254: Discipline is The Supreme Thing That All Victory is Built on. Guidelines for the Leader and Commander pt. 4

This is Jocko, podcast number 254 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

And joining us again is Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. Last few podcasts 251 with Leif Babin. 252, 253, also with Dave Burke. We've been making our way through the book Guidelines for the Leader and Commander, which I brought my actual sacred real copy, not just the photocopy, so Dave could lay eyes on it.

And we're approaching the halfway point. We should get to the halfway point today. No promises, because this book is dense. There's all kinds of stuff to unpack.

This is the root of the book that taught me the most about leadership. About Face by Colonel David Hackworth.

Hackworth references this book multiple times in About Face. So the book is Guidelines for the Leader and commander by General Bruce Clark. Bruce Clark, World War I, World War II, Korea, Distinguished Service Cross, three Silver Stars, 45 years of service as a leader and a trainer in the Army. Plenty of lessons to learn. And we're learning them. We are learning them. So let's get into it. Chapter 8, Philosophies and Principles of Training in Overseas Areas. This is a whole section on how do you train when you're deployed? Section one. The training task, the missions.

The primary mission of all US military forces is to deter communist aggression and if deterrence fails, to defeat aggression, when and where it occurs.

So sometimes I work with companies and they want to have a mission statement. There's a good example of a mission statement. That's what you're trying to do. This is what you can make so many decisions based on that kind of mission statement, what your job is. Why do we exist?

You ever thought about that one? Why do I exist? What am I here for? You ever think about that Echo, Charles Yes. You think to yourself, I'm here too.

I haven't come up with answer yet.

We're working it.

Make some video, I don't know. Press record, apparently.

Jack the mission of the United States army in overseas areas stem logically from this broad US Forces mission. Our first commission is to ensure the readiness of US army forces to defeat communist aggression in overseas theaters. In doing so, we contribute most effectively to the accomplishment of our deterrence mission. Additionally, we have the mission to support U.S. contingency operations in peripheral areas. The Lebanon and Congo operations are examples in of such contingencies. These missions require that all U.S. army personnel and units instantly be ready to undertake combat operations. This requirement provides the basis for all Overseas training objectives which are presented and discussed in the following paragraph. So here's what I think you find in organizations. That really nice kind of clean thing gets put out to the troops, and then the troops start to do their job and they start to live their lives and they lose track of this. It can happen to an organization. It can happen to you as a human being. You kind of forget where you're going. You forget what you're trying to do. You forget what the team is here for. You forget what the mission is.

Can't let that happen. Got to think about that stuff.

So easy to veer off, of course. So easy just to. Just to get off course a little bit. Have you ever seen, you must have seen this Gulf War One. Gulf War One. I'm almost positive. Helicopters are holding station, their holding station, and there's a blue on Bleu and they end up shooting an apc. I want to say, was it a Bradley?

I know what you're talking about. It's a friendly position. I thought it might even have been Marine LAVs. Maybe I'm wrong, it might have been an LAV, but it's. Yeah, it's a lightly armored American vehicle.

Yeah. And you can hear it. It's one of the most horrific things to listen to. But what happens is these helicopters are in position and there's just a little bit of a cross breeze. Just a little bit of a cross breeze. And so they don't really recognize it because they're just slowly getting blown off of their. Where they're supposed to be. And guess what, there's multiple helicopters. They're all getting blown off. So relative to the other helicopters, they're in position and it's the open desert and it's hard to tell where you are in the open desert. There's no real. Oftentimes there's no real clean reference points. Oh, there's the, the mountain with the little peak next to it, or there's the river or that. Whatever. Those things don't ex. Just big flat open. So these guys drift and the next thing you know, they're calling in, hey, we see an armored vehicle. Well, there should be no armored vehicles in your area. Well, are you sure? Yeah, we're sure. You should engage that. And not only do they engage the vehicle, some of the guys get out of the vehicle and they engage the guys that get out. It's, it's absolutely, it's a, it's, it's a night. It's a complete nightmare. And here's the really crazy Thing when once that call goes down and the pilot realizes what he did.

And he says something like, you can hear in his voice he's gonna throw up. He's just absolutely sick to his stomach. And he says, can we return to base? We just, we just, we just engaged our friendly troops and whoever's the air mission commander, is that the right term? I guess as the air mission commander says, you know, negative, go back to station and hold for, you know, enemy, enemy vehicles. That's what you know. You still have your job. But what an example of little slow drift off course with catastrophic results.

That can happen when we lose sight of what our mission is.

Back to the book objectives of training. In order to ensure effective accomplishment of assigned combat, operational contingency and peacetime operation missions, the training goal of U.S. forces overseas is to maintain all units and headquarters of the high command in a state of combat readiness. This goal is equally applicable to combat, combat support, technical administrative type units. And it is attained through careful attention to the following seven specific training objectives.

So you know, you're in an organization and we always think of whatever the, whatever the critical mode, the critical piece of that organization is, whether it's the frontline salesperson, whether it's the frontline infantryman.

Whoever'S making the actual, you know, hand to hand combat, who's doing the work. We always focus on them and he's laying out everybody else. Combat support, technical administrative type units. Everyone's important and they all have to be trained with this mission in mind.

So here's the objectives. One, maintain the proficiency of the individual soldier. That's number one. Proficiency of the individual soldier is number one.

Number two, develop a high degree of responsibility and resourcefulness in the commanders and key personnel, both officers and non commissioned officers of all units.

And one thing, you know, as I continue to read through this book.

You can sense.

There are threads, there is remaining DNA of World War I of centralized command of like obedience. And you can feel, you can feel some of that in there and you can also feel the rejection of that.

And so that's why when he says things like, hey, it's responsibility and resourcefulness, right? You, this is to, you know, we need our subordinate units to take ownership. We need our subordinate officers to take ownership and figure out how to do things.

That's what, that's the number two, look, we want our soldiers to be proficient. Number two, we want our leaders to be resourceful and to take ownership.

Number three, achievement on a continuing and progressive basis. The effective integration of new weapons and equipment, new Organization and new techniques at all levels of command.

Learning is what the Marine Corps came out with that manual. How, how legit was that?

Yeah, I mean he's basically saying you need to figure that. You need event of adapt. You need to figure this out.

You need to figure this out. And by the way, continuing progressive basis.

When does that end?

Oh, that's right, it doesn't end. Continuing progressive basis doesn't end. Next, maintain an effective fighting team of the combined arms and supporting units.

Maintain an effective integrated team of the branches and services. We need to work together. And so combined arms. What is combined arms? Combined arms is the use of multiple different weapons platforms all in conjunction to support each other. It's the sort of the highest form of COVID move. Right, because we got aircraft in the sky that are covering the tanks as they move in. The tanks are covering for infantry. The infantry are also covering the tanks. Actually artillery covering all people. So this is combined arms. It's all these elements covering and moving for each other.

What I miss on that, the piece.

Of that too, you got it right. Is, is the intent there. Sooner or later the enemy is going to have to respond to something. And when they respond to the tanks, that frees up the infantry, they respond to the aircraft, that frees up the tanks, whatever it is. And the beauty of that is that all these different things you're bringing to bear, I don't care which one is the one that ends up closing the deal. I don't care if it's the tanks that take the final shot of the aircraft, we don't care. We're going to work together. We're going to create a problem for the enemy that they cannot handle. They got to pick one and they're going to lose to the other. And I don't care which one it is.

And this bring forth. This brings forth one of my favorite doctrinal terms of all time, which is it's the equivalent of checkmate, which is we are going to capture the enemy in the combined arms dilemma, meaning there is no escape. You're either going to get killed by the infantry, by the air, by the artillery, by armor. We have you, you are in checkmate. That is the combined bind arms dilemma where we have you. One of my favorite doctrinal terms.

That put a smile on my face for the day.

Also talks about. I already said this one. But maintain an effective integrated team of the branches and services. Oh yes. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, all need to work together. Develop a high degree of competence in combined and joint operations. Once again, it's, it's interesting. Teamwork, Teamwork, teamwork. All the last three of these are all about working together and was the last one develop coordination techniques for the effective accomplishment of inter allied operations. So it's teamwork, it's. Out of the seven, four of them are about teamwork.

We have to learn how to work together. Understanding the cycles of training. Combat readiness is the joint joining of well trained men with properly maintained equipment in an organization or in an organized unit of high esprit. The first requirement is that the men of this unit be trained as individuals and as a team to carry out their combat jobs with thoroughness and speed. This task surpasses all others for the commander overseas.

That type of clarity. Once again, if you're a commander on the ground and you're looking at hey, what's my priority? There you go. This task surpasses all all others for commanders overseas is to make sure that guys are trained individuals to work as a team to carry out their jobs. That's the most important thing. Readiness training is therefore the first priority task of every such unit commander. Within the concept of readiness training, each commander will be required to plan cycles or phases of training to meet varying situations and requirements, the most conspicuous of which is an annual loss of approximately 50% of his personnel who will be replaced by soldiers of varying levels of training and service. And look, the whole time I'm reading this book and you and I had a funny conversation when I started sending you pictures of texts of like little sections of the book and you eventually sent me a text to just, just cover the whole thing and I'm like, I will. But I, you know, I, there's parts of it where I go, you know what, that's not 100% applicable or I'm not really sure how that ties in. And sometimes there are some point points we get to a level of detail. What I found so interesting and why I wanted to read this is there's not too many. You know, when you hear, when you talk civilian companies, they're thinking, oh well, you know, in the army you've got these guys and they're trained and they're selected and you know, everyone's got this, this baseline of training. Well, guess what? You're also losing 50% of your people annually. They're just cycling out. They're either getting out. And this isn't even talking wartime. This is just like life. People move on. So you're constantly in this struggle to train and maintain efficiency. And every time you train someone, every for every person you train, one of those, one of those people that you trained leaves. One out of every two people that you train leaves, which is, which makes it a hard job. What do you got?

I'm already coming back to the very first thing you said, which is you said the word clarity, I think a couple times now. And just hearing the, that mission statement of what we do, the amount of clarity in his first comment, here's our mission, we are here to deter an enemy. If we don't, we're gonna fight them and kill them. That's our mission. And the very next thing he says is everybody else's role is to train, to be prepared to do that. That actually sounds really simple, but it's really hard to create a message that's that clear. So by which the infantryman and the person who's running administration, who seem like completely different, have clarity in how what they do contributes to the overall mission. That is not easy to do. And this idea of communicating in a simple, clear and concise manner, which we talk all the time, it's really hard. But from the very beginning, he's like, hey, this is the mission. Here are seven things that we're going to do to allow that to happen. Subordinate commanders, your job is to make it happen. So he's tying all these things together. And it sounds so simple when I'm hearing him say it, but I'm realizing how hard that actually is in an organization to get everybody to understand what it is they do to contribute. If you can make your administrative folks feel like they are war fighters, you have a clear mission statement.

Yeah.

Imagine that. I have no idea how many troops he's talking to. He's talking to overseas American troops. This is millions of. Yeah, maybe not millions, but this is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of troops.

This continual turnover of personnel precludes commanders from programming a single training cycle common to all men as employed in a basic training center. It requires a programming of a number of successive cycles which may overlap to some degree and at times may operate concurrently. During any 12 month period, the commander will need to place emphasis on the following cycles of training. So again, he's just emphasizing the fact that you're going to lose people, you're going to lose them all the time.

And that's going to make your job hard. Here's the things that you need to focus on. Advanced individual training to improve the proficiency of minimum service soldiers or to provide refresher training for men of longer service. So you got to just train individuals. Basic unit training to improve the proficiency of crews, teams and squads. Advanced unit training to integrate teams, crews and squads into small units. Combined arms training to integrate infantry, armor, artillery, engineer and other supporting units into company and battalion group exercises. And then combat mission training to include readiness tests, rehearsals of operational plans and joint combined training. So that's what you're doing. He's saying that same thing over and over again. You got to train the individual, then you got to train that, that next level team. Then you got to integrate them with the other teams, then you got to get all those teams working together. Very good way to think about how you train in any organization you're in.

Next. The need to maintain a high level combat readiness without peaks and valleys of proficiency prevents the commander from concentrating for long on any cycle before going into the next. This is not to imply that a unit must perform all five cycles at one time. It does mean that the commander must elevate continually the level of proficiency of his men and unit in each of these five phases of training. Based on this evaluation, he plans his training program.

