The Team House - INSIDE THE IRAQ WAR | Frank Sobchak | Ep. 341

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Col. (Ret.) Frank Sobchak, PhD, has taught at the US Military Academy at West Point, the Joint Special Operations University, Tufts University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a BS in military history from West Point, a MA in Arab studies from Georgetown University, and a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. During his twenty-six-year career in the US Army, he served in various Special Forces assignments including leading teams and companies in 5th Special Forces Group advising foreign militaries and representing US Special Operations Command as a congressional liaison. He served in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and in combat in Iraq. His final assignments included garrison command.He led the Army effort to publish an official history of the Iraq War. That effort spanned five years and included the declassification of over 30,000 pages of documents and several hundred interviews in addition to having access to a similar sized set of documents and interviews that had not yet been released. The project’s culmination resulted in the publication of the 1,500-page two-volume set, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War.https://www.amazon.com/Training-Victory-Advisory-Operations-Afghanistan/dp/B0DQ1LMSCK/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.wJVAKeIvE68lr8Yj4pztV0s_LiOWOPbvXbmZH8cm4cwXsoYt23Lc3Nd0zJEB_PBp1b7jHHi1vLtlGWT2XAii9w.T-AwlHVcvWYSvntI_hf0W_UwDfjwScXpzRHywMepd1k&dib_tag=se&qid=1745348538&refinements=p_27%3AFrank+Sobchak&s=books&sr=1-1GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!LUCY⬇️https://lucy.co/HOUSEUse the code "House" for 20% off your first order!The Perfect Jean ⬇️http://theperfectjean.nyc/HOUSE15for 15% off!!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Special operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, welcome to episode 341 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave. And our guest on today's show, we're very happy to have in studio, Frank Sobchak.

He is a career Special Forces. officer now retired and he's the author of Training for Victory. This was a really great book. It has five case studies on El Salvador, the Philippines, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq, examining our partner force relationships and where do they go well, where do they go wrong. And we'll get into all of that. But Frank, thank you for joining us on the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I'll prop this up over here. So let's start off a little bit talking about you. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, sort of how you grew up and how that took you towards military service? Yeah. So I did not come from a military family when actually I went to West Point or I got accepted West Point.

My dad literally told me, why are you going into the Army? The Army is for stupid people and schmucks. And he was not entirely wrong. So my dad, the reason kind of I was attracted to military service and my dad, and my dad, the reason kind of I was attracted to military service. was drafted for World War II, but he served in the Panama Canal. Both my dad and his brother were enlisted men. His brother was in 79th Infantry Division, kind of fought his way across Europe, Purple Heart, CIB. Years later, used his CIB when I earned the CIP, so it was very cool. How I kind of got into it was my dad was an orphan. And He went from literally nothing, you know, clothes on his back in a boy's home to upper middle class, electrical engineer, 16 patents, kind of the American dream.

Yeah. Right. And, you know, to me, it was, and he was patriotic, and he appreciated, I mean, he just appreciated what America had done for him. And so to a degree it was paying back, it was an appreciation of what we have here. And that's what drew me to military service. I was definitely the black sheep, for sure, of the family. But you got accepted to West Point, so that's a... And what year is this?

So it was a... I started in 88, graduated in 92. Gotcha. I actually went to enlisted as a reservist as a combat engineer before, because, you know, we had no military experience in our family. It's like no one to be like, hey, what's it like, other than my dad who's drafted and is like, it's horrible. You don't want to do it.

You know? So I did that kind of as a little experiment to kind of test the waters. So how was West Point in the late 1980s? I mean, you know, West Point sucks. It's organized torture. But it gives you great opportunities. You know, you have experiences that, I mean, you're so fortunate.

I did an exchange with the British Army, went to Sandhurst, we went to the field. You know, my second year, spent two weeks of the Brits in the field. Things that, you know, a lot of times you might spend a career in the Army, like, or a tour in the Army and just never have the chance to do.

I mean, you know, the other thing is, is the, it sucks and it's hard, but it really builds your, the camaraderie and the closeness of your classmates and your friends and you know it's just lifelong friends that you know you can always count on um our last episode that we filmed earlier today actually lindsay was the first captain i think is the first captain yeah very cool yeah like the fourth woman to ever have that position at west point yeah very cool so she did pretty well for herself over there.

Yeah. I didn't do that well. You were the guy that had to, what is the, when you get demerits, you have to like walk around the, walk the area, you walk the area

when you get demerits or punishment. I was not bad. I mean, I only had eight hours. Okay. So I kind of kept my nose mostly clean. You know, matter of truth but told, I just didn't get caught most of the time. But,

you know, So when you went to West Point, before you went, did you have an idea of what you wanted to do in the Army? And did that change or form while you were at West Point? Yeah. This is part of the unfortunate thing, I think, coming from a non-military family, not knowing anything about really service other than what my dad and my uncle had talked to me about. and you know shocker the west point experience is not like the experience in the real army right like nothing like it yeah and your dad and was your uncle i mean they experienced a massive global war

drafted probably for like a year's period of time yeah a little bit different than what you were experienced completely different from the you know volunteer army so i went to west point wasn't really sure what i you know was going to do after graduate I actually went military intelligence for the first four years and found it was not a good fit for me. And I was really kind of fortunate, though, one of my bosses, my company commander, was 1001st infantry guy.

This is back in the day there's pre-email, right? But they're sending notices through you through division mail, like photocopies. And I had a photocopy that I was looking out on my desk, and it was, you know, try out for SF. And he looked at me and he's like, I know you, Frank. He's like, you're a good fit for it. And he's like, if you don't do it, he'll regret it the rest of your life. Wow.

And that's one of the best piece of advice I've ever been given, you know. Went through, made it, you know. So you get to group then, what is it, 96 or so? No, I get to group 98. Okay. So, you know, stopovers, ranger school, Q-Corps. you know, armor advanced course, you know, kind of like the pathway. The armor advanced course, do you have to go through that as like Captain's Career Course?

Captain's Career Course. Okay, gotcha. Yeah. And at that point, SF for officers was sending a decent amount of guys there because of like the FID mission, you know, Middle East, a lot of tanks, a lot of mechanized warfare. So there was kind of an emphasis on sending at least a good slew of the guys who would go to Fifth Group. to the armor course. Very interesting. Cool. So you get to fifth group.

Tell us about landing on a team in the now mid to late 1990s, what you guys were up to. You know, there's no better job in the Army than being an SF team later. Like, it's just not. It's just, at least I was very fortunate. I had a good team. It was young, but still. a couple, enough experience guys to, you know, have strength there. And they were hungry, they wanted to employ, they wanted to, you know, go out and do things.

So I got a, you know, trip to Kosovo during that time period. We did three JTF-6 missions. And then this is-out on the border? Yeah, this is all after the period where the Marine shot the Mexican kid on the Mexican side of the border. and then they shut down the hide site operations. And effectively, we're doing FID with law enforcement agencies. Okay. But it was also kind of a cost effective

because they would pay for our travel out there, would pay for our trucks to get out there. And you're doing desert training, basically. Exactly right. Piggy back like two, three weeks of desert training out there. It's just cool stuff. Go out the Imperial Sand Dunes, you know, National Park in California. and driving over 300-foot dunes at night with nods.

I mean, it's just, it's awesome. Yeah, you had the whole, like, Anzabarego out there. Yeah. Yeah. And then Kosovo's interesting that you got that trip because that was mostly like 10th group guys, right? Yep. They had a small contingent called the UAE-L-C-E, again,

a FID-SFA mission, where there's a combined Amaradi and Jordanian soft presence. and so we were there to be their advisors to connect with the you know the Aob that was there as well as you know there were some early kind of rumblings of you know Islamic extremism yeah it was starting to pop up even then in Kosovo that we were some of our guys were plugged into

yeah the Iranian influence too Iranian there was more Sunni yeah at least when I was there I mean, I could have changed afterwards, but the threat was more aQ or, you know, pre-AQ or, you know, just Sunni extremists. And so then where were you guys at when 9-11 happened? Yeah, I was at Georgetown studying actually Arab studies. Okay. I was doing like five and a half hour of Arabic a day as well as regular master's load.

I was going to go teach at West Point. And, yeah, I mean, you know, saw the Pentagon burning from the hill at Georgetown. And here, a fast mover, you know, F-16 flying over, you know, U.S. City, which is, you know, at that point, it was just unimaginable. It was just something that, you know, you knew the world had kind of forever changed. I don't know. And what was the next stop for you after Georgetown? Yeah, I went to teach at West Point for two years. And I went to branch, asked, I was like, hey, Boski, get me in the fight, you know, like, speak Arabic.

I'm a, you know, two plus two plus three at that point. Okay, yeah. So really, like, very functional. And, you know, it's like, look, you know, maybe it's a strategic reserve. You'll have your chance. And I did have my chance. So, yeah, taught at West Point. for two years teaching history.

I got to do Best Ranger during that time period too. And at Elevenworth, too. So I did it twice. And then back to fifth group after that? Back to fifth group. Yeah. Yeah, I had a Bravo Company, 520. Took to Iraq just south of Mosul and Ninoa province.

Oh, yeah. So, Hatra to Mahmur, to Hamamalalalil, and then Kayaara, also area that really went from this arc as it included past the green line into Kirstan all the way to the border up to the southern elements of Mosul and so you're a company commander at this point

what was so you have six teams over there I have four teams you have four teams yeah this is what were your company's partner forces at the time so the partner forces this the The Iraqi military had basically collapsed in November of, I think it was November 04, and they hadn't really been fully reconstituted. So we deployed, if I remember correctly in May,

and it was like an off cycle where they deployed a conglomerate of like third group, 19th group, fifth group, fifth group, battalion headquarters to like try to get the Iraqi army and Ninoa kind of back up the par. And that was the core of it. So we had everything from a battalion that was mostly Shia that had stickers of Mukhtra Souther on their AK, you know, buttstocks,

to, you know, Kurdish, you know, former Peshmerga battalions that you'd go into their areas. Yeah, you know, I think they were KDP actually on the ones that we were with. With, you know, the Kurdish flag is the Iraqi flag. and, you know, they're well-organized arms rooms as opposed to the general chaos to, on the border, a Sunni former Sheikh who everyone just referred to as, you know, Tony Soprano. Sacks of money down in the basement of the mosque?

Would not surprise me. They were quite crazy stories. it's a good year. And also, he's kind of pretty thuggish, so. So how did that deployment play out for you guys? You know, it was, you know, it was not a high adventure. It was not like, you know, Fallujah, Ramadi, you know, get shot out occasionally, but nothing like, you know, not high drama.

Yeah. So not in the thick of anything. Some of the teams in other companies kind of had more, you know, they're out at Telafar. So it was kind of an operation that ran there. Telafar was nuts back then. Yeah. But, you know, it was a mix because even by that point, it was very clear that the Iraqis were really eliminating what we were, at least with the regular army, what we could kind of do.

and reach into their units and kind of control. And, you know, it'd be like, okay, you know, why are we having the same platoon, you know, rotate through from different battalions? I thought we're supposed to partner with one battalion for the whole six months. You know, we're not like basic trainers where platform drill sergeants that the guys come in,

we train them for a month and they leave and then you're rotating your next unit in. Like, that's not, you know, what we signed up for. that's not what we want you to do because it's pointless. Right. But regardless of the complaining up the chain, you know, nothing ever happened. What was your, you know, you're fairly senior at this point in time. And, you know, you have more of a direct line to, you know, command decisions and things like that.

Yeah. Than, you know, then a guy on an A team, for instance. what was your impression of the U.S. management of the war? So that's a great question. I distinctly remember when General Casey, who is the MNFI commander, he flew up, we all went up to Mosul, the whole battalion, team sergeants, team leaders, and team warrants, and met with him as he briefed on the campaign plan

and kind of how we fit into it. And at that point, the whole strategy was basically transatlantic, And it was that within like a year or two, we were going to be shrunk down to like two bases. And we were going to minimize contact with the Iraqis because we were effectively creating antibodies where, you know, there were more, we were creating more insurgents than we killed just because we were the Americans being there. Right. And, you know, we sat through that brief. I remember another major and I, and afterwards we looked at each other,

and I can't remember who it was, one of us said, we're really going to lose this thing, aren't we? And the other one of us said, yeah, we are. Because, I mean, if you know the just basic precepts of counterinsurgency theory, like transition, particularly when the Iraqis are nowhere near ready.

And, you know, this is like a month or two into it where we're like, holy smokes, we got like 10 years of work with these guys to like get them to like where they need to be. Right. And they're telling us we're going to be transitioning to four bases in like 18 months and we're

packing up and leaving. Like that's not going to work. Right. Do you think that's because they were just like on our side just unsurious about the war or were they really so diluted that they believed that this was a possibility? So I think there's two factors

going on is I do think Casey and General Avesade, who was a Scentcom commander at that point, I think they actually both believed in kind of the antibody theory and that we were creating more insurgents by just being there. So I want to take a minute today to tell you guys about the perfect gene. I've been wearing them for a few weeks now and really enjoy them and I just want to share it with our audience. You know, sometimes genes have this problem where, you know, you guys all have seen these skinny jeans that they like crush your balls and

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Please support our show and tell them we sent you. So fuck your khakis and get the perfect gene. And they're, you know, the first. prescription for that was like, okay, minimize presence, go to minimal footprint. And, you know, that works if, A, you know, you don't have a civil war to contend with. B, the political and military side of the Iraqis are capable of being transitioned to, and C, that if you, you know, really have beaten back the insurgency to the point where you don't have, you don't have, you know, of that kind of threat also.

And none of those were viable at that point. So to me, it was madness. And I'll tell you, so my last job in the Army was one of the writers, and I took over the writing the operational history of the Iraq War. And going into it, my core premise was like, now these guys couldn't have believed that. Like, it's nuts to believe it. Right.

