The Unravelling 6: Trying to Win

this is the jocko unraveling podcast episode six with daryl cooper and me jocko willink so i’m coming home leaving this place of turmoil and chaos that has escalated throughout my deployment in 2003 2004 and on my way home actually was before i left my commanding officer who have referenced a bit who i was friends with you know he told me that his last mission as the commander of seal team seven was going to be to make me the admiral’s aide and the reason that he wanted to do it was a good reason primarily because i was a platoon commander that was coming off the battlefield in iraq there was it for an intent for a six-month deployment and so i was sort of the most combat experienced lieutenant in the navy that was available for that type of bullet so it’s a good move you know let’s get the boss let’s get the admiral some guys that are a guy that’s fresh off the battlefield that’s done a bunch of missions that can talk to him and and explain to him what’s happening and give him the support that he needs and it was you know it’s a it’s a it’s a move that he wanted to take care of me too because when you’re the admiral’s aide you know you develop a relationship with the admiral and you meet every single other seal admiral and every single seal captain and every single seal commander and so you know you build a bunch of really good relationships you get to know people in the community and you get to see what the community’s like so so i imagine there was an element of uh yeah he wants to help you out in your career but also next time you go back to iraq he wants you in charge of more than a platoon yeah i’d say maybe but i i don’t i don’t think that was really what it was i think he really just number one primarily he wanted to get me you know i’m i’m a guy and you know i’ve sent you some things that we’re not going to share the kind of the i’m a direct i i d i will not hold back right i mean if there’s something that’s happening that needs to change i will state my opinion i’ll do it tactfully and if you listen to me that’s great and if you don’t listen to me i might not be so tactful you know i’m gonna i’m gonna yeah i think you know you ever heard that cheesy expression speaks truth to power sure it’s a cheesy expression right yeah i i have the receipts you do do that no that that he wrote that in my evaluation like speaks truth to power right because i would tell him with something if i didn’t like something that he was doing and you know we had a good relationship i wasn’t ever disrespectful about it you know we’d have good conversations and sometimes he’d tell me to shut up and i’d say roger that sir and yeah that’s the way it is but i would i would explain to him my viewpoint treating him with enough respect to assume he wants the truth yeah and and so he knew i would do that with the admiral and so he gets me that job so i get home and take over as the admirals aid and let’s see so i get home in april it’s like probably mid to late april when i get home i take over the job and almost immediately after i take over the job um a guy by the name of brian olette who was a seal was was killed in on may 29 2004 in afghanistan and so one of my first jobs as the admiral’s aide was to get the admiral out to brian olette’s funeral and so i knew i knew brian alette and actually at this point there had been brian was i think the fifth seal killed so neil roberts fifi was the first seal killed in in march of o2 and i knew nielsen’s hill team 2 with with neil and then matt bourgeois was the second seal killed also in afghanistan and that was also in march of o2 and it was i was a team one with him so i was like two for two or o for two depending on how you want to look at it and then tom retzer and and dave tapper were um were also were also killed and they they were killed in o3 so and i knew those guys but i didn’t know them as well as i knew neil robertson and matt bourgeois only because i had been at a team with those guys and i hadn’t been on a team with retzer or tapper but i knew him just from being around and i remember my parents asking me you know every time a seal would get killed they’d say did you know him and and i’d say yes and it was very strange that well then i knew brian olette as well and i had gone he was a couple buds classes ahead of me and so i knew him from that and then we went through a comms like a two-month calm school together and we hung out a bunch during that he was just a uh just a straight up um you know stereotypical new englander from from needham massachusetts and you know he had great accent and a great attitude and he was you know boisterous and funny and all those things and when he got killed so i knew him and when he got killed you know i’m the admiral’s aide and we’re going you know we’re going to the the funeral and he had his mom his dad he had six brothers i think he was six brothers and a sister and they were lined up like to shake hands with people and you know um it was like you were looking at just clones like the his dad looked like brian or brian looked like his dad and then his all his brothers looked the same you seem lined up and almost got their their own platoon yeah he almost got his own platoon and you just you just could feel the the just absolute you know heartbreak um and i hadn’t been to i hadn’t been to any other you know any other funerals like that so that was kind of my welcome aboard to working with the admiral was was helping him supporting him as he was seeing off you know the the first seal that he was going to lose under his command you know as as the admiral so there was a couple things too that that as we went forward there was another prisoner abuse scandal that happened yeah and it was with seals actually and what happened was seals had taken pictures and uh these some one of the guys in the platoon posted them on some kind of photo sharing site and the photo sharing site wasn’t protected or got hacked or whatever whatever happened happened but all of a sudden these pictures became public and this is what this is when i thought about it was a good job for my commanding officer to have put me as the admiral’s aide because when this unfolded there was a lot of these pictures that they actually if you interpreted them correctly then they actually made sense and so there were several multiple times where you know i would be looking at these pictures that the public was seeing and they looked awful and my boss the admiral had to answer to you know the secretary of the navy the chief of naval operations and i was able to explain to him exactly what’s going on these pictures so a couple examples