0:01You know, show us and help us do a nationwide sailor armed security shipboard security, you know, visit board search and seizure training program. And we did that and I think we we trained almost 100,000 sailors safely.
0:16>> 100,000? Yeah. I basically anybody that carried a gun in the Navy was coming through our pipeline. How many How many employees do you have by this time?
0:24Approximately.
0:25Uh for that we ramped up to a couple hundred probably between instructors and all the rest.
0:31>> That's That's a lot of people to train still. Crazy.
0:34>> Um and then um so we had that flywheel spinning when 9/11 happens. And then uh Where were you on 9/11?
0:44I brought my kids to school that morning in McLean, Virginia.
0:49>> [gasps] >> And uh I'd heard about the um the first track the first then crash of a light aircraft into a building in New York.
1:00And then I went to uh the same place I always got my hair cut to Ali, my Turkish Muslim barber, who oddly enough had a had a razor at my neck as we're watching the second aircraft crash into the into the towers. And he's been a a great friend ever since and we joke about that, but um uh yeah, it was really sobering. And then, you know, my wife who was fighting cancer then Oh, yeah. her cancer doc and her whole treatment was at St. Vincent's in New York.
1:31And so >> [sighs and gasps] >> she was supposed to be there on like September 13, which was obviously canceled and delayed. We go back We go up a week later, but um I went to Ground Zero and used my ID and, you know, at least had a walk around while she was hooked up getting chemo, but it was a a very sobering Yeah. uh moment to see that level of destruction.
1:58Outside of the odd coincidence with your barber and what was going on that day culturally, what once it once the second plane did hit, obviously, like a lot of people, civilians even, were thinking When I saw the first impact, there was no no no chance that was a chance no no chance that was an accident. So, you knew before that. You're like, okay, something's happening here. Did you have any I'm trying to think of like your timeline when you left the Navy, what you would have been read in on, but like did you have any inkling of who it was?
2:30Um well, it was it was a an al-Qaeda stimulus that that um lit up all the Rangers in Mogadishu in '93.
2:40And it was al-Qaeda [snorts] that hit the embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi.
2:47Mhm.
2:48It was um al-Qaeda certainly that simulated the attack in Yemen. Mhm.
2:55So, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. That's That's my default was.
3:01>> And I again, I had no I was out of the Navy at that point. I had no clearance. I had no facility clearance.
3:10So, I had no uh particular insight to it.
3:13But your business, as you said, was ramping up just coincidentally before that happened. So, you're already cuz you're training all the sailors with the 100,000 people who may be holding a gun.
3:25After 9/11, like how quickly does it go to oh [ __ ] like now we're now you become Blackwater as we know it.
3:35Um the um the agency's protective detail, CIA director's protective detail were regular customers cuz they could rent out the place and do their thing with no um with privacy.
3:50And um we um the a guy who worked on the seventh floor, going to Buzzy Krongard, was would come down with them sometimes, and he was a former NOC himself.
4:04>> [sighs] >> Hell of a life story.
4:06And um >> Buzzy Krongard? Yep.
4:10I don't know if I'm familiar with him.
4:12He was an All-American lacrosse player at Princeton in the '50s, Marine, and then uh CIA uh case officer for a few years, got out, went to work for Alex Brown, the investment bank.
4:27Eventually became the CEO, was a NOC again his later years there. Did some amazing things for his country as the CEO of a of an investment bank.
4:37>> That's crazy. And uh he'd always been a kind of a gun guy.
4:42His uh son was later a SEAL as well.
4:45And um Oh, he's still around, too?
4:48>> He is.
4:48>> Wow.
4:50Uh and but Buzzy said, you know, Buzzy had made contact long before 9/11.
4:57Just uh talking about foreign affairs and guns and tactics and all the rest, and I remember calling um uh well, as a derivative of working for Dana Rohrabacher, cuz when Dana got out of the White House, he first went to Afghanistan in the late '80s, while the Oh, the Mujahideen while the Muj were still fighting the Soviets. And he went and saw Dostum and Massoud and all the ones from, you know, operating on near the the Pak border.
5:35And he went in the country, and he kept in touch with them.
5:39And he came back to me in about '97 and said, "Eric, I need your help to sponsor a peace conference."
5:48Cuz we're trying to get the king of Afghanistan to return cuz he'd been in exile. Right.
5:54His name is Zahir Shah and he lived in Rome.
5:57And so I met him also while I was working for Dana and part of that whole process.
6:03Um and I funded a peace conference in Switzerland where Dostum and Massoud and Mohaqeq and Atta Noor and all those guys came.
6:14Um cuz we were trying to have a loya jirga in Afghanistan before 9/11 happened to try to bring some kind of peaceful resolution and not have the Taliban run the place into the ground. And you knew the Taliban was also effectively protecting al-Qaeda. Bad.
6:31>> Yeah, exactly.
6:33And I had a I mean already already before 9/11 I had a beautiful rug gift from Dostum. Huh.
6:39So so then after 9/11, their phones are lighting up and they're like, "Hey, put us in touch with the USG cuz we want to help kill these Taliban and al-Qaeda motherfuckers."
6:53And so again maybe the agency had contact with all of them, I don't know, but we definitely did cuz we'd had um we'd had them all in Switzerland and had multiple talks with them. But um and and I'm still in touch with a number of them. So >> [clears throat] >> That's cool. Um but yeah, that was my first call to Buzzy and then I said, "If you need anything ever, if you need a floor sweeper, please. We we we just want to help."
7:21And uh yeah, he ended up calling about 5 months later. He needed help with security and that was our first overseas deployment. Okay, so that's when the actual security of assets begins on the ground. You hadn't done that before. No.
7:34Okay.
7:37I imagine you had to spin up an entirely like new part of the company to do that or you bringing in a lot of new people, or you using the same >> We'd had a We had a the makings of a of a security entity together, but not deploying at that kind of scale.
