Jocko Podcast 304: How NOT to Lead. The Psychology of Military Incompetence Pt.2

this is jonco podcast number 304 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening also joining us tonight dave burke good evening dave good evening we're going to continue our review of the book on the psychology of military incompetence we started that on the last last podcast 303 um believe it or not we only got through the forward and the preface and two chapters uh so this one could take a while but there's a reason there's a reason i've been sitting on this book for a while there's a reason i'm doing this podcast right now and so today we're going to get through some of the first part of the meat of the book which is the historical examples and these historical examples are what get referred back to throughout this entire book so each one of these each one of these situations that we're going to talk about they're broken into chapters in most cases not 100 but these are disastrous military engagements engagements or battles or campaigns or wars and each one each one of these events could be an entire book and that means they could be each event could be a podcast or two or three and some of them have been you'll you'll notice some of them that we that we'll talk about we have done podcasts on because they're significant military events some of them i'm sure we'll come back and visit in the future and i'm gonna move [Music] i'm trying to give enough information in from each one of these events so that when he refers back to these events later you get it because if you don't have the context then you won't understand the references that he's making so i'll try and condense the historical examples a little bit but it's it's rough and some of them are really obvious for instance the the section on like world war one considering what world war one is it's it's relatively short why because most of us know the basic history of world war one same thing with world war ii uh but then he gives more specific examples inside of each of those and uh outside of those wars that are definitely more detailed and the this section of the book starts with an epic example of incompetence and tragedy it is about the crimean war including the famous or infamous depending on who reads you the story charge of the light brigade so this war was fought between october 1853 and february 1856 between russia on one side who eventually lost to an alliance of france the ottoman empire great britain and sardinia and so we're going to get into it in the book um the crimean war certainly marked an exceedingly low port low point in british military history the poor quality of the officers most of whom had bought their commissions and for whom no standard of education was required stood in marked contrast to the excellence of the men described by one observer as the finest soldiers i ever saw in stature physique and appearance so so right out of the gate we don't like this scenario how do you get to be in a leadership position you pay money that's how you get to be in a leadership position your dad is a rich whatever and so you're a spoiled punk-ass kid and your dad wants you to have some clout in the world so he says oh i'm gonna buy you a commission and by the way the more money he has the more rank you get savage amongst but yeah he's also saying that the the men were squared away amongst the officers there seemed to be an inverse relationship between rank and efficiency the more senior they were the less competent they appeared at the apex of this pyramid of mediocrity stood or rather sat for he was always on his horse or in his quarters and being inordinately shy rarely walked amongst his men lord raglan his qualifications for leading a british expeditionary force appear to have been his age 67. his lineage he was the youngest of duke of buford's 11 sons and has experienced 25 years as military secretary to the duke of wellington and then master general of ordnance no one would accuse him of having a mind cluttered by any previous experience of command before he had none not even of a company so this guy raglan which is a bummer because raglan is the name of an awesome surf spot in new zealand it's also a name of one of my favorite restaurants in san diego which is named after the surf spot not after not after lord not after the lord yes sir lord raglan raglan obi shout out his appointment however was not wholly inappropriate for of him it was said his chief merit was that despite his incurable habit throughout the campaign of referring to the enemy as the french which by the way with the enemy was the russians and and and the french were on his side he was admittedly and admirably adapted to lessen the friction in coalition wars so this is a guy that was sort of you know easy to get along with right they oh you got a bunch of people we got the french we got the sardinians we got the ottoman empire we got england let's put somebody in charge that kind of can make friends so that's his admirable quality in fact raglan seemed to agree with the with most french proposals it was a characteristic of the man that he hated conflict so many weird things in all these different personalities it is just you know i was on ef online today or sorry extreme ownership academy today and uh somebody brought up one of those personality tests and so he was saying you know we we had a company off site and we did this personality test and it made me start thinking about hey when i'm interacting with someone else i need to think about what type of personality they have and try and relate things in a way that will best land on their personality and i said yes absolutely and then on top of that add 78 other items who is this person what's their personality type sure what's their experience what's their background what kind of day are they having today what's their what's their position in the organization what's my relationship with them because what we're dealing with when you're dealing with other human beings is that that thing that we talked about on the underground podcast which is we're all insane because we all see the world a little bit differently so when i'm relating to dave i can't just think oh it's just i need to relate to his personality but how does he feel about this project what's his passion level what's his experience how much does he know has he had bad experience with this department that he's going to go take charge of all those things you have to think about when you're going into these situations dealing with other human beings it's a disaster yeah we say hum we say leadership human nature endeavor all the time and this idea of even just contemplating how the other person is going to react is a huge step in the right direction oh and it's it's shocking how many people you know that's really what you that's really what you get when you get the young inexperienced leader they're seeing everything just through their own eyes and everyone just what is wrong with everyone oh i'll tell you what's wrong they're humans yeah fast forward a little bit if raglan and his staff constituted the nerve center of the army of in the crimea the sinews compromised a field force of five infantry and two cavalry divisions under commanders who for the most part did little to inspire confidence here too the problem was partly one of age apart from the 35 year old duke of cambridge cousin to the queen all the senior commanders were between 60 and 70 with sir john burgoyne chief engineer topping the list at 72. certainly it could be said of them that what they lacked in experience they made up for in years so am i am i committing ageism right now by saying hey if you're 72 and you're in a war that's taking place in 1853 maybe you're not in the best of health and maybe you shouldn't be running a war um check as i i think a lot of times in these wars back in the day like if you're a british lord or whatever this is just going to check the box right oh you can go out and you know kill some natives and be a hero for the king or for the crown right some of that is definitely going on as has so often been the case the next lower level of command did contain some legal leaders of vigor with a talent for war such one was sir colin campbell his command unfortunately was no larger than a brigade as usual in those days the cream of the crop of the army was the cavalry commanded in this instance by lord lucan an impulsive man of moderate intellect and lacking experience there you go that's a good way to start directly under lucan in charge of the heavy and light brigades respectively were james scarlett and lord cardigan the the arrangement was not a happy one to select cardigan for a position subservient to his brother-in-law lucan was hardly less fallicious than subordinating a mongoose to a snake so you have these two relatives that hate each other and one's been put in charge of the other lord lucan's been put in charge of lord cardigan fast forward a little bit the prime characteristic of lord raglan his almost compulsive non-participation aristocratic courteous and aloof he seemed to display many of the characteristics of the extreme introvert so distasteful was it to have any direct contact with his fellow men that he could hardly bear to issue an order and when he did so it was couched in such a way to ensure a vast gulf between his wishes and the comprehension of those for whom it was intended think about that you're giving orders that basically make no sense it's insanity it's a it's a it's the opposite of simple clear and concise um this first battle was won by england but it it was uh not exactly it didn't exactly go the way they wanted it to um that battle was at alma despite the fact that raglan watching from afar played little part in bringing about alma was a victory for the allies thanks to the courage and superb fighting qualities of the soldiers and their junior officers through what one observer described as a great want of generalship the victory was achieved with much unnecessary loss of life even worse beca and even worse because of a total failure to follow it up yielded few if any dividends for the campaign as a whole so they were able to win the battle this first battle only because the soldiers and the junior officers were freaking squared away and brave and that's a that's a thing that you get throughout these throughout this book is the bravery of the soldiers is undeniable but they get put in situations that are just disastrous there is one final point of some relevance to the thesis of this book it concerns the matter of initiative lack of direction from those at the apex of a hierarchical authoritarian organization provides a special dilemma for those at lower levels in the chain of command confronted with the absence of clear-cut orders what are they to do so you're in a hardcore hierarchy and there's no clear-cut orders what are you supposed to do if they take the law into their own hands they run the risk of being accused of insubordination particularly if their plans happen to miscarry but if they do not show initiative then they are equally likely to suffer for not having done so at alma the field officers for want of higher direction use their own initiative with considerable success in doing so they saved the day if not the campaign this is what we set up in organizations when we're micromanaging people and all of a sudden you can't get the word out what is what are people supposed to do if you've trained them to get micromanaged they're not going to do anything uh fast forward a little bit trouble started in dividing command between the two generals lord lucan and lord cardigan already mentioned them individually neither was fitted to his post together they were a disaster as one of their fellow officers wrote in his diary the more the more i see of lord lucan and lord cardigan the more i thoroughly despise them such crass ignorance and such overbearing temper raglan did not excel in dealing with these men instead of loyally supporting lucan he appeared to condone even the most flagrant excesses of the incorrigible cardigan so he's got the senior officer which is lucan and instead of like okay you know what you're just gonna support the chain of command here instead he sort of lets cardigan run wild as well not only did he allow cardigan to bring his private yacht into bakla balaclava where for weeks it took up valuable space in the congested harbor but he also permitted him to live on board even while his brigade and divisional commander were roughing it ashore on rations under canvas i like how dave is just closing his eyes and shaking his head throughout this by forfeiting his position of authority and exacerbating the already bitter enmity between his subordinates raglan's laissez-faire handling of these relatively minor matters sowed the seas of the ultimate disaster the destruction of the light brigade so look we've heard some crazy stuff but when your troops and your leadership and your subordinate leadership are living off rations intense and you're in a freaking yacht in the harbor you can't make that up dude that is a level of crazy that you almost couldn't believe and we were hearing stories about like they were bringing pianos and like you know gramophones and stuff like wow that's pretty excessive and now you got my i need my personal yacht in the harbor and i'm going to live on it yeah man that's rough have you ever been on a yacht before not like a real yacht no echo charles yes sir i have but yeah i've been on a yacht and let's just say it's not exactly roughing no no sir freaking crazy um fast forward a little bit for behind the color and the glory behind the valor and the dash the charge of the light brigade was a blunder of monumental proportions and an object lesson in what can happen when the promotional machinery of a military organization is such as to put troops at the mercy of men like raglan lucan and cardigan and there's a book actually late always wants to cover this book on on the podcast to charge the light brigade you get into the details of these it's it's it's insane it's totally insane here's a little a little brief of it the explanation of this curious lapse hinges upon the fact that lucan had oppressed upon cardigan that his job was to stay put and defend the position attacking only such enemy forces as came within reach under the circumstances cardigan determined that he would not give his brother-in-law the slightest grounds for making a complaint should the attack fail if it did then lucan should take the blame lucan had ordered him to defend the position and defend it he would even if it cost him his life haven't i said before some people they would rather die than let their ego get get offended here's a classic example it seems that the charge of the light brigade from which only 15 percent of the original force of 673 rode back was the end result of faulty communication between five men five men raglan his quartermaster general aery lords lieutenant cardigan and the impetuous captain nolan raglin's contribution is that he issued orders the precise meaning of which has remained a matter for debate the fourth and more disastrous of these orders arie wrote out on a flimsy piece of paper in doing so he made no attempt to unravel the enigma posed by the words of his master and the um i'm trying to see if they have this in here yeah raglan says cavalry to advance and take advantage of any opportunity to cover the heights they will be supported by the infantry which have been ordered to advance on two fronts that is the vaguest of vague orders right there uh as they're trying to sort through this which front what guns in its new written form the order was then passed to the unbalanced captain nolan who loathed both lucan and cardigan this glittering young officer of the 15th hussars who made up in arrogance what he lacked in perspacity delivered the order to lord lucan luken whose comprehension of raglan's wishes seems to have been minimal but who is not going to demean himself by bandying words with nolan conveyed his interpretation of the order to cardigan this is like the telephone game you play when you're a kid cardigan with a bunch of ego cardigan to give him his due realizing that he was being asked to charge the russian guns down a valley flanked by artillery expl expressed considerable astonishment at what would so evidently be the coup de gras for his brigade but once again communication foundered on the rocks of mutual dislike pride and jealousy joined and then overtaken by the irrepressible nolan cardigan led his brigade into the jaws of death um there's a little section here on a portioning of the blame like what do you do and he says this and it's a very interesting thing to be talking about in this book because well you'll see it's a very sad feature of authoritarian organizations that their nature inevitably militates against the possibility of learning from experience through the apportioning of blame so hi these these authoritarian organizations can't learn from mistakes because they just blame each other well this is extreme owner the opposite of extreme ownership this is extreme disownership the reason is not hard to find since authoritarianism itself is the product of psychological defensive defenses authoritarian organizations are past masters at deflecting blame they do but so by denial by rationalization by making scapegoats or by some mixture of the three wow this is why the book extreme ownership has hit a mark because it's the opposite of this denial rationalization making scapegoats or by some mixture of this the three however it is achieved the net result is that no real admission of failure or incompetence is ever made by those who are really responsible hence nothing can be done about preventing a reoccurrence in this instance as many others to be considered presently scapegoats were found one of them was captain nolan an easy choice since he had very considerably allowed himself to be killed i mean you can't you can't make this up you can't make this up the fact that the book extreme ownership and the concept of extreme ownership is literally the opposite of the psychopathology of bad leadership and the people like even in the you know i did a ted talk about extreme ownership and sort of part of that is no one takes ownership of the problems and therefore the problems don't get solved that's what this just said in more words because because uh no dr nixon is smarter than i am not the only problem another thing going on that mean meaning the charge of the light brigade was not the only bad situation that unfolded in the crimean war the crimean missan mismanagement reached its apogee not in the battle so far considered but in the winter and by the way i'm skipping some battles he gives more detail not in the battle so considered but in the winter which followed them despite the fact that between october 1854 and april 1855 there was no fighting whatsoever raglan's army suffered a 35 decline in its active strength this loss was due to a total disregard for the army's physical welfare and refusal to ameliorate the cold and wet of a russian winter men died of cholera exposure malnutrition they died of untreated wounds of scurvy gangrene and dysentery as one surgeon observed of the early losses at balaclava we now bury three