Americans are valuable commodities. America’s adversaries know it and too often, when given the opportunity, our enemies kidnap, arrest and hold hostage Americans in an effort to get what they want.
The United States Government maintains robust diplomatic and military programs to bring Americans home; but the process is often slow and bureaucratic. Bryan Stern isn’t waiting around for permission to act. He’s the founder of Grey Bull Rescue, a nonprofit that specializes in pulling people out of the worst situations on Earth including conflict zones, collapsed governments, and failed evacuations where no one else is coming. Since its founding, Grey Bull has led over 700 missions in more than 70 countries, rescuing thousands of Americans and allies left behind.
From SOF Week 2025 Fran Racioppi sat down with Bryan to talk about what it means to lead through chaos. They broke down the rescue of 117 Americans from Afghanistan in 2021, how Grey Bull makes life-and-death decisions with limited information, and why Bryan believes the phrase “No American Left Behind” isn’t negotiable; for the government or its citizens.
We also discussed the future of rescue operations. As global instability increases and our enemies get smarter, the need for fast, precise, off-grid capability is only going up. Grey Bull is filling a gap where the government can’t move fast enough and showing what’s possible when the mission comes first.
This episode is about courage, clarity, and acting when no one else can. Because leadership under pressure means getting the job done, no matter how impossible it looks.
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.
The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are an official program of The Green Beret Foundation.
The opinions presented on The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are the opinions of my guests and myself. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Green Beret Foundation and the Green Beret Foundation assumes no liability for their accuracy, nor does the Green Beret Foundation endorse any political candidate or any political party.
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Americans are valuable commodities. America’s adversaries know it. Too often, when given the opportunity, our enemies kidnap, arrest, and hold hostage Americans in an effort to get what they want. The United States government has robust diplomatic and military programs to bring Americans home, but the process is often slow and bureaucratic. Bryan Stern isn’t waiting around for permission to act. He’s the founder of Grey Bull Rescue, a non-profit that specializes in pulling people out of the worst situations on earth, conflict zones, collapsed governments, and failed evacuations where no one else is coming.
Since its founding, Grey Bull has led over 700 missions in more than 70 countries, rescuing thousands of Americans and allies left behind. From SOF Week 2025, I sat down with Bryan to talk about what it means to lead through chaos. We broke down the rescue of 117 Americans from Afghanistan in 2021, how Grey Bull makes life and death decisions with limited information, and why Bryan believes the phrase “No American left behind isn’t negotiable for the government or its citizens.” We also discussed the future of rescue operations.
As global instability increases, our enemies are getting smarter. The need for fast, precise, off-grid capability is only going up. Grey Bull is filling a gap where government can’t move fast enough and showing what’s possible when the mission comes first. This episode is about courage, clarity, and acting when no one else will, because leadership under pressure means getting the job done, no matter how impossible it may seem.
The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by the University of Health and Performance, providing our veterans with world-class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs. Our SOF Week 2025 series is made possible in part by Accrete AI, solving businesses’ 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 you why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.
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Bryan, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
It was SOF Week 2025. There’s only going to be 19,000 people coming through this place. That’s what it was in 2024. We had Stu Bradin. He said they’re expecting 24,000, but they’re outfitting SOF for the next generation right over here on the other side of this wall.
Thank goodness, because I was nervous.
We appreciate you taking a few minutes, coming in, and sitting down with us because we are going to talk about wrongful detention. We’re going to talk about hostages. We’re going to talk about your work at Grey Bull. This is something that, for me, I don’t think I ever set out for it to be something that was near and dear to my heart, but it is. I work very closely with Hostage US, and over the last several years, I have gotten to know you and your efforts.
We had the opportunity to have several folks who have been wrongful detainees and political prisoners. Hostages of terrorist organizations have come on the show, like Michael Scott Moore, Jessica Buchanan, and Jose Pereira. They have all come on and told their stories. We had the chance to sit down with the former Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, Roger Carstens, a former Green Beret. We got to talk to him and go through his experience over the last several years, from the strategic level of what it takes when the country says, from a national security strategy, “We’ve got to go recover these people.”
You’re on the other end of that. You’re working from the ground up at the tactical level. I thought it was a great opportunity, as we’ve been talking about in the last couple of months of putting this together, to start looking at that division and that divide. How do you, in Grey Bull, support the national strategy when you’re not a government organization?
How do we juxtapose that with Roger being a presidentially appointed official who has to go out and execute diplomatic policy? We’re going to get into it all, but we have to start. Let’s talk about Grey Bull. Let’s talk about why you think this world of wrongful detention, political imprisonment, and hostage taking is such an important aspect of your work and why we can’t lose focus.
Roger is an awesome guy and a good friend. We’ve had a love-hate relationship forever, but he is a rock star. I’m his biggest fan. It’s wrong to say that there’s a divide. There isn’t a divide. I like to think that we all work together because at the end of the day, whether you’re in the SBI’s office, the FBI, JSOC, ninja places, agencies, whatever it is, or at Grey Bull, I like to think that we are all Americans who believe in the right thing and we’re all doing the right thing even if there’s friction and tension sometimes, and there is. It happens. It’s part of it.