Ideally, the commander assesses the proficiency of each soldier in all five cycles and organizes his training so that individuals and the unit as a whole progress systematically through all cycles. And he goes on to explain this and what I like about this is how often with whatever organization you're in or whatever organization you're leading, do you actually think in a holistic way comprehensively about the methodology that you're using to train your people?

The answer is probably not great.

So if we don't have even a goal of what good looks like, if we haven't written down what good looks like, how are we possibly going to get there?

Going ahead a little bit based balancing unit and activities. The training for combat readiness is not the only mission of the commander. He must also make adequate provisions for the supply and maintenance of the unit, equipment, administration and discipline, community relations program, troop morale and welfare programs. And all these activities demand their share of resources, time and emphasis. So not only do you have to train people for combat, that's great. That's your number one priority. He already said that. You also got all these other things that you need to handle, which by the way is the same in any organization. In any organization that you're in, guess what? You gotta, you gotta take care of the families. You gotta make sure that your guys are healthy. You gotta make sure that they've got something to distract their mind and keep them occupied.

Continuing on the immediate day to day pressures of these additional functions result in a tendency to Emphasize them at the expense of combat readiness needs. So all of a sudden he just went from like, look, you got to take care of those other things. You gotta get. It's like the.

It's like when you. It's like when someone goes, you know, I just read, you know, I read. I read in that fitness magazine that, you know, rest is even more important than working out.

You know what I'm saying? And all of a sudden, that becomes the thing. The prevailing mode.

Yeah.

Is rest. Yes. You know. You know what I'm talking about.

I do know what you're talking about.

You got that chuckle. Yeah.

Well, you're over here looking at me kind of like I said.

Have you ever caught yourself in that combined arms dilemma?

No.

Where you were kind of like, well, you know, rest is important. Important. Yeah.

Yes, I have in a way, but in this way, which might even kind of apply to this in as far as the concept goes, because you use that as the example if I'm working out or if I don't feel like working out, and I'm like, well, I did work out pretty hard yesterday, and rest is important.

Rationalizing.

Maybe I should rest. It's not like this. Rest today will hurt me. If anything, it'll help me. Right. Yeah. A little bit complicated kind of question or statement. I get it. But I'm just saying it's kind of the same thing where. Yeah. If that starts to become the. Because for that moment, it was the prevailing thing.

Got it. So we have to make sure that we provide ample room for rest and recovery.

Yes, sir.

But we can't let that become the prevailing mode of operating.

Yeah.

Which, let's face it, what do people gravitate towards? People like to gravitate towards that couch. Yep.

The comfort. The fun part.

The unit commander must recognize that even after the elimination of nice to have activities, necessary functions remain which cannot be fully executed within the resources available to him.

His only recourse is to do first things first. And I got a question like that today, talking to a client. Well, what do we do when we're resource constrained? What do we do when we don't have the manpower? It's like, oh, cool. Yeah, we already talked about. Did you hear me talking about prioritize and execute earlier? Yeah, that's what we're talking about. That's what it is. It's prioritize and execute. It's interesting, too. I used to use this quote, and when I was talking to clients, I'd say, there's no organization in the world that has unlimited resources.

We've worked with some companies now that come pretty damn close to unlimited, at least financial resources. They have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources. The problem is, the problem becomes human capital, right? You can only get you. There's only so many people in existence that have a certain job skill, have a certain capability. And so that becomes a limiting factor. So even with a company that has more money than they can spend, they could throw all kinds of money at whatever problem they have, but they're limited by, they're limited by human resources. And you could even when you say, look, we can pay, we can pay, you know, however many people a million dollars a year, those people just do not exist. And so, and so there is, I've had to modify that a little bit, but the state, the statement remains true. There's no, there's no organization in the world that has unlimited resources. Everyone has limited resources. Everyone, every company, the biggest companies in the world have limited resources. That's all there is to it. And so what do you always have to do? You always have to prioritize and execute. You always have to prioritize and execute.

He must go.

What he's. There's a part that I think he's also getting at too is if you understand what that, what that number one priority is. Those other things he talked about, and he kind of did kind of a classic dichotomy, hey, this is important. But yeah, he also understands that all those things, those morale, welfare, recreation type things, what they're actually designed to do is when we need to come back to that priority, when we need to search for that most important thing. Investing in that is actually the best way that to have your guys have the energy to exert themselves even more. I'm kind of thinking about like surge operations or thinking about, you know, when I'm on a deployment, we're supposed to go for six months and we get the, we get the notification. Four and a half months into it, you're getting extended for six weeks. And this six month deployment is now going to be closer to eight months. If you've made that investment in your family and they are all in because you've demonstrated that you care about them, you can do those six extra six weeks. It's no factor. But when you, you forsake all these other things and don't recognize that those things are important, it's really hard to get anything extra out of your guys. And this is a guy who's obviously has experience with. We're gonna have to exert Ourselves at some point. And when that time comes, hey, weekends at home with the family, those things aren't gonna happen. And the way for that to happen is to invest in that when you can, when you have the time and resource to do it, knowing that's gonna actually come back to the thing that matters the most, which is you going to do your job.

Yeah, it's. It's a great correlation to the rest and recovery that we were talking for physical working out. If you got time, you need to rest, and you can, because there's going to be a time where there's not me rest and you're going to get. You're going to catch a beat down. That's the way it's going to happen. Continuing on, he must analyze his mission and determine the relative priority and degree of interdependence of the functions essential to the mission accomplishment. Based on these considerations, he must develop a program of unit activities which provides a balanced distribution of resources amongst these functions. So, yes, you got to take care of your people. To plan such a balance program, a commander must first survey his many tasks in toto.

Toto. Do you think I looked that word up?

Yeah, I think you did.

I sure did. Yeah. And it's a word. Toto means everything. Means just what it sounds like. It means everything completely. So you got to look at everything and then you can do a little prioritize and execute. And then having made a complete list listing of appropriate to his command, the commander should analyze the proportion of hours and manpower being given to each activity. One method is to calculate the man hours devoted to each activity as a percentage of the total man hours available to the units. A continuous realistic appraisal of the units man hours is an essential part of command. When the commander feels that an imbalance exists and that the accomplishment of his mission is thereby threatened, he must take positive, aggressive action to rectify the situation. When he has exhausted all means at his disposal without correcting the imbalance, then he should seek assistance from his higher commander. That little trick. I'll call it a trick of man hours. That little trick of when people say, we can't get this done, and you go, oh, how many man hours will it take to get this done? You ask that question because a lot of times they've just looked at the task.

And made a. Made a gut decision. But the problem with that gut decision is they could be right. But it doesn't help you because you have no. You have nowhere to go. Because if Echo. If I say, hey, Echo, how long is going to take you to pour, you know, to build this block wall. And you say, I don't, I can't get it done. I don't have. It's going to take way too long. Okay, well how long is it going to take? How long would it take one man to do it, but just you by yourself? It'd take a week. Okay, so that's 40 hours. What if I give you three more people? You know what I'm saying? So digging in a little bit and figuring out how long it takes to do something.

That'S the data. That's the data that you need.

He's also telling you, don't go back to your boss and complain. Hey, if you're under resourced, show them the information. Hey, boss, hey, listen, you need to get this done. It takes X amount of time, X amount of people. I'm understaffed. I can't get this done on time. That's a totally different thing than Jocko. Dude, I can't do this, man. This is too hard. It's too much work. Don't go to your boss and complain if you don't have what you need. No factor. We can address that, but we can only address that if you actually come back to me with something that's solvable other than this is too big of a problem for me.

Yeah, yeah, that, that is really what it is. It's like, it's. It's too big of a problem than I'm in the mood for. It's like that kind of situation because you do this all the time, Even on a small level, you'll start asking those questions like, whoa, whoa, you know.

And then, Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're being real vague here.

I know, but I, Because I can't really think of anything that just gave me that feeling. Right when you, when, when you said, hey, how long is this concrete wall going to take? I was like, dang, like, I know that feeling. Where. And I see what you're doing because you're like, hey, we like, this is a problem that needs to be solved to me, you know, and you put some task on me that it's like, bro, that's just your idea. Like, bro, let's think. So instead, Instead of like, okay, let's think through the whole thing, really understand what it takes to do it. You know that that process exists no matter how big and how small me, I just see how big it is or estimate how big it is. And I'm like, I'm really not in the mood for this right now, you know, and then you just get to the bottom of it. So it's kind of, like, undeniably doable, you know? And I'm like, I got to do this thing, man. I don't really.

Yeah, there's a. There's a surface level way of looking at things and just seeing, like, what's on the surface and going, hey, you know, you see the tip of an iceberg, and you go, look, that iceberg's huge. I can't. I can't handle that whole iceberg. It's too. It's too big. Well, let's get a snorkel and mask and look underwater and see how much ice is down there that we got to chip away. Yeah, that can be done.

Yeah.

And I kind of boxed you in sometimes.

Oh, yeah, Big time. Even that analogy right there, the iceberg, like, I see you're like, okay, that's the typical iceberg. We know that iceberg is big. To me, I'm like, yeah, I don't deal with big icebergs. Next, like, just move on. And you're like, okay, it's big, but, you know, there's more to it than that. I'm like, man, I don't need. I'm not in the mood for all that part, you know? You see what I'm saying? It's like, that is the difference, you know? But at the end of the day, it's kind of like that's how we all are naturally, right? Where if you see a big task or let's say you see, like, a goal, right? Or something like this, and you're like, yeah, man, I want that goal. I want that, you know, element of success or whatever. And then you start, like, going for it, and you. The moment you realize that, man, this is going to take a lot more than I'm in the mood for. Whether it be things get boring or you realize it's more work, or you realize, shit, I got to learn this new skill to even get to step two. And I didn't really account for that When I wanted that thing to begin with. You start to be like, oh, well, it's too. It's too much. You know, so you saw. Or even if it gets boring or something like that, Rather than analyzing, be like, okay, well, what would it take to do that? Oh, no, I got to learn this. Okay, let's learn that, and then let's revive, you know, step by step by step. And most of the time, in the beginning, you're just not in the mood for all those steps, man, you know.

You just revealed a pattern of thought that I have that I realize that I do all the time. And I think it's actually very important. And I've never really talked about it before.

Effective.

But I think what it boils down to. I look at things and I see them, or I. I will look at them until I understand that they are finite, that they're. The things are finite. There's. Whatever that thing is. I will. I can get to the end of it. Yeah. I can get to the end of it. I can pull that string, and I will get to the end that. That thing is finite. There is nothing. There's nothing that I'm going to find on earth to. To attack. That's infinite. Right. There's no infinite thing that I can think of that I would look at as. With a view of like, okay, here's something I want to do. Oh, it's an infinite task. No. Doesn't exist. There's nothing that I'm gonna do. That's an infinite task.

Yeah.

Look at. We could. We say it's. It's infinite that we want to continue to learn. Yes. That's an infinite thing. Is it infinite that we want to try and improve ourselves and get better? Yeah, that's an infinite thing. Is there any particular.

Task that we can come across where it's infinite? No. You get a scuba mask, you get in the water, you dive, and you will find the bottom of that iceberg. And maybe you have to come back up and get scuba tanks, and you have to go down there. Maybe you even got to get a mini sub, but you can find the bottom of that thing. And then, guess what? You can get it back up, you can grab a little. Little pickaxe, and you can start chipping away at that thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And then. And at that point, really, at the. At the end of the day, like, if you be honest with yourself, you can come to a point and determine whether or not it's worth it. Like, if you go down, you're like, hey, we're trying to move this iceberg because we want to do this and do that and whatever. Right. And then you go there, and you're like, dang, this is. This iceberg is way bigger than we thought, and it's kind of not worth it. Our end goal isn't worth all what we're going to expend.

You know, Think about your difference in mentality, though, when you see that something is finite.

Yeah.

That. That totally changes your attitude from thinking this Thing could go on forever. Because now your. Your. Your efforts are futile. Literally futile.

Yeah.

But once you know that there, this thing is finite. This job has a end. Guess what? I'm gonna start chipping. And I can. I can be persistent, and I'm gonna make progress.

You know what? I don't know if this is like two of the same thing, but you have this thing where you know the whole idea of, like, doing something even though you don't feel like doing it.

Yes.

