Hey guys, it's Jack.
I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just five dollars a month, and when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes add free.
That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers, but this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Teamhouse channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that, So go and check us out at patreon dot com. Slash the Teamhouse, Special Operations, Cobert Ops.
Spiona.
The Team House with your hosts, Jack Burphy and David Bark to a Christmas edition of the Team House. This is a pre recorded episode so we can all be with our families around the holidays. Hope everyone's having a good one out there, as you know. I'm Jack, This is Dave, and our guest on tonight's show is Jason Davis.
Jason served in a number of infantry assignments, a number of seventy fifth rangeer Regimen assignments and then a few assignments with the Asymmetrical Warfare Group and Special Operations Command. Thank you for coming and joining us in studio today. Jason works with Ventus developing resproberratory respiratory respiratory protection for soldiers, and we'll get into all of that as well. So, Jason, thank you for joining us tonight.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
So let's start at the beginning. We usually start off talking about the guest's origin story, and I think yours is definitely worth going down memory lane. Alit because your grandfather, your father, and your uncle were all rangers.
Yeah, that's a family, Laura.
My mom likes to say that she's the wife, daughter, sister, mother of a ranger. And so my grandfather was a fifth Ranger battalion and World War Two ranger. He says he joined the Rangers as opposed to the paratroopers because those paratroopers were crazy, which you look at what they did,
point to hawk, Now that's kind of crazy itself. And then my father got told go to war, go to jail, not not as a draftee, but because he got into so much trouble as a kid, and so he likes to say it, I enlisted in the Army because nobody was going to tell me what to do. And then you fast forward in nineteen seventy four and he's an airborne Ranger medic, you know, plank owner of one seventy five when he stands that up at Fort Stewart in
those days before we moved over to a Hunter Army. Yeah, so my dad met my uncle inside of first Ranger Battalion. My uncle was a beconger in those days. My dad was in HHC and my uncle took my dad, who was from the Washington, Oregon area, and my uncle's from Hollywood, Florida. And so my uncle took my dad home for Christmas, met my mom, and you know, a couple of years later,
next generation is born. That's fantastic. So it never never had any designs for me to go into the military, never pushed me into the military, but was always proud and you know, kind of accidental the family business. I guess. So where did you grow up.
I mean, if your folks were in the military, I mean, presumably you moved around a lot. Obviously, you must have grown up here in all these ranger stories too.
Yeah, I didn't know you weren't a ranger if you were in the army. I thought everybody in the Army
was a ranger. It's all I lived around. So I was born in Alaska actually in nineteen seventy seven, which on my dad's file it says he was an Arctic Warfare instructor through most of Vietnam, and so it's a really cool kind of you know, he was up there for about six months when I was born, went to Texas, where my sister was born, and my dad went to PA school, which in those days they were you know, became warrant officers at the end of that, and then
spent most of the rest of my life bouncing around the Southeast Georgia and North Carolina, the usual places that you know, rangers go to, and infantry guys in particular. And then my dad was assigned back to Ninth Man Chew. Some of us old guys the Ninth Man Chew up
in Alaska. Fairbanks were basically my formative years until I was about ten or ten or twelve, and then moved my dad retired in nineteen eighty eight and we moved to a little town in Oregon called Ontario, Oregon, and so right on the Oregon Idaho border.
In fact, you guys know Orrida Fries.
Yeah, so Oregon Idaho border, that's Rita and so that plants right there. So that's what we're famous for. So now we're famous for prisons and Rita fries. And so our big city was Boise, Idaho. And then yeah, from there, I went to college in New York. So at New York University, where I met my wife and ended up going to ROTC at Fordham University. I thought I wanted to get away from the military when I left the house, and then realized I gravitated right back towards those people.
Yeah you were, you were on track to be a pinko liberal comedy.
What happened?
Okay, so let me back this up just a second.
So I applied to two colleges from my little town in Ontario, Oregon, right, I think graduating sixty people or something. I applied to West Point and I applied to n y U skip Tish School of the Arts. Yeah, Stella Adler. I want to be an actor.
Yeah.
I loved the theater. I still love the theater. I love Shakespeare and my dad. I got accepted to both, so I was hoping. I was hoping one would you know, you know, reject me and kind of choose my life track for me, right, because I either want to be an actor or in the army, Like.
Did you feel pressure to go in the army?
Like was there a party that wanted West Point to reject you so you could know?
Okay, I felt no pressure whatsoever.
And in fact, it was my dad who said, you can always join the army whenever you want, but when can you be a poor actor in New York City? Right? Right? And I took that advice, and I was always very thankful, and to be honest, I thank my dad a lot for this.
I think it really you know, put my outlook into perspective.
The reason why I have my daughter here right now is so that we can have this life experience together. YEA cool trip, right, And so he set me on the path for that life experience. I went there, and within about six weeks I joined a Greek fraternity. I stopped showing up to school, I started hanging out with the ROTC kids, and by December I learned that I really didn't.
Like the acting.
Community at NYU, and it really wasn't the people that I wanted to be around.
It not that they weren't.
Great people, they were. It just I had different interests, right, and the fraternity tended to fill that a little bit more than Stella Adler did, and I think.
We were both happy for the break of each other.
And so I ended up spending most of my time with my fraternity brothers. And you know, the rot SCENES sounds so dated now, like twenty four years later, just to say fraternity brothers and the RFTC guys and ROTC for New York City in those days, I think it's still the same now. Was run out of Fordham University, so that's where the detachment was. And then if you went to Columbia or NYU or Lincoln Center, Fordham or any of the local SUNNI schools.
Columbia didn't have ROTC until they repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Well, we used to have the Columbia students, and so I don't remember the timeline for that, but so they would come to Fordham to do ROTC if they wanted to make sense, And so I ended up kind of falling in love with the military from a user experience as opposed to from a brat experience, and so I grew up as a brat and I tried to break away from it, and then realized that it was actually what I loved. So I went right back to.
It and commissioned in two thousand and one, bit of a pivotal year for this country and especially for somebody commissioning into the military.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I got married and commissioned on the same day. So Megan and I, who we'd met at NYU or freshman year, stayed together basically most of college and then got literally officially married like the week before my commissioning ceremony. And I remember getting out of the car. Nobody knows we're married yet, Like it's just just she and I and getting out of the car, and it was kind of a drizzly, cold May day, you know, in New York.
And I remember one of the guys going, you know, they say, if it rains on your commissioning, you're going to war. So that guy was right. And about three months later I found myself in IOBC, and nine to eleven occurred. While I was at the urban phase of IOBC. My wife had just moved down from Fourteenth Street between B and C and Lower Manhattan, where we'd had our apartment for a couple of years. The week before the towers went down. Would she was she did?
She have military members and her family. What did she think about, I'm her family's nightmare.
So her so her her mom and dad are our hippies. Yeah, Uh, well, her mom's a reformed hippie, her her dad is not. And it's funny the older I get, the more I connect with, you know, my my father in law than than anybody else, I think.
But he was you know, like literally followed, you know, followed a cult.
In India for a little while and came back and had a commune very Garcia.
Yeah.
Yeah. And and and you know in in the Ozarks, you know, like living in the oars with four hundred acre apple farm like my father in law literally hand makes his cab and like lives off the grid, like you know, living living his values for sure. Yeah, and uh I met, Yeah, she she kind of. She was born in Arkansas, lived in that lifestyle for quite some time. When she was you know, about ten or so, her
mom and dad divorced. Her mom wanted a different lifestyle, ended up going very conservative with her lifestyle to the point where you know who she married. I was like, man, you're a little bit right for me at this point, you know. Yeah, and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where she did her high school years and then went to NYUS as a film major in fact, and we both decided.
We didn't fit into that community.
Pretty yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So my father in law is now an organic farmer in Kawaii, on the island of Hawaii. He's been here for or in Hawaii. He's been out there for about twenty some odd years. He's uncle ned now And when we lived on Hawaii, was always nice to be able to spend some time on there. Yeah.
So, like these massive life changes that happened in such a short span of time, Yeah, is incredible. And then you get assigned to the one hundred and first third of the five o second Yeah, tell us about that. I mean it sounds like by the time you get there, you're kind of getting into the run up to the Iraq invasion.
Yeah. So if I don't know if you guys know this, So when you when you're in IOBC as an infantry officer in those days, it's expected you're going to ranger school, like that's not really an option, right, And in the last couple of weeks of that, we're all getting ready
to go to ranger school. Hours come down, and you know, word comes in that if you're in the eighteenth Airborne Corps, you know, so one hundred and first Airborne, eighty second, tenth Mountain Division, all the dr you deployed for combat ready brigades, you get one shot at this that's it. Period end. And so we all went to ranger school like two weeks later as fast as we could. I ended up breaking my foot that first week and so, which,
by the way, another great lesson. So I still believe to this day, if I'd been tougher, I could have toughed it out. I broke a couple of metacarpals or meta tarsal, don't know what they're called. In the foot. I broke a couple of those things stress fracture. And I still believe that if I could have been just a little bit mentally tougher, I could have toughed that out. It was my first taste of failure and I hated it.
It's interesting and you say, you still believe that, And so it's sort of like that, that's I believe I can fight five.
Guys with the same.
Yeah, right, right, because somebody's always got it harder, right, And.
Yeah, no, I get that.
It was a defining moment in my life coming back from ranger School without my tab and with my story. Yeah right, defining moment And I didn't want to feel like that ever again, right, And so went to my unit without my tab, with my story.
I showed up to my battalion commander.
You know, luckily he put me into adultiple tune to you know, kind of earn my way back into in those days, you know, you had you earn your way back into your tab. Had a great experience as a Deltiple team leader that really learned a lot in those in those gun trucks in those days about how to how to lead small teams and how to move you know, guns around big guns. But really what it did for me is it it gave me an appreciation of why
ranger School was important. And I really started to understand now it wasn't about the tab, it was about the mental toughness. It was about understanding how to lead yourself in those times of you know, real turmoil, and then how do you lead others when you yourself or just want to cry rest of the time. And so that was a defining moment for me when I understood how important that training was. And when I went back, it was a very different mentality. I was no longer interested
in surviving. I was interested in learning and getting better at my craft because I knew we were going to war, and so we thought we were going to war in that first like ninety days, and we all thought we were going to miss it if we didn't get to our unit and so have a little stress fracture was a great excuse, you know, to get to the unit that had to go to war. But really it taught me what I needed to learn, which was how important
that training was. And so I went back. I got that tab I would encourage everyone to try hard things to the best of their ability. I was successful this time because of the people who surrounded me and cared for me. And then the hundred and first deployed to combat for the invasion of Iraq, and I was fortunate enough to be assigned as a rifle platoon leader in Baker Cumber b Company. Then with a ranger, former arranger of platoon leaders, the company commander.
And this is sort of like I mean, it sounds counterintuitive to some people watching this maybe, but if you're an infantry platoon leader, I mean, this is the dream, right, this is your dream. Yeah, you're gonna You're gonna lead soldiers in combat right now.
That's all I wanted to do.
Had one hundred first already been to Afghanistan, had they had they done any rotations.
I believe that Rocaissans, the Rokassan Brigade had had done an initial some initial work in Afghanistan. I had friends of mine in eighty second that had gone in and of course obviously the rangers at Rhino.
You know that I ended up learning later, but I think they had some elements, especially in Afghanism. I would have to double.
But hey, thank you go Speds.
Everybody knows I love this product.
Product.
If you sleep hot at night like me, you know just how disrupt if it can be, whether you're having falling trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of night, or all the above. And look, there's no easier way to break up a relationship. Than have a fan on you all night when your partner hates it. But that's where ghostbed can help. As the maker of the makers are the coolest beds in the world.
Ghost bed is your go to for cooling.
Mattress, cooling pillows, and even cooling bedding from their sins your ghost ice fabric to patent technology that just with your body tempter. Every ghost Bed mattress is designed with cooling in mind. So check out their pillows, check out their beds, check it all out.
It's amazing stuff.
When you purchase a Ghostbed mattress, your comfort is guaranteed. You can try out your mattress for one hundred and one night's risk free. It's one hundred nine one night's risk free and make sure it's the right fit for you. Plus, they offer free shipping and most items are shipped within twenty four hours. They have all they have different firmness and mattresses, so check that out. They have a test on our site.
On their site.
Even better, Team house listeners can get fifty percent off site wide for limited time. Just visit ghostbed dot com slash house and use code house at checkout.
Again, that's ghostbed dot com. Slash house with.
Code house at check out code house h o us and to say, whopping fifty percent? Uh yeah, man, if you're a hot sleeper.
But when you were, when you guys were uh, sort of working up towards Iraq, there weren't just a whole bunch of Afghanistan guys rolling around with combat pat you know, combat pats, no.
No, very new, and we all thought we were going to miss it. Yeah, like we all thought that if we don't get into a unit that's going to war, yes, this is our this is our mogadishi, this is our opportunity. Right, were thinking a desert storm, right, I think in Vietnam? Yeah, absolutely, So in the work up for that for Iraq, what what were your what did you think it was going to be? What were you training for?
And then were any of those things kind of wrong?
That's a great question. We knew that there was going to be a lot of urban fighting, we didn't really understand what that was in those days. And so I can remember we would have kind of opd's officer professional development, you know, with I had smoking. Joe Anderson was my brigade commander. So I don't know if you guys know, General Joe Anderson retired as a three star phenomenal commander one. I have amazing stories about smoking Joe Anderson just being bulletproof.
I mean, he taught me what combat leadership looks like at the senior leader level. He set that example almost immediately for me. Anyway, I can remember Smoking Joe Anderson bringing in these different kind of OPD opportunities to hear from the experts at urban warfare. And we were talking to the police in Northern Ireland, and we were talking
to the cops in London. You know, we were the IDF every once in a while getting in you know, with the tunnels and some under subterranean like, we were taking the best that we could and we were training
that in trenches. And so a trench is a hallway, a bunker is a room, and that's the way we trained urban warfare in those days was on trench systems, right, and so we I think in my mind I imagined it was going to look like Vietnam where you you know what we saw in movies where you helicopter in, because I'm in the uttern first, and clearly we're going to helicopter in and We're only a ninety day force by the way, too, We're only supposed to be there
ninety days and then we recover because then the big infantry divisions and you know, come in. And I remember thinking that we're going to have kind of a we're gonna Hilo in aerosolt and then when we get there, we're going to be doing urban warfare through these buildings. And it was very much like that when we got to the city centers. So you know, the the Karbala's, the mosls.
You know.
I wasn't in Fallujah, but I've heard it was very similar. But also I think what was striking was all of the outskirts fighting for key terrain. It's where I really started to understand the importance of what key terrain meant at the level when there's you know, one or two
roads and you're fighting for a couple of key intersections. Uh, you know, the the fog of war of I need you to move your people here, and then you know, I forced road marched my platoon on the first day of combat for like twenty miles to get to this anti armor blocking position and there's a tank company there, so we felt kind of useless. So they literally just got us into the shooting, like the hell, you know, let let us get our shoot on is basically it
was it. So it was a very It was very much I think what we were expecting, at least in the in the infantry side of it. It definitely met my expectations. I mean it was it was full kinetic, Yeah, it was. It was.
It was scary and fun all at the same time.
Right, So on this showing, many like it, Like we often have people from Special Operations from rangers and you know, and we've said this before that the special Operations mission was very sort of gucci, right, you know, you had the support, you usually the transportation, you're it was generally like in and out type of ops for a specific target. What what don't people understand? What stories aren't told about conventional military who were out there hooking Jabbin with a
tenth of the resources. Yeah, and for prolonged periods.
What are some of the stories or things that you think people should know about the conventional military. I think it's exceptionally hard.
I think we look at you know, we don't make a lot of movies about the you know, like the one hundred and.
First story, I mean third Infantry Division.
Or like when I was a kid growing up, there was you know audio Murphy movies and you know, things like that were going on at World War Two. What you see these days is primarily the Special Operations community, so seals and lots of seals, you know, rangers and other units that are that are their stories are getting told.
What's not getting told is how separating the enemy from the populace while at nighttime affair and very dangerous work when you're going after you very dangerous people, high profile targets that day in and day out with the people and feeling the empathy for the small child and for you know, the animals, and you just living amongst that war and that kind of atrocity in some cases of
what you're watching people have to survive through. I think they don't understand the toll that that ultimately takes on.
Just these are humans, These are people, and we are really the most caring and I think discriminatory military and history, that's arguable, I suppose, but you know, the American soldier in and of themselves is highly trained, highly empathetic, really wants to do well and to do good, and we put them in these situations where it's extremely dangerous, there's no right answer for what you're.
Doing, and we're asking them to figure it out.
Right, they do for the most part, And typically all we hear about is the mistakes. But what you don't see is the amazing things those guys and gals are doing every single day out there to keep the lights on and the people safe. And I think it is an.
Untold story for the most part.
But when I talked to, you know, my brothers and sisters who spent you know, I did, you know, a good portion five or six years of my career fully conventional at the beginning, and then had a solid, you know, two or three years of conventional right in between it again, and those were the hardest and the most rewarding jobs that I really.
Had in the military.
I loved everything I did inside of the special operations community or the asymmetric warfare community. I loved all of it, but it was they were very different. It felt like this was this was leadership right at its base level. And when you talk about leading rangers, for example, I mean, I used to laugh, Rangers don't need leadership like that. You know, leadership is providing purpose, direction, and motivation, and they need almost none of those things. They're better ranger.
