Episode 29 – Lessons Learned As a SEAL Officer and As The Assistant Secretary of Defense – Michael Lumpkin

Jon Becker: My guest today is Michael Lumpkin. Michael has worn many hats in his extremely distinguished career, including Navy SEAL captain, Assistant Secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflicts, acting Under Secretary of defense for policy, Deputy chief of staff for the Department of Veteran affairs, special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, and a special envoy at this Department of state.

Michael's military career included numerous deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, serving as the officer in charge of training the West Coast SEAL teams team, commanding officer service as the deputy Joint Special Operations Task Force commander for the Arabian Peninsula, and service at the US SOCOM Office of Legislative affairs.

His civilian government career has included the implementation of the 2010 Omnibus Caregivers act for VA overseeing the Osama bin Laden operation, reorganizing the DOD, POW, MIA effort, leading the DOD's response to Ebola in West Africa, negotiating and executing the recovery of Sergeant Bo Bergdahl, and direct appointment by the President of the United States to stand up the US Department of State Global Engagement center to counter ISIS marketing efforts.

Michael is currently the chief of staff at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a commissioner on the Afghan War commission. I really enjoyed this chat because Michael has a uniquely broad level of knowledge at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of national power, including on both the military and civilian sides. This has given him a very unique perspective on leadership selection and standards. I hope you enjoy my chat with Michael Lumpkin.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Michael, thanks for being here today!

Michael Lumpkin: Thank you!

Jon Becker: So why don't we start? Let's go back to the beginning. Talk about the origin story. Let's start with the Navy experience. When did you first join the Navy?

Michael Lumpkin: I joined the Navy in 1986, right out of college. So graduated from University of California, San Diego and win the Navy.

Jon Becker: And where did you start? In the Navy?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So I started off as a surface warfare officer. So initially you joined the Navy as an officer, you go to officer candidate school. And then I came out to San Diego for learning how to drive a ship. And of course, at the time, in the eighties, the Navy's motto was join the Navy, see the world. So I grew up in San Diego, so I literally joined the navy and saw the other side of San Diego county.

Jon Becker: That's the world.

Michael Lumpkin: That's the world. That was my world in the navy to start out with. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So how long, how long did you do that before you decided to transition to the teams?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So back in that era, they were only taking about 16, 17 officers a year into the SEAL team. So it was very tough to get there. And the large majority of them came from the naval academy. So because I went through a conventional school and not a service academy, I was very, very competitive in their very few slots.

So I spent a year as a surface warfare officer and then ultimately transitioned over to sealed training once I qualified as a surface warfare officer.

Jon Becker: And so, okay, so you start, you obviously go to buds. What buds class were you in?

Michael Lumpkin: I was in 162.

Jon Becker: And where did you go? Was there anything about your buds experience that we should talk about? Anything?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, I mean, buds is an interesting place, and a lot of people think it's kind of the end state of being a SEAL. It's really, it's a screening process. It's screening more than it is. Training is to screen candidates to see if they have the aptitude to actually be an ABCL.

So I started out with 106, I think was the number in class, 162. By the time of that, 106. By the time we graduated, I think there was 18 of the original class members that started. So it's pretty high attrition rate. And I think it's just you have to be both mentally and physically equipped and have, frankly, good DNA and stay healthy to make it through training.

But I saw guys who were world class triathletes not make it through. And I saw kids from square states in the middle of the country who really never spent any time in the ocean that weigh 105 pounds. Make it through no problem. So, I mean, probably the first and foremost thing I learned was, you know, don't judge a book by cover, that people are capable of many things and you got to get to know the person before you know what they're really capable of.

Jon Becker: That's kind of a recurring theme I've heard from people that have gone through either, you know, whether it's, you know, ranger selection, green beret selection, you know, delta selection, buds, any of those units is, you know, you look at the class the first day and you're like, oh, no, that guy's. That guy's going to make it and that guy's not. And sometimes the guy that you're like, oh, that guy's going to make it just falls apart.

