Jocko Willink - What We Should Consider When Going to War | Joe Rogan

I'll tell you, I think a couple things come up just kind of on what you're saying and this is kind of my perspective on it. When we talk about, hey, when you go in somewhere, you've got to know what the end state is, you've got to know where you're going and when you're going to leave, you've got to have an exit strategy. What's really hard about that is we don't necessarily know and war is so unpredictable that you may, you know, there's a chance that you went in and killed Qaddafi and then all of a sudden some benevolent person steps up and all of a sudden you've got this flourishing democracy. Okay, what are the chances of that? No, very small, but you don't know that it's going to go into this completely failed state. You have high hopes. Maybe your intel people are saying you this. It's like when we, you know, when we did the Bay of Pigs, all the Cubans in America were like, yep, as soon as you guys hit the beaches, all the Cubans are going to be on our side. It's going to be good to go. All the Cubans that supported America were in America. We showed up there and they were like, what are you doing? No, this is our country. So we don't necessarily know where we're going to go, which means you've got to have once again, like the open mind to say, oh, this isn't going the way we thought it was going to go. How are we going to adjust right now to prevent this from getting worse? Which means what you really have to do is prior to intervening in other countries, you have to assess what sacrifices you are willing to make to get the result that is positive. And those could be massive. You know, I always talk about if you're going to go to war, you've got to have the will. And that will comes in two forms. Number one is the will to kill. Because when you go to war, you are going to be killing people. You're going to be killing the enemy and you're going to be killing civilians. And that's that's not what we're trying to do. And believe me, the US military goes through great lengths to prevent that from happening. But it is going to happen. It's war. So you have to be willing to kill. You have to be willing to have that happen. And you have to be willing to die because when you go to war, there's going to be American kids that are not going to come home. And so you have to have those two wills. That's before you go in. So you can't look at it and say, well, you know, we can go into Libya. We can move this guy and probably it'll turn out okay. So we don't have to worry about what the sacrifices are going to be. Another thing to think about when we went to war, when we went to World War Two, World War One, those kids, 18 years old, 17 years old, those kids went to war until the war was over. They went on to point. Like now, you know, in the Navy, in the Marine Corps to six, seven month deployment in the army, sometimes it's a 14 month appointment. And then they're going to rotate back to the States in World War Two is like, oh, cool. Yeah, we're at war. You'll be home when it's over. So five years, four years. If that was our attitude going into the war, this is so important to us that Johnny is going to get on a ship and he's going to sail to the Pacific. And if he comes home, it's going to be in three years, four years, five years. Five years. That's what we're talking about. That's the level of commitment we have. So when we start looking at going into other countries, we need to start thinking, okay, what level of commitment do we really have to make this successful? And like even when I look at Iraq, you know, I was in Iraq, I fought in Iraq. From a granular perspective, being on the ground, Battle of Ramadi 2006, the citizens of Ramadi, the normal citizens of Ramadi were overjoyed that we were there. And it was like we were we were angels to go there and help them get rid of these heinous Al Qaeda insurgents, which eventually became ISIS. Unfortunately, you know, we kind of we did a great job. Ramadi was the model of counterinsurgency for about seven years. And it was less violent than many cities in America. And I had great pride and at least understood the sacrifices, my friends that were killed, my friends that never came home, my friends that won't get to have kids. Right. They did all that. They gave all that. And I was able to look around and say, you know what, these folks in this foreign country, they're going to they have an opportunity for freedom. And unfortunately, because of politics and whatever, we said, OK, you know what, we're we're not staying there. We're going to leave as soon as we left. Everybody that had been on the ground in Iraq was like, this is probably not a good idea. This is probably not a good idea to bail out right now. We don't need to leave a massive force there. But, you know, if we leave a few, you know, we leave a couple of brigades worth of men, then, oh, we'll probably be able to handle any problems that that happened. Well, we didn't. We left completely. And and those those insurgents that were there, they were like little embers and they started to they started to get fired up again. And then the next thing you know, you had ISIS. And by the way, ISIS marched back into Ramadi and they the reports we got from people on the ground that we knew was that ISIS came in and anyone that had worked with coalition forces and many level, they would murder the whole family. There's about 500 families that were completely murdered. So when we talk about these things, we have to be very sure about what we're going to do. We have to recognize that we can't predict everything because we can't. I don't care how good you are and care how many analysis you put on something. When you start throwing human nature into a leadership vacuum, all these things are going to break out and it's going to it can go very, very bad. And so what are we willing to sacrifice? What are we willing to spend? How many of our brothers and sisters in uniform? Are we willing to sacrifice to make this happen? And how does that help our national security? I believe right now, had we stayed there, Iraq would be a pretty strong, positive place right now. If we had kind of completed the mission the way that we should have. Again, when we go back and we say, okay, well, what countries is it worth going into? Where are we going to go? How do we draw that line? How do we make that decision? For me, this is what we do as leaders. What we do as leaders, we look at a situation and sometimes you've got to ask yourself, do we have a moral obligation to go somewhere? If there's a genocide happening, if there's another Rwanda happening where 800,000 tootsies are killed in 100 days with machetes. If that's going on, do we have a moral obligation to try and do something to help that? Hey, that's a decision you have to meet. That's a hard decision to make as leader because guess what? You're going to lose 30, 40, 100 Americans that are going in there and try and shut this thing down. But that's the type of thing we need to think about and that's why as a leader, you want to have an open mind. You want to have your ego completely out of it because it's really easy to say, oh, this is where America, this is what we do. This is we're going to win. It's like, no, actually, we made a bad decision and we're actually leaving right now because we think the expenditure from here on out is going to be too high. Unfortunately, I think in Iraq, we paid the upfront expenditure. We had invested lives and treasure to try and get that place stabilized. We had done a decent job. We were almost there and we left early and all of a sudden we look around and go, oof. But that's why these things are important to think about thoroughly as Tulsi said before you go, we don't know what's going to happen. And if you're going to get in a street fight, Joe, like, you know, you're going to get in a street fight. Joe, like you look as capable as you are, as capable as I am at street fighting. That's great. There is that 10 percent chance that that guy pulls out a knife and sticks in your neck. Are you willing to sacrifice that? Now, if the guy's doing something to an innocent person and you go, you know what? I got to take that risk right now. I'm going to go in and I'm going to get this thing handled. Those are hard decisions to make. And we have to think through them. Thank you.