Stewart Brand

And there's a whole section in the print book about that.

So a lot of these things are culture deep.

And if your culture is making it hard for you to be a good maintainer, you've got to figure out the workarounds.

Maybe make it a spiritual practice.

Maybe ensure that the officers are involved in doing maintenance.

And that way, they will respect it and take it seriously.

In the U.S.

and in NATO militaries, it's the non-commissioned officers that are responsible for maintenance.

And basically, the sergeants train everybody in maintenance, and they're the ones responsible for making sure that maintenance happens.

And the Russian military does not really have NCOs, non-commissioned officers, sergeants, and most of the Arab militaries do not.

And when you don't have that, the maintenance doesn't get done, and then you lose the war.

They overlap and they take responsibility and they keep the layers...

respecting each other.

This is a big part of... So that every single officer in the U.S.

military has a non-commissioned officer who is with them at all times, keeping them alert to what the soldiers themselves need and want and maintenance issues and all of that sort of thing.

And so the...

That keeps it from becoming a caged system where cats, where officers look down from a great height on the troops and do not respect them, but they expect to be respected themselves because they're so high and mighty officers.

That is a recipe for losing a war.

Yes.

What's interesting is, unlike many metaphors, he actually was a very good maintainer of his own bike.