Michael Lumpkin: He does. And sometimes it's health, sometimes it's, you know, stamina. Sometimes it's just mental drive or, I mean, it could be issues at home. You know, it could be, you know, many reasons, but don't look at somebody and judge what you think they can and can't do.

Jon Becker: So where did you go when you get – When you get out? Do you qualify? Where do you go?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So once you finish the basic buds training at that time, I went to army jump school down at Fort Benning and then went to SEAL team four, which focus was on Central and South America at the time. And that's where the real training started. So we did a – It was a training block that was basically SEAL qualification training was the first real training to be a SEAL and not so much screening, but you actually learned small unit tactics at a SEAL team. And then I deployed to Latin America and spent about four or five years in and out of Central and South America.

Jon Becker: And that's when. What year is it?

Michael Lumpkin: So essentially, you think you're doing 89 to probably 94.

Jon Becker: So this is the Tom Clancy era of South America. Clear and present danger, narco wars kind of timeframe.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. I mean, it truly was the wild, wild west. And frankly, from a Navy SEAL perspective at the time, it was kind of the only show operationally that was going on on scale. I mean, there was things going on, of course, in the Pacific and the Middle east, but not like it was in Latin America. It was the height of the drug wars, and US drug policy was quite a bit different than what it is today.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's literally Tom Clancy's clear and present danger. Right? You have US soft forces deploying against the cartels in South America.

Michael Lumpkin: Yes. So I spent time assigned to DEA unit in Colombia, spent time in Peru, El Salvador, Panama, of course, and just throughout Latin America. And it was a great experience. I learned how to operate as a SEAL unit, but also the benefits of working in an interagency kind of organization and construct to get the end states because there are limits to military power and what the military can do and sometimes, especially in dealing with situations in Colombia and such, the benefits of that law enforcement and what they bring to the table and how to work together was a key thing. That I learned during that period.

Jon Becker: Where do you go? So you're there, four or five years. Where do you go from there?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So then I kind of bounced around through different SEAL teams and then went to graduate school and maybe decided that I needed more education. Truly where I understood that there's a difference between education and training. The navy, they kind of lump them together frequently, but they are fundamentally different. I had, Admiral Olson once said something to the effect of, if you have a 16 year old daughter, do you want her to get sex education or sex training? So that kind of highlights, in your mind, there's a difference between the two. And I heard him say that once, and it was like, okay, that one landed to me.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. I have a 17 year old daughter. That one landed hard. Making side notes here for a minute, but I need some time to recover. So define for me what you see the difference. You know, how you saw the difference between the two.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, I see. Education is the theory of the case. It's the understanding the bigger picture where, you know, in the military world, it's where I – Policy and operations meet and why decisions are made that affect what happens on the battlefield. It's largely strategic and operational in nature. I see training, especially as a special operator, is what's happening, and how are you and your team going to react to the events that are happening around you, and how are you going to plan for contingencies? It starts at the basics of mastering the basics, predicting what could go wrong and take steps to mitigate it, and how to prepare for what's going to come next. And that requires some forethought and preparation of what the battlefield for tomorrow is going to look like, not just today.

Jon Becker: What's interesting about that is that the way you just described it is the way that I've always envisioned the two. Training is the how. Education is the why. And I think that one of the problems that we have kind of today in military and special tactics, law enforcement, special tactics, is there's a great deal of emphasis on the how. We spend a lot of time training. We're going to train operators how to do things. We're not spending time teaching them the why. And so many of the kind of modern debacles that we see happening is because with the why comes the why not.

Michael Lumpkin: Yes.

Jon Becker: And it just, it seems to me that a lot of the time we're spending, you know, let's teach them how to do things, but never teach them, you know, to go back to your initial analogy, you know, I don't want her to know how to do things. I want her to know why not to.