Like, and I sat down and I think I had 27 hours with General Casey with, like, person-to-person interviews, 18 hours with General Sanchez, who's the, you know, CJDF-7 commander from, like, 04 to 06. And, General Abizaid, interviewed General Abizaid also, all sorts of others, and they actually really believed it. Wow. Like, I, you know, it wasn't, you know, and going through the documents, they really believed it. And in some ways, you know, afterwards they argue that how things turned out proved them right. In effect, that they wanted to transition because theoretically they didn't think it was ever possible in Iraq. But, yeah, it was weird. I think they're, you know, my original premise was that there's so much political pressure on them, you know, from the Bush administration who just wanted to move on as well as from the Title X Army, you know, the organized train equip and other the Marines, other elements of the Joint Chiefs that were like, whoa, like, we are way overcommitted here. We're going to lose transformation. We're going to lose all these weapon systems that we want to use to focus on the next, you know,

peer, near peer competitor, and we want to get out of Iraq. And I thought that there was so much pressure on them from all these sources that they just decided, okay, yeah, gave my best military advice and I moved on. But their best military advice was that transition. I'm curious because, you know, I spent like three years in and out of there a lot. And I used to think about like what's going on because we see, you know, when you're you do 60-day trips at a time, but you do three trips a year over, you know, three years,

and you see the same thing over and over again. I felt as though our government was too hung up on the concept of liberation, right? We liberate these people from Saddam, and then it's done, where when you see past World War II, for instance, You break it, you buy it. So we stayed in Germany, we stayed in Japan, until those countries were rebuilt. And we didn't shy away from the word occupation,

where this is like, it was such a... Or nation building is the other that we shy away from. Yeah. It's such a, like, it was such a politically sensitive. At no point in time did anybody ever want to say, we are occupying Iraq. And so we basically, like I said, we went in there and we kicked.

it over and then we went okay you know we're here to facilitate but we're not doing it for you yeah i mean there there's there's a lot to unpack there and i agree with you completely so like there was it was crazy because like the the joint staffs there are these interviews like beforehand that they're like unquoted members of the you know geos who wouldn't give their names who'd say hey i want to post a big sign on the pentagon that says we don't do nations building. And it was a combination of the uniform services, but also the civilian defense leaders, whether it be Rumsfeld or others within the administration at that point, who were allergic to it. Like Somalia and things like that they'd seen in the past. Completely. Somalia, Kosovo,

you know, Yugoslavia, all those they felt were a waste of resources. And I mean, I think you can make a viable strategic argument. on the value or lack thereof of of Kosovo or Balkans or Somalia. And I think there are arguments that can be made either way. But to then drag that into, okay, we're going to, you know, topple Iraq, which is the traditional counterbalance to Iran, which is our greatest threat in the region, and then just leave. Right.

Like, seems suboptimal. Yeah, there's some strategic lack of foresight there that is, that's, you know, words on criminal negligence. Yeah. And so there really was, I mean, the, the, many of the civilian leaders, one of the civilian leaders actually had proposed that there was a one brigade, right? I need to remember the, there was intrinsic action or whatever they called it, the one brigade on the kind of like, you know, doing, not peacekeeping, but deterrence in Kuwait. And the civilian leadership is like, we have a brigade there. We can launch now.

And the military leaders were like, wait, no, we need like, you know, four or five divisions. You know, and there's the famous engagement where General Shinseki and then Secretary White, Secretary of the Army White, who actually gave testimony before Congress where they said, well, we would need several hundred thousand soldiers to be able to pry. properly, you know, donation building in Iraq. Yeah. And, I mean, they got effectively,

White got fired over it. Sonseki got his career terminated early. He didn't get extended. Rumsfeld didn't go to his retirement. So clearly, you know, lost off the Christmas or holiday cards. And, you know, they,

they thought that a single brigade, kind of like on the Afghan model, with soft, terminal guidance, J-Tax, etc. precision guided munitions would be able to topple Saddam. And there was also this bizarre notion

like you said that, you know, like almost like the liberation of Paris in World War II, that rather than you know, flowers are going to throw falafels out of us. Right. You know, like to thank us. I mean, and, you know, obviously that was like totally like off. It was insane.

But those were the notions that we kind of went into it with. And it, in some ways, I mean, there are many, it was interesting because we also had access to all of the detaining interviews with all these insurgent leaders. And there was also another, I don't know if you've ever heard of Bill NAR. He, I think he was an SF guy. He ended up going to J-Sow. But one of the projects he did was he went into Jordan in like the, the, 11 to like 13 time period and interviewed all these former Sunni insurgent leaders and so many of them like it was like almost the same comments they're like yeah you know when you guys toppled saddam you know we we had hope like we were we were thinking like this is america this is you know the country that you know put a man on the moon that you know blotted out the skies of nazi germany with you know bombers to like blot me

lot it out the sun there were so many. But you guys couldn't even get gas to the gas stations in the third country with the most oil in the world. Right. Like, they just, they're like, you know, so we, and I mean, you know, the conspiracy theories are so much throughout the Middle East. So they're like, well, they think it's intentional.

Like, oh, this is part of your plan. That's exactly right. They're like, well, what is this? Is it intentional? Are they trying to bring, you know, the Persians over, you know, which is... The level of paranoia reaches the point to sometimes like, not even exaggerating where like

it'll rain outside and be like, CIA did that. What? And I think a lot of it does come from like American movies like our culture, the way it projects into the... Because I remember talking to people and they'd be like, if you guys really wanted Osama bin Laden dead, you'd just send Bruce Willis and kill him and it'd be over. They do believe the movies.

They believe that America has this omnibular. And we backflip over triple-strand concertina wire and all that good stuff. And, you know, just the war plans in general, like, when we went in, I remember going through these bases, these empty Iraqi bases that had been stripped of, you know, all the copper and everything. And I was like, where are the Iraqi forces? Like, if we weren't fighting Iraq, right? If we were getting rid of Saddam, why was there not a SIE-OPS company?

Why were they not dropping flyers over these bases telling the Iraqi army, hey, put your weapons down, stay, remain in place, we're taking over your payroll. Like, where did we come up with this idea of completely obliterating every aspect of a country and then not taking responsibility for building that country back up? Yeah. And I mean, there's so many just crazy. Like when you, you know, historically review it, it's like madness. Yeah.

Because there's no logic to it. Yeah. And the, you know, we were fortunate. We actually got four hours to interview President Bush, kind of talked to him. There are three people who refused us to be interviewed. Rummy. One of them was Rumsfeld. And so, unfortunately, we didn't get his perspective. We got. We got Bremer's perspective. We got Secretary Condoleezza Rice's perspective. So many different people. And the core question of CPA orders number one and two,

which disbanded the Iraqi Army, and then outlawed the Baft Party. It's going to be one of the historical questions that I think it's going to probably take years to figure out. So I'll... Mild, spoiler alert. And I can't tell this story because it's not really my story to tell, but Tim Weiner knows a lot about how that unfolded with Ian Bremer and the debathification,

and I believe it's going to be in his new book that's coming out. He told it to me, but it was like over a drink and a bar. I don't want to get ahead of his work that hasn't been published yet, but so stay tuned for that. But it is an interesting subject. I would be curious. I've thrown a lot of shade Bremer's way since, you know, since that time. and I would be very curious and maybe I'm completely wrong

but I would be curious how your interview with him went Yeah so I was not in that interview with Bromberus myself I did Bush A bunch of others tell us about W I mean I would be fascinated to hear his perspectives So one of the things we did ask him about that question And you know he said look I'm a hands-off manager I trust the people who are on the ground

more than the people in Washington, and I'm going to let, you know, the people there call audibles. And when, if they want to make a decision based on what they're seeing, I'm going to let them make the decision based on what they're seeing. So his core premise was that, okay, it happened in Iraq. We, it was kind of conflicting guidance, and it wasn't clear to us even from what we could because we didn't have access to the National Security Council,

the White House. kind of records or we didn't you know we had sentcom we had you know MNF5 we see JTF 7 all those but not and you know not the joint staff either the there was a notion though from some within the Defense Department that there's this perception that the Ba'ath party equals the Nazi party and that so to reinvigorate Iraq and renew that it had to be expunged, which is bizarre because it, like, totally is not historically accurate. Right. Like, we...

It's more like the CCP in a way or whatever, right? It's more a... Yeah, and, I mean, we employed Nazis, you know, after Nazi party members in Germany and in our space program after the war. Part of it is because we... wanted the trains to run on time. And there's, you know, there's, there's a degree of there's, you know, horrificness to it, but there's also a practicality to it, that there's, you know. When they run your public works, when they run everything. Everything. Right. You know, to be

about, you know, if you're not a party member, you're going to be a janitor. Right. It's just, like you said, it's the CCP, you know, the Communist Party, you know. Like, if you're not a member, good luck. Do you think the disconnect came about? Because what President Bush was describing there is on its face of it, not really a bad thing. He was delegating decisions down to guys who were on the ground and saying, you have to address the terrain as you see it.

But nonetheless, all these other problems we've been mentioning, I mean, where did the thing, did it start to come apart at the GO level? That's the popular answer, perhaps. But maybe it's too obvious. So the Bush interview is very interesting because, you know, in some ways, you know, politicians tell very little. You get very little out of interviews because you're just not going to,

they're not going to bear their souls, particularly as someone that they've never met before, who isn't from the same culture they are, you know. And, you know, some GOs gave useless interviews, others. I had three GOs break down, like, sobbing, like, during the interviews, like, I had to stop the, you know, recording.

Good. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, I mean, and so there's a mix. You know, Bush, it was one of the most interesting things was you could almost tell by like his body posture and how when we started talking about Rumsfeld, it changed a little bit kind of from that jovial, I mean, you know, I'm just gonna say it kind of goofballish almost.

Like, you know, he's a fun guy, right? He's, you know, to, I almost detected a little bit of anger. and just reading the reading him so i think that particularly early on there were a lot of mistakes made because of rumsfeld but i think in parallel my at least my premise is that the uniformed services the generals the strategy of the transition strategy was completely wrong for for the time period yeah and And, you know, if we'd done the surge three years earlier, the whole thing might have turned out, okay. But instead, we, you know, try the transition strategy while a civil war, basically, a slow burn civil war is going on.

Was a surge in 07? Surges in 07. Yeah. Because there was a mini-surgeon in 04, right? I'm trying to remember. But I know there was a major surge in 07. Yeah. The big surge is 07.

Yeah. So I want to come back to the Iraq war study. I mean, there's a lot to talk about there, but also I want to talk about the controversy. But continuing along your career, you spent some time, S3 operations? Yeah, it was the S3 for First Battalion. Okay. And the fifth group. And then legal attach yet?

No, so I went to legislative affairs for Socon. And so I actually like that job. That's up on the hill, right? It's on the hill. So, yeah, you are the liaison. between SOCOM and Congress. And you're doing everything from budgets to authorizations to your like the travel guide for congressional members and staff

when they're doing visits to the base. Yeah, CODELS. Codeos and staff dolls. And I ended up mostly on the Senate side, mostly in the Armed Services Committee working with them, but a little bit on appropriators too. And I mean, I like the job for a couple of things. reasons. You know, one of the authorities that we ended up fighting and protecting was the

live tissue training authority. There were, there was a member PETA. There was a movement to shut that down. There was a movement to shut it down in, it was either 10 or 11, where PETA had gotten something like 47 members of Congress to sign on to a bill to terminate live tissue training. Wow. They did end up, They contracted out now. It's like kind of the workaround. Yeah. Yeah. So then it was serious.

And so we came up with a strategy. And, you know, like, I'm like, look, let's bring wounded guys. And like, literally go into these guys who are, we're going to play hardball and go into the guys who've signed on to this bill. Particularly find a constituent, one of their constituents from their district who's wounded, who can say, look, I'm alive because of live tissue training. Right. And we literally had 15 people on that bill take their name off the bill. That's amazing.

So for people who... And so it collapsed. And it was like, okay, you guys can come back in five years and try it again, but we killed it. For people who are watching who might not know what we're talking about, live tissue training is generally taking a goat or, you know, some other farm animal. But, and pumping and fold ketamine so they don't feel anything. And then inflicting gunshot wounds or some sort of wound on them. so that the medics and other people, like anybody really, on team,

can do actual live tissue training, stabilizing, life-saving procedures, things like that. Things that really matter in the field, in these traumatic environments. And it's really priceless training for people who get it. And so PETA decided that, you know, that it was, cool and you guys managed

to circumvent that we killed the bill yeah and another occasion there were two years when the army is bizarre like totally not understanding like how the system works they came up they thought

they had this principle of approach that okay we're not going to try for any earmarks or ads we're not going to try for any correctional ads No pork barrel politics? We're not going to do any pork barrel politics. We're not going to submit a UFRA list, an unfinanced requirements list. Man, I made like $250 million a year for SOCOM.

I got additional helicopters, I got free-strived plasma, I got all sorts. I got, you know, dog handling teams and, you know, all sorts of like the seal got boats. I mean, we just cleared house those years because the way the game is played on the hill, is that money's there. And it's going to go to someone. Yeah, you have to fight for it. You have to fight for it. And if the Army takes themselves out of the competition,

that money is still there for the taking. Right, right. And you have to make a good argument for it. And's why SOCOM has you up there. That's right. I imagine you learned quite a bit about that side and how it interacts with the military. I mean, how it works in general,

particularly how it works with the military. Yeah. You see how pork, you know, you see how sausage is made. Yeah. And, I mean, there's good and bad and, you know, it's like anything. And many of the members have no clue. Yeah, the members meaning like senators or members of the House representative. But there's staffs that sometimes are like the, you know,

really good and decent and smart and hard. working people that really care, particularly on the armed services committees. And there's a lot of veterans on them too. Yeah. And people who just really, and this is in the era before like partisan politics, I mean, it was 07 to 11, where like the people in the Armed Services Committee, man, you know, they were trying to do what's right for us, for those in the fight. And I mean, you know, one of the funny...

Well, ironic things is, you know where drones came from, the Predator and the Reaper? It was a congressional ad. The Air Force did not want to buy them because, you know, it's not a point-y-nose fighter pilot or a bomber pilot. Right. So they totally opposed it.

It was a forced ad where a California house member, I believe, forced them to, you know, support and buy them, by the original predators from General Atomics. And the Air Force fought it every step of the way. And they're like, no, this is the wave of the future. And you need an aircraft that can loiter over your ground guys for like hours. Right.

Like, I was in a, sorry, I was in one meeting where I went out to Vegas and was at Creech and it was a joint Air Force and Socom won. And so they're seeing our stuff and the Air Force's stuff. And I literally had an Air Force two-star where it's an appropriator. And appropriators are like the gods of Congress, a real appropriator, a member. And this Air Force General says the F-22 is a coin aircraft. Right? Like, I mean, it's got like 15 minutes of playtime probably or 20 minutes.

And it's got like, what, two, three, four bombs, maybe max? No gun, nothing. And I literally laughed in front of him. Like, I laughed in front of him, which is, you know, I was not invited to a future Air Force once. Trips I ended up mostly going with, I found a guy on the Army side that would take me on trips. And, you know, then we had this discussion with him on, you know, how little value in F-22 is to guys in the fight. Right. It's no value whatsoever.

And it's, you know, that was, to me, why I enjoyed that job. is because even if you doesn't result in any change, it puts a seed there, right? Where they started thinking about it. And, you know, you just never know what may come of it. How often,

because obviously the person who pushed for the drones and said this is the future warfare, I mean, you know, it's very possible that it was General Dynamics who, like, pitched it, and you could say that... Could be. You know, you could say that, you know, that they were working commercial interests, but in that case, they were 100% correct.

But then you have somebody who says that this is a coin aircraft. Meanwhile, we see that since Vietnam, they've tried to get rid of the AC130, which is a coin aircraft. Yeah. Oh, do we want to go on a big rant about the coin aircraft that we finally got, the air tractor after all the gnashing of teeth about that? All the willing and gnashing of teeth. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I mean, it's funny. I even hearkened back to a time period when we were there where, I mean, you know, Congress is like anything else. It's made up human beings. Sure. And there's the good, the bad, and the ugly. Right. Right.