are one of them is you know a seal holding a guy holding you know an iraqi guy by the jaw and you know kind of around the throat around the jaw and he’s got his pistol pointed at at the guy’s head and you know my boss says what’s going on here well you know this is horrible and i said here’s what’s going on sir these insurgents do not want to have their pictures taken by us so they won’t look at the camera they’ll look away so a lot of times you got to hold their head in position so that someone can take a picture and in order to take a picture you gotta have lighting and the quickest available light that we all use is our pistol the light’s on the pistol you pull it out you illuminate the guy that’s what’s going on in this picture okay got it next picture um guy with a sandbag on his head uh blood dripping out of the sandbag and you know okay what’s going on in this picture sir in this picture you’ve got a insurgent that was probably captured four minutes or ten minutes before this picture was taken he resisted that’s what these insurgents do they resist according to the rules of engagement you can kill them when they resist and what we try not to do is kill people if we don’t have to so this guy was probably hit with a couple muzzle strikes gotten con you know they got him under control they put a bag over his head and he’s bleeding from his nose or from his whatever his forehead from getting hit with a muzzle that’s what the blood is this is actually this this picture actually demonstrates the restraint that seals show on target because they didn’t shoot and kill this guy so those are the kind of questions that i was you know able to answer um but nonetheless you know those pictures without context they just look bad and those added to you know they added to the abu ghraib photos they weren’t as bad but they weren’t good either what was your impression of how admiral mcguire uh responded to it i mean you respond to it like a guy who was a seal or not you know politician no he was great good he was great he was uh he was you know listened to what i had to say he you know we had discussions about it i heard him explain up the chain of command you know he was he’s a very you know he’s he’s a he’s a great guy and he understood you know when i explained it to him he’s like okay you know he was he’s a seal he understood what i was talking about and he was able to articulate it even better than me to to his boss he watched one of his congressional hearings when he was briefly the acting dni and he just seemed like a straight shooting guy just a direct and and he’s uh you know he’s a guy that bill he’s a great relationship builder because he’s a nice guy you know he was a guy that always cared about seal platoons you know he always cared about sales always the the one of the biggest lessons i learned from him is he’s gonna his mission was to take care of the seal platoons and there’s plenty of people in the military and civilian sector where they lose sight of what it is that they’re actually supposed to be doing as a leader and what he was trying to do was take care of seal platoons which is exactly what he should have been doing and and what we needed him to do and what did that mean it means instead of years you were there it means that instead of trying to look out for you know um some in trying to look out instead of trying to look out for the officer community and how it’s going to compete against the fleet it’s like no how does this help us seal platoon instead of looking at what about the acquisitions that are going to take place in the next four years can we get more money here or there hey does it help us seal platoon you know he was constant and if it helped the seal platoon to get that acquisition in four years or to build this officer structure certain way he would do it if it wasn’t gonna help the seal platoons then he wasn’t gonna expend our resources on it because there’s all kinds of things you can expend resources on you know like and and he would look at it and say how can this help a sealed platoon and by doing that that’s that’s what we do that’s what the seal teams is seal teams boils down to a seal plate and the better supported they are the better they can accomplish their mission i think a lot of people have a misapprehension they think of like a naval officer and it’s like a guy with a cigar on the bridge of a ship you’re talking about an admiral that’s like a ceo yeah you’re running a gigantic organization yep huge amounts of money and personnel i mean yeah and and if you think that because you’re a navy seal admiral that you’re out in the field with a machine gun that’s also not a good impression because that’s not what’s happening and much of what the admiral was focused on was what’s going to happen in eight years you know what where are we going to be in 12 years where is our community community going to be in three years you know it wasn’t you know he obviously is dealing with stuff that’s happening ongoing as well but in that position you actually you train equip and then send on deployment the troops right you man train and equip and then they go on deployment they’re not working for the admiral when they’re overseas you’re working for some you know special operations task force that’s overseas or you’re getting chopped over to some conventional units so he’s he’s not doing that he’s man training equipped that was that was his mission and he and he did it great and you know i was i was very lucky to to have that job and to work for a guy that was you know um very willing to try and teach me as much as he could let me sit in every meeting you know i i mean i sat in meetings you know the characters that that we’re talking about you know we’re sitting in meetings with rumsfeld sitting sitting like i’ve been and sitting in those meetings you know as the not even close i was the most junior guy by you know by five ranks and and just sit there you know sit there in the back and and listen and those were that was an awesome learning experience and those are things that gave me um a much better understanding when i went to ramadi had a much better understanding of how these civilians interacted with our military so i’m very lucky to learn a lot from that i want to hear about that i mean expand on that a little bit what do you mean well you know when you’re when you’re at the building as they call it which is what the military folks call the pentagon they call it the building when you’re in there you start to understand the interoperability and the chain of command and the politics that go on just broadens your you just broadened your scope you know when you’re