Indirect Fire in the Global War on Terror and Today

[Music] Hi, I'm Nicole Wiley, membership editor for War on the Rocks. You're listening to a special crossover episode of our members-only Armed Services Podcasts, with the events unfolding in the Middle East over the last few weeks. Some of our hosts from these shows sat down together to speak on their personal experiences with bombardment and indirect fire. This is a personal, wide-ranging conversation that we hope you find interesting. Before I turn it over to Colin, your host for this episode, I'd first like to take just a moment to acknowledge the American service members who have died in the current war in the Middle East, especially the six Army Reserve soldiers who died in Kuwait by an Iranian drone strike. With that, Colin, over to you. [Music] Welcome to this special crossover edition of the War on the Rocks Service Podcasts. I'm Colin Meisel, here with Patrick McSpadden of Airman Pulse, Rick Glangrath of Soldier Pulse, Matt Francis of Marine Pulse, and Steve Walsh of Sailor Pulse. Given recent events in the Middle East, we've come together to talk about indirect fire, including our own experiences on the receiving end of it during the global war on terror, and what American service members in Kuwait and elsewhere are experiencing as we speak. So, groundless listeners and where we're coming from, let's start by briefly describing when and where we served, where we received indirect fire and the kinds of indirect fire we received. Rick, could you start us off? Yeah, thanks, Colin. My name is Rick Glangrath. I was an Army Intelligence Officer for 20 years. As far as experiences with indirect fire really across three separate deployments. 2004, 2005 at LSA, Anaconda in Iraq. That's otherwise known as "Blood Air Base," "The North of Baghdad," and then the sequel, 2007, 2008 at Camp Slayer in Baghdad, part of the Victory Base Complex there, and then Final Tour in Afghanistan 2013, 2014, Bogram Air Base. And as far as the types of indirect fire, I think, you know, same experiences as other folks, mortars, either conventional or improvised tubes, unguided rockets and artillery. I'd say, you know, these are characterized across these, you know, the two theaters as really harassing fires in both these theaters, as we all know, US had air superiority. So the current threat, as far as like one-way drones, really wasn't part of the picture yet. Steve, how about you? Yep, so I obviously, I'm here representing Sailor Pulse, but I actually began life as an enlisted helicopter mechanic in the Army. So I was deployed to Salerno in Coast Province, Afghanistan, from 2005 to 2006, and then again, in Bogram, Afghanistan in 2009. And we experienced the same thing as Rick, and I had the opportunity as like a 19-year-old kid, essentially, to get really enthusiastic about the Army, coming into the Army, and then go through a couple deployments of seeing how that impacted not only my own attitude toward the deployment, but also all the other soldiers that were there on base. Matt, how about you? So my name is Matt for Ancisa from Marine Pulse, 15-year infantrymen from the Marine Corps, bra. My very first experience with any form of indirect fire was in the invasion in 2003. We were there at Camp Commando, I was at Task Force TARA, with second-time six Marines, and we had a Searsucker cruise missile impact the base, followed by a couple other impacts as well. Fast forward to 2004, 2005, I was in Bogram, therefore the Car's Eye Protective Detail, and QRF, similar to a lot of other gentlemen here. I was on quick reaction force, we had a lot of different indirect fire munitions coming down from, maybe there was basically just a bunch of different tubes on the sides and mountain sides, rounds encased and ice, we'll get in that later as well, but not as much guided munitions. It's more just like harassment fire than anything. Yeah, Patrick, how about you? Everybody, this is Patrick Siving's Fadden from the Airman's Pulse, 21-year career Air Force Intelligence Officer. So one unique experience or one overall experience in my career, I deployed forward from Aviano Air Base to Bogram, May through November of 2010. We went forward with one of our F-16 squadrons, and then we were joined by a combined Strik Eagle Squadron from Wakin Heath. Same time, but at Colin was there at Bogram, and just like everybody else, a mixture of indirect fire from mortars and rockets. The threaded chains rather significantly in that area over those few years, between primarily Taliban to then a mixture of the Halkani Network. One particular attack took out a chew, a couple down for me, and unfortunately resulted in the death of one of the service members. We did have a couple defensive systems there at the time, but just like everybody else, it was one of those kind of wienering threats that everybody honored, but more or less just the kind of came in the background over time. Yeah, yeah, and that was, you know, my experience, like you said, I was there at Bogram a very similar time, and we'll get into that in a minute about kind of almost normalizing that. But first, Patrick, you're in close contact with a few folks stationed in Middle East right now. I'm wondering if you could ground us into present and maybe share a bit about what you're hearing from them. Yeah, absolutely. So one of my buddies in particular is an Air Force Dennis that's forward-applied from Wengwear Force Base over in the Saudi Arabia. As you've seen now over the course of the first week of the war, a significant increase in what we would describe as a threat from now precision fires, a mixture of drones, ballistic missiles, and quadcopters. And as unfortunately, we witnessed now about a week ago a significant attack on a talk in Kuwait, that resulted