Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Us really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Oh well, you're the one who thinks so gracious for reason, your studio, your setup, so won't ever forget it. The reason the genesis of all of this is I was listening to your podcast with Darryl Cooper on Jocko Unraveling. It was on October fifteenth, and you said something that really caught both my eye and actually a segment that
we did that got quite a lot of attention. You said that Israel is losing the information operations in this war, that if you were the emperor of Israel, that you would stop bombing Gaza and you would shift towards a traditional counter insurgency campaign. So it's been more than a month since you made those comments. What are your thoughts generally on where the war is today?
I would say that actually, after that podcast came out, it did seem like Israel started to shift some of its media and I think they've done a decent job of that. Not an outstanding job, but a decent job. And as I look at where the war is, I haven't actually looked at it today, but you can start to see what does look more like a traditional counterinsurgency campaign. Primarily what you're seeing is sort of the isolation of
northern Gaza, which is an important move. And I think there's a there's a limitation that Hamas is going to run into What do you think that is? I think, you know, there's that quote at the beginning of the Civil War. I forget who set it off the top of my head, but he told the South, you have
the will, but you don't have the means. And you know, in the South, what they were doing was making cotton, and once they'd made cotton, they had to send it over to France to get it turned into to get it woven into cloth, because they didn't have the capability of doing that in the south, so really all they could do is grow cotton and in the north. The North was making locomotives. It was just a completely different scenario.
They could make weapons. The technology that they had, the manufacturing capability that they had was was not even comparable, not comparable in any way, shape or form. So I think Hamas is going to run into that problem where they have the will, but they don't have the means. I also, and I have not been to Gaza, but you see a lot of a unified front, or what appears to be sometimes a unified front in Gaza, meaning you see the right from October seventh, people cheering in
the streets, celebrating that unified front. I believe in many cases is not true. It is people that are intimidated. It is people that are trying to live their lives and trying to When the mob moves into your neighborhood, you you know, when the cops come into town, you don't talk to the cops. Course, when you have the opportunity to support the mob in some way that's going to make your life and your family's life better and easier, you show support. And this is the situation that the
Palestinians are in now. Is there a Is there a large group of Palestinians, especially younger Palestinians that have been brainwashed through the point and raised in that culture. Sure, and it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be a hard time to get them to come back. But I think that the unified front in Gaza isn't as unified as it appears to be on TV. And I think once the strain is imposed on Gaza, they're going to have problems.
And this is again a very close comparison, or you could make a close comparison to the Battle of Ramadi, where when we showed up in Ramadi, it certainly appeared on the surface that the local populace was in support of the insurgency, But as soon as the insurgency started to break, the local populace was very thankful and they were allowed to they they took the opportunity to support
the coalition forces. So I believe we might see that kind of thing in Gaza, and I think the Israelis are starting to It certainly appears that appears to be that they are treating this more like a counterinsurgency. I think they're making efforts to take care of the civilian populace, and I think they're moving in the right direction.
Interesting because that was That's one of the main reasons I found you such an authoritative voice. Is with the Battle of Ramadi our. You know, our mission was to destroy al Qaeda in Iraq, the insurgency inside of the embedded inside the city. You participated into the height of
that war in a similar like modern combat environment. And so given the similarity to where we are right now, how would you say the best what were the most strategic what were the most strategically important tactics and decisions that were made to actually achieve that victory In the interim period, well, we had some sort of security control over that city in Ramadi.
Yes, the most important thing essentially was building relationships with the local populace. And when you build relationships with the local populace, the local populace starts to give you information that you need and then you build relationships with the power brokers inside the city. So there was shakes, the shakes that had stayed or the shakes that had come back. Once they what we did was we helped them because
once we helped them, and by helping them. It meant hiring the shake to help us rebuild this section of the bridge. So then what does he do. He gets with his tribesmen. They were construction. He got three guys that were construction. They run this project, they rebuild this bridge. We pay them money. He has money. Now what does he do with that money? He reinvested in the local populace. He hired someone to start taking care of his yard and all the sud and you start rebuilding the economy
and you're moving in the right direction. So that's I hate the expression hearts and minds, but hearts, minds and wallets very important, and that's where you make true progress in these situations.
That's why it's interesting because, as I understand it, the most important thing that happened during the campaign against al Qaeda in Iraq was separating the Jihatas from the local population. The worst critics of Israeli military strategy would say that hasn't happened at all. If anything, you've seen collective punishment, the denial of water, some of the general treatment, even some of the calls you know, just generally for making
the Palestinians and all of them pay a price. From a military perspective, Why is that the wrong thing to do? Just from a conceptual level as opposed to tactics, Why is it the wrong thing to do to not try to separate the Gjihatas from the civilian population.
