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- [00:00]
Eric
Good morning. It is the 3rd of April, 2026, and as we record this week's second breakfast, we understand that United States Air Force combat search and rescue assets are in southern Iran looking for a downed F15E pilot. We are trying to scrape together information just like everybody else is, but we figured this is an interesting opportunity to talk about what is csar, what does that mean, how's it done, how do you plan for it? And just how grim is this are the fortunes of this Eagle driver?
- [00:33]
Justin
So we should probably go back and talk about when was the last time the United States did combat search and rescue, which off the top of my head was Libya. 2010, 2011.
- [00:42]
Eric
It's something that happens not often, but enough that the, the Air Force and the Marines and segments of the army rehearse and train for it. When an aircraft goes down in a dangerous area, if a pilot is separated from the aircraft, there are dedicated units that go out to try and immediately get the air crews out. But in gentler circumstances, like in the war in Afghanistan, you'd go and you'd try and get the aircraft out, too.
- [01:10]
Jordan
Good news is it's in a relatively uninhabited part of Iran. Bad news is it's in a relatively uninhabited part of Iran, which means, you know, if you're a pilot, it's desert hot, not a lot of water potentially, and obviously you don't want to be near the wreckage or the crew. I mean, this, you know, this is a big thing. Like all pilot, a lot of pilots go through SERE training for this for exactly this reason. Because if you're, you know, down behind, behind enemy lines, for lack of a better term, you're, you know, in a position where you're having to evade. You're in a position where you're having to get somewhere where you can be recovered and then hopeful that the recovery package gets there before the bad guys who obviously have a signal to follow to where you are or potentially are. It's tough. That's one of the hardest missions that the US Air Force largely undertakes is the recovery of downed pilots.
- [02:08]
Tony
So how does this work?
- [02:09]
Eric
It's a segment I was going to and Jordan's leading to an interesting question. This is a relatively new part of warfare that you needed aviation in order to strand pilots or individual soldiers behind enemy lines. That if you look Back to like 1914, 1915 in the Western Front, it was often like a German pilot would land and like the, the French would come out and like, shake his hand and treat him as like a fellow gentleman. It was very prim and proper. And in the Second World War that started to erode pretty rapidly that if you were a Russian AV or Soviet aviator that was captured by the Germans, there was no particular kindness extended in East Asia the same kind of principle was upheld. And there are jarring moments in American history with aviators, both Navy and Air Force are captured in North Vietnam who are subjected to extraordinary stress, torture, psychological abuse during their, their captivity. So the, the Air Force treats and the the Navy treat this exceptionally seriously and it's an extraordinarily dangerous mission. And some of the most well trained special operations forces the United States has are our pararescue in Air Force special operations. And they're designed to get those aviators out of these difficult environments. But without further speculation to Jordan's point, like what happens if the Iranians have a Air Force pilot? How does that change the dynamic?
- [03:42]
Justin
Well and so I think it kind of depends on and I know centcom, I think they posted saying nothing happened, which is okay, I think it depends on how they went down. Right. If it's F15s are old aircraft, if it was a mechanical failure for why they went down, which is might be like why there's no video of the pilot ejecting or at least I haven't seen one yet, then okay, that's one thing. It's a high mission tempo.
- [04:10]
Eric
Right.
- [04:10]
Justin
I think the 15 seemed to be doing a lot of the drone intercepts. If you know the Iranians did shoot at them down. Well, was it a SAM system? In which case that means that the whole Iranian air defenses are completely gone. Is not true if it was a lucky Shorad or Manpad shot. Well I think that points to the whole like yeah, you're never actually that safe in the air because of the proliferation of MANPADs, the Man Portable Air Defense system. For those who don't know that's just shoulder fired missiles. And I, I think that is as far as I'm willing to speculate on, on how that impacts the war. I, I think people will say well was it because of incompetence? That's by statistics alone. If there are manpads proliferating in a conflict, something's going to go down eventually. Like that is we're a month into this war and if that's the first aircraft down from, from the Air Force's perspective that's a fair success.
- [05:07]
Eric
It regardless of the mechanism by which the aircraft went down, if the Iranians have this pilot in custody, the chance of a special operations mission to recover that pilot is exceptionally high. That CSAR Combat Search and Rescue turns into hostage rescue quite rapidly. And if special operations can get a fine so like they can locate the pilot, they can fix, they can maintain visibility of the pilot. The, the powers that be are going to send Rangers and seals or Army Special missions units against that objective. To pull that pilot out like that is boots on the ground, which is an extraordinarily stupid term. But that threshold that we have been sort of dancing around since the, the war began a month ago will almost certainly be crossed because of this hostage rescue operation. Again, assuming that the Iranians have them and that the US can the down.
- [06:08]
Jordan
Yeah, I mean, like this, to a certain degree it gets to speculation. What it does likely turn into, though, in some ways is a. Iran has leaned really hard into the messaging and they're honestly doing a relatively good job of messaging. The regime is for it to be decimated and 100% destroyed and you know, all the other things, their online presence and their online messaging has been really good. And I think if they were to shoot down even just one, the message that they would start putting up is kind of exactly what Eric was saying. Like, you know, our 100% destroyed military capability is still taking down aircraft and keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, which is what a lot of their like, AI generated videos and propaganda they were pushing out over the last week has kind of said as well. And I think that's. That would be the biggest impact to a downed pilot outside of, you know, again, speculating to some degree. But if, if they're downed and not recover just the, the tragedy for the, for the pilot's families outside of that, there would be the messaging win by the regime, which they'll lean into. Pardon?
- [07:19]
Eric
Yeah, the, the axis. Do they treat it like that time towards the end of the Obama presidency when there was a, a Navy patrol boat drifted into Iranian waters and the Iranian navy picked them up and then captured the sailors, made them all take off their boots, made them look like goofballs and then repatriated them. Is it going to be that gentle? I, I don't think it would be. It's going to probably be something closer to the coalition aviators in the 91 war against Iraq where the Iraqis put them on TV and show that these guys had had the shit kicked out of them. It's going to be grim.
- [07:58]
Tony
Yeah, I mean, on the, like, Special Forces retrieving the pilot thing, we had Israel running around Gaza for two years unable to find hostages. I For one am pretty skeptical that, you know, if, if they can't find this person in the next, like, 12 hours, that Iran wouldn't be able to, to make that sort of thing, you know, near impossible. Which leaves you in a really tricky situation. I mean, look, we have a president who gave a speech two days ago which was, I guess I can say, fascinating because on the one hand, it's clear he wants this war to end. He's over it. He's sick of it. He started to fire people. He's cranky. He understands that this is like, you know, he even acknowledged that gas prices were going up. You know, the polls have been as low as they've ever been in both of his two presidencies. But this is war, right? And, like, shit happens and you get stuck and it's easy to start them and very hard to end them. And we're just in this, like, you know, the sort of the, the pack up your bags and go home play, which we've talked about in prior episodes. Even leaving Iran with the Strait of Hormuz is a whole lot trickier when there's a hostage. Right. I mean, honestly, would we really put it past this president to do that, though?