Like, you don't really have that. Like, you don't have the. You don't have the opposite. You, like, you don't have that thing that tells you, hey, like, don't do it. Like, if you don't feel like doing it, don't do it if you think it needs to be done. So having that quality helps that kind of situation. So, like, okay, I'll apply it to, like, working out, right? Where.

What's. So what's the thing that I quote? Don't.

Don't have, like, your behavior changing because you don't feel like doing something.

Got it.

Like, so you'll be like, oh, I don't feel like it. But that has nothing to do with what I'm doing, you know? So, like, if you're about to work out and you're like, man, I got this hard workout. I got. I got 25 sets till failure today. That's my workout with all these exercises and all this stuff. If I don't have. If I only got one hour sleep, like, that's just not doable for me. You know, the fact. The fact is, it is doable. It's going to suck. But if that's not a factor in your thinking, then you're just going to do it. You're just going to. The sucking part is just going to be part of the workout kind of thing, and it's going to sort of get done. So if you start thinking like that in the beginning, like, start asking yourself, well, we know that it can be done. What will it take to get it done? The workout. And then you're like, kind of the same stuff it always. Like, that's the truth. The same stuff it took last time, you know, it'll just suck less. And then, boom, Then you have that finite thing like, oh, I see exactly what's making me not want to do it. And then you sort of got to admit that to yourself.

Yeah. Do you ever have, like, a horrible workout? And then you think to yourself, well, okay, sometimes I'll be staring at whatever workout and I know it's gonna suck. And you know what? You know what I just realized? I do. I go, well, I'll start now. It will be over in one hour and 20 minutes. Yeah, if I start right now, it's going to be over in 20. I know what I have to do. I'll just turn off my brain. But it becomes a finite thing. Yeah, I make it. I use time to put a, to put a end on it in my mind. I won't say, oh, this workout's going to suck. I'll go, oh, this workout's going to suck. It's going to be over an hour and 20 minutes done.

So. Interesting. Yeah, I do the exact, I mean, essentially it's another version of that where, okay, when I first sort of started out, I time my rest. And I still do, but I can time it in my head now way better because I'm so used to it or whatever. But if I'm like really not feeling like working out, I'll set the timer right there. So it's like the workout's gonna be done regardless, regardless of if I don't set the timer. I'll take a little 10, 22nd more rest and then it extends it out more and becomes sort of this thing. Yeah, but if the timer's rolling right there, you're gonna do it whether you feel like, because that's pretty part of the workout, you know, and then you're done and you're just done. It's, it actually goes quicker.

The, the, one of the hardest moves to make, one of the hardest movements to make in the gym is pressing start on the stopwatch. You know what I mean? And I, I, I do that and I'll, I'll write it like in, I'll write it on social media. I'll be like him. Hemmed and hawed, hesitated, weighted, stretched some more. Get a little more warm, like just per. And it's usually, let's face it, it's usually squats where you're like, okay, well you know what, maybe I should just do a little bit more stretching. Maybe I should do a little bit more overhead squat form with the PVC just to make sure I'm good. And you do all these things and all you're doing is just putting it off. And then finally I go, okay, you know what? Shut up. And when I go, this thing only ends when I start. It can only end if I start. This thing can only end if I start it.

That's a good thing to say. I never tried that one. It can only end if it starts.

Yes, bro.

I'll do stuff all like organized little thing like. Oh man, that's kind of messy right there. Let me go organize, you know? You know, like that kind of stuff.

You're clean, bro.

Yeah, it can be that.

Well, that's good. I've never gone that far, dude. I might do an extra couple sets of warm up, but I'm not starting to vacuum.

Oh, that's sketch, dude. Oh, man, Check. All right, getting back to the book, Everything that I have said about the balancing of unit activities is doubly valid for the training program itself. The most valuable resource available to the commander is his men's time. And time once lost can never be regained. That's fitting.

Time once lost can never be regained. Poorly, poorly prepared, unimaginative or unnecessary instructions waste soldiers time. Worse, it is boring and soon results in ineffective, poorly trained individuals with no initiative or a spree. The skillful commander is the one who adopts the philosophy of gainful employment for each man and one who takes maximum advantage of every training hour to ensure value received.

Man.

Remember all that dumb training you did in the military?

I do.

Like when they started. Yeah, you would just do some training. You just go, man, this is just horrible. Horrible. What are we doing? It's a waste.

In this respect. Prior preparation and effective supervision are essential. Prior preparation must not be limited to determining merely what is material is to be merely what material is to be presented and gathering appropriate training aids. Meetings and rehearsals should be held for appropriate officers and non commissioned officers sufficiently in advance to ensure that the training preparation meets the desired standards. Hey, prep for your training. If you're an instructor, you owe it to the students.

Nevertheless, a commander must realize that the instructor is his most important training tool and that any time required, including duty hours to prepare that tool for its job is time well spent. The hours given to preparation and rehearsal of instruction will be repaid many fold in the hundreds of man hours that are saved by not wasting soldiers time will with poorly presented training.

Totally legit, dude.

Don't waste your people's time. And if you actually want to apply decentralized command, the best thing you can do with your time is train your people. It's the best thing you can do.

I think we talked about in the last podcast about how much you learn when you teach. We're talking about that. I think on the very last I'm just how when you become an instructor, that's when you learn the most man. When you have guys on your team that can Train.

You want to talk about liberating yourself to do other things. And people talk about how hard it is to train your instructor, Kaja. How hard it is to get your people where they need to be. That is time well spent is training your trainers. And again, everything. I know where he pulls all this stuff from, the experience this guy had.

Anybody.

And you asked me, and I just sat there and just kind of got depressed. Hearing anybody that's ever had their time wasted by a bad instructor, I don't care if it's in school or anywhere else. We all know that feeling of this is a waste of my time. It's like the most corrosive thing you can do to somebody else is waste their time. Your instructors, your. And look, instructors is synonym. Mentors, teachers, leaders, whatever. That's what an instructor is. Those are the people that matter the most in your organization because they're the ones actually responsible for other people's time.

I took over trade at and I had a meeting.

And I rolled into the meeting and I had like a wheel book or whatever, a little notebook, and I had like four bullet points of things I needed to tell the guys. And I walked in there and I told the guys what I needed to tell them. And then I walked out and like, one of my bros was like, dude, you come prepared this stuff, right? And I was like, you come prepared to this stuff, huh? And I was thinking to myself.

Well, yeah, I mean, what.

What's the alternative?

What's the alternative to walk in there and really not know what the hell you're going to say? That's crazy. That's crazy. That's. That. You know what that is? That's disrespectful.

Which I have a problem with.

There's a chunk in here about safety, obviously always important, and we work with a lot of industries that safety is absolutely paramount where lives are at risk. So there's a section there about safety. The success of any safety program is dependent on the quality of support and leadership rendered by all unit commanders. It's like, oh, we have a safety officer. Great. That's great that you have a safety officer. And guess who else is responsible for safety?

Everyone.

Training under tactical conditions. To me, it is basic that all field training should be conducted under tactical conditions. Setting up an administrative bivouac is the easy way out, but it is bad practice and has no place in the field training of today's soldier. Each soldier participating in tactical training will learn to think and act in a manner fitting for combat. He'll make Mistakes at first, but it will be easier for him to overcome them in a tactical environment then it'll be easier for him easier for him to overcome them in a tactical environment than an administrative one. Realistic combat habits developed in training will be second nature to soldiers in combat. Poorly trained soldier the poorly trained soldier, taken by surprise, without a weapon in his, rare in his hand, rarely gets a second chance to amend his habits. So look obvious. The connection to the military here is obvious. When you're going to go to the range or you've got range time, don't bring out an RV to sit around and play video games while you're not shooting. Go and set up tactical hide sites and spend time in the field and make the most of that. The same thing in the business world, right? If we're going to train people for a certain scenario, then do it in the most realistic way that you maximize the training.

After entering combat, commanders will find it's too late to teach dispersion, first aid, marksmanship, camouflage, care and maintenance of equipment, and the thousand and one other things that go to make up the well trained soldier and unit. It is also a little late to furnish him an, an adequate training background of information.

So if you wait, it's gonna be a problem.

It's the similar thing of people that think, well, you know, if I get into a fight, like a real fight, right bro, I'll just go full rage. You know, I'll go full rage. And they think that that's gonna make up for 18 years of Jiu jitsu, wrestling, Muay Thai and boxing, right? It's not happening. You, you, you will lose. There's no, there's you, it's too late. You have to train, you have to prepare before it actually happens. From a leadership perspective, isn't it crazy? Isn't it crazy to think that, hey.

I can just roll into a leadership situation without any training, without role playing, without thinking through some contingencies in my mind and things are just gonna go, I'll just know what to do. Why would you think that? Why would you think that? Why would you get that idea in your head? Why would you get the idea in your head that if you got to go talk to, you know, one of your subordinates that had an outburst and, and is upset about something, why would you think that just rolling in there, you'll just know what to do? Why would you not think through that? Why would you not train? Why would you not prepare if you have subordinate leaders that are working for you? Why would you assume that if there's a contingency that unfolds, that they're just going to figure it out. Why would you assume that they're going to know how to handle when somebody flies off the, off the handle? Why would you assume that they're going to know how to handle when a client comes in and is having a. Having an outburst? Why would you assume that they're going to know what to do? And if they know what to do, why would you assume that they're actually be able to do it? Because that's the next level, right? Is you can do the moves all day of Muay Thai and wrestling, but until you're going against someone, until you spar with someone, until you role play with someone, you're not actually able to do it. Why would you assume that? The answer is you'd assume that if you were dumb. Don't assume that. Train. Train for those leadership situations. Train for those hand to hand combat situations.

Next section.

Training for good habits and discipline.

In battle. The habits and discipline that have been instilled in training are of supreme importance. First, because men in combat will do instinctively what they have been in the habit of doing in, in training. And second, because only the extra drive of discipline will enable the soldier to overcome the fear that all men experience in battle.

There you go.

Supreme importance. By the way, this guy is not. He's not throwing words around just because they sound good or just trying to emphasize something a little bit. He's using this word and might be the only time he uses it.

Habits and discipline are of supreme importance.

Men will do in combat what they have been in the habit of doing in training. Every experienced commander knows this. But too often he fails to appreciate the absolute necessity of practicing only correct procedures. It is essential that good habits be so deeply ingrained in each individual soldier through correct teaching and intensive practice that even under the stress of battle, he will do the right thing both immediately and instinctively. Conversely, because practice makes perfect, a commander must never under any circumstances permit training errors to be repeated.

There you go to the question of discipline. I would ask you to consider this more in the light of self discipline. Because all too often the word discipline takes on the connotation of restriction, overbearing authority and blind obedience. We do not want an automaton. We want an effective, combat ready soldier who has a keen sense of duty and who feels an obligation to his commander, to the men around him and to his unit. So anybody that's questioning, you know, even me when I'm saying, hey look, you get some DNA coming from World War I. You get some of that. You get some of that feeling that he's sort of, hey, listen, you know, the rank structure is important. You better do it yourself. There it is, blind obedience. No, not what we want. Overbearing authority, not what we want. Restriction on what you're able to do, not what we want. What we want is self discipline.

I'm partially just enjoying picturing you reading that and the reaction you had as you're reading that in General Clark's book for the first time. The only thing I wrote down, I wrote it down before he said, this is the good news in all this. When he's talking about the challenge of making difficult and realistic training. People like hard training. They like hard training. They respond to hard training and for whatever reason, pushes you away from not wanting to make things difficult. That's actually what your people want. When I look back and all the things that I did, the hardest things I did were the things I enjoyed the most. So whatever you're feeling like the harder it is, the better it is. Because he talked about the end state of. This is what's going to keep your people alive in war, for sure. But hard training is actually what your people want.

Funny you should say that. Let me read the next paragraph. Instilling discipline in troops is actually not as difficult as it may appear. As a matter of fact, the answer to instilling discipline can be given in one word. Training. Good training overcomes resistance to obedience and resentment of authority.

So I wrote about this in Leadership Strategy and Tactics. You want to build morale in a team, you got to do hard things. Do hard things, go through suffering together. That will bring your. That will bring your unit together. That will increase your rear morale. It will also increase your discipline.

Yeah, that covers the tangible things. It makes them better at the skill, whatever skill you're training for. But the intangible things like morale, the discipline you just talked about, the esprit de corps, the willingness to take and make sacrifices, that's the intangible qualities that also come from that as well, which is every bit as important as being really good at your job.

