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[Assistant] You think the, you think the SEAL Teams needs the CNO calling, asking questions about what the hell's going on with this prisoner abuse stuff? No.


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[Assistant] So I saw how that hap- what happened to our community.


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[Assistant] When guys did things that they shouldn't have done. Then I got to see what happened, we all got to see this one, but I got to see it even closer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was the Abu Ghraib scandal. So the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Again, here you have the soldiers


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[Assistant] They're, they're not acting professionally. Look, were they torturing people? In my assessment, no. They're not. Were they, were they unprofessional? Yes, they were.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Were they electrocuting people? No, they weren't. Were they putting bamboo shoots under fingernails? No. Were they waterboarding people? No, they weren't doing any of that. They were doing


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you know what? It was a massive negative impact on the war. It was a massive negative impact on America.


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[Assistant] It was a, it was a massive negative impact on our image. And our image counts.


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[Assistant] And did Al Jazeera absolutely and did the insurgents capitalize on this? Yes, they did. That Abu Ghraib scandal.


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[Assistant] And, and, and you say you're lucky that I was there. I'm lucky that I got put into that position working for the Admiral and I got to sit, I mean, think about it. I was, before we were in a task unit together, I was sitting in a room with two, three, four star admirals and generals. I was sitting in the room with


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the pentagon. And hearing how these things were impacting us. Otherwise, I would have been the same as you. Like, dude, who cares? Screw these guys, it's no big deal. But no, when you see it from a strategic perspective, it has a, it has a huge negative impact.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On top of that, I'd seen that in 2005 there was, uh, a sergeant had gone to trial. And he'd gone to trial for shooting an Iraqi and killing him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's not why he went to jail. That's not why he went to jail. He went to jail because he tried to cover it up. So it-


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[Assistant] It was a justified shot that they had actually gone in and cleared a building. I don't remember the details of it right now. But I do remember this. They had confiscated a pistol from that house.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And plant, taking the pistol that they had confiscated and planted it on the guy.


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[Assistant] And this guy, and this is why this sergeant got in trouble. For doing that.


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[Assistant] And he had shot and killed, uh, basically, and please don't quote me on this, it was basically like they cleared the house, they found the pistol, they're in there doing, uh, you know, post sensitive site exploitation, and this guy makes a lunge for one of the American soldiers, and this guy shot him. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Totally within the rules of engagement. We just went through the rules of engagement. Is it hostile intent when you lunge and grab at the weapon of an American soldier? Hell yes it is. You get shot, you die.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But instead of just calling it and saying, hey, this is what happened. Instead, they took the pistol that they had confiscated from this guy. So this guy is obviously, he's not, uh, no threat. They like shot around into the wall and then put the pistol in his hand and that's why they got in trouble.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They didn't get in trouble for killing that guy. He, he tried to attack an American soldier at close range. So they shot him. That's perfectly legal. But they tried to cover it up.


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[Assistant] I saw that thing unfold behind the scenes. And so I had a coming out of being the Admiral's aide.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had a much better understanding of


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[Assistant] The professionalism that was required and the legal concerns that were happening and how they impacted everything. They impacted our community of seals negatively, but they also impacted America and they impacted the strategic possibilities of winning this war. So


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was very lucky to have had these experiences and again, uh, and I've had Admiral McGuire on the podcast and I,


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[Assistant] No one wants, no seal wants that job. No seal wants that job. But man, did I learn a lot from seeing these things take place.


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[Assistant] That being said, when we, and not that being said, those are the things that when we arrived in Ramadi, it was like, okay,


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[Assistant] Our mission, you talked about what our mission was. I'll tell you our actual, you know, you said our mission was to secure the populace. The way we were supposed to do that, and from the CJIS ODIF, which is the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, the quote that I remember, cause I had to say it so many times, was to train and fight company and platoon sized elements of Iraqi soldiers. What does that mean? It means you take Iraqi soldiers, they didn't say special operations soldiers, it was just Iraqi soldiers, platoon and company sized elements, this is between 40 and 150 Iraqi soldiers,


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[Assistant] Where I think the benefit of my previous deployments and seeing a little bit more of the big picture and I think really


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[Assistant] You know, once you see one big picture, you start looking for the big picture more often. And I think that's one of the things that led me to say, hey, we can do DAs, and we're gonna do DAs. We're gonna go capture kill bad guys, 100%. We're gonna go do targeted raids.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I think seeing the bigger picture made me think that we could do more. We could provide more support and we could do more than just the DA's that we had done in the past.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and we will dig some wells and we will build some buildings. But in order to do that, you have to set the conditions. And setting the conditions means you need to lower the level of violence and how do you do that? You kill bad guys. Uh, the, the idea that we weren't winning


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[Assistant] That's a very important concept that not many people wanted to actually


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[Assistant] Actually make it's a statement that not a lot of people actually make look a lot of at that time 2005 2006 there was definitely people in US government that were saying we're not winning We're losing where you this is never gonna end as a quagmire that was certainly happening But amongst military people you didn't hear a lot of hey We're not winning and if you're not saying you're not winning That's implying that that you are winning


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yep. Part of this, and we saw this just unfold in Afghanistan, uh, part of this is the way we fight wars right now.


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[Assistant] Is we fight it by replacements. Now listen, in Vietnam they replaced individuals.


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[Assistant] Meaning you have a platoon, Leif Babin's in the army and he's got a platoon of soldiers and every two or three days he gets


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[Assistant] Two or three new soldiers and two or three of his soldiers leave. And so you're just getting these replacements. Well, we realized that that was bad. Cause now we don't have continuity with them. We don't have, we don't know each other. They real, and then you also end up with guys that are like, Hey, I'm just trying to survive for my year. Then I'm out of here. I don't care what happens to anybody else.


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[Assistant] So then they realized that was bad, so they started taking whole units and sending them over.


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[Assistant] The problem with that is, you know, if I'm the commanding officer of a battalion...


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[Assistant] And I do my one year deployment in the army or my six month deployment in the Marine Corps. And my boss says, hey, how did it go for you? What am I going to say? I'm going to say we won. We did this. We proved this. We moved, we moved in this neighborhood. We took over this thing. Our Iraqi troops got better. I want to say that we are winning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so when I, when you show up Leif, and I say, we've got 80% of the populace secured.


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[Assistant] When you take over from me, what are you going to tell the next boss? We are 90% secured. What is the next guy going to say? We're 100% secured and meanwhile we're still 30% secured.


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[Assistant] So this happened, where we have people that are just saying, hey, we're winning, let's keep doing the same thing over and over again. Certainly, the, the 1-1 AD didn't have that attitude. Their attitude with, with, uh, General, now General McFarlane, Colonel McFarlane at the time was, we need to do something different.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I went through this on the, on, on some podcasts before of how that unfolded, but yes, reading the, uh,


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[Assistant] Counterinsurgency Manual, which I had a draft copy of, found on the internet. A draft copy of it. I don't even know what triggered me to read it. I'm sure I read something or saw something. You know, I had watched the movie about Algiers. What's that movie called? Do you know what I'm talking about? Battle for Algiers.


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[Assistant] You know what movie I'm talking about? Yeah, I don't remember the name of the movie though. Yeah, and it's an insurgency. And you can see that they're losing. The French are losing. And I just remember thinking, there's gotta be, this is what's happening. I made that connection. That this is what's happening here. And France lost. And we're gonna lose. If we keep this up. So, we...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the key component, and this is what I had to tell our chain of command, is secure the populace. Secure the populace. Well, how do you secure the populace? You go out and you have to work with the populace. You have to get amongst the populace later on.


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[Assistant] I think it was General Petraeus that said we can't win by drive by counterinsurgency. Meaning you can't just drive by a neighborhood and think now they're secure. You gotta go in there. You gotta live there. You gotta set up shop. That's what the 118D wanted to do. Which meant that they were gonna be out and exposing themselves to danger.


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[Assistant] Going out into enemy controlled neighborhoods and exposing themselves, doing census operations, going and meeting the local populace, going and trying to do these civil affairs projects that we're talking about, trying to lower the level of violence. How do you lower the level of violence? You go out there and you find the bad guys and you get rid of them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the, when the army and the Marine Corps had this idea of going into these enemy controlled neighborhoods, setting up overwatches, how do we help them? Well, one thing I knew we could do is...


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[Assistant] And, but they were, seemed like it was a good idea.


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[Assistant] And I, I didn't even carry it through workup. In our workup, I don't think we did one sniper overwatch. One, I don't think we did one urban sniper overwatch. Did we?


