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- [00:00]
Host
Welcome to wartok. With us today is Jack Murphy, national security journalist, former Special Forces Ranger guy, co host or founder, whatever you want to call for the team house, which is, I think at this point, the biggest military podcast on the Internet, or at least one of them. And he's got a new book out called the Most Dangerous man, which is a modern iteration of the Most Dangerous Game, a favorite classic story of mine. Jack, welcome to the show.
- [00:29]
Jack Murphy
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [00:31]
Host
All right, before we jump in all of Jack's stuff, I think we do have to do an in memoriam. CD Donahue was relieved or I suppose pushed into retirement this week, most likely because he was one of the few remaining competent general officers left in the Pentagon. He was truly full circle because he was a 03 aide to the chairman of. Was it chairman to the Joint Chiefs or Army chief of staff? One of the two in the Pentagon on 9 11. So he had that full story, full circle, 20 years.
- [01:03]
Brian
Should we continue our rolling Driscoll watch? I mean, what does it, what does it say for that whole arc?
- [01:10]
Host
I don't know how much of it was directly about Driscoll. I know Driscoll opposed the move. I know there were champions within the army and within the Joint staff writ large that wanted Donahue to continue and, you know, make his way up to either being chief of staff or chairman. I don't think that folks understand, like, how much the, like 0426, either in the service right now or retired, like, really respected Donahue, even amongst those who were on the political right. And I think this is going to be, this is going to backfire in a big way.
- [01:43]
Derek
We continue to live in a military that fails to have any ability to operate independently of bizarre political action from the top. So I think it's just going to make it very difficult to get decent people to want to stay in.
- [01:58]
Justin
Yeah, I mean, I think it is worth talking about just for a second. Like, if you think about it, because this was fun as CD Resigned, even if that was the case, that would be a huge political story. Like, even if it was just the guy who is in line to potentially be the next chief of staff of the army resigned, that should throw red flags as to what's going on. So even just the way it's been handled, like, unless he were to come out and say, like, hey, I'm having health issues or, you know, somebody in my family is having health issues and that's why I have to do this, like, so it really does, like, they're, no matter what, it doesn't look good. And then, like, we spent all of last year, I felt like Talking about the CCP's purges and how that signaled weakness in their military and things like that. And then to have seen kind of the digression to what we've seen in the US Military is. It's interesting, I guess, is at least
- [02:52]
Jack Murphy
can you guys do a little bit
- [02:53]
Brian
of, like, reflection on, like, caliber of human being that ends up in these roles and sort of the pool that you're currently selecting from and then the pool that you'll probably have to be selecting from in five or ten years because, you know, whatever that chunk of, you know, 500 or a thousand people who could be up for these jobs are going to decide to, you know, take their lives in different directions because of this sort of thing.
- [03:20]
Host
The promotion system was redefined during the Cold War. So now you have kind of these blocks and, you know, everyone's interchangeable. And so that impacts how people progress, how quickly they progress through their careers and the types of jobs they can have, what the requirements are for context. Eisenhower was in 0506 when World War II broke out, or rather when the US entered the war. And by the end, he was Commander supreme in just that short period of time that would never happen in today's army unless a lot of people got fired or died. And so, like, when people think about, well, that the great generals and admirals of old, like, what is it? It's a different world.
- [03:56]
Justin
Yeah, Yeah.
- [03:57]
Derek
I think the. I mean, the challenge we have today is, and this is already a concern in the senior level of the military is that we are selecting people to become flag and general officers based on their performance as a commander, which is a totally different job than being a flag or general officer.
- [04:13]
Host
You're.
- [04:13]
Derek
You're selecting people to become executives in your organization from your best plant manager, you know, which is not how a private company would do it. You'd be looking for people with vision and the ability to think creatively and, you know, lead in a more, you know, innovative or, you know, I guess, inspirational way. And you don't really get that necessarily from your best, you know, commanders at the 0506 level, because those guys are designed, you know, they're following procedure, they're getting things done, they're lowering risk, they're managing personnel and resources. And those are things that, you know, obviously are important to be able to do at the executive level, but they're a lot less important than being able to come up with a, you know, way forward for the organization, and it's just not the same skill set. So when you get these people that go up to the flag and general officer level and fail or just fail to inspire or fail to innovate, it's because they were being selected from a pool that is naturally organized around kind of plant manager functions rather than executive functions. And now we're going to add on top of this the fact that these people that are potential senior leaders are going to look at that and say, well, do I want to enter into the flag and general officer ranks if I'm going to be subject to even greater whims on the part of the political leadership? Because maybe Trump's not an aberration, but we end up with kind of the same thing down the road where it's going to continue to be more and more driven by political priorities rather than maybe who's got the best executive skills.
- [05:35]
Host
It's not like you have all these people who get to colonel and then it's like, okay, we just pick whatever from 06 and they become a general. It's the retention problem begins at 03 or 04. I had a boss who used to say, all the good ones get out at 03. That is a mixed statement at best. But yeah, I think the retention rate, or rather promotion rate from 03 to 04, 02 to 03, is about 98, 99% for the army right now. That means basically you have to murder somebody to not get promoted. And then once you get to 04, really the culling begins between major where you're like a five to nine year staff officer, going into lieutenant colonel where you can hold battalion command, which is basically what the army system is designed for, to Brian's point of like, you're designed to like culminate as a battalion commander. And beyond that, the training isn't really that great.
- [06:28]
Justin
Yeah. So Jack experienced this, so maybe if he disagrees, I'd be interested in his take. There is that theory of, like, you don't get the best of the best, you get the best of what's left. I will push back on that in a, in a rare set of circumstances. And it's actually something that a lot of people in the SOF community have decried for a while. So in the greater soft community that in like the army, that is Green Berets and psyop and CA and aviation, there was always a complaint that CA and PSYOP never were going to be the big commanders. Well, yeah, of course they weren't like you didn't go to CA and PSYOP because you were the top tier guy. You went there because, don't get me wrong, some people really love it, but for the most part.
- [07:15]
Host
No, no, no, please lean into this.
