The war for information, influence, and decision making is paramount on today’s battlefield. Artificial intelligence is no longer a concept of the future; it’s essential for America’s national security and military dominance.
From SOF Week in Tampa, Florida, Fran Racioppi sat down with retired Green Beret and Co-founder of Accrete AI Government, Bill Wall, to talk about a fight most Americans never see.
Bill is one of the leading voices redefining how we use AI and how our government is deploying it in the protection of America. Bill explains how Accrete’s Argus platform is actively being used to identify foreign ownership and control in U.S. defense supply chains, and how more broadly AI is helping analysts detect narrative warfare and influence campaigns before they spread.
He shared how dual-use technology is shifting the battlefield, why algorithmic warfare is already here, and how Accrete is giving government agencies the tools to scale human insight without losing control. They also talked about the dangers of siloed innovation, the gap between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, and what leadership looks like when you’re building tech that needs to work at speed and at scale.
This episode is about changing how we think about war, technology, and leadership; and what it’s going to take to stay ahead in the next fight.
The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by University of Health & Performance, providing our Veterans world-class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs.
Our SOF Week 2025 Series is made possible in part by Accrete.ai; solving business’s most complex challenges today through the technology of tomorrow.
Follow the Jedburgh Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media. Listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
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Bill, welcome to the Jedburgh Podcast.
Thank you very much for having me, Fran. I appreciate it.
We’re here at SOF Week, and we’ve got innovation out every door and window in this place. I mean, there’s like three floors of it behind us. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years, plus really digging into what innovation’s going to mean to the next battlefield. Defining the next battlefield. Really starting to try to drill down from the most strategic level in our conversations with the Sergeant Major of the Army, who used to be a commander, the first SFC command team.
How do we take that strategy and then distill it down all the way to our conversations with the fifth group commander? What does that mean at the ground level? How does that tie into training? We always come back to the same core SOF principles. The SOF truths about humans are more important than hardware, quality over quantity. We know that on the next battlefield, technology is going to be at the forefront of everything.
We’re seeing it today in Ukraine. It’s changing how we are thinking about everything, even on this showroom floor over here. Our humans have to start to leverage this technology. Great humans, we use technology better. You spent over two decades in the Army, in the SOF community, at every level. You focused on technology, you focused on IT infrastructure and enabling our SOF operators to identify close with, and destroy the enemy. Now you’re doing it on the private sector side with the Crete. I want to talk about all of it.
I want to talk about the technology, I want to talk about your journey, and I want to talk about the entrepreneurism that comes inherent to Green Berets and how they leverage that when they transition. We have to start by defining first what AI is. You’re in the AI space, and it’s thrown around all day long. You cannot watch TV or the news for ten minutes without someone talking about AI. What is AI? Why is it important?
I love that question to start off with because it’s so fundamental. I talk to government customers all the time, and they say, “I want some AI.” I say, “What do you mean by that?” You’ll get various answers. Someone will say, “I want to take all my data from Excel and have AI put it into SharePoint.” I’m like, “That’s not AI. Why would you do that? That’s a horrible idea.” Someone else will say, “I want a drone that will circumnavigate the world autonomously, sniff up people’s DNA, and then eliminate them with laser beams based on their DNA and their family connections.” “That’s a great idea, but it’s not AI, and it’s not possible.”
It’s a sick capability.
For us, at the very basic level, and I’m really not a computer scientist or a technologist, so I try to make it simple. Artificial intelligence is just using computers and data to think and reason the same way a human would, but just at a much larger scale and speed. Humans are bandwidth-limited. We can only take in so much information. We have to sleep eight hours a day.
Sleep eight hours a day? No one in this place sleeps eight hours a day.
For your health, you should be sleeping eight hours a day. You’ve got to sleep. You’ve got to step away from things, but the machine, like the Terminator, is constant. Getting a computer, a data to do the tasks and thinking that a human can do, but shouldn’t necessarily do. In my tiny brain, I think of it like a Roomba. Do you have a Roomba?
Yes.
It automatically just goes around and vacuums.
No matter what’s on the floor. We’ve learned it from the dog.
The good thing about the Roomba is that there are some tasks that humans should never do again, and vacuuming is one of them. When it comes to a lot of the data tasks that analysts are doing, that humans are doing, they shouldn’t have to do that. Machines should be doing that for them so that they can do much higher levels of thinking that humans are really good at. For me, that’s what AI is. It’s computers, data, doing human-like thinking at a scale and speed that humans aren’t capable of.
What’s an example of that?
In my company, an example is we’ve built a product to identify foreign government involvement or leverage in a commercial supply chain. That’s a huge problem because there’s so much data. Commercial data changes all the time. Every week, there’s a new company, there’s a new investment, there’s a new merger, there’s a new acquisition. I like to say that commercial data is the river you cannot put your foot into twice.
The moment you take your foot out, so much river has passed by, it’s a different river. The data goes too quickly. To enable a human to make sense of that data without artificial intelligence would take months on end, but with artificial intelligence, they can make sense of it in just hours or days. It just speeds up the process they would naturally have done, but it does it for them in a much faster way.
