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- [00:01]
Jocko Willink
This is Jocko, podcast number 463 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.
- [00:05]
Echo Charles
Good evening.
- [00:06]
Jocko Willink
Also joining us once again tonight is John Spencer. John Spencer, who is on podcast 462. We talked about his book Connected Soldiers Life, Leadership and Social Connections in Modern Warfare. He was active duty in the army for 25 years. He went up through the ranks. You guys call it a mustang?
- [00:26]
John Spencer
Yes.
- [00:27]
Jocko Willink
Okay, so he was a mustang like me, from private to major. Served as a platoon leader and a company commander in Iraq. And right now he is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute, West Point. Also serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Madison Policy Forum and a member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare. And he's written a bunch of books. We've covered one of them. He's written a bunch of articles. I've read some of them. He's contributed to a bunch of different books. And I guess the reason we stopped last time is because we were about to start getting into what you started doing when you retired from the Army. But I think one of the things that led to you, what you did when you retired was teaching at West Point was that it was that impactful. So you're still in the army and you ended up teaching at West Point?
- [01:20]
John Spencer
Yep.
- [01:20]
Jocko Willink
Talk to me about that.
- [01:22]
John Spencer
So actually my ex or the, the young EOD lieutenant had gotten a job to teach psychology at West Point. And I needed to keep the family together. So I applied for a position in the Department of Military Instructions teaching tactics. But it was also nearest the time I had just come out of the Pentagon actually working for the four star general of the, the US army general he had created, and I hate to admit this, something off of what the Navy had created. They called it the SSG Strategic Studies Group. And CNO had one for like 20 years. He closed it, but the general at the time wanted one. So he put together this band of like 20 senior officers, junior officers and civilians to think outside the box for him, the things that he wasn't watching for a year. I studied mega cities, which is really the introduction of my academic study of urban areas. So the growth of cities around the world, urbanization, everything.
- [02:21]
Jocko Willink
And how many mega cities are there?
- [02:24]
John Spencer
There's over 35 at this moment. There were predictions, so those are cities over 10 million. But it was. That wasn't as important as the fact that you're just from 1960, where we only had around 63 cities, over a million. Now there's over 500 so the rapid urbanization of population growth, but also it meant that more war was going to happen in urban areas. The year study found that the US military wasn't prepared for operating in mega cities. And they had some recommendations. But I, like most military people had to go on to do my next job. But that year is very formidable in my ability to think unconstrained by like what we were talking about in the last podcast about way military. So I actually was studying how the US military is designed for certain planning scenarios like we'll fight counterinsurgency when we need to, but the military is designed to fight certain battles against certain enemies in certain locations. They're called defense planning scenarios. So I took that out of that. But I went to West Point, you got to get back to your job. And I was teaching, you know, ambushes and raids and military departments. But the superintendent of West Point, who's a three star general, said he wanted a re look at the, the United States Military Academy's military program because it's a college, you know, that has a robust academic program but also has military. Right. So I was a part of, because I had come out of the Pentagon, I got a point in charge of this external review. We brought in General McMaster, General Abizade, a bunch of people to do and look at was West Point being the best, you know, not just in academics, but in military programs. And one of the solutions, one of the products of that review was to create a research center called the Modern War Institute. Because what we found looking, you know, you want your military academies and you of course you want your military to be prepared for modern wars. But we found that historians study war from like 20 years ago or 200.
- [04:17]
Jocko Willink
Years ago or 2,000 years ago.
- [04:19]
John Spencer
Right. But you know, for a historian to publish on war, it takes them a long time. Just by the. I make fun of historians a lot. Journalists embedded in, you know, like the Sebastian Youngers and all those that report on what's going on now. But the military had actually not had from an academic lens, people studying modern wars that much. That's. We created the Modern War Institute, staffed it. I was the deputy director of it.
- [04:44]
Jocko Willink
And this is when you were still active duty?
- [04:46]
John Spencer
Still active duty major. I also started teaching strategy. So I went from teaching platoon tactics to teaching strategy. So like Introduction to Strategic Studies. So teaching cadets about Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Jomini, Boyd Warren, all these. So it, it was really BH Liddell Hart. Yep. Heart. Yep. All of it. Yeah. No, we get, we cover you because we have A defense and strategic planning or strategic studies academic major there at West Point. So I was teaching, which is a little challenge. I hadn't learned any of that, so I had to learn it and then teach it. But it gave me, you know, some of the stuff I incorporated in the books and not others, but also a language of connecting strategy, war, the history of how to study war. Because some people don't even know. Like, even clauseless books is a guide to how to study war and how to study the width, depth and context of it, which really starts to come into play when I start studying urban battles is the context of it teaching. But it's time to go. Military says, you know, either you move to this job away from your family or you can, you know, take the exit. And I took the exit. But the modern war institute was up and running. And I actually had written one article, a part of the modern war on the U. S. Military's use of concrete in Iraq. It's actually like the most effective weapon on the modern battlefield is concrete t barriers.
- [06:09]
Jocko Willink
Let's go.
- [06:09]
John Spencer
That's right. And I found out that the world did not know that the US military put up concrete in Iraq. That's how we reduced the IDs. That's how we created the safe neighborhoods. We fought a whole battle called the battle of solar city where we put a wall around the enemy. It went viral. Like, National Geographic picked it up. Like, it was insane that the world didn't know that. That was a big part of our actual how we fought the war in Iraq. Whether it was automated, the great wall of automated, it. There was a market for urban research. But also because I had done that work on megacities, I knew that there's not a single office in the US Military that studies urban warfare. There's not a single school outside of like, some, you know, inner and clear rooms schools. So the gap in the body of knowledge for military studies was there. I wrote that article and responded, and then I started writing more articles.
- [07:03]
Jocko Willink
What year was that?
- [07:04]
John Spencer
That was 2017.
- [07:06]
Jocko Willink
Okay. My friend Seth Stone, he was a troop commander that supported the effort to build the wall in Solder city. And so he got home and he was going to brief like, like, someone at the Pentagon, probably the. Probably the CNO or someone. Something along these lines, right? And so he came to my house and he had his. He was preparing his slides and stuff and was crappy, you know, but that's why he was over there, because he knew it was crappy. And he's like, dude, I. You Got to help me. Like, I got to give this brief and everyone's going to be there, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like. So I watched him do it like two times. And I said no. And I gave him this opener. And I, I gave him the opener. It was like five sentences of explaining what Solder City. You know, Solder City had been a stronghold for the M militia for since 2003. It had this many casualties a day. It had mity rockets fired from. And we needed to stop this. So we utilized an ancient, an ancient military strategy. We built a wall. And that was the opening of his thing and it was freaking legit.
- [08:16]
John Spencer
I actually. So I write case studies now, which I find fascinating because a lot of. There's a lot of urban legends about urban warfare, like what we think happened, whether it's even our own experiences. First Battle of Fallujah, second battlefield, Ramadi. Haven't finished that case study, but we just finished the Slaughter City case study, which was interesting because I was there. But then they have to use this framework because case study uses the same framework to analyze the strategic environment, the operational, down to the tactical, and how we actually. The wall wasn't the plan at all. The wall. There's actually like company commander saying, like, well, if I connect this wall, this wall, they can't get to their rocket firing point.
- [08:55]
Jocko Willink
Or some badass company commander was like, hey, hold on a second, let's just finish building this thing.
- [08:59]
John Spencer
And then you had like a division commander going, yeah, yeah, do that.
- [09:03]
Jocko Willink
That's awesome.
- [09:04]
John Spencer
And then it cut the, it cut the enemy off from the money supply because the market was right outside the wall. So we're about to release that case study. This is also that concrete. Interesting. That concrete article, the Modern War Shoe, also came out. 2016, 17. There's a, there's a big battle happening, right? There's the, the 2016 battle of Mosul, the largest urban battle since World War II. And all of a sudden I get a call from some downrange going, we'd like to talk to you about your concrete article. Like, why you want to talk to me about my concrete article? Because we left a lot of concrete in Iraq. We left all those T walls. Like, you know, the Iraqis, if you stayed there long enough, would just move them out of the way. Or think, well, what did ISIS do with all that military grade fortifications? It used them and built very massive fortification lines made of our T barriers, our T bars, which are really hard to do anything about because it's still reinforced, you know, Steel rebar running through those, and you can drop a JDAM on some of them, and they'll still be there. So they. It was really interesting from, you know, academia to be called, like, man, we got some questions about what your ideas about concrete are. But 2018, it was time to hang up the hat in the Modern wars, too. Said we were also doing something big. Part of doing the research was something we call Contemporary Battlefield Assessments. We had this photo at West Point of cadets going to the battlefields of World War II. Like, weeks after the war ended. They got on a ship in New Jersey and went there, and they were being walked around the battlefield by veterans who had fought there.
- [10:43]
Jocko Willink
So. Awesome.
- [10:44]
John Spencer
Yeah, it was. We had that photo. It was a real part of Standing at The Modern Wars 2. Is that West Point used to do this?
- [10:48]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, I think we. We. We do an event called Battlefield, and we take people to Gettysburg, and I think we have pictures of them. Well, we definitely have pictures of all kinds of West Pointers walking the battlefield at Gettysburg. We do it every year, which is. Which is awesome. But actually, it's funny. They. You know, I was pointing out the fire that we had at my gym, which is right here, and the firefighters, because it was a real fire, they really. They got to fight the fire, which you don't normally get to fight a fire. The way they fought this fire, the people had to go inside, people had to put the hose down, they'd rip open the roof. And so they. They walk their cadets through there now, and their probies, they walk them through and show them this is how. This is what the guys. And, like, the guys that did it go there and brief.
- [11:32]
John Spencer
Yep.
- [11:32]
Jocko Willink
So, yeah, that's a very powerful thing. And I guess you guys at West Point were saying, wait a second. They used to take these guys right there right after the battle. What are we doing?
- [11:41]
John Spencer
Yeah, we don't do it anymore. Like, we. We do Gettysburg every year, and I can. I can talk to you about every stand. So we built into building this research center that. That was one of the core functions, because in the summers, West Point cadets go all around the world. They go to Africa. They go. They go all around the world. Either language, culture, they embed with, like, the three letter organizations. It's really a robust summer program, but nobody goes out and studies war. So we built this program called the Contemporary Battlefield Assessments. First place we took them was Bosnia to study, like, the siege of Sarajevo. I actually took. One of the last things I did in 2018 before retiring was take cadets to Mumbai India to study the 2008 Mumbai attacks, where 10 terrorists take down a mega city in one of the most impressively planned terrorist attacks that I've ever seen, but to walk the ground up every site that the. The terrorists attacked and how they did it, how they planned it, everything. And then we went up to the north, towards the Pakistani border, because, you know, there are two week studies, but really after that. And that was amazing too, to learn about that. If you haven't studied that attack. In saying what they were able to do with a bunch of privates, basically with the. The terrorist had earphone, basically satellite in their ears. So they were being commanded from outside the country to attack and do certain things against these. They hit five locations simultaneously and just brought down a mega city, overloaded its systems, everything. From an urban warfare perspective, it was fascinating. But I also learned, like, you can't replace walking the ground right about then is when I'm retiring. And then the. Because of the uniqueness of. There's like 27 research centers at West Point that also have the ability to hire external researchers. And I got offered, like, do you want to keep doing this? That's a dream job. So at 2018, I started this academic urban warfare project, which I would focus only on urban warfare, study it, write about it. I started the podcast that's now many years to include interviewing experts in, like, smart cities and policing, like police chiefs and SWAT team leaders and everything. Because there's two aspects in my job of there's understanding urban warfare and like military operations, urban training, but there's also understanding cities. And it's a giant gap in the world, let alone militaries, even the combatant commanders. I was at a conference where more inspiration to my job, a combat commander, said, look, I had this aor and I didn't have anybody in the entire combatant command that could tell me about one of the cities. Because they do country teams. They can't tell you about, like, Dachau or Mumbai. When I was in Mumbai, like, who's your Mumbai expert? Like, we mean Mumbai. We don't have a Mumbai expert. We have. We have country teams. Yeah.
- [14:32]
Jocko Willink
That's crazy when you think about how unique cities are, even cities inside their own country. Like, just the methodology that the ways the cities are laid out, what they're constructed with, how. What the transportation is like, what the infrastructure is like. Like, cities are so different. Even inside of America, cities are so totally different. Now you go overseas, yeah, that's going to be radically different.
- [14:53]
John Spencer
And we did. I actually was doing this as well, taking cadets because it's close to New York City, right? Which the United States only has two mega cities, New York City, but the influence. And there's a concept of like mayors of the world. Like there's some cities and nations that are more powerful than the nation itself. It has more economic, you know, like all the city is the nation. But we have this nation state, country mindset which applies to even international relations, law of war, like a whole bunch of things. But I teach a course here in California where we actually take the urban operations planners course for divisions and brigades on how to fight large scale combat operations. It's been a part of the development. So I also do that in the California State Guard. But we'll fly them over Los Angeles. I mean you couldn't ask for two different cities than New York City and Los Angeles. Both are mega cities. But the complete terrain, you know, strategic importance, everything, all the variables that we teach are vastly different. So you can't. Urban warfare at that scale, especially that big scale, it's really hard when so many cities are so different. Like even the power structures like Mumbai has a. Mumbai has a slum built on trash that is a million people in a one mile area. It's. If you've ever seen the movie Slumdog Millionaire.
- [16:12]
Jocko Willink
I have not seen it.
- [16:13]
John Spencer
Yeah, but I went in there and you would never even want to let alone do a military operation in there. So I started doing that in 2018. I started writing and writing, writing and I'm publishing articles about everything from drones and warfare to the deeper I understood urban warfare. I also understood everything from even the battle drill. Where does this stuff come from? Where's our thinking going back in the past now writing case studies about Stalingrad, Aachen, Ortona. Like there are similarities in military approaches, but there's, you know, uniqueness. The difference between first battle of Fallujah, second battle of Fallujah, and just becoming more and more aware and learning every year. But then there's a war that starts. Well actually, yeah, there's a war that starts. The 2020 second war of Nagarana Karabakh. You know, if your listeners don't know that there's a place between what it used to be, a place between Azerbaijan and Armenia called Nagar Nakarabak. It was a really big war and everybody was watching because you know, military, not in war, they're watching other wars. And as I'm like this external now war researcher, I'm watching the media about. It's like just a drone war. Like drones are the future, like this whole war is about drones. And actually that, that war ended in a battle of a city, a single city, the entire war, decisive battle over one city called Shusha. But because I was in this new role as a civilian, we thought, oh, maybe this could be a contemporary battlefield. Maybe we could take cadets there once. So we started reaching out to the two country teams of Armenia and Azerbaijan and saying, well, can we go in there? Like, it'd been like six months since the war ended. They're like, no, you can't go in there. Nobody's allowed in there. I got invited. I won't tell you by who. So I took my blue passport because I'm a civilian and I went to Azerbaijan and I went into Nagarna Karabakh and went all the way to where that battle ended, to this place called Susha, which is. You would love it. I mean, they basically inserted two battalions of commandos. They combined their basically version of Navy Seals and Rangers combined them, inserted them over a long terrain. This city was the decisive. They knew it was the objective. And they scaled like a 400 foot cliff to infiltrate into the city and take it down with almost without a fight. But I went there to study. Like, okay, look, everybody's talking about the drone warfare, but this city, this war ended when that city fell urban. You know, cities are the economic engines. A lot of times they are the. They are the objective. Like the take out the political apparatus. Baghdad, right. The drive to Baghdad, punch to the middle, drive a tank around, psychologically defeat your enemy.
