The Team House - Serving in Delta Force & TFO | Pete Gallagher | Ep. 381

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

In this episode, Major General Pete Gallagher shares his extensive military career, detailing his journey from a young boy in Kansas to a distinguished leader in the U.S. Army. He discusses his early life, the impact of his father's death, and how it motivated him to pursue a military career. Gallagher reflects on his experiences in ROTC, his role as a signals officer, and the transition to special operations. He provides insights into the importance of communication in military operations, the challenges faced during significant events like 9/11, and the evolution of military strategies over the years. Gallagher's story is one of resilience, leadership, and dedication to service. In this conversation, the speaker shares personal experiences from their military career, detailing significant events such as a dining facility attack, the establishment of a joint recon task force, and the challenges faced in cybersecurity and communication infrastructure. They also discuss family connections in combat, leadership lessons learned, and the transition to civilian life after a long military career.Today's Sponsors:StopBox USA⬇️Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code HOUSE at https://www.stopboxusa.com/HOUSE GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Start05:45 College Years and ROTC Experience11:56 Training and Early Assignments17:54 Transition to Special Operations24:07 Establishing a Tactical Communications Unit29:44 Reflections on Leadership and Service39:16 From Worst to First: Mastering Marksmanship44:50 Journey to Hawaii: A New Assignment52:28 Training for Real-World Operations01:01:16 Crisis Action Planning Post-9/1101:08:39 Lessons Learned from Iraq01:15:26 The F3EAD Cycle: Exploiting Intelligence01:21:11 The Impact of Insurgency and Family Connections01:26:52 Transition to War College and Family Dynamics01:49:30 Challenges in Communication and Cybersecurity02:01:13 Transitioning to New Roles and Responsibilities02:09:38 Modernizing Army Communications and Technology02:18:38 Reflections on Military Service and Transitioning to Civilian LifeBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey folks, this is episode 381 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy with our guest tonight is Major General Retired Pete Gallagher. He served for 35 years as a signals officer, 12 of those in the special operations community, seven of those years in Army Special Mission Units. All kinds of different interesting assignments throughout the War on Terror. and beyond here that we're going to get into. Thanks, Pete, for joining us on the show tonight.

Hey, Jack, it's my pleasure. Thanks. I want to give a shout out to Frank DeLessio. He obviously connected us, a good friend from ATF, did some crazy things there for that task force, and I'm glad he made the connection there. And folks out there can go and find Frank on two episodes we've done in the past. Frank was an undercover ATF guy who's infiltrating Nazi motorcycle gangs. He's got some stories. So yeah, you guys can go back in time and find those if you want.

But he also runs a pretty awesome Black River Tobacco Company. He runs a cigar lounge about 15 minutes for me. It's like my cheers. I'm like Norm and Frank's like Sam. That's my cheers. Is that down in South Carolina? No, it's in North Carolina. It's in Dunn, Carolina, right off I-95. So anybody out there listening, if you're traveling down I-95, and you want a really nice cigar land to come in and smoke a stick and have some brown water. You know, Frank's a great American and he'll take good care of you. That's awesome. So Pete, I'm going to ask you the same question I ask everyone.

Tell us a little bit about how you grew up and how that eventually took you towards military service. Yeah, so I was born in a place called Pittsburgh, Kansas, on the southeast corner of the state, you know, right in the four state area. So you got Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas right in that area. I grew up, you know, middle class family. My dad owned a construction company. He built those metal buildings. And throughout the four-state area, any industrial park would be, you know, building, you'd find a bunch of metal buildings built by Gallagher Construction Company.

My mom kept the books. I was the fourth of six kids. You know, they tried to do everything they could to give us a quality of life. I mean, sent us to a country. Catholic school there. And we had a swimming pool in our yard, but it was a, it was always leaking. It was nasty. It was miserable.

By the time we got it clean in the summer, it was, summer was almost over. It was, we had a little cabin by the lake, a grand lake that was never finished. It was one of these things. It was always a work in progress. My dad had a boat and it leaked all the time. So he tried to give us the great American, you know, dream, but it was, it was interesting, you know, kind of times. but unfortunately, yeah, he, my two older sisters and my older brother, you know, they had moved out of the house. I was in high school. I had two younger brothers. My dad passed away when he was 51 years old.

And that was pretty significant for me because my mom was a wreck. And she, you know, every year, going back to the, you know, Catholic school and construction company, every summer I'd work for my dad, right? and I'd work with all these misfits, these wage grade misfit guys that were just, you know, rude talking, you know, cuss, every other word was a cuss word. Every night after work, they'd be, you know, pouring down the beers. And I'm this teenage kid, you know, trying to work out and get ready for high school football, working construction in the summer.

And every time I'd start the school year, I'd have to kind of decompress and get back into making sure I wasn't saying something stupid in front of Sister Mary Elephant there at the Catholic school, you know what I mean? But one year in particular, it was the summer of 19, actually 1980. I was getting ready to go into my senior year in July 25th. You know, typically my dad would wake me up on a Monday morning and, you know, kind of chew my ass telling me it was time to give up and get ready for work.

And that morning, my mom woke me out just in shock because my dad wasn't breathing. and he had died in his sleep of a heart attack. And it kind of changed the game for me. I was a little bit of a, I was a little bit of a helian. I wasn't the best student in the world, probably B's and C's, occasional less than that. But I immediately had to grow up. I immediately had to, almost 17 years old.

I had kind of a shock to the system there where I really needed to grow up and take care of my mom and take care of my two younger brothers and kind of figure out life. And it kind of launched me into trying to become the adult in the house. Like I said, my mom was a wreck. And so trying to navigate that because both of my, all three of my older siblings were out of the house at the time. So that was a kind of a wake-up moment for me. And then that same fall, I had a brand new high school football coach. He was just a model citizen. He was a math teacher in high school coach, and I really liked him a lot.

I mean, I was trying to do everything I could to make sure he knew I was going to be his go-to guy on the football team, my senior year. But I was also pretty good at math. And so as I was going through my senior year, I knew I wanted to go to college. And I knew I was, I mean, I was looking at trying to play football. I didn't have any real offers. There was a couple junior colleges that, you know, offered some. scholarships, but Pitt State, Pittsburgh State University in Kansas, the guerrillas, they were an NAA football powerhouse at the time. Now they're Division 2, but I decided to, he recommended

that I walk on to Pitt State. And one of the other things he said, he had a really good buddy when he was going to college. It was ROTC Cadre at Pitt State, an airborne ranger, a guy named Kurt Long, and Chuck introduced me to Kurt, and Chuck Smith was a legendary football coach, That was his first year there. But he said, you know, if I had it all to do over again, I would have got commissioned and I would have served at least four years. He goes, I highly recommend you join ROTC.

At least for the first two years, give it a shot. You'll learn a little bit about leadership. You'll get to shoot guns. You'll get to repel off the, you know, Russ Hall. You'll get to, you know, you'll learn a little bit about leadership, but you're also going to be able to boost your GPA. And so for me, it was like, okay, you know, I'll do that. I'll try that.

So as a freshman going into Penn State, you know, I had a, I had a girlfriend, ended up marrying her later, but I go into Pitt State and, you know, I'm working at the library. I'm, you know, majoring in mathematics. I'm playing football. I've got a couple other part-time things I'm doing. And, you know, my freshman year on the football team, I, I didn't make, I didn't make the varsity. I was on, but I started on the junior varsity. We had like five games. So every other year back then, they would either red shirt the freshman or they would allow them to, to play, you know, junior varsity. So I had the opportunity to play in a few games, starting at outside linebacker there at Pitt. And it was a lot of fun. And I went in through spring ball. I go through, you know, summer.

And I get to the fall of my sophomore year. And I feel like I'm doing pretty good. And I had a really good off-season and kind of working to get ready. And I realized, you know, a bunch of Juco transfers came in that were freaking super. fast, super strong, and they came in, and I started noticing my position on the depth chart going down instead of going up. And so after we had a scrimmage and I kind of got, I got

juiced by the quarterback and I missed the tackle, and I got yanked out of the scrimmage. And I didn't get to go back in. And then Monday, it was a scrimmage on a Saturday. Monday I go back in there and I see I've dropped two positions on the depth chart. I just started thinking about everything I was trying to balance, you know, trying to manage a major, trying to, you know, do okay in academics, having a girlfriend and load balancing all this stuff. And then I, you know, I was still having fun with the ROTC stuff, but I just didn't have time to do it. And so I made a decision to hang up my cleats and focus on something that I could actually maybe go pro in, right? And there's, my thoughts are, if I stuck it out, I may have been able to start as a senior, but you never know. And I just

wasn't going to waste the time and energy. Because it was, college sports is like a full-time job. And I don't think I was good enough. You know, I mean, I had great hands. I was probably big enough, but I don't know if I was fast enough. There was a lot of speedsters coming in there. And it was just, it was a conscious decision. It was almost like one that you make it and you don't want to make it, but when you make it, you know, it was the right choice, right?

And so I did that and I decided to kind of go all in on a military, you know, at least do four years. And that was kind of what he said. You know, try to go active duty and do at least four years. And so, you know, I got married in 1984, ended up going to the ROTC advance camp. And I had no idea what branch I wanted to go, you know, and a lot of guys wanted to go aviation, a lot of guys wanted to go MI, a lot of guys wanted to go infantry. I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I wanted to, what I thought is I was going to go in four years and I wanted something technical to go with my math degree so I could learn something and be marketable. So, you know, when I was out at Fort Riley for the ROTC advance camp, you know, I learned a little bit about the Signal Corps and what they do. And I was like, you know, maybe I'll go Signal Corps, see what that's all about. And so I put that down. I ended up getting my first choice. I got commissioned in 85. I still had to do my student teaching.

I was majoring in math and phys ed at the time and had to do student teaching. And my wife had to do her student teaching as well. So we didn't actually, you know, interactive duty until summer of. of 1986. And, you know, I went to Fort Gordon, Georgia there. And it was kind of the beginning of my Signal Corps journey. That's cool. So you had to go through, I mean, I guess I should just ask you, what's like that process of becoming a signals officer? Like, what is your kind of, like, advanced individual training and all that stuff, that kind of pipeline? Yeah. So, so as an officer, every officer, now they call it Bollick, basic officer leadership course. But back then they

called it SOBC, Signal Officer Basic Course. And it's almost six months. It's at Fort Gordon, Georgia. And they train you on, you know, all the foundational stuff of how to be an officer. Okay. And it builds on everything you get, whether your OCS or West Point or ROTC, they start building that foundation of, okay, this is what it's going to be like for you to be successful as a platoon leader or as a battalion level staff.

These are the things you need to know, the things you need to learn. A lot of focus on PT, a lot of focus on PT, a lot of focus on maintenance logistics, all the fundamentals, you know, the accountability, maintenance, all the readiness kind of things that a good platoon either needs to learn and know. They teach you all that. But then they really focus on the technical skills. And at the time, you know, when I was at Gordon, I got pinpointed. Everybody was either getting Korea or Germany.

And then a few folks would get like Fort Wildchuka, Arizona, Fort Hood or Fort Brough. Those were like the big, you know, places where most folks were trying to go. And I didn't know much about any of those. I actually wanted to go to Fort Lewis, Washington. And I put that in as my first assignment. But I didn't, I wanted to go there because that's where my wife was born. And we were, you know, thinking about, you know, going out there and just seeing what it was like. But I ended up getting pinpointed to third infantry division in Würzburg, Germany.

And so after I graduated the Signal Basic course, I was actually, My wife got pregnant with our first son. It's interesting because his birthday is exactly nine months after my birthday. I'm not sure that's coincidental or not. But he was born in, when I graduated Fort Gordon, I ended up going to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for this very technical school on computer networking. And I kind of realized it was a graduate level training

at the Air Force Institute of Technology. And I went from six months at Fort Gordon to six months there. And it was kind of nerd geek, you know, one-on-one kind of stuff. I mean, it was not in my wheelhouse that I was learning about computer networks. I was learning all this stuff. And it was a lot of studying. And it was a lot of work to learn all that technical stuff. Because I, you know, like I said, I was pretty good at math,

but I really didn't understand all the computer networking and all that kind of stuff. One of the things that happened is while I was there at Wright Pat, my first son, my oldest son was born. And my wife was having some complications. And his birth was right by my, right, the night of his birth was the day before my computer networking final. And it was the hardest class I had. And I tried to get out of taking the final and getting it rescheduled, but the instructor was kind of a jerk. And he wouldn't let me. So I ended up taking the test and I just, I bombed it.

And that was like, I was doing pretty well in all the other courses, but I ended up getting like a C, barely got a C in that class. And anyway, it was just, it was like, it was one of those things where, and the guy was a captain, he was an army captain teaching at this Air Force, but it was like, I will never be like that guy. You know, if one of my guys or one of my soldiers, you know, if they have a family issue, you got to let them take care of that and you can reschedule a test, you can reschedule it like, you know, if somebody,

needs to come off a JRTC deployment or whatever, you know, allow them the opportunity to take care of their family if they need to. And so it just kind of left a mark. But my son was born there at Wright Pat and now, actually he's serving. He's a major in the Army today. But yeah, it was a, that was kind of the training path. And then I ended up going over to Germany for my, actually before, right after Wright Pat, I ended up going to airborne school, Fort Benning. And then my wife, my newborn baby and I flew to Germany to begin our three-year German. journey there in the 3rd Infantry Division, Rock of the Marn in Bertsburg. Hey guys, it's your pal Jack.

I just want to take a moment to tell you about the sponsor for this show, which is Stopbox. Stopbox makes this very cool box to secure your items in for your valuables or weapons. Could be a firearm, knife, things that you want to keep away from kids. It opens up like so. and the way it locks is very interesting. And you can change the combination, by the way. So you have these actuators on the side, and in this case, for demonstration purposes,

the code is to hold down the index finger and pointer finger and then come over and there's a thumb, hit that, and it opens up. So that's the code. And this thing is proudly made in the US of A, so they keep the quality very high. It's also TSA compliant so you can throw this in a bag and travel with it. And Stopbox also offers a range of other innovative products, including their vehicle safe, chamber lock, and other essential gear designed to keep you prepared and protected wherever you are.

For a limited time only, our listeners are getting a crazy deal. Not only do you get 10% off your entire order when you use the code house at stopboxUSA.com, but they are also giving you a buy one, get one free for their Stopbox Pro. that's 10% off and a free Stopbox Pro when you use the code house at StopboxUSA.com. Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with Stopbox. I'd like to ask a little bit about Army signals in general. Like for people out there, including myself, quite frankly, that don't necessarily understand all the ins and outs of it, your job as a signals officer is primarily helping the unit communicate internally or helping units communicate with one another.

