The Team House - Houthis Are Still At It & The Khost Bombing From 2009 | EYES ON | Ep. 9

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Todays Sponsor:Aura ⬇️Go to https://aura.com/teamhouse to get a 14 day FREE trial and see if your personal information has been leaked online.https://aura.com/teamhouse------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today the guys discuss the continued rocket attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by the Houthis, the importance of human intelligence and how the US has gotten away from it and how that failed the CIA in 2009 with the Khost bombing that claimed the lives of 7 CIA employees.Support the show here:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseCheck out Andy Milburn here:https://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8https://amilburn.substack.com/#houthis #cia #khostBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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That'sora.com slash team house to get two weeks for free. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Aizan. I'm Andy Melbourne, former Marine Infantry and Special Operations Officer, Jason over here. Thanks, Andy. My name is Jason Lyons. I'm a former Marine and CIA officer. Over to you, Dee.

What's up, guys? I'm Dee. I'm the producer of the team house in Aizan. And, yeah, I'm just here for the ride, basically. I'm excited about today. Very modestly put. Yeah. Always excited.

Yeah, actually, it's been no shortage. of news. I mean, I'm wondering what we're going to do when this all, when everything tapers off if it ever does. And yeah, you know, we always have, half it does some things to talk about me and he gets through too. So let's, let's prioritize. And I vote for what's been happening in the Red Sea, because it is absolutely effing nuts. You know, when you think about this, it, the Houthis are having a, untold effect on the global economy. I mean untold because we don't know the ramifications how long this will last,

but already they've had a, I won't say unprecedented, but I was reading the other day it's the last time that trade was this badly disrupted was during COVID, which gives you some idea of the fact that it is seriously disrupted and we can talk about only 10% of the trade going through, So it's 10% of the world seaborne trade going through the sewers canal or 10 to 12%. But actually supply chains throughout the world are interconnected with supply chains, obviously, that involve going through the sewers canal. And the alternatives, as you'll remember from your high school geography D, which was only five years ago,

is that the alternative going around South, you know, the Cape, Cape of Good Hope is It's a torturous journey in many ways. It's not only much longer. It's much rougher on ships. You're going to the southern ocean. So all kinds of added expense, the fuel costs. And just to give you an example, I mean, MESQ, which is a massive Danish shipping line the other day announced that the cost of shipping a container from Asia to the United States has tripled, gone from $2,000 to $6,000. in the last two months. Why? Because of the Houthis. And you know, and you look at the, you look at the

array, the coalition that is arrayed against them and all the high tech and everything. But we aren't going to be able to stop them, at least not, you know, not until they run low on ammunition. And part of it is the train. I mean, they've been fighting and moving in that train for a long period of time. We've underestimated them. They've had some, they've had some pretty good training in the last two years and they're very good at shoot and scoot and scoot tactics. The missiles are firing, obviously, you know, I mean, solid fuel. So there's, you know, minimum time required near the launch site for these things. And they can disappear into, I mean, you've seen, you know, maybe pictures of you know, man, I mean, all been there. And it's that whole area is a mass of mountains and wadis.

it's I mean once you get back from the from the coastline it's of course we're not destroying things or stopping them I mean you look at the list of targets yes storage sites launching points these are actually in Huthi hands the way they operate these are very transient so you may have Intel on a storage facility but it's two days later it's yeah it's gone old Intel you know unless we've had so I mean there's a lot of things mitigating against the coalition. I've seen this kind of jocular, acerbic coverage in a lot of the Middle Eastern and Asian press about how, you know, the U.S. can't stop this. And the British and the UK have conducted series of a strikes, you know, the last month. And the O. I'm sorry. Yeah, DOD says that we've done nothing to the capabilities. Sorry, go ahead, Jason. No, I was just thinking. while you were talking about the ripple effect of, and I'm genuinely asking this question, and maybe some of the listeners can help.