- [19:06]
Jocko Willink
Yep. Berlin, Paris. Yeah, these.
- [19:08]
John Spencer
That's right.
- [19:09]
Jocko Willink
Things are important.
- [19:11]
John Spencer
But that started my. And I didn't even realize, like I got in a lot of trouble. Just so you know, why is John, you know, what is this American guy doing in that place that they're really not supposed to be? Wrote the study of the case study, which was doing great. We used to have a practice, like we the world of going to other people's wars to learn about them. Like if you think about our civil war, we had the Germans here, you know, the British here, the French here, just observing like, like the. Both the changing in characters and the weapons. But just we've. We as Americans, we had people like in Japanese, China, war, other places and then Vietnam, you know, observers became advisors, advisors became boots on the ground. But so maybe we shy a little.
- [20:05]
Jocko Willink
Bit away from that for a reason.
- [20:08]
John Spencer
There are many reasons now politically, as I've learned, because I want to tell you about more that I've learned that there's many reasons why we we don't do that. But the fact is that we don't have people in war zones learning about the modern wars. And that came at a cost at West Point because, you know, I'm preparing you for war. But what about this war that's going on right now?
- [20:31]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, just for anybody that, like, no matter what industry you're in, imagine let's say you didn't know anything about construction and then you went and spent a month on a construction site. That that's going to be irreplaceable compared to someone that sat in a classroom and learned about it. Or let's say you want to learn about manufacturing and you sat in a classroom for a month versus you went into a factory and saw how everything was run. So the amount of things that you're going to learn when you get embedded and immersed in an environment is going to be exponentially better than what you learned sitting in a classroom. So to your point, even whatever, 150 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, there's no doubt that when you go there and you walk the ground, you learn more than you did when you sat in a classroom or when you read a book. So now when you get there and there's an active war going on and you can talk to people and you can get the debriefs and you can watch with your own eyes and see it with your own perspective, which, by the way, is a nice detached perspective, because you're not in it. You're watching it and you can. You. The ability to learn is just phenomenal.
- [21:38]
John Spencer
Yep. It's, it's unmeasurable and it's, it's crazy when I tell people, like, we don't do this. Like, we mean we don't do this the same thing. When I tell you that there's, I mean, the US Military is millions of people and there's not one person whose only job is to study urban warfare. There's not one office.
- [21:55]
Jocko Willink
It's crazy.
- [21:55]
John Spencer
Yeah. But we also, we used to have a group called the Asymmetric Warfare Group in the US and they would go into operational areas as operational advisors to U.S. forces in certain areas, but they weren't going into other people's wars that we weren't in. To learn, just to learn.
- [22:12]
Jocko Willink
Right.
- [22:14]
John Spencer
So I did that with Nagar Nakarabak, which was great. Like, and it was. And people really valued, like, how did that city fall? How did that. It led to the end of the war, of course, the war. Two years later, it started back up. But then the. So then Russia invades Ukraine in February of 2022. At this point, I had been studying urban warfare. Everything from tactics, like. And to include myself having been in the military for 20 years. That, like, not knowing where battle drill six, like enter and clear a room came from, how it merged, like from 1973 from, like Israeli special forces. Yamam responding to the failed Munich raid into our special units, into our special forces, into the main. Where I was in Ranger regiment hearing about it. But. And then we exploded across the whole US Military when we were struggling in Iraq. And like, everybody knows how to enter and clear a room now. Even though that tactic doesn't really apply to urban warfare. I don't know if you know that Echo. So we learned to, like, do SWAT team tactics and stack outside of doors, you know.
- [23:20]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, hostage rescue.
- [23:22]
John Spencer
Hostage rescue. But in. In battle, in wars where the enemy knows you're there, that goes away really quickly. Matter of fact, in the second battle of Fallujah, they were doing that and they quickly stopped it. They know you're there. That tactic is on surprise and violence of action. If you don't have surprise, it's not going to work that well. And the Israelis learned that hard, like 2002, when they started going through walls instead of going through the doors and the windows. But I had been. So the war starts in 2022. And I had been studying urban war for a little while. I also studied it from both the operational perspective of how to defeat, how to win wars. Like, take the capital city, you know, or whatever it is, depending on what the objective of the war is. So I saw Russia heading for the capital of Kiev of Ukraine. And this is on February 26th. I started using my. Back then, it was called Twitter. I created a seven tweet, A seven thread tweet on what I, John Spencer, as just a regular guy, would do. If my city was being attacked. It was like, you know, you block the roads, park dump trucks, like, literally from things. I had actually written an article In December of 2021, I think. Yeah. We're saying, looking at all the battles of history, like the battle of Seoul, Battle of Manila, what the defenders did well. So I actually wrote an article like tactics that have worked in defending cities, snipers, barriers, like, all these things. And I incorporated that a couple months later. I'm like, hey, if that was, this is. This is what I would do. I put out this 7 tweet thread and went viral. This is the wars that we live in now. It went viral. Like 20 million people saw this Tweet thread. And then people started asking for more. So I started doing like little wire diagrams of do this, not that, you know, use con. You know, use a bus, not sandbags. And I started putting together these PDFs, and that became these images on. On Twitter, that became a PDF. And then Ukrainians were printing that out and distributing it. But the. The images became a manual that was. Became what is called the mini manual for the Urban Defender. And they printed hundreds of thousands of copies because when the Russians invaded, not just Kyiv, but they actually attacked seven cities at once, the guidance from the Ukrainian government was resist. And they were. But that was literally the guidance. A couple guys were making Molotov cocktails and they made hundreds of thousands of those. And then they made these little. The. These little, I don't know if you've seen these like porcupine steel girder things. And they started putting those out everywhere. But that was the limit of the guidance. My manual. Within a week, the Ukrainian government took it and translated in Ukrainian and put it up on the website for resistors. And it was seen from literally from Lviv to Mariupol as a way civilians could help resist the Russian invasion. Yeah.
- [26:25]
Jocko Willink
And it's a. It's very thorough. Goes from everything from, like, the placement of, you know, well, what you prefer to reinforce a building with all the way down to like, medical advice about, you know, putting on tourniquets, the whole nine yards. So it's a really comprehensive kind of like quick freaking urban combat, defense for dummies type thing. No offense, but like, that's what it is. It's that basic, hey, this is what you need to do. But it's stuff that actually echo. You and I were talking about this earlier today. Like, some things that they seem real obvious once you've been told them, but when you haven't been told them, you would never think of them. So that's what I think that manual's really good for. It's got the fundamental principles in there for defense in an urban environment. And clearly if you've just been attacked, you're going to need those.
- [27:13]
John Spencer
Yeah. And I kept updating it. So like the version five that I stopped that, like, this is becoming more than a guide to civilians. This is becoming like a. I actually helped rewrite the Ranger handbook while I was a Ranger instructor we talked about last. So I knew also this Ranger handbook, if you don't know so what their students are required. But our infantry carrier is like a. An awesome manual, but it has a lot of stuff that nobody reads in it. And you really read it when you're in ranger school because you really need it. Like how to. How to do an ambush. Like, it's in there. Like, and you're allowed to have this book with you. So the. I understood that under stress people need simple instructions. So this is like, you know, go read a doctoral man. If you ever read a U. S. Military doctrine, it reads like stereo instructions. Like, it sucks. So like, this is a. I'm an old infantryman, lots of pictures, simple guidance. But then the manual kept growing. Like, people wanted to know how to purify water because like cities were cut off from water, like Mariupol. And then I had to get to with like survivalists, like the survivor man. And actually I like, I don't want to say anything here that's wrong. Like how to purify water with chlorine boiling. You know, like all this. It kept growing and then you had units like, well, how do you do an ambush? Like, well, I know how to. I stopped doing it because it became more than that. But. And that's great and it helpful and I'm very proud that it helped a lot of people. But then it started.
- [28:28]
Jocko Willink
You stopped writing when they said, how do you run the staff side PowerPoint, you counter drone.
- [28:34]
John Spencer
Like all this stuff. I left it be. But then it started being translated by other countries. So I get requests like. And I put it out there for free, of course, like just as a PDF on my website where it still is. But then I started getting questions from like miranmar, like, can we translate. Translate this? Like, why? Or I. It was actually during the women life freedom movement in Iran as well. Like, can we translate this into Persian? Like, sure, go ahead. Why then like the Polish education system. Can we translate this into Polish for our education system? Like, sure. Why? Because this ideal. I actually didn't. I hadn't studied this. But this ideal of total defense. Right, the ideal. So we have. There's an idea called total resistance. But total defense is, you know, not an insurgency, like the person's already in your country. But like, everybody's going to defend. Not letting the enemy in is very ancient. There's actually some from World War II that I actually started tapping into. Like, the British had one, the Swiss have one that like under attack. Our nation is going to defend ourselves. But with all of that, you know, the access to information, you know, the simple instructions of stuff like that for civilians got lost. So now I have. Now it's in 17 different languages and has been seen like in Crazy places around the world because the simple instructions that are common to you. And I like, nobody knows even if they have this idea that of course all our Red Dawn. Yeah, but you need to know more than just Red Dawn. Some of my book is even like what not to do. Don't stand in the open. Don't stand on a rooftop. That's the worst place you could be in a modern battlefield. So I was really surprised by it, really happy about it that that went out and everything. But I'm also, you know, I'm a. I get paid to do research. So because of Nagarana Karl Bakhtin, I'm like. Then me and my. My partner who I do a lot of stuff with, like can we go into Ukraine right now? Of course the answer is no, you're not allowed. As in like if you're associated with the military or anything back then. This is. I actually was commenting on, you know, writing the manual as. So that happened in February 2022. Russia was defeated in April of 2020 to. And by defeated, I mean they did not achieve their strategic goals of overthrowing the nation and racing Ukraine as a from existence. And they actually withdrew all their forces from Kiev. I understood that that was.
- [31:09]
Jocko Willink
Was that the. Was that the stated Russian goal.
- [31:12]
John Spencer
Yes.
- [31:13]
Jocko Willink
Was to turn Ukraine into Russia. All of it.
- [31:15]
John Spencer
Yeah. It was to denazify Ukraine was. You know, he. So a lot of people try to do revisionist history and go back to what it was. NATO was expanding. Like, I don't. It's a long conversation of things that have been said in the past that people then attribute to like, no, this dude assembled 200,000 Russian forces around Ukraine and then made a statement that the opening moments and said we are entering Ukraine to denazify it from its government and to overthrow the government and to put basically to create Belarus 2.0. Putin wanted to put a. Within this breakup of the Soviet Union. He has and he talks about all the time like his revisionist history of Peter the Great and everything that Ukraine isn't a country according to him. And that's in his statements. He said like, he has said like Ukraine isn't. It isn't a language, it isn't a people. It's Russian. His opening presidential comments on the opening of the war said I'm doing this to denazify and free the Russian people. So he's. He literally doesn't believe that Ukrainians should exist. So he. His objective and what he did to do it. So you could say, okay, words don't matter.
- [32:20]
Jocko Willink
But like but that was the, that was the scheme of maneuver that he set up.
- [32:24]
John Spencer
That's right. He. And he made a lot of mistakes and I've written about this. So if his goal was to overthrow the government, pretty simple, classic war goal, right? Take the capital city, overthrow the government, replace a friendly government, much like Iraq, Afghanistan, right. He launched, the decisive operation was Kyiv, and he had to take the capital city, but he also launched against Mariupol, Sumy, Kharkiv. He actually attacked against seven different fronts, seven different cities, because he wanted them for different reasons. He didn't wait the main objective he sent, and I've written about this. So in order to achieve the strategic goal, you had to take Kyiv. You didn't have to conquer it, you just had to raise the Russian flag over the center of the city and say that it's yours, much like we did in Baghdad. And you know, you cognitively defeat your enemy. He's lost the will to fight. They think it's useless. He thought he would do a Baghdad attack on Ukraine and use overwhelming surprise and speed and force to do it. That happened in February, you know, and he actually tried to take an airfield. They tried to do a joint forcible entry, much like when I was a ranger, we would try. I mean, he, he tried to seize an airfield, Hostomel, inside the capital city. He launched two mounted patrol, mounted formations of over 20,000 soldiers, one down out of Belarus and one out of Russia, to attack the city and to take the city. He ran into a lot of variables that had been studying. He ran into urban terrain. He ran into people resisting that he didn't think would be resisting. He, he had, you know, he didn't listen to the special forces principle that one is none. So he tried to take one airfield, didn't have a backup. So the plan started falling apart. My manual was a sideshow of it, although my manual was actually implemented in Kyiv, as in they started parking dump trucks in the streets and things like that, just trying to slow them down. Because in this war, the strategic objective was to rapidly take your objectives and rapidly take the city. So if you could slow them down, this is where there's an idea about does either. According to Clausewitz, that defense is the strongest form of warfare, but not politically. But tactically, if you're in a defense, it's a lot easier than you're attacking a defense. But in war, the objective could just be time. So in this case, Russia thought that they would take Ukraine quickly and their military hadn't been tested at this scale. A long time. So as I always. I started also, I started, I hit the kind of the news commenting position. Once I did that tweet thread once I, you know, there's an urban warfare guy. I started talking about Kiev. Then I started getting requests to be on cnn, things like that about, okay, what's the goal here, how they do it? And they're. As you've listened to my podcast recently, there's lots of ways you can take a city. You don't have to encircle it and methodically take it down. You can infiltrate it like I had just seen. You can second Battle of Fallujah, punch to the middle, make them fight you. You can. There's so many ways to take a city. I was analyzing. Well, this is the way they clearly they're trying to do it. And they actually had like four courses of action that were close. So to give Russia some credit, I guess they hadn't put years of work into taking it down from inside the city, like with saboteurs, eliminating the government through.
- [35:51]
Jocko Willink
But you said they had plans for that.
- [35:53]
John Spencer
Yep.
- [35:53]
Jocko Willink
They had gone through like course of action planning and picked the final one was speed, surprise, violence of action, get in there and overwhelm.
- [36:01]
John Spencer
No, they actually implemented all three at once.
- [36:03]
Jocko Willink
Okay, so they did all three of these things.
- [36:05]
John Spencer
So they had Spetsnaz and FSB forces inside the city who had like bought rented apartment complexes next to the government building who had were identifying targets to be attacked. They had put some work into the intelligence operation which they had success in. I wrote this for the War on Iraq's the Battle of Hostomel, which breaks you through. Like the first course of action Russia wanted was to take it down from within, which is of course the best way to do it. So they wanted to eliminate, use the sleeper cells. And they had a lot of them activated the sleeper cells to take the city down from within and take the government building, you know, either kill or capture Zelensky. And they implemented that. There's some reasons why that didn't work to include again, if you. I've had to learn all this as well. But after the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, Ukraine, you know, this is when the United States started doing some defense partnership. But we also, other people were also helping them. So they reinvented their army, they reinvented their police. So you, you know, this is again, you think about urban warfare. We think about military on military. But most cities have tens of thousands of armed people police. So their police started doing signals intelligence raids on supercells days before the invasion who are being activated. And so they did immense amount of works. And that story hasn't been written that the. And I had, you know, this is me going back in there and recreating the battle of Kyiv. But the Ukrainian police had a huge part on taking that course of action away from the Russians. The next course of action was the joint forcible entry where they were going to take a bunch of airfields, but there's five airfields in just Kyiv alone, massive ones. So the police and the military went out and started parking fire trucks on all the airfields and doing moving things so that when the Russians attacked, they were bombing empty parking lots because they had moved things, although the, the president had ordered the military not to be out in defensive positions, which could potentially have saved them. Because if had they been out and the, you know, the shock and all that Russia launched with the cruise missiles and everything, a lot of stuff wouldn't have got, would have got blown up. So the joint force of Entry, which is an amazing story of they've successfully penetrated Ukrainian airspace, landed over 300 special forces on one airfield about 10 miles from the capital, less than 10 miles, 20 helicopters successfully inserted into this airfield in the capital city. And it looked like history, that it was going to work, except that they ran into just regular Ukrainians that were attacking them and they actually took down a couple helicopters. So the Russians had a thousand paratroopers on cargo planes in the air headed towards that airfield they just seized successfully, but because of Ukrainian air force.