in the death of six service members, and unfortunately we've had confirmation in the last 48 hours of a death there in Saudi Arabia. Talking to my buddy, they're sleeping in battle rattle, bunkers position, both near their sleeping sides and also at work. He's on count now made at least 50 runs to the bunker. They've got about 20, 25 seconds of warning to get into the bunker. Patriot, CRM, and some other defensive systems in place, which has given the sheer number of missiles and other threats that have been coming in. Just as we know from our studies, over-match happens at a certain point, and some of those missiles have unfortunately made it through. Just for a little bit of context, it appears the Iranians kind of went with the end of the fireworks show up front, with a lot of their medium range and longer range missiles. We're now starting to witness a little bit more use of the shorter range drones, as both the Israeli and the US Air Force have taken out, not only the launchers, but also a lot of the storage sites for the ballistic missiles, but obviously that threat is ongoing. It also appears to be evolving with a little bit more targeted attacks on oil infrastructure, liquid natural gas, data centers. That's maybe something we could talk about here in a little bit. But arguably the greatest threat from an enemy force to American forces, from a missile drone, obviously kind of ever, that is certainly in our lifetimes, and maybe like I said, almost ever. So it's significant. It's had an impact, obviously, both physically, as we've mentioned, those deaths, and also the casualties that are related from that, but also heavily psychologically, as you might imagine, as folks in the back of their mind, "Okay, I'm going into the theater." We've had this looming erodium threat for decades and decades, but the first time that we've really seen the full onslaught of what they can bring to the battlefield, and that has of course resulted in quite a few mental issues, unsurprisingly, and rightfully so for service members that are in theater. I shared a video with me late last week of a ballistic missile landing in Saudi Arabia, and it was just qualitatively different than anything I've ever experienced. I think that most of us have experienced. Certainly anyone I know well has experienced. We all connected before pressing record and tried to strike this balance between minimizing or normalizing what we went through and recognizing that at the end of the day, no matter what the exact circumstances, it's not a good feeling to be on the receiving end of indirect fire. Matt and Rick, you've both had a variety of types of indirect fire come your way. I'm wondering if you could help us and our listeners process this a bit. For me, like I said, my very first experience is in the invasion. I'm 19 years old, and you're seeing all the images and the videos about this guy, so I'm saying this leader. The whole reason we're there. We get there, and my unit was supposed to leave and push across DMZ on G-Day plus three. That's Ground Warfare Day plus three. We start bombing Baghdad, and I'll never forget walking back from the PX and stuff. We're getting our last little odds and then some stuff before we push. Normally, just like any other day, sky's blue, everything's good. We're walking and laughing on the way back. I hope that the war isn't over before we get a chance to go get some. That whole dumb naive mindset of, I hope this isn't the goal, and that we get our chance to be tested in combat. We've trained for all of us here, and we're all waiting to be tested. We go back to our Hooch. We have this big tent city in Camp Commando, and we're doing a junk on the bunk inspection outside. My buddy's like, "Hey, can you watch my solverly quack quick? I'm packing up my gear." I'm like, "Yeah, absolutely." As I'm packing up all my stuff, and he's packing his stuff back into the Hooch, I start hearing that whistle. It's something that sticks to you the rest of your life. We train with artillery sims on the ground a lot. You'll hear that high pitched whistle followed by the explosion. And you're trying to condition troops to be prepared to be reactionary to this sound. But I'll never forget like the 19 years old and stuff, and all this crap into this bag, and being like, "Huh, that kind of sounds like him before I can finish that thought." This cruise missile impacted like you know, inside of our base camp, a big plume of smoke just shoots immediately up from the sky this fireball and there the shock wave comes and I'll never forget seeing the tents like actually shake like them rattling from this shock wave and then right afterwards you hear the alarm start going off for incoming and we've all trained for this but there's nothing like this it's such a novel experience right because we train for all these different courses of action and we were trained to be reactionary but when it actually starts happening around you you've revert and fall back to that training and I so I got my stuff and everyone's like every other unit had a bunker to go to my unit we had a berm to go run through running towards this berm so I was like hey who saw us that and I'll never forget the amount of adrenaline I had to run into my body I grabbed this saw with a 200 round drum and just like picked it up with one hand like it was a paper weight and just taking off running with it and my buddy who saw it belong to he's like where's my soul where's my thoughts and I just like threw it right at him but just the sheer confusion of everything that happened we're all there on the berm and all of a sudden like you know we're just facing this mountain there's like nothing in front of us every else is inside these bunkers but we're just facing a mountain but I remember the chaos of it