can you explain more how you managed working with the local iraqi troops general mattis who i hold in the highest esteem esteem said something to the effect that if you are doing anything that negatively impacts relations with allied forces you are of more use to the enemy than you are to your team this makes it quite obvious that he believes that full cooperation with allied forces is key to attaining victory it is a well established fact that most of the iraqi forces were incompetent to the point of posing danger to u s troops so what steps did you take to ensure success when working with them well obviously relations with your allies are critical it’s cover move right you got to work together as a team and and if you’ve got if you’re working against each other that’s absolutely catastrophic uh i i think for us with iraqi troops you know again we talked about how uh that was liberating right for you know the the big pushback was always like is we want to do just seal unilateral operations we call it just seals or just americans uh you know just like nato ally forces and um and not work with with uh iraqi troops and you know when you said that right away attack asking reason listen don’t even put up a concept of operations wherever conops we call it which is the approval for the plan that doesn’t have iraqi troops on it okay got it we’re gonna have to figure out a way to make that happen so that was the line was drawn we knew we had to do that and we knew it was also important i mean because you explained that we talked about it we we thought through that um but obviously we had to take some steps to mitigate that so i think there were uh there were again this is the dichotomy it’s you got to be balanced there were i saw units who thought um and we gave some examples uh even extreme ownership certainly um and we talked about regularly about where you see a unit that would take two or four americans and a bunch of iraqis and try to go in a really bad area like man you’re not going to be able to count on those iraqis in the middle of a gun fight when they’re overwhelmed you better have enough americans there to have your back so so they were asking too much of of the iraqis and then there are other units that didn’t want to do you know didn’t want to have any iraqis with them they won’t have any relationships with them and i had some stern talking to you know talking to some of my guys who wouldn’t weren’t treating iraqi soldiers with respect i threatened one of my guys he was gonna have to go sleep in the iraqi soldiers barracks if he didn’t go shake their hands i think he would uh knowing that i’m an individual who’s a great guy i think that was uh the last threat you had to make to him to make him submit to do it you didn’t think i was serious the person was like i’m totally serious you better fix this so and you want props to props to sf guys mint teams that go out there and they do they live they eat uh you know even even having dakota myron here he did two meals a day out of three with with his afghan soldiers that’s that’s awesome and you know what i liked about this question was the way that that it relates to to the civilian sector because you know what i talk about a lot a lot of times i talk about how my relationship with my boss regardless of who my boss was regardless my boss was great or my boss was horrible my relationship was always the same i was gonna have this great i was gonna build a relationship where they trusted me they gave me what i needed to do my job and then they let me do my job that’s the relationship i always had with all my bosses right but i i that same methodology and concept can absolutely be applied to other organizations that you’re supposed to work with so whether it’s the army whether it’s the marine corps whether it’s the iraqi soldiers whether it’s the mps whether it’s the i the uh the intel people that the intel organization that you’re working with no matter what the organization you can build a relationship again might you love that organization no you might not and where i see this all the time what we see it all the time now is with businesses because guess what there’s no business that’s standalone i should say there’s very few that are completely vertically integrated businesses i mean like at origin right we don’t we we’re pretty vertically integrated but guess what we don’t grow the cotton like we don’t do that we don’t grow cotton but guess what we have a good relationship with the people that grow cotton we have a good relationship with people that stain the cotton door sorry dye the cotton so we build those relationships with those other people now i work with businesses where there’s a supplier that they don’t like so guess what they form a hostile relationship with this whole company a whole company what good does that do them it doesn’t do any good at all what it means is they have no personal relationships they form that antagonistic relationship with a whole other organization and it’s almost impossible to overcome so now this is something where if you don’t explain that culture throughout your team they’re going to treat that other team horribly and so if you’re waiting on supplies if you’re on a construction site and you’re waiting for materials to be delivered and you don’t have a good relationship with the people that deliver the drywall and now the drywall is running late for whatever reason and you call you you fly off the handle or whatever you’re you’re not going to get that drywall any earlier it’s not happening have you ever you you know when i call customer service