- [39:06]
Jocko Willink
So the special operations guys were going to seize the airfield, set it up for a landing, an airborne landing, and then these thousand paratroopers were going to jump in. And now we have a foothold and we're moving forward.
- [39:17]
John Spencer
They're going to air land. So it's a, it's an air lodgement. So joint forceable entry, you seize the airfield, bring in the heavy cargo air and land it.
- [39:24]
Jocko Willink
Oh, so they weren't even a parachute anywhere we're going to get started.
- [39:26]
John Spencer
Yep. And they were just. All they had to do was punch to the middle of the city. They had sleeper cells that like guiding the way like everything. But some Ukrainians. And there's. It's a really amazing story where like a private, like a finance guy uses like an old air defense system, takes down one helicopter, one of their alligators K52s, which are like our Apaches, like they're like tanks in the sky. And this is the. Again, studying modern war, I found it really fascinating that that picture of that Russian helicopter down did more to embolden the people of Ukraine than anything else because they thought they could fight back. Like, we can fight back. And they took one helicopter, like, dude, it's one helicopter out of, like, 20. And they still inserted like, 300 of their best special forces. And they took the airfield and everything, but they took that one down and they started hitting other helicopters. So they turn off the aircraft. So now you have, in this battle of Kyiv opening moments, you have 300 of your best Navy SEALs on the ground in enemy territory, holding there. But now. But they're cut off and they're alone. So literally, the cnn, I don't know if you saw this, but cnn, this is a modern war as well. It's literally on the ground within minutes trying to interview Russian special forces. Like, what are you doing here? It's like an American CNN guy who went out to the airfield is trying to interview them, which actually happened to me in northern Iraq when I jumped into Iraq the next morning. They're CNN Fox. So he's literally trying to interview a Russian guy going, what are you doing here? Go away. But then you have the president say, we know they're here. And they. And they launched everybody they had, no matter who it was, at that airfield and did a counterattack. I actually talked to the Special Forces major who had four hours to get there. And it was like shooting fish in the gallery. Like, it was just 300 dudes on an open airfield with no, nothing more than what they carried on their backs because the airfield dropped them and left. And then they started raining artillery down. So they eliminate these 300, and then they cratered the airfield with some very big artillery. They have like 200 millimeter. Within hours, though, you have 20,000 Russians coming from through Chernobyl, which I found out where Chernobyl was, and I didn't even want to. I got really close to it as I went into Ukraine. They had 20,000 making their way to that airfield. So the Russian. The Ukrainians killed those 300, basically pull off the airfield because they know there's a massive force and they don't. There's only one brigade in all of Keep. They thought the Russians were going to attack east, which they did. I don't know if they didn't think Russia had the Kahunas to take the capital, but there's only one army brigade. So this is mostly like civilians and police and everybody fighting. And then the vehicles got stuck coming down out of Chernobyl. And then they have a fight for another, like, three weeks where all these mounted forces are trying to make their way into the city. It's a massive city. I mean, Kyiv is, you know, a city of 3 million people. It's an ancient city. Actually. The biggest encirclement in military history happened there in 1941. Soviets versus Germans. Millions of people against millions of people. The terrain got in their way. Ukrainians started doing things like they blew a dam in the. Within hours of the invasion, which has history that I didn't know. But they, they blew a whole dam which took away an entire axis of advance for the. The Russian forces that were trying to make their way into Kiev. They blew 300 bridges in 24 hours. They didn't tell me how they. That nobody will admit to because I think some of it they suicide and just blew all the bridges. So nobody actually will say like who brewed blew all the bridges? Like, you know, but they blew all the bridges, which meant that the tanks, you know, tanks have to get to somewhere. There's only certain bridges, right? You think like a bridge too far. Things like that, like bridges come really important in big wars. So Ukrainians drop all the bridges. They flooded this whole. They blew a dam, flooded a whole region. They went Red Dawn. I talked to grandfathers who, which I think this is what Red dawn got wrong was the veterans. You know, Ukraine's a. A conscript Soviet, you know, used to be a conscript Soviet satellite. So most of the adult men have served in the Soviet military, right? So I have some fascinating stories of like grandpa with an RPG on top of a. Of his house taking out Russians. And there were a couple of winning moments in the opening hours of that where you. And literally like grandpa who went out to the airfield and got some stuff, has given it to his other grandpa friend. Red dawn forgot the veterans. So you have a lot of veteran communities and what they call like territorial defenders. And in April, this goes on for a few weeks. And there's a couple moments in April, the Russians literally, Putin comes on like, oh, we didn't want to take all of Ukraine. He literally changes his entire strategic objectives and pulls. And within 24 hours, though, so you had 40,000 Russians around Kyiv at this point trying to penetrate and never were able to get to the government city. And then overnight they're gone 24 hours. They, you gotta give them credit. They know how to run. So they, they executed a textbook withdrawal under fire and actually followed their path all the way up to as close to Chernobyl as I wanted to get, which was still too close. That was April now, because I had had this experience of going into wars to study it, I. This was the biggest, most decisive urban battle, as in, it achieved the strategic goals for both sides. So either one side failed, one side was successful in saving Ukraine. Had Kyiv fallen, we would probably not be talking about the Ukraine war right now, because the Russian be over. So I wanted to get in there and study it. So I took. I took a flight to Poland, walked across the border, went to Kyiv and started interviewing the commanders who had defended the city. Because I think. I still think it's one of the most decisive battles in modern history because it achieved the strategic goal. Of course, the war continued because Putin himself said, well, that wasn't my goal. My strategic goals are these four districts in Eastern Ukraine that he wants. So he literally, within 24 hours, withdrew them all back into Belarus to Russia, and then redeploy deployed them a couple months later into eastern Ukraine. But he was defeated on for, you know, in April of 2022. But I. I went in to recreate the Battle of Kiev. So this again was the progression of my research of going into war zones while they're still going on. I went back to Ukraine four times until really, until October 7, trying to recreate the, like doing all the firsthand interviews with all the commanders and civilians and others that were at the pivotal moments. So I'm fascinating. You know, I'm not a historian, but trying to write applied history as how do you recreate who writes what happened in the battle and how do you do that has been really fascinating. These are case studies. You can do it through historical knowledge, but if you're doing it through firsthand knowledge, we had to figure out what were the key moments in the Battle of Kiev, like the airfield, Hostomel. But there's another one, another battle, like where the Russians actually had forded the river after all the bridges were blown. And it was like one company of Ukrainian collection of people that kept the Russians from actually penetrating into the city. So I went back four times, recreating and getting all the interviews with the generals to the soldiers at those moments to recreate what happened at that battle. I was also doing interviews with the Battle of Mariupol. If you don't know that story where, you know 3,000 or less, it's like. It's like third thermopylae, 3,000 soldiers hold off 20,000 Russians for over 80 days using the steel factory and underground. Most of them you were captured eventually, but some of them were released. I was doing interviews of recreating that battle, which is from an urban warfare history, very significant. On what? From a operational perspective, how they held down those 20,000 Russians so they couldn't, like, redeploy to the capital or redeploy to this other city. How important that urban battle was to the overall war as well.
- [47:52]
Jocko Willink
What. Let's start with Kyiv. Was there anything that surprised you about Kyiv from an urban warfare, like, lesson learned where you hadn't really thought of that, or maybe some new technology or new tactics that you saw a lot?
- [48:06]
John Spencer
Yeah. So one. So there's so many elements. One is just the history of the. Of the. Of the land. You're learning that this was, you know, Kyiv outdates Russia, right? Kyiv in Rus. The city is like a fortress city. It was built there along the river for a certain reason. And all the battles that have happened for the city, really looking at even in 1941, the biggest encirclement. Where does the battle focus on? It focuses on the east, the western side of the city, along that river that they actually blew the dam for and increased the river. Matter of fact, the Ukrainians who defended Kyiv in 2022 fell in World War II trenches at times and were back into the same trenches, fighting at almost the same locations. So I learned a lot about the city. But there's also an interesting technology that the Ukrainians deployed that I had no idea about until I got there, called Delta. So the Ukrainians had, like, their version of like the DARPA or something like that. They had created this computer system that integrated sensors, everything from drone cameras to bank cameras to everything. They had invented it before the war. So in the battle of Kyiv, like, I didn't understand how just 3,000. That's. How many military people were there? Just 3,000. Not even a brigade.
- [49:26]
Jocko Willink
How were they always in the right place at the right time?
- [49:28]
John Spencer
Yes. So that. It's because of Delta. So the Ukrainians, although I could watch First War I've ever known of, I could watch live YouTube from Kiev during the battle. And I was. And we see. We all saw the videos of, like, highway cameras catching Russians, all this stuff. But I didn't know that Ukrainians had this system called Delta, which was integrating all these sensors. So they knew exactly where the Russians were and basically had an eye in the sky. They actually ordered. During the battle, they ordered $100,000 cameras. I don't know if this is like Amazon war or whatever. And got them into Kyiv during the battle. This is between February and April of 2022. And then put them up on the high rises. So they knew where the Russians were at all times. They only had one battalion of artillery. So there's a bunch of examples of. There's even an example that I tell where grandma in my. I tell this story because it's really an example of a surprise. Out on the outskirts of Ukraine. There was a grandma who woke up and saw a Russian convoy sitting outside her house. So grandma picks up her phone and calls, calls it in and I'm like, well, called it to who The Ukrainians took basically like this government app called DIA that they had which was like carried your passport, your driver's license, everything. And with again this is all under attack, transformed it to report enemy. So grandma takes out her camera or her phone, hits that button to report enemy. It goes to an intel fusion cell of civilians that they had set up. And then dia, the Delta system is able to validate that information. And then they send a TB2 drone over to it. So this computer system called Delta gave them an all seeing eye that allowed them to use a very small force. But also the defensive properties of you blocking everything, blowing all the bridges, blowing the dams, buying yourself time because the Russians only had like certain five days of supplies as well. And the logistical. The 40 mile convoy going back into Belarus and it was being attacked. So that aspect of the Delta system was very surprising. And I'd actually in my urban warfare studies heard of like I had a thing about smart cities on my podcast, you know about the idea you could tap into all the cameras and all that stuff like this was it in real time. And they had a artillery app as well. So they could integrate this all cni, which they had no shortage of people wanting to help. Right. So they had like, that's my question, like, well, how did you fuse this? Like, so they set up all these fusion centers and all the. They cut the city up into pies and put people out there. If you're a drone operator, they told you you're going to give us your feet or we're going to ew. Make it so you can't fly it. They did all this with like in a week and they had this all seeing eye up. So like the Russians in perspective had little chance of surprise. Right? Surprise is still everything in war. If I can. They created this all seeing eye. Then they like that battle of that I told you in motion where they had that breakthrough where the Russians pontoon. It was only they knew they needed to get there. If not, it was all going to be lost.
- [52:46]
Jocko Willink
One of the early reports Coming in was about a lot of the senior officers in the Russian military getting killed. And it, you know, for me, I deducted that. Okay, why are there senior military leaders up on the front lines? Because there's some massive amount of micromanagement going on and, you know, some centralized command certainly causing problems. Is that, is that what you found as well when you debriefed?
- [53:12]
John Spencer
Absolutely. So there's, you know, that really plays out a little bit later when they start using signals intelligence on. There's a reason why the Russians also relied on the cell phone network for their communication. They had just switched out their common equipment. There's a lot of friends of mine that are like the Russian military experts this is. But that's absolutely there. The Russians don't have a non commissioned officer corps. Right. So it's very officer driven, which is, we all know it's a weakness. It's their system. They also had done a reorganization of their battalion tactical groups to where they had less infantry. From an urban war perspective, that really played out as well. Like you can have a convoy, but if you don't have the infantry to protect the convoy, you know, whether it's armor or whatever, then they found out really quickly that the changes they had made was war puts you to the test. It put their logistics to the test. And like all the rot that was.
- [54:01]
Jocko Willink
There, they ran into that problem in Chechnya too.
- [54:03]
John Spencer
They did, they did.
- [54:04]
Jocko Willink
Which is interesting.
- [54:05]
John Spencer
Which, which is from a historian, not. I'm not a historian, but from a researcher. Like we have lessons that we learned and just relearn and relearn. So same same. But yeah, they're officers. And then, you know, after the Battle of Kiev, Ukraine starts becoming very effective at targeting off senior officers and senior commands with the limited capabilities like drones and things like that that play out. But yeah, it's definitely a weakness in the Russian system. But Russia also, especially within the urban, like I'm the urban warfare guy. So like I'm studying like Kiev, Mariupol, Bakhmut, they have a, they have a human wave tactic to where they'll just send human waves at the defender to discover where he's at and then use artillery to flatten wherever they are. And they're still doing that today on the battlefield. So that's another aspect of their weaknesses that started to play out. And what they didn't have in Kiev that they adjusted and had in other places. Like when they had the Battle of Bakhmut.
- [55:06]
Jocko Willink
How quickly did it become apparent the level of brutality that was going to be happening on like the front line scenarios here. Because I mean, I've seen, you know, like everybody else, I've seen the videos, the pictures, the reports of just savagery happening. How, how quickly did that get initiated? Was it a result of frustration over time? Was it something that came immediately or did it show up as things progressed or digressed?
- [55:36]
John Spencer
I should say, yeah, there's a bunch of events in the beginning that really, of course, I would say even in the battle of Maral, where the, they, the Ukrainians who couldn't get out of the city were trapped in the city and there's an event where they're in a theater in Marul. It's 600 women and children and they wrote the letters, children in Russian on the outside in giant letters outside the theater. And the Russians dropped like multiple hundreds of pounds. Bombs on it and killed them all. It was one of the first signs of they're not going to follow the rules. And then of course at the, when the Russians pulled out In April of 2022, the massacre of Bucha is discovered where they just massacred hundreds of civilians, over 100 civilians, where they tied their hands behind the back, shot them in the back of the head, some video cameras of that. It became really early on recognizable that there was a lot of dehumanization that the Russians had in themselves about who the Ukrainian people were and what rules they were or weren't going to follow in war. That savagery was seen immediately in Kyiv because that was my research. But it's all throughout. But some of the systematic aspects of it too, like the fact that. Which is problematic because now we'll talk about it later, I'm sure Israel, but Russia starts stealing the children of the areas that they conquer and sending them back into Russia. So Ukrainian babies, like thousands of them, they're taking back into Russia and giving them to Russian parents. There's a, there's actually an ICC warrant for Putin and his, the female that's helping them do this, not an application for an actual warrant that was issued in 2022 because it was validated that he was doing this. So the savagery is there 100%. But it's also hard for people to understand the scale of this war. And again, going there, like how long it. Unless I walk some of that ground even within a city, let alone the entire front line. Getting people to understand the geography and the scale of this. I mean the Ukrainian military went from like 100,000 to a million within a year. And that's going to cause a lot of problems on the battlefield and in the, in the country when you try to build a military under war. So there's lots of parts about the geography and the scale of this that it was just foreign to most observers of war in general.
