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July 10, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
43:50
The Gouge!
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority, and it ain't going to be that fun.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Duck Commons Podcast.
Glad to have you with us today.
Got lots to do.
As you're always here on the podcast, we talk more politics, we talk sports, we talk a lot of different things that are relevant to a conservative mind that wants to expand and get better.
And today, I can't think of a better way to do that.
I want to introduce everybody.
In just a minute after the break, we're going to bring in Admiral Bob Harwood, Navy SEAL, National Security Council, former National Security Council member.
Also, the gal, "How to be smarter than the situation you are in," a new book out of Post Hill Press.
We're going to talk about that here and just live it.
A lot of experiences from around the world that you want to take note of.
So with that, we'll be right back after the break and jump into it with Alan Harwood.
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Alright, Admiral, glad to have you with us today on the podcast.
I hope all is going well for you.
Doug, everything's great.
Top of my game, and thanks for having me.
Well, it's going to be good.
Well, first, let's start off.
One of the things I always, excuse me, I'm fighting a cold this summer, is just sort of go over, you know, where are you from?
What brought, you know, what made you you?
And I've always thought that, you know, we'll get into your book in a minute, and your life experiences.
I've been in the Air Force for 23 years.
You were a life Navy SEAL. In fact, we probably, we may have, you may have run some dirt with some old, a good guy that I went to high school with.
He's still in the Army, but he was Delta Force commander back in the early 2000s.
Jamie Gerard.
Oh, I know Jamie very well.
Big boy!
Yeah, yeah.
Jamie and his twin brother, Joe, and I went to high school.
Yeah, I know them both.
In fact, we were a co-station at Fort Bragg at the same time.
In fact, that's one of the worst things I ever did to my family.
I picked him up from Coronado, California, took him to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, left him there when I went to Afghanistan for two years.
I'm still paying for that one.
But one of the highlights, a lot of my Army friends that were there, Jamie Gerard, Scottie Miller, John Mulholland, Stan McChrystal, we were all there at that kind of period today, and all of them just great, great Americans.
But they spent a lot of time at Prague.
I unfortunately only had to do two years there.
There you go.
Good to cross paths, not only in the same dirt.
I know Jamie and I were up in Iraq together at similar times.
He was in and out and I was in and out up at Balad and some other places.
But it's all good to have you here.
Give us your background.
How did you get in it?
How did you get in the SEAL program?
Tell us about that for a little bit.
Everybody's always interested in this.
Yeah, sure.
And thanks for your service.
I know that's always a strange comment between two guys served, but I hope you feel better to get over the bug you have.
Thank you.
It was, like all of us, this great adventure life gave me a rather unusual path.
Son of a naval officer, born in Newport, Rhode Island, all of us were, when that was a big Navy hub.
My father was one of those poor kids from Brooklyn who wanted to go to school in the 40s, and the family couldn't afford it, but wanted to go to engineering school, so he went to Kings Point, which was in New York State.
And in those times, of course, he wouldn't go anywhere else, because anything south or west of New York was uncivilized.
You just didn't do that then.
But his timing was bad.
Well, depending how you look at it, but he graduated summer of 43. And of course, right to the war in the Pacific, served on a variety of ships, and then came back to Newport and remained a naval officer.
And that's why we were all born there.
But then, you know, we moved every year or two.
We were in Florida, we were in Virginia, we were in Not California, Hawaii.
And then in 1968, he gets stationed in Iran, part of the advisory groups helping to build the Shah and Iranian Navy at the time.
And he really enjoyed the job, so he stayed there for the rest of his military career, 68 to 74, and then retired there and went into the defense industry.
So I was really shaped by those two things, being raised in the Navy and then spending most of my Formative years in Iran before finishing high school and going off to the service, going into the Navy.
So it gave me a very unique perspective on the world.
And my father was one of those guys who was very much a globalist because he served in the Pacific.
He was in the Atlantic Met.
He traveled a lot.
And so as a young man, he used to kick us out of the house.
Hey, go places.
So in those years, you could hitchhike across Afghanistan Pakistan, Iraq, India, you know, that's what you did.
It was safe in the West.
Everywhere you went, because you were from the West, you were respected, you were embraced.
