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Truth in the Barrel
Devil's Cut | Former Green Beret Weighs In
00:49:18
Devil’s Cut | Former Green Beret Weighs In Amy McGrath speaks to author, podcast host and former Green Beret, Daniel Pace about our current Secretary Of Defense, National Security Issues, Donald Trump’s military debacle in Los...
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- [00:00]
Amy McGrath
Welcome to another Truth in the Barrel Devil's Cut episode. I'm Amy McGrath and today we're talking to author and US Army Special Forces veteran and co host of the Surf and Turf show currently broadcasting over at the Valor Media Network, Dan Pace. Thank you for being with us today.
- [00:21]
Dan Pace
Thank you, Amy. Thanks for taking the time to have me on the show.
- [00:24]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. Well, Dan, for everyone we know you joined the army at 21 and spent two decades as a Special Forces guy. And I want to just start out and kind of give everybody a sense for who you are, why you joined the army, and why did you decide to do a job that is probably like the hardest, most elite job in all of the United States military? And I actually would say in all of the world. So let's start there.
- [01:00]
Dan Pace
I think the stories may be a little underwhelming, but when you graduate. I graduated college in 21, at 21 back in 2001, January. And so, well, when you graduate with a philosophy degree, your options are relatively limited professionally. Like go to grad school, maybe go to law school. None of that was sounding appealing. Just wanted something a little more exciting. So a friend of mine and I walked over to the Navy recruiter actually to join. But as you know, government lunches being what they were, it was closed. It was closed from 11:30 to 1 and we were at the mall already. We'd driven over there, you know, we spent our whole morning getting there. I just walked over to the army recruiter, which was not closed for lunch instead and joined and signed up for the infantry because it seemed like an exciting. It's just like just on a complete.
- [01:46]
Amy McGrath
Maybe guy wasn't around. So you're just like, yeah, I'm going to join the Army.
- [01:50]
Dan Pace
I knew so little about the military that I think probably the one was as good as the other to my 20 year old, one year old brain, just, hey, we're just going to do what we're going to do. And it kind of just worked out, I guess.
- [02:01]
Amy McGrath
But Dan, it's one thing to join the army, it's another thing than to go be a Green Beret. So. Right, because you were a Green Beret.
- [02:12]
Dan Pace
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [02:13]
Amy McGrath
Tell us, what is a Green Beret? And like, how hard is that?
- [02:19]
Dan Pace
So the Green Berets are the nation's unconventional warriors. So basically it's an MOS in the army that is kind of super infantry and it's designed to partner up with people from other countries and then to do work in those other countries in small teams. You know, on behalf of the US Government. So sometimes that can be working with an allied force in Afghanistan or Iraq. Sometimes it could be working with an insurgent force in a country that we want to disrupt the operations of. It's. It's. It's small footprint. It's. It's very kind of alone and unafraid, and. And it kind of prides itself on. On working. Working alone and getting things done.
- [02:55]
Amy McGrath
When you joined, did you know you wanted to go that route, or was that something later on where you're just like, hey, I'm. This is. I think this is what I want to do after. So jobs that are available.
- [03:06]
Dan Pace
When I joined, I didn't know what a Green Beret was. I kind of. You pick in this catalog, like, they had this big 90s flip book of jobs, and they had one of a guy in a parachute was like, I want to be that. And so we went to infantry. And then when you work in the infantry for a while, when I deployed a couple of times as an infantryman, and you see the Special Forces guys around you doing their jobs, it just looked infinitely more appealing. And so I decided to kind of stop the infantry thing and go to the Special Forces thing. And it was a long pipe. It takes about. About a year and a half to two years to finish. But by the time you get done with it, it was. It was very much worth it.
- [03:39]
Amy McGrath
Do all Green Berets go through Ranger school?
- [03:42]
Dan Pace
No. No, they don't. So they don't. So Ranger school is a funny one. You got to suss it out a little bit. But anybody in the army can go to Ranger School. 62 days. It's. It's a fairly miserable school. When you graduate, you kind of learn a lot about yourself, and it's really challenging, but then you're qualified. Either go be a Ranger at Ranger Battalion, which is kind of its own little special operations unit, or you can just go back to your job, whether it's, you know, a personnel clerk or an infantry guy or a Special Forces person, and you. You have your Ranger tap. So you can be qualified and. And not necessarily be a Ranger, if that makes sense.
- [04:13]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, well, so in your 20 years or the timeframe that you were a Green Beret, once you got qualified, where are some of the places you went and what were some of the things that you did?
- [04:26]
Dan Pace
So, gosh, was busy.
- [04:28]
Amy McGrath
I know you can't narrow it down.
- [04:30]
Dan Pace
But a lot of the. So Afghanistan, Iraq were the two big standards. You know, I think everybody in the army did those. Did Some time in Uzbekistan, did a lot of time in Latin America, so across Latin America, moved to Europe, lived there for four years, did work in Europe and did a little bit of work in Africa, although not a whole lot. So a bunch of places now that.
- [04:51]
Amy McGrath
You are out, or you did 20 years and got out, and you sort of have done a lot of things since you've been out. You have written a book or two, right? A couple of books. You have your own podcast, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And you consider yourself a military ethicist, am I right? What. What is that?
