Jocko Willink

And I could also bring the problems at the E5 level to my boss and explain to them in a way that they could understand that, hey, when you tell my guys...

We're not allowed to explosively breach anymore.

Let me tell you what that means.

And then they say, oh, okay, well, I didn't understand that.

Thank you.

Or when I get told, hey, you need to have this number of Iraqis with you, friendly Iraqi soldiers with you on every operation, I need to explain to my boss what that means on the ground.

And if you have a good relationship, which I always had a good relationship with my boss.

So when I would explain something to my boss, my boss would listen to me.

My boss would, because also I wouldn't complain about stuff.

Like I wasn't gonna complain.

If I was going to my boss and telling them that something didn't make sense, they would listen to me because I would only say it if it was true.

And so I just developed that good amount of trust with my chain of command and it would work out well.

So yes, as I got,

into that officer role, I started to see, oh, okay, I can understand why.

If the troops would have known that it was the Commodore of the ARG that now wanted to use helicopters because it's something they have to get checked off the box before they're allowed to go on deployment, if the guys understood that, they'd be like, oh yeah, well, we gotta get quals done too, and this is the quals that they gotta get, cool.

Let's make it happen.

But a lot of times, you know, we fail as leaders to let people know.

And then when I got to, in the platoon at SEAL Team Two,

again, now we're on a strike aircraft.

We got a lot of assets.