How does this affect things such as the shipping that used to avoid going past, you know, Cape, you know, Somalia and, you know, the horn? And now does that force them that way? And how does that help or hurt those pirates? It's, I know that it's a different comparison, you know, and, you know, it's kind of apples to oranges, but it makes me wonder, like, what the bottleneck, if you took a map would look like in the rerouting to try to avoid the areas that the Houthis are attacking. It's just something I was thinking about. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, but to your point, yes, it has an effect on shipping that doesn't customarily use that area because now they have to be put into shipping.

schedules. I mean, the ships that used to get put into shipping schedules, I'm not it, you know. My knowledge of merchant shipping was three months spent as a, you know, a deckhand going around Asia and run a container ship. That's another story. Chinese owned, but I know Hong Kong owned at the time. Nice. So anyway. Oh, so yeah, the other thing so that, you know, we always talk about the, or at least, geeks like us always talk about the resource imbalance when you in short range air defense right

when you're shooting at drones uh that costs maybe two thousand dollars with two million dollar missiles and that's an example of happening in the red sea right now um the sm two is um is around two million dollars a pop um the sm six i think is and i know this guy's watching this, who memorize all this stuff. But I think it's like, I think it's $6,000, no, $4,000, $4,000. It's like going and going, gone for the SM6. And so way more of an imbalance. But you know, honestly, as long as we have those things on the shelf, the math is still good because it's not about shooting down the drone. It's about all these, you know, all the financial effects, global financial effects that we, United States, are taking on because we are guardians of the world sea lanes

and free commerce and apple pie and all of those things. So that's not the problem. The problem is that the Israelis are facing across the border with Lebanon and many other places, the fact that as weapons systems become increasingly sophisticated, the means of remote aiming, become, you know, more. more prevalent in the hands of these groups. In other words, they're minimizing these risk and able to shoot more accurately further with larger warheads. And that has been, as you know, since 2006 in the Second Lebanon War, that has been a very steep in capability for Hezbollah,

Iran has pushed stuff into the hands. And, you know, I'm deliberately jumping between the Houthis and Hezbollah. But there's one reason, okay, and people take me to task for this. This is one reason why even Hezbollah is less, at least right now, than the Houthis. And that is because- Andy, can you repeat that one more time about Hezbollah being less thing? Because it was a little lagging. Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah. Hezbollah is arguably less of a risk to global security, right? Or regional conflict, regional stability. I'm sorry, in the Middle East than the Houthis. I mean, it's not really arguable. I would say absolutely because Hezbollah. despite the fact that they are, you know, they are extremely capable now, far more so than they were in 2006 in terms of having filled their ranks with combat, now combat experienced

operatives who don't want to sit around in Lebanon with a thumbs up their bum. You know, they're all raging for it and they're being, they're armed. But the reason why they are not, I don't think, imminent danger right now is, is beholden and does. follow to something where he does follow what Iran is telling him. I mean, you, behind the scenes we learned after the war in 2006, which apparently he launched without permission from Iran, who knows, but anyway, he launched it and the Iranians were pissed off because Hezbollah is their pocket militia to poke holes in Israel or poke Israel as they want, and they didn't want Israel having it decimated plus half of Lebanon.

because it set them back. And so what they, but what they did is they forgave Nisrallah. We're very wise because Nisraller is, he's who he is. You know, he's iconic. I mean, even everyone, everyone understands that. Nuzraller is one guy that I can think of,

you know, we talked about decapitation psychology, that we always think we can wax someone and that will really bring the organization crashing. Now, Nazraller is one guy I can think of right now where the, death of a leader would really seriously impact the whole organization, maybe, you know, divisively. But the Houthis aren't listening, at least that's what we glean, right, through open source information that they are not listening to Iran. So, you know, or at least they're not as obedient as they once were. They're teenagers, right? So there's two things that are open to the coalition to stop this happening. One is, and this absolutely will not

happen, I know, boots on the ground in Yemen. No, no, that's the worst thing. You just use technology to find it. No, you can't. That's exactly what it. That's exactly one of the lessons of 2006. You've got to, unfortunately, have guys on the ground who can, you know, who can push those large sites back in conjunction with ISR and all those other things you're doing. That's number one. number two is really seriously bring pressure on Iran. But how do you do that, guys? I think along with those boots on the ground too, you need to have that human intel source on the ground

who can tell you who is the Nassrula equivalent to the Houthis. Who's that head that we can cut off that will bring them to their knees, even if it's just temporarily to give some breathing room to figure this whole thing out. Yeah. And I think with the Houthis, that's a, That's a tough thing. Yeah, that's, I think last week we were talking about over reliance on technical means for collection, right? You know, and that clearly is one of the problems preceding 7 October, just a total, I mean, less reliance on human intelligence.

I mean, I'd ask you, Jason, do you see us in the US heading that way? Rhetorical question, I don't know. I mean, I think we're always headed that way. Whatever the is going on or is being shown as going on in the media, we've always, if we've got a stake in it, which we do wherever on the planet, we're going to, we're going to do whatever we are due diligence intel wise. As far as human is concerned, I think we're pushing, like I've said it, I think last week, we're pushing back that way.