- [09:28]
Justin
Like, I mean, well, no, he wants
- [09:31]
Eric
to do, he wants to do fourth of July parties. Like, he is gearing up to be the center of attention around the 250th anniversary. Like, that is supposed to be the capstone. And now he doesn't get to have his parties. No treats. He is frustrated.
- [09:48]
Justin
I, I, I think that's, like, true, though. Like, that there is, I, I don't think there's a world where they just walk away from it. I, I, I, People got mad at me when I said this online. But, like, you, you can't just, like, throw your tantrum and leave. Like, that's not. There are actual security, you know, consequences to that. Yeah. If there's a hostage or hostages, it's even more. I will also say that capture is not necessarily the automatic result. You know, you could look at the Bravo 20 escape in 91. You know, several other cases where aviators and special operations forces are able to, you know, find or fight their way out.
- [10:30]
Jordan
But I, to which, let's just caveat that real quick. The sas, some people in the SAS have some very different opinions of what happened in Bravo 2.0.
- [10:38]
Justin
Yes, yes, that is, look, there was an escape that was made, and that's about as accurate as I can.
- [10:48]
Jordan
Yep, that's as accurate as we can ever make. That Statement. Yes. Only one person knows what actually happened.
- [10:53]
Justin
Yeah. But I think that this, and I don't want to lean too much into the politics of this because there is a man or woman on the ground right now. From the White House's perspective, this is probably about one of the worst things that could probably happen politically because it fights every narrative that they have put out. And you don't get your happy highlight reels of bridges blowing up, which I think that from an operations standpoint, not that we have a national security infrastructure anymore, but I would have some questions if they said, oh, there's no targets left. Let's go after the civilian bridges, and then that happens.
- [11:31]
Jordan
Yeah. I mean, you also have to weigh this with the fact that I think it was a day ago, maybe two days ago, that Kharazi was wounded and his wife was killed in a strike. Either US Or Israeli. Unsure. But Kharazi was supposedly one of the Iranians who was dealing through or that was talking through Pakistan for the negotiations. So while trying to bring this to a close, we're also striking, shooting the messengers.
- [11:58]
Eric
Do they.
- [11:59]
Justin
So here's my question. Do they really think that that is a negotiating tactic that you should take? And I say they. I mean the United States government. That you should kill your negotiators or is this like a. The Israelis are killing the negotiators.
- [12:14]
Jordan
That's. Yeah.
- [12:15]
Justin
You know, like, I'm very curious about that because, you know, I don't think Israel is particularly interested in this conflict ending right now based upon what Netanyahu said publicly, which is that you have to do more.
- [12:29]
Eric
And the liberalities are starting to. Yeah.
- [12:36]
Jordan
For all we know is he.
- [12:38]
Eric
Was he in an ambulance racing to help people on a bridge and they were killed in a double tap strike.
- [12:46]
Justin
Can we talk about that? I mean, that's. That's horrific, by the way, that we're doing that now that we're waiting for aid workers to show up. Let.
- [12:54]
Eric
Here's the circumstance that Tony's referencing. There's a somewhat famous civilian bridge in greater Tehran that was struck by the United States. And bridges are not necessarily protected in war. Like, sometimes you go after bridges, but you have to have a reason for it. There has to be military necessity to do it. That you don't just go after infrastructure because it is on your target deck. That would make it a criminal action. Reporting in the aftermath of the strike, and this happened, I think, Thursday morning or overnight from Wednesday into Thursday, that there was an initial strike that dropped the span. And then Iranian sources indicate that there was a second strike that hit first responders who were helping people who were stranded on the bridge or otherwise injured or incapacitated. That would be objectively a criminal action. If the reporting is correct. And if the United States is doing that right now, then up through Admiral Cooper and down. I mean, you just have people with criminal culpability.
- [14:00]
Justin
Yeah. And so I say I really hope that's bullshit like that, because I think that beyond everything else that has happened so far, I think most of the military commands could find one way or another to justify the strikes that have happened. You know, the. Whatever that stuff is crossing a line that is hard for the United States military to culturally walk back. If that becomes real, and if we
- [14:27]
Eric
want to hover for a moment over international law, international law, law of armed conflict typically breaks into two phases. There's like, first, is the law? Is the war justified? Just at bellum, it's a question of when can countries use military force? Can you defend yourselves? Are there authorized reasons to do it? And this has been developed for ten centuries of human experience have been codified in, like the UN Charter, which is reflected in the American Constitution. Like, you go to war for certain reasons, and countries can defend themselves. And there's a large body of law over when that happens. And then there's Justin Bello, pardon my Latin isn't particularly good. Over how do you conduct yourself during the conduct during the war itself. That I think there are few sober forms of analysis to say, like the United States and Israel's war in this case is justified. They say it's probably a war of aggression, that there. There's no international law sheen over that. But once you breach that threshold, then there's are you conducting yourselves responsibly during the fighting? And to Tony's point, like, if we are hitting aid workers, it is prima facie evidence of violations of laws of armed conflict. And we also know, based off of decades of public advocacy of writing of legal activity, of behavior on the podium, that the Secretary of Defense likes war crimes. He thinks they are necessary conditions to battlefield victory. So for people in a position of analysis like ours, who are observers after the fact, it is, I think, a responsible set of assumptions to say that the chain of command is effectively pro war crime and that they see war crime and the willing war crimes and the willingness to conduct this kind of violence as necessary conditions of their version of victory. And it is criminal, top to bottom. So now should we shift and talk about the ongoing purges in the United States Army? Is that helpful
- [16:33]
Justin
I think that's a good pivot because while this war is ongoing, Secretary of Defense is busy making Dan Driscoll's life hell. For those who don't know, Dan Driscol is Secretary of the army, well liked in the administration, head of the atf, also head of the atf. I forgot about that. Well liked in the administration, as far as I can tell. Well liked in the press, well liked among the troops. And so there's been this persistent reporting and paranoia in the building as well as in media that Dan Driscoll is next up for Zachdef. Now, is that entirely Driscoll's been putting out there? Who knows? But I'm sure there's more than a few folks I've talked to who've looked at that and said, yeah, he'd solve a lot of problems. And so this has made the Secretary of Defense extremely paranoid to the point where he fired one of his PAOs a few months ago. He's now relieved three generals. And look, I'm not really in the business of defending generals generally by. It's pretty clear you can kind of see that the color of people's skin and their gender and be like, sorry, that's there's a little bit more there than just, you know, your last oer. And it's quite clear that there is. Pete wants to reshape the Pentagon of the military in his image in addition to making dangerous life hell. And this will have a long standing impact on the officer corps if they believe that, you know, certain behaviors, certain politics get rewarded and others get punished.
