War, Conflict and Lessons Learning: Building Better Leaders with Aaron MacLean | Ep 19

Aaron MacLean is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Previously, he was senior foreign policy advisor and legislative director to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Aaron served on active duty as a U.S. Marine for seven years, deploying to Afghanistan as an infantry officer in 2009–2010. Following his time in the operating forces, he was assigned to the faculty of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was the 2013 recipient of the Apgar Award for Excellence in Teaching. Aaron received a B.A. in philosophy and the history of math and science from St. John’s College, Annapolis, and an M.Phil. (Dist.) in medieval Arabic thought from the University of Oxford. He has been a Boren Scholar and a Marshall Scholar and lives in Virginia, where he was born.

Chapters  in this episode:

• Avoiding Knowledge of War is Dangerous
• Do Systems Incentivize War?
• To Be or To Do: Boyd's Challenge
• Is There a Better Way to Get Better?
• Boyd: People, Ideas, Things. Always in That Order!
• Ponch is an Aviator, and Culture is HUGE
• Accountability is Crucial to True Leadership
• Boyd is So Much More Than "OODA Loop"
• Quantico is a "Boyd School"
• Reducing Boyd is a Disadvantage
• Boyd Focused on Conflict, Which is Everywhere
• Studying Conflict Builds Better Leaders
• Team Training and Team Science in Healthcare
• Measuring What Matters
• A Thank You and a Gracious Invitation That Ponch and Mark Accept!

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature on Apple and Spotify to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

Aaron MacLean
Follow Aaron MacLean on Twitter
School of War with Aaron MacLean (Apple Podcasts)
School of War with Aaron MacLean (Spotify)

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

00:00:03:04 - 00:00:18:10
Mark McGrath
Okay. So Aaron McClain, we wanted to start off with this with this comment that you have on your podcast, which I think is great. So avoiding war has its merits. Avoiding knowledge of war is dangerous. Why don't we start with that? Let's unpack and discuss that.

00:00:19:00 - 00:00:53:04
Aaron MacLean
Absolutely. Thanks, guys, very much for having me on. Love your show and delighted to be here. You know, one of the reasons why we started School of War is that there's been a real collapse in the study of military history in the American University. I either as a standalone discipline or even sort of within the study of history more broadly, you know, once upon a time, say 50 years ago or so to, you know, study history as an undergraduate at the American University would have involved a lot of political history.

00:00:53:11 - 00:01:18:13
Aaron MacLean
Like who said what and did what to whom? But this or that critical moment and why. And obviously, when you're doing a lot of that, there's going to be a lot of war. That's part of that conversation because it's a big part of history. And then it would have been possible to specialize and have a career, you know, learning about the harder edged stuff, you know, the actual nature of warfare, how it's conducted, you know, what causes wars, how two wars end, all of that.

00:01:19:05 - 00:01:37:20
Aaron MacLean
And my strong impression is, is that it is much harder to come across a serious inquiry into those subjects today in 2023 than it used to be. And I think that's dangerous. I think it's dangerous because as a smarter person than me once said, we've not seen the end of war. Only only the dead have seen the end of war.

00:01:38:03 - 00:02:01:19
Aaron MacLean
And and it's you know, we've got a land war in Europe. We are staring down the barrel of a potential war in the western Pacific. There are any number of other smaller conflicts. You know, sitting here, the date today recording, I think there's still shooting in Khartoum, in Sudan. I mean, there's just stuff going on all around the world, like violent struggle is a part of the human story and always will be.

00:02:02:20 - 00:02:13:03
Aaron MacLean
And to be a citizen, let alone to be a politically engaged citizen, I think requires some knowledge of what war is all about.

00:02:15:23 - 00:02:38:04
Mark McGrath
I mean, as a history major, I completely empathize and understand. I know that we're the rarest major now that history is the I think there's only 23,000 at the student population right now. Which is which is crazy. Do you think it's I mean, I know, you know, kind of the answers, but it's just that if we avoid these lessons and the context and the understanding, then we're more than likely doomed to repeat it.

00:02:39:04 - 00:03:11:18
Aaron MacLean
Of course. And, you know, I mean, look, I think you're just making very broad generalizations here. Right. But it seems to me that one of the reasons why it's harder to engage, you know, in our universities, in schools, in a serious study of this stuff, is there's sort of a suspicion, if you're a military historian or you're, you know, this is what you do, that you're somehow, like pro-war or like you you want, you know, like there's something suspicious about having this interest that if you're interested in this stuff, you must therefore sort of enjoy it and want it.

00:03:12:05 - 00:03:31:23
Aaron MacLean
And so, you know, if we want less war, then we should, you know, talk less about this stuff. It's kind of similar logic to the arms control movement. Like if you want if you want less war, well, you should have fewer bombs, you know, and they're both kind of absurd positions. They're a little different, but they're they're both absurd in their own way.

00:03:32:18 - 00:03:53:21
Aaron MacLean
So, yes, I agree completely. If if you don't know how wars start and how they're conducted and what their cost is and how they end and everything else that goes into it one way or the other. Sure. You are absolutely much more likely to stumble into situations or allow your country right to stumble into situations that maybe you'd rather you'd not.

00:03:54:06 - 00:04:14:01
Aaron MacLean
I would also say, you know, this would be a controversial comment in some circles, but I'm of the view that, you know, to the extent that the United States fails to deter wars and finds ourselves in conflicts, we are in a proxy conflict in Ukraine today. We are engaged in all manner of sort of irregular warfare around the world against, you know, Islamic jihadists or whatever.

