No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
From Battlefields to Boardrooms: Leadership Lessons from Vietnam to Modern Business with Bing West
Join us on a fascinating exploration with Bing, a Marine Corps veteran whose journey takes us from his Irish Catholic roots in Boston to the battlefields of Vietnam. Bing shares compelling stories about how his upbringing and early influences shaped his decision to join the Marines instead of pursuing law school. We delve into the intricacies of the Combined Action Program (CAP) and how Bing's experiences highlight the importance of cultural integration and leadership from within—lessons that echo far beyond military contexts into the realms of modern business and teamwork.
Our conversation ventures into the strategic decisions that defined the Vietnam War, drawing parallels with more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We contrast the philosophies of military leaders like Louis Walt and Victor Krulak, who prioritized local support, against General Westmoreland's focus on attrition. By examining these historical strategies, we gain insight into the complexities of nation-building and the shifting focus from combat operations to winning hearts and minds. Bing's reflections offer a profound understanding of how these military lessons can inform leadership strategies in today's geopolitical and corporate landscapes.
As we navigate through the challenges of adapting military strategies to evolving global dynamics, we also touch upon the innovative approaches of leaders like Elon Musk. Bing's insights into the potential hurdles of integrating transformational leadership styles within bureaucratic environments, such as the Pentagon, are particularly thought-provoking. We discuss the implications of decentralized versus top-down approaches and the strategic lessons learned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, all through the lens of historical insights and personal anecdotes. This episode is a treasure trove of lessons applicable to both national security and business leadership, offering a rich tapestry of historical narratives and modern-day parallels.
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So Big as we were saying. I was commissioned from 98 to 04, and I was reading a lot of your work. I've been familiar with the Village and, of course, read your book that you co-authored with General Mattis about small unit action and other things strike teams that I wish I would have read at OCS or Naval ROTC. I couldn't believe that I was reading it in 2025. I thought that this stuff is really profound and there's a lot of lessons that are applicable not just to military action but to companies and working with teams and things like that. What's?
Mark McGrath:that again yeah, how did you know? That's really an interesting transition. So you're commissioned, you're fighting in Vietnam, you're involved with the CAP program, which we want to go in great depth. You know we just published a podcast with General David Petraeus that was very positive about CAP and he has CAP featured in his book and of course I said CAP for our listeners, I mean the Combined Action Program featured in his book.
Ponch Rivera:And of course I said CAP for our listeners. I mean the Combined Action Program. Before we dive into that, mark, let's kind of explain what CAP is from the perspective of a business. So you know we have a lot of business leaders listening in on this. What does that mean, mark, or Bing?
Mark McGrath:So, bing, how I position CAP. When I talk about CAP with clients, I talk about the principles of integrating inside of a culture and working from a culture, from within, rather than something top down rather than without, such that there's shared experience. And thereia, the Marines were with the village, they were with the people, they were working together, meeting them where they were at, versus a top-down, heavy-fisted imposition.
Bing West :Let me back off and come at it this way by asking why was I a Marine and why did I end up in that village? And I was born in 1940. And I was really lucky because you know, irish Catholic Boston was named, baptized Francis Joseph. But fortunately I had a aunt who was a sister of St Joseph, sister Bunny. My aunt was a sister of St Joseph, sister Bunny and Sister Bunny it was the year I was born was when Bing Crosby had made Bells of St Mary's and he was Father O'Brien and I had red hair and I was born on his birthday. So she did me the wonderful favor of saying, well, he should have a nickname, bing. And fortunately I went through life as Bing rather than Franny or Francis. So here's Bing, 1940, and my mother is about to have another baby and then another baby, typical Irish. We ended up with six. I was the oldest boy and my uncles, whom I was very close to.
Bing West :They were part of a baseball team and when World War II began the Marines allowed entire baseball and football teams to volunteer together and they sent them in together. They learned never to do that again about what happened. But all of these guys go off to Guadalcanal. And then they come back and of course that was a rough battle. They were out of ammunition, they were out of food. They did an awful lot of killing and they came back totally traumatized and they didn't want to go to their individual houses and they had a clubhouse on the top floor of our house because my dad was the doctor in town. So they all went up there. Well, my mother thinking, well, my brothers are home, they can take care of Bing, not, because she had other kids. So she sent me up to the attic and from you know, for every day and all the Marines, anytime they came home, they were my babysitters. So from 1942 to 1947, I was surrounded by Marines and I remember distinctly they would sneak down the back stairs, wrap me in a blanket and bring me to a bar and then put me on the bar while they're drinking and then smuggle me back into the house.
Bing West :My mother was just flawless. What was happening until 1945, when they're in the battle for Okinawa? And I had a blanket that she told me I used to suck all the time. She wanted to cure me of that and she said your two uncles are over there fighting and you're not doing anything to help them. And she said with that I threw the blanket out the window and I said that's for the dirty yellow baskets. And then she knew something was happening up there. And so when I graduated from Georgetown and I was supposed to go to Columbia Law School, I said goodbye and took my suitcase and went down to South Station and I looked across the street and it said Marine Corps recruiting. And I walked in with my suitcase and the captain sitting at the desk said well, you don't have to be in that much of a rush. And just like that the DNA 30, 25 years later had kicked in. And when I went home my mother said you joined the Marines, didn't you? She?
Ponch Rivera:knew.
Bing West :I was in the Marines as an infantry officer. This is just pre-Vietnam. There was this wonderful colonel who was in charge of the regiment and I had the duty where you'd have to get up and check the mess hall on a Sunday morning when you were the second lieutenant. So I'm in the mess hall at three o'clock looking around, not knowing what am I doing, and here's this colonel with all his ribbons on and he said you want to know what's going on? You come to the mess hall before it opens. And he became my mentor.
Bing West :And then when I was at Princeton I saw that my unit had sent back to. That was at Princeton grad school. I saw my unit had been sent back to Vietnam and I was reading SLA Marshall Men Against Fire. And I said to the colonel I said you know, colonel, it'd be interesting to know, are we shooting our rifles? Because in World War II something like only one out of every four infantry actually fired their rifles. And he said you know, that'd be interesting to find out. He got a hold of the commandant and he said Wes knows how to write, he's willing to take his time and go back over there.
Bing West :And the next thing I know I'm assigned in Vietnam to General Wall. They promote me to captain for some reason and they said okay, you're an infantry officer, you go out to the battlefields and we'll send you and you write up the descriptions and we'll turn that into a tactical training manual. And that's how I I got all of a sudden, everywhere there's a firefight. They're sending me there to see what's going on, because they had the honesty to know that from world war ii they didn't understand this war. They're now the generals, but their war was entirely different. And one of the places they sent me, this colonel said every night we're getting into a fight in this village. We want you to get down there and find out why. And I went to this remote village and there is a sergeant with 15 Marines and 5,000 Vietnamese 15 Marines. And I thought what? And during the daytime we're sitting around, we're eating duck eggs, we're chatting with people, everything seems normal. And the minute the sun went down, the sergeant said all right, sir, strap it on. Eight magazines and four grenades were going out. And we didn't get 400 yards before we were in a ferocious firefight. And that happened night after night after night, and that was called the Combined Action Platoon, where we were actually taking squads just normal squads that had some firefight experience, just normal squads that had some firefight experience and sending them into villages where the district chief had said this village is more pro our side and they're not really VC, but the Viet Cong are picking on them, they're really after them and that's how we ended up there.