Come in, meet my family, have dinner.
Have a goat.
Marry my daughter.
It was just a different environment.
But it made you realize how common people are around the world.
Everyone's trying to survive, take care of their family, live a prosperous life.
You know, those basic principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that our country stands for is a common theme and aspirations for all the people on this planet.
And so that was reinforced to me at a very early age.
And that's where the whole concept and idea of the gouge was born and bred and was inculcated in my life.
And then I was graduating from high school, and most people don't realize Iran has the best skiing in the world.
It's incredible skiing.
Tehran's at about 5,000 feet.
The mountains around it are 18.6.
And so I was a ski bum.
And this was in the 70s.
Love, rock and roll, peace, all that kind of stuff.
And hitchhiking, it was the hippie trail and all that.
So I'm this long-haired kid.
My counselor in high school says, well, you need to go to college.
Okay, so we apply.
She said, well, where would you like to go?
Well, where I can ski.
Okay, so we apply.
I can accept the Colorado State.
My dad says, that's great.
I'm so proud of you.
And then he said a few minutes later, how are you going to pay for that?
Well, I never had a job in Iran or anything.
Well, hell, Dad, aren't you going to pay for that?
Oh, no, no, no.
You're 17. You're on your own now.
I'm like, oh, man.
Bummer, you know, the phrase of the time.
But he had this proposal.
He said, look, you enlisted in the Navy.
I can get you into this Naval Academy prep school.
I said, you know, I'm the long-haired peace kid in the 70s.
Oh, no, the military, all that.
He says, okay, fine, but what do you do now?
You go to school, you do your sports and all.
That's exactly what you're going to do in the Navy at the prep school.
If you don't like it after a year, you'll have gotten your GI Bill.
You can go get them to pay for your ski career.
So that's how I started The Great Adventure, and I became in the Navy.
I never did really know if it was because my dad knew how much I love it or if he was just trying to get me off his dole so he didn't have to pay for it.
But that's how the journey's shaped and then this amazing 40 years in the Navy and the wide experience and range of opportunities and career paths I got to pursue and be a part of.
So I think that kind of gives you a good understanding of my background, where I came from and what drove me.
But, and I think one of the things we miss, and it's sort of interesting, because I started out, actually, I've done 23 in the Air Force.
I did three in the Navy.
I started in the Navy and had gotten out, came back into the Air Force and been to the other, and I, you know, made it up to now.
Well, remember, a traumatic experience to make that...
No, it's actually pretty interesting because you talk about San Diego.
I'm a chaplain, and first I was a chaplain candidate, and we were one of the last formal schools to actually go through the old basic training barracks there at San Diego before they tore it down back in the early 90s.
And we were right across the Marine Corps Depot in San Diego.
It was sort of funny because I went back and then I started looking back at the old Top Gun, the original Top Gun, because they shot some of that, you know, those scenes on the base right there.
Oh, it's pretty good.
There was this old, talking about an old installment, there was a place, it was either one of the...
Just off base, Red Rooster, a rooster kind of restaurant.
It was attached, I think, to a hotel.
Had some of the best food.
Red Rooster, I know exactly where you are.
That's good stuff.
Good stuff.
You're dating yourself.
Yeah, I'm getting the cane out here pretty quick.
But I had a state trooper as a father.
So, I mean, he was one who would push us.
I mean, we were out, you know, going like that all the time.
Interesting, though, and I want to take a little quick, before we get into the book, because your background in Iran and your language and mastery of Farsi, the other stuff here, did that affect you?
Because, again, a lot of people don't realize the development in late 70s and the tragedy that happened in Iran with our developmental, what we'll call special forces at that time, that were coming together when we had the accident in the desert.
We had that then began to...
You know, really come together.
You coming into the SEAL team and into the bus training in 84, I believe it was, still probably had a lot.
There was still a lot of formation there.
Did that play on your mind, the difference on Iran and now even up until today?
Well, Doug, like most of my life, I didn't have a master plan.
Life took me on this strange journey.
And Iran plays such a recurring theme throughout my life, having grown up there.
And then the timing, as you said, I graduated in 1979. In Tehran when it fell in 79, we went back home and skied every Christmas.