00:04:15:03 - 00:04:30:06
Aaron MacLean
And, you know, we we're I think we're working hard on deterring a war in the Pacific right now, which I hope we succeed at, because it will be very dramatic if we don't. But let's say, you know, when we when we fail to deter, I would like us to win. I would like us to win the horse that we are in.

00:04:30:06 - 00:04:51:22
Aaron MacLean
And that requires not just military professionals, you know, combat arms officers and the like to know what they're doing and talking about because it is their profession, though, I would suggest that obviously the study of history is important for them as well, and we could all use more of it. But the American public needs to have an appreciation for these things.

00:04:51:22 - 00:05:10:04
Aaron MacLean
Our elected leaders need to have an appreciation for these things. Civilian leadership in national security agencies that there's you know, it's a good thing that we have civilian control of the military. There's no reason these civilians need to have served, but they need to have some knowledge of these things. And they're not getting it from they're not getting it from the schools in the universities.

00:05:10:04 - 00:05:29:17
Aaron MacLean
So that's the basic you know, that's that's the podcast, a very modest contribution to the problem. It's a huge problem that's downstream of some very powerful cultural forces. One podcast is not going to address, but I do hope it's a home forum for folks who want to think seriously about these things. As your podcast is a home for folks who want to think seriously about strategy, which of course, is a big piece of this whole puzzle.

00:05:30:12 - 00:05:49:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah. Hey, Aaron. On a big picture here, aren't we incentivized as a nation to be at war? Isn't that how we make money? If you look at some of the leading stocks right now in the market, defense stocks are doing quite well in this, you know, VUCA environment. So why don't we incentivize by the system to have proxy wars?

00:05:50:14 - 00:06:07:09
Aaron MacLean
Well, I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think. I think we are incentivized to have a world order where we can trade with other nations on terms that are favorable to us. And that's a very blunt way of putting it.

00:06:09:15 - 00:06:35:16
Aaron MacLean
And, you know, in the United and United States is not has never been comfortable. Americans have never been comfortable with the position. We have found ourselves in since the Second World War, which is, you know, essentially the inheritors of the security role that the British Empire played before us. We found ourselves in this, you know, approaching this position after the First World War, and we immediately wiped our hands of it and walked away for 20 years until there was a second general war.

00:06:35:21 - 00:06:56:18
Aaron MacLean
And then after that war, the Cold War kind of kept us in our efforts to walk away from the world failed because the Soviet Union was was too great of a threat for the American public to to countenance ignoring it. And so we we find ourselves, you know, here 70 plus years on, at the center of a global system that we have done a lot to create and design.

00:06:56:18 - 00:07:18:12
Aaron MacLean
And we talk about it in different ways. You know, we we talk about, you know, different depending on your political affiliation and, you know, where you come from. You might talk about something called the Liberal International Order. Well, others have observed that much like the Holy Roman Empire is not that liberal, it's not that international, and it doesn't seem very orderly.

00:07:18:12 - 00:07:36:17
Aaron MacLean
So there's there's plenty to criticize about the sort of rhetoric we use to talk about this system, but we all kind of know what we're talking about when we talk about it. You know, we're talking about a world where, you know, the United States is the preeminent power or, you know, one of the preeminent free power, at least as opposed to, say, communist China or in its day.

00:07:36:17 - 00:07:56:06
Aaron MacLean
The USSR in that world has customs and systems. You might call them rules. Sometimes they are literally rules there. There is, in fact, a system of international law tends to get thrown out the window when when armed conflict starts and tends to get ignored a lot. But but these there are actual rules. And then beyond the rules, there are just ways of proceeding.

00:07:56:15 - 00:08:21:18
Aaron MacLean
And here I'm getting to this along with a way of actually getting to to answer your question, all of which have made us very prosperous, all of which have made the United States the economic behemoth that it is. I would argue, along with our our partners and friends, the United States is a sort of uniquely generous partner in player of its global role.

00:08:23:00 - 00:08:45:15
Aaron MacLean
That's not quite the same thing as war makes us rich, but it is the case that maintaining the security of this system has been part of the American grand strategy. Again, whether it's explicit or written on a piece of paper or simply just de facto like what administration after administration does, kind of regardless of party with variations and sort of differences in the details.

00:08:46:03 - 00:09:03:20
Aaron MacLean
It has been at the center of it since 1945, just as it was at the center of the British Empire. His vision of the world before that, there's lots of I mean, I'm speaking at like 80,000 foot level. There's there's plenty of differences between us and the Brits. And there's been plenty of differences in how we do business decade to decade and so forth.

00:09:03:20 - 00:09:06:10
Aaron MacLean
But I think that's how that's how I would answer your question.

00:09:06:20 - 00:09:42:08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That's great. And I want to dove down to the 40,000 foot view maybe and you have a unique perspective potentially from being in the Beltway and interviewing some fantastic folks throughout the the DOD, the State Department and elsewhere. I want to get your take on the disposition of the type of people that are leading today. And I want to connect this back to John Boyd and maybe Mark can help me with this story from Robert Corum about John Boyd, where John Boyd says, hey, talking about a fork in the road to be or to do, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.

00:09:43:01 - 00:09:58:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
John Boyd raised his hand and pointed in one direction and said, If you go that way, you can be somebody like you can be part of this system. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of a club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.

00:09:59:08 - 00:10:21:12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Then Boyd raised his hand the other direction and said, Or you can go that way and you can do something, something for your country. And for your air force or your military and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors.

00:10:21:18 - 00:10:30:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
My question to you is based off your experience and having these conversations, do we have people that are being or are they doing?

00:10:31:14 - 00:10:51:18
Aaron MacLean
It's a mix. And I think Boyd's analysis is not not off base at all. It's a brilliant it's a brilliant way of like putting things. It's this is also like, I guess, the writers of The Departed, you know, that great Leo DiCaprio movie must have ripped off Martin Sheen tells DiCaprio early in the movie. You want to you want to seem like police.

