433: What Aerial Combat Teaches Us About Leadership and Life. With "Good Deal" Dave Berke.

Jocko Willink

This is Jocko, podcast number 433 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, echo. Good evening. Also joining us tonight, Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave.

Dave Burke

Good evening. So sometimes, Dave, you and I wander into conversations about aerial combat. It's actually surprising to me sometimes how rarely we do that because of your entire career, minus, what, six months or one year that you were on the ground, but the rest of your entire career was aerial combat. And I. It's funny.

Jocko Willink

You will tell me something about aerial combat, at least this was probably it two years ago, three years ago, you would tell me something about aerial combat, and I would kind of interject that. Yeah, you see, that's like the. That's covered move or whatever. And as you know, as another subject would come up, you'd explain to me how you do something in aerial combat. And I would always see these connections, and I thought it would be good to kind of share those connections with everybody so that they can continue to see how, if you see the way broadly, you can see it in all things.

So aerial combat, first of all, when we talk about aerial combat, when you hear the word aerial combat, I know some people are thinking of a dogfight right now. What are you thinking about? I'm not thinking of a dogfight. Not that you can't be in a dogfight, but when I think of aerial combat, I'm thinking about a thousand different things an airplane can do to contribute to the battlefield. And the range of that thing is so wide, like, there's so many different things that is that I don't go to one specific thing.

Dave Burke

I just think about. And certainly what I grew up with, how much more a person in an airplane can do now than they could do 30, 40, 50 and beyond years ago. It's pretty complicated stuff. And at the same time, every time we talk about it, we find these super obvious similarities and how simple that stuff is, too, from what we know about everything else, too. So there's a lot to discuss, but in the end, there's gonna be a lot of parallels.

Jocko Willink

I was reading a book, and I forget which book it was. It was some book about air, and they were explaining how the machines, like, when we think of a world war two plane, either a B 17, a P 51, a P 30, any one of them, we think of. Like, we think of antiques. We think of antiques. You know, when they were going out to those planes to fly them, they were in the most modern, badass science, the edge of science aircraft ever.

And it's weird to think about that. You know, I mean, imagine echo Charles, you're. You're going out to like a model T Ford. And when we think of. When we see them getting into a model T Ford, we think, oh, that's just like an antique car.

But for them, that was a Lamborghini. That was like the highest end freaking Tesla. That's what they're getting into. So it's weird when you say, oh, yeah, 30, 40, 50 years ago, it's totally different. And you can do so much more now.

But for those guys. Did you watch masters of the air yet? 100%. Yeah. Anybody hasn't watched masters of the air.

It's a. It's on Apple tv and it's. I would say it's the band of brothers the Pacific. And now they did one for the guys flying the b fighter pilots. It's really focused on the b 17 guys, which, by the way, my great uncle is a b 17 pilot.

Did I tell you that? Yeah, we talked about that when we did the Bud Anderson pilot. Okay. Yeah, that's right. Legendary b 51 pilot.

Crazy. And then you and I did that Air Force survival and what they talked about and they showed it. Well, in masters of the air, what they talk about is like, you know, your plane is going down for ten minutes. It's not like, for you, Dave Burke, your plane's going down. It's like, I'm.

In a lot of cases, you're getting out real quick. Well, what's the longest you would be able to, I guess you could have you maybe running out of fuel or something like this. There's probably some small scenarios by which, you know, you're gonna be in it for a while, but it's what you're talking about, like in a b 17, you know, and it's. Even the process of, like, going down is gonna take a long time. Yeah.

What are they flying at? 30,000, 40,000ft? Yep. And so their glide path, I mean, they've got 1015 minutes to try and figure this out. Now, sometimes your aircraft's on fire, sometimes it's getting shot up still.

Sometimes it's falling apart. But that was crazy. So when you think of air. So when most people think of aerial combat, they think of dogfight. When you think of aerial combat, you think of this entire mechanism that's gonna take place, this giant airborne machine that's gonna go in and do what.

Dave Burke

And to that too. I also don't just think of one plane against another plane. I think of how my plane contributes to all the other planes that I'm bringing with me same airplanes, different airplanes, and then all of the things I might be fighting against that are in the air, on the ground, or elsewhere, too. So I think the image of, like, air to air combat as me and you were fighting in our planes is not how I think of it. I don't think any modern fighter palate thinks of it in those terms, but certainly the roots of that are there, and you still train to those things.

But the complexity of what you might be doing is so much different than it used to be. So what are we doing? Well, we're doing a lot of different things. In fact, if you think about what it is you're doing, the start of any of this, of anything you're going to do in an airplane, is you have to figure out what it is you're trying to accomplish. You got to identify what the goal is.

Sometimes, in simplest terms, when we talk about planning a mission in an airplane, we have a saying, and I know there's similarities. We have a saying that you start with a target and work backwards, meaning you start with what you're trying to accomplish. In the end, the target might not be a bomb on the target, but it's the outcome. What are you trying to accomplish? Sometimes airplanes are there just to make sure that nobody else can operate there.

And you've probably heard some very similar, some terms similar to the phrase like air supremacy or air dominance, air superiority or just, we're going to fly around here just to make sure nobody else shows up to disrupt what's going on the ground, the range of missions. I mean, I could probably think of ten off the top of my head of different things you might be doing. Sometimes you're just gathering information. Sometimes you are literally dropping bombs. Sometimes you're shooting down on the airplanes.

Sometimes you're getting information to pass to other people. And so you have to figure out really what it is that you're trying to do. And then, of course, now in modern fighters, too, like the ones that I flew, you might be doing three or four things at once on any given mission. In the end, nine times out of ten, you're there to facilitate someone else's outcome, not. Not just your outcome.

More often than not, in the way we are typically raised. And this is really in reinforcement of places like Top Gun. We are the supporting asset. We are there to support somebody else. Most of the time, some are on the ground.

But in the end, the mindset for a fighter pilot, certainly a modern fighter palate, is I'm there to help someone else accomplish their mission. What about when you're looking at like a, like a near peer, like China? Yeah, there's some cool missions. Yeah, there's some cool missions out there. When we're talking about probably the classic mission that if you were to say, hey, you can only do one thing, what are you gonna go do?

We would do something called OCA offensive counter air. I'm gonna take my jets. I'm gonna go fly around in a very offensive posture looking for other airplanes to kill them. Because what we're trying to establish is that that dominance, it has to be done. So at some point, when the ground maneuver starts, people on the ground start moving.

I have to ensure that they are safe from air attack. And sometimes that starts with just dropping enemy fighters. Offensive counter air, sadly, that is a very uncommon mission. Most of the time when we are flying, most enemies choose not to participate in that environment. Now you said it, a near peer.

We know that's gonna, it has happened and it can happen and it, and it will at some point in the future. Again, that's kind of like the dream mission. It's pretty low probability, at least right now. So you're looking for what your end state is going to be. That's sort of the first thing that you're, you're looking for, which is, yeah, like you said, in the SEAL teams in business, we look at what's the end state we're trying to achieve.

Jocko Willink

And listen, can that it, can that end state change over time? Yeah. And if you have a closed mind, that can cost you. You know, that's an important part about the indirect approach, is it gives you an opportunity to say, yeah, you know, this idea that I had wasn't as good as I thought it was going to be, and we need to make some adjustments, but you do have to start with some kind of an end in mind. Once you've done that.

Now, what are you putting together the package? Yeah, right before the in between those two things we talked about identifying what the outcome is, the goal, the mission, the target, why are you there? And as you think about what the package is, one of the things you really want to take into consideration is what is the threat? What is the potential risk of doing this? And I think the reason why you want to think about the threat, if not first, at least simultaneously, is when you decide what you're going to bring.

Dave Burke

A lot of it is in response to what might be out there. If there was no, like, you are operating with total impunity, you could bring whatever you wanted. That is about as unrealistic as I'm going to start a business and I'm going to have no friction in doing. You're going to have some problems, whether it's your competitors, the marketplace, whatever it might be. You got to think about what that threat is and what their capability is.

And I think if you put a generic assessment, you don't want to get too specific, but they're a high threat, a medium threat, a low threat that'll indicate what it is you want to bring. A really high threat, risky mission. You're going to bring different assets than a relatively low threat mission that has some capability, but maybe not ones that you're super concerned about. That's going to dictate what you bring. And then once you get a sense of what the threat can do, then you put together your package.

What are you going to bring to the fight? And then this starts off. So you roll in. How does it get executed? The first thing you got to do is take out the.

Jocko Willink

The ground defenses, right? Yeah. And in some. Some ways, we're speaking pretty generically. There's.

Dave Burke

There's a whole science behind this. I mean, people in the military go to school for how to do this stuff, so we're. Wait, what, what school? Like the war college? Yes.

Jocko Willink

To plan the air side of an operation. Totally. And there's so much nuance in that. So, you know, every scenario, every mission is different. But generically speaking, the way you described it.

Dave Burke

That's right. You. You want to. You want to think about the outcome you're trying to achieve. And even that, we didn't even talk to it, but you could even think it in those terms.

Like, even those missions vary. So if you think about World War two, that's a total destruction mission. You're talking about the b. We're flying over Germany to annihilate them. Think about Desert Storm was like, we want to take this threat and move them out of a particular area.

And it was like, okay, move the Iraqis out of Kuwait. And if we've done that, that was a little bit more limited objective. So even that outcome varies a little bit in terms of what we're trying to accomplish. The total annihilation scenario doesn't happen that often. And, you know, you think about it, that's like World War two, pacific european theaters.

Sometimes we're actually not doing that. Those are guys that we were teaching you when you were going through the rag and stuff with all those guys, like mile of death guys from Kuwait. Yeah. How many of those guys were there. So when I started flying hornets in 97, ooh, yeah, it was prime Desert Storm guys.

They had just done it like six years earlier. They weren't even that. They weren't like old crusty guys. They were like senior captains and junior majors, which means, like, they were experienced guys, but they weren't like these old, super old dudes, like Vietnam level guys. They were fairly young guys that had awesome stories and had awesome experiences there.

But even, like, that example was even inside that conflict, that was not a world war two scenario, you know, what we were trying to do. And so even inside that, like, what your objectives are, and sometimes the objectives is just, we did this for years, is like, we're just going to provide a presence. We used to call those, like, the no fly zone. We did that in Iraq for like a decade, which was just, we're just going to fly up in the north and south just to tell everybody. So you don't forget we're still here.

We're not really doing that much. So the range of even what you're trying to accomplish varies from overall mission to overall mission. But eventually you're going to get to some point where you're going to execute on some kind of kinetic mission where. You'Re gonna say something. You dropped the bomb up there.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. For, what was the situation? Operation Southern watch. Yeah, dude, it's the start of my combat career. What year was that in?

Dave Burke

2000. Spring of 2000. Yep. So we're talking nine years after Desert Storm and not quite three years before oif. And so, yeah, 2000.

Jocko Willink

Do you remember what month it was? I think May. I think I was there. Yeah, you might have been. I think I was there.

Dave Burke

We talked about this. Like, we looked at. We definitely have talked about it. I kind of forgot what the outcome was. And this was a situation where we had been doing presence patrols, relatively non kinetic, meaning we weren't doing a lot of dropping at all.

And we even had criteria for dropping, like, we could only drop for certain criteria, and typically the criteria was below a certain. And I don't remember what the longitude line was, but some place that they weren't. We said, you can't go south of this line, whatever the line was. I don't remember what it was. You could google it.

And if you go south of this line, that's going to trigger what we call a response. And they brought a surface air missile south of that line. And their hope was like, they could do in the middle of the night and get a lucky shot against an american fighter. And shoot them down. That was their plan.

It was literally an SA three missile. I knew exactly what it was. We found it, and we went out, launch, and I blew it up. It was awesome. It was like a super cool mission.

Looking back, obviously, like, at the time, it was probably super exciting. It was probably not the most dynamic. How many people on that deployment from your ship dropped a bomb? Not that many. I was one of the first.

Interestingly, for whatever reason on that, that deployment, once that happened, mine was kind of the start of maybe a good, solid month of the Iraqis. Just what carrier were you on? I was on the John C. Stennis. Do you know who you relieved in there?

Jocko Willink

Cause I was on the JFK. Okay, so the JFK, I think, is the carrier. Before us. You had a squadron, a marine squadron called the 251.

Dave Burke

Damn, I'll think of it. I don't remember. Yeah, there's a marine horn squadron there. I think the JFK was. This was the ship that we released.

Jocko Willink

Because we were there for the millennium, and then we left. So we left in the spring. Yeah. So you must have relieved us. Yeah, we got there in, like, march, April.

Dave Burke

This thing's going off, like, April, May, June. We leave in June and come home in July. Check. So you drop this bomb, come back. But the guys that had taught you were mile of death guys, and now you're the big combat experience guy, right?

I've got a whole bomb under my. Was that your first deployment? First deployment, first bomb. That is pretty. That's good, right?

Pre 911, dude, that was. That was huge. I was almost a celebrity for a little while there. I mean, it was. It was a big deal.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. It just wasn't happening. We took down. We, like, everyone's doing shipboardings over in the gulf, and we ended up taking down this big russian oil tanker.

And it was on CNN, and it was a big deal at the time. And the same thing, like, at the time, I was so stoked that we got to do that, you know, like, it was awesome. Heck, yeah. Super fired up. Looking back, you're like, yeah, you go.

Dave Burke

Back, you know, back to Afghanistan. And obviously, the fact, who are, like, in retrospect, but at the time, dude, huge deal. Huge deal. But an example of a conflict with very limited objectives. We were not going to use.

Oh, they brought a missile south of that. Let's go drop bombs on that. That wasn't happening. So even inside of how we use airplanes, it's all based on the outcome, like the strategic national objectives. We have airplanes even though they're a, quote, tactical asset, certainly on the fighter side, they have massive strategic implications.

If an american airplane gets shot down, news all over the world. Obviously, as you know, an american fighter drops bombs or shoots something down, massive strategic implications. So even down at the lowest level of a single seat fighter pilot by himself, he has to know that what he's doing has huge impact across the entire national strategic scope. And you have to know what it is that you're, we're going to get to this at some point, but, like, that's a huge thing you have to think about. Were you thinking that?

Jocko Willink

How old are you at this time? 25? 20? No, like 29. You're 29, so you're 29 years old?

Dave Burke

No, I'm 27. I'm 27, yeah. And you felt you had a pretty good grasp on that strategic implications? I had a very good grasp. I had a really good squadron that taught things in great detail, like rules of engagement, things that a lot of legal, like, things that aren't all that exciting but are super, super, super important.

And so we had a squadron that put a lot of pressure, focus and stress on the important things. So I felt very capable and prepared and I understood what I was doing. Yeah. I even expected the aftermath that I got, which was like a big prop. I have some cool articles that I printed up, like a big propaganda campaign where, like, some article came out like, I had literally bombed, like a baby milk factory or something like that, you know, like, oh, orphans have been murdered, you know.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. And they're like, this is what's going to happen. And like, so we had a really good sense of what we were doing. I think the country and the carrier certainly were well prepared for even the aftermath of those decisions. Now, how do you think about things since this?

A lot of this is much more doctrinalized. How do you think about things from an unconventional standpoint? When you're thinking about, like, when you talk about unmanned, when you talk about remote, when you talk about using stealth, like, what does that look like from your perspective? Do you. So if you're a conventional force commander, if you're in charge of an army battalion or an army brigade or a Marine Corps battalion, you would say, oh, here's where I can fit some special operations into this thing, or here's how I can do this in an unconventional way.

Dave Burke

Yeah. What are the opportunities for that when it comes to aerial combat? Yeah. I think that the unconventional use of airplanes and airplanes is like UAV's drones, regular airplanes, too. I think the last several years have allowed a lot of pioneering of things that are very unconventional, partially out of necessity, but also partially out of mitigating the risk of, like, putting a person in a plane flying in enemy territory to get a relatively limited return on that.

Things like UAV's have made a totally, I think, a dramatic change in how we think about operating. Not to say that we look at a UAV as a disposable asset, but it's a totally different mindset of if the risk associated with that doesn't involve a human being, an american human being. And so I think it opens up the opportunity for a ton of non traditional ways of how to operate where 20 years ago we might not even think of it. Did you listen to the RFK podcast? Not yet.

Jocko Willink

So I didn't know this. I knew that his. That JFK's older brother Joe was killed in World War Two. Do you know how he's killed? He was killed.

They were thinking unconventionally, and they made, I want to say it was B 17 bombers that were remote control, and they were testing this theory to take these B 17 bombers, remote control, put them up in the air, filled them with explosives, and then basically let these things kamikaze themselves into the target. So they did it. They designed it, but they couldn't make it take off on its own. They couldn't remote control takeoff. They couldn't figure that out, because allegedly, there's a bunch of stuff a pilot has to do to get a plane to take off.

So they couldn't get it to do it. The reaction time was too slow. Yeah. So what they needed was they needed pilots to take the aircraft off, and then once they turned it on, the final iP, arm the thing, and then jump out. Parachute out.

That was the plan. And probably parachute out, you know, either in, I would say, probably over the channel or something like that. So that was the plan. And so Joe Kennedy, he went up to do this and armed the thing and was getting ready to parachute, and it detonated and killed him. And, like, whoever else was with him, the other pilot or whatever.

So, yeah, this idea of unmanned aircraft, this is a pretty old idea. Yeah. And. But now, man, I mean, a six year old can fly drones easily, easily flying drones, take off, land, hover, like, do all this stuff. That's incredible.

Dave Burke

It's totally different, though. Are you still. So the last time we talked about this specific subject, I don't know what time range you gave me, but I was saying, like, the manned fighter pilots are the manned fighter aircraft and bomber aircraft are they don't have much time left. You said, like, another two generations, maybe one generation, 30 years. I think you said 30 years.

Yeah. Have you changed yet? No, I think my attitude is still, and I think of things generationally. That's a term that we use in aviation, like, fifth generation, fourth generation. There's not a time limit on that.

I would say, like, a generation of fighters last between 30 and 50 years. And so when I think, like, how. Old'S f 18 right now? The f 18 1st flew in like 80. You know, I think it came to the fleet in 83.