And there are good people. And what I try to do is I try to find and work with the good people. There are other people who, even in our office, who would, you know, would. work with Frank Underwood? We'd work with people who were a little, you know, not exactly where I would like to work with. But, you know, they would still get things done, you know. But so we had an occasion where the Socom commander wanted to buy a whole bunch of,

I think they're a Super Tucano aircraft made by Embraer, which is a Brazilian company and not a U.S. company. And that's what Socom wanted to be the coin aircraft. Yep. Great lawyer, prop, you know, turbo prop, extended range, shit ton of stuff, you can hang on it. And, you know, it came down, and if I recall correctly, whether it was Beach or Cessna or both were up in arms,

and literally, you know, we had to bring, I don't remember, whether it was the deputy or the vice down to, like, defend our position and they're like you know and they're working through the members from wherever you know beach and cesson right to which don't seattle probably i think so yeah i think one's from kansas and the other yeah anyway and uh you know they're like oh buy our caro craft and so it comes like no it's got you know half the later time half the you know payload you know we don't want it um And I don't know if we won that one. I think it ended up getting fought out and extended out.

And it just, that's one of those where Congress ends up hosing it. Yeah. You know, I mean. And, you know, it's tough because from a military perspective, you're like, well, that, you know, Congress person is fucked up. But, sorry for the language. But from a constituent perspective, That's right.

They're doing their job, right? They're doing what they were elected to do. That's absolutely right. And so, you know, I mean, it's, to me, one of the things that I tried to advise was, you know what I mean? It's like, it's this first off imperative. Understand your operational environment. Figure out how the game is played and then play the game to win. And so what I would always try to do is I would try to triangulate a visit or a euphor, an unfinite requirement,

like something that we genuinely needed. And sometimes, I mean, I would go to, you know, the guys, I think he was in E7 down at, you know, Delta, who was working stuff like freeze-drive plasma. And, you know, like, hey, what do you guys need? And it was approved through the chain of command. And we would align that need with a visit to the district where it was made or where it would benefit.

And that's what you kind of had to triangulate. Gotcha. You know, to try to get the true needs met. That was a big break through too, to get that into the field. And afterwards, you got a Garrison deployment? Yeah. Not deployment, command. Yeah, far from a deployment.

Yeah, I, you know, I competed for a tactical command. not get a tactical command. And this is back in the day where you, like, the first time I actually only put tactical. I was like, no, I just want a tactical command. And then I didn't get a command. The second year, they're like, look, if you only put tactical again, you are not going to get a battalion command.

Like, just read the tealies, buddy. So I'm, okay, put in a garrison, and I got the NADIC garrison in Massachusetts, which is the Soldier System Center. Yeah, testing. Yep. They do, you know, uniform testing. They do fire retardant clothing.

They do MRIs. All sorts of kind of cool. Okay. That kind of dovetailed with your time at Congress. A little bit. There was a small also-socom detachment there. Interesting. Yeah.

Now, are they working? Kim, yes, I think. Are they working with DARPA much and things like that, or is it? It's all integrated. Yeah. You know, DARPA is even more. more cutting edge. Natick is more...

Boots and uniforms and stuff. Yeah, boots, uniforms, MREs. There's actually a parachute detachment there. There's civilians who jump there who the steerable parachutes, the ones with like the GPS hanger on it, they would gut fly in Afghanistan. That came out in Natick too.

So there are these small detachments of, you know, like 30 pound brains. dudes and dudeettes. Yeah. I was thinking about that the other day for some reason. I don't know why it popped in there. I heard about how, like, we actually have classified parachute projects. It's like, it's kind of cool.

Yeah. Not if you're the test jumper, of course, but otherwise it's pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, and then how did you end up getting selected for the Iraq War study? How did that come about for you? Yeah, so I was most likely thinking, hey, I'm going to get out of it. Army. I didn't want to go to US SOC or it's even worse to installation management command, you know, like changing colors on slides and happy to glad. But at the last minute, my officemate

from West Point called and was like, hey, Jenna Oedierano, who is the chief staff of the Army, putting together a team to write the official operational history of the Rock War for the Army, and they need an 18-series guy who is read on to both sides because one of Ode Niro's specified tasks is he's like, hey, I need to capture the soft story because if the soft story is not told, we're not telling the story of the Iraq War. And so they wanted an 18th series,

a must-fill 18-series alpha, 18-alpha, plus they needed somebody who spoke real bright Arabic. You know, my friend knew me, and he was like, hey, you want to do it? And I'm like, sure. So tell us about kind of like you mentioned a little bit before we started recording, like the research process and how it was all digitized, but it was completely unorganized. Yeah. So, I mean, that was, wow. You know, we had such a great opportunity because we did both oral history interviews, but also archival research. And our team did, you know, thousands of hours. hours of interviews with everyone from President Bush down to, you know, E7s in key positions. On the archival side, almost everything is digitized.

And so we were fortunate in the General Oediano, who is the chief staff at the time, had worked with Scotty Miller. No, the Ascentcom commander at the time. I'm drawing a blank for some reason. General Austin. Okay, yeah. And they were tight. And so he called them and it's like, look, can, I'm putting it out of the team to write the first kind of draft of history for this.

Can I send a team down? Will you give them access to all the CENTCOM archives? And Austin was like, sure, whatever you want. And so we literally got access to all the archives at Centcom, all the archives at the Center of Military History in D.C., all the archives at the Center of Military History in D.C., all the archives. all the archives at Leavenworth and at Carlisle there's archives like all over the place it's really weird you know some of them like literally are the hard drives

of the multinational force Iraq headquarters and we would have to plug into it and you know there's like four terabytes of data on that one drive not organized at all and there's everything on there from like porn to like dudes you know iTunes music to movies to photos of an accident,

an accidental discharge with a gate guard, you know, whatever fob. It's just madness, just like how much data is out there. And so it's just like sifting through all that, trying to find the needle in a haystack that was a process.

How many years did it take to complete the study? So I was on the study from 2013 to 2018. and we were and I'm being a little evasive here because it depends how you ask it was five years till it actually got published we were forced to change our publisher from the Center of Military History

which does the official history to the Strategic Studies Institute at the War College at Carlisle because that was an academic institution and we could be more controversial there what had happened was General O'Dirono had retired, and his guidance was like, look, if you have to kill sacred cows, kill sacred cows, I don't care whose feelings get hurt. We lost people. We made the same mistakes of the Vietnam War.

And, you know, part of the reason we made those same mistakes is we never really tried to learn from it. You know, we never really wrote or never finished writing the histories of the Vietnam War with the Army. and so we didn't have any institutional learning on it. And so he was like, I want you to do it. And when you hurt people's feelings, that's totally okay. And so one of the reasons why I was shifted was that commander's guidance. And, you know, just delayed on forever because after General Millie was appointed, the chief staff of the army, he, the chief of public affairs,

the Army and then Secretary Esper, who's the Secretary of the Army, all opposed publication. Because three grounds. One, controversial, which, you know, a lot of Army publications are as boring as a refrigerator repair manual. You know, they're just like, there's no controversy in them because they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. It's like the same argument that was made against publishing the Pentagon Papers. That's exactly right. and so we

tried to do our best to explain why we thought things went wrong who made decisions what their logic was behind those decisions and then you know kind of let the cars fall where they may and so it was controversial there's no question

and you know like a couple examples I'm just going to be blunt here. One of the things that General O'Diano told us was he's like, look, we need to have a honest conversation about what the Guard and Reserves brings to the fight.

And I mean, you know, the Army, there's this big talk of the total force and everyone being equal. And it's bullshit, right? I mean, someone who trains 40 or 50 days a year, just is not going to be the same as someone who does it year round with the budgets

that the active force has. Granted, the Reserve and Guard are going to bring other skill sets to the fight that are good and valuable, but in terms of fighting, they're not equal. And, you know, so the guard went crazy. Like, and there were people who literally tried to, one individual wrote to the vice chief staff of the army, making accusations about that we used too much oral history interviews

rather than archival, which was not accurate, and other accusations about how controversial it was to try to get them to kill the project. And so, you know, that was like the controversial issue is one of it. A second component of it was this weird notion where, you know, in the Army, at the general officer level, there's this sense that we're supposed to be a political, right? And that, you know, you're not supposed to...

I'll take a little. You want? Yeah, yes, please. I'll have an ice, please. Yeah, thank you. And, you know, there was this sense that, weird sense where that we in the military were not theoretically supposed to add any sort of political advice or political guidance to stay out of it. Dimitri, you just want to grab the tray out of the... Sorry, go ahead.

It's all good. But so there was this sense where... They believe that the senior generals shouldn't have been, like, having a back and forth with the president or the secretary defense on how the war should be conducted. Like, they thought that it was like, okay, they give us guidance, and then we translate that guidance and make it happen. And these were generals who were, like, giving us this, like, premise. And it's like, no, that's not how it happened.

There was, like, a back and forth, you know, like, the senior commander would be, like, no boss. I don't think that's a good idea. I think maybe we should try this instead or, you know. And so there was this weird, just a pushback that that came from like senior officers giving their best military advice was they were allergic to it. They were like, ooh, like we don't want to talk about that. Do you, I'm out of curiosity, to me, I would take that as that they want the failure of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they want the failure of those wars to rest. solely on the president, like, hey, we were just following orders.

They want to pretend that they had no say in how things went. So, you know, to me, as a historian, it's harder for me to speculate. Sure. I'll speculate all the answer. Yeah, yeah. No, fair, fair, fair, totally fair. And it's totally fair to do that. And there's a public notion, I think, we've all expoused this at some point, like, you know,

it's not the military's fault, it's the politicians. But it's like, well, the military lost the war. I mean, we have some responsibility, too. We absolutely share the responsibility. And I think really in Iraq and Afghanistan in many ways, we set the conditions for losing it, particularly early on when Bush was so hands off. Yeah. I mean, Bush doesn't really grab the throttle again until 0607 when he's like,

holy smokes, this is a dumpster fire. Yeah. Like, you military people get out of the way. Yeah. Like, I'm going to tell you you're going to search. going to send more people because, and that came about as academics and other strategists were coming and seeing him and providing other options, you know, and he's like, these military people are giving me totally opposite. Like, they still want to transition and leave. I honestly,

though, whether it was Bush or Obama or even Trump in the latter part, I think that, I believe they were all light to. I believe that none of them ever had a true situation awareness that they were always given like the good news you know it's you know it's like a 20 year war fought one year at a time that next year will be the year

yeah we're turning a corner yeah that story yeah that's the turning a corner there certainly was a lot of that of very bad assessments of kind of where the enemy situation was and in particular where the host nation forces were where their capabilities were and a lot of that

that frankly was from the military side in that it was self-induced because all the metrics we tried to pick that we thought were effective were useless. Right. You know, we're trying to say, oh well, are these infantry battalions fully manned? Do they have all their equipment?

That means nothing. Right. We were juking the stats too though. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And the whole notion of, you know, they weren't putting the premise of ghost soldiers of, you know, people not showing up for duty or the corruption that's going on there.

None of that, I don't think, was, at least we did not find any record of that really making its way back on the Iraq side. I will say at the very end, though, there was a friction in the Obama presidency where the military leaders were actually saying, like, wait a minute, the Iraqi army is not ready. Really? Yes, positively at the very end. And we need not X number of soldiers to stay in Iraq. We need Y. And, you know, one of the very interesting things about the very end of it was that, particularly during that period, the military, I think, was presenting a pretty accurate picture.

Because they're reporting back of the corruption, of the problems with the political system. When Maliki for the 2010 election, when he basically circumvented the democratic process in Iraq, the theater commander wrote back and like it's in the records where it basically said, yeah, Maliki is running, conducting a running coup, like, quote, end quote. And that Yadalawi who won the election, who should be allowed to form a government first, is being pushed into the corner and blocked from doing that and his supporters are being threatened, killed,

or hopped up charges of a bathist at one point so they can't be part of the system that prevented them from, you know, despite that they won, forming a government. Now,

Would you say at the very end? Like 2010. Like before the... So our... Right before we withdrew. Yeah. So we went to 2014, but the 2011 to 2014 period

was like a chapter out of like, you know, like 30 or something. The end, our primary end is 2011. Because we... 0.3 to 11 was our... That's where our heavy lifting was. So, I guess... what I'm curious about.

And I don't want you to speculate if you don't know. Do you feel as though the reporting got honest because they knew it was the end and they wanted to say this shouldn't be the end? I don't want this on my record as whatever. Or were they reporting in good faith regardless of whether it was the end? Do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah, I think I know what you're saying. I think some of it is the individuals involved. Right. There are different individuals or the different... Just a higher level of like integrity or whatever. I think part of that is the case. I think part of it is what you say. I mean, to me, I'm always multi-causality.

Sure, sure. None of us functioned by a single, like, determinant, right? Nobody's all good or all bad or, like, all this on it. And there's all sorts of calculus going on in our brains that are driving us to make. make a decision one way or the other. Right. And so I think kind of both of those factors are really playing out is,

is, you know, individuals with more integrity at that, they're involved in the process. You have a sense of perhaps, you know, like, hey, I don't want to be left with the, the albatross. Well, I was going to say burning bag of shit. Yeah. Can I say that? You can. Okay.

You know, don't want to be left with the albatross. or that they actually did realize like, hey, like, this is going to be a disaster. And very interesting, the actual final withdrawal, though, the go-to-zero decision under Obama, there are only three individuals who actually supported the go-to-zero. And that was Obama, Vice President Biden, and then the National Security Advisor. everyone else is unified that we should not leave and that we should leave between 5 to 8,000. The CENTCOM commander, the chairman of joint chiefs, the sectef, the CIA director, and the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, all said we shouldn't leave. With Clinton actually making one of the most powerful arguments basically saying something at the extent of like, you know, we've been in Germany and

Korea for, you know, 60, 70 years. Right. You know, we lost five, six thousand Americans in this fight, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that died. Are we really just going to leave? And yet, we just left. Yeah. With kind of unshocking results in three years later, you know.

And then tell us about the drama around the publication of this. Well, there was a third one, right? Oh, because it was... The third element of why it was blocked from publishing was the... And it's interesting. I mean, you know, once you get to a certain point in the Army, you spend enough time around people. You have friends everywhere, right?

And so I had friends in the Vice Chief's Office, and the Chiefs Office who would filter me back. You know, it's like running my own... Source network, right? And so, like, I'd be like, hey, you know, on a burner phone. They were like, this is what it went down

in the meeting. Like, you won't believe this. And so one of it was that they basically were like, okay, we want to forget about coin an insurgency. We are pivoting to,

at that point I think it was called decisive action, but basically large-scale combat operations. Lesco. We're pivoting to pure, near- Vietnam.

That's exactly what happened. I don't want to hear about that coin shit no more. Exactly. And literally, you know, they're like, I was getting readouts really. Like, they said, this is what they said. They said that this doesn't match with our public affairs messaging, our messaging on the hill, and our budget priorities. So we don't want, it's distracting. We don't want it to be published.