times the number of men every week and think nothing of it and that's not from combat that's just from people dying according to one writer what killed more men than russian bullets what made life miserable what sent men in the hundreds to the hospital tent or the grave they were frequently synonymous was want of firewood without it not only were men never warm not only could they never cook their ration of cold grunter but they were never dry one of raglan's colonels wrote they go down to the trenches wet come back wet go into the hospital wet die the same night and are buried in their wet blankets the next morning and an army surgeon wrote i never thought the human subject would endure so much privation and suffering and we have to remember this is when freaking england is a superpower this isn't like some ragtag military unit hey what's exposure when you die like cold either cold hot you know if you're out in the tundra the freezing tundra you die of being too cold that's exposure if you're out in the desert you're exposed to heat you can dye it just the elements in general elements in general yeah you probably wouldn't know about that growing up in hawaii no because like you're not gonna die from exposure go sleep in exposure it's all good back to the book eventually after a winner of terrible privation raglan's army came to the last battles of the war those of redden they involved the storming and capture of a fortress on the outskirts of sebastopol it seems that little had been learned again there was gross underestimation of the enemy's ability indeed the forthcoming engagement was regarded with such equanimity that it attracted a large assembly of sightseers when the band of the rifle brigade played light music an audience of officers wives traveling gentlemen and even a number of serving soldiers took a position on surrounding hills raglan with his mind closed to all that had gone on before and an enduring overconfidence in in his army chose only 400 of his 25 000 men for the first stage of the battle the occupation of some quarries from which the assault on red end would be mounted this proud economy in manpower was his first mistake so you got 25 000 people and you're gonna use 400 of them and by the way there's people there's a band playing i don't even know what kind of music they're playing what do you say light spirited music if you're going into combat and you're not listening to metallica you shouldn't bring a band raglan's staff miscalculated the strength needed to occupy the quarries and to repel counter-attacks reserves had been inadequate and unavailable when most needed little thought had been given to the selecting of troops to be used the proportion of veterans was low many of the officers although unquestionably brave were young and inexperienced but it was with the second stage of the battle the main assault that things went really wrong again raglan and other high-ranking officers underestimated enemy strength and overestimated the effects of artillery bombardment with which the he preceded the attack nor did he appreciate that between the bombardment of the russian fort and the dawn attacked forced upon him by the french commander the enemy would well be able to repair their defenses and their guns so you can just see mistakes are just piling up under the circumstances it was hardly surprising that the great volume of fire from the russian guns brought the british attack to a very bloody halt it was at this moment just when it was most needed that raglan's artillery received an order to cease fire it was this last blunder which transformed an aborted attack into a massacre no longer intimidated enemy muskets poured a hail of lead into raglan stricken army the latter parties moving like snails beneath their load were moaned down as they struggled up the slope thus ended the first battle for red anne until the most until then the most disastrous of the war raglan's army had no illusions as to the incompetence of their general and his staff a staff officer wrote we had been told from headquarters and other high authority that success was certain that the arraignment arrangements for the plan of attack were so perfect that they must succeed when they when put to the test they turned out to be so excretably bad that failure was inevitable others described the battle as mismanaged blotched blungled feeble and ill-conducted bad business a bungling disgraceful childish failure [Applause] later lord wellesley wrote upon this occasion what we asked from them was beyond the power of men to give our plan for the attack was simply idiotic and was bound to fail another writer has this to say not only was it a question of defective tactics at headquarters there was merely ignorance not merely ignorance but an entire lack of vision how was it possible that raglan and those about him knowing as they ought by this time the remarkable russian ability to repair damage overnight could believe that 2 000 soldiers would be able to advance over a shell swept glacies 250 yards in length thread their way through an undestroyed abitus cross a ditch 20 foot wide and then a sail an escarpment without preliminary bombardment do i mean can you even fathom that sort of operational planning you have to fight you have to think this is no thought yeah i i'll be honest with you i'm having a hard time listening to this and and and trying to even capture like the the the seminal like the the critical portion of this i'm trying to get in my head like what is the most critical lesson from this of all these things that you keep piling on top of each other of all these insane things and there's a part of me that that that finds it unbelievable like i am literally having a hard time believing this happened knowing that it did of something i think is probably you know the biggest lesson in leadership and something you articulate to people all the time which is you you actually have to care about your people more than yourself that that fundamental belief not a tactic not not like like a tool but but the belief that your people matter more than yourself and we see that people struggle with that we see people struggle with that we do and we try to help them and and there's an ego and their selfishness and there are some natural tendencies we have to fight against but the depth the gulf between that idea and this is so far apart that it's really hard to appreciate how how little the perception is that the things that you're talking about aren't things they're people like human beings on your team and and hearing it is it's hard to comprehend how do you get so disconnected you know the yacht was like sort of a funny a little bit like sad story but we all know that we i know it's coming i know what the outcome is so the culmination of that is how inconceivable it could be and then how there's a lesson inside there of if you don't care about the people around you you're not going to listen to them and how far you can get from that i mean this isn't this isn't a thousand years ago yeah yeah the um like there's a billion different the the last section i read it's like oh a tactical problem tactical problem tactical problem tackle problem we get that there's some tackle and people make tactical mistakes how the question is how do you make all these tactical mistakes the answer is leadership yeah all your problems are leadership problem and the solution is leadership the solution to problems is leadership and you end up with people that are bad leaders in these situations they make bad decisions and things fall apart and the other thing we have to think about too because this is a very it's a military thing it's a military idea but there's there's the men and there's the mission right and there's a priority sometimes people say well you know the mission is the most important thing the reality is that's actually not true if you prioritize the mission over the men you won't have any men left and you won't be able to execute any missions so they're mutually supporting things that need to be both that both need to be addressed and taken care of yeah if if now look can you do can you get a mission where hey dave you're going to take your assault team in and you're taking out this you know air defense node in north korea and jocko's team is going to take out the other defense node and echo's team is going and if we don't take out these three defense nodes we can't like we're not going to strategically achieved this objective then it's like okay look we're gonna be we're gonna be taking some casualties and look at d-day that's what we did look the pacific island campaign that's what people did but to look at a situation like this where there's about 10 000 other ways to execute this mission is insane yeah and if and if and if you're going through that sort of mental arm wrestling over the men or the mission or the people and the mission the only way you actually get people to be willing to do that mission is for them to know that you care about them more than yourself and that's too that's your point is you're not even saying the mission isn't as important as the people in in like in a in a hierarchy you're saying that if you actually want to be able to accomplish the most difficult things the most difficult missions missions that almost appear unwinnable if you actually want to be able to do that which of course we do we're here to solve solve the problem here to complete the mission is to have people willing to do that and the only way to do that is for them to go oh dave actually cares about me more than just getting the check in the block that he knocked this thing out or took care of this one thing or got this mission solved we can tell his boss yeah mission accomplished and and you actually have a better chance of doing things that by rights almost appear to be impossible yeah the the culture that you have inside your organization you can have a culture inside your organization where people are going to be willing to sacrifice their lives for your team right and if you look at this time period with the brits with the victorian the honor the glory the i mean when you know at the beginning phases of world war one when they would when they would if there was if you were a military-aged male and you weren't in the military the women would give you the the white flower right which meant you were a coward and so people were like okay where do i sign up right and that was kind of the deal um look at the look at the japanese in world war ii now were those guys was those kamikaze pilots brainwashed well not even just brainwashed but were they regretful yeah in some cases they were but also they were committed culturally to this overarching thing here's the problem with that in both those cases if you as a leader continue to sacrifice people without making the progress you end up having to say uh this isn't working out yeah and the people will look at you and say wait a second we we tried this this isn't working you need to figure out a different plan or we're not going to do what you tell us to do um continuing on here for the student of the psychosomatic disease the aftermath of the battle is not without significance immediately following the defeat raglan was seen seen to age visibly within a few days he had contracted cholera and before 10 days had passed he was dead to his generals were similar similarly stricken raglan's demise added to the depression of the army had they known that his replacement would be 63 year old general simpson their grief might have been more acute it's not that simpson was a harsh task masker master on the contrary he was a gentle old man but a very mediocre ability he was as devoid of useful experience as had been his predecessor his methods were rather simpler be than those of raglans presumably to avoid giving a wrong order he gave no orders at all and he devised no plan in the words of one observer he did not command the army on the day of his promotion he is credited with saying they must indeed be hard up when they appointed an old man like me how about you say no and by the way if the boss doesn't come up with a plan come up with one in fact the government was not so hard up as they had to entrust the army to this gout gout-ridden old general a far better choice would have been the energetic and outspoken sir colin campbell a man of considerable ability and wide experience but campbell was a maverick and as such was unpopular with the military establishment he also came from a relatively humble background so instead of taking the freaking george s patton of the crew you take this loser under simpson's quavering and ineffectual hand the second battle for redden the last battle of the war proved even more disastrous than the first once again a massive bombardment was followed by a frontal assault across a heavily defended triangle of ground flanked by russian guns but this time the troops were younger and greener and despite all their training on the parade grounds of aldershot less inclined to valor than discretion having sustained 2447 casualties in two hours of fighting they turned tail and fled thus adding humiliation to defeat so that's what i was just talking about hey we're willing to sacrifice but but there's a line 2447 casualties and two hours of fighting as an example of protracted military incompetence at a high level of command the cream crimean war is not unfortunately unique it was however the prototype for subsequent ineptitude though small in number in comparison with those of later wars the 18 000 who died owed their ultimate their untimely demise to end and mixture of poor planning unclear orders lack of intelligence in both senses of the word and fatal acquiescence to social pressures on the part of their commander that's a very interesting topic social pressures we see a lot of that going on in this current time in the military social and political pressures on war fighting units who have a job which is to fight they died because they were mismanaged by men whose positions in the military hierarchy owed less to their ability than to their wealth their place in society or their reputation for quote fitting in they died because soldiers were too readily regarded as expendable objects the crimean wars the crimean war was fought at a time of the greatest prosperity this country had ever known when british efficiency inventiveness and sheer entrepreneurial vigor knew no bounds as i said earlier this isn't like a ragtag crew why then was it fought so badly so badly that the casual observer might have been forgiving for thinking that at some level we did not really want to lit win of course there are some obvious and immediate reasons governmental stinginess clearly played a part as did the deliberate policy of entrusting military matters to the to an aristocratic rich but essentially amateur elite this on the grounds that such a class would neither would have neither the motivation nor indeed the skill to turn upon the state but this is only to touch the surface of the problem such reasons do not explain the passivity and non-participation the monumental errors of judgment the ludicrous appointments the paralytic ability to improvise or innovate they do not explain the staggering and ultimately self-destroying wastage of manpower which seems to have its origin in a curiously detached attitude toward human suffering finally they do not explain the even greater depths of incompetence shown on this occasion by the enemy of whom it has been said quote the russians with more men in the field and immense potential reserves were even bigger muddlers than their invaders and seemed to move in a vague dream of battle so this that whole last section is saying look there were some problems like maybe the government didn't support as much maybe there was some some um some what do you say uh governmental stickiness right so there's some problems but you should not be losing like that it doesn't explain all these issues and especially that last part which says look the russians were like crap anyways it's not like they got beat by the freaking waffen ss in 1941. so there's issue issues um next the next thing that he talks about in here and again there's so much more detail in this because you get this book there's so much more detail that is important um the next section here chapter four talks about the boor war and we covered the buddha war on podcast 233 the boomer war the brewer army consisted is an interesting statement about decentralized command the boor army consisted of 35 000 generals each combatant his own master defending his homeland there were also they were also good marksmen agile horsemen and determined members of a flexible knowledgeable guerrilla force so that's what we're dealing with now the boors burma remember that were you waiting for me to say it uh well kind of no but that's the expression in uh in in in south africa for the boors it's like they're going to come up with a plan the boomer makes a plan that's my afrikaans that's good but that's the kind of people that you're fighting you're fighting farmers you're fighting people that work with the land that ride horses that shoot that hunt that's who you're fighting against freaking legit legit enemy fast forward a little bit largely because they eschewed any form of sartorial elegance that means clothing by the way and preferred the wearing of civilian attire dark cloaks and floppy hats to the sorts of uniforms affected by the british the boors were dubbed the rabble of the illiterate peasants and their army utterly ludicrous so these guys were just wearing like what they wore in the field this is like if you went to war with texas and they showed up wearing freaking levi's cowboy hats and wrangler shirts right and you're like well who are these guys yeah how are they gonna fall fast forward a little bit as lord kishner said the booers are not like the sudanese who stood up to a fair fight they're always running away on their little ponies there are good many foreigners among the boors but they are easily shot as they do not slink about like the brewers themselves so here you are complaining what kind of tactics are these what are they doing we had to be careful that like in iraq was like oh they're running around just doing these ieds that's cowardly it's like oh they work yeah how about that sense they're not as easily shot complaining that they're hard to kill yeah yeah check i guess maybe they know what they're they're doing yeah it sounds like they have a good plan yeah and by the way we did this to them in the revolutionary war but just fyi they're england they're they're lord kishner remember remember what happened at lexington in concord you know we were scurrying around too and we kind of kicked your ass so you should have maybe learned some lessons there which is one of the points of this whole book is the fact that there's no lessons learned this then was the background of the attitudes of the expertise the british army brought to the boomer war any residual doubts about its unfittedness for the expedition tend to dissipate when one considers the behavior of the generals put in charge the leading character was the commander in chief general sir redverse buller according to a contemporary description there could be no finer choice for the south african adventure