And then we're bringing you on, took it that much higher

because you were able to give it the attention. It really deserves. Like if you're on... Like, I'm half here. I'm half at these levels right now and I'm half here. it's fucking annoying. Yeah, yeah. And that's why I have the cans out, because I need to hear it because I'm a psycho and I'm neurotic with that.

So, like, with you doing the team house, I remember, I used to watch the team house, and you'd be getting up to fix stuff and adjust and adjust. Yeah, it's hard to, like, have a real conversation where you're not, you're just focused on one thing, your subject, and then have to worry about, oh, my God, are the fucking mics on? Is this fucking camera right, you know? And then at the end, you realize you fuck something up, and you're, like, sitting awake at 3 a.m., like, what did I do? It's brutal, dude.

What did I do? I did that last time I deleted an entire episode of my sister about Henry the 8th. We did that twice. Really? Yeah. The one about the Reformation? No, the one before that was about Henry the 8 specifically. We did a cool, awesome episode and I deleted it while I was editing it like a fucking idiot.

And I brought it to the computer place to try and restore it, try to get it back. He couldn't get it back because it was like a huge file. I was like an hour video. Man. So we did it again. That's the worst. But you got to make lemonade. need, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, what I did was, like, that was a big theme of the episode.

It was me pissed about fucking deleting the episode. So I guess that helped, that saved it, salvaged it a little bit. So yeah, special operations in the United States. Yeah, man. It, you know, I figured for this, we will kind of do like a broad overview. There's much, much more that we'll be able to talk about. But, I mean, we're literally talking about from the year 1634, the first recorded American Ranger to 2021. Sort of, I think, will probably end if we get that far with the targeted killing of Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad last year. So, I mean, there is a lot in between those two things. 400, almost 400 years.

We're not going to be able to get to all of it, but we'll try to. That's literally like a 10-hour thing. Yeah, yeah. I'll try to do a good overview. And then, you know, maybe down the line, we can pick out some subjects where, particularly interested in. And I will try to highlight a couple like vignettes as we go of of interesting things that maybe people haven't heard of before. Right. And the Soleimani hit. I'm going to call it a hit. So, you know, that's basically what it was. People get sensitive about that term assassination.

Carry some legal connotations. Is that what, sorry. Yeah, what's the, so what's like the lawyer approved the word? I don't even know what they're using. Targeted killing. Targeted killing would be That sounds bad also. Yeah, it does sound bad. That sounds like Terminators. Yeah. Lethal ops. Sure. Lethal operations. Liquidation. I don't think you can use that one.

Maybe the Russians would use that one. I don't think we're allowed to use that. You did an awesome story on Yahoo News for that, which was great. Yeah. Yeah, me and Zach Dorffman, another journalist, wrote that story. So, yeah, I figure that's a good place to kind of end things. Totally. But, yeah, I'd like to start with prior to the Revolutionary War.

And this is really where, especially, operations per se there's no such thing as special operations necessarily at that time but this is sort of where we trace the lineage back to and before the revolutionary war you had rangers um who were semi-state sanctioned some of them worked for rich landowners some of them worked for uh you know colonial governments and they were trackers they were trappers they were outdoors men uh they were people who could range they could They could be like game wardens. They could be people who went around the wilderness and they could conduct scouting or reconnaissance. And they could find out what's going on in this area.

That's why you guys fucking ruck forever. Yes. And the first Ranger, recorded Ranger that we have documentation for, was a guy named Edward Bacler in the year 1634. Holy shit. So this is a long time ago. He was working for a wealthy landowner named William Clare. And as time went on, by the time you get to the year 1700, you have references in the literature of ranger parties, ranger troops, ranger companies, or the other way around, companies of rangers,

parties of rangers, troops of rangers, who could be hired on a semi-freelandce basis, other times working for a government. and Rangers fought actually in six conflicts, at least six conflicts prior to the Revolutionary War, fighting against the American Indians and the French primarily, in the French Indian War, the King James War and other conflicts. So we have a history of Rangers in America that go way, way back. I mean, 1634, people, you don't think about America before 1776, really, right? Even though, I mean, it's a country, everyone, people lived here and stuff, but you don't really, like, U.S. Army guys.

Right. Was it technically U.S. Army? No, no. There was just Rangers. And then as we got up to the Revolution, of course, the Continental Army and the Minutemen and all that sort of thing. But this is before that. Way before that. Yeah.

An interesting character, sort of the patron saint of Rangers is Robert Rogers. He, the first recorded instance of Rogers Rangers was 1756. He fought against the Indians and the French also prior to the Revolutionary War. He's mentioned in all of the books about Rangers. He's like, yeah. He is the guy. He's the big guy. Which is kind of funny because although he is sort of like the archetypical Ranger,

he was also prone to corruption. He's known as being something of an. an inept administrator and a drunk. And he switched sides a lot. Oh, that's bad, yeah. Yeah, he went over to hang out in England for a while, came back, and he tried to sign on with the Continental Army, and George Washington wouldn't even see the guy.

Oh, no shit, huh? Yeah, he was like, fuck off. Because he likely saw Rogers as being a royalist spot at that point. Yeah. I mean, you're over there hanging out with the fucking king. Right, right. So Rogers, the entrepreneurial drunkard that he was, takes his services and offers them to the British, which they accept. As a range, like as like a soldier. Yeah, yeah.

And interestingly, there were also, if you like see the television show turn. Yeah, pretty solid show. Talks a lot about, you know, George Washington understood there was a real importance to intelligence and counterintelligence and scouting and so on. But in the show, you also see ranger companies or mixed ranger companies of Native Americans and European colonists, which is pretty historically accurate. There were Native Americans that were brought into, you know, quote-unquote, companies of rangers or parties of rangers. Why would they do that just to bolster the ranks? Yeah, to bolster the ranks. And also, I mean, I presume that the Native Americans, just like the white settlers, were also looking to make a living.

Right. you know yeah um so that's kind of the early history of the rangers um when we get into the revolutionary war uh there were a few things i mean one thing i'd like to point out was thomas nulton's rangers that were right here in new york city okay uh they served under washington and fought the brits as uh Washington beat a uh strategic retreat if you will right through brooklyn yep uh did the famous river crossing across the east river into manhattan and then continue to retreat up into northern Manhattan and then into Westchester County. And also at the time during the Revolutionary War, there are some other things that, you know,

like I was reading this book, Special Operations in the Revolutionary War, written by a retired colonel. This was a really good book. And it points out to, although, again, there was no such thing labeled as known as special operations. there was guerrilla warfare, there were these sorts of maritime raids, things that were very much in the milieu of special operations, as we would look at it today. There's, for instance, the raid on Fort Taekondaroga with Ethan Allen leading the charge. The trader, Benedict Arnold, jumped in on that, and he wanted to claim credit for it. He thought this was his way to get a star to become a gentleman. Really?

Yeah. So he wanted to. So officers have been jerked. off since back then. That's correct. Yes. And he jumps in and wants to kind of take credit for the whole thing. How much he really had to do with the success of the raid. I mean, it was really funny. The whole raid went off and it happened in like 15, 20 minutes. Wow. And the raiders, the colonists, you know, the militia men immediately got into the private stock and became rip-roaring drunk in Fort Taekondaroga, which Benedict Arnold flipped the hell out about.

So needless to say, I don't think things worked out for Benedict Arnold the way that he thought it would. There were some other things mentioned in the book. Also, there's the early American Navy, if you will. They did a raid in Nassau on a British fort on New Providence Island, which is pretty interesting. Really? Yeah. Nassau, Bahamas? Yeah, yeah. No shit.

Yeah, so there were, and there were, again, Ranger companies active all throughout the Revolutionary War. And so that is kind of the birth of American special operations. I mean, the Revolutionary War, like we were guerrillas. Yeah, yeah, we were fighting a regular warfare, guerrilla warfare. You know, as I mentioned with George Washington's strategic retreat and perhaps also his focus on intelligence and counterintelligence, he understood that, you know, you weren't going to be able to go bone to bone with the British. You know, we're going to have to fight in a regular campaign, which we did and was eventually successful. That's why we're here.

Yeah. Brits are in fucking England. Except we have Prince Harry. I don't know what he's doing. Yeah, I wish we could get rid of him. Him and the wife. I find them. I like the wife.

I find the wife attractive. I find the British royals to be insufferable. Sure. And I just can't stand listening to anything about them. there's nothing more boring than listening to a British royal wine or talk for that matter. And I wish they would just go away. I wish they'd go away. The Prince Andrew interview was a 10 out of 10, like, after the Epstein stuff.

And he did that interview like a few years later. Yeah, where he was sweating. Where he was saying, yeah, the picture couldn't have been me and me with the girl who was trafficked. Yeah, it was 17 at the time. Because I don't hug people. Yeah. Oh, he said something like, I sweat. or I don't sweat.

Right, right. Like, bro. One of Epstein's accusers, Virginia Roberts, has made allegations against you. She was very specific about that night. She described dancing with you and you profusely sweating and that she went on to have bath, possibly... There's a slight problem with the sweating

because I have a peculiar medical condition, is that I don't sweat, or I didn't sweat at the time. And that was, oh, actually, yes, I didn't sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at. And I simply, it was almost impossible for me to sweat. On that particular day that we now understand is the date, which is the 10th of March, I was at home. I was with the children. I'd taken Beatrice to a pizza express in Woking.

Why would you remember that so specifically? Why would you remember a Pizza Express birthday and being at home? Because going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do. Did they not coach you before this? Well, you know what that is, though, is that is an interview with someone who has never faced any accountability for anything in life ever. Yeah. And knows that he never will. He can literally sit there and tell you that, you know, yeah, it's all true. We sacrificed babies and nothing would happen to him.

Right. Yeah. He's not going to get through a perp walk. He's not going to jail. That will never have him. No shot. I mean, technically, he's got immunity, right? Because he's a fucking state.

He's like a, he's a product of the state. Like, he's, I guarantee you he's got some kind of diplomatic immunity. I don't know the ins and outs of the law. But, I mean, yeah, it is on the books. you know, the British royals are there as part of, you know, the British government. And you know, he's like the, he's like the second string, right? So he's not really, he's not in the front doing like the ton of interviews and stuff. Yeah, you would think for this one, like, hey, maybe contract people out to like, if they don't have it in-house, which I'm sure they do,

to, like run scenarios about the questions you're going to get and what your answers are going to be. But, like, that's like if you're afraid, though. Like, if you're afraid of being put on the spot. Like, this guy has no fear. But he's doing an interview, bro. about this like you think any normal journalist worth their salt is gonna act i mean anybody with a brain who's not unlike the payroll right but that's that's what a bubble they are they're that they live in it's madness dude british aristocracy i mean they're kind of famous for that aren't

that for sure yeah they just live in a different fucking universe yeah so anyway the brits suck i like the indian food in britain but so we kick their ass out of here uh fast forwarding you know going way forward to world war one there really wasn't a anything quite the same as the Rangers and the Revolution or the later incarnations of, you know, what we'll talk about with the OSS in World War II in a moment. And if I were to speculate, I think that probably the reason why it was because World War I was a war of attrition. There were these front lines. It was trench warfare. Maneuver warfare had not really come into existence until World War II, in the sense that we think of it today, at least.

So there were shock troops in World War I. And there are some instances where, I don't know, maybe we could look back at it and find some sort of lineage there in special ops history. Sure. But World War I isn't really looked at in regards to this particular subject. I mean, it was a war of artillery and cannons and chemical weapons and chemical weapons and trenches and rifles and machine guns. That must have been a fucking nightmare.

Yeah. You still like that guys who dig the tunnels in World War I? Underneath no man's land. What the fuck, man. What a shit show. I mean, war is a shit show, right? Yeah, that one especially. Yeah.

So, yeah, World War I. So we get to World War II, and we start off World War II pretty much with very little in terms of what we would think of as, commando or intelligence gathering capability. Bill Donovan, William Donovan, is asked by the president to establish some sort of capability, modeled on at least initially what the British have. And he ended up creating something that, you know, I think is uniquely American.

He created the Office of Strategic Services. They were involved in intelligence operations, propaganda operations, and commando operations. And what we would refer to today as unconventional work. That's like kind of sort of what the modern day, I mean, it's a precursor to the CIA. Yes. And the precursor to today's special forces. Yeah. Both organizations trace their lineage back to the OSS.

I have, you know, I had a friend before he passed away. He was a Delta Force officer and he would always say, we are not the SAS, we are the OSS. and he would point back to some of the founding documents of the OSS and point to how similar we are, even to this day, to the OSS. Because like the, like what people want to, they say that the formation at Delta is based on SAS. Yeah, and it drew, it does draw heavily from that. And we'll probably get into that a lot. But for sure, the British SAS experience shaped where that came from with the units founding officer Charlie Beckwith. But back to World War II, the OSS becomes very active in both theaters of operation.

There was just one, there's so much, and literally there's volumes written about the OSS, but just one example I'd like to highlight because I don't think it's been talked about too much. I tracked down the son of a OSS officer. This guy's name, the son is Dan Tyler Moore III. his father, Dan Tyler Moore the second, was a descendant of Teddy Roosevelt, went to Yale.

And remember back in those days, I mean, the first generation, a lot of the OSS guys, a lot of the early CIA guys, who was the Harvard Princeton Yale crew. So this guy was, you know, a blue blood, if you will. And he was recruited into the OSS

and sent to North Africa. and early on before the war really even got started and some interesting stories about playing cat and mouse with the Nazis in Cairo and one of his big tasks became eliminating Nazi couriers moving from sub-Saharan Africa into North Africa and then eventually to Nazi Germany because they were smuggling diamonds no shit and diamonds at the time were a well to this day they still are they're an industrial mineral as well they are used in

drill bits. I believe they are using like crank shafts in certain industries as well. So diamonds had a industrial use. Yeah. And they would, I mean, I guess they did make synthetic diamonds back then. No, no. So intercepting these diamonds became a critical part of, you know, interrupting the supply chain to the Third Reich. And Dan Tyler Moore played a role in that. That's pretty sweet. And apparent from what I'm told, it was a question of essentially hiring assassins to take these guys out. Jesus Christ. Yeah, as they smuggled the diamonds. Wow.

And of course, I asked the question after these guys were killed, what became of the bag of diamonds there carried? That question remains unanswered. You take it a little bit, a little toll. Maybe. Yeah, I mean, whatever. Take a little piece on the top of you're in fucking Northern Africa, fucking killing Nazis for fuck's sake. I mean, well, I don't, I mean, I don't know that I'm not alleging there's some sort of corruption or anything like that. This gentleman did after the war try to start up a string of hotels in Turkey.

So, I mean, he was working for a living. Sure. It wasn't like he was. Right, just sitting back. Yeah. Yeah. And also just interesting stories about the gadgets and gizmos that were kicking around his father's house after the war. Oh, that must be sweet.

Yeah, they had different devices. That could be affixed on Nazi trains that had a solar panel on them so that it would detect. It could tell the difference between cloud cover and night and day as opposed to when the train went into a tunnel. So that instant blackout on the solar panel, the solar eye, would be used on this device. It was used to trigger explosives. Oh, shit. Yeah, that's pretty slick. And they had this as far back as the 40s.

Yeah, that's a slick. Yeah. In 1940s doing this. So that the train would go into the tunnel and it would destroy the train, also destroy the tunnel, collapse the tunnel onto the train. Obviously, that makes it much, much harder to clear that rail line. There's a whole science behind how to derail trains and how to put explosives on train rails, and maybe I shouldn't go in all of that. But especially because I saw in the news article yesterday, there was a big train derailing, and the authorities are saying it was sabotage. What? Where?