Wow. Yeah. And so how did it finally come out? So it finally came out in that we were fortunate. You know, usually you're, you're, you know, usually you're. civilian GS employees are not well respected, right? Yeah, there's this, you know, a stereotype, right?

Of your GS employee that never does anything. Well, there was a GS-15 who, after we had been shifted from the Center Military History to the Strategic Studies Institute at Carlisle, who he made a decision, you know, effectively unilaterally, to provide a draft copy to Michael Gordon, who is the senior defense correspondent for the Wall Street draft. And he did it on the premise that, and I mean, this is just like,

this is the Army in a nutshell, right? Because it's like just public affairs, just like negligence, right? He gives it to him on the premise that the Army is going to get a good news story out of it because the Army is a learning institution, we're willing to be self-critical, We're willing to name names and have controversial stuff published about us.

We're willing to like, you know, semi-crucrucify ourselves over the mistakes we've made, right? That's going to be the good news story. And Gordon gets all these scoops because all this stuff that's been declassified, you know, we declassified 30,000 pages of documents, we've got all these interviews. He gets to sift throughout all of that before anyone else. And so he's got all these stories, all these scoops ready to drop, right? like the story about bombing the Damascus airport in 2005, the idea that never came to fruition.

And, you know, it's a bargain, right? You scratch my back, I scratch yours. It's kind of the way the world works. Well, because the Army isn't willing to publish it, you know, Gordon's starting to get pissed. He's got it, and he's being forced to sit on it. And it's not like, you know, the Leaf Chronicle outside Fort Campbell. It's like the Wall Street Journal.

And so finally, he gets so frustrated that, and this is what I was told, and I believe this is accurate, that he sits down with General Millie, who then is the chief staff of the Army and starts a recording and basically says, General Millie, why are you blocking the publication of your own Iraq War study? So he ambushed him. Ambushed him. Nice. After, I mean, in his defense, he did it only after the Army. he basically drug him folding the fuck off every which way.

Yeah, for like a year, year and a half. I don't think he needs any defense. Yeah, I mean, he totally did. I mean, and, you know, he'd expended time and effort to write these stories, ready to drop. Yeah. And, you know, so the Army had opted in bad fate. Yeah.

And he called him on it. And immediately, of course, you know, generally goes, oh, you know, sure, I'm publishing it, I'm going to write a forward to it, which I'd had like emails from other people who'd written like, General Millie will never write a forward to this. They were considering actually at one point that several the options were to put it on Sipper,

which is one of the things that O'Dierno has said, we will never put this on Sipper because if it goes there, it'll be like the lost arc of the covenant at the end of Indiana Jones, they'll be hidden this warehouse somewhere. Nobody will ever learn from it. So real quick, SIPPR is like the secret internet of the classified side. The classified side of like government or at least the military internet. So basically once you put it there, it's immediately classified information.

Then in order to FOIA, you have to know it exists in order to FOIA. So it basically goes to die. Disappears. Yeah. Yeah. And this is after we had already gone through an office that, you know, I didn't even know existed. It was called the Defense Office of Pew Publication Security Review. Yes, I know all about them.

So it had passed the Dobs for review. And, I mean, they were so detailed that they actually, one of the photos that was like on the Centcom website had detainees in it. And they actually caught. They're like, oh, you can't post photos of detainees. Oh, okay. The documents had already been declassified by Centcom. You know, they're stamped, declassified by CENTCOM, so we were clear. So this is just, like, vindictiveness, to put it by, to put it by, yeah, yeah, right.

The other option was they were going to publish it as an independent publication in that, like, I guess we were like. High school newsletter or something. Like, a high school newsletter. Like, we published it, like, you know, above our mom's garage on weekends or something. Right, right, right. Like, doing it in her part time rather than being commissioned by the army. Amazon creates space completely. That was their other option.

Yeah. And so, you know, it was only because of, you know, Michael Gordon basically throwing down the gauntlet. And so General Millie, of course, writes the full word and gets it published. And my phone blows up that day. There's like 10, I'm in a meeting, I think, with my kids teacher or something. I come out of it and there's like 10 voicemails, like 50 emails like, how soon can you publish this? You know? Yeah, I'm curious, what was the response when it was published? I mean, not to use the term that is loaded for Iraq, but was it mission accomplished? I mean, but seriously, I mean,

did you feel like, you know, you guys did what you set out to do and that it had an impact? So, I mean, I don't know. It's, who knows if it had an impact? I mean, I think one of the challenges I think, other than for a lot of the GWAT veterans, I think the Army has, like, turned the corner and I think they want to forget coin. And I think a lot of counterinsurgency or insurgency. And I think a lot of the American public wants to forget it. I would say at the time, it made international news. And like, because it was front page above the full Wall Street Journal, like I was on NPR,

all things considered, like West Coast, East Coast, CNN, you know, like I did multiple interviews over it. it. And the one bumper sticker, which this one was actually one I wrote, that everyone took out of it was that the only winner of the, that Iran was the only winner of the Iraq war. Yeah, for sure. That was the bumper sticker that came out of it. And that was for, I mean, you know, as long as a new cycle last, 15 seconds of fame or whatever, that that was the bumper sticker that a lot of people published. When you know you go on and you do these interviews like even here we do our interviews are two to three hours they're long form and people get an opportunity

to talk about things that normally when they go on these other shows it's like five minutes and how do you condense a 1500 page report like what do they what were their burning questions what did they want to know and depending on the outlet, did they want, do they want to focus on one part that supported something that they wanted to? That became a lot of like, you know, almost the self-licking ice cream zone, where different outlets would anchor onto a certain premise or area or, you know, where we lied to about WMD.

You know, like, you know, what was the, you know, like, you know, like, okay. We looked at an operational level history, so we were not looking at the causes of the reasons for the war. We in the military don't really get to make those policy, but we don't get to make those policy decisions. We get told we're invading Iraq, and then we provide our best military advice, and then we move on.

Right. And then we start planning. If the civilian authorities say execute, then we start to put things in motion. And so it was hard, and to be honest, I mean, I'm very thankful that we're doing such as long form because you can really do deep dive into stuff. And it was hard to be able to distill all that into such a short interview. I was fortunate in that some people did center on that bumper sticker.

And I could talk about that. Others would talk about the withdrawal. you know, like more oriented against politically Obama. They had an, you know, axe to grind. Others would focus on the decision to go to war, the lack of preparation, the, you know, the invasion without a plan or a, you know, phase four post-conflict plan, quote unquote, which, you know, there's lots of asterisk there.

You know, again, focused on kind of axed to grind against Bush. Right. So, you know, you navigate that. Navigate it. Have you ever read Leonard Wong's paper lying to ourselves? I think I have, but I don't, you know, recalling me. If I were to have a hot take about all this, that would kind of be mine about Iraq that we lied to ourselves,

and we institutionalized the lying, right? It became institutionalized and accepted that you can send false reports up to hire about the readiness of these units and so on. I mean, not just Iraq, but Afghanistan, too. And so, you know, I'm curious because when did the report finally get published? And when did you start doing the interviews? 2018. So we were still in Afghanistan.

Yeah. And were people asking you based on what you learned from Iraq? Applied to Afghanistan? Yeah, how was it applied to Afghanistan? Very few would even take that fresh. I mean, I recall a couple questions along that line, but most, you know, just exclusively focused on Iraq. And did anybody ever ask you how smart it was to attempt to overthrow Assad after what we learned about Saddam? I don't think Assad came up.

I don't remember the time frame. But, you know, I mean, this is, I mean, you know how things go. in our media cycle. Right, in the new cycle. I mean, it's like two, two weeks and then it's boof gone. I mean, like, this is just nothing. It, like, falls off a cliff. All of this leads us into your book, Training for Victory,

that I want to make sure we have plenty of time to talk about here. Tell us first to kick it off. I mean, how did this book come about? Was this your dissertation originally? It was, yeah. Yeah. So, is my dissertation, and to me, the, you know, it kind of came about because of the mystery.

And in Iraq, the whole, the general effort to build the Iraqi army is a train wreck. It's a dumpster fire. It's, you know, a Churchillian. It's an epic military disaster. Except for the ISOF, the ICTF and the commandos. And some describe the ISOP is the best thing we built in Iraq. And in fact, in 2014, we kind of see it play out. We see the ISAF fighting against Daesh, ISIS, kind of every step of the way.

They're at the critical oil refinery at Beijing. They actually get surrounded. And they fight for a week, which, you know, I mean... Yeah, it was an epic battle over there. Yeah, it's an epic battle. And it's a, you know, the conventional wisdom, the conventional narrative, and much of the story, which is true, is that the Iraqi army dissolves, large almost. I mean, they're pockets, but the ISAF, they're fighting, and, like, fighting hard.

At, you know, Beijing, they get an opportunity to surrender. The ISIS says, hey, look, we'll let you, you know, you can even keep your weapons, we'll let you go, you know, you won't get slaughtered, you can fight another day. We just want the crossroads to be able to move on and we'll let you live. and they told a pound sand and kept fighting. And then on the way back, you know, once things shifted and the counteroffensive, they're ahead of almost every battle. Mosul, they take 40% casualties and they keep fighting. And so to me it was like, what gives?

What made this unit different while all the rest of the Iraqi army mostly collapses? And now is like the riddle that I wanted to solve. And, you know, we see pockets of other successful units too. And, you know, the commandos are definitely more successful than other, the general, you know, Afghan army. And we see other pockets of successful elite units built, whether it being Colombia or El Salvador or the Philippines. And I wanted to look at, you know, what was it? made those units successful while the rest of the efforts really went off. So let's start with your first case study then, El Salvador, 1981 and 1991.

This was really interesting. I mean, there's a few things. Obviously, you'll key on them much better than I will. But there are some unique aspects of it, communist insurgency in the context of the Cold War in Central America. and Congress had a cap on how many advisors were even allowed in country. It was like 55. Yeah, 55.

So a very light footprint, to say the least. Nothing comparable to Iraq or Afghanistan at all. What went right in El Salvador? What went wrong? What were kind of your observations from that? Yeah, so I think one of the things that went right in El Salvador is a theme kind of across all five of the case studies is that in many, cases you have the same advisors returning rotation after rotation after rotation and it happened for a

couple reasons and man i was so fortunate to have like just a bunch of sf legends from that time period like talk to me like time and time again like tell me their stories and then give me documents sometimes or give me, you know, diaries and stuff that I could kind of go through. And, you know, it happened because, one, as one said, it was the only war they had. You know, the Cold War, you know, Vietnam had ended. Those three seven guys, Panama. That was another component. Yeah.

So, I mean, there were crazy stories of individuals who literally, because then, Spanish was a hard requirement. For NCOs, you had to be a two-two on a language proficiency test, and for officers, you had to be a one-one. And if you didn't have that, you didn't pass go. You didn't get on the bus.

They didn't bring you down. And so people wanted to go to this mission so badly that they're literally in their spare time teaching themselves Spanish. Yeah. Like, and studying Spanish because they know that the Vietnam War you know ended,

you know, like almost a decade before, and this is their chance. Yeah. And their chance to lead indigenous forces in some ways in combat, because there are multiple occasions of units getting overrun, of, you know, battles occurring or helicopters. I mean, advisors are getting shot down on helicopters, even though they're supposed to not be in combat.

Right. I mean, you know, it's insurgency. There's no front line. It's funny when you think about, you know, prior to the GWAT, you know, after Vietnam, when any combat action was, you know, you have Somalia, like Panama, like you have these very short. So the idea that guys go through these hard-ass selections and training processes, and then the chance to get in war, in war, it's like learning, all I have to do is learn Spanish to go to war. I'm down for it.

I'm down. I'm down. I thought one of the interesting observations you had in the book was about the difference between some of our Latino American Special Forces members, as opposed to some of these redneck dudes from Alabama, and that there were actually some circumstances where the El Salvadorians wanted the rednecks who speak with a redneck accent in Spanish because they don't have like cultural assumptions about them. Yeah. And, you know, in some ways, one of the things that surprised me was I kind of assumed that. that language is going to be a really important factor across all of the case studies. And granted for El Salvador and Colombia, speaking Spanish was kind of a prerequisite, and it was important. But even in those case studies, as you point out, what was almost more important was that the

advisors had the right mindset to be a good advisor. Right. That they were patient, that they had, you know, teaching skills. Right. Some people just can't teach. Right. They're just not cut out to be an advisor. And these individuals, they could build and maintain rapport.

And it was like those, you know, that West Virginia, that guy was speaking, you know, Spanish with the West Virginia, that southern accent, you know, that just is talks and can make friends with anyone that some of the El Salvadoran officers just, you know, stuck to like glue. Yeah. Because he built and maintained rapport consistently. Yeah.

And in some cases, that was. is what was more important even in the language. Another thing I've found is that like, just straight up courage, that if they see you throwing yourself out there for them,

even though whether a person is doing it for them or just because they just are in the, you know, in the thrill of the fight, that means everything to them. Yeah, that's another huge component And in El Salvador that proved particularly valuable Because, you know, there were occasions

in cases where multiple times Where an El Salvadoran officer Either crumbled or collapsed And couldn't, like, you know, People collapsed in a fight. Some people do. And the El Salvador officer

turns to an American and says, Hey, you take his place. And when the American goes there and does that, man, that guy is golden. Yeah. Like there's anything he says after that point and after that battle, he's getting listened to. Yeah. And leading from the front becomes it's a whole new world in another culture. When they see an American, you know, somebody could sit back and tell people what to do

or advise the way they're told to. But when they lead from the front, like those indigenous, indigenous forces glom onto that. So when you looked at it, El Salvador, do you give our partner force relationships over there a passing grade? I mean, how do you think that turned out? So I think what's important in El Salvador to kind of look at is that the U.S. strategically, at the beginning of the war, they studied like, okay, what's the situation?

and the situation was really bad. It was a shit show. And it looked like the government was going to fold. So U.S. military comes up with three options, like a win option, an offensive option, and then the lowest cost scenario of like hold the line, but we prevent them from losing. That was the option that the Reagan administration chose.

It was option three, the least cost, you know, inclusive. And so the force we built, we built a force to that specification. The BIRES, the battalions, battalions, infantiria, the reaction inmediatement, or the like immediate reaction infantry battalions were okay. And I think one of the best ways to describe it is there was like a discussion between two American advisors. one who'd been a Vietnam veteran and one who wasn't. And the Vietnam veteran basically said, man, these El Salvadoran guys,

like if they had to fight the Viet Cong, they would be massacred. We'd lose in a day. But then the other guy I looked at him and goes, look, you don't have to fight the Viet Cong. They're not fighting the Viet Cong. They're fighting other El Salvadorans. And that's the only level that we have to get them to.