Jocko Willink

Okay. So I just did an Instagram post, like, happy birthday to the f 16. It turned 50. Now, the f 16 is still, like a super relevant airplane, too. So 50 is like, it's going to be around for another 20 years at least.

Dave Burke

So when I think of generational generations of airplanes, I don't necessarily think of how long they're going to last. I think about what happens to the design of those planes. Designing and building a generation of airplanes takes a long time. We just started really fielding aggressively in the last ten years. Our fifth generation, which means the next generation, the 6th generation, is all being thought of, designed, contemplated, and eventually going to get built here relatively soon.

Jocko Willink

How much faster is that? Is the 6th generation manned? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wouldn't it be faster just to go unmanned right now? Well, my basic assumption would be is they haven't made that.

Dave Burke

They haven't gotten it to do what they can't get it to do what they want it to do unmanned yet. I think the confluence of those things. My point behind that is they're going to build another generation of fighters. We'll just generically call it the 6th generation fighter. It's coming.

I don't know. Ten years, whatever. 15 years, something like that.

My belief is that they won't build another generation of man fighters. That doesn't mean the 6th gen plane won't fly for 30, 40, 50 years. And you'll have some. Some, like, declining usage, usage of band, like this plane when they build them, however many they build, like, somebody will be flying that until it's no longer useful. But I would not be shocked if the next generation of airplanes, they no longer putting a person in the cockpit now, dude, I had people when I said that on this podcast, like, you know, guys like, you're crazy.

And other people are like, no, that makes perfect sense. Of course, I don't know, but I think about how long it takes and what they're trying to do and what the next generation is gonna be. And then I think of the generation after that and the fact that these planes last 30, 40, 50 years, the 7th generation of fighters is probably not gonna have a person in it, is what I think. I think, again, I'm a total idiot novice over here, but I'm gonna chime in anyways. Cause I'm feeling like it.

Jocko Willink

It seems to me like there will be another sort of. Sort of, like another line of evolution that's going on right now with unmanned aircraft. Then that line is gonna overtake, supplant. Yeah, yeah. It's gonna supplant and overtake the 6th generation.

Dave Burke

They're gonna live together. And the man world is gonna be in a decline, and the unmanned world is gonna be in an incline, and eventually one will age out. Cause also, you look at what is the ultimate objective, right? It's what you started with, totally. Like, what's the goal?

Jocko Willink

The goal is to do this. Well, you don't. There's ways to do it without even having that type of aircraft. You could do it with 40 little drones that can fly in, that are expendable, and it can create as much havoc or deliver what you need to deliver and zero risk to human life. And I think it's.

Dave Burke

People don't. We don't do a good job predicting the future. And I think oftentimes it's hard for us to. We, I think, typically underestimate how. How quickly things can evolve on the technology side.

And typically, things evolve faster than we imagine. And it's not hard for me to imagine a world where the remote AI virtual world just accelerates so much faster than we think. I think 30 years from now. Like, it's not hard for me to picture, like, dude, we're gonna be doing things nobody, very few people can imagine, and that the need for a person flying around like I did is gonna be far less necessary. Now, here's some another debate from the air world that can come up from time to time, and it really does relate to everything that we do as human beings.

Jocko Willink

Multirole versus single role aircraft. First of all, explain what a multi role versus single roll is, and then we'll get into it, dude. It's really, how it sounds is for years and years, we built what we called single purpose airplanes. By design, a fighter would be designed to shoot down other airplanes. A bomber would be designed just to hit targets on the ground.

Dave Burke

And at some point, it was really interesting, too, is even single purpose airplanes quickly evolved into multirole airplanes, but it really meant the person or the people inside them. The machine had to be proficient in a lot of different things. The f 18 that I flew, at least on paper, technically, was the very first aircraft designated as both a fighter and an attack, meaning it was built from the ground up with the expectation that the pilot will be able to conduct fighter missions and attack missions, air to air and air to ground. Now, at the same time that the Hornet was being built and proliferated, there was an airplane called the f 16, which technically was a fighter, very quickly evolved into a multirole machine. So fighter and attack and surface suppression, enemy defenses, multi mission thing.

So we've had several of those for many generations, but the Hornet technically was the first one designed to do that. A classic example would be at the same time the Hornet is coming onto the scene. In the late early eighties, late seventies, early eighties, we had an airplane called the f 15 Eagle, which to this day only does air to air missions. Now, there's several different things you can do, air to air, but it is strictly a fighter. That's one of the reasons why the.

Jocko Willink

Eagle wait, so they couldn't even. They don't provide ground support. Zero, it is a single mission aircraft, the fighter mission. Now, again, there's a bunch of different things that sit inside that, but they are not doing anything. Air to ground.

Dave Burke

There's no attack capability in that machine. Basically everything has been built since the early eighties has had multi mission capability. The debate is, and by the way, there are some other airplanes that were built just for air to ground, like the a ten is a great example, like the classic ultimate CAS airplane, cannot shoot down other airplanes, can't shoot a gun or a missile at another fighter. That's a single mission. Of course, there's several mission sets inside that, but the debate is, should we have a whole bunch of different airplanes that do all these different things?

Because if you're just an aero ground guy, you can specialize that and be really, really good at that, or do you need a machine that does a whole bunch of different things? And the risk is, what they would say is, oh, you're a jack of all trades, you're a master of none, which means you're going to be deficient in all of those. Were the f 15s flying missions in Afghanistan and Iraq then? No, the eagle. Yeah, no, dang, none.

In fact, the Eagle community, which had done really, really well in Desert Storm when Iraq, OIF was kicking off in zero three, the eagle community was like, here we go. And we had spun up the Eagle community to go to Iraq to go get some again. And not a single aircraft from either Iraq or Afghanistan was launched against the american forces. And very quickly, they literally just sent the Eagles home to create ramp space for other platforms. Eagles had no engagement in OIF, no engagement in Afghanistan, and have not had any involvement in either those conflicts.

The f 15 c, it's a single mission platform. Unbelievably good at it, but no place, no relevance in those conflicts. Doesn't mean it's an irrelevant airplane. In fact, there's a really strong argument to be made that the reason nobody, the Iraqis didn't launch an aircraft is they knew the eagle was there. So while they might not be getting any kills, it's serving its purpose as a deterrent.

But there's no, like, objective missiles getting launched and planes getting blown out of the sky, so you can't show what you're doing. But every eagle pilot knows out there that a reason, the main reason the iraqi air force didn't fly against the Americans is because how well the eagle did in Desert Storm. So they're like, we just won't do this. They just pulled him into the desert and put them in the sand. F 18 versus f 15.

Jocko Willink

Same pilot who's. Which one wins in a dogfight in eight? Dogfight. Yeah. God, I'm a little biased.

Dave Burke

If you're taking these two airplanes configured just for dog fighting and these two are equal pilots, the Hornet should win. Every eagle pilot listening right now is going to just, his head's going to explode by hearing this. I flew against the eagle a lot. It is an unbelievably good airplane if you are just doing dogfighting and the airplane is just slicked off for dogfighting, the hornet should beat the eagle. How come?

It's, it's, it is a, it is a more maneuverable. It is not as fast, it's not as powerful, it doesn't pull as many G's, doesn't have as good turn rate. These are all words that the eagle guys will hear and go, yeah, he's right. But it is a more nimble and more maneuverable airplane. And if I'm going to get behind you before you get behind me, I'm going to do that in a hornet faster than I'm going to do it in an eagle.

Jocko Willink

So why do we make, why are we still have it in the inventory? It's aging out. There's not much, there's not many. It's been a. Replace the Raptor.

Dave Burke

Replaced the eagle and the Raptor has a lot of air to ground capability, even though it's technically just a fighter, but it has a ton of air to ground ability. The eagle has aged out, and it's around because it still serves a purpose, but that purpose is dwindling a little bit. Again, I attribute a lot of our air dominance in the world to the fact that that airplane exists. So there's still a reason to have it. It's like having an arsenal on your shelf, and you're thinking about coming after me, and I'm going, hey, before you do this, just take a look over there, and you go, well, maybe this isn't a good idea.

That's everybody's effective. As if you come at me and I use those weapons against you. That deterrent ability is everybody is useful. In fact, maybe even better. It might be better for you to go, I don't want to mess with you, because you know it's there.

The problem with that is it's really hard to account for that. The Eagle community has suffered from that because they're so capable, they're so proficient, and so few threat adversaries are interested in messing with it, that they just stopped flying against it doesn't help their cause. But I think it's true. I'm a huge proponent of the C. Model community, so it seems that the debate that I was bringing up has already been solved, which is single role aircraft just don't really make sense.

And I am a firm believer in a multi mission aircraft, multirole machine. There is still a debate that if you put too many mission responsibilities on a pilot, that it makes him less effective in all those. That is an ongoing debate. I think that debate will always continue. I sit squarely on one side of that debate, which is where a multi mission fighter pilot can be as good at every one of those missions when trained correctly.

And I was thinking about it, thinking we might talk about this. When I think about a seal, it'd be like saying, hey, listen, you can be a sniper and you can do a beach assault, but you can't be really good at both. You'd be like, we could. And I'd say, well, okay, jocko, if I told you how to be really good at being a sniper and being really good at, like, a room clearance and being really good at a vehicle patrol and being really good at.

Echo Charles

A. Sea to shore assault, and then I said, but I'm gonna take this other guy. I'm gonna take echo. All he has to do is be a sniper. Who's gonna be a better sniper?

Dave Burke

There's an argument that says, oh, he only has to be a sniper. He's going to be a better sniper than you. That's a fair debate. My experience tells me that you can actually be really good at all those. And actually, I've seen guys be every bit as good as a sniper having multiple missions.

Jocko Willink

I was going to say, yes, I agree with that. And there's a, you could get into a point where you can find some outlying missions that are so far. If you were like, hey, echo, I want you to be good at all these things that you just mentioned, and I want you to be really good at tennis. Yeah, right. That's gonna be tricky.

Cause this is not related. But look, being a sniper and doing CQC, which close quarters combat and doing beach assaults, like those are all things that are all interrelated. And when you get better at one. Have you ever heard this thing in the book, outliers? I think it's in outliers, but they take, and I forget the exact experiment, but it has something to do with this.

So they're training kids to throw a ball into a basket that's 6ft away. And they have a test where you're gonna take this ball and you're gonna throw it in this basket at 6ft away. And they take one group of kids and all they train is putting it into the basket that's 6ft away, throwing it in there and throwing it in there and throw it in there. They take another group of kids and they train them. Sometimes they put the basket at 2ft, sometimes they put it at eight foot, sometimes they put it at four foot, sometimes they put it 6ft.

Day of competition. Who wins? It's the people that had to do the multiple different tasks, right. Because they got better. So.

And the reason that this experiment exists was to talk about the fact that if you're training, if you're raising a child and you go, I want my kid to be a good baseball player. Baseball, baseball, baseball, baseball, baseball. There's a decent chance if he does baseball, football, soccer and tennis, that that combination, especially in the formative years, is going to make him a better ultimate baseball player. Now, look, these days, at a certain point, you gotta be like, all right, my kid's gonna go, really go for it in baseball. He's gotta dedicate himself to baseball.

I would guess 1314, maybe 15 echo. Yeah, yeah, sounds right. Me, I also think you gotta watch out for burnout. I mean, we're getting into a totally different subject here. But, you know, you can burn out a kid.

And I had a bunch of conversations about this at ADCC, but so, so as long as these things are interrelated, and it seems to me like in an aircraft, look, doing a bombing run, which I've done before, in an f 18 backseat, get some dogfight, which I've done before, in an f 18 backseat, get some. All those things. Those are skills that are. But you're doing the same basic skill set. Well, you now know where I stand on that multi mission versus single mission debate as well, which is.

Dave Burke

And that's really one of the reasons why I think Top Gun has maintained such a detailed focus on dogfighting and pure air to air, even though objectively it's very low probability we're going to do that, is what we have known and discovered decades ago. I didn't come up with this. This is something that organization, we have figured out that we believe, is that if you are really good at those things, that translates into all these other things. In fact, if you're really, really good at the complexities of air to air, you're very likely to be a really good bomber, too, because they're so interrelated. Is there an argument that says if all you ever had to do is master just bombing?

Yeah, there's an argument, and that's a debate to your point. And also, I think it might even be like, if I was gonna measure a Navy SEAL sniper that was good at ten different things, and also, like a sniper, maybe he'd get a 98 out of 100 score on his test. And if I told a guy like, oh, all you ever do is being a sniper, and you don't have to do anything else, he might get a 99 out of 100. That disparity is so minor that to me, it's much better to have you having the flexibility, being able to do 567 mission sets, then only being able to do the one. Which is why the multi mission platform and a single seat pilot is how aviation is now.

Meaning all the planes being built. Just about all the planes being built. The cruise has gone from ten in the b 17 to four to two, down to one. Everything is being built with one person. It's not because single seat pilots are any better.

It's because they've created this platform where one individual actually is capable of being really, really good at all these mission sets, because they all translate. And the point is, is that you could get airborne in your raptor or your f 35. You don't know what you're gonna do on that mission, even if you planned it perfectly, the enemy gets a vote, the environment gets a vote, the world gets a vote, and you better be able to be flexible. What, you don't wanna have someone go, hey, jocko, I only know how to. I'm only a sniper.

I can't go clear that room. I don't know what to do. And you're like, dude, you gotta clear that room to get up on the roof. You don't want someone calling back saying, I don't know how to do that. That multi role capability is important, but you also want that guy clearing the room to be really good at clearing that room.

You don't want him just fumbling his way through to get to his primary mission set. You want to be really competent in all those. And it's, I think, very possible for a single seat pilot in a multi mission aircraft to do that 2030 years ago. Massive debate over that. Now, even though you're single seat pilots working alone, there's a massive amount of decentralized command that's got to happen, right?

Jocko Willink

For this to work? Yeah. I mean, so now we're going back to this whole idea of aerial combat. You have this giant mission going on, even though you're a single seat pilot, you're not. You're not king of the world because you're out there on your own as a leader.

You've got to understand what the mission is. You're leading your aircraft, you're leading your part of the mission. So it's a extreme form of decentralized command. Yeah. I mean, you're pretty much reading my mind right now because I'm thinking of the question we talked earlier about, like, how do you win?

Dave Burke

What does aerial combat look like? And the long answer is, decentralized command is ultimately, you get down to this individual in this machine, somewhere out there, doing something where he's going to. He or she's going to end up making an independent decision by themself doing something that's going to have massive implications, and they have to really understand what is they're doing, why the outcome is going to be, and how does it support their larger objective. And then that's happening hundreds or thousands of times in these combat scenarios all the time. I mean, that's what's happening.

Decentralized command is how you win. And that's a very short way. Again, we could talk about this for as long as you want, but that's the shortest answer is that's how you're successful. Person in a plane doing a mission eventually is going to make a decision by themselves that's either going to support or undermine the objective. So from your perspective, you're dropping one bomb in 1990 or, sorry, in the year 2000, you're a frontline guy.

Jocko Willink

On your first deployment, you're doing a strategic operation that you are solely responsible for getting that thing shot. Get it? Dropping that bomb 100% fast forward, however many years, squadron commander. Yeah. And now you've got to convey all that information.

This is like decentralized command. Right? It's kind of like me with snipers. Like, I've got a sniper guy. He's gonna make the decision on whether he pulls the trigger or not.

He's got to understand all the implications that he's got. You go out into in Ramadi, if we have a sniper that kills an innocent person, kills a civilian, kills a woman, kills a kid, it's gonna be a disaster for everyone involved, and they gotta know that. They gotta understand that, and that's our job as leaders to convey that. Yeah. So when you were squadron commander, did you remember what it was like as a 27 year old that's dropping this bomb and said to yourself, that's the reason I asked that question.

Cause you gotta think, man, when you're 27 years old, and I seen pictures that you seen pictures of 27 year old Dave Burke and video, you could see that guy red, you're thinking to yourself, hey, this guy's fired up, man. He's ready to drop some bombs, boy. Especially, like, there it is. Here's your chance to do it, and you're gonna be one of the few guys on this deployment that gets to drop a bomb and one of the few guys in the military that has combat experience, and you've got to be able to harness all that. Now you're a squadron commander.

Now you got to be able to. And I thought the same thing. Like, I got these young guys. They're ready to get after it. If I don't harness that properly, you.

Dave Burke

Can have issues, dude. The similarity is even down to the sniper mission is there's so much overlap there, because all the way extreme on one side is like, you know how bad I wanted to drop a bomb when I got into an airplane? How bad? Like, I would almost like, I'll do anything to drop a bomb, and then with a recognition of anything goes wrong, well, forget it. Even if it goes even 100% right.

I alluded to this. Even when we do everything right, there's still going to be some version of that story that potentially has risk of. We did 100% correct. Exactly right. And there's still going to be somebody out there saying you did it wrong.

And so the implications of that, even if you find the right target at the right time, use the right weapon, cover everything you're supposed to do, there's still risk of something, some other problem being created, even if it's just a media problem, public relations problem. And now you take. And not to diminish. I mean, dude, I was really lucky because I don't know how many hours I spent sitting next to Chris Kyle, but it was a lot, because when I was with you, he and I had very similar. I don't know, missions is the right word, but we were thinking a lot of the same things.

I was up there with you guys talking to airplanes about, how can we protect all the people moving around? That was a way to do it. Chris Kyle's doing the exact same thing. I don't know how many times Chris went to me and goes, hey, dude, come over here and look through the scope of my rifle and tell me what you see. I mean, I have vivid memories of that.

And that was his way of telling me this is him really thinking about what he sees and how it's going to affect the larger mission. That takes a lot of maturity, because in the back of my windows, I want to shoot my gun, I want to drop a bomb. And I've always remarked at that. And that experience with me, with him, with your seals, is so similar to the experience I had as a young fighter pilot by myself, with an airplane where I could press the pickle button, the bomb was going to come off. And, I mean, that's what I wanted to do.

Fast forward to being a squadron commander. I've got all sorts of different experiences reminding me not just how important decentralized command is, but how often you have to emphasize it to the young front line. We'll call them a shooter. Whether they're shooting a sniper rifle, dropping a bomb off an airplane, or any of those frontline marines or soldiers like, you know what those frontline guys are like. They always have to be thinking in the back of their mind, how is what I'm about to do can affect the bigger mission?

