For decades the Middle East has been America’s top national security challenge. Terrorism in Israel. War in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regional instability at the hands of Iran. And some of the world’s richest countries leveraging sweet crude oil to influence others. It takes more than just a military effort to find solutions.
As America navigates one of the most volatile times in history, Fran Racioppi sat down with retired General Joseph Votel, one of America’s most influential leaders and scholars in Middle East policy.
General Votel served as Commander of United States Special Operations Command, US Central Command, Joint Special Operations Command and 75th Ranger Regiment; organizations critically responsible for America’s Middle East operations.
General Votel unpacked the reasons why Hamas chose to attack Israel on October 7th, Iran’s malign influence and proxy warfare, and the responsibility of the other Gulf states in preventing regional instability.
He also broke down the opportunities the United States has in the region across the diplomatic, information, military and economic spectrum of national power; including America’s ability to mobilize for a peer-to-peer fight. Plus he talked all things Ranger Regiment, the officer-NCO relationship, and how effective leadership doesn’t require pages of policy, but a drive to get things done.
Take a listen, watch, or read our conversation with one the Army’s most respected leaders then head over to our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast platform to catch up on our entire national security series from Washington, DC and Fort Liberty, NC.
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General Votel, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast.
It’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to it.
We’ve been planning this for a while.
We have.
I think it has been a year and a half or so. We’ve been waiting for our schedules to line up, but we’re in DC. We’re in the Odgers Berndson. They’ve donated their conference room for the day and it couldn’t be a more timely conversation to sit down with you because I think about where we are and even the events of the last 72 hours or 96 hours that have happened in the world. For twenty years, America has fought this counterinsurgency, this counterterrorism fight.
We fought these ragtag bands of criminals in so many cases around the world with unsophisticated weaponry. We fought through proxy groups. Often, we weren’t head-to-head with nation-states. Today, it seems to have changed. The dynamics and the challenges to the world order. The challenges to America’s place in the world seem to be challenged. I’ve been talking a lot about the role of Special Operations Forces in this peer-to-peer or near-peer fight and how when we do our job, we never hit this nation-state versus nation-state conflict.
We don’t have superpower versus superpower. In a lot of ways, we can say we were super successful over the last twenty-plus years because we never got to where we are today, but you have to start thinking that something has changed. Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela are all in the mix now in various different ways. You commanded CENTCOM, SOCOM, and JSOC. You commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment. All units are critical to the soft presence around the world and the center of the national security strategy. As I said when I started, there is no better person to talk about the world order today.
Thanks. I’m glad to be here with you.
I want to talk about this peer-to-peer challenge. It’s been brewing for some time. It didn’t happen overnight. As I said, for twenty-plus years, we’re in this counterinsurgency. We’re in this counterterrorism fight. In the background, these nation-states have been building capacity. In the military, we talk so much about DIME, Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic. These are elements of national power, and how we leverage them and pull different capabilities in different regions of the world to exert power.
We’re not the only ones who are doing that. Our adversaries are doing that in different ways. We see that all over the world. As we operate in the Middle East, this concept of DIME, even though it’s this doctrinal term we learn as lieutenants, then we seem to forget about it until probably we’re general officers again. All of a sudden, we have to start thinking about these things, but it’s critical now. We see it played out in the press every single day.
The catalyst for so much of what’s going on now, specifically in the Middle East has been Hamas’s attack on Israel in October. First and foremost, I want to ask you, why now? Why are we in this situation now? What has changed over the course of the last couple of years to change the dynamics where we are looking at near peer-to-peer adversaries rising up?
To answer your question directly, the change has been the United States and our outlook on the world. As you mentioned and as you so eloquently stated there, we have been engaged in this fight against terrorism, counterinsurgency, and a variety of things, principally in the Middle East for 20 to 25 years or maybe longer if you look back at some of those things we’re doing.
That has consumed us a lot. It’s given the opportunity for China and for a resurgent Russia to step up in the void that has been created by us being so focused on that to begin to exert themselves. That’s a part of it. The simple fact is China has a plan. They have a much more focused idea about where they want to go as a nation. They assess themselves. They have a strategy in place. They’ve been using the strategy now for fifteen years and they’re making progress on it.
They’re driven largely by their economic objectives and by the fact that they are not satisfied with the world order, the system of rules, and everything that has been put in place largely by the United States and the Western powers after the Second World War of operating in that environment. They want to level up on that. They want to compete. They want to change it to where it’s more favorable for them. They consider it to be very favorable for us.
That begins to explain why we’re in this situation with China. Russia is in a different situation, quite honestly. You’ve got a maniacal leader there whose principal motivation was the fall of the Soviet Union and something almost inconceivable to him to take place. What you see is a lot of activity on his part and on the part of Russia to try to restore some of the greatness of the Soviet Union. At least their perception of the greatness of the Soviet Union and the Russian Fatherland. You see a lot of that is going in that direction. We’ve been focused. We’ve been a little bit distracted from what we’re doing. It has given time and space for these two actors in particular to step up.
The US has been a little bit distracted with what it’s doing in the Middle East. So, it has given time and space for China and Russia to step up.
What’s their end game? If you look at what there is, we’ll go a little deeper on China and Russia for a second. When they look at the world, where are they trying to get to? For both of those leaders, what do you think their ideal world looks like?
Both of them have a different end-state vision, but there is some overlap between the two of them. If you start with President Xi, he has the China 2050 plan. This plan to make China great again, so-called, be prosperous, drive the economics of the world, and be the one who sets the rule. I think that’s what he is looking at. He is looking at this more through the lens of making China great, making China dominant back to its historical position as the dominant country in the world, which you have to go back several hundreds of years to see. That’s the way they think.
I’m not an expert on Chinese culture by any matter, but they take a long-term view even if that long term is centuries. They view a lot of things that have happened at the hands of the United States and the Western powers as being in front of that and being designed to keep them down so that the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Western powers can exploit the areas that would more traditionally be under the influence of China. In a word, they’ve had it. They’re trying to reassert themselves in terms of that.
Putin has pretty much told us what he wants to do. He wants to eclipse the United States. In fact, he has told us in one of the letters or articles he wrote a couple of years ago that he would love to be in a position where he is dominant in Europe. The partnership between China and Russia would come together and they would set the rules of the road for how the world operates on a day-to-day basis. He views this as a more cooperative effort with China in the long run. I’m not sure that President Xi does. I don’t know that as well. Xi looks at it as Russia being more of a minor partner in the relationship. Putin looks at him as being two co-equal partners in this.
What do you make of the argument that’s been made and primarily it’s being made by Robert Kennedy as he makes his bid for the presidency that Putin’s incursion into Ukraine and his frustration with the West is a byproduct of the expansion of NATO and the expansion of the UN into the Baltics and the periphery of what was Soviet Union block states?
I could see how he would feel like that, but I was in a NATO assignment in the early 1990s. About the time we were extending NATO, we had this thing called partnership for peace. You had all these countries, some of which are now NATO members. They were coming in as part of the partnership for peace program.