out there you know when i was a platoon commander you know my chain of command you know kind of stopped at my boss maybe the sigison of commander so my boss’s boss is like okay i i i can kind of i can kind of grasp what’s going on there then once you see the the other end the the the most senior you know when you’re sitting in a room with the we know the secretary of defense you’re starting to see the top down and you start to see where what kind of things are are being thought about at that level and the other thing was and this was this was purposeful um you know when i came back i was uh uh a guy fresh off the battlefield so i was a a kind of a kind of a little bit of a zoo animal right for for the admiral and and not just for the admiral and i don’t mean that in a derogatory way but but he had the opportunity to take a guy because you know um going to brief you know the the the whatever level of senior leadership you want to talk about i’ve briefed them other than the president i never briefed the president but everyone else like i sat in the room and briefed those people and explained to them what what was going on in baghdad and what it seemed like to me and what we did and what our mission was and there were some of those meetings that you know i’d walk away from those meetings feeling not too excited about some of the attitudes and some of the some of the questions that i’d be asked um there were some so it was good it was good for me to see that it was good for me to have the opportunity to do that and i ended up doing again when you know years later when i got back from ramadi but i was very i got a great education from that job and he he had an attitude of you know not only getting me educated but using me to educate other people in the chain of command you know about what we were doing and what was going on over there so the you know the the job i think i was there for 13 months um i was like getting ready to transfer and go be a task unit commander seal team three and uh you know the the new guy shows up and you know he’s another you know junior or another lieutenant and he forget where he was coming from the same thing you know he had combat experience coming back off the battlefield and he was taking over from me and a really great guy and you know he he he says to me um what do you how does the admiral morat how does the admiral react if you make a mistake and i looked at him i said i don’t know because i really hadn’t dropped the ball uh luckily um and he just laughed and said oh man you know so so as we’re completing the turnover i think it’s like literally the day that i say you know you got it i’m out of here um as this is unfolding um there’s an operation that was taking place in afghanistan and we’re right as we’re wrapping up this turnover you know we have uh operation red red wings happened and you know we got guys on the ground the um the qrf comes in on the helicopter the the the helicopter you know gets hit goes down uh we lose we lose 11 seals um eight night stalkers on the aircraft as well um and [Music] yeah like just just absolutely horrible and you know i and i was i was there right as this was happening like right as i was leaving we were getting reports that they were getting radio they were getting radio transmission it was marcus was marcus luttrell like i was hearing you know i’m sitting in the room where they’re telling the admiral hey we’ve got we’ve got radio traffic we think we think one of the guys might be alive and um and i to be honest with you i i was thinking to myself you know it’d been been like a day or two and i’m thinking yeah well obviously some enemy has captured his radio and they’re doing whatever to to make us think a guy’s still alive and by the grace of god i mean marcus you know survived that made it out and that was that was like right that was right as i turned over and and i remember the poor guy that took over for me as the aide you know the it’s kind of like the first major thing i did was one funeral well his first major thing was just a complete the biggest disaster it’s a nightmare and um and and then you couple that with the fact that at that time so now i’m checking in to seal team three to take over as a task unit commander and one of the first things that we did as a task unit was go to the memorial service for these guys over in coronado and you know it was um just a total uh it was crazy it was crazy to go to that it was uh you know obviously we are all now completely focused that was in afghanistan um we weren’t really sure we were going but we still did we the the the writing on the wall it looked like we were going to iraq you know that most likely well either iraq or some like like some non-combat deployment to pacom or something like that but it looked like we would be going to iraq but definitely the way to that was a that was a way to start a training cycle with tasking a bruiser that was very we were focused you know we were focused like you know you talk about not watching videos well like our we watched videos like our training cadre would show us videos of you know mujahideen fighters going through our brother seals gear and you know it’s it was sickening and it’s one of those things that i think mentally really got us you know focused on what we were had to do not that we weren’t focused anyways but trust me that that ups the game when did you find out what your mission would be so we formed up we started our work up and once we started our work up there was actually some debate over who what task unit was going to go to iraq and the debate was some guys hadn’t been to iraq yet and some guys had been to iraq there was one task unit that had not been to iraq and they said okay those guys are they needed two two task units in iraq they took one of them and said you guys didn’t go last time you guys are going this time so now there was two task units left that we needed to decide which one of these two task units would go to iraq we my commanding officer actually called us back and said okay called me and i had to go back for a meeting and said listen here’s the courses of action we’re thinking about one of them is we kind of split up the task and we take guys that haven’t been to iraq before we build a new task unit and those guys go to iraq and then the other guys that have been to iraq already can just go to you know one of these non-combat deployments to pacom to the pacific and or we just go and see who performs better and whoever performs better goes to iraq and um you know obviously my immediate thought was yeah we whoever performs better we go and if my task unit doesn’t perform better than the