Bing West :But what made the difference, I think, was that the Marines came in recognizing from the start what do we have as a 19-year-old, 20-year-old American that they don't have? They knew how to fight. The Marines knew how to fight. They knew how to shoot. That's especially what we had. And the other thing we had do you know that that only the dominican republic and maybe cuba in the united states throw baseballs and footballs by by getting their entire body into it? And therefore, when you'd be in firefights and you're in firefights at night, less than 50 yards and you don't have any night vision devices they don't You're shooting back and forth. We were able to throw grenades. I'd say we could throw a grenade 40 yards, but the other side could only throw a grenade, maybe 10. So we had a huge advantage because we had our own mortars. We could throw farther in a night fight.
Bing West :When we first started, the farmers we were taking out to try to train were scared to death. But after a while we never went into the kill zone. After a firefight we went. That's stupid. And I remember we came home a couple of times back to our base and the colonel would call down because there'd be a ferocious fight. And he'd say what happened, Sir? We got into a fight. Well, how much did you kill, sir? We have no idea what do you mean. And they'd say how much ammunition did you use? And we'd say something like 1,000, 2,000 rounds. He said no Marine can fire 2,000 rounds and not kill somebody. I'm putting you down to seven kills. So you have that kind of stuff going on. We learned later, much later, that we really were doing damage. We just didn't know it.
Bing West :And gradually the culture was such that the Vietnamese got to know every one of us as an individual, because we went around during the daytime and they realized that we were there because we had one specialty we were better fighters than the Viet Cong and they accepted us that way. Now consider if you're a 19-year-old American. You graduated from high school and all of a sudden you're in this environment and you have 5,000 people who admire you. That causes you to think that you're really somebody special, because you have a specialty. They don't. You know how to fight, and so they were looked up to and we found it to be a welcoming environment, because they didn't like the Viet Cong and the Viet Cong were taxing them and beheading them because they were tougher.
Bing West :And all of a sudden they had these guys. It was like, uh, what was that movie, the Magnificent Seven with Ewell Brenner, when, when the west, you know the western, and all of a sudden these guys rode into right into town. Who can shoot the bad guys? So what we brought was a skill and after a while the village was our village and so there weren't any incidents of calling in fire or anything. You weren't going to call fire in on your own village, so they were protected from any untoward events by the Americans and they're protected against the Viet Cong.
Bing West :And then the Viet Cong in our village. They took 200 one night and got us. They killed. We had 15, they killed seven of us in one night and the rest of us said the heck with it, we're staying. And we got reinforcements and we just kept plugging away and plugging away and plugging away. We were in that village for about a year and two months and then the the high command said okay, you're not and there's no more firefights, so you've done your job, so it's time to leave. And I remember song, who was in charge of the popular forces, the farmers he said no, no, no, you can't leave because they're just waiting for you to leave. Then they're going to come back. And after we left, years later, they did come back.
Mark McGrath:You know. So, boy, so many directions to go. So you mentioned General Walt. So Louis Walt, who was the commander of the Marines in Vietnam, eventually became the assistant commandant. He wrote a book called Strange War. Right Like Strange Strategy, strange War. It seemed like that General Walt and General Kulak had a pretty good understanding of what actually had to be done to turn the tide amongst the people. They understood that the war was in the minds, the cognitive capabilities of the people, not so necessarily the way maybe like a Westmoreland would look at it, right, like more of a kinetic body count, like a force on force exercise. It seems like the Kulak and Walt had a different path. That got overridden.
Bing West :The answer is yes, and I was also sent up with the main forces. I was sent everywhere to fight. So I was out with our main forces as well, and General Walt did believe what you just articulated, that the secret was winning the people. That was true, but not true, and that is. We succeeded eventually in doing that and wiping out the guerrillas, but we did it because we were better fighters. Now the big difference between General Petraeus in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam is simple. As I said, when we went in to the villages in Vietnam, we went in as the better fighters to engage and kill the guerrillas. Somewhere it got warped that people had this idea we were in there handing out candy and getting along and the people were going to come over and fight the Viet Cong. That was never true, but it got distorted. So in Iraq and Afghanistan they said to our troops you're nation builders. No, no, no. We wouldn't have a nation builders with the combat action platoons.
Bing West :We were fighters.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah.
Bing West :And so they told our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan you have to give $2,500 a month to the villages, you have to sip tea with the elders, you have to help with construction, you have to help with school, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. That had nothing to do with killing the Al-Qaeda and it had nothing to do with killing the Taliban, and it distracted tremendously because they got mixed up. The people were the prize, not the mechanism for winning the war, and the big difference was especially in Afghanistan. When we were in Vietnam, eventually, the people who really disliked the Viet Cong came over to our side. They did that because they saw that the Americans were the better fighters.
Bing West :However, the problem in Vietnam was that the North Vietnamese it was like a civil war. The North Vietnamese had an iron will and they kept sending people down, hundreds of thousands to die. So you had the truth, on the one hand, that you could win the people, which is what General Walt wanted to do, one hand, that you could win the people, which is what General Walt wanted to do. But in the end it was a conventional war that could be won only by destroying the North Vietnamese army, which was a separate issue than the guerrillas. And I look back on that whole issue and I say the only way, given the iron will of the North Vietnamese and their willingness to have millions die, we were not willing to have millions die. Therefore getting into a war of attrition the way General Westmoreland wanted to do with his search and destroy, inevitably we were going to lose because the American people at some point would say going to lose because the American people at some point would say this isn't worth all the people we're losing. The only way we could have won in the end in Vietnam was a very simple way, but we didn't have quite then the political will to do it. The way to win was to do what we did in Korea and you make a demilitarized zone from the South China Sea to Thailand, which is about, let's say, 100 miles, whereas the demilitarized zone in Korea is 150 miles, actually technically dividing North Vietnam from South Vietnam by putting in a huge demilitarized zone and manning it with a couple of divisions, the way we did eventually in Korea. We could have done that, but nobody looked at it in those terms. And so in the end in Vietnam, it was the will of the North to win that gradually wore us down Because we had a bad strategy to begin with. Just thinking the Westmoreland strategy of thinking we can continue to lose people forever was not going to work with the American people. General Walt's strategy of winning over the Vietnamese people succeeded, but that didn't mean that they had the iron will to fight the North Vietnamese, because the fighters, as we know, the fighters are less than 1% of your population.
Bing West :The Marine Corps is something like one half of one half of 1% of the American population. And everyone says, oh, the Marines are tough. Yes, we are, and therefore if you have a problem, you send in the Marines because they're your tough guys. So you send in the Army Rangers or something. So you have a very small cadre of very, very tough guys to do the job. So you could handle that. You don't expect the population to rise up against them.
Bing West :So then you go to Iraq and Afghanistan, where I spent a lot of time in both those countries too, all together writing about a dozen books. In Iraq, what happened was that we first went in to throw out Saddam, and we did that very quickly. Now Iraq had, say, 60% Shiites that were dominated by 30% Sunnis, and the Sunnis were Saddam's gang. So the minute we got rid of Saddam. Fortunately, president Bush changed the mission from just destroying Saddam and turning it over to the United Nations to saying we build a democratic nation. Well, the minute the Shiites got into power they said the hell with these Sunnis who've been putting us down. So then Al-Qaeda, who are Sunni, come in and they start to kill all the Shiites. And they try to get the Sunnis to say you're opposed to the Shiites, the Shiites are going to dominate you. The Americans are your enemy. And we went through about three years of that and that's why there was a lot of fighting. And then finally, the tribes themselves, the Sunni tribes, said wait a minute, maybe we have this wrong. Maybe the Americans and we were the strongest tribe are actually pretty good guys and if they help us we can offset the power of the Shiites who have the government, because we now have the protection of the Americans. And once the Sunnis switched over that's when General Petraeus came on scene, but it was already done before he got there they had begun to come over. Then he paid them to have neighborhood watches which are really militia in their own neighborhoods. He paid them a hundred dollars a month and all of a sudden the sunni said fine, we have the americans with us, we'll have our territory, the shiites have their territory. And all of a sudden, because they had come over, the wall was won. But then, then President Obama pulled us all out, pulled us all out, and he was warned not to, and the whole place caved.