all and where there's actually on the line some guys some saw gunners are going condition one they're chambering rounds and everyone's like what are you shooting at why are you going condition one but it's this this ultimate like kind of fall back to survival of like I'm so I'm so helpless I don't know I don't have any anybody firing a direct fire weapon at me that makes me want to chamber around in my direct fire weapon but it's all I know to do is to try to protect myself because I have these munitions fall from the sky so everyone's kind of downloading their weapons again you know but then we're followed right back up with the gas alarm which is a it's the same kind of tone but it's just broken up so the signal goes from into like you know for for incoming and then to gas so it was just straight panic and mayhem pitman and women were trying to go in their gas masks out and stuff's flying everywhere and they're dotting and clearing it was it was really a wild thing to see Matt just listening to that story it brings up memories that I haven't thought about in like 10 years one is the signal right like we have all these different bases you know I'm thinking Iraq and Afghanistan this is you know a decade ago big bases small bases and but each base really has some sort of air defense system the bigger bases had that audible you know incoming incoming incoming incoming that signal and then also like different different levels or different like Morse code kind of signals depending on which threat was incoming I hadn't thought about that in years but the thing that that that you pointed to that units have is units really have a standard operating procedure on how to react to these incoming and what did it what this is for for someone who hasn't experienced it it's really sort of like a five step process like you have that alert you have an audible if you're lucky your bases out there with the system that there's an audible alert so you can be alerted you know a little bit ahead of time to seek cover so you take cover and then some of these bigger bases that we had in both those places they had those huge kind of concrete bunkers outside of buildings that people would run into if they're outside or if you're inside I think sometimes that's what he was to kind of get on just lay down on the floor in the prone position and then depending on the threat depending on how long it would take there is that there was always like an all clear signal you know after five minutes or 20 minutes whatever it is and then like we do in the military you establish accountability no matter what size your unit is if you have like a five person team if you have my second employment I was a company commander and I had 75 troops all over the place so that time after the all clear and establishing the accountability sometimes that would take 10 minutes sometimes that would take a couple hours and that couple hours time where you're frantic trying to find your folks that that was stressful because you didn't know what was going on and then after you would establish accountability the last thing is is resume your kind of normal operations so there's kind of that five step process whenever there was an incoming round sometimes it seemed really random sometimes it was predictable like it was times when a lot of people were at the chow hall or it was at night where the enemy it was you know was operated under the cover of darkness so but I will say you know it's something that you do kind of you kind of get used to and you can kind of fall into bad habits for better or worse but it was kind of part of the daily operations there yeah and I think you hit on a good point there if we think about the you know the youngest of the young that are currently deployed that in a way thankfully didn't have the experiences that we had in G-Wat and depending on your service in your unit whether or not you went through any kind of training before and both physically going through those steps if you didn't already had your battle rattle on if it's a chemical environment going through your mop procedures and then before leaving not able to have necessarily that conversation with your family and your friends of preparing them for what this threat looks like I think at the back of their mind a lot of the folks that kind of mentioned earlier okay I'm going to the middle east we that we had the summer war uh 13-day war plus midnight hammer with the Iranians but not necessarily knowing for sure that combat was going to take place and not being prepared for it and now in a you know a week or so you've experienced the greatest you know threat from these uh from in this type of environment in a very very long time I mean that that certainly has a big impact on folks down range right now and I think like with that one of those things that we talked about a little bit was the psychological effects of it is kind of giving into it so that was my very first time ever hearing or seeing like the impact coming into camp commando but once we I think there was like another impact that hit but we started getting more and more incoming and thankfully the patriot system was there and they they picked up a lot of the munitions coming across but I'm going to tell you what like I I talked to people about this in the past and you're right trying to reconnect with other other service members and trying to connect kind of the story and paint this bigger larger picture of connected services and it's really neat but we were taking incoming what felt like every anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes and it was like and it was clockwork and it just became such a disruption in your day so the first time it happened you're right yes this big chaos ball just goes off right around you and you're