PL say that was it, Ray McFadden, he's a two seven five Yeah, MCPAD and two seven five PL.
You said very much the same thing. Yeah. If you think about you know that these are guys you can I had to explain to me once. Imagine the best non commissioned officer, the best sergeant in your mind. You know that you're just the caricature of this is the guy that I want with me. Uh and imagine everybody is that guy, right, And and so it's a very unique culture and it's a very you know, we're we'reth the summer help right, like we're coming in to help you.
We're not really a part of that internal n CEO community, although we try to be, and that core of non commissioned officers drives the special operations community deeply. And then you go out into the conventional ranks and we're raising those n c O s. What you're gonna do? PL? Right, yeah, right, yeah, right, well yeah, and the rangers they're not gonna ask, right, They're just gonna do it. Yeah.
Yeah, it's again, the conventional story is one that is very important to me, and again did because you were an auser and you grew up, you know, seeing you know, you went through the ranks as officer. One of the things is an outsider looking at that and then talking to guys who were stationed out these.
Little cops with no support or you know, in.
These places that it's like somebody looked at that and said, let's put twenty guys there to draw fire, but not give them any resources, any assets to actually do anything. At any point, were you frustrated by by senior leadership, by what seemed to be disconnected decision making.
That's a really complicated question. I'm going to try to give you a simple answer. Okay, we we were trying to enact a new doctrine, you know, so coin kind of insurgency, and you know, I was fortunate enough to be on the periphery of some of the General Petraeus kind of building this in one hundred and first while I was in his command in the hundred and first.
It was in command one hundred first in.
Those days, and I believe his doctrine was the best available at the time, and I still do to a respect. I think counterinsurgency is ridiculously hard. And I think the tactic of placing those small outposts was designed to get you know, in those days, we talked about it as a cop on every corner, right, get get you know, the rule of law and order out into the hinter lens, so that we can control those spaces, or at least
compete for them. Right. And so when you see things like you know, cop keeting or you know, and I had, you know, in my eighty second airborne days, you know, I had two outposts with a company headquarters that I shared with a Polish company, Polish Airborne Company. It's a whole different story and a whole different leadership lessons there.
Right, So you've got.
Two platoon outposts and then a platoon plus company headquarters that shares a forward operating base with a Polish Airborne company.
And then I've got these rifle platoons that literally, you know, nine months out of the year, you can't drive to them, right, you know, the wadies fill up, you can't get these you know, ten thousand pound humvys up armored humb's down these dirt paths that are flooded, and so these guys can get stuck there with only aircraft able to touch them, right, And so if you're asking me to argue the doctrine, I would say, I think the idea was correct, which
was we assume more risk in order to connect more deeply with the population so that we can compete with that populate or for that popularly right with the enemy.
With the Taliban in those days. I think that was the right approach.
The application of it was not always the result that we want, right, Okay, And so I would say that you know Colonel Bill Ausland, if you know him, but he uh, he he, you know, he pushed back on on some of that, you know, when when people started arguing that the coin doctrine you know, was a mistake and that he is a commander should have changed those things. And you know that that was the only doctrine we had at that point to separate the enemy from the people.
So I think it was the right answer of your nation building.
Now, the different question might be should we have been nation building right? Uh?
And and so there I don't know the right answer, but.
That's what we did. Yeah, fascinating did that answer? It did?
Yeah?
It did?
And tell us about during the I guess maybe the tail end of this deployment brushing across.
The I E. D. Task Force. Yeah, yeah, so that's so we in one hundred and first we we basically went burmed to Mosl and so for you know, for the old timers, we crossed the berm from you know, Kuwait and to Iraq and then did the thunder runs and we were a assaulting in on top of third idea and jumping from you know, city to city, urban center to urban center and fighting those urban fights and getting on helicopters and flying to the next one, right, and we end up in Mosol is kind of the
end of it. And so now we're in this fob, you know, which is really it was like a it was like CAMPZ is what we called it, because somebody was trying to steal copper wire out of the you know, the lights before we got there, and he got fried. And so there's a you know, there's literally a burnt corpse where my platoon is supposed to bed down like hanging up in the wires. Right, and so our first task is to you know kind of clean up our living space. So we called it Camp Z because Z's dead.
That's the kind of dark humor yeah, you know, in the military, particularly in those days, and I can remember doing things like gator patrols, remember the gators, the little like a little look like little lawnmowers, you know, with with the trunk in the back. And I can remember three two, three o'clock in the morning pulling my shift right so platoon later with an RTO and a saw in the front of this thing, driving through the streets a mosl at two o'clock on a.
Gator on a gate.
Yeah, you know, keeping the peace, Yeah, just making sure everything's okay.
Yeah, so gators, I can industrial like slow ATV in a way I guess the way it's.
More like a golf car. Yeah, that's the way to put yea yeah. Yeah, but it was it was all we had in the infantry in these days. We didn't have any vehicles. Yeah, and so we were trying to, you know, to patrol cop on every corner.
Could you separate the enemy from the populace?
And I can remember we were starting to hear this thing called the improvised explosive device, and I honestly didn't
really appreciate it or understand it. In those days. We were driving around and you know, no skin vehicles, you know, inside every every air rifle company had one, you know, cargo humdy and so we'd just be in the back of that, you know, squads at a time, moving around, and we started seeing new units that were starting to rotate in to rip us out, right after thirteen months in theater, ripping us out, having these like welded plates coming with their humbies, and we were like, that's not
a bad idea, you.
Know, stopping the bullets.
It's good, you know. And I can remember in that period, this this small team you know, walked into you know, camp's d and they were in civilian clothes, you know,
clearly packing pistols on their hips. And I and the look about them was they just looked different and and and and those of us that have seen you know, really competent, intelligent, you know operators, which you know, when you start working inside of the special Operations community just become almost a character, just a dime a dozen everywhere you look.
But they they're different.
And the confidence that they had when they walked in as a you know, a twenty three year old platoon leader in one hundred and first Airborne Division, I immediately knew I wanted to be a leader like that, like whatever that was that they had, like I needed to
earn that whatever that is. And so I was kind of fanboy in a little bit as these three you know guys walk in and you know, they weren't like Safari Land holsters, you know, and they got you know, Columbia shirts on, and one of them had a forty five cult cocked like.
That was insane to me, like a cocked like a hot weapon homing around, you know.
And we're standing around the kind of the terrain model that we have of our battle space, which I don't even know if we called it battlespace in those days, you know, the area that we were responsible for, and they were just asking us questions about what we've been seeing with you know, trigger wires and you know, improvise explosive devices. And we had started to have some of these initial kind of like pop blasts that would go off ticket tire, you know, maybe maybe give you some
frag fragmentation injuries, but nothing really all that interesting. It was kind of like a claim war where you would hit us, which you know, just let's be careful. And having this conversation with them and they were picking our brains about how we were seeing the operational environment and how we were seeing the threat. And I don't know if we gave them any valuable information at all, because we were we had no idea who they were, what
they were talking about. And I remember as they were talking and as I'm being tq'ed, which we learned to think of it as TQ like fifteen years later by this incredibly impressive dude who I just wanted to be like when I grow up, and he said, well, what are you doing after this? And I was like, I'm going to the cabin's career course. He's like, well, if you're interested in, you know, kind of trying this out, you'll give us a call.
Right. I didn't think much about it. He gave out that card.
I heard it, you know, about a dozen or so guys as he roamed around and saw people that just were interested in what he was thinking, you know, what he was working on. One of my buddies ended up calling that card and ended up inside the Asymmetric Warfare Group back in the old Task Force ID at I d days And I don't know how true the story is, except when I've heard it from a couple of different
guys now, but I said, what was it like? And he goes, well, the vast part of, you know, the greater part of selection in those days, was trying to find the unit that you got to call. He said, Yeah, I show up at this you know, this payphone on this corner at this place, you know, and and then this guy I'll come and pick you up. And so the hardest part about finding the unit was finding the unit. And it was in the old prison on Fort Meade, so it already looked like you were you could get there.
So it was just this really interesting first contact that I had. You know, I'd run into O das in my ground war experience with one hundred and first i'd run into rangers. I got the opportunity to see our Special Operations community employed as they were intended to be employed. So I got to see what a Special Forces officer as an ODA team leader was doing on the ground. I got to see what a Ranger platoon leader was
doing on the ground. I got to see, you know, these select special mission units that are how they're operating. And what I noticed was there's just a different caliber of individual that ends up getting into those units. It's a different mentality, and I don't know what it is particular, but I've been chasing it and fan boying it since two thousand and one. They just looked different.
After the invasion, You've spent some time as an IOBC.
Instructor and then it's off to the eighty second.
Yeah, in another deployment, tell us about getting to the eighty deuce and deployt in Afghanistan.
Yeah, so that was it was a whirlwind. First of all, I don't want to blanch over the IOBC experience.
I wanted to ask about that. You go back as an instructor.
Now you have combat experience, right, and you know after so Afghanistan has.
Been going on for about a year and a half.
When you and when you go into Iraq or about a year or two years two one March two thousand and three, you go into a rock. How long was your tour in I Rock thirteen months? Thirteen months, which is an exceptionally long time to spend it.
It wasn't those days. So now you go to IOBC.
Is IOBC changing because of people like you coming back with experience?
Yes? The short answers yes, And so we we had to redesign how we were training our lieutenants, you know, and so you got to pick and choose.
It's always trade offs.
So do you want to have a you know, a two week large dug in defensive operation like we used to do in large ground combat, or do you want to spend two weeks in an urban center teaching them how to survive in the fight they're in right, right, And so we started to transition the military from more of a large scale ground combat operational force to you know, much more that coin cet footing that we saw throughout the g WATT for the next twenty years or so.
Some amazing experiences that I that I got there and as a leader, you know, some of the most humbling experiences for me to understand, you know, who was volunteering at this time.
You know, I kind of.
Felt like I'm a bit of the pre g Watt generation, you know, I joined the military before all this happened, and just kind of thought, this is exciting. I like what I'm doing. Whereas these guys were a little bit different.
You know, these are lieutenants, you know, a lot of them were senior non commissioned officers that were going green to gold in my unit that I got to work with, and these were dedicated people like these were believers and what we were doing and why we were there and the importance of it, and that was a formative experience
for me. But what I really wanted to comment there was I wanted that assignment because in those days, you came out of your platoon leader job, which most of us did thirteen months of combat and it was about you know, the eighteenth Airborne Corp At least did that, and then you went to the captain's career course for you know, six to nine months, and then you were immediately getting turned to another brigade and going right back
for another year. And so we wanted to have a child at that point, and so we took that assignment. You know, we actually fought for it, tried out for it so that I could be home when she was born, because many people were able to do that in those days. You were gone, that was it. And so I got to be there for the birth of my child, and then showed up at the eighty second Airborne you know, she's fifteen months old at this point. Another showed up on a Friday, took command on a Monday, you know,
did inventories over the weekend. Didn't really do good inventories on my dad. It was all going to combat and it was all going to be a combat loss, you know, at some point, and so it was the good accountability of end items.
You know.
The last company commander had been fired. Unfortunately, there was thirty two UCM. J. Packett sitting on my desk, and I took the job. And we're going to j RTC the next week, you know, to train up for this fifteen month deployment. Amazing experience because we had amazing leadership.
And so that Martin Schweitzer, Colonel Martin Schweitzer was the brigade commander there ended up being one of the you know, senior officers in the eighty second Airborn Division, but kind of a legend in the infantry himself, and he took
that brigade of newly formed leaders. I mean really just the fourth brigade eighty second Airborne Division was just getting formed, you know, being pulled off of different brigades inside the eighty second, and he did a train up with all these new leaders and all these new soldiers and he walked us through that pipeline, and then we went and did a fifteen month rotation in Afghanistan.
Can you can you say why the former captain was relieved?
If I remember correctly, there was a pornography ring in the eighty second Oh yes remember that? Yes I do.
Did that happen when they were overseas or did it? Was that just that was a brag?
Yeah? It was a gay porn ring. Yeah, there was, it was. There was a it was a pronogue. It was a I don't even know if it would be legal these days. I'd have to look at it.
I guess it was like the notorious like man in the pink hat. Uh and he was like approaching soldiers just around the Fayetteville area and recruited a bunch of dudes to do gay porn.
Okay, yeah, so I had I here, here's here's what I knew about it.
So I report I didn't and I didn't want to know anymore because.
There could be more than one porn ring. Yeah, yeah, that's sure. I have to point that out.
That's fair.
That's fair. So you know, Colonel Schweitzer, as I as I take over you know this company, he goes the organization has some troubles that is going to require some good leadership, and so you know, at once you get your hands around it, come back and talk to me, and let's hear your plan. Right. I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea what I was walking into. I didn't even really understand the full story
until you know, a year or so later. But it it to me the hallmark, and I think, you know, Colonel Schweitz or General Schweitzer retired as I think he nailed it.
They needed good leadership.
And I don't know if I was that good leadership, but I know there were some amazing non commissioned officers that circled around me and really you know, grabbed those young platoon leaders and we formed a quick cadre, you know, just really tight. And it was interesting because you know, really that E six and above we'd all been the war at this point, you know, sometimes some of us
a couple of times. I hadn't been. I don't even once, but we'd spent enough time at war that you know, squad live fires had a different feel to them, you know, doing your train up, going out, and I can remember at one point walking up on a squad leader and his team leader had just you know, thrown a temper
tantrum and you know, chewing guys out, you know. And I watched this squad leader, just cool and calm, walk up to this squad and go, did you hear sergeant I don't even remember his name, now, did you hear Sergeant so and so? But he keeps telling you to get cover and concealment, and they're like, you know, yes, sergeant, and he goes, We're never going to tell you that again. We're telling you to get cover and concealment so that you come home. If you don't want to do that,
we'll have to write a letter. But we're not going to yell about it anymore. We don't have any more time. And the boys took that to heart, and so that that non commissioned Officer Corps in those days was unreal.
That's one of the differences I think that you were alluding to between special operations and conventional I'm not saying these are like bad soldiers per se, but you're going overseas with them regardless, you know, And so you have to figure out how to use your leadership and make do with what you have.
Because you're not getting new guys.
Right, and you can't rfs some you can't, you know.
Yeah, well to your point, you know, I had thirty
two U sum jpack. It's sitting on my desk and I don't know if it was the right approach, but you know, me and my first sergeant, Derek Gondik, who ended up being my command sergeant major in the twenty fifth Infantry Division, which you know you pour him, but we decided that we'd rather only have who we wanted in the line then have to be forced to deal with people who didn't want to be there, right, And so you could join my headquarters platoon any time you wanted.
So, okay, So you were giving guys an out if they didn't want to be on the line.
I would tell them. I would tell platoon sergeants that if you'd rather go without him, you're not going to get a replacement. But if it's a disruption and it's disrupting you from preparing your team to go to war, bring him to headquarters. Will have plenty of stuff to do, and they will earn their way into another squad or
another platoon. And it ended up up being I think a success story for us, because what we found was that when the guys started getting put on that headquarters team and then being given the opportunity to earn their way back into the line, and we used to say, you know, living in a rifle platoon is a privilege. It it's not it's not a right. And so you got to earn your way back down there. And only a platoon sergeant can walk into the first sergeant and say I want to take that guy and put them
in my platoon. And so every one of their NCOs would rotate through who had, you know, headquarters platoon that day doing all the details.
So whatever the detail was that needed to be done.
The rifle platoons are out training, and if you want to go out and train and you want to get ready to go to war with those guys, we want you to, but we can't force you to want that.
And so as your NCOs were rotating through that headquarters platoon, they would find talent, and they would find people that they were connecting with and leadership that they were responding to, and they would say, you know, they would walk into Derek and hey, I want this guy down in my squad, and suddenly that guy would get removed and be an amazing soldier, amazing paratrooper.
You said something that I think is kind of funny right now, where people like, there's a lot of mythology built around the number of times somebody's been to war or how many deployments they've been on, and the idea that you know, a lot of the conventional units were doing twelve plus sixteen, sometimes eighteen month deployments and it's like, well, I've been to war one time or two times, and then somebody from the soft community has been like, well
I've been twelve times, and it's like, yeah, those were three to six month trips compared to this eighteen month trip. So, you know, the whole idea of you know, talking about experience based on number.
Of deployments, it's such a ballacy right now.
Yeah, to your point, in my opinion, I never felt one was easier or harder than the other, although I struggled more in the special operations community than I did in the conventional community, just because of the talent that you're just surrounded with, right you know, I mean I'm average on my best day inside of the Special operations community. Just being able to keep my job and stay on
the roster. That was a pretty successful week, right, But the operational tempo in those special operations units, it feels like a fifteen month tour went down four months.
Sure, and the high intense jobs I mean again, not taking anything away from the special operations. It's a dangerous job, you know. It's just it's sometimes just like comparing apples and oranges.
It is. It's but I would say the effect I think is somewhat more akin than we give it credit, at least from my experiences doing fifteen months in a leadership position in the eighty second Airborne Division with dispersed cops on the Pakistani border, and you know, dealing with a Polish counterpart who gets promoted three days before he shows up so he can outrank me on the fob. Right, like that kind of of of an operational tempo, it's a little bit slower, and yet the challenges were just
as exhausting, right, you know. And then you transition to now you're a let's say a Ranger team commander and you're doing a four month DFC, a four month train up, a four month ready you know unit. You're you're constantly on an eighteen hour sequence.