- [07:17]
Justin
They, they, they went there because they weren't going to be able to be Green Berets. What Green Berets started complaining about over the last couple of decades was that a lot of commanders started to show up from Special Missions Unit in particular showing up from, from cag, from Delta Force, whatever you want to call it, especially at the 06 and above level. And actually if you look across the flag officers that are green that are in soft currently, what do you see? You see a Navy SEAL who's at the four star Bradley and then you see the three star is Braga who was Green Beret first group went to jsoc, you know, now he's the JSOC commander. You've got Van Antwerp, you've got Brennan, you know what I mean? Anyways, all that to say a lot of them have special missions experience. Even the ones who didn't go there, they went over there as support or operations. The reason that I say all that story is the guys that go over there aren't guys who are like, I think I'm going to go to selection on a lark. Those are guys who came into the army knowing that that's what they wanted to do. So you're not going to get that same metric doesn't apply. It's not like, oh, it's the best of whatever's left because they really do get to pick the people that they think are going to be the best and they're very high functioning and like they, you may not always agree with them, you may not always like the decisions they make, but you can't deny that they can definitely go several days with no sleep and still make relatively fast decisions. And I think when you see a guy that was in that level and came up and made flag officer basically out of that pedigree because that's where you start seeing problems. Because the argument can't be, well, he wasn't really that qualified. Yeah, he was the unit commander. Right? Yeah.
- [09:07]
Derek
Like, yeah, Justin, I agree. I think the, in the SOF community you definitely get people who are naturally more creative thinkers. They're going to make them, they're going to be more effective as executive leaders. I think in a lot of cases than you know, just to look at the Navy example, like your average surface warfare officer who performed well in his command tour or even his major command tour, where it's mostly about industrial management and, you know, kind of personnel management. There's a lot of things that are common to the civilian world, but they don't really prepare you to have to think about creatively leading a big organization potentially in combat. So it doesn't set you up for success because it just doesn't lend to the skills that you would need to be a good combat leader at that flag or general officer level. So definitely a divergence between the services. And I think the Air Force, you end up with a lot of the same stuff where if you're a squadron commander, wing commander, it's a lot of kind of the managerial function that are great, but, you know, that's not. If you're, you know, General Electric, you're not hiring your CFO out of your plant manager pool. You know, you're looking for somebody who's got some vision in terms of how do you take the company into the future financially.
- [10:16]
Brian
Let's bring Jack in. Jack, any thoughts on all this?
- [10:20]
Jack Murphy
I mean, I guess a few. I just point out that there is good leadership and bad leadership that comes out of the special operations community. But one of the funny things is that even when you have bad leaders, what you do have in a. And let's stick with the example of a Special Forces oda, a lot of young, highly motivated guys, and they will muscle their way through to success even though in spite of bad leadership. And sometimes those company and battalion leaders look really good because of that. And they did not succeed because of some brilliant leadership that was happening or some brilliant staff officer that was making decisions. You know, it's. It's a. Interesting world. And again, there. There are. There are great officers in Special Forces and also some terrible ones. But, you know, the. The reality, I think, is that for a 03 at that level, they're almost like a glorified squad leader. They're in charge of 12 guys. They're not having like a normal company command that they would be having at that. At that, you know, rank anywhere else in the military. But, I mean, yeah, some of them do really well and some of them don't. But like, to Justin's point, I mean, you know, having success in an SMU is in some ways very easy. You know, being a Pl in a Ranger battalion is in some ways the easiest job they're ever going to have because you have these guys who are well trained and motivated and they're going to pull them through.
- [11:57]
Host
Oh, I think that that Makes a good pivot here. Let's talk a little bit about Ranger school and, you know, the difference. Difference between what that means for Ranger regiment versus, you know, a conventional infantry guy going to Ranger school and why the army considers it its premier leadership school. Justin and Jack, both being graduates of the program. Wait, Justin, do you not. I thought you had your tab.
- [12:18]
Justin
No.
- [12:18]
Host
Okay. Jack, it's all on you.
- [12:20]
Justin
Jack. Jack is the guy. Yeah.
- [12:23]
Jack Murphy
So you want like the, the big overview for, like, folks who have maybe never heard of it?
- [12:29]
Host
Yeah, because, I mean, you know, there's always the, oh, he's a Ranger. And it's like, well, he. Tab versus regiment. And then why does the army consider, like, why is it so expected of junior commanders to have a tab?
- [12:41]
Jack Murphy
Okay, yeah, sure. So there's a couple different things. So Ranger school itself. Ranger school is a two month course that takes place at Fort Benning, Georgia, Dahlonega, Georgia, and Eglin Air Force Base down in Florida. And it is all based on leadership and tactics. So you fill squad leader positions, team leader positions, PL positions, platoon sergeant positions, and your patrols are graded. So you're actually being graded on how well you're able to patrol. And in the course of this training and going through Ranger school, you conduct so many ambushes and raids and patrols that it all becomes like second nature. Like, you will never for the rest of your life forget how to set in an ambush. Like, you're just not going to forget because it becomes as natural as eating. You don't think about chewing your food. You just sort of do it right. And when you graduate from Ranger school, you get the Ranger tab. It's an award that you wear on your uniform. It's, you know, golden black, and it says Ranger. That's, you know. And as you know, you pointed out, it's considered sort of like the premier leadership school. If you're going to be a infantry officer, it is basically mandatory that you graduate. If you are not an infantry officer, it's still highly coveted and highly sought after to be a Ranger school graduate. Then separate of Ranger school, you have an actual unit. Ranger school is a training course. There is an actual unit called the 75th Ranger Regiment, which is part of the special operations community. And they are a elite airborne infantry unit that conducts raids and airfield seizures and all sorts of other stuff. Nowadays especially, they've expanded quite a bit over the years, but they are an actual deployable special ops unit ready to deploy anywhere in the world in eight hours. And when you serve in the Ranger regiment, you get to wear a Ranger scroll, it's a third Ranger battalion in my case. Or there's also first, second and regimental headquarters. And then if you deploy with combat to combat, you get the combat patch. So you have the Ranger scroll on the other shoulder designating that you went to combat with that unit. And if you serve in the Ranger regiment, not just PLs or officers, but all the way down to have a team leader position, to be in charge of a four man fireteam, you have to be a Ranger School graduate. So you're in the Ranger regiment, but you don't have a Ranger tab. You get to a certain point during your, you know, career as a lower enlisted and you go and get your tab and come back and then you kind of continue on throughout the ranks in the Ranger Regiment. So the Ranger regiment and the Ranger tab are two distinct, different things. And that's why you'll see all the time these sorts of arguments. You know, somebody's running for Congress and they're calling themselves a Ranger. And then there's a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork like, you're not a real Ranger, weren't in the regiment. And it's like, yes. But also no is, you know, once you understand what I just explained, hopefully I explained it, you know, coherently. They are two different things, separate but related.
- [16:01]
Host
Oh, Jack, in your autobiography, I think you make a point of that. The Ranger regiment is regimented and that is the difference between Ranger and sf. Can you please walk that through? Why? Because, you know, I think people think all special operations are the same. And I promise I building to something important here. But yeah, can you run through that difference because you've served in both.
