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One CA Podcast episodes

March 19, 2024 170: Combat First Aid in Ukraine by Michael Baker
Today, we have a special guest episode.
Dana Lombardy of Lombardy Studios hosts talks on military history and current events. To find out more about Dana's work, check out LombardyStudios.com.
For this episode, he brings in retired Rear Admiral Michael Baker, a general surgeon who travels to Ukraine to teach combat first aid.
It's a great story about volunteering and working in a war zone to help Ukrainians save soldiers' lives.
Great news: FeedSpot ranked One CA Podcast as one of their top 10 foreign policy podcasts. Check it out at: https://podcasts.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

Special thanks to Max Jansson for posting the
Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins instrumental "I'll see you in my dreams," performed live at Secret Policeman's Third Ball 1987. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wTVLIZaxMk
---
00:00:05    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:41    DANA LOMBARDI
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the War College. My name is Dana Lombardi, and I've been using the facilities here for about 10 years to do War College presentations. They've been mostly historical. In the past couple of years have been trying to look at more contemporary things that are going on in the world. This morning we're going to talk about the events in Ukraine and also how this impacts ourselves and our allies. We have really good speakers who have personal experience with this. And they have a lot of things to tell us about what is happening there and also what they have done and some of their personal experiences. The gentleman to my immediate right is retired Admiral Michael Baker, a surgeon.

00:01:26    Jack Gaines
Today, we have a guest episode. Dana Lombardi of Lombardi Studios hosts talks on military history and current events. To find out more about Dana's work, check it out on LombardiStudios .com. For this episode... He brings in retired Rear Admiral Michael Baker, a general surgeon who travels to Ukraine to teach combat first aid. It's a great story about volunteering and working in a war zone to help Ukrainians save soldiers' lives. So let's get started.

00:01:55    MICHAEL BAKER
Thank you for that kind introduction. So I got to tell you this story about how I got involved. Why is a general surgeon going to Ukraine in the middle of a war? In fact, a retired general surgeon. I mean, what am I doing? I decided after all my surgery training and medical school and everything, I felt grateful to grow up in this country, believe it or not. And I decided I would join the military. The military at that time was scaling down, but very short of specialists. So they said, well, we're going to put you in the reserves for now in case we ever need you and we'll find something for you to do. And I said, okay, I can do a couple of years in the reserves and then that won't interfere with my career and I'll go back to civilian life. So I signed up. Little did I know that they would hook me into doing more than those two or three years in the reserves, and I wound up spending quite a long time retiring as a rear admiral with a warfare pin of river and coastal patrol, which at the time was extremely unusual. I had all kinds of odd assignments, most of which had nothing to do with surgery. It was very strange. So Europe's been at peace for 75 years since World War II. How did this happen? If you believe Mark Twain, he says God created war so that Americans would learn geography. And normally I start this talk with some history and geography. We won't dwell on that today because of our time constraints. Normally this is like a 90 -minute talk. So Ukraine's been part of many countries. Borders changed all the time, but Ukrainians are not Russians. That's the key thing here. They never have been. There's a lot of reasons that Putin listed for attacking Ukraine. One of the big ones that's outlandish is NATO's getting too close. So I have to show you that one real quick on the map. And you can come up with some arrows. But if you look at the dark blue, dark purplish color, those are the original NATO countries sort of pre -1991. You know, England and France and Germany. And the purple ones... adjacent to Ukraine, those are all former Russian Soviet republics. So, you know, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, what did they do after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Well, they all rushed to join NATO because they're afraid of the Russians. What a surprise. Where is the border close? Well, they already share a common border. So how do you get any closer to NATO than sharing a common border? They also are pretty close to Turkey. Anybody know what that is? Hunt for Red October? It's Kaliningrad, Sean Connery's port of embarkation with a nuclear sub. There's a Russian naval base with nuclear weapons in the middle of NATO countries. Now, I'm a surgeon, so we would call this a metastasis. I don't know what to call it geopolitically, but it's right between Lithuania and Poland, and my prediction would be that the next place that the Russians would go if they triumphed in Ukraine would be to open that corridor. So the Russian effort backfires so extravagantly that previously neutral Finland and Sweden decide to join NATO. You know, it's kind of interesting. So now there's more NATO countries. It really did backfire because everybody fears the Russian bear, as you'll see. And I put that on there just to remind everybody that the bear is coming. There's really reason here why the Ukrainians stood to fight. Everybody thought it would collapse in two weeks, including all the NATO countries and the Western powers. They did stand. And I think it's well exemplified by the response. There's 18 guys on a place called Snake Island. And the garrison on Snake Island became famous because they were approached by a battle cruiser, the Moskva. And the 18 guys gave a response that became symbolic to the rest of the war with the Russian military. And it actually have we have postage stamps now that talk about it. Next slide.

00:05:46    MICHAEL BAKER
Just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian warship ordered Ukrainian soldiers manning a Black Sea outpost on Ukraine's Snake Island to surrender. What happened next made headlines around the world.

00:06:04    MICHAEL BAKER
It was the go F yourself heard round the world. And tonight we're learning the Russian warship that attacked Snake Island has been destroyed by Ukrainian forces. The Times of London reporting that the Vasily Bikov seen in this earlier video was hit during a firefight after the Ukrainians used a smaller vessel to lure the Russian ship closer to shore where a hidden missile battery could open fire.

00:06:25    MICHAEL BAKER
You know, I'm a sailor, but I would never say anything like that. So what it really amounts to is the fact that fighting for your home is a lot different than being an invader who fights to loot and to rob and to rape and to destroy. Napoleon stated historically that the moral is to the physical as three is to one. It's really true. It might even be higher. I'm going to show you a video of a 15 -year -old boy credited with about 100 kills of Russian armor using his drone to guide the artillery. That's pretty amazing for a 15 -year -old. So how did I get involved with this? To tell you the quick story, I have a friend and shipmate named Malcolm Nance. He was an MSNBC contributor. He's an author. First week of the war, he predicted that Ukraine would beat Russia. He was an outlier. And then he went and joined the International Legion and went to Ukraine. So there's volunteers from over 50 countries. They get background checks and psyche evals, unlike the Russians who take them out of jail and prison. He returned home in August to promote his book, and he was at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. And so I said, I'm going to come down there and let's go out and talk after the lecture. He gave a great discussion about Ukraine. Interesting guy. And he wrote a book called They Want to Kill Americans about militias and terrorists. Great read, actually, fairly interesting. And even though I don't really drink, I learned what certain drinks like a French 75 was. I didn't even know what that was, but now I know. So I want you to meet my friend Malcolm Nance. He's an author. He's an NBC commentator. He's an intelligence guy from the Navy background. And he's the only one who predicted Russia would lose. So here's a clip from the Commonwealth Club. I said this on MSNBC. I said,

00:08:02    MICHAEL BAKER
Club. I said this on MSNBC. I said, these guys are going to fight. I can tell by the look in this man's eye. He is ready to kick Russian ass and enjoy it. And, you know, he's a very short guy, he's a thick guy, you know. And the other commander, the commander of land warfare was General Serski. You know, guy's about five foot five. Five foot fives of five foot five inches of I cannot be defeated. No, really. And as I looked at them, I was like, whoa. I think there's something happening here in media that is not being factored. And I said this on one of the MSNBC shows about three or four days before the invasion. And they were like, well, you know, the invasion will be quick. Analysts were coming on. The invasion will be quick. They'll lose rather fast. And I said, hey. Let me tell you something. They were talking about the Ukrainians losing.

00:08:52    SPEAKER_01
were talking about the Ukrainians losing. He would be in there within two weeks. It would all be over. The entire war would be over.

00:08:54    MICHAEL BAKER
He would

00:08:58    MICHAEL BAKER
entire war would be over. Keefe would be taken in 72 hours. I kept thinking, this is why intelligence field collectors are the smart ones to listen to. We're on the ground. And I've been in the city of Keefe. It's the size of Chicago. It has a bigger population. It's five million people. And these 20 stories Soviet apartment blocks that are 20 buildings deep. And I'm like, no one's ever taking this city. All right. There's little old ladies right now who are woefully heartbroken. that they didn't get to throw their Molotov cocktails out the 18 -story window on top of Russian tanks. If you go to the checkpoints in Kiev right now, there are thousands upon thousands of Molotov cocktails in crates waiting for the reservists because they expected to be fighting hand and fist with the Russians. The Russians never got near going anywhere near taking. Kiev, except one ambush that the Ukrainians let them into the city and slaughtered them wholesale. And, you know, I said the same thing in the pre -war. I go, they're never going to, they're going to lose this war. They don't have enough men to win this war. The Russians. Yes.