They weren’t full partners, but we brought them in. We shared stuff. We were doing training with them. We were trying to address their military institutional challenges, trying to bring them more around to a democratic look at things. It was a very popular program. As I’ve mentioned, a number of those countries use that as the stepping stone to become NATO members. I can remember going to NATO headquarters, at least the military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, and seeing Russian officers in NATO. They were part of this. They were there.
The intention of NATO, the intention of the United States was to have a big tent here and to bring people in. There was a belief that the more we can be talking and the more we can be doing things that are much more in a cooperative vein, that’s good. That idea is right. What changed is you had some changes in leadership in Russia. You think back to a guy like Yeltsin, who was in place and had a generally good relationship with our president, President Clinton at the time.
He stopped a coup in his own country. He has a different outlook, and then his hand-selected replacement is Putin. Now, whether he knew that or not, I don’t know. I can’t say that, but there has been a definite change in the leadership in Russia, and then you began to see the narrative that this has all been about, “You said you wouldn’t do this. You did it anyway. You’re encroaching on us. You’re making us uncomfortable. We have now had to defend ourselves.” I don’t buy that that was the original purpose. I understand how that now can be interpreted by a guy like Putin, but I don’t think that was the original purpose. That’s my experience from being a NATO officer in the early 1990s.
They do a good job of spinning narratives there and creating a perspective that they want you to hear. Let’s bring Iran into the picture for a minute. When we think about Iran, they seem to pride themselves on creating chaos in the region, but what we saw is they’ve made a transition. They’ve made a transition from solely arming and equipping proxies and pushing proxies forward to now conducting a direct attack against Israel. Although they caveat it with lots of forewarning and that immediate weapons are in the air. They’re in the UN saying, “The matter is resolved. No hard feelings either way.” What do you make of their recent intentions and their willingness to now go toe-to-toe with the Israelis in some manner?
Joy, like everybody, was watching this transpire over the last weekend and trying to understand the thought process behind that. Iran felt they were put in a position with the strike that took place on April 1st against their so-called diplomatic enclave in Damascus, which is viewed as sovereign territory. We view embassies overseas as sovereign US territory.
They would apply that same definition to it. They view this as an attack on Iran. I think they felt they were compelled. Not just the attack but the gravity of the attack. The people that were killed in this. The top 2 or 3 IRGC Quds Force leaders in Iraq and Syria, then a whole bunch of their minions that were important. Those were all killed in very public locations
visible for everybody to see. They probably felt compelled to do something. They had to respond to this.
In this case, because it was sovereign Iranian territory, they could not rely on the proxies to do their bidding here. That’s always an option to them but they had to respond themselves. They probably debated it. We’re now watching the other side of the cycle with Israel considering how they’re going to respond to this. They took some time to respond to that as well. I can imagine there was a fairly significant debate.
I would imagine part of their discussion was, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to launch this. We’re going to show capability, but we’re going to do it in a way that is going to give them an opportunity to blunt it to some extent and minimize the effects on the ground.” That’s what they did. I’m a little cautious about saying that because I don’t want to downplay what Israel, the United States, the UK, France, and Jordan did. That’s a significant defense of Israel, but there was a lot to it. I think that’s the way they think about these kinds of things. They’re so quickly coming out and saying, “This is it. We’re done. Conclude it. Let’s move on.” That’s how they think about it.
It is interesting for a couple of reasons. Number one, you have their demonstration of capability. Now reports are coming out that 50% or 70% of the projectiles, whether they’d be aircraft or rockets or missiles failed in flight. Now you start thinking, “This was great because now we learned what is their actual achievable capability.” Similar to what we saw with Russia and have seen over the last couple of years in Ukraine. Do they have the combat capability that they say they have? At the same time, it also exercised the capabilities of the Israeli side, the US, and the Jordanians. It almost drew out who in the region was going to back. You have to think about it. It was always the conversations that were being had.
I’ve done several media engagements. I get a version of this question like, “What does this say about? Integrated air defense across the region?” My answer is, “Here’s what it says. It says that the United States, UK, Jordan, and France are able to defend Israel.” It doesn’t say much about integrated air defense in the region. It’s a wake-up call to the Gulf states to pay attention to this.
I can tell you, as a CENTCOM leader, this was always a concern. The countries have the capabilities. What they lack is the integration gene that brings it all together. The level of mutual trust from country to country or that “What you’re doing will protect me and what I’m doing will protect you” approach. That has to be sussed out more with the Gulf partners. They have to be taking a close look at what happened here.
I want to ask about the Gulf partners. Since Hamas’s incursion in Israel, we’ve seen varying degrees of response from the Gulf partners, whether it be Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the UAE. There’s been a lot of silence as well, especially from a nation like Saudi Arabia, where the discussions before October 7th, where while the Saudis are working with the Israelis, they want to find some common ground. What do you make of the relative silence of the Saudis? How do you assess the oil states, the Gulf states, and their willingness to get involved?
One of the people who I’ve tried to follow, learning more about the Middle East is our former ambassador, Ryan Crocker. He has seen this for decades. He’s got a ton of knowledge in the area and insights. He’s been at all the flashpoints throughout the region. He makes the argument. I agree with this and this does explain it. It is that the rhetoric that you hear from a lot of the Gulf states about the Palestinians is always pretty strident.
They say that there needs to be a Palestinian state. That Palestinian question has an underlying tension in the region that has to be resolved. The rhetoric part of the approach is present. What’s not present is the action part of this, and that’s what we’re seeing right here. When you dig deep into that, you begin to see that the Gulf partners, the other Arab states aren’t that keen about having a new Palestinian state in the region. Many of them don’t want Palestinians coming to their states. This is the case with Egypt. You won’t find any there.
Gulf partners aren’t that keen about having a new Palestinian state in the region. Many of them don’t want Palestinians coming to their states.
Nobody is welcoming it.
Nobody is bringing them out. There is a word deed mismatch that is taking place with the Gulf states. They’re concerned about some of the leadership that Hamas and the PLO have had in the past. They’re concerned that that revolutionary aspect of it will come to their countries and destabilize or further destabilize the situation. It’s important to look at the trajectory of what each of those Gulf countries has been through over the last several years.
Take, for example, Saudi Arabia. Now, it’s largely led by the Crown Prince. His focus has been on the 2030 plan, and economic diversity. Let’s think about the future. Let’s open it up. Let’s become more here than we can be. You see that replicated across the region. They are focused on other things. They view the action part of the Palestinian challenge here as a threat to them. There’s a real serious say-do gap here with the Gulf States over this.
I want to circle back on the DIME piece for a second because we hit a bunch of areas. We talked a bit about the diplomatic aspect of some of these dealings. We talked a little bit about the information warfare that goes on and certainly military capability. You mentioned Saudi Arabia has this economic vision. I would argue that they’ve done a pretty good job of executing on that. Even they almost took over the PGA.