- [16:23]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, sure. So I mean, the interesting thing about Ranger Regiment is they really do like kind of create their own from scratch. You get the guy as a private and so you're, you're at a squad level, you're dealing with privates. They are the, they are the muscle of the platoon, you know, just like in the 82nd Airborne or any other infantry unit. Whereas in Special Forces, by the time that guy gets to you, he's at least an E5, he's an NCO, been through a couple years of training at that point. So they've been in the army for a little bit. Even though if they were an X ray, if they came right into the army to sf, might not have a lot of army experience. So I mean, you can get immature guys in the SEAL platoons or in Special Forces and the Ranger platoons. I really Feel like they have a lot of adult supervision where they are. Yeah, you are closely monitored and you are always being assessed. And I mean it's just like the discipline is such a paramount thing. And again, because they are dealing with privates and you have to indoctrinate them both into the army itself and into the Ranger Regiment way of doing things. You have team leaders and squad leaders that are just all over that ass all day. In Special Forces it isn't like that. And I mean it kind of can't be like that because on a 12 man ODA everybody has so many different jobs. There's so much stuff going on all the time. It kind of has to function under big boy rules or it doesn't function at all. Like each guy kind of has to know their job and just go and do it without their, without their team sergeant breathing down their neck telling them to do it because there just isn't time. I mean when you get like a mission comes down in Special Forces and getting your indige all prepped up and ready to go like the, there's so many moving parts to all of that that yeah, if you don't know your job and you're not willing to do your job, then you just shouldn't be there.
- [18:28]
Justin
Yep, it's, you know, having worked with the Rangers for a long time and then obviously I spent the majority of my time that I was in the Army. I think I, I think I had three years in the army when I went to the, when I went to selection. So I was a psyop baby. Did. Came into the army when you could still go into, into psychological operations. Did two years there. Absolutely hated it. Knew I was going to get out of the army and then kind of on a lark. And this is not, I don't advise this. Anyone who ever asked me how did I end up in Special Forces on a lark. I basically I went, I applied to go to selection and I went with very little training which was terrible. I could barely walk by the end of it. But I got selected. I don't know how. And then I was like, ah, good to try. And then, you know, went through the rest of the course. The amount of things that you're expected to do. And like I showed up to a team where I was the junior medical sergeant. Right away my senior left because there were not enough medics in group so having a team that had two was, was rare. But there also weren't enough communication sergeants in group. So we only had one communication sergeant at the time. So I was also the junior communication sergeant, which meant, like every day that I wasn't actively doing else, I was learning how to set up radios and make them work and, you know, all that crap. And because as Jack said, like, the expectation is that, yeah, you can do your job well, that's expected. The other expectation is that you can also pretty much function across the other board. The, the other sets. Like, nobody looks at the weapon sergeant goes, I can't get my machine gun to work. Or they do once and then they get ridiculed to the point that they never, ever say something like that again.
- [20:13]
Jack Murphy
In all actuality, you really just need 10, 18 Bravos and one Delta and you're good to go.
- [20:19]
Justin
Yeah. That way when somebody gets shot, they just go over there.
- [20:27]
Host
All right, well, that's a good pivot. So there was an article on war on the rocks that I found very interesting about a week or two ago called Good Medicine is Combat Power. And it's about clinical innovation in Ukraine, about treating people on the front lines at role ones and role twos, which are your behind the front lines treatment centers. And kind of some of the ethics of, like, when is it okay to do, you know, battlefield experimentation? You know, you can test a new drone every day in Ukraine and no one's going to complain. Well, the maintenance guys might complain, but that's a different story. If you test a new way to, you know, close, close a wound, you know, it's, it's, it's a little bit different in terms of ethics on the battlefield. So, Justin, I know as 18Delta, what's your experience with combat medicine? I know you read the article. How do you feel about battlefield experimentation in medicine?
- [21:18]
Justin
I think it happens naturally. So I think one, a lot of what he wrote in that this is not a knock. This is one of the areas where the rangers and the PJs, the Air Force pararescue jumpers and 18 Deltas have really. And Navy infinite Duty Corps members, they have really leaned way far ahead and have kind of set the way that trauma medicine works. A lot of the things that the doctor and I cannot think of his name now that he wrote in that article were things that we had already been doing. So there was the idea of like the walking blood banks. That was something that we started doing, Ranger regiment started doing as a way to, hey, we're going to have an emergency. Either Americans or indigenous partners, we're going to start, we're going to be able to pull pints of blood. That then went into knowing who had O blood types and who had O positive blood types, and then testing for those to see if it was low, tighter. So if their Rh factor was low, you could basically give that to anyone, positive or negative. And they most likely won't have a hemolytic reaction, so they won't react and have, you know, the anaphylaxis. That can happen if you give somebody the wrong blood type.
- [22:33]
Host
Type.
- [22:34]
Justin
We were doing that. But even, like back when I was a baby in, in Special Forces, when you talk about, like, not or figuring out new ways to treat people, there was a guy that got shot in the subclavian artery, which runs just up underneath your collarbone. So he got shot there. And it. That's a very hard spot because up underneath that bone, there's actually an artery that runs there that feeds down into the brachial and feeds your arm.
- [22:59]
Brian
Arm.
- [22:59]
Justin
They couldn't get it clamped because it's. It's wiggly and it's wet and it's in a. In a spot where you can't put pressure down because it's in your chest cavity. And what this guy, 18 Delta, figured out to do is he took a urinary catheter where you could pump water into it to blow it up. He shoved it into the hole, and he just filled it up with enough water to. To tamponade off to, you know, pinch off that. That wound. So those type of experiments, like, they happen a lot in the battlefield, because the truth is that nobody's asking for permission when somebody's actively bleeding, and you're just trying to figure out a way to make it stop. Like most helpless feeling in the world is when you can't stop somebody from bleeding and there's nothing you can do. Where I think he is right, and what I would have liked to have seen, the author was right, and what I would have liked to seen is more risk tolerance from the US and from NATO partners that are supporting Ukraine in putting surgeons closer to the battlefield. Because that's, again, that's something we've learned and it's very hard. You know, the golden hour. I think we've talked about that a lot on here, but what the golden hour is is the. It's from point of injury to surgical table, within one hour, you greatly reduce the chance of mortality or significant issue. What we were trying to do is we wanted to get people onto surgery as fast as possible so that they could be saved. So what we did in Raqqa was we had a field surgical team that was stationed at the fire base that basically we could bring Kurdish partners to and we would get them evac to it as fast as possible because it's why you help your indigenous partners. Like you let them know you're going to treat them. When we went down further and we were more mobile. When we were in Hajin doing kind of the next arm of the Syrian trip, we took what's called a soc, which is a special operations surgical team. It's an air force unit. This one, this air force unit, incredibly special because they work in a hospital whenever they're not actively deployed. And they are a team that works together, that does trauma surgery in a hospital day in and day out, and then they get on birds and deploy and they can work out of trucks. They, you know, throw out roller bags. At one point the guy's like using dewalt batteries to like manufacture his own, like fluid warmers. And like he's changing out drill bit batteries to make sure that he's like treating people properly, incredibly capable. But that same thing, like they're, they're taking new techniques that they're learning in the, in the trauma centers, then bringing them out and like throwing away all of the crap and just keeping what actually works and then helping to also train the next generation of medics on like, hey, this is what you do when you see this, this is how you treat this thing. But it's incredibly hard because like, imagine the amount of risk that you're asking, like the allies to take when you say, like, hey, what we really want to do is further forward, deploy surgical teams, get them closer to the fight. But you know, to back it up, even one more, like, talk about experimentation. There was a time, and I don't know if this was around when you were still in Jack, but like we got ready to go for one trip in like the early tens, and as a medic, I went to go sign out all my, all the drugs and everything for the team. And then they like threw, they handed me these two like white boxes that had glass bottles with powder in them. And it was a French plasma replacement that you had to like reconstitute, but it wasn't FDA approved. But Socom had like a special waiver and they were like, hey, you need to get all your guys to sign this waiver because like, there's always a chance there could be something in it, but like, this will make them clot better. So again, like, we do a little bit of experimentation even in non combat situations where they're like, let's try this Out. I never asked what they were afraid of me getting from it.
