Brock Briggs  0:01  

Hello and welcome to the Scuttlebutt podcast. Today, I'm speaking with John Spencer, considered to be the world's leading expert on urban warfare. John has published so much work on the subject of urban warfare through multiple publications, a book and his podcasts, the Urban Warfare Project. Talking to John, it's clear why he's considered the expert. His published mini manual for the urban defender has very specific details and tactics on how to operate in an urban warfare environment. 

In this episode, we talk through his experiences in an urban combat environment, and how those influences views. We discuss why the future of warfare is urban, and how that's played out in the US military policy overseas. We also briefly talk about his views on social connections in war, which inspired his upcoming book, Connected Soldiers, which is available for pre-order on his website. 

I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of not only this conversation, but reading through John's mini manual. The very last segment is entitled The Will To Fight, which we talk a little bit about during this conversation. It's not hard to understand why the will to fight is so important. And the applications stretch far beyond just combat. Please enjoy this conversation with John Spencer.

Brock Briggs  1:53  

John, you're just mentioning that this is maybe your 130th podcast episode, is that right?

John Spencer   2:00  

Or interview, so TV, podcast, print. 

Brock Briggs  2:05  

So what is the question? Maybe I'll start out with what's the question that you haven't gotten in all of those interviews that you want to have been asked? Because I gotta believe that there's one of them?

John Spencer  2:16  

Yeah, that's a tough one. So most of the questions really have been about Ukraine and less so about, you know, what did you most take from your military experiences? You know, a lot of it's about my expertise and urban warfare. But you know, we, you, we all take something from our time in the service no matter what service it is.

Brock Briggs  2:38  

Yep, that's very true. One of the first notes that I had here was just highlighting the fact that you had 24, 25 years in the Army. You're a published author, dozens of articles, book contributor or speaker, kind of like a go to news source, like you said all the Ukraine thing, events taking place right now. What do you think that you would consider your biggest contribution maybe to the military as an organization, to the world? What would you say?

John Spencer   3:11  

So, you know, I had a dream career, and I have a dream job, and I get paid to study something that not many people study, which, not in a good way. It made me very popular because of Russia's illegal invasion into Ukraine. I mean, one of the things I provide I think the world is an expertise, right? So there are a lot of experts in the world. And I consider myself a student, not an expert, of a very, very narrow aspect of war. And only the dead have known the end of war. So I think it'll continue to be important. 

And there's reasons why my field of urban warfare is important. I got a little bit of attention, because like, most people, I just don't like seeing evil things happen to good people. So when the Ukraine war started, I started putting out because of the power of social media tweets on, “Hey, as an old military guy, and it's anything that you could do, like I can give some advice to people without training.” 

So I started tweeting about, you know, if I was in a city, trying to help the military, or if I was the military resist a powerful enemy, there's some very basic tasks that people don't think about. They go back to actually antiquity, you know, seeds, castles, you name it. So I think right now, because of that question, I think we all change every day. We change every month, every year. That question today, I answer it with, I think I've provided a pretty valuable resource to help, good fight evil.

Brock Briggs  4:51  

You've published on your website that's available, called The Mini-Manual for the Urban Defender - A Guide to the Strategies and Tactics for Defending a City. What was the birthplace of your interest in the subject? Because you have published, like I said, dozens and dozens of articles and been featured in all these books. Where does the interest in that particular subject come from?

John Spencer   5:18  

So, that's another good question. And I have many interests, you know, I have like I said, I have a dream job where I was paid to follow the passion and an interest. Where did it all start? I mean, I was a part of the 2003 invasion in Iraq. I had the honor to jump in to Iraq, the parachute assault in the north, during the invasion 2003. And we quickly moved south, into dense urban terrain in Erbil and Kirkuk. 

So I think it all started with some of my first combat deployments. And then in 2014, again, I had another dream opportunity to be pulled into a very special group, researching for the cheapest half of the armies of the top General of the US Army who put together a small research group. And in 2014, we were told for a year, Hey, your job is to study mega cities and what that means to militaries, whether it's literal aspects or doing operations in them. So that's really where the kind of the academic study started. 

And then I moved to the West Point where I was teaching strategy and tactics and was selected to help stand up a research center. And then I started, I found a passion for writing, which I think is, I think it would be really interesting to talk about why I write so much, right? So I have over 100 plus articles. I have two books coming out this year. Clearly, I have an interest and a passion in writing as well. I now get paid to follow a passion in researching urban operations.

Brock Briggs  6:53  

Yeah, I think that the power in writing is so fantastic. And not only a good outlet for people personally, but through uses like an online website, through Twitter or whatever it is, a chance to get your thoughts and opinions out there and be able to quickly share how you feel and what you think is right. 

And I think over the long term, the good things, the cream tends to kind of rise and there's a lot of, to put in one way, there's a lot of shit out there. There's a lot of stuff that isn't really helpful. But I think that your presence online, hard to view it any other way other than constructive. You talked about that position, like being able to do that over the course of your career. You call that a dream? What does that mean? Like how a dream to you, a dream to anybody?