Bing West :Now in Afghanistan, when General McChrystal was there and General Petraeus, they tried to apply the same thing that had worked in Iraq, which was persuade the tribes to come over to our side. But the Sunni tribes did come over to our side. In Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribe that was along the Pakistani border never came over to our side and, as a result, we were never able to stop the Taliban from using Pakistan to continue to attack until they finally won. And the mistake, the huge mistake in Afghanistan was believing that if you sat down with the village chiefs and had tea and you gave them money, that somehow they would come over to your side and everything would be good by. And that just wasn't true, because ideologically, the Pashtun tribe was always aligned with the Taliban, who were protected by Pakistan, with the Taliban who were protected by Pakistan. So my objection to the generals, whom I get along with but I have grave reservations. In three different wars I never saw them articulate an understanding of what the basic problem was and go after that.
Bing West :So being there, they tried to take what they believed they had learned from one war, transfer it to another, and they were mistaken in what they did.
Ponch Rivera:So, Bing, I got a question on this Practical application, thinking about you know if there's fundamental principles behind this type of thinking, understanding the context, embedding troops, maybe going to the Gemba, going to see for yourself. Do you have any heuristics or rules or principles that you can pull from this so you can help future leaders and current leaders understand how to increase the likelihood of success in the next war or next business cycle or whatever it may be?
Bing West :Yes, you start with what is your relative advantage? What do you bring to the table that they don't have? Because if you bring nothing, well, why do they care about you? And what's your relative advantage? Well, your relative advantage in war is that you can kill better. War is the act of killing until the other side agrees with your terms. That's what it's all about. And if you lose sight of that and think you're a nation builder or something, no, you're not a nation builder. The only reason you're there as a 19 year old is that you have a rifle and you know how to fight better than the other side. You're there as a 19-year-old is that you have a rifle and you know how to fight better than the other side. So you have to, number one, understand what's your relative advantage. What do you bring that other people want? And then you work from there. You work from the fact that you have a skill they do not have, and then you determine how are you going to meld that toward whatever your mission is?
Bing West :Look at Musk today. Musk is going to be very interesting. Now we're talking about business. Okay, but what made Musk a success? Two things. First, he was an engineer and he took on projects of engineering, building rockets and building cars. So his relative specialty was engineering and what he bolted onto that was a determination to really succeed, period. But no one.
Bing West :In all the different endeavors that he undertook he did PayPal too, but every single time people recognized he had an expertise that they didn't have. His engineers said it has to look like a bubble, because we need to put a lot of batteries in the bottom of the car and therefore we have to raise the top so people can get up, get into the car. And he said baloney, we're going to come up with a battery that's very thin because I'm not going to have people going around in a clown car. And they said well, we need 9,000 battery volts. And he said no, I've done the calculations, you need 7,200.
Bing West :And he had a huge argument with his own engineers and he said I'm the boss, you get that down to 7,200. Well, he got it down and they came out with this slick car, the Tesla. So what Musk brought as the leader was a true competence that exceeded the competence of the others, and that's why he was. Everyone says he's a real jerk and I don't mean that way, but you know he is a jerk, I guess you know. But personality, you put all that aside. The fact is, he had more expertise and he applied it the right way. Now it's going to be interesting to see what happens now when he tries to go into bureaucracies.
Ponch Rivera:And.
Bing West :I notice he's put together these teams, like he's going to go to the Pentagon with one guy who's going to be in charge, with three others One is an engineer, one is a human resource person and one, of course, is a lawyer. Well, this is going to be interesting to see what happens, because he was used to taking a blueprint, the design and the actual manufacturing and putting it all together. So it was one team. They're all together. That's not how the Pentagon works. The military have all these officers who say we need a drone Okay, they're the blueprint guys. Then they go to another set of people inside the Pentagon they say now give me specifications. All right, that's the engineering outline. Then they turn to a company like boeing and they say now you manufacture it. So what they've done is they divided the people who are the blueprint and and top engineers from the actual manufacturing, and then it's up to Boeing, without these guys being with them, to go ahead and build it. And then Boeing comes back with well, I have to change this, have to change that. And every time you change something, you add layers of bureaucracy, you need more money and the whole thing gradually becomes the mess it is Now what the heck is Trump going to I mean Musk going to do when he gets into the Pentagon?
Bing West :The problem is that he's used to pulling everyone together so they're one team. He's going to go in with four guys and say, okay, boeing, you're not doing it that way anymore. No, I don't understand. I don't mean to criticize. I just mean objectively to say, the model that made him successful was that he had a special skill engineering and software and he insisted that everyone work as one team. So he'd even go down to the floor and he'd walk around to the different workers and say what do you think? So everyone was one team. The Pentagon isn't one team, it's two or three different teams. You have the civilians, you have the military and then you have the Boeings of the world.
Bing West :And he doesn't have the authority to change that. So I'm indicating for business of the military you better start with what's your mission, what's my specialty that causes me to have value added, and how do I build my value added to the mission with the group I'm given.
Ponch Rivera:So those lessons are directly connected back to what you talked about with CAP in Vietnam and the lessons we learned in Afghanistan, Iraq. I mean, that's the connection. Here is what I'm hearing is there is no difference, correct?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah, I mean, like in the CAP case, I always believe.
Bing West :Excuse me oh yeah, go ahead. My problem with a lot of the generals from the start was their baloney. When they said you can't win this war by killing. I said, yes, you can, that's why you were there. And the minute you start that baloney of saying it's drinking tea, it's persuading them. You have lost your relative advantage. Get the hell out of there. You're not doing anything. You're coming in with a rifle and a rifle does one thing it kills. And if you say my rifle isn't no, no, I'm here because I can really give you money and I'm really a good guy, you just give you. You have no specialty. You, you have no value added.
Mark McGrath:You have lost focus, dispersed from cap that way, so it didn't follow what cap like, cap was putting adept war fighters inside of the village. There was never any question that these were tactically professional warfighters. At the same time, the Cap Marines were able to own the strategy, own the big picture and be responsible for the strategy, even if there were 15 of them in a group of 5,000 villagers.
Bing West :Because they knew they were there for one thing. They only had one mission Be better than the Viet Cong. Drive the Viet Cong out by killing them and then teach the farmers how to drive them out, nothing else. 15 months Our civic action consisted that we built one. Well, in 14 months. I mean we were there for one thing we went out to shoot the enemy and we lost sight of that in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bing West :And by the way, you could never do it in Iraq and Afghanistan. The culture was so different in the Muslim religion that there's no way infidels, who are males, who are armed, are welcomed into the families inside. Their entire culture was different, so you could never apply the combined action platoon the way it was done in vietnam. Even if you gave the mission of saying I want to send in a squad, the squad would have been killed within a week and everyone what?
Mark McGrath:about? What about? Uh, like the one tribe at a time with james gant and and he was still fighting, I mean he was he, was he never compromised that idea that you say about, like they had to have been warfighters first and they fought alongside the tribe, I mean, was that kind of the middle, I guess, between, say, cap and the other extreme of sort of the conventional approach in Afghanistan Was Gant on to something in Afghanistan?
Bing West :No, it was the exception. That proves the rule. Look, I've never met Jim, but I'm sure I really like him. He was his character. But he had the balls to go into a small tribe and somehow he he sensed he might be accepted and risked his life and his small team in one small setting and he was successful. But you could not duplicate that across all of Afghanistan because you wouldn't find that kind of acceptability in most of the tribes and in most of the villages. Gant was truly an exceptional human being but he happened to stumble on.