there is no stronger commander in the british army than this remote almost grimly resolute completely independent utterly fearless steadfast and vigorous man big boned square jaw strong-minded strong-headed smartness sagacity administrative capacity he was born to be a soldier of the very best english type needless to say the best type of all freaking legit right here's the reality unfortunately this assessment was at variance with the facts in all but two particulars firstly he was indeed big secondly though sadly lacking in moral courage he was undoubtedly brave when it came to physical danger in this respect as in many others he was not unlike raglan of the crimean war and indeed some other commanders of subsequent years of sir reversabler as he became to be known so instead of his his name is redverse they started calling reverse instead kruger writes at the risk of marring the contemporary description it should be mentioned that his big bones were particularly well covered especially in the region of his stomach and that his square jaw was not especially apparent above a double chin so this is just like a fat dude and they're trying to make him sound like a badass um what was his attitude like fast forward a little bit buller lost no time in trying to rid himself of any direct responsibility for the conduct of the war by handing over the reins to subordinate commanders who to whom he gave no further directives butler's subordinate general methuen with eight thousand men was very nearly defeated by three thousand booers methuen's objective was the modern river a natural defense line for boers accordingly without any reconnaissance he ordered his troops to make a frontal attack are we starting to get off are we starting to understand the frontal attack might not be the best move since he could not see the enemy he wrongly assumed that no enemy was there led by their officers the men advanced across the flat and open belt towards the river all went well until they were within easy range of the boors who had concealed themselves with what was subsequently described as a fiendish cunning below the deep banks of the river those of methuen's army who were not killed outright by the sudden blast of fire from the invisible bores spent the day lying prostrate under a scorching sun in a temperature of 110 unable to move forward or back they including the 70 wounded suffered extreme discomfort from thirst and slowly blistering skin methuen's remedy was to direct heavy artillery fire on the boor positions thanks to the latter's use of cover this barrage had very little influence on the course of events apart from killing a number of his own troops through faulty range finding it was only under cover of darkness that the british even eventually withdrew leaving behind 500 dead and wounded i keep following these little traps as i'm listening to you and the trap i keep falling into is you started up like hey here's this guy in charge and he's totally incompetent and he's um he's gonna relinquish the command and the control this whole responsibility to his subordinates and i'm thinking awesome that's awesome i would love to be that subordinate cool i've got an incompetent boss but at least he's letting me be in charge and the trap i keep falling into is how far down this goes this this sort of like illness of the organization that this leadership it isn't just the people at the very very top it's all the subordinate commanders as well because when i hear you say you have a weak boss i i like that kind of fired up cool that's awesome sweet i'll be in charge this is great i can and i can do whatever i want because he doesn't seem to care but that's that's i've fallen on that trap a couple times now hearing you talk about how far down this goes of people that have should not be there for their dads are buying their position or whatever it might be i gotta bring this up i'm gonna bring it up right now there's a underlying this book this book catches so many of the themes that i talk about all the time and that we talk about all the time there's one theme that i've found throughout this book that never gets addressed never gets addressed in this book and it's an underlying theme that is so obvious as you read this book and that is the idea of detachment because every one of these military leaders as you read the decisions that they're making and you know that they're all caught up in their ego and the and their social structure and the hierarchy and the actual tactical engagement that they're in and that what they can see they make it's so you just sit there and think hey hold on a second you're gonna you're gonna move across this open field that you're an idiot like why are you doing this and the reason one of the reasons yes there's ego yes there's there's uh a social structure and hierarchy and bravery and all those things yep they're all there but if you are in charge of something and you don't take a step back to actually assess what is happening how it's going to happen why you're going to do it this way if you can't detach from these things you are going to fail and you're going to fail all the time and that's one of the only themes that i talk about that we talk about that really doesn't get addressed here he never says hey and maybe i didn't catch it maybe we'll catch it the first time because i'm paying attention to it as we read it but he never says hey no one took a step back and looked at this plan it doesn't really say that which is a huge red flag um you know we were talking about this this commercial is that what it's called advertisement right we shot right an advertisement echo charles was in charge of an advertisement you were making a a video for for jackal fuel gonna get some go right and i had a small roll you know small roll one line right through one leg yep well when i i showed up so you guys were kind of done with the filming and i showed up to deliver my one line right yes sir and when i came in i kind of changed the script of not my line but of the the i would say the lead actors line the straight up ending yeah really well as i was exp i was trying to explain is like that's not because i'm smarter it's not because i'm funnier it's not because i'm better at writing it's because i when i came in your mind is filled with you know first of all four or five hours of prep what you think the shots are gonna be right and writing and then you've been on scene for how long were you an hour there yeah so you're on there for an hour you've got all these different components in your head you're trying to assemble what it's going to look like i stroll in you know fresh off of like a jocko go i'm kind of hyped ready to deliver my line and i hear the ending and i go hmm but i'm detached and so i'm seeing it from a bigger perspective and i go hey the closing line should be this and you were like a little bit of resistance a little bit of resistance because i know it hurts a little bit well okay go ahead i was gonna say the resistance was more like the feeling of momentum you know how like okay we got the beginning we got everybody here it's boom the beginning then we got the middle you know and the end is right after this so it's kind of like things are coming along you know so we're ready and when we kind of are writing momentum and you change it it's like oh shoot we gotta kind of shift and pivot right as it were so it was kind of that a little bit but i i did recognize immediately that that was a good ending and the only reason i was able to see that is because i was detached and as i came in kind of looked at the thing and saw how it was going like okay and luckily you're a humble person you were like check you weren't like you know what hey jocko you don't know how the whole thing goes together hey hey that's not what we're looking you know you could have given me 87 different excuses that i would have been like okay you know what i mean i'm not going to impose on you and just be like change it because this isn't you know it's not like you're going to win an oscar for this freaking ad although maybe you know so so but luckily you're humble and you're you are detached enough to go hmm okay cool so that's what that's one thing that i see that i don't see in this book i don't see dixon talking about the fact that one of the best skills for a person to have to overcome all these other problems is being able to detach take a step back yes i was just thinking about and we god we talk about detachment all the time all the time and i i was thinking about these situations you just described two of them you know between those two conflicts the crimean war in the boomer war is this idea that detachment only works that the people on your team are actually prioritizing the team being successful over these other things like the social pressure or or these other things that i know they sound outlandish i know that they sound outlandish the way you're describing this but but even inside these organizations does dave like oh man i mean i kind of work for jocko this is kind of his company and and i don't i don't want to i don't want to make him mad so so go go go yeah here's what's interesting about what you're saying you because of what we do for a living you're already aware of those things right a person that's you're not even what you just said like wait it's chocolate that's a detachment you're assessing what's going on most people are just they're so caught up they're like i'm not gonna let dave burke get control this operation that that's what that's that's the end state yeah the end state is i'm not gonna let dave burke run this thing or echoes like i'm not going to let choco chase that's that's it i'm not going to let choco change the way this script is going that is it he's that's the fire fight right there in his head i'm not going to let jocko dictate what's happening i'm in charge hey jocko we're doing it my way that's that's what happens that's what happens to these guys yeah the fact of the matter is they they don't detach so they can't see it so it's yes you're right in the fact that you're right in the fact that they they they aren't considering it but the reason that they're not considering it is because they can't even see it because it's all around them it's just the way they're thinking it's the way they're thinking which is freaking horrifying yeah that's the whole horrifying part gets worse by the way within a few days of his performance at modern river he confirmed his worst the worst fears of his critics and even more disastrous battle of maeger's fortine makers fontaine sorry to the people of south africa to the afrikaans i'm sorry makers funtime especially for a dutch guy i should be doing a little bit better the booers were concealed in a narrow in narrow trenches in front of his objective they waited patiently until the british came within easy range surprise was complete when they opened fire a hail of lead swept through the ranks of the highland brigade within minutes the ground was carpeted with dead soldiers including the highland commander george woshop it was too much for the remainder despite their training and discipline despite the honor of the regiment despite all the factors which the high command finally believed would induce uneducated soldiers to sacrifice themselves for the shortcoming of their generals they broke ranks turned tail and fled as they did so they were further pounded and demoralized by hitherto undetected batteries of boo or artillery fast forward a little bit methuen was by no means the most foolhardy of the generals there was general feather stone who at the battle of belmont insisted on riding up and down in front of his men in full regalia thereby announcing his importance to the enemy and effectively hampering the fire of his own men it was not long before the buu has rectified his error by shooting off shooting him off of his horse there was general hart who at the battle of kalenso inflicted 30 minutes parade ground drill on his brigade before marching them shoulder to shoulder in barrack square precision across the open belt against the boo position since it was broad daylight his densely packed column provided an irresistible target for every boor gun and rifle within range this battle in this battle the british were defeated with a loss of 1139 casualties and 10 guns against the boor losses of six dead and 21 wounded fast forward a little bit it is at this point it becomes necessary to introduce another concept which is relevant to the contact of the south african war it is that of the effects of psychological stress upon decision making it is perhaps their resistance to stress and their ability to carry on when things go wrong that good generals are most easily distinguished from poor ones which by the way if you can detach that's what's going to allow you to do that by this standard general buller physically so huge failed dismally irresolute from the outset the three defeats sapped whatever confidence he ever had from being weak and fearful he became a veritable jelly of indecision his plans became vague and indefinite his specific orders scarcely more enlightening his lack of moral courage in the face of adversity revealed itself most clearly in his propensity for making scapegoats of his unfortunate subordinates those admittedly incompetent generals who had blundered on without direction or assistance from above while taking down the blame himself again the direct antithesis of extreme ownership the nearest to such admission was a reference to bad luck bad luck it may have been but worst luck was to follow in the shape of that 1 400 foot monument to miller military ineptitude spying cop the totally unnecessary storming of this mini mountain was to the boo or war what the charge of the light brigade had been in the crimean war the details are as followed while still numbed by the series of defeats just recounted buller's army of 29 000 infantry 2600 mounted men eight field batteries and ten naval guns was enriched if that is the word by the arrival of a fresh division commanded by chur sir charles warren fast forward a little bit the plan was went wrong for several reasons in the first place warren's division was far too small for the main attack the second reason for disaster lay in the character of warren who's been described as a dilatory yet fidgety over cautious yet is irresolute and totally ignorant regarding the use of cavalry he was also obsessive obstinate self-opinionated and excessively bad tempered isn't it interesting how you hear bad temper a lot when this guy is describing freaking knucklehead leaders um this also included an obsession with enormous baggage train and fear that it might be destroyed by a non-existent enemy by non-existent enemy guns on the small mountains spy on cop so concerned was he with his baggage that he spent 26 hours personally supervising its transfer across the river the delay was invaluable to the boers so yeah this is the guy that had um you know pianos longhorned gramophones chests of drawers polo sticks like this is one of those guys and so he's trying to make sure that all of his baggage is getting where it needs to be and personally supervising this freaking savage fast forward a little bit so while the general stayed below the men were ordered up the steeply sloping mountainside so he kind of thought that we needed to take this this high ground spy and cop seems like a good call the men were ordered up the steeply sloping mountainside into a fog hardly less dense than that which clouded the minds of their commanders when in almost zero visibility they thought they had reached the summit the assault force halted congratulated themselves on the total absence of opposition raised the union track jack and tried to entrench the word the operative word is tried for the top was much like the rest of the mountain solid rock nobody had warned them of this by the way he didn't do a recon just fyi they decided to use sandbags only to find that no one had remembered to bring them while the mist cleared they did the best they could with pieces of rocks and clods of earth only too well aware that this flimsy protection provided no overhead cover whatsoever if this gave them food for thought there was more to follow for with a further improvement in visibility they made a second disquieting discovery they were not where they thought they were instead of the summit they found themselves on a small plateau some way below the mountaintop 1 700 men on a piece of ground 400 by 500 yards and above them on three sides the boors the enemy opened fire within minutes the ground was littered with corpses many with bullet holes in the side of the head or body owing to the lack of overhead cover the losses from shrapnel were even greater trapped in this seemingly hopeless position without any guidance or directives from their general the 200 lancaster fusiliers laid down their arms and surrendered to the brewers this their place was taken by reinforcements sent up from below meanwhile warren and bullard did nothing to help the hard-pressed troops no doubt appalled by what was happening to his army on the heights above warren supine at the best of times went into a state that has been described as paralytic important note a war correspondent who had witnessed the dire events on top of the mountain hurried down to the commanding general but instead of receiving this admittedly unsolicited information with gratitude warren flew into a rage and demanded that the journalist should be arrested for insolence name of the war correspondent was winston churchill but before moving on to the next example it's worth placing the crimean and boor wars in the same perspective both present a picture of what appears to be unrelieved stupidity but more interesting is the psychological pattern of these events here was a rich and powerful nation anxious to assert assert its rights first in russia than in south africa what did it do but send out highly regimented armies which endeavored to make up encourage discipline and visual splendor what they lacked in relevant training technology and adequate leadership as to the latter in each case a commander-in-chief was selected who despite his deficiencies remained inordinately popular with his troops for far longer than he deserved both men were genial courteous and kind both were inexperienced as irresolute and lacking moral courage both were rich and well connected but both when the occasion demanded were only too ready to divest themselves of all responsibility for the errors which they had made and the one seemed quite unable to learn from the mistakes of the other from the moment it might prove helpful to keep in mind certain characteristics of the incompetence just described they include so here's as we get into a list of problems number one an underestimation sometimes bordering on the arrogant of the enemy check in equating war with sport oh that's a good one an inability to profit from past experience hello a resistance to adopting and exploiting available techno technological technological and novel tactics this is just a list of freaking what not to do an aversion to reconnaissance coupled with a dislike of intelligence in both sense of the word and i probably skipped over there's a lot of situations where they don't do any recon they're