Michael Lumpkin: Well, yeah, fair enough. And a good operator understands both. Yes, they spend the time to get the education, whether it's through a formal institution or it's spending the time to kind of look, listen, and feel of what's out there and the lessons learned of others to make sure and see and see how they Fitzhen, fit into their life. And are they doing the right thing for success to have the outcomes they're looking for? Because it's easy to get complacent and to.

And once you do get complacent, you set a new standard, and it happens over time. It happens over and over and over again, and pretty soon you're somewhere where you don't want to be in your training. So it always starts with mastering the basics and then building out from there.

Jon Becker: One of the things you told me quite a few years ago that has stuck with me is that your standards are not what you say they are. They're what you tolerate.

Michael Lumpkin: That's exactly right.

Jon Becker: And that has stuck with me for years, because it is true. It's like you said, when you're teaching the how and you're not teaching the why, the why gets lost. And it's very easy for the how to shrink. So your skill set, the breadth of your skillset shrinks because you no longer understand why you need the breadth of the skill set.

Michael Lumpkin: Absolutely. So there was at one point during the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that some of the SEAL teams were basically not even doing diving anymore. They weren't prepared for a contingency should it arrived.

And that's one of the basic pieces of being a SEAL, is combat swimmer operations. And you have to make sure that you do. You know, it's hard. It's difficult to put ten pounds of stuff into a five pound bag, but you gotta spend the time to do it, and you have to do it and train and prepare for the worst possible circumstance. Now prepare for the worst and hope for the best. It's not the other way around.

Jon Becker: Well, and I think that that's very easy to get lost. You know, I recently interviewed Jonathan Mattingly, who was the sergeant that led the Breonna Taylor raid. And one of the things we talked about is that that warrant was going to be an easy warrant. He said, just give me the easy one, we'll take the easy one. And he had done 2000 warrants at that point, and number 2001 or whatever was not the easy one. And so I think if you are not preparing for worst case scenario when it does arrive, you are wholly unprepared for it.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So you need to assume every time the worst is going to happen and approach it that way. I can remember when I was in charge of training all the west coast SEAL teams, and we had a desert training area out in nylon, and there was times when. No, at noon in the summer, doing immediate action drills of practicing enemy contact with full body armor and kit.

Jon Becker: It's not fun, and it doesn't make you popular with your troops.

Michael Lumpkin: It does not. It does not make you popular, but you do what you have to do, because at the end of the day, it's about bringing everybody home, going back to the warrant. It's about bringing everybody back from that warrant, you know, and making sure that everybody's safe and sound, and then it's executed flawlessly. That's what you should be striving for every time, because the enemy, whether you're. You're a SEAL going into combat or you're somebody serving war, the enemy gets a vote. They get. They get a vote on what happens.

So this is one of those times where control, ultimate control, is an illusion, and you have to, you know, plan on others in trying to influence the situation, frequently in a negative way.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So, okay, so you do five years South America, float around team to team. They send you to Naval Postgraduate school in Monterey, California, which is obviously when you grew up in San Diego. Going to Monterey is a completely different world.

Michael Lumpkin: That's it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The beaches on a cliff as opposed to on the sand.

Michael Lumpkin: Right, exactly. The surfing's not as good there, but still. Yeah, yeah. And then. So from. From there, I went and. And did time as the pet SEAL and the third fleet staff. So every fleet needs a pet SEAL. So I was the one there helping train the battle groups and to the SEALs that were at that time riding the amphibious ready groups and the carrier battlegroups, bounced to. Took over a schoolhouse in Mississippi, where I was training foreign nationals how to do maritime riverine operations. Then that puts us about to the year 2000. And I was tapped to run the training for all the west coast SEAL teams when the SEAL community was reorganizing.

Jon Becker: At that point, you were lieutenant commander?

Michael Lumpkin: I was lieutenant commander, yeah, at that point. And then from there, well, 911 happened. I can remember being at the training command at the time. You know, it was 530 something in the morning, and, you know, TV was on and watching. Watching everything unfold and saying, you know, the world's gonna change. And it did.