Right. Train them to do that one thing you want them to do. Train them to that level. And they successfully, got them to that level and they survived and at the end of the conflict the one of the fmline leaders during the peace talks the chibaldiq accords he walked over to the head of the u.s mill group the advisor group kind of poked him in the chest and said you know what if not for your advisors we would have won this war the second case study in your book the light reaction regiment in the Philippines, the LRR. So now, totally different context. Just after 9-11, we obviously have a long

relationship with the Philippines. Complicated, too. Complicated. A little colonialism going on. A little bit. If you go to their museums, they have like paintings of them shooting cannons at us and stuff. It's okay. We get it. The motto for the light reaction regiment, the shooters of death, actually came from the unit that killed the senior American during the... No shit. ...American War. Oh, my God. There's a little weird, like you said, exactly.

I mean, some people don't realize we developed the 45 caliber round for the Filipinos because they were so crazy in combat. So post-9-11, right after 9-11, we have this relationship with the Philippines. There's an Islamic insurgency in the South. There is a communist insurgency in the north. and then we have missionaries being held hostage. That feels like it was the bigger impetus, maybe. So it actually starts before September 11th, a little bit.

Okay. In that the, you know, the U.S., there have been this a period where we drifted apart, right? And so military leaders on both sides were kind of looking for a way to get us back together. because they, you know, the divorce was, we never met anyone else, right? We want to, we're like, oh, we'll give it another shot. So military leaders on both sides want to try to get the situation to start again, to like reignite things. And particularly after the, I don't know if you remember the, I think I'm pronouncing this correctly,

the Bojinka plot where they were going to bomb something like 12 or a dozen or somewhere in that range. Yeah, aircraft. Air car airliners, civilian airliners at the same time period, including possibly, I think they're going to try to target the Pope also at the same time period. And this is pre-September 11th. That originated in the Philippines, that plot. And so the Philippines comes to us, and there is a former first group officer who is now as part of the defense attach there in the mill group.

Joe Felter? Yes. Yep. who were like, hey, this sounds like a great opportunity. We'll stand you up a national level counterterrorism force. And, you know, that'll be a kind of way that we can kind of re-flower this relationship that is, you know, kind of sat fallow for a while. And, you know, then September 11th happens.

And then the Burnham's and the other hostages. and after those two, it goes from being like... An idea to do it. And normally, I think the idea was that it started even a little bit before, but what happens is all the GWAT funds and efforts and troops, I mean, money comes start flying out of it. It was terrorism, so there you go. It's the combination not only terrorism,

but as Americans, we have this thing after the Iranian hostage crisis of, you got an American sell the hostages, it's like Rome. We're coming for you. So money starts falling out of the sky for it as well as additional forces being deployed for it. And it goes actually from being a single company. The original plan was to create a company that over time it becomes a regiment. Yeah. It went from an LRC to LRB to LRR. Yeah. So it's a long-term effort.

And it is the Burnham's, it is the ties to September 11th, it's the terrorism, the Al-Pa-Dah, you know, and associated groups that results in, you know, hey, that spark becomes a fire. Right. So talk to us about the partner relationship there. First Special Forces group in the lead. Yeah. I think the guys from Okinawa, right? Yeah. How does that take shape?

I'm similar to 3-7, right? Because it's the four deployed battalion. And during the Cold War, 3-7 was in Panama. So it made it a lot easier for them to deploy that and consistently deploy it because that's the theater commander's force. And the theater commander, he doesn't have to go to the joint staff

to get that force deployed. It's just, boom, you make them go. And so there were some parallels, actually, to El Salvador, where they were also fortunate because the first group leadership for its part, saw consistency as important in returning the same advisors to work with the LRR or LRC or whatever it was at that point. They saw it as important. They saw it as, you know, they tried to, they actually had names for them and they called it, sorry, I'm drawing a blank here for a second.

They called them as individuals that basically would return. They made a strong effort to try to read it. the same individuals to the mission. And you saw parallels with El Salvador where individuals would go five, six, seven rotations working with the LRR or LRC. And that's easy to do in countries where people can have second families.

Sorry. I'm a fifth group, guys. Right, right. A lot of Western Union checks, yes, the first group, going back and forth. The Seventh Empire, there's parallels there too. But that is, yeah. But that is, I think, vitally important that, one, you know, you build that rapport because you're there.

It's not just a rotation of, you know, Americans coming through, everybody trying to imprint their idea of how things should be done, right? It's the same people. There's that trust that's built. It's the consistency that's built, you know. Yeah, it was in the. I finally remembered the word that I was looking for is they call them repeat offenders or OafP alumni. And so there was a command effort also to like return the same people. They recognized its value that individuals, they would build rapport with leaders and that that it made a difference in the quality of unit.

There's this one great story of an E7 who, or actually I think he was an E8 at that point. But at the very initial stand-up of the Light Reaction Company, it's very inception, you know, Paycom, U.S. Pacific Command, wants to, like, put together a big dog and pony show, meet with all the senior leadership of the Armed Forces of Philippines. Of course, the four-star admiral from Paycom is going to be there. And so Sock Pack, the U.S. Special Operations Pacific, on their list of individuals they're bringing, they have a E8 on the list.

And PACOM is like, why are you bringing an E8? You know, like the least ranking person other than that is like a lieutenant colonel or maybe a, you know, a major and they're like, you know, coffee makers. You're bringing an E8? Why is that? And they like tried to kill them from going on to this, you know, this planning session to create the light reaction company. Sock pack held its ground.

and, you know, the master sergeant arrives. And when the senior Philippine military officers arrive, their chief of staff of their army equivalent, walks in, he sees this master sergeant and literally bypasses everyone else in the receiving line, gives him a giant bear hug, starts talking to him about his family. And it's because this individual had worked so many times in the Philippines that, like, you know, the old premise of a role decks,

he knew everyone in the senior leadership. Yeah. Like, everyone. And they had been, like, lieutenants when he had first deployed as an E6 over his 20-year-year-career, and now he is, you know, the commander of the Army. And it was when they're, you know,

building the, you know, starting to have the planning conference, it's like, oh, four-star Admiral, and now I want to listen to what the master sergeant has to say. One more reason why SF doesn't always go so well. It doesn't always land well with the conventional army. Yeah. Yeah. I had a great occasion.

Can I give you one of my stories from a trip out west? Yeah. So we were training at Naval Air Station El Centro, which is a Navy base. And you know, the Navy is really big on their ranks. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, we're taking a day off, we're eating at their dying hall. And I'm eating in, I guess, whatever, is the chief's section. The chief's mess?

Yeah. So the Navy has the enlisted mess, the chief's mess, and the officer's mess. Like they have three different, like, chow halls. Oh, yes, they do. And I'm there, you know, with my guys, right? And so one of the chief notices me and comes over. He's like, hey, sir, I think you're in the wrong area. And I'm like, hey, man, I'm with my guys.

like I'm going to be with my guys I'm not going to go eat somewhere else period like that's not happening oh this is with your team yeah this is like 99 and of course one of my guys one of my E7 is like hey Frank we pass the salt which watching his head kind of explode

that you know my guy is calling by my first name is like yeah anyway it's just the Navy is the closest thing to a feudal system I think we have in America in the sense of because on a ship it is very segregated in terms of rank.

So we, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, you hit that, I apologize for that little story there, but it's, I think it's reflective of how sometimes soft we can rub people. Yeah, yeah. So the LRR as it gets stand up and its evolution versus what it was maybe initially designed to do versus what it became and what it began to do, how did you kind of chart that out? Yeah.

So, you know, and again, all these cases, I was so fortunate to have so many SF guys, you know, and then also host nation individuals talk to me and tell me their stories. And, you know, it was one of the challenges, there were challenges in particular in the Philippines because the light reaction regiment soon after it was formed while it was still a company, there was a coup plot. The Oakwood. The Oakwood plot against the president, President Oroyo.

And some of the leadership of the Light Reaction Company were involved in the plot. They always get a little cooie over there. It happens all the time. It's where it gets very interesting. There's a lot of ins and outs. I was at Fort Meg Sese once, and I was having, just hanging out with a major,

their version of Socom. and we're just sitting there bullshit and I think like drinking a coke or something like that and he just like kind of as a blue tells me like yeah I got in some trouble because I was involved in a coup plot uh you know my unit never moved because of some miscommunications so I didn't get in as much trouble as the other guys did uh so you know they just kind of hid me out over here and now it's kind of okay and I'm just like wow okay this is a different kind of military we have here yeah I feel like Thomas Jefferson would approve A little rebellion is good.

Sometimes those coups happen for, or attempts happen for different reasons, but there's a lot of, you have to understand, like, amongst the soldiers, like, if their officers are, like, stealing their food, for example, that lends units towards these sorts of attempts. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that created some real initial frictions that hurt the unit's progress.

Initially, and this is before, you know, the, like I say, it became kind of the headquarters of the Philippine equivalent of Socom, they didn't have a soft headquarters. And so when the unit is first stood up, arguably they didn't until a few years ago. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So it took years before they really had a soft headquarters. So they experienced kind of some of the same challenges that we experienced in the U.S. when soft didn't have their headquarters looking out for us.

They're used improperly. They're used for, you know, personal protection details. They still were. They, sure. Duterte brought in a whole LRC just to protect him. Wow. Yeah. But, you know, and the thing is, is, like, what president,

and even if it was just a couple people, like, that's what you can prove, right? And what president wants their tier one unit, right? They're crack guys to be like, are they against me? Yeah. And that's really what caused a lot of the problems is that combination. They, the conventional forces used them like an hammer anvil approach. Right. Just nuts.

Like infantry operations. Like an infantry. Like, you know, anyway, you know, a movement to contact basically, like battle drill two, right? And like, to use a small elite saw force like that is just madness. Yeah. So there was a lot of challenge early on, and it wasn't until battles later on where, you know, in San Balanga and where they were kind of thrown into the situation because the situation was so dire. And there were hostages that were taken. So they needed, you know, that kind of national counterstores.

terrorism capability due to hostage rescue missions, and they get thrown into the fight. And they're, it's a mixed, you know, kind of results between, you know, two critical battles that they have, but they, after some initial kind of missteps, they, you know, generally are successful and they, they are able to rescue, you know, dozens of hostages successfully, which is, I mean, you know. That was, uh, Ted Yen's. Yamis. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Man, that is the coolest dude ever. Please. Yeah. You get to have a beer with that guy. He's such a cool guy. And he's very low-key. Very humble. And you wouldn't know it from talking to him but like later on i met some of the guys who were like his lieutenants at the time

for the zambos siege and they're like yeah that dude was like went right into the battle was like we're taking our orp by force we're putting our ops end right there in that abandoned school in the middle of the city let's go take it and just start like running ops out of it he was like that was nuts and like i had to like fight this battle but at the same time like try to stop my colonel from getting shot because he was leading out from out front he was Who's out there getting it done? Nice. Yeah, Ted Yamas is a really cool guy.

Yeah. They are really fortunate in that they have a bunch of really good leaders, particularly during the Battle of Zambalanga and other conflicts in that time period, that there's success. Some of their sniper shots, their sniper teams are. And I think Zambo and also Morrowing, the LR snipers, like, did God's work. They did. Yeah.

They, you know, they, if I recall correctly, like, one day, they wiped out, like, half of the senior leadership of the Papsalon's organization. I think they smoked HVT number one. They did. Yeah. They got number one also. And, you know, it just created a situation where it enabled the rest of the conventional forces to do the job, to be able to really do the job, which is, I mean, that's what soft does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're an enabler for the conventional forces. in most missions. Conventional. Sort of the force of supplier type. Yeah. Sorry. So, yeah, you know, they're pretty successful in the Philippines,

despite the early challenges from the Oakwood plot. And lessons learned from our partnership with the LRR. What are the big takeaways? Yeah, you know, in some ways they're parallel with some of them from El Salvador. that consistency is absolutely critical. And that those interpersonal relationships, you know, I mean, in America, sometimes we're so fixated on just the job at hand that we forget

how important interpersonal relationships are. And the rest of the world, those relationships are everything. And so having, you know, those OEFP alumni or, you know, individuals who come back mission after mission after mission, that those pay huge dividends because they can kind of short circuit. The continuity. Yep. Their continuity.

They help the unit train better because it's not the every year fighting the war 20 years, one year or a time. It's the same individuals who are coming back. And in some cases, it's back to back. Yeah. So that has a huge impact. The Philippines also is another case where language was, interesting in that, you know, again, we spend, S.F spends about $50 million a year on language

training. There's this whole premise that, you know, you can't be effective if you don't speak the host nation language. And at least in the case of building, you know, a battalion size, a unit like the light reaction regiment or regimental size, that it didn't matter as much. And there are multiple occasions where individuals would start speaking in Filipino or Tagalog or whatever of the hundreds of local dialects there are. And they either had situations where half the individuals were like, I don't speak that dialect. I have no idea what you're saying. Or they're like, you know, like almost like the scene from inglorious bastards where it's like, do you Americans speak any language other than English? you know where it's like my English is better than your Tagalogic so can you please speak in English

right we'll understand you better right one thing that I mean is not in your book I don't think but I've been told that the main partner force for the LRR in recent years has transitioned from American Special Forces to Australian SAS interesting and I don't know if you have any thoughts about you know, the partner force is actually kind of changing hands from one Western soft unit to another and what that means, if anything. Yeah, I mean, so relationships do matter. Right. And in some cases, it is, you know, if their relationship is deep enough, you can go a couple

years and pick it back up. But if that relationship is allowed to kind of like devolve to the point where no one knows anyone in the leadership again. Yeah. Starting over. Yeah. You know, I did not work with the Australian SAS, so I, you know, it's difficult for me to know how good their, you know, advisory skills are.

So, I mean, you know, it's interesting, we, you know, as a nation, we keep talking about wanting to shift our focus to the Pacific, but we keep getting drug back into Centcom time after time. I would kind of premise that, you know, particularly given the Philippines' position, you know, with regards to China and the conflicts and frictions that already exist between them, we would be well served to maintain a strong relationship with them. Yeah. let's jump into Colombia Columbia 2002 to 2016

so again now we're in Southcom totally different fight totally different terrain jungle mountainous guys are still down there with their second families there so there's some similarities and fighting narco-terrorism

at this time with FARC you know I recall when we had Frankie on the show asking him about this subject came up like, why did Columbia work when so many of our other partnerships didn't? And the Colombian officer told them something like, well, we're closer to you, and we're much closer, have much more in common culturally.

And that's it. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, I think there's a component of that. But I think there are other factors. And I think the, so the Colombians went through a period where you know President Ernessa Sempler

his his presidency was racked with corruption to the point where the U.S., and I believe this is under Clinton, literally shuts off aid. And there's so much corruption that

can't, and I mean, you know, we're in the drug war, right? And this is like the greatest place where the drug war is coming from. And yet we actually went hardcore and said, hey, yeah, no more candy for you because you guys are so corrupt, we are shutting off the money spigot. Right. And that created a lot of things, impacts within Colombia.