We kind of got away from it with GWAT, but now... Oh, we're pushing back towards... Back to words. Human. Yeah, I think so because... Because with near-peer adversaries, we have no choice. I mean, when I say near peer, you know, I can't say that, you know, we're all... China's on the level of us, Russia's on the level of us as far as certain technologies go.

I can't speak to that, but they're close enough that we have to step back to traditional means to get that leg up on them. Because that's what it's going to come down to. You know, it's going to come down to like I think I said last week. We need to know what that regional commander or political leader or even all the way up to heads of state are thinking so that we can get a psychological. and a political picture to go along with the technology, to go along with what our satellites and our drones are showing. We need somebody on the ground who can tell us I was in that meeting. This is what he or she said,

and this is why I think they said it. Because at the end of the day, somebody's got to push that button. And if we know what that person is thinking, well, then we've got a leg up. So I think we're trying to go back that way. And again, there are people who are still in the game that could probably talk to that better than me.

but from what I'm being told, that's where we're going. Andy, I have a question. In terms of boots on the ground in Yemen, what would that look like? How many guys? Light footprint. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's soft, you know, essentially what was,

I was saying what was happening before it's been in the, you know, in the media. But there certainly, I mean, just working with partner nation forces within Yemen to are there strong enough partner nation forces in Yemen on the other side

that could help that no no conclusively I can tell you that right now this brings up a great point that ties in and even it ties into intelligence wise too right

how do you set up a network exactly so so one of the reasons and I'm not an Intel guy I think one of the reasons I mean there are a number of reasons why I think we've put less emphasis on human and we've had to make it more and more painful because of legislative requirements, blah, blah.

But another reason is this, that, you know, you need someone on the ground to run those agents, right? I mean, I don't know I'm not a case officer, I never have been. But I remember, you know, but I have been in soft and I think a parallel is when we started kidding us. that we could advise and assist without accompanying, right? That you can build this trust virtually. I'm sure the same is the case for case officers that there's nothing like a personal, you know, you've got to, you can, you can sustain the relationship by technical means, but the initial meet must be, you know, wherever possible in person.

If you can't, if you're not there, and it's not about, you know, field craft are picking up. It's just about human nature. we found whenever we pull out of a place, the thing that hits us, possibly the worst, is a loss of human intelligence. You know, it's happened in Afghanistan. It happened in Ukraine for the U.S. I mean, it's, I mean, you name it's happened in Africa. And now it's happening.

Yeah. Sorry. I know I'm certainly like, but yeah, we either need to. just figure out I mean come up with if it's ledges I don't know I'm funny on

if it's laws that are blocking this then maybe we those need to be reconsidered yeah absolutely because I mean look at Afghanistan in 2001 as a perfect example we shut everything down prior to you know

the Soviet invasion and afterwards we never picked it back up we we ran things out of Pakistan So after 9-11, we had to start from scratch. We sent Drawbreaker in, you know, the drawbreaker teams. They had to reestablish or established contact with the Northern Alliance. And we had maybe one, two, three, you know, here and there.

Old contacts, Massoud, all kinds of, you know, contacts, but reestablishing contact in an area that you haven't been in in any kind of. of not necessarily large numbers, but with any kind of intent is it's tough. It's very tough to do. I remember when I was at the agency, one of the first, when I was doing my OJT at headquarters, we wanted to reestablish contact with an old Soviet era guy who worked in precious metals. And I had to sit and look through literally, it was a big mail cart full of paper files on this guy and read through and try to pick out. anything that we could use. We knew how to reestablishabstack, but what were we going to say? You know, it's like looking up an ex, you know, boyfriend or girlfriend, especially if things, you know,

ended on a bad note. It's like, hey, how are you? Oh, what's up? You need some cash? Yeah, been thinking about you. I was just thinking about you. Yeah. So I think that's, that's a tough thing. And plus we, in the interim years since 9-11, uh, besides stepping back from human, We also, when we did, what we did have going, got burned in China and Iran and other places through covert. In Iraq. Yeah. Exactly. I think how we dropped the intel, the human ball there.

When we pulled out in 2011, we cut a lot of people lose. Absolutely. And we subsequently, we took our eye off the ball. And suddenly there was the Islamic State, 2014, sitting in Mosul. Absolutely. So you have all those, those obstacles against us. And on top of that, the trust factor is just gone. You know, it's like, okay, you got my, you know, my dad.