other task we don’t deserve to iraq and let them go you know that’s may the best man win um the other task commander was more like hey maybe it’s the fairest thing to mix up the task units i went back and went back out to the desert because we were in the middle of training and i told my guys what the options were and i told them what i thought and they were like we’re sticking together of course so we pushed back to just stick together and the commanding officer said roger that best whichever task unit is you know performs best we’ll we’ll send them to iraq and so we did we performed really well and the other option was a non-combat it was an online combat deployment to pay payments and both those task units are competing hard yeah it’s it’s definitely it’s definitely a hardcore competition um every seal wants to go to war well a solid 90 of seals want to go to war by 06 every seal wants to go to war yeah and that’s the interesting thing so we’re forming this up as this is o5 and you still have just by the nature of that very decision you have you have um uh some seals that hadn’t been to iraq in fact a lot of seals hadn’t been to iraq yet you know so i told you when i was deploying with the navy i was doing independent deployments supporting swift and seal operations fighting islamic insurgents down in the philippines mm-hmm a lot of people don’t know there’s there’s a lot of stuff going on all over the world so yep and and those deployments those you know nothing against those deployments those are necessary deployments they’re doing good work as you just said but you know doing doing what those guys were doing there there which again outstanding you know thank you uh necessary and important missions for freedom and democracy but we all want to go to iraq we wanted we wanted to do more and as much as we possibly could so we want to go to iraq so yep we get to iraq i actually did a pre-deployment so we do our workup we get selected to go to iraq we go on i go on a pre-deployment site survey pdss and when i go over we go to baghdad i meet the task unit commander that’s over there in baghdad they’re doing almost the exact same thing that i did on my first deployment which was direct action missions they were the big difference was they were working with uh partner force you know i didn’t do any partner force with iraqi soldiers in 0-304 these guys are doing everything with these highly trained iraqi soldiers called the ictf so they’re running operations they’re doing direct action they’re capturing bad guys um they’re i went over there went out on a couple missions with them you know straightforward i’m like oh yeah we got this this is this is good to go um they had good assets they had you know it was nice they had a ton of iraqi soldiers so you had a pretty good footprint to get out there uh look solid so that was probably you know whatever a month before deployment so i come back kind of give everyone the gouge so what we’re doing you know it’s what we’ve been training for we’re going to baghdad we’re going to work with this partner of course we’ll be doing direct action missions so cool high five everyone’s pumped everyone’s psyched and everyone goes on leave pre-deployment leave and i didn’t go on leave but i’m going into work and one day my boss comes in and says hey there might be a change and i say this is interesting ramadi had backpedaled a little bit ramadi had been had it was now the new hotbed like i it had been the new hotbed since fallujah ended when fallujah when the fallujah um takedown was over the big marine corps november 04 when when that was over it took about another month where everyone said oh okay i guess it’s ramadi now so ramadi started heating up and the intel reports and the after actions reports and the incident reports were in the sigint reports they were all now looking at ramadi so capital of ambar province the capital of ambar province so now at some point uh i put on the task unit bruiser door for three or four days there was a little sign that said uh you know mayor of ramadi or something like that like i was gonna go be the mayor of ramadi i want to go to ramadi but it but that that was early it was early on and then it was a joke that it lasted five minutes and then it didn’t talk about it again actually matter of fact it was leif who reminded me of that later like you remember saying that you were going to be the mayor of ramadi and i was like oh yeah yeah we had a little sign up or whatever so so now what had happened was there was a they wanted to align there was so now there’s two sealed teams in iraq and they wanted to align geographically more geographically aligned the two seal teams that are in iraq and that meant the west of iraq so fallujah habenia ramadi would be west coast seals and then like baghdad and wherever else the eastern eastern iraq was going to be a different seal team so the only switch that it took to make that happen was ramadi that was the only one that was for some reason however it got sorted out before you had ramadi and that was that was a an east coast seal team and and the other fallujah and habaneria were west coast i think but anyways i don’t i don’t remember it 100 but i know that there was ramadi was the key component that needed to switch and so my boss said hey what would you think about instead of going to baghdad you went to ramadi and i was like you know i’m like yeah so absolutely it was my immediate thought and was it clear at this point that this is a whole different type of mission no so i’m but i just know that there’s more bad guys yeah and there’s a lot of bad [ __ ] going on there and what i i want in my life is bad [ __ ] to be going on and reminding you he had a new mayor at that point i mean this is the capital not only of ambar province this was the capital of the island yeah it’s supposed to be the the capital of the caliphate that’s what it was what that’s what it’s hoping to be uh so i remember i i utilized this request to make some deals with my boss to get you know i said i need this this and this i said i’ll go to ramadi i need this this and this it was like random things like i needed some like you you well you may or may not know so there was some there was some satellite uh internet system that we didn’t have allotted to us and i was like i need that i need this other thing i need more people i need this and my boss kind of laid it out and used that as bargaining chips with the the other commander and sorted it out and i got basically everything that i wanted and i got to go to ramadi so so you’re why the fifth fleet uh navy lost all its inmarsat connections it might be okay it might