John Spencer   7:57  

I think it's a little combination of both, right? So there's, I'm a firm believer that things happen for a reason. I spent 25 years in the Army and had amazing experiences. Not everybody who serves in the service has the same experience. Like they each have their own experiences, jobs, first line supervisors, opportunities and doors are open. And sometimes it's telling you to walk through that door. So the dream was the doors being open. And of course, I walked through many of those doors. I pursued many of those tracks. 

But there's very little negative from my experiences. There's some bad that come with a good, but the dream was that career, and the opportunities I was given in the tracks and the people I interacted with. Because I'm a big believer in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, which talks about people that rise and it's not just talent, it is opportunity. But it's also taking an opportunity that get presented to people. And sometimes that's a major shift in your life. 

And there are a couple of moments in my career where that happened. So I think it's about the dream to me as I joined the Army at age 17, from a small town in Indiana. So clearly a dream and nothing I could really is more than a dream, nothing I could have imagined that I would be sitting here and, you know, being on national TV and have books and most of my family's extremely proud of that. 

But it's a both a dream to me and a dream to I think to anybody and that's why, you know, military service. It does so much for the individual for our society to get that experience and then whether somebody just goes back out into the community and no matter what, I think the majority of people become a better person and a better part of society.

Brock Briggs  9:56  

I agree with that. I think that it may take some people some time and like I was sharing with you before we started recording. It definitely took me some time, I think to really appreciate everything that the military gave me. Because it's not, you have to dig a little bit, it's very easy to skim by on the surface. 

And there's just a lot of bad things being away from your family, not super conducive to the family lifestyle, some of those harder things. You seem extremely upbeat and positive and focused in on the great opportunities that the military has given you. Were there any moments that you questioned it? Or were those opportunities weren't super readily apparent?

John Spencer 10:44  

Yeah, absolutely. And I 100% agree with you. And with great things, also comes great hardships and adversity. Sometimes it's the adversity that makes thing great, right? You don't appreciate things unless it's harder, things taste better, you know? It's just human nature, right? Absolutely. There have been low points. There were low points in my military career where I almost called it quits or pursued stopping. 

And usually, when I had younger soldiers, too, that was what I always told them, right? Because, you know, I had a longer view, even though there were plenty of times where I wish I could have got out or, you know, I was, of course, headed towards retirement. So there's kind of this area where you're like, over the hump towards the old retirement system, where you're like, at, like, 12 years, or 15 years, you're like, “Ah, I can't take this anymore, I gotta go.” 

And then there's this carrot, at the end of it, if you can just hang out. I mean, I think everybody faces that, like counting for my soldiers and that family aspect. And the book that I wrote called Connected Soldiers, is a huge part of that research into looking at the connection between the soldier and their family and their support networks, if you're just friends, family, loved ones. 

And I experienced that in 2018. My wife left and my three little kids, even though understanding why we have to go away and do deployments and things like that. It was really hard. But like I said, if you take the aggregate, whether it's a two year career or a 20 year career, there was always more positives and good days and bad days. And I always told myself too, when I was in. If it ever got to a point where there are more bad days than there were good, then I would exit. Luckily, all the good. 

But that's what I used to tell like my soldiers too, who were making a tough decision early in their careers. Like, for six years, they're basing their decision just, I understand 100 percent of the decisions that you need to make, but make sure you don't make them. The military is for us, the army is a million man army, it’s a huge place. 

And I had the gift of being, you know, having great assignments and a majority of great leaders. So but I know that we rotate and you can't make decisions, big decisions on a single place you live, a single first line supervisor, a single duty station. For us, it's, you know, just take it on, if you have a major change, would it change somebody's perspective on good versus bad or time to go or not?

Brock Briggs  13:32  

I'm always curious to ask, from my research on you, it's appears that you had the opportunity to progress through the enlisted ranks before going to officer and I think that people who have gone through something similar and seen both sides of the table, kind of have a really unique perspective about the different challenges and maybe are better to empathize with their soldiers in that position. How did your views of like the problems that soldiers face change when that transition happened?

John Spencer  14:09  

Yeah, so depending on which my soldiers you asked, sometimes it's not as a good thing, because then I was able to go into new positions, where like, as a platoon leader, as a junior officer, with a tacit amount of knowledge on what the soldiers experiences, what the requirements are, what his job is supposed to be doing. And as you quickly rise, the officer rank some of that gets you, doesn't, it isn't as advantageous. 

But as a brand new officer, you know I’ve reached on each class, so I actually held almost every rank of the people that I was in charge of. That's not necessary in leadership, but it did give me this at least short term edge. Now, like I said, my soldiers thought it was when you're getting into their business or you're getting into the sergeant's business and like no, I know where the divides are. Hopefully it made me a better leader. 