The Army-Navy game is a tradition based on tension, rivalry, who is better, who is worse, and all those things, but there isn’t a divide. We very often get frustrated with policy sometimes, but never at the people who are trying to execute those policies. Grey Bull Rescue is simple. We do two things well. We do rescues and evacuations, and they’re very different. The real big difference is the threat to the person that we are rescuing.
If you’re driving on the road, blow a tire, and are in the middle of the desert, you’re in a bad spot, but you’re pretty much okay. What you need is an awesome Uber. You’re in a bad spot. If you don’t get out of there, you’re going to be hurt, dead, or whatever. At the end of the day, you as a human are okay. If I then take you, stick you in that car, and set it on fire, that’s a rescue. The threat paradigm changes. We do a lot of both. We talk about people held. We talk about people being hunted, which we do a lot of. Our focus at Grey Bull Rescue is very simple.
Our mission is to rescue Americans and allies from denied areas, war zones, and natural disasters, wherever the government is not. Why the government isn’t there, I don’t care. More importantly, if you’re the person that we’re rescuing, you don’t care either. What you know is you’re in a bad spot and you don’t want to be there anymore. You don’t care if Roger comes to get you, if Grey Bull Rescue comes to get you, or the Ladies Auxiliary of the VFW comes to get you. You do not care. What you know is you’re in a bad spot and you don’t want to be there anymore. My team and I have done 729 missions. That turns into 7,128 people since August 2021. The numbers are quite staggering.
You’re talking about 7,000 people in four years.
Correct. Some of those, I’ll give you a good example. We did 293 in one day. You see Governor DeSantis at DeSantis Airlines from Israel? There’s a fat guy who looks like me. He’s a big fat guy in a Mets hat coming off the plane. Governor DeSantis was a partner of ours, and he paid for the aircraft. When October 7th happened, my team and I blew out right away. We knew the airspace was going to close. We didn’t know exactly how bad the scope of October 7th would be, but we knew it was bad enough. We knew Americans were going to be in trouble. We knew it was going to get complicated.
It was a trigger for us, so we launched. The first thing we did was get on the ground in Israel. We also started doing things in Gaza, knowing that Gaza was going to be a problem. Fast forward, months later, we got five American hostages out of Gaza because we were two steps ahead. We did 293 in one day, right after October 7th. That was an evacuation. We did a rescue subsequent to that inside Gaza. One theater, one real conflict with two of our flavors, if that makes sense.
How do you prioritize what you want to go after? There’s a whole range of these things. You have hostages who were taken primarily by terrorist organizations. You have wrongful detainees who were normally taken by nation-states. You have political imprisonment, which is normally done by nation-states and governments because they want some negotiation with the US government versus a terrorist organization, which may want money. They may want recognition. There are a number of different things that might drive that. How do you go through your assessment process to say, “This is what we’re going to get involved in, and this is what we’re not?”
We’re very sensitive to biting off more than we can chew.
It is because you’re an independent organization. You don’t have the ass of this behind us.
I answer to two people and two people only, God and the families of the people we’re trying to rescue. That’s it. We don’t break laws. We don’t need to break laws. The reality is bureaucracy doesn’t bleed. People do. We’re very sensitive to committing to something that we can’t do. Because of that, we have a 100% success rate because we don’t do things that we can’t do. It’s a good stat, but an unfair stat at the same time. It’s cooking the books.
For us to initiate an operation, for us to start the game, I need three things. I need a requirement. I need some poor guy or poor girl who is in a bad spot somewhere, or a situation where I can say, “Probably, there will be one.” That’s October 7th. When we deployed, we didn’t have a single name of who we were going to rescue, but we knew that they would be there. I need my crew, my team. I need a team that can operate in that operating environment, whether that’s Russia, whether that’s Gaza, whether that’s Israel, or whether that’s a hurricane. The operating environment will dictate what we need, like the equipment, the comms, tradecraft, and all those things.
The third thing is funding. We’re entirely donor-funded, which sucks. I’ve been military, I’ve been a government civilian, I’ve been a contractor, I’ve been in private business, and now I’m a non-profit. Being a non-profit is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. To people who have successful non-profits, I don’t know how you do it. I have no PTSD from my career, but I tell you what, I have nightmares from non-profit stuff.
We need those three things to be green on my decision-making board for me to go, “We’ve got game. Let’s go.” Very often, we launch without the appropriate funding. We try, shake, bake, and make it happen. It’s difficult because, again, from a planning perspective, we have 729 missions. I have never successfully executed my plan A. Not once. It’s a fundamental difference in philosophies. When an ODA goes to do an operation, wherever it will be doesn’t matter. You’re going to do a DA, you’re going to do an SR thing, or whatever it is, you know what you’re going to do. You build contingency in for that just in the event of. I deploy knowing that the first idea I have, I know will fail for sure.
We rescued a kid from Russia, Kirillo Alexandrov, who is actually here at SOF Week. He is the first American victim of war crimes alive since World War II, arrested by the Russians, falsely charged with eleven counts of espionage, held by the Russians, and tortured by the Russians, the whole nine yards. His case led to the first indictments of war crimes in the history of the United States of America on the Justice.gov website. That’s him. If you google Russia war crimes, FBI, or whatever, it’ll come right up.