Well, it's for what you just said. Yeah, it's for what you just said. If you treat everyone in Gaza as if they're then you're gonna end up inflicting harm on people that, as I said earlier, may on the surface support Hamas, but they live with Hamas, right, That's who they live with. That's who their government is. That's who is going to give them or not give them food, give them or not give them water, give them or
not give them medical treatment. That's who's doing it. So if they don't build, if you're a local Palestinian and you live in Gaza and the government is Hamas, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna Are you gonna be the one that stands up and stages a rebellion? You can, but what's gonna happen to you? You're gonna get killed. So what do you do? You try and
keep your family safe. You try and do what you can to get by and part of getting by is showing support to the government, so that's what they're doing. So now if we start treating or if the Israelis treat everyone there as if they're Hamas, they're gonna inflict harm on people that are not Hamas, and that is going to end up being problematic. Now, there are some people that make this reference to you know, if you kill one innocent person, you've just created five more terrorists.
I have not found that to be true. Interesting, I've not found it to be untrue, but is not completely true. There are times that most of the time the local populace, they recognized the difficulty of the job that was happening, and so when an innocent civilian would be killed, of course they'd be heartbroken, But there was also the recognition that, oh, we know what you guys were trying to do. We know that my son was in the wrong place at
the wrong time, and that's what happened. And of course, you know, we would pay them money to, you know, apologize for what had happened when civilians got killed. So and it would rarely would you see that kind of animosity. In fact, most of the time the was directed towards the insurgents and not towards the coalition forces, So I would my guess is that in Gaza you would find
some of that as well. Again, I haven't been to Gaza, but my guess is, if you're a normal Palestinian and you're not a Hamas supporter and one of your family members gets wounded or gets killed, sure you might be mad at Israel, but I bet you're a lot more angry with Hamas for putting you in this situation in the first place. So I think that Israel's probably aware of that as well, and I think that Israel's weighing that to the best of their ability to try and
keep the local populace safe. I mean, they're setting up these corridors. You can see people leaving through these corridors. They're doing the best they can. This is a terrible situation. This is a nightmare. This is a nightmare to try and solve. This is what's a problem that no one is going to come out of unscathed. It's not gonna happen.
It's getting into a knife fight. When you get into a knife fight, you're gonna get stabbed and you're gonna bleed, and the other person's gonna bleed and die, and that's what's gonna happen. So thinking that we're gonna go into a knife fight and you're somehow gonna miraculously not get cut, not get wounded, it's not gonna happen. Yeah, So that's that's the situation that Israell's in right now.
It's true I've described as a Gordian knot. I think that's really the best way I think, just to maybe
parse a little bit what you're talking about here. It seems to me that there needs to be a baseline level of trust and so a lot of the early criticism, actually the early podcast you guys did, was really in the bombing phase of the campaign, and I was curious, you know, as somebody who operated in a similar type environment, what were the considerations that went in, Like, let's say, if you were calling in an air strike, what level of thought and consideration would you have to make when
you're employing airpower? Because I think the critics that I've seen of the Israeli strategy would say, you know, the US, we went to pretty extraordinary links. I think we can get to this in a little bit to protect the civilian population then a civilian casualty number in Moseil, I
think bears that out for the battle against Isis. So what were the thoughts and the decisions in your mind when you were trying to think about inflicting damage on an enemy target, weighing the possibilities of civilian casualties, and then also when not to call on an air striking instead put your troops in harms way, because you're a commander's actually had to make all these real time decisions.
The effort that was made to not have civilian casualties in Ramadi was extraordinary. It was absolutely extraordinary. The amount of air support that was used was minimal. I'm talking a handful of times when I was there that buildings
were hit with air support, were hit with bombs. In those situations, it would be because there was no other way to resolve a scenario that was happening and you had confirmed let's say a multiple sniper, multiple GI hottess sniper element in a building and they have now killed two three four coalition that's Americans and Iraqis. People have tried to maneuver on and can't get it done. In those few situations, you would get okay, they're gonna drop this,
but we're gonna drop this building. We're gonna hit this building with some kind of air assets. We used occasionally a C one thirty, and do you know a AC one thirty is so AC one thirty is very precision and they also have very good target identification. So there was a couple times where AC one thirty was used to engage. But that's like I said, it's it's about as precise as you're gonna get from the air. But the vast majority of the time we didn't use any
air support at all. Why because the chances of collateral damage in civilian civilian deaths was too high and so we probably used closer or support five times wow, in you know, a seven month deployment where we were troops in contact hundreds of times.