Again, it depends on which one you ask. I actually, you know, I think it frees cognitive load when you have that amount, those types of experiences. So, as a former Ranger instructor, I know a lot of the stress of leadership is really cognitive load, right? You're learning as you're doing. I was able to free up cognitive load, because a lot of the positions I was leading, I had either held, you know, pretty much I held them. So for me, it freed up cognitive load. 

And hopefully, hopefully, it helped me in decision making where I think in other positions where I've held where I was, you know, so overloaded with trying to understand so much, I think that that's where I think the most the biggest advantages. And again, as you rise, you're basically up to like major level, and then you're doing less of that, you know, firsthand decision making really at that point. 

And that's what my mentors told me. They manufacture some of us. I grew up through the ranks, then when they get to that level, then they struggle with other requirements of leadership on oral and written communication and things like that, again, just dream dream opportunities. I had some amazing mentors and teachers.

Brock Briggs  16:21  

I'm not familiar or hadn't heard that term cognitive load before. But I think that that really is succinct and talking about the kinds of challenges that maybe new officers are facing, you know. I hadn't really, from the enlisted side, hadn't really empathized that way before where it's like this, this young, you know, maybe they're 22 years old, and they just get out of college. 

And now all of a sudden, they're in charge of this division of 100 people or something. And, you know, they, I don't know, they just are able to drink legally, you know that's a very big set of shoes to fill for an officer in that position. But there definitely is kind of a different sense of respect, I think that's gained from that prior enlisted marker. And I think you feel it on the enlisted side, you're like, “Man, I know that this guy knows what I'm going through.”

John Spencer  17:19  

Yeah, so in Leadership Studies, or even in the Army Leadership manuals, there’s many forms of power. And one of it, not in power of like a bad way, but just in position, there's something called referent power, which I think yes, I think I was able to do that quickly, where other people had to earn that with actions. Some of my career and the things I had done, and places I had been, allowed me to walk in with a little more referent power as in appreciation from the soldiers as I walked some shoes, maybe not their situation exactly. 

Or I've done some things that you know, us in the military, we have badges in schools and experiences that some people value a lot. And like our Ranger School, which is kind of a, it serves many purposes. And why I identify as a ranger is one of my many identities. But yeah, I walked in the door with a little bit of rubber and power. Yeah.

Brock Briggs  18:22  

Wanna dive in to your study and kind of knowledge of the idea of the urban defender. You're kind of almost lifelong study of it, and deep knowledge and expertise in the area. I spent some time in preparation for this interview, like going through your manual for, you know, strategies and tactics on defending a city. And some of these are like, it's unbelievably detailed. And when I first like was going into it, I try not to have like expectations of anything or anybody prior, but I'm like, you know, how high level is this? 

You know, a lot of stuff that you hear in the news and books are very just kind of woowoo strategies and like, here's what ideally you should do, and I couldn't find anything that was. This was the exact opposite of that. This was like, just for anybody that wants to follow along and read this and we'll have the link in the show notes and whatever. But you start out with Spencer standing orders for the urban defender. 

Defense is the strongest form of war. The attacker must come to you and be in prepared positions. He must cross the Open Street to attack you. Kill him in the streets and alleyways. Like you literally go through very step by step tactfully about resource conservation. I was like blown away. I almost don't even know what to say about it because it is just so it's concrete. It's real. And I think it really shows your expertise. When reading through it, a lot of your ideas hinge around the idea of defense, and I don't wanna speak for you. So if that's wrong, feel free to.

John Spencer   20:11  

That's true. That's true.

Brock Briggs  20:13  

Why is defense so important in urban warfare? And maybe actually, before we even get into that, can you define urban warfare for us? And maybe the role that that's playing in the world right now?

John Spencer   20:27  

Sure, so don't ask, there are more experts to give you a definition of urban warfare. So, one that you pick up, pull the word apart. So let's define urban. So urban as we define it within the military means, it's a built up areas and manmade structures, buildings, a population of people because you don't have urban unless you have people there. So if you're playing around, you're like, us military, people do practice and urban warfare, and it's just a bunch of buildings. And you're not, it's not urban warfare. 

So you gotta have buildings. You gotta have people and you gotta have the infrastructure to support these, right? Cities share the Latin root with civilizations. Urban areas are the people. They are the communities live there. The other word, warfare, warfare means fighting, right? So war is actually a much larger term that includes, like political objectives and things like that. We talk about warfare, you talk about armed fighting. So urban warfare is armed fighting. Along this, there's a big spectrum of who and who's doing the fighting in urban areas, so populated urban areas. Why the focus on defense? 

So if you take this up, without getting like, my professor hat on, or my instructor hat on, all wars is somebody seeking a political objective. In this situation, where you, so I spent years teaching, you know, I go around the world, talking to militaries about the way they approach urban warfare to include a lot of time with our US Army, from the highest level exercises down to the individual soldier. Sometimes people hold things in our mind because of some built in things into our army. So we're really an offensively based army, right? So we imagine ourselves playing a way game, attacking the enemy. 