like oh yeah we know what to do and they just go and execute great physical bravery but little moral courage an apparent imperviousness by commanders to loss of life and human suffering amongst the rank and file or its converse and irrational and incapacitating state of compassion passivity and indecisiveness in their senior commanders a tendency to lay blame on others boom a love of the frontal of sight assault boom a love of bull and we we covered a bit of this but we brought up the term chicken actually someone sent a great i forget what document they got it from but the the term chicken is exactly i should have brought that definition it's exactly what i was trying to describe the technical definition of chicken is perfect it's like meaningless imposed discipline for the sake of discipline um i love the smartness i love a bull smartness precision and strict preservation of the quote military pecking order a high regard for tradition and other aspects of convert conservatism a lack of creativity improvisation inventiveness and open-mindedness a tendency to eschew moderate risks for tasks so difficult that failure might seem excusable and last but not least procrastination this is a good little filter to run yourself through once a week to see where you're at just to check on your damn self what do you got dave i'm literally writing what the so as you went through that list i tried to just as quickly as i could just make the connection humility humility innovate adapt default aggressive humility cover and move dichotomy stream ownership direct approach innovate adapt detach develop aggressive discipline and how quickly and this isn't to like show how smart i am it's like how easy it is to make the connection what you preface this was he kind of i think he listed three one was technology i forgot what the first one was and the third one was leadership and really the list could just be one it's leadership but the title of this book is is that the title of the book is the psychology of it it's this it's the it's the individual's personal psychology and when we're talking about these things is how painful it is to sit from the outside and watch the hole that they dig or just how obvious and to your point of detachment how obvious it is it's not nuanced it's not like a slight little adjustment you're just sitting back here watching this and there is you know there's zero chance it's gonna work not because we know the history because of because of the setup that you're revealing this is the situation this is how these people make decisions this is the way they think like this is gonna fail this is gonna fail and how easy it is to attribute every single one of those to a basic fundamental leadership behavior it's disturbing it's disturbing not the least of which is the one that repeats itself more than anything else which is what you talked about at the very beginning was humility just the inability to be humble it's it's it's hard to listen to you man yeah it is very difficult and it's about to get worse chapter 5 indian interlude which also includes a little section on afghanistan from the data considered so far it might be thought that military incompetence is confined to intra-racial conflicts white against white unfortunately as suggested by the following account of a minor incident at the time of the indian mutiny this particular prediction is not borne out when it comes to interracial conflict a pattern of incompetence is little changed here is the story of fort rouya as recounted by p scott o'connor general walpole wall pool walpole who it appears that never before held the independent command was ordered to lead an expedition up the left bank of the ganges river from lucknow to rohick land [Music] row hill cland to clear the rebels out from that part of the country the brigade set out from luck now on the 7th of april 1858 and on the morning of the 15th found itself in the vicinity of fort rouya the troops had marched nine miles that morning but walpole anxious to win his spurs with the least possible delay sent his force immediately to the assault the fort was the residence of a rebel landholder named narpat singh he had but 300 followers at his command but taking advantage of the troubles which beset the british in india in the dark days of 1857 he unfurled the flag of rebellion at rueya and paid the government defiance his stronghold was nothing very formidable on its northern eastern faces was strongly defended by a high mud wall and a broad and deep ditch covered by a dense jungle but from the west and south it was open to attack as the wall on those sides were about a few feet high the defenders relying mainly on the jahil the waters of which lapped the fort to protect them from their enemies coming from that direction there were two gates to the fort and these open on the sides just mentioned and there is no doubt the general wall poll delivered the assault from the direction of the fort must have been quickly reduced with but a fraction of casualties which actually occurred it was the month of april and the water of the heel was every was everywhere very shallow and in many places dried up so that the only obstacle to an assaulting party from that side was lacking so there's there's uh a place where you can assault this thing pretty easily because there's supposed to be a a river there or some kind of a pond there but it's all dried up so that's the obvious place to usually you use that for defense but it's not there it's like you have a moat but the moat is dried up okay well so that's where we're going to attack however back to the book but general walpole took no trouble to recon order and even without a cursory examination examination of the position launched his men in a blundering haphazard manner against the strongest face of the fort the rebels it was reported were prepared to evacuate the place after firing a few rounds but when they saw the british advancing against the face which could be defended they changed their minds and determined to show fight now walpole under the mistaken impression that there was a gate on the east side of the fort directed captain ross grove to advance with the company of the 42nd highlanders through the wood in that direction and to hold the gate and prevent the enemy from escaping the company advanced in skirmishing order through the jungle before them and dashing across the open space of ground which lay between the forest and the fort found their progress impeded by the ditch which had up until that point been invisible there was no alternative but to lie down on the edge of the counter scarp and there and as there was only a few paces between them and the enemy and no shelter whatsoever they were exposed to a galling fire and suffered severely they held on to their position however in a most heroic manner awaiting the development of the attack in the other directions but finding after a time that no other attack was being made grove sent word to the general tell him that there was no gate and requested scaling ladders for an escalade dude don't talk about a brave individual they're freaking under withering fire and there happens to be no gate instead of said hey dude we're out of here he's like hey can you send us ladders maybe meanwhile captain cafe wholly unaware of the ditch which had checked grove in his advance came up with his seeks and dashed into it with no ladders to help them out again they were shot down without mercy by the enemy no orders had yet reached grove nor were there scaling ladders forthcoming so a second messenger was dispatched to the general asking for reinforcements the general apparently now alarmed at the consequences of his own rashness hastily sent the heavy guns around to the west and ordered a bombardment of the fort from that side i'm sure if you're tracking this you can see what's coming a very natural result followed some of the balls from the guns going over the fort fell among our men on the other side for they had not yet been withdrawn a report to this effect was carried to adrian hope who at once and adrian hope by the way this is like the the son of uh of earl john hope who's like a royal and a very respected heroic soldier from the peninsula wars so adrian hope a report to this effect was carried to adrian hope who at once wrote off to inform walpole but from what followed it appears that latter doubted the accuracy of the statement for hope immediately returned to see for himself it's another thing that you're going to hear in this book is when you hear something that doesn't quite fit in you deny it this is something we see every damn day oh it doesn't match your uh your narrative cool ignore it good god general exclaimed grove on seeing him this is no place for you you must lie down but the kindly warning came too late for even at that moment hope fell back into the speaker's arm shot through the chest soon after came the order to retire and general walpole rode back to camp under the cover of darkness that night the rebels slipped out of the fort and made good their escape the loss the lost the country sustained by the death of willoughby douglas bramley harrington and of the hundred and odd men uselessly sacrificed before rooyah was great but the loss of adrian hope was a cause for national sorrow his death was mourned on the spot by every man in the camp loud and deep with the incentives against the obstinate stupidity which had caused it general walpole's unhappy expedition was not the first disaster to befall the british army in india 16 years previously in 1842 a catastrophe occurred beside which the events at fort ruya seemed scarcely worth a mention quote the road was strewn with mangled corpses of their comrades and the stench of death in the air all along the route they had been passing little groups of camp followers starving frostbitten and many of them in a state of gibbering idiocy the afghans not troubling to kill these stragglers had simply stripped them and left the cold to do its work and now the poor wretches were huddling together naked in the snow striving hopelessly to keep warm by the heat of their own bodies there were women and little children among them who piteously stretched out their hands for help later the afghans were to report with relish that the unhappy fugitives in their blind instinct to perform preserve life a little longer had been reduced to eating the corpses of their fellows but they all died in the end the british retreat from kabul in the first afghan war was described by field martial sir general templar as the quote most disgraceful and humiliating episode in our history of war against the against an asian enemy up to that time end quote judging from the details of how a british army of 4 500 men was wiped out by what was in comparison with the british strength a handful of afghan tribesmen the field marshal's words were are nothing of an overstatement i'm gonna fast forward a little bit so so what did the british do wrong how did they end up in this situation in afghanistan in this worst possible site the british laid out a camp so they they had to figure out where they were going to build a camp and the worst possible site the british laid out a camp to the worst possible design not only was the tomb was the two mile perimeter a purely nominal obstacle consisting of a low wall and narrow ditch far too long to be defended by the numbers it enclosed but the hole was open at its northern end to a compound of dwellings for the british envoy and his staff this hopped this hodgepodge of houses positively invited infiltration by even the least intrepid of enemies to complete this incorrigible behavior there had been one final act of such unbelievable stupidity that its repercussions were to lead to the death of an army by the orders of the commanding officer willoughby cotton the army's commissar store stores were constructed a quarter mile outside the contantment so they have their camp and they build they put their supplies a quarter mile outside the camp the consequences of this division decision were tragic and inevitable when the afghans finally rose up against the british the army were promptly cut off from their supplies thus it was under the threat of starvation that they ultimately capitulated to akbar khan the afghan leader and began to retreat which cost them all their lives it's it's i'm really glad you brought up the concept of detachment being maybe just absent from from at least from an explicit sense of but you're trying to piece together how this is possible from a from a a professional maybe the most professional military in the world at least historically at that point yes you know i mean like you said not a bunch of just jv dude trying to put some things together and the only thing i can get in my head is what you you talked about earlier is is the the inability to to recognize the potential and so the disbelief of hey if we do this you know um they could attack us and kill us all and like nope can't happen cannot happen and being unable to acknowledge that if something isn't the way you think that it is and someone going i guess i gotta think someone's going hey boss do you think we should bring it inside the lines because it could create some potential risk for us and the answer is that can't happen or some i'm trying to create in my mind some version of that where the disbelief is so high that they don't even recognize i can't come up with another way to understand how it could be so bad other than when you made that connection of detachment and how do you deal with with information that you can't process you just deny that it happened how old is your oldest daughter 12. okay so if i said your oldest daughter and what type of military training is she had a little bit you know what i'm saying like you take a 12 year old girl that plays guitar and is on the freaking um softball team whatever yeah and you say hey listen i want you to design a fort to defend yourself from bad guys here's what you have here's the supplies that you have there's zero chance zero chance that your daughter says you know what here's where we're gonna put all of our guns and all of our army and we're gonna put our supplies way over here there's no chance that that happens it's freaking ridiculous the the power of the psychology of of disbelief or whatever i'm coming up with the term of you say something i'm like that can't be possible so i so my only choice is to dismiss it yeah and again the detachment piece if you sit there and come up with a plan yourself you're not going to see these things you gotta even if you have even if you have to let your 12 year old daughter come up with a plan but dude is it is it so unreasonable for me to just say hey man can you at least put your supplies inside the lines from a professional military i have no idea why that decision was made doesn't really talk about it you know is it like hey well i mean i can't even really think of a reason right now right um hey we don't want the stores to be attracting bears i mean i don't know unless like that's why you might not stay with your food if you're in alaska right um i don't know what they're thinking it's cr it's craziness but if you're all wrapped up in it you can't you're not going to see it yeah i guess the other end that you might not see is if you're too far away from it if you're the boss and you're like hey just go ahead and put the storage wherever you want and you know you're like well you know i want this to look like an organized camp so i don't want a bunch of crap sitting around here so we're going to move it out there and i don't pay attention to it yeah so maybe there's too much detachment my guess is not enough well i mean i think there's some validity to that comment though it's certain elements throughout this you're talking about people that are so far detached they're they're miles so they're so far away that there's not even a connection to the potential risks that come from that so i think you're right i think there is elements of this is like i don't the the boss doesn't doesn't doesn't seem to care about these critical fundamental things because he is like oh i got to make sure my personal gear gets across this river it's taking him 28 hours this guy is so detached from things while he's so focused in on these other things yup yup and there's a dichotomy for sure oddly enough uh the government of india chose this moment to appoint major general william george keith elfinstone as commander-in-chief in afghanistan he was to say the least an unfortunate candidate described at the time as quote the most incompetent soldier that was to be found among the officers of requisite rank and it sucks because we're laughing and you're going to see what happens and it's freaking heinous even if necessary his qualifications were certainly not sufficient they were they were that he was quote of good repute gentlemanly manners and aristocratic connections so that's why he's getting hired he's good repute he's gentlemanly manners and the aristocratic connections this is like the opposite of the of the uh btf tony in case of war break glass like hey i gotta go we gotta scrap you want me to go you only take a bunch of people and live out in the middle of you know bad guy country this is not i don't want anyone genuinely manners i want somebody with that knows how to throw a hatchet yeah do i want that nice guy who's well connected no no i don't want that guy he had last seen active service at waterloo 25 years previously and had since been on half pay he was elderly and so stricken with gout that he could scarcely move like general sir redverse buller half a century later elfin stone had no illusion about his unfitness for the job and he pleaded that his health made him quite unsuited to the demands that would be put upon him but lord auckland the governor general was adamant and so the gentle courteous elfin stone was shipped off to kabul once there whatever shreds of self-confidence he may have had were speedily removed firstly by the ludicrous nature of the army's uh contonent and secondly by encountering for the first time his new second in command brigadier shelton a rough brute of uncertain temper so appalled was elfinstone by the army's location that he offered to buy up surrounding land so he could then clear the suitable fields of fire his generous offer was refused about shelton he could do nothing so he kind of showed up and recognized they're in a bad spot um fast forward a little bit there's a there's another area and he goes trying to figure these things out elf and stone ordered shelton to march on the fortress this is their another area no sooner had this order been received though that it was countermanded sheldon unimpressed by this stop go policy reported retorted that retorted sharply that if there was an insurrection in the city it was not a moment for indecision and recommended that elf and stone at once decide upon what measure we should adopt elphinstone then countermanded his countermand and once more ordered shelton to march at once to balahasar that's an area where they were having issues but barely had shelton started before he was overtaken by another order to the effect that he should halt and remain where he was but no sooner had this order been received reducing the second in command to a state