trying to figure things out and once you start kind of getting into a rhythm okay that's incoming that that alarms incoming okay that's gas so everyone's don and clear and doing the gas mass procedures uh you know you have like this big shift of people that were using their gas mass carrier for like carrying things that immediately went out the window because your gas mass carrier is not your wallet or your purse it's there for your two panchloride your atropine it's there for your candidate injectors it's there for your gas mask but all of a sudden you start getting a little bit more comfortable with it but when you're using the bathroom and you hear it when you know Rick you hit it like when I'm going to go wash clothes I still have time here I'm not but you know we weren't leaving yet and but we're just every single day in day out in the night time and it just gets to this point where you're like man when is this ever going to be over I can't wait to leave this impact zone basically like this on call target just so I can not have to deal with this and then as the road as you get further down the road and the like you know your your mission you know we got so kind of numb to it that anytime you've heard any kind of explosion we kind of just laughed it off and we all like shouted in unison like EOD and it was like EOD we all knew it wasn't EOD but it was kind of just a mental like you know aspect of just being like I'm not going to think about that that that was could have been really bad that was actually kind of close and there's no EOD guys anywhere around me but yeah we're gonna just tell ourselves that was EOD cycles of complacency or so important in this discussion for me being a mechanically we knew we were never going off base we knew we weren't going to go out and get any of the the big war but there was this sense going up to Solano that we're leaving Bogram we're going to be on this little forward operating base we're really participating and we lived in tents and so you were talking about the berms I remember the Hesco baskets and kind of thinking how much can one of these really protect me and at first we were completely complacent and then got that I haven't thought about it in years but I will never forget it like 5 a.m. coming off a shift just going to eat and being like man that jet is really loud and then like closest I ever came for a Pogibair quite close and like all my buddies ran for one bunker one direction and I remember I kind of like you with your saw initially I like ran the other way and was like well I'm not going down alone so I ran I like jumped over some obstacles like a Kentucky show horse and I arrived in the bunker with my pals and that moment was so defining and there is this sense of like we're out here on the frontier of this war and we're going to work like this is a worthy thing like we felt really motivated by the mission it was 2005 you know we felt like we're bringing freedom to these people this is this is real and something I think is really interesting now is that we looked back at places like Kuwait or Saudi and we were like that's those guys they're not even getting their combat patch we're here doing the real mission and now these bombardments that you guys are talking about are happening in places where we would have thought we were safe before so it shows how much not only the threat has evolved but how doing battle with a relatively small guerrilla force versus doing battle with a state actor really really changes the calculus because I think that what you're describing with Kuwait that was when Iraq was still Iraq rack a state. Yeah, no, that straight up was like I said, we got the briefs about Saddam Hussein and seeing these videos. And like I said, I'm an '03, '11 at the time, I'm 19 years old and I'm there to fight this war. And not '11, it just happened. So I'm there doing my peace. All of a sudden, once that first missile actually hit the base, it became super real for us. I think for all of us, even our senior leaders, you can see it in their face. It's like everyone kind of locking in and being like, okay, this is what we sign up to do. And the guy that we've seen in images and videos and stuff, it felt like Saddam Hussein was right over that mountain that we could see. He was just past that and he knew Matt Francis and he wanted me dead just because I'm a United States Marine. Like, it felt so real. And I think that's kind of like that fear that it was causing people to go condition one because you didn't see the enemy. There was no, it was just these musicians and it was absolutely as Saddam Hussein telling them the guard, like his Iraqi guard just launch everything that you can across the border. The way that the threat has changed, it makes me wonder of how it's going to carry with people throughout the years. I can think of Bogram Airfield, same experience. I'm at Bogram, okay, there's some incoming fire, but it's few and far between. It's like hitting at a city and then I go back through Manasse in Kyrgyzstan and then back in Germany and I'm safe now. I feel good. And even still then, I told you guys before about a story of I'm back a couple weeks in Spangdollamere base, living off base in an apartment and middle of the night, sleep on the couch and I hear an air raid siren. And you know, I roll off the couch and I'm just kind of laying there on the ground for like two minutes straight, delirious and then I go, what am I doing? What am I doing? I'm here, I'm safe. I still found out the next day that the air raid siren is for the volunteer firefighters. I still, I thought maybe I was just losing my mind, but that was me, you know, going through these experiences that all in all are, I think, or not nearly as harrowing as what you're describing in some of the