- [58:08]
Jocko Willink
So speaking of the scale of this, one of the things that's been debated a lot is the number of casualties on both sides. What do you. What are you thinking? What does it look like?
- [58:20]
John Spencer
Yeah, it's been interesting how it's. I understand. So war is a contest of will. And this is why, again, even in the battle of Kiev, it was about time. It wasn't about killing on both sides. It was about the ability to get supplies in there. So I understand the information operation is part of this. Where Ukraine, like other countries, like Sun Tzu's maxims on the strategies to defeat your enemy are still present today. Number one, defeat. You know, defeat your enemy without even fighting, defeat his strategy. Number two, defeat his allies. So one of the reasons that Ukraine hides its casualty numbers is because of what it would say to the rest of the world on how's it going? Basically, the third one is defeat the enemy's military. And interestingly for the urban warfare guy, the fourth one is don't attack besieged cities. Basically do it at the last cause those maxims still apply. So in Ukraine's casualty numbers. I've seen reports. I haven't and I've been there. And I know that especially as the war continued into some of these very attritional battles like Bakmut and others, where they're just trying to hold the line that tens of thousands are dying. I try to believe this goes to what we will see later on. Who do you believe? So. So the Ukrainians aren't putting it out, but like the British and the United States are putting out what Russia's are. I do believe it's a factor of like five to one of five, because you. Russia doesn't care about their numbers and they're cremating them or they're not coming home. That it's, you know, last estimates like 400,000 plus Russian deaths. But to be honest, I don't have the both sides of the number. It's a lot, of course, but I don't. I also understand why they. Because now you have people saying, well, we just want this to stop. Too many people have lost their lives in this battle, which is almost like the Chamberlain and the, you know, and the Churchill argument, like, when does survival become questionable? Like that was the option. The Ukrainians got asked the Question which was unique to me traveling into war zone just to feel that. And I, I never felt that in my own deployments is going into a country that's under attack of like, you know, an existential attack and a country can either mobilize their, and resist that or what they thought. The, the Russians thought the Ukrainians would welcome the Russians and they didn't. But that was a very unique feeling that I had when I went into Ukraine in April or it was actually May, is that unified aspect of we don't want, we want to survive, we don't want to be Russian. We can talk about in Israel as well. We have people now arguing like that, that the numbers, that this quantitative number means whether they should continue to fight to be free. And then like, okay, what's the solutions here in war? Understanding the history of wars where reason isn't always the number one, it's human. If it was just numbers, and I call this like the abacus fallacy. Like, well, they have more troops, they have more artillery, they have more industrial base. Like it's futile to resist. So what are you saying? Give up? Which is what, as you know, Churchill was faced with. Like, doesn't make any sense to resist Adolf Hitler. Like, yeah, freedom makes a lot of sense. And I felt that in all of the Ukrainian population when I visited. There's of course there's strategies into this and maintaining 50 plus countries as your allies is absolutely, is Ukraine's one of its primary strategies to win the wars if you maintain your allies. So that number is problematic for them. But of course it's in the, you know, tens and hundreds of thousands.
- [62:21]
Jocko Willink
You know, one, one thing that I thought about as soon as this thing started was, you know, war is a test of wills. And I believe that when your country gets invaded and you're defending your homeland, your will is going to be stronger than someone that's trying to, you know, take your property and you know, move into your homeland. It's, you know, this is why Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, like, hey, and this, where I thought you were actually going was like, you know, you're going, you're looking at the war and you're going to leave. At some point you're going to leave and worst case scenario, they win. Cool, I'll go back home, I'll go back to Colorado and live my life. The people in Ukraine don't have that option. If they lose, they're going to be subjugated to this imposing force. And therefore they're much more willing to make sacrifice because their Will is going to be stronger. Now, that being said, there are definitely cases throughout history where people get conquered and at a certain point they say, you know what, I was going to fight. And you know, you never know. This could have happened to Churchill. Churchill was not going to back down. But how many people, you know, how many cities could have been bombed, how many Brits could have been killed before Churchill said, you know what, we're going to make a deal or we're going to cease to exist. Or his attitude might have been, well, we would rather cease to exist than succumb to this tyrannical Adolf Hitler. But this is the thing that we don't always calculate very well. And you might have heard me talk about this before, but after the Idrang Valley battle, we killed something like thousand of their or 2000 of their people, and they killed 155 of ours. And our generals and political leaders looked at each other and said, yep, see, we're going to win because we can kill more of them than they can of us. And what we didn't realize at that time was they were more than willing to make the sacrifice and we were not. And every casualty that we had was a travesty and a nightmare and it would hurt our soul as a nation. And every casualty that they had, every death that they had was moving them towards victory. So that's what I feel about Ukraine right now, is Ukraine the, the, the will of the Ukrainian people. This is where they live, this is their home, and they are not going to be subjugated by anyone else. And they're going to keep fighting for as long as they possibly can.
- [64:59]
John Spencer
So I agree with everything you just said. When I would teach this in West Point, is that though the will to fight is, you know, this is Clausewitz's, you know, war is a contest of will to compel your enemy to do your bidding, basically. But he also had the paradoxical trinity that it's not just the will of the people, it's the will of the government and it's the will of the military. So it's a, this is a triangle. So you could have all the will to resist you want, but if you don't have the military to do it, or your military won't do it, or they're incapable, or they, they, they, they do a military coup and they go with the other side if your government doesn't have the will to continue, like Churchill, like he went out and pulled the people and everything. So it's a, it's a contest of Wills between these three apparatuses and even back from ancient warfare is both a situational, as in, like in the country resisting, but it's also in a international contest. So this is your example. Right. Of course, we all know we were. We won every battle, but we were strategically defeated in Vietnam because the American population lost a will to sacrifice American lives for those interests, even though they didn't believe in the domino theory and all this stuff. Each war has to be looked at through the lens of that triangle of the people, the government and the military within themselves and the enemies. But again, going back to Sun Tzu, you're one of the greatest assets in any wars, your allies. So, yes, if the Americans had not joined Churchill in the fight, then it wouldn't have played out that way. Right? So this is. So, yes, the people can resist, want to resist all they want. They have to have some means. And then that's why, you know, this is about what I've loved and I love my. Because I learned something every day about studying military history is understanding the width of whatever it is, the depth and the context in the Ukraine sense. The context of it is, is it has a coalition of democracy helping it, but it's not asking for anybody to fight for it. It's just asking for the means. And we can talk about. In the beginning, I was kind of vocal in this. We were starting with, we'll give you four pieces of artillery to fight a war. And that was. We have given billions. And we could talk about what that means of if you're America first and military drawdown, how we give them our stockpiles, we buy new stuff, we're making our military better. We're, you know, this is our greatest strategic competitor, according to them, and their pennies on a dollar to reduce them. But in, in the beginning, we were. Ukraine had to fight for itself. That was actually one of my visits. That's the Battle of Kiev. Like, no, nobody helped them during the Battle of Kyiv. Ukrainians defeated Russians in the Battle of Kiev with some stuff that I could never have thought about even if I was on the ground. It is about your. The will of your allies. So this is where especially in the interconnected world, they were really good on information warfare. Ukrainians were on projecting this. But it really mattered. And you asked me about Russian brutality. It's really come into effect on how they maintain, like Ukrainian moral high ground. Right. There's a moral high ground in fighting for your freedom. And it can't ever be, you know, like you lose the will of your Allies and things based on the actions you're doing. So you have. Yes. You have to say thank you for the four artillery pieces. I could use more. But it plays into this, you know, political nature. All war is politics by other means. It's the other quote. So in every context that I'm studying, even a battle, I have to understand the political context of it. And why did the president tell Ukrainians they couldn't be. They couldn't defend the city? That was crazy, right? Like, why would you say that? Because he thought it would crush the, you know, make the economy crash, like much. You know, it would aggravate the Russians and then they would attack. Like, there's many reasons to it. This is the uniqueness of studying as you do wars. It's. There's human decisions that aren't necessarily rational, but there, There is reason. But there's also chance, probability. This is the great prophets of the last three years. I can tell you how this is going to go. Of course this person is going to lose. They're. They're bleeding white. Like, if you know anything about war, there's a lot of uncertainty to say.
- [69:16]
Jocko Willink
If you know anything about war, it's that we don't know anything about war.
- [69:19]
John Spencer
That's right. We have a really good record of getting it wrong, especially predictions.
- [69:24]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, this one's definitely going to be hard to predict to see where this thing ends up.
- [69:28]
John Spencer
Right. I haven't. I, you know, I was studying this. You know, it's really hard to follow a war. Right. So I. You're following it day to day. Every action on the tactical, the strategic. I get a lot of questions about predicting, but I could never have predicted that you would have a Tony Soprano type of dude who has a private military company, that's an army make a run for Moscow, and that's what happened. And nobody could have predicted that. And they try to rationalize it away, but that's an example of the uncertainty of war. You don't. We don't know what's going to happen a month from now in Russia. I mean, with their system, it isn't as firm as people believe with the oligarchs and all this stuff. And the military seems really powerful, but they're asking for Iran to give them stuff, North Korea to give them stuff. And they give people like three days of training. And they emptied their entire prison in Chaco. 50,000 plus Russians, murderers, rapists. Like, hey, you want to go fight? And then after you're done fighting, you're free. And they dumped their Entire prisons into Ukraine. And then some of them actually survived, although most of them died like in the battle of Bakhmut, some of them survived. And all of a sudden Russia has a lot of domestic problems because you have all these freed criminals.
- [70:39]
Jocko Willink
How long did they have to fight for? Do you know that detail?
- [70:42]
John Spencer
Yeah, it was like six months or something. I don't know what the exact guarantee to which populations was. It was like go fight in Ukraine for like six months. But they use them as human ways. Especially in Bakhmut. This is. And the black, you know, in the Wagner is the private military company. But if you know all these, these people that are in my world that predict like they're gonna know what's going to happen and everything. Like. You didn't call that one, did you?
- [71:07]
Jocko Willink
One thing that I've said a few times is I expected and continued to expect to see more insurgency type activity, guerrilla warfare from the Ukrainians as opposed to pitched battles.
- [71:22]
John Spencer
Yeah. And you did see that. So that's the. I've gotten that from Elon. Elon Musk believes that if they speak Russian, maybe they're. They want to be Russian now. You know, again, there's a history of the language that's not true. He's like, well, there'd be more, you know, you know, rebellion in the occupied territories. Like. Well, there is. I mean there's like grandma's given Russians poisoned bread and you know the stuff that happened in Harrison where the lot of inside was able to take it down. It's just a. It's a scale issue and a means issue. I wrote this story of for Time magazine about the. Which you. You should. Yeah, you probably get the guy this Vietnam style helicopter resupply that they do into mariupol. We have 3,000 guys or that are resistant and they flew seven suicidal aircraft resupplies into the city. It's an amazing story. Yes you. But there's a lot of history there, especially where you're talking about in the Donbas because that war started 2011 and the political warfare that Russia does, like it did in Crimea where it takes out and inserts Russia friendly political leader. So this is why it's also hard like one Ukraine has gone on for so long that there's a lot of confirmation, confirmation bias like, you know, drone warfare. That's the future. You know, political warfare, insurgency, rebellion. It's all there. It's such a big war. Like that's it. That's it. I was right. I was right. It is happening. Yeah. At. You know, but There is a, you know, each area, even within Ukraine, this, the thing is huge.
- [73:02]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [73:03]
John Spencer
There are different demographics, different situations, different resistance groups in there.
- [73:10]
Jocko Willink
And you said you kept going back to Ukraine until October 7th.
- [73:14]
John Spencer
Right.
- [73:15]
Jocko Willink
And so how has that looked from your perspective? How many times have you gone to Israel? How many times have you gone to Gaza and what's going on over there?
- [73:24]
John Spencer
Yeah, so I one, I had been studying Israel for a long time where because of those are some of the.
- [73:31]
Jocko Willink
Most significant urban battles of modern times.
- [73:35]
John Spencer
They were in these very.
- [73:36]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, they were. I guess they were. Yeah.
- [73:38]
John Spencer
And very unique. There's so much uniqueness to it because I was doing, I was doing an international working group on subterranean warfare. Like I was having conferences in Israel about tunnel warfare, going to Hezbollah tunnels in northern Israel that they discovered and Hamas tunnels before this war. But yeah, they're. But they're a unique military too. So they're a military that can task organize for the environments in which they face where most other militaries like us. The US military expeditionary anywhere in the world is designed for a lot of scenarios. Why I kept going back to Israel is that they are. They had some forces that were specifically trained for contested urban warfare and had stuff that we don't have like the D9 bulldozer, which is like this three story tall bulldozers. They learn to. In contested urban warfare, when somebody has had time to prepare for defense, you have to have something that can take a hit from whatever's waiting for you. And they had this like three story toll that I got to drive in like 2020 bulldozer with a remote controller that's like a, it's a armored bulldozer that's like three stories tall, that rolls down the street, can take a hit from anything. And they had learned in 2002 that that was very effective and they integrate it into combined arms. They have a tank behind it and an arm formation. But they also have one of the world's best urban warfare training sites in Salem. Better than anything we have the tunnel. So I was going there. But I also written case studies on the battle of Suez City, Janine and others because it's like you said, the genesis of like the close quarters battle comes from Israel. And some of their. I'd embedded with their magav, the their basically their version of Delta, like the Imam and others studying Israel. So I had a lot of connections. October 7th happened. I of course was watching it. I've been there three times. Six October 7th and I've been into Gaza each time because my unique connections and that experience that I had, that when I asked the question, like, I want to understand how you're mobilizing for these urban challenges, I had enough connections to be able to do that. So as early as December, I was on the ground. But I was also not just studying what they were doing, which I hope we get to talk about, about dealing with the Gaza war, the war against Hamas in Gaza. But I also wanted to study October 7th attacks. And that was the podcast I did. So I had watched the video. Video. I don't know if you've seen it.
- [76:05]
Jocko Willink
I have not seen it.
- [76:06]
John Spencer
I think I could probably help you get see it. But I had seen that in November in New York City. I got an I gotten.
- [76:14]
Jocko Willink
So explain what the video is for people that don't know.
- [76:17]
John Spencer
So unique to Hamas, Hamas made it a very. Purposely wanted to record their atrocities of October 7th. So they all wore GoPros. They actually had manuals of how to wear the GoPro properly and they wanted to record all their acts. So on October 7, when over 4,000 Hamas and regular Palestinian civilians penetrated Israel's border in 20 different locations and moved forward into the civilian areas and locked them down and started massacring everybody, they recorded it all. So Israel took Hamas's videos, but also combined it with like vehicle dash cams and home CCTVs and recreated locations. And this 45 minute video is of Hamas's carnage on October 7th. And it's just a small, like it.
- [77:12]
Jocko Willink
You know, it's, it's some of the.