So was there ever So obviously you had to justify that to your men when you're rolling into this combat environment, they're like, Hey, wouldn't it be easier to just drop a bomb? You know, we're putting our lives at risk every time we go outside the wire we can get blown up by an Ied. It seems to me that Israel has made a different calculus where they are trying to minimize their idea of casualty as much as possible. And it sounds like a stupid thing to say, because
everyone said, well, isn't that obvious. Isn't that what every military should do? So how did you work through the calculus? I assume that there was also a strategic decision made at some point where like, no, we're not going to do this explicitly for the civilian mission. Was it because this overall strategic goal was we have to separate the
Gihatis from the population. Was it because that there was you felt like you could still militarily accomplish the mission, and risk is just inherent whenever you're conducting these type of operations. I'm curious he can go into that.
Yeah, I mean, you'd have to really trace it back to the fact that Maliki had been elected prime minister, right he was a Shia, The Iraqi Army itself was vast majority Shia, and they're now rolling into the city of Ramadi, which is vast majority Sunni. So you already have a very ten tenuous situation here where if the Shia army goes into the Sunni city and just starts
wantonly killing it's going to be a problem. So they had done that in Fallujah, and or coalition forces had done that in Fallujah and really gone super kinetic and cleared the entire city and left no one living that were enemy. And they'd also gotten all the vast majority of the civilians out of there. When you when you stayed in Fallujah after there was you know, the fourteenth leaflet put on your doorstep, you knew what was coming.
And those Gihannas didn't keep the civilian populace there either. Where it certainly seems that in Gaza they're being kept in areas where they're being told to leave. So because Maliki didn't want to start a civil war between the Shi and the Sunni, he knew that it had to be a more surgical operation, a slower, more methodical operation than it was in Fallujah. And therefore you can't go
in and just start dropping buildings. And furthermore, for my guys, they're going out in operations and seeing a bunch of civilians and seeing a bunch of civilians with wives and kids and these normal people, and my guys are seeing them there. That's the best. There's four hundred thousand people in the city of Vermandi, there's estimated between somewhere around five thousand insurgents. Is what these kind of like what the average report? Sometimes they say three, sometimes they say seven.
But you're talking about five thousand enemy combatants in a city of four hundred thousand. So it's not like it's hard to look in there and go, oh, yeah, these five houses that we just entered that had a bunch of normal Iraqis in them, we don't want to hurt these people. So it wasn't a hard conversation or it wasn't even that big of a deal. No one thought, no one, there was no there was no no one coming back to me saying, damn it, Jocko, we should
be able to drop these buildings. Never had that conversation with any of my guys when a building like I said, if there was a building that was housing an active insurgent group that was doing actual damage to coalition forces, yep, that we'd attack that building or we possibly could drop that building. But most of the time it was, oh, yeah, there's insurgents in that building right now, and now they're
moving to another building. And the building that they were in, and the building that they're going to all have civilians in them, So for us to start dropping buildings is not what we're doing, and we didn't do it. Well.
I'm curious because you know, again, if we think back to some of the early phases of the Israeli campaign, it was that all the conversation of ald around what we're talking about here, which is what are legitimate targets
and what are not? What was the threshold that you in your experience that the US military would go into an area where collateral damage was not just was likely, and yet the military necessity of going into conducting that operation was such that the commanders were willing to send somebody out and put American troops in harm's way or even drop an air strike. Just in your overall experience, like,
what was the calculations that were being run? And then do you think that Israel is employing the same one or is it a different threshold?
I would say that their threshold right after October seventh was was pretty open. Yeah. Right, Hey, look, we've just suffered a significant attack, a horrendous attack, and we need to put some people in check right now. We don't know what they're planning next. There's three hundred miles worth of tunnels. We don't know what supplies. They just caught us off guard. What else are they going to do to us? We need to put them in check right now. And I think that's why they were very open to
that immediately after the October seventh attacks. So I think that's the calculus that they ran. I think they wanted to I think that they wanted to regain their footing. Yeah, and it took them a couple of weeks to where they probably felt like they It probably took them a week to regain their footing and then another week of like, hey, we still don't know. I still don't feel comfortable. We need to get them, we need to put them, put the enemy off balance even more. And I think that's
what they did. That's probably the calculus that they were running.