00:10:12    MICHAEL BAKER
So he goes back to put on his uniform and roughly a week later, out of the blue, I get some contact saying, would you be willing to go teach combat casualty care in Ukraine? And in this case, it was the International Medical Corps reaching out in the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. And it trains medical providers to deal with acute injuries on the highway, on the battlefield, wherever. But it's really very straightforward. It was introduced about 1980 because an orthopedic surgeon and his family went down in the airplane, and he felt that the family had been very badly handled and poorly treated. And he said, we've got to teach people how to do this right. There are ways to do it. So it's been taught to over a million doctors and other medical professionals. In the U .S. military, we teach it to physicians assistants and to dental officers because they got to know. You never know when combat will come their way. So here I am, retired guy, walks the dog, tells his kids, I'm going to go to Europe and teach ATLS. They're used to me going to South Korea and Germany, so they didn't think too much about it. And I come from a background where you don't really tell people where you're going anyway, because that's operational security. Some of you may know and nod your heads when I say that. It's 12 hours from San Francisco to Warsaw, but we had a layover, of course. It was 18 hours by the time I got there. Then it gets more interesting. I have to change planes, and I go to the desk, and I go, where's the gate for this city, and how do you pronounce it? And she smiles and tells me the gate and says it's pronounced Zhezhov just like it's spelled. And I go, okay, next slide, please. Yeah, I guess I won't be learning Polish any too quickly. So we fly into Zhezhov. And there we get a van to the border. And we actually get out and it's 90 minutes, but we meet a van on the other side. The reason is there's 10 miles of trucks backed up on the border and it would take us three days to get through. So we walk across, which is why they told us to only bring carry -ons, which was really good advice. But we didn't get to go straight because you don't want to travel with all those ammunition trucks and fuel trucks and stuff. So you get to take a few side roads. It takes a little longer. So we finally get there and Ukraine felt like a country that was at war, but it didn't really feel like war imminent. You know, there were checkpoints and fighting posts and armed guards and air raid sirens and bomb shelters everywhere. And going down the highway, you had these barricades with concrete blocks and sandbags. Those are called serpentines. You're met by the greeters, just like at Walmart. And the greeters sometimes will inspect your van or your truck to see what you're doing. And we got an app installed
25 min
March 12, 2024 169: Part II, Bas Wouters on Influence and Persuasion
Please welcome Maria Yager and Bas Waters to One CA Podcast.
Originally, I was cohosting the show with Mariah, but I got OBE'd (or overcome by events), so Maria covered until I arrived and helped with questions and answers.
This is part two of a two-part episode on influence and persuasion.
FeedSpot ranked One CA Podcast as one of their top 20 foreign policy podcasts. Check it out at: https://podcasts.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special thanks to Max Sedgley for remixing Sarah Vaughan's iconic signing of the theme to the show Max Gunn. Found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33GglmH6U1k
---
00:00:02 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:37 Mariah Yager
Hi, everyone. I'm Mariah Yeager, your host for today's SMA speaker session titled On Persuasion. We have Bass Waters, who is co -founder and CEO of the Cialdini Institute. He's the author of Online Influence, which is combining Dr. Cialdini's work with insights from other behavioral experts, creating a highly practical framework to boost online results.
00:00:57 Jack Gaines
Please welcome Mariah Yeager and Bass Waters to 1CA Podcast. Originally, I was co -hosting the show with Mariah, but I got OBE'd, or overcome by events, so Mariah covered until I arrived to help with questions and answers. This is part one of a two -part episode on influence and persuasion, so enjoy.
00:01:14 Mariah Yager
So after establishing the Cialdini Institute, companies like Disney, Bookings .com reached out to our speaker today. So he has extensive experience. We're happy to have him today. So with that, I'm going to turn the floor over to Mr. Waters.
00:01:28 Bas Wouters
Thank you, Mariah, for this great introduction. Thank you all for joining and to dive deeper into the practical application of the science of persuasion. I'm representing the Cialdini Institute. I'm aware that a lot of you know the great work of Dr. Robert Cialdini, and he is my business partner in the Cialdini Institute. I'd like to start with some things you may not know about Robert Cialdini, and one of the things that we are very proud of is this research in 2022. They established a jury of the top entrepreneurs in the world, which included Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. And they voted for the best business book of all time. And as you probably can guess, the winner was Influence from Dr. Robert Cialdini. And actually, they repeated this study with those top entrepreneurs. And in 2023, again, the winner was Influence from Dr. Cialdini. I understood from Jack and Mariah that most of you read his book, published in 1984. And Dr. Cialdini became a professor at the University of Arizona State. He started lecturing, PhD students, but he also started to do research. And one thing that fascinated Dr. Cialdini is why people can influence so easily. I'll give you an example. One day at home, somebody rings the doorbell. He opens. He makes a nice chat. Goes back inside and then he realized, why do I suddenly have a new energy supplier? I didn't need that. I didn't ask for it. I said yes to the request. So that fascinated him. So he started looking into the research that was already done for influence, the science of persuasion. But he found actually the first influence research of psychologists who were wondering in the 1930s. When Hitler came to power, how can a man who is an advocate for such a totalitarian regime, how can he move complete societies in his direction? So Dr. Cialdini was looking at approximately 40 to 50 years of data on influence research. And then he realized something important. These are lab studies. But influence is done in the real world. So I need to go out there where it actually happens. So Dr. Cialdini went undercover and he infiltrated a lot of training programs. So training programs on sales, marketing, VR. But he also infiltrated army recruitment and even calls. And after three years, he collected his findings and connected that to the 50 years of research that already was out there. And then he wrote his book, Influence. And in that book, first he wrote the six principles of persuasion. And later, in this new and expanded edition in 2021, he added a seventh principle. These seven principles of persuasion, these are the universal principles of persuasion. Sayers shows us these principles work in every culture, in every language, in every country. There's also research on what is the most powerful principle per culture, but they all work in every culture. The thing is what Dr. Cialdini wondered during his research is something different because everybody told him, well, we are from marketing. That's completely different than PR. Well, I'm from PR. That's different than sales. Sales is different from advertising. So everybody told him. how different everybody was. What he was looking for, what is the same? Which principles motivates in every case to move more people in your direction? Like I said, in 1984, he found six. Based on research, he added a seven principle. So these principles are reciprocity. If I invite you to my birthday party, you feel a pressure. To invite me back at your party. Liking. We like to say yes to our friends. To give you an example. If I walk here on the street. And a complete stranger is moving houses. And they say to me. Well boss. Do you want to help me? Most likely I would tell that stranger. I don't have time. Or no I don't want to help you. But if my best friend would ask me that same question. Probably I say yes. The fourth principle is social proof. There's something interesting with social proof. In its first edition, it was referred to as consensus. Dr. Cialdini created the term social proof. What it states is, when we are uncertain, we look to other people to decide what we should do. Think, for example, about booking .com. Which hotel should we pick to stay? A thousand people tell me this is a great hotel, so I booked that hotel. The fifth principle is authority. We follow the advice of the experts. This is an interesting one because how we base in our decision making if somebody is an expert is very interesting. To give you an example, if I go to my general doctor. I just ask him questions about whatever health condition I have. But who ever checked the diplomas of that general doctor? Probably nobody did that. But based on his title, I already trust him that he has expertise about whatever complaint I will bring to him in my health situation. Then consistency. It's about if we made a small commitment previously, we feel an internal pressure to act consistent with what we previously have said or done. Consistency is the most powerful internal driver to motivate into action. And that leads me to the second principle, and that's scarcity. Scarcity is the most powerful external driver that motivates us into action. And you can think, for example, about Black Friday. It started in the US, but now it's spread all over the world. And on Black Friday, everybody is moving into directions just because they assume they can get great deals. Then unity. This is the seventh principle that Dr. Cialdini introduced in his new and expanded edition of Influence. And it's about... Do we belong to the same group? We are all football fans. We are all Americans. So the fact that you belong to the same group may increase the motivation to say yes to a certain request if that is raised to awareness. Those are the seven principles. What's important, these principles are based on science. Everything we do in the Cialdini research has three core values. One is science. The other one is application. So you cannot change your outcome just with theory. You have to be able to translate the theoretical research into practical application. But that's another very important component of us, which we will discuss into a systematic way of applying today. And the third is ethics. And ethics, it's about these powerful principles. You have to use them in an ethical way because we talk not about manipulation. Influence is not manipulation. Ethical influence is not manipulation because it's raising to awareness parts of information that are also helpful for people to make a decision. And therefore, you create win -win outcomes. Because things are based on science, it can be taught. And if something can be taught, it can be learned. There are a lot of people out there who have a natural gift to be persuasive. They often end up in marketing, sales, or leadership positions because they have this natural ability to persuade. We know one thing for sure. People who master the science that don't have the natural ability to persuade are more powerful persuaders than people who have the natural ability to persuade. Can you imagine if you have both? One, you have a natural skill to be persuasive, plus you master the science. And why this is also important, I train a lot of people all over the world. And especially in sales and marketing, after a training, people told me, now I can actually explain what I was doing. They were successful, but they could not teach it. It's just what comes up to me natural. That is not transferable. So because it's science, it can be taught, and therefore it can be learned by everybody. And today we want to dive into the application. Dr. Neidert has been a right -hand man to Dr. Cialdini for the last 25 years. He is also a professor at ASU University, and he consulted the Fortune 100 companies, but also a lot of government agencies, including intelligence. And every time when he did such a consulting, he selected a principal that was most suitable for that case. And people asked him, of course, Dr. Neidert, why you've chosen reciprocity or why you've chosen scarcity to overcome our influence challenges? And this answer could not be, that's just because I do. Everything is science and research -based. So he developed the core motives model so we can teach you how to select the best principle in every given situation. Let me start by introducing the first core motives model. In an influence challenge, the relationship we have with a person is very important. To give you an example, let's imagine I'm in a very important meeting and my phone rings and I look at my phone and I see somebody that I don't speak so often. What would I probably do? I wouldn't pick up my phone. But imagine the same situation. I'm in that very important meeting and my spouse or your partner or friend that knows you are in that important meeting calls you. Now probably what will happen is you will excuse yourself and try to pick up the phone to at least know why they are calling you because you assume there's something urgent. You do this based on the relationship. you have with that person. And if you go back to the 50s, one of the communication models that was introduced was the sender -receiver model, which says, when you send out a message with words and images, then you have the receiver. That receiver processes the information they get and make it a message. Then you have the channel. Those channels are now extended in the online world. First, you had face -to -face. Then we had... face -to -face and phone calls. And now you have face -to -face, video calls, phone calls, text messages, emails. Also, the channel is very interesting to look at and which one is most persuasive in influence. Then back to the first core modus model. So as I shared with you in the situation, do I pick up my phone during that important meeting? Yes or no? So in any given influence situation, we have to establish a relationship. Some questions that you can ask yourself, well, how can you recognize a signal that you have to work on your relationship? Do people pick up the phone, for example? Do they answer my text messages because you see those blue check marks in WhatsApp, for example, but they don't reply? You saw that they got it, they read it, but they don't reply. People don't pay attention when you are in a meeting. They are distracted. Look at their phone. These are all signals where you should recognize in the future, I need to work on my relation. And the three principles that most likely will do the job to cultivate a relationship or repair an existing relationship are reciprocity, liking, and unity. So what you see... Pulling here is now we can recognize a signal. Why we might not reach our goals, why we get a no instead of a yes, can only be one core motive and the whole machine is start pinning again. So relationship can be one of those gears we have to work on. It's not a one, two, three step model. It could be in a new influence challenge, but it could also be just fix the relationship. So influence is start to move in your direction. So the second core motive that I like to introduce is uncertainty. In every decision -making process, we get uncertain most of the time. To give you an example, let's assume you want to buy a new kitchen. You go into Google and you type in buy a new kitchen. And then bang, you right away have like a million hits. Unconscious, we get uncertain. Where do I click? What are signals? What could you recognize when other ways that people are uncertain? Well, if you communicate with them, they might just say it. I don't know what to do. Or I doubt that this is the best decision for me. These kinds of expressions will help you recognize that people are still uncertain. Here's another thing people do. They start improving your offer. One of times we think, oh, but I am the expert. Why they don't listen to me? It's because they are uncertain. Those people don't want to act annoying. They know what to bother you, but they express uncertainty. And you should think I should m
29 min
March 05, 2024 168: Part I, Bas Wouters on Influence and Persuasion
Please welcome Maria Yager and Bas Waters to One CA Podcast.
Originally, I was cohosting the show with Mariah, but I got OBE'd (or overcome by events), so Maria covered until I arrived and helped with questions and answers.
This is part one of a two-part episode on influence and persuasion.
FeedSpot ranked One CA Podcast as one of their top 20 foreign policy podcasts. Check it out at: https://podcasts.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special thanks to Max Sedgley for remixing Sarah Vaughan's iconic signing of the theme to the show Max Gunn. Found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33GglmH6U1k
---
00:00:02 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:37 Mariah Yager
Hi, everyone. I'm Mariah Yeager, your host for today's SMA speaker session titled On Persuasion. We have Bass Waters, who is co -founder and CEO of the Cialdini Institute. He's the author of Online Influence, which is combining Dr. Cialdini's work with insights from other behavioral experts, creating a highly practical framework to boost online results.
00:00:57 Jack Gaines
Please welcome Mariah Yeager and Bass Waters to 1CA Podcast. Originally, I was co -hosting the show with Mariah, but I got OBE'd, or overcome by events, so Mariah covered until I arrived to help with questions and answers. This is part one of a two -part episode on influence and persuasion, so enjoy.
00:01:14 Mariah Yager
So after establishing the Cialdini Institute, companies like Disney, Bookings .com reached out to our speaker today. So he has extensive experience. We're happy to have him today. So with that, I'm going to turn the floor over to Mr. Waters.
00:01:28 Bas Wouters
Thank you, Mariah, for this great introduction. Thank you all for joining and to dive deeper into the practical application of the science of persuasion. I'm representing the Cialdini Institute. I'm aware that a lot of you know the great work of Dr. Robert Cialdini, and he is my business partner in the Cialdini Institute. I'd like to start with some things you may not know about Robert Cialdini, and one of the things that we are very proud of is this research in 2022. They established a jury of the top entrepreneurs in the world, which included Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. And they voted for the best business book of all time. And as you probably can guess, the winner was Influence from Dr. Robert Cialdini. And actually, they repeated this study with those top entrepreneurs. And in 2023, again, the winner was Influence from Dr. Cialdini. I understood from Jack and Mariah that most of you read his book, published in 1984. And Dr. Cialdini became a professor at the University of Arizona State. He started lecturing, PhD students, but he also started to do research. And one thing that fascinated Dr. Cialdini is why people can influence so easily. I'll give you an example. One day at home, somebody rings the doorbell. He opens. He makes a nice chat. Goes back inside and then he realized, why do I suddenly have a new energy supplier? I didn't need that. I didn't ask for it. I said yes to the request. So that fascinated him. So he started looking into the research that was already done for influence, the science of persuasion. But he found actually the first influence research of psychologists who were wondering in the 1930s. When Hitler came to power, how can a man who is an advocate for such a totalitarian regime, how can he move complete societies in his direction? So Dr. Cialdini was looking at approximately 40 to 50 years of data on influence research. And then he realized something important. These are lab studies. But influence is done in the real world. So I need to go out there where it actually happens. So Dr. Cialdini went undercover and he infiltrated a lot of training programs. So training programs on sales, marketing, VR. But he also infiltrated army recruitment and even calls. And after three years, he collected his findings and connected that to the 50 years of research that already was out there. And then he wrote his book, Influence. And in that book, first he wrote the six principles of persuasion. And later, in this new and expanded edition in 2021, he added a seventh principle. These seven principles of persuasion, these are the universal principles of persuasion. Sayers shows us these principles work in every culture, in every language, in every country. There's also research on what is the most powerful principle per culture, but they all work in every culture. The thing is what Dr. Cialdini wondered during his research is something different because everybody told him, well, we are from marketing. That's completely different than PR. Well, I'm from PR. That's different than sales. Sales is different from advertising. So everybody told him. how different everybody was. What he was looking for, what is the same? Which principles motivates in every case to move more people in your direction? Like I said, in 1984, he found six. Based on research, he added a seven principle. So these principles are reciprocity. If I invite you to my birthday party, you feel a pressure. To invite me back at your party. Liking. We like to say yes to our friends. To give you an example. If I walk here on the street. And a complete stranger is moving houses. And they say to me. Well boss. Do you want to help me? Most likely I would tell that stranger. I don't have time. Or no I don't want to help you. But if my best friend would ask me that same question. Probably I say yes. The fourth principle is social proof. There's something interesting with social proof. In its first edition, it was referred to as consensus. Dr. Cialdini created the term social proof. What it states is, when we are uncertain, we look to other people to decide what we should do. Think, for example, about booking .com. Which hotel should we pick to stay? A thousand people tell me this is a great hotel, so I booked that hotel. The fifth principle is authority. We follow the advice of the experts. This is an interesting one because how we base in our decision making if somebody is an expert is very interesting. To give you an example, if I go to my general doctor. I just ask him questions about whatever health condition I have. But who ever checked the diplomas of that general doctor? Probably nobody did that. But based on his title, I already trust him that he has expertise about whatever complaint I will bring to him in my health situation. Then consistency. It's about if we made a small commitment previously, we feel an internal pressure to act consistent with what we previously have said or done. Consistency is the most powerful internal driver to motivate into action. And that leads me to the second principle, and that's scarcity. Scarcity is the most powerful external driver that motivates us into action. And you can think, for example, about Black Friday. It started in the US, but now it's spread all over the world. And on Black Friday, everybody is moving into directions just because they assume they can get great deals. Then unity. This is the seventh principle that Dr. Cialdini introduced in his new and expanded edition of Influence. And it's about... Do we belong to the same group? We are all football fans. We are all Americans. So the fact that you belong to the same group may increase the motivation to say yes to a certain request if that is raised to awareness. Those are the seven principles. What's important, these principles are based on science. Everything we do in the Cialdini research has three core values. One is science. The other one is application. So you cannot change your outcome just with theory. You have to be able to translate the theoretical research into practical application. But that's another very important component of us, which we will discuss into a systematic way of applying today. And the third is ethics. And ethics, it's about these powerful principles. You have to use them in an ethical way because we talk not about manipulation. Influence is not manipulation. Ethical influence is not manipulation because it's raising to awareness parts of information that are also helpful for people to make a decision. And therefore, you create win -win outcomes. Because things are based on science, it can be taught. And if something can be taught, it can be learned. There are a lot of people out there who have a natural gift to be persuasive. They often end up in marketing, sales, or leadership positions because they have this natural ability to persuade. We know one thing for sure. People who master the science that don't have the natural ability to persuade are more powerful persuaders than people who have the natural ability to persuade. Can you imagine if you have both? One, you have a natural skill to be persuasive, plus you master the science. And why this is also important, I train a lot of people all over the world. And especially in sales and marketing, after a training, people told me, now I can actually explain what I was doing. They were successful, but they could not teach it. It's just what comes up to me natural. That is not transferable. So because it's science, it can be taught, and therefore it can be learned by everybody. And today we want to dive into the application. Dr. Neidert has been a right -hand man to Dr. Cialdini for the last 25 years. He is also a professor at ASU University, and he consulted the Fortune 100 companies, but also a lot of government agencies, including intelligence. And every time when he did such a consulting, he selected a principal that was most suitable for that case. And people asked him, of course, Dr. Neidert, why you've chosen reciprocity or why you've chosen scarcity to overcome our influence challenges? And this answer could not be, that's just because I do. Everything is science and research -based. So he developed the core motives model so we can teach you how to select the best principle in every given situation. Let me start by introducing the first core motives model. In an influence challenge, the relationship we have with a person is very important. To give you an example, let's imagine I'm in a very important meeting and my phone rings and I look at my phone and I see somebody that I don't speak so often. What would I probably do? I wouldn't pick up my phone. But imagine the same situation. I'm in that very important meeting and my spouse or your partner or friend that knows you are in that important meeting calls you. Now probably what will happen is you will excuse yourself and try to pick up the phone to at least know why they are calling you because you assume there's something urgent. You do this based on the relationship. you have with that person. And if you go back to the 50s, one of the communication models that was introduced was the sender -receiver model, which says, when you send out a message with words and images, then you have the receiver. That receiver processes the information they get and make it a message. Then you have the channel. Those channels are now extended in the online world. First, you had face -to -face. Then we had... face -to -face and phone calls. And now you have face -to -face, video calls, phone calls, text messages, emails. Also, the channel is very interesting to look at and which one is most persuasive in influence. Then back to the first core modus model. So as I shared with you in the situation, do I pick up my phone during that important meeting? Yes or no? So in any given influence situation, we have to establish a relationship. Some questions that you can ask yourself, well, how can you recognize a signal that you have to work on your relationship? Do people pick up the phone, for example? Do they answer my text messages because you see those blue check marks in WhatsApp, for example, but they don't reply? You saw that they got it, they read it, but they don't reply. People don't pay attention when you are in a meeting. They are distracted. Look at their phone. These are all signals where you should recognize in the future, I need to work on my relation. And the three principles that most likely will do the job to cultivate a relationship or repair an existing relationship are reciprocity, liking, and unity. So what you see... Pulling here is now we can recognize a signal. Why we might not reach our goals, why we get a no instead of a yes, can only be one core motive and the whole machine is start pinning again. So relationship can be one of those gears we have to work on. It's not a one, two, three step model. It could be in a new influence challenge, but it could also be just fix the relationship. So influence is start to move in your direction. So the second core motive that I like to introduce is uncertainty. In every decision -making process, we get uncertain most of the time. To give you an example, let's assume you want to buy a new kitchen. You go into Google and you type in buy a new kitchen. And then bang, you right away have like a million hits. Unconscious, we get uncertain. Where do I click? What are signals? What could you recognize when other ways that people are uncertain? Well, if you communicate with them, they might just say it. I don't know what to do. Or I doubt that this is the best decision for me. These kinds of expressions will help you recognize that people are still uncertain. Here's another thing people do. They start improving your offer. One of times we think, oh, but I am the expert. Why they don't listen to me? It's because they are uncertain. Those people don't want to act annoying. They know what to bother you, but they express uncertainty. And you should think I should m
23 min
February 27, 2024 167: Electronic Warfare with Michael Gudmundson
LTC Brian Hancock interviews CW5 Michael Gudmundson on electronic warfare (EW) and how it shapes current and future conflicts. Gudmundson spent four years at I Corps and then transferred to the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa to plan and advise on EW.
FeedSpot ranked One CA Podcast as one of their top 20 foreign policy podcasts. Check it out at: https://podcasts.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special thanks to Zlatno Doba for arranging "Amazing Theramin Music Compilation." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDYvQ8FsZB4&t=502s
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00:00:07    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:43    BRIAN HANCOCK
Welcome to the One Civil Affairs Podcast. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today, we're going to explore the amazing world of electromagnetic warfare and its implications for the civilian populace. I have with me in the studio, Chief Warrant Officer 5, Michael Gunmanson, one of the Army's foremost experts on electronic warfare. Welcome to the show, Chief. Thanks. Glad to be here. Hey, I'm glad you're here, too. Now, I understand we have reason to celebrate. You recently moved from Chief Warrant 4 to 5. So tell the audience, what does it feel like to not have to ever worry about a senior rater making comments on your OER again?