Well, martial law had already gone into ACMA. My dad thought, okay, come back.
And when we got into Tehran and skiing, it got rapidly deteriorated until the day the Shah left and we're in the country.
Khomeini arrives, okay, it's time for us to leave.
We left.
My father stayed through the first taking of the embassy.
People don't realize that.
The embassy was once seized in August, but the students released it the next day.
A few months later, they said, ooh, wait a minute, and I'm sure supported.
They seized it, and that's where the long-term hostage crisis, and then you talk about the failed rescue attempt.
Our whole policies on Iran have been prevalent throughout my career in one way or another.
And I think it played a big hand, or at least the US policies that we formulated.
One, when the Shah was in trouble.
Number two, after the fall of the Shah.
And then in that same year, when the Russians came into Let's fund and prep the Mujahideen with stingers and money.
It may have missed a short-term objective of forcing the Russians out of Afghanistan, but may have precipitated a much bigger problem in the continuous growth of political, radicalized Islam and what that means to the world and how Israel radicalized Islam and what that means to the world and how Israel is dealing with that And then again, the third event in 1979, the seizing of the mosque in Mecca, the Wahhabis.
And so those events of '79 played out in our policies for the last five decades.
And we're still dealing with that today in the current situation.
If you look at Iran, if they had a, and they did, they had a campaign plan they came up with in 80 and 79, and they've executed it brilliantly.
They now control Iran, Iraq.
Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza.
Radical Islam has a foothold throughout Europe in various places.
You could say political Islam is on our campuses.
We've rounded up ISIS coming across the border.
And so this issue has been consistently executed over five decades, and it's been a very successful campaign plan.
And now we're at that The point where Israel's dealing with it in a much more aggressive manner, but it's a problem that could be a lot bigger for all of us in the not-too-distant future.
I agree.
I've said this before, people sort of look at me funny.
I'm one of those that take a longer look at approach, because I think, again, we could get into a whole podcast just on our involvement in Iran from the 50s up to today, and we've had a lot of interesting missteps and a lot of interesting discussions.
But if you look at it today, everybody, and still in the military world that I'm still in and you are still involved with and around, you know, there's a lot of discussion of Russia and the European front.
You got China and all the, you know, the 2025-2027 scenario there with China and Taiwan and that area.
But I still go back to the fact that I think China has risen to the level that they have to make a really conscious decision.
Are they wanting to maintain what they have and become part of the, quote, world in that area?
Or will their aggressive nature take over?
Or Russia, which I'm not sure, but where you just talked about is still being overlooked to this day, that the real, to me, trigger spots in the world is Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, these areas in which there's real basically no control, unlike what you have in centralized China and centralized Russia, which play on a different perspective of war and thought and battle than these groups that you just spoke of.
Well, I would say the common theme to all of these are authoritative governments that want to control.
It's a different form of governance.
These are the democracy.
And if you look at the last five decades, we have dictated the world order.
The West, the United States, Europe, NATO, Canada, Australia have dictated the world order and I believe we're on a consistent track based on policies that we've held since our existence, the ability to project power, forward presence.
You're now seeing these like-minded entities.
I'm sure that light went off.
Jump up and get this.
Excuse me one second.
There we go.
Like-minded entities realizing the opportunities that they have and leveraging each of those to benefit their objectives.
So this latest accord between Russia and North Korea is disturbing.
The progress of radical Islam is disturbing.
Russia that I don't think has any intention of stopping until they control all of Ukraine is a problem.
China's a problem.
So at this point in history, our commitment, our ability to maintain support and act with our partners are critical.
So yeah, I do believe this is a real litmus test for us and our political leadership.
I think that's going to play out in the elections and to whatever the next administration is going to be.
They have some significant challenges on their hands that we're going to confront.
And we may not be able to appease and placate like we have in the past.
It may take a much more aggressive demand to solve some of these problems.
And as you mentioned, China, look, they're building forward presence around the world.
They're building partnerships.
In Africa, in South America, ports around the world, these are real challenges where they're wanting to not just compete, but confront us in these long-standing policies that were so beneficial to us.
So, may you live in interesting times.