Jon Becker: So how long had you been at buds at that point?

Michael Lumpkin: So I was training the west coast SEAL team for probably, I'm guessing, nine months time. Eight months.

Jon Becker: So you've got. You have buds and all of the other additional training stuff on Bubba.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So actually, buds itself, the schoolhouse was a separate entity, but I had all of the operational teams.

Jon Becker: Okay, got it.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, got it.

Jon Becker: So 911 happens, and so then.

Michael Lumpkin: It’s just immediately get everybody ready and try to get them out the door. So we did everything from try to bring desert patrol vehicles out of mothballs, you know, to get them because we didn't have ground mobility, because that's not the war we were training for Afghanistan. We were. And this is not just an indictment on naval special warfare, and I don't think it's a fair indictment. It's more of the military and the Department of Defense as a whole is that we weren't prepared for that type of conflict. We didn't have the mobility, so we were cannibalizing vehicles. We were doing what we could to try to get the forces over there as fast as possible.

And then we – Large deployments there until 2003, when Iraq happened, and then kind of the focus was then split between Iraq and Afghanistan. At that point, I'd become the group one operations officer, which is group one is overseas, all the west coast SEAL teams. So I was the operations officer until I took command of one of the SEAL units down in Coronado.

Jon Becker: Okay. And so then you end up taking command, like, getting a command. Which team did you get?

Michael Lumpkin: Special boat team twelve. So I was in charge of all of the mobility for the west coast SEAL teams.

Jon Becker: Got it. Where do you go from there?

Michael Lumpkin: Well, I went to be in the office of Legislative affairs for US Special Operations command. So I was the SEAL that over. So, you know, basically represented us SOCOM on Capitol Hill, on the House and the Senate with authorizers, appropriators to make sure that they got the resources that were needed.

Jon Becker: So you were the one that was shaking Congress down for money?

Michael Lumpkin: It was, yeah, yeah. I got pretty good at it. I got pretty good at it. So over that period of time, from 2001 until 2000, probably seven ish, the sealed community went from and not the SEALs. The special operation community went from about 33,000 people to an excess of 50,000. So you saw meteoric growth of the organization, and that wouldn't happen without Congress and, you know, appropriating monies and resources to make sure that could happen.

Jon Becker: So go back to the training. I mean, while you're, while you're running training, commanding training, there's also, that's like rapid growth of SOCOM. Right? That's where they want to start to dramatically increase the number of teams and increase the number of units. And how did that affect you?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, very challenging, especially if we want to maintain the standards. When you grow something quickly, there's a real risk of dilution and capability. So frequently you're sacrificing capability with numbers. And so it's one of those things we had to monitor a lot. And I would say that there was significant change.

I'm not saying there was a dilution in capability, but the culture changed to keep the standards evolved. It's what happens with massive rapid growth. You see the same thing in industry as you do in the military.

When product lines, you can't scale them and they scale them too fast. Frequently you outrun your supply chain. A myriad of different things can happen that affects overall quality. This is one of those things that us SOCOM and the SEAL teams in particular have had to wrestle with, of maintaining the culture that they had of operational excellence and making sure that they could have the force strength as far as numbers that they needed to be successful.

Jon Becker: How much were they trying to grow the teams at that point? Give me the order of magnitude.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, just off the top of my head. So they created two new SEAL teams in that period of time. These are two, one on the east coast, one on the west coast. That unto itself, we had three west coast SEAL teams and we went to four. So if you're looking at just a basic simple math, that's 25% more SEALs in a matter of where it takes years to make a SEAL, you do that rapidly, there are consequences.

Jon Becker: So how did you, because, I mean, obviously if you're tasked with training to some degree, you end up being the guardian of the standard. Right? Like how do you, how do you manage that tension?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think the first step is that, you know, clearly there was a large team of people that were trainers. And if you're not willing to make the sacrifice of put your very best people as your trainers, your very best, and it hurts, it hurts to take them out of the operational lineup, but you have to be willing to do that to keep the standards and if you're not, be prepared to pay the consequences.