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[Assistant] I think we could do this again, I think this will be really effective. Also, you know who did, you know who's really into snipers? Colonel David Hackworth. So I'm like, this is effective man, we can pull this off. Uhm, and for some reason, again, luck, we had 13 snipers and tasking a bruiser, which is a high


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you, we went to one of those almost immediately when we got there.


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[Assistant] And we continue to go to those memorial services.


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[Assistant] And if you go to one of those services and you see the broken hearts of these soldiers at losing their friends, and if you don't want to do everything in your power to go and help them, you're not a man, you're not an American. The first one we went to,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had a overwhelming drive to see what we could do to help these guys that were out there patrolling in the day, going out there, getting IED, getting shot up, and what can we do


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[Assistant] To help, there was no, you know, people talk about, oh, how do you draw, how do you draw enemy fire? You don't need to, you know, Romadi, how do you draw enemy fire? Be, be alive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Be alive and be, uh, coalition forces and you're gonna draw enemy fire. That's what's gonna happen.


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[Assistant] So, getting our snipers out there immediately and, and, you know, which we did, and I know BTF Tony


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[Assistant] One of the most beautiful pieces of timing was BTF Tony taking a sniper team out to wear up in Firecracker, which is an area of Ramadi that was very bad, where the Marines had just had a mass casualty IED.


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[Assistant] And BTF Tony takes a team up there and kills an IED in place or two.


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[Assistant] And I happened to be in the Brigade Tactical Operations Center as that report was coming in.


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[Assistant] And you could see, you could feel it in the room and I could see it in the, in the eyes of Colonel Gronsky. You know, he looked at me as, is that your guys? Yes sir. That's our guys. And he immediately said to me, I need you over in Eastern Ramadi. Like that's how impactful it was. It was so impactful that within 30 seconds he was asking me, could we put snipers in Eastern Ramadi? And I was like, yes sir, we can. So,


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[Assistant] The sniper overwatch positions. Setting those up. Talk us through, just give us like generically, cause I want to get into how you, how, how you, how we, how our snipers, what you're seeing, what it's like, and then we'll talk about some of those rules of engagement, how they came into play, but just talk us through like a normal


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sort of, what's the word, generic sniper Overwatch.


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[Assistant] Real quick, small group, just for people out there, I know you think sniper team, you think small group, you think two people.


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[Assistant] Yeah, just to clarify, when you say park your vehicles, we'd park the vehicles in a forward operating base, or a combat outpost, or the government center, like somewhere, it wasn't like we were just parking them in the street and going on patrols, just to make sure everybody knows.


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[Assistant] We're gonna win those 100% of the time. Like, oh, you want, you got 30 moves, they're gonna fight 40 guys in a concrete building with sniper weapons and like, they're gonna lose. And they did. They did. Uh, a couple things that I was thinking about was,


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[Assistant] Shout out to the Marine Corps Cirque boats. Cause we didn't always drive in. Sometimes we went in on those boats and those guys were freaking awesome. Outstanding support that we got from those guys. So instead of having to take a Humvee to a FOB, go in on those boats.


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[Assistant] Yeah, frogman activity right there. The thing about being out at night, um, the,


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[Assistant] The enemy knew that we had night vision, obviously. They knew that we had lasers and they knew they couldn't fight us at night. I would say the number of enemy that we killed was probably 2% during the day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sorry, during the night, 2%. I think you killed a guy. I mean, there's a couple kills that were at night that were kind of chance contacts, but the enemy knew that we owned the night and so they didn't come out at night.


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[Assistant] The local populace had no reason to be out at night, so they didn't come out at night.


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[Assistant] But the local pompies came out during the day and that's when the insurgents would come out as well. That's why discretion was so important. And not just this civilian. So you had civilians out there.


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[Assistant] You have Iraqi soldiers out there, you have Americans out there.


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[Assistant] The amount of discipline that the snipers had to have and the machine gunners had to have was incredible. And I remember


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[Assistant] So you have Iraqi soldiers out there. I remember the first time, you know, a guy came running around the corner with an RPG in his hand and RPG rounds on his back. And for my entire life,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He goes running by, and then I see, like, it's a bunch of Iraqi soldiers. Like, the PID is even harder, because you got Iraqi soldiers out there that are carrying AK-47s, just like the insurgents. And, on top of all this, the insurgents had captured American uniforms.


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[Assistant] They had matching uniforms with the Iraqi soldiers because the Iraqi soldiers were wearing kind of mixed match camis.


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[Assistant] They had helmets. The insurgents had helmets. The insurgents had body armor. The insurgents had AK-47s. So they looked like...


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[Assistant] Had to be hammered home because if you just shoot a guy with an AK-47, you might have just killed an Iraqi soldier. If you just shoot a guy with a RPG, you might have just killed an Iraqi soldier.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you just shoot a person that you see walking down the street, you might have just killed a civilian.


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[Assistant] So the discretion had to be absolutely massive, and we learned that the hard way. Because...


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[Assistant] As, as, as I wrote about in Extreme Ownership, the first chapter, we had one of our guys kill an Iraqi soldier. And I go through the circumstances in the book,


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[Assistant] Of how it specifically happened but, but I had to make sure therefore we had to make sure that that didn't happen again.


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[Assistant] Front and center of every single person's mind.


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[Assistant] Front and center of every person's mind. So, this is why it was such a, a critical component. Uhm, and you know, you talked about like the, there were some, there were some, even inside the SEAL community, some people were like, oh these guys in TU Bruiser just rolling out on these daytime presence patrols.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We didn't do a lot of presence patrols. Of actual presence patrols, I think you, you knew the number was 14. We did 14. So out of hundreds of operations, we probably did a couple hundred, you know, missions. We did 14 presence patrols in the day. They were dangerous as hell.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's why we didn't do a bunch of them. They were very dangerous. We never, we got in some contacts, we never took a casualty. But, the reason was, it wasn't a great job for us. We did it sometimes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what we did do was combat advising of the Iraqi clearance forces that were on the ground in the daytime. And we would put seals with those Iraqi forces. So we might have four or five seals on the ground with the clearance operation.


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[Assistant] So you got a clearance operation that might have 20 or 50 or 100 Iraqi soldiers. We put SEALs with them. The SEALs with them are doing actual combat advising. They're doing command and control for them.


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[Assistant] There's probably 20 or 30 American soldiers, so there's deconfliction going on as well.


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[Assistant] And what they're doing is they're going house to house, doing clearance, meeting the locals. Getting, building relationships with, uh, people. Like you said, Leif, there's 400,000 civilians there.


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[Assistant] And if there wasn't 400,000, there was 300,000. So this place is crawling with locals, crawling with locals. And so taking that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With Iraqi soldiers, American soldiers, maybe some SEALs in the C2 element on the ground. And then these sniper Overwatch teams. Sometimes bounding sniper Overwatch teams, that's another thing that we did. But sometimes in fixed positions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, the census operations, the hearts and minds campaign, totally critical. And luckily,


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[Assistant] When a, when a, when a shooting starts, the women, the children, the innocent men, they hide.


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[Assistant] They're not, they're not walking around. This isn't like, you're sitting there saying, oh well, is this person bad or good? This person's running across the street with an AK-47.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're getting shot by U.S. forces. That's what's happening. They're not, oh, a woman walking down the street during a gunfight. Oh, I wonder if she's good or bad. That's not happening. It's not happening.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just like, you don't have a woman walking down the street during a gunfight. An innocent woman's not walking down the street during a gunfight.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and it was also easy to, you know, like, uh, I've heard people like, oh, you can't just shoot people with cell phones.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, there was no cell phones in, in Ramadi. There was no, there was no cell, the Al-Qaeda had blown up all the cell towers. They didn't want any cell phones to be there to be used by, for tracking. So they blew up all the cell, all the cell towers. So there's no cell phones. So when you saw someone communicating, they're communicating on a, on a radio.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On a, on a high frequency or a very high frequency or ultra high frequency radio, a Motorola radio. And guess what they were doing? They weren't ordering pizza.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were coordinating attacks. So that's a totally different thing. And again, you don't see innocent women out communicating on a Motorola radio, on a handheld radio.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because they're innocent. No, there's military-aged male with radios, with radio out there passing intelligence and coordinating attacks. That's what's happening.


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[Assistant] So this idea that there's like, oh, well, oh, it's hard to tell if someone's on a cell phone if they're, what they're, what they're talking about. There's no cell phones. It's easy to tell what they're talking about. It was a huge problem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you mentioned earlier, you know, my rules of engagement.


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[Assistant] Brief. You know, my brief brief, which was, hey, if you have to pull the trigger, make sure the person you're killing is bad.