00:01:24    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
I was so worried about it before that like now I just keep rowing, just I'll keep doing what I do.

00:01:30    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah, explore the freedom. I think the rest of us are always fighting for top blocks and trying to get those rater comments, which seem to be 90 % of promotions. So enjoy the freedom. I was wondering why you are so happy and now I know the truth of the matter. Okay, fantastic. Let me tell the audience a little bit about you. I'm lucky to know you well. Chief Warrant Officer 5 Gunmanson was selected for the very first electronic warfare warrant officer course taught by the U .S. Army in 2009. Following the course, he spent nine years as a brigade combat team electronic warfare technician. He's completed two deployments, first to Iraq and the second to Afghanistan.

00:01:42    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
I know the truth of the matter.

00:02:07    BRIAN HANCOCK
And next, he spent four years at First Corps and then transferred to the United States Army, Europe and Africa, where he has spent the last three years planning and training U .S. Army cyber electromagnetic activities to include electronic warfare. Amazing. I'm really glad you're here. Glad to be here. Okay. Let's give him the standard disclaimer because I know you and I are both opinionated. Reminder to the audience, all remarks made by Chief and I are ours and only ours and do not necessarily represent the views of the U .S. Army or the Department of Defense. All right, Chief, this is a complicated topic and got some pretty smart folks involved in Army and Marine Corps civil affairs, but not all of them spend time working in electronic warfare. So just to set the foundation, I'd like us to define a few terms. that we're going to be using repeatedly through the show. Let's start with that term electromagnetic warfare, EW. What exactly is EW and how does that differ from cyber electromagnetic warfare, SEMA?

00:03:08    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
The way I define it is electromagnetic warfare is radio frequency propagation and how the... all of the spectrum -dependent devices that count on radio frequencies. Electronic warfare is the attack and sensing of systems that are dependent on the spectrum. Where cyberspace electromagnetic warfare and SEMA, it includes EW because so many of those systems touch the spectrum. For example... I have an image of a cyberspace person who is always on the keyboard, who is hacking and doing everything on the Internet. And that image, I see that as there is a point in the nodes from the computer. to the Wi -Fi from the Wi -Fi back into a landline, either into fiber or some other system. And then when it gets pulled into a company that's providing that service, it's going to hit airwaves again in another form. And there's just all these different areas where electronic warfare will deal specifically with frequencies and then cyberspace would have to do with the effects on a device.

00:04:22    BRIAN HANCOCK
Thanks for clarifying that. It sounds like... If we have the Internet of Things in our house, we're doubly screwed. And that's where it gets complicated.

00:04:27    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
screwed. And that's where it gets complicated.

00:04:29    BRIAN HANCOCK
Amen. You mentioned spectrum. Spectrum, I think, is very important. I don't think we have specific MOSs dedicated specifically just to spectrum. I may be wrong about that. You can correct me. But in modern living, spectrum is kind of like air, right? It's all around us. It's ubiquitous. And everyone is using it for almost everything. Communication. to information, to understanding. Tell us a little bit about spectrum. What is it and who's responsible for it?

00:05:01    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
Yeah, spectrum management for the U .S. Army, it's an all -NCO MOS that manages the spectrums. And it is what frequency is your device operating on and how much of a specific frequency does it need to function properly.

00:05:20    BRIAN HANCOCK
And I'm glad to hear that we have the backbone of the Army getting after that with spectrum management. I suspect that that's going to become more and more contested over time, just like airspace, probably carefully metered, especially in these dense countries that we operate in, such as Europe. All right, let's switch gears a moment to your current role here at the United States Army Europe in Africa. Tell the audience a little bit about what you do here.

00:05:46    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
What I do is I help make sure that there are enough electromagnetic and SEMA resources for all of the units in Europe and Africa to conduct their missions and operations and training.