When you look at the SOF community, and even maybe the broader DoD, where are you seeing opportunities for AI to be leveraged across? I would say the war-fighting functions?
Anywhere that there’s a decisional situation where someone has to make a decision and they’re overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to sort through, artificial intelligence should be there. You see it in the drone world, which I’m not part of, you see it in targeting, you see it in understanding social media. You see it in the Intel and open source information world. There’s just way too much information to make sense of these days. Sorting through that information and figuring out what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense so a commander or a staff can make a decision, that’s where it belongs. Across the battlefield, across our government.
We’ve seen a lot of AI advancements in physical security. In my physical security company, that’s what we deal with every day when we’re talking about integration of CCTV, access control, fire alarm, and how AI is coming into play because it’s giving you pattern of life data. It’s analyzing that, and then instead of having somebody, the age-old conversation we have is we’ll walk into an operational center and there will be 30 TVs on the screen. I’ll ask, “There’s an operator there. What do you do? I watch the cameras.”
Meanwhile, there’s like a magazine, lunch is happy. It’s like, “How many cameras do you watch?” “All of them.” You can see what happens at them out of my new level on each one of those cameras at any point in time when you’re reading your magazine and eating your lunch. They stare at you, and you realize like, “You cannot do any of that.” AI has been instrumental in the ability to identify patterns of life, deviations in patterns of life, trigger alerts, and alarms.
What a horrible job, like no human should have to stare at cameras and computer screens for a twelve-hour shift. We should not be doing that.
They’re not effective at it.
No, they’re not.
We’ve seen AI, I think, really come to the forefront. We’ve talked about things like other terms that get thrown out there, like machine learning. In your words, what is machine learning, and then how does that work with AI?
Machine learning is just a component of AI. It’s one of the things that are there. Natural language processing, neural networks. There are all these computer science terms and techniques that combine together to make a capability. Again, I’m not a computer scientist. I’m a layman. Machine learning allows an algorithm or a program to continually absorb new data and learn from that data. There’s a great historical example. You might remember when Watson went on Jeopardy. Do you remember this?
IBM’s product.
[00:10:59] IBM’s Watson won Jeopardy!, but there was a pivotal moment there where a question was asked, and the question was, “What decade did Oreo cookies come to market?” The Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings rang in first, and he said, “1930.” He was wrong. Watson rang in and said, “1930.” The reason why was Watson wasn’t able at that time in that generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning to absorb new information.
Watson only had what it had. A human, you or I, would have been like, “I thought it was 1932, but I’m not going to guess because I know that’s wrong.” Watson didn’t have the level of machine learning to be able to do that. Machine learning is when the machine can continually get new information, understand the contextual place of that information, and then put it into its deliberations and decision-making process.
How do we weigh the positive that we get out of these computer models, “the algorithm,” versus what’s the point where it becomes detrimental or negative?
It’s all about the human, right? For me, artificial intelligence empowers a human. The first SOF truth stays. It doesn’t go away because of technology. Artificial intelligence doesn’t negate the first SOF truth. It’s always about people. If people are involved in the process, then it will be positive. If we let the machines run by themselves, they will end up going somehow astray. There always has to be a human in the loop that comes back and corrects, recalibrates, and ensures that it’s still doing what we want it to do.
I think that the term human in the loop is the one that we hear come up all the time, in that you always have to maintain it. Sergeant Major Weimer talked about that. We have to put a human in the loop to be the decision maker from the data. If we allow the machine to be the decision maker, then we run into issues. We see that on our YouTube channel. I mean, literally.
Where the processing work so quickly that in real time as you’re uploading a video, it will analyze it, it will give you recommendations, and then it will tell you, “This is fit for any audience. This is going to get flagged for 35 different versions of inappropriate content,” but then will then make a decision for release or not and distribution across your audience, which becomes frustrating when they don’t get it right.
You’re like, “Now I got to go back, I got to challenge it, I got to fight it.” You’re fighting the algorithm back in to relook at all your stuff, but it’s already made a decision, you cannot unlearn it. It becomes super challenging, I think, when we see that. There’s been a lot of discussion, though, about “The robots will take over,” the Terminator situation. Where are you seeing the integration of AI in both the kinetic and the non-kinetic parts of war fighting?
I think everyone’s seated on the kinetic side. That’s all the drone stuff, that’s autonomous weapons and stuff like that, which we really don’t do. For us, it’s all about the decision side of the house. The Intel analytics, campaign planning, and strategy, like understanding what’s going on the battlefield with the enemy, understanding the enemy’s strategy. I think one area that we’re seeing grow, and you’ve heard General Fenton talk about, is it’s also understanding not just the enemy, but also the environment.