Jon Becker: That in and of itself is an interesting point because so often in both law enforcement and military, the guy that ends up going to training is the guy that's nothing appointee into the spear. Right? Like, you don't take the best and the brightest. You take the guys that, you know, aren't the best and the brightest. Cause you want the best and the brightest on the front lines.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, but the whole key is you want to make many best and bright people. Right? And you have to do that through a process. You have to have a kind of a codified process on how you do that. And you have to have the right people who have the training, who understand the difference between training and understand the education piece, and who can fuse the two together to, you know, impart capability and wisdom to those people that they're training. It's tough. It's, you know, and the navy has a culture, and it was largely started by Hyman Rickover when he started the submarine forces, that people do what's inspected, not expected.

So the key is, as a leader, you have to make sure that you are, you are the keeper of the standards. You have to do inspections. Gear inspections is one thing, but there's also the inspect. The tactics, make sure they make sense, that they will bring everybody home, that it will accomplish the mission. And it's a tireless and never ending job, but you have to do it or you will be unsatisfied with the outcomes. And especially in life and death situations, people will die.

Jon Becker: It's a really valid point. I recently read a book that's very critical of DEvGRU, specifically the teams called code over country. I think there's probably any book. He has a perspective, and it isn't necessarily a pro-dev group perspective, but one of the points that he makes in the book is that the issues that they've had were failures of leadership, not failures that he talks a lot about the unit culture and how it was very enlisted driven culture.

And the point he ends up making, albeit maybe unintentionally, is what you're saying, that as an officer, you are responsible for the standard and for enforcing the standards and not allowing the operational aspects of the unit to erode those standards. How do you do that, though, from your perspective? What have you seen work?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, for me is you have to have an alignment of three different things. You have to have accountability, responsibility, and authority. You have to make sure that those things happen at the right level. For example, as a team commanding officer is, I had a training officer. He had to know what his authority to make decisions, when it needed to come to me, when he could make the decisions. He knew what he was responsible for, and he knew that he was going to be held accountable. When those three things happen, you get success almost every time.

Jon Becker: But if any one of them is falling down.

Michael Lumpkin: You're setting yourself for a problem. And in an organization, especially a bureaucratic organization looking department of Defense or in a federal government, or probably even in a large police department or federal agency, frequently that doesn't happen. And it's not by design. It's just over time and power and distribution and things. But it's key to make sure that they are aligned again. It's about outcomes.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So the focus of the organization has to be the product.

Michael Lumpkin: That's correct. And when the organization, there's a misstep or things don't go right, everyone should feel it. It shouldn't be. Just even though. If my training officer, for example, didn't do something correctly or he something that screwed up, everybody needs to know not to lambast him, because it affects everybody. It affects the organizational brand. I talk about the SEAL brand. It's one of the strongest brands on the planet. Without a brand manager, nobody manages their brand. It's just over time, it's just becoming something unto itself, I think.

Especially when there's so many different pockets of operational capability and as many people as there are, you try to channel it and hurt it with ethos and a creed and all the things that they've created. But at the end of the day, it's about people, once that's been done, is holding people accountable based on what they're along the lines with their responsibility, and make sure they have the authority to make the decisions.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's one of the things I talk about when I teach culture centric leadership is the idea that, you know, I actually stole the line from you. People do what's inspected, not expected. But if you don't get on the scale every morning, you're probably getting fat.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Right. If you are not, you know, I always say the culture of your organization is like a reputation. Everybody has one, and if you're not paying attention to it, it's probably not a good one.

Michael Lumpkin: Well, and the other piece of that that's important to factor in is that people, I think it's human nature. They train to their strengths, not to their weaknesses.

Jon Becker: For sure.