00:05:56    BRIAN HANCOCK
So you're kind of like a facilitator or a broker? Absolutely. Well, at your level of excellence, I'm not surprised. You'd be a force multiplier to help all those other people get it right. Do you do any active SEMA planning or coaching, anything like that?

00:06:10    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
Absolutely. If there's a SEMA question that comes up... I'll give my experience and I'll show where electromagnetic warfare and SEMA will fit into the mission.

00:06:21    BRIAN HANCOCK
Great. I wish you would continue that coaching and advice to the people who make GoWarsim and JCATs and these other devices so that we could get a SEMA layer in there. And we'll talk, obviously, later in the show why that's really important from what we're seeing in Ukraine and elsewhere. But keep doing that influencing you're doing. I think we need more of it. All right, let's talk about authorities, right? This is a pretty big topic for any enabler, and SEMA is no exception. What authorities, if any, exist to conduct electronic warfare in Europe or Africa? And how difficult is it to get authorities if you don't have one that you need?

00:06:56    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
The Department of Defense has a spectrum management doctrine regulations at how -to, and every piece of military equipment is annotated in that process. And so that process shows which piece of equipment we work with in the U .S. Army and how much of it can be shared with each country. To get after the authorities, the step number one is can we use the equipment in the country we're in? And then the step number two is how do we assign the frequencies to it? Because we're sharing the spectrum, which is owned by the host nation. Each host nation owns every frequency. In order to transmit on what we want to transmit, we have to share the parameters of the equipment. And there's a process for that. And we make sure that that process is. So that's how we get to the authorities. How long it takes with the processes that we and relationships we've built. If all of the documentation is in order, we can do it in. It's nice to have 30 days, but we can do it much faster. And then if that documentation isn't in order, I think we can do it in about 180 days.

00:08:10    BRIAN HANCOCK
All right. I imagine that varies quite a bit depending on where you're operating. Germany, where we are right now, is a pretty well -oiled machine when it comes to bureaucracy process and paperwork. Certain other countries, I think, is probably closer to the Wild West. So I imagine that that could vary quite a bit. But that's great explanation. It's really important as you move up. that you have those authorities to conduct on frequencies for whatever period is time, for whatever purpose, whatever condition. And ideally, we want to build those authorities into our operations plan in advance so that they're pre -coordinated and train them in exercises too, especially force -on -force tactical type exercises. I think one of the interesting things about electronic warfare and the spectrum itself is that we use antennas as our sensors.

00:08:52    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
think one of the interesting things about electronic warfare and the spectrum itself is that we use antennas as our sensors. Your eyeballs are as close as you're going to get to sensing the spectrum. Light is on the electromagnetic spectrum, but most of the devices we use, we can't actually feel the spectrum being used. And so we have to go through another medium, a computer, to identify whether it's on or off.

00:09:20    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah. I think all those folks in the... Cuban embassy were feeling the spectrum when Russian turned on the microwave emitters. But maybe not normal.

00:09:30    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
Absolutely. That's where you got to say most. But to get those results from what I understand is very high power and very highly specific systems.

00:09:43    BRIAN HANCOCK
Okay, I got it. Many of these folks that we have listening to 1CA podcast are officers and NCOs who have the burden of making things happen. And they have to take senior officers and turn those good ideas into actual executable operations. So they're doing a lot of the sausage mating. So in the intermediate level education that we get on the officer side, one of the things we really don't talk about is the electronic warfare process as to how that moves through boards, bureaus, centers, sales, working groups, all the way to the host nation, the country team, to result in an approved concept of operation that allows us to emit within a host nation. Can you tell those folks who want to incorporate EW into their planning, into their exercises, into their staff products, How do you move an EW CONOP from good idea all the way to firing it?

00:10:49    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
Yeah, for the U .S. Army, there are units that have been fielded equipment or there are units that have requested for equipment and have acquired equipment. In order to do specifically an electronic and attack CONOP, you just need to find the equipment and the power level and then also to plan it.

00:11:09    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah, but can't you get that at RadioShack? Yeah, you probably could. Right? So there's more to it, right, to get an Army approval to do that.

00:11:15    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
Absolutely. In the scenario where you got something from RadioShack and you made a transmitter, you're going to classify the antenna. You're going to measure how far or how powerful it is and at what frequency it's tuned to. And then you're going to have a LAN to do it on. You're going to have to have a sensor to detect it or a device. that you're going to want to jam or interrupt. And the way we do it is you're going to put all of that data in a CONOP or in a request form with the five W's of how you want to perform your electronic attack mission or how you're going to perform your EW effect.

00:11:55    BRIAN HANCOCK
All right. How does that CONOP track through the process? You know, you and I sit at the computer. We ginned something up, and I think it's the greatest idea ever. I don't know if anybody else will, but what's our next stop with that after we've come up with that good idea and dropped it in the format?

00:12:09    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
We start with the signals section, the G6 at UCRF, and that's where they will look at the spectrum needs and determine if they have enough resources for it, if equipment can be turned on, if there is host nation trends. turning on that type of equipment in the location that we want to do it.

00:12:33    BRIAN HANCOCK
Okay. And, you know, like if it's a training area on foreign soil, we might have some type of standing arrangement which would grease the skids, so to speak.

00:12:42    MICHAEL GUNMANSON
And a lot of times in the planning conferences, if there's an event happening, a lot of people would love to have EW into their event.

00:12:47    BRIAN HANCOCK
lot of people

00:12:50    BRIAN HANCOCK
I really think so. You know, we keep looking at all of the CTC rotations, including JRMC. The senior leaders from Forcecom are talking and they say, every time we try and do any type of jamming, the movement goes to hell because nobody knows how to do that. They've forgotten how to operate without all of these bandwidths and all the devices that depend on it. And that doesn't seem to have gotten any better in the last 10 years or so. So I think at every level from tactical on up
40 min
February 20, 2024 166: Ilya Zaslavsky on Alexei Navalny and Russian Political Dissent
With the death of Alexei Navalny, I called Ilya Zaslavsky, A Russian anti-Putin activist, and asked him to come on the show to give some perspective on what happened and its ramifications.
This show was a quick turnaround, so I apologize for the editing. I wanted to get it out to you as soon as possible.
Also, a quick heads-up: FeedSpot just ranked One CA Podcast as one of their top 20 foreign policy podcasts. Check it out at:
https://podcasts.feedspot.com/foreign_policy_podcasts/
---
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
---
Special thanks to the PilSkills Cheftain Channel for creating 11 hours of hip hop instrumentals for the sample. Found on YouTube at (+/-2:40:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl9ZsT3jKs
---
00:00:03    JACK GAINES
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes. Today, we have a special episode.

00:00:40    JACK GAINES
With the death of Alexei Navalny, I called Ilya Zaslavsky, a D .C.-based anti -Putin activist, and asked him to come on the show to give some perspective on what happened and its ramifications. This show is a quick turnaround. So I apologize for the editing, but I wanted to get it out to you as soon as possible. We've known each other for a couple of years now, right? Correct. And for this call, I just wanted to bring you on because of the whole Navalny announcement that he was killed, and it was right in the middle of the Munich Security Conference. It was right when his wife was about to speak, I believe.

00:01:14    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Absolutely, yes. She spoke yesterday and she said that maybe it would have been a better choice for her to go to her family, but... She understood that if Alexei was alive, he would be on this stage speaking against Putin. So that's why she did it.

00:01:29    JACK GAINES
Right. Yeah. And so have you been getting prompt a lot since the Navalny? Do you mind if I just call it a Navalny murder? Even though he was in prison, it was timed specifically for this Munich conference and to send a message to the West. Does that bother you if I call it a murder?

00:01:45    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
No, no, no. It is a murder and it should be called a murder. It's a deliberate assassination.

00:01:50    JACK GAINES
Okay. I try not to editorialize too much, but when something like this happens, it's so obvious that you just kind of have to name it. And I thought of you because you get pinged on these things a lot because of your work with anti -corruption and anti -cliptocracy. And I thought this is a great time to reach out and just get your opinion on what's going on and also talk about how this demonstrates how cliptocracy becomes an ongoing national security threat. Absolutely, it does.

00:02:17    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
And this grave concern has been going on since the beginning of Russian war against Ukraine in 2014, for others much earlier, since actually Putin's speech at Munich conference, I believe it was like 2007 or something, just before Russia attacked Georgia. And within Russian opposition, both within Russia and outside in the diaspora, there have been lots of divisions and lots of different thoughts. But I would say... There were people who were still hopeful to do changes within Russia. And Navalny was their flagman, was their leader, was their organizer. Many people considered him one of the best people who can unite, especially young people and young professionals. Right. Him and Barbouris Nemtsov. And that's why when Nemtsov was killed. There was so much discouragement and tragedy, but people were still hoping that we still got Navalny. And then there was another, I would say, streak of thought and activity that is, especially in the diaspora, where some activists and experts were not hopeful about things within Russia and didn't believe that much can be changed. But they saw a global security. threat coming out of Russia. Sure. Out of Russian corruption and plutocracy. And because they saw it spread in the near broad, that's how Russia used to call former Soviet Union states,

00:03:40    JACK GAINES
of Russian corruption and plutocracy.

00:03:49    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
but also in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, and then in Africa, Southern America, and then in the West, in US, in Canada, in Japan, among G7 and NATO allies. And I belong to the second camp. I don't suggest that they are mutually incompatible, but I never believe that we can actually stop Putin's regime anytime soon. But I always warned since at least 2012 that this is absolutely unprecedented kleptocratic regime. It's worse than Soviet regime in some aspects. And the West is partly complacent in giving resources,

00:04:29    JACK GAINES
resources, money. You're talking about banking. especially intermediaries that help with hiding banking and buying commodities and just feeding this regime allowing it to trade globally in the way that it wants rather than forcing them to trade on the western governance standards and that this will have grave security implications this will this is not something happening in distant russia you know with poor russian people and i sympathize i'm not make sarcasm here but

00:04:30    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
money. You're talking about

00:04:36    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
and just feeding this regime allowing it to trade globally in the way that it wants rather than forcing them to trade on the western governance standards and that this will have grave security implications this will this is not something happening in distant russia you know with poor russian people and i sympathize i'm not make sarcasm here but It will not stay contained within Russia. So this is not some distant story. We in the West will pay a price. In 2012, it sounded freaky and then alarmist. After 2014, it gradually became, the acknowledgement sort of grew. But it still took years and years. And only full -scale attack on Ukraine actually made it mainstream. And now NATO is talking about long -term conflict with Russia. which Russia is forcing on NATO. And everyone is talking finally about defense spending and collective action and containment. So to bring this back to Navalny, Navalny showed the actual magnitude of this corruption. Someone calculated overall, he and his team, around 100 major investigations. And I mean, it depends how one counts, but... I think if you include all the small and little regional investigations and various findings they did on individuals, it will be much more. Like this investigation of Putin palaces and yachts, but also... That's right.

00:06:08    JACK GAINES
That's right. I remember that, the ones that were off the Black Sea, right?

00:06:11    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Yes, and it had millions of views. But what he showed isn't just the fancy and the scary part of corruption. What he showed is the systemic nature of it. And if we're talking about systemic nature, it is not contained within Russia. It is global. They're using global financial system and using lots of various partners, allies, and enablers, including in the West, to carry out what they do. And so that's the legacy of Navalny. For me, he not just mobilized people who wanted to do changes within Russia, but he also showed the international experts applications of This grant corruption for the rest of the world.

00:06:53    JACK GAINES
Then obviously Putin took him seriously because he went after him when he was living overseas and then he captured him when he was in the country. So does that mean that Putin is influenced or his government is influenced by the diaspora and how they think about Russia?

00:07:08    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
It's a great question. To be honest,

00:07:09    JACK GAINES
question. To

00:07:10    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
be honest, I'll be brief about this. I think Putin tolerated Navalny and actually tried to exploit his existence for his own political needs at the time. And his expediency and his needs fluctuated over time and changed significantly over time. I think he always hated the West and the U .S. in particular. Yeah, he blamed him for collapsing the Soviet Union. Yes, and he always had this revanchist kind of mind.