Attorney General Garland and the Director of the FBI announced it several years ago. When we did that operation, what actually worked was Plan Kilo. I went through A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and the reason why he’s alive is because of Plan K. Imagine if it were a Green Beret. “Sir, don’t worry. I’m on my Plan K. Everything is going well.” It doesn’t work that way. We don’t have that problem because we don’t answer to anybody. I’m not an O-5 trying to make O-6. I’m not a GS-13 trying to get my bonus. We don’t have that. We’re 128 people strong. No one is paid. I have two paid employees.
Everyone else is a volunteer.
Correct. “Why?” is the question. Why go to Haiti, hang off a helicopter, maybe get shot down, captured by the Haitian gangs, and barbecued and eaten by cannibals? Why do you do it? It is for the same reason that we all do it, and for the same reason that you do this podcast. It is because you believe in service. You believe in the country. You’re a service member. Our oath when we joined didn’t have an expiration date on it.
My passport says United States of America on it. That means there’s fine print on the picture page. You can’t see it. It’s right under the signature that says if you’ve got something that looks like this, someone will come for you. You have to look hard to see it. That’s what it says. If the government can’t do it for whatever the reasons are, honestly, I don’t care if it’s a policy thing, a money thing, a resource, or whatever. There are optics issues. There are political issues and all those things. That’s all great. That’s where we come in. We’re the last resort. We are never the first option. When we did the 293 people from Israel, I debriefed them personally. Every single one of them called someone else for help. “We’re told no.” You call me, I say yes. That’s the difference.
If the government can’t do it—for whatever reason, whether it’s policy, funding, or resources—that’s when we step in. We’re the last resort, never the first option.
Talk about the relationship that you have with the government entities.
We have a good relationship, depending on where. If the government me was being briefed by nonprofit me, as government me, I’d be reticent. I’d be at least skeptical. We get a lot of that. That said, nothing we do is classified. If you google Grey Bull Rescue and you google Bryan Stern, you get 800 pages of Google Now, front page of The Moscow Times. No kidding. Front page of The New York Times. No kidding. It depends on where.
We’re not part of their calculus. We’re a challenge sometimes for them. At the same time, the people who get it use us as a resource very often. We have dozens of cases that are referred to us by the FBI, by the State Department, and by different agencies, all kinds of things. We transmit up without any expectation of getting anything down. Especially, what we do is our denied area stuff. We’re working with Russian-occupied Ukraine, 100, 200, or 300 miles behind enemy lines, doing things. I don’t want to be in the way. If ninjas are going to come and do a thing, I don’t want to be there.
I’m not trying to be in the way. I’m trying to help. So far, they’ve never said, “Don’t.” We’ve had a little bit of friction with deconfliction and some of those things, but no one has ever said, “Bryan, you need to walk away from this.” That has never happened. In fact, we’ve had quite the opposite. We’ve had more of, “On behalf of my official role, I’m telling you that we can’t support you. Privately, bro to bro, go get them. Wish you the best of luck, man. God bless you and your team.”
At the action officer level, we have awesome connectivity. At the very senior level, General Fenton knows us. My board is awesome. My board is Vice Admiral Pybus, Major General Linder, and Major General Clark Droopy. Mike Durant is on our board. We have some real powerhouse people, also not paid. They’re with us because we’re good, not because we suck. Because of that, we have credibility and excellent past performance that has happened. How many rescues has WARCOM or USASOC done in 2025? That’s okay.
We can’t talk about it. We’re at SOF Week.
That’s okay. There are lots of reasons for that.
The restrictions are different.
Those reasons are usually very valid. I’m not picking on them. The reality is that I can go anywhere I damn well please. That is not the case if you’re the government. It’s just not. I can go sit with anyone I want. I was invited to Abu Nasrallah’s funeral. He was the leader of Hezbollah whom the Israelis detonated. I got invited to his funeral. He’s like the Osama Bin Laden of the Shia world. Imagine if you were an agency case officer and were invited to Abu Nasrallah’s funeral, and you wanted to go target some people in Lebanon, you’d be told no. Even if he got the access, you would be told no. That’s not the case officer’s fault. That’s not the CIA’s fault. There are a lot of good reasons for that.
Let’s talk about how you get into this. You came into the Army. You served in the infantry.
I started as an infantry guy for a minute and a half.
The infantry was awesome. I was an infantry officer. I loved it.
I came in the ’90s. Bill Clinton is the President. At Charlie 2-58 at Sand Hill, if your drill sergeant had a combat patch, it was a big deal.
They were a Vietnam vet.
Desert Storm. They might get a Bosnia guy, maybe. I had a drill sergeant who had a CIB. As a private, it was like, “Yes, that’s right. My drill sergeant has got a CIB. What does your douchebag have? Nothing. You got the Pathfinder Badge. How adorable. My guy has got a CIB.” It was those fun years. I don’t come from a military family at all. My grandparents’ brothers were in World War Two, I guess. I didn’t know them. I had no real military influence. My father was a lawyer and a judge. My uncles are dentists and stuff. My mother was in fashion and finance. I was supposed to be an architect or a lawyer.
All from Queens.
The high school I went to has three distinguished alumni. They are Donald Trump, John Gotti Jr., and me. We’re the only three that ever made anything of ourselves. All from Queens.