- [18:18]
Eric
Yeah. And in Pete Hegseth's vision, it is an overtly partisan act to exist as a black woman. It is overtly partisan act to be a black officer like he. He does not see those identities as being part of the America that he respects, and he behaves accordingly. And one of the more interesting reveals from the ongoing purge, and whether or not it's accurate, is difficult to determine, is that General George, who is the Army Chief of Staff, and the Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, were fighting to keep two women and two black men on a promotion list from Colonel to Brigadier General, and the Secretary of Defense was trying to get. Get them off the list for reasons that he doesn't care to articulate, but we can operate under a fair assumption. So to Tony's original summary, Secretary Driscoll is well liked. He is a close friend of the Vice President. His military experience is vastly more impressive than that of the Secretary of Defense. He was my understanding he was a cavalry. He was in a cavalry squadron in the 10th Mountain Division, but went to Ranger School, did all the junior officer stuff, then went to Yale Law. Like he is academically accomplished. He went after hard targets. He committed himself to being a decent junior officer. That to be commended. And Pete did none of that. Pete literally tattooed a regimental crest of a unit which he did not technically serve on his body to borrow somebody else's veiler. And everybody knows it. And when he walks the halls, I mean, people know this about him. But beyond the stink of gin, it's the stink of desperation.
- [20:18]
Jordan
I think this also goes towards the very beginning of this admin of this version of Trump administration's desire to strip away bureaucracy. I think Jordan, you had a good interview with Kevin where you guys kind of talked about how the military bureaucracy, the profession of arms is a bureaucracy, kind of laid the groundwork for like what a professional civil bureaucracy actually looks like and the capabilities. Because in some ways, like, yes, there is a leveling out effect of like capabilities as officers raise up through the ranks of the military. And we can make fun of it. It's like you don't actually get the best of the best. You get the best of the ones who stayed. Or the best of the rest is kind of the way people like pejorative talk about officers. But really what you get is you get like the solid 70 percenters, like the people who score in the 70 to 80% that don't necessarily want to go out and get involved in business or like really love being in the military. And like that's part of their family tradition. I think about like the Van Antwerps, two, two men who could probably do anything, who decided to stay and serve in the, in the military. And both of them are going to end up reaching, you know, echelons of power within the military. They grew up in this. In the bureaucracy that exists where there are certain things that you do and you don't do. There are certain things that you say and you don't say because no matter what your personal beliefs are, there's a non partisanship that's expected of a military commander. You start throwing cold water on that when you start making decisions that are reflective of the decisions that we've seen Secretary Hegseth make over the last few months.
- [21:57]
Eric
When you've got a flight of Apaches that violate FAA rules to go salute Kid Rock and then the army has to discipline these pilots. It was this, it was a squadron commander 217, you know, a beloved unit in my personal History that has bailed me out of gunfights multiple times. Their squadron commander goes and, like, celebrates this overtly partisan actor. They tell him it's coming so he can have his camera put up as an express violation of the Hatch Act. It's dangerous. It wastes jet fuel, wastes maintenance time. The commander should have been relieved immediately. And then Pete's like, actually, no, this is awesome. It is a direct attack on order and discipline. It is permitting certain unethical behaviors, and then it is penalizing people based off their demographics outside of whether or not they are performing to expectations at all. It is a deliberate partisan reshaping of the military top to bottom. And the Senate's allowing it to happen.
- [23:04]
Jordan
Yeah, I mean, like, there's zero chance that the inverse of that where. So Kid Rock and his post, like, directly made fun of Gavin Newsom and talked about the amount of respect. So again, like you said, he knew it was coming because camera was set up, but he also had, like, the, you know, basically saying that these Apache pilots are showing him an amount of respect that they would never show Gavin Newsom. And it's just like. Well, that's potentially problematic. It kind of goes back to, I think it was Eisenhower and potentially even before then, there were officers in the. In the past centuries who held to the belief. And I was kind of raised on this tradition in my own family where officers actually didn't vote. Not because they couldn't vote. They didn't vote because there was a. If you were the kind of person who could go out and vote for the person who didn't win the president, then you've already had to, like, separate your personal self from your professional self. And to not even have that dichotomy and not even have that conflict of interest. They just removed themselves from it. They never took the step of actually voting in. In the election because they never wanted to have that personal conflict of interest with the elected official. That becomes really hard. And now you're seeing, like, in the span of a couple of generations, going from, like, that being kind of a norm that was looked at to it being, like, nah, as openly partisan as it can be.
- [24:32]
Justin
And so, like, I think bringing up the Eisenhower example is a good one here, which is as far as my recollection goes, they didn't know what party he was. And I think it's like both parties tried to draft him. Right. The reason for a military official in that level of public office is not for partisan politics. It is for national unity. It's why Grant becomes President. It's why Washington is president. Right. And so there, there is that sort of difference there of like, military officers are not, should not be innately partisan figures. War by itself is political. And being able to differentiate that has. I think that line has been blurred basically probably going back to when Petraeus was. Petraeus and McChrystal were relieved, in my opinion, of when it became, you know, the generals versus the commander in chief. And like, quite frankly, like, I think those in politics failed to fight that story in the same way that Truman did. And I think that that is. There's a direct link between that and what we see today.
- [25:39]
Eric
And a lot of these officers grew up in the Clinton era that if you'll recall, Clinton early in his administration had a secretary of defense who fell out very, very rapidly talking about repeal of don't ask, don't tell or allowing queer troops to serve openly. And like the Joint Chiefs, immediately revolted. There was a baseline of extraordinary disrespect that was permitted towards the Clinton administration and the person of Clinton himself because the officer corps in the commentariat treated him as someone who lacked a moral compass that the active duty military was supposed to uphold. And that was about a lot of clouded nonsense, but it certainly existed. I think it was certainly accelerated during the Petraeus era. I remember having lunch with Petraeus when I was at Yale. He came and visited the Grand Strategy Program and he was very confident in telling us that. He's like, oh, well, I'm taking calls from donors and they're all telling me to get involved once I'm retiring. It was clear that Sheldon Adelson had called him that morning and was trying to get him to do something about centcom. But he was very, very comfortable operating in political twilight. And we are all downstream from lesser men creating conditions for what we're seeing now.