It's interesting too, because you know the initial talk and you guys touch on this about the three hundred miles of tunnels something like that, we don't know the exact number, and you were like, man, I'm going to take a lot of casualties if we start doing that. I've just been I find it odd looking at it because the number of IDF casualties as of today that you and I are talking, it's somewhere between fifty and sixty, I
would say, relatively low. What does that indicate to you in terms of the way, So now we have actual operators on the ground, we have guys clearing the hospital. How do you achieve that? Is it through being very slow and methodical? Does it mean that they're not necessarily has a mosque given up? What do these things tell you?
Yeah? So I believe. On one of those two podcasts that I do with Darryl I talked about siege warfare. Yes, right, Hey, if I'm looking at this city that has three hundred whatever miles and booby traps and a bunch of enemy fighters, I'm not looking forward to going in there. And yet I'm in Israel. I have all the time in the world. I have unlimited supplies. We can live forever. We have water, we have food, we have unlimited ammunition, we have power,
we have energy. Why am I rushing in here? And I was sort of hoping that they would go into a siege warfare mentality, because when you go into a siege warfare mentality, you let time do the work instead of your men and so it appears, certainly appears that that's what they've done. They've they took some bold action in the beginning, regained their footing. Now they've the premiere. It looks like, again I'm not on the ground, and you know only I take everything that I read with
a grain of salt. But when I see battle maps in the past few days, they have Northern Gaza enveloped, and you're gonna take casualties as you push in there, as you set up sort of containment around this area, which they took casualties. And now I think you go into siege warfare and listen, I look at a tunnel. I'll drop a microphone in that tunnel. Listen, listen to that tunnel for three days. Why am I going in there?
I'll listen. Oh, put a camera down there, put dogs down there, put cut off the cut off the power. I'm gonna do all kinds of things before I send my guys down there. So I think that's where And what's nice about that is that also provides us more opportunities to help the civilian populace. It gives us more
opportunity for discretion between civilian populace and Hummas fighters. So I think Israel certainly appears that Israel has taken a has shifted their mentality, and they're now into a slower, more methodical phase of the war looks more like siege warfare. I think that's good, and I think they're moving in the right direction. And I also think they recognize that Hamas might have the will, but they don't have the means.
And I also think they're probably they're on the ground talking to the locals, and as they talk to the Palestinians, what do you think those Palestinians are telling them? You think the Palestinians are saying, oh, we all support Hamas and we hate you. That you would probably see a different mentality from Israel if that's what they were hearing from the local populace. The local populace is probably saying, yeah,
thank you for coming in. We hate these people. And look are like I said, are there some Hama supporters? I'm sure there are, of course there are. But once you're sitting there in a refugee camp and you've got some medical care for your kid, and the Israeli soldiers talking to you, and the Israeli intelligence officer is sitting down and wanting to know about what you've been going through, and all of a sudden you're saying, these aren't the monsters that we were told they were. So that's that's
my assessment. I think that Israel is probably making adjustments, and I bet and it certainly seems as their adjustments are, oh, yeah, we can do this in a more methodical way. You know. I got asked I was on a panel recently and people were talking about war with China and what would you what would your what would your mindset be going? And if we were going to China invaded Taiwan and you were Jako, you were going to be leading troops into the battle, what would you be doing? What would
you what would your strategy be? And you know, there was a couple other people on the panel and they all gave their kind of assessment of the technology and the peer to peer or near peer adversary and how this is different in these kind of things, And I said, my major mindset would be the mindset that I always have, especially when going into combat. And then is keeping an open mind because we don't know, and anybody that says they know is arrogant. Yes, you don't know. What's going
to happen When you engage in combat. You don't know what's going to happen when you start it. You don't know what's going to happen twenty minutes into it. You don't know what the enemy. You don't how the enemy's going to react. You don't know how your troops are going to react. You don't know how the civilian populies
are going to react. You don't know these things. Ensure you can have suspicions, but if you are too married to your suspicions, you're going to get caught in a situation where you're doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. So it certainly appears that Israel. Their initial assessment was probably like, oh my gosh, we just got caught off guard. God knows what they have in store for us next next three days. We need to get we need to establish our we need to re establish our footing. That's
what they did. Then they said, well, it looks like we kind of got this under control, but I'm not sure yet. We need to put more control. Okay, they got that done. Now they're looking around going okay, we need to isolate, we need to isolate slow this thing down, and it certainly seems that that's what they've been doing. So I think we're going to see continued modification from Israel.