And if they don't understand that they're going to do something wrong, they're going to make a mistake, they're going to make a bad decision that, in the end, does more harm than good. The maturity it takes to do that and then the leadership it takes to do that is not just so difficult, it's what sets us apart as a country. And why our military is so good is that we believe in that and we train and teach that, and then we ultimately cut our people loose to go execute with that. And that's how we win. That's literally the whole point.

That's how we were successful. Man, that is hard to do. I mean, that's same thing with business. This is a hard thing to do, but that is what we do, and that's how we have to do it. So, yeah, as a squadron commander all day, every day, that's all I'm thinking about is how do I let my young frontline folks do their job, knowing how what they're going to do is going to affect the biggest, the most expensive, most scrutinized program in the history of aviation, maybe even the military.

That I'm the first operational CEO, getting the Department of Defense breathing down my neck, knowing I got a corporal that's gonna determine the fate of my squadron. Yeah, that's what we're doing. And that was, you know, you bring up Armani there. It's like, that was one of the. One of the differences in that battlefield was we were so embedded.

Jocko Willink

Like, everyone was so, like, you're literally sitting up there next to Chris Lex to lave next to the rest of the snipers, the machine gunners. That's you. We got an army guy up there. We got army scouts in the thing next door. We got iraqi soldiers with us.

We got an interpreter. Oh, by the way, CNN's down in the bottom of the cop right there. They can actually see everything that's happening. It's just total visibility for everyone that's out there. And it was so obvious that if you.

You know, when. When a shot gets taken, if it's a bad shot, it's gonna be a disaster, and it's gonna be known about. It's gonna be on Al Jazeera, everywhere. So, yeah, having that. Having that decentralized command, making sure that people not understand not just what to do, but why they're doing it, why they're doing it, why is this important?

What are the ramifications? What are the strategic ramifications of what you're doing? Because if you make a mistake right now, it's not just. It's not just this. Oh, this.

This little mistake happened by you on the front line. You dropped this bomb, and you shouldn't have. You hit the milk factory or whatever it is you said, or you shot this, a mom, or you shot this, you know, a school teacher. I mean, in Ramadi, there's 400,000 people in Ramadi. Yeah, 400.

There's probably, what, 4000 or 5000 enemy fighters was the estimate. So when you're looking down the street, you're seeing, yeah, you're seeing regular civilians, but also you see that they, the enemy really stands out 100%. They really stand out. And to that point too, like part of that is with decentralized command is me realizing if I do something wrong, it's not just gonna be me that gets scrutinized. My flight lead and then my squadron commander and the carrier, like, it goes all the way back up that scrutiny.

Dave Burke

You know, that you're not operating by yourself, you're operating independently on behalf of everybody else. And I think part of what decentralized can. Why the word why is so important in that is that if I squeeze that trigger, and that's also crazy, too, because I like shooting my rifle in Iraq, like, squeezing the trigger on my rifle is a surreal experience as a fighter pilot. Part of you is like, what am I doing? This is crazy.

And then some combat flying airplanes, but also seeing guys much younger than me, much less. And I say experience, I don't want it to be in somewhat a critical sense, but I saw a lot of the military as a major in the Marine Corps before I got to Iraq, in different ways and different strategic impacts. A fairly broad understanding of just warfare and combat in general, and seeing young guys on your team and young soldiers, young marines that are squeezing triggers, knowing that they're doing it not just by themselves, but on behalf. It might as well be your CEO pulling the trigger. Might as well be.

It might as well be, you know, the chairman of the joint chief. They know that. And so. And that weight, when done correctly, isn't like a burden, it's a sense of obligation. But it's also.

It empowers them to do the right thing, which is awesome. And that's what we do again. That's how we win. Yeah, I just wrote down exactly what, what you said at the note I took was burden of command. Because part of decentralized command is passing the burden, passing that weight.

Jocko Willink

And look, ultimately, when you're in charge, you're the one that's going to bear the burden. But they better recognize your team better recognize the burden that they're carrying and what's going to happen. And that's why I got real lucky. Cause I was. I was the admiral's aide prior to being the task unit commander.

So when NSW at large did something that was messed up, I saw that the weight go all the way up the chain of command for what some dumb ass Seal did in Iraq or Afghanistan. I saw that. I saw that weight go all the way up to my boss, the admiral in charge of all the seals. I saw the scrutiny would come on him, and I was like, oh, I need to make sure my guys understand that every little thing that we do is going to get scrutinized, looked at, and that's why you, you have to have the right intent and everything that you do. Yeah.

And they feel what that is, and that's a huge part of decentralized command. And it's a weird thing. It's. It's a weird. I'll have to figure out how to phrase this because you can't, of course, pass on the burden itself, but they've got to understand what that weight is.

They've got to feel it. Look, at the end of the day, if one of your, one of your snipers or one of your fighter jet jockeys goes out and drops a bomb in the wrong spot, you're the one that's ultimately going to totally burn for it. And, look, they might burn too much, but you are both going down at a minimum. You know, it's good. It's coming on you.

So you can't really, you can't really give the burden, but you have to show them what the impacts are of what they're doing and make sure they understand it. Otherwise, you're going to have significant issues and real problems. Well, I literally wrote down feel the weight about 10 seconds before you said that exact phrase. And what I was thinking when I'm saying that is, and you've described this in different ways, that weight is supposed. You're supposed to feel that weight, but it's not supposed to, like, crush you.

Dave Burke

It's not supposed to be debilitating. You have to be aware of it. But the way that you put the weight on them also has to allow. It has to give them the flexibility to do that. But the feeling of that weight can't be so overwhelming.

They decide, oh, I'm not going to do anything because if I make a mistake, then all these things will happen, is the weight has to be felt, but it can't crush them. And that's what a commander can't. You can't just like, oh, this is on you. There's this old saying when I was first learning to be a forward air controller in getting ready to go to Iraq, that when you say cleared hot, which is the phrase that we use, we go all this coordination, all this planning, and in the end, I'm on the ground, you're in the air. I say cleared hot.

That is the only cue that you have to be approved to release the bomb. And the phrase that got thrown around, at least when I was in training, I don't know if they still use it, was, it's called the fac buys the bomb, is the saying. Which was like, okay, now you as the fac, you now own that outcome. And I fully understand that logic, which is, don't you dare say cleared hot unless you are ready to take that responsibility. But the other side of that is, there were times that I would see that early in aviation, and I thought about this as I became a commander, is what I didn't want that for the pilot to go, well, that's not on me.

The FaC bought that bomb. I was like, absolutely not. And if you're a pilot, you don't ever want to feel, oh, the thak buys this bomb, which means you are now no longer responsible for that. You have to feel that same weight that he feels, which means you're the one pressing that button. And if it ends up being wrong, we're going to come back and go, well, that wasn't my fault.

The fact said a, b, and c, like negative. So the fact buys the bomb is a great logic of wanting that forward air controller to feel the responsibility, but you don't want to relieve the pilot of that either. And so as a commander, I wanted guys to understand when we're doing that, nobody can take that burden off of you on either side. Even if I'm the one saying I approve. You do this, you're cleared hot.

That you still have the ownership, too. So there's so much overlap. Yeah, I know there's a ton of overlap there, check it out. Your machine gunner, you're a squad leader, and your machine gunner shoots in the direction you shouldn't have shot at or whatever. And you, it's the same exact thing, cuz, listen, you get, guess what?

Jocko Willink

You tell the machine gunner, hey, dude, you bought that bullet. You pull that trigger, that's a hundred percent on you. And guess what? You tell the squad leader, hey, your freakin machine gunner shoots. That's a hundred percent on you.

It's overlapping and interlocking fields of extreme ownership. There you go. And that's what you need. That's what you need in those situations. Actually, JP tells a he had a situation where he didn't take a shot because he was, he wasn't quite sure.

And it wasn't that he wasn't quite sure. He had a bad, he had a good target, but he was like, wait, should I? This was like, literally his first or second mission. And he was like, hold on a second. Is this, can I shoot right now?

And he had to crawl over and ask Stoner like, hey, I got a guy over here carrying an AK or RPG. Can I engage him? And Seth's like, yeah. And, you know, Seth realized like, oh, I've done a bad job. Like, my snipers feel like they shouldn't shoot a literal mujahideen fighter maneuvering through the streets.

So that's the situation where, again, if you put too many constraints on somebody, they're going to be like, oh, I don't want to take the shot. If you don't. If they don't understand what that burden is, they might go buck wild. And by the way, there's 100% ownership by the guy that pulls the trigger or drops the bomb. And there's also 100% ownership because I'll tell you, one of my snipers takes a bad shot.

Like, oh, I'm not just mad at that. I mean, I'm not just going to hold that guy combo. I'm going to be talking to the platoon commander. And by the way, guess who ultimately falls on. Yeah, you guessed it.

It's me. Because I didn't convey that information. I didn't convey that burden properly. Totally. So these are things from a decentralized command perspective we have to think about and that, you know, how does this apply to business?

Well, the cashier in your store, and you got 38 stores, and you're a franchisee owner, and one of your cash register guys talk smack or does something stupid, and you say, oh, that's you fire that guy. It's not on me. Okay? You can say that. Oh, the store manager goes, well, it's not me.

It's that. It's, we had it. We hired. The guy was a jackass. Okay, so what did you change?

Nothing. Problem doesn't go away. Problem doesn't go away if you say, hey, listen, store manager, I don't do a good job of conveying the fact that we have to treat our customers with respect. Well, yeah, but, I mean, I can't control this jackass. Why'd you hire him?

How'd you train him? What are you doing with him? How often do you monitor him? Do you check in with him? Is he disgruntled?

Do you have a person that's at your store that's working as a cash register that has a bad temper. Cause if that's what you're doing, look, you're in that store every day. You see what the person's like. So these are the things that have to come into play. And that's decentralized command.

Dave Burke

Totally. Now, listen, I know you and I were talking about doing this, and you sent me some, some words, some vocabulary. I also put together some vocabulary that I wanted to run through. So getting to some terms from the aviation world, and I think it's always good. Look, I do this all the time with jiu jitsu.

Jocko Willink

Like, I'll take, oh, what? We're gonna sweep them. We're gonna maneuver. We gotta set them up. Oh, we got a cover movement.

So we use these things for everything that we do. But some of these, some of these terms from air combat and really just from flying, I think are usable. First one, pitch. What's pitch? Pitch is it's literally your nose moving up and down.

Dave Burke

So if you think about it like the horizontal axis, your nose is going above or below the horizon. So you're pitching the nose up or pitching the nose down. It's where you're moving the nose of the jet. So you're either gaining altitude or you're losing altitude. Your nose is going up or nose is going down.

It doesn't necessarily. You could have your nose up, and that's called getting ready to stall. We might get to that. Yeah. Ironically, like, maybe the larger question is, like, when to do that.

Like, if you're stalling, people want to pull the nose up. Oh, because they want to go up. And pull the nose up. Because I'm going down. Like, that's actually usually a mistake.

So it is just where your nose is going. So it doesn't necessarily mean climbing or descending. See, again, this is why I wanted to talk about this, because that's so important, because how often do you see people, they're trying to correct themselves by moving in a direction that's actually not helping them at all. That's right. Oh, we're not doing well in our marketing.

Jocko Willink

Put more money in marketing. It's like, okay, you're just adding more fuel to the fire. And the word that always comes to mind is, and I think about this when I teach leadership, which we do all the time, is the counterintuitive nature of leadership. If you want to go higher, you don't always pull back on the stick. And that can be so difficult because if you're going to stall, actually what you're supposed to do is push the nose forward.

Dave Burke

Means you got to go down even more. Like, wait a second, this doesn't sound right, but that's how it is sometimes. And that perfect example is, oh, we're not getting enough return on marketing. Put more money in. That might be a mistake.

Jocko Willink

Or from a human aspect, like, oh, echo is not doing a good job right now. I need to take away his response. Take away more responsibilities from him. That might be the wrong move. Yeah, I might actually want to give him more responsibilities.

Let him step up. I remember, like, I hate to say even rolling with you, but I remember, like, the first time you and I were rolling jiu jitsu. Yeah. And you made a joke. You said something like, which, you were just mocking me, but you said, like, push harder, which was like, oh, if I push harder, I might be able to move you, which you obviously, and I knew when you said it was like, you're such a joke.

Dave Burke

But your point to that was, and this is sound thing, like, if I want you to move backwards, I should push on you, and if you don't go backwards, I should just push harder. Right? Like, that's how our brains work. But you know as well as I do that is not always the right answer. So inside that, it's counterintuitive.

Like, oh, I shouldn't keep pushing harder won't solve this problem. Pulling back in the stick doesn't make you climb all the time. So it's, it's, there's a ton of parallels. All right, roll. What's roll then?

Roll is just a different axis. So it's the wings going, instead of the nose going up and down, it's the wings going up. Now it's how you turn left and right. So rolling, you know, which is the long axis of the plane. Wing goes up, airplane turns.

Wing goes down, airplane turns. Is there anything that can be counterintuitive about that? Well, there's not. It's not quite as counterintuitive as the pitch, because the pitch people in airplanes learn, like, pulling back in the stick is not always the smart thing to do. Rolling.

When you roll, the drawback to rolling is that whichever wing goes in whatever direction, one wing is going to get more lift and one wing is going to get less lift. So if you roll and you roll too much, you will start to fall out of the sky. So there is a drawback to rolling, which is the wing is most efficient when it's flat, you move it off the level and you move it up or down, which you need to, to move, you can descend. Do you lose altitude then on every roll? In theory, unless you put your nose up?

That's exactly right. Yes. You gotta coordinate that. You can't just roll by itself or you're gonna fall out of the sky to some degree. Wrote Captain Charlie Plum.

Jocko Willink

And I, Echo, and I went up to do a podcast with him up in San Dienez, and then he and I flew back and we did it with Jim, Jim Kunkel and Charlie Plum. And so then it's me and Charlie Plum in. I forget what the aircraft was. Open cockpit cloth aircraft. And I got it.

You know me, right? I get in there and I'm kind of, like, thinking, hey, if something happens, I'll just take over. It's no big deal. You know, I got controls back here. I'll land this thing.

We took off in, like, a massive crosswind, and the plane was sideways. And I'm like, if something happens, I'm gonna die. Like, I can't. I won't be able to fly this thing. Am I getting in that thing?

I thought, I'll be able to fly this. I flew to f 18 echo, Charles. I flew an f 18, bro. I was like, oh, I can do this. I got in that thing.

The. What is it? Mechanical steering and mechanic like. Everything is totally. Yeah, there's no computers.

I had one. I had a freaking, like, leather helmet on with goggles. Like, that's the kind of scenario I was in. And I thought to myself, when I. When I was walking out there, I was like, something goes wrong, dude, I got this.

Something happens to Captain Plum, I got this. No factor. I'll land this thing. By the time we took off, I said to myself, if something happens to him, I'm dead. This ain't happening.

Echo Charles

That was the most sketch take off I ever seen. It was crazy video, real life, the whole deal. Did you like. No, no, you probably did. I might have, yeah.

But, Brad, you guys were like. Like, they were taken off sideways. Yeah, it was nuts. Echo, if you remember, this is one of my, what I call, like, classic Jocko is he comes back, he goes, oh, dude, we just flew up and did this awesome podcast with this legendary fighter pilot, and he took me on a flight I should have seen if you wanted to go. And I'm like, dude, that would have been super cool if you had asked me before the podcast.

Dave Burke

And he's like, yeah, no, I definitely should have called you on that one. So, yeah, classic jago. You would have enjoyed that. I think so. Yeah, you would enjoy the tour of his condo up there with all of his.

Jocko Willink

And then going into Jim Conkel's ao, where he's just, like, got all kinds of. Dude, I'm glad you had a good time, man. I mean, it's no big deal. As a P 38 pilot got shot down over France, no good for you. Walked out.

That's no factor. All right, so roll. That's gonna turn us left or right. How about. So this is.

I kind of knew what pitch was. I kind of knew what roll was. Yaw. Yeah. Speaking of yaw, speaking of taking off in ohigh wind.

Right? This is a yaw scenario. Yeah. So all these things are connected. Pitch, roll, and yaw are like, none of it happens by itself.

Dave Burke

It's just the three different axes you can move, and this is the third axis where they jet. Essentially, you can slide the nose back and forth, or, like, rotates around itself where, you know, up, down, left, right, and then back and forth is yaw. Again, all these things happen together. If you pull the nose up, you're gonna lose lift. Like, all these things are all connected, especially when you're turning.

But the yaw is, like, keeping the nose pointed straight, and then you have a thing called a rudder, which sits in the back, where you use your feet to keep the nose pointed either straight or into the wind. Mm hmm. Okay, then what's adverse yaw, then? So that's like, this is the term that we use, is if you put in too much yaw, meaning you move the nose too much, eventually that will disrupt how the plane is flying, and its response will be to counter your maneuver. Meaning, if I push left on the rudder to move my nose to the left, the jet might, at some point, based on, like, the wings and things go, I can't do this anymore.

The lift doesn't work correctly, and it will whip your nose back around. And what you typically hear called is an adverse yaw departure, which means it stops flying. So, in all three of these control directions, all of them, if done incorrectly, the reaction will be, the plane departs, does not fly, which means you have the risk if it's low to the ground. And where. And you were just talking about this, where this stuff is always the most difficult, is taking off and landing.

Like, that's the hardest part, especially landing. Like, if you have an adversary departure on landing, you're probably gonna crash and die. So you have to be really, really cautious about how you do it. I like the euphemisms. Right?

Jocko Willink

Departure. That's a great euphemism. Like, this is it should be a yaw. That's what it should be, because now you're gonna die. Yeah.

But instead we just call it a departure. Yeah. Or even like, adverse. It was like, instead of, like, deadly or cat. It's like, adverse, undesirable.

Have you ever had an adverse. Yes, of course. Every one of these things. Every one of these things. Every pilot that's ever been trained, you will actually go up an altitude maneuver until it happens.