What’s going on with the local populace? What are they talking about? What’s their state of mind? There’s a great quote from our community from the 1980s, Colonel John Waghelstein, who was the commander of the El Salvador advisors in the ‘80s. He said, “The critical terrain in an insurgency or counterinsurgency is the six inches of brain matter in between the populace’s ears.” Understanding the populace, I think, is going to be a huge thing moving forward. I don’t know if we’ve always done that well enough, but using huge data collection, artificial intelligence, some of the things that are out there, I think that’s going to move in a good direction for us.
You brought up this foreign ownership control or influence a few minutes ago. This is something that I think is
really important when we talk about what the next battlefield is. How do we define warfare? How do we define war? What does war look like today versus tomorrow, versus who our adversary is? In our conversations with the current SMA, with the 15th Sergeant Major of the Army, and daily with the congressman that we’ve had the opportunity earlier this year and late last year to sit down with, I’ve asked this question to a number of them.
To get their different perspectives on how do you define war? What is the next battlefield? I’ll pose that question to you because when we look at something like foreign control in the investments and in small businesses, I’m looking out behind you. After all, there’s a small business row over there. You’ve got foreign investors who are funding these things. When does that become a risk? When you look at the environment, you look around. How do you define warfare as we see it on the next battlefield?
As I said, I’m not a computer scientist. I study political science. In political science, as an undergraduate, we look at national power through the acronym of DIME, Diplomacy, Information, Military, and Economic. We’ve been solely focused on the past 35 or 40 years, almost entirely on the M in DIME. We do it really well.
We haven’t lost very many firefights in the past twenty years. However, we haven’t paid as much attention as a nation to the E, the Economics, or the I, Information. It’s ironic, too, Fran, like here you are doing a podcast, you’re on social media, you’re talking to all these people. In the past 15, 20 years, the information about the army has exploded. There are more channels, there are more apps out there for people to get their word out and to communicate across communities, but as US government has ignored that as a source of power and power projection.
At the same time, our adversaries have embraced it. The same way with economic power. As you said, foreign nations are making stealthy investments. They’re buying companies. They’re making subsidiary arrangements, and they’re hiding it all behind commercial activity, which is hard to uncover. I was thinking about this the other day. Do you remember the movie from the 1980s where the Soviet Union invaded the US? Red Dawn, do you remember that?
The Submarines.
No, no, no, no. That was the hunt for Red October. It was the hunt for Red October, Wolverines. There’s a scene in there where a high school professor or high school teacher is talking to his classroom, and as he’s talking to them, Soviet paratroopers start drifting down into the schoolyard, and he’s looking at it confused, he doesn’t realize what’s going on, and that’s the Soviet invasion.
Nowadays, foreign nations don’t have to parachute their troops in. They’re parachuting in ideas through social media and information areas. They’re parachuting in their influence in economic ways. For me, that’s the battlefield of the future. We’ve proven that we can hunt down and kill or capture almost anyone, but those other realms and our enemies know that. Those other realms, the economic realm and the informational realm, are where the future battles are going to happen. It’s happening right now, actually.
Foreign nations do not have to parachute their troops into enemy territory these days. They only have to spread ideas through social media and various economic means.
We were seeing it on social media. We’re seeing it in the media. To your point about how the media landscape has exploded, I think back to when I was an undergrad and my goal was to be a journalist. My goal was to be a network news correspondent. You had the three major networks, and then we have the cable news networks were becoming more and more mainstream.
Over the last twenty years, there’s been this explosion of mediums by which anybody can be a journalist. I don’t know if that says much for me now. Maybe I just got finished paying BU for my undergrad. I’m not going to figure out if it was worth it. That’s the reality of the situation is that everybody can get out there and say whatever they want. Relatively, get that narrative out. How do you think we’re doing as a country, maybe even as the DoD, in combating those false narratives and misinformation and identifying them?
I was at a conference, not this one, but a conference a couple of months ago, and someone asked General Fenton that question. Before he could answer, someone else on the screen said, “I think we’re on the stage. I think we’re about a C,” General Fenton said. “I think we’re on an F.” We’re not engaging in the narrative battle. We don’t even know what’s being said in the narrative battle. In local target audiences. We don’t know who the influencers are. We don’t know what their discussion points are.
When the US goes to a foreign country and does a military exercise, we have very little idea of what reflections are happening in that society and what they’re talking about. For all we know, the foreign nation is seeding malicious messages about why we’re there and what we’re doing and portraying us in horrible ways. The local populace isn’t seeing any contrast to that, so they believe it. The people who manipulate messages are very good at doing that. They’re feeding into previous fears. They’re feeding into previous incidents. They’re building on small truths to tell big lies. We’re not even in that space contesting it, because we don’t even know what’s happening.
How do you identify it, though?
That’s my question. First off, you have to have organizations that pay attention to that. This is not a hit on our brothers in the intelligence field. They have always relied upon top-secret exquisite information because that’s the best that the US could provide. In the Cold War, that was true. We needed that type of information to reach into the borders behind the Iron Curtain and find out what the Russians were doing. Do you want to know where the Russians are today? They’re on VK. You want to know where Hamas is? They’re on YouTube. We don’t necessarily need the national intelligence community to tell us where our enemies are.