I was at a conference in the spring of ’23. It was held at a location out by this new city they’re building. I sat next to a young Saudi woman who was in this group we were in. I got chatting with her. She spoke perfect English. She could not be more excited about the direction that her country was going under the Crown Prince in terms of doing new things, opening things up, theaters, and concerts. There is something happening in these countries. The Saudi Arabia you go to now is not Saudi Arabia you went to 5 or 10 years ago. That’s for sure.
What do you think our strategy should be when we break those down? When we look at those four factors of national power, where do we need to focus?
One of the challenges that we’ve had in the Middle East, maybe in some other areas but definitely in the Middle East because that’s the area I know the best. We have over-militarized a lot of our foreign policy in these areas by large formations and the conflicts that we’ve been in. We’ve allowed the military element of the DIME to dominate the whole American approach to the region.
The organization has the most resources and the most people that can do the most. They are very capable and know how to plan. It has taken that over. The strategy would be to try to get all of the DIME back in balance, where diplomacy is leading. There’s a strong information component to it that is talking about our values and our interests, not only to the region but to our people to make sure they understand why this is important and whether we are moving investments into the area.
This is one of the challenges I heard in Saudi Arabia when I was there a year ago. They’re doing all this stuff up in the Northwestern part of the country in this fantastic city they’ve got envisioned up there. They’re not getting the Western investment that they need nor from the United States. That has to be balanced out. I think we have to have a more balanced approach to the region. We need to be leading with diplomacy.
We need to be leading with diplomacy.
I like the idea of partnership. That’s important. Being seen as a trusted partner is probably a good approach for us to take and be seen. We haven’t always been that. We’ve largely been mostly a military power. We haven’t been able to bring the other elements and start great things that come along with the United States to bear in that region.
Let’s go a little deeper on the trust thing. One of our staunchest allies in history has been Israel. We referenced the war in Gaza now and nobody will argue that Hamas’s actions on the Israelis are anything less than savage. The relationship with the US, initially we supported Israel. We’re all in anything they need. What you’ve seen of late is now some frustration, some tension.
A lot of that is because of the humanitarian toll that’s being taken very publicly on the Gaza, the Palestinian people. America and Israel, nobody can project combat power like we can, very effectively and very rapidly. We’ve seen that and you’ve led this all over the world. That works well at the outset of the conflict. What we’re seeing and what we witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now what Israel is going through is as we get into protracted combat and prolonged operations, you still need people to take ground. You still need to put boots on the ground to close with, destroy, and finish the enemy.
That becomes extremely complex and difficult. Now, take that into an area as small as the Gaza Strip packed with millions of people and you’ve reduced most of it to rubble. Now, you have to send people in, and it’s an extremely complex environment. How do you do that? How do you weigh the decisions as a commander and as a leader that you have to make between the humanitarian toll that you know is going to be all over the news, versus having to close with and destroy an enemy who is dead set on destroying you and your way of life?
You’re hitting on a critical piece here. In the campaign against ISIS, this came to a head for me as a CENTCOM commander because we were focused on this. I inherited the campaign from Secretary Austin, General Austin at the time. Virtually, the plan was in place for how we were going to do this, but we still had a lot of hard fighting to do. This balancing of protecting civilians with accomplishment in the mission, with operating in accordance with the law of armed conflict, there are heavy tensions in this.
We made mistakes along the way, but what we tried to do was look for ways to reduce the risks associated with what we were trying to do. We had a very clear mission. It was to defeat the caliphate. It was to dislodge ISIS from their so-called caliphate. Very clear. We didn’t deviate much from that at all. We were very focused on that. What we had to do was figure out ways that we could reduce risk around that, particularly with the humanitarian situation.
When we were getting ready to go to Mosul, for example, one of the things we did was good. We’d learned this in Fallujah and a couple of other places that we’d been earlier in the ISIS campaign where our forces that responded did not do as well with the civilian population. We did planning along slide the humanitarian community. It wasn’t perfect but it was better than anything we’ve done before.
We were able to identify humanitarian corridors where people would move. We were able to identify assembly locations. We assisted and advised on stockpiling supplies. We created communication chains so we could communicate back and forth between the coalition, the forces, and the humanitarian aid community to try to minimize that. As you know, it wasn’t perfect. That’s the misfortunes of war. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that isn’t controlled in there.
What I was thinking about in terms of this is how do we reduce risk to the mission as we do this? We knew if we had a bad humanitarian situation, the mission would not get done. We’re going to get ground on. Our administration is going to slow us down and the international opinion is going to work against us. We already had enough of that with the stuff that was going on.
From my perspective as a senior commander, most of my job is about how you’re trying to reduce the risk to the campaign and get the campaign in place. Trust leaders to execute the plan and make sure you’re well informed about it, but then work hard to reduce the risks that are going to impact that plan. One of them was this thing with civilians and Mosul and throughout the campaign. We had to pay a lot of attention to that.
The big argument that’s being made, and I know you’ve heard it, is that if you open these humanitarian corridors, you put food in there, and you put aid, are you arming your adversary?
Maybe. That’s a risk of all this. This is the risk you have to take in the campaign. For example, during that campaign against ISIS, we were coming down to the Euphrates Valley in Syria and Eastern Syria. Supporting our partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces, half Kurd and half Arab militias. There were, I don’t want to say half dozen, but at least 3 or 4 towns where we stopped, at the request of the tribal leaders, to allow ISIS to come out or for them to get civilians out or anything like that.
It was unpopular. It was a difficult thing to brief the Secretary of Defense, but it was what we had to do to move forward and accomplish the mission while also protecting civilians and keeping the force together. We were working through partners, so we had to figure out ways to do this. It’s hard to do but there are risks in everything. It’s not going to be perfect. This is part of the challenge in terms of communicating this. I fully acknowledged we made mistakes throughout this. It doesn’t necessarily deliberate mistakes but it’s the aspect of what we’re doing there.
What role does media play? Everything is broadcast live now and we’ve gone through that. You’ve gone through that evolution in your career that we didn’t have. We weren’t open to reporters on the battlefield. Everything was a satellite shot now. Now, it’s your iPhone. It goes up on social media and it’s instant.
You have to embrace it. As ugly as difficult as it might be, you have to embrace that component of the whole information approach right there. I can remember as a young feel-great officer showing up and jumping in the JRTC. You get over to your simulator and next thing you know, there’s somebody with a camera and a light in your face. They’re interviewing you and it was a shock. They were trying to get you to think about this as part of a training exercise.
It seemed like a little bit of overkill at the time. Frankly, it was a good way to begin thinking about the integration of media into military operations. When you look back to the start of the Iraq war in 2003, our embedding of journalists with different units. That was generally a very positive thing. Not only did the American people get the truth and get exposed to what their military forces were doing in their name.