Dave Burke

So you can feel it like, hey, we're gonna go do adverse yaw departures today. Which means you're gonna step on the rudder until the plane departs, and it's gonna whip around, and you'll feel the rumbling, you'll feel the air, you'll hear the sounds, and then you'll feel the movement and go, oh, yeah, you'll do it enough, and you'll be able to preempt it and go, oh, I feel. I know what's coming. I gotta stop doing this. So all those things have an adverse response, and adverse yaw is typically the, like, the most deadly, because the reaction of a departure and yaw is, like, usually pretty violent and bad.

And if you lower to the ground. You can't recover from it, and it's because you're forcing it and you keep for. So that the instinct would be, oh, I want the nose to go more left. I need to push it harder. Yes.

Jocko Willink

And then it just goes, I can't. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So essentially, you as a pilot, what you're doing this whole time is you're balancing these things constantly, and you've got to be careful that you go too far in one extreme or one too. The way of, like, all these things are about.

Dave Burke

And I think we talked about, like, trimming the airplane, which means you've got this little, you know, it's now it's like electronic little buttons or whatever, but like, there used to be little levers and knobs and things you'd spin, which is throughout flight, constantly. And this is more true in propeller airplanes, because every time you would change the power of a propeller airplane, the torque would change, which means the yaw would change because propellers spin in certain direction. And if you change the pitch of that or change the power of that propeller, it has a different amount of yaw input, which means you're constantly trimming. The point behind that is that what a good pilot is constantly doing is seeking balance in all three of these control surfaces the entire time to the point. It actually becomes subconscious on an f 18 or most jets.

The trim tab, or, I'm sorry, the trim button, whatever they call it, is like, on the control stick, and it's up, down, left, right, and you do with your thumb. I would not be surprised if, like, subconsciously, thousands, literally thousands of little clicks, one click low, one click up, down, that you're constantly just seeking balance to the point that a pilot knows, like, that's what you should be doing all the time, is seeking balance. If you can't find a connection from back to leadership, then we're missing something. You know, you said that the plane kind of shutters. I was watching a documentary about Dave McCoy, who's the guy that founded Mammoth Mountain up in California, which is a ski area, and he did.

Jocko Willink

It's a cool documentary. That guy was a real go get her, to say the least. Like, he made that whole thing happen just out of nothing. And he. At one point, he had this woman, and I can't remember her name right now.

She was a ski racer, and she went and raced somewhere, and she crashed and she was paralyzed. But was interesting was they were talking about when she was racing, I think something with the wind or what she was wearing. She didn't have clothing on that normally signaled to her kind of how fast she was going. And so she entered a corner too fast. Or maybe it was like she was getting a tailwind.

So the wind, she didn't have that feedback of like, oh, I'm reaching a certain speed right now, and this is a problem. She. It just didn't have that little bit of signal. So that's got to be a huge part of being a pilot, of, oh, I can feel this. I can feel something's going on right now, and you know what it is and you know how to adjust it.

Yeah. The term that's used in aviation, as they call it, seat of the pants, meaning you can feel it, like, literally in your seat as you're sitting there. One of the. One of the critiques of modern fighters is the computers, like, nullify all that stuff out so you don't, quote, feel it. So if you got into p 51 and then got into an f 18, you would feel everything that p 51, every little buffet, every little motion.

Dave Burke

And so that feedback of how fast, how slow you could almost, like, close your eyes in a p 51 and feel exactly how fast you're going, how close you were to stall speeds and things like that. Bro, I used to in a zodiac boat. You know, the zodiac? So in a zodiac. So I was in from the beginning.

Jocko Willink

Of my navy career, I was the guy with the GPS. So when GPS is first kind of came out. So I was always, and we used to have this great design on this gps. It was a huge brick to carry. It was bigger.

It was more like a cinder block. But the control was designed by the most brilliant person in the history of the world. It was just so efficient. But one of the things. So I was constantly, while we were doing zodiac transits, I was constantly looking at that thing and I was always looking at our speed.

And eventually I started playing this game in my head and be like, oh, right now we're going 14.4 knots. And I'd look at that thing and sure enough, and I got so good at that where I didn't even have to look, I'd be like, oh, yeah, we're doing 22 knots right now. I look, boom. Yep, we're doing 20. Oh, we're only doing nine knots.

My boss would be like, how fast we going right now? I'd be like, twelve knots. He'd be like, how do you know? And I just hold up the gps, like, without looking at it. He'd be like, 12.7.

I'd be like, there you go. So that's flying. That's the feet of your pants. Yep. Did you, how much of that did you notice going from the f 18 to the f 35?

Dave Burke

Was? Is it a big difference or. No, it's a smaller difference. It's harder in the newer airplanes to feel them, that they are designed to balance it for you, which is good and bad. You could get pretty good.

Certainly in the Hornet that I have, I have thousands of hours in the Hornet over 2000. I never had that many in the other jets. The advantage of that is, let's say I'm looking over my shoulder and trying to figure out how to maneuver against another aircraft. If I want to know how fast I'm going in an older jet without, like, this really fancy helmet, I'd have to come back in and look at the airspeed, which sucks because that means I have to take my eyes off you. And you could get to a point where you could figure out your airspeed, your g, your aoa, all these really important things by that, like, pretty darn tight, like down to, you know, five or six knots, you know, a degree or so because there's optimal ways of moving the airplane with perfect angles of attack, perfect gas.

And I don't want to stare at the gauges to get that. I want to be able to do that by feel. And you could get really, you needed to get really good at that to be good. Usable load. What's a usable load?

It's what you can carry. And it's a huge measurement of an airplane now too, because you don't know what you're going to do, you don't know what you're going to be bringing. Oftentimes we have these loads of a range of weapons. You'll have a couple of pure air to ground weapons. You'll have a weapon that might be functional both in the air and on the ground.

And you have weapons that are only good for the air. And so other things fuel all these different weights of things that go into that, even where they sit on the aircraft for lateral. If you put a really heavy bomb too far out, it can make the jet less controllable. The point behind that is you have to know what you can carry and how long you can carry it, which means you now know what capability bring and when with this thing that you're bringing this useful low that you're bringing. To the fight, which is when I, when I was looking through these terms, I thought about when you're in business, right, and I'm in business and you have things that you bring on board and they're gonna provide you with some capabilities, they're also gonna cost you something.

Totally. And so, and there's times where I've worked with companies where you're like, hey, you're, you've got these assets on board, what are you getting from them and what are they costing you? And if you don't think about that usable load, you might end up in a bad situation. You run out of fuel, you run out of capital. The first GPS weapon that we started carrying was a thing called a JDAM joint direct attack mutation.

GPs guided GPs guidance is really good. It's actually better than my eyeball, you know what I mean? So it's a really cool technology. Changed the way warfare work. Cause we could be really, really precise, really, really precise, and maybe a tiny bit less precise than lasers, but lasers are cumbersome and it's hard to do.

And like, this thing was like gps cool. Go to this target, the first weapon, and the only one we cared was a 2000 pound bomb. And for a fighter, 2000 pounds, especially at a ship, is a lot. Which means like if you're carrying a 2000 pound bomb, that's 2000 less pounds of gas you could bring back. And so even carrying this super cool bomb, that was like changing the, they.

Jocko Willink

Didn'T make any like 500 pound versions they eventually had. But when this thing first came out, the first one that came out was a 2000 pound version. I bet they're like, look, if we're gonna use a gps and it's gonna cost all this money, it's gonna do some damage. They eventually came out with a thousand or 500 and now it's much more. But the first one.

Dave Burke

And so to your point, though, is you take off, like, oh, this is part of my conventional. This is an awesome thing. It could be a huge liability to the point that sometimes, like, I never had to, but guys would have to jettison them to get back aboard the ship, which is total. It was. Your point is these things are real strengths and they have a drawback.

All of them have a cost associated with them too. All these positive things have a counterweight associated with them. I got a term, flying dirty. I don't know, I might have just thrown that in there because it sounded kind of interesting, but it's probably not as exciting. Not as exciting.

You're either dirty or you're clean. Dirty his gear down and clean his gear up. Do you ever, did you ever have to, do you ever fly dirty? Like, do you ever have to put your landing gear down because you're trying to go slower or anything like that? No, it's not happening.

You're gonna dirty up to come aboard the ship. That's it. And that's it. Did you ever. Does anyone ever.

That's literally what they'll say. Like, hey, you know, 206 dirty up, which means you're putting your gear flaps. No kidding? Yeah. Dang.

Jocko Willink

All right, cool. I'm glad I brought that up. When you put the gear in flaps down, like the jets, like loud and rumbling, all the feeling of the jet changes dramatically. Flying a dirty airplane is very different than flying a clean airplane. Do you think commercial airliners pilots say that to dirty up?

Dave Burke

I don't know. That's a good question. There's got to be a commercial guy listening to this right now. You can like, dm me or whatever. I don't know if they use that term.

That is a straight up military vernacular. I don't think it's a technical term. But they will literally say dirty up. That means. That's the word we use, which is.

Jocko Willink

Weird because it means put your gear down even though you're saying dirty up. Yep, yep. Dirty up. That means put your gear in, your flaps down. And they would sometimes.

Dave Burke

And they'll say things like, okay, let's say I'm doing a approach to the carrier and the doctrine says at 8 miles. I know that's when I put my gear down, and if nobody says anything at that time, but it slows you down by a lot, and so it changes the sequencing. They will say, hey, aircraft 203, stay clean through ten, or stay clean through eight, which is them saying, don't do. Following the. So the terms clean and dirty are super normal in military aviation.

Jocko Willink

Check. Stay clean, stay clean. Ground effect. Yeah, this is a good one. Counter intuitive, man.

Dave Burke

And I'm not, like, an aerodynamics expert, but airplanes, actually, from an aerodynamic, like a drag, you know what drag is like? Dragging is poor aerodynamics, like, slow the plane down. It's like a negative thing. As you get close to the ground, like, really close to ground, 510ft off the ground, the airplane. The drag reduces, because the way the drag comes off the wings hits the ground, it makes the plane a little more efficient.

Paraphrasing it, but as you get close to the ground, ground effect is you get more lift at, like, the last couple of seconds, which is kind of a bit of a bummer if you're not careful, because what the plane will tend to do is start to fly a little better, which means it'll float. So you got this whole thing coming down, you're going to land, and in the last couple, literally seconds, 10ft off the ground, just seconds before you land, the jet will start to get a little more efficient and start to fly a little bit better, which means it'll float you long, and sometimes people will get caught in ground effect, and the impact of that is you got a relatively short Runway, or maybe you got a really heavy jet and you have to get stopped and you target a place on the Runway. You've got this image of where you're going to land, and as you're getting ready to put it on the ground, the jet just floats and floats and floats, because it's a little bit more efficient and you can get caught in ground effect and the jet will land much longer than you want. Seems obvious, like, oh, better, efficient. It's not necessarily what you want.

So getting caught in ground effect can be a bad thing. Young pilots struggle with ground effect all the time just trying to land. Do you feel that, like. Oh, yeah, I've definitely felt it. Right?

Jocko Willink

Like, I've definitely felt it in an aircraft where I did a landing the other day in Vegas. It was howling, like the wind was howling. And I don't mean I landed the plane, but I was in a plane and there was freaking howling wind, and it was crazy. It was shaking. Like, I was thinking to myself, okay.

And sure enough, like, as you said, literally 10ft off the ground, the thing just went. And he's. And all of a sudden, I said, oh, yeah. And I've. I've definitely felt that you could feel it.

Dave Burke

Like, floating is, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah. It lasts, like, few seconds now, guaranteed. Is there anything that takes ground effect away if there's a 40 knot, like, wind on the ground, or is it not?

It's. It's mostly associated with, like, as the vortices. I'm getting super technical, but as the vortices come off the wings, they hit the ground. So it's literally proximity to the ground, and they reduce the drag. What I was gonna say, which is how you mitigate that, is the Navy and the Marine Corps have a really cool way of mitigating ground effect, which is we land and, like, smash into the ground at, like, literally 800ft/minute on the carrier.

So if you ever seen, like, a carrier landing, you were coming down on what we call, like, a three degrees glide slope. And we don't, like, in an airliner, you guys, people probably feel this right before it lands. Like, the nose kind of pitches up and it. They want to make it super smooth. They want to, like, almost like you don't feel it.

And if you've ever been an airliner where you've hit really hard, it startles the passengers, like, boom. And, like. And I'm always thinking, you know, that's a carrier pilot. I'm always laughing, right? So most of the time in most airplanes, certainly in civilian flying, all civilian flying, you want to make that really, really smooth because you want the people in the back to have, like, a very comfortable experience.

We don't do that in carrier aviation. So in a normal carrier landing, there is no ground effect. You just come smashing into the ground, into the cables or on the Runway. When I first started flying the f 16, which is an awesome airplane, landing an f 16 could not be any more different than landing an f 18. It has the tiniest little, thin little gear that you have to be very, very delicate with.

I would be struggling. I'd struggle with ground effect all the time in the f 16 because it would not do what I was expecting it to do and be floating and it would wobble and it'd be super uncomfortable. And what you described is you could feel it like, oh, crap. And then you can't predict when it's gonna land and then what the risk is when you're in ground effect, what you should do is nothing as long as you can tolerate it. But that's not what most people do.

They, oh, they feel it float and they push the stick forward, and then they realize, oh, I pushed too much. And they pull back and they get what's called pio, pilot induced oscillation. And they'll, and they'll bounce up and down on the run, which can be really bad. That's why I said most junior pilots struggle with that ground effect. Can be a real hassle when you're trying to land smoothly.

It's not a problem for carrier pilots. Because you're just going to slam. You're just going to slam. No factor. And the gear is built for that, like thousand feet per minute, no big deal.

If you did a thousand feet per minute in an F 16, you'd run, rip the gear off. Literally. You can't do it. You gotta be really careful. How hard was your first landing in an F 16?

I don't. I mean, do you have an instructor in there with you, teaching you to fly that thing? Yeah, I mean, is he like, Dave? Okay, remember, bro, you're not 15 anymore. Like your first flight on an f 16, you know, the guy in the back is like, expects you know how to land an airplane.

And there's a saying in the f 16, it's easy to land. It's hard to land. Good. Any viper pilot listening to this knows what I'm talking about. They were probably all like, crappy landings, but nothing was like, unsafe or dangerous.

They probably just laughing like, oh, that sucks. But it wasn't like, oh, hey, that was dangerous. So. So you never trashed the gear? No, no, nothing like that.

Jocko Willink

Would. Is it possible that a pilot trashed the gear? Yeah, so, like. Cause it seems like to me it'd be a habit. Classic F 16.

Dave Burke

Like, if you're like the classic f 16 quote, mishap, landing mishap would be if you. The way the speed brakes work in f 16, the speed brakes are all the way at the very back. Any f 16 pilot listening to this is laughing right now, because they know exactly what I'm going to say in a hornet. Like, you could flare if you wanted to. If you don't want to do a.

Carry landing, you just flare, which is a standard landing where you bring the nose up and you make it smooth landing. You could flare as much as you want in a regular fighter, in any other fighter. The f 16, the way the speed brakes are, they open up, up and down. And if you flare too much, the bottom of the speed break was scrape along the Runway. And they also had a little thing, like a little speed brake override, where if you're trying to slow down, you'd pull the button back and open up the speed brake even more, like another five or six degrees.

A lot of navy pilots learning to fly the f 16 would be presented as a gift upon graduation. A speed break with the bottom just shredded down. So if you were to screw up in an f 16 is probably not ripping the gear off, it's scraping the speed brake because you flared too much trying to be smooth, and you screwed it up. I fortunately never did that, but I've saw it happen many times. I figured it had to have been a thing.

Oh, it's a thing. It's gotta be crazy. Like, you got all these instincts from the f 18 that things that you're no longer thinking about now. You're talking about this button over here for this special thing that is totally different. How did these guys, like Jaeger, just go and fly a different aircraft, like, every day?

Dude, those guys were incredible. I mean, going. I mean, we're getting way in the weeds here. One of the things that drove me nuts about the f 18 and the f 16 is most of it's fine, but the small things were big deals. I think there's a term called negative transfer, which means how you're wired in your jet, you get into the other one, if you bring that habit, it's going to transfer negatively to your plane.

In the F 18. That's a good one right there. In the f 18, the canopy switch was under your right hand on the canopy on the right side, and the seat switch was on your left by your thigh. For whatever reason, in the f 16, the canopy switch was on your left. Side by open this thing.

Jocko Willink

Yes. And your seat adjust was on. So they were literally exactly opposite. And as you're thinking about landing, sometimes you would adjust the seat position from a fight to regular flying. You'd move the seat up or down and get more comfortable.

Dave Burke

Well, as you're coming in for a landing, it would be not uncommon to raise the seat up and get a little bit better view. And the number of times I've talked to people myself, like reaching for the canopy button and trying to activate the canopy switch to lower your seat in an f 16, as a hornet pilot, is an example of negative transfer window. It was actually open, though, would it? Oh, wait, 100% would open. Oh, really?

Oh, my God. You'll hear, like, you'll hear the motor of the canopy. Or you would like, right before you like, oh, my gosh, I'm about to. You would catch it, but your instinct, the subconscious is you would just do your old habit, those things called negative transfer. When you're talking about the guys like Jaeger.

If you have a lot of habits in your jet, you go to another jet, you're gonna. You're gonna struggle. I don't know if it's like, picture, like getting to a car. Like, you know, cars have electric start buttons now, like, you press the start. No more key.

My wife has a car where the press button is on the dashboard, and. We have a car where the press. To start is in, like, and I'll get in the car, and I'll take, like, four or 5 seconds to try to remember. That's what negative transfer is. When you're reaching and there's nothing there and you don't know where it is.

You didn't have that problem when you. Every car, you put the key in the thing and you turn. It didn't matter what it was. Now every car's got its own little thing. The parking brake is here.

Jocko Willink

That's so annoying. That's what it's like flying different fighters. Should be standardized. Uh, here's one you probably wondered when you saw this on the list. Kneeboard.

Dave Burke

Yep. Here's why. Okay. I always thought the knee board looked really cool. And as a calm guy, occasionally I'd break out a knee board.