I like this guy.

One of the keys to successful training is developing our men into the proper attitude toward training. Generally, our men want to do what we want them to do, and when they don't, it's usually because we have failed to instruct them properly. That's our fault.

A guiding principle that applies to all units and organizations is that a man must understand clearly what is expected of him merely telling him is not enough. He must be instructed. Proper training will also foster pride and confidence in the individual. A pride and confidence that will be extended to his leaders and units as well. When that pride and confidence have been nurtured to a point, that obedience becomes a habit and response becomes natural and willing. You've gone a long way towards your goal of combat readiness. As you can see, habit and discipline go hand in hand. A poorly disciplined unit is evidence that its commander has failed to instill proper habits through his training program right from the very start. Now again, now you feel a little bit of lean back, right? A little bit of lean back to obedience becoming a habit. And response becomes natural. So you get a little bit of a lean back towards. All right, so now we're getting somebody that's going to be like obedience is sort of part of that discipline. Even though he said earlier, look, we don't want automatons. We do not want automatons. That's not what we're looking for. It's not what we're trying to. That's not what we're trying to train.

And that's the last thing that I want.

Decentralization of responsibility.

Once he has set his goals and started his training program in motion, a commander must rely upon the initiative of his subordinates. G.

By properly delegating responsibility and the related authority, a commander will foster this initiative and will enhance the development of all subordinates, officers and non commissioned officers alike. I must emphasize here that this principle cannot be restricted merely to the training program, but should extend to all unit activities. This is it. This is a decentralized command. This is the fourth law of combat. Decentralized command. That doesn't only apply to training, it doesn't only apply to planning, it doesn't only apply to operations, it applies to everything. Decentralized command is how you need to operate.

How many officers are doing the jobs of their non commissioned officers? We speak of enhancing the prestige of our non commissioned officers. But the best possible way of doing this is by giving them responsibility to do the jobs themselves while also insisting that that they accomplish them properly. What's giving people ownership? Let them do it. Try that with your kids, make dinner, make tie your own shoes, clean your own room, do your own laundry. Make them responsible.

Decentralize that command. And guess what you can do then. Then you can focus on getting them better training.

This is not to say that the commander should abdicate his own responsibility, but a one man shop of is a one man shop is evidence of poor leadership. There you go. So if you're running everything. Bad leadership. A good commander will patiently and carefully instruct his subordinates to ensure they know what is expected. He may even have his subordinate coordinates return and present their plans for accomplishing the tasks. But he will then insist that they get the jobs done without detailed guidance. So again, now we're back to like this, leaning back towards, hey, I'm not going to tell you exactly what to do. Look, I. I want obedience, but you go figure out what you want to do. So he's balancing this dichotomy of leadership between, hey, you need to put some structure in place so people know what to do. But I still want you to go and figure out how to. How you're going to get it done.

It's almost like you have to take the word obedience and change what that natural reaction you have is. Because I hear the word obedience. I don't like that word. There's a. I don't like that word. And just like you described, I actually don't. I don't want my people to feel like they have to be obedient to me. And so it's almost as if the obedience isn't, I say to do something and you do it. It's. The obedience is. It's the natural.

Almost unspoken reaction that what we need to get done is going to get done, as opposed to, you will do what I say. Because that if that's the obedience you're looking for, you actually just. You're just hurting yourself in so many different ways. But there's language in here. When I hear you say it, I kind of get that little like, oh, I don't, I don't like that. But as he explains it and kind of peels that back, the obedience he's referring to isn't, I demand you to be obedient to my orders. It's I want. And when he talks about decentralization, I want the obedience to be, we are going to solve this problem. We're going to get whatever needs to get done. I'm actually going to have you figured out half the time.

Yeah. And I think to take what you just said and to take it one step further, what obedience is and everything he is saying is leading towards the result of what obedience is. If you're obedient, you're driving towards accomplishing the mission. That's it. That's my obedience. We got a mission, and I'm gonna accomplish it. That's what I'm gonna do. Because he's literally saying, without Detailed guidance. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it. Here's the mission. Go accomplish it. That's obedience.

By giving them responsibility and authority and by underwriting their honest mistakes, he will encourage them to exercise initiative and accept responsibility. He will help them to develop into more effective individuals and hence into more effective soldiers and officers. This in turn will result in a better unit. That sentence right there.

Giving responsibility and giving authority and underwriting their mistakes, like, hey, you made a mistake. Hey, I got it. No problem. It's no problem.

You're encouraging them. That's how you create leaders that are going to take initiative, which is exactly what you want if you're a good leader.

A problem arises when individuals are given the authority to make decisions on various types of actions and then fail to use it. How much time is wasted by passing the buck to the next level? Even though authority existed to make a decision on the spot.

Training supervision, proper supervision of training still remains primarily the commander's responsibility. A good motto to bear in mind is an organization does well only things. The boss checks. He's. He goes over that over and over again. He talks about inspections again here, and we covered that on one of the earlier podcasts. And one thing he, he does say, and I'll just re emphasize it, a word of caution is an order. Inspections that are poorly scheduled or executed will harass the troops. And if you're harassing the troops with your little freaking inspection, you're wrong. You're wrong. That's not what inspections are for.

Training methods. Proper methods of training will produce better soldiers in less time and hence speed the building of combat ready units. A discussion on training methods invariably includes the question of the committee system versus the unit method of training. Which is better? Probably a combination of the two methods at the lowest practical level of command is the best answer. Decentralized command. Small unit commander should be responsible for the bulk of training. Although specialized subject or those involving a small segment of several units often lend themselves to centralized instruction by committees. So that's all good stuff. If you've got some universal skill that everyone needs to learn, hey, send people to a schoolhouse for that. We get that. And you know, he goes in through these things.

Talks about some bad practices as well. Bad practices such as having men wait in line to run a lane on the assault course, or having men wait behind the ready line to fire on a range. You got to eliminate those things, he says.

And he says it cannot be emphasized too often that a man learns best by doing.

In every appropriate subject or Element of training, practical application must be stressed. Gotta do. Sometimes I would get these instructors, I remember especially going through close quarters combat training, you know, so clearing rooms. And in the beginning, when you're taking a task unit through the instruction of room clearances, you know, you started a very fundamental basic level. And guys are doing one and two man room entries. That's what they start off or sorry, two man room entries.

And so like I would get, basically maybe take two platoons to do two different sections of the kill house. And one of the instructors would be a guy that would focus on really explaining things a lot, going into a lot of detail, maybe maybe like to hear himself talk a little bit. The other person maybe is a guy that's like, hey, here's what you got to do. All right, let's start running, let's start doing it. And by the end of the day, I'd have to switch the platoons because the platoon that was doing would be way ahead of the platoon that was listening. You have to freaking do stuff. Yeah, you have to freaking do stuff. What'd you write down?

I mean, you gotta remember too, I'm sitting here listening as you're talking about it. I'm hearing it from you through him for the first time, connecting it to the things that I've experienced. And I'm hearing all these little, there's all these common things he keeps coming back to. He's talking about not wasting people's time. He's talking about pushing decision making down. He's talking about giving your people authority and responsibility and then taking ownership of their honest mistakes.

A great way to not waste your people's time is to not have them be reliant on you to make decisions for them. And as you push that decision making down, your subordinate leaders get closer and closer to the problem and their ability to solve those problems and do things that are constructive and useful for their people. Is them not being reliant on you. And why I wrote it down is he asked a question at the beginning. He said, how many officers are, are doing the jobs of their non commissioned officers? How many leaders are making decisions and doing things on your team, in your organization right now that you really shouldn't be doing? And the answer is probably almost all of you. And if you can just have a mental exercise of. Let me just think for a minute of any task that I do that I really shouldn't be doing. If you're doing that, you are wasting your people's time, you're hindering their development. Find a Task that you shouldn't be doing and push it down to them. And then when they screw it up, take responsibility and ownership for it, train them better, resource them better. But as you push those decision making, push that decision making down, you waste less of their time. And just. I'm just hearing him connecting all these things together and how crazy, how simple it sounds when he says it, but how often we don't do the very thing he's describing.

And isn't it strange that this is a guy that spent 45 years in the military and it. Well, 45 years in the military, whatever, 50 years ago and actually 100 years ago because he got in in 1917, so 103 years ago. And he spent his whole life in the army, multiple wars. But what we're talking about, you and I, we definitely apply it to. We reflect on our time in the military and then we reflect on businesses right now in every single industry that we work with all the time we talk to on a daily. How many companies do you talk to a day? 3, 4, 5 different companies a day?

Yeah, every day.

Me too. And personnel at different levels inside those companies. And all these things apply. All these things apply.

Universal. There are universal truths to leadership. There really are universal truths to leadership.

Improvement through ideas, research and development. The army is constantly seeking ways and means to improve the training of the individual as well as to develop and improve equipment and procedures. Research into new and more modern methods and ideas is a continuing process.

Various organizations, both military and civilian, devote all their energies to prod to projects of a research nature. And he goes on talking about that. Applying well established scientific principles to military problems. These groups observe the test individuals and units over a period of time to determine the best method of performing a specific operation or the advisability of adopting a specific item being studied. So he's, he looks at things, not saying, hey, I got the answer. That's him saying, look, we gotta, you gotta bring in experts that actually can study and see what the right answer is.

Commander should always encourage imagination and ingenuity, seeking better ways to solve their training, maintenance and management problems.

Next section, Chapter nine. Training the individual. Adjusting the soldier to his new career. The individual begins his military career in an army training center or in a selected unit to the new soldier. This is the front door to the Army. Here he gets his first taste of military life. This is where he is indoctrinated in the fundamentals of military service and where he forms the thoughts, ideas and habits that stay with him throughout his service and that go with him when his service is terminated.

From this starting point in his career, the soldier will develop in proportion to the effort made to put him on the right track and to the application of sound training practices during this vital period of adjustment. This is something that I absolutely saw all the time, and I don't know if you would. I don't know if this would apply to flying jets, but what you learn, what guys learn in their first SEAL platoon, they always are biased towards that as being the right thing. Doesn't matter if it was right or wrong, archaic or not, new, old, they. What they learned in that first platoon, they always. I know I always was. And I had to fight against that unnatural bias or natural bias that I would have towards, hey, well, you know, this is what I learned. This is the way you do it. I guess the first thing you learn leaves the deepest. The deepest scars, the deepest trail. Does that happen with flying jets?

Totally, man. You show up in your first squadron, and the things that. That the more experienced guys are saying is gospel. And it's probably not a lot different for you. You know, most guys that did what I did, we spent our whole lives dreaming about doing it. And by the time you finally got to your first squadron, which was the. The top of the mountain you've been climbing your whole life.

Everything there is. What is. Everything that said there is gospel because you made it to where you wanted to be. And these guys that have been there are telling you that stuff is seared in your brain. And the truth is, is it's not all right. A lot of it is. Is not right. And it's really hard to undo those bad habits. Same thing happened to me. I got there first. Squash, and people are talking. That is burned into my brain.

Is there anything that you learned in your first squadron that later you were like, wow, I learned that the wrong way?

Yeah, a lot. You and Leif do this a lot. When you. When you tell stories about what was unique about Task Unit Bruiser, and the uniqueness of that was. Was a lot less about the tactics and the maneuvers that you executed and. And the weapons and things like that. It was so much more about the culture, the mindset, and the. And the. The recognition of ownership and leadership being the thing that's going to make you unique. What I learned or looked back on in my. In my. The lessons of my first squadron, I certainly learned some things like, hey, that's not the best way to run the system or the best way to maneuver your aircraft. But what I learned the most in retrospect was the leadership that was either good or bad. And it's really hard to diagnose bad leadership when you're a really young guy, at least initially, you'll show up and kind of whatever's going on, they're like, okay, this is how it is.

Cool.