7:51And again, say yes and figure it out.
7:53>> Yeah. So. So, where And where were the first places where you were doing it, and what were what were those missions like? Oh, they were pretty um uh The biggest issue there, and again, it's the they >> [snorts] >> the USG asked the military to do security at these various locations.
8:16And the military said, "Well, we're not going to do that with less than 200 people here, or 160 people here." And and so we could do it with 18 or 25. So, in some cases we took over entire facilities, and I would say guarded them uh well, obviously safety safely, cuz they were never successfully attacked while we were guarding them. Um or running a a remote drone base somewhere where And we took that over from the military because um they had 166 soldiers there, 28 doing security, and 138 people supporting the 28. Hm. It's just how the military organizes. They don't really have any understanding of cost.
9:00>> [laughter] >> No, because because if you're a general, and you never have to pay for all the privates and corporals and all the masters, you're like, "Send them." Yep. And And it's like having uh and you know, people tend to leave the water on when you're brushing your teeth when it's free water. Yeah.
9:16That's a good I'm going to use that. That's pretty good.
9:20Please do.
9:21Um So, look because obviously our guys were expensive, we economized, and so we could take over that entire facility, safely run it for years with 25 guys, five of whom would be dual hatted to keep the water, or power, of sanitation, the the comms, the vehicles running.
9:40And it just works. So, that's that's the difference of When when Elon Musk attacked the cost of space lift, of putting a payload in orbit, he looked at all the drivers of cost.
9:53What's the He said, "What's the biggest driver?" Okay, it costs a lot to build this rocket motor. We're not going to make it a one-time use. We're going to figure out a way to make it reusable.
10:01All those things, if you can if you're of the private sector and you can attack the big cost items, you find a way to make it efficient.
10:10But, if you're never asked to do that, why bother? That's the difference of the private sector doing something versus government.
10:17Was there I mean, it's hard for me to picture it cuz I've I've never been in the military. But, when you're first doing this and now actually taking over security and stuff like that, you have a lot of guys working for you. Most of your guys are ex-military or even high-level who who are doing these jobs.
10:33But, were there any cultural difficulties being that you guys were private contractors in there and you're going into a war zone where our military is? Like, were were there any I don't want to say like dust-ups, but issues in chain of command type things with that?
10:48Um there would be Stay with the mic. Sorry.
10:52Sorry.
10:53At some points, there'd be mild issues of of jealousy of what the contractors were perceived to being paid per day.
11:02>> [gasps] >> But, then when we started to break it down as to what our guys were paid versus what our military guys was, it was effectively the same. The difference is So, my guy might be headline paid 500 or 600 dollars a day back in 2004.
11:20But, they're only paid that for every day they're in the hot zone.
11:23The day they leave, their pay goes to zero.
11:27Versus a military guy who's paid day in day out, whether they're in the hot zone or and they might get a little bit of an extra for danger pay, but the military guy also has tax-free in a war zone, and they get per diems and all the rest. And so, when you do an apples-to-apples comparison, it was largely the same. The difference is guys chose our approach because they're much more in control of their life. They could go hard, they could go 90 days, 120 days, and they go home Mhm. and see their family and be done and not waste their time. And that's the the It was a It was a fundamental difference
12:04in recruiting and retention for us.
12:07And also mental health.
12:08And mental health.
12:09>> Sure. Yeah, because like [clears throat] if if the guys were getting um if it was a little too rough, then uh we definitely scheduled more rotations home, and they would stay home, be with their family, or we'd put them on a training rotation or something where they were not uh at risk of getting blown up.
12:28>> Mhm.
12:30So, you're that starts up, and this is when the Afghanistan war is like the hottest at the beginning. This is before Iraq, when you're starting to do these.
12:38>> Yep. Okay.
12:40Now, obviously, you're hands-on, you're seeing a lot of this, you're getting all the reports on the ground. What what were your thoughts, you know, hindsight's 20/20 now, we saw what happened in Afghanistan in 2021, but what were your thoughts then at the beginning? Funny you say that, cuz I remember seeing the US military showing up in droves Yeah. and seeing the construction of all the um the McDonald's, the all the other amenities, all the other cost stuff that flows with the US military footprint.
13:10I remember a phone call, a sat phone call I had with Gary Jackson while I was on the ground before I left.
13:16I said, "Gary, the DOD is going to come here and screw it all up.
13:22And this will end up having to be solved by contractors because the DOD will become so expensive and so ineffective it'll be left to contractors. Now, I wish I was right on that. I was right on half. Yes, the DoD did screw it up.
13:36They replicated the Soviet battle plan.
13:39We went from the first 6 months of the war when it was special operations guys with a targeting cycle of minutes or seconds.
13:48Enemy there, we go, send it.
13:51versus hyper bureaucratic planning cycle with all kinds of approvals when we basically we allowed lawyers to become what zampolits were in the Soviet Union. Mhm.
14:02A zampolit is a political officer which was in a Soviet Union which would enforce the will of the of the Communist Party.
14:10And it was really second-guess unit commanders from what they could do.
14:14And that's really how bad lawyers had become in the Pentagon.
14:19Even back then? Oh, yeah. Yep. So, I was right on that. I wish they'd let contractors solve it. And And towards the end of the Afghan war, um I remember right after Trump was elected the first time, so that would have been spring of 2017.
14:36Steve Bannon, one of the one of the guest policy advisers to President Trump then, said, "Hey, we're going to we're going to debate uh a change in Afghan policy. Write an editorial to you. to me.
14:52So, I did. And it got published.
14:54And I called out for a different strategy in Afghanistan which would have massively reduced the conventional footprint of the DoD and go back to what worked for 250 years which was kind of the East India Company approach.
15:09You've heard of the East India Company?
15:10>> of that, but how would this work in practice in Afghanistan? So, the East India Company And sorry, Eric, if you don't mind just stay like a little closer. I just don't want you getting out of focus. My bad.