They’re we’re very trusting bonds between the media, military commanders, and organizations that went through. We’ve had some highlights of this. We’ve been inconsistent in terms of this over time. As a CENTCOM commander, I made a practice of bringing media with me when I traveled into the region. I didn’t do it every time but I did it more than 50% of the time. The Department of Defense, my leaders, and the Secretary were initially pretty uncomfortable with us doing that but there was a reason why we did it.
You have to give people exposure to things and you have to be able to let them see it. I can almost honestly say this is that in the thousands of times I took reports of it. I never got burned on it. I didn’t get burned. People put out a story that put me in a bad light or that was inaccurate or anything else. I think they had worked to our benefit. People became more trustful of what we were trying to do in the campaign. You have to find a way with the media to work with them and embrace that whole idea.
I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for the efforts in the invasion of Iraq because I was studying broadcast journalism at Boston University. 9/11 was my junior year. You saw everything that happened there, then 2003 came around, my senior year. You see journalists riding on vehicles in the invasion. I thought to myself, “I can be a war correspondent.” That was an awesome job until I watched Geraldo Rivera pull out a gun after he got attacked by an infantry squad once. He fell down and lost it. I looked at that and I said, “Hell no. I’m not going to do that. I’m going on the other side. I’m going in the Army.”
There has to be some rules in place for this and it is a mutual trust relationship. You got to give and get in terms of this. One of the things I tried to do, particularly as a CENTCOM commander, was make sure I took different parts of me aside. I tried to bring a long-form writer with me. Think of a guy like David Ignatius who is going to write an intellectually stimulating piece for a major newspaper.
I brought along wire service. I was thinking about something from the AP. I brought along a television channel, Fox or CNN. Sometimes, I brought a local. We brought a guy from Tampa with us once or twice. To me, getting a broad sweep of it helped us because then we were trying to push on all different mediums of media out there. I thought that worked well for us.
Let’s talk about your career for a few minutes. You were commissioned out of West Point in 1980, served in the Third ID in Germany for your platoon leader time, and then moved and made the transition to the Ranger Battalion. Late 1970s when you were in West Point and you even consider an interwar period like where we are today when we look at some of the challenges that our military faces. What was your call to serve as you were trying to decide what you wanted to do when you grew up?
It’s a sorted tale here. When I was ten years old, my oldest brother lived in Baltimore and this was 1968. We went out there to visit him during our spring break. It happened right after Martin Luther King was assassinated. The whole area, Baltimore, Washington was all on tenterhooks here. You could be out during the day but you had to be back at your homes at night. You didn’t want people out there doing things.
One of the things he did was he took his shot at the Naval Academy for a day trip. I was a ten-year-old kid. I’m looking around wondering, “What is this place? What am I looking at here? Help me. I’m trying to get my head around this.” I was so impressed with everything that I saw. I can remember turning to my dad saying, “This is right here. This is where I’m going to school.” My plan was to try to go to the Naval Academy.
When I got into high school, that’s what I was thinking about. Somewhere along the lines, somebody said to me, “You ought to consider applying for West Point.” I said, “West Point? Why do I want to do that?” I did, and then I ended up getting to West Point and getting to the Naval Academy. The rest is history. I liked the idea of the military. I had brothers and uncles who served. It was like that. I wouldn’t describe our family as a strong military. We had people that did their duty, but then it wasn’t a career.
I liked the idea of that. I went to a military high school. I liked some of what I was seeing. I liked the discipline and the order that came along with that. It fits my style. It was more of a lifestyle idea. I never had any thoughts about making it a career. When I showed up at West Point on the first day, instant buyer’s remorse. I was like, “What did I get myself into?” I went to New York City the night before. My dad put me on a plane in Minneapolis, sent me to New York City, and told me what to do.
I stayed in a hotel with a bunch of other new cadets. We got on the bus and drove up to West Point the next morning. The loneliest bus ride I’ve ever been on, all the way up there. You get off and all of a sudden, people are in your face. I was going, “What did I just do?” You get sucked into it so quickly and others are going to the same thing. There’s a collective sense of grief with all of it. The next thing you know, you’re digging it.
I like the idea of service. As I continued to serve, I’ve had great opportunities. I went to a great unit to begin with. I had some good examples set for me. This was all the officers and a lot of the non-commissioned officers were Vietnam vets. All my squad leaders, platoon sergeant, and comm officers were Vietnam veterans when I showed up as a lieutenant. It was an interesting time and I learned a lot doing that. I liked what I was doing. I liked the people that I was with. I liked the mission. It was more focused on being put on the military in the early 1980s to correct some of the stuff that had happened after Vietnam. I thought it was a good time. It was something that appealed to me.
I told you we’re going to talk about the Rangers. We’re biased here. I have to admit. We are biased. General Linder once told me that I talked to too many Rangers and that I needed to talk to other guys. We haven’t gone deep on the Ranger Regiment, the importance of it, and what it means to our national security strategy. You commanded the regiment. You utilize them extensively in your subsequent commands at different levels. Talk for a minute about the 75th Ranger Regiment. What’s their mission? Why are they so important to our national defense strategy?
The Rangers constitute this special light infantry commando-like organization that does raids and special-purpose missions here and supports national policy. What I loved about the Rangers is they were a quick-response organization. One of the battalions is always on an alert cycle, ready to respond very quickly. I did my first tour in Germany. You watch what was happening in Grenada and you say, “That’s cool. I like what that is.”
I had a classmate, a good friend of mine, Tony Thomas, who did all that. We connected when we were back at Fort Benning. I was picking his brain a lot. He heavily influenced my desire to want to go to the Ranger Regiment, but the organization has changed over time. Most people may not fully appreciate that the formation of the Ranger wasn’t necessary for this unique capability they’d become today.
It was designed in the wake of Vietnam to create an organization that could be an example for the rest of the Army that could help focus and train small unit leaders, then take those leaders and take them out of the Rangers and get them back out to the Army, where they could do a variety of things.
It’s the Abrams Charter, as you might know. Creighton Abrams was the Chief of Staff then. That was his Charter of the Rangers. This can be elite and well-trained, set a great example for everybody, and then take all of those resources, training, and things out to the rest of the Army and make the army better. That was the real underlying mission of the Rangers. Along the way, they got into the special operations unit. They developed these unique capabilities, then they became this force that became an integral part, particularly on the counter-terrorism side, of special operations forces. They migrated and adapted to that role quite well.
You started talking about leadership and the ability of the unit itself, but more broadly, Ranger School. We’ve had a number of conversations about Ranger School. It’s something near and dear to my heart. As an infantry officer, it’s expected that you go. I remember the night before I went, my wife was like, “Don’t come back without it because I don’t want to deal with you if you do.”
Fortunately, I went through and it was great, most of the time but it does set you apart. It does give you a sense of hard work, discipline, and perseverance. There’s no other way. You can’t read a book about it. You can’t listen to a lecture or even watch a movie and all of a sudden, you’re going to have this experience where you’re going to be a different leader. You have to go through those 61 days. You have to find a way to take those lessons and 20 years, 30 years, or 40 years later in your life, you find yourself in awkward times.