Jocko Willink

Like, if I was doing cas in, like, an administrative situation, I'd be like, I'll be bringing my freaking knee board to talk about a wannabe. That's awesome. But the reason I brought this up is, are these digital now? Cause I've seen pilots with digital knee boards. And what's your opinion?

Like, are we sticking analog? Do we need to have digital? Okay. Or is it just. We're doing both.

Dave Burke

Yeah. So a knee board is literally like a little clipboard strapped around your thigh, typically on your right leg, so you can write, literally, a piece of paper and a pencil that's, like, tethered to that thing so you don't drop it. Everybody. Everybody flies with a knee board now. Just about everybody.

Certainly a lot of people are flying. Well, I shouldn't say everybody. A lot of relatively modern fighters are flying with iPads. Straight, like, straight up iPads. And they're strapping that.

So all these, like, charts. And we have to fly with, like, four or five different books of different airspace. Like, it's all digital now. Now, the most modern airplanes, you don't have to carry that iPad. It's up on the screen.

So most people are flying with both. The drawback to digital, and you probably know this is digital, although it relieves a lot of stuff. Digital can make things more cumbersome. So the best example I have of that is like turning down the volume. If for whatever reason, the volume.

If you know this, as a calm guy, you got two radios going, one's chattering, one person is talking, and you need to hear it. You just turn the volume down for three or 4 seconds, or the other one. And if it's analog, you just rotate the knob. If it's digital, it's like calm. You're pressing buttons, calm button, audio button, volume button, volume, down, down, down.

And you're like pressing these buttons, it takes you 13, 14 seconds to turn the volume down. And so this idea of like, digital is easier. Not always true. Sometimes digital is a huge pain in the ass. F 35 was built with these two iPads up on the screen.

Literally touchscreen voice act like the most modern technology. After about a year of flying the f 35, it was advocated so hard, they installed like a fifties vintage volume knob that sits in the airplane now, which is just a little wheel that you would just turn up and down because it was so difficult just to change radios. Digital is cool. The old school knee board, the old school analog is required in flying. Another word, barricade, which is when you're gonna land on an aircraft carrier without a tail hook for whatever reason, and you're gonna hit a freaking net.

Correct. Did you ever have to do that? No, dude, thank God. What causes that? The most common thing would be like a massive hydraulic problem by which you literally could not put the tail hook down.

Jocko Willink

Got it. The other is like an engine problem that prevented you from. You couldn't, let's say like a normal landing, you had a problem. You just go around if you have an engine problem, like, hey, this is a one shot thing. There is no, like, going long and doing a touch and go, or we'll call it a bolter and try it again.

Dave Burke

You had a one shot thing. They would do what's called rigging the barricade. It's happened in the hornet a couple of times. One was in my squadron right before I checked in. You mean ever?

Jocko Willink

It's only happened a couple times in the hornet. Yeah, just a handful. Okay. Much more common in the past. Very, very uncommon now, but still a thing.

Dave Burke

One was a hornet where they had a massive hydraulic problem, where eventually, when he put the tail down the hook wouldn't come down, like literally you cannot stop, so you gotta take a barricade. The other was a massive engine problem. And in that engine recovery, they deemed like the only safe way is just get them into the. Into the barricade. And as a literally what you said, it's a massive net that sits right between the two and the third wire of a carrier.

And you fly right into the net and it's strong enough to stop you. It's crazy. If you're bored, you Google or YouTube Hornet barricade. There's some cool videos out there. It's probably two or three.

Jocko Willink

You'll see. And is that. That's more of like a emergency measure. It's not like totally can never be a strategic thing. Hey, let's do it this way today.

Dave Burke

100% one time use. You bring everybody else down, it's the last thing you're gonna do. And if it doesn't work, it's gonna be a catastrophe. It's super dangerous. Very uncommon.

Jocko Willink

The weaver on the boats where the. I think it was the marine Corps fly their UAV's into those big nets. Basically fly them into barricades. Yeah, they did the same thing. You see these freaking.

This is back in the day when UAV's were just piloted by some kid. Like, no digital AI making anything easy. It's like big giant net sitting up there. Boom. You're like, yo, these guys are crazy.

Total pilot error. I almost went down a rabbit hole, and I probably should at some point. I started looking on all these aviation accidents yesterday, but one of the things that came up was just total pilot error, meaning this is 100%. And I read some of them, one of them was like, they didn't realize that this switch, the auto whatever switch was off. And they're focused on this other thing and they just crash.

Dave Burke

Yeah, total pilot error. Mishaps read really badly because it's things like that. You're like, dude, what? What is going on here? Perfectly good airplane doing everything it's supposed to be doing.

And the pilot is the sole cause of the mishap. It's actually very rare. When you think about the factors, they call them factors. When they do an investigation, they try to think of the factors that cause the mishap. Is there no factors come from no factor?

Probably, or at least terminology is correct. Almost always. Pilot error is a factor, but almost never the soul factor. The correlator is also almost always true. Like, especially in modern airplanes, it's almost never just the airplane.

The pilot contributes some way. So it's usually a combination of both. So when you read a total pilot error, it's usually heartbreaking, because as you're reading it, especially if you know the machine and know what that switch does or understand it, you're reading it because you already know the outcome. You're like, oh, my God, I can't believe that they misunderstood or lost track or stop paying attention. The most common one is something we may talk about, and we've talked about it before, where you fly a perfectly good jet into the ground because you're looking at something else because you got distracted or.

Jocko Willink

Yeah, that's a c fit controlled flight into terrain. That's. That's like the classic total pilot error. You take a perfectly good airplane functioning 100% correctly, and the pilot flies it directly into the ground for some other reason. Not like he's not dealing with a malfunction, he's not dealing with an issue with the jet.

Dave Burke

He just control. Control flight. Meaning it's, everything's perfectly fine and he flies it into the ground, and it. Could be that they couldn't see. Right.

Jocko Willink

I mean, does fog if I. If I'm flying through the mountain range and it's foggy and I just slam into a mountain? Yeah. I mean, yes, you could have c fit in bad weather, but even then, like, you have instruments and, like, warnings information available to you by which that shouldn't happen, and to the point, like, the plane is not causing that problem, you are. So CFIT is generally a total pilot error.

Dave Burke

Almost always. The worst part about CFIT is what you described is a bummer. Like, oh, it's fought, it's adverse external conditions. See if it happens under perfect conditions as well, like day, sunlight, no fog. And so those are the ones that are the most heartbreaking, which is where typically the most common things that happens is either on, like, a low level where you're flying in this, and that's not that common because you're usually paying attention.

It's when you're diving towards the ground, like in a dive bombing scenario. And in that bombing, you're looking at something to, like, make sure your target is, you have like, a good sight on the target, and you get focused on making a perfect little, they call it like a target designation. You're putting a little reticle, a little sight onto the target, and you want to keep improving it. As you're in this dive and you get so focused on the displays, you forget or you lose track of the ground. And I've seen videos of guys literally will just fly directly onto the target in perfect weather, clear day, beautiful sunlight.

Because they're. They're focused on their targeting and not focusing on the ground, and they'll literally see fit in the ground. Target fixation. Target fixation. That's exactly what it is.

Jocko Willink

And I forget where this came up is. Isn't this what happened with Kobe Bryant's helicopter? It was foggy, and it was just sea fit into the ground. Yeah. That's weather.

Dave Burke

Yeah. I don't actually know the details on that, but to my knowledge, and I should be cautious, but I do not believe there was a problem with the helicopter. Now, obviously, weather's terrible. Weather sucks. When I think of CFIT in a good weather scenario, that's what you were describing, where you're like, oh, looking at this gauge, or I'm looking at, or I'm doing something else, and then I just hit the ground.

That's really hard to reconcile because you're typically, the pilot is overwhelmed. Why? I. Well, what do you mean, typically the pilot pilots overwhelmed because it's not like there's a bunch of different things going on. Right?

Jocko Willink

It's not like they're like, oh, my gosh, I got this. I got that. I don't know what to do, and I. They hit. Yeah.

It's more like, oh, I really want to get this target dialed in. I'm looking. Boom. Yeah. Right.

So they're not really overwhelmed in the classical sense that someone would think of like, oh, there's all this chaos going on, and now I hit the ground. It's more like, oh, there's one little target fixation that I've got right now, and this is gonna make me burn in. Yeah. And the. Am I wrong?

Dave Burke

No, you're not wrong.

The target fixation is probably the most common one. And when I say overwhelmed, in my mind, there may be a better word for it. It's not overwhelmed that I'm trying to do 30 things at once. It's that I'm unable to prioritize those things, and I tend to focus on just that one thing, and I forget that there's other things to think about. Not that I'm just too busy.

I just get. And there's a word, I think, that we call it getting boresighted. It's the same thing as target fixation. That's the most common thing. Struck such a chord with me, this.

Jocko Willink

This idea of controlled flight and terrain. And the reason is because I've worked with leaders, civilian leaders and military leaders, where it's so obvious. You're like watching them destroy themselves there. You're watching them plummet to the earth and you know they're gonna crash and you're just like in an aircraft. I mean, when, when you've seen a guy, a target, target fixated and trying to get that thing, get that little screen, he's getting warnings in his ear that are going altitude and he's not hearing it.

And it says, warning, warning. I mean, that's all that stuff is happening and he still hits. I've had guys where I'm telling him like, listen, you cannot behave like this. If you behave like this, you are going to get fired. And they're like still going, doing the same thing.

Yeah. People, this is a classic case of when you're unaware of what's happening, you're not detached, you have to be able to detach. Otherwise you're going to see fit. You're just going to controlled flight into the ground. That's what's going to happen.

I've seen people do this with, not only in leadership positions, but they do this with their lives, right? They start going down a path. It's so obvious that it's the wrong path to go down to everybody that's around them. The warnings, altitude, like wrong woman, like bad job, like drinking too much, like all these things, their warnings are so clear. Yeah.

And yet they just stay on that path and boom, they explode and their life gets ruined. So this idea that you can have these things going on in your life where you can stop them, you can correct them, but you have to take a step back, look around and say, oh, yeah, this relationship I'm in is a disaster. This job I'm in is a disaster. This alcohol that I'm using, this drugs that I'm using, this, whatever I'm doing is this iPhone that I'm scrolling on, these things that I'm getting cut, all these things are disaster and I can't do them anymore. And you're hearing the warnings and you're not paying attention to them, so this can happen.

And I, it's so often I see this with leaders, I'm looking at them, I'm like, do you not freaking read the room? You know what I mean? Do you not see what's happening right here? Take a look around. What is the people's faces right now?

People's faces, do they look engaged in what you're saying? Do they see, are they nodding their head like, hell, yeah. Or are they looking at you kind of with a blank like, hmm, are they. Are there questions like, hey, how can I move forward with this? Or are there questions like, what are you talking about?

I'm not really sure. Wait, what do you want us to do? Because if that's what you're getting, you got to read the room. You got to pay attention to the altitude because you're going to burn in. So you need to be careful, see fit.

Watch out. Yes. Other human error. Air traffic control. Improper loading, fuel contamination, improper maintenance.

Do. We should do a podcast. There's a really good aviation disasters to look at. I've almost done one in the past two with the challenger. Yeah.

Like, there's so many little things that led to these crashes, these airline crashes, and they're so well documented because they got the black box that's recording what they're saying. Totally. And it's got all the instruments. They know exactly what happened. And like you said, it's heartbreaking to hear these things or read about these things because it's so obvious.

But here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'll tell you. That's what life is like. You're in the cockpit, and there's all kinds of things that you can pay attention to and look around and be like, oh, yeah, this is a problem over here.

And we don't pay attention to the warnings. We get too focused on one thing. We don't listen to the other people like those. I forget which I think it was korean airline or japanese airline, but the. The co pilot is like, sir, I think maybe this is like, hey, hold on.

Hold on a second. I'm working. Like, hey, be quiet. Your subordinate. Yep.

And she's like, okay, I'll be subordinate. Yep. I won't say anything else. I'm obviously wrong, and that's not good. It's thrown to the ground.

Yeah. Middle of the day. Yep. 100%. And.

Dave Burke

And only two things. You're spot on. And the only two things to say about it, just to add from that perspective on it, is typically those lead to catastrophic problems. The discovery of that is usually catastrophic. Like, you literally hit the ground and blow up and kill everybody, which means they're not, like, gentle life course corrections of, like, oh, that's a good lesson learned.

I'm gonna not do that next time. That's not usually how these things go. And the other part, too, is sometimes when you talk about the power of detachment, and we talk about detachment as a superpower, because we're telling people it's not just that. It's really, really hard that if you can do it. It can change your life, is what I have seen.

And I've seen this, obviously, not always after the fact. I've seen it with guys where I've actually had guys where I've not let them fly airplanes anymore, where I'll watch a video of them flying, and they'll be flying around at 200ft, and the altimeter will be going, altitude, altitude, altitude, altitude. And will say, are you hearing that? And he's like, I don't hear that. Where the warnings are being shouted into his ear and he cannot process that.

It's a level of not being attached that's so extreme that even sometimes the warnings cannot be heard. Like, man, I got a guy in an airplane who can't hear the airplane say, we're about to crash. I can't let this guy fly an airplane. I'm trying to help him. But sometimes that can be so debilitating that they don't even hear the warnings.

And you, in real life, you see those people where they have. I don't know if they've convinced themselves, but they've become so unaware of the warning signs that they're no longer registering, which means they're not actively ignoring them. They don't even hear them. And typically, the discovery of that is a catastrophic episode. Something catastrophic is gonna happen in your life.

Like, you can't hear what your wife is saying. You can't hear what your kids are saying. You can't hear what your teammates, your coworkers are saying. You don't even hear it. So by the time you discover there's something wrong, it's not like a gentle tap on the shoulder of, hey, jocko, you need to adjust something.

It's. It's over. Have. Okay. You know when you're driving a car and, you know, you get in a near accident for whatever reason, and you get that, like, full adrenaline thing shoots down your hands and arms and everything.

Jocko Willink

Did you ever suddenly become aware prior to the catastrophic event taking place? Yes, I was fortunate. I never had. Obviously, I never crashed, but I never had an injection. I never had a, quote, catastrophic event, near misses.

Dave Burke

Oh, yeah. Like, I don't know if it's a lot, but I've had more than enough to remember. And what you described, that feeling, that's the feeling. I know that feeling extremely well. And you look back like, holy cow, how did I got lucky?

Or I dodged a pull it. Or, I can't believe I got away with that, or, I can't believe I didn't see those things happening. That feeling of the adrenaline rush often is. It's when you just avoid the outcome somehow or you just figure out beforehand, like, oh, my God, pull up or turn or whatever it might be. Yes, absolutely.

Know that feeling? I was parachuting, and I wasn't very good, and I never really got great at it, but I was parachuting in, but of course I wasn't good at it. But guess what? I was freaking arrogant, cocky, and thought I was a badass. And so my buddy, we were gonna get, you know, one of the guys had, like, a camera, like.

Jocko Willink

And I'm talking, you know, like, the click, click, like, wind up. And he was a good parachutist. So we were like, oh, get a picture. I'm gonna link up with my buddy, and this guy's, like, my best friend. This is a guy I've talked about before.

Like, I went through buds with him, went. Did three platoons with him on training cell together, and we lived together the whole time. I mean, this is, like my brother, right? And so he goes out first, and for whatever reason, I was pretty far back. And so I come out of the aircraft, and I freaking go into, like, a full track, which means you put your hands, like, behind you, and you're doing, like, it's as fast as you can go.

Because I'm trying to get to him, and I'm hauling ass. I mean, I'm probably going 200 miles an hour, and he's. But he, you know, what he did when he got out of the plane was he, like, went what we call flat, dumb and happy. He's kind of, like, slowing himself down, like, hugging the air so that he can be as slow as. So instead of going the normal speed, which is probably 120 miles an hour of flat, dumb and happy, he's probably slowed down to, like, 100.

So I'm trying to catch him, and I'm going, like, 200 miles an hour in a full track. And when I went to, like, slow down, I way, way, way was too late. And I flew by him really fast, and I was like, dude, you're a freaking idiot. And luckily, I didn't hit him, because if I would have hit him, I'm going, I'm definitely gonna die, and I'm probably gonna kill him, too. And I was like, dude, like, I'm an idiot.

But the feeling that I had was, you know, I just avoided the c fit, right? I almost did a controlled flight right into my friend and killed him. And killed me. And. Look, am I maybe dramatizing this a little bit?

Yeah, I'm probably drama. I had enough steerage where I didn't hit him. I wasn't, like, out of control. I still could steer my track, but I definitely knew that I was stupid. Yeah.

Do you have any examples where you were target fixated and all of a sudden you're like, what's that noise? Oh, it's the out. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, yes, a decent amount, you know, especially at the beginning, you know, of the career, because all the stuff you do, you go.

Dave Burke

You're doing missions, you want, like, you're going out to do stuff, and what you want is to come back. And like, I did this mission, I dropped the bomb. I. Whatever. I found the target.

Like, I got the missile off, and the fixation is oftentimes wanting to. I'm gonna ride. I got a rendezvous with my buddy here. Whatever it is you're trying to do, some of it just. Just dumb luck in my career.

Just like you described, like, oh, man. And other times, like, you catch it just. Just in time. Oh, man. I'm lucky I caught it at a certain time.

Not my best story of, like, not hearing. Not, not hearing. The warning is, I've talked, I think I've talked about on the podcast, like, the zero zero landing where you're gonna land on the carrier, and it's. The weather is so bad, you can't see in front of the plane at all. So there's zero visibility, which means you're not gonna see this ship.

And of course, amazingly, the jet flies the same. The jet doesn't care. It's you that care. So you get all freaked out, you get all worked up, you get all nervous, you get all anxious, and all those emotions. Emotions keep you from detaching, from just flying it.

All these little indicators, like the altimeter warning, they're all set up. They're actually never supposed to go off. So a perfect thing is I'm gonna set it at 500ft, and in my mind, at 520ft, I'm gonna reach down and, like, tell the airplane, I know I'm at 500ft, and if it goes off, it's telling you, hey, you're behind this thing shouldn't have gone off. You should have caught it right beforehand, because you know it's coming. So I don't want to get surprised by my altitude.