Bing West :I knew another guy like him, jake Kerr, who brought me to his village Same kind of thing, not that far from Jim Gant, about 10 miles away. And Dangham was where he brought me and Jake was very, very proud and his battalion commander was really proud of him and he had a platoon and they were big strapping guys. They were part of the 300 pound club, you know, where everyone has to be able to bench press 300 pounds. You, the battalion commander, said you got to bring out there and show them what you're doing. Well, jake was really proud and out we went and everyone's waving at him along the road. Then we get to where he had built the outpost and he had done everything for the district and it's beginning to decay. And he says what are you guys doing? You know, I did all this work for you. And then it began to get dark and somebody said well, we'll give you some bread. Then they charged us $6 for each flat piece of bread and Jake got really mad. He said I've done all this work for me and you're jacking up the prices.
Bing West :And then we're looking at the Taliban who come up on the radio and say hey, lieutenant Kerr, let's see you come across the border into Pakistan fell. Because the basic kinds of people we were dealing with were willing to take our money, but in their hearts they hadn't changed. They believed the Taliban were going to win. They're right on the border. Some of their cousins and sons were working for the Taliban, so they played us. So one recipe doesn't fit everywhere, but overall Jim Gant, who was so successful, it's because he hit one of those small tribes that was willing to take a risk with us, but overall 95% of them were not.
Bing West :And we never, never sent our squads into the villages to live. We just didn't do. It Never happened. It wasn't scalable, correct, it never happened. And it did it. And I understand that, gant really. Maybe he disobeyed orders when he did it too, but most of the time in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority of the time, you did not send a 15-man unit into a village to live there. You didn't do it because you knew they wouldn't make it.
Ponch Rivera:And this goes back to understanding first principles, understanding the why. We know in business right now people will look to other organizations and copy what they did and hope it works for them, but that doesn't scale and the reason for that is you have to understand the why. And you gave me a good context on on what happened with the scenario with Grant I'm sorry, what's his name? Again, Grant.
Bing West :Yeah, jim, grant Jim.
Ponch Rivera:Grant, Sorry, I got that wrong there, and that's that's something that is happening all the time is listen to how we did it and you should do it this way too. That may work for you, but what I understand from your experiences is, again you got to understand the why, got to understand the context and apply the right approach based off that context.
Bing West :And what do you have to offer that's different than what already exists?
Bing West :Right, and you also have to have an idea. Define for me mission success. Now, once you define mission success as I'm pulling the Americans out and what we've done will remain intact then you're saying I have to have trained a system that doesn't need me anymore. And that means I have to have and here's where we fail I have to have authority to select the right fighters among the Iraqis and Afghanis and Vietnamese. But that's called the British colonial model, where they selected the officers and NCOs. And we said well, we're not colonialists, we won't do that. So we had inherently, from the top down, from the start, a mix-up between our democratic principles and what we thought we were doing, and by that I mean we did all the work and we turned it over to a bunch of punks. I mean, there's no other way you can put it.
Bing West :The prime minister of Iraq that was finally thrown out when ISIS took over everything, Maliki. Maliki was a cunning Shiite who hated the Sunnis, and yet Karzai in Afghanistan. He had a screw loose, but he was more pro-Taliban. And he's the president. And yet President Bush, he believed there are different theories of history. Most people have the idea that President Bush has that only a few people change history. A Napoleon changes history, a Churchill or Roosevelt or Stalin or Mao Zedong or Trump? It is the worship of the people at the top as the true leaders, rather than the culture. Now, tolstoy had a different viewpoint, which I share much more, that history is driven much more by the cultures of people than it is by the individual leaders. But Bush didn't. I'm sure Bush never had this conversation with anybody.
Bing West :But Bush believed because he was at the top and he seems like a good guy. But he had this idea so does General Petraeus and a lot of them that I'm better and I'm smarter of Iraq and the prime minister of Afghanistan once a week on a televideo. And we'll get to know each other as the men at the top and I'll wink at him and he'll wink at me and I'll gradually shape him so that he accepts my values. And then I've succeeded and built a democratic nation. And here's do you know that Maliki used to laugh? He used to laugh at President Bush. When he'd hang up the phone He'd say that fool he's doing it again and Karzai would explode and complain I love the American people but I hate you at the top. You cannot change the character of a 50-year-old.
Mark McGrath:So it seems like in the case of, say, cap, where General Walt and General Krulak, they're relying in a model, they're creating or allowing for a model that was decentralized, that we have professional Marines, from the commandant all the way down to the lowest rifleman. Every Marine's a rifleman, every Marine can own the strategy. There's a system of behaviors in place such that small units can be empowered and decentralized to carry out a mission, versus having a top-down sort of I'm in control, sort of, say, westmoreland approach or the others that you've mentioned. That the bottom-up marine approach, in that system that we have always, is going to potentially have an advantage in chaotic, non-linear environments like villages in a country like Vietnam.
Bing West :Let's make two distinctions. Okay, if it is a war where it is the American military, the Marines, or the army, but the Marines with their own mission, then the whole concept of what you just articulated is correct, mark, that you decentralize. You say, look guys, this is our objective, I'm not going to tell you. You have commander's intent, you let them do it, and you definitely do not have people at the top with their powerpoint trying to tell you, when you patrol all that kind of crap, you, you don't do that okay, yes, yeah, now that works because you have your own culture.
Bing West :You're, you're, you're inside your own culture okay, it's a marine culture. You're out there and you have an enemy culture. You're inside your own culture, okay, it's a Marine culture. You're out there and you have an enemy and you're going to destroy them and you say, okay, guys, this is how we're going to do it. That's the Mattis approach. If you will, jim Mattis, that works. If it is you as an integral unit.
Bing West :Now that's different than if you say to me I want a nation build and have others do this rather than me. Once you've said it, I want the combined action platoon somehow to become the vietnamese platoon after I leave. Once you do that, then you have to say no matter how good my individual squad is in the village, there has to be connecting rods in the Vietnamese system that work so that they have the same support and dedication all the way up that you have in the Marine Corps. And that's where we failed, but not as badly. Where we failed, but not as badly. Actually, we did a better job in Vietnam. But still, always you get back to this and I don't think we're going to repeat it again. But you have three instances Vietnam, iraq and Afghanistan, where we thought we were going to build another nation, but we weren't going to determine who their leaders were. No, I mean, you end up with punks at the top, and so you have to be willing to take the old English model, and then that's unacceptable now in our culture. So you're stuck, but going forward.
Bing West :It seems to me that, yeah, let's look at the world as we go forward. In what we're facing, china is coming at us. There's no doubt in my mind, sooner or later over Taiwan. And the big issue there to me more than anything else is if our American system has said, we will not say whether or not we're going to defend Taiwan, well, in my judgment, if we're called out, we will not defend Taiwan, because you put yourself into a position where, at the last minute, you have to say to the American people we have to fight for this tiny little island in the middle of nowhere, but you've done nothing to articulate that the threat is so great that you have to take this last stand. So you'd have to begin to change your entire way in which you're talking about China, or you could do something else you could say to the Taiwanese look, you're a freeloader the way the Germans are, but we're not going to come. You should smarten up, because there's a good chance we won't be there for you.
Bing West :However, there's no way that China can have an amphibious assault that works. Amphibious assault that works. China is building an amphibious system of boats and vessels as large as our Normandy invasion in 1944. They're looking at 2,000 vessels moving at once. But? But the Ukraine has shown us that most people the Ukraine is turning out 1 million to 2 million drones a year and the Ukraine has no money.