I was telling these guys that at 4:00 AM, I was still up working on this and finishing a proposal. I thought back to ranger school because I was like, “I want to go to bed. I’m hungry but I got to get this done. What do I do?” You’re sitting there and I’m in the firebase like, “I got a hard decision to make. What am I going to do?” You carry these lessons with you. Talk about the leadership aspect. When you develop Rangers and these leaders who are capable of operating at that level. What are you looking for? What are the characteristics? How does that transcend into building any organization around that character?
We were talking about here Ranger School. It’s designed to break you down and put a lot of pressure on you as many of our special operations community assessments. Selection programs are designed to expose your vulnerabilities, expose your weaknesses, know where you can go, and help you create situations where you go beyond what you think you can do. Certainly, Ranger School does that.
What I’m looking for and leaders that come out of that and in that particular community, I’m looking for folks who can reach the balance between men and mission and understand the importance of doing that. They can take responsibility for themselves and their organizations. They’re going to be able to exercise that and appreciate what they have to do in that. They can share in all the things that their organizations are expected to do and be able to do that. There are some great examples along the way.
To me, leadership has become about the basics. As I continued to move up the chain, it became so much more clear to me. I’d read a lot of business or leadership books out there. I’m always reading about these things. There’s great stuff and you always learn from it. For me, it does come down to mastery of the basics and that applies to leadership as well. Setting an example, taking care of people, being clear, and being a good communicator. These things are the things that I’m looking for in leaders that I was around. As I became more senior, those things we consider to be basics became much more important.
Leadership ultimately comes down to mastery of the basics.
You’ve developed a lot of leaders over your career. I did my homework before we came here and I talked to a few of them. You left a tremendous legacy in the Army. I won’t even say in units, in the Army writ large. Every person I talked to without fail gave me some input and some story about how where they are today. These are the most senior people in our commands who are telling me this about you.
I have a few things here that I’ll throw out, then I have a question for you. You don’t need five pages of ideas and guidance. You don’t need to wait 90 days to make an assessment. One of your biggest advocates told me that you need to get in and start working from day one, from moment one. I also heard that you’ve become more relaxed since you retired. Everybody had a common theme. The common theme is you’ve got to get in and you’ve got to get to work. You’ve got to do it from moment one.
These ideas of figuring it out and waiting for the right moment, it doesn’t need to be like that. Be direct, be concise, and take action. When you’re a new commander, a leader, a CEO, or whatever it is that you come into a role, what is your advice to that person who now walks in the room and they’re sitting at the head of the table and they are in charge?
You have to expose yourself a little bit to the people that you’re leading. You have to create a little bit of vulnerability and tell them who you are. You have to make sure people appreciate who you are. It’s important to have an appreciation of the organization that you’re stepping into. I agree with this idea. You got to get in, take action, and get things going but that’s not incompatible with appreciating where the journey that the organization has been on under the previous leader.
When I stepped into a job, I’ve always tried to be gracious and acknowledge the people who preceded me and the organization. The organization was great before I got here. It’s going to be great after I leave. I’m filling this space right here and I’m helping to move to the next level. I think you had to have that perspective on it as you step into it. You have to take some time and let people understand.
You do have to do some assessments with those. One of the things that I grew to appreciate was making sure you understood the culture of an organization. What’s the thing that drives the organization? Was it on autopilot? What does it think about its role? It’s not the same. Every organization is a little bit different. There’s one in the Rangers, one at SOCOM, and one at CENTCOM. Almost every organization I’ve been a part of, it’s different but you have to appreciate that and then try to build on that as you move forward and as you move out.
You have to learn to trust people. One of the biggest lessons I learned in growing up and being a leader happened to me when I was Admiral McRaven’s deputy at JSOC. I’d been out in the 80 seconds. I’ve been in the conventional arts and came back to the SOF community as the deputy there. I was trying to dive into the targeting process and everything you’re doing. You come to the realization that the people who are working for you are infinitely smarter than I was or will ever be.
Not just the tactics, but on the technology aspects of what we’re trying to do. You have to learn to trust people with that. That was a leadership adjustment that I had to make at that particular time. I was never going to be as smart as they were in some of these skills, but I had to learn to trust that and bring all that into my leadership calculation.
You need to learn to trust people.
How do you build trust?
There are a couple of things you do. In order to create trust, you have to be a good relationship builder. I think leaders, particularly senior leaders, there are a couple of critical skills that you have to master. They’re basic skills that you have to master. One of them is the ability to build relationships, how you get along with people, how you engage with people, and how you feel empathy towards people.
When I was getting ready to go to CENTCOM, I made a point of calling a variety of former CENTCOM commanders. One of them was General Tony Zinni, a Marine officer. One of the things he told me was clear and basic. He says, “Shut up and listen. Listen to what people are telling you. Try to understand it before you start responding to things.” The listen, understand, and respond approach is a good approach for leaders who are engaging with diverse groups of people or diverse relationships to understand what they’re doing.
Sometimes as Americans, we’re type As. We want to get in and solve the problem, but the problem is not ready to be solved yet. Sometimes people just want to be listened to. You have to practice this listen, understand, and respond approach. When you do respond, be responsive. One of the things I thought was most frustrating, I picked up from our partners, people that I work with, is we tend to give people the indefinite maybe here. We don’t tell them no. We don’t tell them yes. We tell them maybe. “Maybe we’ll do something for you here.”
What I found is that people can handle and know. They can appreciate that. We went through this part with our Syrian Democratic Force partners, General Mazlum, a Kurdish leader, all the time. There were things we were just not going to do. We were never going to do something that would be an affront to Turkey. We were not going to go into other Kurdish cantons where we were having problems, and we were not going to get focused on the regime or anything else. We were about ISIS. That was what this partnership was about. The majority of our discussions, particularly in the early phase of this, were about those types of things. Being very clear, listening, and understanding, but also being responsive in terms of the things you’re doing and defining the left and right limits of the relationship.
Trust has to exist between a commander and their sergeant major at senior levels but their senior enlisted partner. I’ve been fortunate. We built this show over the last couple of years to be able to sit down with some great leaders who command our NCO Corps or our non-commissioned officer corps. We were with Sergeant Major Weimer, the Sergeant Major of the Army.
I had a chance to sit down with the now, SEAC Troy Black when he was the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. The conversations that I had with them where I tried to focus a bit of our discussion was why is the NCO Corps so important. How does the NCO Corps separate us as a US Military from everybody else in the world? As I was putting this conversation together, I was thinking that. I’ve never asked that question to one of our senior officers. I’m going to turn it around on you while I have you here and ask you that question. Why is the NCO Corps so important to the US Military? Why does it set us apart from everybody else?
There’s a variety of reasons but one of the most important ones is that the NCO Corps has been able to demonstrate their loyalty to their commanders, the loyalty to the people they serve, but also the loyalty of the troops. To me, that was essential throughout all of this. Before, we talked a little bit about how I had a sergeant major at JSOC, SOCOM, and CENTCOM.