It feels like you're always deployed.
And so even when you're home, I know, I'm rotating back into the generally that same battle space, and I'm going to be ripping my you know, second or third range of battalion, you know, brother up there, and we all kind of get into a rotation with our classmates, right. And so you come back from that deployed for combat with task force, and it's not like, you know, you take two weeks to leave and then you go right back to your computer Monday morning, and you're tracking the
same targets. You're tracking the same into eligence, you're going through the same ideas, except you're doing individual training and then you do ready training and then you're two weeks leave and then you're right back in gay And so I think there the comparison is in the early days of g WATT conventional units, the leadership would deploy twelve, fifteen, eighteen months, who knows right, The officers and the senior non commissioned officers would come back, get dispersed to the
next unit, train them right up, and then go do another fifteen So it's basically y're on year off for those conventionals, but they don't have that year off, right, they're training the next unit that they're going to take to war, rit them through a JRTC and an NTC and so you know, going through an m LAT or going you know, going through a JORT cycle inside of the task force feels like a twelve month you know, high intensity op run for the entire time you're inside
the units, right, And it feels the same way to me as a company commander in the eighties second Airbrine Division. It's just I've got a little bit of a different focus. Maybe more coin here, more CT right there.
Right, So tell us a bit about that deployment to Afghanistan with eighty second.
Honestly one of my quieter deployments. So we were What sticks out is I had my first suicide on that deployment.
In your unit. Yeah, employment, Yeah, that's terrible. Stick sticks out And I'll tell you what tears me apart to this day about that. We were in Goasmy at the time, so we really hadn't moved out to Wazi Quah yet, which is where our FOB would our our FROB would be located, you know, our company FOB, which can really circle at Hasco is in a.
Burn pit in the middle of it.
He's on guard tower, seeming suicide, you know, rifle underneath the rifle underneath the throat, right, and a guy comes into the tent that you know Derek and I, you know, first sergeant commander and you know, my my clerk, right, and basically I hear him waking up, you know, Derek with you know, you know so and so shot himself and I'm just I'm gonna leave names out of this, but you know, so and so shot himself and I hear it, and we all kind of like what like,
you know, an ind like you know, what happened here? Now he committed suicide on the you know, in a guard tower, on guard watch. And you know, to this day, you know, it strikes me that, you know, I was in contact with his mother for a number of years and she doesn't really understand what happened. And it was I felt so empty and I felt so helpless because
I don't know what he didn't have answers. And I look back on you know, you think about those crazy stories, those crazy Vietnam stories, right that we hear growing up in this community of of you know the stuff that happened, and you know, really what happened there is you know, and so I feel like or I'm afraid that she thinks we were trying to cover something up, right, that you know, something terrible happened and we tried to cover that up and and the reality couldn't be any farther
from the truth. But I couldn't convince that I don't know what happened. I don't think that's all that uncommon.
I mean, the survivors are always left with these unsettling questions, right that just can't be answered. You know, that's like God, literally God knows and that's probably the only person.
That can answer some of those things.
Well.
And then you go through as the command team, you know, so taking this back to a leadership perspective, you go to the Okay, do you do you give full honors? Right?
No?
Like, how does that work?
Right? You know? Do you do you have a eulogy? Do you give a twenty one gun salute? Do you get do you get buried at Arlington?
Like this?
You know, this paratrooper gave great service to his nation, and we didn't understand in those days that maybe this was beyond control. Right, Maybe this was beyond his control. Maybe we had you know, we don't know what happened, and that's going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. But it was an eye opening and awaking.
So it really was like even like his close teammates and his squad, this came as a shock.
Yeah. Wow, that's rough. It's from my observation, yeah, and my conversation.
You know.
And you can't blame the family either, because there are enough military cover ups that get exposed, right then everything starts to look.
Like a cover up. It's it's it's hard not to seek meaning when it seems meaningless, right, And you know, as a as a parent now, of I mean, you know that that that young paratrooper wasn't much younger than my daughter who sits here with me right now, And as a parent, I can only I can't honestly imagine
what that was like. And it was the first time in my life as a as a leader that I felt empty and helpless, and I didn't really know how to deal with that now, because how do you lead your organization through that.
Which we've been on. We've been in theater like three weeks.
Yeah, right, like we haven't even really moved into our you know, to our FOB yet, and we know that this is probably this is at least a twelve month or probably going to fifteen. Like we were getting word of that almost immediately, and so this is how we start that rotation right so that that that puts an immediate on it. But what it did for me is it really perked my ears up to you know, how how do you how do you keep your pulse right on your people right up? And this is what I think.
You know, conventional command teams in particular, you know, really spend a lot of their, thank goodness, a lot of their time on it. You've got a platoon in a cop where they're just getting shot at or ordered or you know, they're just sitting there. There's not much they can do to protect themselves from that, right and they're there for nine months twelve months. And what I started to internalize is we now know this thing called post
traumatic stress disorder PTSD. And I will constantly tell you that just because we all have post traumatic stress, and I do believe that every single service member who served overseas or trained to go overseas probably has post traumatic stress. Whether it's a disorder is a a question of degrees in a lot of cases, but it's our post traumatic
stress is the reason why I think we're alive. You know, when I hear the car backfire, it's the immediate action that I took that saved my life in the life of my friends, right, And so there's goodness in that
post traumatic stress. But then you watch that play out when you are helpless to do anything about it, right, And I started to recognize that rotation that those who were able to go out and be proactive and patrol and hunt and you know, fight the enemy and do the things they came there to do, their level of disorder, and my observations is lessened. Right, those who are you know, we used to jokingly call them the fobbits, right, you know,
the folks who never left Kandahar are never left Bogger. Well, I spent a couple of weeks on those places, and it was terrifying to me. You know that all of a sudden, you know, the front gate gets detonated by a v B I ed and you and you get turned into pink mist like you know that that the mortar comes down in the middle of your chew, right, and there's nothing.
It's just all random, right right?
Right?
Uh? And so that that post traumatic stress really started to highlight itself for me on that rotation And how do you confront that? Right? You know that as a leadership team, what do do you rotate your people around? Do you go see them? How does that work? I struggled with that a lot.
I think, you know.
One of the other things, like I have a theory that like suicide ideation is sort of the medic right, It's it's viral, It's mentally viral that once one, once one person in a in a group uses it, it.
It sort of gives it gives permission.
Puts the thought in people's head that maybe this is a solution.
Were you guys concerned with that at all?
Was there like are there means that the command can use attempt to like inoculate their soldiers?
Yeah, Like I said, catching, I can tell you the non traditional things we did, and then I can I can maybe speak a little bit about from the leadership perspective,
how I think we thought through that. So the USO, right, things rotate around, And something that I always laugh about is we lived in a place where only a ring route could hit you once a week, and then of course it's red air like ninety percent of the time, and so when an aircraft comes through, it's kind of like, you know, Christmas is coming and everyone's there, and one day I can remember it's Christmas and birds are landing, mails coming off, you know, and outcomes you know, five
or six. And they were ring card girls from the UFC, right, and they were they were coming down to hang out with you know, paratroopers on and we were definitely in the hinterlands, yeah, you know, And and all of them were wearing white T shirts and body armor in one hundred and ten degree you know, Afghan summer. And so when they took off their body armor, they were very popular and everybody wanted to get pictures and hang out. So there's that kind of just touching home a little bit.
And I know that's a little off color, right, but that that's that's war. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And those are the you know.
And and oh, by the way, all that's happening around one hundred by one hundred foot burn pit that's been smoldering for the last you know chance, right, which will hopefully get into that a little bit. So there's all those USO opportunities there. There was the psychologists that I thought were very helpful. That and uh and and once again, you know, very attractive psychologists showed up, and everybody wanted to.
Go talk to the psychologists.
Right, it's and and we're absolutely go talk to psychologists. They just wanted to talk to an American woman at that point. I think, so those types of you know, kind of morale boosting things occurred getting ice cream down to the guys, right, But I think the most important thing that we could do is leadership, which, by the way, I had one way between starts use my call signed to call in a bird to get ice cream, and I thought was amazing use of power. It was awesome,
good choice. And I thought the best thing leadership could do, though, was keep the guys proactive. I never liked the term presence patrol. I never liked the idea that you're just going to go out and wait for someone to shoot at you and react to it or blow you up, and then we're going to deal with that. That made no sense to me. Even if you're telling them go get a six pack of coke at the local bazaar.
Like go find me something that you know, gives them a mission and a purpose and a task that allows them to go out and do the thing they volunteered typically three or four times to do. If you let that dog hunt what it's supposed to do, you will
be shocked with American ingenuity. And I found that those who were able to actively go out and perform the duties that they wanted to do that they volunteered do, those were the guys that, or at least that's the way I thought that leadership could do its best to increase morality or deal with post traumatic stress.
So let's transition into going to rope, which I believe what Ranger Orientation program today called RASP two.
RASP one, RASP one, No, no, you're right. RASP one is the rip rip you're right, you're right, And now there's a RASP biola. So enlisted go to RIP now, RASP officers and NCOs go to ropes now, RASP two, sir, Yeah, yeah, right on.
Yeah.
So when I was in Afghanistan for those fifteen months, uh, I had to make the decision of whether I wanted to go to SFAs or whether I wanted to, you know, try the Ranger regiment or whether I wanted to stay you know, where I was, which I was having an absolute blast, and I decided that after having watched those communities in action, what I felt I wanted to apply
myself to the most was that Ranger experience. And so you know, if it absolutely positively must be destroyed in one period of darkness, you know, these are the guys to do it.
And so that that's what I wanted to get involved with.
And so I was fortunate enough to earn a slot in rope and I can remember it was the first time you realized you weren't that special, Like when you go to a you know, to get selected for that kind of an orientation program. You're you're you're clearly in the top, you know, ten percent of your of your peer group. And so you've been running, you know, pretty
comfortably in those organizations. You've been doing fairly well, you know, playing eighteen ball, you know, every single day, and then you show up and you suddenly realize that just being average here is a great day, right. And I'm not the fastest runner, I'm not the best road marcher, I'm not the best rope climber.
I can't shoot the best. I can't.
Whatever it is, there is somebody sit it, seated right next to you that can do it ten times better than you. And the professionalism of the ranger non commissioned.
Officer just struck me.
The professionalism, the competence, and the thing about the Ranger regiment that I find most special is everybody's a ranger first. You know, your your cook is a five star Michelin trained, you know, chef, and he jumps out of planes with a gun and he seizes the objective first, and then he starts cooking up dinner for everybody. Like the fact that you're a ranger first. There is no second class
citizen inside of the regiment. Everybody has a tambaret. Everyone goes through the same selection process, everyone goes through the same training evolutions. And watching that cadre of I mean said Adam Nash was a was a Ribbons structor.
Adam Nash was, Oh he might. I'm a little afraid to say this out loud. He was a holacious Ribbon and only he was.
He was he was. He was a great first Sergey. He was good at his job. Don't get me wrong, I mean, that's their job. Is to put you through your paces right well, and for those for those in the audience who don't know, Adam Nash's like eight feet tall Best Ranger competition, you know, literally made it look like you know, you know Mike and Ike. You know, I'm like this tall, you know, balde, I can't run for ship. You know, you got Adam Nash who's like,
I'm like a Clydesdale. But everything works. I had Alex Capratti, So Alex Capratti was my was my rope, my rope senior and CEO that that core of non commissioned officers just set the tone of what this organization expects out of you. And the immediate emotion that gets, you know, raised at least with me, is I'll sweep the floors like whatever job you'll offer me, just to be around these guys. I mean, these guys are literally my heroes, you know.
There.
These are guys who you know Mogadishu, These are guys who jumped into Rhino. These, I mean, these are guys who went after what was her name, Jessica, Jessica Lynch, thank you apologize for you know, Jessica Inch's faily, for forgetting that I have friends who are on that mission, right, like, these are literally my heroes.
And I'm standing.
I'm in the barracks, you know, RIP Barracks, which wrote barracks is just a room down the street from RIP Barracks, right, And I'm in this room with three or four other officers who are clearly better than me. They're clearly smarter, they're clearly better looking, they're clearly faster, I mean just everything about them, you know. I know, I'm already on the B team just getting in the door. And to be around that caliber of person, it forces you to either give your best or get out of the way.
You just can't even come into work that day without giving it your all. And so that rope experience I thought was one of the best introductions to a special
Operations organization. And I've seen a few different selections now and I've helped, you know, build a couple of them at this point, and I felt that the RASP, you know, with the rope that then became RASP and RASP was even better, was such a great culture inculcation for everybody that you bring into the regiment and you are a ranger first, That's why they called it indoctrination is right, Yeah,
that's right. And so at the end of that selection when they're like, you know, well, hey, I know you came here to be a Ranger company commander and to go down to a ranger battalion, but we don't have room in one of those battalions for about nine or twelve months, would you be willing to serve on regimental staff? And the answer is just, of course, yeah, whatever you want me to do to stand in this door.
I mean, in a sense, it's like good that you get learn a lot about the organization from like a top down level, maybe before you take a position at the battalion.
Yeah, you know, I I that was probably the effect.
But you know, for me, what I remember of it was.
Being around guys like you know, Rich Clark, Colin Tooley, Marcus Evans.
I mean, just these these legends of the community when.
They're you know, Majors, you know, Ray Devins, and I mean just these guys that raised me as a young officer inside the regiment to the best of their ability, no fault of their own that I'm all fucked up, it's they did their best. But I also started to learn that I had different interests in the regiment. So when you put you know, you put someone on RHQ on Regimental headquarters staff, it's like a nightmare for an infantry officer, Right, you want to be in the three shot.
That's where everybody wants to yeah, do ops, everybody wants to be there. I was the assistant S one. Nobody wants to be the assistant S one at Ranger Regiment. And I suddenly found I really liked it, Like I really enjoyed the manning and the talent and understanding how to get that talent and how to align that talent and then how to put that talent with the right
teammates to get the most out of the team. And you know, understanding how the senior officers and n c o s and those types of organizations, that's what they consider to be one of their primary responsibilities is getting the right leadership dynamic for that team. You know, when a commander breaks his leg on a jump and you've got to bring in a new you know, a new major to command that team for Afghanistan, for or Fallujah, and you know for four month rotation at high op tempo,
Like who's the right guy? And that's the answer that they'll always give, well, who's the right guy. They don't care who's supposed to do it, they don't care who's next in line. It's who's the right guy to lead these rangers in combat. And they build teams around that, and those teams get I mean we've we've heard about it from Standard Crystal.
Now you know, teams of teams of teams, right.
Yeah, that style of focused leadership is what you know from the Solutions twenty one perspective. Now, as a leadership consultant, I really harked on with you know, the CEOs and presidents that I work on all these private organizations. You need to spend the most most of your time talking to your people and understanding how to align teams and how to get leaders bought into the vision right you've got for where this needs to go. It's not in
front of your computer sending emails. It's not in the boardroom, you know, making those decisions. If you've built your staff the way you should, they will do those things for you. I learned that from watching senior non commissioned officers and officers in the Ranger Regiment build task forces.
It's interesting because and speaking purely from a pregot ranger perspective. You know, you would see for the people don't know, like when you first become an officer, you cannot go to range of Attalian, right, you have to have a command someplace else and uh, you.
Know, and then and then you come come in.
You've got to prove you can do it in the conventional force before you get the opportunity to try out for it in the special operations community.
And it's very interesting seeing different platoon leaders and and how they either adapt or don't adapt once they get to Ranger battalion, you know, and they've got this platoon of you know, highly motivated you know, a bunch of kind of knucklehead privates, but also you know your team leaders or squad leaders, you're a.
Platoon certain and.
Whether whether they could stand back because every because everybody wants to look good, right, you want if that's your time to shine when you go to Ranger battalion and you want to look good. But it was the guys who learned that if they step back and facilitated, right, they facilitated these rangers doing what they're doing, they were
going to look good. The rangers were going to make them look good, compared to the guys who felt that they need to needed to imprint their vision onto these guys who had been who've been doing this job NonStop, yeah, since before they got there. Yeah, And how they adapted and and if they could accept that they weren't they weren't really the star of the show.
Right. Well, it's kind of I don't know if you guys know this, but the Dodgers beat the Yankees a little bit ago in a World Series. I didn't know.
Yeah, it kind of.
Pissed me off because I was a Yankees span for a long time. I was telling Race to go to the old Bronx Stadium here a while back. I don't remember the dude's name, but he hit a Grand Slam home run in the first inning of what not first name, but in Game one. And that's an A team player on the Dodgers, right. That means most of that roster is B team players, right, and then you got four or five A team players and the Yankees have the same thing, right, and officers in particular that go into
a special operations organization, the REGI. In my experiences, the first thing they're confronted with is they're accustomed to being the star quarterback. Wherever they were at, they run a star quarterback. They were definitively top three in their division, you know. So for those who don't what a division is, you know about twenty thousand personnel, which means that's a
whole lot of platoon leaders and company commanders. They were a top three of that division to get the tryout, right, And so you get to that unit knowing that you're elite and you're select and suddenly you're on a team of all guys who hit Grand Slam home runs every single day. And I'd love to even talk about, you know, those crazy knucklehead privates, because there's no crazy knucklehead private in the Ranger regimen.
