Joe Rogan & Jocko Willink on the Military, The Realities of War

Hello freak bitches. To me, as a person who's never been in the military, that's one of the fascinating aspects of how it works. How do you get all these different people to follow through on a plan and who are the leaders and why do the leaders have the right ideas and who educates them as to having the right ideas? I know that a lot of people are excited about where the military is right now. Like Tim Kennedy re-enlisted. Yeah. God bless him. He re-enlisted because he believes that the military has support now. And look, Tim Kennedy believes he's put on this earth to kill bad guys. That's what he wants to do. I think I agree with Tim Kennedy. I think I agree with him too. For sure. Obviously he enjoys it. I mean, he's not fucking around. He went back in. He put his money where his mouth is. And in his eyes, this is the way that it should have been. That you should give the military the chance to do their job. That's their idea. And then other people believe that there should be much more civilian oversight and there should be much more checks and balances before things get done. This is a big debate that's going on today. Well, I think there's two different things that you just talked about. That is what the military gets told to do and how they do it. And those are two different things. And I think that, yes, absolutely, the civilians should control and do control the military, by the way. They do control. The military is under control of civilians. And yet once you say, okay, this is what we want to have happen, you need to let the military professionals figure out how they're going to go and make it happen. Yeah, that's where it gets tricky, right? Because if you're in the... One of the things that was explained to me by a friend who's a Navy SEAL, he was saying that when something needs to get done and you have all these people that are telling you how you can do it, how you can't do it, people that are not experiencing combat and don't understand what could or could not go sideways, to put more problems in place or to put more checks and balances in place, you're actually going to put these people in more danger. That is true. Yeah, you should, like I said, if you let the civilians decide what it is that needs to be accomplished and then the military leaders decide how they're going to go ahead and make that happen. And I mean, it goes back to Vietnam. There was too much civilian oversight of what was happening in Vietnam and the military leaders were... They didn't really have the wherewithal, not even the wherewithal, they didn't have the free rein to go out and try and make things happen the way they wanted to and it ended up in a big quagmire. Well, Vietnam seems like to me from an outsider to be one of the most fucked up wars ever. Absolutely. Because it didn't totally make sense that it was happening and then now we know that the Gulf of Tonkin was very likely a false flag and that there was some sort of motivation to get there in the first place. And then you're dealing with guerrilla warfare for the first time ever in US history. They didn't exactly know how to handle this. No, we didn't. And we didn't adapt very well to what was happening on the ground, which is always going to be problematic if you have close minded people in the military. If people are close minded, you're not going to be able to move forward against when the battlefield changes. And the battlefield changes all the time. I mean, you can look at Iraq. Iraq, the battlefield changed drastically from this big conventional force that we went up there to fight against Saddam's big army. Well, once that fell apart, then what happened? Now all of a sudden we were facing guerrillas again and an insurgency and it took us several years to change our strategy from we didn't even know what to do. Oh my God. What do we do? There's all these people running around. What do we do with all these people running around and how do we get these people under control and the civilians want us here. And yet if we don't do the right thing, now the civilians don't want us here. What do we need to do? So it took us some time to adjust our strategy in Iraq. And luckily we had some good leaders that went ahead and made those changes. Isn't it also that when you're in war and the strategy, not the strategy, but the motivation is very clear. Like if you're fighting against Hitler's army in World War II, this is very clear that you're dealing with an evil force. Whereas in Vietnam, it's like, wait a minute, why are we here? Like what's going on? The communism, what's happening? Extremely extremely challenging, no doubt. And that is why, and I've talked about this before, if America or any nation is going to go to war, you have to decide that this is the most important thing in the world. You have to end the wills that I talk about that you have to have to execute this war. You got to have the will to kill people. And again, I say this all the time, no one wants to hear it because it's ugly and horrible. But when you say you're going to kill people in war, you're not just going to be able to perfectly kill just the bad guys. Civilians are going to die. It is a nightmare. Kids, women, it's horrible, it's awful. And if you think, oh, I'm going to go to war and we're just going to kill the bad guys, it's not going to happen. War is too complex. It's just not going to be saying like, hey, I'm going to go and fight in the UFC and I'm not going to get hit. It's not going to happen. You're going to get hit, you're going to get bruised up, you're going to get dinged, and it's the same thing in war. So you have to have the will to kill people. Of course, it's easy to have the will to kill the bad guys, but then you have to accept the fact that some innocent people are going to die and that is going to be awful. And then on the other side of the coin is, of course, if you're going to send people to war, people, Americans are going to die and there's nothing you can do about it. You have to accept that fact. And that's why Vietnam was just the ultimate tragedy in many respects because we were killing a lot of civilians. We were losing a lot of Americans, but we weren't progressing the way we needed to. It was a nightmare. I agree with you 100 percent. What do you think about transparency? Like when the Bush administration wouldn't let them take photographs of coffins and send them home? Like a lot of people are really upset because there's a lot of people that felt like, look, Americans should know that there's a cost to this and they should know that there's consequences to these actions. And they were saying that these consequences and knowing about these consequences could lessen morale, could lessen support back at home when they really need it. And the people didn't really need to know this. So that what they need to know is we're on the right track and we're doing well. Yeah, that's a tough one. And whether it's the right decision to keep the Americans in their beautiful bubble that they live in and