- [05:13]
Dan Pace
So I. We all pick up kind of our passions over the course of our careers, like the things you just really care about, even though there's really not a lot of incentive to care about them. And military ethics is one of those for me. So I. One of the Special Forces struggles with some ethical issues, as you would imagine. You see it all in the newspaper. We all understand, you know, the headline making stuff, but just the reality of having guys work so far ahead of everyone else and kind of by themselves and particularly in close proximity with indigenous personnel. So, you know, tribesmen from Africa, you know, Afghans out in kind of the eastern border area of Afghanistan, which is super remote, you end up guys having kind of trouble with, I guess what's called moral drift, where you just start to lose kind of focus on kind of what that core value of, you know, growing up in America looks like. And you really start to kind of get sometimes a little too close to the folks you're working with. And I have a passion for trying to figure out how to train that because I think it's damaging to guys long term. I think a lot of the PTSD you see, a lot of the failure to adapt you see, and these really senior, really frankly heroic guys that come home and have trouble adapting is due to a lot of that. And I just have kind of a passion for trying to figure out how to fix it.
- [06:27]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. And you make the point where, hey, this isn't something that we should be doing individual training for. It really needs to be kind of unit, collective training.
- [06:39]
Dan Pace
It's challenging. So what I think is appropriate ethically in a situation, let's say that you're my commander and you're sitting in Virginia and you are talking to me in East Africa, and I'm working a situation there now, I might, over the course of six months, end up seeing particular my partners do a lot of stuff that would in no way be acceptable in America in terms of like Treatment of prisoners or rules on the battlefield or the way that they handle situations in terms of looting, detaining, abuse, worse, far worse. And over time, my ability to communicate what's going on over here to you can start to get fuzzy and limited. Because if I tell you too much transparently, it can actually kind of put the risk, mission at risk, because the people in the rear don't necessarily have the context to understand what the guy forward is dealing with. And so when I say it's a collective decision, there has to be this way to have a conversation about that without immediately drawing, I don't want to say scrutiny, but a lot of times, you know, lawyers will immediately get involved and what do you mean? Detainee abuse and this and that, or the newspaper get involved and it can collapse the whole thing and nobody wants that. But at the same time, if we don't address it honestly, it's just going to keep happening. And we see the symptoms of this play out frequently. And so I try to push units to train to that, to that standard say you're going to see questionable things. You have to be able to honestly communicate that to the decision maker in the rear so that that person can understand what's going on forward and not kind of gloss over and kind of maintain any plausible deniability about it. That that's a super not constructive perspective that I think keeps getting us in trouble repeatedly.
- [08:08]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, it's a huge issue. It appears to be a huge issue. I mean, obviously I've never been on the ground in Special Forces, but I can understand where that's coming from. And there's not a whole lot of Jags out there with. Right?
- [08:21]
Dan Pace
No, and no, there's not. And we're playing by a completely different set of rules. So you're playing with people in, you know, in a sovereign country where it's completely okay for them to do that. And your presence there kind of underwrites the behavior on behalf of the United States, which the United States doesn't necessarily want to put its name on. But at the same time, it doesn't necessarily want to sever ties with the organization you're working with, because it's important for it to be there and working with it. And so it was an endless problem in Afghanistan, it was a problem in Iraq, and it's a problem pretty much everywhere we work. So it's a challenge that we have to overcome.
- [08:52]
Amy McGrath
It's a huge challenge. And we, we have to understand that the partners and sometimes allies that we work with don't always share the same values that we have. And at what point do you sort of impress your values upon them? And it's just a really tough nut. The other thing is, if you sever ties with these folks, the mission doesn't get completed and, you know, there's no way for them to even see your values. I could, I could imagine as, as a Green Beret, Dan, that the partner forces are watching you too. They're watching to see how you handle things. They're watching to see what your values are because you are the gold standard in terms of some elite things that you can do in the military. Right?
- [09:45]
Dan Pace
Yeah, yeah, that's true. And so you end up trying to balance the. Well, over long term, I want to bring this kind of country's values more in line with, you know, the traditional sort of Western values, to kind of bring them onto the world stage, to kind of help them integrate. But at the short term, if you come in too hot and heavy with it, you can risk alienating them. And in terms of geopolitical, you know, competition, you really risk handing that relationship over to someone who is less scrupulous and more willing to just provide resources with no shaping of values whatsoever. And so a lot of times the Special Forces guy is put into this difficult position of being ambassador to a very questionable element and sort of representing the values of the United States, but at the same time having to kind of, you know, smush your way into being able to work with people who are substantially more questionable. But at the same time, you don't want to give that up. And so it's. That balancing act, I think, causes a lot of guys to end up with a lot of long term harm trying to just hold those positions in their heads. And it doesn't help the community either, because a lot of times the community will have, you know, catastrophic failures. We see them. We see them not frequently, but not that infrequently either.