Bing West :Taiwan only spends 2.5% of its gross national product for its own defense because it thinks we're going to do it for them. Taiwan leads the world in semiconductor chips. If Taiwan wanted to for above 4% of its gross national product, it could have 2 million drones a year. With artificial intelligence, that would mean it was sending 2,000 to 4,000 drones against every Chinese ship. It'd be impossible to invade Taiwan, but the Taiwanese won't do it and we will not, in my judgment, over the next four years, do anything to really say hey, smutting up, you're going to have to do this. So I see, when I look at the next four years, the Middle East is going to be a mess, but President Trump has pretty much promised he's not going to get involved militarily anywhere. Okay, so you slide by, but we are headed for a huge disaster, I think in about 2032 because of our debt. He's going to add to our debt about $2 trillion because he has to pay for Social Security and Medicare that are now out of money. We spend 30 cents on every dollar of our gross national product on welfare, transferring money to those who don't do as well, and you can't run a system like that forever and, as a result, our debt is going to be.
Bing West :If you're a bondholder, the Wharton School has done an interesting study. When do people decide that America has too much debt and what do they do about it? Well, the answer is that if you're going to invest in a company, let alone a nation, it turns out the break point where people no longer will pay into that company and the company goes bankrupt is when a company has to use more than 30% of its revenues to pay for its debt every year. Okay, right now we're paying. 25% of all the money that comes in to our federal treasury from taxes is going out about 22 to 25% in interest for our debt.
Bing West :Well, at some point you have to say I'm holding a bond, maybe I'm better off taking my money while the dollar is very sound and putting it into Bitcoin or putting it into real estate or putting it into some other countries, you know doing something with it because I'm afraid that other people are going to start pulling out their money. And when you hit that tip over point the Wharton School indicates now you've got a real problem because everyone's stampeding to get out of the bonds at the same time and when that happens, you have to print more money and then you're in a vicious cycle. At that particular point, I think is when China will say put up a shut up about Taiwan. So I see a crisis coming, but it won't come under President Trump. It'll come about two years after President Trump. It'll be the next president, because we're just going to continue to add to the debt. So people say well, ben, you're talking about the debt.
Ponch Rivera:That's not national security, and I say yes, it is, yes, it is, it is our national security. I think it's our biggest threat right now, I would say as far.
Mark McGrath:I agree. Well, so we're talking about the Marine Corps. We're talking about the Marine Corps. We're talking about how the Marine Corps has modified itself or changed itself through the years. There's a book, first to Fight by Joe Krulak about how the Marine Corps and it seems that there's a couple of different arguments about that. Some may be more of the traditional mindset of that we're losing our mission, we're losing our identity as warfighters. Others that say you know, we have to change, we have to adapt to a specific threat.
Ponch Rivera:And Moose. From my perspective, the battle lines between what is right and wrong is really about those that are still inside and those that are outside. That's kind of what I'm seeing. I don't know if Bing shares the same view as that, but those that are inside the system are saying that FD2030 is the right path, and then there are others that you know on the outside that are probably going to question it. So how do you see that forces?
Bing West :on 2030 playing out. Let me go back a little bit and come forward. Okay, about six or seven years ago, the commandant before the current commandant said our national security strategy is to be prepared for a conflict with China. The Marine Corps has done nothing about that. Therefore, I'm going to change and we're going to have what he called littoral regiments, and our contribution is going to be that I'm going to use Marines to go forward into small islands in the Philippines and go ashore with about altogether 400 anti-ship missiles, but I'll spread them out and therefore I'll be right near China and when war comes, we can strike at some of the naval vessels of China, and this will be the contribution that the Marine Corps makes to the larger effort he said. However, in order to do that, we don't have money, so I'm going to have to reduce our infantry and I don't believe we need artillery anymore because we're in a different kind of environment. So we're going to do away with most of our artillery and replace it with some rockets, but we won't need as many rockets and our tactical air. We'll have to reduce our tactical air to get some money and we don't need tanks on these islands, so we'll do away with our tanks and we don't need bridging because we're not going into places with rivers. So we'll do away with our bridges and I will do that. So I will take the money from the Marine Corps to do a mission that is paramount.
Bing West :And he did this without consulting. He had a very small group and he said one way people believe they have to change is you have to do it suddenly and you can't involve everybody, because if you do, there'll be antibodies, so you just do it as a fait accompli. So he overrode the system they didn't know what was happening and announced this Well, there are 24 retired four-stars, the 24 retired four-stars, and they don't. It's a small outfit, but not that small. All of them were shaking their heads and looking at this different ways and finally, gradually, all 24 said this is crazy, that what he has done is he has made us, the Marines, not capable of fighting in an urban area because we no longer have tanks. He's cut back our infantry, so he's made us less valuable to small conflicts anywhere in order to have the ability to kill some Chinese ships. And that began a big debate. However, now let's look at what happened. That was six years ago.
Bing West :Then that commandant chose the next commandant who's now there, and he said we're going to continue with this and if you're inside the Marine Corps, you better listen up, otherwise get out, get on board or get out. In the meantime, all the people who are outside are saying you're cuckoo and and when you're not gonna, you're sending us down a cul-de-sac. And now it's come to an end. I mean, I think it's over, because in order to do this, there were, there were three, three things that had to be done.
Bing West :First, you had to assume they want 36 ships to bring the missiles forward, okay, and each ship will carry roughly four missiles. So each ship that don't exist turns out. They said well, it'll cost $200, $300, $400 million. Well, it turns out, altogether that's $13 billion for these ships with one mission, $13 billion that the Navy has to put up with the Marine Corps. Then they bought missiles that can shoot 100 miles. Well, technology, that was four years ago. Technology now has missiles that go 2,500 miles for the same cost. So they ended up getting themselves way out of position where they need ships that the navy is not going to build, that the whole system doesn't work and they have missiles that are obsolete. So it's going to crash. It has crashed. It's just a question when people admit that it's crashed, not that it because the Navy under this administration. The chances of the Navy putting $13 billion into vulnerable ships to go forward.
Ponch Rivera:The chances are zero With one mission. That's not what we do. We don't do that. We can't do that.
Bing West :It makes no sense. And whether the commandant even makes it through four years would be interesting, because he's way out over his skis Wow.
Ponch Rivera:And I mean we were talking about bombardments from space. You know, that's something that just popped up on our radar in the last few years, or last few weeks actually. So, going back to Bing's point about something being obsolete, the life cycle of a product, of a weapon, is so short right now, right, so the technology that we have today that we want to implement in three years, will be obsolete in three years.
Bing West :Yeah, yes, again, ukraine is out in front of us. Ukraine now has a system where if you're producing drones and the Russians are figuring out how to counter them, that they have a loop where they immediately keep adjusting practically every day in their factories as the iteration from the battlefield comes in. It's a wonderful system, but our structure, with 70% of all the contracts that are given out for our procurement come through five corporations five. It's an oligopoly that has controlled things for the last 30 years. That system is stunted and it's too vertical and disconnected. The idea of saying to that system get into a loop where you can, you can quickly change in a month or less as you're getting feedback. You can't do it now. Musk if you're doing a musk approach.
Bing West :You could yeah, yeah and. And therefore this deputy secretary of defense that's coming in, this guy Feinstein. He's supposedly a very tough guy and supposedly he's going to divest himself of almost a billion dollars to take that job. If he comes in, I'm sure that he's going to be ruthless toward the obsolete system we now have.
Mark McGrath:Do you think the Marine Corps is to the point of no return?
Bing West :It's hovering there. I believe the anti-Chinese ship mission has failed. They have not yet acknowledged it and, like any good bureaucracy, they'll try to get off that diving board without admitting. They're out there on that diving board which will mean that it may take another five years for them to recover in a lot of ways, especially not having artillery, and they gave up having drones.
Bing West :I mean, the whole thing is crazy. Do you realize that that the ukraine, the average cost of a drone in the ukraine is 750? And okay, they, you know the pieces of junk, blah, blah, blah, but they get the job done yeah we have something like one one hundredth.