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[Assistant] For me, and this is a leadership principle.


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[Assistant] That's what I need to do. That's what I told you, you need to do. You keep your guys out of trouble. And by the way, this doesn't only apply to combat. This applies to where on Liberty in Louisville, Kentucky or Reno, Nevada or Lake Tahoe or San Diego,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our job as leaders is to prevent our guys from getting in trouble.


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[Assistant] It's not cover up when they get in trouble, it's actually prevent them from getting in trouble. We'll get into cover ups because cover ups don't work. There's no such thing as a cover up. It's just, you're just getting, I already talked about it with, with that, uh, case that I, that I mentioned when I was the admiral's aide that happened. Like if you're covering things up, you're making it worse for everybody and we'll get to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our job as leaders is to make sure your guys don't get in trouble. How do you do that? If my guys get in trouble, get an alcohol related incident, guess what? That's my fault.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's actually my fault. What did I do? Why didn't I explain to them what they need to watch out for? Why didn't I keep them busy enough that they weren't out doing something stupid? Why didn't I make sure they'd have a designated driver or a designated brain as we used to call it? A designated brain meaning, hey, it's not just the person that's gonna drive, it's the person that's going to think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we got nine knuckleheads going out and getting drunk. We got a tenth person there that's a designated brain that makes sure nobody does anything stupid. That's our job. So it's our fault if we allow people to get into trouble.


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[Assistant] That means if we don't explain the rules of engagement, if we don't explain, and Admiral McCraven had a good way of putting this, if we don't draw the red lines that you're not allowed to cross very clearly so everyone understands them, we're allowing our guys to get in trouble. That's what's gonna happen. The same thing we talk about since day one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being, taking care of your people isn't saying, hey, do whatever you want and I'll cover for you. That's not how you take care of your people. You want to take care of your people, you explain to them what the rules are and what will happen if they break the rules. That's how you take care of your people. You make sure they understand the rules of engagement.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This city is filled with civilians, with normal, good, Iraqi civilians.


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[Assistant] It's filled with doctors and teachers and imams.


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[Assistant] And the day that we go out and we kill a doctor or a teacher and a mom out in the city of Ramadi, first of all, we've done irreparable damage to the war effort.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We are not gonna be able to take that back. This is a problem. This is gonna get used by Al-Qaeda. It's gonna get used by the insurgents. It's gonna be used for their propaganda. That's what we're gonna show.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we've taken a huge negative strategic step the day we go out and kill an innocent person. Also, we're gonna get shut down.


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[Assistant] That's what'll happen. We go out and kill a civilian, some imam or some doctor or some teacher. We're gonna get shot down. We're not gonna do any more operations. Not one of our


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Military, army, marine corps, battalion commanders would have allowed that to fly. Ever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we would have gotten shut down, the deployment would pretty much be over, and we would have been destroying what we were actually fighting to protect. So,


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[Assistant] But all those consequences, they have to understand all those consequences. That's our job as leaders.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Utilized or maybe maybe connected the dots for you and by the way a lot of this stuff


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I talk about this stuff and it sounds, it might sound like, oh I was this big thinker and I had everything figured out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's not true. Actually, I look back and I feel once again lucky because I feel like I was just ahead of the curve. I feel like I just was far enough, I was mature enough, I was old enough, I had been through enough, I'd learned enough, I'd had the right mentors at the right times, I'd seen enough.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That I was just ahead of the curve of being like, hey, this is our job, this is what we need to do. And one of the dots to connect is, look, if you're in the SEAL teams,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your job and the number one priority is the mission. Look, we take care of our troops, but


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[Assistant] What our focus is, what we do. Look, we take care of the troops, but our action, the actions that we take should all be driving towards one thing and that is effectively executing our mission. And that, as I've said before, is the Trump card. It's the Trump card in any argument you're gonna have with a team guy.


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[Assistant] When that, when that team guy says, well I want to go out tonight, or I want to do this dumb thing, or I want to go make this happen. When, when you say back to them, hey,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Do you not wanna be able to go close with and destroy the enemy on the battlefield?


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[Assistant] There's no answer. There's no answer. The only answer is yes, that's what I wanna do. Is this gonna help you do that? If you get in trouble tonight for being drunk, if you get in a fight, if you...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're all bad. And, and hey, I mean, when, when we were in Ramadi, I said, hey, anybody that fucks this up.


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[Assistant] And you start to do things that are stu- if you do something that's stupid, that's gonna interfere with our opportunity to kill the enemy, to do our mission, you're going home immediately. I don't want you here. You will not be here.


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[Assistant] And when you, so when you talk about the confidence, the confidence is just you figuring out, oh,


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[Assistant] There's no argument with that. There's no seal that says, well actually, I'd rather, you know, take the risk and get in trouble than fight the enemy. There's no, and if you do have a seal like that, kick him out of your platoon immediately. Kick him out. Kick him out of the teams. If you have somebody that prioritizes


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[Assistant] Anything other than executing the mission, then they're not in the right job.


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[Assistant] So I think connecting those dots was very important.


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[Assistant] Now, you mentioned like, oh, they had a government, they had a governor there.


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[Assistant] So, so, just to take that a little bit further, there was a government center in downtown Ramadi. There was a, there was a bureaucracy.


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[Assistant] It was small, but they had a bureaucracy. They had a governor. I forget his name, but they had a governor. And this governor that was running the city of Ramadi met with the brigade commander two or three or four times a week, had


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[Assistant] Sit down meetings to say, hey, one of your tanks drove over this bridge and now the cars can't go over it. You need to fix it. And the brigade commander say, yes sir, we'll take care of it. The governor of Ramadi would say, hey,


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[Assistant] There was a, a, a Bradley fighting vehicle that rolled through the front gate of one of my people. You need to get out there and repair that gate. And the brigade commander would say, yes sir, we will take care of it. Battalion commander would then get tasked to go take care of that gate. When a civilian


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[Assistant] Got wounded or got killed. Well first of all, if a civilian got wounded, they would immediately cazavac that person trying to help. But what if there was a civilian that got killed? Because this is war. And civilians did get killed in the Battle of Ramadi. It was a small number, but they did get killed. When that happened,


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[Assistant] Where civilians had been killed and


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[Assistant] The local populace came and protested, hey, you, you know, coalition forces killed one of our, you know, one of our kids, one of our people, one of our, and, and then we had to go figure out what's going on. Again, I'm saying we, the brigade would have to then go figure out what happened and sit down with the family that had lost one of their family members and pay reparations. This was a huge, huge deal.


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[Assistant] So to think that you could be out there just killing people was just, it's just completely insane thought. It's a completely insane thought. It could, it could not happen. Every civilian casualty,


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[Assistant] Was a catastrophe. It was a, it was a problem that got raised through the entire government of, of Ramadi and brought to the coalition forces.


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[Assistant] And, and was solved. It was investigated. It was, reparations were paid. That's what happened every single time.


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[Assistant] So it's important to think about that as you start to think about.


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[Assistant] The job that you and I had, which was making sure that our guys understood that clearly so that they could make the right decisions. And what that all boiled down to is make sure that if you pull the trigger, you better freakin' make sure that the person you're killing is bad. Otherwise, everything else is gonna fall apart.


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[Assistant] Luckily for me, I had already been through that. So those arguments that you were bringing to me, I had already been through them on my last deployment. I had already been through the whole breaching thing. I had already been through the civilian casualties. Oh, and how bad those were for the war effort. So when the implication


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[Assistant] That comes from Leif that I'm being a freaking wimp, right? Cause that's what it is. Like, what do you mean you can't, we can't expose the breach? You're being a wimp, Jocko. Not only that, but now you're putting my guys at higher risk cause if we don't breach the door and there's a bad guy behind the door and we're sitting there with a sledgehammer trying to open it, you're gonna get my guys killed.


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[Assistant] And, hey, well how many times have you taken rounds through the door on your, on your, on your explosive breaching charges you haven't, how many times have you, so we start having these discussions. How many times have you been engaged inside the target building? I know you're getting engaged a lot outside there, how many times have you, so we're having these discussions.


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[Assistant] We're having discussions that these are not actually black and white.


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[Assistant] That hey, if you're hitting a target where you are deeming it as the commander on the ground, that is so high risk that you feel the need to use explosive breaching charge, do it. Do it.


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[Assistant] But let that be a decision that you're making. And if you look at that door and you say, you know what?


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[Assistant] I don't think we need to do, I don't think we need an explosive breaching charge right now. Don't use one. And the risk versus reward. We're gonna up the risk to our troops. Yes!


