Blake Hall
speaker
270 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Blake Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
At that moment in my life, it's amazing to have this conversation because I was just so focused on what was right in front of me to keep my men alive. hopefully myself too. But that's maybe an introduction to first week in Mosul.
I think the thing you can't know is if you're going to be brave, everyone's scared when you're over in combat. You're not normal if you're not scared. But character is about pushing all that down and doing the right thing for the men that you lead when the chips are down. And honestly, every firefight is different.
For me, just in terms of becoming a man and as a rite of passage, will I be able to do my job when it counts? And you just don't know that until you're shot at. And it changes over time.
The military has done a lot of research now to show that over the course of your deployment at like month six or seven, you go into God phase that you've survived enough of combat that you actually will take extreme risk. And when we hit that time mark, when we were down in Baghdad, we got into firefights where other captains would come out with us and ride.
And I'd be walking around, my snipers would be walking around laughing, pointing, shooting. And they were like, you guys are just absolutely insane. But then as you get closer to coming home, you start almost like sports. You're playing like not to lose.
And so what's really interesting is you take the most casualties at the beginning of your deployment when you don't have a lot of context about what the enemy's doing, but also at the end when you're playing not to lose. It's actually in the middle when I get back.
As I was about to come home, I would think about what I'd done in the middle of my deployment and my hands would shake because I was just, oh my God. So there's like these overarching learnings about are you going to be brave enough to put the team and your brothers before yourself? But also there's it's not even the same. There's these other contextual things that influence groups.
And I think as a leader, you have to understand those team dynamics, too, because the whole point of leadership is to be inversely correlated with the context. When the team's playing not to lose, you have to counter that with extreme aggression in terms of the mindset to offset because you know where the team's headed.
When they're overly sort of risk-taking, you need to try to mitigate risk and pull it back. But the other thing was, similar to entrepreneurship, we were given a novel problem set. And so I had a team, we had a mission, But we had never practiced for using signal intelligence and different techniques to basically be a SWAT team. That was new.
And so a lot of it was just the scientific method of having a certain way of doing things and then codifying learning. So when we would come back, we would say what worked really well that we should keep, what didn't work so well. And over time, that led to a lot of specialization and
So maybe the arc in terms of performance, if you can codify learning and feedback loops, the average success rate for these kill capture missions was like 44%, I think, give or take. And in the first three months, we were in the 20th percentiles, which is to say that we sucked. But around month three, we hit average.
And then we caught the head of the Mujahideen Shura Council for Mosul, which is this clearinghouse of nationalist and extremist Islamist groups. And we caught the spiritual leader of northern Iraq for Al-Qaeda. So we were designated the kill capture force of choice for northern Iraq. by Colonel Townsend, who went on to become a four-star general. But by the end, our success rate was over 90%.
And I think by some metrics was like leading the theater in terms of our efficiency. So there was a lot. That was my first real job. I had a lawn mowing business and like life gardening, but that was my first real job.
I was relentless in preparation. I had an amazing team where there was a lot of prior selection that had gone into it. So in recon, you get to pick whoever you want. So I had already screened my team for certain skills to make sure that I had a good group around me
But the platoon leader is responsible for the maneuver and for getting the folks to the right place at the right time and orienting them to target. So I spent basically all of my free time studying these terrorist cells, their pattern, what was called pattern of life, where they would be on a Tuesday for lunch, what their tendencies were. And it's just like anything else.
Humans get lazy and they get complacent. And if you're willing to put in the time, you could really get a feel for how this person is. operated and where they were likely to make a mistake. It was that. And then just, I think the biggest difference between mediocre leaders and great leaders is great leaders plan for contingencies.
So before we even went on a mission, we would plan for all the things that might happen. So when it did happen, we knew what to do. I think relentless preparation and learning is is just so important because it both inoculates you against risk proactively.
But then if you do find yourself in a position where everyone's like you're in fight or flight, the adrenaline's going, it's really difficult to communicate and tell everyone exactly what you want to do. The more that you've rehearsed that and prepared for it, the better you're going to be able to execute when it counts. And the military really drilled that into me.
And I've carried that particular lesson with me throughout my life.
You have to be credible. That's the most important thing. You have to be credible. You have to care. So when I went through ranger school, there was a moment, you go through three phases, bending phase, mountain phase, Florida phase. I had this just miserable experience in mountain phase. It was wintertime, so it was freezing freezing.
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