00:10:51:18 - 00:10:52:21
Aaron MacLean
You want to be police.

00:10:53:03 - 00:10:54:00
Mark McGrath
Want to be police?

00:10:54:06 - 00:11:27:02
Aaron MacLean
Yeah. It's the same same concept. Look, I mean, it's a little hard to just stick with the military for a second and sort of security leadership, whether it's civilian or military, it's a little hard to look at our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last two decades and say, well, that went great. You know, I do think, you know, that the sort of endless wars rhetoric and the way in which we talk about it sometimes does overlook aspects of the story that are important, like the surge in Iraq was a success.

00:11:27:23 - 00:12:04:06
Aaron MacLean
You know, the insurgency in Iraq and the civil war there were basically defeated by 2008. And then at the political level, we decided to walk away from that. And that's what led to ISIS and all that sort of disasters that followed an Iranian domination of Iraqi politics and everything else. Afghanistan. You know, it's hard to it's hard to put a real positive spin on that, whether it's the cataclysmic, you know, end of the story in 2021 or a lot that happened along the way where our our strategic ambitions were well out of proportion with, you know, our actual abilities.

00:12:04:06 - 00:12:30:05
Aaron MacLean
Right. You know, we wanted to remake a country. Well, put it this way. You know, I felt when I was there that, you know, the folks in charge kind of at every level had just come from Iraq. And that we were trying to jam a lot of square pegs into a lot of round Afghanistan holes, because Iraq, at the end of the day, is just a wealthier, you know, more established nation state than Afghanistan ever has been.

00:12:31:12 - 00:12:51:04
Aaron MacLean
But honestly, our political vision for Afghanistan was even more ambitious than that. Like we were trying to create like a sovereign Western style state in a country that had no tradition of that. And there are a lot of problems with that. I mean, just sort of keeping in the theme of the project, of the podcast and in both of our podcast in a way, is there's just a lot of like ignorance.

00:12:51:04 - 00:13:15:10
Aaron MacLean
There is a lot of a lot of folks who, who, who, you know, at some level, the failures were failures of analysis at the highest level. Like, we've lived our lives in this country where we vote for our leaders. And, you know, in general, there's a state monopoly on violence. And what else? Minority rights are protected like these are all foundational parts of the Western political project, whether in America or elsewhere.

00:13:15:10 - 00:13:36:03
Aaron MacLean
And we have complicated politics and stuff gets messy and everything's perfect. But like, those are things that growing up in America, we just kind of assumed that, like, if some dude murders another dude, like, the police are going to get involved. Like, that's just what we expect. And that's just not the expectation. And, you know, central Helmand Province, that is not that has never been the expectation of how you're going to resolve such a thing if one dude shoots another dude.

00:13:37:09 - 00:13:54:06
Aaron MacLean
And so you grow up that way and you like, live your life like in that kind of politics. And then, you know, starting in 2001, the leaders of the United States in Europe, the ISAF mission and everything else, they were. So obviously we need that. Like, that's what that's what we need to have in Afghanistan. We need to have the kind of politics that we're familiar with.

00:13:54:06 - 00:14:21:02
Aaron MacLean
And that was like a fundamental failure of political imagination and and and a kind of failure of wisdom almost, you know, that we are going to sign up for this incredibly ambitious project, but we want to do it on the cheap, and we'd like it to be done in a couple of years. Please. So, you know, back to your sort of original question about like what what types are predominantly more in charge or not?

00:14:21:02 - 00:14:39:04
Aaron MacLean
I mean, it's like there's this fundamental tension that Boyd is pointing to that is real. And when you find the person who can both, as it were, get the important jobs, but then be willing to lay it all on the line like those people are rare and they often get picked off along the way for very obvious reasons.

00:14:39:15 - 00:15:05:14
Aaron MacLean
They do exist, but it's not. I mean, it's not like on every office down the hallway. We all know that because there's just a tension between the incentives that get you, like the incentives system and, you know, the ways to be successful in terms of getting the next job and what it takes to be successful on, you know, a battlefield, whether whether a literal battlefield or anything.

00:15:05:14 - 00:15:24:14
Aaron MacLean
Right. Like the actual work, whatever, whatever the work may be. And what we're talking about, like those are like two different things that always exist in parallel. People, everyone kind of kind of navigates back and forth between the two to some extent. And Boyd is like making this, I think, very powerful moral argument that the one is superior and more valuable to the nation than the other.

00:15:26:04 - 00:15:45:20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I will say this, Erin. You know, I sat on military boards, Navy boards. You have experience in the military. What I've seen and this in my experience is it's such a checklist. Right? Did you do this? Do you have that? Did you do this? It's not about your ability to lead. It's about your ability to manage and understand the system to get promoted up into it.

00:15:46:01 - 00:16:00:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And you are part of that system. My number one concern is the people that are getting promoted in the military, in our government right now. I would say the military are not the people that are doing things to getting things done. They're the people that are actually part of the system.

00:16:01:14 - 00:16:08:23
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00:16:11:13 - 00:16:35:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And that's very, very dangerous. And this gets back to your knowledge creation. And I think Mark's original question. Right. The way we build knowledge is through direct experience. Right. I mean, and I think that's what you're trying to say is how do we, you know, yoke itand that or spread that across the masses? How do we share the knowledge from or lessons we learn from warfare and conflict?