15:21>> I'm always out of focus.
15:22>> [laughter] >> Um the East India Company was a private company that um and they did three things. It facilitated trade in difficult places.
15:37It um performed functions of government, kicked ass when necessary.
15:42And the whole problem of the US presence in Afghanistan is we never got the economy actually going legitimately there. Right. There is so much money, AID, and all this and and no proper underpinnings of the economy and and dumb things like um the fact that the cost of energy uh the the per dollar cost uh of a gallon of fuel by the time it made it in Humvee was about $250.
16:15Mhm.
16:16From all the logistics costs. Now, because that oil or that gas or diesel was shipped in from the Mediterranean.
16:25Shipped to Karachi, put in a truck, Karachi, Pakistan, trucked up into Afghanistan.
16:31The Taliban would toll that, and that tolling that actually represented about 30% of the Taliban's operating budget.
16:37>> Oh.
16:38Taliban easy pass, let's go. Yeah, exactly.
16:41But the all the generals, the 18 different commanders we had there, never said uh excuse me, there's oil and gas in Afghanistan that was drilled and proven by the Soviets when they left.
16:56Okay? At the Amu Darya oil field up in Balkh province.
17:00I know because my my friend was the local partner there.
17:04And nobody ever said here's here's a $20 million drilling program. Okay? One Texan reservist could have figured this out. Mhm. Probably somebody from the oil and gas industry, a roughneck, drill that, put that in production, spend a hundred million bucks on a refinery, a modular one, and now we have all the oil and gas issues solved in Afghanistan.
17:28A company would figure that out. Clearly the military did not after 20 effing years. So anyway, >> they figured out the poppy fields.
17:37Not so well, either.
17:38Yeah, so He's not even getting credit for that.
17:40>> Brits The Brits used to have a great saying that a functioning workshop is better than a battalion of soldiers. Cuz it's much better to employ the enemy than to fight them.
17:49Okay.
17:50There is um one of the largest copper deposits in the world, the Mes Aynak mine.
17:56It was only about 30 mi south of Kabul.
17:59And it had been in production on and off for almost a thousand years. There's all kinds of archaeological sites there. The Chinese early on bought the concession corruptly, but again, a smart general would have said, "In two months, I want that mine turned on. I don't care who owns it right now.
18:17We do now.
18:18Turn it on, and you could have employed 10,000 Taliban."
18:23Cuz if you're If the Taliban is paying 10 bucks a day, put the word out to pay 12 bucks a day, and they'll put their guns down. Give them three square meals, let them pray five times a day, give them pick and shovel, let them mine copper. Great.
18:38You've just taken an entire infantry division of Taliban off the battlefield without killing them.
18:43That's how the East India Company did business. I got what you're saying. But you're writing this op-ed >> I wrote an op-ed >> Yes.
18:53Laid it out.
18:55And uh made the case for how to Cuz again, it was not a hypothetical situation for us, cuz I'd had dozens of my own aircraft in Afghanistan doing these kind of support missions for DOD.
19:10I'd had a thousand plus people doing security or training or advisory work actually embedding.
19:17Cuz one of the other big problems in Afghanistan was we had I think 31 or 32 troop rotations.
19:24So you say we were in in Afghanistan for 20 years? No. You were there for 31 troop rotations for six to nine months at a time. Sometimes 12 months.
19:34But at every time that military unit would leave they wouldn't go back to the same area.
19:39So you'd have all that area knowledge that you built up over six or nine months leave with those guys.
19:44>> Whose bright idea was that?
19:46>> [clears throat] >> The Pentagon's. That was their That was they they never fundamentally adjusted how they rotated troops to affect the realities of the battle space there.
19:58Our approach, what I laid out and budgeted that I could have taken uh 3,600 contractors.
20:05People love the word veterans. They hate to use the word contractors, right?
20:11Uh but I could pay a veteran contractor to go back in and live with, train with, fight with alongside each of those Afghan battalions that are worth saving.
20:22Live on the same base and guide them so that every time that unit went out in the field there would be some some pale faces with them. Um providing leadership, intelligence, communications, medical, logistics expertise.
20:37Kind of like the training wheels on a on a unit. So that if you have those units um with the basics correctly, they don't get annihilated. And you combine that with a little bit of air support.
20:52Again, right seat, my pilot, left seat, Afghan doing this.
20:57>> Right.
20:58>> Right? So the weapons are released by an Afghan, not by my guy, but you can align up the airplane and you take away the inshallah factor.
21:05The inshallah factor?
21:07>> Yeah, you know, it in the Middle East in Arabic they say, "Well, if God wills it." Right.
21:12>> [laughter] >> It's kind of like it kind of like in the in Latin culture they say, "Well, manana. Maybe you know, maybe tomorrow."
21:18No.
21:19There's no room for that.
21:21You need air support, you need it now with no [ __ ] no excuses. So, mentors in the field and because they're because I can pay them well, I can pay the same guy to go back to the same battalion in the same valley.
21:35Go in for 90 days, home for 60, back in for 90, but they always rotate back back to the same. So, we keep that area knowledge the exact same way that East India Company did for decades.
21:47Um with reliable air support including jets, we could have gotten rid of all the tankers and all the other nonsense.
21:55And take over the combat support because the main sources of fraud were the Afghans paying ghost soldiers where they'd say, "Yes, we have 800 men." Now, they have like 200 men and they're paying for 600 ghosts. People are skimming.
22:10They did the same for ammo, the same for fuel, the same for food.
22:14Take that over.
22:15And then fix the medical issue because you were seven times as likely to die if you were an Afghan and you got wounded.
22:22Which is wrong. Yeah.
22:26All everything I just described for you cost 5% of what the US was spending.
22:31I So, [clears throat] what was that going to cost?
22:33>> they had 20,000 some US military at that point?