let them know that this war is happening, but you don't have to see the brave Americans coming home that have sacrificed their lives. And interestingly, if you remember, I think it was the Battle of Tarawa in World War II. And for the first time, so we were we needed money to run World War II, a lot of money, war bonds and all that. And we were kind of falling behind and we needed some money. And one of the first times that they released a lot of pictures of American dead Americans was I think it was the Battle of Tarawa. And there was all these Americans washing up on the beach. I mean, Marines that had drowned and got shot and it was awful, but they did it for a reason. They did it to show like, hey, this is real. This is happening. We need to put pitch in. We need money. We need to, you know, save save meat, save oil. Don't use your cars. We all need to get in for the big win. Right. And that's the opposite of what we're talking about when they're saying, hey, you're not allowed to take pictures of dead Americans that are being killed. And, you know, I think there should be some level of transparency there when you should America should see what is happening. What is the cost? Because it's real easy for Americans to to sit there and allow these young kids to go overseas and fight and die or be wounded, gravely wounded. And just to shut those, you know, just ignore them because I don't care because I'm over here in the mall. No, maybe we should maybe we should not only, you know, maybe we should not only show pictures of the coffins that are coming back, but maybe we should explore and show the lives that those men sacrificed and who they were and what they did and what their families were like and their wife and kids and mom and dad that they left behind that they gave up. And why did they give it up? Because they believed in freedom. And so now we just going to say, oh, that's not happening. No, it's happening. And you need to you need to know it. It is kind of strange, right, when you think about how little access to information people really had back in World War Two, they were counting on the news, they were counting on newspapers. And now today we have massive, massive access to information instantaneously. But yet you get less of it when it comes to that. Yeah. And and in some ways you get more of it. I mean, obviously, when there's an incident that happens overseas, you can find out about it on Twitter as fast as you can find out about it through, you know, waiting for a real news source to come up with it. But you don't get anything that's like specifically distributed by the US government to let you know the consequences of war and say, hey, folks, we need your support. This is what's really going down. These are American citizens. This is what's happening to them over there. Yeah. And then the same thing could be said for, hey, sometimes civilians are going to get killed. And what do we do? What do we do then? Do we brush that under the rug and we just show the Americans getting killed or do you universally show what's happening? What war is meant? War is jacked up. I'm here to tell you, war is not glorious. It is not fun. And it is it is a horrible, horrible event. And so, yeah, I think you should expose it. And I think you should expose it at a high level so that people understand what we're getting into. And as horrible as war is, there's many times throughout history where war is the absolute in my mind, in my opinion, the right thing to do. And we don't have a choice and we need to do something when when horrible things are happening. And and, you know, I think that's, you know, on my podcast, I talk about like the like I said, I talk about war and death and horrible genocide. And and that's one of the reasons why I think it's it's gotten a lot of traction is because I'm talking about things that are otherwise being ignored. And I think people do want to know. I think people do want to understand war at a deeper level. So that way, when they hear a politician up there saying, hey, we should go to war, they can at least say to themselves, I know what I know what he's talking about. And he's not just talking about, hey, we're going to wave the flag and we're going to send some soldiers over there going to kick ass. They're going to come home. We're going to high five. That's not what war is. And let's not ever forget that that's not what war is. War is a man and another man on a battlefield surrounded by people, civilians, and they're trying to kill each other. And it's a bloodbath. And we shouldn't forget that. And is it necessary sometimes? It absolutely is. It absolutely is necessary sometimes. But we better weigh our minds heavily before we make that decision to go and execute. Now, when you think about the evolution of human beings, you think about how much safer it is today versus how it was thousands of years ago. Do you ever foresee a time where war won't exist? I don't know. You know, people joke with me a lot about the robot wars and robots being able to accomplish wars. I actually believe that thing will come. I mean, we've got drones right now that that are very capable. Pretty soon we'll have land warfare robots that will be able to go in and clear buildings and make things happen. And then will the enemy then have robots that will fight our robots at some point? Yeah. And then at some point, will that elevate to a point where we're not dealing with physical robots anymore, but just the software behind the robots? And now it's just a big sort of cyber warfare that that is that seems conceivable to me. Now, Joe, don't mistake me for some kind of like a Sam Harris intellectual over here or that I'm going to sit here and explain to you what the future of warfare from a technical perspective. But from my from my rudimentary thought process, could it not elevate to a point where we have robots fighting robots? And then that eventually escalates to a point where it's some kind of cyber warfare with it's not physical, but it's just information based. That does make sense to me that that could happen. Yeah, it makes sense to me, too. Especially when you see those Boston Dynamic robots, have you seen those things you kick them over, they bounce back up, they run up hills, they can run like 60 miles an hour. They're freaks. I mean, it's really and what they're doing now is just I mean, who knows where they're going to be 10 years from now. I mean, they're going to be solar powered. They'll live out there with no food. Yeah, it'll be awesome. And then and then then where will we go? Will those robots fight people for a while? Probably people that don't know people that don't people that don't have good robots. Yeah. And that's not going to be fun for the people without robots. Right. And we'll see where it goes from there. I mean, I think that's just a surrender scenario, right? If you've got a if let's say America has these robots that can just come in with ruthless precision and take out bad guys and you know you're going to be at their mercy. There's a fucking science fiction movie, right?