- [27:09]
Jordan
Well, and you also see with McChrystal and Petraeus and those guys where they had a jellyfish like consistency in their moral fiber, where they were able to. 2020 happens. McChrystal writes a book, famously, the first chapter is him take it is all about how he chose to privately remove the photo of Lee or the painting of Lee that he's kept in his house because he realized that it had gone too far and that, you know, it wasn't somebody who should.
- [27:40]
Justin
It had not gone too far in 1861, apparently.
- [27:44]
Jordan
But again, but the issue with people like that, because say what you will about MacArthur and I'll say a lot of terrible things about him whenever we get to talk about him. But he was always the same person. Like, he was always MacArthur, the man who would award himself the Medal of Honor given to chance. And then you look at Eisenhower, kind of the inverse. Eisenhower was. You didn't know who he was, but he also was firmly of that choice. I'm not going to let this be a problem, to be honest. The last person that was, that I can remember that was like, that would have been Colin Powell. Only in the fact that, like, it was kind of like, is he or isn't he, like, is he Republican? Which side does he fall on? Obviously in the end, he worked for Republican administration, also came out and supported Obama. You know, has had had things to say about President Trump. But yeah, you're kind of at the point where you've, have you engendered such a political level at the, at the top of the generalship, where that becomes normal for them to be political and not to be the apolitical national security figures that they're supposed to be.
- [28:54]
Tony
You want to do the awacs?
- [28:55]
Eric
Okay, yeah.
- [28:58]
Jordan
So, you know, sorry, go ahead.
- [29:00]
Justin
I would say so, in addition to what seems to be an F15 shot down at some point this morning, we lost an AWACS last week on the ground in Saudi. Why is that significant? Well, one, because it seems to be in the same place where the Iranians had previously hit targets. Two, there's only 16 E3s in the US fleet now. The Saudis and some NATO members have others, but so we're down to 15. I believe the DoD said that it was only damaged. And if you look at it, it's only 2/3 remaining.
- [29:35]
Jordan
So the damage bit was the important bit.
- [29:37]
Justin
Yeah, yeah, it'll buff out.
- [29:39]
Eric
Just need a fresh CO.
- [29:42]
Justin
But like, so E3s are critical to sensing an early warning, right? They are early warning aircraft. You know, the maintenance rate on them, I think is pretty high from what I understand, like, because they are mostly old. And their replacement, the E7 wedgetail, I think on budget is like replace two of them because it's super expensive. And the Air Force is caught between having to like modernize seven different things at once. So it's significant, right, because that if you don't have that plane, that means, well, okay, well if I have to do deployments to other theaters, like, I am down one. And that has a significant impact. I think it's a pretty big sign. I wrote an article about this last week of like, Centcom didn't learn anything from the last 10 years. Like, they still think it's 2003. Like, and you know, I get it, there's like that meme of like it's forever centcom, but like there are plenty of lessons learned from Ukraine, even within the DoD. The way the DoD trains for the Pacific is significantly different from the way CENTCOM is, is behaving operationally. According to centcom chief.
- [30:51]
Eric
Yeah, according to their chief innovation officer, they were using AI to defeat the Houthis. So who are we to question McDill or Gutter forward? No, it's ridiculous. Like they've just got this entire disposition of we were, we were appointed to lead, not to read.
- [31:08]
Jordan
Yeah, I mean like it's, you go to Qatar, you go to, you know, Saudi Arabia, you spend time on those bases and they're just these massive buildups. Like they're, they're, they are the mounds of iron. Yeah, they're, they're of a bygone era. I can remember landing in a little plane and then like just lines of refuelers and C17s and all manner of aircraft just lined up on the automatic. And I think, you know, I posted that photo that Al Monitor posted in June when they again their osint, like hey, clearly CENTCOM is getting ready to do something because they noticed that we had gone from having 40 exposed aircraft to having like three exposed aircraft at any time. But yeah, I mean like the lessons learned, the lessons learned of Operation Spiderweb, the lessons learned of just like the way your bases are going to be vulnerable. Like you can't have these in an actual shooting war where enemy can range you. You're not going to be able to, you have to invest more in security, you have to invest more in hardening targets. You have to invest more. It makes everything more expensive. The log tail gets longer. The forward edge has to be able to operate further away from their kind of logistics base and you have to just be able to bring supplies forward. And I think that's one of the things that we've lost as well.
- [32:31]
Justin
And that's like one of, you know, this is not to Monday morning quarterback, but. Right. The last 10 years in Indo Pacom, we've spent building out new expeditionary airfields, lengthening runways, you know, rebuilding islands that probably should have been. One of the first things CENTCOM was doing was building expeditionary airfields to distribute their forces knowing they would have more capacity than they could handle in theater. Right. For a sustained ground campaign. And if it really was, it's going to be a three day special military operation. Look man, I, I, I don't know what to Tell you.
- [33:05]
Tony
Yeah, so that's, that's really the question is, like, even if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt of starting the clock in like 2023, right, which is pretty late for all of this, but you get to see sort of a year of Ukraine, the start of drones really like becoming a big deal. I mean, how much would you have
- [33:32]
Eric
expected
- [33:34]
Tony
the performance of what the US has been able to do in March of 2026 to be different?
- [33:41]
Jordan
So I think that we suffer from the exact same American exceptionalism that the Europeans. And I wrote a little bit about this. But you look at the Russo Japanese war, even if you, if you lay aside the civil war, lay aside all that, the. The Europeans got to watch a European power at the time, the Russians, the. The least modernized, but the Russians take on an emerging Japan who, you know, obviously bested them at sea, but then they got to watch the Japanese get absolutely chewed up, running into barbed wire and machine guns. And the Pre World War I, they looked at the Russo Japanese War and they said, well, that won't happen to us. We'll be fine.
- [34:21]
Justin
Yeah. I believe their exact framing was, well, the Russians are lesser whites.
- [34:25]
Jordan
Yeah, the Russians are lesser whites, and we're better than the Japanese, so we'll be able. Our Elon, which I think is a direct quote from one of the French leaders, will overcome the machine guns. I think this is absolutely the type of hubris that people write books about where it's just like, we're different. Like, yes, the Russians got hit by Ukraine, and yes, the drones have been terrible to their stuff, but obviously, like, you know, it's not going to happen to us. And you can only say that because, like, as a base commander, if you have a high, you know, a highly vulnerable and highly important aircraft sitting out on a Runway, not about to take off, not taxiing to take off, like just sitting out on a Runway to where a Lucas or what the Shaheed can strike it, like, you have made a deliberate choice to deny the reality that you're in.