of approaching epilepsy that it was followed by the inevitable counter-order it seemed that he was after all to proceed with his men to the fort and this surprisingly he did meanwhile elphinstone was canvassing opinions as to what to do next i mean this is just a freaking disaster when elfinstone eve did act when eventually elfinstone did act it was a case of too little too late mcnaughton a brave there's a guy that tries to sort of figure out and negotiate a deal a guy named mcnaughton and says mcnaughton a braver man the nelson stone tried to double cross the afghans and was murdered for his pains and there's another uh like british british uh civil servant that gets murdered fast forward a little bit more again we get these books so you can understand these a little bit more fully while rage and a thirst for revenge consumed the lower ranks of the army those at the top became increasingly indecisive and anxious to appease inevitable inevitably the afghan surrender terms stiffened until finally elphinstone in response to empty promises of safe conduct found himself agreeing that his army without its ordinance but encumbered by twelve thousand non-combatants including many women and children would go back the way they had come so they decided to give up arms this may sound familiar to everyone right now they're in afghanistan they decide oh if you let us out of here we'll give up our arms and and when we go to give up our arms that's okay but we also have a bunch of our wives and children with us i don't know if i made that clear yet this is the old school you know imperial idea you go on deployment you're going to go for years you're going to take your wife and family with you having decided upon the disastrous plan of trying to reach jalalabad in the depths of winter across mountain ranges infested with hostile tribesmen elfinstone proceeded to make matters worse by further procrastination right up to january 6 1842 he remained in agony of mind as to whether or not he should commit any commit his army to the march and when on that fateful day they eventually set off he changed his mind when half the force were already on their way like you can't make this up like if i told you that this guy was changing his mind every 20 minutes or every day you just wouldn't believe me it doesn't sound real he tried to stop them but now his order to halt was disobeyed for good or ill the die was cast it was for real so here's this group walking unarmed through afghanistan again this may sound familiar they walk here we go without food firewood or or any shelter beyond that provided by holes scraped in the snow many died each night by day as they traversed grim passes thousands more died at the hands of murderous gil's eyes which is a pashtun tribe like hill people at the end of four days with 70 miles still to go only 850 remained of the original 4 500 soldiers by the end of the tenth day their number had been reduced to 450. throughout this pitiful adventure elphinstone despite the trail of corpses which lay behind him retained a pathetic and wholly unjustified faith in the afghan leader's promise of safe conduct hmm by the end of the fifth day the total losses of soldiers and civilians had risen to twelve thousand as one officer described it this was there was literally a continuous lane of poor wretches of men women and children dead and dying from the cold or wounds unable to move and treated their comrades to kill them to put an end to their misery i mean it's just it's it's horrible how did this on how did this unfold here's alpha stones this refined and gentle creature manifested what at first sight may appear to be some curiously inconsistent characteristics by his own admission he sought the bubble reputation in india and yet when given important command shrank from the responsibilities it entailed he was hopelessly indecisive lacking in moral courage and suggestible yet could on occasions manifest irrational pig-headedness he wobbled when he should have been firm yet was rigid when he should have been flexible what a nightmare that is finally he was courteous and kind retaining the affection of many of his followers right up to the end yet could be totally lacking in compassion for many of those who had suffered at his hands this is a thing to watch out for by the way people that are super nice and get along really well with everybody but they make bad decisions a lot and people just kind of like can't get mad at them just just to wrap this section up to conclude this account of the total dissolution of an army on january 13 1842 soldiers on guard at the british fort in jalalabad saw a single horseman riding toward them with all the speed that his maimed and worn out horse could muster it was the surgeon dr briden the only man it seemed to survive the fearful journey from kabul and the footnote here is that bride was the only european to arrive at jalalabad but in the days after his arrival a few indian soldiers and a number of followers also completed the journey elphinstone himself died of dysentery after being made captive of akbar khan we were laughing a couple minutes ago and i don't know i wish i could remember the word there's a word that described like when your reaction doesn't actually match what you're feeling and i forgot what that word is but it it's it's a it's a the level of disbelief i mean this the reaction that i'm having you're hearing this when you're laughing at the description comes from like the level of tragedy that this is the this is a lot because i didn't read this you know i had actually i have this book i mean i knew i kind of knew this was coming but i didn't do the what you did i didn't do this cover to cover depth i kind of spun around and you had shared some things with me the depth of here is much more than i kind of anticipated and you still have for me it's still this hard time of connecting the behavior and the tolerance of the behavior to the outcome which is real human life that's the piece and if you look at it kind of the in the larger sense of of of the precursors to world war one it makes it even that much more difficult to believe because if you were gonna give any potential free pass would be you didn't see this coming if if you were if you if somehow that could be the case and so whatever potential nail in the coffin is left unhit is you didn't see this coming and this is just tail upon tail upon tail upon tail of of of a total disregard and the hardest part about that is what you said at the very beginning is they don't learn any lessons from it yep and i think that's where the disbelief for me comes from where i'm i'm laughing like almost in in literal disbelief of there's no way this is gonna happen again knowing what this all leads up to as well and let me tell you how easy this is how easy this is and this is what's so freaking crazy you and i look at a situation like this and we go uh there's one thing wrong bad leadership bad leadership oh you got a problem like that it's bad leadership did they pick a bad spot why they pick a bad spot because they got bad leadership like this is just bad leadership bad leadership bad leaders are bad leadership so at some point you look at these disasters and you say hey our freaking leadership selection training is wrong we're doing something wrong we need to fix it instead what do they do they blame the troops they blame the weather they blame the enemy that's what they do and that's accepted up and down the chain of command it's a freaking disaster it's crazy and this was look i i you we'd have a bad seal platoon coming through zero times zero times did i say wow the troops are all jacked up wow the e5s don't know how to work the machine guns wow the freaking uh the the corpsman doesn't know how to work on people the the point man doesn't know how to navigate zero times did i say that now would you have a bad freak appointment occasionally that would get lost yeah and you know what good leadership would say hey dude you're going to real security right now you know we'll work on your did you have somebody that was maybe not too great on a machine gun what'd they do the leadership said hey bro you need to go out and do some extra machine gun classes and courses you need to run some drills so you're better never did i say well you know this platoon is gonna fail this block of training because they're machine gunners because they're riflemen because of any other reason then the freaking leader is jacked up totally that's what's going on and either the leader figures it out or you got to replace him and that's a hundred percent of the time that's a hundred percent of that because if you're even if in a fantasy world you had a platoon come in where all the machine gunners were terrible all the people were fat and out of shape all of that you could be traced back to oh is there is there genetic makeup in this this seal platoon somehow different than all their owns or is there actually a leader who for the last 18 months has been tolerating or not holding a center or not training or not what has allowed this to happen first of all we know it doesn't happen but even if it did is there something unique about those people that doesn't allow them to operate a machine gun or is there a leader tolerating this behavior to let that place to get to a state that's so bad that they're incompetent and again i'm even saying that just just to reinforce the idea that we know that it happened zero percent of the time but even if it did in a fantasy world it still comes back to the exact same reason why there's a leader allowing that to happen at some point in my career probably when i read about face for the 19th time and he talks about the fact that there's no bad teams only bad leaders that that changed my perspective for the rest of my life because you look at a jacked up organization a platoon a task unit a team a battalion a company a business you look at it and you see problems you go oh it's oh i already know what the problem is i already know what the problem is and yet as to your point despite these failures in india in afghanistan in crimea in the boomer wars in south africa despite all these failures failure upon failure upon failure upon failure which is freaking a red flashing light when you look at it with hindsight and you go it's leadership leadership leadership leadership and yet you're gonna see they're not they're not even developing their leaders properly they don't make any changes and by the way let me throw this out there i've worked with the brits the freaking brits are outstanding totally the brits are freaking outstanding soldiers they're some of the most professional human beings never even mind military they're some of the most professional human beings i've ever interacted with in my life so obviously now they've made some steps but and just just another thought i keep having and this came up for me we talked about it during war as a racket 300 that is is is these are hard stories to listen to these are hard stories for me to sit here as an as an audience member of this podcast listening to talk about it is to make sure that we don't fall into the trap of oh this is jocko telling a story about a bunch of other incompetent leaders the the ease with which we we can as leaders especially get put in charge how easy it is to slide into some of those habits maybe not to this degree maybe not to this magnification but this is not a story to be to be taken about what's wrong with everybody else it's how easy a regular human being can be placed into a position and fall into the trap of being a bad leader through things like humility humility humility humility detachment and that these are tales that that the lens that you gotta look at is a mirror as much as anything else they're like hey do i do i do some of these things yeah we do leaders fall into these traps yeah make yourself that checklist that's right am i doing this yeah all right this brings us to chapter six which is the first world war and here we go only the most blankered could deny that the first world war exemplified every aspect of high-level military incompetence for sheer lack of imaginative leadership inept decisions ignoring of military intelligence underestimation of the enemy delusional optimism and monumental wastage of human resources has surely never had its equal can you imagine looking at what's happening and you see all those things occurring in an age when it has become fashionable to question authority it may well seem strange that a bear 60 years ago millions of ordinary men living in indescribable conditions could with courage with a courage of fortitude and cheerfulness past human comprehension meekly carry out the lethal decisions of well-fed generals comfortably housed many miles behind the place where their orders were being translated into several kinds of pointless death apologists for this period have found good things to say of some jed some of the generals who took part we are told that hague did the best he could given the conditions of the western front that he was rock-like and tenacious joffrey's saving grace so it has been said was that he was a skilled politician and the only man with enough prestige to dominate france's allies and to quote ajp taylor even sir john french was supposed for some time to be a great military leader other views have been less charitable quote stupid obstinate blimps butchers ossified brains and donkeys are just a few of the unkind epithets which have been applied to those who bore upon their immaculate shoulders the responsibility of committing a generation of young men to various forms of mutilation on the battlefield a contemporary expression of this point of view puts it thus it it is hard for a connoisseur of bad generalship surveying the gray wastes of world war one to single out any one commander as especially awful there were dozens on both sides incompetence took several forms these included the implementation of a plan for the disposition of the british expeditionary force that had been devised three years before the outbreak of hostilities and remain unmodified in the light of subsequent events you said this on the last podcast dave you're like oh machine gun oh they're shooting a machine gun at us stop everyone go back to the planning room that's how long it takes to figure that out we we receive a burst of machine gun fire and we go hey blow the whistles and stop and everyone go back to the trench and we need to figure some out two a tenacious clinging to the age-old practice of frontal assaults usually the enemy's strongest points skipping ahead a little bit of three the under use and misuse of available technology hague's opinion that two machine guns per battalion would be quite sufficient and the attitude of some reactionary elements to the development of tank of the tank are cases in point and we're going to get into some of that reactionary when when people figured out what the tank was hey i don't know if that's a good thing it doesn't seem like a good idea four a growing belief in the value of prolonged bombardment before launching an attack besides being enormously expensive such bombardments necessarily sacrificed the vital element of surprise made the intervening ground almost impassable to the subsequent assaulting infantry and provided numerous convenient craters to which the enemy machine gunners might be take themselves from their deep dugouts after the holocaust was over there to wait the slowly moving ranks of attacking infantry i had to detail that one because as i read that i was like why is that bad right oh there's the reasons a tendency on the part of high command to ignore evidence which did not fit in with their wishes or preconceptions here's one that you might not anticipate number six a terrible crippling obedience and man if i don't have to go over this over and over again with people you don't want subordinates that are just going to obey you don't want that there was even at the highest levels of command and attitude of mind so pathological and unrealistic that on occasions even army commanders dared not express their doubts about the viability of a particular order or venture preferring to conceal evidence from their superiors rather than be thought wanting in courage or loyalty it's better to say yep got it thank you yes sir we will go and assault that trench yes as liedell hart wrote of the third battle of epres it would seem that none of the army commanders ventured to press contrary views with the strength that the facts demanded one of the lessons of the war exemplified a passchendaele is certainly the need of allowing more latitude in the military system for intellectual honesty and moral courage there's something very wrong in your organization if it requires moral courage to push back against the boss right i get it moral courage is important but if we have an organization and a culture where you only push back if you have tremendous moral courage that's freaking wrong yeah how much of a mismatch occurs in our relationship if it requires moral courage on my my part to ask you a hard question instead of going hey dude hey real quick and you're like yeah what's up yeah how much how much of a disconnect is there between you and me if i have to muster courage and face what is the reason that i'm being courageous because i'm afraid i have to deal with this anyway because there's fear involved what does that say about a relationship if i'm afraid to say something and you you talked about this ignoring of evidence and then the the willingness to just agree with your leadership how convenient is it when the the thing you have to grapple with your own mind is well i'm not going to be there anyway i'm not going to be one of the leaders that gets mowed down so this isn't nearly as hard for me as it would be if i'm like whoa hang on i i have to be out in front of this assault that's a very different story than i have to send my men to go do this those are two very different things yeah they should be uh it should be worse it should be worse you should be thinking hey hold on a second dave hold on a second sir i'm not sending my guys i'll go but i'm not sending my guys it should be the opposite but it's not and you know we talked about this a couple times and and you've referenced or well i mean it's really point from the book it's referenced technology and i made a little connection in my mind because a theme that keeps coming through here is is uh and i wrote down like disbelief of the evidence hey the evidence is showing you this and you're like i cannot process process i can't process that so i'm going to just i'm not going to accept that it's even a thing there's disbelief in that i i saw this when when we developed and the machine gun was the example we used last time but when we developed stealth technology and it really became evident to the world in desert storm because nobody really most people didn't really know what's going on then all of a sudden firsthand a desert storm we're flying on the top of baghdad with airplanes that nobody could see and there was a level of disbelief going on there from the iraqi defense system as there's bombs going off around them they're like i hear i hear airplanes those are jet engines flying over our heads i can't see them but i hear them things are blowing