What's sort of like the way that's framed out? Yeah, so it's, so every unit has to be able to move, shoot, and communicate. And every infantry unit, even an A team in special forces has, you know, 18 echoes, communicators on the team. There are specially trained experts that know, understand, you know, have the expertise and the technical know-how to be able to install, operate, and maintain the communication systems that that unit requires. And the higher you are on echelon, you know, so an infantry platoon may have a radio or two. Now they have a lot of, now they have Android devices and all kinds of comms.

But back in the day, they may have a radio, and they'd be up on one single radio net. As you go up to higher echelons, you know, company, battalion, brigade, there's more coordination and synchronization required, not only down and in with your units, but with adjacent units and higher headquarters. So there will be requirements for communications at command posts where decisions are made. And like the special opposite, it would be a forward operating base, for example, where you'd have additional communications. It might be satellite reachback or big HF systems that allow you to communicate, you know, with, you know, be online a site to hire headquarters and things like that. And so it's really, you're like the phone company for the Army. You know, you know what I mean?

It's like the Verizon or the AT&T. for the Army. And you've got to ensure that, you know, I mean, obviously the enemy gets a vote. And, you know, if they have electronic warfare capability and all that, you have to have what's called a pace plan, the ability to have a primary alternate contingency and emergency. You have multiple options so commanders can command because, you know, decisions don't get disseminated down to the lowest tactical level if you don't have good communications. All right. And then you went to the advance course for special operations signals? Yeah, I'll, yeah.

So I spent, I felt like I was a pretty damn good signal officer. In Germany, you know, we spent a lot of time, you know, supporting what was called reforger exercise. Return a forces to Germany. As an infantry division, we had, we had our, you know, tactical assembly areas. We would have these things called Lariat advances, which were alerts. It was a constant state of readiness during the Cold War. And at this time, you know, President Reagan had just actually, when I got to Germany, President Reagan was still president.

While I was in Germany, George H.W. Bush took over. And then in 1989, just cause happened. And I was over in Germany, fighting the Cold War, you know, was concerned about Russia and USSR, the Soviet Union. And we had our GDP locations. We were, you know, training. We were doing maintenance. We've done all the stuff that every good unit does. And I was really, you know, I felt like I was a good platoon leader, a really good company XO,

and I was learning how to be a good signal officer. And I was pretty excited about, you know, what I was learning. But I also realized that, you know, okay, you had this thing called just cause. And I heard about all the units that went, and none of them were coming out of Germany. And then when I wrapped up that assignment, just as my wife and I were, you know, We had another son born while we were in Germany. He's now a special ops communicator over in the third group. But he was born when we were in Germany.

And as our family was making this way back to the Signal Officer Advanced Course at Fort Gordon, this was in 1990, Saddam invades Kuwait. And I'm leaving in the 3rd Infantry Division, and there were some guys that had the opportunity to get deployed to Operation Deshabilia. Shield, I get to the Signal Advanced Course and I'm watching it on TV and units from Bragg are going, I mean, as you know, there was a lot of different units that ended up going to Desert Shield and Desert Storm. One of the guys I met and we became really good friends at the Signal Advance course had just came from this Special Op Signal Battalion that had just stood up in 1986 called the 112.

And he had a certain swagger about him and he had a certain kind of, you know, mindset and focus, and we immediately kind of became really good friends with the Signal Advance course. And he started telling me about this unit at Bragg called the 112 Special Off Signal Battalion. And so the more I heard about it, the more intrigued I was. And it was, and so for my class, there was one slot for the 112. And I wanted it. And I told Signal Branch that I wanted it. And then I went up to Fort Bragg with him. I interviewed with the battalion commander, interviewed with the battalion S3 and the XO, and I told them how bad I wanted to be in that unit. And so I ended up getting the slot.

But while we're at the Signal Advance course, I was supposed to do a couple follow-on courses. The battalion commander calls me, he says, hey, we're getting ready to deploy to Desert Storm, or Desert Shield. And it was right before Desert Storm started. He goes, I need you to cancel your following courses. I need you to come into the, I want to make my S-1 and then. make you a company commander. So I was like, absolutely. So I, you know, I, you know, as a brand new captain, every captain wants to command a company at least or an ODA, right? You want, you want that, that green tab leadership position. And so, you know, for me, it's like,

hell yeah, I get to come in in a special ops signal battalion. I'm in. Yeah. So I was like, you know, we couldn't leave Fort Gordon fast enough to get to Fort Bragg. And then I get to Fort Bragg. And then I get to Fort Bragg. And most of the unit is deployed. And I've become the S-1, the personnel officer, and they come back. And my first duty is to run the award ceremony for all the war heroes that had just come back, right? So you got this big and I was like, you know, so I was like, okay, I missed just cause. I miss Desert Shield, deserts. And I was like, will my day ever come? And I really wasn't worried about it. It's just one of those things. I wanted to get to brag. I wanted to, you know, be part of something. And it was, but I learned a lot.

And I had the opportunity to command alpha company. We called it Alpha Pride. And the focus was was proud of who you are, what you do, and who you represent. And I took command of the company that it was probably the weakest company in the battalion. And that was an opportunity for me, like on day one, actually. It was actually on day one. I had a chance to make an impact.

We had a, there's this thing called GMF, which I think it stands for ground mobile force or something, but they manage all the satellite constellations out there. And so right after the change of command as a brand new company commander, one of my platoon leaders comes up me and we had this ongoing exercise supporting Usasak US Army Special Operations Command. It was a pretty high visibility exercise.

And we had what was called an 85 van, which is satellite hub van right outside of the Usasak headquarters and they were running columns into, you know, a bunch of the leaders in there. Well, we got notified from GMF, which they're like the big brother of all satellite operations. And they were, you don't want to screw up. And so what happens, they said we tracked off the bird. They can't reach anybody in the van. They don't know, you know, what the heck's going on. So as soon as that my kind of welcome speech to the battalion or to the company was over,

I drive over to the Yusasog headquarters and I see one of our specialists walking up with some bulk cutter. And I'm like, Specialist Blancin, what do you do? He goes, I got to open the van and get us back on the satellite. I don't know what the hell. And then I see this guy named Sergeant Lewis walking up with a Burger King bag. He's got a Burger King bag and he's like, you know, jaw jacket and just kind of loaf. I'm like, what the hell? How? I said, Sergeant Lewis. He goes, yeah, sir, I had to go get something to eat. I'm like,

okay, you are no longer the team chief for this. Blancet, you are now in charge of this team. Sergeant Lewis, I need you to see the first sergeant. When you go back to the company area, I need you to see the first sergeant. And he was one of these weak NCOs. And what I noticed right then is, number one, I had to make, it was a leadership opportunity on day one. But it was also a guy like Blancet, saw that I was willing to make a decision and take away. way the burden of him having to work for a piece of crap NCO. You know what I mean? And this NCO, and he was a weak link. And it was pretty obvious. And so Blancet became a team chief and did a really good job. But for me, it was just, it was kind of like day one in that unit. It was kind of

an exciting opportunity. But we had, you know, several different exercises in events. We did a big exercise supporting soccer over in Alcunbury, England and all across Europe. We had teams all over to include up in Norway. It was a great event. We did that. We were getting ready to plan for a Cobra Gold over in Thailand. I had an opportunity to go over to do the pre-deployment site survey with our, at the time our battalion command sergeant major, his name was Ronnie Beaver McAnne.

I don't know if you ever met Beaver. He was a first group guy, but he was the 112th command sergeant major. And we were getting ready for all that. And then I was on a JRTC exercise. actually JRT's I believe we were at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas at the time, not Fort Polk, Louisiana, on a JRTC exercise with Seventh Group and Sox South. And I get a call from our battalion XO. And he said, hey, how much do you know about the special mission unit across post there?

I said, well, I mean, I'm driven by the compound a lot. I don't really know anybody that works there. I don't know a whole lot about it. I said, well, they need a captain. They're standing up a new tactical communications troop, and they need a captain for this job. And, you know, the Italian commander is looking at one guy, but he goes, I think you'd be perfect for the job.

Are you interested? And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm interested. And it was just kind of like, so you go from conventional, third infantry division to White Soff, and now it's an opportunity to go into a whole other part of Soff. And so I ended up, you know, trying out. And it wasn't, you know, I didn't have to do the long walk. I wasn't going to, you know, West Virginia selection and doing all the stuff that an operator in that unit goes through.

But you go through a lot of the other stuff, the PT test, the psyche valve, the background checks, you know, all the, you know, the, everything that goes into it. And then you go through this interview board, which was pretty brutal, but it was, you know, when it was all set and done, you get out of the board and you're like, holy shit, that was miserable. And then the sergeant major of Signal Squadron. And then he goes, well, how do you think you did? I said, I don't know how I did. He goes, well, you did great. The guys love you. I'm like, awesome.

So I go back to the 112th and I'm, you know, I got to kind of finish up my time. I'm the assistant three after my company command. And while I'm, while I know I'm going from 112 signal over to the special mission unit, they are doing rehearsals for operations in Somalia. And so I get my badge. I get a lot of my kit. I get my wall lockers. I can come and go and go into Signal Squadron.

They didn't impress me completely, but they gave me, the Signal Squadron Commander wanted me to have access and come over and meet with the guys when I could. And he wanted me to be a role player for all the trainups for Somalia. And so I go out there, you know, while I'm still in the 112, while they're prepping for, you know, operations in Somalia, I go out to the compound and they're doing all these rehearsals with the Rangers with 160 of Special Ops Aviation Regiment.

And I'm watching these rehearsals happen with all these aviation assets, all these different units and everything that's going on, the number of role players and what they put into their training scenarios. And I'm like, holy shit, they spent more training budget on this one rehearsal and we probably were able to spend in the, you know, I mean, it was just, it was amazing. I knew that this was, okay, this is a different kind of place. This is a pretty significant.

And before I signed into the unit, I actually went on a JRX, a joint readiness exercise, started out at Fort Bliss, and then we went out to the Nevada test site. And it was with one of the squadrons in the unit, B Squadron. But the day we deployed for the JRX, you know, I went into the Signal Squadron team rooms. And I go in, I think it's in August of 1993. and I'm starting to get to know the guys and I get to go out on this exercise with with one of the squadrons but I still got to go back to the 112th and finish my job and so I go back and I my last day in the 112 signal battalion was a Monday morning it was

October 4th 1993 and so you know it's my last day I'm getting ready to do final out take all my paperwork and you two of one file everything and go from the regular system to the uh the what's called the dasser which is you know where all the special mission units files so i have to basically sign out on the personnel side in one unit drive over across post to the new unit and when i get to this unit everything was different because every time i've been in the team rooms you know it's typical team rooms i mean like team house right i mean it's it's like a locker room it's it's you know it's it's alpha males doing what alpha males do and the, you know, camarader, the teamwork, the banter, none of that was happening.

On 4 October, I walked in there, everybody was laser focused. Everybody was moving with the purpose. There were guys in there, you know, packing their stuff, rolling stuff, getting it packed up. Nobody was saying shit. Everybody had total focus mindset. And like it was all on. It was mission was on. And I hadn't seen the news.

I mean, I got up, I did PT, took a shower. You signed out and drove across post. And one of the other captains in the unit, his name's John Hildebrandt. He's like, I said, John, what the hell's going on? Why is everybody so, what's going on? He goes, you haven't seen the news, have you? I said, no.

He goes, yeah, let's walk in here. So we go into the squadron conference room, they have two TVs on. One was on Fox, one was on CNN. And we walk in, and I see the Somali kid bouncing on the rotor blade. You know, you remember that scene? Yep.

And it was on the news. And it was all over. It was all over the news. And it was like, Holy shit. Okay. You know, because I saw those guys on the day I flew out to the JRX, everybody from Signal Squadron that was flying to Somalia, they were going out one way. We were going the other. And it was like, wow. And this was probably around 930 in the morning. So I'm trying to sign into the unit through their personnel services troop, which is like

their S-1 or their HR human resources entity. Those guys are dealing with mass casualty. They don't have time to improsses this new captain. You know what I mean? So I'm just like watching and learning and saying, holy crap, this is these guys, they'll get to me when they can get to me. And I remember the personnel service troop sergeant major, Angie Whitaker, coming up to me and she said, hey, sir, I'm so sorry, but I said, you guys do what you got to do.

And so I go down, back down to the Signal Squadron. And there was a legendary retired warrant officer, a guy, named Mr. Z, Paul Zisman. He was the deputy commander of Signal Squadron. He was up at the meeting in what's called the Beckwith Room, named after Charlie Beckwith. It's just where the room where, like, it's the command conference room, basically. And he comes back down from the Beckwith Room, and he goes, all right, um, A Squadron is going to deploy tonight. The DCO's going with them. John, he's talking to Hildebrandt, the other captain, he goes, you're going to go over with A Squadron. Pete, you are going to be a casualty assistance officer.

They've identified you to be a casualty assistant officer for a guy named Randy Sugar. He's missing in action right now. He's probably in escape and evasion mode. Hopefully we can roll him, you know, pick him up. But right now he's missing in action. But I need you to go to a meeting at 1 o'clock this afternoon. And I'm like, Roger that, whatever I got to do, you know. And so that moment, that first day in that unit,

with that responsibility and knowing what happened, and I think everybody knows what happened afterwards, if you've seen Blackhawk Downer, if you've read the book, I mean, Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, you know, both of the guys that went in to, you know, and gave their life trying to save the pilot Mike Durant at the second crash site. I mean, you know, they definitely, they were put in for

and definitely deserved the Medal of Honor. But to actually be selected for a duty like that, on day one, it was like, for me, it was like nothing else mattered at that point. Yeah. I mean, I knew I needed to learn how to be a, you know, a communicator in the unit, but I needed to focus on that. And I needed to, you know, and that's what Mr. Z, he says, this is no fail, man. This is this is your job. Everything else can wait, but you got to, you know, do everything you can. And it was a couple days, I think, before, you know, they identified the remains and they notified, you know, Stephanie Shugart.

and I was allowed and I got brought to her house to meet her and help her. And just what an amazing, amazing person. I mean, and Randy's parents, Herb and Lois, they were, you know, just salt of the earth, dairy farmers from the great state of Pennsylvania and just, I mean, just to be able to just help this family navigate that, you know, this all the process that goes with, you know, losing a loved one in combat and everything else especially with like a medal of honor recipient everything that goes with it because there's ceremonies that i mean it was it was a interesting time uh for sure and one of the things that you know as we were going through it

there was a guy one of the sergeant majors in the unit um his name was Craig maxim I don't know if you've ever heard of Craig or met Craig but he was this wierly wiry you know know, just big old bushy mustache. He was an operator's operator. He was the man. Craig led every one of, he went on every single notification to every family member of the guys from the unit that were killed. But he also led every one of the color details.