00:07:29    JACK GAINES
for collapsing

00:07:35    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
of mind. What we should not forget about him is that his cool nature is that he's a KGB recruiter.

00:07:40    JACK GAINES
a KGB recruiter. Right, so anytime you offer him an opportunity, he'll explore it to see if he can exploit it. or if it's worth cooperating with. But if it's not, then he'll go against it or undermine it.

00:07:53    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Exactly. He sort of reached the ceiling of globalization. He exploited it to the best of his ability, and then he got disappointed in it, that he couldn't manipulate it further. But while he was still doing it, he was consolidating power within Russia. And I think until maybe 2010, 2012, he was using... Navalny and other investigations from third parties to keep a leash on his own boyah. It's a story ancient as Russian history. Corrupt and tyrant czar keeping at bay his boyahs through third parties and forcing them to fight each other. He basically wanted to have compromise on everyone and some of that compromise to be publicized. But that led some people to... even accuse, you know, Navalny of being a Kremlin's project, which is nonsense, just insane. But I'm sure Navalny was always a genuine activist and a genuine anti -corruption fighter.

00:08:52    JACK GAINES
fighter. He was probably trying to play within the rules at some point to cooperate and still be the opposition. But when he just got to be too dichotic, he just said, that's it. I got to just go all the way with this.

00:09:05    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Exactly. I share the same opinion. Along that murky and bumpy road, Navalny did a lot of things. He removed all the cases that got in his hands, and he mobilized many young people, and he gave hope to many of them. But then the dire times started. Putin really decided to go full -scale against Ukraine, and I believe that's why he started to eliminate opponents physically. And openly.

00:09:36    JACK GAINES
openly. The chair flying contests out of all the windows in Moscow. Yes, and he did these constitutional amendments, which allowed him to basically stay for life and get reelected as many times as he wanted for rigged elections.

00:09:39    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
Yes, and he did these constitutional amendments, which allowed him to basically stay for life and get reelected as many times as he wanted for rigged elections. I think very few people in Russian opposition or among Western policymakers understood the scale of Putin's intentions. He would actually go at the full scale war with Ukraine, but also with the West. What we're witnessing over the last two years is almost total disentanglement of Russia from Western globalization, from Western economic ties. Something that has been built since even Stalin times. The first gas deals were discussed even in the last years of Stalin and then Khrushchev and Brezhnev. He disentangled all of that, even like the most sacred to some of his KGB colleagues and party bosses. So he was preparing for many years for this attack. And Navalny was one of the people who meddled with this policy. And he had to be either squeezed out of the country or eliminated within the country. So they tried to poison him. And then when he returned back to Russia, not receiving the signal to shut up and to stay abroad, they immediately jailed him and they started to isolate him. And they still couldn't manage to do that. because Navalny managed to be vocal even from the prison. So what happened over the last half a year is a clear preparation for the murder because they moved him around the country and eventually put him in this very distant northern region where no one can reach it. They opened criminal cases on his lawyers. So they squeezed two out of his five lawyers out of the country and the three others are now in prison. And he got new lawyers. So he kept on kind of being resurgent in his protest and in his activism. So yeah, they decided to kill him. In any case, it was deliberate and it couldn't have been done without the protest direct order. And you know,

00:11:45    JACK GAINES
there's two things that come to mind. One, a friend of mine who is very familiar with Russia told me a story. He said, when you get to the point where you feel like you can't win, it's like you live in a neighborhood and you really hate the guy next door. And so you start talking to people who are arsonists and you just start passing out matches and say, just go burn something, just go burn something, whatever, just go burn stuff. And you may burn down your own house, but eventually they're going to burn down that guy's house and you'll be happy. And that's kind of the mindset is if I'm going down, everyone's burning down. And so, which is a very dire view of current conditions. But to me, it shows the willingness to take that risk of losing his money. He's willing to do that because he'd rather take new money out of Russia. He'll take more money out of the foreign campaigns where Wagner and other groups are running mines in Africa. He can get more money. He doesn't worry about the money. It's the power and the position that he worries about. The second thing that gets me is I don't see a transition plan.

00:12:11    ILYA ZASLAVSKY
that's kind

00:12:40    JACK GAINES
I don't see a transition plan. So he doesn't care. Once he passe
34 min
February 13, 2024 165: Part II of the Courtney Mulhern and Dan Joseph interview
Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, Author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts.
His articles and tools are to help soldiers and families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier / happier lives.
As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she is a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer, so I put the two together for this episode.
Dan Joseph's info:
https://combatpsych.com
"Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts":
https://www.amazon.com/Backpack-Rucksack-Leadership-Resilience-Military
Website "Combat Psych" where you can find more information about him and the things he's working on: https://www.combatpsych.com
Instagram: @mhen2.mentalhealth
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of US foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special Thanks to Amr Diab for the song and album "Amarain."
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6RC2T3Q7rs
---
Transcript for episode I&II
00:00:00    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. Contact the show. Email us at [email protected]. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Okay, testing.

00:00:37    COURTNEY MULHURN
Can you hear me, Dan?

00:00:38    DANNY JOSEPH
Yes, loud and clear. Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack, Insight into Leadership and Resilience for Military Experts. His articles and tools are to help soldiers and their families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier, happier lives. As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she's a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer. So I put the two together for this episode. This is part one of two. I'll have a link to his site in the show notes. So back to Courtney.

00:01:14    COURTNEY MULHURN
Hi, Dan, and welcome to the 1CA podcast.

00:01:17    DANNY JOSEPH
Thanks for having me. Yes,

00:01:18    COURTNEY MULHURN
we've got a lot to talk about today. Looks like you've been very busy with several books out now and still more coming. So I want to talk to you about all of that. But before we get into that, I just want to hear a little bit about your military service.

00:01:33    DANNY JOSEPH
Yeah, I was a combat engineer, training folks to go deploy, and was a platoon leader. Got to spend a lot of time with the Joes out in the field. And it was a short contract. I was only in for three and a half years. And I'm out now, but definitely I'm looking at rejoining in other capacities.

00:01:53    COURTNEY MULHURN
Okay. So kind of moving into your writing process, just kind of curious how you got into writing.

00:02:01    DANNY JOSEPH
So the main crux of it was getting out of the military, trying to fit in society and realizing I was totally different. I changed in a big way that I didn't expect. It was quite subtle, to be honest. And I joined old. I joined at 32. So a lot of my buddies were 18, 19 when I met them. So I had to go through basic training before OCS. And so mental health was a big issue due to COVID. I was in the military during the lockdowns. I had a soldier survive his suicide attempt. Another friend of mine lost 13 men from his unit to suicide after Afghanistan, which is crazy, crazy numbers. I'm shoppable. I need to think about. And so when I got out, I just wanted to make sense of what was going on. What I felt as points of friction with my identity and who I was, I also wanted to apply, because I'm a big nerd, aspects of neurophysiology to the concept of being a leader in the military. What that means in an environment where your sympathetic response and their sympathetic response are constantly triggering on and off due to high intensity, high urgency, combat experience, things of that sort. Working with a lot of combat veterans. I witnessed the weight that they carried. And it just begged the question, how does a military leader stay tactically aggressive and at the same time show consideration and care and love for the men and women who are in their platoon, in their unit, who potentially are struggling with invisible weight? And so it's just one big constellation of variables. There's so many moving parts. So writing was just my way of kind of trying to process all this.

00:03:39    COURTNEY MULHURN
So where does one even start? How do you start to organize the thoughts pen to paper?

00:03:45    DANNY JOSEPH
So my first book was a journal entry that turned into like 400 pages. When I got out, I thought about my soldier, Cody. He wrote the introduction to the book. The foreword was written by Austin, who lost 13 of his men. And I started journaling on what could be done to help those who are hurting and struggling with depression, with suicidality, with difficult feelings. So I started a journal entry about the neurobiology that underlies chronic depression. So it was kind of like this dual process of what does my gut tell me? And then what does the science tell me? And I was trying to make sense of this. And all of a sudden I realized, hey, this is an interesting dualistic process here. So I'm looking at warm, fuzzy feelings. And then I'm looking at hardcore functional MRIs and brain scans and all that. And I wanted to marry the two. And then that turned into multiple pages. And then I thought, well, I could write about another soldier right now that I know. I could write about a Marine that I met and an airman and a Navy rescue swimmer, a Navy EOD. And so I started piecing together kind of this crumb trail of service members who inspired me and touched my life even before I joined the military. And this book came out with a little nuggets of advice that hopefully will help. Incoming leaders, especially junior officers, have a special kind of consideration for the nuanced variables of being a leader.

00:05:14    COURTNEY MULHURN
So then Backpack to Rucksack. So was there anything specific that made you want to focus your thoughts into this book? Or how did this one start?

00:05:27    DANNY JOSEPH
So yeah, this one started as the journal entries. And then I created the Combat Psych Handbook as a boiled down version of it. And I gear it specifically towards men because men tend to have less emotional vocabulary and they're much more inclined if you look at the rates of suicidality and successful suicides. It's way higher. I think it's four to one when it comes to men. And so there's just such a stigma on talking about feelings and discussing things. And so I wanted to give the troops some really, really boiled down lists of thoughts and phrases, self -talk, journal prompts. and just variations on how to describe their feelings, how to understand their feelings, and why it doesn't mean that they're weak because they experience very inconvenient feelings at times. Again, it goes down to the neurocircuitry of the brain. So that was a distilled version of Backpack to Rucksack.

00:06:21    COURTNEY MULHURN
I like how you organize the chapters. So you kind of give keywords at the beginning that will be discussed throughout the chapter with some definitions, and then an introduction, how to be a good... military leader, the psychological application, and then leadership advice?

00:06:38    DANNY JOSEPH
While I was in the Army, during the lockdowns, things got slow, right? A lot of the pipelines were shut down. So Ranger School, Airborne, Aerosol, everything was just on hold. And so I thought, and what do I do in an indefinite amount of time? And I thought, well, Army offers tuition assistance. So I started an online organizational psychology degree. And what I loved about getting a master's in org psych is that There's no necessarily right or wrong answer when you give a prompt to the professor, but you need to back it up with peer -reviewed journal citations. And so I started looking at terms and definitions and ideas and concepts in the world of psychology, but based on peer -reviewed journals. So there's a community of researchers that agree or disagree on certain things. And so I kind of brought that muscle memory into this book. And so I wanted to offer terms that basically provide a sense of objectivity. that I'm not just talking about my feelings and my perspective. Yes, a lot of the book reflects that for sure. But I also wanted to inject some objective truth that regardless of my biases, I wanted to mitigate that as much as possible. So I thought, let me add some of the words, the definitions, let me add some journal citations and give credit to researchers who did the science and then expand on that.

00:07:58    COURTNEY MULHURN
Definitely. And throughout this book, you discuss many of your relationships and with just other service members both peers friends and mentors as a part of your research so what was that like talking to different service men and women and hearing their stories and and just making them a part of this book a lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and

00:08:20    DANNY JOSEPH
lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and I was not in a healthy lifestyle before I joined and was asking myself existentially who I want to be in this world. I started meeting service members. I met some awesome Navy SEALs here at San Diego, started working out with them. I started meeting EODs who were coming back and forth from multiple deployments back to back in Afghanistan. I started having these conversations with people who were my demographic, my age range and all that, but they were doing some things in their lives that I just couldn't even wrap my head around. I saw their self -discipline. I saw their humility. I saw how focused they were and that they weren't doing horrible things with their lives like me and my friends were doing. And that rubbed off on me. I wanted to emulate that. And so this book is kind of a journey through all the different people who mentored me through the way they behaved, just observing them and seeing the qualities that they had. And yeah, I didn't have a great relationship with my father. And so especially for me, meeting male mentors was really cool to just understand what healthy masculinity looked like. And jujitsu played a big role in that as well. Getting me to just break my own ego or having black belts on the mats break my ego for me and allow me to reconstruct it in a healthy way. Just knock down my pride. I needed that. And then some of my sisters in arms showed me kind of their side of it too, what it was like being in the military with certain issues that they were facing. It was a family, you know, and so we all kind of bonded together. It was just cool identifying as service members wanting to strengthen America. And that was the overarching relationship that we had with each other. And anything else that we brought to the table, regardless of race, gender, any ideologies that we had, we just together in uniform, you know, we all needed to work together and that was it.