I want to set it up where I got one at 501, at 200, and I'll at least go. Okay, I'm about to hear it. Cool. I heard it move on and I'll silence it when you hear it. The first one, you're like, oh, man.

That. If it surprises you, if it surprises. You, like, oh, that's a bad sign. I should not have been surprised by that. But there are times that you can hear it, and it's kind of like you ever woken up from a dream and you go, oh, that was a dream.

And, like, you can replay back that this thing had been happening for a while where I hit the 200 foot altimeter and it goes off. And by the time I heard it, I was able to go, oh, that thing's been going off for four or 5 seconds. Like, I didn't just get surprised by it. It was in the background somewhere. Like, picture, like, your alarm clock going off in a dream.

You're like. And you're like, oh, that thing's been going off for 30 seconds. I've had moments where I've hit the 200 foot altimeter, and then when I hit it, I go, oh, crap. And I'll be at 70ft, 60ft, something like, really, really low, like, obscenely, dangerously like this. How are you still alive?

This doesn't happen very often. It's the ones where you are. The ones that are surprised are bad. The ones where you can look back and go, that thing alerted me 1015 seconds ago, and I'm just now. I'm just now catching up with, those are the worst.

Those ones, like, I don't know how I'm even here right now. Again, doesn't happen very often. Those are the most nauseating of. Dude, I am so lucky because you can account for dude, that thing's been going off in my head for 10 seconds now. And I would say that's an overwhelm.

Jocko Willink

Like, you got this. You're looking to pay attention that there's some signal coming in that you're not even paying because you're just too much stuff going on. That's right. That's right. It was crazy.

When I worked at trade at, like, I would just watch guys just be overwhelmed and they're just not hearing. They don't hear anything. They don't hear anything. Like, I have the platoon or the troop radio. Like, I can hear someone calling the platoon commander or the troop commander, like, hey, boss, we need fire support down here.

We need. And the guy's just sitting there totally overwhelmed, freaking out. Just nothing happening. We talk about it during when we would turn over, remember, the new units would show up and you'd get these firefights and they'd be standing there and bullets. Like, I remember watching another officer we talked about this one.

Dave Burke

And he's standing up and there's, like, bullets going past, hitting the walls, and everybody is doing what they're supposed to, and he's standing there not being brave, and, like, he just, he cannot acknowledge. He's not able to keep up with what's happening. Like, get down, get, gotta get down. But he's overwhelmed that he can't process bullets going past him. So this is a real thing.

It happens in a lot of different, not just an airplane. Some of the words that you brought into the play here, redefine. Yeah. Freaking great word. I wanted to think about some.

We were talking about the connection to flying to leadership and just life in general. And the word redefine is a term that we use. I'll go into the game plan. I'm going to fight against you. I got a plan.

My plan will be whatever it is. I'm going to turn across your tail, go up and go down. It doesn't matter. I got a plan, and I want that plan to work. And I have maybe a turn or two to figure out, like, am I, is this working?

And if I go around once and it didn't do anything, maybe I'll go around again. But at some point, I got to acknowledge I'm not getting. I'm not, this is not. My plan is not working. And if it's not working, I have to do something different.

We call that a redefinition, which is you have to change your plan. And we redefine by, if you're going to go up, you're going to go down. And again, I'm simplifying it. If you're gonna go level, you're gonna. I'm gonna do something.

I'm gonna redefine what I'm doing. It's an acknowledgement of what I am doing to this point has not worked. I mean, I think about Ramadi. Like, we redefined how we were going to fight in Ramadi, mostly based on what I was doing up to this point, does not work. Did not work.

And I also think about, like, I'll come back from fights, and I'm like, hey, is there any reason why you didn't redefine on this second turn? And they're like, well, I really wanted to stick to the plan, or I wasn't quite sure, like, hey, let's go backwards. Do you have any information telling you you need to do something different? Yes. All sorts of good information.

Nothing's working. Your outcome isn't the way you want the redefinition. Seems super straightforward, very, very hard to do. But a term that we preach all the time is, redefine the fight. Redefine the fight.

Redefine the fight is when what you're doing isn't working. Card passing echo, Charles. Yes. Something everybody. The jiu jitsu gets caught up in.

Jocko Willink

I'm trying to pass whatever. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you. I'm trying to get a knee slice on you.

I'm trying to get a nice. And it's not working. It's not working. It's not working. It's not working.

Get away. What I do, keep trying. Keep trying the same thing. It ain't gonna work. And when there's that much defense in one area, you got to go to a different area.

Just do a different move. That's my recommendation to you on the guard. Passion. That's such a good word. Well, I think this will actually apply to the whole deal where even you can do.

Echo Charles

Can you? Or then again, I should ask you, is there such thing as, like, a little micro redefine? Because, look, if I'm passing Jocko's guard or trying to. Yeah. There's a difference between an adjustment and a redefinition.

Dave Burke

When I use the word redefinition, that's a pretty sick. You're changing your plan. Yeah. Like you were, like, I go for foot lock or something now, but if I make an adjustment, I don't need the redefinition. Seems.

Echo Charles

Ain't. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I met, say it's a small. It's.

Jocko Willink

It's a micro redefinition. I would say something like that. Yeah, that's what I thought. But opens up a pretty big part of the game. Right.

Echo Charles

Sure. And by the way, this happens with people as well. Like, oh, Dave's not performing. What do I need to do? Counsel him.

Jocko Willink

Oh, he does. Still unperforming. What are you counseling? More counsel. A.

More counsel, more counselor, more council. More council. Doesn't work. Guess what? I gotta try giving him some responsibility, start taking some.

Oh, so now give him responsibility. Doesn't now want to take responsibility? There's a bunch of different ways you can approach something. Yeah. And if you don't, you're not gonna get the same results.

Dave Burke

Yes. So whether you're dealing with people, whether you're dealing with business, whether you're dealing with jiu jitsu, whether you're dealing with aviation, sometimes you gotta redefine. Reef, I use the word reframe a lot, but I think redefine is better. I'll say, I'll reframe this question, or let me reframe. Usually, I think of reframing as my perspective on something.

Jocko Willink

Like, let me reframe what I'm seeing right now. Like, honestly, if we're doing jiu jitsu, it's like, oh, I can't pass your guard. I've redefined a couple times. I need to reframe. Like, hey, maybe I should.

Maybe I should pull guard myself. You know what I mean? Like, let me just reframe this whole thing. Like, we're like, I can't pass your guard. I can't pass your guard.

I can't pass your guard. And we go five. Five minute rounds, and I haven't passed your guard. Guess what I might do, Polgard, let's hear your passing game is maybe, you know, maybe I can get something from the bottom, so I might have to actually reframe the whole thing. Redefined to me is a little bit more micro, and then we probably have a micro reframe.

So I dig it. So, pivot, would you say, is that, like, a normal civilian term for redefine? Like, pivot? You know how, like, you know, I think so. Pivot, right?

I think it's a good one. Totally. I think it's a good one. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's a good one. Because I've used that term to describe, like, at echelon front, we pivoted when COVID hit and we had to do virtual engagements with clients. It was a pivot. It wasn't, like, a total change. It wasn't.

And I would almost go so far as to say if we were to reframed what we're doing, it's like, hey, we're going to go from doing leadership training to doing something else. You know what I mean? For me, a reframe is a bigger thing, but just to redefine, like, okay, we'll redefine this situation. We're going from mostly in person to mostly virtual, all virtual, for a few months. So, yeah, pivot.

I've used that word. I'd say they're pretty interchangeable, but redefines. A little bit better. Sounds way cooler, for sure. I think.

I think it actually has a better. Although I will say pivot means there's a still a connection. And I think redefine also has a connection. Yeah, in my mind, very similar. Very similar.

All right. Fluid mutual support. I mean, obviously, this one's good to go. This is so good to go. I mean, it's like, it's classic cover and move.

Dave Burke

This is like a bit of an advanced concept in the idea that, first of all, the word mutual support is you and I are supporting each other. You know the word, you've used the word a thousand times. Mutual supporting. Overwatch, positions, these are two things that are working in concert. I think what makes this complex or what makes this challenging is the word up front, which is fluid, which means it.

It's going to adjust. It's fluid. It's going to move around. So in aviation, you and I, okay, I'm aircraft one, you're aircraft two. We got four of us out there today.

You and I together, we're going to support each other. But old school used to be like, I want you 1 mile away from me, 1000ft above me. We call that combat spread. Like, that worked decades ago, does not work anymore. Which means sometimes you're going to support me from nice and close.

Sometimes you're going to support me five, six, seven, 8 miles away. Sometimes you'll be in front, sometimes you'll be behind. But the point behind the fluid mutual support is all your movements in the sky. Keep in mind what you have to be able to do is provide support for me or be in a position for me to provide support for you. So you can't just move autonomously.

You can't just move around in what might seem best for you if you lose the ability to provide or receive mutual support. So it's that concept, that cover and move mutual support, it varies constantly, three dimensionally throughout the flight. Is it is fluid. It changes all the time. And if you're not thinking about step one is, can I provide cover, move, or can I receive cover and move?

Your movement may seem optimal to you. It's actually a bad move. Yep. There you go. That's.

Jocko Willink

That was a definitely a development because, like, went to do immediate action drills with stoner and stoner was like, oh, here's where we're supposed to be. According to the standard operating procedure, these guys are here. We need to be 20 meters to the right and 40 meters back. It's like, no, bro, you got cover. Where's concealment?

Where are those guys? Where can you provide a lane for, like, there's so many other things to calculate and that's why it's fluid mutual support. That's right. Tethered. What does this mean?

Dave Burke

It's a. It's connected to this. And the way I typically explain. It is like, okay, Jaco, you and I are tethered, meaning I'm the one that you are linked to. Like, I gotta.

We have, like, a tether, a leash between us. And during the fight, I might have this plan, okay, I wanna stay tethered to Jaco all day, so I'm gonna move in relationship to you and keep an eye on you. It might be that in the middle of the fight, go, dang, it really doesn't make sense for you to have to stay tethered to me. I'm gonna now switch. You're gonna now be tethered to echo.

And so the point behind that isn't like, who's gonna be tethered to who? It's the concept that everybody has to be tethered to someone else. Nobody can ever be untethered. Cause then I got, oh, dude. Alone and unafraid is on their own.

We can't help him. We know that's gonna be bad. So the concept of tethering is I always have to be thinking about not just conceptually mutual support, but also that individual is gonna be required. Oftentimes, it's, I'll get a young guy and like, oh, dang. Is it.

Jocko Willink

Is it official? Like a verbalized, like, oh, Dave and I are tethered. We will. We don't. Not during the flight, but we will.

Dave Burke

That is it. That is an actual word where we will talk about when we build formations. Like, hey, these two aircraft are tethered. These two aircraft, like, we'll talk about. So it's an official thing?

Yes. There's a real word. Absolutely, yep. No, I'm not just saying a real world, but like an official thing. Like, hey, Dave, on this flight, you're tethered with echo.

It'll be like these two aircraft. These two aircraft in these positions and those positions in the might. In real time might swap. So it might not be you, Jaco, and two and four, but tethering is absolutely. Yes.

Jocko Willink

Out of plane, out of phase. What are these things all about? Yeah, these are cool things, too. Like this. Really.

Dave Burke

The origin of this is dogfighting, like, relationship to another aircraft. You and I are fighting together when we're in plane or fighting together. Oh, I'm sorry. On the same team. No, we're good.

We're fighting against each other. The origin is really a one against one. I'm fighting you, you're fighting me. Our aircraft. Our aircraft.

The classic way of thinking of it is like, we're gonna be turning circles around each other. Whoever does a better job gets behind the other person, I win, or whatever that's in phase. You're turning left. I'm turning left. You're turning right.

I'm turning right. You're going up, I'm going up. It is a much harder thing to do, but becomes a much harder problem for the enemy to solve. When I maneuver what's called out of plane, out of phase, which means if you're going to go across, I'm going to go down, which now makes the two dimensional this flat problem. And any problem in an airplane is relative.

If I'm going up and you're going up, we're in phase, we're in plane. Like it's a flat problem. It might seem weird from the outside, but from in the cockpit, you're just directly across from me. It doesn't matter if I'm up, down, left, or right. It's only two dimensional, because if we're doing the same thing, if I now move in a different direction, like out of plane, it becomes a three dimensional problem, if that makes sense, because we're now opposite flow from each other.

If you're going up, I'm going to the side. That's a very complicated thing to figure out geometrically where things are going to go. Picture like two circles not working together. You're forecasting movement. It's very complex.

Out of plane, out of phase. We teach and train, especially in. In an airplane like a hornet, which from a pure power standpoint is an inferior machine. You show up in a jet with more thrust, and we are in plane. Sooner or later, you're just going to get behind me.

You're faster, you got more energy, you're more powerful. You're just going to get there. It may take some time, but in the end, it's not going to work out. What I have to do is work out of plane and out of phase with you and make this a very complicated problem for both of us, but also for you, or I'm just going to die. Out of plane, out of phase.

Maneuvering is what makes fighting so dynamic is it's in three dimensions. And doing that, it can be very, very complicated. When you have an inferior machine, on paper, you have to do that or you will lose, period. It's almost like saying, like, okay, we're gonna arm wrestle. And if you're stronger than me, let's say all technique being the same, but if it's just pure strength against strength, you will just push my arm down.

Let's say, like I said, everything else is the same. Well, I. Then this is dumb. I need to come up with something else. I need to maneuver differently.

That's out of plane, out of phase. You. You have to maneuver. You have to maneuver. Maneuver.

Jocko Willink

Differently. Differently. Situational awareness. It's like, the most important thing in the world. You have to know.

Dave Burke

You just said, like, can you read the room? Like, it's like saying, like, bro, do you have no weak. We call it essay. We just abbreviate an essay. Dude, if I were to go to echo and if I want to, like, make one of, like, the most critical comments about you, I'd be like, dude, that guy's got no essay.

That's my way of saying, like, that guy does not know what's going on. It is. It is a highly critical comment. I might. So you're saying in the fighter world, like, in the fighter world, saying, this dude's got no essay.

If I say you got no essay, it's, like, probably one of the worst things I can say, because if there's one attribute that we place a premium on is you go out in this totally complex, three dimensional world of 30 different airplanes all going different directions, and if you can come back and tell me what's going on, I'm like, dude, that guy's got fricking high sa, man. He knows what's going on, which means he's got good decisions. He's a good leader. He's all these positive attributes. And if I go like, dude, he came back from that flight.

He had no sa the whole day. That's. That means you didn't know what's going on. There's nothing more important than knowing what's happening. If you had no essay.

Like, if I. Let's say you're a platoon commander and I was at trade at, and I'm putting you through training, and I grabbed the platoon commander, like, hey, we're all your squads. And he was like, I have no idea. That's way worse than, hey, I don't know if this decision to put your machine. I made this decision, wasn't good decision.

Maybe think about a different location. Okay. Okay. But, like, I don't know where my guys are. Okay, well, do you know where the enemy was?

Oh, I didn't know where the fire was coming from. Like, situational awareness is the most important thing, and without it, you actually can't make good decisions. Now, if you have high essay, you make bad decisions. We can talk about it and go, okay, cool. I learned from that no essay, dude.

That is the worst. And I'll go ahead and throw this out there. No detachment, no essay. If you're not detached, you're focused on that freaking one thing that's right in front of you. Have no idea what's going on around you.

Jocko Willink

So. So be careful. Yeah. Simultaneous or sequential? Yeah.

Dave Burke

This is how we decide how we're gonna move forward. And you can think of moving forward, like, doesn't necessarily technically have to be in a straight line, but we're gonna progress. Whatever our progression is gonna be. We have a choice. We can either do it.

This is also in relationship to problems, adversaries. We got people out in front of us that are enemies. We gotta get rid of them. I can either do it simultaneously. Like, if you and Echo are both my enemy and I'm fighting against you, I can attack you at the same time, pointing at you and putting you side by side, or I can go, I don't have enough people to do this.

This is not good to be fighting you two at the same time. I'm gonna go all the way around and change the geometry, or I do it sequentially. I'm gonna start with you and then go to you. As you know, classic peony. There's pros and cons to both going.

It could take longer, it could be more in theory time, depending, and I need to pick who's a higher. There's a lot of things I have to do, but if I'm just going to go straight, because I said I'm going north, and the problem presents itself, and I say, I said we're going north, we're going north, and I have a too big of a problem to handle. I can lead to real problems by being committed to the direction I'm going, rather than saying, this is not a good problem to handle simultaneously, I'm gonna go sequentially, which means I need to move around. I have to make that decision in real time. How do I handle the challenges in front of me?

Jocko Willink

We would hit targets, you know, sometimes sequentially, sometimes simultaneously. And like you said, advantages and disadvantages to both. So that's what you gotta pay attention to. You also gotta be, I think it's good to have a contingency to, like you just said, switch and be, be going into the target thinking we're gonna do it simultaneously, and then get there and think, oh, wait a second, there's more enemy overheads reporting that there's more enemy on this target. Okay, cool.

We're gonna go sequential now. Let's hit that contingency. Sticking to the plan is not a good plan if. If the information tells you you shouldn't. Yeah, yeah.

We were rolling up in a target in Baghdad, and as we're rolling in, like, the overhead reports, some core. There's 40 people in the street outside, and we were gonna, like, stop off, you know, whatever, four blocks away and foot patrol the rest. And I was like, let's roll. We rolled right up on that thing. So we had the big guns with us and everything and maintain as much surprise as possible in that scenario.

So, yeah. Have those little contingencies ready. Signature. Signature management. Yeah, that's a pretty good segue, because all that is, it's really, in theory, like, it's an advent of, like, modern stealth.

Dave Burke

A signature is just what people can see. My signature is me. Like, what I'm putting out there is you can see me. I have a visual signature. I have a heat signature.

Like, my engines put out heat. That's called a heat signature. If I'm an afterburner, that heat signature is huge. You can see that thing dozens of miles away. If I'm an idol, that heat signature is really, really small.

You can't see it hardly at all. Visual signature. If I'm pointing right at you, you can imagine, like, pretty hard to see a little tiny airplane, like an f 16 point right at you. If I'm on a side with my wings 90 degrees to you, you can see that thing 15 miles away. You need to pay attention to the signature you're putting out into the world.