Michael Lumpkin: In a sense, I can go to the gym and see the, you know, the guys hovering around the bench press. I've got, you know, we'll call them chicken legs and massive chests, you know, because that's all they do, is bench press. So great. If that's the look, they're going for.

But, you know, people train to their strengths, and you truly have to be objective. You can't be have somebody who will be objective before you for you. So that person who's objective for you will tell you what your weaknesses are. So you know what to train to. And that's, frankly, you know, in business, that's a little easier because the numbers show.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: You can go in and pull the numbers and see where your revenue is coming from, where your expenses are going, and you can kind of figure it out and discern it operationally. You have to make sure you're looking at a tomorrow's potential battle potential, and you have to. Worst case versus most likely. And you have to create a training regimen that trains the people's weaknesses, not to their strengths.

Jon Becker: I think it's very difficult to do, though. You know, I think it's. I think it's very easy to, to do. And, I mean, I see it all the times with teams that I work with. Like, they'll run the same problems over and over again, and if they hit a difficult point in training, they'll just avoid it because it's difficult and it's awkward and nobody wants to have bad conversations. And, you know, it's, I think. I think that you lose skill, you lose operational capability, whether it's in business or tactical, in drops.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And you don't realize until you needed those capabilities that they're gone.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And I do think part of this is having a organizational culture that embraces honesty and the fact that you tell me my baby's ugly and I'll decide if it's gonna get plastic surgery or not.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: You know, I think that's kind of key. And so the key to any after action is the honesty of the hot wash. And whether it's a senior or a junior, everybody should be able to say what went right, what went wrong, without any, you know, blowback for doing it, because that's the way you learn. And part of that is, you know, is everybody has to be able to laugh at themselves, you know, to a certain extent, because we all make mistakes, because, you know what? As long as you have humans involved, you will. Mistakes are going to be made.

Jon Becker: But I think. I think it is very difficult in the modern world to create a culture of brutal honesty. Right? We have kind of begun to not want to know that our a** looks fat in those pants. And it's become very easy to socially rude to say that. And it's a hostile workplace environment, and we are kind of. I remember when my son was in the fifth grade, 6th grade, the coach got up and gave it talk to the parents about how they were going to teach the kids sports and they were going to do sports and for them doing all these things.

But he kept using the word non threatening, you know, we're going to play, you know, teach him to juggle. It's good fry hand coordination in a non threatening way. And I walked up to him and he's, he's basically saying, like, if your kid is a dork, you know, we're going to support him and let him know he's a dork.

And, I walked up to him afterwards and I said, hey, coach, you know, Jon Becker, Jonathan's my son, and said, do me a favor and if he sucks at something, let him know he sucks at it. Don't tell him he's magic because I deal with too many people that come in looking for a job that nobody has ever bothered to tell them, hey, you suck at this and if you want to get better at it, this is how you do it. But I think culturally we're given a lot of f****** 7th place trophies right now.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And I think this is where the leadership comes in and has to, if it was easy, it'd be done already. I mean, as far as creating a culture that can accept that kind of honesty, but at the end of the day it's about saving lives and getting, you know, being successful in the mission at hand. And you have to be able to, to be really honest in order to educate and to train people to make sure that they're ready for what's going to come next.

Jon Becker: How did you, as they're trying to expand the teams, I imagine there is a point that you guys hit the diminishing returns point for lack of a better term.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. No, absolutely. Especially when we didn't increase the size of the training staff. Your numbers are increasing, your throughput. Each person being trained received less time and you're still trying to get the same outcome. It's really difficult and you have to sit back and rethink about how you think about solving the problems.

So you have to start thinking about the better mousetrap, how to do this on scale. How does this change? Do we need to tweak this? Do we need to tweak that? Are there things we can do to find economies so we can try to increase the time of training and to make sure people have the time to get the iteration that they needed to do? The repetition of training in order to create muscle memory.