I think they're going to continue to adjust. I think that we are all going to learn, and I think the world will learn about what Hamas is like as a government and what it's like to live under Hamas. It certainly appears from the outside that that is not
a great place to live. And the chances that people Palestinians that lived in Gaza, who had lived in Israel, who had lived in other parts of the world, who had lived in in Gaza during different times that remember that are looking around saying, wait a second, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't have to be this bad. So I think that will come to light, and I think Hamas will come out over time as looking like a really bad group of people.
It seems like everything you're saying is that there has to be a real baseline of trust for the people who have been now been hopefully liberated by Hamas will see that something better will come. And last time, when you had talked about with the podcast on Jocko Unraveling, was the necessity of immediately showing Palestinians that a better way as possible. So you were like, well, we should
give work visas. We've got to get these people in Israel, like, we got to make sure that there is not only a commingling, but a light at the end of the tunnel. It's something that the US obviously did quite well, I think, at least during the surge years in Iraq and during that period while you were operating there as well. It seems though that you have to do that simultaneously, and I'm curious. You know, you talked about the work visa
and all of that at the same time. These really have got to manage their own domestic politics, which is they don't want any of those people coming in there. If anything, they want to build a wall ten feet higher, they want to include a security zone and all that. It seems to me that's probably the more likely scenario.
So if we do end up with that, which is, you know, you come in, you blow everything up, you or you know, you envelop Gaza City, you clear out the Al Shifa Hospital, and then you include some let's say fifty kilometer zone or something that's been floated by the population. You have no commingling. Is that is that just setting up the fight for another day or is it an acceptable thing from a military perspective.
The first, some kind of peace has to be established, right, So you talked about there has to be some kind of trust. Well, in order to get some kind of trust, there has to be some kind of piece. You know what I used to say in Iraq, one of the best things we could do is like, oh, let's bring in Walmarts Starbucks and because when people see, like, oh wait,
I'll go work for that place. They pay me seven dollars an hour and I'm going to get you know, a ten percent discount, and it's this huge place and we can get food and we can get water, and we can get clothing and all these things are there. So when people start to see, oh, this way of life is possible for me and for my family, there's that's that's what people want essentially, a hey, look are there extremists that don't want that and they see that
as Western and evil and satan? Yep, absolutely there are. But that's not normal. That's not the normal person. The normal person wants to take care of their family, they want to have a good job, they want have an income. They want their kids to have more opportunity than they did. They want to own a house. This is I'm talking when when you would talk to an Iraqi family, that's what they would talk about. Oh you know, I used
to have this. I used to I used to sell tires, and right now there's no cars driving through here, so I can't sell any tires. And you know, I'm just waiting for I've got look come back and they can go back in their garage and they've got some big stacks of tires, some tires for our little tractors and some tires for cars, and they just want to get
back to that life. That's what they're concerned about. They don't care about al Qaeda, they don't want them there, And so giving people some kind of stability seems like a that's sort of a precursor to any kind of co mingling. And then I think you just have to be really really strict about the co mingling, Like here's the protocol that you've got if you want to work
in Israel. Here's the protocol that you've got to go through on a daily basis until you get to your What we have down here in California for Mexico is like a century pass. Like, Okay, if you're this person, if you've been cleared and you've had this, and you have had that, then then you're gonna get some kind
of a expedited protocol. But again, when you talk about Israel separating Hamas from the populace, I would hope that the world can do that as well, because I think that the world, much of the world is looking at Gaza as if everyone is hardcore anti Israel and borderline if not full support of Hamas. And I don't believe that to be the case, and I think it'll I think it'll play out that way in the long run.
But you do have to give the opportunity for prosperity and growth and peace before people, before people accept that. And if you're a Hamas and you want a population that hates Israel, what do you do. You keep them poor, you keep them uneducated, you keep them suffering. And the more that they're uneducated, poor, suffering, the more they're gonna hate Israel.
Yeah, the satsquo is good for them. That's why I think a lot of people also didn't understand is that no, they liked it they actually really enjoyed the way everything is going. And you know you said previously Hamas doesn't have the means, Well they don't really. I mean the Jihatas never had the means to destroy or defeat the
US military. They did have a capacity to just outlast them, which in the end they work on it, right at least whenever it came to Isis and all that I came to a whole in their military pop operation that was required. Is this then a battle of wills or is it a battle of means?