They’re broadcasting it. “Here I am, Mom, crossing the border into Ukraine.” It’s on Facebook, it’s on YouTube, it’s on Reddit. There’s this vast array of unclassified open source information that we have to pay attention to, and we’re not paying enough attention to it. The reason why we’re not paying attention to it is that there’s too much of it, and people are overwhelmed. That’s why artificial intelligence is so important, because it helps sift through all of that information and get to the important contextual things that people need to know to make decisions, to build counter messages, to build supporting messages, to understand the operating environment.
This show, conference, trade show, whatever you want to call it, SOF Week, is designed to bring the private sector
into the spotlight of governments. Specifically, Special Operations Forces on a global scale, because we have partners and allies here from all over the world who are looking at the same stuff we are. SOF, SOCOM specifically, has done a very good job, especially over the last couple of years, of identifying what they’re good at and what they’re not good at.
Saying, “If we’re not good at it, we’ve got to go find somebody who is.” You’ve seen a real strengthening of the public-private partnership. You see that across the globe in a variety of both lethal and non-lethal capabilities. Why is it important that more broadly, the DoD, the US government, really began to strengthen that public-private partnership when we’re talking about innovation and technology advancement, versus doing the old NASA idea of like, ”We got to build it ourselves?”
I think the world has changed. 80 years ago, innovation came out of the government because they had the resources and innovation. The innovation and ecosystem of the United States wasn’t what it is now. Now you’re seeing all of the innovation is coming out of the small, innovative companies, industrial, what we call Silicon Valley, wherever you might be.
People’s garages.
It’s really hard for most of those people to engage with the government because the government has so many challenges in doing business with them. Any event like this that helps break those barriers down, that helps get technology in front of users, helps the technology providers understand the government’s process for evaluating and contracting technology, is really important. You have to break through those natural barriers that have been built over time, those bureaucratic barriers that have existed, and knock them down, and that happens here a lot.
Who determines what capabilities are out there that almost become like, “This is US only, versus this is something we’re going to market and allow to go out to our partners and allies?”
Congress passes a law, the international ITAR, International Trade Agreements. There are specific systems that Congress prohibits from being sold. We’re talking about specific types of airplanes or tanks or bombs, or munitions. Versions of them can be made for foreign export. When it comes to commercial stuff, like my company, which is a dual-use commercial government company, we sell commercial software. Anybody can buy our software.
I think the government is beginning to think more about whether they should have more control over that or not. Is artificial intelligence a general category of something that should have a governmental review of it, or not? Right now it doesn’t. We make a moral decision of where we want our software to work and who we do not want it to work for. For us, it’s an ethical decision, not a legal one. That’s how we look at it.
What’s a Crete doing in the corporate space?
It’s so fascinating. A Crete started as a commercial company. About seven years ago, they were bringing artificial intelligence to the finance world. in the finance world, everyone in the finance world is seeking alpha. First decision advantage. That’s about the speed of your information and understanding the context of it. One of the products that we’ve made for the government information operations space came from the commercial space. Within the recording music industry, if you can imagine those, there was a pressing need for artificial intelligence to help with the recording.
I am actually. Yes, because I got a buddy who actually is a Green Beret, just retired, who moved to Nashville, and he’s a talent. He’s a music artist’s representative. All I hear are the stories about how they got to go walk. They got to go to 80 bars and watch people perform. Maybe they don’t even find one.
It’s interesting because that’s the traditional model is you send your talent scouts to the cool bars in Nashville and LA, and Manhattan, and they see the bands. 40 years ago, they’re like, “Guns N’ Roses, that’s the band, sign them.” You sign them before they get too big, and that’s how the recording music label makes money. They develop that band, they make records, whatever. Now, the majority of music doesn’t get released by bands in bars. It gets released on SoundCloud, YouTube, and TikTok. There’s such a volume of it. 20,000 new songs and artists a week.
No talent scout can keep up with that. When they look at things online, it’s very hard to distinguish whether or not someone’s going to go viral or not. For instance, if I were a young artist and I wanted to make a name for myself, the first thing I would do I’d go hire a bot farm to give me 30,000 likes a week. Those aren’t authentic likes. If you have 30,000 likes, but they’re unauthentic, then you’re not going to go viral. You look at the opposite end of the spectrum, let’s say someone only has five followers, that cannot be good, five followers.
If those followers are Taylor Swift and Jay-Z, and Ed Sheeran, those are some pretty powerful followers, so they’re going to go viral eventually. We built this product to help talent scouts sort through the massive amount of information that was flooding them on a daily basis, make sense of what it meant contextually, and then make a business decision of, “This is someone that we think we should start looking at and determining whether or not we want a contract.” We took that technology and we started thinking about how the government could use it.
Part of my career has been a CT background. If you want to know where the next Salafist Jihadist preacher who’s going to lead an uprising in North Africa, if you want to know where he is, he’s on YouTube. That’s where you’re going to find him. You have to be able to understand what his following is, what his reach is. Is it authentic? Are people engaging with him in an authentic way? Is this someone we should pay attention to? That’s how we look at understanding target audiences now is it’s a growth from the recording music industry.
