 and welcome to Figments, The Power of Imagination. I'm Dan Leif, as you know, I hope, I go by Fig. And in this show, we examine ideas and dreams that are brought to fruition. At least that's the concept. Today's show is going to be a little bit different because as I envisioned this show, this is going to be a human interest story about the partners and enablers we left behind in Afghanistan and the chaotic evacuation. And we know they're very much at risk and the concerns. All of us certainly have worked with partners and enablers throughout our career. And after the withdrawal, much has been written and said about them, the idea for the show came from a connection with a fighter pilot, buddy of mine whose son-in-law is an Army soldier, has been an Army soldier, enlisted and officer, retired Lieutenant Colonel now. And he taught me a lot about this and made me think more broadly about the importance of how the United States interacts with and respects our partners and enablers. So I'd like to welcome Lieutenant Colonel or retired Jeff Chase Aloha, Jeff, how are you? I'm doing well, Dan, thanks. How are you? Great, hey, thanks for joining me on this. As I said, you've taught me a lot and I know this will be a detailed discussion, but before we get to that, I think viewers always like to know a little bit about who they're hearing from and they know plenty about me. So tell me a bit about your career or your life, your roots, and I'll ask you about your career then. So where are you from, son? Well, I born and raised Tex and Dan. So grew up here and was really thankful to be able to return here after retirement. So yeah, just finished up a 23 years career with the US Army and really unique experience. We got a lot of interesting things along the way. Obviously we're finishing up a very interesting time in our nation's history. And unfortunately or unfortunately, however you prefer to look at it, it was all in the front row seat there to some really historical events that our nation's been in. So yeah, just now transitioning and trying to figure out what's next. And back to Texas, are you a Cowboys fan? I am, Die Hard. I'm a Green Bay native that probably makes you mad, but who knows what this season's going to be like. So you grew up in Texas working on your grandpa's farm. I think you told me and your grandfather was a big influence. I've got a photo here of him, your mom, and one of her three sisters. Tell me why your grandfather influenced you to have a life of service to our country. Yeah, so I grew up working some of the summers spent there on his farm that he had out in the Hill Country of Texas. And it was just a lot of quality time working on various projects with him when we just get to talking about a lot of things. And one thing that just always really came through to me was his sense of service. And I used to ask him from a really young age, what got him in the military, why that happened. And of course he was coming in on the tail of the greatest generation in the World War II and had siblings that fought in World War II. But his sense of service, I was really drawn to that. And so he was just always a positive influence. I always looked up to him and his experience and wondered if I would have a chance at that one day. And your chance came when you were attending school after high school and pounded about as inspiring as I did, not very. And you decided to enlist as a soldier in the Army, right? I did. Think things were going nowhere fast and I was lacking a little bit of direction and it just occurred to me that if there was ever a time where I've got nothing else on the schedule right now and I'd like to explore this further and see what this is about and if it's for me, that time is now. And so I did, I enlisted and man, I was just so much better for it. I have never once regretted that. It was a really great informative time in my life. Yeah, I can't imagine what my life would have been like without the direction that the Air Force gave me and I'm a polypsi major so I shouldn't speculate about what an object in motion without direction is, but I had lots of motion and no direction. So I'm sure somebody can explain that concept in scientific terms. I've got a great picture of you here with your 113 armored vehicle. And where was that taken, that picture? Oh, I think that was a training exercise probably at the National Training Center in Southern California. So it looked pretty desert-like and of course, soldiers spend a lot of time out at NTC and it's pretty dusty. And that's what I remember from all my time with the Army as a Ford air controller and early as an officer and later on going into Iraq is dust and dirt and dust and dirt. It's a gritty life. So you were picked for what's called the Green to Gold Scholarship where you go from the enlisted ranks, get your college degree and then become an officer, commissioned as a lieutenant. How were you chosen? If you were without direction, what made you somebody the Army would choose to send to school and make an officer? That happened. Well, I'm not sure exactly what all they saw, but I was stationed there at Fort Hood and I was in a recon unit. That was my job at the time. And my squad leader and platoon sergeant and platoon leader, the entire platoon leadership, they just brought me in one day and said, hey, we think you've got future potential, but we're basically split right down the middle on