- [35:19]
Justin
And so I go back to this. I believe it was a New York Times article like 20, 23, 24, that basically says, you know, it's talking about the Americans training Ukrainian forces in Western Europe. And like, you know, you can complain all you want about the Ukrainians not understanding why we can't use DJI drones. Right. But like, largely, yeah, the, the arrogance of American trainers is on display of the Ukrainians being like, half of what you're teaching us is not relevant to our fight. You guys have no idea how to handle drones. It's still largely true. And there were some questions of like, well, how true is that? You know, and it's quite clear that for the DoD, being a learning institution for the DoD, you know, having all these lessons learned, manuals and everything, nobody reads them apparently, or it's down to commander by commander. Clearly there are no standards set for how to train against these things because we're still doing this. And I get it, commanders will, and soldiers will behave on convenience if not enforced through discipline. And clearly there is no enforcement of how to handle these sorts of threats.
- [36:27]
Jordan
Last week there was an interview. I can't remember the name of the commander, but he was talking about the Ukraine's use of some of the air defense systems that we've given to him. And he was like, you know, at first I really thought the Ukrainians, they, they wouldn't be able to master it, but really they're kind of better than us now. It's like, well, no shit. They've been using it for two years in actual combat. Like, of course they're better than you. That is the way this works. Like it is.
- [36:48]
Tony
But then you're going home at 4:30.
- [36:51]
Jordan
Yeah. Every day. They're doing this all the time. Like, yeah, they figured it out. Imagine that the ones that are still alive are really, really good. Like, you should be bringing them over here to train you. But we saw the exact same resistance, Special Forces, US Army, Special Forces and SOCOM saw the exact same resistance from the regular army and conventional forces as the push through Syria. Because we were already at that time using the drones, both MQ9s, Ravens, Pumas, all these. The drones that the US army had in supply to do things like FO and call for fire, to be able to identify targets, to be able to like. And we're using them to actually spot rounds from mortars and from indirect fire to be able to walk them onto targets. The US army did not care. They didn't care. Like, we tried to say, like, hey, like, this is like, you're. This is how you should be. Like, hey, guys, you all need to be using atac. You all need to be using these different systems. You need to be marrying them together and training like this. This would have been in 2016, 2017. Basically. That's a version of what you have now where you have drones serving as spotters for indirect fire in Ukraine. Then you have the armed drones, obviously that are coming over and that are planet. Nobody even wanted to learn from our own lessons because it wasn't a threat to them. They could keep doing things the way they were doing it. Everything was cool. That's the exact same thing. Like, we have the inertia of the way things have always been.
- [38:21]
Eric
Yeah, Justin, that's very hard to go. Yeah. Can I make that worse?
- [38:25]
Jordan
Yeah, please.
- [38:26]
Justin
Always.
- [38:28]
Eric
Yeah. So recently here in my. Here in my humble office with you can see books, but the other wall is my game collection. Almost exclusively like military issues. I had a brigade commander, active duty down here, talking about, you know, the ebb and flow of contemporary war. Sharp person who, who has spent a substantial amount of time focused on Ukraine issues. And he recently took his brigade to a training rotation at one of the. The major centers. And he relayed to me that he had to spend a inordinate amount of time coaching the artillerymen embedded with his infantry to accept the fact that UAS could spot and adjust fire. And he said that it was just a baseline cultural rejection, that if it was not a 13 series soldier embedded, looking through their own binoculars, using their own optics, using their own laser designators, that it didn't count that if they had Air Force aircraft or army embedded uas or if they had their own workshop stuff that was floating over the unit that could spot and assess and adjust fire, the artillerymen wouldn't do it. And this is 2026. And the army has had these tools at its immediate disposal for two decades.
- [39:57]
Justin
Well, I think one of the fundamental problems here is that, and I say this because this is all in China policy of, you know, there's peace disease among the PLA, right? They haven't fought since 79. Right. And it's like, all right, well, let's go through by branch of just the US Army. We won't even get to the Navy. We'll. We'll just focus on the US Army. Armor hasn't had an armor on armor engagement since 2003. That was certainly not against a peer threat. If you look at, you know, aviation, right? Aviation has not had to deal with heavy contested airspace in a very long time. If you look at the infantry, counterinsurgency is not the same as living in a trench 24 hours a day or living under constant threat of drone attack on maneuver. It is significantly different. And every GWAT veteran that has went to Ukraine has said, my experience is irrelevant. And yet the US army still says, well, we're the most combat experienced force on the planet. No, you're not. You might be still very good at logistics. I have some questions about that. But combat Experience. No, it's the Ukrainians and the Russians and you can choose to learn their lessons. And it's clear that we're just not the.
- [41:14]
Jordan
One of the clearest indicators for me is always like when you start looking at risk acceptance and risk tolerance, you see commanders that are making decisions today still in the military, well, at least when I retired, they were starting to pay lip service to the fact that, oh, we're not going to have the golden hour anymore. So the golden hour was that you could be from point of injury to on a surgical table within an hour. And that was kind of the standard for medical evacuation within the GWAT era. Saved a lot of lives. Absolute shit ton of lives were saved by that. That and the. And tourniquets cut down on casualty rates and mortality rates from what we saw in Vietnam. You know, something like 72% of people who died in Vietnam died from bleeding out from extremity wounds that could have been saved by tourniquets. You know what I. So we've in those ways, great lessons were learned. But now you're asking commanders to say, like, hey, you're not going to have this capability, which means you as a commander are going to have to make some actual hard choices. Somebody gets injured, you actually are going to have to decide if they die or not. Because can you give away your position? Can you do all the things to get them out? And as we see in Ukraine, like soldiers clumping together to even pick up and extract a casualty becomes a target because now you have six soldiers clumped up around the wounded individual. It is very, very hard to make commanders actually recognize that that's the new risk and then recalibrate their risk acceptance and risk tolerance and make decisions. And you see that by we're not even willing to make those risk acceptance and tolerance trade offs in sitcom, which is, hey, we need to spend a shitload more money and build reinforced bunkers for every aircraft or we need to distribute these planes across a large. And we need to reinvest more in the actual types of base security that are necessary to secure them from these drone attacks. That's going to be a generational shift that's going to have to happen unless there's ground combat that causes it to happen faster. Here's the only reason it'll happen faster is because people will die.
- [43:24]
Tony
So is this just the bull case of the Iran war, as if we lose hard enough, then maybe some of
- [43:30]
Eric
these things will change?
- [43:31]
Justin
No, there'll be. Well, some things will. It kind of depends on the politics of it, I think, yeah, it's.