If that makes sense? All wars are a battle of wills, for sure. But here here's the one big difference between Iraq and Gaza. Israel is in like America, Well, you can out you can outweigh us, you can outweigh us. In Afghanistan, you can outwait us. In Vietnam you can outwaite, you can kill us with a death of a thousand cuts. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, yep are populous will eventually say what are we doing? We don't care about this anymore,
and we'll go home. But Israel's got no place else to go, and so they're they're not going anywhere, and that's why it'll be it'll be a test of wills, but there's also the test of means, and I think that's what I think, that's what Israel's focus is. I think they see Hamas as a finite group of people. And what's the number being flowed around thirty thousand.
Thirty it's thirty to fifty is PIJ plus Hamaska PIJ is like probably ten k of that if we're thinking on the high end. Yeah, when we think about those numbers. Last I checked, I went back the Battle of Mosl was I think eight thousand is As fighters. It took about one to one civilian casualties, and it also took a ton of Iraqi casualties. That's something that a lot of people have forgotten, how literal heroes fought in that war. It doesn't seem to be tracking at all like that though.
Right now the civilian casualty number, we don't know what it is, somewhere between twenty ten to twenty thousand. It'll probably drop as they move away from bombing towards the more ground operations they're pursuing. But as they go south into communists, are they going to go back to air power like we'll see. But with the thirty to fifty thousand, do you think it's militarily feasible that they could accomplish that within the embedded population of two million because you
had what five thousand? I think And yeah, as I said too, with this, it's a bit different.
It depends on the strategy that Hamas takes. It depends on the strategy that Hamas takes. If Hamas, if Amas stands up in fights, it's feasible. Yeah, if a mosque goes to ground, it's going to be long gorilla insurgency and a terrible nightmare. So that's what that's that's the way it'll go down. That makes sense. And what is Hamas going to do? They're going to do what Hamas does. They're gonna They're gonna go and go to ground and go into a long insurgency of terrorism and then it'll
go back to sustained kind of intel operation. But I think one of the best things that Israel could do is the more they can prop up the economy and the the general life way of life in Palestine, the more local Palestinians will be like, Hey, we don't want this anymore. We want we want to we want normalcy, we want prosperity. That's what we want, and they'll root their own problems out.
There was something I want to come back to about. There's a pretty decent chunk of Israeli society, and to a lesser extent, some Americans who are like, look, these people voted them in, they're all the same, We shouldn't care about them. You're right in that. You know, many Iraqis didn't nest, they don't like al Qaida, but they many of them were probably observant Sunni Muslims who believed
in very similar values. That are a couple of different, you know, places away from and ISIS is extremist interpretation. I'm please disagree with you feel free?
Yeah, not so m much, Okay, I mean really not so much.
Uh.
There's a there's some very small number of like hardcore gy hottists that were Iraqi, but the normal hierarchies, the normal Iraqi populous, they were not supportive of al Qaeda. And you know, there was a great piece that WEIS did and it was as it was, I forget what year it was, but basically ISIS was starting to surround Ramadi and the governor of Ramadi or the mayor of Ramadi was he's talking. He's like, please get me on the call. We need American we want the Americans back.
Like that's what you was saying, and that's how that's how they felt.
I think I meanted more. The reason I was framing that way is more so like they're not the same as us, and I think that that's an easy way to other them and then to put them together. And so there's a desire for collective punishment, and I think I just want to return, not even just from a military perspective, but as somebody who actually had to see some of this and kind of parse it together. You probably heard similar things, at least from people around especially after nine eleven.
I remember this.
The only thing I ever needed about Islam was, you know, I found on nine to eleven, just bomb the crap out of Afghanistan and that that'll solve the problem. And obviously you know it's I guess, but it's not necessarily feasible. How did you work through that? Then, whenever you're talking and having a conversation with somebody who would have that type of mindset and wanted to employ it in a military in a military setting as somebod who actually would have had to carry out such things.
No one said that, Yeah, but there is there's no one that was saying, oh, well, we should just kill everyone and you know, destroy all the buildings and bomb everything. No one said that. No one said that, Wow.
Well yeah, I mean it's interesting because I'm watching. I'm I guess I don't know the mind of the individual israelly soldier, but we've seen some cabinet officials and other
people with security governments similar ish type thing. Is part of why I'm asking is just to say, I guess what I'm really learning is that there was profound lessons that were learned from the US military inside of Iraq to eventually get to the high level of capabilities that we reached, you know, at the peak of like the operational tempo against against al Qaeda, against ISIS and with all that, what what were the what was the learning curve like as somebody who had to go through and.