Yeah. Ah, shit. In the United States? Yeah, in the United States. I'll forward the article to you. No shit. So, yeah, rail line sabotage is still a thing. In 2003, the CIA working with paramilitary components, derailed a 90-car train,

heading into Missoule, Iraq, just as the invasion, the 2003 invasion kicked off. Wow. Yeah, there are other trail. We can look at rail sabotage. I mean, now it's big, especially World War II. like that's how supplies got there I mean sure air drops and stuff but I'm sure trains played a huge fucking

Lawrence of Arabia engaged in trail line sabotage the Rhodesians sabotaged trail rail lines people hate on it bro I want to say it again because I said it when I did my half-baked

fucking Greek resistance show people want to fucking make fun of logistics but they're important I mean without logistics there's no war right full stop no bullets no fuel

no food no water you're going to have a short war With our logistics, there's no nothing, dude. Well, I mean, this is a big part of why ISIS swept across Iraq so quickly because you have all these cool units that American Special Forces trained for years and years. But if the Iraqi government is not supplying them with fuel for their vehicles and bullets and everything else, then how do you expect them to fight? Right. So, yeah, everything is logistics. That's hilarious.

It's all ridiculous. Some other interesting tidbits about World War II. we would be remiss if we didn't mention the Jedberg teams. The Jedbergs were multinational teams. There was a joint effort between the Office of Strategic Services and the British Special Operations Executive. And they were three-man teams parachuted behind enemy lines. And they were composite nationalities on the team of British, French, and American.

Some teams had one of each. you know, one American, one French, one British. What's the train up like for that? It was very short. It was on a very short fuse that these guys would be trained up and then deployed, you know, parachuted into France or wherever. They would link up with partisan forces, begin conducting raids, sabotage. As D-Day kicked off, they could go in and secure a bridge,

secure a rail line junction before the Nazis were able to destroy it and slow down. the allied advance or just secure it so that it was clear when the allies got there it was a dangerous job a lot of these guys got hunted down by the gestapo and uh and killed and murdered i mean parachuting into fucking nazi occupied france yeah is fucking crazy at three a clip you know what i mean like just three guys you really have backup like completely insane and there was also infighting um amongst the partisans uh jack singlob did an interesting interview about this uh talking about the partisans they were with would be having these squabbles with a communist partisans. And so the communist partisans would like, when there's an air drop coming in from the UK,

they would like get on the radio and they'd set up like a fake landing zone so that our allied pilots would like drop the resupply and the communists would get it. And meanwhile, the actual partisans was meant for standing there like, well, guys, what? Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Hammond, like. Yeah. So, I mean, that was a big deal with the partisans. Then also in World War II, of course, when D-Day does hit, Rangers are back into the fray. Second Ranger Battalion famously scaled the cliffs at Point Du Hoc. This is where the Ranger motto comes from. Rangers lead the way, where I believe it was told Colonel Mack Schneider, who his commander said, well, God damn it, Rangers lead the way. and told them to get up the cliffs. That's funny. And it's stuck? Yeah, and it stuck. And the cliffs were, you know, the Rangers got bogged down on the cliffs. We're having a very hard time. The landing craft could fire these grappling hooks with lines on them. And that was supposed to be how we were supposed to initially get a foothold on these cliffs and get up them.

The grappling guns failed. They did not get, they did not anchor up on top of the cliffs. So now you have these Rangers down at the base of the cliff. cliffs and they're getting shot at, and some of them are getting injured. What eventually happened was there was some rubble that was collapsed from the pre-assault fires. So you had some big boulders on the ground, and some of the guys got up on there with a ladder, actually, and put like a ladder up on top of one of these big boulders. And that's how they were initially able to get up there, scale up to the cliffs, and get that first foothold.

That's crazy. When they got up there, they found out that the whole point of this operation was to secure these cannons that were overlooking the beaches. And what they found were these were like telephone telegraph poles. They were decoys. No. Yeah. But there were a couple of ranger privates who they took it upon themselves.

They found some tracks and they went down a muddy road. And they did seize a bunch of Nazi cannons. I guess they were howitzers that had never, they hadn't even been fired yet. So they captured those. And so Second Ranger Battalion gets up onto the top of the cliffs. and the Nazis counterattack. They took severe casualties, more than half of the unit, as I recall. But they did hold out for reinforcements.

And so this was one of the big Ranger actions of D-Day. Would you, I know I'm going to bring it back to like weird layman bullshit because I'm, you know, not smart. Like saving Private Ryan, those guys aren't Rangers. Like that company, right? It's in it. They're airborne guys. I'm trying to remember in the film if they were Rangers or not. And it's interesting that you mentioned this.

So Rangers and World War II were not airborne. They weren't. No, not until Korea. Huh. Yeah. So airborne was its own thing. Yeah, it was its own thing. And, you know, the guys who they made a band of brothers about 101st.

They were obviously airborne. They jumped in. 101st Airborne Division today is not airborne. That's hilarious. How is that fucking? their air assault or air mobile so to speak they fly in on helicopters but they don't parachute i mean they don't have that in their bag i feel like all you guys fucking jump out of planes no no 82nd airborne uh 173rd airborne the 75th ranger regiment and uh i believe there's an airborne unit up

in alaska 173rd is is in italy okay um so those are all airborne units um and there may be other Airborne, and of course, special forces is airborne. All the special ops units are at least static line qualified. So, no, at this time during World War II, the Rangers were not yet an airborne unit. Another interesting aspect of the war is, meanwhile, we have the whole China, Burma, India Theater in the Pacific. Merrill's Marauders were out there. Again, this is where he had different colored teams. around the theater, and this is where the Ranger colors come from, red, white, blue, green,

orange, and khaki from the colors of Merrill Marauders team. And the Ranger Insignia has the Burmese star and sun on it from Burma in World War II, that campaign. One of the interesting things that happened during World War II with Rangers was also 6th Ranger Battalion, the raid at Cabanatuan, which was a POWW rescue mission. and Colonel Mucie and his 6th Rangers did a really, frankly, brave infiltration behind Japanese lines in the Philippines, snuck in. They get up to the POW camp, and they had to low crawl through, because it was all just shortened grass. They had cleared out all the vegetation around the POW camp. So the Rangers had to low crawl through this low grass to get up to the gates of the camp.

They initiated their raid with bazookas and machine gun fire, blowing up Japanese pillboxes, got inside the POW camp. What's a pillbox? Like a hardened bunker where they fire machine guns from. And the raid was completely successful. They rescued POWs. And these were like death march survivors. Like the accounts, there's a great book, I believe it's ghost soldiers,

written about this raid. And the inhumanity and the cruelty that these American POWs suffered at the hands of the Japanese is unreal. And, you know, thank God, Sixth Rangers were able to rescue these guys and get them out of there. And we'll talk more about POW rescues as we go. Sure. It's an important subject here. So those are some of the highlights. Oh, another element was the Alamo Scouts, and they provided intel for,

Sixth Rangers for that raid. Alamo Scouts were another sort of mixed indigenous unit that did a lot of that sort of unconventional work in that theater of operations. And today's Rangers trace their lineage back to the Alamo Scouts as well. So then we get into the Korean War. Well, we put Japan in the microwave first and then we go to the Korean War. Yeah, we dropped a bomb on them that was so big and made their penises smaller. I know you guys want to cancel.

me for that. You're not allowed to say politically incorrect. Yeah, you're a big time journals. I know. You're not allowed to say that. Look, I just are degenerative. I have no grievances with Japanese people today and the loss of civilian, any civilian death is horrible, including

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, what the Japanese were doing across Asia was reprehensible. It was worse, maybe, than what the Nazis were doing in the Holocaust. Yeah, it's on a level. they were straight up empire building for sure like you know taking going in the they were waging

genocide ethnic genocide in manchuria and elsewhere and the level of war crimes that happened in japan that the japanese perpetrated has never really been uh reconciled the way that the germans have had to deal with their past it all got swept under the rug because we needed japan as an ally against the Soviet Union. So there was very few war crimes tribunals. There was never a real Nuremberg tribunal for what the Japanese did to Americans, but also across it. That is a good point. To other Asians, to other Asian communities.

Supposedly like Southeast Asians specifically. Yes. Fucking hate Japanese. And the Chinese also. Yeah. So like, because just stemming back from. So I recognize the, uh, how horrible war. is, including the dropping of the atomic bomb, but I'm not going to apologize for that.

I mean, you could debate it all day long, right? I mean, what was the alternative? The alternative was taking all of our troops and going into Tokyo, like, you know, invading mainland Japan and losing how many people would die. Which would have been millions of casualties. Right. And look, the Japanese needed to be humbled at that time. What they did was wrong and was reprehensible. And the United States humbled them and put them back where they belonged, which was not as some ethno-nationalist power sweeping across the Pacific and across Asia. That was unacceptable. Sure.

Yeah. So, yeah, we dropped the bomb on them. That could nipped that in the bomb. Yeah, and then listen, I guess this is more geopolitical, but I mean, we were the only ones with a bomb at the time. Yeah. And we wanted to show, because if, you know, whoever didn't notice that, like, fuck, these fucking Russians are fucking no joke. Like, you know, they just steamrolled fucking Germany after, you know, they just threw human sauce. offering at them, but they did it.

We got to show them what's up. That was definitely part of it, too. Yeah. You know, just let them know, like, hey, we're here now, so you got to get used to it. We're going to put a fucking McDonald's in Moscow. Your motherfuckers, don't you even sweat it. Well, yeah, that's a whole other conversation about the conclusion of World War II in Europe. And also in Korea with the Japanese.

That's a whole other subject. I'll have to say for another time. Hey, by the way, are we going to open up the rainbow cookies here? I got these from Fortunado brothers and Williamsburg. No, I got these because your sister was complaining about the cookies. She sucks, my sister. She's got no fucking taste. She's complaining about the cookies.

And this is like the whole, look at this. This is the whole variety pack. Oh, my God. Look at that. Fortinado brothers. I'm trying to be a fucking skinny guy, bro. I'm trying to find a girlfriend for fuck sake. He's not going to hurt you.

No, I know. Oh, man, I'm a amp for my fucking commercial. It's going to be sick. Oh, look, that's red dynod. number three right there. Hey, Awaya, this is Giacomo from Giacomo's Tritaria and Bakery. We got a beautiful place over here in Bath Avenue.

Look at the fucking egg. It's organic. We're mixing it in with the flour. If you got a gluten problem, you got to go somewhere else. We can't help you here. But, you know, if you like fresh bread, you like the best of the best, that's what we got over here, Giacomo's Triteria and bakery.

Look at that. Look at that bread rise. Jesus Christ. You kidding me? We got a whole warehouse in the best. back. This is my mother right here. It's my mom. This is our Lori. Where's Lori? What are they doing over there? They're making fucking, what are you making? Impanadas? Fuck. Beautiful. Look at that. Look at that. We care about our big goods. You understand what I'm saying? So next time you're around,

come through. That's there's Lori. My mother. Beautiful. That's my brother Tony. Tony. Kesekeree. I want you, my man. And, uh, well, this is my ex-Brenda. We split up, but I was too cheap to change the fucking commercial. She's a fucking bitch anyway. All right. When you hear your family, see ya. So, we get into the Korean War. Korea happens.

Rangers are now airborne. I talked to a Korean War era ranger at one point involved in an airborne operation. Airborne operations can be used. as a, think of it as like a flanking maneuver. You're getting behind the enemy lines. You're inserting troops by the air that allow them to attack the enemy where they don't expect it. Right.

He told me about a big operation where they seized a dam in Korea. And it was just an amazing story. He had just an amazing experience in life in general. And this gentleman, who's a squad leader at the time, one of his privates, died in his arms. I was shot and killed and died in his arms. And his last words to him, this dying soldier's last words, were full of grace. And he said that was the day I became a Christian. No shit, huh?

Yeah. Wow. I would think the opposite would happen. No, he became a believer that day. And that guy, he was from here. He's from Brooklyn. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Incredible story. He went on to serve in special four. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit Child and Family Resource Network.org today.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things

to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting visit child and family resource network.org today forces after the war had a great career and uh it's just an amazing life in general real great guy what's his name can you say it uh i can i'd have to look it up and my work. I believe his first name was Robert. I'm just cautious. I don't like to screw up people's

names. I'm sorry, I don't have it on me. Super nice guy, though. And then the other person I'd like to bring up in regards to the Korean War was another ranger, Ralph Puckett, who was recently awarded the Medal of Honor by President Biden for actions during the Korean War. And Colonel Puckett... Yeah, he was... He's alive. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I saw, yeah. Colonel Puckett was the, and I believe he still is, the honorary colonel of the Ranger Regiment. Oh, no shit, okay. So when I was a young ranger, Colonel Puckett used to come out and talk to us every once in a while. Wow.

Yeah, amazing. And he served in Korea, served in Vietnam. He, again, just a great guy. And he would come out and he would talk to us about how important we are, essentially. He was like saying, you guys, they're individual. Ranger, the team leader, the squad leader, like you're the ones that make the difference out here. He would, even though he's an old man at this point in the 2000s, coming out to our after-action reviews. So after a training mission, you do an after-action review, everyone sits down, talks about

what went right, what went wrong. We'd be out at Kegler 22 at Fort Benning doing our raids, and afterwards, you know, we'd be sitting there covered in, you know, sweat-streaked, camouflage paint on our faces and everything. And Colonel Puckett would be out there at three in the morning to talk to us. Holy shit. Think about this. Make sure you do your rehearsals. Don't bunch up on the objective.

I was told my team leader actually told me that Colonel Puckett came out to his ranger school class out in Florida phase and was doing the rope bridges across the rivers. And he must have been in his 70s at that point. Yeah. I mean, so Colonel Puckett was and is a standard. bearer, he shows you how to lead the way. And I had, and I had and I continue to have a lot of admiration for Colonel Puckett. And the action, you know, when I was reading his Medal of Honor citation, it made me think about maybe why he came and would tell us about the importance of, you know,

the enlisted Rangers. That action was his, he was a Ranger Company commander as a lieutenant. And they went and captured a hill, a Chinese battalion counter-attacked. They got hammered with indirect fire, and then the Chinese, like, attacking in human waves. Colonel Puckett ran from foxhole to foxhole, you know, encouraging the men, keeping morale up. Eventually, they had to withdrawal. Colonel Puckett's legs were shredded by a motor fire. He told two Ranger privates to leave him behind. He said, go on without me. Jesus Christ. You know, you guys can make it with

that, you know, you guys can make it back to friendly lines. You know, in accordance with the Ranger Creed, as every Ranger knows today, never will I leave a fallen comrade. These two privates refused to leave their commander and they picked him up and they carried

him back to friendly lines. Yeah, that's great, man. That's fucking sick. That's crazy. I can't even fucking imagine that shit. Yeah, Colonel Puckets, real deal. When you were in Ranger Battalion, like, he's training up and stuff like that. You were a young guy, right? 21. Yeah, I got the, I was 19 when I got there. Okay, so like, Colonel Puckett comes in. Do you know, like, what this guy's about? Do you guys really care? Because you guys are young dudes, you know, fucking ready to rock, basically. I knew, I mean, I knew he was the honorary colonel. I knew he was like a legend from the Korean War.

Okay. I did not know all of the specifics about what about his career. Because I could see it like, you guys are training your dicks off. You're young guys. You're not, you know, how like you kind of, I'll take it for granted. I guess maybe take it for granted, right? That happens when you get the VIPs coming by, which is, when it's like some general or like some officer that's not even in your chain of command. It's like, dude, why are you here? Why are you talking to us?

Right. Colonel Puckett always come to us. He's always very warm and very friendly, very encouraging. And he did have some actual advice to impart. on us. So I never really felt that way about Colonel Puckett. And also, he's just like a wealth of knowledge. Right. He could walk you. Like, he would be, he's really the person to do this, this podcast with, rather than me. He can walk you through the entire history from A to Z. So, no, it was great to hear from him. And, I mean, I was just so happy to see him being awarded the

Medal of Honor at the White House the other day. Yeah. It was literally, like, a moment. Not even. A few weeks ago. Like a month ago. Yeah. So, Colonel Bucket. So Rangers were finally airborne in the Korean War.