videos we've seen and still it hangs with you. The sounds and things, I think incoming, incoming, hearing that too after you already heard boom, boom, boom. And you're like, yeah, no shit. I heard it incoming. I don't know. Patrick, any vivid experience that really sticks with you? Yeah. I mentioned that attack at Bogger when we were sleeping that hit the chew and as you remember calling, I think you got in there right before a rather significant attack on the wire that had occurred. IDF proceeded that. But I also wanted to kind of take a second to maybe zoom out a little bit and thinking about what's going on now and also kind of thinking about the future a little bit. You know, for us, you know, sitting home and say for their families in the United States, you know, for the Ukrainian people in their military, they've now gone through, you know, four plus years of warfare that has been highly precise, but also for the Russian tactics perspective, rather indiscriminate everything from MRBMs to cruise missiles to the advent of everything from FPVs and they become gettition to it. And now we have Ukrainian forces that are being forward to point to Jordan to help us out in this fight. And also I think if we think about the future and you kind of talk about this impact on the collective force, you know, if we think about a Chinese Taiwan scenario, you know, certainly geography and distance gets a vote there. But for all our installations that are kind of in the second island chain, I mean, those installations are going to receive very likely, you know, highly, highly significant amounts of rounds. So obviously, I wish this wasn't happening, but there could be a little bit of a silver lining that this helps prepare the force for what this threat actually looks like and then continuing to develop both defensive and offensive systems, but also from a battle rattle, procedures and a casualty care perspective. Again, I wish it wouldn't happen if something we didn't have to think about, but it's just the reality of today and the world that we live in. I think something that you've pinged off of though there is about like the preparation of everything. I think something that we've all kind of spoken about in our conversation has been the reaction of everything. As service members, we're all trained in whatever job we chose to do. However, we all choose these different jobs, but when we get trained, we get trained in a way that we're almost like immediately trained to be reactionary in nature. You look at like how we do close over drill, just marching movement. Everything is led by a preparatory auditory command, followed by a command of execution. So what you're seeing and what I'm hearing is that you heard that alarm. That's the preparatory command for something else to happen, an action. As in the Marine Corps, we train as far as the gunshot. You hear that initial gunshot, that explosion. You assess, but immediately your first thing to do is like you take cover. You get down. But it is that auditory command, that auditory happening that triggers us to go into our follow on actions. And speaking what Patrick's talking about as far as the island chain in Taiwan and as far as service members abroad, I mean, I think if anything, the one thing that we do have on our side is our level of preparedness and how we choose to go about learning from like lessons learned that we've seen happening in Ukraine and Russia. It's what's happening in the Middle East right now. We've had years to kind of dial in how we're going to react. What are drills are going to be? And I think that's really important for the listeners to understand is that like every single day, regardless of what MOS, what job an individual is in or what branch they're in, every single day is training. And we train like we fight. And that way when we fight, it will all go back to our training. And that's one huge thing that I think that we do exceptionally well in the United States Military. Gotta give a shout out to my Navy guys. For many, many years, there was the sense that the Navy was not participating in being bombarded the way that the other services had been. And I don't know if you guys are familiar with the term general quarters. I know you are Matt. Sense that the Navy had not had to assume the sort of reaction to threat that you're describing Matt. And now thanks to the Yemen experience. And I would imagine it's ongoing. These guys have gotten much more used to assuming general quarters, battle stations, and responding. And a lot of that was going on with Yemen with relatively little public fanfare. Steve, I want to stick with that for a second. Because you have the experience in the Army and the Navy, how did you process that shift in mindset? And did you become more complacent again? Were you able to kind of socialize sort of the things you learned or how did that play out? When I joined the Navy, that experience of having been on a fob in the Army was relatively unique. Certainly, guys who did individual augmentee assignments, you know, so the whole Navy is there are lots of guys who have those experiences. But to go into a fighter squadron, that was a relatively unique thing. And you experienced this weird culture shift where I went from being a mechanic with guys who had only played defense on a fob and had been attacked to now being in a fighter squadron where under the global war on terrorism, everyone had only played offense. People had dropped many, many thousands of pounds of ordinance, but had never experienced being attacked themselves. And so now the wars that we're seeing in Iran and that we would see in a Taiwan straight scenario synthesizes those things. And it's been extremely interesting. And I was not deployed in Yemen. I didn't experience the ship