Short-term Thinking Weakens Our Country at Home and Abroad

This happens all the time. There's like something happens in the news for the political candidates running for president. It's who can get their tweet out the fastest on the issue. We saw this recently with the situation in Syria with the Kurds and who can get the tweet out the fastest people are asking me like, Hey, what do you have to say? What do you have to say? And like, I'm trying to understand the situation first. I'm actually trying to understand what happened and why we are in the situation that we're in. Once I do that, I'll let you know what I think. And that was another one of those end of the world scenarios that unfolded. You know, we Trump pulled the troops out of, out of that area and it was like, Oh, the world's going to end. And look, there was some bad stuff that happened. I get it. Some ISIS folks, folks, some ISIS terrorists, murderers escaped. I got that. Some, some Kurds were killed. Like some bad stuff happened. But it wasn't the end of the world. And and one thing, you know, I was at my second deployment to Iraq. We were, we started doing counterinsurgency operations instead of counter terrorist operations. So we, we changed our strategy. And as we did this, we were, we were starting to kill a decent amount of bad guys, about of these insurgents. So a few weeks go by and I got a message from up my chain of command and they're like, Hey, Jocko, we get that you're doing these missions, but right now we're not seeing any changes in the metrics as far as enemy attacks that are happening, happening. Right. And luckily I had read the counterinsurgency manual that was written by General Petraeus. And, and I, part of that explains that the average counterinsurgency takes seven years to work itself out. Right. And so I said, Hey, you know, boss, the average counterinsurgency takes seven years to, to flush itself out. It's only been three weeks. Can I get some more, some more time here to work through this? And he's like, okay, yeah, you know, make sense. But my point is it's the same thing here. We think that some news event. That we can fully understand a news event within one hour of it happening. We don't have any understanding. We, you need to let these things develop and, and see where the actual long-term effects are, we can't be snapping judgments and making radical decisions or, or split decisions when we have to actually assess what is really going on. And so the press for sure is like snap decision, snap decision, snap decision. And you can see it's comical to flip back and forth between the two, did to the left wing media and the right wing media. And one of them is the greatest decision ever. And the other one's the most horrible thing that's ever happened. And there you go. And you know, no one can even make an assessment of what just happened because it only happened 14 minutes ago. How about we see where it plays out? It's about being first rather than actually being accurate and presenting the American people with here's what has gone on. You can form your own opinion. You can form your own conclusion, but here's the course of events that took place, A, B, C, D and E. And that's, that's exactly what we're missing in, in most of the time. Well, I think it's what we were talking about earlier. I think we're poisoned by this desire to have our information fed to us very quickly and the fact that there's so much information coming at us. We don't have enough time to sit back and read a manual on how long it takes counterinsurgency efforts to be fruit, fruition, to reach fruition. The fact that that's hitting you in the military, that you would think that the most pragmatic, the most disciplined people that understand the long game that are playing 3D chess, those are the people that you would want telling people like you what you can and can't do. The fact that that kind of thinking is even filtering down to special ops groups is crazy. Well, what's nice is we do have decentralized command inside the military. So when I'm telling my boss, this is what's going on, my boss isn't like shut up and do what I told you to do. My boss is like, okay, make sense. Explain it to me. Okay. Got it. Yeah. That makes sense. Cool. Move forward. That's that's a very positive thing in the military. Everyone thinks that the military is this rigid structured way where you just obey the chain of command and you don't you don't veer from that at all. But if my boss tells me to do something that doesn't make any sense, I'm gonna say, hey boss, this actually is a bad plan. We should do it a different way. And if I have a good boss, my boss says, oh, okay, I didn't see that angle. And that's another thing that, you know, when Tulsi is talking about how politicians, we come up with a plan and then we start executing the plan. Guess what? You once you start executing a plan, some other things are going to come to light, right? And you as a leader have to say, hey, you know what? We started executing this. It's going pretty good, but I didn't foresee this happening. I'm making an adjustment. Here it is. Here's what we're going to do. And I'm going to wait for that feedback to come to me. The promise people are so insecure or slash their ego so big that they won't, they'll just, I just going to stick with the same plan. No matter everyone else is dumb. No, you just need to see it through. It's like, no, actually we need to make some changes because they, you know, they, they are afraid of saying, hey, my initial assessment might have been inaccurate or wrong. Yep. And, and I think that, that also just points to the bigger point for the political leadership, the civilian leadership that sets the policy that the military executes is so often lacks that foresight and that, that planning of actually looking, okay, if we pursue course of action, a, you know, we call it here, here will be the second, third, fourth order of effects, right? Here's how, you know, the enemy or the opponent is likely to react or here's how other actors are likely to react to our action. So we can try to anticipate that. And then we can, okay, this is how we would respond. This is how they're likely to respond and actually go through this so that we don't end up in the situation that we too often find ourselves in where you're like, all right, here's the, here's the mission guys, go for it. And then you, whether it's a week or a month or a year later, like, Hey, how the hell do we find ourselves here? It's like you failed as leaders, the leaders of our country failed to ask those questions about, you know, what happens, what happens next? You know, after we go in and topple Saddam Hussein and we completely obliterate the entire Iraqi military, what actually happens next? What will be the consequences to this? What will be the cost to our troops, our military? What will be the cost to the Iraqi people? What will be the cost to American taxpayers? Is the, is the object, do we know what the objective is? Is it achievable? What's our end state and exit strategy? When you look back and I've just, I've seen this throughout my seven years in Congress sitting on the foreign affairs committee, sitting on the armed services committee where we're, we're questioning and providing oversight over the department of defense and department of state asking leaders these questions. And when we're not given answers or given ambiguous answers or things like, you know, I asked secretary Mattis once in a hearing about how al Qaeda has gotten so strong in Syria to where, I mean, right now they, they control an entire city. The entire city of Idlib is controlled by al Qaeda. And I asked him at that time, I said, well, why aren't we going after al Qaeda in Syria in a very serious and concerted way? And his answer was, well, it's complicated. It's complicated. And it's, it's, it's frustrating to say the least, but I think it's been a very trans, it's been, it's been a very clear window into the lack of foresight and good judgment and just the ability to look at these challenges and situations with that that basic understanding in a non-emotional way and understand what are the, what's the objective cost and consequences before we launch this action.