- [43:37]
Jordan
So that's the hard, hard thing, right. Is like, we lost in Vietnam. There were some really good lessons that could have been learned from the loss in Vietnam, but instead we fell into. Well, the politicians didn't give me what I needed. So really, it wasn't until the 1990s that the army really reset itself and it shook off the dust. Late 80s, early 90s, where it shook off the dust and then had the success of the Gulf War, which was one, we have to have a political end and something that is achievable by the military, which is a man like Powell actually helped push towards. Like, hey, the army can't do everything. Like, you have to have a winnable political solution that like the army, the use of force actually makes sense in. But then they went in, they won and they left and they okay, we got a victory. Losing hard enough in this goes back to that exact same thing. Well, the loss, it won't be a tactical loss. It's one of the issues I have with the way that people talk about it is people, of course, there's a plan. Yes, there is a military plan. Obviously, it doesn't matter if the military plan is rested on a foundation of something that the military can't actually achieve and that can't be achieved through military
- [44:45]
Eric
force, which is an antitasking order, is not a strategy.
- [44:48]
Jordan
Exactly. Like, what is the end state with Iran? Because Iran, I know people are going to say now, well, it's clearly the five things. It's the. Destroy the Navy, deny nuclear weapons sometimes. Unless you ask it. Yeah, yeah.
- [45:02]
Eric
Make them not. They're not hostile to their neighbors. They can't hurt people.
- [45:05]
Jordan
Yeah. And they don't have proxies anymore. But the one that the president mentioned when we started this whole thing, the very last one he mentioned was, people of Iran, now is the time to rise up and overthrow your government. That's expressly regime change. And you even killed the regime leadership to make it easier for that to happen. So like to say that now we've changed it. Okay, fine, we've changed it. To what? To what end? And did we change it because we realized we couldn't achieve our goal? Because that's a loss even if we win tactically, like not achieving your goal is a loss. Right.
- [45:41]
Eric
There's another layer that I want to add, and I think Justin's disposition is fundamentally correct, that the military get likes pointing to political leadership and saying, well, it was in Vietnam we couldn't march north into Hanoi. So of course we lost. Or in Iraq and Afghanistan we weren't able to torture Iraqis or Afghans and we didn't shoot enough civilians. So nobody was afraid of us. So we lost. Like there's this ability to point to somebody else. There's a book that I recommend everybody in the military read if you're ever interested in risk management. And it's not a, it's not a pecan warfare. It's the, the smartest guys in the room. It's the classic history of Enron and it's fundamentally a story of hubris of business in Houston. It's a real classic, but something that I picked up in my own research in writing a book that someday I'll put on substack is Enron had a extraordinarily robust risk management division. They hired extraordinarily well regarded financial planners, geopolitical risk analysis experts, people who do oil and gas. They really went out of their way to hire expert risk management. And they advertised it like when Enron went out for fundraising, when they went into definitive agreements, they would say, hey, we've got this risk management division. We know what we're doing, trust us. And that risk management division in terms of like the investment committees that were making decisions to enter into these agreements or making these investments or deciding which accounting principles to employ was never consulted that they had this ornamental risk management division that did not exist inside the core decision making cycle of Enron's management. So what they had is like an expensive great looking bauble that shifted responsibility for thinking about risk to an institution that then could not erupt bad choices. So they got the worst of both worlds. They had this extraordinarily expensive program that they were not able to actually rely upon. And that model has me thinking about sort of a bugaboo of mine, something that I bring up in our broadcast or writing or an advocacy is we are talking through this problem of identifying lessons from Ukraine or from previous military conflicts in the Middle east and applying it and learning from it and adapting. And that is what innovation is supposed to be. Innovation is bottom up refinement. It is learning lessons that are immediately available. It's discarding lessons that aren't necessarily applicable and adjusting your behavior accordingly. And we are in a Department of Defense, a military structure right now that has created innovation as its own separate vertical. And that separate vertical is the Defense Innovation Unit. It's the Marine Corps Innovation unit. It is afWorks, softWorks, spaceworks, this host of or Navy rapping capabilities organization. This Host of external organizations whose job it is is to figure it out and then come back to us with a solution. And that innovation often requires sort of devolves to, well, we're going to buy a product from Silicon Valley. Innovation is a product we buy and we're going to then integrate it. We're just going to go out to the true disruptors. We're going to buy it and bring it into the slow Department of Defense. And what I'm afraid of is beyond bringing in shitcopters into the Department of Defense that don't work or embedding yourself with tech fascists, which is another challenge is that falling back on the anecdote that I elevated I don't know, 15 minutes ago. If you are an artillery commander and you are responding to a brigade commander and you are in some sort of a training exercise, innovation is somebody else's job. Just like at Enron. Hey, we've got this risk management division. We don't have to think about risk. They're going to catch the ball. I'm curious and I think I know the answer and I really want to be wrong. That the concept of observing what's happening in the world and applying it internally has been brushed off as somebody else's mission. And that's why we're seeing a reluctance to adapt to cold realities.
- [49:58]
Justin
Well, I think there's a couple things here, one of which is just for fun, trivia for everyone. When was the last time U.S. artillery took counter battery fire? I don't know the answer to that. I'm pretty sure it was 1973
- [50:13]
Eric
in Iraq we would take in direct fire.
- [50:18]
Justin
Yeah, but whether it was counter battery. Yeah, I mean more like directed counter battery like from like large artillery.
- [50:26]
Jordan
Pull this off. I, I imagine it. No, they had an artillery. Sorry, yeah, I don't, I mean Korea, mortars and the North. I'm sure they had mortars. Yes. But a lot of triple canopy jungle they're trying to shoot through. It's not the best, not super conducive to firing mortars out.
- [50:47]
Justin
Well I, you know, if you do
- [50:49]
Tony
it from the tree top, if you do it from your tree house,
- [50:53]
Jordan
you fire it, it falls through the. Yeah, I mean like counter battery where you have to fire and then even move like that's, yeah, shoot and scoot
- [51:03]
Justin
is really what I'm, Yeah, yeah.
- [51:05]
Eric
That would have had to have been Korea, Vietnam maybe.
- [51:09]
Justin
Yeah. But I, I, I think something that I've seen in my day to day and I, I forget if I brought this up on Another episode of, like, on the government side, because I know there's a lot of, like, you know, there's new technology. How do you innovate? The government is not developing ttps fast enough for the new technology it's buying. And that is a fundamental problem, because, one, it means that that knowledge is not being shared, right? So you're not sharing the lessons learned that other people have. You're not sharing, you know, the knowledge on new systems. And if you don't get that back to companies, if you don't get that back to the acquisitions folks, they can't fire and adjust on what they should be doing. I think that there's a fundamental problem of our cycle for learning is not as fast as we need it to be. And I understand that it takes time to learn. But we also have all of these case studies from Ukraine on which we can start to build and that we should be. And every time I have meetings and I just hear people talk about things as if it's still 2010, and it's not all of them. There are a lot of people who have really adapted, but they haven't kicked those voices out of the room. And that is the fundamental problem, is that let's put politics aside for a second. Being objectively right about what's happening on battlefields is not something that is being solidified in the US Army. That is scary to me.