I now work in the ministry that he used to work in, but you got him caught and killed. So why would I trust you? Or you know, you left, right. Exactly. Or, you know, like in Afghanistan and you just left. You didn't even say anything. You just left.

And now I got this night letter, you know, tacked to my door that they know who I am. So why should I trust you now that you're back? Again, it's like an ex. Don't ask. You know, so it's just, you know, we have to establish. I think first and foremost, we have to reestablish because I'm sure that we have old assets in places that we have an interest of, you know, and not necessarily an interest, but it's on our, on our whiteboard that we may end up going back into. Yeah. What has our relationship, how did we leave the relationship? And number two, what was our, what is our reestablishing contact plan look like? And trust has got to be the biggest thing because, first of all, in some of those places like probably China and Iran, the case officers who established that contact are probably no longer working that operation or they've retired or whatever. So now you've got a fresh new face who, it's a whole. weird psychological dance that hopefully we're getting better at.

So like, like pertain it to like the Houthis, right? It's definitely going to be different like than like setting up shop and like China or even Iran. We don't have, I mean, we don't have boots on the ground in Yemen right right now. So what I'm saying is that the difficulties, if you don't have people there, I mean, your people, not recruited people,

then running these sources becomes, you know, it really impossible practically. Look, I mean, I, you know, I'm sure Jason has experience of trying to do this stuff virtually. It sucks. And it's possible, but it's not the initial or not that, yeah. And even trying to run them from across an adjacent country, from across, you know, you might, they might come out every night.

now and then, or you might be able to get in every now and then, which, you know, probably not. How do you know what's going on in the interim? You know, look at Coast. You know, we're all familiar with the triple agent in Coast who we kind of fell in love with that agent. Tell the story. I mean, you know, I know it deeply does, but I'm sure there's people. So just the broad, because I don't know all the details of it. Broad story is no honeypot involved. No honeypot involved. Okay, I'm still paying attention. Hey, guys, it's Jack.

I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. We would really appreciate it if you guys went and reviewed us on Apple or Spotify. Those reviews really help people find the podcast and help it get recognized. And, you know, if you've been enjoying the show, we really appreciate your support. Another thing that you can do to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon membership. that start at just $5 a month.

And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Teamhouse channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. So a foreign intel service captured a gentleman or had him in arrested gentleman, had him in prison. He was a doctor.

We were told, hey, we've got this guy and he's, you know, spouting off that he's, he knows some pretty high-ranking al-Qaeda members, like personally. And so immediately we jumped on board. We sent some case officer over to speak to this guy. and he, you know, for lack of better term, said, I have the keys of the kingdom. I am treating the number two in al-Qaeda at the time, and I can get you close to him. Okay, great. Well, the problem is, this is coming from him, the problem is I can't come into Afghanistan all the time. I do a lot of work in Pakistan, and it'll be, you know, I can come in once a month or whatever it was,

once every couple of weeks or so. And that's normal, quote unquote, that happens, but there should have been a little bit more vetting about how this guy basically ran the operation. He told us when they could come in, he told us how he could meet, where he could meet, these sort of things. And we fell in love with that because he was bringing information out. He was giving us things that, you know, that were useful. The problem became where it was we fell in love with the information in the guy and then started to back off on things such as his security and our security. So it got to the point. And if anyone's seen the movie Zero Dark 30, it's pretty good. And again, hopefully there's someone in the, you know, the listenership who can, who may have a little bit more

intimate information on it. Long story short, he was given carte blanche to come onto coast, the, you know, Cal's Coast, however you want to. pronounce it onto the base, and I believe there were three layers of security he needed to go through. So the chief of base had given permission that he wasn't able to bypass, just let him through. He wasn't searched at any of those checkpoints

to the detriment or against the protests of the chief of security for the base. And so he was able to come onto the base and I won't go into the details of it, but he was able to bring a suicide vest in with him under his robes and clack himself off right in front of, I believe it was seven of the, or seven were killed of CIA officers and contractors were killed

because we fell in love with this guy. And they'd gather to get the golden eggs. To get the golden eggs, exactly. I believe even a, I believe a cake was made. made. I don't know if that's actually true or not for this guy. Because we, we fell in love with the, with the information and the thought of what this person could be. Again, like a relationship. You know, people getting these relationships and they say, you know, this guy could be or this girl could be the woman or man in my dreams. I'm going to marry them. And we start projecting into the