By the time you hit a team, you're a tab spec for.
You're a tab specialist for generally by the time you're really rotating on the aircraft. I don't know if that was your experiences, but mine was. You show up as a PFC, you go immediately into Ranger school preparation. You then go to Ranger school preparation while going through all your A T and finishing schools and holy schools and
all that other good stuff. That's going on, and then by the time you come back and then go on a rotation where you're probably working backside support inside the targeting cell, you know, running errands until you get your chance to go on a couple of missions that we know are going to be good for you to.
Break in on.
Right by the time that guy is going out the back of an aircraft, he's probably a tabspec for It was that your experiences.
I mean by the time guys are going out of the aircraft, I mean we had guys.
Graduate from RIP and go out of the back of the aircraft later.
It used to it used to be that it was like you had to you had to spend your time.
You were probably going to be on the line.
For eight months to a year before you before you were allowed to go to ranger school.
I went, and I mean, this isn't because that's closer to my experience, not because I was anything special, just because I passed a PT test they sent me to ranger school like right away, which was good and bad. But prior to that, yeah, I think there was a thought that you'd, depending on the first sergeant's philosophy, that you're going to stay there, like a year to two years before you go to ranger school, and that's why we had a deficiency of ranger tab guys in the company at that time.
Yeah, no tab, no slab. I don't know, I don't know if they still do that anymore, but as the old days. But yeah, so that so the greatest thing that I really pulled from that experience is you have to eat a whole lot of humble pie immediately, and you're coming in with an eighty second I walked in there with an eighty second combat patch, one hundred and first combat patch, you know, twenty seven twenty eight months of deployed combat time at that point, right, I'm feeling
pretty confident in my abilities. Yeah, ce team player day one, Like, don't even know how to don't even know what the accuracy if you didn't wear an assault patch when you show that. My first introduction, right was it was a senior non commissioned officer? Can at me going? We got to get that in stereo before you talk to me. So yeah, of course I had a result there, but not on top, on the bottom where it belonged in that unit.
And then so you mentioned you really enjoyed S one you're learning about the regiment, but then you had this rear D job that you said was just horrific.
Yeah, that was the worst job in my career. And so and I say worse because think about your My job is to be the voice of the command, you know, rear literally, and the times that they really need me are when we have killed and wounded rangers. And so it's caring for those families, it's connecting those families to the resources, and the special operations community really lays it out right. And some of the most you know, heartbreaking events are funerals.
And you go to these funerals and you or.
The escort for a general officer who's presenting the flag, which in those days General Votel did almost all of the ones that I was on for whatever, I don't know if that was just the rotation or that was his decision. And you're dealing with these parents that are in one step so proud of what their son has done, and on the other just we've just devastated a family, right, I mean, they're never going to recover a change from this. And the toll that just the emotional toll that that
took on the rear detachment. I really got to understand it, and I really got to see it, and it was compressed. And so in the eighty second or in one hundred and first, you know, a conventional unit, those you know, those five KIA those thirty I think it was thirty two vs.
I very serious, seriously wounded.
So when Walter rued, we're in San Antonio, I'm flying to visit those rangers who have life altering in injuries like will never you know, live without care kind of injuries. Uh, you know, you're you're working with the wife who has small children, who you know, with the parents and the
emotional toll. I watched that take on our rangers going through that, and I only started to understand the emotional toll that was taking on me years later, right and and and that is, uh, you know, when when you think back to the things that really trigger my you know, like my post traumatic stress disorder, the thing it's it's children, Yeah, you know, kids getting hurt and watching children, you know, at a coffin, and you know, and and it's probably
because of my own children, right, but it's a it's a very much my my nightmares are always about kids. Something happens to a kid, and and to be with someone's kid, you know, to escort that body home, which literally you're talking about your ranger buddy, and you know how it works. It's your ranger buddy that's going to escort you home, going to make sure of that if we can. And then to surround yourself with the family that is so proud like I literally, you know, Jason Dalky,
I'll just give this one. Jason Dalkey were in Jacksonville for his funeral. I remember correctly, Jacksonville, that Naval Air Station and beautiful chapel.
Jason's remains come in.
The naval commander had everyone in dress whites from disembarkment of the plane all the way to.
The chapel and then all the way off of the installation.
And then when you got off the installation, I'm in the lead vehicle with you know, the police and the fire department. They shut down the Interstate I seventy five North was shut down and they were escorting us with I was, and I'm in the lead vehicle, and I can remember coming up this little hill and looking in the rear view and General Votel is sitting behind me, and all I see is Patriot Riders. So just hundreds and hundreds of motorcycle riders and then behind them this
endless convoy of Jackson Naval Air Station. These these are these are our Navy brothers and sisters, right and just I'm getting a little emotional just think about it right now, Jason Dalky was this amazing? I mean I didn't know Jason. I know, I unfortunately only got the stories of Jason. And when you listen to his wife, go, I mean, look at him. I remember this plain as day, his
picture in full gear. You know, we all take the operator picture when you get into the theater, right, so we're in our full kit, in the talk and in the jock and someone tick snaps that picture. Well, Jason literally looked like a poster child, like this is the ranger of you know, this is our modern day ranger on the battlefield. He looks like he'll tear you apart from there. And he died doing what he loved doing.
And she knows that how heartbreaking for them and for the family, and that that was the worst job ever. And yet it probably made me a better commander.
Yeah, because you understand the gravity of all this, That's what it sounds like you took away from.
It when when we make mistakes in our business, it can result in life altering, right changes.
Right, So after this, uh, this ordeal, you become a company commander at one seven five, HC went some fun. We're happily representing all three battalions here on the show today.
Yeah we are. We're getting together for a second and third we're getting we're Uh. I'll tell you, I always feel as an impostor inside of the Ranger community. I always feel like, you know, I never quite became one of you, Like you guys are just so my heroes, and so I look at you guys, and and you're what I wanted to be when I grow up. And so it's a it's been just a humbling miss. It's the I have very much the same sort.
Of feeling that you do that I was just lucky to be a part of this like storied historical unit for a short period of time, you know.
And well, I feel like the unit revolved around me.
It probably did.
No, No, I was I was average everywhere I went.
Uh.
Yeah, tell us about becoming HHC company committeder in one seven five.
Yeah, so I was the Candaharfusion Cell director. So we're overseas and the Cannaharfusion Cell director. I remember, I worked really hard for like three or four months to make this a useful thing. And so for the you know, for the people who don't know what the canaharf Fusion
Cell director, candrahearfusion cell was. It was where all the NATO soft elements, you know, white and black were supposed to be synchronizing their efforts inside of the Candahar you know, battle space, the Candle Canahar aar and I was the Candorharfusion Cell director from you know, from Task Force, and so my job was to coordinate and synchronize all of these with the with the battle space owner, which in
those days was the tenth Mountain Division. I was really proud of myself because I was able to coordinate one or two somewhat synchronized operations of delivery of humanitarian systems. I mean just ridiculously you know, low output, right, And I was really proud of my ability just to put that together. And I can remember, you know, Mike Foster, the Battani commander, went seventy five. He's like, you've run
how many missions? And I was like I've done two missions something like that, and he's like, sounds like we need to find another job for you. He called me to congratulate me that he just selected me to be the HAC one seventy five commander. And I put a good face on it because I was disappointed that I didn't get a rifle right, right. I wanted a rifle company right. And I put a good face on it. And I think, you know, I think to, you know, Mike Foster's credit, you know, he he he wasn't letting
me get away with that. He continued to, you know, this is you know, rare opportunity, and blah blah blah.
And I knew it was. I knew intellectually.
I knew this was a lifetime opportunity, right, but I was still a little disappointed. I wanted a writing.
So for for viewers out there who are a little confused. Headquarters and headquarters company is where the mortars are located, and the snipers the RECKI guys. And then you had all this like burgeoning intelligence capability, technical yeah, technical support element yeah, what I called it t S. And so it became I lovingly nicknamed it the Dark Arts. And I remember Mike Foster, and I think you and I
were chatting about this before the show. But Mike Foster, he always had this uh, this kind of you know, bloom wher you're planted, And I always hated him for it because he planted.
Me in a place.
And and lo and behold, and I probably owe Mike a call at this point, you know, but he was right, you know, I think what he recognized is I wasn't quite you know, I was just as good. I could do it as good as them, but that wasn't where my talents lied. You know, there was lots of people who to do that just as well, if not better than me. In fact, I know at least you know, five guys who can do it better than me. And here was a place that needed something a little bit different.
He wanted something a little bit different, and he saw, I think something in me that he said you can go and do this. And so it ended up being almost a life altering moment or experience for me where I suddenly realized you fast forward now, you know, almost ten years later and I'm on a range and with the Asymmetric Warfare Group doing nonstandard shooting through a rental car which that's a whole fun story. And a guy asks me, are you you know your battalion command selections
coming up? Or you go into the eighty second, one hundred and first, one seventy third, the usual places that we go to before we try out for a ranger battalion, right, And I was like, no, there's about fifty other guys in the back of my head that can command a paratroop battalion better than I can. But I think this is where my talent was is here, and I really enjoyed it, and I really loved it, and I fell
in love with HHC. I mean to the point where I almost tried to rebrand it, right, whereas just I just had h instead of you know, HHC. Because Adam Nash was my see, my senior and listening advisor. And I was like, nobody listens to me in the headquarters. Nobody cares what Major Davis says in the headquarters. No NCR officers listening to me, but they will listen to
Adam Nash. And so Adam, I need you to command headquarters because I can't walk into the battalion commander and go, hey, sir, is what you're going to do today Adam nash Can as a ranger, non commissioned officer and hotel company was where I put my emphasis, which was the dogs, the Rekie Platoon, TSC, and how do we start changing the way that our organization connects to other intelligence organizations out there in order to give a strategic through tactical uh
picture that then we can put strike forces on target.
Which is very important because one of the challenges I think with whether it's work with other units or whether it's even working with the line is a lot of times people don't know how to employ their snipers, they don't know how to employ their records, they don't know what their capabilities are, you know, and so a lot of times those elements if they aren't there to like
sell themselves. If they aren't there, you know, they the planning is just like a lot of times the most unimaginative right there after effect, right like this is the
big show. You're enabled either that or to imaginive like, Okay, the sniper is going to infill you know, three hours plus they're going to eliminate this guy and do this, and it's like that, I'm sorry, that's you know, you we appreciate that you think that we're all that, but that might not work, right, So we're of duty, right, So and you know, and even I think for a long time preach you at even the commander of h AC didn't really understand the capabilities of the people who
worked for him because he was more focused on the headquarters aspect.
Right, we just the the the people.
Who got put into h AC is like, well, we don't know where else, you know that we try them on the line.
You're in the you know, in line companies will put them in AHAC.
But for you to take such an interest in and and it grew right because you had the TSC and the dogs, and somebody has to understand what they were capable of sometimes what they're not capable of, and then proselytize right and and sell them and and teach.
And fight for them and fight for them as for them, because it's interesting to mention it that way, because you have to interface up and down the change in that regard, right, Yeah, and with my you know, with my fellow company commanders, who are the priority, you know. And so when you've got a rifle company that's doing you know, a calfax or you know, a large combined arms live fire exercise as a team. You know, well, they need their mortars,
they need their snipers, they eat their dogs. And training those guys and getting those guys selected because their psychological profiles are a little bit different than other rangers, right right, And so just finding the guys that psychologically fit into
those teams. I got to spend so much time with the you know, the task for psychologists and learning about you know, human uh, human needs and human interactions and personality styles and understanding how and I which, by the way, if you guys don't use DISC at this point, you know, DISC personality styles like, I'll teach you to you because once once you do it, you can't unsee it.
Really.
Oh yeah, it's just I can see the personality style, which means I can understand and how you like to be engaged with, how you like to be talked to, and learning all of that from the psychologists. And then, by the way, the reason why I joined this company, Solutions twenty one is they employ a lot of those same understanding and ideas of how to build and align
leaders as we learned inside the Special Operations community. And so seeing that and understanding what we could be doing with these teams and how we could be connecting to the ranger reconnaissance detachments, and how that could be connecting to TFO, and how that could be connecting to different intelligence organizations that are all trying to gain targetable fidelity
on X whatever it is. And that, ultimately, I think is what grows me into the AWG, where I get into strategic studies and strategic understandings.
So as you finish off your time at HHC, you're going to staff College, and I think you were saying that, like a waiver had to be signed because what was going on in the war at the time.
Yeah, So.
It was it was it was timeline management of officers. And I don't want to get too deep into it, but I was fortunate enough to get hired very young as an officer, So you know, I had like three years before my major selection and then was retained you know for two years after that, and so there was about three or four of us in my class years I did okay at the regiment.
Yeah, so one year run, it was, it's a long run.
I was the longest standing officer at that point when I left. Yeah, Chris Vannick, who you know, long standing officer in the end of the five year run of Davis, which was probably a blessing for some and a curse
for others, I hope. But yeah, that there was about five of us, or so for four or five of us that came out of that same regiment class that we had to get waivers because we were too old to go to the Command in General Staff College, because we were getting we were already majors, right, and and so General Botel reached in again to my life and you know, signed a letter to get us into the
Command of General Staff College. And I was fortunate enough to also be offered the SOCOM Interagency Studies Program, where I got to spend you know, really a year in the basement with some truly impressive you know special operators, Green Berets, Seals, you know, rangers, you know, a couple of Special Mission Unit guys, only twenty of them in the cohort, and we lived together trying to understand how best to interface with all of these three and four
letter agencies while conducting overseas operations.
And that was you know, the g WAT was really the first time that there was a lose relationships right times. But really the gyt put put jasock and so used to sock whatever in ned with the agent because they both realized how much they needed each other.
Lots of lots of and I hate to use the word synergies, but but yeah, there was a lot of a lot of venn diagramming of what we were working on and how we could help each other there. And we were starting in those days to understand how technology
can tear us apart and bring us together. And that's the days when we started building you know, so us NEETs and Socrates and you know, coming off the giants and you know, stuff like that, and so it was really interesting to watch those different organizations try to tear down those barriers in order to integrate the intelligence picture, in order to optimize the effects on the ground.
I know, we kind of skipped we're at the college now that I wanted those five years that you are and remen especially in headquarters as so a lot of things you're talking about did not exist when I was free done right, they they were We had mortars and snipers, right, and so.
That's plenty to keep you busy, by the way, But what I mean.
Is is that the regiment very much like professionalized very much, you realize the things that it needed and grew up to be more than just the light infantry. We lead into the best night entery in the world, the shock troops right for airfield seizures. What what were some of the things when you were there, What were some things.
That you were impressed by?
What were some of the biggest growths you saw where regiment really came into it.
Sound yeah, so I think you know, the eight hundred pound gorilla is what it's commonly referred to, right, so, Range a regiment, the eight hundred pound gorilla of the Special Operations community. Because the GAT and the op tempo and the area that we were at, we couldn't just have you know, unit platoons out there, you know, three or four of them, you know, we needed thirty of them, and well you can't grow you know, a special operations team overnight. And we were even trying to grow the
regiment in those days. Delta companies you know, started coming online in the days that I was there, and we were trying to grow Ranger.
Well, what we were were.
Doing was essentially taking a platoon from the three companies and you know taking you know, just baking, basically making two platoon companies to make a D squadron and then trying.
To bring in more ranger and build them.
And the soft truth is you just can't make them fast enough, right, which is why I'm really interested in the longevity of the operator, which is why I'm really interested in respiratory care. But that was I think that the transition is wasn't a like Mission Creep. It wasn't the regiment trying to get a little bit more like
an SMU. It was more the regiment was asked to perform more of those functions, and so the regiment did what the regiment does, It responds to its nation's call, and it started to professionalize those teams to do those particular functions and thus multiplied the effect. I'm trying to not be too specific on there, and I think I know.
A little bit about like what you're the road you're going down, And I think something that's really impressive about the ranger regiment, you know, that you're alluding to, is like when there's a problem, when there's a task, they really can and will throw a bunch of highly motivated rangers onto a problem, and sure we can be knuckleheads at times, but eventually they get to the right answer. You know, they really do put themselves into it and fix the glitch, whatever it may be.
Whatever tribe you come out of, you know, before you go into an SMU, I find that the same caliber that's in the SMU is just the same caliber you've got in the tribe you came from. There's just more concentration right at the SMU. And so to your point, that level of competency and that level of proficiency in those functions, that which you know is basically direct rate. I mean, these are direct raids in urban environments and wherever it needs to be. So this is the world's
premiere rainforce, the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment. We come in and we come out yeah fast.
But then as time goes on, I mean you have rangers with beards and you know, cruising around doing intel stuff that the public doesn't really associate the Ranger Regiment with.
Yeah.
So the the relaxed grooming standards, which in those days we would tell you it wasn't a relaxed grooming standard. We were just meeting the Army standard, right, we just weren't didn't have high yet, you didn't have to have the high entire four inch in landing strip on the top, which is kind of the you know what I thought of as rangers for you get four inches for those who don't know, you know, which is high and tight
basically relaxed grooming standards. Well, they weren't relaxed grooming standards. We just met the army standard, right uh. And then the types of missions that the rangers needed to do in order to gain the fidelity on the target required that we grow some of those capabilities. Now like r r D has always been you know, the Range of Reconstance Detachment has always been a thing. It was r r C, you know, the Range of Reconstance Company for the years before I got there, but that has always
been there for the regimental commander. And then we started to then professionalize those forces and make them even more competent at the battalion level to tie into those ideas. And then technology just forces us to you know, get away from green face reki for a while, you know, camouflage in the woods. And and what was interesting about that is by the time I now you know, take command with you know, Adam Nash and h AC one
seventy five. When I come through there, you know, Adam and I have these hilarious conversations about we're having to teach rangers how to put on camouflage right and do patrol based activities right, Like how do you put up a poncho hoo?