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[Assistant] Accomplish the mission, and the mission is to secure the populace, and if you're out there hurting and killing the populace with explosive breaching charges, you're failing the mission.


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[Assistant] And Gilly, I'm sure you want to talk about that one story where you made the call. You're, you know, you had a breacher that was like, Hey, we're going to blow this door and you're assessing the situation. You see what the situation is and you said no breach.


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[Assistant] Yeah, also because we'd already cleared like other buildings. It wasn't like this was the initial breach, like it was...


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[Assistant] It was, that's what it painted, and you know, when you debrief, debrief me on it, I was like, yeah, good call.


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[Assistant] Is because you knew and understood that the decisions, that the actions that your platoon took under your command


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[Assistant] Were your actions and your decisions and you had 100% ownership of them. You weren't gonna be able to come back and tell me, Oh, the breacher put a charge on the door and blew the door and you know, wounded a civilian. It was my breacher's fault. That wasn't happening.


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[Assistant] You were going to make decisions. Every decision that got made was your decision. It's your platoon. And by the way, when my, my commanding officer came to me, I wouldn't say, well, Leif Breacher did this. It's Leif's fault or the Breacher's fault. No, it's on me. I didn't explain this clearly enough. So the ownership


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[Assistant] Up and down the chain of command is what allows


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[Assistant] There to be that kind of discretionary leeway, and you had to have it with your snipers. I mean you can't, Seth had to have it with his snipers. To say, yea, if there, if you know the person is doing something bad, if you know they're a bad person, they have hostile intent, then you take the shot. You don't have to call me, you don't have to call Seth, you take the shot.


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[Assistant] That is because everyone is taking ownership of what is going on and, and it goes.


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[Assistant] Direct, like when you, I mean, we started this in Workup. You know, when your freaking point man got lost.


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[Assistant] And you came back to me and said, oh yeaah, sorry my point man got lost. I didn't go talk to your point man. I talked to you. I'd say, well did you, did you go through the route with him? Did you know what the landmarks were looking for? Will you keep in pace?


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[Assistant] Cause this is your platoon, it's not your point man's platoon. When your machine gunner, you know, was outside of his field, shooting outside his field of fire, I wasn't like, hey, machine gunner, let me talk to you. No, Leif, what is going on with your machine gunner? Why didn't you explain the fields of fire? You're in charge. Same thing with Stoner.


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[Assistant] Stoner has his freaking, uh, medic doing something that he shouldn't be doing.


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[Assistant] Do I say, oh, medic, come and talk to me? No. Hey, Seth, why is your medic doing this right now? Why did they take that action? So, I definitely, you know, there's, things can get a little bit,


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[Assistant] I mean this can happen in any organization, but certainly in the SEAL teams.


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[Assistant] The SEAL teams are tactically run by our enlisted leadership. Our platoon chiefs run the platoon. Our LPO's run the platoon.


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[Assistant] Our senior enlisted SEAs inside of a troop, run the troop. They're, they're, they're gonna make things happen.


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[Assistant] And it's pretty easy for an officer to start thinking, well, you know, the chief made that call.


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[Assistant] Maybe it's the chief's fault. It's pretty easy for that to happen, and I had many of these conversations when I was running training, when I was running trade at. Many of these conversations, you know, the OIC would tell me, well, you know, the platoon chief wanted to do this, so that's why we did it. Oh, so it's the platoon chief, you want to go talk to the platoon chief, it's the platoon chief's fault? Is the platoon chief overall in charge? And I know.


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[Assistant] What I, when I used to teach that junior officer training course, I would say, you know who's going to court martial?


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[Assistant] On that decision, it's not the platoon chief because it's your freaking platoon. You're the one that's going to answer. So making sure that people understand that when you're in charge,


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[Assistant] It's your decision. No matter who makes that decision inside the platoon or inside the team or inside the organization or inside the company or inside the department.


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[Assistant] When you're in charge of that department, when you're in charge of that division, that's your call.


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[Assistant] And you're going to have to own it. And that understanding for you, for Seth, that's what allowed there to be leeway. That's what happens. That's, that's decentralized command. Uh, you have to have trust in order to get there. I have to make sure that people understand the why.


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[Assistant] And that's what allows us to handle those types of situations.


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[Assistant] Now, we talk about our rules of engagement, but the enemy, they understood our rules of engagement as well. And, and they certainly adapted, cause they have no rules of engagement.


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[Assistant] Which is, which is, which is a huge advantage for them. They don't care about civilian casualties. They don't care about destroying the infrastructure. They don't care if they have blue on blues. They literally don't. In fact, they have suicide bombers. They don't care about any of that.


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[Assistant] So, they understood our rules of engagement and they did their best to utilize our rules of engagement against us. It's tough to deal with.


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[Assistant] And by the way, that's hostile intent. Total hostile intent. That spotter's getting killed. You know, you, you, that's, that's, we killed spotters that were doing exactly that. And I remember the first time, cause we, and when we'll get into this, but,


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[Assistant] We had to send up shooter statements of who is engaged and why are they engaged. And I remember the, uh, the CJSOTIF asking about, hey, this is an unarmed person.


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[Assistant] Uh, that's just observing and giving directions. And I said, no, they're coordinating. I remember I remember writing this, this email up the chain of command when a person is giving, passing, uh, coordinating instructions to


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[Assistant] Active military aged males that are armed. They are not just gathering intelligence. They are coordinating attacks and they are going to die. And I got the reply back. Roger.


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[Assistant] Because it was absolutely warranted. That's, that's what the enemy was doing. They were co- those spotters were out there coordinating attacks and in order to disrupt those attacks, they needed to die. And so that was a,


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[Assistant] That's the way, that's the way we had to operate. And it wasn't, but just real quick, it wasn't like...


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[Assistant] Any seven year old kid could watch and go, oh that person's doing something bad. And then you take a trained military person that's been observing this enemy TTP for the last one month, two months, three months, they're gonna get it every time.


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[Assistant] There's no, and I remember explaining this, there's nothing that Al-Qaeda wants more than for us to kill a kid.


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[Assistant] There's nothing that they want more for their propaganda than for us to kill a woman, us to kill a kid, us to kill an imam, us to kill a doctor. That's what they want.


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[Assistant] They couldn't make a doctor walk out there and do that. They couldn't make it a mom do that, but they could force a 12 year old or 13 year old kid to walk down the street knocking on all the doors. They were hoping and praying that


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[Assistant] We would shoot them. And then they have their big propaganda victory. So...


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[Assistant] Why are we making, how can we make these decisions? It's because we're thinking about what's going on. We're thinking from a strategic perspective. We also know, like you said, I mean, uh,


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[Assistant] So it's not like you're gonna, it's not like you're taking some tactical, some huge tactical loss where you're gonna be in a extremely compromised position now that you've been compromised by this kid. That's not happening. So there's no value. There's no value at all. And, and again, thinking about the strategic value of letting that kid live is


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[Assistant] Infinitely more important than the tactical value of them not knowing we're there for another 10 minutes. But matter of fact, you engage the kids now they know exactly where you are. So there's a lose-lose situation.


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[Assistant] Literally used human shields. And utilized these, like these 12 year olds that we're talking about walking solo down the street.


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[Assistant] The enemy also literally used, I know literally gets used all the time, but actually used children as human shields.


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[Assistant] Yeah, props and salute to the snipers and the NSW, which is the Naval Special Warfare Sniper School and just the training that they got, those guys got put through and how just outstanding they were and how, how


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[Assistant] That although there were 400,000 civilians there, and although there were civilians, you know, in the populace, there was also an incredible amount of legitimate targets and


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[Assistant] When we arrived, as you pointed out, the enemy wasn't used to Americans being in these neighborhoods. They weren't used to it at all. They weren't used to...


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[Assistant] Used to Americans being able to take accurate long range shots down long axis roads. It was a target rich environment. And the enemy killed in action.


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[Assistant] The numbers of enemy killed in action were big.


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[Assistant] We're high, right out of the gate. And what that did is...


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[Assistant] Immediately we got a lot of eyes on what we were doing, a lot of examination, a lot of inspection, and even some scrutiny in the beginning, which is fine.


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[Assistant] So quickly hadn't, that we really hadn't had that, that those high numbers since Vietnam.


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[Assistant] Since Vietnam that there was just killing going on on a daily basis, enemy being killed, reports coming up. So the chain of command...


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[Assistant] They started to say, hey what's going on? And our attitude was, come and see.