Bing West :We have something like 50 000 drones that cost 50 000 each. I mean, you know, come on, where are we? We, we're so gold-plated, and then we say we don't have the munitions. Well, we don't have the munitions because we have a system that is so speltified and so filled with bureaucracy that we can't do things cheaply.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Do you think we've lost our?
Bing West :I don't mean the Marine Corps, I just mean the larger establishment. You know, have we really lost our way as like a warfighter culture? Well, I think the jury is out because we haven't gone to war, but it's going to be a close thing. Look, we're up to what? 20% of the force is female, and I don't mean that in itself, but there've been a lot of studies on the bat, but they're not on the battlefield. So let's just put that aside. Let's say we job is lethality. Do they all believe I am here not to have a job? I'm here because I am a warfighter who believes that I have to prevail in war and that means killing the enemy Is the lodestar of the military lethality and I believe we lost that yeah.
Ponch Rivera:I think we lost that years ago too.
Bing West :Reverend Austin did a terrible job, but he's gone. Now I don't know what to think of the new secretary coming in. I'll hope that he says a lot of the right things, maybe, but the whole idea of our culture, which is what you're asking. Has our culture changed so that we really can't bring ourselves as a nation to be united for our own self and fight when we have to? The historian Toynbee said no great civilization has ever been murdered. They all commit suicide. And what he means is every civilization, every great power at some point tilts over and becomes too self-indulgent and it loses its focus, it loses its vigor and it'll happen eventually to the United States. There's no such thing as saying we're the one nation, that is. 10,000 years of history don't pertain to us. The question you're asking, mark, is have we gotten near that point? I say yes, we have.
Mark McGrath:If you carry that analogy, does it apply to the Marine Corps? Is the Marine Corps committing suicide?
Bing West :I believe, from what I hear, the answer is no. No, that inside the ranks it's still pretty good, it just has gone a little bit in the wrong strategic direction. But this gets all the way back to a fundamental question that the Pentagon will not undertake to answer, which is why do people join the military? And do you know that overall those joining, the propensity to join, has dropped dramatically? And then the question becomes why and how did this happen? And there are surveys indicating that the military has been a family business for generations, that something in the order of 70% of those who come in come in because somebody, an uncle, an aunt, somebody, was in the military and says you know they're pretty good.
Mark McGrath:I'm guilty of that. My dad was a retired army officer.
Bing West :Exactly army officer, exactly that cohort. Okay, the, the veterans, their support for joining the military has dropped from something like 85 to 60 percent in the last three years. That is extraordinary, and it was due basically to dei. Now they done away, because people were cynical about it. Now they've done away with DEI or they're about to. But you're asking, does our culture, our America, have a cohesion so that we have a subset of people that really, really feel compelled to serve and, by gosh, they understand that they are there with one mission and that is to be lethal? I can't answer that, mark, but I'm worried about it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah Well, I wanted to tie a couple things back just to questions about CAP, because I think, again, it's something that needs a lot more study. When Ponch and I were in the archives at Marine Corps University in Quantico, you know and we do a lot of research on the theories of John Boyd and how to apply the theories of John Boyd. Incidentally, did you ever interact with Boyd or meet with Boyd?
Bing West :Fortunately I never met with him and he had died, you know. But I was very, very close with the commandant at the time. He was just, you know, a real character, but he had tremendous influence. Tremendous influence and I can't speak highly enough about him, you know just.
Mark McGrath:Today's. Well, today would have been his 98th birthday when we're recording, so we're fitting that, we're glad that we have you. I should point out too that a book that cites your work of the army in vietnam, by andrew kropinovich, was one of boyd's favorites that he would discuss in patterns of conflict, um, and they cite one of your rand reports about small unit. Andrew kropinovich used one of your rand reports on uh, on small unit action, in his book and I, of course, as you started off, I figured it out Well, fj West, yeah, that's big, so what I was saying?
Mark McGrath:So Potch and I were in the archives a couple of years ago and one of the things that they were giving out, the history division had a booklet. It was a blue cover and it's the United States Marine Corps Civic Action Efforts in Vietnam March 65 to March 66. And it was written by a then-Captain, russell Stolfi, who I understand became a professor at Naval Postgraduate School for many, many years. And what was interesting about it is that it was signed for approval january of 68, that general nickerson approved it on 9 january 1968, the month of tet. Right, that's what I was looking at it, the month of the tet offensive. And what was interesting too about the booklet about civic action was in the back there were the principles of cap you know ponch had asked about. You know are their first principles were. There were their concepts that were driving and captain stolfi. Then captain stolfi had six. Are you familiar with that, with that booklet or that, that historical rendition?
Bing West :I'm not, mark, no no, anyway.
Mark McGrath:The first one was uh, continuous action, like I think you kind of hit on this, like if it's not continuous and you leave, you're opening yourself up for failure because the consistency is lost. That was the first one. The second one was local, that it had to be functioned through the local people. We had to meet them where they were. The third one was that the programs had to be related to basic needs, so in addition to security, as you say from very adept warfighters, that the local needs still had to be met. Anyway, no, I was just pulling that out because it did look like the Marine Corps was trying to talk about this. But I guess I'd ask you when Tet happened, did the mindset and the thinking about Cap kind of take a backseat? Did people stop thinking about that because the war got so kinetic?
Bing West :No it was the exact opposite. It's the opposite that Tet proved combined action platoon. What happened in Tet stunned everybody. But the objective of the North Vietnamese was to seize Hue City and to seize Da Nang. Da Nang was bigger than Hue City. Da Nang was the headquarters. They sent probably maybe 30 or 40 battalions toward Da Nang. They never got there. They never got to the city because they kept bumping into the combined action platoons and what had happened was, as they were moving in units of 500 to a thousand, with a couple of local guides, all the village, the villages you're out there, and the whole place lit up.
Bing West :Everyone out in the field said Holy smokes and they all ran home. Everywhere, the word spread throughout the villages. So here are all the combined action platoons. There are about 30 or 40 of them over the course of about 10 by 10 miles, in about 10 by 10 miles. So they're not integrated one with the other, but they're close enough. So the word spread in the course of eight hours my God, all of these people are coming.
Bing West :So everyone buttoned up and then immediately went to full alert and all of a sudden the North Vietnamese had a plan that said you overrun the combined action platoons because they're the outposts. And then you mass against the city. They never got through the combined action platoons. Not one combined action platoon out of something like 32 fell, but some of them fought without stop for seven days. And the North Vietnamese high command the communications going back and forth was unbelievable because the North Vietnamese were saying, holy smokes, you know, we've run into a beehive. And then they were getting all. Every single combined action platoon, of course, already had all their fire registration points on their maps, you know. So all they had to do was call for Bravo Zulu 172, bravo Zulu 174, and they were getting continuous artillery and air support. And these guys were right exactly where the arty spots were, because it was where you would think the troops were coming to try to take you.
Bing West :And after the battle was over, the combined action platoons were lauded by everybody and suddenly wanted, even General Westmoreland changed his mind a little bit about the combined action platoons and began something called the MTTs, because everyone said look at what happened. I mean, it was amazing. Now, it couldn't have happened if it weren't for artillery and air support. But we all know every single squad. When you go somewhere, you immediately take your artillery points and put them on a map so you have them all, so you don't have to be scrambling if you hit at night, and then you simply put the aircraft where the artillery is. It was, I mean, the North Vietnamese. 10,000 to 20,000 North Vietnamese were incapable of getting through. It was amazing.
Mark McGrath:So is it fair to sum up and say that a decentralized approach with small teams upheld a massive chaotic onslaught from a much larger superior force?
Bing West :Absolutely. I mean all the data. The data is overwhelming.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, it's amazing, a couple of questions of names. So one name that kept emerging in a lot of my study on CAP was Paul Eck. Yes, did you know him?
