0:00:0 – Opening
0:10:10 – By Water Beneath The Walls. Ben Milligan
4:10:43 – How to stay on THE PATH.
4:26:00 – Closing Gratitude.
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Jocko … please mate … You’ve got to get Ben back ASAP to talk in greater depth about the stories that couldn’t make it into his fantastic book !!!!
Agreed, this could easily be a regular thing like with John Stryker Meyer.
Dammit Jocko,
I swore I was ordering any more books until I finished the stack I bought this summer. After hearing your interview with Ben Milligan I Immediately bought a copy.
The stories and history are unbelievable. Thank you and keep doing what you are doing. You’re an inspiration.
Fascinating. One of the big questions is: How did the U.S. Navy come to have one of the world’s premier land-capable unconventional warfare units (the SEALS)? The answer is pride and stupidity … both the Army and the Marines, the obvious services to pull that off, f— it up. They both thought primarily in terms of infantry. They thought of commandos as primarily aggressive and determined soldiers. And sure they are … but more importantly they have special skills. So their notion was: use those people to train other infantry—because they’re just the same but better. This ignores that those guys—if they have been properly trained—have special skills. So at best they saw them as an elite, at worst as a suicide squad to throw into impossible situations on the conventional battlefield. This ignores that they could undertake special purposes—long range reconnaissance, coastal raids, sabotage far behind enemy lines, kidnapping of key enemy personnel, etc., etc. This is stuff that the average infantry soldier/marine doesn’t do and doesn’t need to do.
The guy the U.S. Marines put in charge of “Raiders” was the son of a congregational minister who knew the Roosevelts. He refused to have his men trained by the British Royal Marines; he fired trained personnel sent to him; the training was irrelevant and perfunctory; many of the men couldn’t swim; he had no concept of tactics; when they came under fire in the Pacific, he tried to surrender to the Japanese in a panic, but the men he sent couldn’t locate a Japanese to surrender to … a complete debacle. He was also obsessed with communism and tried to indoctrinate the Marines with the concept of “gung ho”—which actually means “all together”.
I’m struck again by how stupid and incompetent people in important positions can be and probably always have been.
The U.S. Navy’s saving grace was it had no infantry of its own, so didn’t have pride revolving around what an infantryman was. It was task-focused: what do we need to do? Let’s train people to do that.
Mr. Milligan has written one of the best histories on The Teams I’ve read and very glad that you got him in for an interview. Excellent,…. as is the book.
God dang Jocko. This is a good podcast!!!