up but there was an incapacity to to accept that it was happening because they didn't see it and this doesn't exist well unfortunately one of the byproducts of that was some people were paying attention to that and there's this massive shift from the early 90s to building style airplanes we have a bunch of them now guess who else has the russian the chinese are you know our primary enemies but the idea of being in a fight with something you can't see which is what's one of the things that stealth allows you to do is one of the most common things that you see when you're in the stair airplane is other people behaving as if you're not there when they know you're there they just can't see you and like well i'm just going to keep doing what i'm doing like good lord you are just going to allow things to unfold because you cannot you cannot come to grips with what is happening even though i know it's the wrong choice of words even though you know it's happening and that machine gun example is probably the best real-time example of there's a machine getting shot at us i know but we're just going to keep going down this path we're going to get to uh singapore in the second world war and when singapore goes down the uh the japanese attack with their aircraft and it's a night attack and there's like a 30-minute warning of hey there's a enemy inbound and a bunch of the leaders were like no the japanese don't attack at night they didn't do anything they didn't launch aircraft they didn't do anything they just sat there like oh no that's no the enemy the japanese don't attack they don't fly their aircraft at night it's not them it's not happening it's exactly what you're saying it's the exact same thing this isn't happening this isn't happening this isn't happening yeah uh detachment from reality is not good the kind of detachment we don't like i think it's the one kind of detachment i don't like it's attachment from reality and number seven a readiness to accept enormous casualties in terms of the number of lives lost relative to the ground gained the the actions of the first world war make dismal reading in the first two hours of the battle of luz we lost more men than were last lost by all services together in the whole of d-day in 1944 that's two hours on the first day of the psalm offensive the british army suffered 57 000 casualties on the first day the biggest loss ever suffered by any army in a single day and yet as one historian has put it to see the ground gained one needs a magnifying glass and a large scale map um the we he he'll cover some of the world war one stuff but it's a pretty brief as i said in the opening today as he goes into more well-known events like world war one he doesn't go into as much detail because we already know about it but he does go into some detail this next chapter is about uh cambray which there was a battle of cambrian it's really the first the first tank battle where tanks were used um and this is just so important because there's so much resistance here in 1912 a private civilian inventor e.l demol of adelaide presented the war office with the design for a tracked vehicle which to put it at its simplest would help solve the major tactical problem of the first world war which hadn't even started yet how to get soldiers across no man land barbed wire and enemy trenches without being shot the war office looked at demol's design and laid it on its on one side in 1915 through a total lack of personal protection british soldiers on the western front were dying at the rate of thousands a day demol was moved to resubmit his invention again it was ignored and by the way he didn't come up with this idea forerunners of the tank can be traced back to caesar's invasion of britain leonardo da vinci had designed an armored fighting vehicle in the 16th century and the concept was advanced by h.g wells in his book the lion iron clads published in 1903. i remember when i was a kid i saw that leonardo da vinci tank i was pretty stoked on that thing it might be concluded therefore that his invention was put aside not just because it was a new idea which it was not nor because it was not needed which it was but because it conflicted with a mystical belief in the virtues of horsed cavalry and in the power of a prolonged military barrage now we get into some of the politics that was going on about the tanks while churchill and lloyd george were enthusiastic supporters of the tanks master general of ordinance general von danop remained implicitly implacably opposed to any such development in the services the major proponents of the tank development included ironically a small group of naval officers the fact that the admiralty felt less quote threatened by tanks than the war office did was strikingly illustrated at one of those demonstrations wherein proponents of a new idea strive to convert skeptics by confrontation with evidence of their senses after an impeccable display in which prototype tanks cut through barbed wire cross trenches slithered through mud and clawed their way out of craters a naval officer was heard to remark we ought to order 3000 now so the navy guy's like hey bro that looks like a pretty freaking good thing but the war office contingent remained cool one senior general recording who is this damn naval man saying we will want 3 000 tanks he talks like napoleon him in his detached point of view um [Music] they get some tanks they get some of them they use them in battle and and here's what happens of course how do they use them about this is like when you learn a new jiu jitsu move like hey echo you know here's this new move and i teach you the freaking whatever some arm lock variation you go try it for the first time how does it work it doesn't work yeah so you're like i'm never using this again similar activities here the small cooper cooper writes the small part played by the tanks however successful on the local scale was overlooked in the general sense of failure doubts which many staff officers had previously expressed as expressed as the value of tanks turned to scorn instead of trying to plan an intelligent use of the superior weapon that had been put in their hands the military leaders could only make minor criticisms of minor details you joke loose arm lock i was totally off balance you know whatever instead of you saying hey you know i need to make some adjustments the way i'm employing this can you help me instead you just go dude i'm not your move sucks don't you yeah i mean you always say how when you implement anything new yeah you're going to lose efficiency or lose efficiency yeah the first thing that happens you become less that happens all the time to me in jiu jitsu some new move that i'm starting to work i get smashed by everyone oh yeah and you're even it jams up other parts of yours because you're thinking way more way less than than you usually would and then yeah just be like oh yeah jiu jitsu sucks now yeah or that yeah that move messed up my game that whole game that whole part of my game is i'm not not doing that anymore fast forward a little bit frustrated by failure and unable to admit their own contributions to defeat by the way when they lost this battle when they used tanks for the first time what was the problem oh it was the tanks there wasn't anything that any mistake that they made they did what all what the highly prejudiced do in such a circumstance vented their feelings upon the original object of their prejudice and in doing so precluded any chance of learning from the exercise fast forward a little bit meanwhile the futile third battle of eapres continued to consume the lives of intramu infantrymen at the rate of more than 2 000 a day nevertheless the general headquarters blamed the waste of life upon the few tanks that had been used i mean this is freaky you can't make this up it seems they they just disappeared into the mud along with everything else now here we get to this chapter's thing the cambrai cambrai tank offensive on november 20th 1917 occurred in three stages the first was eminently successful 380 tanks operating on ground suited to caterpillar tracks achieved a spectacular success over running three strongly held lines of enemy trenches whereas previous offenses had been lost measured in yards gained for tens of thousands of lives lost the cambray offense advance was four and a half miles on a six mile front with negligible casualties so there you go they freaking use the tank they're like hell yeah this worked but if the first phase first stage was an unprecedented victory the second showed a beginning of the rot which was to turn victory into disaster there were various contributory factors the first was general harper whose 51st highland division had been given the task of capturing key objectives in the center of the attack the village of fleskires i'm sorry everybody about my pronunciation unfortunately harper who had been described as a quote a narrow-minded soldier of the old school was one of those who disapproved of tanks consequently not only were his troops given little training in working with the new weapon but they were instructed in tactics contrary to those recommended by the tank core even worse harper delayed his assault by one hour because he did not believe that the first objective the hindenburg main line would be captured so quickly so this guy's just a hater out of the gate can you imagine you get a tank and you're like hey i'm not going to give my people proper training on it the unnecessary delay allowed the germans in an hour allowed the germans an hour in which to bring up and sight field guns on the ridge here in one here's one description of what followed the tanks continued blightly onto the crest of the ridge in line abreast as instructed they came to the top huge dark shapes silhouetted against the skyline and there before them were the german field guns had the infantry been close behind the tanks as fuller had planned they could have easily dealt with these guns in a matter of minutes but the infantry were far behind not only held up by having to find their way through the wire but because of the machine gun fire which was causing heavy casualties the tanks were on their own with such perfect targets the german gunners opened fire one by one the tanks were hit while the crews worked desperately at the cumbersome gears to drive a zigzag course and the gunners tried to return fire but taking accurate aim and all the pitching and tossing was virtually impossible it was some minutes before the german guns had been put out of action but by this time 16 tanks had been destroyed with huge gaping holes in their sides most were on fire and those crew members who had not been killed outright by the blasting shells were burned to death there were no survivors through a pious fast forward through a pious and mistaken belief in the value of horsed cavalry and a paralysis thought occasioned by years of trench warfare the brilliant breakthrough by the tanks was thrown away some 10 days later the germans counter-attacked in a matter of hours they recovered much of the ground originally lost the british third army commanded by general sir julian bing lost 6 000 men taken prisoner some thousands killed or wounded and a vast quantity of guns and other equipment the magnitude of this disaster was directly attributable to a feature of high level military incompetence seen all too often the ignoring of intelligence reports which did not fit in with the preconceived ideas when at last news of the disaster reached britain it was naturally assumed that the generals had failed again hague's reputation already low sank to a vanishing point the war cabinet demanded an immediate explanation hague's response was to endorse a report from general bing that the third army had not been taken by surprise and that the failure to stem the german breakthrough was due to the shortcomings of those junior officers ncos and men who had been involved in the fighting what a freaking savage in the face of so much contrary evidence these views did not impress the critics to stifle further debate the war cabinet called in general smuts and this freaking savage smut stated and they go into what his relationships are and he's you know he's just a just a real piece of smut stated higher command army or core command were not to blame everything had been done to meet such an attack he went on to say that the fault lay either with local commanders who might have lost their heads or with those lower down junior officers ntos and men of those two alternatives he preferred the latter explanation and so smuts in the fashion of the day blame those least able to answer back the youthful the junior and the dead again what corrections are we now making we're not making any corrections we're just like oh yeah it's the team's fault and by the way the team who fought with bravery that is unquestionable all in all this black episode raises several matters of great rel relevance to the theory of military incompetence presented later in this book stupidity does not explain the behavior of these generals so great was their fear of loss of self-esteem and so imperative their need for social approval approval that they could resort to tactics beyond the reach of any self-respecting donkey from their shameless self-interest lack of loyalty to their subordinates and apparent indifference to the verdict of posterity a picture emerges of personalities deficient in something other than intel intellectual acumen so again these people aren't stupid how about that phrase a lack of loyalty to your subordinates and how often we fall into the idea like that's supposed to work the opposite direction they should be loyal to me because i'm in charge i'm the commander and it's the lack of loyalty to your subordinates as the cause of why this happens sickening as to how they look to a contemporary chronicler here is the following passage and so the white washing went on to protect armchair generals who in the main had little conception of what the front line was like and had no intention of going there to find out one of those infantrymen so blamed was j.h everest during the two days when he and his fellow soldiers were being pushed back by the germans they had no water to drink and no food to eat at the end of the second day while waiting in a trench for a renewed attack everest went up to his company commander and asked for permission to search for water my request was refused everest wrote in a letter nonetheless i went over the top and found some water in a mud hole thus ending two days of torture shortly afterwards everest was wounded and found himself in the australian general hospital at abbeville but the most bitter pill on top of this was to be blamed for their commander's own mistakes can you imagine reading those freaking articles about how jacked up you were another world war one example here chapter eight the siege of cut if the degree of military incompetence is indicated by the ratio of achievement to cost then the activities of expedite expeditionary force d under the command of major general sir charles townsend merit examination firstly there was a 250 mile discrepancy between what was designed to do and what it tried to do secondly the cost of the this discrepancy was large to reach cut cost townsend seven thousand casualties during the ensuing siege a further 1600 died attempts to relieve his force accounted for another 23 000 casualties when he eventually surrendered to the turks thirteen thousand of his troops went into captivity and seven thousand of these died while still prisoners of war all of us went for nothing not one inch of ground or any political advantage nothing that is beyond corpses suffering and ruined reputation so you have this this take place this is in iraq in mesopotamia i mean this is i guess current day iraq and mesopotamia there were four enemies the turkish army marauding arabs the terrain and the climate all four played their part in hazarding the lines of communication and bringing about a defeat which cost much and gained nothing but the real instigators of this tragedy were neither the climate nor geography neither the turks nor the arabs but three generals general beauchamp duff commander in chief india general nixon army commander basra and major general townsend commander of the sixth division through an admixture of self-interest personal ambition ignorance obstinacy and sheer crash stupidity this trio sealed the fate of some thousands of british in and indian soldiers i kind of wanted to fast forward through this part but this one is insane nixon who made up an ambition for what he lacked for in intelligence ordered townsend to capture amara a township on the tigris some hundred miles north of basra townsend equally ambitious but by no means stupid did as as he was bit in doing so he and nixon were already exceeding the directive of the british government so they're kind of pushing the envelope down there a little glory seeking happening as well as occupying amara townsend struck westward and took nazaria nixon's appetite for glory was wedded by these easy victories with no thought to the risks involved he pressed townsend to continue his advance a further 90 miles to cut in this he was backed by duff who had never visited mesopotamia and had no idea of the conditions prevailing there but townsend had he wrote to general sir james wolfe murray in england by the way townsend is about to become a villain of horror that you've likely can't even understand i believe this is this so this is townsend running back i believe i am too advanced to amara to cut to el amara the question is where are we going to stop in mesopotamia so i this sounds good right okay wait a second dude what are we trying to do we certainly have not good enough troops to make certain of taking bad dad baghdad of our two divisions mine the sixth is complete the twelfth has no guns or divisional troops and nixon takes them from me and lends them to guardians when he has to go anywhere i consider we ought to hold on to what we've got as long as we are held up as we are in the dardanelles all these offensive operations in secondary theaters are dreadful errors in strategy the dardanelles egypt mesopotamia east africa i wonder and wonder at such expeditions being permitted in violation of all great fundamental principles of war especially that of economy of force such as a violation is always punished in history so he's saying you gotta prioritize and execute why are we running around doing all these different things i'm afraid we are out in the cold here the mesopotamian operations are a little noticed though we are fighting the same enemy as you have in the dardanelles plus an appalling heat the hardship in france are nothing to that so this seems like a logical thing right townsend's like hey dude what are we doing like we already kind of got done what we're supposed to get done why are we pushing further let's hold what we got i don't have a bunch of troops i'm getting my my troops are getting pulled all over the place let's just kind of stand down but it's an interesting um there's another historian that writes the letter was completely in character it revealed a gift for strategic appreciation amounting to uh prescience it revealed townsend's chronic tendency to criticize his superiors and