And they were immaculate, flawless. He had, you know, all, I mean, there was a combination. We had a couple guys from Signal Squadron. They were part of the color detail. But they did every single service, you know, memorial service. But when I was getting ready for Randy's funeral, which was in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania,

it wasn't at Carlisle Barracks, but it was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But a former unit member was actually going to the war college at the time, Colonel Ike Slaughter. So he was like magnificent. He was like one of those guys that, you know, he was helping me kind of like my,

almost like my advanced party where he was on the ground, and Carlisle and he could help me kind of orchestrate stuff. But if you can imagine the number of people that were coming in from all different locations and trying to orchestrate all this. And planes, trains and automobiles, you know, VIP's coming from all over. I mean, General Downing, you know,

just all these different cats and coming from different places. You know, I was focused on the family, but you have all these heavy hitters and you didn't want, I couldn't have any hiccups, you know what I mean? So I'm laying out the plan. I go into Sergeant Major Maxim's office and I'm kind of laying out the entire plant, boom, boom, boom, you know, walking it through and trying to make sure I didn't miss a freaking beat, you know,

because again, before that, before Randy, before Randy's funeral, we had the memorial service when C Squadron came back, we had the memorial service at JFK Chapel there on Fort Bragg and Wayne Downing. I remember him telling me he was the four-star commander at Socom at the time. He's like, hey, if you run in, he goes, number this duty this duty is sacred and you do not let anybody tell you know do not uh if you run into a single brick wall i want you to call me directly i didn't there was no way in hell i was going to call i was just not going to let i was going to breach any brick wall but it was one of these things where i knew the pressure was on i could not screw this up i mean i could there's probably things i did

screw up when i was in that unit but that was one thing i was making sure there's no way in hell i can can screw this up. So anyways, I'm getting ready for Randy's funeral and trying to, you know, again, take care of the family and all the, all the people flying in and everything, laying it out for Craig Maxim. He's like, damn, sir, you got this shit wired tight. He goes, you consider being an operator? And that was like the greatest compliment, because I knew this guy was legendary. And I was like, oh, sorry, Major, I'm a, I'm a communicator. I think the unit needs communicators. And I said, that's where I can best serve the unit. But I appreciate the, the, the, the vote of confidence.

And I thought about it, but I knew my place. You know what I mean? And I knew what I brought to the organization. And but it was one of those really significant compliments at the time. But yeah, that was kind of my, I guess, between the whites off and the 112th and then joining that unit as, you know,

a fairly young captain. I think I was about 93. I had just turned 30 at the time. If you're in the market for a new mattress, you've probably seen all the brands out there vying for your attention. Big names, splashy ads, all promising the same thing. But here's the only brand that does it right. It's Ghostbed. Ghostbed was created and is still run by manufacturing experts with more than 20 years of mattress making experience.

They know the craft and they know how to build a bed that actually lasts. So how do they offer premium mattresses for up to 50% off less than the competition? It's not hype. It's smart logistics. As a family-owned company. That means there's no board of investors to answer to, which is folks working hard, selling mattresses. These are the true manufacturing pros, and the result is an exceptional cooling and comfort at a price that won't keep you up at night. Every ghost bed mattress includes proven cooling materials backed by a 20 to 25 year warranty.

You also get 101 night's sleep trial with free returns that the mattress doesn't work for you. And fast free shipping. Most orders arrive in two to five days. right now as a team house listener you can get 25% off site wide for a limited time you can just go to ghostbed dot com slash house slash house at checkout that's ghostbed dot com slash house promo code house upgrade your sleep with ghostbed the makers of the coolest beds in the world some exclusions apply see cypher details i want to think ghostbed so much for continuously supporting us it's been going on a year almost so i really appreciate that i hope you guys in the if you're in the market for mattresses or pillows or bedding check out ghostbed you can go to

ghostbed.com slash house and get 25% off right now love you and love ghost bed thanks guys and i mean that's a bit of a baptism by fire arriving to the unit under those circumstances yeah absolutely and how was the rest of your time there um helping to establish this joint communicator unit or troop. Well, so, so the tactical communications troop, it consisted of running the base station for the unit, the reach back, basically the, you know, the lifeline for everybody deployed was the base station. So we had operators in the base station, you know, but we also ran, we had a deployable team that ran the units command post every time it would deploy. They were the forward communicators. And then we had communicators with every Sabre Squad.

So every Saber Squadron at the time had two communicators that had to go through the operator training course and be able to pass OTC. They went through, they were direct support communicators for the Saber Squaders. Now I think they have a lot more than two. But back then it was only two. We had a senior and a junior.

It's kind of like an ODA, but on steroids a little bit where a Saber Squadron had a couple communicators there and then, but all of those worked for the TACCOM troop commander. And so I didn't go to OTC, but I got to go to a lot of different training events that related to OTC. So my first year in the unit, I went to the selection and training squadron, I guess, and you've had like Paul Howell on here before, some of the best operators teach S&T. They teach operator training course. They run selection.

But they ran a combat skills course for support folks like myself, communicators, netics and others. It was only a couple weeks, but it was an abbreviated kind of basic focus on, you know, the fundamentals, basic rifle marksmanship, you know, all the kind of, you know, PT tests. You did all the, all the stuff that, you know, that they would, it was like an abbreviated, condensed OTC. I mean, we did ladders. We, you know, fast rope.

We repelled off the tower. We ran the O course. We did CQB. I mean, everything that they thought we might need to do or a support guy might have to do. They tried to take all the lessons from Somali and say, hey, look, never again. Are we going to, you know, have to rely on support guys to go outside the wire and not have them, you know, trained and ready on the basics. And so it was pretty awesome to go through that. Because I will tell you, on day one, you know, my basic rifle marksmanship, my target, it looked like a freaking shotgun blast. But by the end of the two weeks, when we had the long gun competition, I kind of went from worse to first. So it was kind of cool. A lot of the guys in the squadron made fun of me, but it was one of those things. I mean, I wasn't like a laser, you know, a dead eye shooter. But by the time those guys got done with me, that was a pretty damn good shot.

Because they know what the hell they're doing. And they focus on the fundamentals. And, you know, but so I got to go through that. We went through live agent training, you know, where we went to Fort McClell in Alabama with the OTC course. I did live agent training, did a lot of role playing for the OTC classes. They were going through all the different scenarios. I spent a lot of time helping S&T where they would always request volunteers to be role players. And then ended up going to Halo School in June of with that OTC class that was going through.

I got to go to Halo school with them out at Marana in Arizona, which was pretty cool. But that first year, we did a, my first real exercise with the unit was an exercise called Hadrian's Wall with 2-2SAS over in Scotland and England. And it was pretty awesome. I mean, it was my first time going out as the senior, you know, representing the squadron. We were out there with A squadron. It was in December. And it was, I think it was that while we were at that exercise, we had members of the unit that were down in Columbia. We got notified that Pablo Escobar had been killed.

But there was still a lot going on with exercise or operations in Columbia. And so, you know, I spent the time over with the 2-2SAS. Great exercise, kind of a little bit of a suck fest, because you just tried outdo each other on the training. It was pretty cold. It was rainy. It was somewhat miserable. When it was all set and done, we went back to Hereford, you know, had a great after-action review and, you know, drink some suds together in a place. I don't remember the name of the bar, but they called it the sticky carpet.

But it was just good bonding and camaraderie. And they had a similar unit, the 264th Signals organization that some of the guys there, we became pretty good friends. And then later on, I ran into some of them when I was, you know, the JCU commander after 9-11. It was a good first year. I spent Easter Sunday in 1994 in Bogota, Columbia, you know, going to visit our guys that were there. That was a big time. In the summer of 94, we were planning very, I mean, very heavily for Haiti. Haiti, yep. And, you know, I was the lead planner for Haiti. As you kind of know what happened there. I mean, you know, they aborted the mission. I mean, we had guys at their ready. But I did have communicators from my team with Colin Powell on the grant. Colin Powell, Sam Nunn and Jimmy Carter. One of our signal squad on communicators was there, and we had another one up at the White House. I mean, that's how, you know, and I, I mean, they handpicked this unit to send communicators. So what I learned there, I mean, just, you know,

going through, I mean, just all the different, every quarter you'd run a joint readiness exercise, every and there's always training events where the squadrons are doing environmental training, whether it's winter training, jungle training. You know, they would do building training in urban areas. There was always a need to participate in those types of events and learn and do everything you can to understand what it takes for the operator on the X and everything that they need to have all the enablers to interconnect them. So I learned how important it was not only for the assault net, the fires net,

emergency resupply, Kazevac, you know, all the kinds of things where they need a lifeline and they need something now, there's no time to blink. I mean, you've got to have the ability to connect those guys. And so I spent three years in that unit. I wanted, as I was leaving, you know, I went through two different Signal Squadron commanders. I wanted to come back more than anything and be the Signal Squadron commander. I ended up leaving that unit and going to Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, which was pretty close to where I grew up. I spent a year there before I ended up going out to Hawaii. And what was the assignment out in Hawaii?

So it was in the 25th Infantry Division. It was interesting because I was at a before I left Fort Bragg, I knew I wanted to come back to Fort Bragg because my wife had a teaching job. Our kids, our kids had friends. And we had a house. We had bought a house. It was like, you know, there was a single brigade at Fort Bragg.

a signal battalion in the 82nd. And my goal was to get back to a conventional signal unit by a little bit of time and then get back to Signal Squader. That's what I wanted to get back. Right, right. Right. Right. 11th come back to Bragging and find my way back into Signal Squad. But when I get out to Fort Leavenworth at CGSC, because my records were on the Dasher, they were hidden from the normal system. When Signal Branch came out to interview us and and decide where we wanted to go. The branch assignment officer said, hey, we want to get you what's called branch qualified,

which means be a battalion S3 or an XO or Brigade S6. And even if it means going back to Fort Bragg, so I was trying to find a job back at Fort Bragg. When I get out to Leavenworth, a new Lieutenant Colonel assignment officer and the majors assignment officer were interviewing all the majors from the Signal Corps. It was Branch Day and you're meeting with your assignment officer.

And they didn't have my ORB. And they had everybody else's ORB in there. And I said, well, I have a copy of it. They didn't have it because it wasn't, I guess, because I had just left the unit, it wasn't in the system. And so she looks at my ORB, says, Germany, Fort Bragg, you spent six years at Fort Bragg. You're going overseas.

I said, well, wait a minute. I've been overseas. I was in Germany. I said, and the guy sitting next door, I said, I can't remember his name, but I said, he told me I got to get branch qualified, and even if it means going back to Fort Bragg, I've already got units that want me to come back.

And she goes, well, it's not fair for you to do back-to-back assignments and homestead at Fort Bragg. And just, oh, no, she said, it's not fair for you to just hang out at Fort Bragg while other people are doing, you know, back-to-back tours in Korea. I said, ma'am, have you ever been stationed at Fort Bragg? I said, nobody just hangs out at Fort Bragg.

I said in the units of Fort Bragg, they're on mission, they're on every deployment. You've got the units with the highest level of priority. I said, you don't just hang out at Fort Bragg. I said, I want to go to Fort Bragg for the mission. It's not to hang out in Fayetteville. But she goes, well, okay, but if you did have to go overseas, where would you want to go? And I said, it's like a stump to chunk question. I said, okay, maybe Hawaii, Alaska, of Italy.

You know, I just kind of threw things out there. She was, and she had just come from Alaska. She goes, why Alaska? Why not Saudi Arabia? I'm like, what? And so I'm like, holy shit, this didn't go, how this plan? So I go home and I talk to my wife. I'm like, I might be fucking going to Saudi Arabia.

I don't understand. It's got no beer in Saudi Arabia. Like, hell with that. I'm going to Alaska. This did not go as planned. But then Scotty Miller, who was in the unit with me, was my next, it was lived right across the street from me at Leavenworth. We actually became really good friends. while we were at CGSC together.

He was, as you know, he was the assault force commander on the ground there in Somalia, and obviously I got to do it pretty well when I was working with Randy's family there. But Scott introduced me to the division commander of the 25th Infantry Division at Leavenworth. So I talked to him and it was basically over a beer at a place called the Havana Club there on Fort Leavenworth.

It was almost like an interview. And so I ended up getting the opportunity to go serve in the 25th ID. So when I left CGSC, I go to 25th Infantry Division and I, my first job is as the division, it's called the ADSO, assistant division signal officer. Now they call it the deputy G6, but it's a, it's a majors billet. You're on the division staff and you know, you do what division staff officers do, a lot of planning, a, you know, every, all the different exercises. And in 25th at the time, they have all these different exercises all across the Pacific, you know,

Balacatan in the Philippines. You have Copa, Gold and in Thailand. You have JRTC rotations where one of the maneuver brigades would rotate back to Fort Polk and go through JRTC. So you're always kind of planning, you know, division activities and events there. So I spent a year doing that. And then I became the battalion S3 at the 125th Signal Battalion. And the great part about that is the battalion commander, was a guy named Tom Trowbridge, who had spent time in the unit. He was in the unit before I was. He was a legendary communicator as well. He was a Ranger Regimental S6.

We spent time in the Ranger Regiment, and he was the JCU commander, the Joint Communications Commander at J-Sog. And so he and I had a history, and we had a lot of, you know, had walked some of the same ground previously. And I got to be his S3 for a year, which is really his operations officers, you know.

And so, you know, it's conventional communications for a conventional division in the Pacific. But I learned a lot. And it was a great opportunity. And then I stuck around one more year to be, I was trying to work my timing again to try to get back to Bragg. And so I stuck around one more year to be what's called the Secretary of the General Staff working for two different commanding generals,

a guy named Tom Hill, who ended up going to First Corps, and then a guy named Kip Ward who came in after him. So as a Secretary of General Staff, It's a thankless job. Really, you run the staff for the general, the aides. You learn how a division headquarters runs, but it wasn't a job I necessarily wanted, but it was a job the C.G wanted me to do,

so I did it. But while I was in that job, I got to go interview and put my name in the hat for JCU. And I, so I went and interviewed an interview at the time, Lieutenant or no, that was Major General Doug Brown. Doug Brown was a former 160th guy. He ended up being the four-star at Socom, but General Brown selected me to be the next JCU commander.