- [10:54]
Amy McGrath
Well, I'm so glad you're thinking about this stuff. You know, this is the sort of thing in my mind, Dan, that we really need people to think about outside of the military, but also inside the Pentagon. I worry with this current administration and this current, frankly, Secretary of Defense, that there's not going to be a focus on that sort of stuff. And it's really, really important. But I want to move on because there's a lot going on in our country right now, particularly with the use of the National Guard in Los Angeles. So we're going to talk about that. Before we do, I just want to share with you what I'm drinking, because this is a show also about whiskey. And have you heard of this Horse Soldier? I brought this out for you. Okay. Do you know these guys? This is. The horse soldier is a whiskey that is made by former Special Forces guys. And so I figured, you know, don't all Special Forces guys know each other?
- [11:55]
Dan Pace
It's funny. We're. We're a little tribal, and so the different groups that are oriented against the different regions stay tight. So I was a seventh group guy, so I'm very Latin America focused. The guys who made that were fifth group, so they're very, you know, CENTCOM focused, very Middle East. And actually, I worked with one of those guys, Mike Elmore, for a long time, and he's the one that got me poked on Horse Soldier. So I, too, have a bottle in my living room. It's wonderful. Unfortunately, it's the middle of the day, so I can't have it shrink right this.
- [12:23]
Amy McGrath
Oh, come on, don't say that now.
- [12:25]
Dan Pace
Okay, no judgment. No judgment whatsoever. But I can't come home from the office smelling like booze or I will burn rapport with the household.
- [12:37]
Amy McGrath
I gotcha. That makes sense. All right, so Donald Trump has nationalized the National Guard and is deploying the National Guard right on the streets of Los Angeles. And he's talking about deploying the active duty military, the United States Marine Corps, in the same manner. And this is the first time in 60 years in which a president has deployed the National Guard to a US State over the objections of the state's governor. And in my mind, he's doing it for purely political reasons. But I really want to talk with you about this issue and just throw it out there. What are your thoughts right now on. On what's happening in Los Angeles?
- [13:24]
Dan Pace
So I can't. I can't see it without thinking of it in terms of a commander, a commander who got handed that mission and told, go execute. Obviously, there's a lot of kind of red team, blue team dynamic on, you know, in terms of the president versus the governor versus the National Guard, and honestly, I'm not an expert on that. I. I wouldn't even want to begin to talk it. But I do know that if you were that poor Marine commander who is now put into a position where you need to pacify an area that is both violent and full of US citizens. And to your point about the SecDef's focus on lethality, you end up in this weird position where, hey, you told me to train lethality. You Told me to train, to go kill people. You want me to go fight wars overseas. And that's usually a fairly. It's straightforward in its way. You know, we're going to go and we're going to kill the people we encounter. And so missions like this, my concern as a commander is always, every time you get this sort of pacification mission, like, okay, now these are going to be US Citizens, it's going to be a police action functionally, and it's going to be a really emotionally charged police action. And so you have to switch these guys that you've just told, focus on lethality, kill, kill, kill. You have to shift their mindset entirely to say, all right, now you've got this entire code of how you interact with U.S. citizens. You've got these entire set of responsibilities that come with policing. And that is super difficult because your action arm is really like a 19 to 24 year old who's a fairly feisty individual and also not terribly well trained in the sense that they don't have a lot of breadth of experience. I mean, they know what they're doing, they know their job. But to put them in a situation like that is just, to me a massive risk and it's difficult, it's difficult for me to stomach it as a.
- [15:04]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, what are, what are the rules of engagement? I mean, this is, this is really, really tough right now. And I just think that. Well, first of all, the LA Police Department said that they had it under control. You know, the pictures are what they are. There's burning cars. Well, there was burning cars when the Philadelphia Eagles won the super bowl too, in Philadelphia. I mean, the governor's not asking for it, the mayor's not asking for it. And so to me, it's an escalation. And I really worry that we send in sort of potentially active duty troops to Los Angeles or really the proclamation right now from the President says that he can send them anywhere, which is just unprecedented in my mind. And the concern is that one, you're taking the military away from training.
- [16:01]
Dan Pace
For.
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Amy McGrath
What it's supposed to be doing, and you're deploying them on streets. And as you said, you know, with, with young corporals, lance corporals, you know what, there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong here.
- [16:14]
Dan Pace
In my mind, there's a lot, there's an awful lot that can go wrong. And it's, it's going to be super challenging if that gets executed in terms of the level of education. You've got to get these guys up to to get them out there and then how do they interact with the police? And you have again, a combination of citizens and then you have non citizens on us. So and you're just, how do you even start to unpack this? And it is, it's just fraught with a lot of things that go bad.
- [16:38]
Amy McGrath
You know, this is what John Kelly, who was former DHS head, former Chief of staff to President Trump during the first administration, this is what he was worried about when he said that the President would use the military in inappropriate ways. Secretary of Defense, then Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said, told the American public, hey, the President said that. Why, why couldn't we just use troops to shoot the protesters in the legs? And it's just, it's really alarming. And one of the reasons, it's not just the alarming part of oh my gosh, we're shooting, we're talking about shooting people who are just exercising their First Amendment rights. But also what does this do to the military itself? Meaning we had this code right between the military and the civilians. And now I fear I'm really worried about that fraying. What do you think?