Because after Sampler, the next president who basically pushed forth Planned Columbia, cleaned house. Uribe? Oribibe, yeah. And I believe it was Oriba. I apologize, my little... deft on details right now, I apologize. He basically cleans house, takes off almost all the three and four stars in the army,

reappoints individuals who are, you know, upstanding, not corrupt, who want to win, who are capable, and then they, in turn, appoint a whole series of individuals below them who are also capable. And so it's like this entire virtuous cycle where it's like cascading levels, where everyone is appointing like cleaning under them and appointing new individuals under them. That has a huge impact because all those

new Colombian officers who come in, a lot of them have been trained in U.S. programs and they are really capable. And so they come in with a totally different perspective and they want to win. And so when we

start working to partner with them there are some of the old hands. I mean it's, we should point out too in that regard that our relationship with columbia also goes back to like what the Korean war i think is what they traced it to yeah uh and the one of the units the aglan aggrupation de lanceros or the lancero group is formed after the lanceros and the lanceros is kind of a columbian version of ranger school but you know without the safety restrictions without any safety restrictions and and I think

I mean I'd you know been to Ranger School but didn't go to Lancero but my friends who have been is like it's harder than Ranger school yeah like and you do combat patrols yeah like real combat patrols yeah yeah your graduation as a Colombian yeah

not for the Americans but the Colombians yeah I know a seventh group guy that went to Lancero and like his Ranger buddy got smoked on patrol wow yeah it was a Colombian officer Yeah. And so, you know, Lancero School was something that the U.S. actually started in the 50s. They came to us and were like, hey, we'd like a Ranger School type course.

And so I think the second advisor who was standing up the Lancero program actually ended up being the Southcom commander in the 80s in El Salvador. And there's these all weird connections where like a bunch of the individuals who were really junior advisors in El Salvador are now. now like group sergeant majors or like group commanders or, you know, SAC South commanders, they're all senior leaders and they have this experience from Al-South area. And they're kind of trying to compare the, you know, the different situations. But, you know, the relationship is strong. The Colombians really want to, they want to succeed. And they kind of want to please the Americans.

So there is this really good relationship where they, when we ask him to do something, unless it's like really stupid, you know, it's not like in Afghanistan or Iraq where there's a lot of foot dragging. Like the Colombians are like, okay. The Colombian people I sense are also like kind of sick of fork at this point. They're sick of the FARC. Yeah. And it's been, you know, they've been a war for decades. Yeah. Like 50 years.

And so it's not just, you know, that there's pressure from the U.S. that convinces, you know, that goes when it goes from St. Florida to Oriba, but there's also the Colombian electorate is like, look, we've had it, you know. And they, I believe they doubled, like, the percentage of GDP going to the defense to military. they supported transition from a draft to a professional army, all these series of reforms that improved their military capabilities domestically that they took on themselves. So from the Colombian Soft perspective and the U.S. Special Forces partnership, same question. I mean, what went right? What went wrong there?

Yeah, I mean, the Colombian Soft is literally the poster child of, like the best example of a soft result I think we could hope for. They, you know, Colombia goes from exporting coca to a country that's exporting security force assistance, where they're literally doing FID missions throughout Southcom. And like, they're working so closely.

They're with us, like, hey, we're going to go to, I don't know, I don't know, I can't remember the nation, but Trinidad or to Barbados. We're going to do a Fid mission there.

What would you like, to train them on. And that's literally working yourself out of a job. Literally working yourself out of job, not only in the country, but across the theater. Yeah. Right? Which is, you know, which is a testament to what you accomplished there, I think.

Yeah. And the long-term, you know, playing Columbia and all of that. I mean, there's some long-term, you know, thinking that went into that. For sure. And the, you know, a lot of the success is there is that there is consistency. And that, there's actually more consistency on the Colombian side than there is on the American side. Right. In the mission in Columbia, there are challenges because, you know what I mean?

It's in the middle of the GWAT. And there are these demands in Afghanistan. There are demands in Iraq. There's, you know, everyone's getting pulled every which way. Yeah, that was a big thing in Colombia at that time. With like all the, like, willing spirit and everything like that, they're kind of having to compete for resources. Yeah. As one of the individuals said, you know, we're a supporting theater.

And so, you know, we would get what we got and we just had to live with it. And that they were just fortunate that the Colombian partners were so dedicated and that in particular those soft units, unlike most of the other soft units, you know, it became like our soft. They created a SOCOM, a US SOC, a national force. and individuals would spend 20-year careers in that. Yeah. And so those relationships would just help tremendously. As well as the Colombians, you know, not resisting reform.

Right. You know, when we would suggest something of the Colombians to be like, okay, sure. Like, unless it was stupid. And even if it was stupid, sometimes they would do it to, like, placate us. Right. But then not, like, follow through the whole way. We were really blessed to have great partners in Colombia. And so FARC collapsed.

That conflict is over. But, and I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, my impression of it is that a lot of the drug violence got pushed into Ecuador. And we have a lot of Ecuadorian, mostly illegal immigrants here in the city. I understand, like, they're here because of the violence and the poverty in their country. I mean, what do you think about that, that, like, there's always these insurgent elements in South America. Like, are we ever going to be able to really, as long as there's an American demand for drugs, are we really going to be able to end that?

Yeah. I mean, you know, to me it goes back to the movie Traffic. And, you know, the movie Traffic, one of the guys who's turned against the narcot traffickers, you know, is talking with one of the individuals that's guarding him and says, look, you guys are never going to win this because you're fighting this war on both sides. Yeah. You're, you know, you're fighting by it because you want to get, there's something. such a demand for drugs that you're fighting, you know,

to get the drugs. So you fight the drug war there, but you're fighting the drug war by getting it shipped to you. So you're never going to win until you resolve that challenge. And fight the war on drugs and drugs won. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, man. Especially, you know, I mean, it's just a huge... It's the Gordian knot. Right. No. I mean, it's... I mean, it's... I mean, it's...

But you deal with it, I mean, I think you deal with the way you deal with prohibition or anything else. You legalize it and tax the hell out of it. You know, once you do that and give it legitimacy, it kills the black market. It kills the black market. It kills. That is one course of action. I mean, I don't know.

I, you know, drugs is unfortunately not my, you know, the drug war is not my kind of specialty. Yeah. So I don't... Well, I don't advocate. I think drugs are horrible. You know, like most drugs or a lot of drugs are horrible and destroy people and families and communities. However... There's always going to be demand.

If there's the demand, like, you know... Humans are getting them anyway. The war on drugs, like before the GWAT, like the war on drugs was where all the money went to, right? Everybody wanted to be part of that. That's why I did JTS6 machines. Because there was tons of money there, and it'd get our vehicles out to the west so we could train. Everybody makes fun of the Coast Guard,

but the Coast Guard was stacking bodies because we were on drugs. Big time. So it's one of those things of, you know, do you keep sort of with this self-flagellation saying, this is the moral course, or deal with the practicality of it? I don't know what the right answer is, but... So as we come to Iraq,

I'm not going to harp on it too much. We talked a lot about Iraq, but just through the soft perspective and the partnerships with the ICTF and the commandos. The commandos. Yeah. Just talk to us about how that partnership played out. Yeah. And it was similar to the others in that everyone recognized that relationships matter. And the same individuals kept coming back time after time after time to the point where,

particularly with the ISOF, they got it to a point where one unit would deploy, the next unit would be in garrison, and then they would flip-flop. And it would be just, you know, one punch after another for almost like two or three years.

For the first two or three years, were just two units. And then they got to the point where they're starting to hit burnout. So they're like, okay, well, we'll do three punches, where we'll do one, two, and then another unit,

it every other rotation will bring somebody else in. But even then that was, you know, like one in four rotations it ended up being. So there's huge just consistency where even while they're in garrison, they're using WhatsApp or whatever to communicate, you know, to forward and find what the unit is doing, where it's at, what its skill levels at, and so that they're in touch with that they can return and pick right back up where they were last time. I mean, there's ownership of a unit.

Yeah, they acted as the pay masters for the unit. They came up with the T-O-N-E. Like, the Americans really were running those units at that time. One of the themes really kind of across many of the case studies was that in some cases, the U.S. has a reluctance to, in almost our, you know, our, like, liberalism from like a Jeffersonian, like, liberalism, right? ideal that like we we don't want to be a colonialist and like run things but a theme kind of became

was that there's sometimes that you have to step right it's the responsible thing to do the responsible thing to do and and not from a colonial perspective but just to prevent corruption right to enforce standards to take care of the soldiers take care of the soldiers yeah and if you do that at the beginning and then you transition, they can be more successful than if you didn't do it at all. And for example, in the ISOF, you know, the U.S. held a selection,

and if the guy didn't pass selection, they didn't go to the ISOF. And it was a real selection. It wasn't like, oh, everyone passes. Right. You know, they're taken off half to a third of the individuals. They selected the leadership also, which is really the most important.

You know, Father Al-Jalil al-Barawi, who was the second brigade commander, really a kind of core driving force of the ISAF, who, you know, not perfect, but he was brave. You know, it was like the individual in the Philippines, you know, that you're talking about. He was brave. He was a dynamic leader.

He led from the front. He was a Kurdish dude. He was a Kurdish dude. And he, you know, in Iraq, he was a little corrupt, but he wasn't really badly corrupt. Right, right. And so it was enough where, because we had picked these people who we knew were going to be decent leaders,

the unit was successful. It was also interesting how you point out how it was, like, mandated that the demographics of the unit represent the ethnicity, you know, percentages, you know, across Iraq. So there was, like, what, six different groups Yeah, that was another thing that they really mandated again, and it wasn't the Iraqis that, you know, it was like, okay, from squad level to battalion level, you know, everything is going to represent Iraq's demographics. They're going to be roughly 20% Kurds, roughly, you know, 20% Sunni, and then roughly 60% Shia, and then a handful of other minorities, Turkmen. And it, like, gave them the reputation over time, right, that they're not. not a partisan force of like Sunnis going after Shias or vice versa, that they are a national

force. It became a national force. And individuals within the unit, you know, interviewing them, they'd be like, yeah, you know, at first it was really hard for me to, like, trust, like, the Sunni dude that I thought was like, you know, we thought they were like Al-Qaeda, you know, I've been raised to think Sunnis were going to murder us. And the Sunnis are like, oh, I've been raised, you know, that, you know, all the Shia were a postage. and that they were devil worshippers, you know? But, you know, you fight alongside of them for months at a time, and you come to realize, like, this guy saved my life more than once.

And, like, it builds these bonds so the unit becomes a national unit. What was that quote in your book where they did some op that had all this political fallout, and the Iraqi was like, yeah, we don't care about that. We work for President Bush. Yeah, there was, I think it was, I can't. I remember whether it was 06 or 07, it was a 10th group rotation, and it was a hit on a mosque where in one of these typical cases, the insurgents, I think it was a Sadrhus or the Shia mosque, I believe, where afterwards, you know, they rearranged the bodies, they take all the

weapons away, they shoot a couple civilians and women and children in the streets, drag their bodies in, and all the Americans have massured all these people at prayer. You know, they put out prayer rugs and everything, so it looks like. Fortunately, they also had a combat cameraman on that mission. So, like, on the U.S. side, it helped us a little bit. But on the Iraqi side, the Iraqis were like, and this is one of those examples of where at some point, you know, you can't play nice when the host nation is being corrupt and incompetent. You have to step in. and and you know we stepped in enough that you know like you had said we were paying the iraqi's

like directly to make sure that the soldiers that the commander wasn't right right stealing money like the american soldiers were paying them to make sure that there's no corruption that they were getting paid and they're like man like i'm getting paid my chow is good because nobody's skimming money off the chow fund like i'm getting fed You know, my family's here on base too because they were worried that, you know, that if my family was off base, they'd get killed. So I'm willing to fight because we've arranged all these things to be successful. And then over time, you slowly start stepping back. And then you get to a point where they're actually standing on their own.

Yeah. But in this case, it turned out Malachi ended up using them for his own political purposes. And that really ruined the unit's reputation. It did for a while. a couple years Maliki who really helped in my opinion is one of

these central causes of the second, what I would call the second Iraqi civil war this is the civil war not from like 06 to 2009 it's really from about you know

12 to you know ISIS is really part of it because everyone buys into ISIS because they're like, well, you know. Yeah, fuck this guy. Fuck this guy. And, you know, the Shia,

Maliki was literally going down the list of the sons of Iraq of, you know, the Sahat individuals and arresting them off their list because, you know, he's like, oh, well, you know, they're al-Qaeda. And because, you know, when Maliki came in, he, he, you, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, He flooded the isof with more Shia candidates. And it was this weird dynamic where the unit would push back a little bit, but they couldn't push back completely because if they did, then they'd get fired. So it's this weird dynamic where they're trying to pick,

what is the amount that I can push back without any of them, you know, some jail somewhere. And eventually, you know, it comes to the point where the isof is being used to, like, arrest political opponents for a couple of years while Maliki's in power. And they get this reputation as Fedain Maliki. Right. Which is, you know, like Fedain is

fighters, guerrillas, resistors. And the Fedain were originally Saddam's Fedain. Yeah. And so they had this reputation, but then like when the whole 2014 Daesh-Isses, ISIS, blew up and they saved the nation and maliki got punted out you know finally and some of that was the

US stepping in and saying like look you're gone man we're not going to support you being you know the p.m. anymore when as soon as he's gone the eyes off many of those cultural habits that they had been trained with they defaulted back to them right they expunged a bunch of the incompetency officers they brought back in a more balance. And so by like 2017-2018, when they're starting to do assessments again, I'm like, okay, well, what is the breakdown now? It's almost back to like, you know, the 2000, what's that? No, that's awesome.

It's almost back to the same demographics. I want to ask you, because so I wrote in this book, a whole chapter about the SIF. And we haven't really mentioned them in this discussion thus far. But you mentioned, for instance, that Isloff continued to fight while the rest of the Iraqi army basically dissolved. The SIF was involved in training the LRR. They were down in Colombia, training their hostage rescue national asset down there. What do you think about the SIF being kind of disbanded and turned into a different sort of capability?

I mean, I'm just curious, you know, based on your research and your experience as an SF officer, like, was that the right decision? Was that a bad decision? Did the SIF have a lot of value added that we've lost? I mean, what do you think about that? So, you know, so I had a lot of friends in A15, because obviously, you know, I was right downstairs. And even when I was a team leader, there are two stairs downstairs, right? So Joe Conella, Rick Frazier, all these, you know, great dudes, Dean Franks, who ran A15 and ran a great organization. I think disbanding the SIF, you lose a really good capability.

But the challenge, I think, is that, and this may be controversial, and it may piss off some of the old A15 or other SIF guys, the SIF probably was never going to be used for its original, for its intended function, right? To be a backup to the U.S. National Mission Force, to do hostage rescue when they weren't available. The chances of them doing that mission is highly unlikely. But what they were amazing at was building these national mission forces.