Bing West :I did not. I never had the honor of personally knowing Paul. He was the one who really began it up near Way City. Everyone spoke very highly of him.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and it seems he died quite young. Uh, that's yeah, yeah, the colonel.
Bing West :Another name, uh, william corson, that wrote a I knew, I knew wild bill, of course everyone uh, now he.
Mark McGrath:Now he wrote a couple of famous books. He did one.
Bing West :One was called the betrayal, what maybe you could unpack a little about, a little about, because the betrayal came out in 1968 as well yeah, well, I mean bill corson was, I think he was a full colonel and he was put in charge of all of us in the small different areas and he was a true believer and he felt that general westmoreland was a terrible human being. But what bill never quite got was that general Walt never ordered the Combined Action Platoon to be a strategy. It always remained a tactic. That is the word in the Marine Corps. Never was look, let's pull them all together and integrate them and have a strategy. So we do this systematically. The General Walt left it up to every battalion commander what he wanted to do. Well, some battalion commanders wanted to do it, some didn't, so it was patchwork.
Mark McGrath:I see.
Bing West :Corson liked General Walt, so he didn't complain about that. Instead, he just complained about General Westmoreland not being behind him. But in truth, the Marines themselves never took the combined action platoon from a tactic to a strategy. I see.
Mark McGrath:Now imagine Monday morning quarterback that one. So had they done that, I think it's probably a safe historical bet to say that things would have turned out a lot differently in Vietnam who was the ops officer, a Marine down at headquarters with General Westmoreland.
Bing West :We never really got it to his attention, but the proposition was to do exactly what you're saying Instead of making them individual, put them all out there but then tie them all together and you would save dramatically on your manpower. It was the exact opposite of intuitively what people thought. But if they looked at it for a moment, we did the mathematics. If I take 10 squads and put them in, each squad has two kilometers by two kilometers, then for the sake of 150, I'm doing the job of a battalion with a thousand. Unfortunately, we never had a strategic thinker at the level to say come on, we can do this and it would benefit us more and we would save manpower. Instead, they believed the opposite. They believed it had to be added on to keeping all the battalions on the hillside and they never said let's have a trade-off here.
Mark McGrath:Was General Krulak trying to drive that as a strategy, and is that why he got relieved?
Bing West :No, Krulak really wasn't relieved. Krulak was angling with President Kennedy for big things. General Krulak thought in big terms. He was thinking far beyond the Marine Corps.
Bing West :He was thinking of where he might go. You know that sort of thing. So no, and he was in Hawaii. General Kulak was in Hawaii. General Kulak's focus was really at the very high level. It was trying to persuade the president and then Johnson I'm sorry I got it a little mixed up Kulak and Kennedy. President Kennedy got along very, very well. General Krulak was never able to penetrate Lyndon Johnson's gang and Lyndon Johnson never wanted to be in the war. He was a terrible president in terms of wartime, terrible, terrible.
Ponch Rivera:Hey Bing, I really enjoyed your New Killer Apps article that you pushed out in the last 10 days or so talking about Defense in terms of wartime Terrible, terrible. Hey Bing, I really enjoyed your new killer apps article that you pushed out in the last 10 days or so talking about defense innovation unit.
Ponch Rivera:Oh right, yeah, yeah. So that was my last assignment in the Navy Reserve. I was assigned to what we identified as a brokerage it's not an innovation unit. And then in your article, you have a great line in here that I just want to read out. At least have a great line in here that I just want to read out at least some of it. The Pentagon is producing several thousand exquisite Lamborghinis instead of a million cheap but solid Mustangs, and that's again I think it's an article that I want everybody to read who's listening to this episode, and we'll put that link into the episode notes.
Mark McGrath:Thank you, punch Question. Now, this is just a historical curiosity now, and also being a fellow Marine, there's another Marine Vietnam very controversial that also worked with Rand was Daniel Ellsberg. Did you ever know him or interact with him at Rand?
Bing West :Yeah, I did.
Mark McGrath:All right, I'll tell you.
Bing West :Yeah, let's hear it. Rand hired me because I had gone to Princeton, the Wilson School, etc. But they hired me to go right back to Vietnam. So I did for them for years and when I first got there, jim Schlesinger who later became the Secretary of Defense and I was his special assistant when Saigon fell and Albert Wohlstetter and Charlie Wolfe some of the big gurus at RAND, and RAND was very highly thought of. Now we're back in 1967.
Bing West :They brought me down a corridor in RAND and they said oh, we'd like you to meet a very special analyst. And with that that was all they said. They brought me to the cubicle of dan ellsberg and opened the door, said hi, dan, you know this is bing wesley said hi and they left. I thought they left and I sat there and and we began to talk he had been a marine and, uh, he's a very intense, wiry little guy. And I look and he has a photograph in black and white and it shows him in camis, with a helmet, with a Thompson submachine gun from World War II and a helmet that is filled with water and froth and a K-bar big knife and it shows that he's shaving. And I burst out laughing and I said that's a great send-up. And he looked at me indignantly and he said well, I guess you don't have too much field time. And I thought, are you thing me? And it was the end of the conversation, turned off and I walked out.
Bing West :I walked down the corridor and there are these three old Randites, you know, schlesinger and Wellstetter and Wolf. And they said what'd you think? Yeah, and I was young and I didn't. And I said he's a fake. And they almost applauded. Well, it turns out that he was the favorite inside um rand at the time, the brilliant guy, etc. And he was the one who then leaked the pentagon papers and all kinds of terrible things. But he really, he really was a faker. These, these old ran guys, sensed that that, that what he was saying about vietnam and his real experience was different. But because I had been in the field, suddenly they had a guy there confirming but dan ellsberg never spoke to me again for the time. We're in. Did you know, john Paul Vann? I did, I did, wow, oh, I was in Vietnam, for God.
Mark McGrath:So many years. Where did he think a cap? Like you know, somebody like John Paul Vann.
Bing West :I looked at him like he was one of these real, I stated. He had me over his house. He had a great villa, but it was way outside in the province he was in. He had his own helicopter, he was his own warlord. To a certain extent he was a true, true believer. He didn't want to hear anything, he wanted to lecture you all the time, but his he wore his hat on his sleeve. You couldn't help but to like him. But he was a real apostle. I mean, he was on a mission and I wondered about his not rationality, but that he was too emotional. But he was very good to me. He brought me around in his helicopter, blah, blah, blah. It's just that he was a little bit too infectious for my taste in terms of a true believer. He was going to get this accomplished huh, and he and he was.
Mark McGrath:Was he pro cap? Was he positively? Oh yeah, oh yeah, he was. I would say he was, he was the.
Bing West :He was the real deal. So much the real deal that he became, I guess, almost an apostle, but he was. He was the real deal. So much the real deal that he became.
Mark McGrath:I guess almost an apostle, but he was the real deal industries could take too. They can start extracting principles and concepts that help them better understand, that really tell the story effectively, and it may or may not have to be about CAP per se, of course. We recommend the Village by Bing West, as well as your rant papers.
Ponch Rivera:I thought your work with Mattis was phenomenal with talking about effects-based operations and how we got rid of that. Well, thank you, that is huge, because that was you know. When we try to use that in a complicated or, excuse me, a complex space, it doesn't work. I'm right here outside of Norfolk and we grew up with effects-based operation through JPME. We saw a value-focused thinking in industry and we use that to explain to folks. You can't use this in a complex space. General Mattis did so eloquently inside that book and and thank you for doing that that's something. Again, do you have any more insights on EBO and why it didn't work, or it did work in some?