Then we get into Vietnam. There's a couple of things that are worth mentioning here. One is that these quote-unquote special operations capabilities, any kind of like Ranger or special forces capabilities, even specialized capabilities like snipers. They were typically disbanded after. every war. After the war would end, we don't need these guys anymore. You know, there's really no need for them. That's so interesting. Because, well, I mean, it's probably a combination of things. First off, it takes money and funding to maintain specialized units. Let's be honest, we're also kind

of cocky, paratroopers especially, cocky bastards. The rest of the military looks at them. It's kind of a pain in the ass. We're high maintenance. We go downtown. We get drunk. We throw fist to coughs. Right. You got to deal with that shit. Yeah, you got to deal with that. So I'm sure the military, you know, has their reasons for getting rid of these units. But it's also very short-sighted because, you know, after every one of these wars, we all want to think we're never going to have another one. History has shown us otherwise. Right. So, yeah. What happens? Listen, I get that. And it's like, I mean, it should be the case, but it never is. So you need to get, you need to get. to be ready. So what happens is we have to develop these capabilities from scratch every time we get into a war. And you start seeing this happening in all these conflicts up until we'll talk about in a

moment here after Vietnam. What's also happening at this time now is the Cold War. The Cold War has kicked off the dawn of nuclear weapons and a nuclear standoff at the Soviet Union. So we don't want to fight a straight-up slugfest with the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union doesn't want to have a nuclear war with us either. So instead of fighting a straight-up war, we're going to fight a cold war. We're going to fight a war just below the nuclear threshold, right? Moscow rules. We're going to wage unconventional warfare, guerrilla warfare. The Soviets are going to wage revolutionary warfare. We're going to try to wage counter-revolutionary warfare, counter-guerilla warfare. And what we see is that, you know, the Soviet Union can't directly attack NATO. We cannot

directly attack the Warsaw Pact nations. So what happens from there is that we end up having a global battle for every third world nation all around the world. And we're looking to especially shore up key terrain features, key maritime choke points like the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the straits that go south of South Africa. Some of these other key terrain locations become hot spots in the coming years. Vietnam, there's a whole history there, of course, between North and South Vietnam. Vietnam could be its own fucking, yes, absolutely. But long story short, we see the spread of the communist menace in Vietnam.

We want to demonstrate to our NATO ally. that, you know, we have some lead in our ass that, you know, especially I think after the Suez debacle in the 50s, we want to demonstrate that we are committed to fighting communism, wherever it rears its head. And so we chose Vietnam as a flashpoint. Also, the funny thing is, I like how you say defeating communism, because it's not about spreading democracy. Because, like, we, you know, supported dictators and stuff like, as long as they were anti-com. communist, you are our guy. Well, we prefer to see a democracy, but failing that.

Right, right. Yeah, right. So we choose Vietnam as a strategic battleground. In hindsight, I'm sure many people wish that we had chosen another place, another battlefield where perhaps we stood a chance of winning. Or kept it just cold. Because the Vietnamese saw it, the difference between how America viewed the war and how the Vietnamese viewed it is just so stark. And the way we conflated Vietnamese

nationalism with communism. You know, for the Vietnamese, they saw it as a war of reunification. And we constantly saw it as a battle against communism. For them, they saw it as a battle against colonialism. They had fought the

Japanese there. They had fought the French. Now, here's this other group. And we never intended to turn Vietnam into a colony, but if you're a Vietnamese person and you see 500,000 American troops in your country. What's the fucking difference? Yes. Without a doubt. So with all of this in mind, President Kennedy sees the importance that we are going to

place on guerrilla warfare in various forms of a regular warfare moving into the future. And so that's why Kennedy authorized Colonel Yard Burrow, the wearing of the green beret for special forces and helping to create special forces. Same thing with the Navy. Seals, JFK had a hand in that. He had an understanding that we were going to fight war in a different way in the coming decades. So in the Vietnam conflict, we have Lerps who later evolve into ranger companies. They start off as long-range patrols, then long-range reconnaissance patrols, then ranger companies. And these were guys who were attached to different infantry or cavalry units around Vietnam, and they operated in small six-man teams. They would go and operate,

using that term, enemy lines. So there's just say contested areas and do reconnaissance for the infantry units. Yeah, you're going into a hot, like, yes. You know, you're going to where big army's going to go, and you're going with six guys. Right. Or five other guys. And, I mean, this was really the sort of accounts and the stories I read that so fascinated me with the military and with special ops and made me want to become a part of it. There's these six guys who have balls of steel. They're on their bases, these fire bases, training all the time for every contingency. They're taping up all of their gear, so there's no metal on metal, nothing rattling.

They're doing every little thing they can do to be as stealthy as they can. They're fucking ninjas, yeah. They're going into these hot areas where there's enemy patrols all around them, and they would go for a week without even speaking, just. using hand and arm signals and, you know, forming up in small patrol bases and staying on watch. I mean, it's just really incredible what they did. You had the seals, of course, also doing a lot of patrolling and riverine operations around the Mekong Delta. They operated in a riverine ops and maritime ops, but also on land doing patrols in the jungle and through the swamps.

Special forces all over the country. including special projects, Omega, Sigma, Delta. Delta was also doing reconnaissance within Vietnam. Omega and Sigma were doing intelligence and reconnaissance in Laos in Cambodia. And then you also have the Phoenix program. The Phoenix program was mostly staffed by SF, but also in conjunction. It was worked with the CIA. And their job was to eliminate the Viet Cong shadow government.

in South Vietnam. It became super controversial when it got leaked to the press, and Congress started getting wind of all of it. And it got a somewhat of a bum wrap of being an assassination unit. It's a little bit more complicated than that.

That's kind of how, like, that's like the headline about the Phoenix program. Right, about the Phoenix program. But it's legitimate in the sense of what they're trying to accomplish. I mean, if you're trying to create a sustainable non-communist, hopefully democracy in South Vietnam, you're going to have to eliminate the Viet Cong shadow government that exists in basically every village.

And that's what the Phoenix Project aimed to do. Now, the other program out there that's worth mentioning is MACB SAG, which is MACV is simply Military Assistance Command Vietnam, which was like a huge conventional command. Yeah. Within that was SOG Studies and Observations Group. And this was a highly classified program at the time. They were doing ops across the fence, so to speak, into Laos and Cambodia, also operating in about six, seven-man teams. Usually it would be five indigenous personnel and two Americans. The Americans would be the leader was the one zero. And then the assistant team leader would be the, the assistant team leader would be the, the 1-1. That would be their call sign. And these guys, I mean, I'm going to shout out, fucking Team House. You've had some Mac V. Saug guys. These guys have seen probably some of the worst shit, craziest shit that there's ever been.

Just absolute mayhem. It's a high watermark in special operations history. Yeah. Yeah, that needs to be like, you know, set because they're fucking, it's fucking crazy, the stories. Mm-hmm. Sorry, I'm eating the cookies here. Skinny fuck, it's fine. Mac v. Sogg, as I said, yeah, it's a high watermark in our history.

I've been privileged to know and interview some of these gentlemen. Absolutely, as you said, absolutely insane what they were able to pull off. They were inserted behind enemy lines, two Americans, and then five indigenous personnel. A lot of times there are mountain yards. Sometimes they were Chinese. Nungs. And they were being actively hunted down by NVA, battalions, brigades, regiments. That's nuts.

Yeah. That's fucking insane. So they would insert in these really tiny landing zones by helicopter. Sometimes they were on the run the entire time. Right. Yeah. I mean, the minute they fucking get there, they're probably under fire. there were SOG teams who inserted and were never heard from again.

They never even made their first comms window. Fucking insane. I think what's interesting with, there's much, much more to MAC v. Saug. Right on. Yeah. And there's some interviews, as you mentioned, on the team house. We interviewed John Stryker Mayer, John Mullins, Nick Brockhausen, all those guys served in SOG.

What's interesting about SOG also, as well as the Phoenix program, you're looking at something that's sort of like a proto J-Soc, which we have today, the Joint Special Operations Command. McV. Saug, because it brought in a lot of SF, it brought in seals, it brought in the CIA, it brought in all these different elements that are now sort of operating in a joint environment. So you're starting to see, in my opinion, a sort of embryonic form of J-Sox starting to materialize. You know, there are still to this day, you know, over 100 Green Berets who are listed as MIA have not been recovered. DPAA, which handles a recovery, they still list 1,584 Vietnam veterans as MIA. That's fucking wild. in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And if there's anything to take away from maybe this podcast, you know, I hope people will consider contacting their congressmen and asking them to place additional resources at the disposal of DPAA to go and repatriate these American soldiers back to the United States so their remains can be properly buried.

as you can imagine locating in recovering an American soldier's remains deep in the jungles of Laos or Cambodia is exceedingly difficult Yeah

I mean it's a needle in the fucking haystack Yeah It's a needle in a needle stack Honestly There's no shot I mean It's close to impossible

Probably with the resources You know But you still need to give it a fucking go You have guys Who went down And helicopter crashes That exploded I mean

There are some Who sadly I will probably never be able to recover. There are others who can be recovered. It's just, it's a lot of work. It honestly is. It's a lot easier to locate the MIAs from World War II. You think about like in Europe and the European theater,

they're much easier to recover. So I just want to, I just want to highlight that. And we'll circle back on the MIA issue in a bit. final thought on the Vietnam conflict again this is a subject I could talk about for hours and hours but the last thing I'd like to bring up is the Santee raid this was again a POWSCU mission there are American POWs being held in North Vietnam we got wind of where they were at and we began recruiting and training a force of special forces sold soldiers to go and run a POW rescue mission.

In northern Vietnam. Yes. So we had to locate or identify who was going to be on this team, put them into isolation. They started, I believe it was down in Florida, actually, where they did the rehearsals for this mission. And then, again, I believe they launched out of Thailand because military assistance command was like hopelessly infiltrated by communism. Spice. No shit. Yeah.

And the MacV sod guys knew this, too. It was to the point where the sod guys would send up false grids to MacV. Whoa. What a shit show. Because they would get compromised at every LZ because it was being leaked. So the Santee raid, they went through this whole process. They got everyone ready to go. They launched the operation.

They successfully raid the POW camp. Unfortunately, the POWs have been moved. just like several days prior. So the mission ended in failure. The POWs did hear the raid happening. They were that close. And so it provided some morale for them that at least they understood they were not forgotten. Right.

But America and the American military will do everything possible to recover our POWs. We do our best to recover our MIAs. It's still sometimes things don't work out the way. way we want them to. Yeah. But the effort was being made. They were, they were not forgotten. That's insane.

That's intense, dude. Fucking, they hear it whatever miles away. Yeah. And again, once again, we're going to come back to this subject of POW rescues. And I just want to, just to point out here, again, we had to recruit the force, train the force, have them do their rehearsals and then deploy them on the operation. What year was this? Oh, geez. This was getting towards the tail end of the war.

I don't have the date in front of me. We'd have to look it up. That's fucking crazy. Yeah, they had to, like, build it up right there. From scratch. Right? And then, hey, all right, guys, deep behind enemy line. I mean, a POW camp, it's probably one of the more secure places you'd assume.

You're right? Like, besides, like, fucking Ho Chi Men's fucking house. You know? Yeah. So that was, it was called Operation Ivory Coast. So the Vietnam War. war ends. The military is in not a great

state after Vietnam. It wasn't very popular to be in the military. It wasn't very popular to stay in the military. There wasn't a lot of resources. Morale wasn't so great. Let me ask you this, okay? You're a pretty even-keled guy. You call it how

you see it. You chase the truth before everything else. Was Vietnam a quagmire? Yeah. I don't want to, and I hate saying it like that, like just like lumping it all into one word like that because like you said 1500 plus guys still m ia real fucking people died real people came back fucked up from this on drugs from this yeah you know what mean like there's real deal consequences do you think it was a like a bad move yeah i do um and i have

the luxury of course of having been born in 1983 so my entire uh views of vietnam are retrospective reading the accounts of veterans and reading, you know, the literature on Vietnam. I have that luxury. The guys who served in Vietnam didn't. I think it was a mess. I think, you know, even in Henry Kissinger's book, diplomacy, he points out that, in retrospect, probably it would have been better to hold the line in Thailand rather than in South Vietnam for the reasons of the complications I mentioned with South Vietnam earlier.

Thailand actually had a more sustainable, legitimate government with some, you know, predispositions towards democracy, working with the United States. If we were going to build a firewall against communism, it would have made a lot more sense to do it in Thailand and choose that as our battleground as opposed to South Vietnam. Yeah. Yeah, Vietnam was a mess. And as we can see, this whole experience we're going through with Afghanistan, I hate to – there's a – there's a – always the risk of making superficial, this is like that comparisons. But in my research and some of the things I've been working on right now, some of the comparisons are hard to ignore the way we were bombing, the strategic bombing of Laos and Cambodia, the pressure we were putting on the

Ho Chi Minh Trail to try to force the Vietnamese to negotiate with us in Paris. It does have echoes of the pressure that we tried to put on the Taliban, the last three years. And the last three years or so, four years, to make them bleed, to make them hurt so bad that they would come and negotiate with us in Doha. And in both cases, I would argue that there was a sort of lack of tactical efficacy in that there was no line. There's a profound disconnect with our strategic objectives, that these things just did not marry up with one another.

and this plays into why, but we have to call it like it is. And I recently received a letter from Jim Gant, a Green Beret, whose heart and soul is in Afghanistan, maybe more than anyone else. And he wrote me this letter and he said, you know, a lot of guys are holding their heads down right now. They shouldn't. They should be proud of their service. But also we have to understand, we were soundly defeated at a strategic level in Afghanistan. And as veterans, I think that's something that we have to come to terms with.

Yeah, I think it's tough to to throw that needle. It's very difficult. It's very difficult, especially for the subject of this podcast, the special operations. And the thing that we fear the most is failure. Right. And every single one of us, I mean, we're basically selected on the basis that we will rather die than fail. You think about the whole selection process. You have guys who will walk until they collapse and die before they'll throw the towel in.

Which is literally happened. It has happened, yeah. So that's the selection criteria, and that's the type of person that winds up in these units. So admitting to a failure is very difficult. But I think for our own sake of mind, for our own mental health, in order to derive the correct lessons from history, this is something that we're all. going to have to come to terms with in the coming years. Well, we can talk about that more later. So after Vietnam, the United States military is not in a good place to say the least.

And you also have now in the 1970s the rise of international terrorism. You have aircraft hijackings. You have all these Palestinian nationalist groups. You have all sorts of things going down. a new form of irregular warfare, a new form of guerrilla warfare, that we are not directly confronting the communist menace, but we are fighting them arguably. The Soviet Union was sponsoring certain terrorists like Wadiah Haddad, as that came out when the KGB archives were opened up.

sponsoring him. There's a little bit of a wink wink, nod, nod with Abu Nadal, allegedly. He made some very interesting trips to East Germany. That the Soviets may have been sponsoring some of these characters to do aircraft hijackings in other acts of terrorism in order to weigh us down to tie up our resources

chasing around what is now a strategic threat. that terrorists are able to take hostages, fly them around in airplanes, and make political demands against the United States. And they'd get them. And then start executing hostages and dumping them out on the tarmac. So they're literally, they're able to hold not just American citizens hostage. They're able to hold American policymakers hostage. Now, how is the United States going to cope with this new type of threat? You can't send a fucking quarter million troops down there.

You know what I mean? Like that's trying to kill like an elephant with a fucking pea shooter. And it doesn't work. You know, so it's this new form of warfare that is being waged against the United States. And we were slow, I guess you could say, to respond to it. There's a series of escalating threats. You had the Israeli raid on Entebbe in Uganda, where, you know, Israeli, high, Hostages were taken and they were flown to Uganda.