Yeah, doing CT-FID. Exactly, doing CT-Fid. And if you look at it, you know, time after time, the SIFs fingerprints are all over these high-end units that are successful. And is successful at being host nation national mission forces, capable of doing hostage rescue missions like the, like reaction. regiment does, like the ISAF does on occasion.

You know, these the skills that they had they rarely actually use them other than transferring them to host nation forces. And that's what they're really good at. Out of curiosity, you mentioned

like ISOF and this massive battle with Daesh, ISIS, you know, we talk about El Salvador and Colombian and these units, what is it about because it's one thing for them to behave and perform in a certain way

when American advisors are attached. Right? Very true. But you're talking about the advisors have left. Yeah. And these units sometimes, not necessarily with like Columbia,

but maybe with, you know, the ISOF, in spite of cultural norms, in spite of what? happens with the rest of the military in spite of it, they still maintain, I want to say sort of that American espree to court, right? They still...

Culture. They still, like, have that culture that binds them together and gives them a sense of right, wrong, and... A sense of mission, right? Yeah. What is it...

How is that passed on? How is that germinated and fostered? And then even when Americans leave, these units are still an echo of those American ideals? I think it's in some ways it's a transference of culture. And how it happens, I think there's a couple factors. One is that there's a long-term partnership.

And it's not like particularly what we did with a lot of Iraqi Afghan units where we would show up, we work with them for six months, and then they'd be trained and they wouldn't need to violence. izers again. You don't pass culture on in six months. Like, you know, that's, that's a decade or more project. So that's one component of it. It's a long-term, consistent, you know, connections. Second is leadership matters most. And in helping pick the right host nation leadership either directly as we did in the ISOF or indirectly as we maybe help nudge things along or help individuals careers or whatever, that makes a huge impact

because those individuals then pass on that culture to the units. And rather than a corrupt culture, they're passing on a culture that we have selected that we think is closer to ours, I think. And not culture meaning like American culture, but just like viable military cultural norms of the warrior ethos. How you get promoted. How you get promoted. Professionalism, you know, proper civil, military relations respect,

lack of corruption, you know, taking care of your soldiers, leading from the front, all that stuff. You kind of have leadership. You've got to pick the right leaders for that. of, you know, special forces and, you know, anybody else who's doing, you know, FID, seals when they, you know, when the money, you know, when they want the money or whatever.

Don't get me started. But outside of, you know, special forces going in and teaching these commando skills, has the Army overlooked the idea of senior leaders, whether senior enlisted or senior, or not senior, officers, but senior enlisted and officers, creating that sort of FID capability from a leadership point of view with, with like the Iraqi army or with trying to teach that culture at the top so that it filters down.

Yeah. So there is one quote from the Iraq war study that really stood out to me. And it went something along the lines of, in Iraq, you know, we had all of the guns and money to influence the Iraqi military, its creation, its leadership, its ethos, and we used neither. And for some weird reason, you know, like the money troth kept going mostly. Right. And the weapons troth kept going. and that we very rarely really threw down and said no like this guy is a sectarian thug

and he's not going to be he should not be leading any units whatsoever right I mean I could even give you a personal account of my time there where the one Tony Soprano the sheikh out at Mahmour The Sheikh of Sheikhs Yeah I don't know what happened to him Actually post

You know 2014 The previous unit That had worked with him I mean in a On a positive note You know he is Tony's a problem He's a thug so he fights

But he was horribly corrupt Right And skimmed huge amounts From his soldiers He was And he was a thug to the point of dangerous to the civilian population. And to the point where, you know, he had hooked ratchet straps up to Iraqi insurgent

that they had captured, who was still alive, and then drug him behind. This is the rotation before us. Drug him behind until he died. you know, I tried to get him replaced because I was like, this guy is, we do not want to work with this guy. And our, the team leader, the team sergeant, the whole team is like, this dude is bad. We do not want to work with this guy. We need to find someone else. And so we had even worked through and, in all this, so much had happened before in like that November 04 period, or he had fought, he'd been one of the few that fought, that they'd kind of got in Stockholm.

syndrome with him. And so my team, I representing them, I put together the packet to try to get rid of this guy. We even had the point where we had talked to this guy, buttering him up, you know, like, oh man, you are so brave, you're so awesome. And we've heard these stories about you dragging, you know, the dude behind. We heard there were photos. You know, do you have photos? Oh, yes, I have photos. Here, let me show you. You know, and there's photos like, have copies of those. We'd love to show them to our friends. We know, and so we literally had photos of him doing this.

So did you try to do this through the Leahy vetting? No, I just tried to do it through the regular chain of command. So, like, company command, or team leader to company commander, the Italian commander, goes up somewhere to the ethos. Conventional guys get very angry at the soft guys. Goes up to the death star. Goes up to the death star somewhere. And then it comes pouring back down of,

Hey, Frank, what the fuck are you doing down there? Why are you pissing off the conventional guys you're working with? The artillery guys. I mean, it was even to the point where with the photo that we had gotten from the team guys from rotation before us, I actually posted that next to the infamous photo of the, and there is definitely a backstory to the Vietnam, you know, where he's executing a prisoner. Oh, yeah. But my point was the political impact of that, right, on the war.

I was like, what happens when this comes out? Yeah, right? Totally fair point. And my battalion commander, totally, to his great credit, he absolutely supported me. He's like, Frank, you're totally right. I'm going to support you. I'm going to support your team. He took the fight up somewhere into the ethos and came back like, no, dude's going to stay in.

If I recall correctly, kind of the, it's basically that they kind of become almost like Stockholm syndrome. that they'd been through this, like November 2004 was a really, really bad time. Like, they're dropping J down, like, four, five J-D-Ns. The word that always gets used to avoid or excuse why you can't do the right thing is equities. We have equities. Which is so weird, sorry, which is so weird because in other countries, when it's a soft, pure mission, they'll be like, they'll come down on you guys for the smallest. human rights violation that the guys that you didn't even go out with commit oh yeah it's crazy

absolutely absolutely and you know so it was just like well let's uh you know to i don't want to keep you all night no it's okay this is a great conversation um thank you for dying so deep into it and take time i'm just trying to you know make sure that we uh we cover it all um so the last case study in your book, Afghanistan. Again, widely different culture, terrain, the auspices under which were there are very different. And also the auspices under which we stood up the Afghan special operations capability was quite different than Iraq. Very different. Start talking to us about the Kandak commandos, how that comes about and how that partner relationship develops. Yeah, so it comes about unlike Iraq where the ISAF with the commandos and the ICTF, you know, the invasion,

it's seven, eight months after the invasion that the initial seeds of the ISAF are being, you know, started to be created. In Afghanistan, it's like four years after. And after the, you know, that the Taliban had been kicked out of power in Kabul. And by that point, the whole premise of, like, host nation sovereignty and that they're, like, there are things we can and can't do, you know, as Americans, and this is their, you know, kind of area, and this is our area. So, like, we're not going to overstep or bounds because this is their host nation sovereignty had developed.

And so it became very difficult to kind of, like, really push or force things. And so unlike with the ISOF, with the Afghan commandos, when they have a selection, almost everyone passes, you know, their little ability to select leaders for it. They don't have the ability to kind of command it in battle. Pay is different. Their pay is more than the rest of the army, but they're not generally like doling it out like the situation in it. in Iraq where you literally, the Paymaster is an American at the beginning, to kind of like treat, teach them almost the right way to do it and then transition. By the time, you know, it starts, we're, you know, quarter of the war is over almost already, or, you know,

20% of the war is over already. And so it really limits our ability to make changes within the unit to kind of like, you know, force the unit to be created in our, image. At the same time, there are challenges on the U.S. side with consistency in that one of the Afghan guys, advisors, SF guys, described it as we were chasing bright and shiny objects, where even on the soft side, we basically replicated the conventional side where, you know, as you said, we're fighting one-year wars, 20 of them. And every two years on the soft side, we have this weird change on our partner force, where we go from the commandos to the Afghan National Army Special Forces, to the police force, to the Afghan local police, to the village stability operations, you know, and it keeps changing. Would you look at the, like, Afghanistan, just look at, like, the Afghanistan Special Ops and paramilitary and on all these, like, weird saps and stuff.

stuff. My impression of it is that it's about 10 times more confusing than what we did in South Vietnam, which is a little confusing. Yes, which is very confusing in itself. But the stuff in Afghanistan is like, it's mind-boggling. It's crazy. Yeah. Like, there's no unity of effort because we keep changing things. It's like, it's like someone with ADHD is like in charge. Yeah, no, that's a good point. That's why it came about like that. It's nuts. But where was that coming from? Was that coming from theater like the theater commander, was that coming from the theater soft commanders? Because obviously, no E7 is making that decision.

No way. Right. The E7s are picking, pulling their hair out because they can't believe how stupid the decisions are. The general sense was that in many cases, it came from either the group that was rotating as the Sucidotiv headquarters, or as the Theater Soft headquarters,

as the point when a Theater Soft headquarters stood up over the group headquarters. Because it was weird, in many ways it was almost like, weird, there's a two-year time period. Is it done? And now we've got a new partner force. Wonder what the correlation is there, Right.

You know, meaning basically that's somebody's command tenure. Right. They've now rotated out. Somebody else rotates in and they got to leave their mark on it. They want to leave their mark. They've got a new pet rock. Do you, you know, we talked a little bit about GWAT veterans' contempt for general officers and why that is. Do you feel as though there is an argument?

It's kind of impractical because of how, you know, that they gain rank as effort. But do you feel there is an argument for when you start a war, it's your war until it's over? That was actually one of our challenging conclusions in the Iraq War study, in that, you know, the World War II veterans, that it was the war from beginning to end. The challenge with that is the all-volunteer force.

Right. And, I mean, there are ways that you can kind of perhaps get away or get around it, where if you actually return the same units to the same theater. I mean, we did this bizarre stuff. In Afghanistan, we did the same thing in soft, where their NCOs were like, it was insane. Like, I requested to go back to the same Commando Kandak. And I never did.

Like, you know, but the conventional force was just as bad or even worse, where they didn't even return the same division. vision to the same theater. They put a division that had been to Afghanistan, and they'd throw it into Iraq, and they're relearning everything from scratch. So this is a totally different environment. But what about on a geo level to say,

if you want ownership of this war, you have ownership of this war, and it's all on you. Yeah. Like, you don't get out after two years and say, well, they just failed to carry on my vision. Yeah. General Casey actually commanded from June 2004 until, I think it was like February of 07.

And, you know, so it's a pretty long tenure. It's not a year tenure. It's, I think it's three and a half years. Yeah, yeah. And the challenge was, is he was one of the ones who was pushing the transition strategy. And he, I think he really was a true believer. But, I mean, I went in thinking, like, oh, this. When I interview these guys, they're going to be like, yeah, you know, I gave my best military advice,

and then the politicians told me to do it, and I saluted and drove on. No, they were like, this is the right idea. We should have done this all along. We should have just totally left. And it proved me right, you know, that the Iraqi army collapsed. And I was like, wow. So much denial. Yeah.

So the flip side of that, the challenge is if you get the right, GEO. Right. Great. Right. If you don't get the right GEO, you are totally screwed. And one of the challenges, to be very honest, I think, in civil mental relations and post-volunteer army is we don't fire a lot of generals. Right. We don't fire enough generals.

We don't fire, we almost fire no generals. Right, right. We have this sort of like cultural inclination towards, like, worship of this, like, unique, singular individual who's going to save us with his brilliance. All of us. That's not really how it works. Yeah. I think in some ways it's also worse when your senior civilian leaders

believe it. Believe it, but also have little or no military experience. Yeah, yeah. Like when they've never served or if they've been, you know, their National Guard for what, six months or whatever, or zero, like zero,

it takes a really strong person like an FDR or, of Lincoln to be like, hey, McClellan, guess what? You're a fired next commander. I mean, think about the number of senior commanders we went through in this of war until we found a good one. Right. That's the model.

Sorry. The Kandak commandos, I mean, despite our very many failings in Afghanistan, it's interesting again that it seems that SF essentially accomplished their job. Yeah. And even as Afghanistan was collapsing, the commandos fought until their... logistics lines just crapped out on them. Completely. And that's a military failure. You know, to be clear, the military logistics failed to get them to fuel, the ammunition,

water, whatever they needed. But they did fight. Yeah. They did fight. In many cases, they're WhatsApping or sending notes to their posting on Facebook. I need ammo. I need fuel. I'm willing to fight. Somebody get me ammo. Like, it's crazy stuff. Like social media, right? Like Twitter. Like, I'm at this location. Send me ammo. I'll fight. We'll fight for ammo, right? You know, where they did fight. And, you know, in many cases, some of them were executed. You know, they fought until they ran ammunition,

and then the Taliban executed every single one of them to, like, prove a point. And, I mean, despite our frictions and our challenges and our mistakes, you know, we still ended up with a partner force that performed far better than the rest of the African military. And the irony is that this is not a small force, right? It's a division-sized force. There's like 16,000 people in the commandos

by the time it's done. So it's huge. It's not this small force. You said it's like a fifth of the overall A&A? Yeah, it's like a fifth of the overall A&A, but they're doing like 70% of the fighting. They're larger than like six NATO countries' militaries. Like the commandos. So it's a big force.

but writ large there was enough time and impact even though it was with different individuals to create enough of a culture that they bought yeah so any final thoughts about the book before we move on I mean I know there's a lot in here

you know I guess the biggest thing I would just say is you know thanks to all of like the ASF guys and most nation forces and everyone that just like poured out their, you know, life stories. And sometimes their worst days that they, of their life. Yeah. You know, they spent time with me. I mean, time is our most precious resource, and they spent a lot of time with me.

And so I'm just super thankful that so many people gave me so much time. And let me tell their stories, because there are some fucking amazing stories out there. So training for victory, it's available now. You guys can go out and find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Tell us about life after the book. What are you up to nowadays? Yeah. So I am kind of a gig economy for education.

So I do, I'm the chair of a regular warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, which means I research and write. I'm fortunate. I do everything from insurgency to, you know, security force assistance, kind of everything in between. So it's fun. To be very honest, I would far prefer to teach. And this is going to sound maybe a little weird,

but I would almost rather teach, like, civilians, like undergrads, like particularly ROTC kids. than military. Because, man, they are so, so like I teach as an adjunct at Tufts University. I teach a class called War Film and Politics, which uses war films to kind of help understand the military ethos and to understand how politics is inserted into films we watch. I've taught a couple other courses there.

I'm also teaching a class in Civil and Military Relations, at the master's level, there in the fall. and I taught other classes like a class in intelligence and technology taught that at J-Sauau I taught at Rechman University at Herzlilia in Israel so you know I get around kind of whatever is available to me I would much prefer kind of a more stable kind of like particularly civilian it would be my dream opportunity but it's it's a It's challenging.

It's challenging being 55 because people look at you differently, particularly in the academic world. And in the academic world... Aren't you supposed to be like a 70-year-old professor that you just stay there forever and collect the paycheck until they kick you out? Yeah, that is the most accurate thing about the latest Indiana Jones movie with Harrison Ford playing. That's still the professor and still teaching it. Putting the transparencies up on the projector, like, yeah, this is, yeah. So, you know, getting into it late is hard because, in many cases, they see it as publisher pairs, you know, we were talking about before, and they want you to publish a lot and research a lot.