- [17:38]
Dan Pace
So firstly, I hate the idea of the active duty military conducting operations inside the continental United States. I hate it. I'm not going to say there's never a time for it. I'm not going to say that it can never happen. Obviously it's happened before, but I hate it because one, the short term impacts, as kind of we discussed with Marines in la, are terrible. You're going to end up with situations where people are coming in to do things that they're not really trained to deal with. They have no policing training. That's not what they're supposed to be doing. But you also end up with the longer term institutional damage. So the first time an active duty guy shoots a US citizen, whether or not it's the right answer, it was a completely justified situation. The person's family is not going to feel like it was the right answer and that's going to have trickle down impacts. I mean, you see a lot of my hatred for the police in a lot of parts of the country. It's taken a long time to heal that. Right. It takes a long time to kind of unwind damage. We saw it a lot on the ground in Iraq. If you shoot someone, the family's gonna hate you forever. And I, it's different when you go home. You're not going home, you're in the States, you're in the United States. And so I, I worry about what that's gonna start to move toward. And I. I just. I hope if it happens, that it's an exception and it doesn't become the norm, because I think it would be a terrible precedent, and I don't want to see it to see it go that way.
- [18:54]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, I worry about. This was before you and I were born, but Kent State and what happened during the Vietnam. I mean, that whole scenario, untrained troops in a place where it was rioting, et cetera. But, yeah, it was a disaster. And the American people, it took a long time for many in America to see the army and the National Guard in a positive light after that one incident.
- [19:34]
Dan Pace
You could say some people never have. Right. Some people still don't. And it's not. It's not good. It's not different. To me, it's not different than, you know, people alleging that the CIA does things within the bounds of continental United States. Like, it's not their mission. They need to stay out. And the military is kind of similar. The military needs to point out it's not, again, trying to resource to do things in. And in is very different. And I just want to keep that line as clean as we can.
- [19:59]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. Okay. Well, I want to talk to you about the use of special forces in Mexico against the drug cartels. And for a lot of people, they may not know that this is even a thing. Right. So I'm going to get everybody up to speed here. Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. This is during the first Trump administration disclosed that President Donald Trump had privately proposed launching missile strikes against drug labs in Mexico. These were strikes that Trump reportedly said the US could deny responsibility for. This was during his first term. And now here we are in the second term. The current Trump administration's border czar, Tom Homan, said that the President was, quote, committed to using the full might of the United States Special Operations to take them out, meaning the cartels. So in February of this year, Trump put down an executive order. Now, he's done many, many executive orders. So we haven't been talking about it so much on the news, but it's there. Officially labeling these drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. And, you know, that sort of the. Opens up some doors for what Special Operations, special forces can do. And many people have advocated for this aggressive deployment of special OPER or special forces to combat the cartels. So I'll stop there and just ask you what does direct action look like? And then we'll go into some of the hairy parts of this.
- [21:33]
Dan Pace
So in general terms, direct action is specifically surgical strikes. So the idea that you would go in and kinetically kill the people involved in that target, so it's in the community, it's a pretty definitive term. I think sometimes it gets used more loosely. So I can imagine that they're probably generalizing a little bit to other options. But one, I think you're right that the label of the organization or the cartels as terrorist organizations specifically opens up authorities and money. It specifically says all of a sudden you can do these sorts of things as the military against these targets. And so if you wanted to make that happen, that is a necessary. Not necessary, but it's probably one of the easiest steps you could do to allow it. Now when you get into the nuance of this one specifically. So I did a lot of counter drug in Afghanistan toward the end of the war. So I was, I guess, relatively highly placed in kind of making that some of that stuff happen. And a lot of people don't know, but there's a tremendous amount of meth that flowed through Afghanistan back then because it was seen as a funding source. Now, one of the challenges we always had with that is a large portion of the drug cultivation industry is not bad guys per se. Right? It's, there are bad guys, there are bad guys and they're funneling this money into terrorist organizations. But a lot of the nug work down in the shop, the guys that are cooking the meth, the people that are dealing, running the wheelbarrows, they're just people. And a lot of times they're kids and they're women. And so the idea that you're going to start dismantling the Cardinals or the cartels through surgical strike or direct action. I start to think about the fuzzy edges around it of, well, okay, I mean, there's definitely kingpins that you could work on and you could kill. I get that for sure. But there's. There's a higher risk of collateral damage. And as you start looking at collateral damage and you start bringing that closer to home. We don't have the most comfortable relationship with Mexico and as governments. Government. And there's a lot of history there, right? There's a lot of history. I mean, my great grandparents were growing up in Texas. Pancho Villa was still raiding across the border. Like there was a war not that long before that, you know.
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Amy McGrath
Yeah.
- [23:35]
Dan Pace
Against Mexico. And so Mexico was very sensitive. The idea of involvement in their politics and the idea that we're going to start killing Mexicans and Americans, let's not kid Ourselves. Like there's a lot of people on both sides of the border that are involved in this. There's going to be U.S. citizens involved, there'll be dual citizens involved, there should be family members, U.S. citizens involved. And before we start killing people, we need to think about what the spin offs of that are going to be. And I think LA is one of the spin offs that you could see from that sort of effort. But you're also going to have tremendous amount of resentment built up really quickly if American missiles start killing Mexicans, whether or not they're involved in the fentanyl trade or the drug trade in general. And I don't want to downplay, I mean, fentanyl is super serious, the crisis is serious. I'm not going to pretend like there's an easy answer, but we should be very careful before we start having US people killing Mexicans in Mexico or in the States.