The Israelis embarked on, again, this is a high watermark in special operations history, a daring commando raid to free their hostages. They used a surprise by coming, flying in in the middle of the night. They used a deception campaign that they made their vehicles that they drove up to the air, the airfield lobby or hangar area. And they made them look like the Ugandan presidential convoy of Edie Amin. So it had all these special ops elements incorporated into it. It was very successful. Yanni Netanyahu, the commander of the operation, was tragically killed by friendly fire on that operation. But he died a real Israeli war hero, rescuing all those hostages.

But when the United States looked at that, we see this is something we can't do. We don't have this capability. You had another incident happen where, geez, I think it was Red Army faction, actually. They took some hostages and flew them down to Mungadishu. GSG9 is a sort of a border security counterterrorism unit back in those days from Germany. They flew down there to Somalia and they executed an aircraft takedown. They got lucky more than anything, but it was successful. Were they the ones that blew Munich?

That was a What are you talking about in regards to Munich? When they were going to the helicopters and shit And they started lay open fire on the Was it GSGG-9? I don't know that's wrong exactly It may have been It may have been GSG-9 snipers

But I'm not sure offhand And again That was another Palestinian group So you have that happen Again, the United States Isn't quite sure how to respond to it. Then another game changer was the Hanafi incident in Washington, D.C. And this happened. There was a schism. There was a split between Islam Nation and this dude named Khalis between what became a sort of

a Sunni Orthodox brand of Islam that this part of the black community was practicing. And they split off from Islam Nation. Kalis was very, very critical of Islam Nation at that point. And what happened was some people, some from Islam Nation went into this guy's house while he wasn't home. They took the women down into the basement and shot them. Jesus, fuck. And they drowned four of the kids in the bathtub and drowned an infant in the sink.

Oh, my God. When one of the murder, it was actually a Philly, an African-American police detective, police officer from Philly, went undercover and very quickly got one of the killers to confess while he was wearing a wire. Holy smokes. It goes to trial. One of the murderers gets acquitted, and Khalis loses his mind at this point. And him and his followers take over several buildings in Washington, D.C. I think some of them were Islamic centers.

One of them is where the mayor's office and, like, the state councilor or state council has their office. Um, they killed a killed one guy in the process of this. So this is a big holy shit moment. Right. And remember this is like 1970s. Uh, we don't really have the capability to deal with this kind of shit. Yeah, there's not like how we think of it today. There's no SWAT even.

Right. Right. And the call goes to Fort Bragg. So Fort Bragg has special forces soldiers starting to spin up like, okay, plan this thing out. How are we going to do this? So they're giggle-eat-there different ways that this could be done. The president would probably have to sign off on posse commentatus, or maybe the SF guys would just work as advisors.

It never even really got that far. The plan, I talked to one of the guys involved in this. Oh, man. And he told me the plan was very rudimentary. We were going to repel from helicopters up onto the roof, hopefully not get tangled in the radio antennas up on the roof, make our way inside, shoot the bad guys, and hope not too many good guys got killed in the crossfire.

Because there was no such thing at that time as counterterrorism. All these tactics, techniques, and procedures had yet to be developed. So these guys just kind of had this job thrown at them and told like, hey, figure it out. Don't try not to shoot his civilians. Thankfully, some ambassadors from the Middle East intervened. They negotiated with the Hanafi Muslims and got them to surrender themselves. So thank God nothing further happened. But now it's like, okay, we can't ignore this terrorism issue anymore.

It led to the creation of the FBI's hostage rescue team because we need a domestic capability. But we also need this overseas capability that can go and chase around hijacked aircraft and free hostages as needed. So this is where we enter Colonel Charlie Beckwith. Colonel Beckwith had been batting around this idea of a counter, even to say it's counterterrorism is maybe too much at the time. But a unit that can execute unilateral, unilateral surgical strikes that can do POW rescues, like we've been talking about so far through this podcast,

that the idea that we're going to build up these capabilities from scratch, mission to mission, just doesn't cut it. It can't be amateur hour. Right. We have to have a force that is professionally selected and quick and trained. Right. And then standing by for that emergency to occur.

We can't do all this. It's kind of wild that they waited until the 70s. Well, I mean, it was one of those things, and it's the U.S. government. Okay? So it's one of these things you can ignore it until we can't anymore. And there's also a lot of resistance. There's a lot of bureaucratic infighting and a lot of resistance. And I could see the hangover Vietnam, I'm hangover.

if they're pitching a fucking quick reaction force kind of thing. People would be like, what are you crazy? Right. And it's going to cost a lot of money. And it's going to take up a lot of funding. So we get to this point. Colonel Beckwith had already been batting around these ideas probably back to at least since the mid-1970s.

When he was at the War College, he wrote his thesis paper on the subject. So he was thinking about it. He had done a exchange program. program with the SAS. So these ideas were already kicking around in his mind. And he was already heading in this direction. After these incidents, the Mangadishu aircraft take down, the Radan and Debe, and then the Hanafi incident, they finally gave it the green light. They said, okay, Charlie, build this unit, do it. During a meeting, a general told Colonel Beckwith, listen, if anything, any other emergency comes up, I'm going to call you.

And he's going to, and Beckwith says, well, that's not going to do you a lot of good. I need two years to select and train my force. Right. And he's like, listen, Beckwith, you didn't hear me. I just said, if an emergency happens, I'm calling you. So now you have this situation where there's this two-year gap. What do we do? So this problem gets kicked down to Colonel Montel at Fifth Special Forces Group. out on Fort Bragg, and they tell him to build an interim counterterrorism unit,

a sort of stopgap that's going to be able to cover down on this until Charlie gets his unit up and running. And that unit became called Blue Light. Okay. And Colonel Montel, who served in Vietnam, loved by his men, called in his sergeant major, got everything organized. They selected guys. A lot of them were Sontay Raiders. A lot of them, the vast majority of them, probably almost all of them, had served in Vietnam.

So these guys were like hardcore dudes. I mean, you've got to understand, like, this is a different generation, too. Think about what are those guys do after? Like, now there's opportunities for guys like that. Yeah. Back then in the 70s when it was like, oh. It was different. Yeah.

There's no, like, contracting, really. And this was a different breed of guys, man. I mean, these were some hard dudes. And there was a generation of men. They were children of Vietnam. And they were the type of guys. Like, if you got into their face, they were going to get right back in yours and say, well, what the fuck are you going to do about it? Oh, to like superiors?

To anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, a lot of these dudes, they would throw fisticuffs. They were hard, tough men. And they didn't take no shit. I mean, bro, if you go through the kind of shit that they gone through, I don't even know how you can fear much after that. Yeah. Yeah.

So Blue Light gets stood up and they start doing all kinds of training. Again, they're developing the tactics from scratch, basically. They're doing parachuting. They're doing, they create a kill house. They create all these fuselages. They were going around the country training on aircraft to take down aircraft. I feel like that was the big fucking everyone was just that. It was.

And one of the big scenarios at that time was like that they would jump in Rangers. They would form a security perimeter around the aircraft. And then the Special Forces soldiers would halo into the middle of that security perimeter. And they would go and do the raid and take the aircraft. That was like an early concept about how this would work. They, Dead A even, or I'm sorry, not Dead A. That's another subject. Blue Light even recruited a young.

woman who's a intelligence analyst uh katie mcbriar um who i've been able to interview a wonderful woman she was like a e4 at the time and colonel muntel sees this need that we need people who don't look like hardcore snake eating vietnam veteran green berets yeah people who can get close and gather intelligence so they bring in katy and she can disguise herself as a nurse or an airline stewardess or whatever the case yeah and women are less threatening yeah yeah and she could parachute like everyone else. She shot a 45. She has a whole bunch of

championship pistol marksmanship trophies that she wanted. Yeah, yeah. She's a really tough woman. And she integrated. I mean, the guys were not used to working with women at all. These guys are fucking Neanderthals. And I say that with the most respect to awesome. This is 1970. I'm a fucking Neanderthal.

1977. It was a different world. Sure. But they all came to love her and really appreciated her and what she did. Meanwhile, Colonel Beckwith is running special forces and rangers through his selection process, and then their training process called the Operators Training Course running OTC number one and then OTC number two. The unit goes into its final validation exercise, right? So all the VIPs are out there watching it. they did a simultaneous operation taking down an aircraft in a building and it was successful at that time delta force got the thumbs up they were good to go and blue light was now seen as

redundant and they were stood down which creates it still to this day creates a lot of animosity sure there was also a lot of animosity between the special forces soldiers and charlie beckwith because of his time commanding Delta in Vietnam. And again, this whole subject of the birth of counterterrorism, we can go into another time, perhaps, because it's so in depth. But this was, this is a thumbnail sketch right here of the birth of counterterrorism. I believe it was the day, or close to it, the day that Delta Force got the thumbs up that they were now activated as an official unit, that Iranian, quote, unquote, students took over the American embassy in Tehran. That's fucking why.

That's so, like, I don't know what, the poetic justice is a bad word, I guess, but it's just fucking crazy. And so this is the first mission for Delta Force, Operation Eagle Claw. And the force goes into isolation and they begin training. The intelligence officers and the entire planning cell, the Pentagon has to put together a sort of ad hoc planning cell for all of this. Delta Force is doing rehearsals. there's a lot of problems working with the CIA an organization that gathers strategic intelligence where Delta Force really needs tactical intelligence.

They need to know what's the door made out of. They need the specific shit. They need the nuance stuff, not who's fucking who. Is there a fence around the building? How many bad guys are inside? What are the windows made out of? Are they pain glass? Are they single panes or are they double panes?

Like these are all the kinds of questions that an operator needs that a CIA spooked. I know what the guy wants, drinks for coffee. Is that help in the morning? Right. So there's even an ad hoc intelligence cell that was created for all of this. Interestingly, there's another unit, another clandestine special forces unit in Berlin called Detachment A,

which is an amazing, amazing unit and amazing history there we can talk about sometime. Two of those guys, fluent German speakers, went undercover as German businessmen. to Tehran. Whoa. And they actually got pictures in front of the buildings, like with their arms around the Iranian guards and stuff. Like, hey, bro. One of them, I was told even got inside the building and, like, snapped some pictures.

Wow. So, yeah, balls. Balls. Of course, all of you are probably familiar with the Argo incident from the Ben Affleck film, that there were some embassy personnel who were outside when the embassy was taken over. The CIA did a big operation with the Canadians to smuggle those guys. out, which was very successful. But Delta Force is going to have to go in and get the rest. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're

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This turned out to be a watershed moment for U.S. special forces or U.S. special operations for counterterrorism. There were problem after problem after problem being thrown at the planners, at Delta. that they would have to overcome and figure out all of these things. The operation was incredibly complex. And again, we have to look at it. This is 1980. We did not have any sort.

There's no such thing as special operations aviation at this time. No stealth helicopters. No fucking dogs with night vision guys. You know what I mean? Like none of that. Exactly. Exactly. So we planned a very complicated operation that we were going to fly the Delta

the operators were going to fly in and land at a staging ground known as Desert 1. Helicopters were going to fly in from an aircraft carrier off the coast, meet at Desert 1. The operators would then crossload onto the helicopters. They would fly to a second stage in ground known as Desert 2. At Desert 2, there were guys already, some of the aforementioned guys we already had on the ground, would have pre-positioned like two and a half ton trucks, things like that, transportation vehicles that the operators would, they would spend the night at Desert 2. The next day, they would board the vehicles. They would drive them into Tehran, hit the embassy, seize the embassy grounds, rescue the hostages. By the way, the objective area, the embassy grounds was so big.

Delta couldn't handle two Delta squadrons couldn't handle it on their own. Charlie Beckwith reluctantly had to bring in a small force from Detachment A in Berlin. because those guys had a counterterrorism mission. So a bunch of them were brought in, and they would have handled taking down the chancelry building or the MFA building, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, and that would have been their responsibility. So once all of this was completed, the rescue team and the hostages, we're going to move to a soccer stadium where the helicopters would fly in and evac all of them out.

Yeah, that's crazy. So in the middle of Tehran, a very common. In the middle of a city. Yes. And I've talked to guys who were there, who were part of this force. You know, Sergeant Major Mike Vining, one of the original members of Delta Force, you know, he was on the assault team for that. Did the rehearsals. They knew the whole thing backwards.

Yeah. They did it so many times. And I asked him the question. I was like, if you got to the embassy, do you think you could successfully execute this operation? He said, yes. Really? He said, I believe if we. We got there, we could have done it.

But sadly, what happened was on the infiltration to Desert One, the helicopters hit a sandstorm. The pilots were pretty much physically and emotionally spent by the time they got there. They're so exhausted. Sure. Yeah. A couple. So there's a thing in these operations called minimum force. It's the minimum amount of soldiers or helicopters or trucks or assets that you can hit the objective with. they had a couple helicopters breakdown they were below the threshold of the minimum force already already

so colonel beckwith following the protocols they had set up he made the right decision and he called the mission off he said we can't do it we're going to have to come back next time we're going to have to try again so he canks the mission now they're beginning the procedures to exfil off of desert one and head back uh during that time um one of the helicopters It's lost in the rotor wash and it comes down on a C-130 aircraft, a fixed-wing aircraft. A bunch of, Sergeant Major Vining was in that aircraft, just flames. It comes all through the aircraft. And they jump off of that.

The pilots, unfortunately, perish in the fire. At this point, it was called the debacle in the desert for a reason. It was a mess. It really was a mess. They got everyone out of there, but now the mission had to be scrubbed. They began planning for a second eagle claw, I believe it was known as Honey Badger, as I recall. So there's going to be a second attempt. It never happened.

That was my stage name. Mine's Robin Sage. What ended up happening was Ronald Reagan came into office and they released the Iranian. released all of the hostages. I remember reading, like, when Carter was driving to the inauguration, they were, like, still on the phone, like, negotiating terms for, like, the eventual release or whatever. There's a lot of funny stuff. I mean, the vice president, like, asking, like, shock, like, to Charlie Beckwith, like,

you're not going to shoot the kill when you raid the embassy, are you? And he's like, hell, yeah, we are. We're going to shoot them right between the eyes. And if any of the hostages pick up a gun, we're going to shoot them, too, to be honest with it. Right. You know? And it was just funny. The vice president was like so shocked by this.

Like you're not going to shoot them in the shoulder? Yeah, shoot him in the leg, leg wound. Like, bro, what do you fucking? First of all, we're fucking driving into a, I don't even know how big tarant is fucking five million person city. It's huge. Yeah. Like, first of, this is, it's, I don't know anything about tactics. All right.

I'm not a fucking anything. That's crazy to do. Mm-hmm. It's like a suicide mission. To be completely frank with you, forget about the fact that it's like the first real ever mission for this special unit. It's insane. I mean, I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but like, dude, first off, you're not, it's not in the middle of the fucking desert. The objective is in the middle of a city.

And then you shoot over to a fucking stadium. Your helicopters, are they not like, that's insane to me. And so a couple of the big takeaways from Desert One. This led to the creation of first off, J-Soc. I realized we can't create an ad hoc like Pentagon planning cell. There has to be a joint command that handles all this stuff. And that also brings in the other branches, right, so that we're all there under one roof. And you can get the goods from each branch, right?

Like Navy SEALs, they know how to fucking swim really well. Correct. And at the same time, of course, you have Dick Marsenko standing up SEAL Team 6. that's and so that came out of the seals obviously so creating a maritime counterterrorism unit they're brought into that this also this incident leads also to the creation of 160th special operations aviation regiment so all these cool helicopters we have today the blacked out mh47s the little birds yeah all of that um that was created out of desert one makes sense um because we're We needed, I mean, these helicopter pilots, they were conventional pilots.

They had never flown conditions like this before. They just weren't up to it. I remember just a, like a team house episode, Gary Cook, Greg Cook, he was a 160th pilot. Greg Corker. This guy. Coker, yeah. He's a fucking gangster, dude. And also you had the general, too, right?