Not a bad group.
We’re remarkably similar. We’ve all been shot at. We are remarkably similar in uncomfortable ways. I got recruited into counterintelligence. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. CI is a passion of mine. I’m a very proud CI guy. There are two kinds of CI guys. I’m the fun kind. I had this awesome run. I was working in New York on 9/11.
You were a first responder on 9/11.
Yes. Hard to talk about this environment, but I was working in New York. I was an E-4 in New York, Specialist Bryan Stern. Type one each. I was getting out. There was nothing going on. I was getting out. I was doing my thing. When 9/11 happened and Tower Two got hit, I was at the base. I was at the exit hall of Tower Two. I was right under that. All the debris and all that stuff fell right on top of us in the plaza. I’ve been at war pretty much ever since Tower Two got hit.
I was in both collapses, which is a nice way of saying I’m a moron because I went the wrong direction. They fell in reverse order. Tower One got hit, then Tower Two, but Tower Two fell first. When Tower Two fell, I went the wrong way. Tower One fell. I was in the wrong spot. It sucked. Ever since then, I’m on gravy time. I live every day like it’s September 12th. 9/11 is a very important part of who we are and what we are. It truly led to our journey in this game.
During our withdrawal from Afghanistan, August 2021, almost twenty years later, I was preparing for my speech for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, which was a few weeks later. I’m working on my speech, which is a very emotional thing for me. I lost friends on the morning of 9/11. My city was ruined on the morning of 9/11. This was twenty years later. I’ve been to a lot of wars and lost a lot of friends in war since 9/11.
I’m watching the fall of Afghanistan on TV. That sucks. I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. I lost a lot of friends in Afghanistan, too, as we all have. It is all that stuff. I’m going through two very emotional experiences. I’m watching TV, watching this terrible thing. I’m working on my speech at the same time. I’m sitting in my living room here in Tampa. It’s breaking news on TV. It’s the imagery of the C-17 taking off and the Afghans falling from the wheels.
I said to myself, “What planet am I on?” Twenty years later, almost to the day, the Taliban are back in charge. We’re getting our asses kicked on TV. People are jumping to their deaths as a better play of staying where they’re at, caused by some of the same people. It is twenty years later, almost to the day. I said, “It is not happening. I can’t do it.” I was in the private sector making tons of money. I had clients doing consulting.
I worked on a movie, Mile 22, the worst movie ever made. We kill a lot of people in the movies, so that’s cool. TTPs are severely lacking, and all kinds of dumb stuff. I was out. This part of my life was behind me. I was done with this part of my life. I never thought I’d think about Afghanistan again. I never thought I’d be going to Afghanistan ever again. This part of going to sandy places, getting diarrhea, and taking Cipro was behind me. I couldn’t watch it on TV. I couldn’t just sit there. I know how to do infills. I know how to do exfills. As an SF dude, probably, you’ve never chartered a plane before in your life. In my career, I’ve done many.
I was General Linder’s aide. I do know how to charter.
You know how to fly like Von Dovey because General Linder is the dapper Green Beret.
That was before he actually went off and ran an aviation company. Maybe that was the precursor. We must have spoiled him.
Once you fly private, you never want to go back. Once you shoot with a red dot, it’s hard to go back. Yes, that’s what happened. I got some guys together, and I looked at it as a dude’s trip, one last blast. Let’s get the band back together. Governor Atta in the north is a friend, I would call him. We have lots of relationships. I’ve worked all these borders. I’ve been to Sher Khan Bandar a million times. I’ve been to Termez a million times. I know this region with the back of our hand. I know these streets well. After twenty years of working in this region, I know the area and the people. We’ve got friends. I was like, “We’ll go for wo or three weeks.” I got a couple of guys together. Matt Herring from UDC USA, a great company. He has an awesome company that does everything with munitions. They buy, sell, and broker munitions. They also manufacture. They do R&D for propellant and stuff. It is a cool company, not military.
He packs his bags and comes with me and a couple of other guys. We go. We fly to Uzbekistan. We get to the border, and we are working. They were like, “We’re busy. We have jobs. We have companies. We have stuff.” My pitch to them was, “It’ll be a few weeks. I have to be back for my keynote in New York. I got to give a speech. This is going to come and go. We’ll do our part. We won’t watch it on TV. We’ll help out where we can.”
That was a few years ago. Since then, we’ve done Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, Maui wildfires, fires in California, Hurricane Ian, Hurricane Milton, Hurricane Helene, and Idalia. I’m missing one. There’s one more in there. That turns into 729 missions. We’ve grown. We’ve changed. We pivoted from one. We had one nonprofit that everybody left. We have a new nonprofit that’s Grey Bull. All those things, same characters, same mission, new name.
It has been the most amazing experience of my career. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I’ve worked in all the cool places with all the cool people, all the cool units, units that don’t have names, squadrons that are cool, the cool troops, the cool squadrons, the cool commands, and all those things, agencies, and stuff. I had an awesome run. I’m all over the place. We’re proliferation stuff, which is an awesome career. It pales in comparison in every aspect, from a leadership perspective, from a contribution, and from an impact perspective.