be yeah like that kind of thing it was beautiful and so i i when i said i was super excited i didn’t show my cards i just was like well you know we could do it let me look at you know well let me look at what i’ve got let me look at what’s on the ground over there let me see what i need they’re like giaco you have a boner yeah yep yeah so i so that’s what happened so i actually i don’t remember if i called the guys and let them know i mean i know i called the key leaders and said hey guys we’re not going to bag anymore we’re going to ramadi but i don’t think i even called the the e-dogs you know they were they were on leave man they don’t care they don’t care they didn’t discriminate they’re kind of like me you know you asked me if i knew the mission was gonna be totally different i didn’t think the mission was gonna be totally different i just thought it would be more action i didn’t know that we would do something completely different and you didn’t know what would be riding on it like did you have an idea of that no no i just knew there was more bad guys there and that’s where i wanted to be and that’s what i wanted that’s where i know everyone what in my task unit wanted to be so that’s where it kicks off we we well they’re about 30 35 of you guys yeah there’s so there’s technically there’s 36 guys in the task unit you know two 16 man seal platoons and a headquarters element but then so that’s that’s the seals and then there’s another uh i think my my cam my account normally in camp was around 100 so the support personnel so right radium and seabees um uh armory guys supply guys uh we had a we ended up having a couple marines that ran radio like we so we end up with about 100 guys you know 40 or so support or no sorry 60 or so support 40 or so seals something like that is generally what it looked like did you understand at least that this was a city that it’s not quite right to say we had no presence in but i mean we were as i’ve heard it from some journalists and from people who were over there we were you were going into a city that there were parts of it where the civilians may not have seen an american uniform in 8 10 12 months absolutely i knew that our people were basically sitting in static defense positions occasionally running out on patrols and getting shot at the entire time i mean this was a city where that the insurgents largely controlled the insurgents controlled a lot of it um and when we got there it was the 228 was the pennsylvania national guard that was on the ground and and to say that they were sitting behind now they were out getting after it and they were they were pushing hard they were pushing really hard and they were very experienced you know they’d been on the ground i think the number’s 14 months i always say 14 months i heard it from one of them at some point but they’d been on the ground for a long time fighting hard so all of us seals that have been through navy seal training or whatever these guys had way more combat experience than we had okay and you know we knew that as soon as we got on the ground that it was really obvious as soon as you get on the ground that this was not i mean even even in comparison to baghdad i mean you go out of the like i we ended up in this little um little saddam vacation house i guess is what it’d be it’s like a small mansion on the euphrates river and you go out at night onto the onto the deck and look at the city in the city you’re going to see you’re seeing explosions and you’re seeing you know tracer fire like you know like a like a war movie that’s what it looked like i mean in fact you’re getting a target and you’re going after them in ramadi they’re coming for you i mean this is a this is a city that they expect the insurgents expect to control and they are mounting a tax on our fortified positions right yes absolutely they are mounting attacks on our fortified positions they have maneuver elements they have qrf they are using combined arms they are using communications they are on the attack no doubt so you get you guys ready well we show up there and the first thing we’re doing is we’re turning over with the guys that are there and they’re giving us good solid turnover um uh of what they’ve been doing how they’ve been doing it they had been continuing to focus on uh doing trying to do direct action missions working with some of the iraqi soldiers that’s what they had kind of been focused on they had been trying to still do unilateral operations meaning operations where it’s just seals and they were getting shut down on that and it took me three minutes to decide okay well we’re not going to try and do any unilateral operations because this was a time of by with and through right so the the the attitude had shifted that what we’re trying to do is get the iraqis able to handle security in their own country so if you go on a mission you’re taking iraqis with you so that that’s where were these iraqis coming from at the beginning uh in the beginning they were they were they were army soldiers but i mean iraqi army soldiers are all coming from almost all shia okay vast majority shia occasional sunni some kurds um but vast majority i mean the sunnis were in a position by this point in large parts of the country where if they showed up to a recruiting station their family’s dead if they show up to a polling station to vote in one of these elections in 05 they’re dead if you run for office you’re dead yeah i mean aqi had consolidated control over the in the 05 election i think there was 2 percent sunni turnout i mean people just couldn’t do it you couldn’t show up to work for the police you couldn’t be seen speaking to an american right and uh there were a lot of people on the political side by this point who were like this is over you know ramadi’s lost and bar is lost and there is nothing we can do short of turn that place into a parking lot to get it back i remember there was i remember because it was on september 11th and it was the fifth anniversary of september 11 2006 a report that had been going around generated by the head of intelligence for the marine corps i’m sure you remember it colonel peter devlin and this is the fifth anniversary of september 11th and you know the 10th anniversary 15th anniversary we always have like this is going to be kind of the articles that come out in the washington post and places like that which is where this is they’re kind of setting the conditions where are we right tom rick’s put out he didn’t have he couldn’t publish the report it was classified but he put up part of it it said chief of intelligence for the marine corps in iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country’s western anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the u s military can do to improve the political and social situation there said several military officers and officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents one army officer summarized it as arguing that in anbar province we haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically and that’s where wars are won and lost devlin reports that there are no functioning iraqi government institutions in anbar leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al qaeda in iraq which has become the province’s most significant political force said the army officer who has read the report another person familiar with the report said that it describes anbar as beyond repair a third said that it concludes that the united states has lost in anbar these people said he reported that military operations are at a stalemate unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases and that’s where you guys are going and you aren’t being given a mission to go get us through the next six months we’ve had a strategic shift where some of the people who are arguing for a more aggressive policy to actually try to turn things around are being given an opportunity to show that they can do it yeah that was some of the meetings that i went that i was in in the building when i was an admiral’s aide that’s where i started hearing talk and and i started seeing um i started seeing two sides of the story and two opposing viewpoints of what was happening there was a side that was trying to figure out how to win and there was a side that was trying to figure out how not to lose and and you know trying to by by saying trying to figure out how not to lose it’s like how to get out of there how to shut this thing down how do we how do we get out of this without just you know without egg on our face and the other side of saying how are we going to win and and there was surprisingly there was military and civilian people on both sides of of that of those two divergent opinions of how we should move forward the obvious one is president bush president bush wanted to win he wanted to win and you could you you could sense that you knew that you actually knew that he wanted to win you also could sense that there were people on civilian and military side that believed that report right there which was we cannot win this thing it’s a quagmire not not just ramadi we were talking iraq ramadi was the was the was the exclamation point was the example of why we cannot this is impossible this isn’t going to work that that that’s that’s the way it is so you definitely i definitely heard both sides of that of of of those opinions sitting in the pentagon in in meetings as a junior guy sitting in the back of a room hearing discussions between high-level people and yeah so when we got out there you know we definitely knew that it was gonna be bad and and for the most part you know what seals are looking at is like you know okay how are we gonna win you know our opinion is how we’re gonna win and it’s it’s even tighter than that it’s how are we gonna win tonight how are we gonna win what are we gonna do today to make an impact to make a difference and unfortunately what that can lead to and it’s not just seal so you talk about any you know any company in below sized element you know whether it’s a task you know whether it’s a company you know any any small unit led by an 03 or or below a platoon they’re looking at like okay what do i do today how can i improve today and tomorrow what can i do to fix this immediate problem that’s what you’re looking at so when we show up there there’s do you can you immediately know i mean there’s there’s memorial services almost every day and we’re go you know we almost immediately we’re going to memorial services for soldiers and marines that are being killed um the you know there’s like i said there’s more there’s mortar you know we’re getting mortared on base and that’s a pretty regular occurrence there’s firefights out in the city all the time and you know when you were in baghdad like in baghdad first of all baghdad’s huge i mean it’s huge geographically it’s more like la right ramadi is a little tiny city it’s not a big place so when there’s a firefight going on you and you’re in an elevated position if there’s a firefight going on ramadi you can see it like you can see any tracer you can you’re going to be able to see it from an elevated position so that means that any time you get on a rooftop at nighttime you can see gunfire going on especially when we first got there there was a lot it seemed like the enemy was fighting during the night a little bit more um we they started to adjust their tactics i think and fight more during the day and then we are adjusted our tactics to fight during the day as well but we get there you go you you started your deployment in march right when did you get to ramadi um well i got i just we started in april i went right to right right okay right to ramadi and i never left he started prepping for i believe the operation began in earnest in june um you know my goal was to start doing operations as soon as we got there and we did yeah it was like as soon as life showed up and stoner um it was like strapping on boys and you know i i had i had told both those guys the two platoon commanders that worked for me um i will get i’m my goal is to you know make you quit get you so much combat that you come to me and say jocko i can’t take anymore and they said bring it and they said bring it and uh were you personally like are you working for colonel mcfarland i’m working for so when i get there it’s colonel gronski who is 228 commander and he was um so i’m working for the special operations chain of command which means you know there’s my boss who’s an o5 commander of seal team three and he’s working for the siege zone of commander who’s the colonel in charge of all the special operations in the ao so so that’s my actual chain of command my relationship chain of command which i have a relationship obviously my boss but i made a relationship with with the conventional commanders because it’s their battle space and i want to help them win that’s my goal i mean ramadi’s kind of spoken of as a pretty um as an important battle in showing i mean very innovative in how special operations forces and conventional forces worked together in a way that hadn’t really been achieved with that level of success before relationships and and humility because you know when you when you roll in and you’re going to uh going and you’re seeing these these kids getting killed you are going to think