What was his? Clay Hupmacher. I mean, the stuff that they train them to do. Yeah, they're incredible. is unreal and yeah and i'm for you know i'll throw in my my two cents my uh personal note i've flown with uh 160th many times when i was in the military and those pilots are amazing they can do amazing things with those with those birds um and you can just have total confidence yeah and what they do the guy cocker i remember when he was saying like uh was it cocker was the general i don't

remember but there's a great story because it's like the the team's getting off the little bird And it's like these guys are a fucking 220 pound jack dudes. So like the litter birds rock. And it's like it's like you're making stew. He's trying to control the fucking. Trying to control the helicopter. I like the story Clay had about making the Rangers get out and push the Black Hawk to like you got to put you got to get it to get it to push start it. I don't remember that.

Yeah. And so there's like a whole platoon of Rangers out there pushing it back. And then he hits the ignition and starts it. Okay, guys, good work. That's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys are like they don't get.

I mean, they do get love, but like they don't get, you know, like CEL Team 6, everyone blows or whatever, but which great, you know, the gangsters too. And the point on that I would make, I had someone tell me this one time, the biggest development in special operations isn't, you know, the SF guys. It's not the operator. Like, yeah, these guys are badasses. But it doesn't matter how big a badass you are if you can't get to the target area. Right. So the biggest developments in special operations really are. fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft.

First off, the fixed wing aircraft, modern American airpower can get you basically anywhere in the world within 24 hours. And then once you get near where you're going, we have all the helicopters loaded in the fuselage of those aircraft, and we have these amazing 160th pilots who can handle pretty much anything. Unreal what they do.

Like, I remember the... What's the general's name again? Sorry, man. Clay Hutmacher. Clay Huttmacher. He's saying like that, you know, you train flying fucking 30 feet above the sea level for like hours at a time. He's like it's not easy at all. It's like brutal to do that. Just like the type of endurance these guys have is fucking nuts.

And so this also leads to the creation of some other capabilities like there was, oh geez, what was the name of the, there's an Intel organization set up and it was like field, field studies group or some weird thing like that. But it ended up being formalized as what became known as intelligence support activity. Or today, I mean, it's known by various classified code names. Most people today know it as Test Force Orange or T. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah. And they're still around. So my point with the Desert One operation is it led to the creation of all of these different capabilities. From a failure.

Yes. Yeah. So that's Desert One. Now, I'll get into in 1981, getting back to the POW and the MIA issue, and this is very controversial. I was kind of debating whether or not I should even bring it up. 1981, I believe this was the second mission that Delta Force got, Operation Pocket Change. So this was a newly formed mission for the newly formed J-Soc to rescue American POWs that had ostensibly been left behind in Vietnam.

Wow. Yes. The CIA was again leading the effort to recon a alleged POW camp. There were some radio intercept. There were some like image analysis that there were supposedly code letters marked out in the camp. So this camp was in layout. So it was known. as Fort Apache. That's what we called it. And the CIA sent a indigenous reconnaissance element there

to surveil the area. They noted seeing someone they thought was Caucasian inside the camp. They reported back. At this time, Delta Force begins training up for this operation. It was Colonel Bucky Burris that would have led this mission. He would have, the whole like process, again, the planning process begins. They were looking at the roads in northern Thailand where they would have launched from. They were looking at some, you know, helicopter landing zones. And they were looking at Tinian Island, which is, it's north of Guam. It's a small island that they would have used for rehearsals.

Oh, shit. do the mission rehearsals. So they would have gone there, done their rehearsals, then gone to North Thailand, and launched into layouts to do this POW rescue mission. At the same time, now after the CIA had done their reconnaissance, the military wants to do their own reconnaissance. They want actual soldiers, Americans, to go in and look at this target area and get eyes on American POWs before we commit a rescue team. Now, what happened was this whole thing, the obsec around this mission got blown up because of a separate POW rescue effort.

That was, you know, basically mercenaries were going to go in. It was Bo Gritz and some other guys were going to go in and rescue mercenaries. And it hit like the Washington Post. It was like front page news. And so that blew the whole opsec around this mission. The whole thing got scrubbed. What happened to this whole, I mean, this is an emotional subject, understandably for so many guys. Were there American POWs there?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't think anyone really does. Were there American POWs left behind after Vietnam? there's one guy who stayed there voluntarily. He was a douchebag and still is. Why did he stay there voluntarily? He was like a, he turned, he turned to the other side.

Okay. He was like a trustee for the North Vietnamese. Okay. So he stayed there voluntarily. That's different. Yeah, we didn't leave him behind. He was a scumbag who decided to stay there. But were there POWs left behind in Vietnam?

I don't know. I don't know if we'll ever be able to answer that question. question. And there's several thick books written about this subject. And it's highly debated. It's definitely debated. And yeah, there's a couple books out there that you can go and read on this subject about POWs potentially left behind in Vietnam. I don't know the answer to it. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, how did they distinguish between MIA and POWW? Well, there are They were, you know, they would be listed as MIAs. Okay.

But if we got wind that they were still alive. Got it. Okay. P-O-Ws. So they never even sent like a fucking couple guys to see if they can get eyes on, even just to get info? From my, from what I've read and what I've researched and never got that far. So I would think like, send a couple guys in there.

Just to check it out. I'm not saying, don't fucking rate it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like the whole thing got kanked after this. Um, you know, and I, uh, you know, of course, Colonel Burris would be the person to talk to about this.

Unfortunately, he doesn't care for me very much. Oh, what'd you do? I wrote, well, oddly enough, I wrote a positive review of his novel. He wrote a novel in the 90s, and I wrote a review about how great it was. And, um, he blew up on me. Because you said it was a good novel? Well, because I, because I kind of decoded it. And I understood he was writing about real things.

Oh, okay. Including bits of what we're talking about here. Um, you know, that there were real operations and real tidbits of things that were written into that novel. And I kind of wrote like, oh, yeah, it's this and that and this and that. And he didn't get it. Got it. Okay.

Yeah. So, you know, yeah, Colonel Burris is not my biggest fan. Yeah, you pissing off brass is shocking. But I will say this despite all of that, I have a great, great admiration for Colonel Burris and the service he's done for our country. his service in Vietnam with Mike Force. He wrote a memoir about his time in Mike Force in Vietnam. Highly, highly recommended. It's one of the best memoirs I've read from the war, and I've read a lot of them.

Yeah, sure, yeah. Very highly recommended. So fast forward a few years here, 1983 Operation Urgent Fury. The Island of Grenada. You know where that is? Europe? Just outside of the, like, in the Mediterranean, right? That's the Gibraltar.

Oh, sorry. No, this is, the Grenada is down in the Caribbean. So the problem with Grenada is they were flirting with commies right in our backyard. And that's no bueno. That never goes well. It never works out. Never works out. They're inviting Cubans there.

Like, this isn't cool, dude. Like, come on. And so they end up holding American medical students hostage down there, too. We decide we're going to invade this little island. Why not, right? A little fucking give it a go. We're going to show them what's up. We're going to give it the old college try.

You know what's funny? Because I was reading, like, when I was a kid. So, like, we're close in age. So this is like mid-90s, I want to say. It was like 11, 12. And I start reading about SEAL Team 6 and Navy SEALs and Green Berets and all that shit. And Grenada was like literally like the only shit like was out there. Really besides like Desert Storm.

But Desert Storm won, they didn't really say much about it. I guess like there was time here to like get accounts out. People are retired. We'll get into it. There wasn't that much special ops happening during Desert Storm. Yeah, right, exactly. We'll get into that. But it's so interesting how Grenada is like, and Panama are the two that I remember reading about first.

And there's like one or two iconic pictures from Grenada that were published over and over again. So in Grenada, you have Rangers jump in, Ranger Battalion jumps in, Seal Team Six guys. They really do lead the way, huh? Yeah, they're all over the point. second was also there. Seale Team 6 fast ropes in. Delta Force went to go raid

a prison and they actually got shot out of a prison. Like it was really bad. They never even landed their helicopters, got shot up so bad. So we did successfully invade the island. But honestly, it was kind of

dicey. There were a bunch of seals who drowned off the coast during infiltration. Yeah, it was a little dicey. But what comes out of Grenada was the Goldwater Nichols Act, specifically the Nunn-Cone Amendment, which specified the creation of Socom. So we talked about J-Soc before that's going to kind of co-lose around or co-locate all of these counterterrorism, you know, these days Tier 1, elements, if you will, under one command. Now we're realizing it's kind of like go big or go home.

We need to have all special operations kind of under one roof to coordinate things. And so that specified the creation of SOCOM. Again, we're going to bounce a few years later, 1989. Panama in 1989, this is kind of where people often say America got over its Vietnam syndrome. that we kind of put our defeat or our sense of shame. Kind of got over the hangover. Got over it and launched a massive air mobility operation down into Panama to unseat Noriega. There were, there's a lot that goes into that and the planning.

It's kind of amazing, actually, how in-depth it was. From a special operations perspective, there are a couple of things I would like to highlight. one of them is lesser known it's there's the smallest bit of mention in one book but i was able to have a drink one time with somebody who served in the a four mentioned intelligence support activity or tfo and he was telling me about how when the invasion of panama happened in the run-up to it his unit was doing surveillance on like a half dozen different residences where Noriega was known to, Noriega was known to Freakley.

The idea being that they were going to just like go in there and snatch him up right before H-hour, right before D-Day. What ended up happening was that Noriega was on the road. He was driving from Cologne to Tukaman when D-Day and H-hour happened. So it's not like, like, we're talking about like airplanes in the air. This is like a massive military undertaking. you can't just like, oh, hold on a few hours, guys, until Noriega gets to his villa. Like, so that portion kind of got, I don't want to say it got screwed up. They were doing the best they could, but it didn't work out as optimally as they would have hoped.

That's another thing now you put it on the list. Like, oh, fuck, what if the target's not fucking there? Right, right. What do we do? Do you delay? Do you turn off this entire invasion for that? And so. And, you know, you got to assume, right?

Like, we think of it like special ops now is like you guys were doing. raids fucking every night. You know, it's like fucking quick serve. This was like the amount of planning and prep that went into this and everyone's puckered up fucking like trying not to lose their fucking jobs. Yeah. Like there's major pressure here to get it right. Of course.

And at the, as this happens now the invasion is kicking off, you had Delta Force and Navy SEALs are doing strikes to prevent. Well, obviously to find Noriega ideally. but also to prevent him from fleeing the country. So there were Navy SEALs who combat divers who swam up under a vessel that he was known to use, and they attached explosives. Holy shit. On the bow and the stern went in their subsurface, attached all the explosives.

Like, this is Frogman shit. Yeah, legit, yeah. And then as they were swimming away, Noriega's boys, the PDF, the Panamanian Defense Forces, they're throwing hand grenades into the water like searching for them. Oh, fuck. And the seals managed to get away, swim under the dock. And I think it took them like two and a half or three hours to swim to meet their exfiltration point where a boat and Navy ship picked them up.

So they blew that vessel. That was done. Meanwhile, seals raided a airfield, came up in boats, rated this airfield where Noriega's Learjet was. Or was it a weird? Or it was definitely a plane that he was known to use. And I know the seal officer who led that operation. He's a great person. I don't think.

I've tried. I would really like him to tell his story because he's a terrific guy. He's a guy who has values. And he lost a bunch of seals on that operation. They got hit really hard out on the tarmac and killed. One of his guys woke up. in the body bag. I mean, it was bad, bad stuff. What do you mean? One of his guys walked up in a body bag?

They thought he was deceased. Yeah. What the fuck? That's insane, bro. Yeah. And they successfully took the airfield. They disabled the aircraft. And then eventually Rangers came in and relieved them. But they lost a bunch of seals on that operation. Rangers jumped into Rio Hato and another airfield. Interestingly, all three Ranger battalions jumped into Panama. Really? Yep.

Yep. So that happened. Delta Force did a raid on a prison to free Kurt Mews, who was allegedly transmitting pro-American propaganda for the CIA. I talked to Dale Comstock, who was the master breacher on that operation. I mean, he had some interesting stories about how they put the charge on the door. And they didn't realize at the time they used, they would use that black electrical tape. Yeah.

And because of the amount of humidity down in Panama, it gets in there and it loosens up the tape. And the charge fell off the door. Oh, my God. So, like, he had a, like, and there's like a whole troop of Delta operas stacked up on the roof. They've been infiltrated by a helicopter by little birds. They're all standing there on the door, like, ready to rock and roll. and he has to run up there and like reattach the charge. Oh my God.

Gets down there. Apparently, he said he used P for plenty because there was a heavy jail door. And he's like, oh, there's no bad guys on the other side or no good guys on the other side of this particular door. So we're not really sweating that. Yeah.

So boom, blows it. And the operators flow in. They assault downwards to the prison cell. Get it open. Put a helmet and body armor on Kurt Mews. Get him back up to the roof. The helicopter gets.

shot down, has to make an emergency landing, comes down in the street. But they successfully get him out of there. That was the first successful hostage rescue mission that the U.S. military ever did. That's awesome. Yeah. That's a big one. Yeah, they pulled it off. Meanwhile, Delta and Seal Team 6 are raiding these different targets. Sort of a predecessor to what we ended up doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're manhunting, right? They're looking for this guy, a high-value target. They're hitting all these different places. I was told they found his pornography collection.

Take that for what it's worth. One SEAL Team 6 operator told me about hitting one of his houses and popping open one of Noriega's beers afterwards. He almost have to. Noriega ended up fleeing to the Vatican Embassy, and they got him to surrender himself eventually. One story I'd like to kind of

cap this off with. about the Rangers jumping into Panama. This is a story that has kind of entered into Ranger War, and I probably wouldn't even be repeating this had I not once talked to the Jumpmaster on this particular jump. So the story goes that the Rangers are in the aircraft, they're about to exit, the combat jump. So, you know, they get all the orders like stand up,

then the next order is hook up. You're hooking up your static line parachute to the cable. Right around that time, they had a new guy in the platoon or in the company. And he jumps down on the ground and he starts screaming. I quit. I quit. He's jumped before, right? As they're about to do a combat jump, they're like a minute away from jumping.

So he's jumped in training. Yeah, for sure. See, like, I'd be the guy who quits and quits at training. I'm scared of heights, dude. I'm out of you. I quit. I quit. I quit. The Rangers, the rest of them, hook up their static lines. And as they're walking past

this guy, they're kicking them, they're stomping them, they're spitting on them. They're cursing this guy out, you motherfucking quitter. I mean, on a combat jump. And they all go out the door, execute this combat jump at like 500 feet. Probably like a reserve parachute is probably useless at that point. Right. But no one died. Thank God. They all hit the ground, execute their operation the way they were trained. So, time goes by. Rangers get back to Garrison. And as it turns out, that guy who fell down and screamed, I quit, I quit, I quit, was actually screaming, I'm hit, I'm hit.

Oh, my God. Because some anti-aircraft fire came up through the skin of the C-130 and clipped them. That took a turn. And so they're standing out there in formation. And now all these proud airborne rangers are wearing their parachute wings with a mustard stain. When you have a combat jump, there's a little gold star on your parachute wings. So they're all standing there, including this guy who never exit the aircraft. Oh, so everyone's like salty?

He's there on crutches because he's been hit. But he has his combat star on his parachute wings. And the first sergeant, who I was told is a like five-foot tall Asian-American, like calls him up to the the front of the formation. It's like, did you exit high performance aircraft and combat jump? And this is a guy who's a E5 is like, he's like, no first sergeant, no, I didn't. He says, exactly. And he pulls out his knife and just cuts that shit right off his uniform right there in front of every one. That's fucked up, kind of. I guess. I don't know, he got hit though. It wasn't like he quit, quit. He didn't go out the door. He didn't combat jump. There's technically right. You're right.