Oh, you definitely have that.
I think you hit on an interesting issue.
I think they become more world-orientated than not, but China has an interesting issue.
They don't have to worry about the people of China worrying if they're going to spend, quote, foreign dollars.
They can spend money all over the world, and nobody through that authoritarian regime is going to question them going into Zambia, Mozambique, Yemen, Building bridges, building ports, those kind of things.
They don't have to worry about that.
And I think that's something that a democracy, a republic like ourselves and others, again, we have to go through the political process.
That sort of leads us into, and I think probably a good transition here into your book, discussing the gal how to be smarter than the situation you were in.
Give me the background behind it.
What's in it?
Why should I buy it?
Well, Doug, let me ask you a question first.
Did you ever hear the word gouge when you were in the military?
Yeah, I'm letting you explain that as you go for it.
Okay, so you're a military guy, and it was a military phrase.
What did it mean to you?
Well, the way it's really different to me is taking that, I think it goes back, I take it a different take.
It takes assessment, take command, and take action.
And I think in many ways, that's the way I sort of broke it down and break it down in my line.
Okay, cool.
Well, you've heard this word for years in the military, and everybody used it in a different perspective, what the gouge meant.
And naval aviators, the Navy aviators, always were the guys most vocal on it.
If you Google an internet, it'll say, you know, and to them, it was an inside track, you know, the scoop, the advantage information.
And so in the book, I wanted to really go back and trace the roots of where the gouge came from.
It came out World War II, what it meant and why it's so important to an organization, a team and the culture you set.
And what it really meant, it came out of World War II, where, like my father, graduated from Kings Point, never really spent time at sea.
They were thrown right onto a ship and out supporting the landings and invasion of Saipan.
And they had a lot of this crew who had some rudimentary training but a lot of inexperience and very few experience.
So the gouge was the term they used that they used to train and educate each other.
They treated each other like a family.
They depended on each other because their lives depended on it.
You know, if they got hit by a kamikaze and the bridge got wiped out, that seaman who's after steering may be the guy running the ship.
So they trained and educated him.
Hey, here's what's important.
Here's what you need to know.
Don't forget that.
Because these were the people who had the trust and experience and belief in that kid because they knew his well-being was their well-being.
And in my career, 40 years in the Navy and then over a decade in defense, that philosophy has been critical to my success and I believe the people with me.
My job was not only being a leader to accomplish the needing The missions we were on or the business objective, but to take care of those people because they're the ones that made it happen.
And in two or three years, they'd be the guys running it because I moved on.
So I wanted to capture where this all came from, what the term means, and inculcate that leadership tool, That teamwork, that philosophy in organizations, because it is important.
And at the end of the day, it's the best cultural philosophy for the individuals, because we all balance that business or mission and people.
And so this inculcates that throughout the book and illustrates why that is so important.
And there are various vignettes Because I think, especially now, and I'm always struck by, we lost a little over 6,000 guys in combat over the last two decades.
At the same time, we've had over 125,000 suicides.
So we may have lost the wrong battle.
And never in our history have we trained and prepared our forces so well.
We are the most professional, experienced military in the world.
And everyone talks about the China, they're building ships, they're building, but they don't have that experience.
That's our competitive advantage.
But at the same time, we need to focus on taking care of our people, not just professionally, because they all want to be the best We've got to make sure we take care of them personally, give them those life skills.
Educating and training from the experience to give them those things that will help them succeed in the military, but also when they're out of the military personally.
So that's what the whole objective of this book is and why I wrote it and why I think it's so important.
And it goes beyond the military because we've become a culture that's so combative, so confrontational.
And that's not all bad.
Confrontation can be healthy, but you've got to go into it with the right mindset, you know, understanding where you need to compromise, that the person you're talking to and fighting with may be your friend next week.
So I wanted to get all those things out and talk about and illustrate that.
And that's the purpose and what the book was written for, Doug.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
And that goes back to what we're talking about.
You've got to have the information, you've got to use the information, and then how to execute the information.
And I remember years ago, I used to train, and still do, I still have to go into companies, but I used to go into fire departments and other places, and I would work, and I'd do leadership training.