okay what can i do to help and the last thing you’re thinking of is hey i you know you guys should listen to me you’re like what can i do to help you guys in any way what can we do and that was the attitude that i had um to to try and move forward and try and help the situation on the ground now a few episodes ago we talked about this um this beautiful mind wall that i had built with all these targets on it these link diagrams so when i got to ramadi i there was another seal element in ramadi and they were they they were set up there but they they they had a like a small command center there and they had guys working out of other areas and i knew the i knew the commander he was a friend of mine and so he had been in ramadi for a while and i went down and you know like you know linked up with him and was uh just you know he you know we were we’re friends you know he was telling me what they’ve been doing and i was you know he was giving me like a brief of what was happening what to watch out for all standard kind of turnover stuff and his intel officer was actually the same intel officer that i had had at sealteam7 you know it was like awesome so and uh she was a female and so you know i saw her and we started talking and she started kind of going through you know what they’d been doing and then she says well why don’t you come and you know come to the intel shop and i’ll show you what we’re doing and so i walk into the intel shop and on the wall is this big giant link diagram and it was basically the same thing that i had left you know two years earlier in o4 same big giant group of people some little red lines through them some little green lines through them meaning they’ve been captured or killed and i thought to myself this is not a good sign because it’s been two years and even though there’s some red lines and green lines here this this thing hasn’t gotten any smaller and that was my wake-up call that we were gonna lose like what we were doing is like a hack-worth situation for me where you know i’m i’m looking at this going this is what hackworth was thinking when he’s coming to vietnam and he sees the same battles being fought over and over again with nothing changing so i was looking at this going wait a second it’s been two years and i’m just looking at a big link diagram that has the same number of people on it as it was as it was when i left this is not a good sign i went back to my to my tactical operation center i pulled up the internet and i downloaded the new brand new i didn’t think it was um out yet it was a draft version of the counter-insurgency manual that had just been written by petraeus and all his crew he’s got a whole crew of really yeah the whole crew mcmaster um this whole crew of guys that had written this this fm three tech 24 i downloaded it and read it sat there and read it and i just thought okay how can we change what we’re doing because this is this is not this is what we’re doing is not working this is a different situation than it was when i left this is an insurgency and you realize it’s going to take more than kicking people’s asses to win this thing this is when i realized that we were in a counter insurgency that we needed to fight a counter insurgency and that’s what i started doing colonel mcfarland knew that so colonel mcfarland had come from tal afar so so shortly after we got there um it was time for the 228 to go home colonel gronski and all those brave souls from the national guard and their adjacent units awesome guys and they gave us incredible turnover you know they they they they did great they were just amazing they were amazing soldiers i think most people can’t even wrap their head around that when they think national guard they think like weekend stints and a little bit of college money the idea that they’re a national guard people holding the line in ramadi for however long 13 14 months is out of control yep and total professionals um and saved our lives like they saved our lives with the information they gave us with the lessons that they taught us you know our our guys were like listening you know incredible yeah it’s like and and props to my guys you know like um oh my gosh we’re not just saying now we’re seals we know what we’re doing there’s none of that it was hey what do you guys think of this you know what do you think of that how do you how would you do this what do you think of this route like we’re ready to listen but it was time for them to go home they’ve been there for 14 months so now the 1-1 a d comes in when the 1-1 ad armor division comes in colonel sean mcfarland at the time now he’s a general retired but so he had come from talifar and up in talafar he had relieved mcmaster so mcmaster had run the the counterinsurgency model the seize clear hold and build the go out into the neighborhoods form relationships he’d run that model in talifar and it worked it worked so well that by the time mcfarland got there they didn’t need a brigade up there anymore all they needed was a battalion and so i and again i might be a little bit off on these but you know so they said okay you’re going to leave a battalion up there to handle talifar because it’s all but good which was a nasty place it was a nasty place and now it’s all but tame it’s all but peaceful and um mcfarland comes down and is is like he’s he understands the plan that needs to be executed he’s going to mimic what happened up in talafar because he got the good turnover and mcfarland just a smart open-minded humble guy that would look at problems and come up with an idea and if someone gave him a better idea he’d say that’s a better idea let’s do that instead and so he had that attitude coming down and and that’s why you know when you when in the earlier episodes when you’re talking about you know bremer and there’s nothing that makes me sicker than ego’s driving decisions and and people that don’t listen it’s just it’s the worst possible thing you know that’s why i always say when we’d fire a seal leader later on in my career when we were running when i was running seal training for for advanced you know for sealed platoons and steel task units when we would fire a seal leader the thing that we would fire the seal leader for is because he would have a big ego and was arrogant and wouldn’t listen to people because that right there is what gets people killed when you don’t listen and so mcfarland was up smart and looked at what mcmaster done and said that looked like it worked to me and now you want we’ll go do it down in ramadi and this is where we get to the point with what you were talking about where people were saying this isn’t going to work hey it might