But history shows that based on what the objective is in the fight. So, for instance, I wanna talk about generalities. In the war in Ukraine. Russia did not recognize Ukraine as a country. And Putin, as a leader have put out a message saying he doesn't recognize Ukraine is a sovereign nation, which is, you know, a concept of the world created. And then he invaded, with the invasion with the sole intent of taking out the government. So the strategy all the way down to the tactics that that army, the Russian army needs to do is very clear. There's one goal, get into the capital city, because cities are the economic engines and the political seats of power, right? 

So it's not rocket science on analyzing what Russia needed to do in this war. He needed to get to key, he needed to get the inside key. Now, right, he has this overwhelming military power. But across history, the defense like you read in those basic instruction has always been the strongest form of war, that's historic, and data and everything. And it makes sense, right? If my political objective in the war is not to allow you to take my stuff, whether that's my people or my cities, I don't have to go out and attack the other army. I can defend and let them attack me, which they give up almost all their advantage when they're attacking a defender. 

And the other thing you talked about on the manual, which, to be honest, I had no I could not have dreamed. The viral miss that that little manual, which now version four is out, how fast it went. It spread around the world. So it's been translated not just in Ukrainian, but it's been translated in Romanian, Latvian, Japanese, Mandarin, I think, Taiwan and Taipei. It's really become a manual for the weaker countries that viewed themselves as weak and endanger on ways that they can either buy time because all wars about time as well. Or you defeat somebody who's trying to attack and overwhelm and take what's theirs. So, you know, I'll let you kind of re-hit that, but that's kind of basically why did the defense. And another thing about the manual, I think this goes back to your question about my enlisted time.

You know, I've taught strategy at the very highest level, and I'm talking about all the greats like military theories and it sounds like so like at this level. But I'm also an old soldier who knows that if you need to communicate, it has to be in simple terms that's understandable, right? You know this from even learning basic military tasks. So if you look at my standing orders, or a single page, it's in its clearest language. 

And also something I took from writing is about short sentences, concise, because I know even the best soldier and who I'm communicating with that manual is not really soldiers. It's really, if you're not a soldier, but you wanna help fight, a lot of it's about protecting themselves. Because I would quickly realized in the war in Ukraine, people just don't know, like, don't stand in the street, or you will get shot. But the importance of the way I write is that it's short sentences, very clear. And some people you may call it like, elementary. 

But the point is that war is not as complex and fighting absolutely is not as complex as you think, once you understand the basics. And so, and then lastly, is this aspect of it. You know, I had the great opportunity to be a teacher at multiple points in my career. When you're forced to teach something, we know for a fact, in learning sciences, that you achieve a new level of mastery. Because your ability to communicate information and let somebody else learned, then you also achieved this weird new level of mastery like you don't even think about it. 

And you know, the information. After you've taught us there's so much success. Again, the beauty of my weird development and what I hope that the manual, that people can just pick it up and understand something. They might not get all of it. Some of it is, you know, like how to do an ambush. It takes time to learn how to do that. But you go out and put a barrier industry is about as clear a message as you can get.

Brock Briggs  27:00  

How would you square your ideas around defense being the primary? Maybe the first resort, as you know, a strategy and like a country? How would you square that with the US’s approach? And your views don't have to constitute anything or whatever. We're just talking to you here. Do you think that we have adopted that strategy? And has that contributed to any failure and or success in your view?

John Spencer  27:36  

Yeah, no, that's actually a great question. I would love to answer because one of the reasons that I have job security is because militaries don't allow themselves as a military is an institution, right? And I'm talking about soldiers, for some reason, which boggles the mind haven't allowed themselves to focus on urban operations. Because militaries don't wanna fight in cities. It's the worst place, you could ask the military to fight. And most of the power that is military power gets reduced if you send them into urban terrain. 

So there's something interesting, you asked the question, and we call it the Western way of war. There's actually a really good podcast that I was on, it's not my podcast, my podcast is the Urban Warfare Project. But looking at, is there a very specific way that the West, and the United States, which really, if you listen to that podcast series, ends up being the answer to the question, what is the Western way of war? Is the US and that other people adopt. And that's kind of just the nature of what it is. And I'm not being arrogant. It's just a fact. 

Now there are some people do it differently. And some people do think differently. But not to get too technical on you, the foundation of the American way of fighting is what's called a Combiner Maneuver. And like I said, it's offensively based, we think we're going to be. Because of our power, we can force, we can project power, and actually, some of our powers our logistical backbone, right? Like our Navy, the ports and the ability to move the equipment around the world anywhere in our Air Force, the ability that's unique in the world, that amount of power. 

But usually it's offensively based, even though we know and all war, whether it's a city block, where it’s full out war, that you're going to be doing both offense and defense. It's just a fact. Yes, I think that the United States military, and people that follow us, underestimate the power of the defense. And that's some of that's based on what we believe, when wars come will be our objective. What the US military will be asked to do, right? We get our directions from the political leaders, do this and then we'll develop the best military advice in the campaign to do it. 