00:10:25    COURTNEY MULHURN
Absolutely. So how were you able to network across different branches and ranks? Like if there are units out there, you know, it's important. We're all brothers and sisters in this. So how would you suggest to network with each other?

00:10:40    DANNY JOSEPH
One big thing was jujitsu gyms. I guess fight houses. So if you do MMA, jujitsu, Muay Thai, things of that sort, you know, CrossFit, go to a gym where you meet people with uniforms, right? So you meet. all these different service members who are driven, who are motivated, who are making healthy decisions with their minds, their bodies. And that's a way to connect. I met a lot through like groups groups and men's groups and things like that, where I was intentionally seeking mentorship and just kind of spiritual guiding as well. And then honestly, just having, having conversations with people from whether you go to MEPS and you're joining, you just talk to the people left or right of you, or if you're at a D shock at a dining facility, I mean, Having that openness to just talk to people like they're people, regardless of rig. And I noticed that just the more relaxed someone is in approaching others in uniform, you allow them to relax as well. And you can have these awesome discussions. And one thing that was so cool was I'd be working with a soldier, let's say a senior NCO, who's fairly reserved. And then I would just ask them a question. Hey, so how long have you been in? Where have you deployed? what's your take on things going on right now and we would talk about what they experienced in combat like things would come up that they'd want to share voluntarily it was just so cool to know that they did these things for our country and they weren't looking for the limelight or anything by just validating that and asking them to share some wisdom you know i'm a new officer tell me something that i don't know that you know that you learned in war that you wanted them and you just see them light up And say, yeah, you know what, when it comes to this, this should be your focus. So these are your priorities. This is how you care for people. And then it would just blossom into these discussions where you realize you're talking to the smartest person in the room and they're also the quietest. They're the most reserved. I love that. You know, I'm just naturally curious about people's inner world and what makes them tick. I love that because in the military, it's so easy to loo
25 min
February 06, 2024 164: Part I, Courtney Mulhern and Dan Joseph on the book "Backpack to Rucksack"
Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, Author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts.
His articles and tools are to help soldiers and families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier / happier lives.
As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she is a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer, so I put the two together for this episode.
Dan Joseph's info:
https://combatpsych.com
"Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts":
https://www.amazon.com/Backpack-Rucksack-Leadership-Resilience-Military
Website "Combat Psych" where you can find more information about him and the things he's working on: https://www.combatpsych.com
Instagram: @mhen2.mentalhealth
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of US foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special Thanks to Amr Diab for the song and album "Amarain."
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6RC2T3Q7rs
---
Transcript for Episode I&II
00:00:00    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. Contact the show. Email us at [email protected]. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes. Okay, testing.

00:00:37    COURTNEY MULHURN
Can you hear me, Dan?

00:00:38    DANNY JOSEPH
Yes, loud and clear. Today, Courtney Mulhern interviews Dan Joseph, author of the Combat Psych website and the book Backpack to Rucksack, Insight into Leadership and Resilience for Military Experts. His articles and tools are to help soldiers and their families build mental fitness and overcome past trauma so that they can live healthier, happier lives. As you know from Courtney Mulhern's episode, she's a practicing therapist and a terrific interviewer. So I put the two together for this episode. This is part one of two. I'll have a link to his site in the show notes. So back to Courtney.

00:01:14    COURTNEY MULHURN
Hi, Dan, and welcome to the 1CA podcast.

00:01:17    DANNY JOSEPH
Thanks for having me. Yes,

00:01:18    COURTNEY MULHURN
we've got a lot to talk about today. Looks like you've been very busy with several books out now and still more coming. So I want to talk to you about all of that. But before we get into that, I just want to hear a little bit about your military service.

00:01:33    DANNY JOSEPH
Yeah, I was a combat engineer, training folks to go deploy, and was a platoon leader. Got to spend a lot of time with the Joes out in the field. And it was a short contract. I was only in for three and a half years. And I'm out now, but definitely I'm looking at rejoining in other capacities.

00:01:53    COURTNEY MULHURN
Okay. So kind of moving into your writing process, just kind of curious how you got into writing.

00:02:01    DANNY JOSEPH
So the main crux of it was getting out of the military, trying to fit in society and realizing I was totally different. I changed in a big way that I didn't expect. It was quite subtle, to be honest. And I joined old. I joined at 32. So a lot of my buddies were 18, 19 when I met them. So I had to go through basic training before OCS. And so mental health was a big issue due to COVID. I was in the military during the lockdowns. I had a soldier survive his suicide attempt. Another friend of mine lost 13 men from his unit to suicide after Afghanistan, which is crazy, crazy numbers. I'm shoppable. I need to think about. And so when I got out, I just wanted to make sense of what was going on. What I felt as points of friction with my identity and who I was, I also wanted to apply, because I'm a big nerd, aspects of neurophysiology to the concept of being a leader in the military. What that means in an environment where your sympathetic response and their sympathetic response are constantly triggering on and off due to high intensity, high urgency, combat experience, things of that sort. Working with a lot of combat veterans. I witnessed the weight that they carried. And it just begged the question, how does a military leader stay tactically aggressive and at the same time show consideration and care and love for the men and women who are in their platoon, in their unit, who potentially are struggling with invisible weight? And so it's just one big constellation of variables. There's so many moving parts. So writing was just my way of kind of trying to process all this.

00:03:39    COURTNEY MULHURN
So where does one even start? How do you start to organize the thoughts pen to paper?

00:03:45    DANNY JOSEPH
So my first book was a journal entry that turned into like 400 pages. When I got out, I thought about my soldier, Cody. He wrote the introduction to the book. The foreword was written by Austin, who lost 13 of his men. And I started journaling on what could be done to help those who are hurting and struggling with depression, with suicidality, with difficult feelings. So I started a journal entry about the neurobiology that underlies chronic depression. So it was kind of like this dual process of what does my gut tell me? And then what does the science tell me? And I was trying to make sense of this. And all of a sudden I realized, hey, this is an interesting dualistic process here. So I'm looking at warm, fuzzy feelings. And then I'm looking at hardcore functional MRIs and brain scans and all that. And I wanted to marry the two. And then that turned into multiple pages. And then I thought, well, I could write about another soldier right now that I know. I could write about a Marine that I met and an airman and a Navy rescue swimmer, a Navy EOD. And so I started piecing together kind of this crumb trail of service members who inspired me and touched my life even before I joined the military. And this book came out with a little nuggets of advice that hopefully will help. Incoming leaders, especially junior officers, have a special kind of consideration for the nuanced variables of being a leader.

00:05:14    COURTNEY MULHURN
So then Backpack to Rucksack. So was there anything specific that made you want to focus your thoughts into this book? Or how did this one start?

00:05:27    DANNY JOSEPH
So yeah, this one started as the journal entries. And then I created the Combat Psych Handbook as a boiled down version of it. And I gear it specifically towards men because men tend to have less emotional vocabulary and they're much more inclined if you look at the rates of suicidality and successful suicides. It's way higher. I think it's four to one when it comes to men. And so there's just such a stigma on talking about feelings and discussing things. And so I wanted to give the troops some really, really boiled down lists of thoughts and phrases, self -talk, journal prompts. and just variations on how to describe their feelings, how to understand their feelings, and why it doesn't mean that they're weak because they experience very inconvenient feelings at times. Again, it goes down to the neurocircuitry of the brain. So that was a distilled version of Backpack to Rucksack.

00:06:21    COURTNEY MULHURN
I like how you organize the chapters. So you kind of give keywords at the beginning that will be discussed throughout the chapter with some definitions, and then an introduction, how to be a good... military leader, the psychological application, and then leadership advice?

00:06:38    DANNY JOSEPH
While I was in the Army, during the lockdowns, things got slow, right? A lot of the pipelines were shut down. So Ranger School, Airborne, Aerosol, everything was just on hold. And so I thought, and what do I do in an indefinite amount of time? And I thought, well, Army offers tuition assistance. So I started an online organizational psychology degree. And what I loved about getting a master's in org psych is that There's no necessarily right or wrong answer when you give a prompt to the professor, but you need to back it up with peer -reviewed journal citations. And so I started looking at terms and definitions and ideas and concepts in the world of psychology, but based on peer -reviewed journals. So there's a community of researchers that agree or disagree on certain things. And so I kind of brought that muscle memory into this book. And so I wanted to offer terms that basically provide a sense of objectivity. that I'm not just talking about my feelings and my perspective. Yes, a lot of the book reflects that for sure. But I also wanted to inject some objective truth that regardless of my biases, I wanted to mitigate that as much as possible. So I thought, let me add some of the words, the definitions, let me add some journal citations and give credit to researchers who did the science and then expand on that.

00:07:58    COURTNEY MULHURN
Definitely. And throughout this book, you discuss many of your relationships and with just other service members both peers friends and mentors as a part of your research so what was that like talking to different service men and women and hearing their stories and and just making them a part of this book a lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and

00:08:20    DANNY JOSEPH
lot of these people molded me before i joined and while i was in i had my own issues growing up i had my own experiences and I was not in a healthy lifestyle before I joined and was asking myself existentially who I want to be in this world. I started meeting service members. I met some awesome Navy SEALs here at San Diego, started working out with them. I started meeting EODs who were coming back and forth from multiple deployments back to back in Afghanistan. I started having these conversations with people who were my demographic, my age range and all that, but they were doing some things in their lives that I just couldn't even wrap my head around. I saw their self -discipline. I saw their humility. I saw how focused they were and that they weren't doing horrible things with their lives like me and my friends were doing. And that rubbed off on me. I wanted to emulate that. And so this book is kind of a journey through all the different people who mentored me through the way they behaved, just observing them and seeing the qualities that they had. And yeah, I didn't have a great relationship with my father. And so especially for me, meeting male mentors was really cool to just understand what healthy masculinity looked like. And jujitsu played a big role in that as well. Getting me to just break my own ego or having black belts on the mats break my ego for me and allow me to reconstruct it in a healthy way. Just knock down my pride. I needed that. And then some of my sisters in arms showed me kind of their side of it too, what it was like being in the military with certain issues that they were facing. It was a family, you know, and so we all kind of bonded together. It was just cool identifying as service members wanting to strengthen America. And that was the overarching relationship that we had with each other. And anything else that we brought to the table, regardless of race, gender, any ideologies that we had, we just together in uniform, you know, we all needed to work together and that was it.

00:10:25    COURTNEY MULHURN
Absolutely. So how were you able to network across different branches and ranks? Like if there are units out there, you know, it's important. We're all brothers and sisters in this. So how would you suggest to network with each other?