We were together for eight-plus years. It’s longer than the average American marriage. We were together for a long time. I learned so much from him. Calm, collected, smart, articulate, and thoughtful about the things he’s doing. He has the ability to look down and see what’s happening with the troops and in the organization. He also has the ability to communicate to senior leaders in a way that makes a lot of sense and provides great, candid, and articulate feedback to me and others as we went through this.
We have made a huge investment in our non-commissioned officer. We have academies. We have selection processes. We’ve created a whole architecture around putting people in these positions and making sure that they get the requisite skills and training that goes along with this. Especially in the sophomore year, we brought non-commissioned officers out.
We put them in the master programs or other things like this that made them the smartest non-commissioned officers that we could find and put them in these situations that made them better. To me, it’s been about their ability to look up and down. It’s been about the investments that we’ve made. It’s been about the trust that we’ve developed with our non-commissioned officers over a number of decades.
I was telling the Sergeant Major that I was very fortunate, both as a leader and as an ODA commander to have a phenomenal senior enlisted team sergeant and platoon sergeant when I went. They took me under their wing and didn’t allow me to fail. They saw my success as their success and invested in that relationship. How does the relationship change? How does it evolve from a second lieutenant, a platoon sergeant, and an infantry platoon to the CENTCOM commander and the CENTCOM senior enlisted?
There was a concept a number of years ago. You don’t hear as much about it anymore, but it was one that I liked. It was called the directed telescope. It was the idea of getting somebody out there to be your set of eyes, looking at something and providing you candid feedback on that. Again, I’ll go back to talking about Bill Thetford because he was my sergeant for a long period of time.
He did that all the time for me. There were times when we traveled together, but there were also times when he went out and did things by himself or with other members of the NCO support chain to look at what we were doing, then came back and provided feedback to us on all that. To me, that was essential. The role changes as it becomes much more of a personal advisor and in some cases, a whisperer to help you think through a lot of things.
Leadership becomes lonely, as you know. When you get up to the top, there’s not a lot of people you can go to. You do have to have people in your circle that you can go to. It can’t always be the chaplain. It’s got to be the psychologist or your wife. You’ve got to have somebody who’s a professional who understands what you’re dealing with and understands the impacts of the things that you’re doing here and who can in a very trustful way share insights with you that can help inform your thinking and decision-making to this. That’s what Bill was able to do for me. He was invaluable.
That continuity is important. We’ve seen that. I talk a lot about General Inder. General Inder had Dave Gibbs. They spent years and 3 or 4 commands together where you develop that relationship. It’s a partnership.
It very much is. That wasn’t always popular, frankly. A couple of places along the way, I had to fight to keep Bill with me throughout this, but it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing for me and it was the right thing for the organization. I agree with you. The idea of continuity is important.
I want to talk about where we go from here. We’re in this interesting period in history. People are calling it a 1939 moment, this interwar period. You’ve got the FBI director who’s testifying in front of Congress. The red lights are blinking. Even the commanders who I’ve spoken with at various levels of command across the military are giving this perspective that it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, and how long can we delay when, what’s it going to be, and will we be prepared?
We’ve talked about Putin, Israel, a bit about Iran, and China. There are threats across the globe. Our job and the job of the military is to be prepared to combat those threats when and if they present themselves. How do you develop a force that has to be so dynamic that it is capable of responding to very different threats in very different regions of the world that may be foreseen or unforeseen?
In thinking about it, let me take it back to the Rangers. After 9/11, we went to Afghanistan. This was an exquisitely trained force. We could seize airfields wherever you wanted us to do. We could do raids and stuff like that, but what we found very quickly was that the things that we had trained for, while they were important in the initial set of operations, they became less important as time went on.
The organization had to change its way of operating. This is an organization that generally operates as a battalion or on occasion, as separate companies. Now, we found ourselves in a situation where we had to completely change how we were doing. We had to create platoon-sized strike forces and multiple ones, going on multiple missions, and every night doing things. The most important thing is that you’ve got to develop an organization with the ability to be adaptable and move to what the Department of Defense or what the nation needs you to be.
General Miller used to talk about this a lot when he was the JSOC commander. The organization has to be what the nation needs us to be. If it even needs us to be a heart-hitting CT force that’s going out and banging targets every night, then that’s what it needs to be. If it needs to be a force that leverages some of the more subtle aspects of special operations and is creating relationships in the land, then that’s what it needs to be.
The idea of adaptable leaders who are questioning what they’re doing, looking at the relevance of how they’re doing things, and always searching for better ways to do things as the environment changes. To me, that’s how you do that. The Rangers went through a painful period but then found their footing throughout all of that as they had to change. As did a lot of special operations and frankly, our conventional forces as well. Everyone had to change based on the situation. We’re in that period again now as we look at the so-called great peer-to-peer competition here. We’ve got to think our way through this very carefully.
There’s been a lot of focus over the last couple of years on going into the conventional forces, long-range fires, aircraft carrier strike groups, and advanced aviation platforms. We’ve seen the effects of this. In October, the first thing that happens is we deploy aircraft carriers to the region. We deploy fighter squadrons for deployment out of the US across the world.
We can project combat power very rapidly. When we talk about resource management, we talk about where is the DOD going to apply focus as we prepare for this near peer-to-peer conflict. As Sergeant Major Weimer said, “How do we keep near in front of peers as long as possible?” The DOD put a lot of emphasis on the conventional force, but we know SOF was developed.
We talked earlier about the Jedburghs, the OSS, and the operational groups that were developed because everybody understood that we can’t have a conventional force on the conventional force of superpowers. We can’t have peer nation-states go against each other because it looks like World War II. We don’t want that ever again, so we have to invest in SOF but we’ve seen reductions in SOF. We’ve seen SOF be asked to take a backseat to investment in the conventional force. How do you see the interaction and the relationship between SOF capabilities and the conventional force as we sit in this period and the DOD has to allocate resources somewhere?
We can’t lose what we gained throughout the last 20 to 25 years of fighting here. We saw ourselves get to a level of integration and trust between soft forces and conventional forces that was, frankly, unprecedented in our military history. We integrated staff. We had SOF officers who went to conventional organizations. We even brought some conventional officers into SOF formations. We created platforms and mechanisms so that we were much better integrated during that global war on terrorism.
We have to be careful about losing that. I am concerned about the direction where some of the decisions were making our service. The Army, for example. I get that the Army is reducing the structure of the 452,000 soldiers. Our smallest Army since the Vietnam War. It is the path we’re on right now. I get that there’s something but there has to be a more thoughtful process into making some of these decisions. We have to look at the inherent strengths of what SOF can do to help the conventional forces. Again, this is about reinvention. It’s about adapting to the times and making sure that we’re leveraging those things.