00:16:35:00 - 00:17:01:16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
How do we share that? And that's critical. We don't know how to do that. And right now, I see a lot of folks that don't have, I hate to say, combat experience, but don't have the experiences that you or Marka and I have. They're not the ones leading it. And in fact, I heard this from one of our guests on our show when I originally met him, and that was the the number of military leaders that want to go to war is increasing.

00:17:01:17 - 00:17:10:05
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I'm said not the friends that I know. We don't want war. Once you experience it, you don't want to be part of it. And I want to get your take on that.

00:17:10:17 - 00:17:43:14
Aaron MacLean
Yeah, well, look, I mean, I would I can make the critique just to emphasize something that you just laid out there. I mean, during my time in Afghanistan and sort of preparing to go and coming back and just watching the whole machine that we had built in that part of the world. You know, getting getting your battalion or whatever it was over there, sort of pursuing whatever the metrics were that we were measuring, which may or may not have anything to do with actual success, making sure you had a minimum of embarrassing incidents.

00:17:45:09 - 00:18:02:15
Aaron MacLean
That's that's the key to success. You know, in the in the in the bureaucracies, that is the the military promotion system. Right. Like that's what you're looking for. And it's helpful if you look the part, right? And there's there's there's sort of other things that go into it. But none of that requires like a kind of dynamism or kind of success.

00:18:02:15 - 00:18:23:13
Aaron MacLean
Like the striking thing about the kind of counterinsurgency warfare we were engaged in there is, you know, unlike, you know, if you think of the American campaign in northwest Europe in 1944 and 45, like, you know, managing that fight, you know, if you're a commanding officer of a unit at any scale, right? Like either you're going forward or you're going back or you're dug in, in trenches looking at those are your three options.

00:18:24:08 - 00:18:42:13
Aaron MacLean
And only one of them is good, right? So there's no managing here. Like, there's, there's, there's fighting and proceeding. And that's going to require real leadership. Whereas where we were in Afghanistan, like you could manage that, go take your R you just kind of go about your business week to week and kind of leave with your head held high.

00:18:42:14 - 00:18:58:03
Aaron MacLean
Did you, when unclear, said generously, it's unclear. So, you know, this this this kind of thing is is part of the military. I agree very much. It's like a real problem that we've had to deal with over the last 20 years.

00:18:58:11 - 00:19:28:18
Mark McGrath
And I was going to say, well, back to Boyd. You know, Boyd was adamant after and this is on C-SPAN and we link to it and refer to it all the time. When he testified after the first Gulf War about people, ideas, hardware in that order and why that's important and why when we violate that, we we get hosed, you know, and, you know, punch and I spend a lot of time briefing his theories and teaching his ideas inside of nonmilitary, nonmilitary audiences, but specifically to the military audience.

00:19:28:18 - 00:19:47:06
Mark McGrath
You know, we've spent also to an inordinate amount of time in his archives visualizing these things in his hands, where he wrote. And I could I can be happy to share some of these things. But, you know, books that he had read about Vietnam and talking about why we lost and putting things like an and Tricia Patricia mentality and the inability to alleviate friction between silos.

00:19:47:06 - 00:20:05:17
Mark McGrath
You know, he was very big on our CAT program that we had in the in the Marine Corps of of of civil action, sort of, you know, using squads versus versus a firepower mentality or a tonnage mentality. And there's a couple of different quotes that they kind of wind up in this general vein, and so I could send them to you.

00:20:06:12 - 00:20:41:15
Mark McGrath
He talks about how the impact of the 20th century, the science of war. We're really good. We don't really understand anything except in terms of hardware, you know, except in terms of tonnage, except in terms of numbers. And we're violating that people, ideas and things, which he was very clear when he was testifying. And he was you know, we all know he was a big part of the a big part of the reform movement in many ways, something of of not maybe not the but certainly of a godfather, if you will, of the reform movement.

00:20:42:03 - 00:20:59:06
Mark McGrath
But I just wonder if that's I mean, we can see it from our angle and the work is there. And the research and he also to on insurgency we brought that up. I mean Boyd and powers of conflict goes on and on about insurgency and guerrilla warfare and how to understand that it's a moral war. It's a people's war.

00:20:59:06 - 00:21:06:15
Mark McGrath
It's not a they're not going to respond to hardware. They're not going to respond to things like Western democracy, that kind of thing. I mean, it seems like he was there saying it.

00:21:07:06 - 00:21:31:22
Aaron MacLean
Yeah, no, look, I mean, the hardware obsession in the sense that if you if you have the right technology, you're going to prevail. I think it's right to like push back on that and question it and, you know, give you give you an example like in a in a prior role, we spent some time taking a close look at the culture of the surface warfare community in the US Navy.

00:21:32:17 - 00:21:55:01
Aaron MacLean
Ponch I don't know which, which, which community is, is yours, but I spent a little bit of time teaching at the Naval Academy, which is kind of my insight into into Navy culture, even though otherwise I was with with marine organizations. But the bottom, Richard, had just burned to a crisp pier side. So what years? This is like 2020, right?

00:21:55:16 - 00:21:56:17
Aaron MacLean
Some of their and yeah.

00:21:56:18 - 00:21:56:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right.

00:21:57:12 - 00:22:19:12
Aaron MacLean
And you know, this is I was working for someone in the Senate at the time who was a advocate for larger defense budgets. And generally, you know, for a for a strong military to include, you know, gear and high end items and still hard to to make that case when the service is letting that stuff get destroyed at a dock in San Diego, let alone an action.

00:22:20:08 - 00:22:46:03
Aaron MacLean
And so we sort of started we did a we did an inquiry, sort of used the Congressional Oversight powers that we that we have to do a little report which are having to send are you guys people should should look it up. But it was pretty concerning. You know we spoke to about 100 naval officers, some enlisted folks, either folks, predominately folks who are actually in the surface warfare community, a few handful of folks who just had spent a lot of time at sea with the surface warfare community.