And what I would always start with is you got, and basically look at the guys in the front of the room that had the white shirts on, the officers in the front, and I'd talk to them, and I'd say, but all of you in the back of the room who don't think this applies, you're going to, whether you realize it or not, You're going to be moving up into a white shirt at some point.
The military is such a great example of that.
I mean, you move and the senior airman of today is going to be the tech sergeant of tomorrow and the master sergeant and chief petty officer.
You've got to flow that all together.
And I look forward to this book, and I think it's going to be great for a lot of areas here.
Because another thing is happening as well, and you talked about the experience factor.
We've had a military now from 90, really from 90 to 2020, that has had at least some combat going on at all times, okay?
And, which is pretty unusual for what, so we've developed, and especially from 2000 into about 2015, we developed a pretty good senior NCO class.
We've developed a middle officer class that had, you know, a good deal of training, good deal of fire, good deal of real world experience.
Question coming now is, as people have sort of been pulled back a little bit, where do you see that not only in business with some of our workforce, but also in the military in the fact that we're having trouble keeping that retention, those unfortunate suicide numbers that you talked about?
How can we use this knowledge and how does your book help that so that we can have a better prepared service going forward?
Yeah, great points.
And I want to throw a vignette that illustrates this so powerfully because you hit the nail on the head.
That kid could be the guy tomorrow.
9-11, you know, we launched out of San Diego and three weeks later, we're putting guys into Afghanistan.
And I love this story because there's a young kid and I won't say his name.
I'll just call him Tom.
Great kid.
The CEO of a SEAL team, and he's just checked into the SEAL communities, into the team, so I want to see him and have an interview.
I'm talking to him, and he's a Naval Academy grad with a bunch of tattoos, which was unusual, part of the new generation, so I'm talking to him.
And he has the same old name as a former senior naval flag officer.
And I'm talking to him, I realize, are you related?
And the kid says, oh yeah, that's my dad.
And I've known his dad and his dad had had my butt a couple of times.
And I asked him, does your dad know you have these tattoos?
He goes, oh, no, sir.
I said, get him on the phone.
I want to call him.
Oh, sir, we can't do that.
Payback's a bitch.
But we moved on beyond that.
But he's the first kid we put in Afghanistan.
We fly across from Oman, across the desert, land in the middle of the desert, kick him out.
And he's the guy who's going to put eyes on targets for two to four days before we come in.
He's now a flag officer.
Two things.
He had 20 years of war, much more than his father ever saw, and now he's leading it.
So again, the quality of the The military personnel and the leadership now is unsurpassed.
But back to your point, you hit two points.
And I'm less worried about retention than I am about bringing them into the field, recruiting.
Army, Navy, we've lost.
We're missing 50% of those coming into service.
And so one of the things I've always been struck on, how hard it is to get in the service.
If you ever smoke pot, you ain't coming in.
If you ever got arrested, you ain't coming in.
Which is very opposite when you and I came in.
At the end of Vietnam, if you breathed on a mirror, come on in.
We transitioned to this volunteer force.
I'm a big fan of adapting the marine model.
Let's lower the standards.
Okay, you smoke pot?
Yeah.
Okay, we're over that.
Oh, you had a crime?
Okay.
Bring them in so we meet those retentions.
And you know, the day you put on that uniform, you're a completely different person.
I don't care how bad you are.
But get those numbers.
We got to bring the standards out so we can get a broader playing field to bring kids in, but make them compete to stay.
That's the marine model.
They bring a lot of them, but they're only a one-trick pony.
If they want to stay, they got to compete and really be good.
So I think that would help tremendously, not only on the front end of recruitment, but I believe also with retention.
The more gain you have in this, the better you are.
Meritocracy works very well in the military, reinforcing that.
Again, I don't care who you are or what you are or that, but you've got to perform and you've got to be a top performer, and not everyone's going to get a medal.
So I think those are tools we can use to really reinforce the melting.
But again, if we're going to make that investment at the bottom, but they compete to stay and we can do the retention, the investment in their personal loss becomes a long-term It's a long-term investment that's going to pay you big dividends.
So I think we've got to tweak the model a little and get to where we can really build the force.
And again, we have the most professional force in the world.