- [52:37]
Jordan
I mean, I had a commander, Joe Wortham, who used to always say, like, the person closest to the problem is best suited to solve it. And a lot of times he was right. And what he's literally saying is exactly what you're saying. He's not saying they should be the one that's coding the software or anything like that. He's saying that they're going to be the ones who are going to actually tell you what the problem is and can define what the problem that you need to solve is. The problem that Eric has highlighted is that when you create these units of action that are stratospherically removed from the warfighter, no matter what they say, no matter how much they talk about it. If you're wearing a $2,000 suit to briefings with industry, you are not a war fighter. You're not, like, it's. It has ended. At some point in your career, you have elevated yourself to the point that you're no longer there. I'm a retiree. I'm no longer there. Like, and it's. It's. I'm far enough removed now that I can't Say that I am. The type of questions and problems that they're going to solve and they're going to face have to be the ones that are actually being solved for. Does having better targeting software make everybody better? Maybe we're seeing in Iraq that there's a. Or in Iran that there's a limit to, you know, what great targeting can do militarily. There are some very real questions about like how do we do base defense, how do we organize fires, how do we protect soldiers that need to be getting answered at the ground level, experiencing some combat that I'm not confident are being solved in meaningful ways. Because there is a huge delta between the innovation people and the people who actually are going to face the problem.
- [54:12]
Eric
One of the early points of genius that Palantir embraced was beyond selling software to the government is that they would embed their engineers at the unit level. They would have their technicians operate alongside intelligence analysts and they would get immediate customer feedback. They would be at that exact point Justin just described of here's the problem, let's articulate it with precision and then send it back into the larger organizations that install it. I would be much more of a booster of the Defense Innovation Unit if it was sort of like the late great asymmetric warfare group, which was designed to take subject matter experts, embed them in teams of one and two, put them at the front, observe what was happening, collect lessons learned, do on the spot interviews with soldiers, review equipment, and send information back into the larger army for problem solving. Instead, DIU has become this interface with Silicon Valley. They are not sending individuals out to the front in the Iran war. They are sending people to like ces. And I think that is misplaced.
- [55:18]
Justin
One I will say is that that's perhaps the best innovation in industry, is for deployed engineers are the best innovation industry. An industry that like that is actually the greatest contribution that the tech industry has to defense industry is actually doing that. Right. And it matters so much more for. For software. Second to that, what happened to the asymmetric warfare group? I. I had heard it was. So for those who don't know, basically there was this group in the army that was supposed to, as Eric said, go out and collect lessons learned and then pass that information on everybody. As I understand it, it was basically killed because it told a lot of inconveniences. Am I wrong on that?
- [56:00]
Jordan
You're not. So they got staffed really well early on where it was a bunch of people who were like older members of certain units and stuff like that. They weren't going to be command sergeant major of the unit. They were done with their squadron time or they were done with their team time. They needed to go on. They still wanted to contribute. So they went off and this is what they did. They provided feedback that was really good on the NCO side, the officer side, they were less selective of, which always becomes problematic when it becomes, when it comes. Because everything is a political knife fight within the Pentagon, right? When you have a major who's telling a colonel that he's doing things wrong, that has to be delivered a certain way and with a certain amount of backing. And I think in my experience, what happened is a lot of those majors that were from the regular army that weren't going to get promoted in their career field, that went over to asymmetric warfare group, they took on the capabilities of their very, very capable NCOs that were with them, that were actually the ones that were solving some of these really, really hard questions. And they forgot that that wasn't what they were there for. They weren't there to be the guy getting their boots muddy as much as they were the ones that were supposed to package these insights and make sure they got to the right decision makers. And I think that they stepped on a lot of toes because of that. Because again, like, I remember being in, I was in Lebanon. We had an asymmetrical warfare group there with us in 2011ish. And they were going, they were, the major was super happy that they were getting to go down to south, south Lebanon, which is an area that, you know, pretty, pretty off limits. It's where UN peacekeepers go and stuff like that. I was the first American to go down there. It's like, yeah, but that's not why you were here. And that's not why we needed you. Like we needed you to do these other things. And you're writing up reports talking about being the first person to go down to south Lebanon in three years or whatever. So again, they started taking on a little bit of the wrong Persona. They started seeing their job as more than answering those hard questions.
- [58:01]
Justin
Okay. So they fell into the same trap that a lot of the innovative groups, SFABs, everybody else fell into, is that they, yeah, got it.
- [58:11]
Tony
Yeah.
- [58:12]
Eric
I spent a ton of time with AWG in Afghanistan, 2008, 2009. It was very, we were extraordinarily lucky. We had very high quality individuals come out and they would do everything from pick up trash to pull guard. Like they were very, very good. I, I, the reason that it got Shut down is nobody. Like if you're a project manager, if you're a mid level leader in corporate America, nobody likes it when McKinsey shows up because there's this whiff of somebody's looking over your shoulder, somebody's going to tell you you're doing it wrong. Your span of control is going to be limited and there's going to be a package of reports that go back to your supervisors that imply that you are a doofus. And AWG was often taking, like Justin said, sergeants major or master sergeants that were like Ranger babies or come out of special missions units, people with articulable tactical experience and putting them out for an edge of the battle. And they were coming back with difficult messages. And AWG was witnessed, I think fairly as a concurrent pipeline of reporting to your traditional chain of command. But that spirit that is now gone because AWD was shuttered along with other functions of the late GWAT like Human Terrain Teams or the Joint IED Defeat Organization, which kind of got folded back into Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Like there were these out of these institutions that were stood up to try and help the army understand what it was facing and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps. And they did work. But sometimes when they work they shake trees that didn't want to be shooketh and people are uncomfortable with the findings.
- [59:57]
Tony
So I guess we'll have to save our biggest blunders in American military history. My War of 1812 comparisons between what's happening in the Iran War for next time. But any other closing remarks or should I do my War of 1812?
- [60:19]
Eric
We should talk about what's a blunder Like a blunder is an unforced error like Pearl harbor, not necessarily a blunder because that was inflicted on the United States and there's some stupidity around it. But a blunder is something that you enter into with eyes wide open and you step on a rake and then you back up, you step on a second rake and then it becomes the meme of Sideshow Bob walking around with his giant floppy shoes. But the case study is the War of 1812, but regrettably it is not limited to that. So Jordan, why don't you close us out with a study of the war in the Great Lakes.