00:22:46:17 - 00:23:01:05
Aaron MacLean
And we kind of asked them all, like across the board, like, you know, if you take the bottom, Richard, if you take the McCain, if you take the Fitzgerald, these are these other sort of incidents where we have collisions at sea and, you know, one way or the other, we're losing sailors and equipment when we don't have to.

00:23:01:06 - 00:23:24:12
Aaron MacLean
There is no war. There is no bad guy. Somehow we're still running ships into each other when they theoretically should be in the hands of, you know, masters of their craft. You know, are these just isolated incidents that, you know, like, woops, sorry did it again, you know, and there's just no thread to connect them. Or is there a thread here and do we have a culture problem in the surface warfare community.

00:23:24:12 - 00:23:31:01
Aaron MacLean
And the results were striking. I mean something like I mean, 90 plus percent of the people that we interviewed said, yes, we have a problem.

00:23:31:01 - 00:23:52:13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, yeah. So Aaron, to answer your question, my background is in naval aviation. In 2017, during those accidents, I was brought on to the SECNAV team that looked into industry best practices that are saying how we build a better culture. This is in response to Fitzgerald McCain. And then we had the Bonhomme Richard mishap or fire. Four years later.

00:23:52:13 - 00:24:13:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So to answer your question, there is a big difference in cultures. Very big difference. And I would say and this is going to lead to what Mark and I do now is a lot of the lessons that we have brought over those that knowledge and experience from fighter aviation, from special operations, things like that, those are not inherent side of surface warfare, the teaming things, right?

00:24:14:18 - 00:24:40:23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
There are other things that we saw there and I think we can build on this, too. And I want to make a point here with this, and that is what's happening in my view, in the small community. A community, surface warfare officer community is they're very insular, right? They don't take lessons from the outside and they don't understand that the team science we get from aviation can be applied to their the plane brief execute debrief approach that we use can be used there.

00:24:40:23 - 00:25:09:23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You know, the stuff we think about alcohol and sleep, you know, the sleep time that we get in aviation can be applied in their world, but there's a little bit more. So I'm going back to boy don't understand complexity theory oh what isn't happening and it's not happening in today I just saw a note come across my desk this morning about the safety symposium that's going on, where they're using each facts and all these other things that are legacy thinking from 20 and 30 years ago, trying to improve the future.

00:25:09:23 - 00:25:47:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So what's happening now is you're still using the legacy approaches to understanding culture, understanding the disposition of of a ship demand, you know, how do we get our training done? All those things they're not capturing. And this goes back to Mark's point. What's actually happening in the minds of the people that are on the ship. And that's something that we on this podcast that we talk about is how do we move away from this legacy approach to thinking about management to this a movement towards leadership, the disposition of the attitudes and beliefs of the people that you're in command of.

00:25:47:21 - 00:26:09:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. How do you how do you find that out? So, man, this would be a fantastic conversation we can have about some more things about what you've learned inside of the the inquiry you looked at and then what bodies of mine are. Tell me what's going on inside of the Navy has as you know, we lost a lot of evidence to what happened with the the fire in San Diego, right?

00:26:09:13 - 00:26:35:12
Aaron MacLean
Yeah. Well, look, I mean, this the point I was trying to make was, you know, the U.S. Navy, at least until has overtaken by the play Navy one day is an incredibly impressive organization from a material standpoint. It's not it's not my field. I'm not a I'm I'm not an expert in the technology of surface warfare. But I but I do think we are in a position and have been in a position for some time where no one, technically speaking, can hold a candle to us.

00:26:36:00 - 00:26:54:19
Aaron MacLean
But that's that's that's not going to get you to where you need to go. Because to your point just now, Ponch, the people who are actually running the systems, A, they need to run them competently, which in the McCain Fitzgerald cases bottom out, too. When you talk about fire damage control procedures, you know they're not right. Like you have real problems just at the most fundamental level.

00:26:54:23 - 00:27:17:02
Aaron MacLean
But then beyond that, like when when the cruise missiles start to come in, when when, you know, the next ship over is gone in a flash, and when you're taking on water and you're on fire. Right. You know, all experiences that folks in the special operations community and ground combat communities had in their version of it in Iraq and Afghanistan and aviation, you know, you kind of know that for a second and you're dead.

00:27:17:08 - 00:27:35:19
Aaron MacLean
So you don't actually need war, I think, in aviation to kind of just require yourself to have the same mindset, like the surface warfare community has a human problem or has clearly had a human problem that I do think there's there are efforts afoot to address. But it was very obvious to us.

00:27:35:19 - 00:27:51:23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Hey, sir, I want to I want to check I want to check in with both of you office, make sure I have this correct. So you were both Marine officers. The way I understand leadership is the failures of those that you're in command of or you're leading. Are your failures as a leader, right? There are successes. Are there successes?

00:27:51:23 - 00:27:52:08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Correct.

00:27:53:05 - 00:27:54:10
Mark McGrath
Know the question.

00:27:54:22 - 00:28:03:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Okay. So so why is this when you look at these accidents or mishaps, why is nobody held to account on them? You know, yeah.

00:28:03:23 - 00:28:26:16
Aaron MacLean
That's a phenomenal fit. I mean, to be to be clear, I mean, I, I don't necessarily have the recall of every specific incident to mind here as we speak, but I'm quite confident that we went and looked, you know, some oh five somewhere in some watch leader somewhere was definitely held accountable, no question about that. I know they court martial this kid who theoretically I think he was acquitted.

