So, I think the biggest problem here is that both of these men are commenting on this issue from within the confines of their own wells of personal experience. And, while they may be judging the situation appropriately from within that context, they both seem to be unable to step back and evaluate the issue from any other vantage point than their own native one. Jocko is an expert war-fighter who has a lifetime of experience in waging counter insurgencies and asymmetric warfare while simultaneously policing an urban population that is being controlled by a foreign power, and he’s approaching this problem from that vantage point. Rogan is an idiot, and he’s approaching the problem from that vantage point.

Rogan actually sums up the whole problem very well when he says something to the effect of “what’s going to happen to these neighborhoods in ten years without police” with the implication being that they will be lawless combat zones run by gangs. The problem is that those neighborhoods are already lawless combat zones controlled by armed gangs. The gang that’s currently controlling the territory just happens be the police.

If you were to ask the people who actually live in those communities who they would prefer, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that most of them would rather have the Crips or the Bloods running things over the LAPD, because at least the gangbangers are openly corrupt rather than lying about it, and they don’t routinely patrol their own neighborhoods with discounted military hardware looking to snatch up anyone of good working age on trumped up drug charges to ship them off to a for-profit prison system that’s essentially just re-branded chattel slavery.

Both of these men are speaking from the position of having lived 50+ years of life never having to worry about getting killed over a traffic stop. Their parents never sat them down to tell them about the family members that got lynched by men who took off their Klan hood on Sunday night and put on a badge Monday morning. Jocko and Rogan have largely been the beneficiaries of a massive criminal organization that has attained political power and filled its coffers by walking on the backs of a non-negligible subset of American citizens. That that same system happens to provide the legitimate service of public safety, and acts as a capable investigatory body, for the subset of the population that it doesn’t directly victimize is not relevant to the conversation. The Sicilian Mafia provided actual protection to the people that paid it, and it enforced contracts when the Sicilian government would or could not, that didn’t make it any less of a criminal enterprise worthy of destruction. And the same holds true for the American law enforcement community.

We need police. At the end of the day there will always be bad people and the state will always need a means by which to enforce its monopoly on violence. But the number of individuals who can or should be employed to execute that duty is vanishingly small compared to the number currently employed to do so. Jocko actually makes a very compelling argument for this when he talks about how hard of a job being a cop today is. He’s right. And it’s hard because we’ve extended law enforcement much further than it ever should have been extended. We have police officers doing jobs that men with guns should not be doing. Traffic cops do not need firearms. Most traffic stops don’t actually need to take place at all, as we have dash cameras and can simply mail people tickets. Investigatory officers do not need firearms. Most situations that a police officer is sent to deal with are made worse by the presence of a firearm and someone who has the authority to use it, not better. And most of the people who are authorized to use lethal force shouldn’t be.

Jock is absolutely right about this much: The job of enforcing the state monopoly on violence is an emotionally and psychologically taxing one, and we should draw from the best of our population to fill that role. Anyone who policies their community with a lethal weapon should have, at a minimum, a bachelors or its equivalent in criminal justice and a year of post-graduate training in use of force, rules of engagement, and de-escalation tactics. They should spend ¼ of their time on duty training to re-enforce those skills. And everything that they do, from the time that they clock in to the time that they leave to go home, should be public record. Your body camera does not go of while you are on duty. Ever. If you need to piss, well then your genitals are now public record. Because that’s the burden that you signed up for when you decided to become a law enforcement officer. You signed up to be the best, of the best, of the best. Someone who is constantly trained and placed under constant scrutiny. And, as a consequence, those that meet the burden of these training and duty requirements should be paid very, very, well. $100k/year starting sounds fine to me.

But we can no longer tolerate a system that employs anyone who can get a GED and gives them a gun and three weeks of training, then send them into what they are repeatedly told, by psychopaths like Dave Grossman, is an urban war zone where everyone wants them dead. We can no longer tolerate a system that promotes racist officers into management and protects its own like priests shuffling around child molesters form parish to parish. We can no longer tolerate a systemically corrupt criminal organization that appeases the majority by providing it with protection while victimizing the minority to fill its own coffers with blood money from civil forfeitures and kickbacks from a for-profit prison system that’s fueled by the immoral war on drugs.
We need less police and more social workers. Fewer officers and more funding for social programs. And we need a complete re-thinking of how we implement the state monopoly on violence and use of force within our own communities. We need to scale back the police, remove the majority of field officer positions, eliminate police unions, dismantle the institutional and bureaucratic system that runs the departments and perpetuates these crimes, and reallocate those funds to reinvigorate our communities to prevent children from growing up into violent offenders. We need, in short, to dismantle the police as we understand that organization and then reinvent what a police department should look like from the ground up.

Once we do all of that, then we can put a man like Jocko in charge of the process of rebuilding our law enforcement community from the ground up. And give him a budget commiserate with the solemn responsibility of training the best of us to use lethal force against the rest of us. But, until we get that first part done, I’m not terribly interested in his thoughts on how to fix a fundamentally broken system through a #leadership, a strong jaw, and ju-jitsu. It’s just bigger than that. It’s not that simple.

Napoleon once said that amateurs think about tactics and that experts think about logistics. What he meant by that was that only someone who doesn’t really know how to actually solve a problem concerns themselves with the minutiae of problem solving. Someone who is confident in their training and ability to meet the demands of a situation will not waste time thinking about tactics but, instead, worry about how to facilitate and support the implementation of those tactics when the time comes to deploy them.

This video is just two bros talking about tactics, 100 years past the point of when we should have been talking about logistics. Joko’s not wrong, he’s just talking out of his depth.