22:39And about 29,000 contractors and I just advocated a massive rationalization down to about five as a stay-behind force.
22:50Would have kept the Afghan military from completely collapsing because the reason they collapsed and I called I called it about three [snorts] months before I made a bet with a buddy.
23:03I win Kabul is going to collapse.
23:05And we knew that but but did it based on I knew because of the fuel contractor, I knew when they were going to stop delivering fuel to the Afghan Air Force.
23:14>> Oh.
23:15>> And the US Air Force.
23:17So that the close air support was going to stop. Should have called a hedge fund.
23:21They pay a lot of money for this. Yeah, well.
23:24Um the last thing we need to do is help hedge funds. [ __ ] those [laughter] guys.
23:29I like that. Good call.
23:32Um So I knew that if the if the Taliban were not going to get smashed by grouping up as 50 and 200 then they could go to 5,000 5,000 they could start running over cities. Exactly what happened.
23:46>> Mhm.
23:47Now cynically like cuz your plan on paper sounds pretty good but again you were writing this not that this is your fault but you're writing this 16 years in. Right? And so when you think about all the things that had led to that like the All kinds of incremental thinking? Oh yeah. Oh >> Incremental thinking de de um um and deprived of any kind of price information. Right? It was like the embodiment of socialism.
24:14Can you explain that? Yeah.
24:17The problem when when the military says we need this much to do something.
24:22They're they're making that general or that staff person is making that decision not really understanding how much something costs.
24:31Okay. So it it basically is going to be a road paved to hell of inefficiencies if they do that.
24:37The road to hell paved by good intentions.
24:39>> Right.
24:39>> Sure. Okay. But you're writing it when all this [ __ ] has happened for a long time. Do you think that if you had been given the carte blanche in 2017 after writing this type of op-ed there would have been a chance that you could have turned it around?
24:52100%.
24:54Cuz it was not theoretical. I knew I And And the one time I saw President Trump while he was president, the first term, it was on Veterans Day of 2019.
25:09And he came up to me and said, "Eric, you were right. I should have listened to you on Afghanistan."
25:14>> [laughter] >> I was like, "Mr. President, there is still time. We can fix this.
25:18Give us a chance." But, he never really controlled this national security apparatus the first time around. He never controlled it?
25:25The same um Mattis and uh Esper were very much very conventional thinking, completely immune to um innovation.
25:39And um Gina Haspel, cuz what made sense is to do this under a Title 50 authority.
25:44Title 10 is how the Pentagon goes to war. Title 50 is how the CIA does its stuff. When the When the SEALs, sorry, when when the special forces went into Afghanistan the first time, they were working for the CIA director.
25:58Right. Title 50 authority.
25:59>> Yeah. Yeah. When the SEALs went cross-border into Pakistan to kill bin Laden, Title 50 authority. Not Title 10.
26:08Interesting. And that was like when Cofer Black was running that whole initial one, right?
26:12>> Cofer Black was running the original one. Yeah.
26:14>> Yeah. Okay. And he worked Didn't he work for Blackwater?
26:17>> He did. He He retired. He went to work for the State Department. He was the ambassador for counterterrorism. And then uh he joined us for a while. He was fantastic. I Yeah. That guy is so massive.
26:27A true um a spy spy. And he understood uh unconventional warfare because he'd done it against Gaddafi in the '80s.
26:38Against Gaddafi? Oh, I didn't know about this. What was he doing there? Cuz Gaddafi used to invade Chad and push south, push his army south. And so, Cofer would help uh push them back. And so, if you send a huge convoy of trucks deep into the Sahara desert, how do you make them want to turn back?
26:59Poke holes in the water trucks.
27:01>> [laughter] >> You don't have to kill them all.
27:04Just poke holes in the water trucks.
27:06Yeah. And uh he did the same thing to the Cubans and the um Oh, he did to the Cubans, too? In uh Angola. Yep.
27:14Wow.
27:16Yeah, that guy's been around the block.
27:17Yes.
27:18>> He's the one with the famous quote about flies crawling across their eyeballs.
27:21That was That was pretty baller. I don't know.
27:22>> a fantastic flair for the dramatic and and that's intent-based leadership. Mhm.
27:28Right?
27:29>> [gasps] >> And but barring that kind of out-of-the-box thinking, you know what the Pentagon wanted to do after 9/11 while the Pentagon is still smoldering?
27:38Yeah. They said, "We want to wait until the following April and do a mechanized invasion of Afghanistan via Pakistan."
27:44>> Yeah, he wanted 6 months.
27:45>> Come on, guys.
27:48I mean, Rumsfeld wasn't the brightest.
27:49Yeah. He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.
27:51>> I people want to dig on Rumsfeld, I like him. You like Rumsfeld? Yeah, he at least he at least understood how broken the Pentagon was and it needed to have some business focus at least to understand how much these things cost. I mean, he is the guy that said, "We're missing like $2 trillion." I'll give him that.
28:08Like I no one else really ever said that, but I still don't know what happened to that $2 trillion. Well, and I think there's more than that missing now.
28:15More than $2 trillion now? Oh, I'm sure.
28:17How do you lose two, three trillion?
28:20Like what Is this just like a very slow, steep climb down a, you That's the That is the the fundamental problem. You have a Congress that appropriates way too much money and all Congress really knows how to do is People say, "Oh, there's a problem."
28:37What's the American response to that?
28:39Throw money at it.
28:39>> Right. Throw money at it. And And so our foreign policy has become one of fire hosing money at all these problems and it's like um it's it's basically watering the weeds in your driveway. It's making all of them grow that much faster and reinforcing all the wrong things.
28:59And the business of America should be business.
29:01Not warfare.
29:03Not not foreign policy largesse. What do you mean by foreign policy largesse?
29:10The the massive spend of USAID and a massive over bloated Pentagon budget to the point of of making the Pentagon like an obese giraffe athlete.