- [77:15]
John Spencer
Sites, some of the sites. And I, I watched this in November and I've seen a lot right now and I've now traveled the world. It messed me up. And I actually was really adamant before I saw it, like, why won't you release this? Show the world what happened on that day. I mean, it's 90 Hamas videos. Like they captured themselves to include beheading people and you know, awful things that they did. After watching it, I realized, do not release this. It's it the way it's done. And not like, I'm sure you have too. Like, I've seen enough carnage and I've seen Kill TV and I've seen things. But the way they did this with having different perspectives, it almost put you at the spot of the whatever it is that's happening. And there's one scene that really messed me up. Where it was, Hamas had entered one of the villages, all these villages around the border. And the dad wakes up with what's going on because they have like 30 seconds to jump into bum. Because Hamas on October 7th, the morning I've launched 4,000 rockets. So the entire country thought it was a normal Hamas rocket attack, although the scale was beyond anything they had seen. So they all jumped into their bomb shelters. If you live in Israel, it's a requirement when you build a house to have a bomb shelter, because Hamas and Hezbollah and others launched so many rockets. So in this video, the 45 minute video, is one where this dad, you know, you know, and I'm a. I'm a father, is in his underwear. He grabs his two sons and he runs out to the bomb shelter because they'd gotten the alert that the, the rockets were coming. It just happened to be seconds before the actual Hamas terrorists were in his village. And they enter his courtyard, throw a grenade in there, and you see him fall out of the. Because they're, they're, they're not like safe rooms, they're just shelters. Sometimes in the back or sometimes in the house, and you see him fall out and you see the two kids come out and they're all rippled with shrapnel and everything because the grenade went in there. The terrorists take them back into the house, and this house just happened to be fully equipped with CCTV camera. And the two kids are put on the couch and you can tell, like, they're bleeding and they're talking to each other about, I can't see, where's dad? Dad's dead. And then I hear one of these kids make this moan that I've heard Enemy make on the battlefield. This very, like, deep, like, eerie death moan, I call it. And the Hamas guy is standing over them laughing. And this is the scene that people have talked about where he, he laughs at them, tells them to shut up, and then goes to their fridge and drinks a Coke over the top of them. For some reason, that savagery really, at that moment, like, really hit me. But it's everything. I like. The, the, the glee that they, they have and when they're recording themselves, how happy they are about what they're doing was like something I had never seen. It's like they had released thousands of Jeffrey Dahmer's into Israel. But that's what that video is. It's 45 minutes straight of seeing from the Nova music festival to all the different villages with all these different perspectives and from beheadings to, you know, awful things.
- [80:20]
Jocko Willink
And who is it? The Israeli government that compiled this?
- [80:22]
John Spencer
Yes.
- [80:23]
Jocko Willink
And it's the Israeli government that has decided not to release it.
- [80:26]
John Spencer
Correct.
- [80:26]
Jocko Willink
And they think they're. Their reason for not releasing it is because it's too brutal.
- [80:32]
John Spencer
There's a few reasons I've never asked. You know, I've interviewed now everybody because I've. On all my trips, I've interviewed the Prime Minister, the head of the military, like many politicians, everything nobody's ever said, like, John, this is the reason we, we didn't release. I know many of the reasons. One is respect for the, the people that are in it. It's traumatizing. It literally like causes traumas for people that watch it and you have to like, get help. Some people that have watched it and it's the savagery of it. So it's almost like you're fulfilling the terrorist interest because even the Nazis tried to hide what they do. And it's really unique that they wanted this to air. And you can go, you can go to like places like October 7th.com and you can see a lot of the videos, just not with the Israeli kind of the dashboard cameras and stuff. You can see most of Hamas's videos that are out there, the savagery of it. So I think there's many reasons why they haven't. They tried to show it to as many groups as possible and they wanted control of it because you almost fulfilling the terrorist interest of spreading it.
- [81:40]
Jocko Willink
And for the Hamas to, you know, go through such extreme efforts of training their people on how to wear these cameras so they can capture all this savagery. What's their purpose behind that? Why are they doing that?
- [81:57]
John Spencer
So it's. So the video. So the books that they carried, so the other videos, why they do it? Because it, you know, it's, you know, some people have lost the definition of terrorism, what terrorism is meant, the definition of terrorism. You know, basically violence on civilians for the purpose of political goals and instill fear in others. And. But I think it was a accusation of their radicalization. Like they wanted they. And this is the videos of where they're literally calling back to their mothers in Gaza saying, I just killed 10 Jews. Aren't you proud of me? That level of radicalization within them is they wanted to spread to all other jihadists their successes. So I think that was a big part of it and part of their warped form of fundamental Islamic jihadism, which isn't even what it says. So I think that's something, although I never asked them. That's some of the reasons. But it wasn't just like where the GoPro the books actually explained, which as a, you know, as somebody who wrote a mini manual and everything this, it was really eerie that they said stuff like take the tires out of the Israelis cars, light their tires on fire and then roll them into the, into their houses so that it will burn and suffocate them at the same time. For some reason, burning was really big to them in this plan. They also had drugs that they took to kind of, not that they needed it to almost dehumanize the fighters if they were having problems, which was actually what happened in the Mumbai attacks as well. They had food with them to stay longer. They had, you know, now we can get into what was it, was it a terrorist attack? Which I personally don't think it is. I think it was an invasion because if you add up the 4,000 plus individuals who penetrated 20 different locations, the thousands of rockets, you get over a division of forces and they plan to take terrain and hold terrain. They had maps to go to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This was an invasion. And they planned for, like Hezbollah did in the north, for other people to join them. And they had all this intelligence on all the different communities and they locked them down from a military lens like I couldn't have even arranged school, taught, you know, many of those lessons were there. They set up ambushes on any road that led into southern Israel to ambush any security personnel that would come in that direction. They had intimate information on every village because, you know, each one of these villages are, have their own security personnel in the kibbutz's and they have armories where the weapons are, which is a, you know, was an evolution of the gun policy. So the terrorists would enter the village and immediately cut that off and put in snipers above that armory and take out anybody that went towards it to lock it down. The military planning of this invasion was, was intense and there's so many stories that are starting to come to light, but they wanted the rest of their jihad to see what they were doing in the savagery of it.
- [85:05]
Jocko Willink
I've gone through thoughts in my brain where I was thinking that one of the reasons why they wanted this to be recorded and seen was because they wanted a strong reaction from Israel. And like that's why they did these things in such a heinous way. But also, you know, now that I'm thinking about it and what you just said really landed was like, this is the actualization of someone that has been told their whole life that the Jews are demonic beasts that have oppressed everyone and killed all of our family members. And they've held us down for centuries and we must destroy them and kill them. And if you get told that your whole life, well then when you get a GoPro and you get the opportunity to do it, you want to record it and you want to share it, which is really disturbing the psychological upbringing of these kids. Tell me a little bit about the background about growing up under Hamas. What does that do to me mentally? What does that do to someone mentally?
- [86:20]
John Spencer
Yeah, I can't. I mean I'm sure you could find more systematic radicalization in the world if you talk about like some other companies. But it would be really hard for such a intense amount of radical. Radicalization at birth. So the time of Palestinian under Hamas, right, which is this group who sees power in 2005, 2000, 2008, and then starts implementing this Sharia and radicalization. And there's lots of histories to it, but it starts at birth. It literally isn't somebody who is basically has seen actions of the Israelis and then feels that resentment of their actions. There's all kinds of documentation of literally basically a version of Hamas, Sesame street with characters discussing that the how the Jews are less than human and our goal is to kill them. That's the, the ultimate form of basically what the religion tells you to do. So that dehumanization and interest to, to slaughter Israelis, which they, you know, it's really a part of dehumanization. It's the only way you can explain some of the things and the, the rape and the mutilation and the burning and the beheading that happens on that day. That was a lot of Jeffrey Dahmer's, but that was started at birth. And you can see from the textbooks that start from the first time they can read to want to not just hate the Jewish people, but to kill them and destroy the Israeli state. This is again going back to all these misinformed people on American campuses that believe that this is a resistance and they just want their own state and they want self determination and better things for their. They have never said those things. Their entire education, their charter, everything is about the death of the Jews around the world and Israel not existing. They even had these things called summer camps in Gaza. Summer camps were. And I thought the numbers weren't right and I had to keep looking like 100,000 kids a summer going through camps on how to use weapons for the sole purpose. And then tactics, techniques and procedures to slaughter Israelis and kill Israelis. And they have the sayings that, you know, like almost answer like the motto is the death of the Jews. And like that level of radicalization Gets you to a deep hatred that isn't even like passed on from some action that happened. It's, it's programmed in to achieve your ultimate goal on life, which is crazy. Like they're taught that that's the goal in life, is to have children to be martyred while killing Jews to fulfill this philosophical ideal of the caliphate, which is the erasing of the Jewish people.
- [89:25]
Jocko Willink
Then on top of that, they're in an environment where when you look outside of your house and you're a little kid and you've been told that the Jews are terrible, you look out and what do you see? Oh, you see an Israeli with a weapon imposing control over you and your family and all of your people. So you end up with this self fulfilling prophecy because every, when you look around, well, you know, my teacher just told me that the Jews are bad. And then guess what? One of your friends walks too close to the to, to some security station and gets shot. Well, sure enough, the Jews are bad. And this is, and it just go, that goes on, you know. Now this is the, these are the people that live there in Gaza. And you know, because what 2005, 2006 is when Hamas takes control there. So these are the young adults and they've been raised this way since birth. And I know you and our, you and I were talking before we hit record and I brought up, you know, being a 15 or a 13 year old in, you know, Nazi Germany in 1944. Like you are just, that's what you think. That's what, that's the way you, that's what you believe. You mentioned the Imperial Japanese, you know, looking at the emperor as if he was God and because that's the only thing, you know, and you know, I mentioned actually before we hit record, I had, I knew a guy that was raised in a cult and he thought when he left the cult, he believed, half of him believed, well, when I leave, I'm going to get struck down by God. He believed that and he had a little hole, he had a little room for error in that he had seen the outside world and he was like, oh, this doesn't. Some things didn't match up. But here, if you're in Gaza, the things match up because you're living. You don't have food, you don't have water. You, the things match up with what you're being told and how you're living and just reinforces this idea that the Jews are bad, they're oppressing you, and the only proper way to fulfill your destiny in life is to kill as many of them as you can and martyr yourself.
- [91:43]
John Spencer
Yeah, there's a lot of the radicalization is more than just the education, but it is there. The books and the religion and the sayings and everything. But you're right, it's if that's what you live in of this population, you know, Gaza Strip is a strip, you know, of 25 miles long, 5 to 7 miles wide as the biggest area with 2.2 million people living into it with massive cities, but 80 plus percent of the population lives well below global standards of property for potable water, food, everything. And they're taught that that's because of Israel. Although since Hamas seized power in 2005 and started launching rockets at Israel, that the leadership of Hamas are billionaires like the ones that live in Qatar billionaires. The ones that live in like those are no longer around were millionaires. They the subjugation of the people is needed to fulfill the hatred that is indoctrinated. Like you said, self prophecy validated. Everything they learn about doesn't matter if the head of Hamas gets, you know, saved in a surgery to rid him of his cancer like that. That doesn't matter. The what they view of the outside world and to include anybody, not them, but especially for the Jewish people, is validated in what they're living in. And the cause of that, which is unfortunately even in some Western societies, that this is all Israel's fault, Right? The whole idea of apartheid, the whole idea of blockade, all of this and revisionist history. It's all Israel's fault that all they want is to live side by side as good neighbors. No, they've never said that. They've only ever said they want to kill all the Jews and erase Israel. It shouldn't exist. And that's what they teach and radicalize in the population. But that element of them living in poverty while they're spending billions of dollars to develop military capability to destroy Israel, that there's a break in that and everything is built into it. The UNWRA refugee system, everything is meant to create this idea that they are the oppressed. And the idea of just, well, I want to break away from this. I want to make a good life. I don't want that everything is done to, to ensure that that maintains that cycle of hatred continues.
- [94:15]
Jocko Willink
And it's aimed at Israel, not aimed at, let's say for instance, Egypt, where Egypt is right there on the border and that border is completely shut down and you're not allowed to be a Palestinian living in Gaza if you want to escape from there, you can't go to Egypt.
- [94:35]
John Spencer
Nope. And it used to be most people don't understand, you know, again with the history that people only want to, that they construct their own narrative by taking the bits of the history they want and rewording them or whatever. But there used to be Gazans on the Egyptian side of Gaza. There was 50,000 in Rafah city, actually split on the other side. And Egypt one day said, I don't want them there. And they basically forcibly told them all to leave. I don't care where you go. And then since the war, which I have been as an urban warfare specialist looking at the history of anything similar, although there's very few, I've never seen a situation where the citizens, the civilians that don't, the non combatants, the ones that don't want to fight, have nowhere to get out of the main combat areas because Egypt closed their gate on October 7th. Said not one refugee. And if anybody knows the geography of that area, the Sinai Desert in Egypt, there's a massive area of land. The ability for Egypt to open the border and create a temporary displaced person camp like there has been in many urban battles, tent cities, non NGOs, and get in there without the threat of attack would have saved thousands of lives. Nobody talks about it. Nobody points a finger to Egypt because they have self determination if they want to, and they did. Not one refugee coming out of Gaza. And they have their history of why with the Muslim Brotherhood and their tenuous political situation right now. But I found it really unique today. Nobody talks about Egypt like you in the broader scale, like the blockade. You can't have a blockade if there's another country with a border that goes in and out and controls the borders, not a blockade. And if there are thousands of Gazans that are coming out of Gaza, which there were over 20,000 Gazans coming out of Gaza to work in Israel, then it's not really a blockade. And if things are getting in hundreds of trucks a day and being searched for weapons, then it's, you know, there are lots of reasons there. But then people reconstruct this narrative. Getting back to yours. No, the radicalization doesn't point the finger at their situation to God, to Egypt.
- [96:52]
Jocko Willink
Or Hamas for that matter. Obviously.
- [96:53]
John Spencer
Well, obviously. And Hamas is not the only bad guys there. Right. So this is, you know, again, a study in war on October 7, Hamas and Palestinians, to be very clear, it's thousands. So there was, there are waves. And I broke this down in the article that I wrote about the Attack. There were waves of, you know, Nukba, which are the Hamas special forces that came in hang gliders, penetrated the walls, came in, went to their attack points, set up the ambushes. And then there were thousands of Palestinians who said, got the notice that the attack of the Jews was ongoing and they crossed into as well. But Hamas is not the only evil terrorist group in Gaza either. They have the Palestinian Islamic Jihad lion's den, other names of real people who have the same radical ideal that the whole goal in life to include to be martyred is to kill Jews.
- [97:47]
Jocko Willink
So what have you seen as far as now the operations commence in Gaza and the clearance of Gaza looks like a hellscape over there. What's that been. And you've been in Gaza since October 7th. You've been on patrol and seen what's going on?