- [24:29]
Amy McGrath
And that's on the drone side, but using special operations. I've heard this from lots of people. Why don't, let's just send in the special operations like raid these, these, these drug. I try to take it back. Well, first of all, and I'd like to know your answer to this. What you need, you would need the consent of the Mexican government, right? You would, you would have to for it to be a successful operation, I would think, unless you're, you're just, we're just going to invade another country.
- [25:02]
Dan Pace
I mean, so if we looked at the Osama bin Laden raid as an example of what you could do without the consent of the country, whether or not there was consent, I have no idea. I don't know how to pretend to know. But let's assume there was not consent because they've already said there was a consent. That would be, to me, the best case you could hope for is that Mexico denies there was any coordination. We have attacked, we have destroyed this target, we went home. They're mad officially that we did that. We don't ever say that we did that. And that's kind of your best case. But to your point, it could get a lot worse, right? It could get a whole lot worse. Because that's going to be, you know, in terms of administration approval on the Mexican side. I mean, that administration could suffer huge political turmoil back home and get ousted immediately if there was a perception they were authorizing U.S. actions in Mexico. And how long could you really deny them? How many things could explode in northern Mexico before you're just. It would start to look a little fishy, pretty much Instantly, Right, yeah, yeah.
- [26:00]
Amy McGrath
And plus, as you said, that the cartels are deeply embedded in the local communities there. So you have to have a broader strategy than just, I'm going to go in and take them out. Right, because you have to have a counter finance narcotics finance strategy. You have to have a counterinsurgency almost because you're going to have members of the population there that are going to not be happy about this. There's a diplomatic aspect of this that I always try to bring in. I mean, Mexico is our number one trading partner in the world. It's not China, it's Mexico. And this, that's kind of a big deal. We don't just raid other into other countries typically. Right. I know the Osama bin Laden cases is a little different, but typically we don't go into other countries. And even if we did this with the consent of the Mexican government, it would be hairy because you talked about it earlier in this podcast. There's going to be retribution like there is. I mean, these, these cartels are, are well funded. The enemy has a say, and we have a lot of soft targets in the United States.
- [27:19]
Dan Pace
That's very true. That's very true. It's, it's, it would be hugely dangerous if they started to escalate. And then we'd escalate and then kind of you look at like, well, where does it stop? But you brought up something really interesting, and that's the economic angle on this. And I think that makes it really approachable, people trying to understand the problem. So, you know, in Colombia, a lot of times we were trying to do crop replacement because they're growing all this cocaine in Colombia for a lot of decades. Everybody knows that it's kind of cliche. They tried to do crop replacement. They just say, hey, look, stop growing cocaine and grow coffee. Coffee grows in Colombia really well. You can sell it, it's internationally available. But they bumped into tons of problems with this because one, the cartels would pay a lot more for the cocaine than you could ever get on the free market for coffee. And the cartels would do the work. And if, by the way, if you switch to coffee, the cartel would kill you. And so there was a huge incentive to stay on cocaine and not switch to coffee, even though on the surface you would imagine that coffee would be a fine thing to grow. And every person beside the coffee grower has a similar stake. So every truck driver that is getting paid by the cartels right now to kind of quietly shepherd this thing across, maybe he's not making A ton of money. But for him, he's making a ton of money. And so when you pull that out of the system and all of a sudden 50,000 people who are receiving a decent amount of money to do a service no longer get that. You risk immediately turning those people against you and saying, well, I miss the cartel because the cartel was putting food on my table. And I. Yeah, that doesn't defend what the cartel is doing. It's just a very pragmatic look at, hey, if you're going to do it, like, it's going to take some effort to really get that solution in place, or you kind of risk causing this huge collapse. And I. It's. It's challenging.
- [28:55]
Amy McGrath
It is challenging. And I also think that there's some real risks here that, that aren't being talked about enough. For example, a lot of us, how many of us have vacationed in Mexico. I mean, you know. Yeah, I mean, you're. You're going to. To open up that can of worms. Well, now Mexico doesn't. I mean, I'm sure they want the tourism, but now you're looking at potential attacks against American tourists in Mexico, which the cartels have actually sort of avoided. Actually, they have avoided in. In many cases because they. They don't want Mexico to, you know, to lose that tourism. Also, Mexico right now is cooperating with the United States to stem some of the flow of migrants through the border. I mean, I can just see Mexico saying, oh, you just did that. Well, we're not going to cooperate with you. We're just going to let them go, you know, let them go north. And that's going to hurt our country.
- [29:54]
Dan Pace
It's tremendous risk, right? I mean, you have one. You have the question of how much capacity does the Mexican government have to even control the situation? Like, how much of the situation is only in control because the cartels kind of will it to be so, like, they are not incentivized to cause us to start going to war with them. Right. They don't want that to happen. That's very bad for business. They would much rather us just continue to buy their drugs quietly. But when you start looking at, like, what are we going to do? Their ability to respond, as you said, pretty. Pretty serious. It's funny, you get stuck in this trap because you want to address the problem, but how do you address the problem? Because if you address the problem, you're like, well, there's going to be a lot of problems if I address the problem. And to an extent, you eventually have to pull the band aid off to do something. But gosh, if you're too heavy handed about it and you don't have it really well thought out, you can really make yourself a pretty huge mess. And that's my biggest concern.