You know, how do you stay?
How do you sustain yourself in a hole in a hide sight for two or three days?
Now?
These were things we had been raised. His guys have been doing urban warfare for these guys have been doing CQB, you know, running and gun in and assaultman shirts and so more college and then you make your way to Commanded General Staff College. Ye, thank you, major school and then twenty fifth Infantry. Oh why yeah? How do how do you end up there?
What's uh? What assignment do you land in there?
Yeah?
So I did not want to go back to the conventional army.
I did not. I was. I was doing everything humanly possible to you know, keep touching the dragon and riding it. I went to rasp too, or rasp Il is what they call it now. So it's where majors go at Il to compete to go back as a field grade inside of the regiment, made it to the final four and and and wasn't selected. Uh and and because I
wasn't selected, I walked out of that room. And you know, I was fortunate enough to get offered a job by Marcus Evans to go to second Brigade twenty fifth I d and and and being his team, which was truly humbling and and so I took that opportunity, as you know, if I, if I can't be in the Ranger regiment, Uh well, actually what I should say is my plan was to then go to the Long Walk in the Spring if I couldn't be in the Ranger regimen.
And so I got my age waiver.
And I remember coming home from not being selected and from you know, having a quick phone call with Colonel Marcus or Colonel Evans at two o'clock in the morning my time, right, you know, like noon his time, and sitting on the stairs in my in my you know, Fort Leavenworth, you know BOQ with my wife you know there, and.
She goes, well, all right, what's next?
And I was like long Walk in the Spring, you know, and she goes, okay, now may not be the right time to have this conversation. But you're a little bit older than most majors here, you know, you've got eighteen years or not like sixteen years or something like that.
Then, you know, just to clarify for people.
Out there when we say like a little old.
Not exactly an old man, what's considered a little bit older.
Yeah, that's a great point. So in twenty thirteen, I would have been thirty six, one foot in the grave, yeah, debt, yeah, yeah, dead and special operations down right?
Two retirement right?
Yeah, really, I mean really yeah, right for an eighteen year old. I had to get a waiver even to go to selection because I was older, and I don't know, maybe thirty eight is the breakoff point or something. Now, so we got the waiver and everyone, most guys coming out of the regiment at the waiver and I remember her, you know, her saying, Okay, So you've got a lot of buddies who have now done this and you know, had the same experiences you have. You know, we're some
of them a lot more successfully than you have. H What happens if you go to selection, not that you fail, but you get selected and then you wash out of OTC, which is what was happening to most of my peers, right, Like, just because you get the opportunity to go and try out for the big leagues, it doesn't mean that you're going to make it. And I watched a lot of you know, of my peers who are way better than
me get selected go to OTC, wash out and OTC. Well, when you've got a few years in your timeline to
play with, that's okay. But I was at the point where if I didn't KD, if I didn't get a key development job as a major, meaning a battalion XO or S three job in some unit, I wasn't going to be eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel, which means I was going to miss my window for colonel, which means I wasn't going to get a battalian command, which means and you just start seeing the downward trajectory of I'm going to be exiting this career very quickly.
Right, I'm a stress being an officer.
Yeah, well it can be if you mismanage your career as badly as I.
I always did what I want, and now what was I supposed to do?
And so she goes, Hey, how about she goes so if you go to selection and you get selected and you wash out of OTC, what happens? And I said, I'm probably being riffed. You know, Force retired as a major at eighteen years And she looked at me and she said, how about you take one for the family? Yeah? And I was like, that's that's a fair ask, right, right, It's a fair ask. And so I then looked at every you know, all kinds of other organizations to see
if it was going to be a better idea. But in the end, I begrudgingly went back to the light infantry, not airborne, not aerosolt.
Right.
I'd never been in a straight leg infantry unit in my entire career, and it was the best experience of my career, of my entire career. Being a battalion XO in the twenty fifth Infantry Division was my favorite job.
It was the first to AS's a great question.
It was the first time, I think it was the first time that I knew what to do. I had been trained in how to do it, and I was given the authority to make it happen. Right, you have some motorship over this, right, and so you know, for those who may not have served at a know, a
senior league level in the battalion or brigade. You know, the battalion commander is the boss, right, but he doesn't want to do the job of the battalion XO or the Italian operations officer to the battalion S three, And so those two are intended to be, you know, autonomous making decisions, you know, within the intent of their commander, right.
And so it was the first time.
So I'm a two IC second in command of a rifle battalion in the twenty fifth Infantry Division.
I know how to be.
A better S one than my S one because she's been in the army for twelve months, right, literally eighteen months by the time she gets here.
You know, she's learning her role.
I've done that for a long time. I know how to do target packages better than my S two, who's fresh out of his Military Intelligence captain's career course.
And so as you walk through a battalion level staff.
You're walking through the growth of leadership occurring at every door. And I really found that I loved it, that I truly loved, you know, mentoring and teaching these younger officers the things that I didn't need them to learn right, like I learned these lessons, Please don't relearn them. Let me help you get through this. And it was a pivotal moment in my leadership growth as an officer because I had kind of grown up in a pretty high pressure,
you know, high intensity environment. You know, the term toxic leadership probably comes from our community, right, and we know that it's effective, not necessarily the right way, but it can be effective right, and really high performing teams can also be terrible to be on right. But that experience, I decided, I don't think you have to do it that way.
I don't think it has to be that way.
I think you can do it differently. And I got the opportunity to really test that idea because I just didn't want to be that.
Person to my people.
And so, you know, when I was getting you know, you know, beat down by my majors rightfully, so by the way, I was a cluster fuck. And so when I'm getting beat down by my majors, I didn't want to beat down captain. I wanted to build my captain, and so I wanted to have a different approach to that. And it changed my leadership style forever. I wanted to teach you everything that I knew, not beat you over the things you were supposed to know. So did you have a good time out there in Hawaii?
I had a blast, other than just the job, of which sounds like you had a good time, sort of rewarding.
Most of what I did was the job. From there, I did go to the Brigade XO. We do Pacific pathways, right, did Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia. Yeah? Yeah, So I was fortunate enough, after being a Battalion XO to then get the opportunity
to be a Brigade XO in that same brigade. Not as much fun because you don't spend as much time with the you know, the young officers and the NCOs down on the line doing the deed, but another really rewarding experience because now I'm leading a staff of my peers, you know, and so I've got you know, now, the S one is one of the best S ones in the army, you know. Now the S two is this is their k D job, their key development job is a major right, and so now I get to learn
the lesson that leading down and mentoring down. It's actually kind of easy right, Like, people will do what you pay them to do in the end. And so leading down can be pretty simple, right. Leading up, you know, getting your boss to one hundred percent align with your vision and said like, that can be hard, right, But getting your peers to come online with you and to you know, drive together as a team like that, that
is the hardest form of leadership. I think you can imagine and and and As a brigade, you know, field grade, you have to be able to lead your peers. And I filled so many times, and I had so many successes, but all of that really grew into us going to this Pacific Pathways experience where we deploy the brigade into the theater to conduct mutual training exercises with these other partner nations. How did you accomplish that?
I mean as far as getting your peers, as we'd say in the military, on the same sheet of music.
Yeah, So I think the way that it is I learned, I think because it definitely didn't happen the first couple couple of times.
If you can get everyone.
To envision what it looks like when you've successfully completed the task. So the effect I'm trying to achieve is X. And the more detailed you can be with what success looks like. And I would get as you know, my ADHD brain would get as focused as when you hit that corner, take a knee and pull security and then call set position one. You have personally achieved my decisive point like that kind of I need you to do it.
I need you do in vision what this looks like, what success is and when you can paint that vision and then surround yourself with people that you trust, that you've you've built and empowered to make every decision within
the limits of their comfort. Another Mike fosterism. I got to call him, you know, so you know, when you give them that trust and and they have the authority to make those decisions and they agree to the vision and they've bought into that, they'll do it better than you ever could.
Right, And so did the twenty fifth? Did they do a deployment during this time while you were there?
So we did the Pacific Pathways was considered a deployment that this was almost getting a little post gyt now right. Yeah, we did a JR TC rotation which I did not get to do because I blew my knee out. Also, another leadership experience, first time Scott Kelly, the brigade commander. They're a former unit member. He walked up and he said, you're never going to be the same again. You're breakable now, and he was one hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, once one thing goes and it all starts going down.
Do you do you think because you did have a combat scroll and you know, in addition to.
One on one in the eight second, did you wear your combat scroll?
Do you know? Do you remember? No?
No, I did I wore combat scroll.
I wore Well it's as well no.
It depended on where I was at. But but the.
Reason I'm asking is obviously there's whether it's real or not. There there is a presumed i think authority and expertise, right that goes along with having a combat scroll or a combat SF or you.
Know what I mean.
Yeah, that that when you when you were in a conventional unit. Does that help you when you are talking to people, were they they're they're automatically giving you, uh like credibility?
Yes, and I think it's a double edged sword, but yes, so one I would say my my personal rule was I wore the last patch of the unit that I went that I deployed with, right, unless I was assigned to a unit that I had a combat patch from. Okay, So if I was to be reassigned to the eighty second, I would wear eighty second in stereo. Like I'm very proud of my eighty second combat patch.
Right.
If I was in the one hundred and first, I would wear one hundred first in stereo. I'm very proud of that combat patch. The last unit I deployed to combat with and that I saw combat with was the first Ranger between you didn't have a twenty fifth ID patch and the Yeah, and in the AWG. I never heard a shot fired in anger, thank god. So, yeah, I didn't get that opportunity.
Tell us, tell us about that starting to you know you, I believe the trajectory here is that you had a job and then that got changed. Kind of there's a rug pull unfortunately. Yeah, you were trying to find a way to stay in Hawaii. But tell us about how the Asymmetrical Warfare Group came about for you.
Yeah, so thank you for tying that back together for me.
So I run into Task Force IED in two thousand and three in Iraq, Right, and then they grow throughout the years. I actually have them assigned to one of my patrols in Afghanistan as a company commander. You know, two guys come out of Iraq and so I get to kind of touch them again a little bit and kind of see what they're doing. And then I was leaving my brig I left my brigade XO time and I was fortunate enough to get a follow on assignment as the Brigade Operations Officer for the one ninety six
JP M r C SO Joint Pacific. I'm gonna screw this one up Readiness center, but it basically it's a deployable Sure, I'll take one.
Yeah, it's a Deployable.
Training Center or NTC j RTC package that goes to the units that are signed to INDO PACON and so into Paycon literally a place of tyranny of distance, and so instead of moving those units to a national training.
Center, we go to them. Thank you, sir, I appreciate you.
And I was in that unit as the Brigade Operations Officer, which I was very thankful for the opportunity because I hadn't had any OPS experience as a field grade officer. I'd been alarm. I'd been an EXO in a battalion, and I'd actually wanted to be the EXO in the brigade. I didn't want to be the three. And so I got the opportunity now to kind of round out my
experiences and go be a brigade operations officer. And I was supposed to be a two year assignment that would keep me on island on Hawaii, so my family would be stable. I didn't want to move my kids, you know, anymore than I had to, and we loved the islands that we didn't want to live. Yeah, I learned how to I learned. I really I really learned how to surf there, you know, like I really enjoyed it. And about I was in Indonesia at the time with the
one ninety six. Then we were with the twenty fifth actually at that point, and my branch manager called me and said, hey, the code on your billet has been changed from an infantry officer to an armor officer and we're going to need you to find another job next year. And I was like, well, find another job means those jobs are closed right now because we've already filled them out.
And so to find another job I'm gonna have to leave Hawaii, and he was like, more than likely bad news, right, and so so in essence, and I'll just truncate this so.
We don't have to belabor officer timelines.
But you know, in the end, you know, when when you're trying to get a battalion command, your window gets real short and people start driving you to positions. So you've got to go to pre command. Course, you've got to go to pre coote in the organization. You know,
ideally you've been in that organization before. You know, Usually the chief of Staff, at least from my understanding, likes to place commanders who have lots of experience in those units as battalion commanders because we want you to be successful day one on the job, right. We don't want you to learn the proclivities of you know, training in Hawaii, which is really hard to train in, right, you know, we I want you to understand those things inside now.
And so I just did my reverse career when I applied for a battalion command, and there was that one year that I was supposed to be stable before I did that PCC battalion command, et cetera. Well, now I lose that year, and he goes, I'll tell you what, Jay, And this is a guy I was in the one hundred and first with as my branch commander or branch branch manager.
He goes, I'll tell you what. If you can find anything on island, anything on.
Island with a you know, an eleven Alpha four, you know, bill it pill an infantry officer at the major level, I'll give it to you just for stability. And so I immediately went and started to look for something that was nominative or had a selection involved in it, so that I could lock it in with branch right, because if you get invited to a selection or you get nominated, I don't have to go through this, you know, submitting my packet and you know, kind of a resume selection.
And so I went down what was available, and the only thing that I could find on island that had a selection that would you know, make it where I could go compete was this Asymmetric Warfare Group, you know, senior strategy advisor to Indo pay Com. I have no idea what this job means. I have no idea what the unit does. I've heard of it before. I've sent guys I've approved guy's packets to go and try out
for it. Most of them were returned, you know, without being selected, and it just this, it's this weird little corner of the world that I've never seen except once or twice. And I was like, fine, it's got a selection that keeps me on island, I'll go for it. And so submitted my packet and then followed it right up with the recruiter and said, hey, did you get my package? Did you get my RB? He was like I did, And I was like, are you interested? And
he's like, we are. And I was like, would you be willing to call branch and tell them that if I don't shit the bet on the on selection that you want me And he was like, I would let me talk to a couple of people. Right, it's hard to get a staff guy that you know, that has some of those experiences to go want to do aft job, and for me to be on island. That worked for me, and so I kind of accidentally fell into going to selection for the Asymmetric Warfare Group and so I went to support selections.
So after that, as we talked about already, you really didn't know what the hell this unit did so before we get into what it does, Yeah, tell us about selection.
Yeah, yeah, so I'll Yeah, I'm not gonna talk a whole lot about it because it is it is designed to allow you to work through those things in the moment, like solving a lot of problems, solving, but also how you think through problems. And I'm gonna do not do this justice because there are guys who absolutely know this better than me. So I forgive, I forget. I'm thinking about the guys down at a A A WTC that built that thing a smash warfare training center, forgive me,
as I butcher your your your baby here. But I believe the distinction is it's it's slightly less physical, but it's extremely intellectual and it's extremely mental. And so we want to see how you're going to make decisions. We want to see why you're going to make decisions we're going to We want to see if you can connect the dots, you know, So you get a piece of information here, you get a product there, you get an
idea here. Can you connect the dots and then can you take that problem that you've just identified connect the dots on the effect that we'll have on an organization that's confronting that and then develop a solution for that problem, and then go get it in through the training and doctrine elements so that by the time you know, sons and daughters are showing up to contend with that asymmetric threat, they've been trained, prepared, armed to deal with.
That's actually a pretty heavy lift getting an institution the size of the Army to change, you know, identifying problem through and forcing new.
Doctrines, especially before it's like ten years after the fact, right, you know, like it before it's like a lessons learned.
Okay, let's change.
Things right, right, And so the the easy way to explain the Asymmetric Warfare Group is it's it's the Army's scouts, and so they want to make sure and these guys do it. They did do it better than anyone and most of them are still out there doing different stuff. But their job is to ensure the United States military
is not surprised again, right by whatever it is. And so IEDs, electronic warfare, information warfare, you know, UGVs and UAVs, you know, all of these technologies that we take for granted can be their dual technologies and they can be
weaponized against us. And so we go to where conflict is occurring and we observe how as I used to say, you know how we're using the kitchen sink in order to solve problems, right, right, so just tactical problems are occurring, how are the x berts on the ground who are dealing with that problem daily dealing with that problem? Right?
And what lessons can we extract from that?
And then what dot milk PLP, you know, doctrine, training, leadership facilities, the whole system that builds a service member from you know, a civilian to a warrior with the tools they need to be able to shoot, move and communicate on that battlefield.
It's interesting too because just from an from an outsider point of view, you know, like they started out like you say, as Task Force ID, which is you know, they're out there in the early part of the GAT collecting up samples, creating products of like this is what to watch out for.
These are some of the TTPs they were.
They were going out and collecting up the individual like everything they could and then trying to disperse it to the white and then then a little bit later in the gut, you know, you see these guys come in who are all like former operators or former you know, former former soft guys or whatever.
Sure, who are now like going out with.
These conventional units and almost like an almost like an assistant advisor, right.
Well, and and literally the title of those guys is operational advisor, right. And they go on the ground and they say, these are the lessons that we've learned in other places that are applicable here, and these are the things that we're going to take from this and apply elsewhere. Yeah, it's it's one of the most humbling collections of experts. And when I say my heroes, I mean like guys
who did the Pablo Escobar hits. Yeah, you know, guys who are in some of the most storied operations of the special Operations communities.