Jon Becker: So, I mean, as you're doing that, when you hit the point of no return, how are you managing above you? Because I'm imagining there's probably some downward pressure.

Michael Lumpkin: Of course there is that, again, you have to. There's times when you have to salute and say, aye, aye, sir, and get it done, but there's other times when you owe it to your seniors to tell them, here's the challenge, and this is what I'm doing to mitigate it. So just don't dump the problem on their lap, but also offer that this is what I'm doing to mitigate the problem. Do you have any suggestions that might help? So, I mean, help me help you. Well, that's kind of it, right? Because, I mean, at the end of the day, everybody works for somebody.

Jon Becker: Yes.

Michael Lumpkin: Whether you're in business, you're working for your customers, or you're the president of the United States working for the American people. Everybody works for somebody.

Jon Becker: But I think that one of the challenges in working for people is you have to be willing to speak truth to power, and I think that that is very challenging in a high alpha environment like the one you worked in.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, it is. And it doesn't always end well. It doesn't. So, you know, you got to be able to take the licks and, you know, frankly, it's. And not make things personal. When it is personal, you have to not wear it on your. Your shoulder all the time that you got dressed down or that the boss didn't see it the way you see it, but you owe it to the boss to tell them, this is the challenge you're facing, because at the end of the day, you're not by yourself.

This is, frankly, why they call them the sealed teams. You have a team of people and a culture that's focused on teams working together to solve complex problems. So embrace it.

Jon Becker: Makes a lot of sense. So what else did you like at the time that you're doing the training? What else was there that, like, what were the lasting lessons for you there?

Michael Lumpkin: You know, there's several. I think I kind of touched on it earlier, is you need to remain objective to your weaknesses, and you really, because we all have them, and you have to just identify what they. What they are and just be cognizant of it, or you're going to be the guy at the bench press, you know, standing around.

So, again, you don't want to do that. You know, I always said that, you know, kind of tactical lessons learned are kind of written in blood, you know, that spilled on target. That's where we learn the tactical lessons. Operational lessons are learned in the newspaper and strategic lessons are written in the history books.

And I say that because there's lessons all the time that. But you got to be observant enough to discern them and to recognize them for what they are and be willing to apply them just because something happened. I mean, you've had some great folks on your podcast who tell some events that happen and just an amazing perspective on things.

There's something there for all of us to learn. When you hear them and figure out how does this apply to you and your team? Frankly, whether it's a sealed team or it's a law enforcement team, I think it's so important. Frequently lessons learned are put in a book, put on a shelf and never looked at again.

Jon Becker: Which is why we're doomed to repeat history.

Michael Lumpkin: Over and over. And over again and again. I say this regularly. We haven't won a war since World War two and things aren't getting better. So we need to rethink about how we're thinking about the problem.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Our plan may not be working here. We're spending almost a trillion dollars a year. Yeah, it's a very valid point. So when you leave training, you end up at being the congressional liaison for SOCOM. What do you learn there? Like, what is the big lesson of shaking Congress down for money?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And authority. So it's not just the money, but it's also to get the rules changed in acquisition to make sure we can get the stuff we want in a streamlined fashion. It's about all kinds of different variables where the law and policy come together. I think what I learned is from that perch was where tactics, what's happening in the field as an operator and policy legislation mix and what it looks like and how each one feeds each other.

I also learned that it's how much more valuable it is to, at least for me, it was to go from being an operator to kind of a policy legislative view instead of the other way around. Having that experience of being a, being in the trenches for a while gave me an amazing perspective on how sausage is made and how I can influence the recipe.

Jon Becker: That's a really good way to put that. Yeah. I think it's so much now in business, in law enforcement and military, we see people coming out of school and going into the tops of organizations like apprenticeship is not a thing anymore. Right?

You come in as a trained genius and it has always struck me when I'm dealing with somebody who's 23 with a backpack and a Stanford education who's now at the head of an organization that they make really simple mistakes because they never had that low level experience that taught them all of those paradigms for decision making that you don't get.