Bing West :context Two different things. Lou Sorley's book S-O-R-L-E-Y about General Abrams is definitely worth reading. Relative to General Mattis, that general is the worth reading. Relative to General Mattis, that general is the real deal and his notion always was when he had a battalion first went into Desert Storm decentralize, but understand that everyone understands what the operation, the mission is, and then let them go. For God's sakes, don't try to second-guess them.
Bing West :And the other interesting thing is he never wanted to know the names of those who were killed while something was going on. He didn't want the distraction of knowing the cost of the Joint Forces Command. He looked at what they were doing and he said wait a minute, wait a minute, you guys really think. And then he broke the code very quickly. He said the Air Force at that time in warfare knew exactly what the targets were and they had more targets than they had bombs and planes at any given time. So they had to figure out they had bombs and planes at any given time, so they had to figure out which targets were most important and then they hit them first. So then they said therefore, we do our targeting based on effects, right?
Ponch Rivera:So I was the reason I bring this up.
Bing West :Effects-based operations.
Ponch Rivera:Right and it worked well inside an aerospace operations center.
Bing West :It was fantastic, yeah, mattis said well, that's just commonsensical if you're a bomber and you're in working in that kind of an environment, he said but are you asking me you're going to apply that to infantry warfare? He said get out of here. So he said look guys. He said this doesn't work and I'm not going to fool around with it on the margin. I'm killing it, period. We are not warfighting according to that concept.
Bing West :And then I really like Jim. I mean he's sitting there, but he hated being away from the troops to begin with. So here he is as a four-star. He's supposedly in charge of all this stuff. He knows he really isn't and he knows that he has an entire staff. And the danger of staffs is, if they're smart they'll figure out something to do, even if they don't really have a job. So he's sitting in a meeting with the Secretary of Defense, gates, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mullen, and several others. Gates said we've got to cut something. It's all over the place, this damn bureaucracy. Mattis writes on a napkin and hands it to the chairman and says abolish my command. And he said Mullen looked at him like this for a minute and Mattis nodded. And so Mullen turned to Secretary Gates and said sir, let's abolish the Joint Forces Command. With that, mattis said well, if you have to, you have to. And Gates walked out and said I got rid of all these bureaucrats, et cetera, and, madison, I got rid of that command.
Mark McGrath:Nice.
Ponch Rivera:That's pretty rare yeah.
Mark McGrath:Well, that's certainly a book we recommend. You're also too. You're not the only West that writes. You're not the only West who's a Marine, who writes novels and books about counterinsurgency and other things.
Bing West :Well, my son Owen, he's written some really good books about his experiences, so he's carried on the tradition. You know, his force recon, all that kind of stuff. So we again it's you know, marines, it's the whole notion that the military is a family. You know you hand it down in your family, you know.
Mark McGrath:so yeah, Well, I got a question this came up the other day uh, there's a, there's a sub stack that we get a lot of uh traffic from, called the military reading room, and they had asked you know what? What books are? Are you know the best ones on the commandant's reading list? Of course I said the village it was taken off.
Bing West :They took it off, they took it off. So you know why they. I call it up. It turns out the commandant's reading list is put together by the staff and the colonel said to me we don't do counterinsurgency anymore, so we took it off the list. And I said but this is the only example you have. There were no officers. Every combined action platoon was a sergeant and a corporal and and this stands the test of time about a concept of war, fighting where you trust your ncos to do the job, and you eliminated it and you said yeah, this is leadership.
Mark McGrath:We didn't say it came up to our standards, I thought okay because the star, the star of the village, is really the corporals, right they?
Bing West :travel.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, it's the most important rank in the Marine Corps, correct? Okay? So let me rephrase the question. In addition to the village, what are the books that are not on the list that Marine leaders should be reading and not just Marines, but, of course, in business? But if you had the books that are not there anymore, what should it be?
Bing West :Well, I saw these books about Abrams, so I wouldn't have that one. If I had to choose them on my own, I would actually put the last platoon before I put the village, because the last platoon I tried to take everything that had happened in Afghanistan over 20 years and put it into one seven-day mission for one platoon, where the platoon is dealing with the drug dealers, dealing with the insurgents, dealing with the Pakistanis, and I bring it all the way up to the president at the same time, and the huge disconnect at the same time. And the huge disconnect. My new book that's coming out is called Winning Battles, losing Wars, where I indicate that the reason we lost three wars Vietnam, iraq and Afghanistan wasn't really, it was never our troops. Our troops could do the job, our generals were okay, but the policy coming from the White House was so disconnected that it killed all three efforts. And so I've written a book about that and I try to explain what I saw on the ground in all three wars versus what was happening in the White House. And it bothers me very much and I said look, every policymaker and every president should have only one thing when he sends people into major combat, and that is that he is sending them out there to kill others and to risk dying themselves dying himself. So he should envision himself as swinging an axe and decapitating another human being. He should recognize that his hands are as bloody as those of a corporal and therefore he cannot.
Bing West :My biggest problem at the top was that the policymakers become so conceited about their own theories that they swap theories around, realizing that somebody else is bleeding because of this, and they take their eye off the fact that if you go to war, you're going out there expecting that some of yours are going to die in order to kill the other people so that they will come to your conclusions and do your policies. And when you get so convoluted, you keep changing your own policies and why they're out there while they're still dying. You have betrayed not betrayed them, but you've entered a world where you shouldn't be. Many times as the Assistant Secretary of Defense, and the biggest problem is you get into an atmosphere that wreaks power. When you walk into the White House, west Wing, and you walk into the Oval Office, I don't care who you are suddenly you realize this is the big time and you become very careful with every word that you utter, and it's very easy to get into theories at the top that have nothing to do with what's going on and believe them.
Bing West :I mean like President Obama convincing himself to pull us all out of Iraq after everything we did, because he sat around with a few people and had this vision, even when the generals were telling him, sir, don't do that. And then President Biden saying let's just get out of within a couple of months, let's just get out, period, get out. And he ordered President Biden ordered that the embassy would stay. Most people don't realize this. The embassy would stay and operate as our military left. What world was he in? And unfortunately, I guess nobody said to him sir, what you just ordered, it just can't be done.
Bing West :And that relates back to what President Bush said to a group at one point after he was finished serving, and he said you know, one of the biggest problems looking back was everyone always agreed with me and I didn't have no people. But it's so easy when you're in that environment and it is very hierarchical. General Mattis told me you know, there he is as a four-star. Okay, when he was, what was he? He was in charge of CENTCOM and in meetings with President Obama he was at the end of the table and he said he can't recall ever speaking up. He was never asked anything.
Ponch Rivera:As CENTCOM. Wow, he was never asked anything. Has CENTCOM said that Wow?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, man, yeah Wow.
Bing West :I'm so, so hierarchical. And then, when you walk out of the meeting, the person, the people who stay behind, are the assistants to the president, and then they talk to him after everyone else has left. In other words, we've become extremely vertical and President Trump probably reinforced this even more extremely vertical toward one person, and our democracy wasn't designed to be that.
Mark McGrath:Well, bing man, I mean we could go for, I think, days on this, because I tell you there's no more fitting guest I have on John Boyd's birthday to record today, on John Boyd's birthday, january 23rd, to really get us thinking about. We've covered so many, we've covered so many topics and the beauty of, I guess the beauty of the history is that you've shared with us, that you've written about is that there's so many things that leaders can extract a lot of these lessons and apply them in whatever they're doing, and it's not really necessarily only pertinent to the military, the military profession of arms. It extends to others and it's unbelievable. We really thank you for your time today.
Bing West :It's my pleasure and best of luck. Thanks, punch, thanks, thank you.
Mark McGrath:We want to uh, we want to definitely have you back to talk about winning battles and losing wars. By the way, when is the publishing date of that? I don't know.
Bing West :I have to have to put my agent deal with certain things okay okay, all right, well, we'll stop the recording.
Mark McGrath:Stay with us one second bing.