- [27:05]
Jack Murphy
Remember, Justin? I mean, in the civilian side, even the use of a tourniquet was considered controversial.
- [27:11]
Justin
Yeah, that's actually a great point. I mean, like, when we were working in. So the way that medical Training works for 18 Deltas and independent duty corpsmen, when I went through it was a year long. The first six months of it was almost all trauma medicine, where you were doing, you know, gunshot wounds, knife injuries, things like that. Very little of what you would consider clinical medicine. And then in the second half, you do clinical medicine and you run how to run labs and you learn how to do like more advanced surgery and things like that. That and you learn how to do anesthesia. Incredibly important, obviously, if you're going to do anything like that. But in the first half, at the end of that six months after you take some pretty extensive testing, you get released for a month to go work in a hospital. So I worked in the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical center, which is a level one trauma center in the state of Virginia, where you see gunshot wounds and car accidents, people having heart attacks, just picked the thing and we went and to put a tourniquet on a person who had been in a car accident that you were trying to transport to a hospital required calling the doctor. This is paramedics required calling a doctor and asking permission to be. They would rather, and this is a thing that we talk about a lot in hospitals, they would rather continue to hang units of blood in a hospital, then put a tourniquet on somebody and then fix it. Which goes a lot to like, the waste that you see. Like when there's an accident, you'll people just hanging bag after bag after bag of blood, which obviously is not something you can do in a battlefield where like, the first thing is stop the bleeding, then let's put more volume in, you know, patch the holes, things like that. The students probably find it a little weird. So like the medical students that are going through, it's slightly weird because we have more leeway than they do because we've seen more and like there's, you know, we, we have a certain protocol we have to go through when we first, you have to do so many IVs, do so many, you know, visits. There's so many things you gotta get checked off on. But once you get those checked off, you're basically free to do whatever has been ordered and or needs to be done within reason on a patient. And you have a doctor who's shadowing you the entire time. That's one of the differences. It's always a doctor that's with you or not with you, but there's always a doctor. Like, they'll come in and check on your work and stuff. But, yeah, I remember, like, the first time I gave a live intubation was a lady came in to the hospital. She had a high heart rate, was running a fever, and they were like. They put fluid and turned it on. Like, they gave her an IV and turned on the fluid. Well, she ended up having pneumonia. Her lungs flooded and, like, walk in and her sats are going down, and it's just like, all right, we're going to intubate her. And, like, the doctor, like, hands me the intubation kit, and he pulls out the drugs to.
- [29:57]
Host
To.
- [29:58]
Justin
To, you know, put her, paralyze her for a second. And he's like, tell me when you're ready. And I was like, all right, I'm ready. And, yeah, he takes away her ability to breathe on her own. And I intubate her. And then, like, she's upstairs and admitted and, you know, going through all of the. The trauma. So it's very open. There are, of course, doctors who don't want to see you there. Like, the first surgery I set in on was a cardiac surgery. So I just kept my hands sitting on the side of the field and just watched and was just like, oh, that's the inside of a heart. That's. That's cool. Not something that you want me doing. But then later on, again, trauma comes in. Guy, you know, gunshot wound, stuff like that that you. You get to see a level of trauma that, again, the normal medic doesn't get to see. And it goes. It goes a long way into why 18 deltas, IDCs, you know, special operations medics that work with the rangers, why they have a very high level or high standard that they bring into the unit when they show up. And then that just continues as they continue through the years of training, because you continue to go back through refreshers the entire time you're in. And then there's the things you're doing overseas. I actually know. I watched a couple of episodes, and my wife was like, why are you watching that? That seems so stressful. Because she was a nurse that worked in the ICU for a while and stuff. And she is right. There are certain things that I was just like. Like that got my heart rate up. Like, this is not relaxing to watch. Some of it is very real.
- [31:28]
Host
Jack has written.
- [31:30]
Jack Murphy
So the green light teams were special forces Teams that trained to jump behind enemy lines carrying a backpack nuclear weapon. It was called the satam.
- [31:41]
Derek
The.
- [31:42]
Jack Murphy
I believe it was subatomic munition device. I have to look it up. But the satam, Wade, you know, the exact weight is probably classified, but I mean, it's not that heavy. It's just kind of big and awkward to carry. And it is on the low, you know, low yield, megaton range, as you can imagine. But the idea was that if the Cold War ever went hot, that we would have these teams that could parachute behind enemy lines and target strategic objectives. So, like, blowing up dams was a big one. Also mountain passes, bridges, and even just enemy troop formations. Like, if you had the Russians trying to push through the fold, a gap in the rear areas, you'd have some big troop formations that you could target with this sort of thing. So I guess the interesting way to think of it is that today we have all these precision guided munitions, JDAMs, and all this other high tech stuff that you guys are familiar with today, we would use that to hit those types of objectives. But back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and this program ran into the 80s, you know, basically you had to use a human being for terminal guidance. Like you actually had to have a person, you know, by hand, placing explosives on the bridge or on the dam or whatever. And so that's what these guys trained for.
- [33:09]
Justin
Yeah. Mike Vickers actually has a part in the opening chapters of his book where he talks about it, him being on one of the greenlight teams. Yeah, yeah.