He was just on the plane. But that story, I think it's a little amusing in retro, respect, but it also encapsulates just like how highly motivated, how hard charging Ranger Battalion guys are. And I'm biased, of course. I served there at one point. Not that I did anything that really matters, but I have an affinity for those guys. And as you can see, I started off this whole thing talking about Rangers in a revolutionary wars. I know. I got it. As far as I'm concerned, Rangers are basically the moral center of the United States military, if not our country as a whole.

Listen, man, I don't think Rangers get enough credit. And it's not because you're sitting here, you were a Ranger, because they do a fuck ton of shit. Yeah. They do almost everything. And a lot of it flies under the radar. Yeah. Like just a lot of them like it that way.

So a few years later, we get into 1990, 1991, we're getting into Operation Desert Storm. Now, there were not a whole lot of special ops missions going on in, Desert Storm. Particularly, the Rangers really got sidelined. It all had to do with Schwarzenkoff. He did not like special ops. He just wanted fucking half a million guys to go up with tanks. He didn't want us hogging their glory, I guess. So he sidelined special forces and Delta and all of them as best he could. There were some places that, you know, I guess they slipped through the cracks. The Rangers took down an antenna. That was an operation.

They ran special forces. They did have one operation, or not an operation per se that they had, but one function they played in the war that was very successful was they had a liaison mission. So, you know, H.W. Bush's big thing was he put together a coalition force to attack Saddam. Within all of those different Arab armies that were attacking, there were embedded special forces advisors, U.S. Special Forces advisors. There's an acronym for it, like FETs or something. I can't remember off the top of my head. But it was a liaison advisory gig that American Green Berets did working with our partner forces.

And that was very successful. There were some recon operations that SF did. And then there was, of course, Delta Force in the SAS were hunting scud missile launchers out in the desert. I mean, that was the big fucking to do. That was like one of the Yes The big You know

Talking points as far as like how dangerous Saddam is and shit Like with scuds hitting Israel Yeah He was firing scuds into Israel Threatening to draw Israel Into the conflict Which would have been a huge huge shit show So

They're out there hunting scuds Again this is controversial The Delta teams And the SAS Probably Almost certainly And I'm just going to say it, they didn't destroy a single scud. And that's controversial. Why? Because the story is it did?

It's controversial because some operators genuinely believed they did. You know, they destroyed decoys. They destroyed anti-aircraft weapons. And they thought they were scuds. Okay. And some were decorated for it. I had dinner with the commander of the SAS from during this time frame. He was a retired brigadier now. and we discussed this topic

and I asked him straight up you know how many scuds did the SAS destroy and he gave me to his credit straight up answer he's like I don't think we destroyed any I mean that's crazy a guy finishing up as a brigadier yeah I mean who would say that most people are fucking career guys he was real

and he was and he was also like you know that wasn't entirely the point either and I was like because it denied the enemy you know freedom of mobility, freedom of movement in that area. And he's like, yeah, that's part of it. Because if they know there are these soft teams, SAS teams run around there, now they have to factor that into their decision-making process.

You know, the Delta guys also, you know, I'm not trying to throw shade on anybody here. I mean, I think it's very brave and I know some of those dudes. But I don't think they destroyed any scuds. So. Yeah, I don't think like even that's. they didn't. Like, they still fucking did the missions. They fucking, you know, did what they had to do. Yeah, they went out there behind enemy. Right. Yeah. They did their job. So that was the, that was the Gulf War, the long and short of it,

for special operations. Now we move into the 1990s. And, you know, that whole period of time where, as far as some people were concerned, nothing was happening. But there are some things. There's some things that did happen, some that have kind of entered into legend, some that have kind of reached like epic proportions, almost to the point of ridiculousness in a few instances. But still interesting things, and there were guys out there, you know, doing their job and serving. And, I mean, we can start just about anywhere. I mean, maybe we want to start with Columbia and Operation Heavy Shadow when we were targeting Pablo Escobar. This guy, Pablo Escobar, what a dunce. I'm sorry, man.

Like, he had the world by the balls. He made deals with Columbia where, like, he could basically get off. And he couldn't fucking do that. Like, he couldn't even handle it. It's ego, man. I know. You know, bringing down a commercial jetliner. Insane.

That is, that's a tipping point. That's a tipping point. I mean, we would have gone after him regardless, I think, because of the narcotics. But not as intensely. Right. Now you're getting into international terrorism. We're talking about a whole other category. Right.

And so Delta Force put together a small team of guys and was sent down there to start doing liaison ops with the Colombians and start trying to figure out where Escobar was so that he could be apprehended. And the legend that goes on persists to this day is that the Delta guys were the Delta operators were the ones who actually killed him, that they assassinated him. That is not true. Jerry Boykin affirms that in his book, never surrender, and I believe him. It was not our guys. It was the Colombians that went and killed him.

However, here is an interesting point. Prior to that incident, to that operation where he was killed up on the rooftop, there was about half a dozen operations with Americans that were launched to go and kill escrowments. So it could have happened. And to my knowledge, this has never been reported anywhere.

But we did a whole series of operations where, like, logistics was moving. Helicopters were moving. Everything was going into place. Yeah. And I was told that the same issue we ran into in Somalia, that we were telegraphing our moves, that we did that down in Columbia. Okay. And that he got wind of what was going on. And it ended up canking those operations.

Then there's also, this is operative. opposed to nothing, perhaps, but the mercenaries that got hired to go and kill Escobar in 1989. And we interviewed just recently. Peter McAlees about that, who's former SAS. So it wasn't until 1993 that Pablo gets popped, and that ends that episode in history. But right around the same time, we are getting into Somalia Operation Gothic Serpent. when we're going after a deed and a bunch of other high-value targets. I don't know what can really be said there that hasn't been written.

Yeah, about Black Hawk Down, yeah. Yeah. It's one of the famous, most famous special operations, missions or battles, whatever you want to call it. You know, I feel like everyone knows about it. Right. Right. And rightly so. I mean, it was crazy what those guys did and what they accomplished.

You know, I know. know one guy who was a ranger on that task force. And he went on to serve through the war on terror, state in the military. And he told me, he said, I have never in my life experienced that volume of fire that we did in Somalia. Really? Holy shit. And he was like, we were out there flapping because they didn't have any real fire support. Other than those little birds coming in and doing gun runs, like there's no fast movers.

There is no AC130. Yeah. Like, they were severely limited. That's fucking crazy. Yeah. And, like, now, most of the time on ops, you guys have fire support. Like, you guys have... It's to the point now where it's almost arguably too risk adverse where we won't go without air superiority.

Yeah. That we won't launch an op without real-time overhead ISR drone feeds going all the way back to, you know, McDill or wherever. Yeah. So it's to the point that we won't do the op If we don't have all of that I mean, I get it, man You don't want to get people killed Yeah, you don't want to leave people out there hanging

You want to have Something on call a quick reaction course That's a very good point, bro I didn't even think of that, right? Like no fucking predators You know, drop in health fires or whatever The litter birds, sure, great, awesome, right? But it's not the same as like an F-15 or whatever

like an AC130 that just fucking kills everything in sight. Yeah. Oof. So then we're also getting into Bosnia and hunting for war criminals or they were called Piff Wicks at the time. And so this was like something for Delta to go and do, for J-Soc to do. So they were all stoked about getting to go do some ops finally. You know, we interviewed George Hand on the team house before who was a Delta operator doing work there, doing actual operational stuff there.

He'd be, you know, wearing civilian clothes, driving around, doing reconnaissance. And he was talking about how there is a element within Delta, which is commonly referred to as the funny platoon. But they are females, female soldiers who serve as like Katie McBryer did in blue light, serve in an intelligence gathering capacity. And as George was telling us, it was also to help break up the pattern, the outline of like some muscle-bound 30-something-year-old dudes. Yeah. That every time it's like these two guys who are like super in shape, probably white, certainly male. Right.

So by having to happen to be in this fucking war-torn country. And if we open our, if they open their mouths, they have an American accent. So at least in this way, they can be husband and wife or something like this. cover it makes sense. It could be their girlfriend, you know, whoever. So George was around doing recie work like that. RRD, which we haven't talked about here, the Ranger or the regimental reconnaissance detachment, which has also been around since about 1983, to do reconnaissance for the Ranger Regiment,

doing recon on airfields because one of their primary responsibilities for the Ranger regiment is airfield seizures. But RRD would also get more specialized tasks as time went on. And they did some work with Delta in Bosnia. And the operators were kind of holed up in these like clamshell bunkers. They were hangers, really. And they were just trapped, essentially trapped in there, just waiting for a mission. And they did go and get to bowl up some work criminals and, you know, who were, you know, sent to the Hague.

at the same time some of the other things we have going on is you had delta operators who were embedded in the UN's weapons of mass destruction program their weapons inspector program so you had guys who are undercover in this UN program to go and facilitate these weapons inspections it's interesting why is it Delta like not a CIA thing um because Delta has specialized tasks and skills. Like when it comes to the tactical stuff, those guys are going to be better at it than the CIA. Yeah, so I guess like they need to know the ins and outs of like, you know, the more specific nuanced info.

So I'll give you a few examples of things that a soldier could do that the CIA couldn't do necessarily. The CIA can do some of these things, but arguably not as well. you would have Delta operators who were very good at what we now call sensitive site exploitation or SSE. So a very fast, very methodical way of searching rooms and searching entire buildings, which was critical for doing weapons inspections. Because they're going to go and hit like the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, the Iraqi Department of the Post Office or whatever. looking for signs and traces of WMDs. So you need to have a very quick, very thorough, methodical way of searching. And the J-Soc guys had developed to that.

Also, you need some guys who are good with lock picks. As you come across doors that are locked, there were operators who... Quick. They could pop a lock in 20 seconds. Yeah, because I could see a fucking inspection. They're trying to move your ass along, quick. Yes. And, you know, on paper, the Iraqis are like, hey, come look at anything.

It's an open, we're an open book. but in reality when you get there, they're trying to stymie you and slow you down as much as possible. That's what I used to do when I had restaurants with the health inspector. I try to just fucking distract as much as I could. And then also having soldiers there, having operators there, they are, of course, equipped to do reconnaissance in case they ever have to go and hit these facilities at some time in the future.

No, it makes sense. And another thing that not too many people are aware of, is that they had to contend with what happens if Saddam takes the UN weapons inspectors hostage, including the Americans. So there were delta elements close by. Right. And the American weapons inspectors had a technical means that they could alert them that they were under directs. Oh, okay. So this element could be launched to come and rescue.

It does make more sense tactically for sure. And you don't want to add like another level, I guess, like another, why make it even more? why make it even more complicated by a CIA doing this, like a CIA element doing this, rather than Delta doing it where... The CIA has paramilitary elements. Yeah, but they're not going into hostage rescue or... No, that they would not get cold on. Yeah.

No, so it makes sense why it's Delta. But they do have guys who are... There was a cell... You can read about this open source. They had a group of burglars that would... Around the same time frame, I guess, who would go and break into embassies. Oh, wow. And steal nuclear codes out of SAPs.

Holy shit. Yeah. And so these guys were like Beanie specialists. Yeah. Holy shit. But more often than not, what the agency does is they have professional locksmiths who they'll have get a top secret clearance. Right.

And bring them in for specialized jobs. Yeah. Because otherwise, what's a locksmith at the CIA doing 24-7? Like, yeah, bro. practicing breaking like locking like you know yeah not not probably not so much so much so that's kind of how that shook out um in the 1990s 19 uh there was also a lot of planning operations that never got off the ground uh of course there's Haiti almost happened but not really uh one operation that was off and on for a long time was the tarhuna chemical weapons factory that cadaffi had uh old colonel gaddafi had an underground

chemical weapons lab out in the middle of the desert. And there's a J-Soc planning cell looking at that. And the plan was actually to come up over the beach in Hovercraft, Marine Corps Hovercraft, get as far, penetrate as far into the desert as they could. Then they would drop ramp, drive like military vehicles off of the hovercraft, drive further into the desert, set up their security perimeter, and they would be dragging with them on a trailer or whatever, a industrial drill like you use for mining. Yeah, like a boring kind of. Right.

And they'd set that up and they'd start drilling straight down into the desert into this underground weapons lab. And once they drilled out a hole, they would pull up, I guess, like a cement mixer, and they would pour a explosive slurry like a liquid down into the underground facility. and I don't know if somebody would like light a match and drop it down the hole. I'm sure there's a real initiation system. Yeah. And then blow it up.

But the through negotiations, Gaddafi agreed to shut down the chemical weapons plant on his own. That's a nuts. Fuck it. Just a hovercraft alone is fucking nuts. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, all this stuff that I are not all of this stuff, but there are some, I probably should have had a list of references. There's a book called Crippled Eagle by Rod Lennahan, which is about the birth of

counterterrorism and Desert One. Very, very good book. He also wrote a book called Confrontation Zone about Panama. Very good. Sean Naylor wrote a book, a history book about J-Soc called Relentless Strike, which is worth reading. And to pat myself on the back, at my website, Jack Murphy RGR, or I'm sorry, it's jackmurphywrights.com is my website. And if you go there, you can download for free a PDF of an article I wrote all about blue light. Okay. And it talks about the creation of blue light and delta force and the interplay between the two. Yeah.

In blue light, did they, like a bunch of blue light guys go over to Delta at some point? About four of them ended up over there. One of them, some of the, I mean, I don't say this to, I hate to even like bring this up. But one of them was Marshall Brown, who turned out to be a serial rapist. And he's still in prison. I wrote to him in prison a couple times, and he never replied. Really? Marshall was the Delta Squadron he was in was going all around the country doing training.

And during that time, Marshall was breaking into women's houses. Oh, Jesus Christ. And it eventually came out. Um, there is a Delta operator I spoke to had, while he was away, had someone wearing a ski mask, try to break into his house and rape his daughter. So this, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. He believes it was Marshall Brown who knew that the father, that the teammate was on TDI. And so that he waited until his fellow operator was on TDIW to go and try to rape his daughter. Can't prove that, but a lot of the rapes were proved. Um, I talked to, his squadron commander who was on TDIW with them going training all around the country.

It's a tough guy. The only time I ever heard fear in this dude's voice was when he talked about Marshall Brown and God knows what this guy did while we were all over the country. Yeah. That's fucked. Yeah, that's one of the black marks on our history. One of the takeaways from that, I think, is my understanding was that when he went through a, assessment and selection, the unit psychologist gave him the thumbs. Oh, really?

Said no. And that Charlie Beckwith overrode the psychologist and said, no, we want this guy. Why? Is it because it's so hard, like the attrition rate so fucking high? It may have been because of his experience or just a good old boy network. So I guess the takeaway from that is let the selection process do. Yeah, it's there for a reason, right? Yeah.

That is fucking nuts. That's a wild sidebar. It is a wild sidebar. Also, during this time frame, the 1990s, Delta Force and J-Socc in general, they were training for the hardened target, or the hardened, deeply buried target or deep underground mission, where they were tasked, they've always been tasked to interdict weapons of mass destruction. And from their inception, they would do training exercises to go and interdict. uh, INDs, improvised nuclear devices.

And that was a big fear that maybe some terrorists would create an improvised nuclear device. Pretty hard to do, actually. Sure. Um, and so they would train for that. They would train to go and interdict other WMDs. Um, and the mission would be to, to interdict them and destroy them. To, it's, and essentially we're talking about sabotage operations. Yeah.