his obsession with his own affairs to the exclusion of all others it revealed his habitual lack of general of generosity to his colleagues who whom he praised only if they were of inferior rank to himself his tendency to whine and almost embarrassing immodesty i think that's a hard reading of that letter i think that's a little bit strong but the most extraordinary feature in the letter was that for all its strategic prescience it bore little relationship to towns and subsequent behavior i guess that's what makes it interesting though he clearly realized that he was being asked to undertake a major campaign with the logistics of a subsidiary defensive operation he said nothing of this to his superiors 17 days after writing to murray townsend not only enthusiastically accepted nixon's orders that he should advance a further 90 miles to cut but also entirely of his own bat talked of pursuing the enemy another 190 miles and possibly beyond that to baghdad indisputably he was a man ambitious to the point of egomania a man whom the lore of promotion had goaded throughout his career to such an incessant intriguing and important lighter writing that he'd incurred constant snubbing and rebuke yet he had persisted to such a man the smallest hint of condemnation seems enthusiastic improvable closing his mind to to his own forebodings townsend and his unsuspecting troops pressed on once again the turks were defeated and the british occupied cut so they do they press into cut um but this battle is not easy because remember i said those earlier battles were kind of easy at cut it's not easy and it's not easy for townsend's troops it's not easy for the the turks either he says about the turks the turks though suffering many casualties they were not destroyed they escaped and then there were the british wounds here's what's going on with the british wounded the wounded suffered frightfully untended they lay freezing all night some to be stripped and murdered by arabs and when daylight came were placed on supply carts unsprung iron slatted and drawn across a cruelly uneven surface to the riverbank there in fierce sun they languished until they could be crammed onto decks of iron barges and towed very slowly downstream to omura what little water they were given was impure what little treatment they could be given was ineffective their wounds went gangrene and they lay in a morass of their own blood and ex and excreta assailed by millions of flies quite unnecessarily many of them died um now townsend they also say this for another he was despite his appraisal of realities loath to relinquish his own dream of becoming lieutenant general cyril townsend lord of baghdad and so grossly unequipped he marched his men beyond the point of no return towards baghdad he never reached that fabled city for a army of 13 000 turks lay across his path nixon received nixon received intelligence that a second turkish army thirty thousand strong and led by the redoubtable khalil pasha was also converging but because this news did not accord with his desires nixon chose to ignore the report is untrue thirty thousand people heading to take on your whatever you have 12 000. the battle marked the end of townsend's luck through his conduct though his conduct of the fight was exemplary if not brilliant he sustained 4 000 casualties and again did not succeed in routing or destroying the enemy he withdrew his force to cut cut which he knew to be without defense so this this town of cut is not like a really great defensive position and townsend knows it townsend's newfound delusion regarding the virtues of cut may well have had its origins in a much earlier event the siege of chitral when intractable desires are thwarted by reality there is a tendency to hark back to the memory of early earlier gratifications and chatrol epitomized for townsend just such gratification here so this is townsend as a young officer of the indian army he had withdrawn into a fort and and captained his small force throughout 46 days of siege when eventually he did emerge it was to find himself a hero beloved by queen and country so that's what happened to him as a young officer he goes into this place they learn in lock down and they hold out for 46 days so now he's going to do the same thing at cut that's his plan he can now overlook the shortcomings of cut and see in his smelly collection of mud huts the key to ultimate success um another inconsistency in townsend's behavior is that he had always prided himself upon the fact that he drew upon the lessons of history identifying himself as the occasion demanded with such great captains as hannibal napoleon and wellington but we joke about that when you think you're freaking wellington or hannibal or napoleon there was nothing he liked better than to quote the precepts of famous military commanders two such precepts were to make wars to attack and movement is the law of strategy but here was townsend's townsend as heedless of fred frederick the great as he was deaf to the council of martial falk for the bottle himself up in cut was to assume a posture of defense as stationary as it was passive so why is he doing this well he's doing it because he remembers that he had the big victory back in the day and it was unnecessary for there was still time to fall back on the safety of our so he could have still made it out of there that he did not do so cannot be ascribed to stupidity or to ignorance of the principles of war for townsend was neither stupid nor ignorant his first move toward hastening his rescue was so was so to manipulate his would-be rescuers so they felt compelled to try and relieve the siege before they were ready thus he persuaded his army commander at basra that since he had only a month's supply of food for his british troops and early relief was essential to sustain this lie and force nixon's hand he deliberately refrained from rationing either as british or indian troops nor did he make any attempt to unearth the stocks of arab grain concealed within the town so he's out of the gate he's just telling mize hey you better come and rest me first i'm running out of food just a freaking lie what does nixon do well nixon's trying to help out okay dude i want my people to starve nixon ordered the unfortunate lieutenant general ailmer to break through the turkish defense forces and relief cut there's a whole section on here talking about how that goes down elmer failed time and time again to achieve the impossible thanks to the combined efforts of the man he was trying to rescue and those of nixon the man largely the man largely responsible for rescue being necessary the relief force suffered 23 000 casualties nearly twice the number of those invested so this guy tells lies they're like hey we need to go help him we're not ready yet but just run in there anyways and they take freaking 23 000 casualties more than these trying to save 12 yeah double the people that are in there remember i think it was a debrief podcast we talked about you talked about you made a list of things that keep you from being successful in the future and one of them was lessons learned yeah you always liked that one i did because it was something i didn't expect the way and not just the way you were going through the list because the list was like obvious ones or or let me say that more carefully what appeared to be obvious ones and you got to that and it's so easy now once i've heard you say it to just transpose that idea of lessons learned actually if you're and you didn't say don't take lessons learned of course not but they can be an impediment especially if like the paradigm or the or the the scenario with which that lesson was learned doesn't actually apply to the scenario that you're in but it's the same city well it must be the same situation cool we'll just take that and we'll just i did this back in the day when i was 23 and i was a hero watch this and of course it's easy to see now because i'm sitting in a detached position but you i did you wrote down i wrote down you said it delusion disbelief and desire god bless he's hearing that good lord how bad and if that third one might be the worst one of like i want to be a hero i want to be what did he call himself the king of baghdad or whatever whatever yeah that desire and go we're losing no we're not hey we're outnumbered no we're not hey we shouldn't do this yes we should because you know what i want i want to be the king of baghdad freaking disturbing crazy man the um the thing about lessons learned lessons learned should open your mind not close your mind uh these guys are lying by the way secretary of state for indian army commander basra joseph chamberlain cabled this statement on arrival wounded on arrival wounded basra please telegraph urgently particulars and progress so this guy's saying hey what's going on with the wounded you got and nixon replies wounded satisfactorily disposed of many likely to recover medical services under circumstances of considerable difficulty worked splendidly but nixon two had lied for you just witnessed the arrival of 4 000. and the the mejide which is a ship with 600 casualties on board and two crammed lighters in tow had reached basra festooned with with stala tight salicites of extra excreta and exuding a stench that was offensive from a distance of 100 yards she had labored downstream for 13 days and nights on her decks and on the exposed decks of her lighters men lay huddled in pools of blood urine and feces their bodies slimed with excrement their wounds crawling with maggots their shattered bones splinted in wood from whiskey crates and the handles of trenching tools and their thighs backs and buttocks leprous with sores and meanwhile townsend he's got his guys safely up and cut well all this is happening these guys are getting slaughtered 23 000 casualties and townsend's up there kind of chilling over the period of the siege he had he evinced several characteristics his townsend's communications were not however confined to those outside cut during the siege he had devoted much attention to issuing of communiques to his troops these were remarkable for three features a flagrant disloyalty toward towards and criticism of his superiors of thinly veiled contempt for the valiant but unsuccessful relief force and a total absence of gratitude toward those who were losing their lives trying to rescue him townsend was always prepared to abandon his beloved command in the interest of either his own release or his own advancement on march 5th he had again requested promotion this guy's calling he's capped he's freaking in sieged after causing himself to be there he's asking to get promoted on april 9th for the second time he had suggested that he should attempt escape to escape from cut and leave his division to its fate can you imagine running that up the chain of command hey boss i'm good i think i should just try and get out of here and whatever happens the division kind of happens the division three times he had suggested negotiation to exchange cut and its guns for the release of himself and his men though he must have known that only he would be allowed to go twice he had sent ingratiating letters to the enemy commander in the field and once had insisted that no attempt be made on the life of an enemy field marshal any doubts to the correct interpretation of these unedifying facts are dispelled by three subsequent events the first is a minor one but nonetheless revealing when townsend learned that that ale mayor's successor gringe had been promoted to lieutenant general he burst into tears and wept on the shoulder of a shrinking subaltern because he knew that gringe's promotion meant none for him the second is the fact that he did leave his division to die as prisoners of the turks and the third is that neither then nor later did he so much as lift a finger to ameliorate their plight for present purposes little remains to be said after 147 days townsend's food supplies which he'd originally stated would only last a month ran out confident from his exchange with the turkish commander that he would be treated generously he capitulated on april 19 1916 and handed his weak starving men over to the not-so-tender mercy of the turks then it was where their paths diverged while he was transported in the greatest comfort to baghdad and thenced against constantinople his thirteen thousand men began their one thousand two hundred mile march across the arid waste and freezing heights of asia minor and while he was wined and dined honored and entertained as the personal guest of the turkish commander-in-chief his men died in their thousands of starvation dysentery cholera and typhus and from the whips of their bad-tempered kurdistan guards they died of the heat by day and of cold by night they died because they wearied of staying alive dropping out of the column to be set upon by marauding arabs who have robbed them filled their mouths with sand and stones in all seventy percent of the british and fifty percent of the indian troops perished in captivity but townsend was spared these sword details for he traveled by train and arrived at constantinople on june 3 was met by the general commander of the turkish army his staff members of the war office and a crowd of respectful locals he felt very flattered he was even more flattered to be entertained later at constantinople's best restaurant then escorted by a detachment of cavalry to the waterfront where a naval penis waited him his baggage staff and servants aboard he sailed 10 miles down the sea of marmara to the fashionable island of halki where high on a cliff he took up residence in a comfortable villa that same day in the building the turks called the hospital those of townsen's troops still too ill to march from samara were being allowed by their captors to die in agony there was no treatment for them and very little food and those who fouled their beds were given an injection of brandly colored fluid after which they stopped fouling their beds because they were dead by that same day more than a third of the british troops to whom townsend had vowed he was leaving them only to procure their reparation had died yeah i don't know if it gets any worse than that back to the point of this book in conclusion one point demands particular emphasis in the mismanagement of the mesopotamian campaign sheer stupidity played a relatively minor role certainly duff was no genius and nixon was unintelligent but townsend was not men's fates were decided for them not so much by idiots as by commanders with marked psychopathic traits stupidity and ignorance there may have been but it was the ambitious striving of disturbed personalities which accounted for the loss of townsend's force in such matters as vanity personal ambition dishonesty lack of lack of compassion townsend was not unique where he differed from others was in possessing charm intelligence and professional expertise in a world of the square the pompous and the desperately unfunny townsend had a refreshingly light touch but underneath the agreeable veneer there lay a fatal flaw which showed itself in ravenous self-destructive hunger for popular acclaim though its origins remain obscure townsend gave the impression of a man who at some time had suffered traumatic damage to his self-esteem which resulted in an everlasting need [Music] to be loved well that kind of wraps up the world war one phase [Music] but there you go you got a smart man a charismatic man a guy with combat experience and a guy with psychopathic traits if you take those first one smart man charismatic man right that guy would breeze through uh officer so you know if we're looking for an offspring this guy's very charismatic he's very intelligent right oh let's sign him up let's put him in charge of something and not only do we bring him in but then he's going to rise through the ranks because he's charming and he's smart right and he's he he as things go well when things are going well he's freaking fantastic but the minute things went bad the the psychopathic monster comes out and that's what we need to avoid that's what we need to look out for that's what we need to prevent and the only way we can do that is to study the past and try and understand it to the best of our ability anything else dave that's a rough one dude this is just this has been a downhill adventure from the word go man and it's hard to listen to you set it up i think really well at the very beginning of the last podcast this is these are not stupid people and it gets reinforced just like that final that little conclusion you just expressing like this understanding these are not dumb people and the psychopathic trait of the psychopathic tendency the thing that might trigger that in us connected to the idea of humility is the fear of being exposed for not being smart or the fear of being exposed for not knowing what to do or the fear of being exposed for not understanding what's going on and how powerful that fear can be to get you to behave in a way i'm i i wouldn't i probably wouldn't use the word psychopathic very often to describe too many people and it's it's totally appropriate here yeah well it's weird when you think of psychopathic you think of someone that thinks of their own self it so they murder someone right so they make this move and and and do whatever they're gonna do that negatively impacts you know some other person or maybe a few people you don't think of it of where it impacts 12 000 people right it's just 23 000 people yeah or 23 000 people it's just insane yeah and just the thing i was thinking about too in the and i'm trying to just make somewhat of an objective reconnection to the things we teach this idea of leadership is god i wish i wrote it down but the the the the respect for your subordinates the loyalty the loyal yeah the the the the loyalty to your subordinates the belief in their just their basic welfare in this case just their basic welfare how liberating it is if you're surrounded by people that know that you care about them to be like hey fellas i don't know the answer to this one and then like no factors here we'll figure it out hey i'm not really sure what we should do here sir no problem that we can we got this and how many times the best thing i ever did was tell my my subordinates my junior marines that were junior to me in the hierarchy the senior ncos mid-grade ncos and be like hey gunny what do you think i should do here sir i've seen this 10 times here's what i think you should do cool right on and just the willingness to reveal that you're not smart or reveal that you don't have the answer or the willingness to just be get past the fear of what what will i look like if i don't know and it's actually the best thing you can do the best thing you can do is go hey jocko dude i don't know what to do here man and if i actually care about your welfare and they know that jocko will solve that problem for me to help me figure it out a bit or or come up with a thousand different ways that we could try to make this thing work out but if i succumb to that fear of maybe this cost me my my my desire to be the king of baghdad maybe this is the one that exposes me and i cannot let that happen the ends the lengths that people are willing to go to and i think you said it that people are willing people are willing to die before tell me