And while I'm working for General Hill, he gets announced to go to I-Corps, the first Corps out at Fort Lewis. So he's getting promoted to three-star, and he and Doug Brown are friends. They've known each other from days in the 101st together, and they've known each other for a long time. and General Hill

wanted me to be his aide and go, like leave Hawaii and go to Fort Lewis but I had just been selected for JCU and I was like, there's no freaking way I want to go be his aide. I've been the SGS for a year, but I was like, I said, sir, I think it would be an honor to be your aide, but it would not be the honorable thing to do. I looked General Brown in the eye and told him I wanted to be his JCU commander

and I am not. I want to be the JCU commander. That's what I want to do, and I want to commend. So I had the opportunity. We ended up pulling our kids out of school a little bit early in 2000, and I took command on our anniversary on the 12th May in 2000. And at the time, everything was focused on the Balkans. You know, a lot of work going on inside the J-Soc community.

It was all about the Balkans and, you know, Tuzla, all across Bosnia, you know, Sarajevo, I mean, they were, they were hunting the, you know, the war criminals, Piffwick, I think is what they called the operations. And so, you know, again, one of my first trips when I got to JCU was into, let's see what we were doing on the ground there in Bosnia. But we had a really awesome training cycle. You know, the joint operational readiness training cycle for the J-SAC units inside J-CU, we have these named exercises that we run every quarter.

And we do everything from, you know, basic establishment of the ISB, the forward staging base, mission support sides, you know, putting your communicators through the drills, just battle drill after battle drill. We had communicators that would go up and work in the national capital region at the FBI headquarters for what's called the emergency support teams where those guys were on a short string. They had to be wheels up within an hour and a half. So we would constantly, every month, we would do a rotation up there. We did, we would do shipboard training where we would establish a float staging bases on a variety of Navy vessels. We would do that once a quarter. I got to do my first quarterly training brief to General Brown on the USS Teddy Roosevelt, which was pretty awesome. But I will tell you, we had a readiness exercise out in Guam and in the Pacific where we were on the USS Bellowood.

It was miserable. We couldn't get comms, and I thought I was going to get fired. It was, it was, it was, it was one of those things where I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to lose my job because we just could not. There was, there was problems with the satellite antennas on the actual ship, and we had difficulty communicating where the J-Soc commander had to leave the vessel because he didn't have reliable comms. And I was frustrated as hell because I felt like I let him down.

But, you know, we hot-washed it, we figured it out. And, you know, I mean, the unit had succeeded so many times before that and after that, he realized that there was a problem. And it was beyond what our operators were able to fix at the time. So while we're going through all that, we have a change of command. And Dale Daly takes over for Doug Brown. And Daly's the new J-Soc commander. and he starts, stands up this capability called Advanced Force Operations, AFO. And so they picked a former squadron commander over at the unit to lead a guy named Scotty Miller.

We talked about before, again, the same guy that was on the ground in Somalia. So Scott's a personal friend of mine, we're neighbors. We live in, you know, in the same neighborhood there in Pine Valley in North Carolina. know, we, you know, we would drink beer and share stories together and all that. So Scott's standing up this, and I handpicked some of my very best communicators inside JCU, which is saying a lot because in JCU, they are considered the best communicators in the department of, I guess now, Department of War. And so best of all the services.

But I handpicked three or four guys, actually three guys that can function in this low-vis environment, that have the maturity, have the ability to, help Miller stand up this this capability. And so we go through another, we go through another joint readiness exercise out at Nellis Air Force Base, you know, kind of run in the traps and, and, and getting our muscle memory and improving what we do. But then in September of 2001, we're on this big exercise. It's the first real theater-wide AFO joint, AFO focused joint readiness exercise. And so we have folks spread out from England, Germany, Hungary. And because we still had stuff going on in the Balkans,

we had an operating base in Tewsla. We were flying from the UK in a C-17 with, I was actually with the J-Sog J-3 and a bunch of the battle staff that were flying into established a staging base in Tuzla. when across the data net we get word that you know the world trade center and the Pentagon had been you know airplanes had crashed into the world trade center and the Pentagon and the communicator watching the data net force pulls us up it's like this doesn't make sense because it hadn't it was you know we were it was everything almost all the traffic

up to that point was exercise traffic right right and we get this and it's like holy shit does it come across like this is this is not a drill you know not part of yeah yeah i didn't say that it just but it was like it you know it didn't say exercise and it was just it was like bam and so i get it and i give it to the j3 he's like holy fuck and you know i'm just like and so we're sitting there and uh we land we land on the ground at the airfield in tuzla as the ramp comes down i remember a master sergeant wadat he was the jock nceo he walks up meets us on the ramp and basically just told us in he was hey, the exercise has been canceled. You know, we're going into crisis action planning.

So it was a few days before we could actually leave and get back on, on U.S. soil. But, yeah, it was another kind of monumental moment there as the commander of DOD's finest communicators. I guess now Department of War's finest communicators. And what was kind of like the tone, I guess, when you got back to the states? Because, I mean, now you're planning for a real war, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so we get back. And it's, you know, typically you're on a string for a four-hour sequence.

You know what I mean? Yeah. If there's a JCS order to launch the National Mission Force, you typically, you know, it's fairly, it's usually no notice and it's, you know, the O300. I mean, you go through the drill. This was, you know, crisis action planning to deliberate planning to, you know, building concept of operations on what can we do, what will we do? We're going to, you know, and all this stuff has to get briefed up to the president, right?

And so we're going through the drill at Fort Bragg. We've got, you know, a bunch of different scenarios going on. And, you know, we're, we start pushing communicators out probably, I think it was around the 7th of October. You know, we start sending L&Os to different locations. And then I can't remember what day we actually deployed, but we ended up deploying to establish. a staging base at Masira Oman, and then we had a float staging base on the Kitty Hawk. Coms were good, by the way, on that one,

which was real world and it mattered, and when it mattered most. That was the super long helicopter infill was flown off the Kitty Hawk group. Yeah, so we're at Masira, Amon, with the staging base, and, you know, you got the whole task force there, right? And so the Rangers are getting ready for Operation Rhino, and the unit, the special mission unit out of Bragg is getting ready for Operation Gecko. And those are set to go down 1920 October.

So we're going through everything, a couple things that, I got in a couple heated arguments with the J6 at the time, because they were, they wanted to use, that was, they, there was a deal with call signs. They didn't want to switch calls signs from one squadron to another or something. So we had to resolve that. We got that resolved. But there was a crypto was going to change on midnight on the 20th.

During the mission. Yeah. And so I tell the J6, I say, hey, we got to talk to the sitcom J6 and have them freeze the crypto key. Yeah, yeah. And he didn't want to do it. And he didn't want to tell the boss. He didn't want to tell the J-Soc commander that we had a crypto changeover in the middle of the op. And I said, sir, we've got to.

No pointo. Yeah. And so I'm a lieutenant colonel at the time. He's an Air Force colonel. And I tell General Daly, I said, hey, sir, we got to, we're going to have to either roll early or we're going to have to freeze the crypto. But we can't have operators flying and be dicking around with changing the crypto key in the middle of the op. And so I ended up calling back to J-Soc, J-Soc, I called one of my buddies that was in the, in J-Soc at the time. And then I ended up calling personally called, I kind of went over the head of the J-Soc J-6.

And I personally called Dennis Moran, who was the Sintcom J-6. I said, hey, sir, we got a little bit of a problem. I think, you know, you can make a decision, but we need to make a damn decision because we can't have this go down in the middle of the op. And so they ended up rolling early. but it was created a bit of a kabuki dance because the guys go through the rehearsals and they're on one set of key and then they got to come back and reload all their crap with the new key but they did it and they were able to do all the columns checks but it's like why don't we just

freeze it and you know what I mean but it's one of those things but if the the J6 at the time didn't have the guts to tell the boss that he needed to you know that we need to do this I was like you can't just let it happen we got to be proactive and like make it happen you got to take care of the guys on the ground. You can't let them just, you know, anyway. That would have been a little frustrating. One of those situations you mentioned where all of a sudden the reach back is cut off because the comma was rolled over. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just that that can't happen. Yeah. You just can't have to happen. So then, you know, we ended up pushing, I mean, so we, we went kind of from that mode of the initial operations, Rhino and Gecko, to operation called Relentless Pursuit.

I think, a relentless strike. I can't, went from relentless. We kind of rolled from multiple operations, a multitude of strikes to something called relentless pursuit, which kind of took us into the Battle of Torabora. And so at the time Miller had brought over a whole bunch of different operators from different units and started standing up this AOA, FO Task Force and they established Advanced Force operations and they were some of the first elements

and they added some additional JCU communicators with them to establish comms in Bogram. And this was when Boggroom, it wasn't. There was a bomb-ed-out Russian. There was no, there was no green beans. It was, it was, it was dusty. There was minefield, there was, there was mines out there, live mines. There was, it was a very, very, very. rustic to say the least. And so we get out there and we get set up and you know guys are,

you know, using the bathroom in a piss tube, you know, the white PVC pipe tube, you know, burning their stuff. I mean, it was it was luxury living at its finest, but it was a, and then I remember Gary Harrell had come over. He was leading an element from, from CENTCOM. And Miller was leading AFO and that's when kind of things started happening where, you know, the first squadron that came in was B squadron. And then, I can't remember who came in behind them, but we were kind of doing a rotation in about January. And so I came, I came back in January of 2002. And I sent, you know, we had, we kind of did a rotation and had some other folks out there. So I wasn't, I wasn't out there during the Roberts Ridge,

or the, what was it called? Pete Blaber ended up, I know Pete was on your show before, but Pete ended up replacing Scotty Miller as the AFO lead out there. For Torabora. Yeah, what was the name of the operation? Anaconda.

Anaconda, yeah. So I had some guys out there, you know, supporting J-Suck at the time, but that was a pretty ugly, ugly event, you know, what went down with Anaconda. And I know, I mean, I don't know if Pete was able to tell you the story there, but, yeah, there was. a lot of hard lessons learned on that one. I ended up giving up command of JCU in the summer of 2002.

And then I got to go command another unit, so which I went back to the 112 Signal Battalion to become the Signal Battalion commander. And while I was supporting J-Socq as J-CU commander, the 112th had supported John Mulholland in the fifth group up in, you know, Uzbekistan, you know, the early days. They had a company up there supporting him. And by the time I got to the 112, they had been rotating, you know, in and out of, in and out of Afghanistan. And when I took command on the, in July of 2002, the 112 had folks all across Afghanistan. They had a team up in Djibouti, supporting Horn of Africa, and they had a team out in the Philippines, supporting see Jashota dash P or combined joint special operations task force Philippines and so I

think the picture that was on the on the splash page that was me out at Oregon E on my first battlefield circuit they were pulling a couple of my guys out of Oregon E and switching out the teams there there was a great opportunity you know to go from JCU to the 112th continue serving in soft continuing in command continuing you know to support the fight while we you know you my first year in the 112, about December of 2002, we started planning real heavy for operations in Iraq. There was sent-com level exercises that were all kind of set in the stage for what would we need to do if we were going to go into Iraq. And then the spring, obviously, of

2003 is when Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off. And I basically deployed a battalion tactical command post, co-located in Alludeed Cutter with supporting General Gary Harrell, who was the Soxent commander at the time. But we had one of my companies was in Romania supporting Charlie Cleveland in 10th group. And I had another company in Jordan and spread out between Jordan and Kuwait supporting John Mulholland and fifth group. And one company had just returned from Afghanistan and they were kind of our reserve back at Fort Bragg. So the majority of my battalion was deployed from 2003 for the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. How did that kind of go on or how did it turn out for you from like a signals perspective? I mean, a lot of times we hear

the operator perspective or the soldier on the ground, the tanker. I'm kind of interested in the communications piece of it. Yeah. So I would tell you that this, I mean, even though you're in special ops and you have probably better communications capability than the conventional forces, at least we did at the time. They still, our systems were still too big, too clunky, not as maneuverable as they needed to be to support up and support what needed to happen, and especially with, you know, 10th group where they established a staging base in Romania and you have this big satellite hub in Romania.

Typically, you don't jump a satellite hub. You jump the spokes. You jump the single dish, you know. But General Cleveland wanted to get his just sort of out of Romania and into northern Iraq. And so jumping the hub was a bit of an undertaking. And it was challenged. I mean, the guys, you know, fought through it, but we learned a lot of lessons. And what we were able to do, though, from the lessons we learned on OIF1, by the time I gave up command,

In 2004 of the 112, we had pretty much modernized the whole battalion. We had supportive USAC and SOCOM, really SOCOM was in our corner, helping us modernize the get smaller, lighter, more capable capabilities out there. And basically upgrade almost every team that we had in the inventory, which was good. But a lot of that was you kind of got to go to war with the kit you have. And then you know, you build as you come as you are, build as you go and constantly improve. right? And that's what we were trying to do is constantly improve and try to make things better for the commanders and the soft elements that were out in the field.

And after the invasion and everything, what was sort of the next step for you? So I spent about four months over there, came back, and then we had downsized our support to about a company level. So we started rotating companies, you know, always had a company rotating over the whole time I was, remainder of the time I was in command. And so, and I took a couple more trips over to visit the guys, but I was not there, you know, permanently after, probably about, I guess, back July of 03.

That's when it started getting, you know, after the initial phase of OIF, started getting ugly into the, you know, the insurgency, right? And so things were starting to get a little uglier there. But, yeah. And then what did you do after the, one talent one 12 so I got selected on the what's called this smooth board the special mission unit selection board to command a a mission support squadron for a special mission unit up in

up in northern Virginia based out of Fort Belvoir so I got selected I got notified actually I got notified while I was in Iraq visiting I was visiting the task force in Iraq and I got a call. And I remember I got the call from the deputy commanding general of Usasok. And then I get to the units, the special mission units, forward deployed headquarters in Baghdad. And I remember Bennett Sokolik congratulating me. It was like he already knew.

He didn't know. I guess a lot of folks knew before I knew. But anyway, I got notified while I was there. And then the following summer, I took command of the mission support. for this special mission unit. It was a unique, very unique command. Everything the unit does is, you know, low visibility, kind of clandestine mindset.

Most of the, you know, a lot of our, you work very closely with the Intel community. We have, you know, specialists in human intelligence in one of our squadrons. We had specialists in signals intelligence in another one of our squadrons. And then I had the squadron that had all of the medics, all of the rigors, all of the logisticians, and all the communicators.