Does it bring in obviously active duty, but also contractors and almost so you have a blending of SF ranger uh jasok guys.
Who else was in the mix? So to make it simple, there was literally no tribe or no color unrepresented. Yeah.
None, Like even though we didn't.
Pull seals on the m too, we had seals as contractor.
Do do you know how that evolution happened?
I know it was before your time, but you know how that evolution happened from T F I A D to somebody going this this deserve more clarity and more attention.
I believe, you know, General Votel for sure, but General Cody also took an active interest in this in his time, I think, and I should if I ever get the opportunity to talk to General Botel again, I'll probably ask him this. At this point, we have kind of a storied connection to Once an Eagle as an officer corp, particularly in the range of regiment. So you know, Once in Eagle is just this book that it's almost require reading right next to Starship Troopers for any infantry officer.
Right the book, not the movie. The book's awesome. And inside of Once an Eagle, Sad Sam Damon, the lead character, he literally goes to communist China before the war, before World War two, embeds with these, as it says in the book, you know, these guys are eating a handful of rice and living, you know, wearing slippers and running through the mountains in twenty degree below weather with you know, T shirts on, and they're winning. Like how is that possible?
And Sad Sam damon, who's you know this pre war you know captain in the Philippines, you know, an infantry captain gets told to go and in bed with that organization and understand that we are seeing a different kind of warfare here than we are prepared to fight as
an American institutional army. And it's got this new thing called guerrilla warfare, right, And so sad Sam goes and he embeds with that organization and he extracts all the lessons that if we are are going to be successful against a guerrilla warfare campaign, these are the things we're gonna have to train differently, and that we have different equipment, you know, different ideas, different doctrine, and he writes this huge book about it, right, And the character Sad Sam
comes back to the Philippines to his commanding officer and he hands him all the lessons of the big after action review, right, and the commanding officer shoves it in and a desk and close the door and we all move on to World War two.
That's never seen again, right, right.
And so what I believe General Votel in General Cody, we're trying to you know, really CODIFY was a learning organization for the Army, right, you know, the army is a learning organization, right, and so some people called it the Army's consultants. But I think that was a little bit, you know, a little bit tongue in cheek. But what he wanted to do was he wanted to increase the deployment or the rapid deployment of capability that we needed to fight this breathing, living war that was occurring.
In multiple countries.
He's in the Middle East at that point, you know, Iraq, Syria, in Afghanistan.
Just one more question about that, because you said that when you a company commander, right with one O. First, Uh, when I was a platoon and that these that you know, these two A A w G guys were with you, how how does that that?
In the eighty second? I did they have? Yeah? Sorry in the second?
How do these guys out on a combat patrol who are advising but also learning. They're also like there to take in what's going on, right, but they're also advising.
How how does that work?
You know, Uh, it's it's really hard. So how do you, as a let's say Master sergeant or or sergeant major operational advisor from the aw G how do you embed into a company or platoon without assuming command right right, without or without undermined right the command. And it's a really tricky position, and you know, gray beards do it best, which is why I love some of those contractors that
can come in and do that. But it's a very slippery slope of understanding when you're advising the young captain and you're mentoring the young captain and never getting on his command mic right, things like that. So I just little tricks to the trade of giving suggestions to the leadership while leading by example with the soldiers right, That would be I think the best way I would answer is fascinating. It really is really hard, really hard. Yeah, I screwed it up a couple of times. Tell us
about Baker Squadron. So I was selected for the AWG position, which you know, it felt like kind of a you know, yeah.
Yeah, I go out there and be a staff officer man. Well, in my.
Board at the aw G, the last question I was telling you guys before and the last question on the packet was you know, who do you know? And I was like, I don't know anybody in this organization. I had no idea I knew everybody in the board, you know. I knew the commander, I knew the commander major. I knew it like I just knew everybody by reputation, if not personally. And in fact, the DCO is a personal
friend of mine. And at the end of that, the commander, who I had known for about ten years, you know from previous stuff, he said, a j I want you to pick up I don't remember what they call it now, but it's like, you know, one package, package one or something like that. And I was like, okay, whatever, package one. Good to see us her walking out of here. And I hit my buddy and I was like, hey, you know, the boss said to draw package one. What do you want?
What does that mean? You know? And he goes, it's operator kit. He wants you in full load, not computers. He wants you with you know, draw your kit. And I was like, I thought he said I was going to be in bed at night when I and he was like, I don't know, man, he wants you to have operator kit. Get operator kid. So I went down and it was like you know, kid in a candy store. Because the Asymmetric Warfare Group had every bit of experimentation
and testing whatever you can think about. And so when you walk in and say, you know, I need to pick up CRY, They're like, well, do you want cry or do you want Patagonia? Do you want Patagonia or want our tariks like it comes in different camos if you want it, you know, so you get to choose the things you want, which that was a lot of fun for me. I hadn't done that in a while.
And then I go out to Hawaii where I'm supposed to be, you know, in meetings during the day, being the eyes in the years of the command and then basically reporting back and saying you should put guys here, you should put guys there, we should get teams in these locations, right. And I got a phone call maybe a week or so later, and one of the team sergeants was like, you know, one of the troop sergeants, I'm sorry, It was like, hey, would you be will
to go to the Philippines with us? We need an officer who knows how to do you know, like a live fire planning exercise and so that, you know, I.
Was like, I'd love to go to the Philippines.
I've never been to the Philippines and the next thing, you know, I'm getting broken in by a troop sergeant major, you know, going through Korea and Thailand and the Philippines and Malaysia and Indonesia. And so I became the Chief of Strategy for the Asymmetric Warfare Group, which was my official title, but really I was reporting to Baker Squadron Asymmetric Warfare Group because they owned the Indo Pacific Area
of operations. And so the Asymmetric Warfare Group wasn't broken down necessarily by region, it was broken down by threat and so Baker Squadron was PRC, you know, China focused, right, Able Squadron was Russia focused, and so different squadrons have different threat focus and they build on those threats with those interested parties.
That was gonna be my next question actually, because the way I usually think of Asymmetrical Warfare Group is, yeah, the IEDs all the coin encounter insurgents and stuff that that's what they were really invested in. But tell us a little bit about what they were doing in the Pacific. I think that's interesting.
Yeah.
So, yes, the ABG, the Asymmetric Warfare Group was very much known because almost everybody who rotated through the GLO wear on terror into Afghanistan, Iraq or Iraq or Syria, probably had an encounter with an operational advisor at some point and Baker Squadron while and so in some ways the organization did supplement that was you know C Squadron, Charlie squad or.
I forget they're called now, but yeah, C Squadron.
They they owned that threat, the counter veeo CT threat, and so that was their box that they typically rotated into. That made sense, that's where the threat is. And then Able and Baker were often augmenting and supporting them for a number of years. And so as you transition from Task Force I D through a direct report to you know, the J three five seven in the Pentagon through it you know, now an m towed unit that starts to report to Tradeock in twenty thirteen, which you want to
talk about a culture shift in an organization. Yeah, right, So that that was that decision. I'm going to come back to your Baker point, but I want to tell this too. So that decision to report to trade Dock, you know, it wasn't that the organization change. So the AWG was still the collection of the same dudes and
due debts. It had always been the same experiences, the same special operations expertise, the same culture of you know, we'ren't civilian clothes and you know, not showing up with you know, we don't we don't go to a whole lot of meetings and uniforms and stuff like that because we're always traveling and doing stuff. And then to have a trade doc you know, style of institution and bureaucracy
laid on top of that. And so imagine as a squadron commander where I'm like dropping you know, like a vouchers my trip to Yukon or to the Ukraine, where I'm like, you know, at a hotel, you know, off the so dropping those vouchers into Tradeock's bureaucracy and watching their money managers go wait, wait, wait a minute, why
are you in the four seasons? It's the only hotel in Indonesia where I may not get kidnapped, right, And just like things like that, And so the culture, you know, SHOCK was a little hard for the organization I'm told to work through because I wasn't there in those days. But I felt like they did a really good job of it, and I think it was the right decision.
It was hard for the guys to you know, kind of move under trade OC socially right, But it was a really good decision because it connected the eyes and ears of the army, the ones that were out there seeing and understanding the threat, to the people that actually built those solutions for the long term.
And so it was a brilliant move. As an institution.
It was difficult for us to manage, but it worked really well, and so Baker Squadron. Then as we start to transition in at twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen days, we're starting to understand that, Okay, the global war on terror and counter terrorism is still a thing, and it will always be a thing as long as you know, we are a huge, large military that you can't fight us head to head. So that's always going to be a thing. But we need to start looking at the next horizon.
We need to start looking at the next threat. And in those days, if I remember correctly, we believed that, you know, while Russia was the most likely to kickstart a regional war, it was China that we were most concerned with as a competitor. And I was very fortunate in those days to be the chief of strategy with Baker and Able and the Asymmetric Warfare group out there.
Because we had General.
Brown, who was the one the User pac commander the United States Army Pacific that his mentality with how to compete with China was that word, we're going to compete with China.
They're not our enemy.
At that time, no one would really identify publicly, the military or the government would not identify China as a threat or refer to them as an adversary.
It was always europere competition, right, It's a pacing challenge.
You speak, officer really well, man, I have.
To listen to you guys a lot more than I really want to. There's a lot of synergy in your pacing commumn. Yeah, so it's good. Uh yeah, that was that. That was exactly it. And so we you know, Baker Squadron in those days in particular, we're spending a lot of their time trying to help, you know, into a pay comm and user pack in particular, understand where to compete and where the competition should occur. And the picture that started to develop for us was, you know, terrain
doesn't change. It's the same thing that we learned as young you know, platoon leaders and noncommissioned officers inside of any unit, you know the Well, here's the great story.
So I'm a company commander in Wasi Quah in the eighty second Airborne Division in you know, southern Afghanistan, and I'm looking at the map like a good officer does and doing my map reconnaissance before I drive down this thing for the first time, I ed alley is what the guys are calling it, and I noticed that there are two high points that command iedally on the left side of the wadi in the right side, and this waddy's near twenty miles wide right, and I went, you know,
that would be a great place for at TRP right, and it would be a great place for you know, from maybe a reconnaissance element to do some overwatch. You know, we can think about that, right, And so I drive out there with my convoy. I mean, I'm brilliant, clearly, like I've looked at a map. I know exactly where these high points are, and we need to command these things.
And I get out there and that, I kid you not.
There's a castle on the left and there's a castle on the right. And I turned to my interpreter, and I was like, who built those? And he's like, that one's Russian and that one's British, And I don't mean from this century. Like, we have been fighting the same war in the same location for the same terrain, for different reasons, for literally hundreds of years, in generations. And the lesson that I took from that was terrain doesn't change.
And so when we went out to the Pacific and we were thinking through how to help where should we compete with China, Well, let's look at the terrain, right, And so the Malacca Strait became very important for trade. You know, obviously Taiwan becomes very important. And when you really start breaking down the geography of the Pacific, there becomes locations that you need to own to be able
to project combat power into it. And so when you look at like the Marshall Plan or the MacArthur right, so when MacArthur moved through there in World War two, the island hopping campaign that we all know, right, if you look at the map, you can see how well, okay, we went to Fiji because in the old days we needed a water refill for our sale ships, and then we needed coal for our coal burning ships, and then you needed a resource to resupply from crossing the Pacific
Ocean from the continent. And then you get there and you island hop to work your way into the Philippines and the Malacca Straits right there. Well, when you start to look at island hopping that MacArthur did, you can see what's happening is we need to get from island A to island B. And on the way to island B, the enemy has a vote in this conversation.
And we have Ewajima, yeah.
And we have Peleelu, and we have these places that they're not strategically important except they give us strategic access to resources that we have to use in order to
project combat power to the mainland. And so the Malacca Strait became really important to understanding how do you compete for the Malacca Strait when Malaysia is trying to develop and China is building the rail system that's connecting from the Malacca Strait to the opposite port, and you've got terrorism in the Sabah and you've got I mean, and you just start looking at the tie separatists above it, and you realize is that Malaysia. We drew an arbitrary line,
and the Thai separatists are actually Malaysian. They're melee and that's why they're separatists from Thailand, and that's why you have that fight there, and you start to truly understand, you know, why we've been fighting over some of these pieces of terrain. It's not hard to extrapolate again that we will again. And so now you look at it from the perspective of, well, let's just update the technology at play. So now we need satellites, and now we
need aircraft, and now we need flotillas. And if you're crossing the ocean, and I challenge everyone to look at a map of the Pacific, and it is a daunting exercise when you look at the time it takes to get to Australia, and that's not even the start point for most of us to get into the Pacific.
Right, So you're.
Talking about how do you sequence these really exquisite assets in order to conduct a bounding fight into the Pacific like literally army bounding Navy and navy bounding Air Force like World War two style with modern technology, and you start to see, oh, we're gonna need to own GUAM.
Out of curiosity why I understand why AWG, like what the benefit of being under trade DOC and in the theoretical terms, but trade DOC in my mind, is not a quick moving organization. It seems like belabored by a lot of bureaucracy and it's training.
Right.
How why is AWG uh not under inscom or or USU or somebody that that understands the need to move quickly on certain things.
Yeah, I think I'll challenge that just a little bit, okay, because I think the reason why a w G was fought for by Trade Dock and Tradeock wanted the a w oh really okay, is because they wanted to be able to increase that cycle, okay, And and they knew that to do that they needed to bring in and and you know General Funk, who was the last Trade
Dock commander that I served under. He you know, he used to call us the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment of Trade Dock, and you know, and in some ways that was a compliment and in some ways that was a shot, right because he's an armor officer, so he but he
was a phenomenal, phenomenal commander. So I think I think it was fought for by trade DOC because if our job is to go out and ensure that the United States Army is never surprised again, right, we have to be able to increase our ability to rapidly prototype and disseminate and train and get those tools into the inventory. And a lot of what we're talking about doesn't have like a hard product to it.
Like it's not like we're going out and you know.
We built drones and we build underground you know vehicle or you know ground vehicles, and we did all kinds of techie stuff, but we also did a lot of stuff about like decision making and leadership on you know, under stress and you know AVPs. Yeah, yeah, you know
sniper sniper TTPs. Like that's the tactical stuff, right. But I think what what really was important about us being under trade DOC and the reason why I think it was the right move for the institution is it allowed us to help the organize the Army move faster to provide those services to our service.
So trade out wanted that and they they were able to, uh, they were able to shd or change evolved based on like what you guys were providing.
I'm not here to tell you that the am Warfare Group, you know, revolutionized trade DOC. That not happened. Sure, we were a small part of that conversation. I would just say the leadership of Trade DOC understood the value of having that organization underneath their guide on and they employed us to the fullest.
So that's fantastic to hear us.
About able squadron in the Russia focus. That was sort of your follow up, right to become.
The squadron commander there, right, Yeah, yeah, So I was fortunate enough that I think I mentioned it to you guys. I was at a premission training a PMT with Baker Squadron, and it was the first time I'd gone through a real PMT with, you know, the Asymmetric Warfare Group. So I've done PMTs with other teams and units, but I've never done this one. And I was just humbled. So let me paint an egotistical picture and then show you how humbled I got.
So I'm a senior major.
I'm literally, you know, a breath away from being a lieutenant colonel. I'm going to get a command. It's the question is what kind of command is it's going to be. And I've been a ground force commander and you know,
some amazing special operations units multiple times. And in fact, I've just come off being a ground force commander like three or four years ago, Like I'm I understand how fighting works at the tactical and operational level, I think, and I've employed it in an environment that not many leaders get to do in their careers, where you've got, you know, anywhere from five to fifteen aircraft stacked in the airspace above you, with maneuver units on the ground,
and you know, and you're doing a high value target you know X to the X strikes and just these amazing synchronizations of these assets in dynamic space occurring and you're trying to control that ball all at once. I feel pretty confident in my ability to do that. I finish it off with you know, a couple of master's degrees and how to you know, deal with people that you know in three letter agencies and build coalitions and
I prefer your personality over your personality. And I finish that off, and then I go become an XO in a large organization where I'm doing logistics support across the Pacific while I'm in Australia and Malaysia, Like, I feel like I kind of know what I'm doing at this point, and I show up to this AWGPMT and the first thing they have us do is we called it multi domain battle. And now, of course we know that as multi domain operations, but in those days, there was just
this concept of multi domain battle. And multi domain battle is the integration of cyber and space and air and land and sea, and understanding that the environment cannot be bifurcated as it was in the old days, and that the Navy does the Navy stuff and the Army does the Army stuff. It's no longer true. We got to be able to do a little bit everything. We have to do it as a co piece of team to really be able to project that effect that the only United States military can do. And so.
Sorry, I lost my things. Oh you're saying like this was a really humbling moment for you.
Thank you. And so the first exercise is we go through kind of a tabletop exercise of what is multi domain battle and what are the potentials? And then we follow that up with I am a Ground Force commander playing a ground force commander at the Asymmetric Warfare Training Unit or training center which has amazing subterranean you know, subway systems and you know high rises and just all this.
It's this.
You can go full cyber range down there in those days, you know, so you could do full multi domain battle on this site. And I've got five of the most impressive sergeants majors who have taken off their wreath to do this job right around me, as like my rto
my radio telephone operator. So it's not like I've got you know, myself on a radio playing like a JTACH and a CCT and like I have legit the best in the business who train the best in the business on how to do that function surrounding me as a headquarters. And we had social media play like doing social media reconnaissance. We had underground unmanned vehicles with subterranean maneuvers with you know, low oxygen, no oxygen, hazardous particulate, the whole nine underneath there.