- [98:05]
John Spencer
Yeah, I. So I went there first in December. So I watched that video in November. I went there in December. I walked many locations, which actually was a realization. Like even watching that video, I had no clue of the scale of the October 7th attack and the military planning of it and how they locked it down and where were the police, where were the. So I was studying it from a kind of an urban warfare, terrorist attack perspective. But then I was also, I mean, this is the biggest urban centric war you could say, since World War II, just on the scale of it, but that we've known just by the complexity of the urban terrain and the mission. I went there in December to start understanding how Israel was going to move forward to achieve his three goals. And I have. I interviewed Netanyahu, I interviewed the chief of staff, like from a. Like we talk about, from a strategic goal. What are the goals? Right. So after the October 7, they had to repel the enemy. The enemy took 250 hostages, men, women, children, Holocaust survivors, American citizens back into. Because there's a lot of history there on the theory of they wanted this counterattack. There's a lot of history there to taking hostages. And the head of Hamas that's recently died, yahya Senwar, spent 20 years in Israeli prisons trying to figure out what Israel's greatest weaknesses were. One of them being its reliance on allies in the international community. The deep anti Semitism like you got. He planned this out for years. And the taking of hostages being the same. I mean, that guy was. There was an Israeli NCO sergeant that was kidnapped and held for five years. Gilad, Shalit and Israel exchanged a thousand prisoners to get one guy back. And during that five years, from a special forces perspective, they never knew where he was in that density of Gaza. So a thousand plus people and yahya the mastermind, October 7th being one of them. So after October 7th you had 250 hostages be taken. Like literally eight month old babies and everything. The rockets did not stop. And so I think some people discount this on like what is the realm of the timeline of this. You had the hostages immediately being taken and then you had 4,000 rockets launched in the first few hours of October 7th and thousands launched every day. Then on, you know, now it's down to zero or one to two or three a day. But nobody knew that they had amassed this level of a rocket arsenal. But their 13,000 plus rockets launched out of Gaza despite the operation. So Israel declared war in accordance with UN Charter Article 51. Like a self defense war with three goals. And those haven't changed since. Since October 8th. Although Hezbollah attacked on October 8th, which does factor in. So you have this massive army attacking in the north as well. Their goals were to return the hostages the 251 to destroy. And this is where people have tried to argue that they're not doing it destroy Hamas and by destroyed, not from a ideal perspective, but destroy as in remove them from their military and political power. So it's more. Now listen, I kind of get frustrated on people thinking that Hamas is a counterinsurgency. Is that Gaza since 2005 when Israel left and in 2008 Hamas. There's no that's not Israel that Israel left it. Then after 2008, after the rocket tax put up the wall, it was a de facto statelet like an area. And the goal was to remove Hamas from political power and remove their military capabilities. And then lastly is, you know, prevent them Gaza from ever threatening Israel again like with military capabilities. So those three goals were the start of it. Now how did they array to do that? Is why I went in December to look at some of the bigger fights and how they started in the north. So hamas was over 40,000 fighters. But the numbers don't really matter because. But it was a military. So it had 24 light infantry battalions arrayed across the Gaza strip, which includes 24 cities. 10 over 100,000. Gaza City is over 600,000. Rafah is 300,000. But major urban areas. All which I think people miss. And this is where I've tried to come in with the urban warfare experience. Is that a. You had 250 hostages rockets emanating out of Gaza with an army arrayed in that territory prepared for the defense. So one of the reasons that the 2016, 17 battle of Mosul is the biggest since World War II is because ISIS had two years to prepare, and prepared it in very good belted defenses. The Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 is the greatest battle for the entire Iraq War, entire time we're there. I know Romania was big, but the second battle of Fallujah, and because they were given nine months of defensive prep. So in Gaza, they had 15 years to prepare the ground and actually built the cities with the. For the purpose of war. So this is where.
- [103:23]
Jocko Willink
And their budget was billions unlimited. From some perspectives, yes.
- [103:28]
John Spencer
This is where, you know, at one point there were 200. You know, and then I've gotten a lot of people, like, why would Israel knew this? Why didn't they do something about it? Like the fact that there were 200, at one point, 200 cement trucks a day going into Gaza to build hospitals, schools and everything. But there weren't a lot of high rises going up. Because in this 15 years, they built the largest underground network ever seen in war. They originally thought it was 300, and as they started to interact with it, noticed over 400 miles. So bigger than the London Metro, the New York City Metro, Seoul Metro, under the cities of Gaza. And unique to military because China and North Korea have lots of tunnels too. They have thousands of miles. They call it the Great Wall underground in China. But it's not built under civilians for the sole purpose of using the civilians as human, human sacrifice to achieve their political goal. Because Hamas never, like you said, Hamas knew it couldn't defeat the idf. But in its history, in Israel's history, that's not ever the goal. The goal is to attack, withstand the counter attack, and then get the world to cause them to stop. So this is where I said, even in December, Hamas's only goal is to survive. If it survives the war. Politically, they won because Israel set the goal of removing them from power, removing their military capability. But you have 24 battalions of Hamas, so you have like five brigades, and then you have 24 battalions arrayed across the Gaza Strip, with the main part in northern Gaza with all geographic locations. Each battalion has their own arsenal of rockets and caches in the houses and its own tunnel network to support a delayed defense. I can't find in history where any military has faced those variables. Because you have the hostages, because that leads to time. Like just, well, let's do a siege. Although doing a siege in modern wars it would be hard to do legally because you can't cut water Food and everything from civilians. So you have the hostage thing, you have the underground network. So you can't, you're not going to reach that many of them. They remove them from power aspects of it. You have to physically do it because Israel, you know, went into Gaza in 2008, 2014, 2021, with very limited goals of just reducing the rocket supply that was emanating out of, out of Gaza. To do it, do this though, it's more analogous to like a invasion of Iraq, invasion of Afghanistan, invasion of Panama, World War II style. I'm going to remove this, like even the invasion of Kiev. Like, you got to remove the power and then you have to take away this military capability for the next power to do it again, et cetera, et cetera. So Israel waited for. So after October 8th, Israel of course mobilized because it's, you know, it's a very small military. It only has two serving divisions, about 100 plus thousand kind of in the field, and it mobilized 300,000 in the first couple weeks. But it also gave notifications for northern Gaza to move below the central part. And I think you were talking about this in one of your podcasts as well, which is pretty much the standard of removing civilians from the population. Right. You know what we did in the second battle of Fallujah, you know, you drop flyers, you keep notifying, drop more flyers. Israel did that in the. Which I found it really interesting that they did that. Like, because they're a raid, four divisions of forces waiting to go in. They're doing, you're basically preparatory, like they're engaging rockets that are emanating out the rocket locations. They know where headquarters are. They're engaging with that bombing campaign that we could talk about. But they're, they haven't launched the full, full invasion to remove Hamas from power. They give all the notifications and then the. But the world says, well, you can't do that. I can't do what? Evacuate civilians out of combat areas so I can moved them out of the most risked place. And they identified a road for them to go. Same thing that anybody's ever done. They identified an area to go so they couldn't go into Egypt. So Israel identified this beach area on the southwestern portion of Gaza. And one of the reasons they picked it is it's the only place in all of Gaza without military Hamas infrastructure underneath it because it's too Sandy. But these 400 miles of tunnels, and they only knew this, some of this now from discovering it. And I was in one in December. It was a multimillion dollar invasion tunnel that ran from Gaza City to 100 meters outside Israel. Gaza's border had had power, ventilation, communication, lighting, everything you could now, you know, you could basically enter northern Gaza in a tunnel and come out in southern Gaza. That's how many tunnels. It's like I've never seen anything like it. I mean I went in in February into Khan Yunis, in July into central Gaza where they're creating this, where that, that, that thing that split northern Gaza. Nobody thought that they thought that was a barrier, like a natural barrier. Used to be a river, now it's a river basin that splits northern and southern Gaza. The Wadi Gaza thought that was like a natural barrier. But Hamas actually figured out how to dig miles long tunnels underneath that river basin to connect northern Gaza to southern Gaza. So if you're a military though and like okay, what, what are the options here to return the hostages, get the rockets to stop firing, remove this into the from power. This is what I teach in that course, you know, division level attack. So when I went there in December and why I'm, why do I keep going back into Gaza as I'm trying to analyze like what are the types of forms of maneuver and operations they're doing and I did that and how they did some very innovative things to not fight the way the enemy wanted them to fight. So Hamas had built its defensive lines in a circle with the water to their back, thinking that okay, the direction of the enemy in Israel will come this way. So they had, you know, especially in northern Gaza, which was the strong point of the, the brigades, they had developed this defensive belt and defensive belts to include the tunnel networks that went between the buildings in a kind of a crescent circle. So Israel of course didn't attack a frontal attack. You know, they're not marines, they didn't frontal attack that they went around it in, in like to include commandos coming out of the seas and came from behind that defensive belt. They also moved forward and secured the hospital which is historical to the second battle of Fallujah. If you know that battle we, the hospital was the primary objective because they're very strong information warfare aspects. But I found myself as I was going in there, I saw the misinformation happening about what Israel was doing, that they were being indiscriminate, that they were being excessive and especially they were being disproportionate because proportionality and war. This is because of the social media, because of, to include everybody's ideals about Israel and anti Semitism. Everybody became an expert in the law of war and what proportionality was. And people thought, well, 1200 Israelis were massacred on October 7th, so that means you can only kill 12. There can only be 1200 deaths on the other side has nothing to do with proportionality. So I had to. I started writing and talking a lot about even what is proportionality. But as I went in, I also. Because I've. Because I study urban warfare for a living. I also did a lot of work with the United nations, with human rights groups that since our battles, I mean, the United Nations High Council of Human Rights said we did like, 83 cases of war crimes in the second battle of Fallujah to include carpet bombing, targeting civilians, all that stuff. Like, it's not new for these groups to say these things. Even in Ukraine, Amnesty International said that you. It was illegal for Ukrainian military to be in the cities they're defending because it puts civilians at risk. So this is. I had been working. I had spoken at the United Nations. There is a giant initiative in the United nations to ban the use of any bomb in any urban area. It's called the explosive weapons in populated areas. In like 100 countries have signed this, that if there's an urban war, we're going to not use really big bombs because it's really destructive to the cities. Which sounds good in theory, but as to include a lot of military theorists, is that if you understand the forced Geneva Conventions out of World War II and all the things that we said we wouldn't do, that has now been taken by human rights groups to say there should be no war and there should be no use of explosive weapons in urban areas, clearly, because it destroys cities, but it actually drives warfare into urban areas because it's a place where somebody who wants political power goes, you can't touch me. And this is what. What we've seen in Hamas is that really the culmination of all my studies of, you know, the laws of war and what our protected population protection sites, right? Hospitals, schools, medical staff, like all these are protected under the laws of war. And Hamas built cities with that in mind. So every hospital in Gaza, Hamas used in some way for military purposes. It built this tunnels. I used to say they built their tunnels underneath all the schools and hospitals and houses. Now, after being especially in my February, they built the tunnel and then put a school or a mosque on top of it, as in this, what they call law fair. They have been studying the R wars and Israel's, you know, situation for years. And they built an entire environment with the sole Purpose of getting this world to do what it has, which is lose its mind on what the laws are and what the realm of possible is. There's only one battle. I don't know. You probably know this. There's only one battle in, in all of military history that I can find that has any of the parallels of the war in Gaza, which is really hard for people to understand. Like, people have tried to compare, like Ramadi or other battles to the war in Gaza. Like the. There are 24 cities in Gaza. Gaza City itself is over 600,000 people. Which, which context are you comparing it to? There are 5,000 in all of Ramadi. There were 3,000 in Fallujah. There's only 5,000 in Mosul.
- [114:06]
Jocko Willink
Are you talking about enemy fighters?
- [114:07]
John Spencer
Enemy fighters, yeah.
- [114:08]
Jocko Willink
And like the population of Ramadi was 400,000.
- [114:10]
John Spencer
Right.
- [114:11]
Jocko Willink
Whole thing.
- [114:11]
John Spencer
And by time they started, it was about 250.
- [114:13]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, probably 250. And yeah, like they estimate around 5,000 enemy fighters.
- [114:18]
John Spencer
Yeah.
- [114:18]
Jocko Willink
So what do we, what do we got in Gaza?
- [114:21]
John Spencer
Two million.
- [114:22]
Jocko Willink
Two million people.
- [114:23]
John Spencer
Yep. And the fighters are over 40,000. Just of the organized, the named enemy. Because this is the other thing. You enter Gaza, it might not be Hamas that attacks you, but it's, it's a combatant. And I've had to teach people like, what is a combatant and a non combatant, because you can be. This is a part of law where nobody understands and maybe I didn't know as much like you can. If you're a named military that I've waged war against, I can kill you wherever you are. You don't have to be holding a weapon. If there's a barracks full of enemy fighters sleeping of the other military, that's. I can destroy that barracks while they're sleeping. That's the law of war. And you could be a civilian. And you can also, like the grandma, which is the example I try to use that I told you about in Ukraine, who picked up the phone and called in enemy and called in an airstrike, basically while she was using the phone, she was a combatant. She could have been killed. So civilians can. And there are rules like if she stops doing it and then she's not, but if she keeps doing it every day, then she can become. You don't have to be carrying a weapon as a civilian to be partaking in the hostilities, but if you are protecting in the hostilities, you lose your protections. There's only one battle that has any dissimilarities of the hostages situation. The defense of the Enemy, which I think people really discount on the realm of possible. Again, if the enemy has had time to prepare, it's going to look different than other situations where the enemy didn't even in, like the Battle of Kyiv. Right. It was, you know, there wasn't a defensive position assigned. So the 1945 Battle of Manila is the only one that I've. I've found and I. That has any of the similarities. So, you know, we were defeated in the Philippines. We retreated, but we left thousands of prisoners of war and civilians. When we regained power, we hit the beaches in the Philippines and MacArthur said, go to Manila and free our people. Because there were over 3,000American and British prisoners of war and attorneys, so civilians being held in the city of Manila. The Japanese originally had not planned to defend it, but then eventually the Navy, the Japanese generals, the navy admiral and the guys are arguing, and one of them decides that they're going to defend. Defend it, and they use 17,000 Japanese Navy personnel. They sink the ships in the harbor. I know some Navy stuff, but they try to mess up the harbor and they sink the ships and they take the naval guns off the ships and put them on land and they. And for months they build this defensive position around Manila. MacArthur hits the beach in 1945, says, go to Manila and free our people. It's a city of a million. There are 17,000 defenders who have barricaded the roads, they have dug tunnels that can. They have sewers, they have some of the aspects of the military defensive infrastructure. MacArthur said no air power. So he didn't want the Americans to destroy the city to save it. So he said no air power. So the 37,000Americans and some Philippines attacked the city. We retrieved our 3,000 plus prisoners of war, but it's a bloody block by block fire and 100,000 civilians die. I've gotten into this numbers game, though, in my work where like that. That's horrible, right? Well, just like I can tell you the number of civilian casualties in the Battle of Mosul was, you know, 10,000 when there are only 5,000 fighters. But we actually don't know how many fighters died in 100,000 that died in Manila. The Japanese killed both of those. The Japanese were, because they too, didn't care about the population, were slaughtering them and stacking them in the bottom of the houses. They also starved them so that there would be a humanitarian crisis by the time the Americans got there. But I think the unique aspect that MacArthur didn't want the city destroyed, so he didn't use the air power, which as you know, as a military person means that like in my strong point podcast, that if you. I can teach you how to hold a building for weeks if it has a sub training in it, if it's ironclad made, you can hold. And we have this like in Stalingrad with Pablo's house, where I can hold a single building for weeks against division level attack.
- [118:39]
Jocko Willink
Yep.