00:28:26:16 - 00:28:49:03
Aaron MacLean
Right. Who was accused of starting the fire at at the bottom, Richard. But to your point, yeah, you know, where the flag officers who have been held accountable, where are the where are the civilian appointees who are their bosses, who have designed the systems in which all of this is occurring? You know, where's the accountability for Iraq and Afghanistan?

00:28:49:14 - 00:29:07:12
Aaron MacLean
This is the case with that Marine lieutenant colonel just blanking on his name here, Stu Scheller. Yeah. Who made those videos and got into all that trouble and got fired. And I listened to the first video when he did it, and I just cannot in the long that all sounds pretty right to me. Kind of hard to find a point of disagreement there.

00:29:07:12 - 00:29:28:15
Aaron MacLean
I thought the second video was a little a little a little harder for him. But the first one, it was like, this is totally true. Like, where is the accountability? We value accountability. Where's the accountability? Well, it turns out that Stew Sheller found some accountability for saying those things, and that was about it. I you know, is he the only person to be disciplined for four, four for Iraq and Afghanistan?

00:29:29:01 - 00:29:31:08
Aaron MacLean
Maybe so. Maybe so. It's right.

00:29:31:09 - 00:29:51:23
Mark McGrath
I mean, it's it's not, you know, I mean, it's we I'm sure when you went to O.C., just like I did, I went I went those. Yes, in 97. But they were talking about the Lance Corporal Rather incident out in 29 Palms. And as I recall, that incident where basically a marine was abandoned and left to wander in the desert and die of thirst.

00:29:51:23 - 00:30:13:07
Mark McGrath
The entire chain of command was was was was punished for that and, you know, relieved. So, I mean, it's not I guess it's not a perfect system. I think, you know, bringing it back to bring it back to Boyd, that's our concern. And is that the people aspects of it and the people aspects that we learned as as as candidates in.

00:30:13:07 - 00:30:36:00
Mark McGrath
Oh, yes, as second lieutenants at the basic school, second lieutenants, brand new out into the fleet on your billet, whatever it was always was very people centric. And there were systems and there was hardware. But at the end of the day, it always came down to Marines taking care of Marines, getting Marines stuff done, and the hardware didn't much matter because as you all know, we usually get the retreads that nobody else wanted.

00:30:36:01 - 00:30:57:14
Mark McGrath
And in some other service without mentioning. Yeah, without mentioning names. But that's that's a people thing. That's, that's a people applying ideas to things. It's not a, hey, we've got this thing, let's come up with an idea for it and retrofit it to our people. That's the opposite of what Boyd was saying before the House Armed Services Committee in 91 after after the Gulf War, that we couldn't violate that.

00:30:57:14 - 00:31:24:04
Mark McGrath
And whenever we did, at some point, maybe not immediately, maybe not a couple of months or years, but at some point we're going to we're going to pay for that because we'll we'll come to overreliant on on on tech when our tech doesn't work among tribes in caves or our tech doesn't work with our ideas of democracy, you know, don't work in ancient cultures that not even Alexander the Great himself could, could, could figure out.

00:31:24:04 - 00:31:38:23
Mark McGrath
And I know that you're a classical scholar, too, you know, I mean, so some of these things, it seems like they're not lessons learning like they're not they're not they're not getting learned. And but there was a guy that we had Boyd, who was who was telling us this stuff.

00:31:38:23 - 00:31:59:08
Aaron MacLean
I'm not sure how to bring Boyd into this. And you guys would know better than me, but, you know, I would be in favor of a personnel system or just approach to personnel that had much swifter and more ruthless accountability, especially at higher levels, but also had much greater capacity to forgive, because right now.

00:31:59:08 - 00:32:19:09
Mark McGrath
Episode three Don Vandegrift or Episode four on our show, Don Vandegrift you know, the expert on mission commander, the scholar, really not expert scholar and mission command. The personnel system is a big thing that he continuously points to as a lot of our a lot of our problems. And again, the principals, they're not just military. These are things that we see out in the business world, too.

00:32:19:09 - 00:32:21:11
Mark McGrath
So but but yeah, he would be a jerk.

00:32:21:20 - 00:32:39:16
Aaron MacLean
Yeah. Now I remember I think people people who are in the military sometimes have this fantasy that the corporate world is like much, much saner, because, like, it's the bottom line, and you either make your targets or you don't. Well, we we all know that that's that that's not true. And at the same human problems that you find in the military, you know, happen in these companies as well.

00:32:39:16 - 00:33:00:00
Aaron MacLean
But yeah, now we have a system where accountability is inconsistent. And like, the bigger the mistake, the less likely it is you're to be like lose the war, you know, like pretty unlikely you're going to face some accountability, lose arrival. You're done. And when you're done, like because you're, you know, you're a company commander and some kid lost you lost a rifle and you failed you know, you failed to have the systems in place to prevent that.

00:33:00:04 - 00:33:13:04
Aaron MacLean
You're done. You're done forever. And that is crazy, in my opinion. That's crazy. There should be okay to be relieved or face some severe sanction and then live to fight again another day. In my view.

00:33:16:00 - 00:33:33:23
Mark McGrath
To show is that you're promoting understanding or you're attempting to promote to get people to listen to. Because we've had guests on from a who's a product manager at Google that never spent one day in the military. And he studies military history in decision force cases in order to get better at what he has to do from a business end.

00:33:34:06 - 00:33:58:00
Mark McGrath
And he was not a marine. He wasn't like I said, he wasn't in the military at all. So there's a lot of value in what you're doing. And that's why we're fans, because we believe that war, you know, conflict really conflict can be studied in any capacity. And I can extract principles, say the battle of Gaugamela, and I can think about that as I'm sitting in traffic or I'm dealing in a sales call or I'm dealing with a production line or whatever it is.