But we strongly believe that that will be offense. So what Ukraine is showing is that there is a giant. There is still a giant need to be able to defend what you protect, what you wanna value. And matter of fact, I view soldiers' role is not only the ability to close with and destroy an enemy, but also to be a guardian, right? So to be the protector of the weak and all of that, that clearly has an aspect of the defense. So I think after this war, to be honest, there's going to be a lot of relooking at are we prepared to defend? And, you know, Russian failures, they failed to be able to do offense, to be clear.

Brock Briggs  30:42  

Yeah, I think that that's right. And I think you touched on something there that's important is like understanding what the objectives are of the country, you know. Ukraine might not in and of themselves have the ability to kind of play the role that the US largely as for the last couple 100 years, and that's the kind of Big Brother waiting to, for somebody to step out of line and, you know, jump in to defend. 

But yeah, I think that that projection of power has certainly been the motto of the US for some time, especially on the Navy front. That's something that we heard all the time, you know, “Hey, we're gonna go through this area.” Why? “Well, we just need to let people know that we're there.”

John Spencer  31:27  

Yeah. And that we can go there. Yeah, I think so, again, I'm a huge believer in basics, don't over analyze the Ukraine war. Number one, simple thing is that the Ukrainians prevented the Russians for doing what they wanted to do. That's it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, they've killed a lot of people, a lot of Russian soldiers, and they paid a big price for that. And that's a method of defeating a superior military is to basically kill more of their soldiers. 

But the number one simple thing they did was stop Russia from doing what it wanted to do, which was to get into and hold, or to get into key, but also in all the other areas. They actually never controlled a single city, other than Harrison, one of the cities in the south. And it's arguably on that. So number one, you claim at the end of this will say they are they've already won a phase of the war. But the way they did that was to prevent the Russians from doing what he wants to do.

Brock Briggs  32:31  

Yeah, well, and I think that even already, it seems to me and as a non expert, I'm not the foremost expert on Ukraine, or anything that's going on in the world in regards to warfare by any means. But to me, I think that the first initial response sets such a large tone for how the rest of the time will go. 

And if it's not as easy as you think right at the beginning, then that might serve to show that like, hey, maybe we're up against something much larger, something that I wanted to call out from the last segment of that manual. It's called the Will to Fight and a couple of lines from that. Do not let fear overcome you. Urban defenders must keep the will to fight inside of them. And I think that if the news has shown us anything about what's going on in Ukraine, it's that those people are ready to die for their country. And that's something not to be underestimated.

John Spencer  33:37  

No, no, absolutely in that one's near and dear to my heart. I think, again, people that don't know, assume that what wins wars is a bigger military, a better military, like more better weapons, and I'll go through all the analysis and talk about all the different types of weapons. I know what wins wars our soldiers, or, you know, seamen or Marines or it's just, that's there's no doubt in history from antiquity until now. And we know that once a soldier, a motivated soldier with the will to fight and pay a bigger price, and there's history on why soldiers or fighters or civilians will fight, some of that is for a nation, some of that is for a cause. Some of us just to protect their family. 

What really it comes down to honestly and what my book, Connected Soldiers talks about is history shows its soldiers, don't they, all those are motivations. But the biggest thing they fight for is the person to know let them right, the people they are fighting with. When people forget that, then you see what would be called an upset where an army that you thought should have lost in a day can achieve great feats like we've seen in Ukraine. I mean, you're not gonna, don't belittle the fact that the military, the Ukrainian, military was highly trained, highly equipped, and then got a force multiplier when the reserves, which is civilians called into kind of military duty, and the civilians helped fight. 

But you can nick it all down to them having a higher willingness to fight and be willing to pay a higher price. And then you can look at some of the Russian side. They didn't have any of that. They didn't have the will to fight. They didn't know where they're going. It went really bad for them. And we know as leaders, and when it starts to go bad, which it always does. There's things that hold it all together, like leadership, like morale, like the will to fight that all has to be nurtured. And like messages, like the president of Ukraine messages, were a huge part and will go down in history as a huge part to keeping everyone with the will to fight.

Brock Briggs  36:03  

I think that there's a lot of application of that concept to things far beyond just war. What would your advice be on how our current military and just day to day people, whatever it is that you're fighting for? How do we keep that will to fight alive?

John Spencer  36:31  

Yeah, so that's a tough one. And as I've gotten interviewed, and everybody focuses on morale, and what I and yes, it's, but it's actually complex. So I like to look at as you're driving a car, and each one of the indicators are important. Some, you know, your engine, your engine heat is really important. 

And some of these are more important than other things. It really takes an understanding of the individuals to be really applied that, right? And we talked about that, right? It's why we have the best military in the world. It's not necessarily our equipment and all of that. It’s that we value every soldier, and we have this leadership backbone, right? The noncommissioned officers and the officers, that we all view every person as a soldier himself, or a seaman. Don't let me keep my service. You know, when I say soldier, I mean, okay. 