Not just your heat and not just your wings, but what are you putting out into the world, and what do people see? And sometimes I want you to see me. That might be a good deterrent. Sometimes I don't want anybody to see me. But the lesson from this is, pay attention to what you are emitting.

What are you putting out into the world again? Might be a good life leadership lesson snuck inside this concept. Yeah. It's interesting how if you don't have good essay, you might not know what kind of signature you're putting out to the world. I keep coming back to what you said.

It's like, the best example is like. Bro, read the room. Read the room, man. Can you not see what you're doing? These people are now afraid of you.

How do you not know that you're doing it? How do you know that you're not putting that out there? There's no essay. There's no detachment marking. And this is, they're super closely connected.

If I'm flying with you, I'm like, hey, jocko, you're marking. I'm telling you, everybody can see you. Mostly it's connected to what we call cons. When you get up to a certain altitude, like your engines disturb the air enough that you'll get a white line. You see it in commercial airlines, these white streaks that come from behind the airplane, and we'll get a brief that says, okay, cons today between 27,030, 4000.

Okay, I should know that. I should be below that or above that, or if I'm in that, they're going to see you and you can have this super fancy airplane that's invisible to everybody. But if you're marking, everybody can see it. And so we'll run a test and fly around and go, hey, you know, climb, climb, and go, hey, Dave, you're marking. Okay, cool.

27,000. All right. Everybody knows it's also an alert, like you're emitting a signature. This is a visual one. You should be aware of that.

It's how we tell someone they're not managing their signature. Once again, no essay, and you're marking. Bad situation. Behind the power curve. We have definitely talked about this one.

Yes, there is a odd regime of flight which the phrase behind the power curve is connected to, which is a line that's used in all sorts of scenarios by which you need more power to go slower. The power curve really is just this arcing curve that it's pretty intuitive for the first. Most of it is, which is the more power you have, the faster you go. Like the more you push up the throttles, the faster you go. Well, at some point, due to all sorts of different factors, mostly just aerodynamics, is if you get to a place where you get behind that power curve, meaning you're not on that curve anymore, the jet needs more and more power to stay up, which means you've gotten behind.

And of course, power is limited. You don't have unlimited power, unlimited resources, unlimited energy, unlimited money, and you need more and more of that to stay airborne. If someone is behind the power curve, in some sense, it can be a very literal thing, like, oh, man, my jet, I didn't fly it very well. I got behind the power curve. 90% of the time in aviation, we're talking about this mentally or relationship wise, or how you're interacting, not just the mechanics of the aerodynamics of flying.

If I'm talking to echo, I'm like, hey, dude, I've been with Jaco on this task for a while. He's behind the power curve. That's me saying he can't keep up with what's expected from him, or he doesn't have enough energy or ability or capacity or capability to get done when he needs to get done. It's a. It's a critical sentence.

If someone's behind the power curve, they're struggling, and at some point they're gonna reach a limit, because the more power you need to stay up, eventually there is a maximum you can do. Like, if you're exercising, you get behind the power curve, you're gonna push harder and harder, and eventually you can't push harder anymore, the weights gonna come down. On top of you. It's not a good thing. I had a saying before I even understood any of that, but I knew what the power.

Jocko Willink

I knew the power curve. Like, we'd use that expression. Yeah. And I would always say, get as far ahead as the power curve as you possibly can. So, like, um.

Hey, should we. Look, we're doing a mission tomorrow. Should we finish up the plan tonight and. Or should we just get some sleep since we know. No.

It's like, no, finish the plan tonight. Finish. Get ahead of the power curve. Get as far ahead of the power curve as you can. Oh, you know, I got a.

Actually, here's where I failed. I failed one today. I was gonna cut my hair before I got down, before I came to this today, but because I got a flight tomorrow and, like, stuff I got to do and I didn't get it done. Now, at some point, I know I'm going to get it. It's in my mind right now, but there's times where it's like, oh, wait a second, I still got to cut my hair.

That takes 20 minutes. Like, all of a sudden, I'm behind the power curve. Could be a thing. What I should have done was done it yesterday. Yep, that's when I should have done it.

I should have done it. So I went a little bit behind the power curve today. Now, again, it's 20 minutes. I'll catch it back. But I don't like it.

I don't like that feeling of being behind the power curve. Get as far ahead of the power curve as you can. Here's the thing. Once you're behind it, like you said, once you're behind the power curve, it's a problem. Yes.

And listen, in aviation, as long as you have enough altitude, you're going to be okay, because you just put the noise to the ground and you're gonna be okay. But when you're in life behind the power curve, something's got to get sacrificed. Yes. And you're gonna drop something. Something else isn't gonna happen because you got behind the power curve, and that something that isn't going to happen could be a very significant thing.

So you got to stay ahead of the power curve. The Seal teams was great at teaching this, and I don't mean the seal teams taught it to you as like, hey, here's a course in the power cord. It was a lesson that you would learn. It's like, I remember being a young guy. It's like, well, do I, should I waterproof the radios now or just wait till, you know, for a few hours, go to lunch, get a workout in, and then I'll just do it later?

No, do it now. Get ahead of the power curve. The lunch can do later. The workout can get sacrificed. The radios need to be power waterproofed.

Right. You know, before you go on this mission tonight, it's going to take an hour and a half to do it. I can either do it now or I can get behind the power curve. And now what am I sacrificing? And by the way, once you get done with it, it's done.

Now. If you got time, you can eat. Now. If you got time, you can work out, but if you don't got time, cool. We didn't fall behind the power curve on the most critical thing, which is the mission.

So if you keep that in mind in life, get as far ahead of the power curve as you can, especially when it comes to projects and tasks and daily life, get as far ahead of the power curve as you can. It's going to make your whole life better. It's going to make your whole life easier. 100%. When in doubt, broadcast your intentions.

I've never heard of this before. What does it mean? Yeah, so this is the next phase of some of the words I wanted to throw out. There was, we have a set of rules. We call them training rules.

Dave Burke

And this really applies friendly to each other. This is not like, to an enemy or anything like that, but let's say you and I are working together and we've got, I got my group, you got your group, we're working together, but we're doing our own things right now. I have a set of rules that we're both going to follow for the most part, and you probably, we know each other pretty well. I'm hopefully predictable. You're predictable.

I have a good sense of what you're going to do. At some point, I go, hmm, maybe I don't know what's happening. Here. That's the doubt. And the default is typically, I won't say anything.

We have a totally. The rule is when in doubt, broadcast your intentions. If you have any shred of an idea that this person might not know, tell them I'm going high, I'm going low, I'm going whatever it is, as opposed to not broadcasting your intentions. The whole point behind that is I want everybody else to know. We have this whole thing choreographed and planned well.

Unfortunately, when we get out there, things are going to get a little crazy. Maybe this plan isn't gonna work. I need to tell everybody what I'm going to do. It's really cover and move. But when in doubt, broadcast your intentions is don't assume the other person knows what's going on.

Assume that they don't and let them know what you're going to do. What are your intentions here? Rather than saying nothing. Yeah. And if you don't know someone else's intentions, ask them totally, like, hey, dude, hold on a second.

Jocko Willink

What are you trying to make happen here? Always assume the, the other aircraft doesn't see you. This is kind of tied into the last one, right? 100%. As part of our, like I said, we have these training rules.

Dave Burke

There's probably 15 rules. We brief them every time we go fight that are reminders of things to do. Always broadcast your intentions. Always assume the aircraft, the other aircraft doesn't see you. So if I'm fighting, part of it is I want to see the world from your perspective.

I want to. If I'm going to do a good job fighting you, I want to know what, I want to picture what you're seeing. And as I do that, I don't want to get to like, oh, I know what he's going to do. He's going to do this, this move. He's going to do this thing.

I actually am going to make the assumption that you don't see what I'm doing. That's my mindset is going to be, is I'm going to assume you don't see me. So I don't want to put myself in a position that requires you to do something to keep us safe, to keep us from. Not in this case, we're trying to avoid hitting each other. I mean, that's the simplest way to describe this, is I don't want to make a move that the, the safety of this move is reliant on you seeing me.

So I'm gonna do everything with the assumption that you don't. Oh, that's. That is very close to something that we call extreme ownership, which is, listen, I can't count on echo to solve this problem. Like, I need to step in there and make things happen. I can't.

Jocko Willink

I need to take ownership of what's going on, as opposed to saying, well, I thought Echo was gonna do it. That just doesn't work. Break off attacks prior to pushing the defender through the hard deck. Yeah. So another rule.

Dave Burke

This goes in both directions. There are two really cool ways of looking at this. One is that I'm fighting you in real life. In real life, and I chase you down to the ground, and you fly into the ground, and I follow you into the ground. I didn't win, so I have to break off my attack air to air.

I have to. Before I hit the deck, which means I have to have the awareness as I'm being aggressive in my maneuver against you. There's another disinterested third party called the ground that doesn't care who we are or what we're doing. It will kill us both. And so I have to calculate that there's also another part of it, too, like, the way I think about this when we talk about this in training, if I'm fighting in training, and so you and I working together to try to figure things out and learn from each other, if you're looking up over your shoulder and you see me, me leave this maneuver, break off this attack, you should wonder why.

Jocko Willink

Like, ooh, oh, I'm about to. Yes, I'm about to form a relationship with a disinterested third party that doesn't care. So there's a methodology of I'm gonna break off the attack part, of course, in real life, for my own. Like, let him hit the ground. I can't do that.

Dave Burke

But I also want you to learn to do that as well, which is a way of saying, like, I'm gonna give you a little bit of an out, a little bit of an opportunity to exit. Like, you can not. You don't have to hit the ground either. I'm gonna break off this attack. I'm gonna give you an opportunity to break off your attack as well.

And if I do that in training as the defensive person, the person looking up learns that that problem of the ground is every bit as important, sometimes more so than the person attacking you, which means I can't just be looking at you. There's other things out there that are a problem. Again, I like it. We can't find parallels to life here. Like, we're missing out.

Yeah. This one intrigued me. Skate versus Banzai. What's going on here? These are what we call flow decisions.

We're air to air. We're fighting other aircraft. Very simply, skate means I'm going in and out. Bonsai means I'm going forward. So you can think of banzai like banzai, I'm going in.

Jocko Willink

I'm gonna attack you like Leroy Jenkins. That's it. Now, hopefully, it's a little more controlled than that. Now, if you picture I've got you, and then behind you is echo, and behind that is Carrie. Bonsai might seem like a really cool idea until I get past you and go, oh, crap, what did I get myself into?

Dave Burke

And sometimes skate is like, oh, you know, you're avoiding. You're avoiding the enemy. And so again, there's pros and cons to both. The point behind the decision of skate and banzai is there's risk and reward to both. Banzai is a really aggressive maneuver.

And being aggressive is a really good thing. It's a really good thing. It can catch you off guard. I could be really offensive. I can kill a lot of you if I'm aggressive.

But I can also use a lot of weapons, use a lot of gas, get really, really far away, and then find myself where I can't get home or something because I've been bonsai ing too much skates. Really conservative. I'm gonna probably kill less of you. I'm gonna do less damage to you, but I'm gonna save a bunch of gas and a bunch of. I have to figure out what the balance is between those two.

If all I do is banzai. And I'm just like, here comes Dave, we're just gonna attack everybody, or here comes echo. Like, it's conflict of virtue. Never wants to kill anybody. Neither one of those are by themselves are good.

I have to have a going in plan. I have to broadcast that, hey, we're gonna skate on this. We're gonna bonsai on this. I gotta tell everybody what we're thinking and so they understand what the intent is. The worst thing I can do is have half my team skateboard and have my team Banzai and that we're not providing mutual support.

Jocko Willink

This one I recognize pretty quickly in some prioritize and execute situation, you have a saying of aviate, navigate, communicate. This is a little diddy, a little catchphrase taught, probably like, I think day three of flight school. And it's really associated when something goes wrong, is you will aviate, navigate, communicate in that order. Think of it as just classic peony. You got something going on.

Dave Burke

The very first thing you do is aviate, is you fly. If you got all that thing sorted out and you're flying. Cool. Now figure out where you're going and navigate and get to the right heading and location. Cool.

You did all that, cool. Then you can start talking to people. What typically happens is you got a problem and you start talking, oh, I got a problem. You know, I got this and that. And like, and you're not flying or navigating.

That's when people crash. That's when people have problems. Mid air collisions is I'm trying to figure out where I am, what I'm doing, and how to communicate that. And I'm not just flying my jet. So it's the constant reminder of aviate, navigate, communicate.

If you get a problem, the priority is, the most important thing is fly the airplane. If you don't do that, I don't care how well you're doing all the other things, you're gonna have an issue. So every pilot in the world knows this, saying, av, navigate, communicate. That's the priority. In that order.

If you get them out of order, you will have a problem. But you are gonna gonna aviate mean, I start to pull up on my stick now. I figure out where I'm going. I'm still pulling up on my stick. I'm still figuring out where I'm gonna go in a little bit longer, but I'm still coming back on the radio and saying, hey, I was just, I got a little low, I'm okay.

Yeah. And then you're going back to. So it's like you're doing all three. It's not hard to do all three. The reason this is a thing is that when you have a problem, you get boresighted on one of those things.

You get target fixated, you get emotional, you get focused, you're not detached. Flying, navigating, communicating is easy until there's a problem. If you recognize the problem, you have to make sure you're flying first. CFIT is people that skip the aviation part and they start doing other things. You're like, dude, did you forget to fly the airplane?

And the sad part is, yes, yeah, they did. And what happens is it's catastrophic. So we have a saying, aviate, navigate, communicate. It's the reminder of prioritize and execute. You can't skip this to get to these two.

Have you got this? Cool. Good to go. Get to this. And if you do, cool, no problem.

999 times out of a thousand, no factor. But one out of a thousand, it is a factor. And if it's a factor and you get it wrong, catastrophic. That's how flames plant people fly to the ground. And you just mentioned the last word that we had for this, which is bore sighted, which is target.

Jocko Willink

Did you guys use the term target fixated, or did you just use the term bore sided? We typically use the word boresighted because that is a target fixation we used. And actually target fixation, we would typically use air to ground because you were literally fixated on the target. Most of the time, we use the word boresighted because there's a mode in the airplane which is called boresight, which takes all your radar, all your tools, and it focuses in front of you in, like, a little three degree circle, which means you want to get what's directly in front of you. Sometimes that's really important.

Dave Burke

It's rarely very important, but every now and then, I want to just get the guy right in front of me. I push the button forward. It's called boresight mode, which means everything is focused directly off my nose. Mean all my instruments, everything. That's what you're saying.

Jocko Willink

My instruments. When I go, boresight, all my instruments, everything. Find that guy right in front of me. Get the radar on that guy. Shoot that one guy.

Dave Burke

Boresight mode. Everything is pointed directly in front of me. Cool. For about 10 seconds. What?

You'll typically come back, I'm like, dude, I got really boresighted on that one guy, which means I lost everything else that's out me. If you're going to boresight someone, you better kill them immediately and then get right back out to a wider search. Being boresighted is the same thing as is being targeted fixated, but it's against something in the air. So if I'm boresighted, it means I'm pointed at someone in the air. If I'm target fixated, it's typically on the ground.

That's just typically how we. It's the same exact thing. And how often do you think, in a fighter, people get boresighted? They'll go, oh, there's a plane in front of me, and like, cool. What'd you do?

I locked them up. And, you know, the classic is you got flanked. You guys got somebody behind you, and all these other. It's usually not just one against one. It's usually ten against ten or something like that.

If you're bore sided, you're gonna get killed.

Jocko Willink

Well, there you go. Don't get bore sighted out there. Could have some problems. Yep. Could have some significant problems.

Awesome. So many comparisons, so many verbs and descriptions to use for everything that we do, and. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming down. Speaking of systems, speaking of, you know that one problem that you can have, which is contaminated fuel.

Sure. Hell, yeah. We don't want to have contaminated fuel. You ever. So I have these go karts.

Echo Charles

De brick. Yeah. And they go, I don't know, what, 20 solid for a go kart. They're for the kids, but I jump in there from time, so. From time to time, meaning every day, every sedge.

Jocko Willink

King of the block. So. Well, me and my son, Mario Andretti. Out there, he's seven. So we'll go out there and we bring these boxing gloves.

Echo Charles

So you know what Mario Kart is, right? It's, like, basically battling, but you're on go kart, so you can hit them with what? Different. I know. Well.

Oh, hell, yeah. Is it a video game? Yeah. Okay, so. But so this is essentially the real Mario Kart.

So we have these gloves, boxing gloves, and then a regular, like, these gloves. Right. That we just have. I don't know. So you go and you.

You throw the gloves at them, right. And if you have weapons, the rules are, if you got weapons, you get hit. They gotta hit your body. You gotta, like, throw all your weapons up anyway. I feel like you'd be real good.

Dave Burke

It's the green tortoise shell right here and what's going on. Yeah, exactly. Right? It's. That's essentially what it is.

Echo Charles

I feel like you'd be really good. I fit in a lot of times where when you describe, like, how to, um. You know, how to be successful when you're in dogfighting and all this stuff, it's like, dang. It's the same. It's two dimensional because you can't go up and down or whatever, but I feel like you'd be real good at that.

Jocko Willink

I agree.

Echo Charles

Come over sometime. We'll play. We'll see. What up. Check.

But, yes, bad fuel's no good. Me? The good fuel? Yeah, the good stuff. That good on the good stuff.

Integrity. So the jocko fuel, I guess, apparently, from what I understand, is synonymous with integrity. Like, people try only the good stuff. Well, we go through great lengths to make sure we keep it that way. Yeah.

Jocko Willink

If you guys need fuel out there, go to jaquafuel.com, comma, get some hydrate, get some greens, get some protein, get some. Go. You finished that one already, huh? Killed it. Killed it.

What flavor you got over there? This is iced tea. Lemonade, jaco style. Apparently, you were out of orange. Yeah, I was out of orange.

Sorry about that. We couldn't get you that. We got that. We got protein. Both the protein powder, which is freaking delicious, and the rtds now, which, let's face it, they're super convenient.