- [33:20]
Jack Murphy
I think I cited the interview we did a podcast with, with. With Mike and I. I think I used some quotes from him in the book about that.
- [33:28]
Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:29]
Justin
I think they were trying against China, which is also just crazy when you think about.
- [33:34]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting thing too, is, you know, you might get the impression from what little information is out there that they were really just targeting the Soviet Union. But no, this was global. The targets were global. There were targets in North Korea, There were targets in Cuba. There were targets or some of the other interesting places. Iran, like mountain passes in Iran. I mean, some really. So because the special Forces groups are geographically oriented, pretty much all of them had their own green light teams that were focused on that. The only group that didn't have green light teams, as far as I was able to discover, was first group. It sounded like it was mostly seventh group that fell in on Asia. Targets for the green light mission. Ye. There was. There was a mechanical timer on the device, nothing digital, because they were afraid that the radioactivity would interfere with it. So it was mechanical. Had to be set in increments of 60 seconds. So you had to be able to count in increments of 60. And there was always some consternation about how accurate the timer was. And even the stated out of the manual, minimum safe distances weren't even close to being safe. So, like the times and the distance and there's just a lot of things that when you start adding them up, like this mission doesn't necessarily make sense unless you're planning to just torch an entire team. And there was, I have to say, a conspiracy theory. I don't think it was true, but there was a conspiracy theory on some of the teams that they would put in the time, you know, an hour and a half or whatever, set the time, and then hit the arm button and the bomb would just go off in their face, that the whole timer was just propaganda. It was just to make you feel good about yourself. I don't think that was actually true. There was a timer, but again, the team was supposed to have snipers maintain eyes on the device right up until detonation. It's like, what? How is that going to work? But there was also, I mean, maybe more pertinent questions about like, just the entire concept of the operation. So, like, for instance, to deploy a green light team to do the mission that they've trained to do, let's say, blow up a Russian port, like Vovlada Stock or something, they're going to go in and blow up a Russian military installation. We would have to have intelligence way ahead of time that the Russians, the Russkies are planning to invade Western Europe. We get that information, it's vetted, we're confident in it. Now we have to activate the green light team. The green light team has to travel from their location in Germany, in this case, to a bunker in an adjacent NATO country where the nuclear weapons are stored, draw the weapon, catch a flight from that country to the UK where they would get on a C130 and then they would take off and fly behind Russian lines and parachute. And then, of course, the movement to their target and the arming and the whole sequence. Is it realistic that you're going to have intelligence that is that spot on with that much of a head start that you're going to be able to initiate a mission like this? And so the thought with a lot of the guys was that by the time we got on the ground, the targets will have completely changed. Like the targets that we were targeting Won't even be relevant anymore.
- [37:06]
Derek
That sounds logical, but makes me think, Jack, as we now in the current era where we of course use stealth and precision weapons to accomplish a lot of those same missions, but we're now starting to see the erosion of that capability because air defenses are better. There's lots of sensors out there. We even saw against the Iranians that we had some difficulty with some of our even stealth platforms being able to operate with impunity over Iranian airspace. God forbid, what we have to do over China. Are we entering an era where we maybe have to rethink not nuclear weapons, but do we have to rethink SOF taking the place of these precision weapons in cases where we reliably get a stealth airplane into a country to the point where it can put a precision weapon on a target? And maybe even hypersonic weapons that have long range can't get us that kind of penetration either. I mean, a lot of the war gaming we've done with the Japanese and the Australians have kind of showed hypersonic weapons don't necessarily solve the problem. They can still get shot down. So do we need to rethink maybe SOFT needs to go and trained for this kind of hitting these targets that we can't hit with a precision weapon and a stealth platform anymore?
- [38:15]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, and there are a bunch of different examples and a bunch of different contexts, but, you know, rangers still, you know, plan to, you know, parachute behind enemy lines, do a 20 mile movement to a target and destroy it. So that's just like one thought process on it. The other is you can look at Russia and occupied Ukraine, the partisan warfare and insurgent warfare that's been taking place behind enemy lines in Russia. A lot of it is with drones now, but there have also been ground teams that have placed explosives by hand, blowing up rail lines, oil depots and so on. And I mean, so that's also done by proxy for purposes of plausible deniability and everything. Of course, you're not gonna send Americans to do an operation like that for obvious reasons. So the sort of like covert clandestine side of it is another thing to think about. And then even on the JSOC side of it, you can look at this operation that has been, you know, I mean, it's been publicly reported that it's pending that they might go in and try to retrieve the highly enriched uranium out of Iran. But one of the other kind of sidebar missions, counter WMD missions that they do is also, in a sense, WMD sabotage, where they would go in and destroy the WMD facilities so that the enemy can't use them. In this case where it's something nuclear, we would be ostensibly taking it out of the country entirely. But if there were chemical warfare facilities, biological warfare facilities, go in and actually destroy those facilities with explosives on the ground. So the sabotage mission itself is definitely still relevant. Everything from railroads to power lines present linear targets that still need to be hit in one way or another. Thankfully, I don't think the actual green light, the nuclear mission is going to be necessary because nation states have maintained pretty tight control over nuclear weapons. And it doesn't seem, sorry, it doesn't seem that that status quo has changed enough that we would have to do that. But yeah, I mean aside from the nuclear bomb, everything else is relatively still relevant I think.
- [40:42]
Derek
I mean the other thing too today is our network analysis capabilities, you know, to figure out what the right target to hit with that kind of precision. It's so much better now that we can probably do some work to dismantle an opponent's ability to fight more effectively now with a green, with a special ops team compared to what we could have done in the past.
- [41:01]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, no, definitely. I mean the analysis is much better. But I mean also with the, it's an interesting like you kind of need a combination of high tech and old school because you don't want to abandon the technological advantages that we may have or the edges we may have. Or maybe we just want to maintain parity with whoever we're fighting. But at the same time the electronic warfare environment may become so intense that you need to punch through that bubble using old school techniques. A mapping compass, some snipers using a bolt action rifle. It's 100 plus year old technology. Making field sketches with piece of pencil on a paper. I mean that may be a thing in the future.
- [41:46]
Justin
Yeah, I was going to say too to that point I think, think you know when we look at Iran, Brian, not and not a knock but like if our, our targeting is, is way better, we have over, we potentially have over leaned into the effect side without really considering like at what level the effect is. And what that has done is given us a lot of tactical effects that don't necessarily result in a strategic effect. And that's what we saw like the amount of munitions that we threw into Iran, the amount of munitions we threw at the Houthis before that really like they didn't change anything. I mean I think as of 2 days ago I saw a report that the Iranians had just fired on a cargo ship that was transiting through the strait. So it's like again, like we didn't even during that time as our technology is still, you know, demonstrably better. Like that's not even parody, you know, to Jack's point that we're well above the Iranian capabilities, you know, tech versus tech. The effect of it though just isn't there right now. And like there is a little bit of that. Like, I almost feel like to do either of these things. Well, now, even if you were talking about going back to a green light team, you kind of have to even almost go back to the old model of thinking of sof, especially like Green Berets with like the lodge act, where you're dealing with people who were from Eastern Europe, you're dealing with people who were from, you know, Vietnam or that were from China that had, that had left that. That's what kind of became a nexus of first group to some degree.