right customer service i learned this when i was working for for the admiral working for the admiral’s aide i’d call up we’d we traveled a lot and i’d have to call up whatever delta or american whoever and i’d be trying to get whatever seats on an aircraft or something or a flight that was full whatever get him an upgrade whatever and you know i’d say hey how you doing that’s always i always start off with the with the because they’re going american airlines how can i help you and they’re mad right they’re just mad to start with out of the gate out of the gate they’re mad whatever you know airline whatever car rental service whatever restaurant like people are just mad they don’t care they’re they’re mad they don’t know who you are well they actually they’ve just talked to probably you know the last 25 people have screamed at you you screamed and yelled at them and it’s awful so you know you call them and say hey how’s it going and you know i always i had little i had little micro jokes that i would make with the airlines that i used with all of them all the time but one of them was i’d say they’d say well do you need to do you need to sit next to your boss and i’d say you know what i’d honestly appreciate it if you put me as far away from it and they’d laugh and then they’d try and hook me up even though my boss was a great guy and i’d sit with them all day but just it was a funny thing and it it humanized me with them they thought i was ditched some poor sorry bastard that had to travel with his boss and then they were trying to take care of me it was like awesome so i would get the hookups i remember one time i went up and i like had a conversation on the phone with someone and then of course this is different because it was live but i had a conversation like no i can’t get you on that flight and then i went up to the counter and i was like hey how you doing i’m trying to get me and my boss and it’s on this flight and we’re trying to get there and he’s like this girl’s like you know do you need to go today i’m like well look if we don’t get there here’s the deal if you can just get my boss on that’s great if if neither one of us could get on this flight it’s been nice knowing you cause i’m screwed and she just started laughing and again humanized it and then it’s like all of a sudden she’s like oh guess what we’re gonna we’re gonna bump some of these or whatever and she’s making room and we’re on the flight so don’t develop this antagonistic relationship with another organization with iraqi soldiers like is it great working with iraqi soldiers no it sucks it’s hard but guess what that’s what we have to do and i’ll tell you something else strategically the iraqi soldiers that are descendants of the guys that we train i mean maybe not i’m saying training or or training descendants right the guys that we trained trained guys who just went and fought back and got ramadi back from isis and got mosul back from isis those are the guys that went in there and did the bulk of fighting did they get supported by americans yes did americans do a kick-ass job of doing massive fire support yes but the guys that were moving from street to street those were majority iraqi soldiers did they have special ops guys with them yes but it was the majority of the people that were moving through the streets were iraqi soldiers and there’s no way possible that wouldn’t have happened if american coalition forces over the last whatever it was 10 years 12 years would have taken those guys and made them work and done the the type of partner missions that we did with them so it was and when i again when i say we am not talking about us the the seal teams i’m talking about everyone everyone made this concerted effort and it ended up being a great call because when those guys went out to to finally have to fight to take these cities back they were able to do it not totally by themselves but they were able to do it they did it and that’s a vast improvement if we would have sent if we would have sent the iraqi troops as they were when we were in ramadi into mosul they would have gotten decimated so it’s a credit to the us military it’s a credit to the iraqi military that they have now gotten up to speed where they can push forward and to credit the u s military and other coalition forces that work with them to get them up to speed and what that all boils back to is forming relationships with the people that you are dependent on not just the people but the organizations that’s all i’m saying yeah i think they we learned the lesson let’s it’s let’s do uh let’s use them for their strengths and and that’s what we learned in ramadi uh we put them in situations where they could succeed uh we took enough americans where we could actually succeed and and help them succeed and uh and of course we put some uh you know some efforts to mitigate rest too with with uh oh we always said armed guys we always had guys looking around we always would presented a you know a hard target if one of those guys decided that they wanted to you know start batting for the other team and uh you know we were in a position to to handle those problems and we never had any issues as a result but that’s that’s what you have to do is it’s all about building coalitions and and and using people’s strengths uh and complementing those strengths and working together as a team it’s cover move if you don’t do that you’re gonna you’re gonna fail yeah and to all you people at the airlines thank you thank you for taking care of me over the years appreciate it
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