00:10:40    DANNY JOSEPH
One big thing was jujitsu gyms. I guess fight houses. So if you do MMA, jujitsu, Muay Thai, things of that sort, you know, CrossFit, go to a gym where you meet people with uniforms, right? So you meet. all these different service members who are driven, who are motivated, who are making healthy decisions with their minds, their bodies. And that's a way to connect. I met a lot through like groups groups and men's groups and things like that, where I was intentionally seeking mentorship and just kind of spiritual guiding as well. And then honestly, just having, having conversations with people from whether you go to MEPS and you're joining, you just talk to the people left or right of you, or if you're at a D shock at a dining facility, I mean, Having that openness to just talk to people like they're people, regardless of rig. And I noticed that just the more relaxed someone is in approaching others in uniform, you allow them to relax as well. And you can have these awesome discussions. And one thing that was so cool was I'd be working with a soldier, let's say a senior NCO, who's fairly reserved. And then I would just ask them a question. Hey, so how long have you been in? Where have you deployed? what's your take on things going on right now and we would talk about what they experienced in combat like things would come up that they'd want to share voluntarily it was just so cool to know that they did these things for our country and they weren't looking for the limelight or anything by just validating that and asking them to share some wisdom you know i'm a new officer tell me something that i don't know that you know that you learned in war that you wanted them and you just see them light up And say, yeah, you know what, when it comes to this, this should be your focus. So these are your priorities. This is how you care for people. And then it would just blossom into these discussions where you realize you're talking to the smartest person in the room and they're also the quietest. They're the most reserved. I love that. You know, I'm just naturally curious about people's inner world and what makes them tick. I love that because in the military, it's so easy to loo
21 min
January 23, 2024 162: Rob Boudreau and Joel Searls
This week, Rob Boudreau hosts Joel Searl, who created and runs the U.S. Marine, 1st CAG, podcast "The Human Dimension," their social media and public outreach programs.
The original is located at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpdSA_Z7pAs
One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of US foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
Special thanks to Gloria Estefan and Sony Music Media for a sample of Dingui-Li Bangui. Released 1990-09-16. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7J_DVryF-g
---
Transcript
00:00:06 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at [email protected]. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:42 ROB BOUDREAU
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. I'm Rob Boudreau, and today we're joined by Joel Searles, who is a podcaster in his own right. He is also a Comstratat Officer and Civil Affairs Officer in the Marine Corps Reserve. Before we get started, I'd like to just include a quick disclaimer that the views expressed today are those of participants and do not reflect the views of the federal government or any of its components. So with that, Joel, welcome to the podcast.
00:01:05 JOEL SEARLES
Hey, thanks for having me, Rob. It's a pleasure to be here.
00:01:08 ROB BOUDREAU
Absolutely. Our introduction was through Jack Gaines, who made a connection, I think, with mutual contacts of both of ours. So my understanding is that you're a podcaster, is that right?
00:01:18 JOEL SEARLES
That's correct. Yes, I've worked on and ran and created three podcasts.
00:01:24 ROB BOUDREAU
All right. So I know that you're a reservist. Are you able to provide a little information about what you do in the civilian world?
00:01:29 JOEL SEARLES
Sure. I currently run my own company. It's a small production company in the entertainment business. We focus on military and inspirational stories, sports stories, features, and television. Currently do that. I write within that company as well. I've been hired to write core screenplay based on a true story. And then also I do acting. And I've been able to act usually as a Marine or as a police officer or authority figure in some TV shows and feature films and supporting rules.
00:02:00 ROB BOUDREAU
Wow, that's terrific. That sounds like it dovetails really well with your reserve career as a Comstead officer. It does. Yeah. How have you been able to blend those things? Have you been able to use your civilian skills? How do you pair those with your military service?
00:02:15 JOEL SEARLES
Well, this all came about during the pandemic. On July 1st, I was called by my boss. I worked at a boutique entertainment firm, finance firm in Century City. And he had called me to let me know. He went out of business. His deal flow went through the basement, basically, and he wasn't able to sustain his company anymore. And he'd had some of his assets acquired. So I got that call and thought to myself, how am I going to survive this? And, you know, how am I going to find a job when nobody's running or, you know, only a few companies are. So I called my reserve unit, which was the entertainment media liaison office. And I hadn't even been to public affairs QCORS yet. I told my boss and talked to him. His name's Joe. And he's like, well, I want to help you. I know you need to work, but we're closed. But what would you want to do if you could? And I've already done a few interviews of successful Marines in Hollywood. And what can you do during the pandemic? You can make Skype and Zoom calls with people and phone calls and write interviews. And so I pitched, how about I do a series of interviews with successful Marines in Hollywood? He's like, that's a great idea. It'll help with recruiting. You know a lot of folks, so give me a list, I'll prove it, and you go talk to them. And that led to me starting a writing career, and I'd just been hired by We Are the Mighty the month before because they'd seen some of the interviews I'd done and enjoyed them. And so I was kind of dual hat, and I was writing for the Marine Corps and, you know, getting things published on Divids, and then eventually over to We Are the Mighty, and I was viewing veterans during the pandemic like Robert Duvall. And Bob Gunton, who was the warden in Shawshank Redemption, Warden Norton, who's a Vietnam vet. And Roberto Barba, who's a showrunner, TV show producer, probably done 40 or 50 now. But through the Marine Corps, I was able to interview Don Balisario, who created NCIS and Magnum PI and Airwolf and so many other great shows. Bill Broyles, who wrote Cast Away and Apollo 13. I mean, you know, Oscar -level screenwriter and Vietnam vet. And then that eventually led to me interviewing Fred Smith, who founded FedEx and finances feature films, such as The Blind Side and Sicario movies. I know those are a lot of names and a lot of references, but that's really where this all started. And I started writing, kind of got a name for myself as a writer in a good way, and then, you know, started my own small firm. focused on specific genres that I'm comfortable with and that also resonate with a lot of veterans and the American audience. So that's really where it started. From there, it just kind of branched out. That's now three and a half years ago.
00:04:54 ROB BOUDREAU
Wow, that's fantastic. So you live in the information space. How did you get into civil affairs?
00:05:00 JOEL SEARLES
So I was doing some research. I looked at civil affairs even seven, eight years ago and recognized a couple of things. My initial MOS was air defense and a LAD, Stinger missiles. That MOS has now since kind of restarted and gained some steam. But, you know, eight years ago, there was really talk about it all. If you wanted to have a continued career in the reserves, you needed to find an MOS that was more applicable and relevant. And so I looked at civil affairs, saw it was only secondary. I didn't know how that would allow me to continue. And so I held on it. Went to the entertainment office after making about four or five different inquiries about coming to the office on an MLS waiver. And they let me in based on my industry experience because I worked at a talent agency, actually for probably the only Marine talent agent left in Hollywood and packaged the film while I was there. But I digress. So after completing the time there at the entertainment office, I looked at civil affairs and knew some people in the unit. Got some intel and information about people who enjoyed it. And I decided to join the unit myself back in August of 2022. That's great. And you're with First Civil Affairs Group out of San Diego.
00:06:17 ROB BOUDREAU
First Civil Affairs Group out of San Diego. Is that right? Camp Pendleton. Camp Pendleton.
00:06:23 JOEL SEARLES
Pendleton.
00:06:24 ROB BOUDREAU
All right. Close enough. But either way, you're living the Hollywood Marine dream as a civil affairs officer. I like that. Well, the way our intro came about as a result of a podcast that you launched with First CAG. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
00:06:38 JOEL SEARLES
Absolutely, yes. Our CO and XO, and OPSO at the time, brought me into the unit, and they wanted to maximize not only the Hollywood style, being able to translate the narrative into action, but also some of my creative skills that I've been blessed with probably since childhood. I guess they kept that part of me alive and always maintained curiosity. So they initially wanted me to do a social media revamp. which allowed me to kind of structure and align our social media, develop a system that was accessible, and allowed the CO's voice and the Marine's voice to be heard and seen. And so I wrote an SOP, spent a good amount of time developing that, and got a lot of references and insights and help from people. So I'm grateful for that. And got the SOP signed and put it out into action. And then that's since led to an increase in our recruiting and efforts there as a unit. We've had people come in from all over the base. and even off base on the other side of the country. And they've seen some of the posts and they've seen what's going on with the unit. And they're like, yeah, I'd like to check this out. I'd like to join. So the CEO was happy about that. The hire, Marfor Rez, was happy about her social media impact and imprint. And that led to them being open to, hey, can I do a podcast? That's great. Yeah, you can highlight things within the unit, what we've done or what we're going to go do. You know, I have an OPSEC manager who comes in and makes sure what we've talked about is kosher. And I briefed the maroons beforehand to keep it on the unclassed side and things that are out in the ether are ready. So we're keeping our cards close to our chest. And I share it with the CO and usually the INI to get their opinions on it as well. And then I post it. And that's helped generate some interest, obviously, even from yourself. We're grateful for that. And you put in one of our podcasts on your page and sharing it. And that it led to... us doing an internal command messaging program called the CMP, not the Combat Marksmanship Program, but the Command Messaging Program. And we've put up displays inside the command to highlight what the Marines are doing so they can see current messages inside of our unit. You know, we've got stuff from the Gulf War, stuff from Mogadishu. We have things from OIF like 2 and 3. So everything on the walls, for the most part, is either 10 to 30 years old, older than a lot of the junior Marines that are there at times. And even some of the officers like myself, like I remember the Gulf War as a kid and watching it on CNN and PBS. But, you know, I certainly wasn't in the service. And I mean, I know people that served in that war, but that's a long time ago. So the CO wanted to be relevant. We've repainted the walls. We're doing some stenciling. updating everything. We've got a really engaged first sergeant. We've got some other engaged Marine sergeants and even up to company and field grade officers that really want to see this turn out well. And so it's looking good. We've got the electronic displays up and it's crossed into the 2020 plus decade and years to engage the Marines to know that what they're doing is relevant. And here's photos from a lot of different Marines of the unit and what they're doing.
00:09:52 ROB BOUDREAU
That's amazing stuff. You made reference there to we had the privilege of rebroadcasting one of your introductory shows over the holidays, so we appreciate the opportunity to synergize there. Getting off the ground, you had a lot of resources and folks you're able to lean on. Is it fair to say that this is a fairly siloed effort by First CAG? And what I'm getting at is the social media stuff. That's not really being driven by hire, is it?
00:10:17 JOEL SEARLES
No, the CEO wanted it, and I wanted it too as a comms right officer. I've done that. sweet social media managers course, which is really tough. I went and did that and paid for it on my own dime to get better even before I came to the unit. Once I came, I was able to put it into use right away. So it is an internal CAG, internal generation, and an internal purpose and drive that is making positive ripples and waves far out from our unit.
00:10:47 ROB BOUDREAU
That's great. And obviously, outside of yours truly, Have there been other folks from the Marine Corps or units that have looked into what you guys have been able to generate and ask you any questions or anything like that?
00:11:00 JOEL SEARLES
Yes. To my knowledge, the SOP I wrote was shared with Hire because they asked for it. I believe it was FHG asked for it because they wanted to know what we were up to because they were seeing a lot of activity and they were hearing positive things.
00:11:14 ROB BOUDREAU
Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like your reach, beyond the substance of that, you've also been able to provide. additional influence, if you will, in the recruiting lanes and other things that I think are outside the traditional mission, at least as we ordinarily think of it. So that's really awesome. Thank you. I'm blessed with some strong support and good Marines.
00:11:30 JOEL SEARLES
Thank you. I'm blessed with some strong support and good Marines. For sure. And sailors. Absolutely.
00:11:36 ROB BOUDREAU
Can't forget our Navy brethren. Right. We've got,
00:11:37 JOEL SEARLES
We've got, I believe, our corpsman and then our logistics chief. And then I think the first sergeant, they were out doing woodwork to put up stuff and hold the displays we hang on the walls now. with the laptops and the electronic displays. So even the Navy's jumped in and done some carpentry and some staining to bring, I guess, an old core sense of work ethic of just getting it done and making it look new and fresh and taking responsibility for our structure and engaging younger Marines and the younger audience, the Marines and sailors and their families and the general public.
00:12:13 ROB BOUDREAU
Wow, that's awesome. That's quite a concerted effort. Thank you. Leading up to the launch of the podcast, did you stand up an operational planning team or conduct any kind of formal planning for what it was going to look like?