Let's face it, dude. Oh, yeah. It's a lot easier. And the. The sweet cream coffee is crushing you guys out there.

Really? Like the sweet cream coffee. Cause it's selling like crazy. Yeah. So just a heads up, I'm pretty.

Dave Burke

Sure my wife is a large contributor to the. She crushing it. It's got. Loves it, dude. Was she a coffee drinker?

Jocko Willink

She is a. Well, she was a. I don't drink coffee. Yeah, she drinks coffee. And we have supplanted significantly.

Yeah. And she didn't, I hate to say it, like, she didn't drink the other molds. Like, just wasn't her thing. She crushes the sweet cream. Yeah.

It's a real thing. There's a whole, like, there's a whole demographic of human beings that that's what they're doing, man. Like, they get the caffeine in there. 95. It's like a cup of coffee with 30 grams of protein.

I mean, it's. Let's face. It's freaking awesome, bro. My daughter's into it. She's into all the mokes, but I had to stop her because the caffeine or whatever, but she was like, she's down for that.

It tastes good. Tastes like tiramisu.

Hey, we got it all for you. Go check it out. Chocolatefuel.com. Also, also, you can go to wawa and get milk, which is the protein drink. You can go to vitamin shop, GNc, military commissaries, a fees, Hannaford dash stores in Maryland, wake fern Shoprite, h e b down in Tejas, Meyer up in the midwest, Harris Teeter, lifetime fitness shields.

Small gyms everywhere. And by the way, if you got a gym, whether you got a. You might have a globo gym. Yeah. Hell yeah.

You know, you might have a crossfit gym. You might have a jiu jitsu academy. Hell yeah. Might have a boxing gym. I don't know.

I don't know what you have. Or you might go to one of those gyms. If you want that gym to have Jocko fuel, email jf salesockofuel.com. We're spreading across the country with that stuff. Anyways, appreciate it.

Jockofuel.com. Get yourself some clean energy. That's what we're doing. Also, origin USA. Originusa.com.

If you need a jujitsu gi. If you need a jujitsu. Rash guard, by the way, there was a girl competing at ADCC in day two, and I was across the arena from her and she was wearing an old school freaking trooper rash guard. And I didn't get. I couldn't find her.

I couldn't, like, make it happen. But, I mean, she was just out there wearing a, you know, zero. 434. Yeah, just represent. She was in the semis, maybe.

Yeah, just out there representing. And I didn't get. I, like, you know, look, there's a lot of people wearing origin. Hell yeah. But that was an old school representation.

Echo Charles

That is hard to do. So whoever you were, I appreciate it. She actually lost, unfortunately. But I mean, look, dude, these are the best people in the world at grappling. Yeah, fully.

Jocko Willink

So if you need a rash card, if you need a gi, if you need jeans, boots, t shirts, if you need stuff and you want to support freedom and America, go to originusa.com and get something. That's what we're doing also. Jocular store called Jocko store. New discipline equals freedom shirt. What is it?

Echo Charles

It's a new one. I haven't seen it yet. No, nobody's seen it yet. Watch about the time of this being released. It's still gonna have a few more days, so do this if you want to.

Reminder, sign up for the email list if you haven't already. Mmm. You get the email when it drops.

Jocko Willink

Echoes going. He's lost his mind. No no no no. Sign up for the email list. He's got all the warnings.

No no no. I'm not stopped. People just stopped listening. No, that. You're talking about drop culture.

Echo Charles

See what I'm saying? That's different. That's where all your stuff is. Only through drops. You heard of this day, Burke?

Dave Burke

Negative. Okay, so there's this way of selling stuff, whatever it may be. Wait, your wife drinks coffee, right? Does she have Starbucks cups? Like, you know, the ones you can buy and stuff?

Echo Charles

So anyway, Starbucks does drops with cups. They'll be like, hey, limited edition. You can only get it from this day to this day. That's it. It's on my new track.

Your new track? I'm gonna. Is that gonna drop sometime soon? Is that different? Echoes gonna drop a new track?

It's the same term. Okay. Kind of the same vein, but it's different. Yes. So anyway, if you're.

Dave Burke

So. Drop culture is what you sell. Everything like this, all limited edition. You got. You got to get on the email list, which I dig, by the way, because you can find some.

Echo Charles

Some cool stuff. That's not what this is. This isn't drop culture. This is a one off drop. I just use the word drop.

Dave Burke

Oh. Because it's also not gonna be unlimited. No, no, it's unlimited. Oh, it is. It's the new one.

Echo Charles

So you know how, you know, time goes on? You know, a lot of people have the old school. Discipline equals freedom. Then they got the second one, which was good. You designed that one, by the way.

Jocko Willink

Oh, you're talking about when I made it more of an equal sign. Yes, sir. You made it. So that equals was the biggest word. Well, look, that's debatable spatially.

Echo Charles

You know, it made sense. But hey, look, I dig it, man. I like yours as well. Then we got the third one, which we called the standard issue. Oh, yeah.

Representing all the different branches, if you pay attention now, we got the fourth one. Four. It's been years. You know what I mean? It's just an updated one.

Dave Burke

Anyway. If you want to, you want the first edition on that one, sign up for the email list, and then we'll indicate that the day that it drops. Yes. Okay. And that's at jocko store.com.

Jocko Willink

Check it out. Also, shirt locker. Don't forget about this subscription scenario. One drop every month. Yeah.

Echo Charles

Not limited edition. Because all you gotta do is sign up. Subscription scenario. Anyway, you get new, new designs every month at ADCCC. At ADCC.

Jocko Willink

I saw some in the wild. Oh, yeah. And you know what? There was lies. Lies.

Yeah. People. A lot of response on that one. People very much like that one. I see.

Echo Charles

The one Dave Burke's representing. That's one of the shirt locker ones. Dish. Oh, yeah. Also, if you need some steak, you can go to Colorado, craftbeef.com.

Jocko Willink

Or you can go to primalbeef.com. People make an awesome steak for us out here. That's what we're doing. We're eating steak. By the way, the beef.

Do you have any beef sticks from Colorado? Craft beef? They're gone. Yeah, you have to stock up on those, dude, because it's like having a Snickers bar, but it's steak. Better.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like having a Snickers bar, but it's better. Cause Snickers bars junk. Way better.

Dave Burke

Yep. Hey, no offense, Snickers bars, but let's face it, I appreciate what you did for me when I was nine years old, you know, and it's like, what's for lunch? Snickers bar and a coke. God. Growing up in the seventies, bro, that was this.

Jocko Willink

That was the deal right there. That was a jam. Did you. Did they do that? Did.

Did you do that? No, my mom was a hippie, bro. My mom, she don't. She don't play. She was giving you, like, mineral water?

Echo Charles

Yeah, kinda. I mean, not mineral water, but yeah, yeah, sprouts. You know, like, make the sandwich with the real turkey and the sprouts in it. I mean, I guess, you know, hey, man, do. What you did wasn't better than Snickers and coke, I'll tell you.

Jocko Willink

Coke, bro, that was kind of the jam when I was a kid. Like, little league baseball games over, you got fifty cents to go to the snack bar, you get a 25 cent coke and a 25 cent Snickers bar. Hey, why is America having problems with obesity right now? I'm not sure. Why do we have type two diabetes running rampant?

Echo Charles

Well, then again, no, it's not because of that. Because. Look, you guys are saying. You guys are freaking down for the Snickers and coke. You guys aren't obese?

Jocko Willink

No, no, no, we were. Yeah, we were. You were obese when you were. No, no, no, no. I'm saying.

I'm saying that people that didn't go, hey, hold on a second. This might not be the best combination of breakfast, lunch, and dinner over here, bro. They didn't do the. What do you call a refrain. Re fine.

They got a redefine. Yeah, you got a redefine. Especially now you got all your other problems solved. That phone.

So there. Anyway. Beef sticks. No, snickers. Stop snickers already.

And primal beef calm. Colorado craft beef calm. Check those out. Also, subscribe to the podcast. Also check out jocko underground.com.

We're getting ready to record one of those. So that way we can say whatever we want, answer questions. Go to jacob underground.com if you want to check that out. We have a YouTube channel. So does.

So does Jocko Fuel have a YouTube channel? So does origin USA have a YouTube channel? So does Echelon Front have a YouTube channel? So a bunch of different options there to see what's going on. I would say origin USA is sort of a behind the scenes of what is going on.

I would say Jocko Fuel is kind of a current what's going on. And I would say echelon Front is information a little bit about what's going on, but mostly about, hey, here's some good leadership things for you to move forward with. So check those out. YouTube psychological warfare flipsidecanvas.com. Get some cool stuff that Dakota Meyer makes to hang on your wall.

And also, we've written some books. Leadership strategies and tactics, field manual, the new one. There's a new version that expanded a dish. Talk about the extreme ownership leadership loop in there. Written a bunch of other books.

You guys know what they are. Check out the kids books for your kids. How's the warrior kid progress coming over on the burke front? Strong. You get good insights because I send you texts.

Dave Burke

And when they, like, get a new belt or run a tournament or something. But they're on the path, bro. They're totally on the path. Jiu jitsu for them, for your kids. Right now, it might be different for different kids, but is it like, the focus of your family, or is it just part of the family?

Jocko Willink

Is this part of what we're doing? Especially for my middle and my youngest, it's just like, it's just what we're doing. Yeah, it's just. It's funny because they're like, oh, what sports do you play? And they're like, oh, I play soccer and baseball or soccer and football, whatever.

Dave Burke

And then, like, oh, and like, we also do. It's not like a seasonal. It's just, it's just, it's like saying, like, do you guys, like, do your homework and you guys sleep and you guys like, whatever, like, and so for me, as a parent, obviously that is the best part about it is it's not. It's not an activity that they are like, oh, it's football season, or it's just. It is just part of the deal, man.

Jocko Willink

It's just. They're on that path. It's just what they do, I think. And no judgment on. If you're, like, doing soccer season, like, they're doing that stuff, too.

Yeah. Yeah. But jujitsu is just. It's just a standard. It's just a thing that they do.

Dave Burke

Yep. What I was gonna. What I was. You actually gave me a response I wasn't really expecting. There's people that maybe hear us talk about jujitsu, and they think that it's gonna be this thing that's like, all of a sudden you have to dedicate your life to and.

Jocko Willink

Well, I guess you did give me a response. Hey, your kids still do football, they still do soccer, they still do all these other things, play guitar. This doesn't have to be your life. Yes, but it should absolutely be a part of your life. And it's not.

Dave Burke

It's not. They don't. There's no, like, deterrent from something else. It doesn't come at the cost. It's just.

It's just part of life, and it's normal, and it's just what they do. Do you know what a gift you're giving them? I mean, small sense when that kid. Is gonna get picked on, and they're not gonna get picked on. I mean, like, they're not.

Jocko Willink

They're gonna. First of all, they'll be able to avoid it. They'll have the confidence that people won't look at them like, oh, I'm gonna pick on this kid over here. There's just that right there. Epic.

Dave Burke

Yeah. And here's the thing. Just quickly, I I guess I have a little bit of an advantage. I am closely connected to Jaco and echo and, like, that world. But here's the thing.

What Dave Burke is doing most days out of the year is just following the plan. Like, the warder kid books. Like, the plan is out. Like, I'm not doing this. I was lucky to have the secret insight into some secret world that nobody knows about.

Like, I'm just on the path, just following the plan, and that plan is out there for everybody. The warrior kid books. Just, like, just, here's the plan. Everybody can do that. It is not rocket science, man.

And I'm not doing some crazy mental gymnastics to convince my kids to do. We're just on that path, and it's a path that everybody can follow, dude. It's an awesome community. So, yeah, I'm just. The kids are.

I'm so stoked that they have that in their lives. Get your kids or your neighbor's kids or your nephew or your whatever kids around the neighborhood. Just give him the books. Give him the books. Best invest.

Jocko Willink

You know how much nicer it's gonna be when that kid turns 15? And that kid is working out, eating healthy, doing jujitsu instead of. He turns 15. This is your neighbor, by the way, and the other kid. What?

He's at home blasting music. He's getting in trouble. Cops are showing up, like, there's all kinds of mayhem going on. So don't. Don't let that happen.

You know, let's just get the kids on the right path. You get that kid, square their life away. It's beautiful. I couldn't find my son last week. My wife and I could not find my son for, like, 15 minutes on a day.

Dave Burke

We're like, I should know where he is. Walk down into the gym. I open the door just to. And he's doing push ups. I didn't tell him to do push ups.

I didn't ask him or make it. He just. I'm like, hey, bud. He's like, hey, look. He's like, in the pushup position.

Looks over his shoulders like, hey, dad. And I just like, see you later. I close the door. I'm all like, I am, like, super stoked. He just said they're doing push ups.

Jocko Willink

Yeah. The path is out there, man. Freaking outstanding. Outstanding. Also.

So, yeah, a bunch of books also. We have echelon front. We have a leadership consultancy where we solve problems through leadership. When you have problems in your life, they're leadership problems. We can help you solve those problems by teaching you leadership, by teaching your team leadership.

We do, obviously, consulting. We also have some big events. We have one coming up. Sold out, though. Sold out, right?

Dave Burke

Nashville is pretty much sold out. Yeah. You. If you really want to go to Nashville, reach out. Do it quick.

Jocko Willink

That's very quick. That's two to 4 may, and then we have Dallas, 16 to 18 October. So if you want to come to one of those, they all sell out. So. And we sell out to a point now, it used to be like, we sold out, and then someone would call the, hey, I got four people that really need to come.

We'll be like, okay, now it's like fire code scenarios. And we already did the thing. We already did the thing where we eliminated all the seats for everybody in echelon front, so no one has anywhere to sit. We're all in the back standing or in the back of, like, tables with, like, packed in there. So there's nothing else we can do.

So if you want to come to the muster, get. Get signed up quickly. We also have the FTX. We have council. We have battlefield.

The next council is June 26 through 29th. That's up in the mountains. That is a total exercise in detachment. Are you going to that one this year? I don't know.

Dave Burke

We actually added a second one this year because first was sold out. We sell them all. So we added a second one, and the second one's, like, halfway sold out. So there it is. That's the council June 26 through the 29th, up in Washington state in the mountains.

Jocko Willink

And then we have the women's assembly run by our COO, Jamie Cochran. That's September 11 through to the 13th. This year it's gonna be in San Antonio, Texas. So women's assembly. This will be the number two of those.

Just incredible feedback from the women to that went to the first women's assembly. So if you wanna learn about these principles? Check out some of these things that we do at echelon front. We also have an online training academy. Cause you don't just, you don't get an inoculation.

You need to go to the gym. So check out extremeownership.com and learn these principles. Go through the courses and they can apply to your business and to your life as well. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, want to help gold star families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization.

It's an incredible organization. I know the people that she has helped. Well, I don't know them all, but I know a number of the people that she has helped. It's been phenomenal providing the medical services that the VA doesn't give to veterans. And that is outstanding.

And it really just dramatically impacts people. So if you want to help out, you want to donate, you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org dot. Also check out heroesandhorses.org dot. This is Micah fink up in the mountains of Montana, taking veterans up into the mountains so they can lose themselves and find their soul. Also, Jimmy May's organization, beyond the brotherhood.org, helping transition guys that were in the military into the civilian sector, setting them up with mentorship, setting them up with jobs, helping them through that transition.

He's doing an awesome job with it. If you want to connect with us on the interwebs, Dave is at David R. Burke. I'm at jocko.com dot. Got that website, jocko.com dot.

I'm willing on the social media scenario echoes at Echo Charles. Just. Just be careful because there's an algorithm out there and it'll grab you by the throat and it'll do horrible things to you. And you know what? You won't know it.

You won't know it. You'll see fit you. You will just collide with the earth because you won't be paying attention. What's going on? You know what this was?

I've talked about this experiment before, going in the cold tube, and if you go in the cold tub while you're scrolling instagram, you're like, oh, that went by pretty quick. In a bad situation, like you're freezing, it goes by quick. It just disappears. Time goes by real quick. Guess what happens when you're in a comfortable situation.

Guess what happens when you're on the couch. Like an hour just went by an hour. And don't do that while you work. Have you ever scrolled instagram while you work out? Do that?

I'm. I have done it before, yeah, but it's a total disruptor. Like, if you. You gotta look at that phone. Like, you cannot pick up your phone when you're working out and open it.

Like, that's just a bad thing across the board. Well, I did it, like, probably maybe four or five times in a row. Workouts in a row. Where I'd, like. Basically your mind is, like, open to is fine with it.

Echo Charles

Yeah, I'll just. Between sets or whatever. Sets, bruh. And then when I was like, okay, I gotta stop doing this. I gotta hurry up and really fast focus or whatever.

And it was actually kind of hard, like, habitually for that one where. So I had to force my brain or whatever. But the workout. And then, you know, then obviously I got ahold of it, bro. Your workout gets just done way quicker, probably thing will just suck you into it.

Dave Burke

Like a two and three hour workout. Watch out. Think about that thing. That dopamine flowing? Yep.

Jocko Willink

That's really disturbing. It's real, so don't let that happen. And that's where we're at. Also, obviously, thanks to all of our military out there around the world, and I'll say today, especially in the skies, our aviators, mechanics, air traffic control, maintenance, all the ground crew and flight crew. Did I miss anybody?

We got them. If you're out there, we appreciate it. Thanks for your service. Thanks to all the military. Thanks for our.

Our air men and women for keeping the skies free for us all. Also, thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, emTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks for what you do as well here at home to keep us safe and everyone else out there. These are some good rules to pay attention to. Good things to watch out for, not just while flying, because you might not be a pilot, but while living.

Don't get boresighted. Be careful about how you mark your position.

If things aren't going right or they don't seem to be going right, redefine the situation. And you can't do any of that. If you lose sa, if you don't have situational awareness, if you're not detached, you can't make that happen. And also, if you're not detached, you might get behind the power curve. So do everything you can to stay ahead of the power curve at all times.

And until next time, this is Dave and Echo and Jocko out.

433: What Aerial Combat Teaches Us About Leadership and Life. With "Good Deal" Dave Berke.

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Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to Aerial Combat

2. Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit

3. Comparisons Between Military and Business Strategies

4. Q&A with Dave Berke

Actionable Advice

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