whether you'd make a better NCO or a better officer. So we're going to throw that over to you and let that be more of your decision. So what do you think? And at that point, it's probably one of the first times I thought that I actually thought about the future in those types of terms. And I definitely wasn't some strategic visionary that was plotting and planning right over the time. I was trying to be the best Mark 19 gunner I could be and all the time, you know, those things. So I did, I put some thought into it. And honestly, I think the choice is drawn as I was to the unbelievable quality of NCOs that I had at the time. I felt like I might be able to do more good and impact more people from the vantage point of an officer. So it really wasn't a vertical, I guess it. Right. I think for me as much as it was just a level or span of influence. And just based on the things I had seen, I thought I might be able to impact more. That's a really interesting point. And when you first said that your leadership was debating your suitability to be a non-commissioned officer, a sergeant or an officer, a commission officer, I by mind immediately went to the notion that that is not a vertical choice and it's not a qualitative choice as some might think who haven't served in the military. Some people are ideally suited to NCO leadership not because they're lesser in any way but because they're ideally suited to that situation and that mode of leadership. So interesting. So they sent you to Texas Tech, right? Yes. So I was accepted to tech at their ROTC department and so I went there and finished out the remainder of my schooling. I had that one quality year, if you remember right out of high school. So I had to add a little bit more. And so I finished up the schooling there and I commissioned in August of 2000. Well, Jeff, frankly in my education I don't remember a quality year. I remember getting by but if you had a quality year good for you. You got more than a degree at Texas Tech. Yeah, that's where I met my lovely bride, Lauren. And so yeah, it ended up being just one of the most positive experiences I think of my life. And you got commissioned. That had to be quite a feeling. That I do remember when the gold bars were pinned down. We've got a picture of you with your grandpa when you got your jump wings. What was that moment like? I tell you the, so I, you know I commissioned into the intelligence business but I was branch detailed into the infantry. So my first few years would be spent in the infantry. And so I went from Texas Tech. I started a little bit of time as a gold bar recruiter waiting for my school slot to come up, right? There you go and helping out around there. And then I went to Fort Benning, Georgia and started the litany of schools that you go through to prep you for a career as an infantry officer and airborne is just one of several. And my grandfather was airborne and he and my mom actually drove down and were there when I made my final two jumps. And oh wow, and his wings on me. And that was a really, really special time that they got to actually watch me jump. And you know, you could tell he always missed it. And there were some aspects that he was super happy to leave behind and some aspects that he really missed. And I think he's always enjoyed being connected through me back to Kanai. So how, how is it now that, you know, it's been so long since I left it. And that was just one of those occasions where he got to go reconnect with the place that he was stationed with a school that he had been through and whatnot. And it was pretty special. And partially your shoot up in both times that would have been miserable. But for those who don't have military roots or haven't served with the infantry in the field, like I have, we get a lot of thank you for your service. Never really know how to answer that other than to say I got more than I gave. But let me just say to the viewers who haven't lived it, the infantry life is a hard life. It is. Even in peace, Dr. Mayworth. Yeah, and hopefully as an airborne guy your knees are in good shape and all that, but that's not the topic of the discussion today. But thanks for all he did for our country and for the world. So you're commissioned, you're branch detailed. If we had three or four hours, I might be able to explain the intricacies of army professional utilization, how you go back and forth that we don't, I won't. But in your commission career, you serve infantry, then focused on intelligence, but also got into the special operations role. How did the transition to special ops go? Well, my first duty station was at Fort Carson, Colorado. And that's where I did my infantry platoon leading time and whatnot. And after when it was time to transition to the MI world, military intelligence, I just went up to brigade and so some of my higher headquarters and that was my first iteration. You know, as an intelligence officer, I did a quick turn and burn course to teach me enough to make me dangerous. And then, you know, took over a fairly substantial leadership spot up at the brigade S2. S2 intelligence. Yeah, sorry, the staff section, right. And then after doing that, I was in a kind of a counseling session with the division senior intelligence officer on post. And he said, hey, you've had a pretty interesting goal already. Is there anything else you'd like to do? And I said, I'd really like to go across the street there on