I’m thinking about your example of the next extremist leader, thinking about how even fifteen years ago, that was all manual process. When you didn’t have social media, you didn’t have YouTube, you didn’t have the ability to so rapidly get in front of so many more people. From a targeting standpoint, it was a lot easier to track down when they were holding meetings, when you have a mass of folks coming into Libya to go have one of these get to others to be radicalized.
We’re using specialized intelligence, signals intelligence, and we’re intercepting messages, and we’re trying to understand what’s going on. Now people are just doing it on their phones.
Where do you think it goes? There’s no limit. I think that there are a lot of things that are coming and happening so quickly every year, where we’re looking back going, “I didn’t even think about that.” It’s very hard to predict and say, “Where are we going to be in 5 or 10 years, or what’s the ceiling?” Congress is trying to identify that. I think even at the DoD level, they’re trying to identify that.
With this conversation about what the limits are that we put on AI, what are the left and right boundaries that are going to help dictate how we govern and regulate this space? Are there limits to this, and what are they? As Congress probably uses AI models to inform them on how they’re going to make decisions on this very topic, what are those decisions, and what are the left and right limits that need to be put in place from a regulatory standpoint?
I think a lot are still in flight, and I’m not sure exactly where they’re going to go. Our point of view on it is that the most important aspect of artificial intelligence moving forward has to be its explainability and I never want to put a person, an analyst, a non-commissioned officer in any organization in a position where they go to their boss and they say, “This is a bad company,” or “We need to do this.” Their boss says, “How do you know it?” “It’s because a Crete said so. The computer told me so.”
There has to be an explainability portion to it that says, “The machine learning algorithm came up with a recommendation, but here’s the basis of that recommendation. Here’s the data that it looked at.” Just like in college, when you had to do footnotes. “Here are all the footnotes. I’m not trying to hide my work from anybody.” As long as the artificial intelligence remains explainable, and people aren’t hiding behind this black box theory of “It’s too complicated, Fran, don’t worry your pretty little head about it, just do what we say,” I think that’s where it has to go. That’s where regulations are going to eventually go towards explainability.
You said a couple of minutes ago that you’re not an IT guy, you’re not a tech, you’re not an engineer. You’re a Green Beret, which in my mind means basically we live this every day. In my company, you can do anything. Talk for a minute about why you came into the Army in the first place and why you became a Green Beret.
I came into the Army in the mid-80s. It was a different world, the Cold War era. I remember very distinctly as a young kid reading a National Geographic magazine, and on the cover of it was a Green Beret captain in Vietnam who went through a ceremony to become a mountain yard. That was part of building an alliance between two different tribes. I was just fascinated by the idea of being a US soldier but working with a local populace in their language and in their culture. That’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to be a Green Beret from the moment I saw that article. I went to college, and I knew in college that I just wanted to be a Green Beret. I was a ROTC cadet, and knowing that I was going to graduate, knowing I couldn’t get into SF right away, I got in as fast as I could.
What’d you do first?
I was an infantry officer, I did a tour in the 82nd Airborne Division for two and a half years, and then I went to assessment and selection. I went to the Q course right after that. I was the first lieutenant in the Q course. I got there as fast as I could.
You went through your career in a time of monumental change. We’re here talking about technology, but you really span that era of being trained in the ‘80s by a Vietnam generation of special operators and leaders. By the time you fast-forward and get out of the military, we’re in the GWAT. We’re rapidly advancing, probably seemingly every day. If you go back and you think about the career that you had and you saw this technological advancement, what are some of the biggest innovations that you think really changed SOF over that time?
I remember as an ODA commander in seventh group when we got computers for the first time and we had printers and the printers were dot matrix printers and they had a roll of paper and on the edge of the paper was these holes that would fit into spindles that would push the paper through the printer and the way we decided to use them was for any type of paperwork we had to do with the S-1.
An award recommendation of 4187, and we would space out on the computer screen where the words would end up on the army form, and then we’d tape that army form to the paper that was going through the computer. That’s how I started with computers, and I literally remember, “What are we going to do with this thing? Who wants a computer?” Only to fast forward 15 or 20 years later, and we’re doing things like computer network operations.
Who even heard of that? When I was a captain, I never said to myself I want to be involved in any. Even as a senior officer in the army, I never said, “I cannot wait to be in an artificial intelligence company,” because no one saw that coming at the time. You ask that question, “What’s going to happen next?” I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I do know that in our community, there’s this ethos of being prepared for change and being able to take advantage of change as it happens.
That’s the important thing for us is we’re always going to be flexible. We always have that mentality of we’re going to think and figure things out. Deep thinkers who know how to use violence when necessary, but not just violent guys like deep thinkers. That’s always going to be one of the hallmarks of SF and the rest of the community, too.