Experience that, Yeah, well the learning curve was definitely steep. And you know, luckily for me, I deployed in two thousand three, two thousand and four, two thousand and six, and you know, this was this was us failing to
recognize what was happening. And there's a whole series, you know, Darryl and I did a whole series of podcasts about the Iraq War and about how that thing kicked off and what we did with the Bathist and how we we fired all the people from the from the military, and we made all kinds of mistakes there, and we took us a while to recognize that we were fighting an insurgency and that we needed to employ people and take care of them. So we made all kinds of mistakes.
And once we figured that out, we did a pretty good job. It just took us too long to figure it out, so the learning curve was very steep. And then unfortunately, once once we figured it out, we left. And you know, I've seen Darryl defend the sort of counterinsurgency that took place in Ramadi a couple times online because people say, well, look, it didn't work because you
had ISIS and all this other stuff. But we had ISIS because we left, and if if we stayed, there would have been embers of extremists that would have pomped up and US forces in direct conjunction led or actually we would support. We would have supported Iraqi forces as they went in and as they took out these last remnants of extremist whether it was ISIS or al Qaeda, they would have taken them out, and it would have
been we would have moved in a really good direction. Unfortunately, we left, and that's that's where you got the You know, I always describe it as if you had a fire in your kitchen and you kind of put out the fire real quick, and then you said, all right, well I'm going to the movies and you left. Well, you're gonna come back in your house is gonna be burned down, cause there's still little embers that you didn't take care of.
So that's what we did in Iraq. We left and we let that let those embers start to burn again.
Yeah, well, yea, it was mismanaging all kinds of ways. Even if you defend the withdrawal, there are certain things that we could look back.
But I'm not sure I answered your your original questions. Sure of you know what's going to happen here, I'm not sure yet. Yeah, Yeah, I know we'd be a lot better off.
We would be very lucky if we were able to be clairvoyant, and to kind of look at it, I guess from a counter insurgercy perspective, Israel is almost in the in a situation where as you said, they have a border with these people, they don't have a choice, I think, at least to eventually learn these lessons and get to the point where this is going to happen.
That's the only type of sustainable solution. Whereas as you said, you know with the US, you can outweight at the US in Afghanistan, you can outwait, and they did successfully in Afghanistan, they did successfully in Vietnam, they did successfully to a certain extent in Iraq, requiring the US to go back in. They're almost in an ideal scenario for having to eventually arrive at this to get to a peaceful resolution, simply because they really don't have another choice
in the long run. At least that's how I see it. There are a lot of people wh would disagree with me.
Though, Yeah, and so that's what when I think about Israel's situation, israel situation. If I was Israel, I wouldn't want to be on defense for the next thousand years. And the only way you're not on defense is if you start making friends with your neighbors. Otherwise you got to protect your borders to an extreme level. Look, are they always going to have to be wary, Yes, they're always gonna have to be wary. But I would want to have to be less wary. And how are you
going to have to be less wary? It's by having better relationships with the people that are around you. And look, Israel's tried that. They've also done things that have cost them, you know, many many more years of attacks. So but essentially, what I'm saying is the best solution for Israel is some kind of normalized relations with the people that are their neighbors, right, And I think that they understand that.
Are there extremists that think, well, nope, we would rather just build a like you said, build a fifty foot wall and put a no man's land for twenty kilometers around that, and we'll just be Israel here. That's tough. Whether it's even feasible, I'm not sure, but I think most people would rather have some sort of normalized relationship with our neighbors and have a lower level of security and live a more normalized existence.
Yeah, I totally agree. I want to zoom out even from just Israel Gaza, which I know it's tedious to talk about, I totally understand, is to just think about employing use of force and negotiation. So you guys have talked previously about Ukraine, and this is something we focused on quite a bit where I live in Washington. It's basically anathema. To float the idea of negotiation. You get immediately tarred as like either pro Russian activist or oh
or are you saying that that's Russian propaganda? Are you saying that Ukraine doesn't have an absolute right to defend all of its territory. It's like, well, no one is saying that. What we're saying is that it's simply not feasible. I've heard you talk a little bit about this in the past, but I've often heard it as an idea of caving, whereas to me it just seems like a
level of feasibility about a test of arms means. As you said, so, as somebody who was in the fight, how do you think about negotiation and diplomacy and peaceful resolution? How do we separate those two even when we're thinking of both the Ukrainian fighting man on the ground and then also the big strategic perspective.