- [118:39]
John Spencer
So if you don't have the ability to hit the enemy once you know where he's at, it's going to cause the fight. That's why when I spoke with the United nations, like this is a bad idea. You're going to create really awful urban wars. If you say you can't use munitions if you know where the enemy is to engage the enemy target, that gets you in a category of civilian harm mitigation. So that's the Manila case. I can give you the battle of Seoul, right, Hackworth Korea war. Most people know about the Inchon landing, right? You know about that. It's like one of the greatest maneuvers of military history. But they hit the beaches of Incheon and then where were they headed? Seoul. And they had to liberate Seoul. Guess who's in charge again? MacArthur. So again he says no air power, take the city. It's called the battle of the barriers because the North Koreans set up barriers and they have a very protracted fight. There's only 7,000 defenders. We attacked with over 15,000American forces. And there is, as I wanted to help people understand because this. Some people said, well that's, you know, Manila's pre Geneva commissions when we said we wouldn't carbon bond cities. Right. Because we were carpet Dresden and trying to influence the will of the people and their government to stop resisting. Well, souls post second Geneva Conventions. And it was in MacArthur said no air power, no unobserved fires. He had to release that as Americans started dying. There is zero record of how many civilians died in that battle. Most of lots of the city was destroyed. All the Japanese, just like in Manila. I know that the or the Japanese in Manila all died, all 17,000 because they killed themselves. There's no record of how many enemy died. There's no record of how many civilians died. But it's this huge, like we raised the UN flag over Seoul and it was a great victory, but nobody was. And one of the reasons is because the South Koreans were killing people they thought were North Korean collaborators. There's 2 million that die in the Korean War. But there's actually. That's another example of a Very. When an enemy takes a city, how hard it is to take it back. And. But where the ideal proportionality in this war. Everybody started asking me, what's the civilian to combatant ratio? I had never heard of. And I've been studying urban war for 10 years. I never heard that question asked. And that's where we're at now. We have national leaders of government saying, yeah, but their civilian to combatant ratio is all wrong. They need to stop. Like, are they doing everything that they can to prevent civilian casualties? So this is the other thing that was created after our wars, actually after the Iraq war, really, at the end of the Afghanistan war, something called civilian harm mitigation steps. As you know, McChrystal and others started doing basically changes in ROE and what you could do. And these were viewed as civilian harm mitigation steps and became a terminology that I started to get involved with in urban warfare. Some of those are like, evacuate to cities before you go. Things like that. Israel did that, right? I told you. But then they started doing things that nobody does. Israel calls buildings before they strike them and tells anybody that's in them that, hey, we're about to strike this building. I knew that. I didn't think they would do it in this war. They had done it in previous wars, but they were doing it in November and December. They were. It's called a roof knocking, because they'll call everybody in the building, tell them all, like, you have an hour to evacuate. We're getting ready to strike this building. For it's a military purposes. People don't leave. Then they'll drop. Not, you know, basically low yield explosions on the roof and knock on the roof and do it. They were doing that. And I knew that before I went. But when I went there in February, I learned that they were doing things that no military has ever done. They were using. They had handed out their maps. So like our GRGs that we use Israel started that started to be the flyers in that they were dropping where the GRGs that they could communicate to civilians to tell this the civilians and Hamas where they would be every day and to stay away from that area. So instead of, you know, saying, okay, everybody in the city needs to evacuate, they cut it up. And the GRG said, okay, today we're going to be operating in area 200. Please evacuate this area and stay away from this area. We've never done that. And they started also. And this is where I think I was telling you about this guy that I really want to tell you about, General Goldfish. Who's a, an Israeli Navy Seal flotilla the 13 guy who they made a division commander. It's just their system who was always trying to think ahead of the enemy. And I, I embedded with him and his division into Khan Yunis and he was doing things like encircling a neighborhood because at first Israel just said evacuate the cities, move south of the Wadi Gaza, move into Almo Asti humanitarian zone. And you know, they had limited capabilities but they, they did that evacuation but reasonably thinking, you know, that much of Hamas or hostages or something moved with them. You know they were, they were being told where to avoid. Some stayed to fight of course. And there was rough battles in Khan Yunis. Not only did he do what's called a call out, you know what a call out is, but he did it like citywide. So he launched four brigades in a penetration in enemy territory overnight, surrounded a neighborhood of over 250,000. When they woke up, they got the notice to evacuate through these Israeli positions. And Israel used facial recognition to pick out all the Hamas that were walking out like Nukba level fighters. He's also the guy. The evolution of the tunnel warfare, why I keep going back as well, is to this tunnel problem. Nobody's ever faced, nobody's ever faced, you know, tunnels at this depth. So the tunnels run from underneath buildings to 200ft underground at over around 100ft underground. There's no military munition that reasonably is going to reach that. I mean yeah, we dropped the Moab in Afghanistan in 2017, but that was on a tunnel complex in the cave network. There's Most, even a 2,000 pound bombs only going to get you about 30ft underground. 400 miles of these as Israelis move forward in northern Gaza, you know, with they found over six, you know at this point there are over 6,000 shafts. It's, it's, it's just unimaginable. And even when I go there, it's like I would be walking on top of tunnels that they hadn't found yet. And then they found them like an hour later not understanding that was an enemy tunnel underneath me. But the way they approached the tunnel, because this is about clearing disturbance, rain. It wasn't, isn't, it's about also finding the supplies and removing it from those areas. They move everybody out of safety and they still got to clear the areas and they're facing the same thing that we did, right? The IEDs, the houseborne bombs, the snipers, snipers are lethal. But the tunnels was a problem set that I just didn't even though I studied tunnel warfare originally, they were, you know, being very deliberate about it. Like they find the shaft, secure it, they lost some soldiers even to the booby traps around the shafts. But by time they did this, the tunnel, the people in the tunnel, although they tried flooding, they actually brought in five industrial level pumps and were pumping seawater and fresh water into the tunnels thinking that it would help destroy because Egypt had since us doing that destroying Hamas cross border tunnels by flooding them. It didn't work.
- [126:22]
Jocko Willink
How come it didn't work?
- [126:23]
John Spencer
Because if you've ever seen one of these are multi million dollar complexes. And actually there's really interesting report in 2021 I was actually there when there was a another Hamas was launching rockets and it was operation guarding the Wall. So Israel was striking the tunnel complexes and collapsed a bunch. But between that 2021 and October 7, Hamas spent hundreds of thousand dollars to insert blast doors in the tunnels to mitigate the blast that you know, if you hit a tunnel, the blast will ripple through the tunnel. They Yaya somewhere himself authorized hundreds of thousands of dollars to put more blast doors in many of the tunnels. So this factors in when they started flooding is that they're, they're concrete tubes. So and some of them are made with drainage in them. So they in one battle, in the battle of Ben Hanoun, they spent two weeks flood, you know, basically massive industrial level pump into this and in two weeks it started to hit the surface. And actually that's when they started have fights on the ground. So they were having weeks long battles with people and never barely seen people because of the way each brigade and battalion and company have their own tunnel network. So it fill up but they're just drained back out. They're, they're not, they're not made of sandy stuff that's going to collapse in on it. And if it's, if it's not a steady like if you laterally drilled from. There's some theory that if you laterally drill from the Mediterranean, you know, into the tunnel and had like a constant supply, maybe it worked but unlikely it just would all drain out. But anyways they were still ceding the initiative to the enemy in these tunnels. So they would get there and clearing like they'd segment like we would do they minor objectives in a certain area. Okay, you're going to isolate this, you're going to clear enemy personnel, you're going to search it. And they found things like things that they just didn't know were possible. I already told you about the ones going under. But they found deep buried rocket production sites. So, you know, this is the myth that all this was brought in. No, no. They were. They had the chemicals, the lays, everything to build rockets like a military industrial base. In tunnels 100 meters underground. Complete workshops which requires advanced ventilation. Everything. As they were fighting this though, they would always. They're always one step behind the enemy. So Hamas was doing a delayed defense. It would fight for as long as it would move through its tunnel, activate all the booby traps and then leave. They were still. It was still an issue of now you had to spend all that time dealing with the tunnel. And what you do about a tunnel is different than what you do about a tunnel if there's a hostage in it. So that's always in this real from from the go. Where are the hostages? As a factor in every action to include what to do about a tunnel. Right. And Israel's the only military in the world just that has actually major organizations focused on tunnel warfare. Again, why I was going there. They have their version of tunnel rats. We call them weasels. It's a brigade level engineer, special forces engineer force that's trained man equipped for underground warfare. But they. Nobody was prepared for this scale. They quickly ran out of resources and they were ceding the tunnels to the enemy. It was General Goldfuss in Khan Yunis when I was with him, who as an. I guess he just thinks differently. He literally would do like, you know, Boyd's oodle loop. He would do clause of his trinity. I have a picture of him like drawing this stuff out each time I visit him, like trying to think as. Because the enemy was adapting as well. So he like the casualty numbers like the enemy deployed basically fighting a war with TV reporters reporting is different than there being millions of sensors in the environment. So every action is recorded on cell phone. And Hamas did a really good job on projecting that to the world and getting them out. And this is. You know, there's a. I don't know if you saw this event. There's one example where a bomb goes off near a hospital. You know about this one. The Ali.
- [130:27]
Jocko Willink
Yep.
- [130:27]
John Spencer
And in Hamas immediately said that the.
- [130:30]
Jocko Willink
Bomb hit the hospital and there was hundreds of people and innocent civilians.
- [130:34]
John Spencer
Al Jazeera, CNN, everybody ran it. Over 500 deaths. Israel bombed the hospital. Even I was like, what? And Israel waited about an hour just to make sure. Like did something happen? Like an accident, Somebody dropped something they weren't supposed to everything and then come to find out it was actually the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who had had A.
- [130:53]
Jocko Willink
Rocket launched a rocket and it went.
- [130:54]
John Spencer
Astray, and went astray and landed in the parking lot of the hospital and created like a grenade sized hole and. But Hamas, Gaza Health Ministry, it's Hamas had formed before that was all revealed, had a news conference outside the hospital with all the doctors, they emptied the morgue of all the people, laid them out and actually had people holding babies and did a national broadcast of that. They had just been bombed and hundreds of people were dead. So Hamas was again doing that as Israel is trying to clear to train. Goldfish was always thinking through that. That's why he's doing these big call outs. He's trying to out maneuver the enemy, whatever the enemy strategy is to win in the tunnels. He also said like, I'm, I'm seeding the initiative, but every time they find a tunnel, it'd be booby trapped. And it took all that time to deal with it and the enemy was still in the environment. So he developed a way to enter the tunnels and not enter them, to clear them, to use them as maneuver corridors. And I told him, like, sir, I've never seen this where you have a force maneuvering on the surface like a brigade and then you have a force maneuvering underground, flanking subterranean, flanking subterranean or simultaneous maneuver. And I was like, sometimes I ask questions like, next question, like how did. And I actually talked to the brigade commander who was on the surface, like, how did you communicate with. Like, I didn't because they, you know, they're controlling at the division level. But they were entering the tunnels before Hamas knew they were in the tunnels. And it became, and they kept advancing this to where they could, they could enter a tunnel and know from the tunnel's construction what type of tunnel it is. So whether it's a brigade tunnel connecting or a command and control tunnel. And they were entering the tunnel and maneuver, maneuvering on Hamas before. So it, it went from being an obstacle which most militaries view tunnels as like an obstacle to deal with. Don't enter it at all cost. I think I heard you talk about just siege it. Like why do I go in there to where it's now, their tunnels? That's not Hamas tunnels.
- [133:02]
Jocko Willink
I'm using that as a tool.
- [133:04]
John Spencer
Yeah.
- [133:06]
Jocko Willink
From the pictures, it looks like much of Gaza is devastated at this point. How much longer is this operation going to take place?
- [133:15]
John Spencer
Yeah, it's a great question. So at this point as we're talking, Hamas's military is, is no longer has military capability, as in it's all of its 24 battalions. Although there's rumor that one battalion is still effective. And by effective meaning can do their assigned military mission. Right, Destroy in our definition, kind of like our doctrine means unable to do its assigned mission. Sometimes there's a percentage like 50% destroyed or whatever. It just can't attack or defend. Hamas as a military is destroyed, its leadership's gone and its ability to hold ground and defend it is gone. So now it's like this shadow guerrilla force. How long so other people and I wrote this in Foreign Foreign affairs, like about Israel is achieving its goals. How long would it take and does Israel need to destroy all the tunnels to win? One of the challenges that Israel discovered was how to destroy a tunnel. And you talk about a two mile long tunnel. They have some liquid explosives that they, that they have, that they mix a compound, they put it in the ground. But they, they tried the flooding didn't work. So now they, they basically string anti tank mines along the entire length of a tunnel and use deck cord and blow it that way. And if you try to do that all 400 miles, there's not enough TNT in the world. But they also figured out that there's different types of tunnels. There's strategic tunnels that give you like maneuver all over the entire Gaza Strip or cross border tunnels. So they're prioritizing the tunnels just to find all the tunnels. And I was in July, in the Netherland corridor, there's that strip that they're trying to split the two to make the problem bigger. And within there there's thousands of shafts and tunnels still left in that quarter. But your question is about the war. How long would it take to achieve Israel's ultimate goal? Because this is where it could be a counterinsurgency. Although I rail against Hamas being an insurgent force, until there is a new power, then they are the de facto power even in the shadows right now. How long will it take Israel to create a security environment? Like, like you said with, when we talk about Iraq, you had to bring it down to where the, our partners could maintain stability. And it'd be great if the partner wasn't somebody whose goal was to destroy you. Right now Israel has, you know, is still searching for the hostages. So if you took all three of its goals, how long is it going to take? Which is a very political complex issue for Israel. How long will it take to get the hostages back? There's 101 as we're speaking, still left in there. So how long would it take us is a different question right now as we're speaking Israel has five divisions in southern Lebanon because it had this other terror army with over 200,000 rockets attacking it daily to where it had 80 to 100,000 civilians since October 7th that had to be evacuated from northern Israel. How long there's only two divisions in Gaza for the last like six months since Rafah operation began. How long would it take two divisions to clear can't hold and to build something new? They're still doing targeted raids against Hamas remnants. So these are Hamas members that are trying to reform. They have less rockets, they have less tunnels, they have less ammunitions. I don't want to give a number because we were talking about predictions. It's going to take a long time. A long time. When they have five divisions trying to push Hezbollah back from its border in the north and only essentially two divisions, although they just got senior with one of these divisions just by a chance contact, which is insane. It will take them a long time. But there is a lot of positives on like the ceiling of the border. Like this is something that we never even achieved. Not in Vietnam, not in Iraq, Afghanistan. To cut off the enemy from resupply. Their ability to seal that. Israel, Egypt. Yeah, the Egypt Gaza border, which they did. And really to again, you got to point the finger at Egypt. Like there's over 100 cross border tunnels here running a highway of munitions and everything else into Hamas since forever. And they've sealed that and they put in a new. The actual interesting thing about the, the wall between Israel and Gaza is that it worked. You know, the challenge before the. It was, it's a, it's a, you know, almost a failure of imagination was cross border tunneling underneath the wall and they developed a deep sensor technology that there is, there was none. Of course the enemy didn't need any on October 7th because it, they already said it drove bulldozers into the gate, but it did work. So now they're going to build that along the Egypt Gaza border. A deep penetrating thing. And then maybe there's some agreements with Egypt forces on securing that. But just that step alone means less hope to the enemy. So this war only ends, Jocko, if the enemy believes they don't have a chance to win.