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[Assistant] That's, that's just, and, and this is something I actually learned from the army, was,


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[Assistant] Come and investigate. Come and look at what we're doing. Come and see what we're doing. Come on out here. You want to send the, you know, whoever from the chain of command. You want to send the ops officer. You want to send the CMC. You want to send anybody that you want to come out. Send, come out. You want to send out our JAG. Send them on out. We'll bring them out so they can actually see what's going on and


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[Assistant] And those, then they did. So they come up, this is exactly what we're doing. And then they put some things on us that were, seemed a little bit rigid, but if you thought about them, they actually made sense. Things like sworn shooter statements.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and, and them not being there, it seemed unnecessary at first because for us, on the ground, we knew that if a civilian was killed, the, the,


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[Assistant] The civilian populace was gonna go while the government officials were gonna know and we'd immediately send that up to chain of command. We knew! We had Iraqi soldiers with us.


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[Assistant] We had Iraqi soldiers with us on every, almost every single, 98% of operations we did, we had Iraqis, probably more. But we had Iraqi soldiers with us. They're not gonna just watch as civilian Iraqis are getting killed. We had Iraqi interpreters, as you mentioned.


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[Assistant] That are out there, they're watching us take shots. We had, you know, and some of them were Jordan, some of them were Lebanese, but they saw who we were killing.


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[Assistant] We had conventional forces that are out there every single day, interacting with the local populace, trying to build relationships. They're, they're trying to win the hearts and minds and now all of a sudden we're just going out and shooting civilians like it was insane for us to think that that could be happening.


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[Assistant] So I was like, okay, we need to just take a step back. Why are they asking those questions? Well, it's because they're not here.


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[Assistant] And that's why that attitude of come and investigate, come with us, come down and see what we're doing. And I learned this from the army. I learned this from the first of the 506. They had some, they had some incident happen and they were like, Hey, come and come and look at what happened. Do you want to know what happened? Come and look and raise your hand and say, come and investigate.


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[Assistant] If you think we're doing something wrong, or if we think we did something wrong, raise your hand and say, hey, come and investigate this. We need a second sight of eyes. And that is a totally positive thing. Totally positive thing. And we did that. And we got investigated.


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[Assistant] And it was like, oh, here's the outcome. Here's what you did. Here's why you did it. You followed the rules of engagement. Here's what was uncovered. Okay, cool. So, so.


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[Assistant] If you're operating within the ROE, which is what we stuck to,


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[Assistant] And you can articulate that, and you do articulate that properly, and the investigation shows yeaah, you followed the ROE, you engaged the target as you should,


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[Assistant] You have nothing to hide. You have, you have, you only say this is what's happening. So it was actually great. And I look back now, I'm so happy that we did those shooter statements. I'm so happy that when we got investigated, we got investigated because then it's like, yup, this is what we did. This is why we did it. And the other thing is, uh,


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[Assistant] You know, clearly, if you're doing things and you're not doing the right things, you're going to jail.


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[Assistant] You're going, you're getting shut down, you're going to jail, that's what's going to happen. But when you, if you, and if you cover it up, it's going to get even worse.


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[Assistant] It's gonna, you know, learning from that event with, in 2005, thank God I learned that event. Look, I'm not saying I would have been doing nefarious things, but it made it very easy for me to explain to you


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[Assistant] And your guys and sass guys, hey, if you try and cover something up, you're gonna get burned. There's no such thing as a cover up, doesn't work.


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[Assistant] That's a absolute executed tactic, technique and procedure by the enemy. The enemy at this juncture


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[Assistant] We had known before we were there and while we were there, if there was snipers in an Overwatch position, they would, the enemy would put IEDs outside that building so when the sniper team went to leave, they would


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[Assistant] IEDs clacked off on them, and in fact, within days of this operation that you're talking about,


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[Assistant] And the Marine Corps had gotten blown up on Exfil. I think they had two killed and like three wounded. Like, like, I mean that happened. Matter of fact, I briefed that. I briefed that.


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[Assistant] As one of the points of, hey, we need to be watching out for this. This is what they're doing now. So, all that's in this particular sniper's head, he sees someone putting a wheelbarrow up against the building that you're in, he's probably getting ready to clack off an IED. So, yeaah, he made the decision, took the shot.


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[Assistant] So young leaders, old leaders on care, if you're, that story right there is just so important for people to understand. It's so important, especially military, law enforcement, that story right there is so important for you to understand. The move is,


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[Assistant] This is what happened, come investigate. That's the move. Like you just said,


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[Assistant] To say, okay, hey, let's plant some explosives on, hey, breacher, give us some of your breaching charges and we'll make it look like he had explosives, give him a weapon, put an old AK in his wheelbarrow, any of those things, then we won't get- If you make that move,


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[Assistant] You are going to get busted, and rightfully so. You're, you're, it's gonna get found out.


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[Assistant] They're gonna go, oh, he had explosives, oh, this is American explosives, oh, this is at this, this, uh, serial number goes back to your task unit, so this is you. Or the weapon, oh, the guy up the street said this weapon was taken from his house by you four days earlier, you're getting busted. Or whatever, you are not, or somebody in the platoon, or somebody in the Marine Corps is gonna say, oh, I saw that guy get shot.


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[Assistant] I'm saying number two, because number one has to have already taken place. And number one is, you make sure that your troops know that if you do something that is immoral, unethical, or illegal, you will not have their back. Hey, if they do something that is, that is within the rules of engagement, if they're doing the right thing for the right reasons,


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[Assistant] Not only do you have their back, you will die for them. That's what the SEAL Teams is.


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[Assistant] But if you do something that's illegal, immoral, or unethical, I don't have your back anymore. And you know what I used to tell guys? There's nothing I can do for you.


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[Assistant] There's nothing I can do for you. You, oh you like me? Cause I'm gonna, I'm gonna help you out and I'm helping you, uh, with your getting to the right schools and I'm helping you with your evaluations and I'm helping you with your career.


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[Assistant] You did something stupid over the weekend and we're gonna bring it up the chain of command. We're gonna get it taken care of. I'm helping you. You do something that's immoral, illegal, unethical. I can't help you. I remember that actually used to scare guys a little bit. Cause I had a lot, I had a lot of clout.


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[Assistant] If you did some dumb shit, you did some stupid stuff, you got into, you got into some little incident out there, I'm gonna get it taken care of. I am.


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[Assistant] I am. I'm going to take care of you. You get in some trouble. You make a mistake. You do something that you shouldn't have done. You stepped outside the box a little bit. Okay. There's going to be some price to pay, but we're going to get it squared away. But if you do something that's immoral, that's illegal, that's unethical, I'm not going to be able to help you and I'm not going to help you. So that's step one.


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[Assistant] And actually the way Admiral McRaven was talking about, like, there's red lines, you go outside these red lines, there's nothing I can do for you. There's nothing I can do for you anymore. You're on your own. You need to know that. Where guys, where leaders slip up, is they don't want to say that.


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[Assistant] They don't want to say that, because it's kind of sound like, I mean, even, even sitting here in this room, with you, my brother, Leif Babin, saying like, hey, I got your back to a point, doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel right. It's like, what do you mean you got my back to a point?


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[Assistant] Hey, here's how this comes full circle. The way that I have your back 100% is by making sure that you know what the rules are and what lines you cannot cross and if you cross them, you're on your own.


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[Assistant] That's what we're talking about. This is the crux of what we're talking about. And you as a leader have gotta say that.


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[Assistant] You have a leader, as a leader, that's step number one. To make sure that the team realizes that there's lines that if they cross, you will not have their back because they're doing something that they shouldn't be doing.


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[Assistant] Your, your nefarious behavior. I don't got you anymore. That's where leaders mess up.


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[Assistant] They don't, they don't clarify that and that crushes them.


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[Assistant] Always felt comfortable because I know that you guys do that. And that's, you know, like, whatever it is, me, you know.


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[Assistant] Everybody knows there's lines with me. You know not to cross them. You know there's certain things, if you do it, you're fucked. I will, I will destroy you. I will, I will hate you. You know, if you do something that gets our platoon


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[Assistant] In some situation where we don't go to war, I'm gonna hate you for forever. And I'm probably gonna try and kill you.


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[Assistant] Everyone understood me in the fact that the most important thing to me was we have a job to do.


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[Assistant] And we are gonna do this job. And look, part of doing this job is we take care of our troops. How do we take care of our troops? We make sure that they understand what the rules of engagement are. They understand if they cross those rules of engagement, there's nothing I can do for them.


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[Assistant] There's nothing you can do for them, there's nothing anyone can do for them. They're on their own.


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[Assistant] Yeah, you know, I've been talking a lot lately about the mob mentality that the, that the team has. Any team. You know, company, whatever. They've got this mob mentality working. And that mob will start to do things as a mob.