00:33:58:07 - 00:34:15:18
Mark McGrath
The one thing I would say about some of the strategies I've seen you talk about like Corbett and you know, we all know Clausewitz, it's in Germany and other things is that we've got to remember about Boyd that he went far beyond war. This is what what the one of the I don't see the battle that Ponch and I fight.

00:34:15:18 - 00:34:40:07
Mark McGrath
But but one of the thing that we run into a lot is that people are, quote unquote, teaching Boyd and they're reduced it down to OODA loop and 99.9% of that scholars study and inputs in and everything else is completely lost. And at the time that when he when he was speaking before the house Armed Services Committee, this is after countless years of studying things like Toyota production system and the Toyota Way.

00:34:40:12 - 00:35:01:05
Mark McGrath
And Taichi Ohno in the Book of Five Rings, you know, really elegant and Eastern influence, which again is very differentiated from something that's more industrialized, something that's more Western or maybe more more hardware centric. So that's you know, that's that's always the message that we're trying to get across. That strategy is complex. It's not just one particular strategist, and we only go with this with this one.

00:35:01:05 - 00:35:13:23
Mark McGrath
But when we look at somebody like a Boyd, we have to understand that he was a completely multidisciplinary person. He was not a fighter pilot that came up with a little process that everybody can think they know a lot about. You. There's a lot more to it.

00:35:14:03 - 00:35:36:07
Aaron MacLean
I really think the project you guys are doing is important and there's just, you know, Boyd thought obviously, I mean, I went through Quantico in 2007, 2008, so I can't speak to how things are today. But I mean, it was a it was a Boyd School. Whether or not you, like, invoked his name every day. I mean, it was clear that much of what we were doing was downstream of his his thinking and his work.

00:35:36:21 - 00:35:56:05
Mark McGrath
Yeah. And in that sense, as fellow Marines, we should be we should challenge ourselves. He's been harder because if you read Ian Brown's book and we and we just interviewed him recently, which is on the comments reading list and everybody should read this book. But in his intro, General Van Riper talks about how Marines we think we know Boyd because we heard about it.

00:35:56:05 - 00:36:22:19
Mark McGrath
We learn about most. Yes, sir. I learned about him first at Naval ROTC or whatever it was. We think we've got it, but we don't. And what what General Van Riper found was that he taught a ten elective course. This is all in the in the intro to the forward rather to to Ian's book that Air Force officers that were at Marine Command Staff College were more interested in taking the Boyd curriculum than Marines were, which which is been some of our experience.

00:36:22:19 - 00:36:51:18
Mark McGrath
We get a lot of interesting questions and engagement from former Air Force officers, current Air Force officers. If you listen to one of our episodes with Major-General Tank Leonard, talk about Boyd in theory and all this, and that's kind of the wake up call I think maybe a lot of us need to think about is that. Yeah. Oh, and we'd love to meet you in the archives down there someday, because I know you're in D.C. I mean, we're in there a lot and we'd love to show you the stuff that we found.

00:36:51:18 - 00:37:14:03
Mark McGrath
But the point is, here's the point. When we any time Boyd's reduced to the loop, you've you've focused on 0.1% of the 50 or so years of scholarly work over many, many disciplines that went into his thinking. And that was only the final the year before he died. And it would have no doubt changed a million times.

00:37:14:03 - 00:37:34:15
Aaron MacLean
So now I think and you guys are the experts here, but I do think that Boyd grafts something at the deepest level that is true and important, which is that unlike how we normally think about war in sort of Western liberal societies, right, where peace is the norm, and then one day something goes wrong and you have a war, and then the war ends.

00:37:34:15 - 00:38:11:18
Aaron MacLean
The war is this mysterious, unique experience. It's totally separate and different from what we do. And like so much of our society's conversation about war, I think takes that as premise. And people are fascinated by this mysterious thing. But what we know and what think Boyd grasped is that the lines between war and peace are much harder to draw, that the dynamics and systems that you find in armed conflict are just a subset of what you find in human competition, which is itself tied up in every aspect of human life and biology and so forth, in that, you know, war itself is, you know, it's different from, you know, my, my, my mourning today is

00:38:11:18 - 00:38:32:08
Aaron MacLean
I've done some calls and appointments and, you know, thought about, you know, the errands that need to run after work this afternoon in in the sense that it's obviously more intense. Everything happens faster. You live a kind of life time in a day. You know, it feels like sometimes. But like what happens in that day is the stuff that still would have happened to you in your lifetime in some sense.

00:38:32:08 - 00:38:57:07
Aaron MacLean
Like there is courage and betrayal and you lose people that you don't want to lose. And sometimes you kill people that you do want to kill and like to some extent, the experience of combat and of violence is is just life just sped up. It's just experience that a sort of what feels at the time like an insane pace, but it's not actually as different in kind from normal life as people tend to assume.

00:38:57:15 - 00:39:16:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Well, let's let's pull something out of there. So you're so warfare. So warfare is an opportunity for people to learn leadership more with more intensity. Right. And this goes back to beginning with Mark's question. So the reason we should be looking at war warfare conflict is to build potentially build better leaders. Would you agree?

00:39:17:08 - 00:39:18:15
Aaron MacLean
Absolutely. Okay.

00:39:19:00 - 00:39:31:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So that's why you're doing your podcast and it's kind of why we're doing this as well. The next question is, are we at war right now? Isn't we're, you know, misinformation, disinformation, fifth generation warfare. It's not happening all around us.