I want to ask you about the transition. We spent a lot of time at Green Beret Foundation, really talking about
transition. Recently, over the last year or so have put a lot of emphasis on the next Ridgeline 2.0 program and developing really cohesive courses and classes that we could take, transitioning SF guys, put them in, them the skills to be able to go out there and succeed in the next chapter of their life.
Also, combining that with the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual side, that’s going to change when they come off the team, when they leave SF, and they go into the civilian workforce. I’m out nine years at this point, which is crazy because it feels like yesterday. One of the things that really frustrates me is that guys get out as Green Berets, and they spent this whole career, whatever it was, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, as part of a team.
With this group of like-minded individuals that whether they’re on an ODA or on a JSOC staff or the SOCOM staff, even the guys who work in the Pentagon are on a team. They’re there every day with these guys. They get out and they’re like, “I’m going to move to the middle of nowhere and I’m going to hunt and fish all day long.” Eventually, you hear stories about them in rehab for drugs or alcohol, or you hear stories about them taking their own life or getting divorced, or estranged from their family. I’m going to compare us now.
It’s important, I think, because we got the Navy SEAL Foundation over here. SEALs, I think, do a great job of bringing their guys in post-service, and they go into finance. I got a buddy, one of my best friends from undergrad at Boston University. We rode together at BU. He spent 25 years on SEAL Team 6, and now he’s working at Andreessen Horowitz as a consultant. I feel like your story and guys like you who did this long, multi-decade career and then said, “I’m not done yet. I’m not going to go off and do my own thing.”
You are really impactful for the community to understand that you have a next career. I started this, opened this block up with you was a Green Beret, you were a tech guy, but what being a Green Beret allows you to do in my mind, and I tell my team at FR6 this every day, is, “We cannot do everything, but we can do anything. We just got to figure out how.” Can you talk about your transition? How do you view the transition process? We, as Green Berets, bring to the next chapter of our lives?
I think first off, what a great topic. For our community, transition in some cases is a life-or-death situation. The amount of percentage of suicides that we have, the degree of PTSD that we have is horrendous. For me, transition is a way to combat that. I’ve been out seventeen years now, like that’s frightening. I learned a lot of things the hard way because there weren’t any transition services at that time. The Honor Foundation didn’t exist, the Green Beret Foundation didn’t exist. I mean, there were none. There was a tap that was horrible in my day when I went through it.
Even for me, that’s all there was.
I’ve learned some lessons a long way. I think the first lesson I learned is, the military and special forces, in particular, teach us and we learn inherently that you are what you do. That’s how you identify your self-worth and who you are. I see it when transitioning, I get to transition seminars and guys introduce themselves like, “I’m Bill Wall, I’m a Green Beret.” Like, “No, you’re not.”
The first step is to understand that if you drive your self-worth based on what you do, one day you’re going to wake up and you’re no longer going to do that from which you derive your self-worth, and you’re lost. That’s where guys get lost, because I’m no longer a Green Beret. My whole life, I wanted to be a Green Beret, and now I’m not a Green Beret anymore, and I’m lost, and I don’t have a sense of purpose, I don’t have a mission.
You have to get over that first step. There’s like three paths, I think. One path is, “Don’t change who you are. Embrace that. Be a Green Beret.” What can you do career-wise as a Green Beret? Go back to the schoolhouse and be an instructor. Go work for a company that has a contract supporting the community. Get involved in the Green Beret Foundation or any of the other charities out there. Hold on to that community. Keep all the stickers on the back of your pickup truck. Just own it and that’s who you are, and that’s fine.
I love seeing those stickers, by the way. I live in Connecticut, so they’re like rare. Every once in a while, I’ll see a pickup truck go by with like a Ranger tab or the SF unit patch, and I’m just like, “Hell yeah.”
There’s nothing wrong with keeping that. There is an additional path, though. The other path is to say, “I was a Green Beret, that’s a foundational part of who I am, but it’s not all that I am. I’m going to embrace a path of growth and learning. I’m not sure where it’s going to end up, but I’m going down a new path to figure out who I can be at my fullest measure of who I am.” That’s a scary path to go down for some people, because you have to learn new skills. You have to learn to self-reflect in a different way.
You have to understand that you’re not protected anymore in the way you were in the past. It was very simple in SF to know what your next jobs were going to be for the next ten years. You had a certain sense of value in who you are. Now you’re going into this strange corporate world where you have to figure out who you are. The other thing I would tell you is that the third path is, we have to realize what a privilege it is to get a sense of value and self-worth from our job, because a lot of people don’t have that.
I guarantee you, within 20 miles of here, there’s some guy unclogging a toilet, and his job as a plumber is not his personal self-aspiration. It just pays his bills. His self-worth comes from his church or his bowling league or his fantasy football league or his kids, or something else. Your self-worth and value don’t have to come from your job. If it does, great, embrace that. Maybe think about where else it comes from because we get so absorbed in being a Green Beret that we forget there’s a whole wide world out there.
Your self-worth and value do not have to come from your job.
As you said, that world can be super scary.
It can be.