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[Assistant] And you as a leader can't be in the mob. You can't be in the mob because then you can't tell which direction they're going. Sometimes they're going in a great direction.


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[Assistant] And you, you can just sit back and you can encourage them, let them go. But when they start going in the wrong direction, you're the one that has to pull the reins. And this doesn't matter. You know, we could have a sales team that's starting to sell a bunch of stuff and they're making some good deals, but they're starting to cut margins. And if you're part of that, we're hitting records and like, yeah, we're going to sell the most we ever sold this month. And you're all excited about it with the rest of the team. All of a sudden you're losing money.


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[Assistant] You can't do that. You have, you can't be inside that mob. You've got to be stepped out to say, Hey, listen, I know we want to break records this month on our sales, but our margins are getting too low. We're not going to be profitable. We're going to lose money.


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[Assistant] The other, the opposite thing could happen too, where the team's not making good sales and they're all bummed out and they're not, not being proactive and aggressive in their sales. So you can't be bummed out too. You gotta say, Hey, listen, we got this many days left in this month. Here's some things we're gonna do to make things happen. I just talked to the boss. We're going to cut margins a little bit more so we can get, improve our price point. But if you're in the mob.


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[Assistant] We can't do this. Here's the red line. If you cross this red line, you don't have my support anymore. And as a matter of fact, you're gonna get arrested and that's what's gonna happen.


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[Assistant] If you don't make that clear as a leader, you're, you're absolutely failing. And I think that with, with us,


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[Assistant] Everybody knew and understood this and I think that's what was powerful and that's why it was so appreciated by the Army and the Marine Corps. The Army and the Marine Corps had us out there on, you know, they wanted us to support every operation that they did. The reason? Because we had the most squared away, well we, we,


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[Assistant] Look, I'm not gonna compare, not the most. We had, they knew they could count on us to make the right decisions out there on the battlefield. They knew that with, with the highest percentage of certainty. They knew if we had an incident that happened like you're talking about, what would we do?


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[Assistant] We would raise our hand and say this is what happened. Just like in the opening chapter of Extreme Ownership. That, you know who knew about that blue on blue? When it happened, you know who had figured out what had gone down? You know who knew what had happened? One person. Me.


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[Assistant] Me, I'm the one that actually said, oh, this was a blow up. No one else knew. No one else knew.


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[Assistant] And what did I do? Went back to the battalion commander and said, hey sir, this was a blue on blue. This was, this was a blue on blue. This is what happened. I explained it to him.


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[Assistant] I actually didn't have to do that. I actually didn't have to do it. And you know what, eventually it would've come out most likely, but, and I would've looked like a real jackass and I would've been in prison. But to say, hey, here's what happened, I know what happened, and here's how it went down. Okay, got it.


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[Assistant] When you start covering stuff up, you're terrible. So the Army, the Marine Corps, they knew that they could count on us. They could count on us to do the right thing, and they could count on us if we made some kind of a mistake.


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[Assistant] What we would do is raise our hand and say, Hey, here's what happened. Please come and investigate so we can make sure it doesn't happen again.


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[Assistant] And, and that's why they had us conducting operations until the day we left. We conducted operations that entire time. The, the, the conventional forces trusted us implicitly with hundreds and hundreds of shots taken, hundreds and hundreds of enemy killed with precision and lethality and all the while protecting the local populace. And that's what you do when you understand and you lead.


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[Assistant] That's how you maintain the moral high ground. You take ownership of what you do.


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[Assistant] That's, that's how you can come back and hold your head high and say we did what we're supposed to do.


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[Assistant] And you know, that's one of the things, you hear these, uhm, the news medias out there, books are out there, articles are out there. And...


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[Assistant] What really is terrible about those things is the incredible sacrifices that were made. Incredible sacrifices that were made.


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[Assistant] And you think, you know, you think about all those soldiers and Marines in the battle of Ramadi, think of tasking a bruiser, the sacrifices that were made and for


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[Assistant] Lessons can be learned and I'm glad we were able to get together because I know


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[Assistant] Like I said, I feel like I was ahead of the power curve just a little bit. I was ahead of that crest of the wave. I was lucky enough to have a very lucky career.


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[Assistant] You happened to come work for me. You happened to be humble enough to listen to what I had to say.


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[Assistant] Seth happened to be humble enough to listen to what I had to say. The platoons happen to have the respect for you guys to nod their head and say, yeaah, this makes sense. So you add those things together, that's leadership.


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[Assistant] And you do that by taking ownership. Preemptive ownership of what you do. If something goes wrong, you take ownership of that.


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[Assistant] And then as you mentioned, you do the right thing. The legal thing. The lawful thing. The ethical thing. And then you don't have to worry about anything else.


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[Assistant] Any other comments, Leif? It's a heavy subject. It is a heavy-


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[Assistant] There's, there's people that are, you, you might be listening to this right now. It might be in three years, it might be in three months, it might be in ten years. I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy for thirteen years. For thirteen years.


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[Assistant] But just know, just listen to what we're saying. Look, we try and teach our leadership lessons all the time. Cover, move, simple, prioritize, execute, decentralized, command. We literally started a company to pass these lessons on.


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[Assistant] If you are not thinking about these truly impactful lessons that we were, that we got to live through. We got to live through it.


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[Assistant] And, and, and, you know, I said that before about combat. You go, you go through combat, you don't wish it on anybody, but you're, I'm, as you said, it was an honor that we actually got to do what we did.


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[Assistant] And the lessons that we learned, we try and teach, but this is like another area. And, and you know, sometimes I think it seems obvious.


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[Assistant] You know, it seems obvious now, but I also know, and as a matter of fact, you and I were talking about this yesterday, there's a lot of pressure on a young leader. There is a ton of pressure on a young leader. All kinds of pressures.


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[Assistant] You want to be liked, you want to get the job done, you don't want to let your guys down, you want your guys to respect you, you want to do the right thing, but at the same time sometimes the right thing is viewed as different by different people. All those things, all those things are going on. All those things are going on. Let me tell you this, there's no escaping this.


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[Assistant] There's no escaping this. You have to own what happens in your team. You have to, you have ownership of that.


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[Assistant] There's no getting out of it. There's no sloughing it off on anybody else. You can't do it.


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[Assistant] When your sniper takes a shot, you might as well have pulled the trigger.


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[Assistant] When your machine gunner lays down fire, you might as well be the person laying down fire. It's on you. It's on you.


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[Assistant] And if you have that attitude, you might recognize that, hey, I gotta get control of this situation.


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[Assistant] So if you're in a leadership position, do me and Leif a favor and lead.


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[Assistant] What do you got? Echo. Give us a freakin', uh, what do we used to call that? Rough transition.


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[Assistant] Are you gonna ask Leif if you have to be in the Navy to be a SEAL? Leif, you haven't heard this yet. At the end of the podcast.


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[Assistant] Is a grown man. He's been, he's been on this podcast with me for seven years. He sat and listened to hundreds of military books and military guests.


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[Assistant] Am I built up enough? He asked Admiral Craven, uh, do you have to be in the Navy to be an Admiral? So anyways, what do you got for us today?


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[Assistant] I do, I actually, no I wasn't pro. I didn't know, I thought you were leading up to a joke, I thought this was going to go somewhere. He's like, do you have to be in the Navy to be an Admiral? Well, I could see like, he, uh, uh, uh, Admiral


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[Assistant] I think you're right, I think it's just the easiest blank, the easiest way to lead this is say no war trophies.


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[Assistant] It doesn't make it the right thing to do, but yea, I could see the slippery slope being like, oh, we're gonna have guys here trying to smuggle back. What they should have said is like, hey, here's the protocol. You know, every, every, you know, company sized element is allowed to take back three,


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[Assistant] Uh, enemy weapons, they have to go through this process, you know, and I kind of said like it'd be cool to have one on my wall, which it would be.


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[Assistant] But at a minimum to say like a company sized element is allowed to take some war trophies for their freaking heritage. You know? Like, at SEAL Team 3 right now, there should be a wall that has


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[Assistant] Some RP some Iraqi insurgent RPGs They they did do that in Vietnam like their seals that brought stuff home from Vietnam I think the statute of limitations is probably clear by now But you know that you can go and you can see like they have some of that stuff They'd have it in some of their sometimes we'd have old like chai comms in the weapons in the armory so they would bring stuff home and


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[Assistant] We, we, we, we messed that up. So yeah, war trophies next time, you know.


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[Assistant] Think about that there, leaders. Give, give the opportunity to get some, get some, put some protocols in place. Here's your war trophy.