And everything we had to do, you know, if you have to do it in a clandestine environment, in many cases, you know, not in uniform, in many cases, everything has to be unattributable, you know, non-attributable. So it's all, you know, you've got to be able to hide in plain sight and be able to, you know, connect these operatives that are spread out in a variety of, you know, very dangerous places and make sure they have everything they need to function and survive. And so it was a unique opportunity there to command a similar but very different kind of unit. And so for me, it was six straight years of commanding in special ops, you know, between JCU, 112th, and then this other special, I'm sorry, yeah, between JCU, the 112th and then this other special mission unit, it was, it was, you know, loved it.

It was, it was great. you know but while I was in that unit every time the unit commander would deploy I would put me in charge to be like the rear D I was running the unit in the rear and we were constantly rotating a squadron commander over forward deployed to run all the unit operations that were happening between Afghanistan and Iraq and a lot of the adjacent countries okay because a lot of what we were doing was, you know, intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, and those types of things. And so as a, in March of 2005, I got to deploy, we had previously called this the forward deployed element, debt A. It was a pre, you know, I think you'd talked about dead A in your book, actually, but it was a, they named it.

It was just our, our commander had called it that, but McChrystal wanted to change the name of the task force. And so he called it Task Force 356. And the story behind the task force is one of our operatives was actually killed in a suicide bombing at the Mosul dining facility in December. September 21st, a guy named Rob O'Dell, Special Forces 18 series. He was a member of the unit. He got killed. And because our unit was kind of leading this task force, General McChrystal picked. the number based on the Julian date of the date that Rob got killed. And so 356 was what, you know,

the Julian date of December 21st. So I was the first commander of task force 356, which was pretty awesome. And I get over there and I'm replacing a guy named Sean Mahal and who's related to John. Sean was, he had one of the other squadrons at the time. But we did the battle handoff. And then one of the big things that happened, you know, I had a tremendous team of in the task force supporting, supporting the task force. I had a smaller task force 356 that we had a foreign fighter exploitation team. So I had members from our unit, some intel support. I had members from the FBI, HRT that was on our team.

And what we were really trying to do is understand and run the rat lines back to all these different countries. were fueling the insurgency with foreign fighters. And so a lot of it was, you know, things that were coming off of computers. We had a computer forensics exploitation expert out there. We were getting information from the tactical screening facility, the TSF where they were doing before guys would go to like a lot of the prisons. They would, you know, there was interrogations going on to kind of exploit and analyze what was happening so they could, you know, disseminate.

that information and find and fix. So that was kind of there we were there there during this whole thing called the F3 EAD cycle. I think you're familiar with that. Find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate. Where we came in was really the exploit analyze and disseminate. Exploit analyze and disseminate. We were we were trying to pull the thread on all of that stuff. And working with the task force on the ground, we're doing multiple operations every single night. We had, there was a joint interagency task force being led over in Afghanistan. There was another one in Iraq. And then we had working directly for me, I had, you know, operatives and analysts at various embassies and stations co-located with their counterparts where really we would fuse the intel, put a plan of action together, and then give it to a force to take action. And, you know, typically on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, it was a direct action and one of the units would take it.

But if it was in one of these other countries, it was usually internal law enforcement where they would take action based on information. And so it became a pretty powerful machine. And one of the things that while I was there, we had this special event that we had planned where we brought in a chief of base and one of my senior liaisons that was in,

I'm not going to say with country, but they came in with some equivalence to, I would say probably equivalent to like the U.S. FBI where they brought in some investigators that were hardcore, you know, no, really they understood the culture and they were going to do the interrogations. And so we launched this thing at Abu Ghraib, and it was on the second of April in 2005. So I fly out there with my team, we get everything set up and, you know, we're kind of going through our first day of planning.

We're getting, you know, kind of putting on our game face to figure out how we're going to do all this we're coordinating with the staff there at Abu Ghraib. You know, you have conventional units there. You have MI units. You have military police. You have, you know, Marines guarding the facility and all that stuff. So we're trying to get the lay of the land and figure out we've got this nasty little hoots we're staying in. You know, we set up our comms. We had a couple of communicators from the joint communications support element with us that, you know, it was kind of a mixed bag of teammates and we built this little, I'd say a little cross-functional team to go take on this mission. And so, you know, we get there on day one. We get everything set up.

And that night at Chow, right after the call for prayer, at about 7.06 p.m. or 1906, you know, local time or whatever, we're eating chow. We're at the dining facility. And we hear, oh, like, damn, that was close. And we hear another one. And it's like, holy shit, they're bracketing the dining facility. And then there's And then all hell broke loose. And for about two and a half hours, it was just constant state of rockets. There were four vehicle-borne IEDs that hit the towers of the camp.

There was, the gunfight went on for, I mean, it went on for a long time. It was pretty significant. And we ended up, a couple of our guys, I mean, we went to Chow, you know, we didn't bring our long guns with the sword nods, but it was getting dark and all. And so a couple of guys went back

and they scooped up our long guns. We were still at the dining facility, They didn't want a lot of people running around the compound. But we were kind of bracing ourselves for the Alamo moment. You know what I mean? Because we didn't know what the heck was going on. There was a, I think like 70-some insurgents got killed. I think there was like 44 wounded, U.S. wounded.

We had one guy that basically had a shrapnel scrape on his arm, but that was about it. But it was, I was supposed to leave that night at 9 o'clock. I was getting the team set up and I was going to go back to Balad. I called back and told General McChrystal, I said, hey, there's threats. There's, there's discussion of having, like, the threat indicates there may be more of this. And I don't really feel comfortable leaving my guys out here and not being here. So I'm going to stay for the week if you're okay with it. I didn't have great comms with all the other outsides, which kind of, but I had a good NCO back at the law that was taking care of all the other outside.

So I had good enough comms. And Balada had great comms. But here I had, but it was like, I could do what I needed to do from Abu Ghraib for a week. But I didn't want to leave the team and not, and go back to Balad when they thought there might be, you know, this was during the heavy days of Zarqawi, just doing, you know, brutal stuff in a variety of locations. And that same night. So I forgot to tell you this, but while I was at Balad, my brother was also, he was in a conventional unit. He was a logistician in the first COSCOMs, Core Support Command and out of Fort Bragg. They were on the other side of Belad, but every Sunday night or every Sunday afternoon, he and I would meet at our DFAC, our dining facility for lunch.

We'd have lunch together, and then we'd smoke a cigar and drink near beer afterwards and just kind of shoot the crap and tell stories about what happened. And so that's Saturday night when all hell broke loose, I sent him a note and I say, hey, man, I'm not going to be able to have to meet you for lunch and cigars tomorrow. Crazy thing happened. I'll tell you when I get back. And his response was, yeah, no kid and me too. I'll talk to you when I can. And so come to find out, I get back to Balad. He was leading a convoy of a logistics unit that was getting ready to go replace another unit. And they were about two and a half miles outside the gate of Abu Ghrae going to a logistics facility.

When their convoy got blown up by, they actually lost guys in the convoy. They hit an IED and they came to like a standstill. And they had Apache gun ships called in and actually helped them get through that situation. But that all happened, you know, myself and my brother, you know, within just about a three-mile radius of each other on the same night, which was pretty crazy. When we told that story to my mom, she about lost her mind. I bet. And before we move on, I wanted to ask you sort of what you learned about the foreign fighter networks, because, I mean, it's obviously kind of a nebulous thing. But I remember the intel we were getting at the time that these guys were coming from all across North Africa through Syria into Iraq.

What did you work? There was a lot of them coming from North Africa. There was a lot of them coming through Jordan. The rat lines were running through Jordan and through Syria. There was a lot coming from places like Saudi Arabia, you know, other. I mean, it was, yeah, there was no like single source of foreign fighters. There was a, I mean, they were coming from all over the place. And Zarqawi, I mean, he was, God rest his soul.

But he was a, I mean, he was, he was a vicious, vicious, I mean, he was doing everything he could to fuel the insurgency and wreak havoc on, on our forces on the ground. And I mean, just ruthless killings of, I mean, thank God he met his fate, you know, a few months later. But yeah, it was, it was pretty brutal. But I would say, I mean, there was no single source. A lot of them coming from North Africa, a lot of them coming, you know, from, I mean, he had talked. back to Jordan, obviously. So I'm coming from Jordan. Yeah. Yeah. But the folks we brought over were brought over for a reason because a lot of them are coming from that particular country. Right. Right. And around after this assignment, was this when you went to be a part of the Joint Recon Task Force?

Yeah. So there was a lot of different. units doing clandestine like stuff, right? And General McChrystal realized that we needed to establish some best practices and some capability. So you had the Ranger Recon detachment, you had operational support troop at the unit down at Fort Bragg. You had, I can't remember the name of the squadron that, that, out of a dev group. Black squadron. Yeah, yeah. And then you had, you know, the unit I was in.

And so what they did. as they picked a guy named John Burnham. I don't know if you know John, he's a retired Navy SEAL, but John and, and Hightman, I can't remember Hightman's first name, but he led the Black Squader group. And then we had, so what they did is they stood up this Joint Readiness Task Force, co-located with our unit at our headquarters

at Fort Belvoir and really trying to get a handle on who's doing what, where, and for what purpose, for all the clandestine, you know, it was related activities, you know, it was, kind of advanced force operations that Miller and those guys that stood up was a very small sliver. But all the units were building their own intel capability. They were all building their own, you know, they were running sources. They were running, you know, and doing signals intelligence and all that.

And so it was really trying to get it all organized and focused. And they stood up a task force to kind of coordinate and deconflict that stuff. So we wouldn't have folks tripping over each other, I guess, and really trying to establish some best practices for a lot of that capability. So it's sort of like J-Soc for the recon community. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really a J-Soc entity. Yeah.

But our boss was asked to stand it up. And at the time it was Conrad Troutman. And then Mike Nagata came and took over my second year there as the unit commander. And around this time, like what were you seeing from, you know, the recon community? I guess you could say, like how had it evolved over the subsequent, you know, of 10 years or so. I mean, a lot of it was, you know, having the process of the capability down for, you know, getting guys to go to the farm and actually learn how to do humid operations correctly

and then coordinating that and deconflicting that with the agency. Everything we did on the SIGA side had NSA oversight, you know, because, and so making sure that, you know, we weren't, we weren't going to get out. of sorts with folks that really had SIGAN authorities and stay synchronized with the with NSA. But a lot of things was really establishing best practices and best capabilities for technical capabilities, you know, clandestine comms, covecom capabilities, you know, making sure guys could go in, you know, undetected with capabilities that were going to allow them to do what they needed to do and be able to communicate in a clandestine fashion

and trying to find the best kit that wouldn't send some sort of military signature where they could go in with something that just looked like a phone or a laptop or whatever, but it had capabilities that could be used. We had some establish some cover capabilities for logistics where things could be forward-staged in a variety of locations and just learning and working with Intel community teammates and counterparts to put some, you know, systems in place.

Using, you know, diplomatic pouch to, you know, get capability in and get it distributed to, you know, different location. And just a variety of tradecraft and field craft capabilities that constantly were evolving. Does that answer your question? Yeah, absolutely. And from there, you were off to the War College? Yeah, I ended up. So when I was Mike Nagata, I was, I think I, so on the trip, later I went back to Iraq,

and it was just a short visit, visiting our guys. And the first time, I think Troutman was my boss, the second time Mike Nagata was my boss. And well, and I got selected for brigade command while I was, we were in Balad. I remember we were kitten up, getting ready to fly out on a, on a helicopter out to the, to link up with some of our guys that were in a safe house out on the Syrian border. And I was flying with Nagata and a couple others. And he gets the brigade command slate. And, you know, commanders typically get notified when somebody on their organization either gets promoted or gets slated for command.

And he reads my command slate. He said, well, Pete, looks like you're going to command a brigade. You got the diso-central field command, whatever the hell that is. He goes, you know, you can't spell disappointment with. out Dissau. And I was like, I never forgot that. So anyway, I get slated for command. And then I leave the unit and I go to National War College. And so I'm at National War College in 2006, 2007. My son, my oldest son had just enlisted in the Army as an infantryman. And he signed an airborne contract. He was supposed to go to 82nd. He's going through one of the army. He's going through one

station unit training at Fort Benning, Georgia. And he gets pinpointed to Third Brigade Tenth Mountain Division. And at that time, Third Brigade Tenth Mountain Division, the brigade commander was a guy named Mick Nicholson, who later became my boss. But they were deployed and they were in the Korngal. They were all on what's considered Regional Command East. And I'm at the War College at National in downtown D.C. spending my year there before I go into Brigade Command. And I go down to my son's graduation. And, you know, he's excited.

He just made it through something. I didn't even think he was going to, you know, survive his teenage years because he was more of a hellion than I was. But he ended up, you know, making it through basic training and AIT as an infantryman. And he's slated to go to the 10th Mountain Division. When I go to his graduation at Benning, he can't wait to end up.

introduce me to his drill sergeant. And so I go meet his drill sergeant. I was like, this is freaking awesome. Man, he's proud of his accomplishments and his drill sergeant told me some great things about him and all that. Then he gets to 10th Mountain and he's up at Fort Drum, New York. And the brigade he's going to is deployed. And he's going as a replacement because they've lost a bunch of soldiers.

And so he's in third brigade. And he's slated to go to Afghanistan. He just doesn't know when. And I'm sitting at, you know, I'm living. at Fort Belvoir. I'm attending the National War College. And I started asking him about, you know, it's like, Matt, hey, what do you do for like pre-combat training? He's like, we're not doing anything. We're freaking painting walls, moving wall lockers. I said, well, who's, he goes, well, they got rear-D, you know, rear-d, the rear detachment, NCOs, they're not the cream of the crop.

They're, you know, as proud as he was of his drill sergeant, he was frustrated as hell when he was, you know, in, hurry up in wait modes, sitting back at Fort Drum, North Carolina, at Fort Drum, New York. And so I'm like, this sucks. And I realized Mick Nicholson's NCO, his command sergeant major, was a guy named Jim Redmore. Jim was, he was the fire support NCO at the unit at Fort Bragg when I was there in Signal Squad, and we got to know each other pretty well. And so I sent Jim a note, reach out to him on email.