- [30:45]
Amy McGrath
And Dan, you were doing this sort of operation in Afghanistan, right? And so aren't these fentanyl labs, aren't these drug labs, aren't they sort of decentralized? They're kind of, you know, sometimes small, defined, they can be easily rebuilt. So, you know, striking and taking out a few of these, to me it doesn't seem like it's going to fix the bigger problem. But how did it work in Afghanistan? I mean, and then also did it work in Afghanistan?
- [31:17]
Dan Pace
So 2021 probably would suggest that most of what we did didn't work in Afghanistan. So just like totally level it. Obviously it didn't work very well. But I would say that in general, no counter drug to me was always somewhat useful as a tool to force negotiations. In Doha, back when we were negotiating with the Taliban, ability to interdict drugs and therefore cost them money was a useful kind of lever to pull to get them to make concessions or whatever. But I don't think we ever seriously destroyed the capacity to produce drugs because as you said, once it's decentralized enough that, well, okay, you blew up that lab, I'll build another lab. It does slow them down, it does kill those specific people, but it's hard to stop that machine as long as there's demand, to be frank. And that's to me, that's like the elephant in the room. Like, well, as long as people want to buy drugs, I think they're going to continue to produce and sell drugs. And it's, it's hard to imagine stemming that flow without addressing the number one problem, which is really people use a lot of fentanyl and until they stop buying it, I don't think that they're going to stop producing it.
- [32:25]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, it was always interesting to me where people would really want to focus on let's stop the drugs from coming across the border. And I know that we should be doing that, we should be doing that every chance we can. But it's a big border and a lot of people don't also think about the fact that most of our borders are actually water.
- [32:53]
Dan Pace
Yeah, I mean, the Port of Los Angeles, right? The Port of Los Angeles, number one in the country. A lot of stuff comes into Port of Los Angeles.
- [32:59]
Amy McGrath
It's a lot harder than we think. It's just difficult. So, well, Look, I want to talk to you about a little bit about a more broad look at America and the wars that we have been fighting since World War II, because Americans don't always get to hear from a Special Forces guy, right. And somebody who fought in elite forces. They might have a generalized thinking of that and what you think. And there's a current focus on lethality from the current Secretary of Defense. It's a, you know, it's his big thing. President Trump has said in the past that he believes that we as a nation and our military institution no longer knows how to win wars. And I'm just curious if you can respond to that. What do you. What do you think about that? Just throwing it out there?
- [34:01]
Dan Pace
No, it's. It's obviously a pretty inflammatory comment, right? I mean, the institution would be pretty irritated about that. And so I guess the way I would bumper sticker it is to say that the further up you go, the more accurate that statement is in the military. And here's what I mean. So at the lower echelons, I think that a focus on lethality is there. 100% it's there, and it's certainly been there since the end of the gwad when Afghanistan collapsed. Mostly tactical training switched back to just force on force, wartime training. And it's there. Junior leaders, they're there, their minds are in the right places. They're absolutely capable of achieving military objectives. Which, which kind of brings us back to that earlier, like, well, maybe you don't want to put them on police actions, but. But that's. That's what they're really good at. The trouble is, is I think at the senior leadership levels, you have seen, at least in my career, basically, careerism and this kind of idea that we manage wars, we don't win them. And that, to me was one of the hugest scars that we took away from the gwat is the idea that this war is kind of this permanent thing and we just manage it year to year. You go in for your year, two years, you go back out, and just make sure the slides all kind of move up toward green. The next guy will move them back into red, and we'll move them back up toward green. And you go to this cycle. And so to add a little more nuance to that, that mentality to me, ultimately is caused by DoD responding to impossible policy objectives. So one of the things I talked a lot about in my book on Iraq is it really the military can do what you handed the task to do. And it's the biggest Arm of the government. And so it tends to get handed every task, the government, everything to do everything. And so you're like, go rebuild Iraq. Like, okay, I could destroy the military of Iraq. Absolutely. Good at that. The next day when we're saying, could you get the power turned on? Could you provide jobs for people? Could you economically stimulate this? The DoD will do its best, but you're really grinding the gears to get that 19 to 20. I mean, I was 25 at the time. Like, hey, go build employment in your sector of Baghdad. You're like, well, okay, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do, but I'm going to take a crack at it. And you had thousands of me's taking cracks at it. And it produced a kind of incoherent patchwork quilt of successes and failures and this cobbled together sort of effort that you got out of it. But that's what a DoD solution to that statement, rebuild Iraq and promote democracy in the Middle east looks like. And I don't know that the DoD can ever accomplish that. I think the DoD probably can't accomplish that. And so as long as we have this friction of kind of, I would say, bad policy, to be honest, if we have this, hand me a policy that's impossible and I'm not going to achieve it, well, that's bad for both sides, right? You could have put a little more work into what you needed me to do. I, there's no way I was going to achieve that. So I ended up coming out of it feeling kind of bad about myself. And my guys are kind of mistrained now. And as a senior leader who grew up doing that, you get stuck in this mindset of, you know, just manage your 12 months, make it go as best you can, there's no way we can, and then, you know, we'll get out of it at the end. And I think the movie War Machine actually captured the overall sentiment very, very well. I don't know if you've ever seen that movie.