- [43:18]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, the lodge act was a huge thing and gave Special Forces so much language and cultural capability, especially in that European theater. A lot of those guys were hardcore dudes who had fought in World War II, some of them on the other side, as it turns out.
- [43:36]
Justin
Yeah,
- [43:39]
Jack Murphy
but I mean, yeah, I mean that brings up a totally separate issue, which is the challenges with ubiquitous technical surveillance and using non effectiveness official cover or even official cover. And those longstanding issues are really hitting the CIA hard. They're really hitting the military hard too. And again, the future may be that we're not really using Americans as not just spies, but case management people. I mean, even the managers might have to be foreign nationals who, who don't really need a sort of backstopped cover because they can live their cover. It's their life. It's their actual life that they're living.
- [44:25]
Derek
I mean, I think that, I mean, I could see that as a way to open up options that don't currently exist, you know, to get to the Iran point. I think, you know, part of why we were not as successful with our strike campaign is we limited ourselves to targets that were amenable to airstrikes. Right. So if there's a set of targets that would have been the best targets to strike, but we're doing that would require putting boots on the ground to do some kind of SOF operation. Well, then we're taking that option off the table.
- [44:50]
Jack Murphy
Right.
- [44:50]
Derek
Because we don't want to put boots on the ground. Well, now we can only hit things you can hit from the air, which means you're really constraining yourself to what's, you know, probably not going to be an effective campaign. But, you know, Jack, to your point, if you. If you can bring in a bunch of new players that would allow you to put people on the ground, maybe that creates options that would be. Allow us to address a situation like we're going to face with every other adversary, where their air defenses, their ability to contest the spectrum are such that we're not going to have the option of hitting every target from the air that we would want to.
- [45:22]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. It's funny to watch the way the Kurds get reported in the media and they become our saviors for periods of time, and then they go away, and then they come back, and then they go away. And so, I mean, the Kurds in Iran got a good two weeks of publicity that they were going to be our saviors, they were going to win this campaign for us. It's like, yeah, guys, like, I mean, it doesn't really work that way.
- [45:45]
Host
Jack, didn't you.
- [45:45]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. By the isa, the secret police. Yeah.
- [45:49]
Derek
They.
- [45:49]
Jack Murphy
They alleged that I had illegally crossed the border from Syria to Iraq. Unfounded allegations which were never proven. But, yeah, I. I was. I was cooling my heels in their prison for a night.
- [46:03]
Justin
They were always so happy to see me.
- [46:04]
Brian
Me.
- [46:05]
Justin
No. Sorry.
- [46:07]
Jack Murphy
Oh. Oh, dude.
- [46:07]
Derek
They.
- [46:08]
Jack Murphy
You know, I mean, I. I remember the. The interrogator literally asking me. He's like, so you were on ODA 3220? I'm like, what?
- [46:19]
Host
No.
- [46:19]
Jack Murphy
What? Yeah, I guess I was a journalist at the time.
- [46:24]
Justin
I.
- [46:24]
Jack Murphy
And. And it just came up because they were interrogating me, and, like, I was. They were asking me about my. My background and my past. And I told them that, because, you know, why not?
- [46:32]
Host
Not.
- [46:33]
Jack Murphy
And, yeah, and that came. That came right up. And I'm like, no, no, I wasn't with those guys. So this is the use of official cover. So the Green Berets who were in Berlin, you know, clandestinely during the Cold War, they were ostensibly there as military policemen for the most part, but their real mission was to conduct acts of sabotage, largely. There are some allegations. You know, people have said over the years that they were an assassination unit. Not really the case. They were a sabotage unit. But of course, some of the sites that they wanted to sabotage, rail junctions, power stations. You know, I think one mission was to take over media, television station. There are certain things like that that would necessitate eliminating a security element around it, but the sabotage was the name of the game. They were the stay behind force. So that's considered to be the fourth method of infiltration. You can go air, land and sea, or stay behind. And so the stay behind guys are placed in an area, they live a low, viz, clandestine life under a cover, and they wait for the enemy, in this case the Russians, to attack. And once the Russians push over past them and now they are trapped behind enemy lines, these sleeper cells essentially activate and they go and they hit their targets. And so the Dead A guys were casing targets, building targeting packets and all that sort of stuff. And it bears some lessons for today. I think the military, I think especially special Forces, can use official cover very effectively. And there's some other lessons that come out of it. I think another thing was that Dead A was very good at what they did, but over the years they kind of became the go to and they got sucked up into a bunch of other types of missions, including counterterrorism. Before there was Delta Force, Dead A had a counterterrorism mission. They were really afraid of Pan Am fights being hijacked in Berlin. And so what happens is that it becomes very difficult for a unit to have a clandestine mission and a counterterrorism mission because one is kinetic and overt and the other is covert and secret, and eventually that unit is going to get exposed. You're not going to be able to keep that on the down low forever. Yeah, well, of course, you know, as you mentioned, it's, you know, the premise from the classic short story the Most Dangerous Game is the original is over a century old at this point, and it's been rehashed countless times, really, in movies and books and so forth. But what kind of inspired me to take that idea and run with it was a couple conversations I had over the years with people, a contractor, I know, we were having lunch one time and he was telling me about some of the things he was hearing and he heard about this guy who is a big game safari guide in Africa. And so he would take wealthy clients hunting water buffalo or whatever, but then he had this other job where he had to protect endangered species on one of the national game reserves. And so what this guy did was he crossed the two business models over and he started taking wealthy clients to hunt the poachers on the game reserve. Many years went by, and then I was talking to another friend and they had a very similar story about a European royal family that went down to West Africa hunting poachers from helicopters. Like it sounded to me, the way it was described was like, you know, those videos of people hunting hogs up on helicopters? It sounded very similar to that, so that's kind of like what served as the inspiration for the book. And then making the villains tech CEOs and people like that, that was just a natural fit. And I mean, you say it's cartoonish and I mean, I agree that it's cartoonish, but the stuff in the book is what they really believe. Like that that's not something that came up out of my imagination. It's just reality itself is cartoonish at this point. Yeah, you know, the, the only like real like research that I did for this book, I mean a lot of it was stuff I already knew. So like the real research part of it for me was reading Nick Land, who's a philosopher. His book Xenosystems was a good read. The version of Nick Land, the villain in the book, it is the comic book villain version of Nick Land. I don't think that he's actually evil. He's an interesting guy and that's why I had a character based on him, that he is a philosopher. He's a former academic and not all the time, but sometimes he lands on some actually very interesting ideas. But the thing about Nick and people like him is that the philosophy and their worldview ultimately leads towards authoritarianism. And I don't think Land has any. I don't think he fetishizes the aesthetics of Nazism. I don't think he's an anti Semite. There's nothing like that. But he does see that his view is that the technological world that we're in and that we're moving into to is going to necessitate a sort of like techno authoritarianism. And I think he has his philosophical reasons for believing these things. But some of these tech bro guys, very wealthy