And you kind of get on board. And it's actually connected to a note that I wrote when you were talking about people walking in the front door. We may think we've got a lot of time with those new folks, but they start to form those opinions very quickly. You know, the first couple days are just kind of clueless. They're just going to get on board, but very quickly they're going to start to take note of what's going on around them, and they're going to acclimate to whatever type of leadership you give them. And if it's good leadership, they're going to, they're going to align with that. And if it's not, they're going to align with that, too. And so the clock that you're running with these new folks, they start to move to whichever direction you push them very, very quickly. And what I look back on is the lessons that I learned. I look back like, man, I thought that squadron was really good, and it really wasn't. We didn't do a lot of these things that we should have been doing. And it's mostly centered around the things you've always talked about, about, hey, you know what? When we take our squadron up to Fallon for three weeks for a big Fallon air wing debt, you know, what we're doing on Friday nights, everybody's going out to the bars on Friday nights. And that's what we did. And when I was in squadrons, units that they didn't do those things because they knew that they had limited window for training and they were going to stay and, and, and get better.

That's when the contrast became much more clear about the things that I'd grown up with that weren't nearly as good as I thought they were at the time. And look, man, when you're on the other side and you tell the stories about trade at. When you've seen ten things, thousand runs of the same clearance, literally just thousands upon thousands, it becomes very easy to see what good and bad looks like.

Yeah, the, the, the pid, the positive identification of good and bad, man, I don't know why I was paying attention to that stuff when I was a young frogman. And it was.

You know, we, we showed up in the 90s man, we showed up in the 90s, and the 90s was after the 80s. And I know that might sound funny, but it's important because the 80s, there was basically no war.

I mean, most of the 70s.

Yeah.

So think about that, you know, like the last SEAL platoon in the early 70s. What is 72, 73, something like the last SEAL platoon. There's a couple more stragglers over there, but then you go 70. Then you go all the way to 1980. Then you go all the way from 80 to 90. And you had. Look, you had Grenada, handful of guys. You had Panama, handful of guys. And by handful, you know, 50 guys, whatever the number is. But it's a very tiny percentage of the community. And then you roll into the 90s. But I'm coming off the 80s.

So.

Understanding what it meant to be combat ready was a faded picture. It was a faded picture. And there were some guys that knew. And thank God. Thank God some of those old Vietnam guys were there. Thank God some of the second. Some of the people that had learned. Learned firsthand from the Vietnam guys. They were there to. To. To hold that line.

But there was also guys that were, you know, we ain't going to war. We ain't going to war. We're going drinking. Totally. You know, that's what. And even if we're not going drinking, you know what? We're not going. We're not going to war. We're going to hang out with our family. We're gonna go run some side business. We're gonna go do other things, but besides, just be a team guy. And. And that's a weird place to come from. It's a weird place to roll into the teams when you have these expectations. Like, I had the. I had the dumbest expectations, you know, Thought I was going to Nam.

Thought I was going to Nam in 1991. I was ready to freaking deploy to. Dang.

You still think.

I still kind of do think that, man. Whenever I talk to Tilt.

Those guys, I remember asking Tilt, like, was it hard to. Or no, maybe it was. Maybe it was Dick Thompson. I was like, was it hard? Because he volunteered for this, volunteered for that? And I said, was it hard to volunteer? He's like, no. They were like, oh, you want to go to Special Forces? Cool, right over here. Oh, you want to go to sog? Cool, right over here. Oh, you want to be an officer? Cool, right over here. He stepped right. Oh, yeah, we got openings, man. We got openings. Why do we got openings? We got openings who have more than 100% casualty rating. More than 100% casualty rating. If you show up here, you will be wounded or killed. How's it going? You get. There's the line.

And those tilt Frenchmen. Dick Tom. Just rolling in. Just. Yeah, good. Let's do it. What do you got? We can't tell you about it. Cool. I'll sign up when I put my name.

Don't do the titles for the SOG episodes of this podcast. Dead Man Walking. Don't. Don't go to sog. That's what that was the word. That was the gouge. Did you use that term? The gouge?

Yeah, totally. That's the gouge.

That was the gouge.

Don't go to sog.

Don't go to sog. And these guys are like, well, why wouldn't we go to sog? Everyone gets wounded or cool. Killed. Oh, cool. Sign me up. Yeah.

So I thought I was going to Nam.

So when I get to the team and. And you know what I had to do with Vietnam? I got Vietnam issue Vietnam era H gear that was left over from Nam. I got that. You couldn't tell the difference when you saw me going through sqt. My, like the, the gear that I used was Vietnam gear. Like, that's the same gear. The same canteens, the same mag pouches. Everything was the same. So I kind of was going to Novel.

But that impression that you get in that first platoon, man, it leaves a mark. Yeah, it leaves a mark. And so that's why if you're in a leadership position and you got people checking on board, you got to recognize that you're making a mark. Don't play around with that.

Essential to the smooth and orderly transformation of the individual from a citizen to a soldier is the organization and caliber of the training establishment. The commander of this training activity must be given the tools to work with and enough priority to ensure assignment of the most competent officers and men. Personnel should be carefully selected, highly motivated and imbued with the standards prescribed for basic combat training. A prerequisite for later command has its foundation in this criteria. Until an officer, a non commissioned officer, has served in these capacities, he is handicapped in the art of training units. That's powerful. How often is it that we actually invest our best people into being instructors? Not often enough.

Not often enough.

You guys do it. The Top Gun does it.

Yeah. Well, I was thinking you guys do it as well. I mean, the parallels between what you did in trade it.

This is the thing. When I got into the teams, no one wanted to go to training it was, hey, man, I don't want to go over there. I want to go on deployment. Yeah, I want to go to Nam. I want to go on deployment. That's what everybody wanted to do. Part of the reason was because one of the ways that you got cred.

Yeah. Was by doing deployments, right? Hey, I did three deployments. I did four deployments. I did five deployments. You were in the pecking order. There was a pecking order. So nobody wants to get out of that cycle. They just want to go on deployment, deployment, deployment. Because you want to, you want to go up that hierarchy. You want to be five platoons, you want to be seven. But do you want to do as many platoons as you can, as fast as you can?

It's kind of funny because when the, you know you'd be a new guy in your first platoon, but then I was talking to Nam guy and he was like, you're a new guy until you go into combat. So all you are cherries.

It's like, roger that. This dude's sitting there with six deployments under their belt, but they never went to war. So he's just like, yeah, cherries, whatever. Yeah, cherry boys, whatever.

Keep.

Keep it up.

Man.

What a life. Trainer personnel will face many problems with their new soldiers. Trainees come from every aspect of life. So this is what I think the reason I wanted to cover this part is because we work with companies all the time. They hire people all the time. What's your indoctrination program? How are you welcoming them aboard? What are you doing to train them out of the gate? Oh, you gotta. You're so critical to get them in the role that you can't spare four days to set aside and get them trained, trained up and familiarize and meet them with the right people. You can't do that. It's more important that you just get them totally blind rolling into their role. That doesn't make any sense, man. Set aside some time.

Trainees come from every walk of life, all kinds of schooling, other civilian experience, multitude of aptitudes, beliefs, skills. From this complex mixture of raw material, the training unit commander has to turn out trained soldiers who are ready to undergo further training in order ultimately become combat ready fighters in the Army's combat ready units.

During this period of his training, this new soldier will have to learn how to live as a soldier with other soldiers. He will learn to accept discipline, to keep physically fit, to develop proper habits of eating, sleeping, recreation, and sanitation, and to live harmoniously with his fellow soldiers. These things Will not come easily to all trainees. Many will need lots of help and lots of guidance to overcome their troubles. Their commanders are the ones who can and should give this assistance. Isn't that weird to think about? This is where you're going to develop these people that have just. They're. They're just random. I know. I never. I always joke about the fact that I. I never flossed my teeth until I joined the Navy. And in boot camp, they're like, you need to floss your teeth every night in a while. Like, okay, whatever. I've never. I've lost my teeth every night since then. I was just a savage that didn't floss my teeth. But that's one of the many habits where they. This is what you do. This is what you're supposed to do. Cool. Roger that. I'm that kid.

Of course I can floss some of my teeth with, like, a piece of rope.

Although new soldiers are being trained as replacements for other units, all training commanders will do well to look at their trainees this way. These are my men. I will train them as if I'm going to fight alongside them and as if my life will someday be in their hands. That's a. That's.

That's.

That is one cool thing that you hear from guys that worked as BUDS instructors is the attitude of, like, hey, this. I do. I want this guy in a platoon with me.

Right.

That's a great place to start.

That criteria is so important. I mean, yeah, Top Gun we talked about a little bit, maybe a difference. There was a key emphasis put on training in my community. Top Gun was obviously a place that resembled or reflected that apex of that training facility, if you want to call it that. But really what it was, there was a chance to pass on information to. To teach guys. And the criteria for finishing that program was if you. As an instructor, who was gonna. If I'm gonna put that Top Gun patch on your shoulder, the criteria was, would I go to war with you? That was the criteria. Is this guy someone that I would go to war with as his wingman? And.

Again, you've talked about may be a little bit more evident in the military example, because we're talking about literal war, and we're talking about a guy who's written something based on his experiences in war. But the translation to anywhere in the private sector, even your own family, isn't that hard. If you think about what is the criteria that really matters to you, what you'd be willing to do with or for this person it doesn't have to be war as the outcome. And you're talking about, you know, the investment you're making in your people up front. You, can you spare, can you spare a week to put this person on the right path so his, his ability to be successful in the organization is 100 times greater than if you just shoved them out there because we're understaffed or we got to get this job done.

Go get that person in the role. Yeah, got in. Make the, the investment that you make up front will be tenfold than not making it.

Next section is entitled. The army is built on discipline. When a man comes into the army, he usually leaves home for the first time. He leaves behind his parents, his friends, the inhibitions he has built up from being around those who have been close to him. Without these, the restraining influence of these inhibitions, and in the quick tempo of his new life as a trainee, he is likely to slip in morals, in neatness, and in energy. The one thing that will keep him on the right track. His discipline. Development of discipline is the best way to re institute the desirable inhibitions he may have lost. How can commanders instill discipline in their trainees? The answer can be given in one word. Training. This is a rehash, right? Good training overcomes resistance to obedience and resentment of authority. When obedience becomes habit and is natural and willing, training is paid off. In terms of discipline, Soldiers development of discipline can be part of every period of training. During basic training, commanders have many opportunities to stress the importance of these things which take. Which make a disciplined soldier. Obedience, alertness, neatness of dress, and physical fitness. The trainee will also develop a respect for commanders and a renewed devotion to his country. In battle, discipline is of supreme importance. Let's see. The only time you use the word supreme.

Most men are afraid in battle. But discipline produces the courage to overcome this fear. Discipline in a soldier implies a sense of duty and obligation to his unit. When the soldiers of a unit share that obligation, the unit has gone a long way toward the goal of combat effectiveness. Only one kind of discipline is acceptable. It is perfect discipline. When trainees show evidence of poor discipline, it is generally because their commanders have failed to insist on perfect discipline from the start. And that's patent. That's a patent quote. Only one kind of discipline. That's perfect discipline.

He talks about getting to an overseas environment. The new arrival should be indoctrinated in the customs of the new country in which he is stationed. He should be encouraged to meet his new neighbors, learn their ways, study their language, become Familiar with their history.

And then he talks. I'm going to skip forward a little bit to.

Well, I got to cover this one, this one of the little section. Simultaneously with his. With his new geographical environment. Must come adjustment to his new situational environment. The transformation is one of attitude in which the new arrival must be made to realize he is no longer in a basic training or garrison situation. He must now apply the training principle and garrison experience he has gained. He must be made aware of the seriousness of his situation. That he is in the front line of defense against aggression.

While there are many educational and recreational diversions overseas, the commander must keep the new arrival constantly alert. To the necessity of keeping himself combat ready. The astute commander must be not only a leader and trainer of men, but but a student of psychology and human nature as well. He must be able to instill in his men the feeling that they can enjoy their tours of duty overseas, benefit from the experience, and at the same time be prepared to assume more serious endeavors when called upon.

So there you go. You gotta understand human nature. You gotta understand a little psychology.

Motivation for performance. It has been said that man is the army's most valuable asset. Even the greatest asset, however, becomes a liability if improperly used. The American soldier must be properly motivated. Before he will efficiently and willingly perform his assigned tasks. From this motivation develop esprit, enthusiasm, morale, effort, competition and accomplishment.

When I mean motivation of the American soldier overseas is best accomplished when he, number one, knows why he is there. That's the number one thing. The number way. Number one way to make sure someone's motivated. Make sure they know why they're doing what they're doing. Same answer I give nine times a day.

Is made to feel that he belongs. Is performing primarily a job for which he has been trained.