being attacked. But I think that what we've seen in Yemen and what we trained to with Taiwan will have to integrate both of those things. The idea that we're going to defend the ship and we're going to have the same time launch jets to go out and eliminate whatever threat is threatening the ship is now an integral part of Navy culture. And it always has been. We would train to it all the time. But the cultural shift I think is pretty palpable in the Navy right now. Yeah, I just wanted to add that I, with my experience and some of these other experiences that we're sharing today with indirect fire, it's really fundamentally different than what the service members today are facing in the Middle East. One, the type of round that's incoming. And then back decade ago, decade plus, we knew IDF was a threat, but it was, it wasn't ever really considered a serious threat. It was more of a nuisance and something that you just kind of dealt with living on a base. And you knew if you were in Iraq or Afghanistan, that was, you were under threat and there was a possibility that your base would get hit. But once you were in Kuwait, you knew you were relatively in a safe area. You know, you would get like a counter intelligence brief and there would be threat briefs stuff like that. But you knew once you stepped off the plane in Kuwait and either going out on R and R or going home or mid to relieve something like that, you knew you're relatively safe. And what's happening now with this war is that that sense of sanctuary in Kuwait or Saudi is just totally gone. So the psychological effect of not having that confidence that you're in a relatively safe space must be, it's got to be really hard for the guys and gals over there now. Hard for me to imagine really, you know, it's really hard to get in their shoes and to think about, you know, the satisfaction of just being able to punch back or knowing somebody is, right? I'm sitting in the joint defense operations center in in Bogrum and I hear a boom and I know that pretty soon, Matt or someone like Matt is going out to try to find those guys. Maybe they don't find them, but where at least we get it, we get to swing back. I don't. Matt, could you share a little bit about what that experience was like? I mean, I imagine even there there might have been some frustrations of being the one trying to swing back. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, on Bogrum, we were there, living on Steel Beach. We did a week on QRF for the region for Hamid Karzai, but then we do a week off of patrolling around Sharkar, Salirno, on the outskirts of Bogrum. And like, you know, like we were talking about earlier, taking an IDF shot inside Bogrum, near one of the posts, and we get spun up as far as being a quick reaction force. We go out there. We go into this one hillside where we've kind of triangulated where this, we think this round came from, and sure enough on this hillside, you know, where like you said, where are the ones that go out there? We're the hammer. We're going out there to strike the enemy and to find them, locate close with them destroy. So we go out there and we find this tube and it's aiming towards Bogrum, but we're looking around trying to find tracks. We're trying to find spore. And, you know, we don't see, we see some older tracks and everything, but nothing's fresh, but like we see a lot of liquid around the tube itself. And so we're all kind of thinking about the process of what happened, everything we got out to, but it's aiming towards base. We hit pretty much pretty sure this is where it came from. And we need to answer, we're not going to just go back to like our rounds complete, we're going to let's go home. So we start looking, we're trying to figure out what happened. And that's where it kind of clicked. We're like right outside of Bogrum. There's a couple of businesses. There's a bizarre and stuff, but there's these businesses and we're like, we kind of put one into together. And this is in 2004. And we put one into together and we're like, wait a minute. Isn't there a gentleman down the road that sells blocks of ice? We're like, yeah, but yeah, the other is. And so we kind of put that together and we did a raid on this building because it's suck going back and being like, hey guys, sorry, like, you know, everybody's okay getting you all clear. But having nothing in regards to we're the hammer that you sent out to go strike the enemy and we found nothing. We found a tube as some water. Sorry, gents. But when we went out there to find this business and we found out that absolutely through a hidden door, they're taking these rounds, these these mortar rounds and they're encasing them in ice and then shaving them around the tube. They then put them around and encased an ice over top of the tube and they can just walk away. They just said it and forget it and go observed impact of their rounds so that they need to make adjustments as far as the elevation or anything. They can then observe from a safe distance. But what we were able to do is to like, you know, disrupt that distribution chain of that munition. And, you know, from what I've heard, that was like a common TTP that they were using. And I think something we're talking about as well and Rick, you kind of hit it as well, talking about the different types of munitions that we're seeing. It was the early part of the war and the invasion that we saw, like real guided missiles from the Iraqi government. And you're right, majority of everything after that was always some kind of improvised harassment device. If that's an IED on the road or like we're talking about some kind of IDF coming down from the sky, it was never used in the same ways we were using our munitions. Attatical precision drop on infrastructure, key