You came out of your role as the leading business executive for national security and what that organization is working to do is bridge that industry into the defense sector. Although we’ve been at war for twenty-plus years, the nation wasn’t necessarily mobilized. The military did more than their fair share. We had the defense industry, which was mobilized during that time, but we didn’t have car manufacturers making airplanes like we did in World War II.
Nine out of ten people used to walk down the street and it did not affect their daily lives. We understand because of history what peer-to-peer competition looks like. That doesn’t get fought with 452,000 soldiers going against a nation that looks like the society has to be mobilized. Do you think that American society could mobilize? What do you think that timeline could be? Do you think there’s a propensity for that?
I think we can but our muscle moves and support of that are atrophied a little bit. I’m an eternal optimist about the United States. We will inevitably do the right thing and rise to the challenge that comes to us, but it will take us some time. We have not kept up with all the things that have kept us on the competitive edge of our partners out there. If we look at, for example, our production capacity in the United States. China has about 2.5 million square feet of shipbuilding space. We have about 100,000 square feet of shipbuilding. That’s an example right there.
We will inevitably do the right thing and rise to the challenge that comes to us, but it will take us some time.
The average age of our ports, our military to federal shipyards that service our capital ships, carriers, or nuclear submarines is in the 1,900-year-old time frame. The infrastructure matches all that. We have four dry docks that can service all of our capital ships in the United States. That’s it. You can’t send a carrier to this place or that place because of their classifications.
We haven’t kept up with addressing the infrastructure that goes along with this. We’ve outsourced a lot of our production capacity. At the beginning of the Ukrainian war, as I recall, we had one plant in the United States that was making 155 artillery rounds. We’re doing it at a relatively low rate of production. We’ve done good. They’ve now doubled or tripled that and they’re doing it. There are more plans to do that, but it’s taken us the better part of two years to get there. We don’t have the time to do that.
We have atrophied in this. We have the capacity, but the muscles are not toned to do this, so we have to do that. First and foremost, it starts with making sure we have a clear strategy about how we’re going to do things in the world and how we’re going to look at things. That has to emanate from the national level and it has to come down. We have to have hard discussions with the American people about what’s at stake.
If we don’t prevail in a competition against China, what does that mean? I’m not sure most Americans could articulate what that is, but if you’re okay with China writing the rules of the road going forward, stand by. We’re on the path right now. We have to be clear with the American people about what’s at stake in this. We have to talk about it. Sometimes, for political purposes or other purposes, we choose not to talk about those kinds of uncomfortable things.
As a kid who grew up in the ‘60s, all the schools, we knew where the fallout shelter was. We knew who the enemy was that could alter our way of life, the Soviet Union. We appreciate that. Our whole economic, diplomatic, military, and informational aspects. All this DIME that we were talking about a few minutes ago was geared towards that. We had a United States Information Agency that on a day-to-day basis was competing with the Soviet Union in the information space, all the time going back and forth. We didn’t do business with countries that were dealing with the Soviet Union. That’s not the world that we’re in. We’ve got to look at those types of things and that’s all got to be tied into a strategy that American citizens can understand and appreciate the stake.
What comes out of that is the concept of going to combat versus going to war. For so long, you got second chances. You’d go out there. You conduct your raid and your patrol. If you got hit, you came back to the base. You went to the gym, to the dining facility, took a nap, and you went back at it. You don’t get second chances in the war against nation-states.
We’re seeing some good lessons. The scale of big power war. Look at what’s happening in a place like Ukraine. Over half a million casualties, civilians and military. Russia has lost over 2,000 main battle tanks. Hundreds more were lost by the Ukrainians. Many materials have been lost. We are seeing 1950s vintage vehicles from the former Soviet stockpile coming into use in the Ukraine.
This is the whole scale of production. We talked a little bit about the whole scale of what a big war is. We don’t have an appreciation for that because that’s not what we’ve been doing and we haven’t conditioned the American people. Russia, for example, has mobilized over half a million people to go fight in their part of the Ukrainian. That’s more than we will have in the active Army at the end of this year.
This idea of scale is critical. We’ve got to begin to find ways to communicate to the American people about what this means and what’s at stake with this, and then make sure we’ve got all the systems in place so that we can produce this. It took us twelve and a half years to build the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier. It took China about eight years to convert their first ship into a carrier, and it took them five years to build their second one.
It’s probably going to take us another twelve years to build our next version of the next Ford-class carrier. We have to figure out ways to speed this up. It starts with the Department of Defense. It starts with Congress and the administration. There’s a lot of work to be done here in terms of this. We can do this. I am confident we can do this, but we have not moved with the alacrity and the speed that we need to.
You know better than anybody saying that people are the most important asset that we have. SOF number one, people are more important than hardware. We need the best and the brightest to come into the military. I’d say the Army, but we also need to retain them across the force, across the DOD. How do we compete for that talent? That talent now, it’s so easy. You go on Instagram, you can be anything you want to be. The algorithms continue to promote that and make you believe you can be whatever you want to be. The younger generation is smart. They see opportunity. They see options. They want a choice. How does the military compete with that talent to get them to come in and continue the mission?
I talk about this with a lot of civilian audiences. A lot of the questions came up on the recruiting challenges that we’re having. They want to understand what that is. One of the most important things that I try to emphasize to people is this is not going to be a problem that is going to be solved by the Army or by recruiting command or by putting a few more flashy commercials up on this.
This goes back to the previous discussion here. It’s about how the nation thinks about itself and how it protects itself. This has got to be a discussion with the influencers and with the American public, exposing our young people to what the opportunities are out there. Let’s start at the big level. It would be great if everybody was serving in the military, but let’s not set that as the bar. Wouldn’t it be great if everybody served the country in some way? Whether it was in the military, the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the peace corps, or they’re a member of a police force or something in their communities.
This idea of service is paramount. We have lost this idea in our country and it’s so important. There have been initiatives out here to think about some type of national compulsory service that people do. You go to Israel and you talk to members of the IDF. Everybody serves. It’s impressive when you talk to people there. They understand why they’re doing things. They understand what that service means to the nation largely in the IDF. It carries with them going forward and they are a nation that relies on people being mobilized.
There’s a lot to it. We have to put more focus on it. It’s being borne out in some of the statistics we’re seeing. The proclivity for people who would even think about service in uniform or in some other way is at an almost record-low level for a variety of reasons. One, we’re a larger population. We’re not 200 million people or 330 million people. There are more people there and people doing lots of diverse things. There are fewer people or no people that are in the military or doing something that is serving the country.
A lot of kids don’t know what the opportunities are out there because they haven’t been exposed to them, whether it’s in the military or some other part of service to the nation. We have to look at how we address this in our communities. I’m being a little emphatic with this, but this idea of service and people grabbing onto it isn’t a job for military recruiters and gets people jazzed about serving the country.
It’s about the American people. It’s about our communities. Everybody is an influencer in terms of doing this. We do have to appreciate the generations we’re on. Your daughter is here. She’s of a much different generation. They think differently about that and we have to appreciate the differences in all of these generations. It’s interesting. Oftentimes, when I talk to audiences, these are people who are my generation or maybe a little bit in the next one down behind me.