have worked in talifar but this is different this is ramadi they’ve had years to consolidate this place this is going to be it’s not going to work they were high level people who thought that not only was we were we gonna fail but we were gonna go in there and get a bunch of our guys killed for nothing no doubt no doubt and colonel mcfarland had a different attitude which is like okay well we’re going to try and win and he i don’t you know i wouldn’t say that he looked at it here’s our exact plan that we’re going to execute and i can i wish i could think of all the times i saw that guy pivot and change his mind and make an adjustment and and and take input from his battalion commanders or take input from a company commander out there in the field and talk to him and say what do you need and the guy said i need this or we should do that he’d say that sounds like a good idea and he’d execute on it i mean he had it he had that kind of mind but the mind was well i didn’t mean to interrupt your mind was we’re we’re going to try and we’re going to try and stabilize ramadan when does it first take over when did this happen i got there in april i’d have to it was about it was about three weeks to a month then so you got there was there was there a shift that came down all the way to the troop level that people realized like okay we’re not we’re we’re gonna start we’re gonna take this city um well so there were some there were some units that stayed so the first the 506 was there and they they had been scrapping it out um the three eight marines were there in downtown they’d been scrapping out the first the 506 was over on eastern ramadi they’ve been scrapping out those guys had been just in a dog fight um but yeah it took a little bit of time to come up with like okay hey we understand what we’re going to do how what is this actually going to look like and and he so it wasn’t a shock to anybody no one was like wait what’s happening right now no it’s like hey this is what we’re going to do we’re going to start we’re going to start putting some some combat outposts in and throughout ramadi i think a lot of people have you know from the outside have this it’s really easy to get this idea the u s military is just so advanced and everything is in place that once we decide we’re going to take a city it’s like all right reach into the reach into the file pull out plan two alpha and now execute we had to you know think about a city with half a million people in it that’s been in control of the enemy for maybe up to two years and now you gotta go figure out how to take that city i mean that is a vast undertaking and a complicated one it’s not just military in nature okay so let me let me let me go into a little bit more detail on this so we did know and as soon as i got there you know i knew that ramadi was important but when i got there i realized that it was a strategic it was a strategic decisive element of this war and we needed to win so what did that look like when we showed up there this was going to be a this was going to be a fallujah style kinetic push through the city of ramadi that’s what was going to happen and we were going to do it during the kind of during the turnover between the two two eight and the one one a d so we have double the forces that we need we’re gonna and and for me i’m like awesome hey awesome we’re gonna go hey guys get ready we’re getting ready to we’re getting ready to smash this city we’re getting ready to do a fallujah you know it’s gonna be a nasty two months get ready you know that’s what that’s what everyone was thinking okay well in this timeframe we would have to check the notes on this one but maliki takes over yes as prime minister do you have the dates on that do you know when that was april 22nd right when you chopped in so he takes over we’re planning this big kinetic smash and he comes out and says no we’re not doing it that way and this was a very politically savvy move politically savvy move because what it would have looked like had we done it that way it would have been the shia government going out and destroying a sunni city and killing a bunch of sunnis and he didn’t want to do that he was smart and so he said listen you need to secure ramadi you need to do it with more with a scalpel not with a hammer that’s what needs to happen and okay so we we one of the first missions that we did was and this is just kind of tell you where things do get political sometimes so we we chopped over to and this was this is when it was still colonel ground screen the 228 we chopped over to or we went over to the east side of ramadi and we’re gonna do a big push like a three-day push through this area called the malab district and we were you know gonna go in take a bunch of air take a bunch of city blocks hold up for the night move you know stay there the next night take a bunch of more city blocks stay there until we got this whole area secure and almost like a fallujah style type thing right so um the battalion commander gets like basically shut down um and gets told hey listen we’re not doing any this was sort of the limitations that got put on we’re not doing any we’re not going to do any battalion sized operations no battalion sized operations that was the instructions and he was like okay roger that so like he put whatever it was four companies plus something like we had all the combat power we needed but we didn’t you know we weren’t under battalion command or whatever so those are the kind of adjustments that got made and and but that was sort of one of the initial operations that we did but it wasn’t the concerted strategy to hold it was going to be a clear and then and that was actually you know that’s the um the blue on blue from extreme ownership is that first big giant clearance operation so once we did that um and then that’s kind of when the 1-1 ad showed up and that’s when this idea said it was hey you’re not doing this we’re going to do it a different way and mcfarlane had mcfarland had the plan you start setting up cops around the city yeah that’s the plan if only we’re that easy yeah i say we just let this one run i want to hear about this i mean what are we at an hour are you guys gonna have to wait check yeah like i said if only it was that easy stand by you can also check out our other podcasts i got a podcast called jaco podcast i got a podcast called the warrior kid podcast and i got a podcast called grounded and daryl has a podcast which is called martyr made then you can support all these podcasts by getting some gear from either the jocko store jackostore com or from origin maine origin maine com until next time this is jocko and daryl out