the other side of post and see if the 10th special forces group would have me. And he goes, you know what, if they'll have you and they'll say yes, then you've got my blessing. So I did, I walked over there and it turns out they were ramping up. I didn't know it at the time for the Iraq invasion. And so a series of conversations led to them saying yes. And so I walked over there. So that was my first exposure to the special operations world. Still a first lieutenant at the time, which was quite the anomaly. I think their task organization has changed a lot over the past 20 years. And I think it's not such a weird thing, but at the time I was the only one. And they made that known. Yeah, you were a kid, though you were a kid who'd had, unless time that had to help a little bit in terms of not being too wet behind the ears, not to typically wet. It got me through the door, not to worry about it. Yeah. Yep. So you served during the Iraq invasion, I was, as I told you with General McCarron as his senior Air Force representative on his staff during the invasion. I'm pretty sure I still have dust somewhere in me from that man that was unique dust. You simply couldn't keep it out of anything. And then onto special ops. And what all did you, within the limits of classification, what all did you do as a special ops intelligence officer? Well, really the first, you know, couple of deployments with 10th Special Forces group actually was, you know, it was part of the broader task force Viking that held the north. So that was our area of responsibility was to watch the northern half of Iraq. And so obviously that was, had to have a lot of partner engagement in that and the Kurds up just north of the green zone, the KDP, those, you might remember some of those partners who really got a front row seat to partner engagement. And, hey, there's a lot more people on a battlefield than I've just read in books and whatnot. And so that really was my first exposure to not only how many players you find on a battlefield and what the competing agendas and whatnot lead to, but more the value that they bring and how, I guess, unbelievably impactful deliberate relationships can be for good or bad. And in northern Iraq, there wasn't a large U.S. force presence up there early in the war, right? Oh, they ended up calling as a Joint Special Operations Task Force or just sort of north. And so it was us against, when we first got in there was, we were facing three Iraqi corps, I believe. And I was roughly, It was a big unit, folks. It was about, it was about 1,500 versus 35,000, I believe was the numbers I remember. Yeah, wow. And so you're kind of on your own and absolutely on your own without partners and enablers. And we're gonna talk about the partners and enablers in a minute, but first let me take a break to talk about pigments on reality coming up on September 13th at 10 o'clock Hawaii Standard Time. And it will be available on YouTube afterwards. So I'm going to talk, continue to talk national security to go with my three episodes directly related to Afghanistan. I'm going to talk national security, the Washington problem. It will still be non-political as I always am, but I think we've got a problem with the Washington national security community that can be addressed. So hopefully I'll offer a solution. So Jeff, back to our topic partners and enablers and friends and colleagues eventually they become at times. First of all, I've never flown a combat mission without partners because my combat missions were over Iraq, kind of limited. And then over Serbia, Kosovo, less limited, but always with not just U.S. Army or Air Force and Army, Navy, Marine aviation units involved, but also NATO or other coalition partners. So I didn't go to war without them. And in my work in the Pacific, I know that across this vast expanse, we don't do anything without attempting to build our partnerships. And right now, as a matter of fact, there are significant efforts to expand both the quantity and quality of our partnerships. And in my experience, we don't always fully respect our partners. We kind of treat them as add-ons. We have the typical American hubris, which is very dangerous. In your case, what did your partners and enablers do? Talk about what that means to be a partner or enabler to American forces in peace and war. Well, like you said, I don't think people have a full appreciation for just how much partner involvement just exists. And that can be on a training standpoint. That NTC rotation, there were partners there that young private Chase was seeing. There are partners in every activity period. And whether you realize it or not, and sometimes they're unilateral within the U.S. apparatus, but partner nations are just such a big part of what it is that we do. And I think one of the biggest values that they bring is a local or regional perspective. And it's just a lens that we're not familiar with. And the idea that we could go into a location and understand the nuances, whether or not you understand a language or not. I mean, if you think about nuances of slang and dialects and cultural isms across various subregions, we can point to things like the Middle East. It's like, well, there's so many sub-regions. Asia. The Leeds. Yeah, exactly. And so those things, you don't have a full appreciation until you get up close and personal. And then as you start to build those bonds, build those relationships