I said, hey, sir, Major, I don't know if you remember we were. work together in the unit, but my son is in the brigade and he's getting ready to deploy. And when I saw him graduate, and I basically told the story about when he graduated, he was, you know, he had nothing but confidence in the non-commissioned officer corps. And he was as proud as he could be. But he's on his way to Afghanistan in a few weeks. And I want to make sure he's an asset and not a liability because he's not getting any training right now.

and he goes, sir, I remember you. I remember you well. He goes, my daughter's over in Iraq, right now, I know exactly what you're going through. I got this. And that weekend was Labor Day weekend. And Matt, he gets a pass, and he comes down to visit me at Fort Belvoir. And, you know, I had just left the unit, and I had all the medics that worked for me. And so there was a high-speed special forces medic that was in the mission support squadron.

and he brought over a dummy and he brought over you know a manica you know basically brought over all kinds of of training aids for for medical training and so i'm cook we're doing having a cookout on our back porch at fort bellowr and um the guy's name's neal gleason neal is running mat through a scenario after scenario of you know first first responder combat lifesaver kind of stuff and just the whole weekend then like saturday and sunday and and and and it's you just running him through drill after drill. And he puts together a med kit for him. And he puts together, he has this laminated training thing.

And, you know, it's just SFMedic 101 kind of stuff. But by the time Matt got done, you know, drill after drill, just doing this, he had a lot of confidence in casualty collection. You know what I mean? Just treating a casualty and all that stuff. And he was like motivated. It was like the first bit of pre-deployment training he had was by accident. over beer with one of my buddies from the unit.

But Matt left and Neil, he built him a med kit with a little, you know, in a canvas pack. And he said, hey, man, when you get back up to Fort Drum, when all you, he goes, when all your privates are sitting around pounding your puds waiting for leadership from an NCO and you're not getting it, just pull this stuff out and do everything we did this weekend, do it with your buddies. And that's like, cool. He loved it.

And so he goes back up to Fort Drum. About that time, the Rick. cachet effect that happened from Sergeant Major Redmore back to the rear D. And they started, you know, putting them through their paces and running, and taking them into ranges and doing all the kind of stuff that they should have been done. But, yeah, just, you know, I mean, we owe it to those young kids before we put them out there to make sure that we're not sending them out there.

You know, and it hits home pretty hard when it's your own son. You know what I mean? So I called in a favor, but it was worth it. And it needed to happen. Was your son ready to drop his SFAS packet after that experience? Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know about that. He was still a private first class, but he was pretty motivated. But then he gets to, what's funny is he goes back to Afghanistan.

And by this time, my brother that was with me in Balad a few years earlier is now in JASC as a logistician. And he's in Bogram. And so Matt flies into, first he flies into K2, I think, and he flies into Bogram. And, you know, my brother meets him at Bogram at the airfield. And he's, you know, duffel bag, drag carrying all this crap. And, you know, they go have lunch together or they go have chow together or whatever. And they get caught up. And then he flies out.

I think he ends up going out to Oregon E. Same place where I picked up my team from the 112th. But he ends up going out there. They're in Burmell, I think. I think they end up in Burmell. Is that? I'm not sure. Yeah.

So he's in, I don't know if you've ever heard of the book by Sean Parnell called Outlaw Platoon. Yeah. But Matt was in that platoon, 287. Oh, I think he company 287, if I'm not mistaken. He was in, Sean Parnell was his platoon leader. By the time Matt gets there, there's six months into the rotation. So you got this newbie showing up. And he's fresh meat, obviously.

So he's got to like find his way amongst a unit as a as an FNG, you know, kind of trying to earn his, earn his stripes and figure out life. And the first time he goes outside the wire, one of the other, they go to set up a casualty collection point for another platoon that it got hit. And everything that Neil taught him on our backports that day, he was able to actually put into practice on his first mission outside the wire. which was like, holy crap. Yeah. Then that brigade, I don't know if you remember, but that brigade got extended. Typically they were doing 12-month rotations.

That brigade got it. They were supposed to come home over the holidays. And in fact, some of the folks, they had already done the left seat, right seat with the brigade that was coming in behind them. And some of the elements of their unit had already returned back to four. drum and some of the families had left Christmas presents waiting for their arrival after

right after the holidays where they were you know they left the tree up and they were left Christmas presence waiting and they got notified they weren't coming back till like Memorial Day so he ended up you know spending all probably about nine months over there but uh when he was uh when he got back um he uh you know he was again it was one of those moments was where my other son and I went up to meet him at Fort Drum, New York. We kind of went back to the, we went to the welcome home thing. And I flew up there. It was Memorial Day weekend.

I remember it pretty clear. But when they got back and they came in, he couldn't wait to introduce me to a squad leader. There was a guy named Staff Sergeant Jeffrey Hall, former ranger. It was in the 10th Mountain. And I asked Sergeant Hall, I was like, you know, like any dad would do, I guess. I was like, so how'd he do? I'll tell you what, sir, he's fucking steady in a gunfight. I was like, holy shit.

That was the greatest thing anybody could ever tell me. You know what I mean? I was like, okay. I was like, wow. That's good to hear. You know what I mean? So anyway, later on, okay, after the war college, I get to Disa Central Field Command, and you can't spell disappointment without this.

I'm responsible, you know, for all the, like, enterprise, the big pipes for all of the CENTCOM AOR, you know. So we've got a lot of different things going on. You know, we're trying to build up capacity, network capacity, big pipes for reach back, you know, for Iraq and Afghanistan. And at the time, Iraq was hot and heavy. Petraeus was leading Iraq. I can't remember who was leading Afghanistan at the time.

But anyway, While I'm at disassent, we go through a couple major challenges. Number one is we had this event called Buckshot Yankee. And Buckshot Yankee, the 101st was the forward deployed in RCE East, Regional Command East. A good friend of mine was the G6 there named Brett Reister. What had happened is there was site. vulnerabilities being on all USB drives. And they were able to kind of penetrate networks and move laterally through the networks.

And they were considered a huge risk. At the time, it was NSA and Joint Task Force G&O, Global Network Ops, this was before Cybercom actually stood up. But this operation became a freaking nightmare for everybody on the ground. And they were trying to identify all the risk. had to wipe a bunch of different machines, clean them up, and get rid of what they believe to be all of the cyber risk and the cyber threats on these. It significantly changed a lot of tactics, techniques, and procedures of what people were doing when they were going out on aircraft and when they were going out in vehicles. Because thumb drives at the time were being used for almost everything.

It created quite a challenge. But that was kind of thing, one, that was pretty significant during my time at this event. The other thing that happened that was really significant was there was a cable or a anchor drag across some undersea cables off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. And during this time, it wiped out about 95% of the intratheater, the reachback, intertheater reachback comms from Centcom AOR to anywhere. the world basically. These big pipes rely on these fiber optic cables that are go undersea. They carry a tremendous amount of data. When we lost that, I get a call in the middle of the night.

As the DisoScent Commander, we run on the Theater NetOps Center for all of Centcom. So everything has happening, you know, from the network side, we're monitoring it and managing it and trying to, you know, operate, defend and constantly improve the network. And we get this call that, you know, we had a cable cut. And first thing is like, okay, and what does that mean? Well, we have no reach back except satellite. I was like, oh, that's pretty significant. Because the throughput on satellite and the latency and everything else just, you know,

it's with two major operations going on simultaneously, it created a real challenge. So we ended up figuring out how to execute something called minimize, where you minimize unnecessary traffic, focus on the stuff that matters most, We had to bump up some, add some additional satellite capacity to certain organizations out there, reduce for others. We were making all kinds of moves. And at the same time, we're working with all these telecommunications because a lot of this is commercial telecommunications providers that do all this. And it had impact not on just operations.

It was the banking industry, everything. I mean, it had huge impacts globally on, you know, commerce and everything else. but you know they had to get these cable repair ships out there and it took a while and we had to alt-rout a bunch of that stuff but all that stuff you know was happening and then we had a general Petraeus ended up coming out of Iraq and taking over CENTCOM and I think that's when we went through buckshot Yankee which so the first cable cut thing actually happened first but then we went through buckshot Yankee which was the big cyber event I had a new disa direct and we were looking at how do we get, you know, more capability over in the theater, more fiber

connectivity, multiple routes, reduce the add capacity, add resiliency, and reduce the single points of failure. So we spend a lot of time and energy working that and coordinating that and setting up different routes. And one of the things we were trying to do is establish a fiber ring around Afghanistan around Ring Road and connect a lot of the keynotes and we were putting beefing up the comms in Kabul in Kondahar and in Bobram and so as the disocent commander I go over in 2009 it's in the spring of 2009 I think it was right after buckshot Yankee actually and uh my son is deployed again this time he's still in 287 but now he's sergeant gallager and not uh you know pfc Gallagher and while I'm visiting the 101st in Regional Command East,

and we're looking to set up, you know, big communications node there and add capacity, I get a chance to fly out to Fob Airborne, which is where my son was located. And so, you know, my NCO, I see, and I hop on a 47, and we start flying into Fob Airborne, and we're going to spend the night. I'm going to meet with Matt's Battalion Commander

We're going to do midnight chow with him and his buddies, spend the night, and then we're going to link up with, at the time, the deputy commanding general of the 101st and the G6, we're going to meet us the next morning. And we were going to go out to Pakistan and do some other stuff. And so anyway, I fly out to Fob Airborne, and as we're flying in, they're getting rocketed. And we get waived off. And so we end up landing at Fob Shank, which is where the third brigade headquarters is. So I was going to go in and see my buddy, Dave Haight. we were in the war college together and I was going to go tag up with Dave and kind of check in with the brigade commander and we were on kind of a milk run so we ended up catching a ride on a on a supply bird that was going from fob to fob right so we start we get off my nCO and I get off the bird at fob shank we start heading into the brigade talk when one of the crew the crew chief from the aircraft runs up and grabs us and said hey we got the all clear from fob airborne and so we're going to we're going to head back over there I was like all right so we get back in the health helicopter and we go back to Fob Airborne and we land, we drop off and it's like freaking pitch black

and we see a couple little lights. And then my son walks up to me and goes, Dad, you're not going to let a couple freaking rockets cause you to push out and, you know, he was basically busting my chops because he goes, I can't believe you weren't going to land here because of a couple of rockets. He goes, we get that shit all the time. All right, buddy. So anyway, it was pretty cool to see him. I mean, he had been downrange for a little bit. And so, and yet we had, we had, we had a, we had, ended up having Midnight Chow. He was in his, he was in the same squad. He was actually a team leader now, still working for Sergeant Hall. And, you know, he showed me his hooch and everything, his living arrangements. We got to, you know, stayed up and had Midnight Chow with him and all

of his buddies. Everybody was in his squad. And, you know, kind of telling stories like you do at a combat outpost there. And then we get back. And, uh, you know, Then he gets selected to be a squad leader. And he gets moved from that team in that squad for working for Sergeant Hall. And now he's leading a squad that does all the, what's considered all the, oh man, what are they key leader engagements? All the KLEs. When his battalion commander was doing battlefield circulation, they had a PSD.

And Matt led the security detail for Colonel Gallow, the battalion commander. That was his new squad. So he got moved from, I think, B Company over to H.HC. And so he got fleeted up to squad leader and moved to a different role. Well, about a week after he got fleeted up to squad leader and moved to a different role, his squad, Sergeant Hall and I think three or four other guys got killed by an IED blast. Oh, my God.

And so I'm sitting in my office back at Tampa, and I get this call from Matt. And I told my deputy, my deputy was a GS-15 civilian. I said, hey, if I ever get a call from my son, I don't care who I'm talking to him. I don't care what I'm doing. If he calls, interrupt me, I'll take the call. And so I had somebody in my office, and Sid was a little nervous. He didn't want to interrupt me, but he said, hey, sir, your son's on the phone.

So I get on the phone with him, and I could tell something was wrong. And I hadn't heard the news of this. And he said, he had sick. I mean, he had never dealt with, like, grief ever in his life. He had not, he hadn't even seen, you know, one of his grandparents died or anything like that. He had not, I don't even know if he'd ever go to a funeral up until that point. And so, you know, he calls me and he kind of is telling me what's going on. He said, he goes, he goes, I'm over here in HHC.

And he goes, because those were my guys. Those were my buddies. I've been with these guys for years. That was my squad. That was my team. Those were my guys. I should have been there. And he had significant.

significant remorse, you know, and he had guilt and everything else. And he was, he was dealing with it. He, that was a long conversation about how to deal with grief and how to compartmentalize it and be able to, you know, when you're sitting in your cot or when you're working in, you know, when you're working out at the gym or whatever, or if you're at the dining facility, you can think about all of that. But when you're on the turret and you're out there and you're doing, you know, PSD for those key leader engagements, you got to put that, you got to put that, to lock that stuff in a box and you've got to focus and you got to make sure you keep your head on a swivel and focus on the mission. That's why you're there. And it was a hard conversation for me.

Just to hear the pain in his voice. You know what I mean? And I had just had probably just a few weeks earlier, you know, had midnight chat with all those guys. And so I tried to make it a point to go to all their funerals. I hit all but one. But yeah, it was it was tough on him. But he, you know, he's a stud. He's, he's, but yeah, that was a, that was an interesting, you know, dad moment. Yeah. And being the father of a, of two soldiers. And they both, you know, between them, they've got, you know, five combat deployments.

So, you know, Matt's had three. He's had two in the 10th Mountain and one with the 82nd. And then his younger brother, Jake, had two combat. He was deployed in Operation New Dawn. And, you know, as a young, uh, paratrooper in the 82nd and then he got deployed in uh inherent resolve they were both in uh in iraq at the same time so for uh in 2017 but yeah that was a that was an interesting one you know yeah i mean being you know immensely proud but also very worried about your sons yeah yeah yeah yeah i'd much

rather be deployed myself than be worried about them and they're deployed you know what i mean Yeah, probably every other parent, too. And then 2009, you're with the AFPAC coordination center? Pardon? 2009, you were with the- Oh, yeah, yeah. So I leave this assent, right? And they have this big signal conference every year.

It was down at Fort Lauderdale. And I get told by the chief of signal and by the Army CIOG-6, or no, the NECOM commander, Hey, look, we're going to try to get you to Fort Gordon to be the chief of staff. And it should be a great job for you and may make you competitive. I'm like, all right, cool, I'll do that, whatever. Whatever you guys need me to do. So I think I'm going to Fort Gordon to be the chief of staff. And my wife and I are actually celebrating our anniversary.

We're down at Key West, Florida. And I get notified that I've been by name requested by General McChrystal to stand up this thing called the Pakistan-Afghanistan coordination. It was actually Scott Miller, who was on the joint staff as the DDSO, the deputy director for special ops. At the time, Miller was the deputy director for special ops, McChrystal was the director of the joint staff. And they're standing up this cross-functional team on the joint staff to focus the attention of D.C. and all the interagency and everybody on the main effort, which President and Obama made clear was Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So they built this thing and Admiral Mullen at the time was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It was established in 2009 and I was one of the plane coasters. I had the chance to work between myself and there's a Navy seal, was the other, oh six, a guy named Tim Samanski. Miller handpicked both of us basically and got McChrystal to sign the by name request, but they built the team with people they knew and trusted.