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[Assistant] It could, it could, that's another reason. Maybe there's some, you know, thing I'm not thinking about, but for me, uhm.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and this, when you start talking about the slippery slope, just going back to this whole conversation we just had about ethics and what you're gonna do and what you're not gonna do and, and literally taking care of the boys, right? Taking care of the boys. Look, if


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[Assistant] JP Donnell is 23 years old and he gets in a fight out in town. Guess what? I'm going to do what I can to make sure that he doesn't get in any trouble at all.


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[Assistant] I'm gonna take care of him. Now, is he gonna maybe get some freaking


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[Assistant] Get an ass chewing? Is he? Absolutely. Is he gonna get some extra duty? Is he? Absolutely. Is he gonna be the designated driver on the next three trips that we go on? Absolutely. So there's this, I don't want to, I don't want to, number one, I don't want to give the impression because it's not the right impression that I was like, oh, you know, if you crossed, if you disobey any rule at any time, I'm gonna, you know, you're out.


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[Assistant] That's, that's not what we're talking about. I probably should have clarified that better. Like, hey, you're gonna, you're a young team guy.


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[Assistant] You're going to do some dumb stuff. You're a young whatever Marine. You're going to do some dumb stuff. I'm not going to wreck your career over it.


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[Assistant] I'm actually probably kind of known for that. Like if you, hey look man, you do something dumb out in town, or you make a mistake, or you, even, you know, going through the house, you do something stupid, it's like, oh, I'm going to ruin your career. No, actually, I'm going to train you. Going back to what I said earlier, if JP Danel gets in a fight out in town, whose fault is it?


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[Assistant] It's actually my fault. I actually didn't do a good job explaining how if JP can't go on deployment with us, he's aiding Al-Qaeda. Do you think JP Donnell wants to hear the words, you're aiding Al-Qaeda? That freaking guy would go nuts.


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[Assistant] So, so it's actually my fault. But if I didn't do a good job of making him understand that, and then he ends up getting in trouble, well, I failed him. I'm not gonna fail him twice. I'm gonna say, dude.


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[Assistant] Alright, listen, you just got your freakin', you just got your uh, your alcohol drinking card pulled. You're not allowed to drink anymore until we, you know, until we get back from deployment. You are the designated driver from now on. You are gonna do whatever, whatever little assignments to get him tightened up and make sure he doesn't get in trouble again. So, that's how you take care of the boys. And then it goes into, hey, there's things that you could do


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[Assistant] That are immoral, illegal, unethical. And if you cross those lines


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[Assistant] You're on your own. And I'm actually gonna do my best to crush you.


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[Assistant] So just, I wanted to get that point of clarification because I don't want a bunch of my, uh, guys that work for me over the years sitting there going, what are you talking about? Because yes, if you did something stupid, I was going to handle it. I was no, I was, I just had a couple of conversations over the past weekend. You know, we went to had some retirement ceremonies and whatnot and I had some great conversations with guys that were like, Oh, Hey, remember when you, when I did this and you,


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[Assistant] You, this is what you did to me. And basically what I did to them was punish them on, by myself. Not running up the chain of command. And I had, I, for some reason, this is an interesting statement. I didn't mind, if someone did something dumb, I didn't mind being the senior guy with a secret.


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[Assistant] Like the senior guy like, okay, this happened, you did something stupid. It stops with me. You're gonna get punished. And by the way,


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[Assistant] The, my boss calls and says, what the hell, I just found out about this. You know what I say? Oh yeah, sir. I didn't want to bother with you. Here's the punishment that I administered. Here's, you know, he's no longer allowed to drink. He's the designated driver for the next six months. Like all those things. That's what I did. I'm okay with that.


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[Assistant] And my boss still might get mad, but my boss probably is gonna say, alright Roger that, I got it. Next time you better give me a heads up in case this comes back. So, being the senior man with a secret on something that you have, you have handled.


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[Assistant] And something that's not like a stain on the reputation of the teams or a transgression of the morals of a human. I got you.


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[Assistant] And if you do some dumb shit, you work for me and you're a good dude, work- I'm gonna make sure you do less of it.


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[Assistant] Did I freakin' write you up and, and, and, uh, give you a bad fit rep? No, cause you just did some dumb shit and we're gonna learn from it. No big deal. Freakin' stoner? Think stoner wasn't out doing dumb shit?


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[Assistant] Come on. This dude was captain dumb shit, right? He's getting out there getting after it. What are we doing? Like, hey bro.


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[Assistant] Think about what, you know, like we think through these things. So again, I don't, I don't want to sit here and give this impression that we're over here running, running the Boy Scouts, right? We're over here running the Boy Scouts because we're not, we're not running the Boy Scouts.


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[Assistant] The Boy Scouts doesn't have to kill people for a living. We do.


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[Assistant] But the, the people that are gonna kill people for a living, they've got a lot of testosterone in their body. You know how testosterone affects people? You know? Makes people wanna fight.


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[Assistant] Makes people want to go get with girls. This is what happens. This is not like, this is the physiological stuff that goes down. So, what kind of person wants to become a frogman?


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[Assistant] I'll tell you what kind of person wants to become a frogman. He's got a high testosterone level. He wants to fight. He wants to break shit.


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[Assistant] That's what he wants to do. I actually want that guy. In my platoon.


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[Assistant] Yeah, no, and you can see where all of a sudden it turns into, you know, every single person's got their war trophy. Which honestly, I'm still good with that. Like, I think it should be like, hey, if you deploy, and you're in combat arms, you get your, you can get, you can bring back one, you know, weapon.


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[Assistant] And you know what, I bet you're right too, like I've heard some of those stories about


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[Assistant] Like the Marines going on the beach and they come back out and the Navy guys would do anything to get, you know, a Japanese freaking samurai sword or whatever, a German Luger. You know, then maybe you get into black market stuff, like maybe it just escalates to the point where they just had to shut it down. But again, you need to make a protocol.


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[Assistant] If you make a protocol, like you're allowed to take one, you're allowed one weapon. It needs to be demilled, it needs to be serialized, it needs to be assigned to you and you're gonna sign for it.


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[Assistant] Yeah, that's, so sometimes I'm a little bit too much of a rule follower, you know, that's one of those situations. Uh, it's like, Hey, you know, like here's a situation where I didn't follow the rules was they were hot on the photograph thing. Like you're not allowed to take pictures of operations and


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[Assistant] At my first deployment, we didn't. We followed the rule. Like I was like, hey, here's the rule. And so, no pictures. So, it was very limited pictures. I don't have a lot of pictures from that first deployment.


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[Assistant] Again, there was some situations where guys took pictures and I'm actually thankful. But probably a little while into our deployment, I kind of realized we better take pictures of our friends. And I'm really thankful that we did that because


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[Assistant] But that was a rule. And it was actually a heavily enforced rule at the time because photographs


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[Assistant] Were against general order number one, like you weren't allowed to take pictures.


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[Assistant] You know, uh, it actually wasn't general order number one. General order number one said you couldn't take pictures of like, enemy combatants. But the NS, the naval special warfare rule at the time was like, no pictures of operations period. That's it, period. And...


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[Assistant] And so, we weren't, and then very quickly in deployment, I cleared everyone out. I was like, hey, take freaking pictures, cause we're, we're gonna want them.


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[Assistant] And that's one of those rules, you know? You gotta, and I would, I could easily, uh,


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[Assistant] Explain that to anyone in my chain of command that would have said, Hey, why did you take pictures? I said, Hey, we were in a serious combat situation. There was a chance that someone was going to get killed and I wanted it us to have pictures of our freaking friends. And if you want to.


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[Assistant] Send me to, uh, a corps marshal for that. Let's go.


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[Assistant] Let's go, because I think that's, I think is actually the ethical and moral and right thing to do, was to take pictures, and we did. So there's an example. You know, uhm, we didn't quite follow the rule.


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[Assistant] Alright, uhm, let's wrap this up. You got any more questions, Echo Charles? No, no, that was it. Awesome. Hey, uh, if you want to support this podcast, go to JockoFuel.com. Get yourself some, some go.


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[Assistant] Drinks. They're awesome. I'm too deep right now. Too deep into the Jocko fuels. You only got down one.


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[Assistant] Uh, check, you can get those, you can get the, the, mulk. The ready to drink mulk, the pow, the pow pow mulk.


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[Assistant] Well check this out, go to JockoFuel.com and you can check out all this stuff. You can check out the Joint Warfare, the Supergirl, the Time War. Time War all day. The Time War all day. The, I mean, well it's not all day, it's every day. Every day. It's just a good way to feel better across the board.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a legitimate way. So, give that one a crack. Uh, you can get this stuff at Vitamin Shop. You can get it at Wawa. Wawa, you're gonna have to look.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Little bit, trying to get, we're getting squeeze, we're getting the squeeze from some of the big Empire beverage companies. So, but Vitamin Shop, number one brand, you know that? No big deal. Yea, we're in the military commissaries, commissaries, we're working on the military exchanges.