- [60:55]
Tony
All right, so I've got two quotes for us here, one from Henry Clay talking about how cool it was to have won in January 1816. Let any man look at the degraded condition of this country before the war, the scorn of the universe, the contempt of ourselves, and tell me if we have gained nothing by the war, what is our present situation? Respectability and character abroad, security and confidence at home. And then we have a letter to the Naval Chronicle, which is a British newspaper, talking about how they're feeling after losing in New Orleans. And the whole thing wrapping up. Thus has ended in defeat all our attempts on the American coast. And thus have the measures of and inadequate force provided by our government brought disgrace. For assuredly, we have now done the worst against this infant enemy. Lamenting the fallen fortunes of my country and the availing loss of so many brave men, I now take leave of the American contest. It is to all appearance over, but history will record our defeats, and posterity will see and appreciate their consequences. Sick transit. Gloria Mundy. I mean, I don't think it's going to be that bad, but
- [62:17]
Justin
so I think the comparison here, right, why are we talking about the War of 1812? And that's because there was this hubris before it. There was a lot of discontent for the American government as it was trying to figure itself out. And we got too big for our britches and thought that we could liberate Canada again because we didn't learn it the first time. There were rightful grievances, right? Just as there were rightful grievances against the Iranian regime. And yet we did not properly assess how we should conduct that war if we could conduct that war, if we had the wherewithal to do it. And so you end up with this world in which The War of 1812 ends after, like, two and a half years. It's basically a stalemate. The British are distracted with fighting what you might consider one of the earlier world wars against Napoleon. And you basically have it where, you know, the White House burned down and. And somehow we were still the United States government. United States people were ecstatic after we supposedly fought this great empire and won. And it was like, no, I mean, we. Basically, nothing was resolved.
- [63:25]
Jordan
Tony.
- [63:25]
Tony
I. I think the analogy is the inverse. I mean, this is the British not recognizing that, oh, these Americans, they can make frigates too, and they know how to shoot cannons. And maybe if we, like, rush their trenches in New Orleans, like. Like, they have elan as well. So, you know, I see that side. And yes, like, the War of 1812, it could have ended the American republic, like, for literally no good fucking reason. But I see a whole lot more parallels with, like, America picking on Iran today than the. Than the UK who, like, kind of already had a freaking Napoleon to deal with deciding, oh, yeah, let's, like, teach the Americans A lesson, because, like, they're kind of being assholes about this whole impressment.
- [64:09]
Justin
And I will. I will see that point. 100% that. Yeah.
- [64:13]
Jordan
I mean, I think, too, like, it's also interesting that the COVID of the Economist this week is she with Trump in the foreground, slightly blurry with a Napoleon quote about never interrupt an enemy when he's making a mistake. But, I mean, even Jefferson, who was, like, famously pro French, anti British, was characterized 1812 as something like an unprofitable contest of two sides trying to do each other the most harmful. I mean, yeah, that's what this sounds like pretty, Pretty clearly. I mean, and again, that's. That's somebody who was pro the. The war, who still described it that way. So, I mean, you know, and, hey,
- [64:53]
Eric
it gave the United States an industrial base. Let's. If you want to put a W on the board, especially around upstate New York, the combat around the Great Lakes was oriented around Sack harbor, but there was a. An arms foundry outside of Albany, the Waterville Arsenal. And the cornerstone of that armory that was building cannon for the United States army at the time is still in place at that arsenal that makes Hauser tubes. So the concept of the American industrial base dates back to that. And it was a panic to arm the forces to fight that war, just like it will be a panic to rearm our Air Force and our navy to fight a future war after our recent escapades in Iran.
- [65:42]
Justin
And just to close it out on lessons learned. It is not until Teddy Roosevelt writes his Harvard thesis in the late 1800s. This was his undergraduate thesis, which turns into a book on the War of 1812, which is still considered one of the preeminent texts today on the war. Where do you get actual analysis of the battles? Because the British historian that came before him was more interested in spreading, we'll say, spreading British propaganda and not taking the United States seriously. So there's actually no reason for why. There's no mechanism by which you automatically learn lessons. You have to get up and do it.
- [66:23]
Jordan
Yeah, I think that's the perfect closeout, because that's exactly what every unit that rotated through CENTCOM during the global war on terrorism fountain was that they repeated the errors of their prior unit because they came in ready to change the world, and there wasn't a strong mechanism to ensure, hey, we're deploying there in nine months. There's a unit there. We need to be reading everything they're saying today. We need to be in on every conversation they're having today. So that when we come in we actually know what they've been driving for and what they because what happens is they would come in, they do their left seat, right seat and then when the other unit would leave, they would go, well, those guys were obviously screwed up. We're going to do this the right way.
- [67:07]
Justin
Exactly.
- [67:08]
Eric
Same as it ever was Yep,
- [67:19]
Poet
16 AWAX in the whole damn fleet now 15 and a pile of sheet and metal and solid Damn it says the Pentagon not destroyed we swear brother two thirds of an airplane is not an airplane in the air park them on the tarmac like it's Bagram03 lined up nice and pretty for the shy he's to see our monitor Saw it coming ran the OSINT rang the bell Base commander said we're different how's different working? Tell it'll buff out Just need a coat of paint It'll buff out Every warning's a constraint Most experienced force on the planet, boys It'll buff out it will not buff out. Ukrainians been screaming for two years Straight disperse your harden your base Learn to dig a grave Operation Spider Web Wrote the manual wrote it clear But CENTCOM doesn't read CENTCOM says that's not us
- [68:38]
Eric
here
- [68:41]
Poet
3 years of drones turning Russian armor into scrap and we still line up refuelers like it's show and tell on the map C17s and tankers parked wingtip to wingtip in the sun went from 40 birds exposed to three but only after one was done it'll buff out we're not not the Russians, man It'll buff out that's not the sitcom plan we trained for this in PowerPoint in Tampa on the beach It'll buff out it will not buff out. See the Europeans watch the Russo Japanese war Watch the machine guns eat the infantry and said that's not what we're doing for we're better than the Russians lesser whites we'll be okay Our a land will carry us Our spirit wins the day that was 1905 and then they learned in 1914 we watched Ukraine in 2020 and still can't say what drones mean It'll pop out same as it ever was It'll pop out don't ask us why because indopac EM built new airfields built them spreading low sitcom said we're good and park they eat 3 in a row damage not destroyed 15 left the replacements over budget It'll buffet.