And I can tell you right now, in San Diego here recently, the SEAL training is Three times harder than when I went through training.
Bullshit, you're in the hardest buzz class.
It's a year-over-year program.
The professionalism, the sacrifice, it's hard.
But the flip side of that, we keep these kids for a long time.
They're doing a year assessment and training.
That's hard.
That makes them understand your career is going to be hard.
You're going to be gone a lot.
It's a sacrifice on your family.
So I think we have to be realistic in our expectations, widen the aperture to get kids, but reinforce that personal investment as much as professional investment to drive that retention.
I agree.
Well, one of the things you just said that it brought up something that I, and now I'm, you know, at a level like you were toward the end of your career where you're overlooking and, you know, from a kernel perspective on now, you're seeing our forest development, you're seeing how we come up and how that affects with, like my case, been in reserves almost all my career, the effect between active and reserves.
And what we're seeing now, I agree with you, bring as many people in as we can.
The concern I'm having is that some of the retention issues, we're seeing promotion rates at major You know, upwards of 90%.
We're not seeing that culling going on.
But you know why?
Because they can't keep them.
That's right.
So those are problems.
I'm going to hit this one Those are problems, again, systematic, you're having the flexibility and the agility, so that's fine.
But where we can reinforce the capacity, I also think technology is going to help us in this regard to some extent.
And as you know, space command, cyber command, the threats are different, so we're building a different type of force.
And that's why this volume helps.
That gives you the agility when you need that.
Did we have those right sort of people?
Look at what we've done with cyber forces over the last decade.
We went from Relatively none to a significant capacity within the Department of Defense.
So I think that flexibility, that adaptability and having scale and volumes could be very important to us.
And sure, so maybe that competition for boatswain's mate or a guy in a gate is going to be different than the other stuff.
But we've got to be able to craft that into our policies, our retention, and our skill set to have that flexibility.
And numbers help with all of that, Doug.
Before we let you go here, I've got to transition to something.
We're going to plug your book.
Folks, if you want to go get this book, I would encourage you to, The Gouge, How to Be Smarter Than the Situation You Are In.
It's an applicable book, not only for just those in the military or anywhere else.
This is something that You know, can apply to everyday life.
But turn the twist here just a minute.
I've heard from many in the community, the SEAL community.
I've served with some in Congress that were there.
I've served, I've talked to several special operators.
There's a, and I'd love to get your take.
There is a divide over the, and I'm going to put this in a positive form.
I'm not being negative here, but a positive form.
Rise in notoriety of the SEAL member in the last 15 to 16 years.
Before 2005, 2006, you heard about SEALs, but they were never on the front page of anything.
And individually, you never really heard about them unless they were an admiral or something of a different nature.
That notice now that almost everywhere you turn, there's a SEAL who's a writer, there's a SEAL who's now, you know, doing movies, there's a SEAL doing a podcast, there's a SEAL, you know, you got Jocko, you got Andy Stumpf, you got, I mean, there's a lot.
And then, of course, folks that I served in Congress with, yourself and others.
How does that, do you see that playing out and does it surprise you that more and more who have had a SEAL background or in particular, that's the one that gets pictured, are making their way to public life or political life?
Not at all.
Let me give you a couple vignettes to illustrate that.
So I come out of the Naval Academy in 1979. I went in right at the end of the Vietnam War, and I wanted to be a SEAL. They would not let you be a SEAL. The Navy was kind of over SEALs.
They didn't want to put money into us.
I think we had two 06s at the time, one on the East Coast downsizing.
And so I had to go to a ship first.
They won't let you go into the SEALs.
So I did about four years.
I'm ready.
And then I lateral transfer.
My father finds out about it.
He calls me.
My dad was a 32-year Navy ship driving captain.
And he calls me and says, God damn it, I never did think you're too bright.
I just didn't think you're this dumb.
There's no future in that SEAL. Oh, okay, that's it.
Yeah, yeah.
But what struck me, the guys we attracted to the SEAL community were physically inspired.
They came for the physical.
And what I've seen, and I think our colleges are illustrating this more and more, physical development is becoming just as important as mental development.
And the two are closely related.
If you're physically strong, you're in most cases going to be intellectually strong.