We know that everyone matters. Now, some people will get that wrong or right in but it's under adversity, right? Because there's lots of things that we do in the service that, you know, has application, some of it doesn't. Or if you're civilian, some of it's okay, it's back and forth. But under the most extreme adversity, we know that there's core things that really matter. One of them is just connection, right? So when you allow somebody to, and this is part of the urban manual too, is to stay busy. 

When you allow a single person to think that they're alone, whether it's during COVID, or in the worst situation of war, ever, we know as human beings, we need social connections. We need to stay connected and to know that we're not alone. And even in our little network, or in the world, where that somebody has experienced it before. That applies as much to soldiery as it does to living. And then the other aspect, I think, personally, my personal opinion is that there are acts that can be done to show somebody you care about them. That aren't, you know, some people joke about hugging people. 

But I've been in some very dark places. And when somebody stops and talks to you as a person, and says, or even ask if you're okay, that's a huge aspect to keeping somebody in the fight. And in the fight can mean literally fighting. That can mean literally just surviving, like if your city is under siege, and you're in a basement, not knowing why you're, if life is a value or either. Or it could be in your everyday life here in America. Keeping somebody in the fight is part of human nature. And somebody in whatever situation, especially in the military, if they ever forget that all the way down to the individual level, that's when things start to go wrong.

Brock Briggs  39:33  

You think that the focus on the individual soldier, their mental health, kind of just the ability to kind of like talk through issues that they're going through? Do you think that that will be an increasing part of our military readiness going forward?

John Spencer  39:54  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think most people in the military understand that especially when you have a professional military, right? So the United States military went from a conscript draft system in the 70s, which is was needed and it was needed after World War l, at the end World War ll. Sometimes, you need to do it. 

But we understand that the most powerful system is a volunteer system of professional soldiers. So absolutely do I think it'll be important going forward? In a system where you're asking somebody voluntarily to do much of what they're doing. You're not because there's, it's a weaker system, if you demand things of other people, right? And that's what leadership is about leading and somebody's following, right? it's not leading from the rear and sticking a rifle in somebody's back and telling them to go forward. 

We've learned that across time too. The most powerful form of leadership is when you're in the front, and they're following you. And when they wanna follow you and you can take that symbology, across many aspects, even in everyday American life. Like you know, our elected leaders are our leaders that we wanna follow. It could be a personalized supervisor. So absolutely, it becomes the core. And as the world changes, right? So the mental health of the soldier, that's a very complex topic, right? 

And every individual soldier is different. And they've experienced different things in lives up to that moment. And it's like, near impossible to know all that. But this aspect of connection, that's not virtual, to be honest, will become even more critical as the world continues to change and social media and virtual connections. They're still basic human needs, or basic human practices, like eating together, sleeping together, talking to each other, regularly face to face, that's chemical that will become even more important in the future. 

Brock Briggs  41:58  

I wanna talk about how that plays into your book that's coming out this year. I have one other question on, like, urban warfare, I guess, and just kind of maybe your thoughts and views about the future. I think, in large part, a lot of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last 20 years, and we're seeing this now in Ukraine has been a lot of this urban warfare. You know, fighting in cities fighting against this extreme disadvantage, really, you know, surrounded by civilians in places that don't allow for just kind of total destruction, and the enemy has kind of used that against us. 

Do you think that that's what the future of warfare looks like? 

John Spencer

Yeah

Brock Briggs

Because and I mean, take that any direction the way that you want, but I think that our enemies, whoever they may be, probably have seen how the urban warfare style has maybe not forwarded us completely, but been a, you know, a splinter in our side, in terms of effectiveness and completion of the mission.

John Spencer  43:15  

Yeah, so like you said, I can take that in a bunch of directions as the urban guy, right? I'm a one trick pony. And that's what I do. And people sometimes will push that aside, and then try to weaken my message that the world is urban. I don't see any wars in the future not being urban. Just the geography and terrain still matters. You're going to have to either go through urban or the objective is urban, right? All wars are politics by other means. Urban areas, see the power's economic importance. This is no reasonable way people could say that teacher is not urban, right? 

180,000 people move to a city a day. It's almost hard to believe, but that's a fact. The most developed countries are over 80% urban. You know, there's, you can go to like Africa and things like that, where it's not, but the things that are of most value are urban, or the roads that are gonna take you somewhere go through urban, so absolutely, and in all wars is. So I don't like the term asymmetric warfare. Because all war is about symmetries. If you know whoever's coming, or whoever you're attacking is more powerful than you seek other ways, right? You never attack an enemy at his strength. 

One of the problems with being a superpower in the world, is that everybody's trying to beat us asymmetrically. They're not gonna come at our power, like at the things that we're really good at. They're gonna come at us and try to take advantage, anything that we're not as good at, although we're really good at a lot of things. So where does that all come into play in the Urbanears, like you said, because a lot of our strengths are weakened, not negated, weakened in the urban terrain. And number one is our core values, right? So we don't kill civilians, purposely. We follow the law or and then some. So that's not a weakness. That's our strength. 