29:23Right? You should have the Pentagon that is forced to make um disciplined decisions for what what are priorities versus what are not priorities. And when you have so much of the Pentagon budget is Oh, you have 800,000 civilians, DOD civilians working for the Pentagon now.
29:42So for our Secretary Hexstead to try to reform the Pentagon It's a lot.
29:46>> It's not just uniform services.
29:48But she got to give them um true hiring and firing authority to clean out cuz there is deadwood upon deadwood upon deadwood.
29:58You're also set up though and this is like kind of the catch-22. It's set up to be so compartmentalized for [snorts] basically intelligence purposes meaning like this team has a need to know on just this one thing and that team has a need to know on just that other thing and that's why they're all >> people sitting high enough they can see across those issues. The the problem is is a lot of classification is used to to hide incompetence and waste.
30:24I don't disagree with that.
30:25>> be bleak on that.
30:25>> No, no. I I I I don't disagree with you.
30:28I'm just wondering how much those people in those high places can see all that. I know they can definitely see a good bit of it. But like it's hard to say like well, cuz some of the guys like Mattis I guess when he was running the Pentagon like I've had guys in here talk about the things he wasn't read in on. He's like the head you know, I would just think the heads read in on everything but that's not that's not the case.
30:49>> It's so large that it's almost impossible for anyone to really get a handle of all of it. This is we talk about this all the time in here. I've had so many guys who were at different levels of special forces who were in Afghanistan throughout the 20 years there and every time someone comes in we learn something wild and new about what was going on. But it's like I've always looked at it not to be too black and white about it but that initial invasion was obviously necessary and very impressive. The one that Cofer was running. It was one of the And it should have stayed a Roman style punitive raid.
31:24What do you mean Roman style?
31:27When um you've heard of the Battle of Cannae in Rome, right? What you've heard of the the Punic Wars, right? When the Carthaginians were ravaging Rome.
31:37And um Hannibal the Barbarian rolls across all this and then they do the Battle of Cannae and it's a single I mean they lost like 80,000 people in a morning, Romans.
31:49Imagine that.
31:52Uh I mean imagine killing that many people by sword. It's nuts. Before noon.
31:56It's nuts.
31:59And they stood up in the Roman Senate they said Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed. So who did they send?
32:06Scipio Africanus.
32:08And he destroys Carthage and he salts the earth.
32:13That's what we should have done in Afghanistan.
32:15We should have sent and allowed SOF to remain off leash and to smash any and all remnants of Taliban manpower or Taliban adjacent people and let them howl in pain and then leave.
32:34We're not there to make them a a liberal representative democracy.
32:39We're there to punish them for accommodating terrorists which hurt America and then leave. That's how Rome maintained peace for multiple centuries.
32:49Would have been a better approach and vastly cheaper.
32:53I don't like to I I really try to look at these situations as 30,000 ft in the air as I can because I think a lot of people like me can get in the trap of playing Monday morning quarterback having not been to these places having not seen realities having not understood what warfare is like up front. But like as a devil's advocate to that if you were to take that type of approach are there not a [ __ ] ton of people in Afghanistan who are just living under that thumb who would be caught in the crossfire perhaps unnecessarily if we took a more conventional form of warfare that could help avoid that?
33:38I would say that you would have liberated the um men, women, and children from Afghanistan that did not want to live under a Taliban um religious rule.
33:51And or or ruled by the Pashtuns which is really what you really what you had.
33:57>> Um and when I say a punitive raid that means you're killing anybody that's resisting. Okay. Not killing anything and everything. No. Okay. Not just not a wholesale slaughter. If you want to fight fight. Cuz that's what Scipio did.
34:11Scipio I mean like going through that history like he did wholesale slaughter entire entire [ __ ] >> I well, but they took most of them as captives or slaves. Right. And and I'm taking that as the same that end result.
34:26Okay. So let's call it call it Scipio light. Okay.
34:30All right. That's a good distinction. So you think we you think we could have been out of there in a year?
34:35Yeah, or 8 months.
34:37Mhm.
34:40>> [snorts] >> What do you What did you think I mean going back to I mean as as a as a I heard a soft guy or I read it and he said and he was part of that initial push and had been in there for months. But then at Kandahar when they're starting to build a big base exchange with a McDonald's and a Burger >> and all the rest of it. Yep, time for us to leave. Because it really became a money thing for the Pentagon.
35:05And that's ultimately what it is about the Pentagon. SOF did extraordinarily well.
35:12Fought in unconventional warfare with a small light lethal footprint.
35:17And then you have all these conventional airborne units and armor and all the rest and they wow, we have to get be part of this.
35:27So, they come with their very conventional approach to warfare and replicate the Soviet battle plan that had been done from '79 to '89 by the Soviets.
35:38It's interesting >> Like down to the same base bases.
35:42History just repeating itself. Yep.
35:45It's interesting to hear you give these perspectives because everything you're pointing to I can appreciate because it's it's anti the worst parts of the military industrial complex, right? You're trying to say like for example, let's end the war in 8 months, get the [ __ ] out of there instead of spending 20 years and open up McDonald's and stuff.
36:06And not that this is your fault at all.
36:08It's just it's always wild when someone who is in the middle of it, like you're a part of those groups that people look at and label military industrial complex is the guy like sounding the alarm saying let's not do this. I I I I I but I I specifically remember that phone call I made to Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater back at our headquarters saying, "Holy [ __ ] This is already turning bureaucratic and bloated and and ridiculous."
36:37What did you think when they when the rumble started coming in that we were going to do Iraq?
36:45Um Okay, if they did Iraq properly, it would have possibly been a different outcome, but again, having a massive conventional military to depose Saddam, the a smarter way if you were absolutely hell-bent that you had to depose Saddam, do it through some kind of covert action and save yourself the massive cost and blow and and infrastructure destruction that would come with rolling 300,000 US troops into Iraq.