I think it’s important too, and I want to talk about entrepreneurism for a minute. As a business founder, you know I’m living it now. People will say, some of the effects of like, “Being in Green Beret must have been the hardest thing you’ve ever done.” I’m like, “No man, that was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. The hardest thing I’ve ever done physically was being on the men’s rowing team in college.
Nothing’s been as hard as that ever was, and nothing ever will be, but emotionally, at times physically, mentally taxing is being an entrepreneur, is being a founder, is being a business owner.” I think that guys get out, and I was guilty of it. I see it every day, and they say, “My next job has to be the next twenty-year career because they’re committed. Commitment lives at the forefront, the foundation of everything we do.
They get scared by this because they get so nervous that their first job out of the military has to be this thing that is going to be so perfect in every realm, they’re never going to have to leave it. When the reality is that you have a lot of agency when you get out. You can go do whatever you want. What’s your advice to the person who’s sitting there saying, “It’s time to move on, time to move into the next chapter,” but is now scared about that first step?
I think the first thing I would tell him is, “Your first step doesn’t matter. Land anywhere.” When you parachute into a country, you just land where you land, and then you have to figure out where you’re going to go next. Same thing in business. Take any role, and do it and learn from it. What do you like, what don’t you like? My first role then when I got out of the military, I worked for a large company.
At a big IT infrastructure company and I learned a tremendous amount about how business is run. What good looks like in the business world. After a period of time, I began to realize that I wasn’t personally fulfilled there, because for me, personal fulfillment comes with being involved in change and transformation. I was not going to change this big multinational corporation, and if they were going to change, it wasn’t going to be by me.
If I wanted to do that, I needed to be involved in smaller, more startup-like companies. I started gravitating towards those companies, which is, it’s a different world. I had to go into different roles and learn what startup companies are like and what’s important, and build up the skill set to eventually get to the position that I’m at. It was a series of learning jobs, and interestingly enough, in seventeen years, I don’t know, I’ve had 8 or 9 jobs and 8 or 9 companies.
When I talk to people about transition, one of the things I say is “Transition isn’t a one-time event. You’re going to continually transition. You’re going to grow in your skills. You’re going to transition to new roles. You’re going to move to a new company.” I hope you don’t spend twenty years in one company. That sounds horribly boring, and it doesn’t sound like you’re growing to me, right? Maybe that’s good for some people, but I’d like the challenge of learning something new and then applying it in another place, and learning something new everywhere I go.
That’s 100% how I view it, too. I got out, and I worked at Bank of America. I knew day one, this wasn’t going to be for me.
That’s right.
I also knew I wasn’t going to quit. I wasn’t going to walk away. There was something to be learned. I knew that, however long that lasted there, I would be better at the end of it. Those relationships that I made were instrumental in starting this show when I met the CEO of Jersey Mike’s. When I started the show, three years later, I called him up and said, “Would you be a first guest?” He said, “Absolutely.”
Three months, four months after that, I was just calling him up to wish him Merry Christmas. He asked us what we needed. I said, “It’d be awesome if I had a sponsor.” He’s like, “You have a sponsor. I’ll send you a check today.” They did. They got us through the first two years of the show, which all comes down to jumping in and saying, “I don’t know if it’s not going to be forever. I’ve subsequently had multiple roles. When we look at entrepreneurship and then starting your own business, it’s totally different.
It is. I think something that guys have to think about is what their personal risk profile is. If you’re coming out of the military and you have three car loans and your house isn’t paid off and you have six kids that are getting ready to go to college, you’ve got a high financial risk. Maybe entrepreneurship is not the way to go, because 90% of startups fail. If your startup wins, if it’s successful, great.
You hit the lottery ticket, you’re good to go. If you’re in the 90%, you lose everything. Maybe start a little smaller, get your feet in the business world, start with an established company, learn what business is like, and then build your risk profile to the point that you can accept a little bit of risk in your personal, professional, and financial life. What’s really interesting is that we all have the skills to succeed in business.
We just don’t know it yet, and we don’t know how to explain it. When I first started in business, I was doing business development, and my job was to capture new business. Having spent many years in the JSOC community, I understand how to capture things. We have a methodology for that. Find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze. That was the methodology to hunt down Al-Qaeda and ISIS, and all those guys. That same methodology translates to the business world.
It’s different words, it’s different activities, but it’s the same phases. Instead of find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze, it’s identify and qualify and propose, and close. It takes different skills, but it’s the same thing. We have a plethora of knowledge and experience that is applicable to the business world. We just have to have some experiential learning to know how to translate that into a new language and a new way of doing things.
I always say, you don’t know what you don’t know. You have these inherent soft skills. What we have to do is get the experience and the hard skills so that we can actually apply them when you’re faced with the tough business challenges, which mostly come around oh managing the financials, the cashflow, understanding marketing, and understanding sales cycles. It’s like all those things can be taught.
The other thing is, I think guys have to be willing, as you talked about, number one, to understand the risk. Two, be ready to constantly evolve and change.