But it's also something that an evil enemy or a bad enemy will try to take advantage of. And again, regress into the urban train to take advantage of the fact that there are a lot of civilians around, which does mean the future of war is. And the reasons that we strengthen the laws of war after World War ll is because we didn't wanna, the war in general to be impacted, to be felt by as much as the populations of the world as World War ll was. And currently Russia didn't, doesn't care or whatever of that lesson. So absolutely future’s urban. And the problem is that, hopefully, there continues to be a raising awareness of that, and then preparing for it because it does change the approaches, even us the superpower, approaches, war in the future.

Brock Briggs  46:06  

Well that's so interesting, I think from a bystander perspective, it would be easy to say and to see a increasingly online dominated world, and maybe in like some kind of futuristic setting that all attacks we see are like cyber related, and you know, shutting down power grids over the internet and things like that. 

But like you highlighted, there's still such value in a physical location. And you know, there's value in farmland. There's value in cities. There's still a geographical value that can only be found in that urban environment, like you highlighted. I want to talk about your new book, Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership and Social Connections in Modern War coming up July 1st. Is that right?

John Spencer  46:57  

Yeah. Available for pre order now, though. 

Brock Briggs  47:00  

Oh well, maybe get on that. Do you wanna talk to us a little bit about the book? What's the role, big learnings and takeaways?

John Spencer  47:08  

Yeah, absolutely, I'd love to. So the book is mostly a memoir, right? So it's a memoir of my 2003 deployment as a young officer, platoon leader, invading into Iraq in 2003 and the life experiences of that. And then it's a memoir of my 2008 deployment, which was, I was a new person, the war was a new type of war. And to be frank, the military was a different type of military. And then lastly, my personal experiences of staying at home while my wife went off the war. And I took care of my three kids. 

But of course, you know, I'm a little bit of a geeky academic. So there's a theme and a reason for the book, which was to look at how the world has changed, how soldiering has changed with the invention of social media, right? And Ukraine is showing that like, soldiers yearn to connect with their families and their social support networks outside of border. The days of sending soldiers off to war, and then receiving letters from them weeks and months later, or just waiting for them to get back or gone, right? I can watch live feeds into Ukraine today. I talk regularly to soldiers and civilians inside of Ukraine to include in places like Odessa and places like that. War has changed. 

And that's what the book is about is, if it's changed, are we ensuring within the military and within our families? That we're making sure we stay connected not to use a pun, to what's most important. So the fact that my soldiers in war 2003, so I kind of show us like a starting point, I think 2003 was what we remember what we portrayed in the movies. It was very band of brother aspect, and sitting around campfires and bonding together. By the time I went back in 2008, it was still that but it was also a come out of you know, I go back to my wherever I'm staying and I can dial up, not dial up that's really dating me, I can get online and then connect to my family, my friends, like shoot emails.

And then when I went, my wife left she FaceTime my children every night. And that changed, and it changed her. So there's this aspect of change that I really tried to highlight. I don't give any answers of course. I give, I have more questions than I have answers. But the book is a really a hard look at even what we know is the lifeblood of a fighting force, right? We just talked about the will of the fight. Well, we call it cohesion. If the word if we're if the lines between home and work are gone, clearly that has an impact on the unit's ability to form cohesion. I would die for the person to my left and right. That's a very, that's a fact that is needed in war, and has this new world that we live in, changed that. I don't think it's changed it. I think it's different.

Brock Briggs  50:14  

What I hear you talk a little bit more about that and I'm gonna present a little bit of pushback. And I'll have to read the book and hear what you have to say. My dad was in the Navy and hearing him tell stories of like writing letters to my mom, you know, back in the 80s, or whatever. It's obviously very romantic. And it's all these things and this whole kind of, like, idealistic thing. And obviously, that was much different than when I deployed. I could, you know, once or twice a week, get on the computer while we're out to see in the middle of the night and maybe send some messages to family. 

And I would push back on that and say that I needed that. So I guess how can we use the tools of technology effectively? Whereas I mean, people's families are probably, I would say that that's probably 95% of the reason people get out of the military, maybe 5% they hate it. Maybe the other, the rest of it is that “Oh, I have a family and I need to be home.” How is more connection with the homefront a bad thing?

John Spencer  51:24  

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I don't think what you're saying is push back at all. I think you're in 100% agreeance. And once you read the book, you will be. So one, of course, it's better to be connected. And it is what my family needed. It's what my wife needed. But there's also a new sense of. right? So if I'm in war, of course, I wanna be connected, right? I yearn to be connected with what I value most, my family and my loved ones. And now that we have that benefit, but there's also a lot of stresses that come with that, right? 

So if I know someone's sick, or if I know something's going wrong, there is an aspect of now I know that when before in history, it may have came to me a little later, or coming to me in a different way. So I don't talk in generalities. That's why I wanted this to be a memoir. I wanted to show like, “Look, this is, in 2008, one of my soldiers receives a message that his pregnant girlfriend is in the hospital and after a drug overdose.” And that's extremely crushing to the soldier, and it mattered, you know, on the team's ability to do what they're doing. And on the flip side, the families now get to experience war differently than they ever have in the past, when they can hear from their loved ones. 