We had drones when in those days drones was a brand new concept, and we were talking swarms of drones. And We're doing all of this in one exercise where I've got three teams on the ground conducting deep reconnaissance in order to bring in combat power. And at the after action review of that event, I stood up and I said, if one bullet had been fired, I would have been overwhelmed.
Because of the amount of things you're managing at the same time, because.
Of the amount of information I'm trying to digest the picture I'm trying to understand in a live combat situation, and I've got the best of the best of the best performing a role that would be done by someone fifteen twenty years younger.
With us, it's a real issue. I mean, when you think about the way we're trying to integrate some sort of reality plus goggles, which I think that's like the wave of the future. But you can easily see how much information is too much information more than is able that they can process and know what to do with.
I think one of the best things we did for multi domain operations was to have a conversation about echelon, right, and so there's certain yeah, so there's In those days, it was all about let's get the enabler as lowd as possible, so let's get everything to the squad level, the team level.
Right.
That's because that's what our experience is, what we're overseas, so every lethal enabler goes to the line, right. And what we quickly started to learn is if this you know, senior major with all of this experience surrounded by this, you know, literally team of sergeants majors can't do this. Okay, we got to figure this out, and so we started eche lining those capabilities based upon where those tools were arrayed inside of the Army's system. And so some things,
for space do not exist below the brigade level. You've got to go to division to get them. You've got to go to corp to get them, you've got to go to army to get them. Right. And so let's let them manage those things, and let's find a way to have connective tissue between those echelons so that commanders can choose how to employ those effects together, but the responsibility for managing them can be withheld at a location that could properly do it or nationally.
I'm curious because when you start talking about multi multi domain and how all these things go together, how, especially like at an aw G level, I imagine that obviously army cyber or military cyber like you guys can get a decent read on what capabilities are. And and yet you know, when we're talking about like the NSA or maybe the n r O or or these other organizations, how do they play into this because I imagine at.
Some point they're like, well, like they.
Don't want to give up, they don't want to give up the you know, give up the goods. Sure necessarily, right, So somebody at some level, Yeah, it has to know what are all these capabilities are.
But does that person who knows what all these capabilities are, are they like qualified or competent to manage all these capabilities or do they just know that they exist?
So I'll try to That's a really tough question, and so I'm going to try to answer that the best I can by giving an analogy. Yeah, so, if you walk into any company on the planet right now, looking at yours, right, you've probably got an Apple computer, an HP computer. You know, one of you's on Microsoft, some of you have Zoom. You know, you've got one guy who has that weird like alien computer and his software
doesn't matching of your software. And so what we find in large organizations that have been around for a long time is we have layers of understanding and capability that have been that some are you grown a little bit better and some are a little bit less developed, less mature, right, And what's important is if we can understand how to
layer them all together to achieve the best effect. And so ideally, if you're on all Apple hardware with an M one chip running Microsoft you know, Microsoft teams that is incorporating Copilot from open Ai, and your team now only uses Apple computers, Microsoft stops Microsoft software and an l M from open Ai, that's it. And you just train on that persistently and consistently you're going to get
really good at those things. Right. We find the same when you start talking about che lining capabilities in multi domain battle.
There are operations.
There are some that are you know, really mature and and lots of people understand how to play with them, like drones and you know, unmanned aerial is really starting to get something that you know, these kids are growing up playing right stuff, right, and so now as they come in the the ability to employ that effectively is really mature. And then there are some that will under water autonomous vehicles. We don't have a lot of experience
with that in the army. We're gonna have to go to the Navy to do that, right, have we ever done those things in conjunction? And so understanding where the possible you know, venda is for that capability and that need and then building an exercise or something that exercises right that that capability does that help answer that?
Does it does?
And how willing are some of the organizations out there to share their capabilities in these types.
Of environment My experience has been varied, that's varied. Yeah, no, very very very very very willing. I I have run into you know, protecting my rice bowl and making sure
that no, this is what I do. But to be honest in my experience, I just haven't had a lot of those a lot of those run ins, right, And Yeah, Generally what I find is when you show up, you know, like a multi domain task force or something like that, and you go, hey, I know how to build water bottles, and they're like, we don't know if we need water bottles yet, but go over there and start building water bottles. Thanks for joining the team. So I don't see that
in the military, for sure. Three letter agencies a little bit. I saw a little bit of that, Yeah, but I didn't have armies has more of like a can do kind of attitude. Right, it's a little bit like, yeah, we don't know what you do here, but you're one of us. Yeah, you know, jump on, yeah, you know, we'll figure out where you figure right, Yeah, get on the bus and fit in.
And so you went on to one more assignment before retirement at a special Operations Command.
Yeah. Yeah, well we didn't even talk about Able Squadron there. Oh yeah, wait, did we go right over that? We did? Yeah? Yeah. So I was fortunate enough after that to go to Able Squadron, which was you know, Russia focused, and so twenty nineteen to twenty twenty one that was my that
was my assignment there. Built an amazing team and we were working deeply with US Army Europe and you know, the team over there to you know, figure out what does it look like if you're going to deploy a package like in World War Two style, like a large ground scale combat operation Normandy Beach, right, what does that look like in modern day? And the premise that we operate within is contact with the enemy starts at our home base.
It's happening right now.
You're in contact with the enemy either electronically, informationally whatever it might be with the adversary right now. And so, how do you move the one hundred and first Airborne Division from Fort campbl Kentucky's at so Fort campbl, Kentucky. I'm not sure Fort Campbell, Kentucky to let's say, you know, Paris, how do you get there undetected? How does that happen? And so I would say almost not possible at this point.
So then do you make it an information campaign? Okay?
So then you get to the port and you've all seen port ops right because we've all been to NTC and JRTC and you're downloading all of this equipment. So clearly, now in the age of social media, you're under reconnaissance active reconnaissance, which means as I'm watching things come off the boat, I'm able to understand echelon unit, you know where they're coming from, with their capability are because most
of that's open source. And then you start turning on all of your electronics and a really interesting things happens in the electromagnetic spectrum. When Americans start turning stuff on, we look like Americans because you get you know, six to nine, you know, dudes and dudets in the back of a Blackhawk, and all of them have Apple Washes and iPhones and Samsung's and one five two Harrises and all the communications equipment that only the United States of
America only can possibly do. And then I can give you chlanning, meaning I can tell that's a division headquarters.
I can tell that's a brigade headquarters, guys, right.
And so we started building this understanding of what the multi domain battle space looked like from an adversarial, large
scale ground combat position, right. And we take those lessons back from working you know, within Poland and Ukraine and the Baltics and the Balkans and looking at where you know conflict is happening and what lessons we can take from that, and we bring it back to our training centers and then we rep it and develop it into something that can then go into tradeock that can then start being disseminated throughout the team. This culminated for us in an NTC rotation. I think it was the first
time an AWG squadron had ever gone to NTC. We painted a rock by the way still out there. I had my squadron do it. It was fun.
I made them do it.
I helped, but I made them so they painted a rock out there first time. And what we were doing was helping the unit that was in the box think through how to employ these multi domain, large scale ground combat techniques that we had been repping and practicing in the European theater. And so some really fun stuff started
to happen. Where I think the lesson that I took from that entire exercise was in the modern day, modern day battlefield, the commander who's willing to turn off the lights first is going to win.
It's really interesting.
You know, we hear about singin and human all the time, but you know, you're talking a lot about like mass and like elents things like that.
That I don't.
They don't. They don't. Really they weren't.
They didn't used to really be a thing, right that you needed to worry about, right, but now but now they're almost everything.
So think about uh uh, you know ambush protocol, right, So silence violence, silence right, right? This is standard you know, grunt stuff. I'm walking through the woods, make contact.
I don't.
I'm not quiet anymore, right, I'm yelling and I'm shooting and everything. It's explosions, it's violence. And then as soon as we're clear, right back down to silence. Right, think about that electronically now, yeah, yeah, all of your systems are up. You are literally on the electromagnetic spectrum. You're glowing like you were just a glowing beam a target.
And then all of a sudden, all those go off, and then you disperse and infiltrate, and then you have decisions about when to do calm windows just submarines do so that you are giving a picture to the enemy, a battlefield arrayment that you want them to digest, and you want them to counter array towards. And as soon as you can confirm the composition, disposition, and strength of that counter arrayment, and then you can give your final intent based orders because only the Americans can run on
intent based orders. And your boys deploy, and then you turn off all the lights. And what I mean by that is you jam everything. Nothing electronic works. You can't see them, they can't see you, you can't talk to you, you can't talk to anybody. And the commander who's willing to do that, first confirm battlefield arrayment and then turn off the lights. After he set his team, they're gonna win that fight. That's what I think we learned that a little bit interesting. I mean, first off, you know
from what you're talking about. I mean we think about back in the old days, signature production you know in Vietnam was like taping down right stuff so you don't have metal on that, you know, all that kind of thing. Today's signature reduction is the IR spectrum, it's electromagnetic, all
this sort of stuff. But also during the g WATT, I think there's this real propensity to use modern day information technology for a general to basically reach all the way down the chain of command to the posability right. But with you know, if we're facing a electronic warfare environment in future fights, that we may be going back to the old days. Like I'm reading it's in my bag book.
Frank Subcheck wrote a book about special forces and partnership relations in El Salvador in the nineteen eighties. It's like some of these seventh Special Forces Group NCOs would be out in the bush country in El Salvador and not have any communication with their commanders for weeks, if not months, Right.
I would compliment that thinking with I believe, and I'm a little outdated, so you know, four or five years out of date, so it may have changed, I hope a little bit. The future battlefield is a megacity. It is a it is a littoral mega city. So it's a megacity with water deep water access, you know, New
York City, Taipei, you know, yeah, there you go. And so that means that you're going to have subterranean spaces ten stories down easy, Like just think of the subway system in New York City and the way I typically paint this picture to folks in New York City is imagine ten nine to elevens a day. Right, That's what megacity warfare is going to look like against a pure
threat in a large scale ground combat engagement. That means that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines and now space cadets are going down into ten story deep subterranean where right now we're still having to pump oxygen because we don't have pappers, right, Okay, how do you communicate down there? Right?
And so we.
Played with mesh systems, we've played with right GPS. So now take that you know, team out of ten stories deep and now they come up to the surface and now they go into a ten story high rise Think about the equipment changes you would want to make right now, think about the communication changes. Think, I mean, just everything that we do to shoot, move and communicate. We're literally talking gets combined into you know, a ten by ten square island that's just full of this dense urban terrain.
And then when you get outside into the countryside, you're back into a whole different Now you're back into camouflage. Right, yes, right, And so we have to build an expert team. This is what America has always done best is we have built a all volunteer which quite frankly looks like a special operations military to everyone else.
It's fascin you know, it's fascinating when when you're talking about like going dark and the you know, the signature and things like that. I remember back in dl I, one of the guys there was a civil affairs or not civil for h a syops guy, and he would joke and say, you know, like they're commanding officer to say, hey, go to this top of this hill and pretend that
you're a tank. And he'd be like, hey, sir, how about we send a tank up there and pretend it's like, you know, nobody sure, And and the idea is that you know, pyops. Obviously syops has evolved and it's like social media and a lot of other stuff now too. But when we start talking about these signatures and how the enemy responds to sims, reminds me of like the tank on the hill, right, or or cardboard tanks made to look up World War.
That.
Now, now, how is like psyops going to you know, be involved when it comes to tell that story.
Yeah, to these electronic signature Now you get into missing disinformation and information warfare. Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely, it's absolutely yet and so that that was another thing that we clearly started working on was information warfare, and that's what we called it in those days. And one of the first things that we started to recognize was that, you know, there's two types of information that we're being confronted with.
There's information that is from friendly sources but it's just inaccurate, which is what we would call a first report. I mean, every first report is always inaccurate. And then there's information that is from an adversary that is intended to disrupt your decision making cycle. And how do you distinguish between the two. In the modern world where I go on X, I go on Facebook, I go on threads. I don't go on threads because I just have too many at
this point. But you go on those platforms and you can literally find the opposite of whatever it is that you found anywhere else at any given time. And so miss and disinformation is something that our military has been to contend with for the last you know, at least five or six years, I would say, since the early COVID days.
Yeah, I think that, you know, they've also because of social media that whether it's political operatives or foreign you know, thread actors, foreign nations, whatever, have gotten very good at poisoning the well in the sense of when there is a true report, they've been getting very good at They're they're very good at getting out ahead of it and throwing false information things that can be debunked as part of that true information, so that when those things are debunked,
everybody ignores the true information by saying, oh, it's already been debunked.
Yeah, we started calling that information overmatch. Where you're you're you're just being confronted with so much information you just cognitively cannot process what is true, what is fiction, what is important, what isn't important, and it is absolutely something that we've built some systems. I know of some teams
that have built some targeting idea theologies. Because it's not a technical solution, it's a human cognition understanding the source, the intent, and then the applicability to that particular moment that is really really hard.
So let me ask you a controversial opinion in that you know, we have seen our government at times and.
We see it.
I think that like in special operations, these ideas that social media things like that need to.
Be restricted, or.
That they're that you know, we need to protect against foreign influence things like that, and you run into one a issues like where where do you think the military and the government in general should be on the on those types of topics.
My personal opinion is we should use information to our advantage. And so that means just like I can walk down the street and I can choose that deli or that bodega, or that pizza hut or that McDonald's. I can choose where I'm going to pull my information from that I think is going to be most probably most probably to
be right. I can then look at a track record of that information to verify that this one has been probabilistically more correct than those others, and I can choose to go to a different location if I don't like the source there. I can then choose which points of those information I am going to incorporate for an effect. And so this is the same idea of well, I can just choose which information I want. And so my response to it is, I think we're post truth in
a post truth era. I think there is no longer a truth. I think there is a version of truth based on that moment in time, and that applicability can be pulled away and can be extracted to be useful. But we're so overwhelmed with information. Our natural bias as humans is to short circuit that and to say I like this information because it fits into the narrative that I'm telling, and so I can easily draw the conclusions
for it. And so I think we, as particularly American service members and you know, in Americans in general, we have to become more discriminatory about the types of information that we're allowing to be connected to our narratives, and we have to be deliberate about verifying that that is a source that we are choosing to trust on this, and I think it's really important these days to listen to the source itself.
It's why I think that.
In the modern era where we are right now, human touch and authenticity are going to win.
Every single time.
You know, the sound bites, the thirty second, you know elevator speeches, you know you've got one minute to describe what's wrong in Afghanistan. I mean like those types of engagements are no longer satisfying because I think we as a population have started to become aware that we can pick and choose which truth we want to align with, but it doesn't mean it's always going to be true, and we have the ability to interrogate that continuously, but only if we're willing to do so as an individual.
My example for this is COVID.
COVID was the first time in human history that I believe that I'm aware of that we not only knew what we wanted to do, we knew how to disseminate it, and then we knew how to socially enforce it on almost global scale like that has never occurred. We've never had the ability to inform the globe at once and then to have to now go through a learning process, which we all know from our military experiences. When you hear that first report. We know that first reports are
always wrong. We know that, but we had to learn that over decades of experience in decision making. And something that I tell you private companies these days that I get to work with with Solutions twenty one is because in the military we're constantly rotating into leadership positions. We're constantly learning those lessons over and over and over again at higher levels, and we become more comfortable with that's a first report.
Let's let it develop.
And so I think the distinction that I find between what I would like myself to do better job at and what I see as an example of what I don't want to do is I think we as a society can just go Okay.
First report, could be bad, could be good.
Let's let it develop with all sources of information enlightening us of what they believe the truth is, and then we will figure out the truth that we need to move forward. I don't know if that sounds too mystic or you know, squishy, no, no, no no, but I think we have to make that decision. And so it's there's no longer a truth. There is a way that we can incorporate information to achieve our ends.
So take us through the last the SOCOM assignment and into your retirement.
So we we knew that, you know, the window was
going to open. So my last year with able Squadron was you know, within COVID, and I spent a lot of my time at Tradeock headquarters actually, which in and of itself is an interesting story because I don't know if you know this, but we were having trouble getting basic recruits to go to basic training, and so like I was down at this, you know, at Tradeock advising a four star general, Sir, I don't think we should get haircuts at basic training anymore, and at least until
we can figure out how to deal with what we're dealing with.
The Marine Corps got.
Shut down for their basic training, and so I did that at the conclusion, which was an education in a lot of ways, because then I spent about three months in the Pentagon, and I really knew I didn't want to go into the Pentagon after that, mainly because I just wasn't happy, Like I appreciated the work great Americans and really important experiences that I know that I probably should have had if I was going to be a senior officer inside the military.
I just wasn't happy there.
Yeah, and it's where I need and I wasn't happy there when nobody was really there. So I don't think it was going to be better when people were telling me what to do there. And so I decided that, you know, this next move could be our last because if I don't get that one good piece of paper in this next assignment, which I mean you're at the level you know, five to six transition where you know the paperwork, you know, you.
Can stay there for a long time.