with partners on the ground, you quickly see how important their opinion and their insight is. And so yeah, I don't know of anything that I ever did that wasn't enabled by a partner in some director-endric way. So if you're getting that insight, and I had an interesting career with a, or conversation with an active duty four-star a couple of weeks ago talking about Afghanistan. And he said that one of the mistakes we've made in Afghanistan was not understanding what the Afghans want. And that's one of the nuances of, of partner engagement. And if you simply treat it as what you get from your partners as data, you get maybe half the value. If you take it as insight and perspective that you don't share, but have to appreciate respect, then you might get some value from, more value from it. Would you agree with that assessment? I would. And I, you know, in talking to a lot of junior officers, you know, we've been doing this a long time. So you obviously as you grow up and you, and you get further along in the ranks and whatnot, there's a lot of people coming behind you that you want to instill some of these lessons that you've learned. And junior officers, junior NCOs, yeah, it didn't matter. Everybody that was ever sent to work with me, that's one of the first things you, you have to get through and make sure they have a better understanding for us. This is that the partner perspective is not something that you have to put up with. It's not something that you remember. It's something that you have to appreciate and you have to put yourself in their shoes. Or else what you find yourself doing is you're talking past competing definitions of success or competing definitions of time and competing risk tolerances. And if you, if you don't take the time to deliberately understand that lens and ask the questions, they, I have never yet met a partner that did not want to have a meaningful discussion on how they could get closer aligned in terms of, hey, this is the plan. How are we gonna do this thing that we've been called to do? They all want to do that. And they can sense it when you feel like you're having to put up with them rather than fully appreciate their perspective. And it's easy to do at times because we tend to be the most technologically sophisticated. Sometimes we're taking a bit more risk a story from the Serbia operated air campaign over Serbia was we had Afghan partners at my, or I'm sorry, NATO partners at my base and their national leadership who wouldn't let them fly offensive sorties or would only let them fly patrol sorties, combat air patrol and not engage targets directly. They were still an important contribution because those are combat air patrols we didn't have to fill. And it was easy, it could have been easy to disrespect them because they weren't getting shot at, frankly, which is a big discriminator in combat who's getting shot at and who's not, wasn't their fault. And even if they had chosen at the squadron level to do it, they're still contributing and it is what it is. And frankly, one of the best perspectives they had was that they were Europeans and we were fighting in Europe. And I don't know if you noticed, but I'm not a European. So it can be easy to default to sort of a condescending view of others who aren't doing the same things you're doing. And that's at your own peril, it seems to me. How important are partners and enablers to our missions? You said they're always there. On a 10 scale, where would you rate partner enablement, engagement? Easily, nine and a half. You can't do things without them. So everywhere that you go, everything that we're going to do, you have to have somebody's permission, you have to have somebody's concurrence. And if it's a location that you don't have that or you don't need it, that means really bad things are about to happen. I mean, you are in all out conflict if you are violating those rules. So if you think about, hey, I'm going to go to a different geographic place on earth and do this thing, there's a lot of phone calls that are gonna need to be made to make sure that people understand, number one, that we can protect our own forces. Force protection is absolutely, and security is the number one priority when you go anywhere and do anything. And we can't keep our troops safe if we don't have the partners that are involved and spirited. The biggest thing though, is, you know, I envision this, the idea that we're going and we have a thing and it's way down the road. There's so many bins in that road before we get to what our definition of success is. And really, our partners just provide a, that critical look around the next bin when we don't even realize there's a bin in the road coming up. It's like, for more, we can only see with our technology or our defense budgets or whatnot, there's only so much that we can see without the enablement of a no kidding local perspective. And they help us see around those corners and they help us anticipate problems that we would have never realized that we were about to have. And you can't understand, you can't make a good determination of success as you said earlier, if you don't understand what their notion of success was. And as we got ready for this, we spoke about time and our presence, especially in combat operations, but folks, let me tell you that the same concepts we're talking about are just as true for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief or any other in military endeavor around the world. That it doesn't have to be when the bullets are flying, but that notion of time, we're temporary, we see an end. Our Afghan friends right now don't have an end and what's ahead doesn't look good for our partners and enablers. They're going to be stuck with whatever we leave and if our definition of success is stops on date certain, that's not their success, even if they're compatible. Agree? I do and we have to remember that we aren't all of the vote. We get one vote of many and you know this all too well, and it's the idea that what we do and that decision, the decisions that we make within our perspective and our agendas and our definitions, the idea that it doesn't affect the partners and the ripples in the pond go in all directions, that it doesn't affect other people, it's just wrong. And it does affect our partners and we have to make sure that that's the collaborative nature of the discussions that got us to the event and made us successful to whatever varying degree. We have to remember that same level of collaboration is absolutely critical when we're going to figure out how to end it, terminate it, stall it, change its name and reclassify it, whatever it is, the dismount. How do we get off this bull after eight seconds? It's a group discussion, it's a team sport and I'm just seeing a concerning trend that we're not necessarily respecting the team's sportness at those final stages and it's really gonna affect us long term if we don't watch that. Because it is because partnering is something that we typically have done better than other nations and we can't do everything ourselves. We ought not seek to do everything ourselves because it's impossible. So that would be a fool's errand. But when we compare ourselves to other powers like China and Russia, we have generally been good at partnerships and if we lose that advantage, we'll have a more difficult time being a force for good which I really believe despite the difficult, the terrible events of the last few weeks we continue to seek to be. We don't always do it. Jeff, I'd like to talk about one other element of this partnership that you mentioned earlier and that's language. I speak one language. I can get by, I can be cordial in several others of places I've served generally. But I think there's a natural bias to be dismissive of people whose English isn't perfect when you're a native English speaker and it's hard work to communicate with partners and enablers when you don't share a common original language, first language. How important do you think it is to work through the difficulty of translation, understanding, truly understanding, not just translating, how key is language in all of this? I don't think it can be overstated the importance of it. I mean, some of those most critical early victories in the Iraq invasion, rather, they were decided on languages that we didn't realize that we had, but you get there and you think you're going to go in and hey, we need this type of linguist or this type of dialect and you get there and realize actually the guys we need to partner with, they actually speak a little something different, right? I figure out, okay, so between the two of us here, what do we have? And so I'll just say that that was a little surprising what languages ended up being used for planning a lot of those initial operations, but it can't be overstated. I mean, and that I think a lot of people have made that I was at a conference one time with Heckman Karzai and he was commenting on that exact thing and he was very underwhelmed at this conference. At that point in the war, this was probably 0809-ish with the lack of investment in language that he saw from his US counterparts from primarily the diplomatic level. But it's interesting, yeah. Yeah, it's important, it's time consuming and as you know in combat, there is nothing more precious than time. That's always compressed and you're on the clock, but you can't take a shortcut with language and understanding and in air combat, we used to have a cliche, take your time and get there faster and if you've got to do that with language and speaking of time, holy cow, this went by quick and I really appreciate your insight. Got a nice picture of you and your bride, we pinned on Lieutenant Colonel. I think that's Washington Monument behind me if my landmark or behind you, if my landmark recognition is correct. So again, I wanna thank you for your insight. I wish we had more time, perhaps we'll talk again some other time, I'm sure we will, but it's been very helpful Jeff. So thanks for your service and thanks for teaching me. Thanks for having me, Dan, this has been a lot of fun. You bet, and note he's in the Army, so he calls me Dan, nobody in the Air Force calls me Fig, they're a little more formal than we are. So reminder folks, figments on reality, national security, the Washington problem coming up on September 13th at 10 o'clock, Hawaii Standard Time. I'd like to thank Think Tech Hawaii for being the platform for these shows, like me, they're a nonprofit. We don't do this for money or citizen journalists and we'd appreciate your support of Think Tech Hawaii if you'd like to donate, but also check out their website because they have shows about everything. You'll find a lot of interesting there from other citizen journalists. So thanks for watching, figments, the power of imagination, aloha.