And it's almost like a timeline. They're like, oh, well, you got 20 years left, maybe, if that, 15. Whereas if we hire somebody who's 30, you can kind of mold them in our image or her in our image, and we have a lot more years of research and et cetera. Yeah, what the crap? I wrote this 1500 page Iraq report.

What do you want? Yeah. There is also, I think there is, in some cases, some universities are very military friendly. You know, when I got my people, PhD at Fletcher School, law and diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. When I was going there to, like, try to decide where I was going to pick for my program,

got any elevator to go up to do an interview. There was like a flyer like, come celebrate the Marine Corps birthday. And I was like, wow, this place is like pretty military friendly that they're like, you know, come have cake for the Marine Corps birthday and they're celebrating it, right? And so it was a really good fit for me because they're like pretty military, friendly but there are other institutions out there that are not very multi-friendly that you know look at you like you know you're some sort of barbarian crow magnon yeah you were over there killing brown people for uncle sam yeah and which is total misunderstanding of what we were doing yeah total

misunderstanding of what our ethos is yeah total misunderstanding of like why many of us join knowledge. I think, I mean, if you're 22 and saying that, okay, if you're like 40 in saying that, it's an intentional misunderstanding. Like, it's, you, you, you, you haven't interacted with many military people. Intentionally. Right. Like, you have no intellectual curiosity whatsoever at that time.

Yeah. Yeah. And there are some schools to have that problem. Yeah. I'm, this, yeah. So I, uh, I'm on a kind of a hiring freeze at another position, so really excited about it. I'm really looking forward to potentially start there.

It looks like it will happen, but... Cool. Hard to tell. So, you know, but, you know, anything could happen. I mean, it's a very dynamic environment these days is, you know, putting the screws to the college. Yeah, within government and outside government, it's a very dynamic environment. And, you know, the entire ecosystem, education ecosystem, whether it's within the military system, teaching at military schools, or whether it's at a civilian school, there's government dollars. You're going to have a party member in your office pretty soon, supervising, making sure you're doing the right thing.

Yeah. So there's so much government dollars involved that we're in a very dynamic. Yeah. And I'm kind of waiting on, you know, something to see how it turns out. Outside of academia, I mean, you are arguably one of the leading experts on, like, what happened, what went wrong in Iraq. your book shows that I mean before a book like this I mean what did we have

we have learned to eat soup with a knife like we there were very few resources on conventional warfare conventional warfare yeah but now we we have you know you're like you're generating new documents historical documents

on that outside of academia are there places in the government and the military where anybody's saying, look, we need to retain, not only do we need to retain the knowledge, but we need somebody with the ability to look back. And when we're making these military decisions,

give us a historical perspective as to how this might go. Because if they had had anybody... From Vietnam. From Vietnam. Or look at Yugoslavia. Obviously, that was in a military decision. Tito just decided to die. But we saw what happened.

And they would have gone, well, you know, this happened in Yugoslavia. Maybe taking Saddam out isn't the best idea. Produce a similar result. It's demographically similar. He's a shithead, but he's a stable shit head. I think there's this interesting thing where the politics are happening right in the moment. My sense is that, like, they don't want to know what the history is. I agree.

Like, that's not something they're even interested in because they've made a decision. Right. And so now... Well, it's like... Like, there's... There's some information coming out of Syria right now, but not a lot about, you know, sort of the ethnic cleansing of Christians and other white.

You know, it's like... Nobody, nobody saw... Nobody thought that if we get rid of Assad, that things might go sideways. Yeah. And they'll be taken over by a extremist regime. Nobody thought that. Yeah, so I think, to me there are two factors at play.

One is, you know, the old adage that success has a thousand fathers and, you know, defeat has none. Right. And taking that a step further is, you know, when you lose or you don't do well, you try to want to forget about it. Right. And I think that's played out, and is playing out kind of in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably even during experience in Syria, et cetera, where we, I mean, you look at, on the army is, you know, where we gravitate. You know, look at the last two uniforms that we wear. It's the World War II and the Civil War uniform. Both wars that were clear-cut, like good guys, bad guys, you know, both wars that were mass.

massive, you know, moving, not divisions, but cores and armies, right? And, you know, conflicts that were very kind of straightforward. And frankly, we won pretty much. The second dynamic, I think, that's kind of going on a little bit is being an American. And one of the most beautiful things about an American that I think is good that we are very different. in so many other countries the world, is we are always forward-looking. We are always looking for the future.

We are, what is next? What is the next big thing? How am I going to change the future? We are so focused on the future. And it's great. And I think it creates our national culture to being a very successful culture, to being a culture that just wants to change,

to move forward, to improve things. But on the flip side of that, we don't know history. Like, you're really bad. history and you know teaching history at west point for two years there are some hunginger's where we would you know keep records of essay responses of you know the most shocking responses that future second lieutenants would have to historical questions of you know our high school education system is falling a bit short yes of the the lack of success of our high school education system and again at a

top university right yeah These are Ivy League kids, basically. Yeah, equivalent. Okay, so Frank, tell us where people can go to find you on the interwebs. What's the place to go? Yeah, you know, I'm on LinkedIn. Facebook, interwebs. I mean, you know, I publish Small Wars Journal.

I publish, I mean, if you go to my LinkedIn, you'll see all my publications. Okay. That's probably the best place because that's where I kind of, that's the, and I write a lot. I write a lot, I write for the Miriam Institute, which is Israeli-American kind of think tank. And so I've written a lot about the, you know, Palestinian-Israeli-Iranian conflict, multidirectional, both October 7th, pre-October 7th and post-October 7th. You know, I've written for war in the rocks, written for war on the rocks, written for Jerusalem's Tribune.

A pretty good amount of shorter pieces if you're interested in something you can finish in five, ten minutes. And we will have a link to that in the description for this podcast for folks that want to go check it out. Frank, we covered a huge array of topics in this interview, and I'm sorry if I kept you a little late.

Thank you so much for taking so much time. Yeah, it was very good. And I mean, this is very important information that I hope people will take some time to reflect on. Before we get going tonight, I mean, is there anything else that you want to talk about that I didn't ask that you'd really like to shine a light on? No.

I mean, thank you so much for being so patient, taking time. No, we appreciate it. Talk too much. No, not at all. Nobody, no guest ever has to come on the show and apologize to us because I, and, like, Jack's being very, like, magnanimous by saying, I'm sorry I kept you so long.

when we all know we all know why you're here so long thank you well no they're legit was a lot of content to cover in the book and I'm glad that we were able to get to it

so yeah thanks for joining us thanks coming out I really appreciate you hosting me and especially with such an awesome channel and podcast and check it out Training for Victory is the book I actually finished reading it this morning

I read the first three chapters when it first came out And then when you were coming on the show, I was like, oh, I got to really finish it now. I really enjoyed it. I hope you guys will go and check it out. It's out now. Find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or wherever. Oh, Dee, do we have any questions?

Good point. I almost forgot about that. From M. Corbin. Coin, from my civy, dumbass point of view, seems to work best when done with a long-term, multi-generational goal in mind. How important are women in achieving coin goals? in that respect. So multi-generational, I think, is critical. That is really the outlook that you have to take from it.

And one of the biggest challenges, I think we talked, I don't remember it was before the interview or after, but there's this premise that, like, it was just over the horizon. The next year was all going to be over. Right. I think the second part of the question was, how important are women in it.

So I think women are a really important factor in it. if you and so there's a challenge there's a balance right certain cultures do not appreciate women and do not value

them like we do in the United States well okay maybe I'm that's maybe a little harsh but I think and I'm just going to say it I the challenge is pushing

you don't want to push too hard too fast, but you also don't want to push too slow. Because there's a tremendous value there in, you know, 50% of the population that could be producing economically, that could be producing new ideas, is out of the workforce. You're automatically stymie yourself. The Afghans had like the was female tactical unit and the CST, the FET. Well, that was American. Oh, for the, yeah. And you point out in the book, the, the ICTF used women for RECI. Yeah.

You know, for, just say for, because I'm trying to figure out, the best way to say this, for, you know, human intelligence, oftentimes women make superb, sources. Yeah. And, you know, and there is tremendous value there. And I think particularly on the human intelligence side, if that is overlooked, it, it, it's a huge resource that is being not tapped. Well, in a lot of times, you know,

and whether it's in a Latin American country where, you know, the women are free to speak, but, you know, are tired of losing their sons, are tired of the bullshit. Or, you know, you go to Afghanistan where, you know, the FET and CST teams or even a med cap or a PRT or whatever. whatever, where all the guys are like, I'm not saying shit.

And the women are like, yeah, they built a well. And then these motherfuckers came in and blew up the well. And now I have to walk, you know, two clicks. You know, I have to walk to the river to get the water. Yeah, I want to tell you who blew up the well. Right. To be able to leverage that and have, you know, U.S. or indigenous intelligence or information galleries, even if they're not.

not like intelligence, but being able to interact with those women, it's a massive... Advantage. Yeah, advantage. There is one last thing I wanted to throw out is oftentimes when women are more included in the defense forces, there's a statistical correlation with less corruption. And, you know, whether it's that, you know, they're the outsiders. And so by being outsiders, they're more willing to kind of call out stuff and willing to be whistleblowers or whatever.

But there is a correlation there in that in organizations and armies that have women in the services, the corruption often is less. I wonder if that is, I wonder if the corruption is less because there are women who will call it out, or if a culture that is progressive enough to have women, is just a less corrupt culture by nature. I don't know. I'd be curious. That's a valid point.

Yeah. That's a valid point. It's the causation versus correlation. Yeah. Any other questions? From Ryan P. Training for Victory was a pretty informative read. I learned a lot, particularly about the Afghans and Iraqis and their advisors.

However, I kind of wondered why an uncritical take was given to the Colombians. Can we get an explanation? So, I don't know. Uncritical? Uncritical. Yeah. I think, I mean, my perception of the Columbians, and I, okay, so I'm going to back up. When I went into this, if I was going to rank order the most successful units before I started my research,

I thought it was going to be ISOF, Afghan Commandos, LR, Colombians, else. like my perception not having worked in Latin America and perhaps you know just the stereotype you know I thought oh they're they're going to be a mass corruption etc man like everyone I talked to like everyone and I talked to civilians I talked to people in the intelligence community I talked to a journalist I talked to host nation I talked to everyone for from, you know, E7 to Lieutenant General. And every rank in between, I talked to State Department people.

I talked to Army people who were not soft, but who were in the embassy, in, you know, the at SGA or the advisory group. And like across the board, it was, this is the best partner force. And so if it comes across, perhaps is the least critical, I think that's just a reflection of mostly of the research,

of, and frankly, my surprise that I had them ranked fourth initially, and they came out the best. If anything, you know, a critical comment about the Colombians was, or let me rephrase that, a way to understand perhaps why training for victory isn't critical of the Colombians, is if you look at the time periods that is involved, it is after the sampler presidency. And that is a big turning point.

Like, Columbia in the 90s is a mess. It's a disaster. Everyone is predicting it's going to be a failed state or that large tracks of the country are going to be overrun by the FARC. The FARC is going to run parts of the country. They've become their own country. They already did.

They had autonomous zone. They did it in Autonomous Zone. Parklandia. Farclandia, completely. There were more kidnappings and murders in Colombia than in Afghanistan in the late 90s. It was like the number one per capita in the world. It was a disaster. The training for victory comes after that period partially.

I start after the sampler has ended because the, you know, Boko and Aglon don't start getting really stood up until post-September 11th. Who made that comment? Ryan P. So if Ryan, if you're still watching right now, just throw up in the chatter and the thing. Like if you had criticisms of it, I'd be curious, obviously you saw it as uncritical. I'd be curious what criticisms you may have expected that didn't land. All right.

We got one more from Matt G. What's the best advice you've received and thank you for your time? Best advice I ever received? Yep. Oh, great question. I mean, the best advice I ever received was from Captain Conliff, who is my company commander and who told me to try out for us out. I mean, that was the best advice I ever received.

And he said, look, if, you know, you don't do it, you'll regret it the rest of your life. And there are certain things that kind of turning points in your life where, you know, I didn't come from the military family. I certainly didn't come from a, you know, a soft or elite family. You know, my dad was an orphan. You've got to jump into deep end. Yeah. And, you know, having the wrong. right mentor or right person at the right time in your life to help push you a little bit off

or to tell you like hey jump it's going to be okay that taking that jump is okay do you had were you aware of suff prior to him saying that i mean i was aware of it but i you know i i was not one of these guys that was like at west point like i'm going s f you know like i was the Infantry Tactics Club. And so, like, I spent my spring breaks, like, overseas, training with foreign militaries, like the Brits mostly. I spent my weekends in the field doing cool, you know, patrols, basically pre-ranger, almost like patrols, but without getting hazed.

It was, like, it was fun, right? It was just, like, you know, doing training all the time with ammo and anyway. But, yeah, so. Do you think, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say. It wasn't like something that I knew that I was going into. Can you think that you ever would have it had he not said do it? I got to tell you, I don't know.

It's interesting, like the fate. It's on my mind because we just did it. But when we interviewed Lindsay earlier today, and she went and assessed for 160th, because her commander told her, you'll never be a little bird pilot. There's no way you'll ever get selected. And she was like, I'll fucking show you.

It's just, it's interesting how, like, different people need to hear different things at different periods of their life, right? So I will add one of the other company commanders, I overheard him talking to another commander saying, oh, F, sobchak's never going to make it. And I was like, oh, motherfucker, I just wait, you know? So, yeah, so I had that, I had actually on both kind of both poles, right? Going around, yeah.

But pushing me kind of like magnetically, like pushing pole. right um but to answer the question i don't know yeah and and i i've become kind of more of a believer in like fate and like just like shit kind of happens like without almost like there's gravity in our lives and and we get pulled certain ways just people in our lives you know whether there are connections from previous lives or or what or if if that's I think back to it, like, if that flyer, if he'd gotten lost in the mail. Yeah. Right?

Like, right. If Captain Conliff hadn't been there looking over me when I was his X-O was looking at it and he hadn't remarked, I don't know. I might have gotten out of the Army at the six-year mark. Yeah. I probably would have, because I was not happy. Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah.

Did Ryan P respond? No. Okay. So I think that's about a wrap for tonight, Frank. At least until you write your next book, publish or perish. Yeah. You know, we'll see you here again sometime, I hope. Insha-Lah.

Yeah. So then thank you for joining us. Thanks for the video. Yeah, we really appreciate you. I really appreciate you having me. Thanks so much. Yeah, you're welcome anytime, man. And we'll see all of you guys out there next time.

Thanks for joining us. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you. for a moment about how you can support the show if you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com slash the Teamhouse. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of the Team House ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, McMulroy.

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