There were 7,128 lives saved. Everyone has a mommy. Everyone has a daddy. Everyone has a brother, a sister, a dog, and a cat. Our impact is 9X or 10X. It’s truly that there is nothing I will ever do again. This is it. I’m having way too much fun. There’s way too much need. We came back from Haiti, rescuing Americans there. We’ve got operations going on in every COCOM. We are global. I’m in every COCOM. We’re like nonprofit JSOC. It’s crazy. Sorry, Admiral Bradley, who’s my old boss. I didn’t mean it like that. JSOC is awesome. We all know. We’re a global operational element funded entirely by donor money, which is remarkable. We don’t have any big donors. We don’t have any whales. We’re grassroots, mostly veterans.
You look across the world. We have about 200 Americans who are taken every year. In addition, the Human Rights Council, if I have that correct, estimates that there are 1.1 million or 1.3 million people globally who are wrongfully detained from all nationalities. That’s an absolutely incredible number on both of those scales. One American is too many, let alone 200.
There are different circumstances with everything. The reality is that if your passport looks like my passport, as an American, we move heaven and earth to get you back. Roger got a lot of criticism. Roger got these hostages out on a thing. I don’t want to talk too deeply about it, but Roger and President Biden at the time got a lot of flak. They did a deal to get an American out that was not equitable. The message was that it was an unfair deal. It’s always an unfair deal.
It’s an unfair event.
No one wakes up and says, “I hope to be unlawfully detained.” Once you are unlawfully detained, everything about that entire thing sucks. There’s no good at the end. Even when you come home, it’s still bad. The trauma that happens in captivity, what Kirillo, Terry Gately, Robert Platt, and the guys that we’ve gotten out, what they will tell you is that they are scarred for life. It’s almost like losing arms and legs. They’re forever changed. It’s more than PTSD.
Kirillo, for about two years, would get squeamish about looking at someone in a uniform, like a rent-a-cop or a fireman. It doesn’t matter. Anyone in a uniform triggered him because the people who tortured him were all wearing uniforms. He associated that and all kinds of weird things like that. If you’re an American and you’re unlawfully detained, I don’t care if we do a bad deal or not. You hope for the best deal possible, but the answer is to bring them home. If we have to bend over a little bit, okay.
Just because we do a bad deal does not mean we’re not the greatest country on earth. There’s a reason why half of Guatemala is trying to move to America. It’s not because we suck. It’s because we’re awesome. If we have to do an unfair deal to get our people back, so be it. We have plenty of money. We have plenty of resources. The people who screw us over, generally speaking, at some point, pay for it later. We’re not forgetful that way.
If we have to make an unfair deal to get our people back, so be it. We have plenty of money and resources, and the people who screw us over generally pay for it later.
You see that with the Israelis, too. They’re operating somewhere around 100 or 200. Was it 25? The number of Palestinians that they were releasing for one Israeli hostage was a huge number. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.
Gaza is not the best situation. If you take a step back from a mindset perspective, whether you like Israel or not, their entire strategy, their whole thing, fits on a 3×5 index card. It says, “The pain will stop when you give us our people back. Over to you.” Bottom line is, “You’ve got AKs, and I’ve got an Air Force. This is going to hurt your people significantly more than it’s going to hurt mine. I want my people back. I will do whatever it is I need to do to make that happen. Even if it means I’m unfair, even if it means I’m disproportionate, and even if it means I turn your entire area into a pile of rubble, I will do what needs to be done to get my people back.”
While I don’t agree with all of it, I do agree with the mindset. I agree with that completely as a guy who volunteers and doesn’t get paid. I was hanging off a helicopter in Haiti to rescue two kids from Nebraska and California. My team and I will do what needs to be done to get our people out. If that means we have to cause some trouble, I guess that’s what’s going to have to happen. If it means that we have to put ourselves at risk, I guess that’s what’s going to have to happen. If we have to put the bad guys at risk, I guess that’s what’s needed. Hopefully, we can all get along. We’re a rescue team. We’re not assassins. We’re not trying to get into a gun fight at all. We haven’t lost a single person on my team. In 728 missions, there is not a scratch.
We see these things in a variety of different ways. We’ve seen Jessica Buchanan rescued by SEAL Team Six. We’ve seen Michael Scott Moore be released for a couple of million dollars. We saw Brittney Griner and Evan Gershkovich released from Russian prison and Russians who were imprisoned in the US for various crimes, and in Germany, too. We’ve seen a number of different ways these things can end. How many of the events that you’re participating in ended in a negotiation? How many ended in a ransom payment? How many ended with you running in and grabbing somebody? They’re all different.
To answer your question, we have never successfully negotiated with anyone. Having said that, the reason is that I don’t have Russian prisoners hiding in my basement in Tampa.
You don’t have anything to give them.
In the world of leverage, I come to the party completely unprepared.
I will do whatever needs to be done to get my people back. While I don’t agree with all of it, I do agree with the mindset—completely.
You’re like, “I can owe beer and whiskey.”
At the same time, we bring our wasta. Very often, we’re the only Americans there. Almost always, we’re the only gringos running around. We’re able to say, “You could talk to me, or you could talk to DEVGRU. I’m nicer. I promise. You do not want to talk to Red Squadron. I promise you. It will be self-correcting, and it will not end well for you. Let’s figure out a way to work together on this thing.” The reality is that I can’t call Red Squadron from DEVGRU. I couldn’t. I don’t have that, but often, they don’t know that.