- [37:19]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, I did see that movie. I mean, to me it's this idea that the military, we're asking the military to do everything. We didn't invest in diplomacy and development in the same way that we invested in military. And that's not a judgment. I mean, we need to defend our country and everything. But I fear like your experience over there was similar to mine and that, you know, I was a pilot, yes. But I still interacted with guys on the ground all the time. And I remember, you know, talking to one first Lieutenant who came in to, to just coordinate for, for air support, for something else. But he had been, he was like the mayor of his town in Iraq. Like he, he, his, his experience prior to me working with him in Afghanistan was one tour in Iraq and in that tour he was like, that was his job. And he had no idea, just like you said, he had no idea how to do it, didn't have expertise. In Afghanistan we would have entire battalions of Marines and we would have one person from USAID. And that one person had the Ph.D. and the knowledge and the understanding of development, but no power. She was treated fairly poorly, in my belief, by the senior ranking Marines. And I don't know if that was a gender thing or what, but she, she had the knowledge and understanding and in many cases she had the keys to some of the money that could be used for certain things. But we just never figured that out until too late in, in my mind. And, but it was, I almost feel like we have to think about this. There's this simplistic notion of winning that this current administration had. Well, we got to win. We've forgotten how to win. Well, what is winning? I mean, in a fight like that, it just, it's morphed so many times and it's almost an impossible situation, as you said.
- [39:30]
Dan Pace
It is challenging and I think your diagnosis is pretty spot on. Right. We invest heavily in the dod. A lot of the other arms of government don't get a lot of investment, at least in terms of the, the kind of foreign apparatus don't, just don't have the investment and the size, the capacity. Right. So even at the height of Baghdad and the surge, you know, where everybody that I know in the army was in Baghdad in that period, I think pretty much everybody, we still, I think had two USAID guys at the brigade. And you know, there are a couple guys, I'm sure they were fine, I'm sure they did their thing. But you end up with this learning curve of again, we're 12 months in, right? So we're going to start, we're going to do our 15 month rotation and then we're going to go home. And so it takes us six months to even figure out what we're supposed to do at all, except just normal combat stuff. Okay, got it. And this is, at all levels, this is the kernel down to me, like, okay, six months in, we've gotten beat up enough, we figure out what we gotta do another couple of three months. What tools do I have to achieve those things that I now see that I would have to do and like, oh, USAID guys. Okay, I see who you are. Got it. Educate me on what you're doing. Meanwhile, you're still going out every day, you're doing your 10 hours. So six months later you're like, I got this. This is really valuable, the service you provide. Come on, provide this for me. Help me out. Meanwhile, they've rotated once and then by the end of your rotation, you rotate. And so we're two new people meeting each other again. And they just never ended up with that traction between the organizations to say, hey, we understand each other, we're here for the long haul. Let's work together to make this happen. And I think that lined up very rarely, if at all, and it certainly didn't line up enough to really make it work the way it should have. And sometimes it kind of feels like it's just kind of the way it ended up.
- [41:10]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. And it is absolutely true to say that the United States has not done so well in the limited wars that we have fought since World War II. It's absolutely true statement. But when I read what Trump said, I found it to be extremely simplistic. And I also found it to be something that I really wanted to push back on. Because while it's true that we have that the military hasn't, quote, won in some of these limited wars, on the big strategic picture Since World War II, in my mind, we have been extremely successful because we have kept great power peace since 1945. With a strong military, we've been able to determine the greater powers. We have undergirded a US led economic system, a world system that has brought out some of the greatest movements in terms of scientific advancement, economic growth in human history. And it's all been done because we had, well, in large part because of the United States itself and our economy and our values, but also because we had a United States military that was forward deployed, that created stability around the world. And I just think we don't think about that enough. And you know, while the limited wars didn't go our way, we were successful in the big picture. And it goes back to like the whole Sun Tzu. Part of the best way to win a war is not to fight it at all.
- [42:53]
Dan Pace
Right, Right.
- [42:53]
Amy McGrath
We did some pretty cool things by having just this amazing military in which, you know, and amazing war fighters like yourself that were. Nobody really wanted to go up against.