Knows where his efforts fit into the big picture. Is recognized and rewarded for success. But one of those that I would say was a. Was a new thought in my mind was that is performing primarily in a job for which he's been trained. And I was kind of like, that's a good point. That's a good point.

Think about when you're. When you're doing something, you're like, oh, yeah, this is what I've been. This is what I learned, you know, in jiu jitsu. It's real clear, right? Oh, I learned this escape. And you use it. That's just a total reward.

Yeah.

How about when you learn some new technical skill on the filmmaking and then you get to apply it. Sometimes you kind of force it in there. In many cases, yeah.

It's like you'll do it. Yeah. Just because you're pursuing that very thing. Right. That you're talking about.

Yeah. So when it comes naturally, when it naturally occurs, it's a super positive thing.

Big time.

Dave, how long were you in the Marine Corps for before you dropped a bomb on target from an F18?

Six years.

Six years. Did that feel good? It did, yeah. Did that give you motivation?

It's crazy how to do the math. There I was thinking, man, how long was it? It was six years.

What year did you get commissioned?

94.

And then you dropped bombs.

Bomb. Singular.

You dropped a bomb.

Bomb. 2000.

In 2000? Yeah.

Listen, like you said, man, remember, this.

Is by straight up. You were straight up, like Top gun, experiencing the MiG, right? Like Maverick. Didn't Maverick have the close Flyby with the MiG? I'm saying that because. Because in 2000, how many people there was.

I. Look, I don't know if it's fact, but if it's not fact, it's really close. I was like the first guy in the world to drop a JDAM because I had. My squadron on deployment was the first squadron that had gps.

Good deal, Dave Burke is coming in hot. But at the time, billions of dollars developing this weapon system, and you're the guy that gets to drop it again. Okay. Do you know. Do you remember the date?

No.

But the month.

It was April of 22,000.

Okay, so April of 2000, we're going out there, just. Just canvassing the world. If there's anyone out there that knows anyone that dropped the JDAM Before April of 2000, please let us know so I can put this guy over here. Good deal, David. Check. Yes, put him in check.

It's like you said, though, man. I mean, first of all, at the time, for me, that was it. Dude, we're done checking the block. I can. I can die a happy man. It's because of what you said. There wasn't anything going on. I mean, you look back now, you know, post 9 11, it's. I mean, it is. It's embarrassing. I don't even. Like, we talk about this all the time. I don't even like bringing it up. But at the time, that was it. And. And to get back to your. Your more serious point of. Dude, was I stoked. I. I never felt more useful in what I was doing than that night. I can picture it hitting that pickle switch and that bomb coming off my jet, blowing up that. That SA3 launcher in Iraq. That was like the Most important thing I'd ever done in my life.

How many people did that? After you drop yours, did things start to escalate?

Well, no, we were.

You just get the one.

Good deal. Dave.

Look, man, it was kind of a cool thing at the time. It really was. And yeah, if, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm out of turn, let me know. There's just not that many people out there that, that is, that have the potential of doing it. Given the systems that were required when the bomb hit the fleet and everything. It was a confluence of a lot of things that just went my way.

So you're saying that in the whole fleet the JDAM had just kind of arrived?

First of all, the JDAM had just arrived and what was required is a GPS aircraft on my carrier. There was one squadron that had GPS.

On board, which was in your aircraft. In the aircraft.

The other aircraft. The other four squadrons couldn't even carry the weapon.

And this was the first time?

Yes.

And Marine Corps got it before Navy.

No, it's not that the Marine Corps got. It just so happens that on my deployment, the three, the Navy squadron of fighters, they didn't have GPS aircraft, which.

Is kind of crazy, but we did.

So again. So you dropped the first ever jdam?

Like I said, if it wasn't the first, it was really close. It was definitely the first on that cruise.

What about Bosnia? What about Sarajevo?

That's, I'm almost positive that predates GPS guided weapons. That's all laser guided, some other, other guidance systems. That's not GPS guided weapons.

You're going out on a limb.

I am. And look, fix it. If I'm wrong, dial in, send a message. I'll be happy to get JDAMs hitting your brain.

Maybe when there's some guys that flew into Sarajevo dropping bombs.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, I could definitely be wrong.

At the time I wasn't like, do.

You know, I'm going to add this to like your bio when I talk about you because you know, I got my little, you know, hey, he was this, he was that. Now I'm gonna say he also dropped the first ever JDAM. The first ever GPS guided munitions was dropped by Colonel Dave Burke.

The 2000 pound JDAM in the year 2000 was this brand new incredible thing that we just got trained on, which it was kind of.

What were the circumstances that got you cleared hot?

Yeah, the circumstances were, you know, during the day I was scheduled for like a night mission, just a pre scheduled mission that probably involved, you know, a handful of airplanes doing Operation Southern Watch, just kind of monitoring the airspace, which we did.

I was on deployment.

Right on.

I was on deployment.

Yeah. I was about to head home. What aircraft carrier were you coming off of? The Dennis was the JFK. Did you replace the JFK? Replaced the JFK. I was on the JFK. So I guess I missed you.

That's as we're talking. That's the other carrier that would have had the potential. I think there was only one squadron on that carrier. The other Marine Hornet squadron might have had the chance. So if it's gonna happen, it's gonna be off that carrier. But between the JFK and us during that, you know, spring to summer of 2000, which was just monitoring the no Fly Zone, what happened was in the middle of the day, on a day that I happened to be already hard scheduled, we got triggered what's called an RO Already Response option, which means Saddam did something that met some criteria that we had a preplanned response to. And what he happened to do in this case was took a SAM launcher south of, you know, the, The. The parallel. The. The. The line that we were. That we were responsible for. So intel says, hey, they moved to SAM site down south of where they're not allowed to be here, below this line. They can't be here. And the big debate was, so we got this information, this intelligence, the debate was, hey, we're not gonna let the brand new guy go on this mission. This is a response option that mandates we're gonna go blow this thing up. And my squadron commander was like, negative, that's the schedule. He's going flying. And if it wasn't.

Wait, you were a new guy?

I was.

Was this your first deployment?

Yeah, my first cruise. My first deployment.

And the only reason I was on there was just, you know, every fourth or fifth night, you just ended up on the schedule. I was, you know, dash, whatever. Of this. Of this mission. It turns out that my flight lead.

Yeah. I'll tell you, look, I'm. I'm all about being fair and everything. If I was the squadron commander or the squadron XO or the ops officer or one of the other or anybody.

Else in the squadron, I would have.

Been like, that new guy just broke his left heel. He got heel hooked. Weird.

I don't know how it happened, but.

I'm taking his place, dude.

It was one of those things that the Air Wing had scheduled, responsibility to cover the no Fly zone. I was on the schedule. It was going to be a totally boring night mission, which we'd done all the time, was just covering the no fly zone. Middle of the day, this happened. We knew that that package that was going in was going to go from a monitoring mission to a targeting mission. The, the mission loadout required a GPS guided weapon. There happened to be one aircraft in that formation from one squadron that had the GPS aircraft and GPS guided weapon. I was there. I was scheduled for that. There was a behind the scenes conversation I was not part of over whether this new guy, Chip was going to get to go because this is garbage because he's brand new. The squadron commander was like, I'm not building a habit pattern by which because of the mission, I'm going to change the formation. He's a young guy, he can go do it. I went and did it. I launched. I joined on the wing of, of some other squadron aircraft. We flew north for two and a half hours. I blew this thing up and I came home.

Were you nervous?

I was, yeah, but not like, I.

Was nervous, but not like, were you super confident?

I knew that I was. I was nervous and stoked.

GPS bomb. I mean, is this a hard job?

No, it is not a hard thing to do. As a matter of fact, the beauty of this mission, just to put things in context, is that before I even got into my airplane, I was handed the precise latitude and longitude which I pre programmed into basically a disk that I downloaded to the airplane. So before I even took off from the carrier, I, my aircraft and the bomb all knew exactly where to go. It was literally, I'm just carrying this thing on my wing. My only job was to arm it up and, and press the button.

Do you. Did you fly flat, dumb and happy like at a certain altitude or did you. Come on, did you kind of like.

Hey bro, I would love to tell you the coolest story in the world. It's not a cool story. That's why I told you. Telling the story now is almost embarrassing because people listening now, when they think about what we have done since 2001, this story is the least exciting combat story you'll ever hear. And combat should be in quotes. In 2000, it was the coolest thing I had ever done.

We did, we did a bunch of shipboardings in the. On that deployment. Yes. So in the millennium deployment between 2000, 1999 and 2000, we did like ship boardings overseas. And one of the ship boardings that we happened to do was of a big Russian oil tanker and it was on CNN and all this kind of stuff. So it was kind of the big Mish. Kind of the same thing. And just to put it in perspective, when we got back, so we were on the carrier, and then there was another platoon from Team two that was on the arg. And when we got back, we had to, like, brief the CEO and the commodore about, like, what we did on deployment. And so we got to brief, you know, that we did this thing, which was kind of, you know, at the time was pretty cool. And just to put it in perspective, what the other platoon commander briefed was that they did an inextremis.

Propeller clearance for the AR ship. Like, something got tangled in the propeller and they, like, anchored the ship and they dove down and like, cut the thing off and they kind of, like, helped. That was what they briefed. That's what a SEAL platoon did in, you know, night in the year 2000. And that was the highest level thing that they did with the most visibility that they could debrief, was we did a maintenance dive on the ship. We were on. On board.

Yeah.

So that just kind of tells you how what it was like at the.

Time were different back then, man.

So I. I'm a hundred percent. I can totally imagine what you were feeling going into this and coming out of it.

Yeah, it was. It was awesome at the time. And look, when I came back, I mean, the whole ship knew about it.

There was a press release that I have a copy of somewhere that. That the Iraqi media put out that, you know, I honestly think it was like straight up, a baby milk factory had been attacked. You know, the standard propaganda, you know, unarmed civilization, civilians were killed, the whole story. I got into the intel officer came down, hey, check this out. This is the report from your attack. I've got all the stuff somewhere.

Send it to your mom.

Totally. Yes, absolutely. So it was. It was an interesting time. It was a time that I had. Obviously, none of us knew what was coming, you know, and I didn't know the following year how much things would change. And I actually thought at that time that was probably the only chance I was ever really going to have to do something that contributed to the mission, which is exactly how I felt. I felt like I finally did my job after a lifetime of dreaming about it and six years training for it. Little did I know.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

So if you're in. If you're in CAG 9 on the Stennis, or if you're in CAG 2 on the JFK, which was 251 was the Marine Hornet Squadron. Let me know if I got my facts. Not Straight. But at that time, there was just not, not a lot going on. JFK did some work.

The ship you're on too, they dropped some bombs. They did, but maybe not GPS guided. I don't think so.

Like it really matters, but call me out. It did at the time, bro. I can tell you it did at the time.

Jack.

Legit. He goes through looking at these, these, these items to, to motivate, keep someone motivated.

First of all, a man does any task better when he thoroughly understands the reasons for performing that task. Surely you have heard the question, what am I doing here? What have you, the commander, done to answer this question? Have you made your troop information information program merely a corner bulletin board in the day room? Have you explained to your men the role of allied forces in your overseas area as part of the United States army and what it plays in that role? Have you discussed with them the threat of communism? Have you shown them how an alert, well trained, strong force in peacetime becomes a deterrence to aggression and armed conflict?

So.

That'S the why. And that's the why that we talk about all the time.

Go ahead.

Yeah. Do they understand how what they're doing contributes to the mission? It's as simple as that.

Yeah. And when you're working on the front lines of a factory.

Look, if you understand how that contributes to everything that's happening and what we're trying to do, that that makes a difference.

The only way they're ever going to know that is if their leadership makes that a priority though, or else they're going to get stuck down there and their perspective, the world's going to get smaller and smaller. They're going to feel more and more disconnected and they're not going to understand it. You have to make that happen. That will not happen on its own.

That's one thing that's cool. Up at origin, you know, the troops that are on the front line, they see what's happening, right down to the fact that they can see people competing in their geese. Right? They can see people working in the jeans that they made. They get thank yous, they get, you know, pictures of the jeans being worn in North Dakota, being worn in Texas, being, you know, being used. And it's awesome. And they know that, that they can feel what that means because it's bringing back the community. And so everybody understands that why and it's so important. Pete does a great job making that clear.