targets, I mean, and just seriously dialed in munitions. And so that is like one of those things that we do have to wrap our heads a little bit more around in the sense of how this new enemy, this new threat is using these precision guided munitions and what that does to the men and women that are downrange. And we're talking about the psychological aspects of it. It absolutely is one of those things where we as the leaders and everything, making sure that, you know, rehearsals are done, tease or crossed, eyes are dotted, that you're going through that you're doing everything you possibly can. If you're that leader that's listening right now, doing everything you possibly can to make sure everything is within your control to try to move around that area of influence and to try to make sure you can influence everything that you're possibly doing as much to be your ability. Just wanted to pull the thread a little bit more on the psychological impact, you know, certainly during our deployments, smartphones existed, the internet was there, can remember exactly when Twitter started, but for you know, folks in theater, but also their families at home, the war is televised. And so just thinking about like the video we discussed on the attack in Saudi Arabia or the various ones that are floating around on the internet, you're certainly going to be careful these days and whether or not that was created by AI or not. But I just trying to put myself in the shoes of a family or home, like knowing that my loved one is in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, wherever or at sea right now, watching these horrific and unfortunately successful attacks. And just then waiting for like that message, that phone call, that signal, you know, attacks to say that I'm safe. I think that's also another unfortunate twist and an impact on the psychology of this war. Maybe one of the dumbest things that I've ever done going to the psychology of this, you know, talking about that cycle of complacency during deployment. I remember by the end of deployment, when that rate, you know, the siren would go off, we would be peeking out of the bunker and we'd be kind of casual about it all. And I remember one where we were all kind of hootin' in hollar and because we knew it was imprecise, I had only heard rumors of the iced TTP. So it's really fun to talk to Matt and find out that that's real life. And then as you guys alluded to earlier, we had one where guy was killed in the sleep. We had one where we were kind of poking out and then it hit our little improvised aircraft hanger and destroyed it. And we were like, oh my god, get back in the bunker. I would imagine if this goes on as guys deploy you know, the guys who are out there right now, they're the first wave, they didn't really, I would imagine for these guardsmen who are enduring this, they did not know when they deployed that this is what they would encounter. As waves of this go on, you may see the psychology that we experience begin to set in because who knows how long this thing will go on. Maybe it'll be short, but maybe it'll go on for years and two years into this. You might have a lot of stupid, young kids like me out there poking their heads out and it might be a different story. Yeah, for these men and women, I have to imagine you're going to see things like that. And the dichotomy between the vividness of those experiences and also the complacency, I think, you know, I never went in a bunker once the whole time. None of my NCOs enforced it. You'd hear it and be like, well, you're not dead. Keep going. Keep working. Right. Keep doing what you're doing. I wonder, especially with the way the threats of all with drones, if these folks are going to look at drones the same way. I mean, Matt, how long did it take for you to look at a block of ice normally again? I'm going to tell you what it took a lot longer than I thought it would. There's things that, you know, psychologically speaking that really stand out to us. And like I said, we're talking early about the, I guess you have the reaction of everything. As service members, we are all very reactionary in nature. We either are going to be proactive, like I said, about training and trying to find ways to better prepare ourselves to prepare our men and women. And so that way on the battlefield we're successful at whatever your battlefield looks like. However, there's certain senses that just don't go away. Like we were talking about, it's a sound of something that high pitched siren noise. There's a, if I hear an ambulance go by, it's not it. It's kind of close, but not it. If I hear it, it's one of those things where I will completely freeze in my tracks and it will, it just my body will run cold. But the same thing that we said about the sights, the smells and the tactile sensation of all kinds of things. These are things as far as the, they really kind of get burned into the, aren't to the fabric of ourselves, right? And we're talking about the, the overall psychology of, of how bad this can get is that with us being so reactionary in, and you have the men like Stephen that are poking their heads out, you know, it's important as leaders that we dial in and make sure that we, we explain to our men and women that are in service that we say the seriousness of this nature. And we try it and still as much discipline as possible into ourselves because it is that discipline that's going to carry us all home safely. That's why we train over and over and over again in the military. We don't do things wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong until we get it right. And then we all high five and go home. No, we do things so many times right that you'll never get it wrong. And that's the goal is that muscle memory so that when the