The way we work looks more like Ocean’s Eleven. It’s more like a magic trick. Kirillo, the kid who’s here, the war crime from Detroit, was held about 250 miles behind enemy lines by the Russian FSB and the DNR, which is a subgroup of the Russian forces, tortured and everything. We went through 50-something checkpoints without a single piece of paper. They still have his passport. They still have his underwear. He was not released. The Russians don’t know how we did it. They don’t know. It’s a magic trick.
It’s like David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear in front of 3,000 people. Three thousand people saw the Statue of Liberty disappear. They’ll pass a polygraph. They saw it. They heard it. They were right there. Right in front of their very eyes, the Statue of Liberty disappeared. Probably, he didn’t actually make the Statue of Liberty disappear. For us, we’re only operational. We try and negotiate always. The reality is that we don’t have much.
We use tradecraft and deception. We do a lot of military deception. We do a lot of false flag operations. We do a lot of recruiting sources and getting people to do things that they’re not predisposed to do, not realizing that they’re doing it. We’re an operational element. I wish I could negotiate. I’d be happy to. I probably have better contacts in many of these bad-guy organizations than the government does because of who we are, what we do, and where we work. We’ve always tried, but always failed in negotiation.
As you look forward into the next couple of years, we sit here at SOF Week. We talk a lot about innovation. We talk a lot about technological advancement. We’ve heard from General Fenton at the SOCOM level. We’ve heard the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, and everybody talk about the importance of investing in technologies that are going to be foundational to the next fight. How do you view the next battlefield? Where do you see these types of activities? At the end of the day, it’s the SOF truth. Number one, people are more important than hardware. You’re in the people business. The hardware is great. Where are you fitting into that next battlefield?
The Role Of “Old School” Tactics In Contested AreasIn all the places that General Fenton, who’s a friend, is worried about, talking about, concerned about, and making decisions based on those AORs, those specific countries, and all these things, generally speaking, we’re either operational there, have been, or could be. The question is how. How is that possible? I’ll tell you, because our TTPs are from the Jedburghs. We’re two-man teams, three-man teams, single-man teams of big packages for us, and for our nasty stuff, four dudes. If you can’t fit in the car, we’re one vehicle deep. Just like the Jeds, dudes are parachuting to occupied France in a suit and tie with a bag of cash, some radio crystals, a knife, and a .45. “Good luck, laddie.”
We’re here to help.
Go make friends. Find Germans. Kill them. We do the same thing, except it’s go in, find Americans, and save them. The TTPs are the same. The only thing that has changed is that things like communications have gotten better, GPS, and that kind of stuff. The TTPs on the street have not changed. When we talk about technology, technology is great. For denied areas where we like to hang out and contested areas, technology is a double-edged sword.
It’s why I wear a Rolex. You won’t find me with an altimeter, “I’m a part of the Big Watch Club.” I was never cool enough. I’m not that guy. I’m a CI guy. I’m a team guy or SF dude. I didn’t qualify for the Big Watch. It’s important to understand that old-school tactics still work. Everyone I know still runs a two-point sling. There was that single-point sling fad that came and went. There was a three-point sling.
It never worked.
The secret to the three-point sling is that it doesn’t work. The secret to the single-point sling is that it’s annoying. The two-point sling has been around since the Revolutionary War because it works. Our TTPs and our tactics that we employ in these denied areas, in these contested areas, are small teams, which is what SOF is going to need to do. You can be incredibly effective if you’re a little creative and a little innovative, and then use technology where it’s appropriate. Some of the technology is bad, but I can’t carry a 30-pound drone quadcopter thing across the border from Poland into Ukraine, and then go to Zaporizhia, take a boat into the river, and now I’m in the occupied area. Why would I bring a backpack drone thing? I wear Adidas and a bag of cash. It’s easier. I wear a tracksuit.
It’s different tools.
It’s different instincts. Technology is great. Here at SOF Week, it’s important not to think about everything like we’re still in Jalalabad. I’m seeing a lot of that with a lot of these vendors, like, “Here’s my giant Gucci thing that requires all this infrastructure to make my Gucci thing work.” We’re never going to have FOBs again. We’re not. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a floating something. Other than that, we’re never going to have that stuff. We’re just not.
How do you know? Ask the Ukrainians. They’ll tell you all about it. Ask the Israelis. They’ll tell you all about it. Israel has logistics problems going from Israel to Gaza. Gaza is 20 miles by 7. It’s smaller than Tampa. Even in there, they struggle with logistics. The other people you can ask are the Russians. They have big-time logistics problems. It is hard to get stuff from Moscow to Zaporizhia. That’s a whole pain in the neck.
Technology is awesome, but it needs to be the right stuff. It has to be based on what we think we will need for this fight and understanding that fight. You know what I don’t see out here? There’s this great company that makes this little dashboard thing that you can do secret writing on. You write on it, you push a button, and it erases itself. I use this thing religiously. It’s $8 on Amazon. I forgot the name of it. It looks like an iPad. You write on this thing, and you push the button. It erases itself. It’s $8. It is the best piece of kit in my gear bag, overwhelmingly, because if I’m taking notes and I see a guy stop me, I push a button. I’m clean, and you can’t recover it. There’s no onboard cash.