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[Assistant] I like going to the commissary when we're in there. That's good. But the NEX and all they have is poison for our troops. For our troops.


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[Assistant] Actively giving them stuff that's bad for them. Well, this is wrong. So we're working on it. Hannaford's, DashStore's, Wake Fern Shop, ShopRite, HEB, Tejas. You gave me a report this morning from the field, Life Babin.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so rolling to HEV, rolling to Meijer, out in the Midwest. Lifetime, you know what Lifetime Fitness is? Yes. Dude, have you been to a Lifetime Fitness? They're insane. Have you been to a Lifetime Fitness?


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[Assistant] Yeaah. So, go check all that out. Get yourself some Jocko Fuel. Jockofuel.com.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You wear black jeans. I'm about to be wearing black jeans. You know what, you know, uh, I, I am going to, I think, I think those black jeans, especially when they're new, are going to be suitable for like, little bit elevated scenarios. Yes. You know what I'm saying? Yes, I do. Like date night. Yeaah. With the old lady. Yeaah. And I will.


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[Assistant] Where I walk down, like with a pair of jeans on and a t-shirt, a black t-shirt. Down from where? Down from my like house upstairs, where my mom is. Oh right, downstairs. Walk downstairs and my daughter, my 13 year old daughter sees me with like jeans and a black t-shirt on and she goes, hey, oh, she's like, oh, why are you all dressed up?


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[Assistant] What's good about that is uhm, you know, just the same way that I talk about jujitsu, like if somebody, if, if, if you don't train and someone grabs you, you have a level of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, you're just frozen for at least, even if you're, even if you're a squared away person, you don't know what to do for at least three quarters of a second.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And by the way, that could be all it takes. So when you start doing combatives, when you start training, like you start training pistol, you start training knives, you start thinking through those things,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You all of a sudden, you're okay. And that three quarters of a second, it starts to get minimized. I'd actually have to run the numbers. Let's see, if you don't, if you don't train Jujitsu and someone grabs you, you're probably dealing with ten seconds. Five seconds, six seconds before you start processing what's happening in a legitimate way.


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[Assistant] If you train jiu-jitsu, you're, you didn't just, zero seconds, you're already processing. It's the same thing with like, doing combatives, doing weapons type training where someone's pulling a knife on you. If you've never seen it before, you are not, not knowing what to do for five seconds. Even, literally, even if the reaction is, I know I need to run away,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you haven't fought through that before, that knife comes out and you freeze for three seconds. Guess what? You got stuck in the neck. You're bleeding out, homie.


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[Assistant] So, so don't let that happen. Yeah, so Actually when you were setting up your gym stoic jiu-jitsu, you sent me the name You're like we're gonna be called stoic jiu-jitsu house. I just I stoically just nodded to myself. Oh, yeah Hell yeah, especially because mark is kind of stoic dude, right marks


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[Assistant] So, Stoke Jujitsu, check it out, Dripping Springs, uh, how many times a week do you have classes? How many times a day do you have classes?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stokejujitsu.com. Freaking good name. It's a good one, man. You done good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They are, they are mobile. They are more mobile. We actually are, have some experimental phase gi pants right now. Now there's going to be problems, right? Cause you got, you got IBJJF, you got rules, you're not allowed to have stretch cause it's going to interfere with things, but we're trying to see what is the, what is the parameters of that? Like what, what, what could be legal, right? Cause there's certain amount of stretch that gives no,


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[Assistant] I'm definitely not getting limited by my jiu-jitsu gi pants. I'm getting limited by my own freaking lack of ability to stretch. Your lack of mobility. Or my lack of mobility in my own self. Good. So we gotta watch out for that.


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[Assistant] And here's the thing, I think if you didn't announce that they were stretched, no one would be able to tell. So I think that's probably gonna be the answer. Like it's so small, you can feel it, but you can't feel it. You can feel it, but they can't feel it, is what I'm getting at.


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[Assistant] Origin USA. Get yourself some of this stuff. By the way, it's made in America. Uh, everything we just talked about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Going and fighting and trying to preserve freedom in the world. That's awesome. We appreciate the military 100% for sure. We also have to appreciate economic power. And right now, we've shifted economic power overseas. That's what we've done.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've done it. The corporations have done it. They've just voluntarily said, oh, we can make an extra


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] $1.78 on every pair of jeans. So we'll just fire everyone we have here in America and we'll move the factories overseas and that's exactly what they did. Cause they're scum. They're scum.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, we're not doing that. We're, we're, we're building here. Every, when you put on a pair of origin jeans or an origin gi or an origin rash guard, you are...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So get yourself on board with America. Get yourself into a situation where you are defending America and bringing back this economic power that we've given away. And by the way, it starts with manufacturing things like jeans and clothing, but we're reliant on other countries


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actually adversarial countries for things that we need. And that's terrible for our national security.


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[Assistant] So let's start. You can start with a pair of jeans. You might not feel like you're helping out our national security when you buy a pair of jeans, but you are. You're actually helping out our national security when you buy a pair of jeans.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's what you're doing. So, look, you may or may not have served this country as a military individual. If you did, thank you. If you didn't, you can still serve. By, by building our economy. So there you go, originusa.com.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, which is what the funny thing about that is, you legitimately have to say, if you got a flat tire on your Cadillac Escalade Echo Charles, you can legitimately be like, good, you know, I got a Cadillac Escalade, bruh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It costs 8 dollars and 18 cents a month. Unless you can't afford it, then you just email. What do you email? Assistance at jocondeground.com. Subscribe to the YouTube channels. We got-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some, some content on there. So go and check those out. Subscribe to them. We got Psychological Warfare. We got Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, they're like, it's the best book ever. I've had people say, you should write more. I'm like, there's four more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Kid. Kid in the game. Where's your parents? I'ma smack them around.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, yeaah, no, it's my fault as I just said, because I haven't done a good job of putting the word out. So, get those books for all those kids, Mikey and the Dragons, About Face, Extreme Ownership, and the Dichotomy of Leadership, written by myself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And Leif Babin, you heard a lot from him today. So yea, we wrote those books a while back. We also have a leadership consultancy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which is called Echelon Front and we solve problems through leadership. We've worked with every different kind of company that you can imagine in every different industry. We take lessons learned from combat, from the battlefield, from life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we help you solve problems through leadership.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can go to EchelonFront.com for details. I know you're heading out, you're heading out after this, going to work with a construction company.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And good deal Dave. Yep. And that's what that's what we do. So let's say a construction company in this instance, they're wanting to perform better. They're wanting to do better. Oh, what do they want to do better at? Doesn't really matter. They want to do better as a construction company. They have some issues.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, cool. How do we solve those issues? We solve those issues through leadership. That's what we do at Echelon Front. So go to echelonfront.com if you need help inside your organization and we'll get a team out to you to assess and then fix. That's what we're doing. We also have some live events.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So we sell out, and then we sell out a little bit more, so we sold out, it was, it wasn't like overly crowded where you were stuffed in there, but


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] None of the instructor staff or echelon front staff got a seat. We had to give it all up to people. So my point is we sell out. So you should, uh, if you want to go to one of those things, you want to go to Gettysburg, you want to go to the Battle of Little Big Horn, you need to go and register.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, you wanna go to the FTX and see what it's like to utilize these things in simulated combat situations so that they really make sense and then you can apply them in your life? Go to the FTX. So we got all those things. Go to eslanfront.com. We also have an online training academy where you can learn to take ownership of your life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, it's magic in the same way that Jujitsu is magic. Yes. It's magic in the same way that Jujitsu is magic. So, back in the day, back in the day, if you knew Jujitsu,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You could win any fight, right? You could, you could be like, oh, this person's gonna mess with me, cool, I'll beat him. Hoist Gracie, UFC 1, goes up against boxers and wrestlers and Muay Thai and just is able to beat him. Why? Cause he understood this magic called jiu jitsu.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's what, that's actually what leadership is. You're gonna communicate to those human beings. You're gonna build relationships with those human beings. And it doesn't matter if they're in your wife or your husband. It doesn't matter if they're your co-workers at work. It doesn't matter if it's your children's football team.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It doesn't matter if it's your buddy, your girlfriend, you have to interact with other human beings. That's what's going on. And there's actual moves. There's actual magic, just like jiu jitsu.