people latch onto some of these philosophies and run with them. And it kind of tells them what they already want to hear, that they are the Sun King, they are the anointed one destined to rule over all of us. And so that's kind of like the approach I took with that in the book. And the Nick Land character is the one character that kind of waxes poetic in the book. And you kind of hear quite a bit from him. But there's also some other obscure stuff in the book about like archaeo futurism is another thing that some of them believe in. Looking backwards to the pre enlightenment agrarian past to inform our future and what that should look like. And again, but this is all leading to the same place, which is about platforming the white male and putting women and black people back in Their place. And that's kind of the thing that you have to be aware of when you read this sort of stuff. There's even one line in the book about one of the guys is kind of like waxing poetic about how he feels the loss. He feels the extinction of prehistoric megafauna on a very deep emotional level. And it just touches him and it's like this depression that he lives with that the giant sloth is no longer with us. That's something that I actually read one of these guys writing on social media years ago, and it just stuck with me so much. I was like, yeah, that has to go in the book. Yes. Yeah. So this is kind of wild. I wasn't even aware of this until the very end of the editing process of this book where something started. Things started popping in the news in the Italian court about people, wealthy people who went to Bosnia during the war, during the 1990s. And the Serbs took them into the outskirts around the city to shoot people. And they were tariffed per person they shot, apparently. So, like, pretty women had a certain tariff, shooting children had the highest tariff. And this whole thing is kind of winding its way through the Italian court system now. And, and some of the most recent stuff that has broke about that is that they are investigating a sort of an aristocratic Italian person, wealthy person in Milan. And as I'm reading this, I'm like, I get this sinking feeling, and I don't know for a fact, but I'm almost positive I know who that person is and have met him on numerous occasions. It's somebody who is a huge military enthusiast, has stuff that would blow your mind, like, like military gear. Always a nice enough guy when I met him. I hope I'm wrong. I hope it isn't that guy. But he's wealthy. He made his money in a different, a different industry. He was, he was not never in the military or defense himself. And apparently, you know, according to the, the press that that has come out, you know, this dude was like, bragging at dinner parties about how he went to Sarajevo and shot people for Sport during the 90s. Again, I hope it's not the guy that, that I've, that I've met, but there's only so many wealthy people in Milan that have that sort of background. And I, I, I have some, like, kind of odd connections to that part of the world, you know, through, through marriage, two ex wives.
- [55:45]
Brian
Well, you know, I, I mean, my one thing with the Sarajevo safari is like, there was, there was a great Atlantic feature, I think a Month or two ago about this person who claimed that they were part of, like, a gang Olympics where, like, different gangs in Mexico would, you know, capture various, like, former athletes or whatnot. And, you know, the Zetas would have, like, their basketball team and whatever, whatever. And it, like, it turned out, like, obviously incredibly compelling copy. Right. And, you know, turns out that, like, this guy is, like, a charlatan and he's, like, completely making it all up. And so, yeah, it's like, whenever you hear stuff which is like, that heinous and horrific, like, the first thing that goes through my mind is, like, somewhat like.
- [56:47]
Justin
It's just.
- [56:48]
Host
Just.
- [56:48]
Brian
I don't know, there's a lot of, like, horrible things that happen on this planet, but ones that horrible things that happen on this planet, which also just like, hit every kind of, like, right. You know, high, like Hollywood bone. Gives me a little bit of pause. I know there's been, like, actual investigations. There was a serious documentary on it, but I'm still. Not entirely.
- [57:10]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, the documentary is worth watching. But, you know, I think you're right.
- [57:14]
Justin
I mean, because.
- [57:15]
Jack Murphy
Because, like, isn't it possible that this guy was just, like, you know, embellishing and bragging at a dinner party and none of this stuff ever happened? Like, it's possible. And I think the Italian courts that are trying to, you know, prove this and are interested in prosecuting people, I mean, that's a. They're going to have a hell of a case there on their hands, because how do you prove a murder in a war zone 30 years ago? Like, that's extremely difficult to do.
- [57:40]
Brian
And it's also, from the prosecutor's perspective, like. Like, what else are they doing with their time? Like, this is far and away the most exciting thing that they'll ever have as like, a, you know, local Milan da. Anyway, speaking of military enthusiasts, Jack, I wanted to close a little bit on your grand media empire as the. You know, I don't even want to call you a big brother. I feel like you're just, like, in a different stratosphere from what we have going on on here at War Talk. But I don't know, I'm curious, like, how you relate to this broader ecosystem of, like, folks who are just curious about these things because, I mean, your. Your audience has gone from, like, you know, as expansion from, like, professionals to, like, I don't know, the broader, you know, community of Americans who are, like, into this stuff.
- [58:34]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, I mean, it's. It's a shame. A strange field to be in, because for the last 1415 years or whatever it's been. I've kind of maintained a foot in two worlds, one in the press and the other in the military. And that's kind of a very strange place to be because both sides look at you skeptically. You know, I've had reporters tell me, like, can you report objectively about the military? Because you're so close to these people. You go and smoke cigars with these CIA guys. How, how can you do this? And then the military, of course, like, oh, veterans and people I served with are like, oh, you're a journalist and you're trying to write yellow journalism. So you kind of get it from both sides at times. And it's just an interesting place to be. As far as the space, I mean, it's changed, I think, quite a bit. I came on the scene first in 2012 in the media world with a startup venture, and at the time in 2012, we were really the go to and the only place you really could go to for kind of news and information about the special operations community. There were a few forums out there of grumpy old guys that are like Robin Sage role players and they'd yell at you if you asked them a question. But other than that, there's really nothing. And so that that website had a lot of relevance, I think, at the time. But then what happened was social media really picked up in subsequent years. And so whereas I was kind of like the only Special Forces guy that was kind of like talking about the community. Now tons of them are. They're posting pictures on Instagram and they're telling their stories and Which I totally support. And I'm happy that they're doing that. That. So I think the landscape there changed. But then also the national security journalist space changed a lot too, with all the layoffs and all the stuff that you've seen going on with big papers, small papers, pretty dramatic changes. Another website back in the day was Task and Purpose. A bunch of military veterans writing there. I don't know if that website is even relevant or if people read it at this point. The former website that I used to write for is not relevant and no one reads it. It's just the world has kind of moved on in different directions and I guess I've been very fortunate to be able to work in this field as long as I have and to adapt as time goes on. And now doing this podcast and having a substack that I write with Sean Naylor called the High side, where we do investigative journalism, I feel quite lucky to be able to do this because so many people who were sort of colleagues or peers 10 years ago, five years ago even, they're not in this field anymore. They moved on to other things. And I mean, maybe I would like to pat myself on the back and say, well, I'm the successful one, but the reality is maybe I'm the dumb one that stuck around and they're making money flipping houses now.