And so we're recruiting, especially in our officer corps, absolutely incredible people.
You know, Johnny Kim, who's an astronaut.
He's a SEAL. He's a doctor.
Who knows?
He's going to be president.
You know, I'm at the White House working and I'm playing racquetball and I blow out my bicep.
I go to Bethesda.
I lay on the table.
They put juice in me to retouch.
And the guy walks in and his last words to me before I pass out was, hey, sir, I was a platoon commander for you at SEAL Team 3. And I go to sleep thinking, oh, I'm going to wake up with my penis sewn to my forehead or something.
But the kid liked me, and it all turned out.
My point is, those two things, the people we attract, and it's competition.
They've got to compete to get those billets, the best of the best, physically and intellectually.
So not only are we getting the best coming into the pipeline, the pipeline only reinforces that confidence Mentally and physically and reinforces that they can do anything they want.
So a lot of them realize that and they feel, okay, I'm plateauing the seals or it's not.
Oh, I'll go to Congress.
I'll go be an astronaut.
So I understand it completely and I salute all of them because they're all going to contribute to our nation in ways you can't believe.
One of my favorite stories We came out of Afghanistan and there's this young kid who ran some of my toughest ops, one where we went out on 24-hour mission.
He ended up being out there nine days.
Incredible kid.
We come back to San Diego after a year in Afghanistan.
We're reloading.
We get a short stay before we go for Iraq.
And this kid comes into my office.
They say, sir, this is too hard on my family.
I'm going to get out.
I said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You know, we're in our heyday now.
We've been trained.
This is what we're...
So it's too hard on my family.
I said, well, then you should stay in the reserves.
And oh, no, I'm not getting out of the Navy.
I'm like, you're staying in the Navy, but you're not going to be a SEAL? What the hell are you going to do?
And the kid says, well, so I'm going to be an astronaut.
I almost went and I'm so smart.
I'm kind of a smart ass.
I said, well, You think you're a rocket scientist or something?
Well, I am a rocket scientist.
I almost went across the table and choked him out because he was flaunting his superior intellectual capacity.
But at the end of the day, he became Chris Cassidy, one of our top astronauts, more time and space than most other astronauts.
But my point is, this whole system It pays huge dividends to our country and all of us, regardless if they stay or not.
Now there's a little dilemma there.
We get a lot of folks now who are coming in to get the benchmark.
Oh, I'm a seal to add to their resume.
I need guys who I can keep For 30 years, 40 years, like in my case, because the longer we have them, the better we are as a force and the more ever that experience.
But that system of process of competition incessantly brings out the best not only in the people, but in the individuals themselves.
And that's a reinforcement.
Of why this gouge principle is so important, you know?
So it's all good.
We all went for it.
I'm greedy.
I need to keep them as seals because the longer I do them, the more they're going to be able to do our missions, meet our nation's challenges in combat, which I think are growing exponentially at right now.
So I need those kids.
But if some of them get off to go to Congress, okay, so be it.
But the system and process is a fine-tuned machine that pays dividends.
And back to our military at large, I think that's a critical component to reinforce.
Bring one, bring all.
But if you want to stay, you better perform and be a top performer.
And we've got to be able to differentiate those people who perform and who are just there for our own well-being over the long haul.
I agree.
Folks, this is why we bring guests like Admiral Bob Harwood on.
He's a legend, a great guy.
Thank you for everything that you've done for this country and for the vast history of knowledge that you bring.
His book, The Gouge, How to Be Smarter Than the Situation You Are In out Post Hill Press.
We're going to attach a link to it here in the podcast notes so you'll be able to get a taste of that.
Admiral, thanks for being a part of the show today.
I'd love to get you back on and discuss some more intricacies of Iran.
I think a lot of our folks today, I believe there's a history lacking.
I think there's a lot of things we do well, but I think history in our country is becoming something we don't do very well in understanding world events.
I think you would have a really grand perspective on that at some point.
But folks, again, Admiral, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, and thanks, and good luck with all the book.
Thanks, Jimmy.
Thanks, Doug.
Good seeing you.
Folks, that's it for the.com's podcast for the day.
We'll be with you next time.
Take care.
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