If you don't get that one paperwork that moves you to the next level for the next job, then just don't move on. And so we knew that just by you know, the top gets tighter as you move up this this could be our last, you know, our last move,
or at least our last command. And so if it was going to be our last command, it was probably going to be my last assignment, and so we wanted to move to a place that you know, one I was excited by the work, you know, I was, I got my blood boiling, you know, to go into work every day to work on something that I thought was important, but also to put my family in a position where I could have some stability for you know, one of my daughters right here, who was, you know, a sophomore
in high school who I only get to ruin her life once. Patiently, right, you can't say I ruined your life twice. I can only ruin your life once. I wanted stability for her, and I wanted stability for her younger sister, you know, in those formative years. And we also realized that we just I hadn't seen my girls as much as I wanted to. I'd been gone a lot,
particularly you know this one. And I told you guys beforehand, I don't think we talk enough about the trauma that occurs to our you know, our brats or our military children. I think they go through a lot of post traumatic stress just like we do, and and they and they need just as much attention, I think as our service members, and we don't give it yet, but I think we're getting there. And so I wanted to focus on my family if that was going to happen, And so we
went to SOCOM because I was just blood boiling. I'd love to go back to you know, something like that and touch that again and stay in it. Love Tampa, So we moved there. I was fortunate enough to get
a job inside of Silcam Headquarters. General Clark was the commander, you know, General Evans came in while I was after it, so it kind of felt like, you know, the right culmination of my career, you know, there and they you know, within the first week of being there in that job, you know, President Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, and with that withdrew a lot of the ways that we had been confronting the global war and terror you know, traditionally speaking,
because now it's been twenty twenty five years, and that resulted in US you know, having to find new ways to confront those threats and new ways and quite frankly, I think in some ways good you know, we did have a lot of you know, inventiveness and creativity and lots of you know, collaboration between all of your inner agencies and the military, and it was a very humbling experience again to watch you know, this team come together over the course of the year and solve a really
hard national problem. You know, for whatever, you know, whatever you think about it. And it was about that time that I realized that I wanted to go chase my own shiny objects. I've been chasing other people's dreams. And while I believe I, I, you know, could be a good brigade commander. I could be a good group commander, I could do those things, well there's fifty other people you could do that better than me, and and maybe
that's not where my talent lies, you know. And so I decided that I, while I probably had a future there, did I care enough to go to that next level? And I don't think I did. And so I did what I thought was right for the service and for my family, which was I don't care enough to go to that level.
It's probably time for me to leave.
And so I started to retire, and I started to think about what does it look like to exit? And then you start doing what everybody does, you know, What do I want to be when I grow up? Right? You know? And and well, all I've ever wanted to do is jump out of planes and blow stuff up and hang out with guys, and you know, and so what does that mean? And so I started looking for
what purpose? I started looking for what was what was the thing that I loved the most about my career, and so kind of to rewind, I loved teaching, and I loved coaching, and I loved mentoring, and I loved taking every lesson that I'd learned and giving it to someone so they don't have to learn those things. They can just catapult beyond me. I loved finding the talent that was capable of doing that far beyond my capabilities.
You know, the guys who I know that if I can just give you thirty minutes of this, you'll take it to another level that I never could. And so I started looking at, you know, consulting, but it wasn't working for me. So like the McKenzie's and you know where I was going to go in to write a three hundred page book report. I didn't want to be sad Sam who went in there and wrote a story about what the things we needed to change and then the boss goes, hey, thanks for doing that and shoves
it in desk. I wanted to get dirty and to fix things, and and so I started saying I want to build companies. And people would say, well, what kind of companies? And I would go, I don't care what kind of company do you have. I want to build leaders, right, I want to build a leader who is building a
really important company to solve really hard problems. And I was fortunate enough to be connected through an AWG former operator who was working for a small consulting firm called Solutions twenty one, and so I was introduced to the
Solutions twenty one team. They are a leadership development team and they focus purely on that kind of We come in and we build elite leaders, and then we teach alignment to the organization so that as they are growing that vision, the organization's resources are aligned to achieve that vision, and the execution is then feedback looping into that vision so that they're adjusting to meet the competitive market that they're in. It sounds like building a task force, you know.
It sounds like training a team for a specialized mission. And I just fell in love with these guys, and so I started going into these companies and learning from these amazing CEOs and presidents, and yes, I was getting satisfaction for, you know, being able to teach, coach, and mentor and use the things that I had learned in my career. And I believe Solutions twenty one does it better than anyone, which is why I still love working
with them. Uh And Solutions twenty one has this amazing culture where we encourage you to pursue your passions for your community, whatever that might mean. You know, if you really food drives or you know, hurricane recoveries or you know whatever that whatever it is that gets you back into your community in order to support your local community, we really want you to do that. And I suddenly realized that I don't have a local community. I don't
I don't have a hometown. I don't have a place that I can you know, go to church and that's my bar and this is my you know, I don't have that right, And so I started looking for what is my community?
It's us right, this is my community.
This is the people that I so, Okay, well, what's the problem that we're dealing with. And right about that time is when I started to you know, hear about the Pack dect and and and if you guys haven't read the Pack Deck yet, you know really Rosy and Leroy Torres, you know from burn Pit three sixty if you've ever heard of that organization, they lobbied for what we all dealt with for the last twenty five years, which is how do you deal with trash in a
combat zone? You know, persistent and consistent for the last twenty five years, we have trash and it's everything from JP eight you know, jet fuel, to human hair to animals and whatever it is and needs to go on the pile.
YEA, most of us have turned to stick at.
Some point in a you know, in a I don't know what they call now, the outhouses with the burn drums, you know, like a lot of that plastic mri.
Yeah, every everything.
You every one of us has been in a built up outhouse, you know, four by four wood on the outside with a half you know oil drum with JP eight and it burning it off literally, you know, burning human waste with with with oil.
Uh.
And we sucked that in right over and over and over again. And the way I typically explain this to people is we went on a drive in this country to remove smoking. So literally smoking a cigarette, you know packa day, turns into cancer. We get it, right, Okay, Now stand over one hundred by hundred burn pit and suck it in for fifteen months. You know, it's not surprising that we're seeing these strange cancers and injuries in these pockets of teams. And when you're talking about special operators,
I have a different problem. And so now burn Pit three sixty starts lobbying on behalf of our service members. And in November of twenty twenty two, the Packed Act is signed by the Biden administration. Phenomenal job by the Biden administration, we will add, and that Packed Act. I was skeptical because I was like, I don't understand how we're connecting. You know, bo Biden's brain cancer. I mean
to burn Pits, don't. I don't get it. And it wasn't until I read the Packed Act in two hundred and eighty three billion dollars over five years for respiratory related illness and injuries that I started to recognize my own danger, my own threats, and I started reaching out to buddies that I've been you know, I've known for twenty thirty years, and I feel like I'm the only one that hasn't had cancer yet, right, And I mean honestly, Meg, my wife and I we spend we kind of darkly
laugh about we're just kind of waiting for the shoe to drop, right, like we've been in all those places, We've done all those same things, and harder men than me are going down for really tough stuff.
One of my former teammates, guy I worked with, we got back in touch after fifteen years and had him on the show. Yeah, and I told him afterwards. I was like, man, don't wait another fifteen years, because those burn bits are.
Going to get one of us. Well, yeah, go get tested, yea, even before the burn pits.
I mean, if you think about like all the range time we spent and then what do you do You go collect up brass and put it in your hat, right, and all the shoe houses with all the like the lead dust like like, so there's so much that that
we were exposed to on a constant basis. You know, we talk about TBIs or blast related illnesses that they're just now And how many times were you on the range when you had to do a spendex with gustas and after like three or four rounds you're like, like, I don't want to do this anymore.
Right, because your head's banging. One sixtieth pilots one sixtieth gunners. Those guys sucking off the mini gun and they walk out of those colfaxes with you know, just booming headaches, and they wonder why. Okay, So I started to have those same encounters, right, and I started to put the pieces together, and I started looking at, you know, the data, and what I realized is, we have this M fifty gas mask that we've been carrying around in our pocket
for twenty five years. I've worn it legitimately once, you know, in Iraq when we when we had scuds on the invasion coming and we thought all of them had chemical rights, right, and so I legitimately wore my full MOP gear, you know. And for those of you who don't understand the MOP system, so you know MOP zero to four four being nuclear biological chemical imminency, right, And so we were in this
gear fighting for three months. And then I look back at the rest of my career and I wonder, when was the last time that we had a service member
die of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack? And the answers world War one, World War two, maybe, And so then it's well, wait a minute, when I look at the PACDAC data, what it tells me is in the civil I love telling this story, so please forgive me in this in the Civil War in the eighteen sixties, we decided we should probably start wearing helmets, right, and we got those issued around World War One, And so in World War One we started wearing helmets, and then
we realized we should probably have hearing protection, and we started getting that out in like Vietnam Korea area. And then we decided in you know, probably the eighties and nineties, we should start wearing eye protection for our eyes, and we re got that issued inside of the Global Warrant Terror.
It's why I wanted to go to a special operations unit.
I get the cool Oakley m frames and I get to have my hands in my pockets, right, And we missed the fact that the last piece of real estate, potentially the most important, is the nose in the mouth. And we're sucking in lead and antimony and aluminum and all of the things that we know to be carcinogenic, right, and that we know we are going into shoot houses day in and day out without lung protection. And so I know this sucks. Like I'm the guy who's like,
I don't want more body armor. I don't want more you know, I need to be lethal. But now, as looking back on it, I go, I don't just want you lethal, I want you long, I want longevity. I cannot afford to have a guy trained for twenty years and then to go down for something like this that is preventable. So we then went and found a company that was working on this innovative platform and it's called Vent Respiratory Technologies, and on behalf of Solutions twenty one.
We've been working with that startup where Who's the CTO is one of the key designers of the M fifty gas mask of a low burden, low cost particulate respirator for the operator, by the operator that protects you from all those hazardous particulates that you suck in day in and day out, and then you go. And we now connect that with the House Armed Service Committee and the Senate Armed Service Committee, and we did this last January.
We were very fortunate to work with some members of the House and the Senate in order to get language inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act that asks the DoD to conduct a study and determine do we have the right respiratory protection for our service members in accordance with what we think we know from the PACKED Act. Rather than spending two hundred and eighty three billion dollars
over five years and injury and illness. Can we provide a three hundred dollars tactical respirator in everybody's pocket as preventive mating?
You want to show us this thing? Yeah, I do want to show it to you, and you.
Know, and asking you since you know what it's like to be.
On the objective.
One of the challenges with a gas mask is your ability to breathe, right, your ability to breathe because you are moving at a very high you know output, that's right, and so like when when they were building this, were they taking that into consideration.
Yeah, absolutely, so this.
Was designed in order to not impede the way we shoot, move and communicate. And so it is literally a quarter mask, which is why it's not you know, absolutely, so it's literally a quarter mask, and it's designed to fit atop the chin so that your chin strap properly seats, okay, which that that was the first issue, right. The hole on the filter is purely for particulate, so it's just for the dirt, the dust, the aluminum, the lead, those things that are it is not it's not a gas mask.
Filtering down to the smallest micron or whatever.
Right, So when you when you start going after gases and vapors, you start needing to get activated charcoal in this. When you start getting more material into this filter, it starts becoming more of a burden to breathe right, So by breathing heavy, we now can't perform optimally. So this is the lightest pull on the market. It's the only
CE certified system out there. That's the European version of niosh right, and it's designed so that when you breathe, you don't get the whole per hole per because the MIC is actually offset from the breathe port and so you're breathing over the filter to protect your lungs, but your MIC connects directly to the outside and a push to talk so that it's not being impacted.
And so we have some teams.
That were these for helicopter operations, like you know off little bird platforms, because they can get assured comms because they can simply talk into it without the wind getting them. It's meant to be used when you want it, so like a fighter pilot's mask, I put it on when I'm coming off the X and I've got muddust and rust going everywhere. And then when I get back into a cleaner environment or I need less pull, I take
it off. I'm on the catwalk. I can wear it to protect myself below from the particulates that are coming from explosions and nine bangers and lots of ammunition not even talking about simmunition yet. All of that is protecting me. But I don't want to wear my helmet. Okay, you can do that. And so it's designed to be integrated with how the soldier or the operator shoots right now, so a good chee cheek. The weld is allowable communication.
It's asshured communications through whatever you know system we're using, and it's clear, uh, and then your ability to move in it is. It's the lightest burden or pull on the market for sure. And the trade off is it's not a MOP three and four system. It's meant for MOP zero to two, which is where we find ourselves at least in my career ninety nine point.
Nine percent of the time, right I mean, and I.
Mean even outside of the preventive measures of it. The communication ability when like you say, in a helo, when nobody can hear what's going on, you know, you know, in an open air vehicle run across the desert where there's dust flying and he's trying to yell about what's happening.
It's like it works in a number of environments exactly. And we and we have, you know, some some additives to this. We were just at SOCOM's Research Development Acquisitions experiment this last week and we have a voice projection unit that goes onto this It's about an eighth of an inche thick, so that when you speak, it'll project like a bullhorn, so that you don't have I can't communicate with right, I can control a room, I don't
have muffled. It comes out like a bullhorn. And then I can connect it to my atac yes with a downloaded language program, and when I speak into the mic in English, what comes out the speaker is whatever language you've selected, that's incredible, Mandarin, Russian, pick the language and you can also there's two ways you can do it now on the return and we haven't built this prototype yet, but you can either have your silens in which means
the return gets translated right back into your SILENX your earpiece, or there I've seen some heads up displays now some ARVR stuff that you could do text so that I would just read just like a subtitle if I'm talking to someone in a different language, if you wanted to do an ARVR gone, And that is incredible.
It's impressive.
And so what I keep saying is all of the technology to change the way we protect our service members' respiratory systems is there. We sim need to decide how to deploy it. And so instead of simply presenting a problem to the United States Military Solutions twenty one, in conjunction with VENTIS Respiratory Technologies is building the solution, and whether you want to adopt it or not, that's up
to the military. Right We're using these right now with a lot of first responders, a lot of SWAT teams.
Fentanyl is an issue, a.
Lot of you know, customs and Border patrol agents are starting to look at this because they can speak fluently with anyone they encounter, odas and seal teams that are doing j sets. This is the perfect tool for you to protect yourself from those environments that are not as environmentally clean as we might be in in the United States or another developed country and still be able to cleanly communicate that's with somebody else.
Thank you.
It's there's an amazing team that's been working on this, and I'm simply an advocate for it.
Where can people go to find vent this and Solutions twenty one on if they're interested in this STA So if you're interested in you know, leadership development and US coming in and teaching the way that we build teams inside of the military in particular, and you know how we align vision to execution, then Solutions twenty one dot com ww dot Solutions twenty one dot.
Com, you know, tell them Jason Sention and then Ventus Respiratory Technologies, so Ventus RT dot com and you can just Google into that, put it in perplexity, put it in chat GPT and it'll bring up the links.
Any final thoughts before we get going anything, We filled the cover that you'd like to hit up.
I think the only.
Thing that I do want to reinforce is this was a once in a lifetime opportunity for me, and so you know, thank pleasure to having me.
Thank you gentlemen for letting me come in.
And thank you tell the story of you know, some of the amazing heroes that I got to work with. I was simply standing amongst giants. I definitely was not one, and I'm only five nine with my shoes on. So when you're standing next to some of these guys, they are definitely the giants, and deservedly so. But more importantly, this was a really unique opportunity to have my nineteen year old daughter, who grew up in the Global War on Terror, who I deployed when she was fifteen months old.
I really didn't come back until she was about sixteen, maybe seventeen, and giving me the opportunity to have this experience with her to just tell her why maybe we did this or why it was important at least to hear the story the things that I don't think we do a great job of. And so I think I'd love to raise some awareness around our military brats and what they went through and the support that they need. And I hope that this is the beginning of that conversation.
And it was a pleasure for me to be able to sit here with my daughter, who I know is partly paying attention and partly talking to her friends at college about what they're going to do tonight. But maybe one day she'll think back to one of these stories and it'll mean something to it.
It means We were talking a little bit before the show and telling you about how I hear a lot from the children of Vietnam veterans and their dad has been dead now for ten twenty years in some cases, and they come to me asking, you know, how can I find out about what my dad did? And you know, you can foia some documents, but it's not going to give them the experiential information that you know you shared
with us today. And that's why I know going on a podcast ism for everyone, but I really encourage veterans to at least pen ten to twenty pages, put it in a shoebox for their for their kids and grandkids. Doesn't have to be public for the family, right, because your kids and grandkids will have these questions.
Yeah. Captain Joe Thomas Special Forces E seven, who became a lieutenant in the one hundred first Airborne with me, told me to keep a journal at every combat tour, and I have followed his advice to this day.
I wish I had, I really wish I had, you know, kept like it's all just.
One big blur to me.
Now, you know, one big green right experience that I have a hard time separating things.
Yeah.
No, it was a powerful, powerful mentorship from me.
Yeah, guys, thanks for joining us for this Christmas episode.
Our next one is gonna be our yearine review.
We'll talk about all the shows we had in twenty twenty four. It'll be nuts and we're looking forward to going in at twenty twenty five. We're scheduling, We're done, January is filled, February is almost filled. We're looking at March now. So are we gonna talk about a new format.
On this one?
Yeah, we'll talk about on the next one, next one cool. So yeah, thank you, Jason, I appreciate it. Thank you for coming in being here in studio, and we'll see all you guys next time.
Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.