My son has one of those. It’s a little pad. It’s like a modern Etch A Sketch. You hit a button, and it’s gone.
I can take notes. I can write down my plates. I can do for SDRs and stuff, and trade all the tradecraft spook stuff. If I come under scrutiny, I push the button. We did an exercise where we tried these things out. We had a notional bad guy who is going to be a cop. The first thing he did, push the button. He’s like, “Thank you. Check, please.” It is $8 or $9 on Amazon. They’re not even here. That piece of kit should be issued to every human guy, every CI guy, and every team doing ASOF stuff. All the Third Groups should have this. All the Seventh Groups should have this. It should be a standard piece of equipment.
It is for $9, not $9,000.
That’s the difference. Here at SOF Week, there’s some cool technology that’s here. Comms in these contested areas is overwhelmingly the big deal. The Russians, in the early days of the war, were able to DF and get rounds on target in about six minutes. Ours is two days or some crazy number. They’re effective. If you come hot, if you emanate, they can see it in the RF space. Secure comms, data comms, all those things are important. It’s important to think about how we’re going to fight these wars. They’re going to get fought. They will.
It’s important to think about how we’re going to fight these wars, because they will be fought.
I’ve been saying it for a long time. I think that Iran is nuclear-capable already. I do. I think that they got the stuff, and we don’t know, or we do know, but we are not talking about it. I think China takes Taiwan. I do. I think Russia takes Ukraine. They have. Not that long ago, the Houthis couldn’t get toilet paper. Yemen was the largest humanitarian crisis on earth, as per the United Nations. Now, they have guided missiles hitting the Hungarian airport in Tel Aviv.
That report out of there was that it was a hypersonic missile, too, which I’m not sure if that was accurate or not, but that’s scary.
Imagine if Mohammed Atta, on the morning of 9/11, had hypersonic missiles. That’s what we’re talking about. The whole thing has changed from a SOF perspective from dudes who are going to have to go deal with this, and we have to deal with this turd, this mess. SOF is the best answer overwhelmingly. If I have a choice of deploying an ODA from Seventh Group to go make friends with the cartels or sending a B-52 and bombing Guatemala, ODA sounds better to me.
It’s a strategic deterrence that we have as an organization. Stu Bradin, head of Global SOF Foundation, was out here. He said, “The thing that needs to be discussed is that SOF’s time is now.” This is SOF’s time, not tomorrow, but today.
It’s right now that everyone should be deployed. Everyone should be deployed doing something, anything, because the enemy is afraid of us. They’re also afraid of the unknown. They don’t know what they don’t know. If they know that every SOF element is somewhere doing something, anything, loudly, proudly, deception, whatever it is, just doing things, even if we get hurt a little bit, it’s better than full-on large-scale combat operations.
I don’t want to see the US Navy launching torpedoes against China. The best way to defeat China is from the inside out, and taking away their friends. That’s, last time I checked, what SF is good at. Last time I checked, the whole Robin Sage thing is predicated on that. We can be good at this. We are good at this. We have to assume a little bit of risk, not exactly palatable sometimes. We have to get over that and then employ technology that enables that. I would argue, don’t rely on technology. Rely on the dudes, the men and women who can do these things. Enable them with the tech that they need without getting caught and bring it to the enemy. That’s exactly how we do it.
It’s also one of the SOF truths, which is that you cannot create competency after emergencies occur. If we’re looking at where the employment of SOF is now, it is to prevent an emergency. This is where it is. We’ve got to live by that value. We’ve got to get out there and do it.
I was talking with a former, very senior leader over a cigar. He asked, “What would you do?” I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “If I gave you SOCOM and took away all the restrictions, God, President, and us, in that order. If I made it where you are God-like, so what do you think?” I’m like, “I could decrease fentanyl. I could stop them and solve the fentanyl problem. No problem. I can do this. I can do this.” I go on this whole thing.
He goes, “How would you do that?” I was like, “I would use the tools that we have.” He was shocked. We don’t have a capability problem. We could see golf balls from outer space. We’ve got cool stuff. We have the best people. We got good people. We’ve got every language. We’ve got every culture in the military right now. Every country in the world is probably represented. We’ve got linguists. We’ve got the stuff.
We’ve got the tools. We have to think about the problems the right way. I would argue that we’re thinking about, “My God.” I was on this panel. They’re talking about Russia stuff. They asked me, “Aren’t you worried about what Moscow says?” No. Why would I? You think Putin is going to kill and rape fewer Ukrainians or more Ukrainians or anyone for that matter because of me? He doesn’t care about me. I don’t care about him. Who cares?
When we got this kid, they thought it was an inside job. The Russians executed 39 Russian intelligence officers at the O-5 level and above. They thought it was an inside job. They came in. They killed everybody. They executed all their people. They all thought that they were working for me. It sucks for them, but it goes to show you can have a kinetic effect without ever squeezing a trigger. The Israelis taught us this with the beeper operation.
You can have a kinetic effect without ever squeezing a trigger. The Israelis taught us this with the beeper operation.
We talked about that.