trigger happens, when that allable cue occurs, you know exactly what to do. You can just fall back onto training and it's almost like this autonomous thing to just execute. Yeah, I wonder if, you know, we've had these experiences deployed and I know different, the different services that are, our, our length of tour are, are, are different over there. My second tour in Iraq was one of those you left thinking you were doing 12 months, but when we, when we got there at month nine, they was surprised you're staying for an extra three or four. That was during the, the surge in 07, 08. And I, I just wonder, I, I kind of felt like if you're there for that long, you know, 12 months, 13 months, 14 months. And I was a company commander. We had a lot of, a lot of issues with, with soldiers as far as like disciplinary stuff after month 12 because, because guys were just checked out mentally and people got complacent. And I wonder if units that are there for shorter time, let's say like a three month tour or six month tour, you may not have the opportunity to get complacent because you don't, by simply not having as many experiences in dealing with IDF. But when we were there, you know, those 12 months towards 12 plus month tours, you could, you got to get stuck into a battle rhythm and complacency can really set in, which is really tragic because for these, these guys that have worked here recently, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, right? And they were in a place where they thought that they were, they were safe. And I remember, you know, those the bunkers that we had and the the the choose that we had. None of the ones that I ever lived in had any sort of overhead protection. They were all side protection. They were concrete tea bears on the sides because that was the threat in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no drone threat. There was no overhead threat. And it's totally different now. Just one last ad and not that the service numbers downrange aren't frosty right now and ready for this. But if I put my old intel hat back on and looking at this from the interviews perspective, it's different but the same for what we encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan as we discussed the threat level is much higher because of the numbers of munitions and the precision and the hostility of these type of munitions. But you know, from the Iranian perspective right now, it's really kind of wait this out. They've kind of only got two games. They've got this against military targets and against civilian targets. You know, obviously we're seeing what's going on at the oil markets right now as a result. But as they're just trying to wait this out, that is that that's their only option. So just one last charge, you know, to our our colleagues that are downrange right now. This is this is not going away. Yes, the number of launches has decreased rather dramatically over the first week. But there's potentially a whole other way we mentioned the Yemen campaign and the Houthis haven't seen anything from the Houthis as of yet. They certainly didn't diminish. Thankfully because the result of Israeli and American actions has ball and a Hamas are really not in the fight right now like we would normally think they would be in this type of campaign. But the Iranians have spent four decades building up asymmetric threats around the world. So whether it's downrange or here at home, not necessarily of course from these particular type of threats but from some type of a you know, you throw around the term sleeper cell. Just for everybody out there like this. It's only week one. It feels like it's already been a year for this campaign and just for everybody and their families just staying tuned in and staying aware of the threat environment. Yeah, Matt, you've you've focused a lot on mental preparedness, mental wellness and recent marine pulse episodes. And you've shared some of this advice already. I'm wondering any any final thoughts advice for folks downrange right now. Yeah, so one thing I learned about these environments is the fog of war is real. Okay, I'll say that again. The fog of war is real. All right, a lot of times it's a strange mixture of boredom and heightened awareness at the same time happening. You could sit for long stretches like nothing happens, but your senses are still dialed in and you know things can change like so quickly. That uncertainty can play tricks on your mind. Sometimes it makes you anxious. Sometimes it can lead to complacency if you're not careful. But the best thing you can do is to stay grounded in the people around you. Take it, talk with your troops, you know, check in with each other. Keep your routines where you can and focus on the things that you can control. I think that's a huge thing. But the fog of war never really goes away. The uncertainty is part of the job, but taking care of each other. That's what gets as it gets people to room. So as leaders, make sure you're taking the reins to check on your men and women, check on your troops, have those conversations. Try to do the very best you can as far as the things you can control and push. All right, we'll have to leave it there. Gentlemen, thanks for this conversation. To those downrange right now, those who've returned and those who are headed that way, we're thinking about you. Thanks for tuning in to the special crossover episode of our Armed Services podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can hear more like it by becoming a member of War on the Rocks at War on the Rocks.com/membership. Our members have access to the full suite of War on the Rocks' exclusive content, including the shows that these guys host. Have a great day and as always, thank you so much for your support of War on the Rocks.