I always have in the back of my mind what you said, that most of these are going to fail. How do you not? I always think that you have to continue to do what Green Berets are great at, and that sees opportunity from challenge. Everything that comes your way cannot be no. It has to be how. If you continuously put that in the back of your mind and reiterate that to your team, reiterate that to yourself every morning when you wake up, that “Today’s not the day where we say no,” then I think the opportunities will come.
Again, you don’t know where those opportunities are going to take you because you have to have every conversation. If you have every conversation, you’re going to probably waste some time and get the big light bulbs go off, and you’re like, “It’s so awesome,” and you realize, “Maybe it’s not so awesome,” but then you have another conversation, which might be that thing that takes you to the next level.
For me, entrepreneurialism is a lot like when I ran the eighteen alpha course. We would do a training exercise for the students, and at the end of the exercise, they would always want to know, “What’s the answer? What’s the blue book solution?” I’m like, “I don’t know, you tell me what the answer is. There’s no answer here.” Entrepreneurialism, there’s no checklist. There are all sorts of things that you can learn from, but if you’re a checklist-driven person who needs to be told what to do to understand your job, then entrepreneurship is not the place for you.
Every day, I’m trying to ask myself, “Am I doing everything well that I know to do?” What I’m really thinking about is, “What am I not doing that I should be doing that I’m not thinking about?” That’s a different mentality as an entrepreneur to constantly be thinking about what I should be doing that I’m not doing. It fits our mentality well because Green Berets think like that.
That’s a conversation that I have with myself every day. It’s always at night. Kids go to bed, know, like wife goes to start watching TV and I’ll sit there in the kitchen or in my office and go, “I can go to bed, I can go watch TV, because I haven’t seen anybody in weeks, or there’s a list of things that I need to be doing to get to the place that I want to go.” You’ve got to weigh your risk-reward on what decision you’re going to make there in that moment. For me, I’m always thinking about that same thing.
No one’s going to tell you, no one’s going to hand you that list and say, “Here are the ten things you need to do today. You have to do it yourself.”
To me, it’s the drive, the adaptability, curiosity, those characteristics that we’re looking for.
The curiosity’s huge.
The ability to just continue to go get after it. Bounce back, I think, comes back to my mind. Running the 18 alpha course, you intentionally put guys in positions to fail to assess their bounce back. That’s entrepreneurism.
The other thing is you put them in undefined situations that don’t have clear, concrete answers. That’s the entrepreneurial world. There’s no blueprint for what’s going to be successful. You have to discover it every day as you keep figuring out where your business is going and what the right thing to do is to make it grow and be successful, and bring value to your customers.
What’s next for Accrete?
Our government business is about five years old. We’ve gotten significant traction, but we’re not a big company yet. We think we have amazing technology that has applications across several different domains and customer sets. I think for us, it’s just continuing to grow. It’s continuing to educate customers. One of the biggest challenges in innovation is Henry Ford’s famous quote.
Do Henry Ford’s quote? Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” because they couldn’t comprehend an automobile. For us, there’s a lot of education with customers about what the art of the possible is, what you could be doing, not what you are doing, but what you could be doing.
Technology and innovation are transformational, and transformation is about a journey. I’m on a journey with my company to transform the way customers do things, to use artificial intelligence to make them better at their core mission. That’s a never-ending job, I can do that forever. There will always be transformational needs. Technology AI capabilities will continue to advance.
We’ll find more and more places where it makes sense to use them, and we’ll find more and more places where it brings value to customers to get to their end mission, which supports the SOCOM community. There could be no higher mission. It’s an honor and a privilege to support all of our organizations, much less the ones we came out of, because they’ve got hard missions. Having been there, I know what those guys are struggling with, and they just want a little bit of help. That’s for us, where we think we’re going.
It’s a busy week. We’re getting you on your way here at the Tampa Convention Center. You guys are doing
awesome work. We appreciate your leadership, both at Crete and what you’re doing now, and your time in service leading the rest of us. A young Green Beret is coming up behind you. But you really set the foundation for so many of us to follow in a great path, and I really enjoyed looking up to you and all of those who served with you a few years ahead of me, and thank you for charting that course.
Fran, like everyone else, I stand on the shoulders of giants that went before me. I learned so much. In those early years, the guys who were in Special Forces were guys who all had foreign names, who had all come into the community through special programs that were set up to pull people out of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain.
Jakovenko and Ivan Ivanov, and Schoenhaus, and being around those people and learning the values that they pass down to us to
be involved in making your units better and transforming them for the future carries on. It’s an honor to support the company, and not just that, but to continue to support the community as people transition out. We haven’t always done that really well. We’ve got a commitment, me personally and as a company, to support that transition process also. The next mission is out there. It might not be with a Green Beret on, but it’s out there.
Whatever we can do to help, we’re here.
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much.
Thanks.
Green Beret Foundation
P.O. Box 25138
New York, NY 10087-5138
Note: Please use USPS mail or priority mail. Do not use FedEx.
Green Beret Foundation
10205 US Hwy 15-501, Unit 26-8
Southern Pines, NC 28387-4301
Call: at: (844) 287-7133