future what could be and not looking at what's in front of us. At the very least, he should have been he should have been searched physically and he hadn't been up to that point or or at close to that point he hadn't been so he saw an opportunity and you know he actually even made a video of you know basically just before saying um you know this is what you deserve and um yeah so if we don't have that so you can it goes back to what i was saying about about case officering from across from a distance from across the border if you're not in there or that person isn't coming out on a regular basis you can look them in the eye and say how are things going just as simple how's it going you know and then ask little questions like last time we you know how's um your sick brother

and if they have no idea what you're talking about but they mentioned it the last time well that's something you know that could should give you pause um so i think in certain areas that's hard to do it's very hard to do i was just going to ask about yemen because it's like it's not permissible, right? Exactly. It's a non-permissive environment, so it's very, very hard to do,

but it still has to be done. I mean, that was part of the problem with the covert communication that got burned is we weren't looking these people in the eye, so we had no idea who was on the other end of it. And it turned out.

Yeah. Go ahead. About like the coast bombing, were there indicators leading up where like people were like, oh, this guy might be full of shit. I mean, he probably established bonafides and stuff like that,

but we're leading up to like the big meeting. on the base, where there's, was it ever like, oh, this kind of sounds like bullshit and like it sounds like there was a lot of wishful thinking going on, you know? There definitely were some who, uh, who pushed back on how it was being run because these things don't happen in a vacuum. These operations don't happen in the vacuum. So it's not just the case officer and the, uh, the asset. There's back at headquarters, part of my, one of my, my, uh, jobs when I switched over was to a staff. operations officer. So part of my job was, if I was back at headcores or even in station,

was to read the operational cables as they came in and the intel cables to see, do I see anything that doesn't make sense? And also the chief of security is looking at or the security chief is looking at them. The ops chief is looking at them. The deputy and chief of station are looking at these things. Plus it's going back to headquarters where analysts are looking at them, case management officer. There's all these. these eyes on them saying you need to assume too like that level of asset right yeah is going up to like the tip of top too like NSC yeah this especially during that time period like it's been scrutinized heavily it's not just some asset in a country we're not heavily involved in where it's got like a lot there's a lot

going on like there's a lot writing on this absolutely and I think what happens is sometimes you get people who do have reservations about it but because someone above them is saying no, it looks good to me. And there are other things at play that I've heard. I'm not saying their fact, but the fact that it was the chief of base was a woman, and she was an analyst, I believe, and was one of the first non-opps personnel

to run a base, you know, or station. And I could be wrong on that again. I think politics sort of may have come into play here. And so it was kind of like, So far, so good. Let's just let the, and it also becomes they're the eyes on the ground. The chief of base and the, you know, those people, they're there. They're dealing with this person. They know best, which is not always the case. Sometimes we get so close to it. You know, again, it's because this is all like a relationship on the outside in the civilian world.

Sometimes we get so close to a person, we can't see their flaws or we can't see. We don't listen to that best friend or, you know, parent that says, you know, you might want to think twice about this. And that happened in this case and you see the results of it. And there's the, just the element of, you know, even if the military wasn't such a hierarchical organization, I mean, even in the civilian world, you get group think. But then when you get group think reinforced by that hierarchy, it becomes tremendously difficult if you are junior and less experienced to think that your judgment is better than all these people who have vastly more experienced. So it's not necessarily a lack of courage. It's,

it's kind of a humility, you know, I must be wrong. This looks, this looks as, this looks really bad, but no, he's going with it. Absolutely. You know, what really intrigues me about that story to Jason, and I think, you know, an unusual element, which may have contributed to the surprise, was the fact that, you know, typically a suicide bomber is not, you know, he's not someone with, with Wasta or skills aside from being able to be a suicide bomber, otherwise he would be used otherwise. And yet here was a guy who obviously had tremendous skills, right? And getting in with the, getting in with the Americans, earning that trust, setting this up. And yet he was expendable. you know what I mean yeah and again that's unusual to the fact that we didn't have eyes on this guys

this guy on a regular and continuing basis so he had all that time to plan and get the training that he needed so that knowing that he was coming onto the base and it previously he hadn't been searched you know things like that um he was able to say hey listen you know i i can get in no problem you know suit me up and they were able to do it um and if you think you about it at the end of the day he was a you know he was a triple agent so or a double agent so to al-Qaeda he was expendable you know oh right okay so he so they probably recruited him after you know they gave him a choice that he couldn't absolutely yeah that wasn't the choice after he was already being used by the gringoes yeah and he was going on to what was more than likely

a known CIA base. So it's like, we don't care if you get a couple of garbage men on the base. No, the juice was worth to squeeze there. Yeah, from a propaganda standpoint, you were able to clack off on a CIA base. So that just that the... And honestly, it's way more than just a propaganda win, right? Clacking off on the base. He took out a lot of the people like the CIA folks.