37:19Um but worse than that, once we were there, I remember in about spring of 2004, so about a year after the UN invasion, uh the head of the Iraqi intelligence service came to see me.
37:36Guy named Muhammad Shawani with a CIA handler. And he was a legendary Iraqi figure, former head of Iraqi special forces back in the '80s.
37:45He had done um the largest helicopter invasion in history into Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Oh, wow. Okay.
37:55And that kind of stuff put him at crossways with Saddam cuz Saddam figured, "If the guy can do it to the Iranians, he can do it to me."
38:02But um uh Muhammad eventually made it to Jordan cuz the Iraqis were trying to kill him.
38:11Um Saddam ended up executing both of his sons.
38:15But anyway, um he came to see me and he said, "We're seeing all kinds of evidence of the Iranians setting up political offices, assassination teams, influence operations all through southern Iraq.
38:30And we want a program to find them and to eliminate the Iranian officers.
38:36And we priced it up cuz we were doing some stuff for the agency back then.
38:40>> it up.
38:42>> [laughter] >> And it was effectively going to be a a kind of a small version of the Phoenix program.
38:48And uh I remember we're going to call it Ted Williams. Why?
38:52Cuz Ted Williams was one of the greatest hitters of all times. Teddy Williams going [ __ ] yard.
38:57>> [laughter] >> And um >> [snorts] >> the whole thing the agency was going to fund it and it was blocked by Condoleezza Rice.
39:05Then National Security Council said >> Iran is not our enemy. We have to respect the political process. All the rest. It was to me it was a massive sliding door moment in the entire Iraq debacle because if we had been allowed to sever the Iranians putting their hooks into Iraqi society.
39:25Cuz think about the Iran-Iraq War.
39:28That was a massive loss of life for both sides.
39:33And the Iranians are a very deliberate society.
39:38Deliberate. Deliberate.
39:41They put a thousand stitches making a Persian rug. Mhm. Okay? Thousand stitches into a square inch. Beautiful, planned, deliberate.
39:50So they do long-term intelligence planning, long-term influence operations. As So So what they were doing in Iraq is exactly what they'd already done in Lebanon with Hezbollah.
40:02What they've done in Yemen with um with the Houthis.
40:08And now they're doing it with in Iraq which became the Hashd al-Shaabi which is a 250,000 man unit of the Iraqi military now paid by the Iraqi government that are effectively under Iranian control.
40:23Before as that's in its early stage the Iraqi intelligence service wanted to cut them off properly and we were blocked from doing so. But if we'd been allowed to, I think Iraq would look much different today.
40:35Even with the whole vacuum we created cuz like yeah, I I don't want to be misheard here. Like Saddam was obviously a terrible guy. There's no one questioning that. But like I think it's almost impossible to say we didn't create a bigger problem once he once he was deposed because it basically allowed al-Zarqawi to come in and eventually form what would eventually become ISIS. Uh yes, but that was that was a I was almost a Sunni blowback onto the Shia hegemony that was stimulated by Iran.
41:07Cuz the biggest ethnic group Uh the sorry, the biggest religious group in Iraq are are Shia. Mhm. Uh and then Sunnis then Kurds. And um the amount of of dominance that the Shia had with that Iranian control over all parts of society that stimulated a lot of Sunnis to say, "Well, maybe we'll go with these radicals even if it's Zarqawi cuz we're not going to take it from these Shia anymore."
41:34So it it definitely it corked off a effectively an internal religious war that we could have prevented if we had kept the Iranians on their side of the border.
41:45And the even the entire uh the EFP, right? The the the really nasty roadside bomb, which was you know, you know what a roadside bomb is, of course.
41:55>> HE explosive blows up, energy gets thrown at the vehicle. An EFP, imagine this is copper and you put this on the front of a ex- can filled with explosives. The explosive starts here with a cap.
42:08The explosive wave goes through what C4 goes about 22 to 25,000 ft per second.
42:15It turns this copper plate into a copper slug going about 8,000 ft per second.
42:19Bores right through the side of your Humvee or your Abrams tank. That was built, organized, supplied by the Iranians. The same ones that Condi Rice prevented us from taking out.
42:32It's too bad. It was a I I feel you. I mean, it's interesting though that like the entire you know, administration that was really pushing this war though would almost get cold feet on something like that once they're there.
42:48That's fascinating to me. No place for half measures.
42:52If you're going to If you're going to If you're going to go that Now that's the thing we have a lot of unserious people in Washington making foreign policy decisions with no skin in the game. So, if you're going to do the you're going to make the call of sending people into harm's way, then let them finish the job and don't hamstring them with 10,000 lawyers and half measures that devalues the actual human sacrifice of your people and of the damage you're causing on the other side as well.
43:23Finish the war, not this managed conflict nonsense. When approximately was that conversation again where she said no?
43:31Early 2004.
43:33Okay, so this is still That's interesting. So, they were already hamstrung at that point with, you know, legal hurdles on everything.
43:42You wouldn't think that >> and and again, that was a that was an It would have been an intelligence program, not a conventional military thing.
43:52Oh, doing that. Right, right, right.
43:54Taking that action.
43:55Is this a You and I were talking before camera cuz obviously this got leaked, so you can talk about it. But were you already a knock at this point for CIA? So, can you explain what that program was cuz the way I understood is that it was a CIA assassination program? So, what was leaked?
44:14And that this is my beef about it. So, the Yeah, the agency had come to me, the director himself, and said, "We want a unilateral um no attribution back to the USG capability to go after targets globally." When was this?
44:342004. Mhm.
44:37And um all of that would have remained silent and sealed.
44:43It was never leaked by me. It was never leaked by the agency, but it was leaked by Leon Panetta when the Obama crowd took over, and he briefed the program and me by name to the House Intelligence Committee, who within a half an hour of him briefing it, cuz one of the members of Congress came out and told me, "Hey, he just briefed you by name for this program."