That operation, that, that, that tasking evolved in the, 1990s that they didn't just want them to destroy it. They wanted them to take it out with them. So now these guys are training to raid enemy bunker systems and to steal a nuclear warhead. Come on, it sounds impossible. And bring it out with them. They have been through full mission rehearsals and training for this. And out at the Nevada test site, they deep below underground, they set off explosive charges practicing to blow open like bank of type doors and things like i get destroying the facility that's obviously doable but to get in get out and take the fucking weapon or weapons right get out like i get maybe like a one-off in

north korea because i'm sure that i was probably like the big fucking everyone was stressing about north korea you know because they're going to have like two to four weapons at that point but to get out with it is crazy dude and i i asked why was this requirement changed that now they want you to get out with it. And I never really got a satisfactory answer. The only thing I can think of is there are two labs in the United States where they could potentially dismantle the bomb and determine where the radioactive, the nuclear material. So see where they got it from.

Correct. Okay. I understand why that is important intelligence, but I mean, everyone would die coming out. You've got to assume these places are fucking super fucking secure. I mean, with enough resources, maybe anything is possible. But I agree that it sounds a lot like a suicide mission unless it takes place under very specific circumstances. Sure. Okay. Yeah. And then, of course, 9-11 happens and everything changes.

I feel like, yeah, the 90s were kind of sleepy to be glib about it. If you were in J-Soc, I think they kept you pretty busy. Sure. In Ranger Battalion and in special forces to a large extent, SF at least deployed on training missions all over the place. But from that perspective, from a combat perspective, pretty sleepy, yeah. Yeah, I feel like 9-11, these last 20 years, have legitimately supercharged special operations. Yes, absolutely.

It put a huge emphasis on special operations. You know, Afghanistan was called from the beginning the Special Operations Olympics. It's like everyone gets to come out and play and use all these capabilities, all these toys we have. Yeah. So, yeah, now it's on. The war that everyone had been waiting for is on. Right. And we invaded Afghanistan, obviously.

We invaded Iraq. And special ops now gets involved in a new type of warfare, sort of industrial strength counterterrorism that I was a witness to some of it where we're hitting two or three targets in a single night. there's a lot we can talk about in the global war on terror this is literally its own fucking yeah for sure it is um we can talk about any aspect you want of it or you know i can also jump into like a few specific things it's a few specific things yeah because literally we can go another two hours on this yeah yeah a couple um a couple that are lesser known um there are many but just one i can think of is delta did a free fall jump in afghanistan jumped from 18

thousand feet and set up a hide site and they were doing surveillance on a highway system. Wow. Watching to see where traffic was coming and going from. So there are some free fall jumps out there that have never been publicized that aren't in any of the literature. Another one that we could get into, so early war on terror, as you might recall, we were trying to set up a sort of platform for cooperation with the Russians. there's going to be some intelligence sharing.

CIA people I talked to said nothing came out of that. It was all bullshit. But there were some efforts made, early efforts being made. And one thing that I don't know if it's ever been publicized before is that there were some operators that went and did a liaison job in Russia with the Russians. And they were in Chechnya and Dagestan looking to track down and interdict fizzile material. Wow. Yeah. That's a crazy story that like not many people.

You told me about it before. And even me, I was like, what the fun? I never heard of it. Yeah. Well, interestingly also, 10th Special Forces Group did a joint mission with Spetsnaz in Bosnia during the 1990s. Yeah, that's fucking wild. Where it was, they were part of a, part of like a peacekeeping mission together. Yeah.

And they were on the same fob. And almost by happenstance, like they found out where the leaders of, you know, a bandit gang were. And they just rolled out on gun trucks. together, Spetsnaz and Green Berets. That's interesting. And they went out there and did a joint op together. So that was in the year 2000, I believe. So now early into the war on terror, there were some. So whatever happened with that mission? I don't know. Nothing. It probably just went away as that intelligence sharing kind of dissipated and became clear nothing was going to happen. Right. That's my suspicion. That's insane. First of like,

are there real credible threats like fissile material getting fucking bought and sold? Yes. There is. Yeah. For sure. And it's mostly a lot of the assumptions we have about it is that it's terrorist organizations

or that it's disaffected ex-KGB guys or the Russian mafia. It's really like farmers and stuff like peasants poor people who are trying to make money. Yeah. And who have access to this shit, I guess.

Grab whatever they can. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure fucking, I mean, I hope it was a big concern in like the late 80s, early 90s when the Soviet Union broke up for. Yeah. Jeez. To be able to try and least get them under control a little bit. So, yeah, I mean, as we said, the war on terror we could go on and on about. Then there's everything that happened with ISIS.

There's a lot going on there. Do you want to talk about bin Laden real quick? I mean, it's done to death too. Yeah, it is done. What do you think about Seymour Hershey's fucking angle? I think with Seymour Hirsch, it's very difficult. And I think that his article on it did as much harm as good because, geez, forgive me for saying this. I think that sometimes all of his facts are correct, but he still somehow manages to get the story wrong.

that there's a little bit too much of a agenda imprinted onto the story overall. But I do think that a lot of the facts, and I don't believe everything that he wrote in that article. That's why I say I think he muddied the waters along the way. But I also think the truth began to come out in that article. Right. Yeah, I mean, I read the, I only gave it credence because, you know, he's Seymour Hirsch, right? He's like a legendary reporter. And it was just like two, like when it first happened,

some of the info got a little muddled, right? And then they clarified the next day and then they clarified again. And then the fucking movie comes out, Zero Dark Dirty, which I've gained a new fucking hatred for Mark Bull, that rat fuck. Because he's a rat. And like just the straight-up CIA propaganda that they fucking spewed out, which it's a win for us, right? It's a win for the United States, right?

We got the guy that literally, for better or worse, changed our country forever. Right? We got the rat. So it's a good thing. But again, like, I don't want to be spoon-fed fucking propaganda. No one does. And the CIA is lying about how all that went down, but they aren't lying for the right reasons. Yeah, I get it.

You know, protect people, sure. So, yeah, there's very little about the whole narrative that coalesced around the bin Laden raid that I put much stock in. Although from a special operations standpoint, look, no conspiracy theory BS here. Sealed Team 6 loaded up on some really high-speed ghost stealthed out Blackhawks and flew into Abadabad, landed, took out bin Laden, snatched up whatever documents he had, grabbed up his body, and high-tailed it out of there. And that happened. Yeah. So ever since then, I think U.S. special operations can be almost written into the U.S. Constitution. Sure.

That's like one of the big things that comes out of this. This is the predominance of U.S. special operations, the renewed importance that it has and that it's not going anywhere. Now it's like so firmly embedded in the minds of Americans. There's no shit. We can get out of Afghanistan. We can get out of Iraq. We can get out of everywhere. Syria.

it's not going anywhere. When I get on the subway system and I hear 12-year-old kids talking about this stuff because they're playing video games. They're playing Call of Duty. When I go through Irvington, New York,

our beloved Hudson River community, the most yuppie town in Westchester. And I see like Crossfitters out there wearing cry-precision plate carriers. Like they have assumed this whole operator aesthetic. Yeah. Special operations is not going anywhere.

Right. It's not going anywhere. No. This is the future. And there are a lot of hazards in that also. From a policy standpoint that you have these people who are, you know, they're trial lawyers or whoever. They get elected into office. And all of a sudden, they're being briefed on all these capabilities.

And they're being read on to all of these classified programs. And they can see it as a toy. They can see it as a play thing. Yeah. And something that they can use to. resolve all of their policy delimals very easily. You see these problems that we have going around in the world. We got a Taliban problem.

We use special ops. We got a nicest problem. Yeah. We use special ops. Special operations has itself to blame, too, for some of this. Because look at the way they behave. They're like, oh, you got a disinformation problem? We're going to be this disinformation guys.

We're going to handle disinformation, and we're going to, you know, we're all over that. cyber warfare we're all over that too i think it's just another thing like when you grow yeah as a business or as an institution at some it gets to a point where you just need to feed the beast now it's its own living thing right and it's not it's like how eyes and hour said about the military industrial complex this is like a cottage industry of that yes they've created a military within a military yeah and the next step is they want to create a special operations branch so that's its own branch of the military. And there's all kinds of shenanigans going on with OSD Solek and how they want to like preposition that. And they want that. What's that? They extensively write policy

at the Pentagon for special ops. They want to have a more direct line of access, an organization that already has a direct line of access. I mean, J-Soc has a direct line of access to the White House. Right. Like the guy who actually pulls the, you know, presses the button and gives the okay. They have legit, the direct actions. And it has to because the decision to execute a time sensitive hostage rescue or raid like the

bin Laden raid, it's inherently a political decision and the president has to make that decision. So when you hear people talk, a lot of people throw around the term like National Command Authority, actually National Command Authorities is the Secretary of Defense and the President. The

SACDF has some authorities that he can move forces around at his discretion, but to actually launch an operation across international borders, you're going to need the president. So Soleimani. Yeah, Qasem Soleimani, this is getting into a whole new ballgame here. This operation was, in my opinion, more important than the Bin Laden raid, even though that had tremendous symbolic importance to the United States. He's the scumbag who killed 2,000 Americans. Yeah, but 10 years later and under house arrest, quasi-house arrest. How important was he?

to the movement. Baghdadi, I think he was more of a figurehead to ISIS. I don't think he was a real leader of ISIS. I don't think he was like the Nazis with a little shuffleboard thing where he's moving the pieces around the map. I don't think Baghdaddy was doing that either. Again, an important symbolic win. Qasem Soleimani is something different, very different. Yeah, it's very brazen.

I got to be honest, like, I mean, it's a better, I'm, listen, strategically we're better off when I'm gone, right? because he was like a pro's pro in terms of like guerrilla, you know, he ran shit for Iran's Quds Force. Correct. Soleimani was a uniformed general in the IRGC, the Iranian Republican Guard, specifically at Quds Force, their version of special forces that handles proxy warfare. And it's active globally. They are all over the world.

Not just regional in the Middle East. They do assassinations globally. Not in the United States that we know of. But I'm telling you, they whack people globally. because they don't give a fuck. Right. They don't give a fuck. These guys run proxy forces in Yemen.

They ran proxy forces all over Iraq, killed American soldiers, enabled terrorists in Iraq. They run proxy forces in Syria, in Lebanon. They are everywhere. And this gets into the whole geostrategic picture. But a lot of the stuff we do in Syria and in Iraq, these days. It's not really about Syria. It's about Iran. We're there trying to

break up Iran's monopoly on the region. I mean, there's no reason why they have a monopoly on the region. Let's be honest. It's because the Iraq War. Partly, yes. But they're also... That's a huge... They've been at this for a long time also, and they're very good at what they do. Since the

Iraq War, has it grown? Yes, I think it has. As a friend of mine in Intel guy who studied Soleimani very carefully, he pointed out to me that Soleimani is very interesting in the sense that it was like he took the framework that we built for the OSS back in World War II, the Office of Strategic Services. Like he took that concept of building commercial covers. The Iranians call them Bayans, building up commercial covers and using them as a prop

to wage global intelligence and paramilitary operations. Whereas, America has kind of like seesawed and took this wishy-washy approach. The Iranians are obviously they're not accountable to a Congress, to an electorate or any of that. They can go and do what the fuck they want. And they have. So Soleimani has been a thorn in our side for quite a while, but we never targeted him for a variety of reasons. One of the big ones being we fear the retaliation and also that he is a general in the Iranian army. He had it. It's not, yeah. He's not a part of a, well, okay, he was not a terrorist like bin Laden was. Some of the actions he participated in, arguably, were terrorists. Absolutely, yeah. But he's not a quick K-dweller.

And under the Trump administration, we did designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization. Well, yeah, because we did that so we can kill this guy. Partly, yeah. Right, yeah. We got to cross-arget legal teas. It allows us to target the entire infrastructure in a variety of different ways legally that we wouldn't be able to do before. So, and again, I think taking him off the board is probably, I hope, I mean, the blowback is probably going to be felt for like the next generation. But I think short term and like medium term, it's probably better, net positive. Short term, I think it's better. It definitely clips the wings of them that enhamperes their operations. Long term, there's a retaliation coming and they don't care if they have to wait 20 years. Yeah, and it wasn't just like they should.

shot some rockets at a fucking base right after they did uh they shot some rockets at some bases in afghanistan they fired those ballistic missiles at us that didn't kill anyone um that was their retaliation at least to save some face yeah for the papers right it also swept their legs out from under them that they shot down that ukrainian airliner accidentally right yeah and they kind of exposed themselves as a bunch of incompetent thugs which most of them except for salamani of course were right um So when Trump comes into office and he brings on John Bolton, of course, all this stuff comes very much on the table. Yeah, John Bolton, like, what's his face, Pompeo.

They want United States imperialism. Like, they want, you know what I mean? And they have an almost irrational obsession with Iran. This country, Iran is a problem. for the United States. The Iranian government is a problem for the United States, I should say. But they have an obsession with regime change in Iran. That's difficult to understand. Not Trump. Is it evangelical-ish in nature? I think for some of them that plays a role. And I'm not saying Trump is one of those people, but Bolton and the neo-conservative crowd, it is. For Trump, he came to see it as something he could use to put a feather in his hat for reelection. And also he did. Trump did have his red line. You were recalled the Iranians shot down a drone of ours, and we were going to retaliate, do all kinds of air strikes in Iran, and Trump called it off because his red line was not unless they kill Americans. Right, which I can respect, actually.

They shot down the drone. That's not enough for us to go and kill 50 Iranians. Right. Over. His red line was crossed a little later when the Iranians launched rockets, as they rocket our base. all the time. But it's either it's going to be their fucking militias like that they pay for. Yeah, the Shia militias. And they rocketed one of our bases and killed an American contractor. So now the line has been crossed for President Trump and he's prepared to green light this thing.

The talks begin with J-Soc and the CIA. The agency somewhat involved. The CIA is very much involved in a project of trying to find this guy and listen. in on him and gather intelligence on him. As far as the targeting and the killing, that was all J-Sox. CIA was kind of- I'm not surprised by that, yeah. Yeah. So-

CIA wants to keep fucking milking that goat. You know what I mean? Like, well, it's interesting because they wanted to keep their hands clean of it, but then after the fact, they definitely want to act like, oh, yeah, we were all about this. Sure, I get that too. After you have a successful mission. Listen, you have a successful mission. You see what the news cycle's doing, and you're like, no, yeah, we were,

Totally on that. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? So, J-Soc comes to the president, and the command offers them a series of different options. We can take them out with a sniper. We can do a tactical team on the ground, do a vehicle interdiction, which those guys have gotten very good at over the years. We can do a drone strike, or we can do a controlled yield IED. So we can build an IED and blow them up on the side of the road, make it look like.

whatever. So the other options are kind of deniable. Like the IED specific. The IED. Come on, guys. That's the way to go. Well, it's one of these things where it's like plausible deniability, right? The Iranians aren't dumb by any means. They're going to know what happened. But they haven't been publicly shamed. And if you slap it's not an international incident like it was. Yeah. If you slap them in the face publicly, now they have to respond to that. Right. If it's done covertly or with plausible. deniability. Now they have some wiggle room. They don't have to come in like blow up one of your federal buildings necessarily. So the like the sniper shot or a tactical team on the ground, you can deny it, but you know, they'll figure it out. That's a little tougher to deny than the IED. Yeah, yeah. Now, the one that really can't be denied at all is the drone strike. Oh, dude. And that's the one President Trump. Like Sunni militias have fucking drone strikes as drones? That's the one that the Trump administration went for.

They wanted something they could claim credit for. Now comes the whole project of trying to figure out where Soleimani is. That whole fine, fix finish, right? We got to find them and fix them in place so we can finish them. And that becomes a huge ordeal. The Russians are, I'm sorry, the Russians. The Israelis are involved in that. NSA, of course, is involved.

CIA is involved in some aspects of it. J-Sach, obviously involved. Solomani used very complex methods to throw us off his trail. Yeah, he was like fucking Nicky Santoro and Casino, changing cars, doing the whole fucking Jamalc thing. He would change cell phones like hourly. Every three hours, change cell phones. When he left a airport, he would have like three airplanes take off at once. So you don't know which one he's on.