- [43:04]
Dan Pace
Yeah, I mean it's the Pax Americana, right? Like this kind of idea that Since World War II we just keep the peace and by keeping the peace, trade thrives. And when trade thrives, mostly, there's kind of money for people to do things with. And you would say, I think Matt Ridley's the rational optimist, really aligned this out really well. But this is this kind of idea that, well, everything's just a little better than it was. It's actually going okay. It's easy to focus on the things that are going rotten. But actually, most metrics would suggest that humanity is in a pretty good place. And in large part, it's because what you're talking about, there's no general war, right? I mean, limited wars, as bad as they may be, there's just nothing compared to like, you know, the devastation that comes out of something when you get total war. And so by that metric, you would say, yeah, the military has done its thing, it's done its job, it's achieved strategic deterrence, which is kind of the. The technical term of saying we kept everybody from causing any trouble. Nobody's really done too much. I think a lot of people are worried that that's. That's cracking around the edges right now. I think you see a lot of. You see a lot of traffic that suggests people are kind of worried that that's starting to fray. I mean, to be honest, I'm not sure how completely. I'm just not. I'm not sure. I'm not. I'm not sure on that one. I can see both sides of it. I can see, you see situations like Russian invasion of Ukraine. You could see China saber rattling, and you can wonder if the, you know, the wheels might fall off and the packs kind of falls apart. But at the same time, I'm not. I'm not sure that's going to happen. But I tell you, I don't want it to happen. I really don't. I don't think anybody.
- [44:29]
Amy McGrath
I don't either. And it's one of the reasons that I. That I'm so worried right now because I see bigger picture from the American political leadership, a leadership in the past that has been bipartisan in standing up for alliances, in standing up for democracy around the world, to the extent that we at least had it in values. And I'm not talking about having our military go and impose democracy around the world. There's definitely has been debate about that in American foreign policy, but just the basics of, hey, we stand by our own values. We stand as a beacon for the rest of the world in terms of democracy. We stand up to autocrats and authoritarians like Vladimir Putin at least in the past. And we stand with our allies who have the same values that we do. And I do worry that that is fraying and what, what that means. That's my worry.
- [45:35]
Dan Pace
I share your worry. I wonder. To be honest, I'm politically independent. I kind of sit between, between the two sides, and as much as anybody in 2025 can do that. And I, I always, I look at the things that I see and I wonder if there's a level of sophistication behind the negotiation and the decisions that's going on or if it's just kind of on its face, just kind of simplistic and bombastic. And I, I don't know the answer. I guess the answer is going to be, I'll tell you in four years, we'll see. We'll see what's going on behind the scenes. And I, I hope that it's well thought out and it makes a lot of sense and, and that's kind of the best I could do, unfortunately.
- [46:11]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. Well, we'll see. Well, now, Dan, you have your own podcast, and so can you tell us about that?
- [46:18]
Dan Pace
I can. So a friend of mine named Adam, he's a retired Navy seal. We met in grad school in California, actually, back when we were a decade younger. And we, since getting out, we both started writing and we both kind of sit, I guess you would say, the middle of the political spectrum. And we have this sense that we're both parents, so we're both parents of young kids. And so we have this sense that our kids are growing up in a pretty turbulent time. And we wanted to start this project to see if we could provide, I guess you could say, a voice of reason. We hope to provide a voice of reason for in particular, young men who I feel like are a little adrift right now in terms of the messaging to them. I think, I think, I feel like young men are mostly told they're either you're part of the problem, sit down, shut up, or you're told you need to be this dominant, ridiculous, like, hyper testosterone, perpetual adolescent. And I want a more moderate voice that says, hey, no, you're part of the team. You got a role to play. Let's talk about what that role can be, and let's talk about how to make ourselves better people kind of moving into that. And it's called the Surf and Turf Show. And so we tackle, you know, parenting problems like self improvement kind of problems, and we try to put out a little bit of just, I hope, quiet humility and thoughtfulness. Into. Into. Into the Internet to. To help people, you know, kind of through the turbulence.
- [47:39]
Amy McGrath
That is awesome. That sounds really interesting. So surf and turf. Everybody should check that out. And you've also written a children's book. Am I right about that?
- [47:49]
Dan Pace
I did. My daughter. My daughter and I wrote a. Wrote a children's book. So she's 16 now and would probably be embarrassed, but when she was 10, we just sat down over. Over Covid, you know, because we're like, Covid. What can you do during COVID Well, I guess let's write a children's book because we can't do anything else. Can't go to the park. Gotta do something. And we just wrote, she had these little dinosaur toys that she. She had scribbled in her journal for pages and pages about all the things they'd done. I was like, I'm gonna help you turn one of these into a book, sweetie. And. And we did. We turned it into a book, and we went through the whole publication process, and it was. I think it turned out pretty well. That was awesome.
- [48:24]
Amy McGrath
And if people want to check all that out, they need to go to your website, right?
- [48:27]
Dan Pace
Absolutely. Please go to danielvpace.com or my Amazon authored portfolio, and you get our profile. Profile, and you can check it out.
- [48:36]
Amy McGrath
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dan, for coming on this show, for talking to us about national security, about everything that's going on right now, and sharing your experiences and thoughts. We really appreciate you.
- [48:47]
Dan Pace
Likewise, Amy. Thanks for having me on. It's just good to talk to somebody else who's trying to find that path, right? Just trying to find the path of reason through the now.
- [48:54]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is common sense in the world, and we need to be listening to people that have been there and done that and can bring some of that calm, collected thoughts to what's going on. We appreciate you.
- [49:10]
Dan Pace
My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for what you do.
- [49:12]
Amy McGrath
All right.
- [49:18]
Dan Pace
Trip planner by Expedia. You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and.
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Amy McGrath
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Dan Pace
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