Or oh, by the way, if they get used to hearing from them, and all of a sudden they don't. It changes many aspects of the war. And clearly I say there's absolutely huge benefits. And then there's huge drawbacks, and it's very complex, and actually, at the end say that there's something like this, we just don't know, it has to be studied more. And interesting aside on your writing of letters, right? What your dad did, and what you end up doing and what I did. There's been some really longitudinal research and analyzing letters from Civil War and before that, and what the content of the letters are, right? 

So the soldier yearns to explain what they see and what they're experiencing. And there's something different in electronic communication on the immediacy of the communication where that is, has started to change and go away as in what the content of the letter is, because there is a separation in time. Like what the goal of the message is, when it's more frequent and more immediate. Some of its, it's not your good or better or better, bad English, but it's a lot different.

Brock Briggs  54:04  

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I was actually just having this discussion with my fiancee the other day, who's also in the Navy. And we were discussing how while on deployment and being able to see, it was almost hurtful to log in when you get the chance to hop on the computer and you don't have a message. We're so tuned in, kind of like immediate response and like, we're the ones that are going like multiple days without being able to check. We should be, we look forward to that message. And when it wasn't there, it was like, “Wait a second, why aren't you responding? You have your phone. There should be no reason it's been four days.” And so that's an interesting highlight.

John Spencer  54:49  

Yeah, I actually talked about that too, right” Since 2003, like mail call, like coming around and no, and somebody's calling your name that someone had written you or sent you a package, how much that means to the soldier. And in the worst case scenario when things weren't going right at home, either call home and they were too busy to talk.

Brock Briggs  55:08  

Yeah. That's, you're never gonna call it a good time. That's for sure. Do you think that the increasing connectedness that we're talking about and this may be something, hopefully not burying the lede here on the book. But does the increasing connectedness come at the cost of the cohesion in the unit, do you think?

John Spencer   55:30  

It can, if unchecked. There's no control of the information, right? So I don't argue to and this has happened to include recently taking that communication bridge away, like taking cell phones, taking computers, in some aspect in the world of operational security and some aspect of just to be able to allow this cohesion. So it can and that's what I saw. But there are things that we've done across time, that we needed to understand are vital for not just why we did, and I think I mentioned one of them. 

My family has basically an electronic free dinner every night. And my wife tries to make a home every night. Now that has value historically, in humans, more than people know is when you eat, there's something weird about eating together. And like at the military academy, it's still enforced to this day that you're gonna eat together. There's a bonding that happens and what we call breaking bread. And that has nothing to do with the amount of connection that we have. It's just a moment of bond. 

Actually, what we know and I talked about in the book is that people think that what I call the band of brothers effect, right? Because that was a really good series. I do believe in it. And it does happen, it still happens. Just happens, it doesn't just happen, actually. And actually some of the most powerful bonding, that's what leads to cohesion isn't just suffering, the extremes of combat together. It's mindless hours of talking to another person, as you know. Even you know, on the ship, it goes both ways, right? If you get a butthole roommate or somebody, it can go the other way as well. 

But bonds of friendship which lead to brotherhood actually are formed in mindless hours of being together. And where connections can water that interfere with that if it's not, if he's not aware of what's happening, right? So that's what I became aware of is that after a traumatic event, my soldiers came back. Normally, it would just be normal to sit around and talk about that specific traumatic event at that exact time. And they were rather coming back and then immediately connecting and telling someone else about it, which is natural, it's normal. But a leader has to be aware of no, there has to be this controlled moment when we all talk about what we all experience that together. 

So there's no control that the world has changed. But there's things that we've done across our time. And sometimes we didn't, we don't realize why, what the benefits of what we're doing are. And the military is really good and bad about that, right? So we keep doing things that really are relevant. Just because we always have, and then suddenly, we do away with things, like people sleeping in groups and things like that, while they're deployed, that for us and you're in the Army is, has so many benefits. Sometimes it's not known.

Brock Briggs  58:37  

To think that it's very easy, especially for a younger person like myself to look at the military as a dated organization, and make the call for change and to update with technology. But I think deep down, there's a reason we do a lot of the things that we do, and it's showed itself in our effectiveness as a global power for the last couple 100 years. So I think that that's absolutely true. John, I wanna be respectful of your time. Thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me today. Where can people go to follow along with you? Where can they preorder the book? Anything you wanna dish out?

John Spencer  59:18  

Yeah, so I have a website, johnspenceronline.com, where most of my writing. You can preorder books there. You can also get most of my books on Amazon, if you just look for them. I have a big Twitter kind of presence because I think it's important so you can find me on Twitter @SpencerGuard. Also Facebook, so mainly the main website, but there's a couple of directions.

Brock Briggs  59:44  

John, thank you so much. This has been great.

John Spencer  59:46  

Thanks, Brock!