00:12:25 JOEL SEARLES
That was just left to me. You know, I conversed with higher and I conversed with my wife's counsel on how to exactly do it. And then, you know, registered the website with the YouTube page with headquarters Marine Corps and discussed it with the INI and the CO and the XO. But there really wasn't OPT. Kind of like, just go out and make it happen. You know, do it, you don't. And there was planning that went into it. It was just, you know, more focused on what it
20 min
January 17, 2024 161: Curtis Fox, Part II on Russian Hybrid Warfare
Today, we welcome back Curtis Fox, author of Hybrid Warfare: The Russian Approach to Strategic Competition & Conventional Military Conflict, which is now hot off the presses and in stores.
We discuss the book's concepts and how they apply to current events. This is part one of two, so sit back, enjoy and come back next week for part two.
Link to Biography: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-fox-mba-pmp-59b74223/
One CA Podcast aims to inspire people interested in working on-ground to forward U.S. foreign policy.
We bring in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences and recommendations for working the "last three feet" of foreign relations.
Have a story to tell? Please email us to either speak or guest-host at [email protected]
One CA Podcast is a product of the Civil Affairs Association: https://www.civilaffairsassoc.org/
Today's music is from the Disney film COCO and is a tribute to Ana Ofelia Murguia, whom I once met at a San Diego Latin Film Festival. Ana passed away this week at age 90, so this episode's music is her tribute.
Murguia: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/movies/ana-ofelia-murguia-coco-dead.html
Link to music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJfoPUOUWBw
---
Transcript for I&II
Introduction
Welcome to the One CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. One CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at [email protected]. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassoc.org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:41 CURTIS FOX
This is Curtis Fox.
00:00:43 JACK GAINES
Curtis! Jack Gaines, how you doing?
00:00:45 CURTIS FOX
Doing good, man. You're very punctual.
00:01:07 JACK GAINES
Russia and Syria is a great example of a combination of, as you say, hybrid operations evolving into the full scale kinetic operations.
00:01:35 JACK GAINES
For the listeners? Sure. I can't even pronounce them. And I did read them, but it would be better for you to describe them. I mean,
00:01:42 CURTIS FOX
I mean, I tell you what, I speak Russian and they're still hard for me to pronounce. Maybe the first term we can go into is Maskarovka, because this is one of the Russians' favorite terms. And that literally just translates to camouflage. This is the hidden hand approach that the Russians have in history done so well. They don't want these things to be directly attributable to Moscow.
00:02:06 CURTIS FOX
Just literally means activity. And what they mean by that is all of the little things that you do in the background to try to frustrate a target nation's institutions from responding to the intervention that you're conducting. You do not want them to be able to get forces in the field. Preferably, you'd have them stay in their barracks. And you want to set up blockades that frustrate public transit and encourage people to stay in their homes. Or maybe come out in mass protest, preferably in front of city hall or a police station so the political apparatus is frozen. And then vignettes at most is surprise. But it's surprise of, you know, like speedy movement. And what they mean by that is if they can use soft forces to rapidly deploy and establish some sort of a foothold on a limited number of key objectives. then they need the rapid maneuver of heavy ground forces to entrench those gains. This was the secret sauce that did so well in the Crimean annexation back in 2014. So the VDV, the Russian Airborne Services, those are really the elite trigger pullers of the Russian armed forces. And once a number of Spetsnaz battalions had advanced far enough up roads and blackaded positions coming into the peninsula, The VDB immediately used a number of secured local airstrips to move in forces in mass. And they spread rapidly throughout the peninsula and secured all those gains.
00:03:43 JACK GAINES
You know, it kind of reminds me of Bosnia and Kosovo during the conflict and how it has resulted in Kosovo having a Bosnian shadow government in part of the border towns.
00:03:53 CURTIS FOX
There's some real similarities in the way Russia continues to manipulate and maintain influence in Georgia. and the Serbian approach in Bosnia. That's probably where they get a lot of these ideas from. If you look at Georgia, there's an autonomous enclave called South Asatia, and then another one called the Bukazia, which is right up on the coast of the Black Sea. And the Russians would have us believe that these enclaves had ethnic Russians in them, that they would have you believe that they don't want anything to do with that government. And they want to remain segmented off and autonomous from the country with no trade and political independence.
00:04:33 JACK GAINES
I remember Lithuania had that issue, too. They were arguing that there are Russians in Lithuania that want nothing to do with Lithuania. I remember them posing the same argument there. So it must be a form of foothold mentality where they're saying, look, these are our people.
00:04:49 CURTIS FOX
Sure. Yeah. Vladimir Putin actually talks about it as a genuine tragedy that these are Russian citizens that have been scattered across the globe and isolated from the government in their mother country. Never really offers so many resources to come home if it's really that big of a tragedy. And they don't seem to want to migrate to Russia on their own dime. But this being a civil affairs podcast, it's probably also worthy to point out something the Russians do very well. is they figure out what influencers have their hands on which buttons. They're very good at understanding which individuals have access to what information and which individuals run X, Y, and Z departments and who would it be good to make friends with.
00:05:36 JACK GAINES
Right. They have good influence operations. They know how to map people and their networks and reach. So your book is really large.
00:05:44 JACK GAINES
book is really large.
00:05:48 JACK GAINES
And I appreciate it. I mean, it's what, 500 pages?
00:05:52 CURTIS FOX
I tell you what, my publisher made me take out three appendices and an additional chapter. I actually wrote a chapter. It was a comparative glance on U .S. doctrine to highlight how is the Russian apparatus, the political apparatus, how do they actually create authorizations for these interventions? And then, you know, how do they actually deploy military force? from the available units that they have in SOF. And then I compared that to how we would do it in the United States. So that whole chapter was removed. And then I had separate appendices on the Soviet arsenal that Russia inherited in 1991, including the nuclear ordinance.
00:06:35 JACK GAINES
Huge maintenance cost. Oh, my gosh.
00:06:37 CURTIS FOX
my gosh. And then I had an appendice on the state procurement programs, GPV 2020 and 2027. And I go through. All the hardware that they've been purchasing over the last 10, 12 years, you know, for Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces.
00:06:53 JACK GAINES
So are you going to push those into a second book or are you going to make those online dependencies for people who just want to learn more about it?
00:07:01 CURTIS FOX
So those are on the website right now. You can actually go read those. And, you know, if you're, I mean, you need to be an Uber nerd to get into them. But if you want to know which electronic warfare systems Moscow is running in Ukraine right now, it's all there.
00:07:15 JACK GAINES
Well, if I'm uber lazy, could you send me the link so I can post it on the website?
00:07:19 CURTIS FOX
For you, anything.
00:07:20 JACK GAINES
I'll put it in the show notes. That way people can check it out.
00:07:23 CURTIS FOX
I'd love to pivot from that and talk to you a little bit about some of the units that they actually need to execute these strategies. And the reason it's such a relevant conversation is because a lot of these units have been hollowed out now in the current war, the Russo -Ukrainian War. Oh,
00:07:41 JACK GAINES
wow.
00:07:44 CURTIS FOX
has taken such extraordinary casualties that it was combat ineffective by the end of last year.
00:07:51 JACK GAINES
Is it kind of like that old saying about soft? The best time to train a soft person is 10 years ago? The best time to train a new VZV person is 10 years ago? Is that what they're facing right now?
00:08:03 CURTIS FOX
It's a little bit of that. The other issue that they're running into is they just have nobody they can recruit into the ranks. They have an inverted demographic. in their country, and so they just have no healthy young people that can serve as soldiers. So they can go through and round up the homeless, and they can go through the prisons, and they can round those people up. They have a vicious, vicious narcotics crisis in Russia, and they can put people who are addicted to substances in the armed forces, and you can throw those people in as cannon fodder, but they don't perform the soft mission very well. And they certainly don't make good elite light infantry. So they're in a real pickle as far as deploying elite forces go. And you need those elite units to conduct hybrid warfare. So maybe that's a good starting point.
00:08:51 JACK GAINES
Are they recruiting other people than the White Caucus people from the steppes so they don't have a race issue that's also blocking it?
00:09:01 CURTIS FOX
It's entirely possible if they get desperate enough that, yeah, they'll start channeling them into elite units. I don't really have any direct evidence that they wouldn't have put people from an Asian disposition into, you know, let's say the 10th Spetsnaz Brigade.
00:09:14 JACK GAINES
Right.
00:09:15 CURTIS FOX
But the big one to watch are the Chechens. The ruling family in Chechnya is allied with Vladimir Putin, and they're very willing to contribute troops. But one of the unspoken realities about that is that the more Chechens are organized into, you know, the Volstok and Zapad battalions and pushed into foreign wars. The fewer Chechens there are at home to cause trouble for Moscow. And there are other ethnicities that start getting uppity. Moscow will absolutely adopt similar tactics.
00:09:46 JACK GAINES
Sure. Now, the trick is, though, the surviving Chechens that are battle -hardened to come back to Chechnya, what's the risk that they'll flip the nation back towards independence?
00:09:56 CURTIS FOX
It's definitely on Putin's mind. But the goal is, first off, those individuals are loyal to the family and basically rules Chechnya through a puppet governor, let's say. It operates almost as an autonomous vassal state. And so they would first have to fight their own people. And then the second issue is that Moscow has absolutely no qualms about sending a special missions unit down there to round somebody up in their home. I mean, you can go to their Wikipedia page and they're open and honest about saying they still conduct operations in Chechnya all the time.
00:10:35 JACK GAINES
Actively hunting people down. Actively hunting people down.
00:10:37 CURTIS FOX
people down. And they're on the southern end of Chechnya. And those guys will have no problem going up there and getting them. Okay.
00:10:45 JACK GAINES
Okay. So it's dangerous, but it's unlikely. It's less likely right now. Yeah. Unless Russia comes out of this Ukraine conflict so battered that everyone starts seeing the blood in the water. Right.
00:10:57 CURTIS FOX
The one thing that could create a real separatist movement in Chechnya is if Kardarov and his cronies decide that they're just going to switch allegiances. Sure. If he decides that Putin is weak or that serving Moscow is no longer in the family interest, that would change everything.
00:11:14 JACK GAINES
Okay. So we were talking about the development and evolution of hybrid warfare.
00:11:20 CURTIS FOX
Yeah, yeah. We got a little off track.
00:11:24 JACK GAINES
That's okay. We'll just play as is. It's fine.
00:11:27 CURTIS FOX
Well, and, you know, Chechnya is a good place to start for this because the first and second Chechen wars were so taxing on Russian and international standing and resources and manpower and so embarrassing for Moscow that they realized they needed to come up with another way to do this. They needed a way that would limit their investment, limit their risks, limit their attribution, and let's say stack the deck in their favor so it was more likely that they could slant the outcome to victory.
00:11:57 JACK GAINES
And they've had a long term intelligence practice. And so do you think that a lot of their successes in intelligence were just incorporated into a more military style that they just weaponized it a little bit more? to what we want, our desires for Russia.
00:12:29 CURTIS FOX
Russia. So let me kind of outline the framework here, I guess, and I think I'll answer your question. Sure. There is a ruling class in Russia of about 200 individuals. Right. Those 200 individuals, they call themselves Slovy. Most of them were educated during the Soviet era. The education system collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed and it was never rebuilt. And so their talent pool that is constantly getting smaller and dwindling. A lot of these guys are into their mid -70s now. Some of them, like Sergei Lavrov, came from the Foreign Service, but a lot of them are simply KGB men like Putin.
00:13:08 JACK GAINES
So these aren't long -term families of Russia? No. They're not the Vanderbilts.
00:13:14 CURTIS FOX
Yeah, they're not oligarchs, for sure. They're only oligarchs in the fact that they wield in fun.
00:13:19 JACK GAINES
Yeah.
00:13:20 CURTIS FOX
Basically, the promise that Vladimir Putin made to the Russian elites when they started this project, w
23 min
January 02, 2024 159: Albert Augustine and V Corps CA
Today we welcome Albert Augustine, the G9 at V Corps.
Albert came on the show to discuss the changes in army training in Europe and how they impact civil affairs.
Additionally, we discuss how CA members can get a tour and how to prepare for a gig at V Corps or in Europe.

One CA Podcast aims to inspire people interested in working on-ground to forward U.S. foreign policy.
We bring in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences and recommendations for working the "last three feet" of foreign relations.
Have a story to tell? Email us to either speak or guest-host at: [email protected]
One CA Podcast is a product of the Civil Affairs Association: https://www.civilaffairsassoc.org/

Special Thanks to Backing Track Music for sharing Track C of Big Band Blues. You can find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=bWzuzLgde28
37 min

About One CA Podcast

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One CA Podcast is here to inspire anyone interested in traveling to work with a partner nation’s people and leadership to forward U.S. foreign policy.