45:07And within a half an hour of that, the Washington Post and New York Times were calling me for comment.
45:12Now, he was head of the CIA though when he did that, or was this before that?
45:16Panetta was head of the CIA when he did it.
45:18>> When he did this?
45:21Why do you think he did that?
45:23Um I there's nothing positive I can say about him for doing that.
45:30I can imagine.
45:31>> [laughter] >> But it's But it's Whether people love me or hate me, fine. I don't care.
45:38It's not great for any CIA director to brief people by name that are extending themselves, and it's not very good for the CIA to to um promote recruitment of people that will be sticking their neck out for America to get thrown under the bus by a director just cuz you don't like me politically.
45:59Had you had previous disagreements with him on other stuff?
46:02>> Nothing, ever.
46:04In fact >> that. In fact, the only other interaction the company had with him was they were chicken [ __ ] scared. They wanted to close this drone base, which was essential.
46:15Drone base? That we were operating.
46:17Okay.
46:19In a dangerous part of the world.
46:21And my people had to go in and brief him in person to say, "We got it, sir. We're not afraid of getting run over. Give us these heavier weapons. We got it."
46:30And okay, fine. That was literally the only interaction. And um I I whether he was just a partisan hack or an [ __ ] or weak or whatever, but briefen briefing assets by name is not only wrong, it's illegal.
46:45>> Right. I was just going to ask that. So, why if he's briefing you by name and then it leads to the press >> whole idea if you're if you're a NOC, if you're a NOC, you have a file. It's called a 201 file. I definitely had that.
46:58To brief it by name is is really bad intelligence policy and it's a violation of federal law.
47:05Yeah, it's like the Valerie Plame thing.
47:07Yeah, but worse. I mean, she was she was an analyst at some nuclear conference and here I was running a killing people.
47:17A unilateral capability that the US government needed. Right.
47:23So, I know you can't comment on specifics of things that happened at Oh, you can. Well, the last chapter of my book is written from uh from open source stuff. So, you can infer Yeah, but we Yeah, it was a it was a hell of an education.
47:40What All right. So, they come to you in '04.
47:43They ask you to do this stuff. I'm I'm so curious by the by the background with how this stuff works because A NOC is someone who's supposed to be completely deniable. Meaning like if you are I mean, here's the thing. The The fact is without any any American that volunteers because of their unique access or placement to help their country with intelligence matters or providing cover or providing the means to ship something or whatever.
48:16That is run through the NR department NR part of the CIA National Resources.
48:20>> Okay.
48:23And so they handle all the knocks.
48:26And that should be a an A of a huge amount I mean Americans globally have a lot of unique access and talents and that's a huge part of the reliable capability. And so that's my beef with Panetta.
48:41You might not like me.
48:43I did everything the agency ever asked and we did it well. Mhm. And we protected all their people in the most difficult places ad nauseam.
48:53The guys that um were in Benghazi.
48:58Right? After the US ambassador was killed by terrorists.
49:04And he was supposed to be being protected by State Department diplomatic security people who incidentally fired how many rounds? How many rounds did the State Department security people fire protecting their guy? Zero.
49:18The guys that were over at the agency annex.
49:22Many of them had worked for BW.
49:23Had worked for us before before they were direct hired by the agency.
49:27So we'd done all of that.
49:30And then to get thrown under the bus by the director cuz he doesn't like me or he's afraid or whatever. That's just [ __ ] I I have issue with that. And so I the denouement on that is I'm living overseas and I get um contacted by the embassy that I'm now on the okay to hit list because of that.
49:48I'm sure because there was more blowback from Yeah, whatever. but That's got to be crazy. I mean, I I would be I can't even imagine how angry you were about that.
50:01I It it's It's part of the um I would say it's part of the lawfare of the left where they make you toxic and unbankable and they just throw a lot of [ __ ] at you to make you toxic so you are choked off of access to business, banking, credit. They make you unbankable?
50:21Oh, yeah.
50:22Like internationally or Okay.
50:27Because of the type of team but in the US were you unbankable, too? Oh, yeah.
50:32Really?
50:32>> Yep. Big banks, sure. Sure, the all the [ __ ] that that got thrown at us after Nisour Square Yeah, we got thrown at and all the all that bureaucratic attack, yeah, that's all that's all part of a kind of a left-wing playbook.
50:46So. So you So did Have you ever talked with Panetta about that? Have Have you Yeah.
50:52>> did. I I confronted him at an OSS dinner.
50:54When was this?
50:57Probably five or six years ago.
51:00I said, you know, I said, you know, that's pretty [ __ ] up when you name an asset like that. Well, I I was under a lot of pressure.
51:08Like, really? You're under pressure?
51:11I said, what does that do for recruiting? And he just He turned and walked away. He was a [ __ ] Oh, he didn't handle it. No.
51:17>> stand on business.
51:20That's tough.
51:21>> [laughter] >> Good for you, though, for confronting him. I mean, I Yeah. I'm a pretty direct guy.
51:26>> Yeah, I I kind of got that.
51:29What was the You mentioned Nisour Square, though. I I have to give credit to Shawn for this because he did the podcast with >> Shawn, and that's why I did his podcast originally cuz he Cuz he did that.
51:40>> He did those guys so fairly. Yeah, so to be perfectly honest with you, I had found Shawn, I think short and maybe a month or two before I watched that podcast. And when I found him, I was going through his catalog at the time.
51:55And I saw he had those guys in. I'm like, "Oh, he had the Blackwater guys in. Didn't they like blow everyone away?" So, I didn't watch it. And then [snorts] I watched it and then went and reviewed the case and everything that happened.
52:08And I have to say, it completely changed my mind on it. It feels like when you look at the facts of the case and I guess you could call it destroyed evidence, too, between the drone footage and stuff like that. Like those guys got hung out to dry. But, for people out there who are unfamiliar with the case, can you just walk them through what happened in '07 here?