And so it was pretty cool that, again, was an opportunity to do something other than Signal and go in there and be a deputy director for a very important entity at the time. There was a lot of antibodies. So the joint staff, J5 didn't, you know, he felt that that was his job. He didn't want something one star, you know, having the same credibility as a joint director. But if you know Scottie Miller, if you know Mick Nicholson who came in behind him and every other PAC director that came in, I mean, they were all, you know, high quality, you know, war fighting leaders that were the right guys for the job. But it was a, it was an interesting opportunity. So when we first get there, you know, it's my crystal,

when we first getting set up, McChrystal just gets on the ground in Afghanistan and he's doing, and he's doing his assessment. And I remember, I mean, it was late nights, every night, early mornings, late nights, weekends. It was probably of all the jobs I had in 35 years of service. That was probably the worst grind because we were constantly and just churning out in a read-ahead material for the chairman and the sect-def. And at the time, the chairman was Admiral Mullen and the sect-deff was Bob Gates,

Secretary Gates. And it was during this period where, you know, McChrystal was going over there and he wanted to, and they were ramping up the night. number of forces, and he was doing his assessment. And I get a call on Saturday night from the director of the joint staff's office, and they said, hey, somebody leaked McChrystal's assessment. And Bob Woodward, you know, Bob Woodward, the author, and he said, Bob Woodward has a copy of it, and he let us know that I need you to come in and we need to go through this assessment and we need to look

for what should be redacted because he wants to give us a shot to redact things that should be redacted before he goes to the press with it. So that was good on him to do that. So like I, you know, call in a few guys, Dave Doyle and a couple intel analysts and a few folks. And we end up meeting at like 930 on Saturday night and we're going through the McChrystal assessment line by line. And the guidance was, you know, if it's a risk, risk to mission, risk to four. and risk to international relations. Everything else is fair game. Okay, leave it in there unless it will cause a risk to mission,

the risk risk to the force, and risk to international relations. So we spent all night going through that and making a recommendation of what should be redacted and why. And so the next morning, you know, Miller, he let us do all the work and then he meets us the next morning with the director of the joint staff, Admiral General Cartwright,

the vice chief, the vice chairman of the joint chiefs and michelle florinois who was osd policy and we're sitting in the the vices office and we're going through it and uh you know some of what we recommended being redacted they say now that's common knowledge that's not you know we have to worry about that so we finally get to a spot where we're comfortable saying okay you know leave this in we'll take that out so then it's got to go to mullin so sunday morning we have the meeting with the vice and Flournoy, then the next day it has to go to Mullen and Gates. And so, you know, we're churning all day on Sunday.

And then it finally gets to Secretary Gates and Mullen, and they're satisfied. It's like, okay, we can let this go. This should be no harm, no foul. It's fine if he prints it. But then Secretary Gates is a press secretary, comes down and he wants me to email the redacted version to Bob Woodward. I said absolutely not. I said, I am not.

I will send you the redacted version, but I am not going to be the guy that pulls the trigger on an email to Bob Woodward on unclassified network. I don't blame you. He goes, damn, I got to go log in. I say, yeah, but I'm not done it. But anyway, yeah, it was interesting. Then, you know, constantly supporting, trying to do everything we could to support General McChrystal,

make sure that ISAF was synchronized with CENTCOM, was synchronized with the joint staff, was synchronized with the services. And it was, it was good. We established a thing called the AFPAC hands. I don't know if you remember that, where we were trying to get guys, you know, trained on the language and the culture. And there was folks identified from all the different services. It was a good idea. I don't think it actually delivered us.

as we wanted it to, but trying to get guys, you know, culturally, culturally astute and, you know, learning, you know, Dari or Farsi and trying to and posh to and learning the languages and being able to go over there and actually, you know, be difference makers. And some of them did better than others. I mean, but by the time I ended up, my next job, I ended up from there, I went over to be the ISAF J6. But it was a good year in the Pakistan, Afghanistan coordination cell, but I could not wait to deploy. But a year of that churn, I was ready. I was ready to get downrange.

And so as we're approaching, you know, the spring, I think I'm going over to be General McChrystal's J6. And then I don't know if you ever heard of a lady named Sally Donnelly. Do you know who Sally is? She's a very, she's a strategic communications expert. She spent a lot of time. She was a special advisor to the chairman at the time, Mullen and she spent some time in media. She does a lot to prep people for, you know,

going through congressional hearings and testimony and stuff like that. She's very, very knowledgeable. Anyway, she walks down with a couple of copies of the Rolling Stone article and drops them on my desk and Tim Samanski's desk and we start reading it. And as soon as we read like the first paragraph and a half, it's like, oh, crap, this is, and then so McChrystal ends up, obviously, resigning and gets replaced by General Petraeus. The good thing is I had met Petraeus when I was the disocent commander before, so I didn't, I had never worked for him, but prior to that, but I worked, you know, with him when I was down at disocent and he was a sitcom commander, and when he was before that, when he was in Iraq. So I felt comfortable enough knowing, you know, if I wasn't going to work for

McChrystal was going to be working for a good boss. So I ended up deploying in August of 2010 to be the ISAF, you know, J6 there. It was a big push there was really getting everybody on the Afghan mission network, which was the coalition communication or computer network where everything was releaseable and really trying to get U.S. off of Sipper and really, you know, writing for release and sharing information with coalition partners and actually, you know, trying to operate as a coalition with everybody on the same network. It was a NATO job. So my staff was a was an interesting mix of people. I had a Canadian deputy when I first got there. He was amazing. I had a Polish frequency manager. I had a German sergeant major. I had a French plans officer. I had, it was a mixed bag

of donuts, man. It was, it was awesome. And it was very difficult to find anybody on my staff that could speak clear English, let alone write, you know, clear English for staff products. It was, it was quite challenging. So I spent a lot of, you know, a lot of time kind of, you know, really muddling through some stuff but uh it was uh it was an interesting time um you know i learned a lot working for general petraeus i spent a lot of time trying to do battlefield circulations trying to pull the whole j6 community together from all the regional commands and and all the different units and stuff that were out there it was a it was in the height of the surge so there was a there was a lot happening during that time um that obviously the biggest thing that happened was and it wasn't i was not involved with

it at all was the Neptune spear, the operation to take down, you know, to kill bin Laden. That happened while I was there, but had absolutely nothing to do with it. You know, I come in the morning for our standard, you know, battle update brief, first thing in the morning, go in to try to make sure everything's working. You know, so when the commander takes his update brief, he isn't frustrated with the comms and the VTC and everything else. So I go in a little bit early like I did every morning. And then I, you know, they got the TV on and they're getting.

ready for the Obama's speech after the operation had happened. But the operational security for that was, was, you know, from president on down, you know, through J-Soc was pretty tight. I mean, I don't even think they let Petraeus know until the operation was ongoing. I mean, that's how, you know, how good the OPSEC was. And then I have right before,

shortly before I redeployed after, you know, I was there for about 13 months, the, had the horrible, horrible crash of extortion one seven where we lost all the special operators that were on the on the Chinook that was a pretty pretty brutal incident as well through my time there it was a there was a lot of uh i think they've been making quite a bit of progress i had portrays for probably the first 11 months and then i ended up having john allen for the last couple months there.

Then I came back and I spent a year as the Exo to the CIOG6 back in the Pentagon. It was another, you know, interesting job, a little bit of a grind, not necessarily a job you really want until it's over. And then while it was a test of my resilience, I'll put it that way. I mean, you're being deployed with guys like McChrystal and Miller and Mick Nicholson and, you know, Joe Votel and all these different leaders, you know, that were just so calm and poised under pressure to just going back to the Pentagon and seeing the stupid stuff people would just freak out over when nobody's shooting at you

and, you know, and you just watch and learn and live working for some of the most poised leaders under pressure. And then you get in an environment where, you know, they flip out over the crazy. the craziest stuff. But anyway, it was an interesting year. I was kind of, it was a position that they picked me for again, because this was probably about the third opportunity I was, I had to be looked at for, for Brigadier General. And while I was in that job, I ended up getting selected. And so I ended up, my next role was as they, I got selected for one star and I went out to Fort Wachuka, Arizona and commanded what's called Network

Enterprise Technology Command, Netcom. which is they run really all the IT infrastructure for all the post camps and stations for the Army. So it was more of an enterprise IT type role, about 16,000 people spread out all over, you know, the globe. A pretty big mission. But the biggest challenge I had in that role was dealing with sequestration. So we were furloughing. We had a pretty heavy concentration of civilian workforce. And we had to go through the challenges of sequestration, trying to figure out.

how do we keep the network up when you don't have any money, you know, and trying to make sure we focused on ensuring that all of our O-Conis connections weren't bothered. And we took all of our risk in Conis. And there was a method to the madness there. All your four-star headquarters in the Army were in Conis, and all the Army senior leaders were in Conis. And if we could isolate everything forward deployed in Indo-Pacom and Southwest Asia,

and in Ucom and Korea and everything else and make sure that they could kind of focus and operate without any risk admission. We would assume risk in stateside because we know the senior leaders weren't going to tolerate it. We would be able to get the resources we needed. So there was a little bit of method to the madness, but it was interesting times.

We were trying to manage, you know, down to the dollar every individual contract. And a lot of this, you know, enterprise IT is a lot of its contract labor. And so it was creative contract management and just to try to make sure that, you know, we could keep the phones up, keep all the VTCs up and the networks run. And so the Army could continue to function. But it was an interesting time, especially for the civilian workforce, because they were furloughed for quite a bit of time. And from there, I spent a couple years at NETCOM.

acting or the deputy commander for a few months, about a year, and then I ended up being the acting commander for the second year. And then from there, I ended up going to CENTCOM to be the J6 for General Austin, who I had worked for when he was the director of the joint staff. He was the four-star in CENTCOM. And so I get there in late May, and I start my transition. the first week of June. And my first day as the J6, after the left seat, right seat with my predecessor, was the day Mosul or the day ISIS went rolling into Mosul. And so we ended up going right into crisis action planning for operation, what ended up becoming Operation Inherent Resolve. So that was again another tremendous opportunity, another baptism by fire in a new role. But it was,

it was good. You know, pulling all the communicators together. trying to find creative ways to stitch together the coalition, rebuilding a lot of the big connectivity that had been atrophied in Iraq because there wasn't a whole lot left in Iraq, but there were still, you know, there was still fiber and there were still capabilities that weren't hot, so we had to figure out what was available to us and what we could reestablish and start building an interesting connection

for this coalition that was forming under Operation Inherent Resolve. I did that for a couple years. I ended up getting promoted to a major general. I actually thought I was going to go to, they were looking at me to either go command, what's called CCCOM, Communications Electronic Command, or possibly the Cyber Center of Excellence. Then I get notified that I'm going to be what's called the Aeons director,

the architecture, operations, network, and space, director for the G6 of the Army. And so I ended up working for the new G6, or the G6 Army guy named Lieutenant General Bob Farrell. And when I get there and I have my first office call with him, I was like, hey, I thought I was supposed to be going to CCCOM. What happened? He said, General Millie happened.

Millie wanted you to come here to the Army G6. And part of that was because Millie got to know me when I was on the joint staff and I think he trusted me and he brought me in. He knew that the Army network was pretty jacked up and that the Army didn't have the network get needed. And there was this report that was written from the Institute of Defense Analysis that was directed by the House Armed Services Committee, Airland Subcommittee, that really wanted to take a good hard look at the Army's network because the network was not the network the Army needed to fight against a peer adversary. And so I got selected to lead what's called the Army's Network cross-functional team and spent my last four years, you know, leaning in. to try to modernize the Army network.

And that's everything from, you know, multi-path, you know, resilient communications in a contested environment, you know, where you're contested in space, the electromagnetic spectrum and cyber, trying to find resilient capabilities that can function in that environment, being able to establish a common operating environment

for computer, you know, for command and control and being able to communicate and synchronize all the warfighting functions, trying to streamline and make our command posts more survivable, more mobile, reduced signature, and then really working on joint interoperability. So those were kind of the three or four lines of effort we were focused on. And we were driving it pretty hard, you know, and I did that from 2017 to 2021. And that's where I culminated my career in the Army.

I ended up, we went through COVID, which was an interesting time. We went through some major, you know, fielding of new capabilities to a lot of the units called the Integrated Tactical Network, you know, providing units smaller, lighter, more capable columns connectivity than that they had before. And that's going to be a constant work in progress because technology keeps evolving. The threat keeps evolving. And so what we kind of found and what we decided then is we made a decision to stop fielding capabilities that weren't going to, it weren't going to be needed in the future. fight and we we tried to fix the ability for immediately for units to have better capabilities to fight immediately get them capability that was either being leveraged by the special ops community or by others but get them new kit that was capable without trying to develop something new and

take years to develop and spend you know a fortune and by the time you field it it's obsolete so trying to use a lot more stuff off the shelf and then capitalizing on stuff that the special mission units and the special ops community was using, if it could scale to the Army, we were trying to, you know, feed, you know, deliver that kind of capability into the Army. So it was a great mission. I had a very small team. I like to call them the most powerful platoon on the planet. There were about 24 people assigned and I had about, I would say, attached. I had about another 25. So it was roughly about 50 folks that were really trying, you know, doing the heavy, heavy lifting of trying to modernize the Army and get a network that will allow the Army to do, you know, command of control that it

needs to be able to do. Again, the focus was peer adversary. Think Russia, China, think electromagnetic or electronic warfare and being able to fight through all that. So that was fun. It was a good last few years. And then on July of 2021, I, you know, hung up the uniform and I made my move into industry. How did that feel after, you know, 35 years of military service and, you know, the way you describe your career?

I mean, it's a great trip, a great ride, you know, you did all the things we were supposed to do, got promoted to two-star. What was it like to finally hang up the uniform? Everybody tells you you will know when it's time. And I knew. I knew it was time. I mean, I was kind of seeing the writing on the wall. There was only a few other things that I could do if I was to, I was. I hit five years in grade as a two-star.

And it's kind of like, okay, it's time to get out of the way and make room for some other guys to move up. If I was going to be a three-star, which I don't think I was going to be, it would have been the Army G-6 or DISA or possibly the Joint Staff J-6. And at the time, they picked a great guy to be the G-6, a guy named John Morrison, a personal friend of mine. They picked a Marine to be the Joint Staff J-6, a guy named Dennis Krawl.