The second item I outlined as a motivation force is a sense of belonging. Very few drives of a man are stronger than his desire for identification with a group when he knows what that he is wanted. He has a definite niche, a specific job. And that his efforts contribute to the achievement of common goal. Then he becomes proud of himself, his unit and his superiors. Develop your men. Developing your men. This feeling of identification and your task will be lighter then. When the chips are down and they are called upon to do battle. They will perform as members of an integrated team, not as individuals. This brings us to the utilization of man. And this is what this is the this is the story of Dave Burke. Thousands of dollars were spent to train each man first is a basic soldier than his specific mos. Is each man in the unit doing being used in the job for which he was trained.

I realize only too well that commanders must occasionally put men off their jobs to meet temporary requirements. The men realize the necessity for this too. Too often, however, commander forgets to put the man back in the job for which he's trained. The men do not understand this. And such action is often demoralizing and results in the loss of unit effectiveness. When it becomes necessary to assign an individual to a position other than the one for which he has been trained, the commander will rise in stature. If proper counseling is given. Explain why the temporary assignment has been made and let that man know as soon as possible he will be reassigned to duties commensurate with his mos. One thing should be kept in mind, however. No amount of motivation will make a man tackle his job he knows is too big for for him. That's the infinite thing.

Where a man fits into the big picture. Obviously important, and then goes into that a little bit. And finally, there's a great deal of vanity in each of us. And few things are more motivating than recognition for a war and reward for a job well done.

He then jumping forward a little bit. He's got a little section on physical fitness, which I always like to cover. The vision of a push button war suggests that the physical rigors of the battlefield belong to the past. Isn't that crazy? 1963. He's thinking that.

Just think of that.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Physical fitness in today's army is even more important than it has been in the past. And this is especially true in overseas theaters where to meet any communist block aggression. The fighting man on the ground is the only ultimate weapon. The fundamental factor of the decision. The soldier overseas must be combat ready. Not only in terms of equipment, training and conviction, but also in terms of ability to withstand the rugged demands of physical combat. The time to begin is the day a new physical, a new replacement arrives in your command. In many cases, he will be fresh from basic or advanced individual training, and it will merely be a matter of maintaining his high state of physical fitness that he. He brings with him. In other cases, you may well have to start from scratch and bring the man up to the desired standard. In both instances, your solution as a commander is a physical fitness program that will provide for progressive and continuous physical conditioning of your men. It can and should be integrated into a phase of pro of phases of training in your program. As an asset to your unit Commander is the highly developed sports program. And he talks about how important that is, how important it is to. To have these kind of programs where you're running. He talks about care of equipment.

Got to take care of your gear. He uses this little quote in here, remember the rhyme? Rhyme. The rhyme about for want of a nail. And I had never heard that. Have you ever heard that before? So I had to look it up. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For one of the shoe, the horse was lost. For want of the horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost. All for the want of a horseshoe nail. Does that little thing, just that little, just that little thing.

Talks about.

He goes into, like, this is where I started kind of breezing through some stuff because he's talking about. He's getting in the weeds a little bit about how do you get people to take care of their vehicles. He goes through some execution charts, proficiency of weapons testing, the abilities of soldiers. He runs into this a little bit performance testing and talks about how you've got to continually test people so that you know that they can do their job. Schooling. He talks about schooling of the individuals. And again, this is. He starts getting into some of the weeds.

And then he gets into professionalism. And professionalism to me is, you know, a word. You know, talk about your first experience in the military and how that leaves a mark. Well, in 1991, when I checked into SEAL Team 1, there was an underlying theme of professionalism. It was, hey, professionalism, SEAL Team One. The nickname for SEAL Team One was Stalin Dolog Team One, because, you know, we had haircut inspections every two weeks or. Yeah. And then uniform inspections. I think the first Monday of every month. SEAL Team Five, they. We can, we can confirm this with Jason Gardner, but I don't think they had uniform inspections in a decade. So, you know, everyone looked at Team 1, the Stalag Team 1 and it was this. The underlying tone was professionalism. Back to the book. In today's army we can afford to keep only the worthwhile individual in our ranks. Every effort must be made to strive for professionalism in all things.

Retention of the desirable and dedicated individual is the goal. Constant supervision by officers and non commissioned officers is necessary to raise standards of performance. A great deal can be accomplished by each individual by setting the example and being a professional himself. More than any other thing, demonstrated competence, ability and efficiency, I.e. professionalism will encourage new officers and enlisted men to make the army their profession.

What is real professionalism for the career army officer? Many do not understand what is meant by professionalism. I submit that professionalism to the young soldier, to the career non commissioned officer, to the young reserve officer on limited active duty and to the reserve officer on extended active duty is different from that applicable to the career regular army officer with 20 years of service. I will explain this as I see it. If you are enumerate, if you enumerate the various things that have to be done in order to produce a combat ready army to meet the demands of our country in case of emergency, I believe you will find that these necessary operations pretty well cover the field in creating an army. So here's the list of things that you have to do in order to create an army. Raising an army. Organizing the Army. Equipping the Army. Training the Army. Supplying the Army. Leading and commanding the Army. Administering the Army. Moving the Army. Communicating within the Army. Employing the Army.

A career regular army officer who wants to prepare himself to be a professional should learn the general requirements, techniques and principles of each one of these necessary operations. In addition, he should become a master of one and have at least one other as a strong miner.

And I think that's probably a pretty good place to stop right now. We could go all day with this. But what's interesting, I find it interesting about that is.

If you've got 10 broad operational fields in the army and you can only be a master in one of them because we just don't have the ability to be more than that. You could be a minor another.

Then how can you be a professional? Right? Because I was kind of expecting to say you need to learn all these things. He says you can only become a master one and you can only become a minor and one more. So I'm thinking how do you become a professional?

And I think the answer is humility.

To actually know that you're not a master of everything. To actually know that you have shortfalls and you have deficiencies, and then what you do is you surround yourself with people that are masters in those areas. You build a team.

You build a team. And that starts with humility. It starts with knowing your weaknesses so you can turn those weaknesses into strengths by bringing the right people into your organization.

There you go.

Echo. Charles.

Yes.

Speaking of turning weaknesses into strengths.

Sure.

Do you have anything that can kind of help us maybe turn weaknesses into strength technically, factually. Do you know you're known for saying the word factually?

I do now, yeah.

Yeah. Some people will occasionally just throw out just a factually like comment.

Yeah. Apparently my daughter gives me.

Shit about that as well, so I couldn't.

You understand what I'm saying?

Anyway, so. Yes. Okay. We're on the path. Right. Turning weaknesses into strengths. Okay. So the thing we don't want to worry about is our joints.

So, Jocko, speaking of comments, maybe we should just ask the question. You are gone for two podcasts.

Yes.

This whole sort of support section, you know, it was like, I don't know, three minutes, seven minutes, something like that. Yeah.

Way too short.

Maybe people could put in the comments, you know what, you know how they're feeling about that. Maybe they missed it.

Yes. Well, we'll just say technically, the support section factually as well. Yeah, the support section and all these fine products and services are infused into the section as a whole. Same thing.

So the section isn't only about supports.

It's how to stay on the path straight up. That's what the sex section is. If you want to, you know, get all namey naming things as far as sections go. Anyway, thing you don't want to worry about is your joints. When you're on this path that we're all on.

Definitely don't want to be worried about your joints.

No, sir. So chocolate supplements, Overall, a bunch is up. Supplements. All Jocko supplements called Jocko Fuel. The joint supplements to keep your joints in the game. Don't have to worry about them, don't have to think about them, don't have to consider them. When you're doing individual, specific things.

I like when you paint yourself into a corner and then you got to kind of work your way out of there verbally.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny because individual, specific things, that's, you know.

Yeah. Nonetheless, joints, we're not worried about them. When we're doing deep squats, we're not worried about joints. You know why? Because we're on this joint warfare Super Krill oil. You go on that consistently, you don't worry about none of that stuff. You're worried about your gains. So speaking of gains. Boom. Milk. I know. I'm skipping around. Don't worry about it. I got you good mo. Protein in the form of dessert. That's what you take after you're working out. So, boom, Break down, build back up. All good. Okay, so here's what we do. Want to talk about discipline and discipline.

Go. Wait, can I add something on the monk scenario?

Sure.

Because there is something to talk about. It's a little something called Smashing Pumpkin.

Oh, yeah.

It's a new flavor. Have you tried it?

No. It literally came in when I was leaving right now.

It is. It is at the top of my list. Have you got it yet, Dave?

Negative.

It is. It just is at the top of the list right now. It's just beat everything now. Part of that is because it's new, and I'm sure there's some level of, hey, just like the variety, and it tastes good to have something different. But I am. I already, you know, Pete and Brian. Well, you know, it's a seasonal thing. I was like, no, stop. This is not a seasonal thing. There's no. This is. This is a new. This is in the game. This is. This is. This is part of Jocko Fuel. Smashing Pumpkin. I don't even. I didn't even really understand what pumpkin. Have you ever eaten pumpkin before? Like when you were a little kid? Carbon pumpkins. You just ate some because you were.

No, not the raw pumpkin.

I did.

No.

Right.

I was like, let's see what this tastes like. It doesn't taste like anything. Right. Basically, it's slimy.

That makes sense.

So I'm thinking, what is. What is pumpkin flavored milk gonna taste like? Slime. You know, I wasn't really sure because that's what pumpkin. Pumpkin has no taste, kind of. It's just sort of slimy.

Yeah.

So I wasn't 100. Sure. But, you know, these guys are all fired up, and they send me the sample and I mix it. I was like, good Lord. I don't even. So it's. It's a pumpkin spice.

Yes.

Flavor.

Okay.

And there's a cinnamon situation. But what it. I don't know. Look, does it taste like pumpkin spice?

Maybe?

I've never really eaten anything that tasted like pumpkin spice. Let me tell you this. It tastes freaking good. It tastes real good. It tastes shockingly good.

Yeah, I understand. You know what pumpkin spice is, right?

I don't know.

I kind of.

Spice a thing.

Yeah, it's a thing.

It's a flavor, like. Yeah, my wife will get pumpkin spice drink.

Right. Some latte or something.

Okay.

So I, you know. So, yeah, that's why it's funny when you're like, I've never eaten anything with pumpkin, so. Yeah, because that's not what pumpkin spice tends. Pumpkin spice tends to be like, drinks and stuff. You know, they're trendy drinks. That's what it gets, like, you know, the rap for or whatever. It's a fall thing. It's a seasonal thing. It's kind of softy, softy kind of thing.

Maybe that's why Pete was all like, seasonal. Oh, yeah. What else did you say besides seasonal?

Softy, softy.

Okay.

If it's fall, it's a fall thing.

Because, you know, Pete is towards, you know, like that.

Oh, yeah. I dig it. I dig it. I mean, you gotta have balance. You gotta have balance for sure.

Sometimes we wonder if Pete listens to these parts of the podcast, and I can tell if he does or does not because he. I'm always busting his chops here. Whether he listens or not, he's kind of missing out and he can't defend himself. Yeah. So you either listen or you can't defend yourself. You're called Pete.

Yeah.

But we know that you're leaning towards what you say. Comfy, comfy, softy, softy, softy cozy. I did tell Pete hadn't even tried pumpkin spice yet. He had even tried Smashing Pumpkin today.

Oh, the actual.

I told him, and I said, bro, this stuff is so good. This stuff is so good. He goes, I haven't even tried it yet. I go, because he's got a sweet tooth.

Yeah.

Like, that guy mainlines baklava, like it's going out of style. And people send that guy, you know, they send him, like, cookies and donuts and stuff just to. Just to torment him. So pumpkin spice, anyways. Smashing Pumpkin molk.

Wait, not. Anyways, we're still getting to the bottom of the pumpkin spice thing.

I thought. Okay.

Oh, we're not getting to the bottom of it.

No, no, no, go ahead.

No, no, no. We don't have to get to the bottom.

I want to know. I thought it was a food staple.

Exactly. That's kind of my point. Right. So you know how you were saying otherwise. Okay. My wife, you know, my wife gets it. It's a trendy thing. Right. So Pete's saying seasonal, but it is Halloween. That's a pumpkin thing, too.

Yes, that. That I do know.

Okay. Pumpkin spice. Think about pumpkin pie. You have pumpkin Pie before.

Yeah. And again to me. What?