Three innovative guys, a little bit of supply chain smart, took out 3,000 bad guys. They took out more people than Al-Qaeda did on the morning of 9-11 without firing a shot. They weren’t even in the country. They weren’t even there. They weren’t in Lebanon. They did it from Cyprus and Turkey. They weren’t even in the country. No troops at risk. No people at risk. You’re being smart and creative about it. We’re vulnerable. They’re vulnerable too. I promise you. They have the same problems that we have. We have to think about it that way and not care so much and not be so sensitive about, “If we get caught, if an SDV team is caught off the coast of China, that’ll start World War Three.” No, it won’t.
You’re talking about the use and implementation of clandestine and covert operations. It’s not a capability question. It’s a willingness issue. We had John “Shrek” McPhee. We did talk about the pager incident and talked about the fact that as Americans, we have the most capability of any country in the world, but do we have a willingness to use it? That’s where we have to start thinking about where we can apply this thought process to do things in a different way. As you said, the tank battle is over.
We have an episode with Mike Vickers, former ASD SO/LIC and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but also a Green Beret, paramilitary case officer. We talk a lot about clandestine and covert operations. His book, By All Means Available, was Ronald Reagan’s directive to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan in the ’80s. They said, “Mr. President, what do you want us to do?” He said, “By all means available, we will win.” That was the directive that they had to go out there and do that. We cannot let the fear of being unsuccessful or some political backlash affect our ability to operate and have success, what we can call the limited battlefield, to prevent the nation-state on nation-state, superpower versus superpower.
It’s worth the risk to me. That’s where I’m at. We don’t have a capability problem. We have creative people and innovative people. This show is about innovation. If the willingness isn’t there, then creativity gets stymied because the creative minds will answer the requirements that are able to happen. If I’m willing to fly a drone, then creatively, I’m going to figure out a way to fly a drone cooler, better, smarter, or whatever. If you tell me, “I just want you to go bring pain,” whatever that means. When President Trump was President the last time, there was his maximum pressure campaign.
His message was, “I don’t know what to do. I just want them to feel bad. Hurt them in a way that their mothers feel it. Go.” Lots of good things happened from that. From that moment, not a single Purple Heart was issued until Abbey Gate, years of Americans not getting torn up. We have the capability. We have the talent. We have the people. We have excellent leaders. I look at the leadership within SOF. Twenty years later, our leadership is extremely experienced. General Braga, Admiral Bradley, and General Fenton, these guys grew up. Twenty years is a whole career’s worth of war, combat, and getting briefed on different ideas and things that worked, things that failed, and all kinds of things.
Our leadership at that level is awesome. Below that, though, there’s this gap in motivation or willingness, and that stymies creativity. The answers are all there, but you have to ask the right questions. General Fenton is asking the right questions. He’s trying to inspire creativity. I know Admiral Bradley is an extremely creative guy, so he’s getting ready. That is what needs to happen. We have to put all cards on the table and say, “Here’s our end state. I don’t care about what we need to do, what we can do, or our capabilities. What are we trying to do here? I want President Xi to feel pain.” I got asked by a guy about what success in China looks like from my world. The answer is President Xi coming to us asking for help. That’s what I want.
It’s important to understand what the definition of war is. We have certain fundamentals when we talk about the elements of national power. We have to say that a true war encompasses all of the elements of national power. Often, we default, especially because our military background and thought process come down to, “They shoot us. We shoot them. That’s war.” It’s like, “No, you can be at war when you bring in diplomatic information, military component, economic.” Even in our conversation with Roger, we started talking about, “What about the financial aspect of things?” You have intelligence. You have all these other aspects that can come in. That’s what war is. It’s not just downrange and see what comes back. It’s the totality of everything.
We’re able to do this. There’s a real belief. When I talk to people, they’re like, “Man, we’re all screwed up. Man, what are we going to do?” That’s crap. That’s not true at all. I know that because on a shoestring budget, my entire operating budget is a rounding error for lug nut grease in the SOCOM motor pool. SOCOM spends more money on paperclips than I do every year, all in. It can be done 729 missions later, 7,128 people later, small teams doing what SOF has always done.
I have not invented a single tactic. There’s no piece of gear that I have that SOCOM doesn’t have. There are no people that I have that
SOCOM doesn’t have, or an agency or someone. We don’t have a capability problem. It’s a way of dissecting the problem in a way that gets us to where we want to be, and a willingness to do so. I would argue that in DOD, we have the willingness. Not everywhere in government has the willingness, and that’s also part of it.
What we know is you do. We appreciate you taking some time. It’s a busy week. You’ve got a lot going on. You’re doing great work. We need you. We need your team out there continuing to bring Americans home. As you said, it’s stamped on our passports somewhere in there. It may not actually say it, but when you have it, you know that that’s the oath and the bond that we have to all American citizens. We appreciate everything you’re doing.
Thanks. GreyBullRescue.org is our website. You can follow us on social media. Social media is helpful for us. It’s how people find us. That’s our 911. We’re entirely donor-funded. We’re always looking for partners and friends to help us out. We’ll bring you out there. If you want to come out and play, I’ll bring you out, Fran.
We got a whole Green Beret Foundation to guide everybody to do stuff. Let’s make it happen.
That’s a shameless plug, but I appreciate it. Thanks for having us.
Thanks.
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