He and I served together in St.com, another great American, and great leader. And they picked an Air Force leader at for this. So I kind of knew that, you know, there was nothing. The music stopped and there were no more chairs and I was okay with that. So I didn't really want to do three more years of grind. I was, you know, a couple of those jobs would have been in the Pentagon. And I, it was, it was time to move on. And I was very, I served longer than I ever thought I was going to be able to. You know, I went in thinking I'd do four years, to build a little technical, you know, technical skills to offset my math degree and figure out where it would take me on the commercial side. I ended up spending a lot more time and being able

to do a lot more things than I ever dreamed possible. And I think it was good. The time was right for me personally. And so we, you know, I was looking at all kinds of different things. I reached out to a whole bunch of peers, a whole bunch of former bosses, folks that used to work with me, folks that used to work for me, folks I had met in industry over the way, you know, and on my way out, it was kind of during the height of COVID. It was, you know, early summer of 21, COVID hit in 20, but, you know, everybody was working hybrid, you know, at the time. Almost all of my interviews were either Zoom calls or teens calls or whatever, not a lot of space to face. And I kind of narrowed my search down to, you know, I was looking at everything. And I, I, I, I, I, I thought,

I felt like, you know, I've got 35 years of experience. I need to be able to use that to give something back. And with a son that's, you know, former infantry now, special ops communicator, another son that's former infantry now as a military intelligence officer, the company I ended up joined in CACI was a perfect fit for me because I can leverage my, you know, technical skills, my leadership, my domain experience, and be able to provide capabilities that's going to help those guys,

you know, give them solutions that, we'll allow them to do their jobs better. So for me, it was a good fit. And there was jobs I was looking at, companies I was looking at that were big, that were big bureaucratic machines. It would have reminded me of serving in the building. There were other companies that were big bureaucratic machines.

It would have reminded me of serving in something like DISA again. And then there was this company, which reminded me a lot of J-Soc. Because it's got structure. It's got tremendous, I mean, it's 40 plus percent. percent veterans, a lot of support to the soft and intelligence community and across all the federal government. But what I liked about it is they had the structure in place, but they had been really

on a trajectory of going from kind of butts in seat services to high-end, very unique, very technical, mission-focused capabilities, everything from space to airborne platforms to terrestrial you know, everything from command and control communications to ISR, electronic warfare, counter-UAS. I mean, it was a great fit for me personally to feel like I could come in. I could bring something to the table, but I could also learn something. So it was a good thing people, oh, go ahead. I'm just going to ask, you know, specifically, what do you do at Kaki? So I'm a senior vice president in the, it's called our C3I, Command and Control Communications, Intelligence, Line of Business.

So our primary customer base in the division, I'm in the division that does tactical and platform C3I. But our customers are Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Huntsville. We support SOCOM with a big program at Fort Bragg, North Carolina that supports all of SOCOM and with their deployable communications capability. We do some work with the Air Force. we do some work with Customs and Border Patrol. We run their Air and Maritime Operation Center Forum, and we run the DHS ICE Tactical Communications. I mean, it's a pretty good portfolio.

It's kind of right in my willhouse, but I like it. And one of the things that when I was leaving, a lot of other retirees and folks tell me the thing they missed the most when they got out was the camaraderie. And the thing I like about this company, because you've got so many veterans and the from the CEO on down, everybody's so mission focused that the camaraderie is there. I mean, I feel like the people I work with, you know, the role I have,

I feel like I can do good in the role. People I work with, I feel like I can have fun, you know, and feel like I'm with like-minded individuals that get the mission accomplished. And it's actually, for me, it's been a pretty good fit. I've been doing it for about a little over four years now. And tell us about the Six-eight Alliance. Yeah, so another great piece of advice I had when I was transitioning was, you're going to want to do different things like be on boards or do consulting part-time. And so I immediately, when I transitioned back in 2021, I stood up in LLC.

And I called it 6-8 Alliance because the unit I was in up in northern Virginia, the motto was Isaiah 6-8, when the Lord says, whom shall I who will go for us and the Isaiah 6a says it is I Lord send me and send me was kind of the unit motto and so I I had to pick a name and I was trying to find something that wasn't already taken so I set up an LLC in North Carolina for really it's focused on consulting leader development if I get to sit on any boards or anything like that I'll do that through the limited liability company I'm also had the honor of speaking at a ROTC commissioning a few years ago at Campbell University, and we bought a house right outside Campbell,

actually right on the golf course there at Keith Hills by Campbell University. And when the president of the university found out I was moving there, he asked me if I wanted to be an adjunct professor. And so I met with the dean. I met with the chair of the Homeland Security Department. And so I teach about, I got four different classes I teach in the Homeland Security Department. I teach one on foundations and concepts of terrorism. I teach a course on intelligence and national security.

I'm getting ready to teach a course on Homeland Security and another one on national and international security. So they're very, they're all undergraduate courses, you know, 200 through 300 series. It's a lot of fun. It's a good opportunity. needs to do good and have some fun. Stay connected to the youth. You know, contribute to a local university there in North Carolina. I think we have a question for you from a viewer or listener.

But you mentioned that you might be working on a book also. Yeah, I'm putting some pen to paper. I'm trying to get it structured. I am not sure exactly what to call it. And I'm not sure exactly what, you know, it's really going to be, I think, a bit of an autobiography and a leadership book. That's where I want to go with it. I'm just trying to make sure it will resonate, hopefully it will resonate with some folks beside myself. If nothing else, I want to leave it as something that maybe my kids and grandkids will read.

You should. And we'll be able to hear some stories they wouldn't otherwise get to hear. But, yeah, I'm working on it right now. It's a long way from publication, though. That's great. I've got a bunch of stuff jumbled together, and I'm trying to get it organized into some sections, and I still have a lot of editing I need to do.

Dee, what do we got? All right. We got from Sean. He asked, can you talk about the overall frequency of having to troubleshoot Army comms issues, and what's the most extreme action you've had to take or heard of to reestablish communications? Good question.

Say that again about the frequency? Sorry about that. Hold on. What's the most extreme action you have had to take or heard of to reestablish Army communications and the overall frequency of having to troubleshoot Army comms issues? Yeah, so I will tell you there was a, I think the most extreme challenge I had was actually on a flow staging base in the Pacific. in, we were operating out of Guam, and we were on the USS Bellowood. It was a Navy vessel, and it was as well as the Joint Communications Unit Commander. And I had the best communicators on the planet on my team, and we were out there,

and we had done this multiple times before, and we could not make it work. And the extreme, I mean, because it was a staging base and the J-Soc commander, who was a two-star at the time, when I was a, at the time I was a major, I could not provide him the comms he needed. He had to depart the vessel and go back and go back to the intermediate staging base to command and control. It was frustrating.

It felt like mission failure to me. We stayed there and tried to identify and isolate the problem and continue to work. One of the tier commanders from the Navy side, he was on the vessel and I didn't want to leave the vessel and leave him stranded without comp. So our guys constantly troubleshot it. And we realized it was a problem inside the system, inside the Navy ship,

where we just couldn't fix it. Our guys couldn't fix it. And the Navy couldn't fix it. And it was the only a flog staging base where we've had that kind of a troubleshooting problem where we could not find a solution. I think another, I mentioned the cable cut in Iraq. I mean, that was significant, just the, the sheer impact it had on because at that time in 2007, 2008,

off the, you know, having all two simultaneous wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the reach back requirements that those four star commanders on the ground, back to sent com, back to the Pentagon, and the fact that, you know, they were operating basically on a on a shoestring, you know, with satellite connectivity and significant reduction of bandwidth. A lot of messages couldn't go through. That was a pretty significant challenge. I would say on the tactical side, at the lowest echelon,

I think being in situations in Afghanistan where you've got all the different crew systems and the counter IED systems, and you got communication systems on a lot of these convoys and platforms. And the spectrum was so congested that a lot of the, if you had some of your counter IED systems up and running for force protection, a lot of the comms wouldn't work. And so we were actually, we weren't, we weren't being contested through electronic warfare,

but we were congesting ourselves by just, you know, mismanagement of the spectrum. We had stuff that was just coside interference on antennas and different things like that. And so you had to find creative ways to when to turn off and turn on the systems and be creative on kind of, you know, establishing some TTPs for that. Hopefully that answered the question. Yeah, I think so. Thank you, Pete. And before we get going tonight, is there anything that we didn't get to talk about that you'd like to mention?

I mean, I just think that, you know, I know you had Pete Blaber on here before. He talks a lot about common sense leadership. I think, you know, I established something I called common sense leadership years ago. And it was, you know, and it applied. It kind of helped me out through the military a little bit. But it was one of these things where, you know, having the five senses. And I call them the five senses of leadership. and that's a sense of pride.

And I think if you go into any organization and they have a sense of pride in what they do and who they are, what they do and who they represent, typically that's kind of the key to a high-performing organization. And I think, you know, as a communicator, having a sense of urgency is important. When you do have a problem with the spectrum

or you have a cable cut or you may not be able to fix it immediately, you may not be able to get the answer from the top. But you've got to figure that, downtime is measured in seconds and you got to get after it. You've got to have a sense of urgency. I think it's important to have a sense of direction. Know where you're at, where you're going, and how you're going to get there. And that's not just when you're driving from here to, you know, from North Carolina up to New York, if I was coming up to see you in person, I would need to have a plan, right? But it's also, you know, if you're a leader and you're

mentoring a young soldier or you've got an employee, it's like, when you sit down for performance counseling, It's like, here's where you're at. Here's where I'd like you to go. And here's how you get there. And I think helping put that sense of direction in place, I think that's a key part of counseling and mentoring, no matter whether you're in the military or in any world, any job. I think having a sense of purpose, too,

understanding the big picture. I had a leader one time that had a little sign on his desk. It said, why leads what and how. And if the leader knows why, things need to be done, and the people that are working for him know what to do and how to do it, typically they can usually be successful. But I think, you know, if you have a brick layer putting one brick on top of another, if he knows he's building a cathedral, he'll be a little bit more excited about putting one brick on top of another.

You know, and I know Sidney Shacknell used to use this example. You know who Sidney Shacknow is? He says, you got the guy and he's putting one brick on top of another. And he asks him what he's doing. He says, I'm putting one brick on top of another. And you ask the other guy, what are you doing? He goes, I'm building a wall. Can't you see?

It's going to be a big, beautiful wall. And he asked the third guy. And the third guy says, I'm going to build the cathedral. It's going to be the most beautiful cathedral. He goes, that guy has a sense of purpose. He takes pride in what he's doing. Right, right. So anyway, sense of purpose, knowing the why, knowing the big picture.

And I think it's also important to have a sense of humor. Okay. And this is, you know, I was kind of a little bit of smart ass growing up. I was sometimes the class clown. Like I said, when my dad died, I kind of had to buckle down and become the man. But I feel like I haven't lost my sense of humor. I just got to know when to temper it and, you know, make sure I don't say the wrong thing in the run, you know, and offend somebody unintentionally.

But I think it is important to have fun. I think it's important to be able to laugh at yourself. I think it's important not to be thin-skinned and be able to have a good time. Because I think you can have a hell of a lot more fun, you know, being ready when, you know, when you can tell a few jokes every now and then and be able to take a joke. I think, yeah, I think I guess what I'd leave you with is my last kind of mantra that I lashed onto, my youngest son when he was a teenager, and I was in the unit in Virginia, he was playing travel hockey. He was the captain of his hockey team, and he had what he called the three

rules of Gallagherism. And he was the hockey captain. And okay, Jake, talk me through this. He goes, find a way. Don't be that guy and give him the business. I said, I'll explain it. He goes, find a way, dad, find a way to get the puck, find a way to score, find a way to win. Find a way. I'm like, all right, I like it.

He goes, don't be that guy. Don't be that guy that gets a penalty when the game's on the line and we've got to play a man down. Don't be that guy that, you know, violates curfew and, you know, has to sit the bench. don't be that guy that does stupid shit. And if you find that guy, give him the business. A little tough love, a little performance, a little, you know, wall-to-wall counseling, whatever it takes, give them the business. I'm like, all right, I can live with that.

That's pretty good. So anyway, don't be that guy. Give them the business. But I think the most important of those three is really find a way. And I think, you know, growing up as a special ops communicator, I mean, I like to call myself a special ops communicator, even though it was only about a third of my career in special I think that's what really gave me the fire in my belly to want to continue serving and want to keep doing this. Because I feel like, kind of like Abrams charter, you know, for the Rangers, if you can take back what you learn to the regular army and make it a better, you know, make your unit better.

I think you've, you've done something there. And I felt like, you know, even though I was never a ranger, having the privilege and an honor of serving in some of the best special mission units in the Army, what I've learned there, I've been able to take to some of the of the conventional assignments and I think make the organizations better. So for me, it's about being able to take something, bring what you've learned and be able to contribute to whatever organization you find yourself in. So anyway, Jack, I want to thank you and for giving me the opportunity to be on this. This was really fun. Yeah, absolutely.

I really appreciate you spending your evening chatting with us. This has been really interesting and, you know, insightful for me. Yeah, I'm not, I mean, I know you have a lot of good shows with gunslank. and folks that are doing a lot of stuff where, you know, they're working on muzzle velocity and, you know, close quarter battle. And there's some real, I mean, you have some real no-kidding, you know, warriors and gunslingers on here. I mean, I'm, you know, I've worked around the nation's heroes and supported the best of the very best. And I've just been blessed to, you know, like I said, consider myself a special ops communicator. And I've, I've loved every minute ever.

We've also had all kinds of other people from CIA analysts to a combat weatherman, who is a hero in his own right. I'll embarrass him by saying that. He has a bronze star with valor. All these incredible people that, you know, you get to meet through doing a show like this. It's awesome. And I've tried to get special ops logisticians on the show before. And I've had a hard time getting them to talk.

But the logistics are, as you know, I mean, it's paramount. It's none of the other stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. But yeah, thanks again, Pete. And I hope to talk to you again soon. And for everyone else out there watching, thanks for joining us on the Teamhouse. Check us out on Patreon if you haven't already.

And we'll see you next time. All right. Thanks, Jack. Hey, guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Teamhouse podcast, the Eyes on podcast. and the high side news outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox, and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Aizon and the Teamhouse

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

Checking her out. The website for it is teamhousepodcast.com. slash join. Teamhousepodcast. Dot kit.com slash join. You go there and you enter into your email list, or you enter your email into the little thing on the website, and you're good to go, and that'll be it.

So we really appreciate your support, and hope you'll consider signing up. The link will also be down the description if you're looking for it there. And that's teamhousepodcast.kitkiloindia tango.com backslash join.