That's not your.

Yes, I've had it.

But okay, so, like, consider. Like, this is the closest I can get it. Get to it is like cinnamon added to the pumpkin pie kind of thing. Flavor.

Got it.

You see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

And then, boom. Milk. All good. But so seasonal. Is it because of fall season, or is it because of Halloween season? You know, Jack o' lanterns and whatnot?

Well, pumpkins.

Yeah.

Halloween, just.

You think. Not the fall, though, because pumpkin spice is fall. That's a fall thing. You see, I'm saying. All right. But it's not seasonal.

I quit.

I'm asking you about the milk. Is it seasonal now or is it not seasonal? Can look in January or March or spring or whatever.

We will keep it in the line.

We have to keep it in the.

Line because it's too freaking good.

Yeah.

Smashing pumpkin.

I believe it, actually, when you mentioned it, I was like, dang, that's a. Whoever came up with that kind of idea for molk? Like, that's pretty. That's good. That's all it.

It's really good. I'm not sure. It might have been my daughter who.

Came up with the idea.

My daughter. I said we, because my daughter is into nutrition and stuff, and she's into milk. Yeah. And she's into mixing up recipes.

Yeah, sure. Hell, yeah.

And I. One day, I was texting with her, and I said, hey, you know, what flavor do you want? And one of the things that she said she wanted was pumpkin pumpkin spice, which I didn't even really know was a thing.

It's a thing, man. Yeah, big time. And hey, hey, man, you're down for it. Obviously. You like pumpkin spice.

Apparently.

So, you know, you're done.

I don't like pumpkin spice. I like smashing pictures pumpkin.

All right, well, there you go. You know, there you go either way. Yes. Okay. So plenty other flavors, too, by the way. So all good malt protein formula of a dessert, and in form of a. Some pumpkin spice. Boom. There you go. Monk is good also. Okay. I skipped around a little bit. We usually talk about the vitamin D. That's important, too, now the season's changing. You're not gonna be outside that much getting sun. You see what I'm saying? So, boom, you want to be sure you got that kind of stuff also. Cold war free immune system. Vitamin D is good for immune system, too. But boom, in combo, same, same deal. You don't got to worry about your sickness.

Let's face it. I think everyone should be upping their immune system at this point in the world.

I think so.

In time, yes.

That is my.

There's plenty of reasons. There's one big reason. Get that immune system kicking.

Yes, sir. It's true. Also, chocolate, white tea. Get that in bags and in cans. What's up with the cans?

Well, what's going on right now is we may have initiated a little bit of a war in the drink world. In the. In the canned drink world.

So there might be a delay in getting Jocko White. He. Back in the game that we've been. We've been drawn into a. There's been. There's been a declaration of war against.

Jocko. Discipline. Go cans.

Yes.

Yes. So we're. It's. It's on. I'm not going to talk too much detail, but let me just say we are at war. And. And look, it's one thing when you're kind of down there and you're scrapping and you're. You know, but whatever. You're just having a good time, but then all of a sudden you realize you. You're at war. Yeah. And so we. We had some events unfold that some. Some big actors have taken action to attempt to suppress our people.

Yeah.

So we're gonna have to fight.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Looking forward to hearing more about that one. Plans and whatnot. Nonetheless, you did mention display. Discipline Go. So discipline, Jocko. Discipline. And discipline go. Discipline is the powder. Discipline go is the cans and pills and capsules, by the way. But we're talking about the cans. Rtd. You know, ready to drink. Right? This was for.

Yep, ready to drink.

Deploy.

Okay. A health. A health. An actual healthy energy drink. Actually healthy, though. Not the kind like.

No kind of. No, no, actually healthy.

Yeah, actually healthy. Good. No preservative, no nothing. Okay. Available in Wawa Vitamin Shop and online. Boom.

It's a. Speaking of war, so check this out. Part of this war is.

Driving and crushing the enemy. So we're not in all Wawas yet. We want to. And by the way, Wawa is just the beginning, but we got a crush, so check this out. So right now, we're only in Florida, the Florida Wawas. We have, like a battle map. Especially now that we're at war, we have a battle map. If you're in. Check this out. If you want to support the cause, go to Wawa in Florida and just clean out. Just get yourself some discipline. Go get yourself some discipline. Go and help us win the war.

Appreciate it. Also, vitamin shop. You get it there if you don't have a Wawa near you. Also originmain.com.

Yep.

And let's face it, also Amazon.

Yes. Yep.

Available prime.

You mentioned originmain.com other stuff on originmain.com. jujitsu stuff.

Yes.

We'll say everyday stuff to wear. Jeans specifically American denim. It's a big deal. American denim. Also boots on there. Real good stuff. Yeah. Go in there, get something, man. If you want something. American made stuff. It's not like that's not a big deal.

Yeah. By the way, you may have been looking for Delta 68 jeans. They were unavailable for a while. They're back. We're. We're catching up right now. And they're freaking awesome.

And I have a confession to make.

You know how I'm always like, you know, I mean, I literally have written books about putting your people ahead of you and take care of the people and all that.

You already know the confession.

So we kind of re engineered the Delta jeans a little bit. We re engineered the fabric a little bit. We re engineered the cut. And so Pete sent me like the. We. We went back and forth like three iterations. Finally sent the iteration, like recently. Yeah, he sent me like, okay, this should be it. I put them on. I sent him a text. I'm like, execute. Send me two pairs immediately. Put me above everyone else that's waiting.

I got a package. So I have. I. All my other jeans are in the garbage.

Garbage.

Because now it's just Delta. Delta 68. The best things ever.

Yeah, totally good to go. So if you want those, you can get those.

You know what's funny is like, now you're not too mad at Pete for his design and fashion. It's functional design. Functional fashion. Can we say functional fashion?

Yeah, sounds good.

Good job, Pete, man. Keep up. Keep being you, Pete. Great guy. Anyway, also we have a jocko as a store. It's called Jocko store. Got some. That's where if you want to represent, you want discipline equals freedom. Shirts, hats, hoodies, some board shorts on there. Boom. All that stuff.

I'm wearing them right now, by the way.

Oh, yeah. But heavy rotation. Oh, yeah. Camouflage and black. We'll have some other ones on there too. Some good stuff on.

You say we'll have other ones on there.

You will have other ones on there.

Oh, dang.

Oh, yeah.

Look at you. Decentralized command, man.

We're doing the best we can over there anyway. Yeah, some good stuff on there. Christmas is coming up. Maybe not this month, but soon. Seems saying there's. There are good gift items on there, you know? Yes. So, Jocko store.com, if you want something, get something.

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, because Echo Charles thinks you should. Don't forget that we have some other podcasts, once more called Jocko Unraveling, which Echo should be putting out some episodes.

It has its own thread.

It has its own thread. Now feed sir his own feed. So if you want to get the Unraveling podcast, it's on its own feed.

That one you can subscribe to to make sure you're getting them when they come out. There's. We have some in the bank. Let's get them out.

Okay.

I'm not talking to everyone else, Echo Charles. I'm just talking to you right now. This isn't like a. This isn't a kind of a universal statement to the people. This is the statement for one person.

Yes, sir.

We have episodes in the bank. We don't want them in the bank. We want to spend them. We want to get them out to the people.

I understand fully.

Is that. What's the man hours that it takes to get that done?

Roughly, what, 0.2?

Okay.

Man hours.

So maybe it's something we could make happen.

That's very possible. Yes. Here's the thing about that, though. Okay? So the. The Unraveling link podcast used to be called the thread. Used to be. So if you're subscribed to the thread, if you were, and then it's in your, like, library. I don't know the different sections. And I'm talking about, like, itunes or the Apple podcast or whatever. I'm not sure if it works for Stitcher. I'm not sure. It might very well. But it'll be in your library still. But you'll. When you click on there, it won't indicate that you're subscribed, so you just got to click it again.

Okay.

So you don't have to go search for it, is what I'm saying. If you are already subscribed, but know if you're not, then, yeah, go there, get it.

So the Unraveling, the Jocko Unraveling podcast, subscribe to it. It's me and Daryl Cooper, grounded podcast, Warrior Kid podcast. We have a YouTube channel if you want to see what Good Deal Dave Burke looks like, or if you want to see what Echo Charles looks like, if you want to see what I look like, or you want to see some enhanced videos that Echo puts his effort into. Allegedly. And a lot of the videos, you got to remember, some people, they go, oh, you Know Echo. Good job. And they always forget.

That Echo might be the guy that presses record, but I'm the assistant director to these videos. There's no. I'm the kind of the glue that brings it together. Assistant director. That's me. So keep that in mind. If you want to see videos that have me as the assistant director, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hey, we got an album called Psychological Warfare. A bunch of me talking about how to overcome whatever problem you're dealing with. Flipside Canvas. Dakota Meyer making awesome things to hang on your wall. Bunch of books about face by Hackworth. I wrote the forward to the newest edition Leadership strategy and tactics Field manual. Discipline equals freedom. Field manual. Brand new version is out right now. Weigh the Warrior Kid 4 Field Manual is out right now. I just brought the first copies in. One for Dave and his kids, one for Echo and his kids. Way the warrior kid one, two and three are out. Mikey and the Dragons just got elected. Selected on Amazon.com as a teacher's pick. Teachers pick. Kind of a big deal. Yeah, kind of a big deal. Very cool. So thanks all the teachers out there that selected Mikey and the Dragons to be a teacher pick on Amazon.com, extreme ownership and the dichotomy leadership where it started. Also we have Echelon Front. It's our leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for details. We also have EF Online, which is online interactive. Training for leadership is a skill for leadership. Remember not sitting there earlier saying, hey, why would you go into a room if you haven't trained? Why would you think you could know how to have a conversation if you had? Yeah, it takes training. We know that. So we made online training EF Online. If you want to ask Dave a question, if you want to ask Dave, if you want to ask Dave about dropping the first JDAM in history.

And what courage it took to do that, then you can go to efonline.com and Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we are live. We are there. We're answering questions. If you want to know how awesome it was when I was doing shipboardings in the Gulf, overcoming fear to board these smugglers vessels.

No, but seriously, if you want to ask us questions, you want to talk about leadership, go to efonline.com we also have the muster. There's only going to be one muster this year. It's in Dallas, Texas. It's December 3rd and 4th. Check out extreme ownership dot com. We've got.

We'Ve got social distancing COVID protocol in place. We're not going to do Jiu Jitsu. We usually do Jiu Jitsu the last night. But what we're going to do, instead of Jiu Jitsu, we're going to do a Jiu Jitsu philosophy course of instruction. Slash Q and A. Myself and another black belt will be there, maybe two other black belts. One of them will be Echo Charles. I'll probably get another one. Yeah. Gonna talk about Jiu Jitsu, how those, how the Jiu Jitsu principles apply to life. And I've been doing some writing about Jiu Jitsu, which should be coming out shortly, so I might read a little precursor of that.

And then EF Overwatch. If you need executive leadership inside your company, go to efoverwatch.com we have military veterans that understand these principles that are ready to go to work. If you're a company that needs veterans, go to efoverwatch.com if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold star families around the world. Then check out Mark Lee's mom. She's got a charity organization, Mama Lee. It's called America's Mighty Warriors. And if you want to donate or you want to get involved and go to America's money mighty warriors.org and if you find yourself.

Thirsting for more pain.

And you want more of my droning drudgery, or you want more of echoes farcical folklore, or maybe you just want some more of Dave's overzealous zingers. And you can find us on the interwebs, on Twitter, Instagram, which Echo will only refer to as the Gram. And on Facebook, Dave is at David Arberk, Echo is at Echo Charles, and I'm at Jocko Willink. And thanks to General Bruce Clark and Colonel David Hackworth for leading our nation's best in combat and for passing on those lessons to us. And thanks to all the people in uniform out there right now putting those lessons to use, keeping democracy and freedom safe in the world. And to police and law enforcement, to firefighters, paramedics and EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service and other first responders. Thank you for keeping us safe here at home and everyone else out there. Remember what you have heard from General Clark.

Remember what he said, that it all starts with discipline. The army is built on discipline.

So so are us, so are we as individuals. General Clark said that the one thing that will keep a trainee on the right track is discipline. That's the one thing, the supreme thing.

So maybe we should be more disciplined. And maybe we should stay on the right track. Maybe we should stay on the path every single day.

By getting after it.

And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jocko out.