- [61:52]
Brian
I mean, I guess maybe. Sorry, Brian.
- [61:54]
Derek
No, we're glad that you stuck with it. Yeah. Like when I, when I was sold in the Navy and working over in the Pentagon, you know, we'd use Task and Purpose and Small Wars Journal and those would be sources for us to kind of figure out what's happening elsewhere because their information flow is just not that good, especially between the joint forces. So that's a way for us. And when the war was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, we'd be getting better information from those sources than we were getting from internally in the Pentagon just because of the way information moved. But that's just not the case anymore. Those, those, you know, like you said, those websites are just not staying relevant and, you know, not really tapped into what's happening in the military today in the way that they used to be.
- [62:35]
Jack Murphy
And maybe it's, it's also like a personal thing or maybe I'm becoming a grumpy old guy. But like, everything that we see going on, like, I'm not going to read the Washington Post, I'm not going to read the New York Times, like, why even bother at this point?
- [62:47]
Brian
Maybe close a little bit with we've on the sort of, like, I don't know, celebritification of the SOF ecosystem you mentioned earlier, like, you're happy for people to like, be out there and telling their stories. What are the pluses and downsides of having, I don't know, every third person on Joe Rogan be like a Navy seal?
- [63:08]
Derek
Yeah.
- [63:09]
Jack Murphy
I mean, look, the, the, the, the mission as I see it in, in a large part is to record the history to get these stories out there. I think the public needs to know what happened during this war, the last 25 years of war. And if we don't tell those stories, they're just not going to be told. They're not going to hear them. And we can't even blame civilians for not understanding the military if we're not communicating with them. What we've seen, though, throughout the course of the war, I think, is that especially as the war failed, we looked for success stories and JSOC in Special Ops was a success story. They were a part of the government that seems to work. They do their job right, you send them and they're successful. And the operator, the Special Ops soldier, is kind of elevated through the media to basically like a superhero type of status, that they sort of play that role for people. And then this sort of ecosystem develops as more veterans are getting out of the military, and you have, like, the jockos and other people that go out there, and there's this sort of, like, interesting sort of paramilitary culture that grows around it with civilians and all this, like, kind of corporate leadership stuff. And, you know, we're going to do jiu jitsu and, you know, we're going to go through the obstacle course and, like, what the hell does this have to do with working at IBM?
- [64:37]
Brian
Or.
- [64:39]
Jack Murphy
I'll never really fathom that, but.
- [64:41]
Brian
But
- [64:44]
Jack Murphy
then it sort of reaches the sort of apex. It sort of hits this crescendo when you start to get to these movies about Lone Survivor, American Sniper, and it really deifies a lot of these guys. And then the downside of it on the back end is you come to find out that none of it is true. It's all lies. And that's come out time and time again, the embellishments, just fabricating service records. Some of the more recent stuff with Tim Kennedy. When I first started writing things publicly about the Special Ops community, one of the things that I hear most frequently was that we were demystifying it, and there were a lot of actual Special Ops veterans who. What they were upset about was that they felt that they were losing a sort of mystique that they carried. And that's even worse than saying something bad about these units, about pointing to failures. The worst thing that you can do is kind of reveal Superman, right? Reveal the fat man behind the curtain is kind of the worst thing you can do. So those are some of the pros and cons. It's a very weird thing. I mean, hero worship is a very weird thing. And, you know, but the reality is that these guys are human beings, and we see all the human problems that they have.
- [66:19]
Brian
Is there like, a January 6th tie into all this? I don't know. Like the.
- [66:24]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, there is a January 6th tie into it, because my team sergeant and special forces was at January 6th. 6th, and was put in prison and got pardoned by the President.
- [66:34]
Brian
How do you see the. I don't know, tie the line through all this, through all that?
- [66:42]
Jack Murphy
Well, I mean, it's like. Is it like World War I veterans in the Weimar Republic. We're in the beer halls talking about how Hitler is our father. I don't think it's that bad, but there is this sort of strain again of military and paramilitary culture. And you deployed soldiers to two failed wars for several decades and then they come home and they're confused and lost and nothing really makes sense. And they're angry and of course they're angry. How could you not be angry? And I don't think that we've really as a country really wrapped our heads around the social and cultural fallout that these wars are going to have. I mean, I think we're still living in the shadow of the Vietnam War in many ways that we don't want to acknowledge. We haven't really begun to grapple with the war on terror years at all, in my opinion. And I think the worst social consequences and fallout is probably yet to happen.
- [67:43]
Brian
Also just makes you think about what the hell's gonna happen to Russia,
- [67:49]
Justin
not
- [67:49]
Brian
to mention Ukraine after this wraps up.
- [67:53]
Host
Oh yeah, I think in both cases, I mean, I think the, you know, Jack has some good sources there, but I think on the Russian side like that, that's if it's not the end for Putin, it's certainly going to be a. You're going to end up with gang
- [68:04]
Brian
close on something a little less dark.
- [68:08]
Jack Murphy
Jack, what's a, what's a podcast you've
- [68:10]
Brian
done in the past year you're most proud of?
- [68:12]
Jack Murphy
Oh man, that's hard. Put me on the spot. There's so many that I really like. I really like the interviews that we've done with the lerps in Vietnam, the Warp Rangers. We have probably like four or five of them up there at this point. Where's some of the other ones that were like really blow your mind? I mean we mentioned the interview. We did a two parter with Mike Vickers. People might get a kick out of that. We have another one, it was a couple years ago. Now we have a four hour long interview with Chris Miller, former Secretary of Defense. That's a fun one.
- [68:51]
Host
Right?
- [68:52]
Brian
So got some content wrecks alongside a most dangerous man to take you out into your.
- [68:59]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, thank you.
- [69:01]
Brian
Fourth of July warm up. Jack, thanks so much for being a part of War Talk.