52:28Sure. That was um we were providing security personnel for the State Department, where we would perform under a bid contract, 1,100 page-long contract of all the things that we'll be trained to and how supplied and all the rest. And we would send them to the State Department and chop them to their operational control. So, I wasn't controlling the mission.
52:51Drive here, turn there, all this.
52:53A State Department, the Regional Security Officer, the Chief of Security for the State Department would be.
52:59And in that case, um in September of 2007 was during the surge, right? So, there was a big extra amount of US forces in because they were trying to get a handle on a very aggressive insurgency.
53:12And um the [clears throat] week before it started with one of our helicopters being shot down by um by insurgents.
53:20And then two other attacks with explosives against our vehicles put some of our guys in the hospital.
53:26And then Nisour Square, uh September 16th, 2007 was a um was a car bomb outside of a building where we had a USAID official.
53:39Um and normally the guys would hard point, meaning wait, at a building, but all the Iraqi guards ran away, so they decided to move, and so they called for a support team, one of these Raven 23 is a tactical support team, meaning a bigger set of gun trucks to provide support in a firefight.
54:00And so they were to block and certain entrances to a traffic circle so that the fleeing guys could flow through there safely. Because if you know anything about deer hunting, you always want to hunt a trail intersection. You want to kill Americans, hunt the traffic circles because you know they're going to pass through.
54:21And so this team is there, and of course they've gotten a briefing that morning to be on the lookout, a bolo announcement for a white Kia, which is likely a car bomb.
54:33And all the other cars stop in the traffic circle like they're supposed to, except a white Kia, which keeps coming and coming, and they go through all the different signaling of flashing lights and um lasers and smokes and all the other stuff, keeps coming. They light it up.
54:53Sadly, well, it wasn't a car bomb. It was a guy driving his mother.
54:58And um And then a firefight breaks out and um from other insurgents or somebody firing at the vehicles, one of the vehicles actually takes a round, which skips off the pavement, and it severs the um the coolant drain line. So all the coolant drains out of this $500,000 State Department armored truck.
55:22And of course, modern electronic engines, if no coolant, no motor, so they're delayed further as they're trying to rig a tow to drag this thing out of there.
55:31They do, and I get a call uh uh, that night from our country manager.
55:36He goes, "Hey, boss, just let you know we uh uh there was a firefight [clears throat] today. It's actually much milder than the ones we've had just the previous few days."
55:46Uh, in case there's a uh, you know, media fury. And and this one went absolutely high and right.
55:54Um How quickly did it go? I I don't remember. I'm sure >> Within hours. Within hours. And and so, you know, we'd had indications from the Iranians that they really hated us. They really hated I mean, can you imagine we did stuff for the intelligence community? They knew who Blackwater was.
56:09>> Mhm.
56:10And Blackwater protected the most Al Jazeera or newsworthy targets. Meaning, you know, cuz if they catch an American, cut the head, that's their propaganda thing.
56:23And so, the Iranians knew who we were.
56:25Um, and um, man, between a left-wing media, which in the Vietnam War they went after our troops, this time they went after contractors.
56:37And um Blackwater represented everything they loved to hate, even though we were tiny compared to the Lockheeds and the Boeings and all the rest, because we uh, I was a sole owner.
56:51Um, company was successful. I was married to a woman.
56:55I had kids. I was Roman Catholic.
56:57>> [laughter] >> Right? I mean, I I represented everything the left loved to hate.
57:01And the business made money. And sometimes our guys were armed, and sometimes they had to use those arms.
57:07And uh, you know, in Iraq, I think we did more than 100,000 missions.
57:11Uh, and no one under our care was ever killed or injured. And in less than 1/2 of 1% of the time was there ever a firearm used. And, you know, all that stuff was logged.
57:20But this one went really high and right.
57:23And um yeah, State Department threw us under the bus for doing exactly what their mission was.
57:30And uh, and and yeah, it was a it was a mess. And and yes, it was not a not a good shoot.
57:38But, having followed the rules of engagement, um when you're when you have it just probably 2 months before, we had a Suburban, a armored Suburban that weighs probably 8,000 10,000 lb that was thrown almost 150 m into a building from a car bomb.
58:01So, when you see your buddies die from that, and you see a a white Kia that doesn't stop in traffic that's coming on to you, yeah, they engaged and uh tragically it was a not the right shoot. But, you know, as recently as 2000 I think 14 or 15 in DC, there was a woman that drove her car into security barriers outside one of the federal buildings, and federal law enforcement officers opened up on her, and she drove away, rammed into some other buildings up by the Supreme Court.
58:41Whoa. And they eventually gunned her down and killed her.
58:45And you know what?
58:46You know what she had in the back of her car? No weapons, no bombs, a baby in a car seat.
58:52Why was she doing that? Did they ever figure that out? No idea. But, you know what? I I see you. Was there any human cry for the federal law enforcement >> Right. killed an innocent woman?
59:03Right. I think >> only imagine the noise that would have been if it was a contractor that took that shot >> I can I'm instead of a federal law enforcement I don't disagree with you.
59:11So, I think like looking back on it >> dozens and dozens of It was not just like a mag, it was lots of dudes sending it.
59:19It's like unfortunately a lot of things in our world is just marketing, you know? And you I always wonder if he named the company like Red Hills or something like that instead of Blackwater. Not that that's a bad name or anything, but it's like it's it's a hard name. You also have a memorable name, Eric Prince, like also pretty hard name, too.
59:41He's like He's like, "No."
59:43>> [laughter] >> You know, I but this comes back to we had asked the State Department for [snorts] cameras.
59:50We wanted to put basically dashcam cameras like the I like I I I got a police car in our vehicles to prevent exactly this kind of he said he said she said disagreements. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below.
Read the essay version →