Sometimes he would just purchase a commercial plane ticket. And so like his whole posse. would get on the plane, and then sometimes he would get on, sometimes he wouldn't. And because he switched out cell phones. And he's operational. He's traveling throughout the region. He's traveling throughout the region to meet with his proxy commanders. That's crazy for a top guy to do. Yeah. He's directly controlling it.

We eventually compromised his cell phones, even though with all the difficulties because he's switching them out all the time. with the help of the Israelis. We had surveillance teams at different airports, watching out for him. Because he's switching up the electronic signature so much. We also have to get eyes on him. Right. You got to make sure it's him. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the big fears, of course, is also, what if it's him and we just clip him and we miss? Like, he's going to let us ignite the Middle East on fire afterwards. So we've got to be sure. Right. And this was probably the most complex, sophisticated operation that J-Soc has ever run. They track him to Damascus. He's getting on a flight to Baghdad International.

He gets there late. It's also important to point out that this was part of an entire decapitation strike, that we had other strikes planned for Syria and Yemen. We're going to try to take out Kud's force, in a sense, like cut the head off the snake, set them back years. Yeah. Only the Soleimani part of that operation really got executed. Why? It was too complicated.

It was complicated and I, we missed the guy in Yemen. And then the ones in Syria got canceled. And I don't know exactly why they get canceled. I suspect it had something to do with him getting on that airplane late and the timing was thrown off. But I'm not 100% sure to be clear with that. Soleimani arrives in Baghdad that night. We had Kurdish surrogate forces who were at the airport disguised as baggage handlers. They were able to PID, get positively identify Soleimani.

He gets off the aircraft, gets onto a couple of vehicles with a leader, one of the Shia militial leaders, the PMU leaders in Iraq. They peel off the access road onto the other road that goes around the airfield. We had shut down that side of the airfield for a snap training exercise with the Iraqis. At least that's the excuse we gave to limit collateral damage. As Soleimani drives out, we had Delta teams situated in vehicles. They were disguised as like maintenance workers and stuff like that, kind of triangulating on Soleimani as he's driving out in this two vehicle convoy. They were there to isolate the target and confirm. just as they're driving out on that access road,

the first drone. There are three drones overhead. One of them strikes, hits Soleimani's vehicle, blows it apart. The other vehicle, the driver, steps on the gas,

trying to make a getaway. One of the Delta Force snipers opens fire, shoots through the windshield. When that happens, the driver panics, stomps on the brakes, and just as the vehicle comes to a halt,

second hellfire missile hits it and blows it to pieces. I One final part of it is there was a Kurd One of our surrogates Disguised as a police officer Who went up to the scene Took pictures of Soleimani's remains

And took a tissue sample for DNA confirmation So it was like fucking plain It was all plain It was not like The way it kind of came out initially in the press Was that it was just another drone strike Right yeah We did a drone strike no

We had him penned in We had him fenced in The second he got off that airplane, we had him in the box. Yeah. He was not walking out of half. Because even if the drone missed somehow, the snipers would have taken him out. There's redundancy after redundancy because you can't let him, you can't let him get out of that. First off, it's a win for them, a win.

And you can't let him get out there to retaliate. That, yeah. And let him, he will look like this little shadow war, Iran's been reaching, will turn into like a real war. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild to me. I mean, I get, listen, I'm a fucking little bitch boy, lib cuck bitch, but I get it. He's got to go.

That guy's got to go. I'm still a fucking scumbag. So from, you know, like, you got, it's just some things. He's got to go. But not doing it ID where there's plausible deniability, I think is bad in terms of, like, the level of blowback we're going to get. And that's sort of, after the fact debate, should the CIA have been able to take the lead on this? Arguably, the CIA doesn't have a great track record with this kind of shit. I don't even think CIA should.

Like, Delta can't pull that? But let Jaysock do it and bless off on it as a Title 50 covert op. Like they did with the Bin Laden raid. It could be done, yeah. That's what I would. Like, I would let Delta or JSOC whatever do it, contract him to the CIA for a little, and that's it. Yeah. It was, oof.

I'm just worried about the blowback, for sure. I mean, I don't know what's going to happen, obviously. Yes, we hurt them bad for sure in terms of operationally, but I mean, at some point, they're going to build back up. One day, they're going to blow up one of our embassies or something. And then what happens? Right. What's the proportional response there? Right.

Invading them? Yeah. Yeah. And that's sort of the problem that I was alluding to earlier is that I think policymakers often look at J-Soc and SOCOM as a play thing. It's something they can use to resolve their policy. dilemmas. Sure. And it's something that they can hang their hat on.

Like they put a feather in their hat. Like look what I did. This is a little political of a question, but do you think the, you know, putting a fucking light bulb on it doing it the way we did it where there's no, I mean, it's us. And we did and we took a fucking ad out in the New York Times that it was us. Was that to political, like for political cover for, because the impeachment was happening? Yeah, I believe so. I think you can draw a pretty straight line

And I think the sourcing on the article that I and Zach Dorman wrote I think paints a pretty clear picture that yes Yeah, like I don't want to say where I'm like back like but it's I mean it's obvious like You know we never we've never done something like that to a general like that's crazy I mean I know he's fucking bad dude yeah But you don't see us going around clip and fucking North Korean generals right I know Israel those targeted killings like this all the time. That's their MO. That's what they do.

It's fine. And this is the epilogue to all of this is, have we moved into a new error now? A new era in the sense that now they're going to start targeting our secretaries of defense, our national security council members,

you know, like people like General Millie, like is he on the target deck now for a nation state like Iran? Right. I mean, And what do we do if they do take them out? I don't know if he is. Just because, unless they can really deny it, because they know that if they did something like that,

it's 50-50 or better that we're going to invade and take them out. Like regime change, even though it's going to cost us $2 trillion again, we're going to lose fucking 10,000 soldiers. It's going to be a shit show like Iraq and Afghanistan were, more or less. But what do we do? What's the response there? It's a dangerous game.

And I'm not convinced that our policymakers and some of the other higher-ups at, you know, that level of government have necessarily done their diligence and thought through all of the repercussions. That's a nightmare to think that the people that we elect, and even the people that we appoint, whether it's in, I mean, the Pentagon does what the Pentagon does, right? They have a job. It's to be able to fuck everybody up, right? That's their job. That's what they get, 750 billion for. It's what they, and it's Jay Shot probably gets a nice chunk of that, for sure. sure that's what they do they're the point the end of the spear they're there for a reason the

civilian side needs to fucking smarten up to the point where it's not even looking 10 steps ahead it's two steps ahead right not even like something super like uh complicated but it's part of our cultural style right we uh we think in these four you know these short four-year cycles right you know you're in office you have a short period of time to you know make uh make your mark Build your legacy. It's not even two years. Build your legacy up. Yeah.

And then move on. I'm, you know, Iran, China, Russia. They don't think like that. No. China specifically, they're fucking like slow playing us. It's, I'm in America. I love America. I don't like China, obviously.

China, it's an inevitability where they will surpass us. Maybe not militarily, because we're, you know, we love spending money on big, hairy weapon systems. And, you know, jacked fucking Navy SEALs to go in at night and fuck people up. But economically, their leverage on the world is undeniable almost. Yeah. I mean, I hate to be pessimistic, but I think that we're pretty much done as a global power in the next 20 years, and we will be supplanted by the Chinese, which also leads to all sorts of problems. You know, the United States does not put up with would-be usurpers to the throne. I know. We backed down the Third Reich.

be back down the Soviet Union. We don't play games like that. If China is coming to supplant us, we will go to war to prevent that from happening. Yeah, it's bad. Because I'm not saying we can't win a war against them. Right now, we could. Sure.

But even now, you're talking, I don't even know if it would go nuclear, but you're talking, I don't think it would because we would all fucking be dead, but you're talking, it's a war of attrition again. It's literally like, what do you call a battle the way,

you win, but it's like how Vietnam, what do they call that term? Like a pariah victory? Yeah, like, you're not going to really win because you're talking millions of people will die. Mm-hmm. And, oh, by the way, they have a billion more people than we do. So they can go the Soviet route if it was a real all-out kinetic war and just throw human suffering at us. Like, you know, as glib and fucking crazy as that sounds, it's the truth.

I mean, there's definitely a lot of theories and papers, and I've read some of them on how it would go down. It would probably happen to be all over within a month. And... Clear? I don't know that it would go... It would probably only go nuclear if you had American troops on Chinese soil or vice versa. It's probably the only way it would actually go nuclear.

So it happened in a month? What would happen? We'd be blazing away in the Pacific in the South China Sea, fighting over Taiwan, maybe fighting in the Philippines or wherever else. And then what happened? I mean, Navy-wise, we'd beat them. right now. Somebody would come up on top. They'd be the new big dog. We would either push China back another hundred years or China would become the new global power. They would they would be like

you know all the things we were talking about earlier about the Vietnam syndrome. They would put us right back in that spot. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not you're not talking a small country. You're talking a country a legit superpower. They are. I mean there's nothing you could do about. They have they have the industrial leverage, the manufacturing leverage, if shit hit the fan and they needed 100,000 planes like we did in World War II, they'd have it in a month. And these are, this is the future of special operations, is contending with, you know, the buzzword nowadays is near peer and peer adversaries, right? So we're looking at Russia and China all over again. Literally dusting off plans that were, you know, right out of

the Cold War. We're talking about like stay behind networks in Latvia and things like this. Yeah, so I had a conversation with a congressional staffer a while back and he was asking me, like, what kind of questions should we ask SUCOM when they come down here? Or like, what? So they're on a committee? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Like, what should we be looking at as far as like what, what can soft, you know, bring to the table when confronting China? And I told them, you know, in my opinion, you know, there are a bunch of different ways that, you know, special ops can be used. I mean, And obviously we're familiar with the surgical strikes and different capabilities we've talked about POW rescue things. They would have to be prepared to do if a shooting war broke out.

But a lot of it is a good old-fashioned special forces OSS-type missions, working by with and through indigenous forces, working with the Filipinos, working with the Taiwanese, working with, you know, if Vietnam wants to work with us, which they might. They're not too happy with China. Japan. Japan, obviously. South Korea. Yeah. All of our allies there. And I think the capacity for U.S. special ops to work in China or in Hong Kong is very, very small.

And this is something that came out from the World War II experience versus the Vietnam experience, the Indochina experience, the Indochina experience with the French. so, is that as predominantly Caucasian Americans, we are able to infiltrate into Europe and conduct operations there. But when we try to replicate that sort of template of the Jedberg teams in Asian countries, it doesn't work out very well. We tried, in the French tried in Vietnam, it just doesn't hash out. It doesn't work out so well. And our assets all get killed. We just don't have... It's detrimental to the war effort. We don't have the depth of understanding of Asian cultures that we do, of European cultures.

So what special forces can do, though, is work through host nation forces. We can train surrogates. We can train exiles. Right. And send them back into the country. And, I mean, I think that we should look at training not just soldiers. Like, we don't need to make. like Rangers per se, but we did train like sabotage teams that are going to go behind enemy lines

and like physically by hand plant plastic explosives at strategic level targets. Because that's what the Chinese are going to do to us. Yeah, and they can do it far easier than we can. And they're going to do a lot of cyber warfare. D-Day and H-hour, the Chinese are probably going to turn off the lights in a large part of this country. You don't think we can do that to them? I'm not confident. Really?

I feel like us playing the victim with the entire cyber warfare stuff, obviously Snowden's set us back big time. I think that is us playing a little possum because there's no way we don't have offensive weapons in that place. No, without a doubt we have offensive weapons and I am not some expert on cyber warfare by any stretch of the imagination. There's probably a lot of stuff I don't know about.

Just when I sit there and I watch, like our congressman interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, I'm with you. Excuse me. How do you make money from Facebook? It's like, like we have, even our senior Pentagon officials, I mean, they're boomers. Yeah. Like, they don't understand this shit.

You're right. You're right. So I hope that we have some capabilities, you know, and maybe at some point it creates like a, like a mutually assured destruction. Like, I'm not going to do that because I don't. want you to do it. Yeah. But the way the Chinese have waged cyber warfare against us for the last like 25 years, they have tested us. Definitely. And what we have demonstrated is that we won't do a fucking thing in retaliation. That we won't do shit. No. So I think that there's a real issue that

on the day one of that war, shit turns, yeah, that the lights get turned off, that energy gets turned off that our military leaders aren't able to log into their computers because all of their access privileges have been denied. All of those sorts of what we would call operational preparation of the environment, that the Chinese have done that electronically and will slow us down. But I think that maybe we can leverage some of our background in the OSS and elsewhere to gain our own sort of asymmetrical advantages in a kind of. conflict like that.

It's tricky, bro. That's fucking bad. Yeah, and hopefully there are people way, way smarter than I am thinking about these things. Yeah. Yeah, because I feel like we need that. Like, we need to, like, if that needs to be a priority. Spending $750 billion a year, let's throw $50 on that.

You know what I mean? Let's fucking get some nerds in the room and get them going. I mean, I've had conversations with people about this topic and my understanding. I mean, things may have changed, you know, in the last couple years, but. Have they, though? We literally got clipped for a $5 million ransom for our

fucking north or northeast gas when I would talk to people about China we're not doing shit like we like all of these things I'm taught like preparation of the environment yeah we haven't done anything we haven't even and they've been doing it for 50 fucking years since like stealing

IP stealing every kind of like you know patents or whatever that's good we're good so long story's short, soft is not going anywhere. Special ops is going to be around. Policymakers are going to continue to lean on them to do all kinds of challenging jobs. And in a future conflict, be that with terrorist organizations that may continue to be state sponsored, as they have been in the past in many instances, or with so-called near-peer adversaries, special ops is going to have

its handsful. For sure. Yeah, they're definitely not going to be sitting on their fucking hands. They're going to be busy. Yeah. Yeah. And they're also dealing with as it's come out in the press quite a bit in the last couple of years, their own cultural issues fighting wars for 20 years, you know, and the wear and tear that that puts on the units and the men, the actual soldiers.

And we're now dealing with the, you know, we're going into the conclusion of Afghanistan. That war is ending. There's a lot of painful questions that, you know, we're all going to have to ask ourselves and take a step back and look at what are the, I think the real lessons from all these conflicts are, you know, what are the limits of American power? And it's not to say that we should become pacifists or isolationists, but let's choose battlegrounds where we can win.

We should be more strategic. As opposed to just fighting, slinging mud at everything. Right. Some people have called it playing whack-a-mole or we're just running around shooting terrorists, hoping, it's in hopes that one day a political solution presents itself. That's nuts. And it's also not working pretty well. Yeah. I mean, I don't understand how anybody could think it would fucking work, to be completely honest with you. People who like to stay employed.

Yeah, I guess so, man. And to want to prove their fucking thesis is like Petraeus. Petraeus a fucking rat. Him too. Fuck him. Sorry, guys. Ah, man. It's, uh, yeah, it's going to be a shit show for the foreseeable future.

Ugh. All right. Well, don't forget to check out the team house, guys. Yeah. Jack and Dave. And we interview people out of the special operations and intelligence community every week. It's right in that wheelhouse. Of course, you could follow Jack, Jack Murph, Mick Murph, right, on Instagram, which is extremely active on.

And he loves it. Twitter. What is it? Jack Murphy, RGR. And that's it. That's dirtback history. Go check out my book, Murphy's Law. I'll leave a description.

You got to plug that. Down, down, right, down there. Yeah, and I'll give you some links to, like, other books on these subjects, people. I think this was awesome. I think this was fucking thorough as fuck. Pretty good. Pretty thorough for, yeah. Even though it's an over, like, literally every topic, we can probably go fucking...

Yeah, no, it's easier. All right, that's dirtback history. Thanks again, Jack. God bless you. Thanks for having me, man. Bye-bye. He's the smoking grease, snacking lips, or the soul's in trade shall part of the thirsty to drown. They're good?

Yeah, no shit. They're good. Skinny fuck.