00:39:31:16 - 00:39:54:19
Aaron MacLean
Yeah. I mean, this is that's a great point. And it's something that, again, think there's there's insufficient understanding of. And some of our adversaries have a better understanding of it than we do. Again in the West. We like I was saying that we think in terms of peace and then war and so if you look at, for example, us and China today, you might think that it's a state of peace, which in some literal way, you know, is true and in other way it's very false.

00:39:54:19 - 00:40:16:12
Aaron MacLean
And the Chinese communist Party understands very well things that I think we struggle to understand. I mean, their way of looking at this is it's less an Eastern thing, it's more of a revolutionary thing. It's about their roots as actual communists, right. And descendants of Lenin and Marx. You know, the Communist Party gets started and then the Chinese Communist Party gets started in the twenties as a revolutionary entity.

00:40:16:21 - 00:40:23:11
Aaron MacLean
The goal which is world revolution. Right. And that gets modified and we can get into what that actually means in China.

00:40:23:11 - 00:40:28:13
Mark McGrath
And it's all in part it's all in patterns of conflict. We talked about these exact things totally.

00:40:28:13 - 00:41:01:18
Aaron MacLean
And so foundationally, this is a revolutionary party, which means that they are in a state of war with everyone who's not in the revolution at all times. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean there it is. That doesn't necessarily mean that you're fighting with with physical violence every day. But you are constantly maneuvering for advantage in the way. Again, the line between political warfare, which is what I would describe what I'm talking about right now and in actual warfare, is, in their minds much vaguer than it is in our minds.

00:41:01:18 - 00:41:21:07
Aaron MacLean
They see it all. You know, war is that for for the West, for us, war is an extension of policy by other means. Right. That's the famous Clausewitz in line, I think, for the Chinese Communist Party policy is an extension of war by other means, right? The warfare is the basis.

00:41:21:23 - 00:41:45:18
Mark McGrath
Yeah. So that's the difference between really understanding John Boyd and not understanding him at all or reducing him to utility. Because what you're describing is what Boyd is trying to teach with, with patterns of conflict, with the strategic with or organic design for command control, with literally everything he's saying. It's exactly that. That's a complex, multifaceted domain. That's part of the moral, mental and physical levels.

00:41:45:18 - 00:42:07:14
Mark McGrath
Whereas maybe we tend to sounds like what you're saying is maybe we tend to focus too much on the physical level, the hardware level, the technology level, and they're playing a completely different game, which is dangerous. Now, when we're coaching companies, we're working with companies, we're trying to help them identify that inside of their competitors because that's easy to isolate.

00:42:07:20 - 00:42:33:05
Mark McGrath
Well, what you just described is exactly what revolutionaries are doing, too, because if you read unrestricted warfare, which was the book I was holding up, they're talking about media, finance, agriculture. They're not talking about, you know, me and Aaron in our regiment, two Marine regiment squaring off with their regiments and three up to back or two up. They're not talking about that at all.

00:42:33:05 - 00:43:10:17
Mark McGrath
They're in a completely different sense. And that's why we think what you're doing is phenomenal, because we're creating a knowledge base, right? And we're trying to create a knowledge base in order to what? So I think what people would gain understanding of what's going on and we believe passion. I believe in me. It's our it's our livelihood and our our what we dedicate, our life to our our, you know, our podcast, too, is getting those ideas out because it's so critical for us as Americans to effectively understand the way the world works in its complex nature so that we can thrive rather than become, you know, become victims, things, you know, or be or become

00:43:12:00 - 00:43:13:22
Mark McGrath
on the opposite end of where we want to be, if that.

00:43:14:16 - 00:43:39:10
Aaron MacLean
Yeah, no, I think it's really important what you guys are doing. Really, really important. And just, you know, there's like an ethic that like a serious study of body. Honestly, even a casual study of Boyd suggests. Right, there's a way to live your life in terms of how you think about preparation, how you think about the initiative that will allow you to be more successful in competitive environments, and that is just applicable everywhere.

00:43:39:11 - 00:43:50:22
Aaron MacLean
It's applicable, you know, until the day that humans competing with each other, which I think is the same as the day there are no more humans, it is universally applicable as a kind of way of life almost.

00:43:51:07 - 00:44:08:11
Mark McGrath
You know, well, for the sake of closing out the podcast. And we want to thank you for joining us. I mean, we knew this was going to be fun and lively and that there would be some some interesting things that would emerge from this. We would love that our listeners tune into School of War, too, because there's some fascinating learning going on.

00:44:08:17 - 00:44:31:04
Mark McGrath
Aaron, you're also to the second st College grad that we've had on the show, Michael Strong being the first from Conscious Capitalism, the Socratic Experience and Punch. I would certainly love to connect with you in D.C. and go into the Boyd archives with you and show you some of the stuff that we had found. And now we really we really appreciate your time.

00:44:31:04 - 00:44:32:11
Mark McGrath
Thanks for coming on. No way out.

00:44:32:23 - 00:44:57:15
Aaron MacLean
I've had a blast. And can I make an embarrassing confession as we close here, which we are a few score episodes into School of War and I have yet to do a dedicated John Boyd episode. Boyd comes up all the time. He's been discussed many times on the show. But you guys, if you would, come on sometime soon and let's just you know, we will I think a lot of the audience will maybe have heard his name, but won't know, won't know very much.

00:44:57:15 - 00:45:00:18
Aaron MacLean
We should just we should just do it. Let's do it. Let's do John Boyd on School of War.

00:45:01:06 - 00:45:04:19
Mark McGrath
Absolutely. So when we would we we would love to do that.

00:45:04:19 - 00:45:06:10
Aaron MacLean
So thanks for having me.

00:45:06:10 - 00:45:07:15
Mark McGrath
Thanks again, Aaron. Yeah.