Oftentimes, people aren’t enjoying the military because of wokeness, for example. I always have to say, “Let’s talk about that.” Let’s talk about the top ten reasons why people in the principal recruiting age group of 17 to 24 don’t join the military. I’m here to tell you, at least in the surveys that have been done by the Department of Defense, which I would give credence to. They do them on a regular basis. They’ve done them over a long period of time. They looked at it longitudinally in terms of this and how attitudes and things change.
If you look at the top ten reasons now, one of them says wokeness. They talk about fit, they don’t think they’d like it, and concerns about sexual assault or sexual harassment. They are concerned about being deployed. They don’t think it’s compatible with their skills or they don’t think they’ll make it. Thirty-three percent self-select themselves out of it because they don’t think they can meet the standards in terms of this.
That’s how that generation is thinking about it. The influencer generation above them, that is parents, coaches, teachers, and others who are seeing them all the time do have some different things they look at. We have to get our heads around how we look at this as a nation. We can’t be solved on the backs of just the military. We got to think about this idea of national service.
Our problems can’t be solved on the backs of just the military. We need to think about this idea of national service.
We can’t wait till the event happens either then it’s late. There’s another soft truth.
I was reading an article earlier about the direction that the Army has gone and some of this. There’s some reason we’re importing out the sector, in the army sector of warm with this. It’s reservedly positive here about where the recruiting is going this year. They’re on track whether they need to be a little bit ahead. Guardingly so, recognize that things can change with this but they’ve done some things to address this.
This program that they put in place, the pre-enlistment training people go to get them up to a standard either academically or physically has resulted in over 5,000 soldiers coming into this. They’re allowing people to choose where they serve has been popular and it’s been a positive thing. You’ve seen some of the other services doing things like that as well. We’re doing things that can be manipulated and can be done at the services and within the Army to address so many things with that. There are a variety of different levels that have to be addressed here with all of this.
You have a long career. You served at every level. What do you tell that young kid? The young Joseph Votel who’s in high school, who’s maybe in college, who’s trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.
If I’m sharing something about my experience, I’ll try to tell them about some of the experiences that I had. I’ll try to talk to them about the opportunities that I had and the satisfaction I derived from them. I’ll try to talk about the people that I’ve had the opportunity to serve with and how we’ve now seen them growing up. You come to a point, and I’m at this now. I’ve been at it now for several years where you look into the Army or for me, the Joint Services.
You see people that were young officers or non-commissioned officers and now, all of a sudden, they’re Sergeant Majors. They’re Division Commanders. They’re out doing great. There’s no greater satisfaction to me than seeing that. You have to talk to people about what to get out of that service. That’s what I try. What it meant for me, my family, and my wife when we departed the Army. Much harder on her than it was on me, frankly, because that had become her life.
She’d completely bought into all of this and was into it as I was. You have to share those kinds of things. People want to belong to something. They want to do something that’s important and makes a difference. They want to do something that helps people. All of these things can be done in military service or other aspects of service to the nation.
Back to basic human instincts that people aspire to, you have to talk about that. General Downing said this all the time when he was the youth secretary, “You always have to talk to your troops about values and about the importance of what they’re doing and why it makes a difference.” That’s exactly right and that’s a message we have to convey to people.
Last question, test question. The Jedburghs in World War II, I prefaced it with that, but soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and elite performers have got to have habits. They have to have foundations. I say that the Jedburghs of World War II had to do three things well every day. They had to be able to shoot, move, and communicate. Those are core foundational tasks. If you do those to a high degree of proficiency, then when other challenges come in your way, you don’t have to think about them because they’re muscle memory. What are the three things that you do every day to set the conditions for success in your world?
I’ll tell you what I try to do every day. I’m probably over-organized in the way I do things. I try to make sure I spend a portion early of every day trying to make sure I am well-informed about what’s happening out there. When I was on active duty, it was about what was happening in the command, making sure I was familiar with that.
I devoted time to that early on to make sure that I was well informed on that. That has carried over into my retired life when I now have curated a series of things that I look at every morning. Every morning, the same things. That’s what gets my intellectual juices going to make sure I understand, “This is the world that I’m living in.” You have to get yourself calibrated every day and take time to make sure you’re informed about what’s going on out there. That’s the first thing.
Get yourself calibrated every day and take time to make sure you’re informed about what’s going on out there.
The second thing is there’s got to be a physical component to all of this. All of us who grew up in the army or the military usually started our days this way. I still do. After I began to get into that, I did something physical every day. It’s less about the physicality of it and more about the mental aspect of it for me.
I was a runner. I liked endurance kinds of things. I have now taken that and continued to do that. Not to the same degree, certainly, but to the degree to which a 66-year-old guy can do it. I’m doing okay. I’m in the top 5%, but the guys in my neighborhood. You have to do something to keep yourself physically going there. It’s physically vigorous. That extends over periodically doing things that scare the hell out of you, whether it’s skiing down a tall mountain or doing something that gets your juices flowing.
You have to do something to stimulate yourself physically every day. I try to do that. The important thing is to try to learn something new every day. It doesn’t have to be anything overly significant. It can be listening to a podcast, watching a YouTube video, reading a portion of a book, maybe learning something about somebody else, or maybe refining a skill that you have or that you want to develop. Try to make an improvement every day.
I had a coach who was very influential on me in high school and this is his whole deal. He’s like, “Every day, try to make yourself 1% better. Don’t worry about the big leaps, 1% better.” Over the course of a week, you’re 5%. Over the course of a month, you’re 25% better. Over the course of a year, you’ve repeated yourself. You’ve multiplied yourself 2 or 3 times. That was such a powerful idea for me. This idea of learning and making yourself a little bit better and a little bit sharper every day was important to me.
Be well-informed, stay physically fit, and learn something new. Try to be 1% better.
Try to learn something every day.
You’ve impacted a lot of people. I ran into you. I certainly didn’t know you during my time there, but I ran into you a number of times in different events where I was in the corner hiding, pretending that I didn’t want to be there and avoiding people like you. You’ve impacted an entire generation of the Army. Those
leaders that you talk about who you look back on now and their sergeant majors, their commanders, and their division commanders, they exist in every command.
Every one of those leaders has respect for everything that you’ve done for them and the country and we’re all better for it. We’re way more than 1% better as a nation for everything that you’ve done for us. I agree with you 100% that the future of America is bright. The future will always be bright as long as we continue to invest in our people, continue to put America first and share that vision.
The mission is the most important thing that we have in any organization. Your mission may have been a bit undefined when you came into the military and graduated from West Point in 1980, but you certainly found it and you carried that forward. There are a lot of people who ascribed to that mission today. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.
Thanks, Fran. I’ve enjoyed this. Thanks for your comments about taking more than I’ve given. Believe me, it was a wonderful journey. I loved every day of it. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
We’ll have you back soon. Thanks.
Thank you very much.