You know, I'm sure that's set coast back fucking a year, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah It's fucked up out there Yeah it's just I mean I remember You know I wasn't involved at all

But I is just you know We had a CIA Case officer in our class At the war college And quite small class And she was very I mean she was in tears that day Because she'd known

Yeah I remember where I was when I got When I found out It's kind of wild Like over the It had It had Jason didn't

I mean it had and a really fundamental kind of shocking effect on the agency. I mean, I don't want to use the term train. But, you know, I mean, certain things occur in an organization that kind of a watershed. Absolutely. I was less in a year. Yeah, I was a less than a year at the agency. I'd been there less than a year and just a couple months short of a year.

And I remember finding out. but I also remember thinking about it years later when I finally got a full brief on it. They briefed our station, the station I was at on it, like a lessons learning thing. So it took that long. Now I'm sure other people got a full brief, you know, like immediately what they knew, but it took that long to say, okay, this is everything we know and this is why we think it happened and this is the lessons you take up from it. Because, I mean, yes, we.

have the stars on the wall, God rest their souls, but we hadn't had something like this in a long time. So we, you know, like you said, Andy, put us back on our heels. Yeah, sometimes really painful things happen that change, end up changing culture for the better because it needed to change, you know, and sadly, because of this tendency in certainly military organizations to go with kind of the flow on thinking, we don't read team things enough. And when things go horribly wrong. You know, cost is one example, but we were talking about things, you know, just generally, you want to have a red team whenever you go over anything. And for leaders, you know, it gets really annoying when Peter, there's always someone who's always naysaying, everything you're saying.

But after a while of just being pissed off, I realized, you know, just irritated, not saying it, I realized, actually, that's really healthy, you know, A, that he feels he can do that. And B, you want someone who's annoying that way. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it does the cost to take a breath and listen to what that naysayer is putting forward and saying, let's run that and see what the outcome might be. It at least gives you another tool in the toolbox of what could happen and how do we prepare for. Obviously, you can't prepare for everything.

But you can at least get in the ballpark. It's like it's heading that way. You can think back and say, you know, holy crap, Andy, you know, bought this up a year or six months ago. Let's see if it's actually going in that direction. If it doesn't turn out to be that way, great. If you head something awful, then even better, you know, but like you said, if somebody pushes enough, like for those who have seen, you know, zero dark 30, the analysts who kept, you know, being a thorn in the side of everyone at headquarters and in the field, it turns out she wasn't wrong.

Now there's obviously a lot more to that story. It wasn't just her that did everything, but it took her to push and push and push and literally say, I don't give a shit that you don't like me, but you're going to listen to what I'm saying either now or after I say I told you so. And they did and you look at the results of it. Yeah.

Parallels to obviously, well, maybe not obviously to what happened, 7 October to the to the Israelis and I heard that time and time again we you know we we used to be good at red teaming things and we don't do it anymore and this is you know kind of what happens that people yeah get locked into a certain viewpoint. Absolutely. The voices of dissent were two junior and two divided, isolated to make any difference. Absolutely. Take the headache now you know in training and, you know, man hours and money, whatever, before you have to, you know, rather than the headache of filling coffins and calling families, you know, just do it now.

It's a pain in the ass. We all know. Nobody likes to have to, you know, spend money and time away from family and all this other stuff. No one likes changing a plan. Exactly. Especially if it's that plan. And especially if they've already put effort into it, you know, let alone resources. Absolutely, but what's the cost of not doing it?

Yeah. Yeah, speaking of sunken cost, I think we need to end because Jason, Jason has a job to go to. I just want to emphasize that we only have winners here. Professionals, go-getters with not a lot of time on their hands. Thanks, Jim. Well, goodbye from me.

Yeah, thank you, everybody. appreciate you taking the time to listen and to you gents yeah guys thank you don't forget to like don't forget to subscribe raider review five stars on apple or spotify check out the patreon check out andy's uh substack andy's twitter we're trying to get jason to get on social media maybe it'll have i'm not doing it uh yeah uh thanks again and uh we'll see you next time all right gents take care