Yeah, the people that are always anti compromise, and there's usually a lot of them, they're not the ones that are on the front line getting killed, and of course they don't want to compromise, right, So that's what happens. They don't want to compromise because they're not out there having drones drop grenades on them. That's what's going on.
And if the leadership better understood what the people on the front lines were going through, they'd be a hell of a lot more open to compromise than they are. So it kind of discussed me when the people that are, you know, shaking the sword, are shaking the sword from one thousand miles away, and they're shaking the sword and it's the young guys on the front line that are suffering and dying. Yeah, it's horrifying.
I mean, the level of prosthetics has now reached like World War One levels inside of Ukraine, which I didn't even think you would ever see again. In twenty twenty three. We're talking about the average age I believe of the Ukrainian fighting soldier right now is like forty three. I mean, even an entire generation of young men, which is valiantly you know, wants to defend their territory and God bless me,
you can't think anything otherwise. But then when you look at the long term strategic picture and you realize where it's heading and can continue to put arms into the country, and then you know, dispel any idea of negotiation. It just feels, as you said, as if it's like saber rattling from thousands of miles away looking at these guys as pawns, and that is just dehumanizing to them at a very real level.
One percent. Yeah, that's what it is.
It's watching I often find and this was actually I was curious too, is because I'm you know, around Washington politics, and you know everything everything is talked about at a fifty.
Thousand foot level.
I think got a necessity actually, because they have so many different decisions and things that they had to deal with when you were actually fighting on the ground, to what extent was it even important or are you paying attention to big level discussions about should we go petray Us his way, should we go Joe Biden's way, like the bigger strategic conversation? How much did that even factor whenever.
You were operating, you're definitely paying attention to it. Are you paying attention to it while you're receiving machine gun fire? No, nope,
you're not thinking about it then. But when you're you know, you're when you're planning for an operation, when you're in between operations, you're definitely paying attention to what's going on and how we're conducting this thing, because it's affecting, it's impacting how you're conducting your miss I think I told a story with Daryl where there was a there was a battalion sized operation that was going to take place,
and my guys we were supporting it. So we were going out with the big Army battalion and as we pushed this plan up the chain of command, the army battalion was told, hey, we're not doing any battalion sized operations in Ramadi. And the reason was because a battalion sized operation is like a flex of Oh we're doing a big battalion sized operation with seven hundred soldiers. We're not doing that when you guys are not allowed to do that. Okay, well why not? Okay, Well it's because
we don't want to. We want to show that the iraqis are taking the lead. We want to show that we don't. We're not engaging in battalion sized missions in the war anymore. That's not what we're doing. Okay, Roger that And you know the operation got changed to a two company plus operation, which is almost a battalion but but that's what we were doing. So we're all thinking about this and yeah, so those things have an impact for sure.
If you had a message, I think to people who are cavalier in there. Just so in Washington is very in vogue to call for war with Iran, it's very in vogue to call really for war with Russia. With anyone. Everything starts to become pieces on a chess board. It's like, oh, well, if they do this, and we'll do this. What would your message be to people who are very cavalier in their discussion of the use of force in the US military.
From everybody, from the people in Washington, DC that are cheering for war to the people in the streets that are cheering for war on either side, I would say, get your shit on, get your gear on, and go lock and load a weapon and go fight, because you have no idea what you're doing. You have no idea what you're talking about. And you're sending young, brave people to fight, and you have no idea what it's like. So I'd say, if you want war, go get your kid on.
Well, I think that's a great place to end it. But I do have one last question for you. This is somebody who works up at four thirty am. This may seem random. As a personal pet thing of mine. Are you pro standard time or pro daylight savings time? Would you rather the sunrise earlier or would you rather have more sunlight in the afternoon.
I would rather have more sunlight, sunlight in the afternoon. And because by the like right now in California, it's getting dark, like at four thirty eight in the evening, so that that's not cool. And in the morning, I can do the stuff I do in the morning, I don't need light for right I'm in the gym, I can go for a run and it can be like dark outside is not that big of a deal. But you know, you can't surf. You can't surf in the
afternoon and it's dark outside. So I and California had some weird thing happen where we voted to it to stay on permanent daylight savings time. But then it somehow didn't pass. It needs to get approved through the federal government, so it's one more, one more reason for everyone to be mad at the federal government.
Well, you just put you put a knife in my heart as someone who's pro standard time. But it's okay, Jocko. I really appre huge you doing this and taking the time out of your schedule for all. That was a great discussion and we thank you very much thanks for having me appreciate it.