what you said i just they would rather die than take an injury to their ego then take an injury to their ego yeah they would rather die than take an injury to their ego and this is the case where it's not their death it's the death of tens of thousands of their other people because they don't see them as human beings and the hardest part is is all the lead-up of that crimean war the borah war like world war ii world war one's coming war one's coming we're not gonna learn these lessons and you just see this this tragedy coming because you know what happens in history and like is this really going to happen and yeah this is this is really going to happen and that's i think that's what's made this so hard for me is like man we're not going to we're not going to fix this in history so i just got to listen to this story knowing exactly what's gonna happen yeah you can't change what you know is coming you already know where this story's going and you can't change it and the the the other really scary thing about this is like i just said these are people that you know a guy like townsend he breezes through officer selection he's freaking class president at ocs right he's smart he's got some dapper to him he's friendly he's charming this guy's just a you know winner all day yeah and he's surrounded by people that aren't so he stands out oh yeah you know people say i started off all these podcasts by saying sometimes and this is certainly true in the seal teams oh if you're in the seal teams you know everyone thinks that someone's in the seal teams they're like incredible human incredible whatever people think that about everybody that's in the military oh this person was a general this person was an admiral they must be freaking awesome and look there are tons of awesome seals and tons of awesome admirals and tons of awesome generals and colonels yes we get that but occasionally you look at when you go geez what just happened where'd that come from and here's where it came from because inside these organizations they if europe you know i said this thing about i don't forget what podcast i said it on but i was talking about the fact oh it was with daryl cooper in a bad organization the worst person rises to the top like the person that is willing to just be totally ruthless is gonna like if you take the nazis who's gonna ride to the top the guys that are willing to do whatever those are the ones that rise to the top they become the leaders the mob who's willing to go out and kill people and like those the people that rise to the top and unfortunately sometimes even in a good organization a person with those traits that can kind of kind of hide those traits they can still make it through the wickets and rise to the top and it's until they get put under pressure that they go and their and their true self comes out well good place to stop for today and we need to be look at on the lookout for people with uh psychopathic traits it's true in the meantime you know maybe we try and avoid having those traits ourselves maybe we actually try and become something a little bit more positive something good maybe we try and make ourselves better echo charles what did you suggest well psycho psychopathy apparently from what i understand isn't like it's like a thing in your mind like a normal seemingly normal person can be an uh clinical psychopath it has less to do with like crazy stuff that they do it's just the inability to if i'm not mistaken to empathize with people that's one of the big problems yeah yeah so yeah so it kind of makes sense where i mean i don't know if he's making a clinical claim clinical assessment company or whatever but if you if these people were psychopathic that's what it would look like i'm gonna say yeah if you do what townsend did yeah and you're in a villa while your men are being butchered starved tortured killed yeah you're a freaking psychopath right right while telling your leadership hey i think i should get promoted and get evacuated yeah it's like you just don't i mean and do you think this and maybe this is like maybe goes without saying or maybe kind of obvious or whatever but is this one of those situations where you know how like you're such so ahead of all the competition in your organization or whatever your team or whatever is so big where victory is almost like a foregone conclusion and you start caring about other stuff like you get like these individual self-interests that spring up because the real goal and the real like worry is kind of like on the back burner now yeah i think you're right i think that that's the british army thought that they were just right invincible yeah the british military britain thought it was invincible right right so they're just more concentrated yeah yeah like like okay yeah you know we're gonna do that all right that's obvious or whatever so lit you know so now i start caring about like you know my the king of wherever and all these other you know personal interests or whatever i'm gonna say something that i don't know maybe this makes me a psychopath if i would have been in charge of the british military i would have assembled a hit team and we would have gone and killed townsend like execution style and brought his body back and said hey leaders this is not how we lead and to the question you asked too i think given the author's education he's using that term in the clinical sense like that is not like a a it's not a slang term for a dude who's kind of messed up he's calling him he's referring to his psychopathic tendencies he means that in the the medical literal sense of that word right yeah exactly that's what it felt like to where it's like yeah 20 you know 23 000 people dying and this guy doesn't care he cares you remember when we set up the last podcast this guy's background right oh see what's funny is i knew one of you guys are gonna start making jokes about that i didn't know when i didn't know when and i didn't know who which is interesting it was dave burke good deal dave apparently but either way yes i'm here now that here now i'm here now yeah and i'm here to let you guys know how to avoid psychopath we're moving right into the treatment behavior because i don't know if one can avoid actual psychopathy i think you're either psychopath or not okay okay but how can we at least make ourselves a little bit better if we're not it's like avoiding celiac disease you know celiac disease so it's like you can't avoid celiac disease but you can avoid gluten you see i'm saying okay anyway so we talk about discipline the supplement now not necessarily just discipline as this was the supplement okay discipline go ready to drink energy drink a new era of energy drink a new idea of energy drink indeed gluten free by the way nice nice sugar-free sugar-free gluten-free chemical chemical-free um preservative-free because it's it's pasteurized yeah so we're not going to put any chemicals in your body yeah into your temple yes exactly right so so what you need what you want what you expect from an energy drink the good parts you get that no downside but you don't get the drawbacks exactly right the downside there's no downside so me i just drink three okay i'm saying i drink three today you drank three today drink three today okay sir all right i'm more healthy than i was before that's why you guys feel like that's pretty okay many different flavors we're up to what seven flavors is that one no i think we're at seven what's the best one mango hundred percent dave what's the best one it's nothing well hey look hey mango's good i'm going to say it right now i like mango it's one of the better flavors i would say yeah so you know how like different people like different flavors like my middle daughter dax savage all day dakota what do you got all day obviously my son sour apple sniper another psychopath i understand but my wife going going the distance she'll she's cracking open all kinds she's a she's mixing it up party party mix well the good news is they're all good technically you're not gonna really drink one and be like oh this one sucks this can be pretty rare that's gonna happen so i dig it and i understand but technically yeah man but either way whatever flavor you guys like look this is the new the new era the new what do you paradigm right that's the word of energy drinks don't have to worry about all that bad stuff boom so yeah get get that uh also stuff for your joints this is important you might not think about it every day it might excite some of us like other supplements might but when your joints start acting up then you'll be excited to have them not act up so yeah you take joint warfare super krill oil get on a routine too you won't have to worry about your joints anymore there you go true vitamin d3 cold war we got extra protein if you need it in the form of mulch that's the one to get excited which you could call a protein called dessert yes let's face it bro it is so tasty you get done eating some elk which by the way we're eating at the villain household right now kind of a lot but sometimes you get done you're like i wouldn't mind some dessert to go on top of that fine meal i just had hey but i don't want to eat ice cream i'm definitely not eating cake because we're not cake eaters over here no no no no do you dave burke do you put um like no foreign actually you know what i knew that i think you told me that already here's the thing that the frozen banana the frozen like overly ripe banana so every once in a while you won't blend it up quite as good i need to make a tulsi gabbard uh like drink we got i think we got i think we got banana coming maybe that needs to be the tulsi gabbard flavor signature flavor signature flavor of mulch it's called over ripened frozen banana yes there you go tea put that in if it sometimes you don't blend it all away let's say you're in a hurry or whatever or maybe just not just thorough that day whatever and then you'll get the little chunks of the frozen banana in there and it kind of feels like ice cream it's a little treat you can trick your kids with that too but they think it's ice cream so yeah all right you can get the drinks you can get all these things at vitamin shop you can get all these things at jackalful.com you can also get the drinks at wawa we're working on a bunch of other stores right now so um check it out there you go also the free shipping situation oh yeah and this is kind of a big deal would you call it a subscription it is a subscription okay subscribe to any of these things like let's subscribe to for sure joint warfare subscribe to that for sure d3 you probably don't need to subscribe to d3 because it's got like 360 pills in there so like what are you gonna yearly subscription is gonna show up no you don't really need to subscribe to that but super krill joint warfare definitely and then whatever your go-to milk flavor yeah probably worth it yeah especially if you're lifting because say resistance training but if you're lifting this let's face it that's that's going to be the jam 100 all right what else also origin usa this is where you can get your american made like for real american made for real american-made jeans boots geez geez of course for the jiu-jitsu oh yeah plenty rash guards also for the jiu-jitsu yeah in hoodies you know compression pants otherwise sometimes known as spats we you ever wear spats no ever nope the privacy of your own home why would i wear spats in the privacy of my own home you never know okay no whatever brad you know there's some stuff that you do in the privacy of your whole own home that you're just not going to just talk about freely i'm the same well okay yeah don't act like you don't that's like you didn't just catch me right there that's like one of the dumbest things i've heard in like two weeks what are you even talking about that could or could or that may or may not be limited or not limited to spats is what i'm saying i'm just saying origin spats okay oh you're too good for this talks really rapidly you know you you know anyway american-made spats if you're into spats whether or not jacqueline's or not there's that they actually come out with a lot of cool stuff also like that heavy hoodie that they got the heavy they're heavy like it's not like heavier or warmer hoodies is like a new thing but the heavy yeah it's kind of a new thing it's insane so they've done some good stuff over there that original winter winter arrived by the way in sd yeah i transitioned this morning to jock a white tea in the morning like a warm jack of lights so it's a little bit let's get a little chilly gotta get out that heavy uh originusa.com originusa.com if you want to give me that stuff true um yeah cool also we have a store joco has a store we we all it's all it's kind of all of our store now at this point uh it's called jacquo's store so you go to so you can get by the way our store is not located one quarter mile outside of our camp right we're not doing so it is co-located in our camp no we will not run out of supplies in our camp no it's uh yeah well you know it's online so i guess it's relative but either way discipline equals freedom shirts hoodies some hats on there a lot of good stuff on there uh if you want to represent while you're on this path while we are on this path if you want to represent hard or just a little bit jacqueline.com we also have a subscription subscription scenario some good designs coming out some good designs on that if you get a new shirt every month uh with some cool fun kind of layered ideas going on your shirt some good stuff good feedback on that one yeah so far people are digging that one i also subscribe to this podcast the jocko unraveling podcast that i do with daryl cooper dc grounded podcast which we haven't done a long time warrior kid podcast i know i owe some of those you can also join us on jackondeground.com that's uh alternative amplifying podcast with some it's q a answer a lot of questions for you all there's a way to ask questions through that we're on question we've done hundreds of questions so far so if you want to tune into that we also talk about like i said ancillary but impactful topics and it's also uh we're we're setting up this platform docker underground.com in case in case things get a little bit wild in case we lose control which we would be losers if we didn't have a contingency plan right you could be look we i had to detach i was looking at some of the things that were happening in the world and i was like we might get this might turn into a problem yeah i remember i called you i was like hey dude we need a freaking backup plan yeah yeah you're like it's going to cost money we got to do this and i was like okay well let's people will get in the game so if you want to get in the game it's 8 and 18 cents a month if you can't afford that we still want you in the game email assistance at jacquelineground.com if you want to just support if you don't have a place to go if we get banned uh what else could we get caught off inundated inundated with outside with outside interests all those things do you want to hear do you want to hear uh the podcast with uh a advertisement for a mattress right as we're talking about you know a tank battle yeah you don't want to hear that just mess up the whole you also by supporting that you keep advertising out of this thing yeah it's true also we have a youtube channel the video version of this podcast if you don't know what dave burke looks like boom you can know so yeah or you know or like a lot of people a lot of people are watching and listening at the same time newer ish medium kind of either way if you want to watch it on youtube you can we have a youtube channel also some excerpts on there so if you just want little nuggets medium nuggets we'll say okay origin usa has a cool podcast to subscribe to as well psychological warfare i made an album for echo charles kind of yeah time what kind of if you have little issues little moments of weakness uh press play on your phone after you download it from any mp3 place and i'll tell you how to how to push through that moment of weakness flipside canvas.com dakota meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall got a bunch of books final spin you better pre-order that thing right now if you want that first to dish that's what i recommend um it's getting some good reviews right now from the from the kind of like the terminator review people people that like to smash you in their reviews have given it really crazy good reviews yeah so final spin dave what's your review good it's so good uh check dc gave me a review the other day because i gave it to dc and he read it and he was like he was freaking stoked so um leadership strategy and tactics field manual the code the evaluation the protocols disabilities freedom field manual way the warrior kid one two three four mikey and the dragons hackworth about face extreme ownership dichotomy of leadership uh we have the leadership company where we teach leadership echelonfront.com if you need details on that that's where you can find out about our live events including the muster including field training exercises ef battlefield um we have an online training platform you can hear us refer to it from time to time if you want to ask me a question go to extremeownership.com and enroll in the extreme ownership academy and you can ask me a question you can ask dave a question you can ask leif a question we're on there two three times a week we also have a bunch of courses you can take so check that out and if you want to help service members active and retired their families gold star families you can check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization that does all kinds of amazing stuff if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mightywarriors.org and if you want more of my boring blathering or you need more of echo's interjecting inquiries or you want dave's enhancing estimations you can find us on the interwebs on twitter on the gram and on facebook dave is at david r burke echo zadek with charles i am at jocko willink and thanks to all the men and the women of the military who are leading not from a psychopathic mind but trying to take care of their people and accomplish the mission and also thanks to our police law enforcement firefighters paramedics emts dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders thank you for taking up care of us by locking up the psychopaths of the world and to everyone else out there take care of your people take care of your people put them first and you don't take care of them by being easy or letting them cut corners or allowing a lack of training and allowing a lack of discipline you take care of them by helping them be the best they can be by helping them be prepared by listening to them by incorporating their ideas and by putting your own agenda and your own aspirations below theirs go do that and until next time this is dave and echo and jocko out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 142,906

Keywords: jocko willink, podcast, discipline, defcor, fredom, leadership, extreme ownership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, dichotomy of leadership, jiu jitsu, bjj, mma, jocko, victory, echo charles, flixpoint

Id: 3T6Btc_3jrw

Length: 170min 24sec (10224 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021