The Horse vs The Tank – Jocko Podcast

so they had this long fascination with the horse they loved the horse the people that rode horses in the cavalry ended up with a bunch of you know prestigious positions and high ranking positions and they saw the tank not as like hey this is what’s going to take over the horse it’s trying to to to to it’s juniors of the horse it’s not as good as the horse nor is it surprising that the desire of the war office to placate the cavalry was stronger a lot than logic not only did they veto any expansion of the tank core but under the direction of montgomery ruled that the new tank brigade should never be reassembled and this in the mid 1930s with hitler arming to the teeth that’s you can’t you you just you have to have you have to be a kind of like a psychopath today there’s there’s a level of insanity in there it’s like how how do you look at a horse in a tank and look at him go well yeah and you know i was thinking like the bolt action rifle or the automatic machine gun hey fire that one i think we’re actually talking uh sword versus automatic machine gun i’m just trying to converse yeah you gotta go fir you gotta go harder bro yeah that’s a fair point it’s just the the depths of craziness and look at that and and carrie was talking about this after the last podcast kdog was talking about this was the culture of the of the um the cavalry and you just said in there was it a thousand years yeah people will be using horses in combat like there’s a culture inside there that’s going to be kind of hard to break into the tank come on man and and it’s invokes kind of the same frustration that i articulated in the very first podcast about the machine gun no it was before then and when i talked about the machine gun how long does it take for me to watch a machine gun mow down some of my guys where i go time out stop stop i got this one wrong we need to come up with another plan as opposed to like no just keep sending them in and do that for four years for four years at the risk of literally i mean millions of people but but the horse and the tank and even like old pictures of the world the the crazy thing about world war one tanks so like the previous air of tanks that they’d be leveraging from they’re these giant massive things they’re like almost like comedically too big but you if you were to just put those two side by side like you said there’s a level of psychopathy level of of of of crazy you gotta go no the horse yeah give me the horse give me the sword dude there was a little bit of maybe even a little bit more than a little um when when we started using night vision night vision goggles yeah man we had guys that were like we we’d be wearing night vision on patrol guys but we shouldn’t wear night vision like what are you insane it lets you see in the dark yeah you get to fight an enemy that’s blind to you yeah well i’ve said this and i’ve i mean in in aviation i got to fly stealth airplanes like very modern stealth airplanes and to this day despite the insane advantage the insane advantage there is still an ongoing debate over as to whether or not we should have non-stealth this is not this is a like in fighters there’s reasons to have nonsense cargo planes and attack planes like but in this world of like airplane fighting against another airplane or using airplanes to get into a contested space there’s still an ongoing debate of hey we should just retrofit like really nice legacy airplanes with cool cool missiles and cool engines and stuff like that like my airplane is invisible my airplane is invisible you will not see it it doesn’t matter how fast you can go or how much gas you can carry or how cool your weapon is you’re going to lose how much longer till pilots are not doing this job fighter pilots i think we are one generation away my opinion is that the next generation which what’s scary is like it’s much sooner it’s not like 40 years from now the next generation of airplanes going to come out in the next 15 20 years and they’re gonna be no pilots no no i think this gen like they’re building this now they’re designing and building it now right so yeah and so technology one of the drawbacks of of airplanes like from conception to development and building it takes a long time so this plane has been on the drawing board for 10 years and this is what happens when you got the military industrial complex because if we gave this to elon musk it’s electric and to his dismay he probably wants and thinks and understands that we should be a generation ahead but be that as it may even with that i think we’ve got one more airplane in us with a person inside that’s my opinion and you know even with that it is met with so much resistance so much institutional resistance yeah that’s which is crazy right because you take the pilot out of the plane and and the other thing is you can you don’t have to fight a plane with a plane you can fight a plane with 19 unmanned drones that have that cost a fraction of the price and can maneuver and don’t have to worry about this stupid human in there screwing things up and that’s why that story of the naval officer going you should buy all these tanks because he’s got no he has no personal vested interest in the tank he’s not inside that whole thing he’s not a cavalry guy riding horses he’s like i’m over here in a boat i’m just telling you from my vantage point it’s not even close buy this thing buy them all right now because he’s he’s detached he’s just like oh no i’m not this is not for my personal game i’m not going to be in that tank or on that horse i’m just telling you from from over here it’s not it’s not even close just do this because he sees it from a perspective and that’s what i think that’s where the that is the level of frustration of hearing this is really harnessed because hey you’re there i said both acting rifle and machine gun like go harder dude go harder you know which is like a slingshot and a heavy machine get an automatic heavy machine gun that’s how big the gap is and the only way to not see the machine gun is to be so invested and so committed to your point of view that just like we said last time you will dismiss the truth because it doesn’t align with your preconceived outcome that you you’ve created in your head which is probably to some degree the definition of being a psychotic a psychopath