- [138:37]
Jocko Willink
Is there any partner force, Palestinian group, a Palestinian tribal leader that is ready to step up, that has the wasta and the respect to say, hey, we're actually going to turn this small piece of Mediterranean beachfront property into an amazing place and we're gonna forge a positive future.
- [139:05]
John Spencer
Yeah, no, basically not yet. This is the Idea of the Palestinian Authority, which is the group of the Judea Shmaria west bank who are also terrorists who have this massive welfare program that pays people if they martyr themselves called the pay for slave program. This organization actually pays those who committed the Oct. 7 attack and died their families martyr fund money. So there is nobody waiting at the. There's. There's ideals about international, like an Arab coalition of people that would come in to help provide the security force, allow, you know, their, their ideals. You could even. What Israel is doing is like the inkblot strategy, although it's. There's a manpower problem when they're in wars right now, seven different enemies attacking them and you have this. There's five divisions. They only use four divisions. When they entered Gaza, there's five divisions and then two divisions. This is, these are. They don't have a military. These are people from the economy. There's an idea to make Gaza into smaller areas and then finding local leaders. And there have been a few during this war who have said, I'll be that person. I'm not. I don't want Hamas. And then this is the, what you've talked about, the stability operation, the post conflict reconciliation, all that happens if you find another power. But right now Hamas is killing anybody who says Palestinian Authority. Israel knows that they're equally as bad. Then that's who Hamas killed to take power was Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. So the answer is no. But if Israel, it's on Israel to create the security environment which something could form. Like if you're a Palestinian right now, if you know you raise your hand, you're going to get killed, then there's less incentive to do it.
- [141:02]
Jocko Willink
Security for the populace.
- [141:03]
John Spencer
Security for the populace. So Israel is working on. And there are these ideas of islands and there are even international hospitals within these islands. So there's ideas of like, okay, there's a Turkish hospital. So could Turkey come in with a force to create the environment in which a local leadership could lead? So it's not like they're not learning the lessons of our past, but it's like look at the variables that they have alternatives they have in the moment to do what? If they don't reduce Hamas's ideal that they can win again, then nobody's going to sign up to be the counter Hamas. And you're right. And I listened to one of your podcasts where there is now even more vocal voices within the Palestinian people or the Gazans that are resentful to Hamas for doing this to them. That has Started to grow as well.
- [141:56]
Jocko Willink
Well, that's positive thing.
- [141:57]
John Spencer
That's a positive. But there's most people say, well, you have to do de radicalization. So I have a really good article headline of General Eisenhower's after World War II. It's actually like an. It says it Eisenhower says it'll take 50 years to re educate the Nazis. And within the article it says, if you ever think I'll give Germany the ability to wage war again, you're crazy. Direct quote from Eisenhower is that people think that de radicalization one can be done fast or two can be done without there being another power. If you don't find another power. This is the Taliban, right? The Taliban went to. Went to Pakistan, waited us 20 years, came back, strategic victory. Yep.
- [142:43]
Jocko Willink
Well, appreciate it.
- [142:49]
John Spencer
Yeah.
- [142:50]
Jocko Willink
Look, I'm gonna go plug your podcast again. Urban Warfare podcast. You have a bunch of really knowledgeable people that you bring on. You're obviously knowledgeable yourself and you actually, you know what I appreciate is you have, you go there, you've been on the ground, you interact, so you know what's happening. What else are you working on? What else do we need to get up to speed here? Writing a new book.
- [143:12]
John Spencer
So I have two new books. I have one. So I've writing. Studying history is really, really hard and I have some mentors like General McMaster and others. So I have a case study project where I've going back and it's been really helpful recently as I'm like, you think this happened during that battle? Like, so I'm working through historical battles and creating case studies and they're on my the Modern War Institute website as well as my website of Stalingrad, Ortona First Battle of Fallujah, second Battle of Fallujah, battle Mosul with a going back and you know, it takes sometimes it took us a year. We wrote the 2017 Battle of Marari. I don't know if you know that one.
- [143:55]
Jocko Willink
How long are these case studies? Like how many words is the completed document?
- [143:58]
John Spencer
Yeah, under 5,000 words.
- [144:00]
Jocko Willink
Oh, wow.
- [144:01]
John Spencer
So we're trying to summarize because some people have attention span. So there's a 5000 version for the website. But we're building, we're writing a book where we're going to take a lot of these case studies. Two ones that there isn't. Like the Battle of Mari took us a year because there's no other information out there. But it was a massive battle in the Philippines against ISIS that was very destructive. I mean matter of fact destroyed 90% of the city of over 200,000. It was uninhabitable, but it wasn't like the Philippines weren't trying to protect it. Writing these case studies. And it'll be one overall book in the case studies in the book will be 10,000. So the website's 5,000, but the book will be these bigger versions of it.
- [144:37]
Jocko Willink
Yeah. That's interesting because, like, a battle like that, like, you think, oh, well, the Americans are going into Fallujah or the Americans that are going into Ramadi, they don't care, really, if that building gets blown up or not. They, you know, it's just. They don't care. Well, first of all, we do care. But even, like, when you're talking about the Philippines and the Philippine forces going in, of course they don't want to destroy the infrastructure that is part of their country. Guess what? It's freaking hard.
- [145:02]
John Spencer
Yep.
- [145:03]
Jocko Willink
It's really freaking hard.
- [145:04]
John Spencer
There's. There's an aspect of that I call it the precision paradox, after somebody else called it. Like, in the idea that you. You should only use precision guided munitions in urban warfare is a fallacy. It's a. And we actually, in the battle of Mosul, there was that concept of, okay, you. We're only going to help the Iraqi military with precision guided munitions. We fired so many hellfire missiles that we ran out of our strategy, strategic supply. And we still destroyed, like 80% of western Mosul because the enemy just went from one building to the next, so you could precisely destroy it one building at a time. So I had the case study book, and then I have this other book, which is 20 times I almost died, which I've had mostly. It's mostly written. I just don't have the title locked down. But it's some interesting events, both in military and now that I travel into war zones that I have been in, some interesting chances to almost die. But there's a little bit of a lesson there.
- [145:56]
Jocko Willink
Yeah, you're in the. Not the safest line of work right now.
- [146:01]
John Spencer
It's relative, right? It's self. Your safety is relative. Like, Echo might think it's dangerous.
- [146:07]
Jocko Willink
Right on.
- [146:08]
Echo Charles
I don't. I think it's very safe.
- [146:10]
John Spencer
I don't lose. I don't fear. My enemy.
- [146:12]
Jocko Willink
Fears Echo. You got any questions?
- [146:15]
Echo Charles
Yeah. Oh, well, this is kind of from long time ago before the guy that you fought in the alley, going back.
- [146:21]
Jocko Willink
To the last podcast.
- [146:22]
Echo Charles
Yeah.
- [146:22]
John Spencer
Okay. Yeah.
- [146:23]
Echo Charles
You know, I didn't get the opportunity, but was he a big. Was he big? Like, was he a big guy?
- [146:28]
John Spencer
Because, you know, okay, a Wiry, actually a wiry, feisty guy that was like to bite. Haymakers fight, you know, thumbs in my eyeballs, everything. Yeah. It wasn't a big guy.
- [146:40]
Echo Charles
Yeah, yeah. Because like if he's a big guy, you'd kind of think he wouldn't be doing the biting in the thumbs and stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah. Cuz usually like, like the smaller guys just busting out all their weapons, we'll do that kind of stuff. Am I right? That's right. Right.
- [146:54]
John Spencer
The lesson there was I didn't need to be there that night. That was just so dumb.
- [146:57]
Jocko Willink
Yeah.
- [146:58]
Echo Charles
Feels like. Yeah.
- [146:59]
Jocko Willink
Good one.
- [146:59]
Echo Charles
Right on.
- [146:59]
John Spencer
Cool.
- [147:00]
Echo Charles
Good to meet you.
- [147:01]
Jocko Willink
And people can find you on the Interwebs. You're@john Spenceronline.com you're on Twitter X and Instagram at Spencer Guard, Facebook, Jon Spencer, YouTube, John Spencer 328 and LinkedIn John Spencer. That's where people can find you, follow you, learn from you and get updates from you. John, any, any final thoughts?
- [147:26]
John Spencer
No, I mean I think that. So I'm a student of this. I don't. I mean some people there's experts and who we call experts. I learned something every day. My podcast is actually me learning and doing research. So my Urban Warfare Project podcast, you know, whether it's somebody who was in a battle or you know, some expert in some element like concrete or something like that, I'm learning. So join me along the process.
- [147:48]
Jocko Willink
Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for passing on some of these lessons that you have learned. Thanks for your service, your sacrifice the army and thanks for what you continue to do today to capture even more knowledge and pass it on so people don't have to rely learn those lessons. Appreciate it, bro.
- [148:07]
John Spencer
Thanks, Jocko.
- [148:08]
Jocko Willink
Thank you. And with that, John Spencer has left the building. Good to hear from somebody who has had boots on the ground and can tell you with a better assessment rather than just what you see on the news. So appreciate him coming in. A lot going on lot. You know, it's interesting. There's things we could do in the world, right. We could build, we could flourish, we could destroy.
- [148:38]
John Spencer
Yeah.
- [148:40]
Jocko Willink
At least on a personal level. I recommend you flourish. I recommend you build. I recommend Jocko Fuel. Hey, check it out. Jocko Fuel. We got protein, we got energy drinks, we got hydration. We've got everything that you need. Joint warfare, super krill. Things that are going to make you healthy, smarter, stronger, faster and just a better person. So go to jockofuel.com or you can go to Walmart, you can go To Wawa Vitamin Shop, gnc, Military commissaries, afs, Hannaford Dash stores in Maryland, Wake Fern, shoprite, HEB down in Texas, Meijer up in the Midwest, Wegmans, Harris Teeter, Lifetime Fitness Shields and small gyms where we're getting into a bunch of doors. If you got a Jiu Jitsu gym, you got a CrossFit gym, you got a powerlifting gym, you got any kind of gym, email jfsalesacuel.com also, we got, we got, we're in chiropractors. Chiropractors are bringing us in. Jared, I think got us into some hair salons. Okay, brah. Oddly enough, yeah, sure. So we're in there. Jockofuel.com check it out. Get the stuff that you need. Also if you need Jiu Jitsu stuff. We didn't talk about Jiu Jitsu very much with John Spencer. We kind of were chatting on the way out. Jiu Jitsu is an important part of everything. Train Jiu Jitsu, get it yourself. The best jiu jitsu uniform. OriginUSA.com get yourself American made jeans. OriginUSA.com get yourself the clothing that you wear on your body. OriginUSA.com check it out. American made. No child labor, no slave labor. Built by Freedom. Originusa.com True.
- [150:25]
Echo Charles
Also chocolate store called Jaco store. This is where you can get your shirts, hats, hoodies, some shorts on there representing discipline equals freedom and good and other notions of similar, you know, dynamics.
- [150:42]
Jocko Willink
You just went down the freaking Hamas tunnel with that sentence.
- [150:46]
John Spencer
Also shirt locker.
- [150:47]
Jocko Willink
No coming out.
- [150:48]
Echo Charles
No, there's coming out the short locker. If you don't know this is a subscription scenario. You get a new shirt every month, new design every month. Design a little bit more creative. You know, all of it is at.
- [150:58]
Jocko Willink
Jacobstore.Com also you need steak. Check out coloradocraftbeef.com check out primalbeef.com and get yourself the goodness, the tasty steak, the best steak. Colorado craft beef.com ColoradoCraft beef.com primalbeef.com it's the best. Go get some awesome people, awesome businesses, awesome steak. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to Jocko Underground. Jocko Underground.com Also, we got YouTube. We got Psychological Warfare. We got Flipside Canvas.com Dakota Meyer making cool stuff to hang on your wall. Books. You heard some of the books today. Connected Soldiers by John Spencer. Understanding Urban Warfare by John Spencer. He's also got the one that you can download, so check that one out. Very cool. Good to have on. Good. Good to have on tap in case goes down. Want to be ready to defend your urban location. Also, I've written a bunch of books. You can check those out. Check out the kids books. Again, we've got to start. John Spencer was talking about his kids. Their warrior kids are getting after. He's wearing a T shirt where his own kids warrior coat is on the back. So check that out. Totally legit Warrior kid books. We got a movie coming out on that. You ever heard of Chris Pratt?
- [152:16]
Echo Charles
Yeah, I heard great things.
- [152:18]
Jocko Willink
Yes, he's in it, so you might want to be checking that out when it rolls. Mikey and the Dragons about face by Hackworth. I referenced that a couple times in the past couple podcasts. Extreme ownership dichotomy. Leadership. We have also have a leadership consultancy. It's called Echelon Front. We will teach you and your leaders how to unify together and win. So go to echelonfront.com if you've got a company, you've got a business. If you've got a team and you need help with your leadership, which you probably do, then check that out. Also we have an online training academy to learn how to lead yourself and others through life. Little things, big things, it all. Everything boils down to leadership. So you need to. Leadership is a skill. People sometimes forget that. It's like playing guitar. That's like the jiu jitsu. You just don't. You're not born ready to play guitar. Now look, some do. Some of us have a natural gift and talent for the get box. Yes, some of us do. But most people, well, even me, I need a little help with the guitar. I need lessons. Somebody gotta tell me it's the same thing with leadership. So check out extremeownership.com you can learn lessons that will apply to every part of your life. Also, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help gold star families? Check out Mark Lee's mom, Momma Lee. She's got an amazing charity organization. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org also Micah Fink has a great program for veterans helping them find themselves by losing themselves up in the mountains. Heroes and horses.org and Jimmy May. He is helping SEALs when they get out of the SEAL teams to find their next mission and transition into the civilian sector. Check out beyond the Brotherhood. And if you want to connect with us on the Interwebs, John Spencer, you can find him John SpencerOnline.com he's on Twitter X and Instagram at Spencer Guard he's on Facebook. John Spencer. He's on YouTube. John Spencer 328. I forgot to ask him what 328 was.
- [154:34]
Echo Charles
Yeah, I was wondering that too.
- [154:35]
Jocko Willink
All right, my bust. LinkedIn John Spencer for us. I'm@jocko.com and we are both on social media. I'm at Jocko Willink. Echo is at Echo. Charles, just be careful because you can wasting your entire life on that thing and you're going to get nothing from it. Thanks once again to John Spencer for your service and your continued service to share lessons of the battlefield so that we don't have to sit make the same mistakes again. Also thanks to all of our military personnel out there who fight in urban battles around the globe. A vicious place to fight. And we thank all of you for defending our way of life. And also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service as well as all other first responders. Thanks to you for keeping us safe here at home and everyone else out there. In John Spencer's mini book for urban defense he explains the six elements of any defense. Preparation. And by that means never stop preparing even while you're fighting. Flexibility, be ready to change Security. Protect all your flanks. Operations in depth. That means have multiple layers. Disruption, that means break your attackers formations, disrupt what they're doing, disrupt their maneuvers. Cover and move maneuver. We have to maneuver in urban defense. Mass and concentration. That means you need to be ready to prioritize and execute. And I would add one more thing based on his book Connected soldiers stay connected. Not just via communication, not just radio communications, not just work communications but foster both social and task cohesion vision through communication build relationships. Because a connected team is a strong team on the battlefield, in business and in life. And that's all I've got for tonight and until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.