I mean, again, that crossover between education and training, you can understand the why all day long. If you don't understand the how, the application of the why gets a little dicey.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And it's also the understanding and anticipating what the second and third order, 4th, 5th order consequences for every decision are. And they're real. And frequently policies and decisions are made where the second and third order consequence was way worse than the original thing they were trying to fix.

Jon Becker: Mean like us trying to fix terrorism in Iraq by removing Saddam Hussein.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, like that one.

Jon Becker: Just as a theoretical, that would be a good thing, destabilizing a country together just to get even.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And do away with the Baath party, the glue that held the society together. Oh, that one.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that one.

Michael Lumpkin: Okay.

Jon Becker: Yeah. But see, again, it's like you look at the recent exfiltration from Afghanistan and we have policymakers that are making decisions without consulting people on the ground with the real operational experience. And that seems to be kind of a recurring theme in both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. Is this like, oh, we're going to do this policy wise and then, oh, what do you mean that happened? And it's like, it just feels like there's kind of a disconnect vertically in a lot of our organizations where we are.

And you see, even with law enforcement in the way that we're placing, you look at the city councils are like, oh, we're going to cut the law enforcement budget. We're going to cut the number of cops. What do you mean, crime went up. What did you think was going to happen?

Michael Lumpkin: Right, exactly.

Jon Becker: But they didn't. How do we, from your perspective, because you've been, you know, we haven't quite finished going through your career yet, but you've been on both sides of this. Right? Like you've been on the policy side and you've been on the tactical side. How do we improve that? What, what is your perspective on that?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, it's a great question and I wish I had. There was a really simple answer for it, but there isn't a, I think it, and it really depends on the way that we'd look in the Department of Defense is probably going to look different than it does at LA Sheriff's office. But I think what it really starts, where it starts is people talking together and recognizing that they don't know it.

All the policy folks need to understand whether it's a city council, they got to sit down and recognize what they don't know. And this part of this is, I do think there's opportunity for, whether it's a city council or it's a senior policymaker, actually being educated and trained, and I don't mean at, you know, at GW University.

I'm talking about by, say, military people or by city council, by the, by the police department is to actually conduct training and walk them through different scenarios tactically, so they can understand the consequences of things. And it's work. It's not easy, but I think that's where it's going to have to start if it's going to happen on scale.

Jon Becker: That's funny. I was in law school when Rodney King happened, and I was working at police litigation. I was Rodney King happened just before I lost. All the litigation is happening. And while I'm at police litigation, we're working on the Rodney King case. And we had a conversation in a class one night, and the professor was basically kind of ripping on LAPD and saying how, you know, this is ridiculous. They shouldn't happen this. And it was very clear that she had a fundamental misunderstanding of defensive tactics. And so I finally just said, like, professor, how do you think police officers are trained?

She goes, well, they're all black belts. They're all black belts in martial arts, so they should just be able to do this without having to use sticks. And she kind of looked over and saw the absolute look of horror on my face. I think she's like, well, I don't understand. Why do you have that look on your face? I said, because almost none of them are. And they get almost no defensive tactics training. Like, you don't even understand what's going on, do you? And it was the first time that I really realized the public perception and the fact set that they are making decisions from and raising opinions from can be completely wrong.

And if there isn't this moment where you go, hold on, that's not what happens, that you do end up with some really stupid policies and really stupid decisions. California right now is in the process of trying to ban bite dogs completely. They're trying to ban bite canines because there have been a couple of bad bites in a couple of city council members. And what they don't understand is the consequence of that is more people are going to get shot.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. They will. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's an approach. I would say not a good one, but it's an approach. Right.

Jon Becker: I mean, it's definitely safer for law enforcement. You know, if we just shoot them, then that's a simpler problem. But it's not going to solve the societal aim that we're trying to solve now.

Michael Lumpkin: And generally, if there are, I think we've reached the point in society there aren't a lot of really simple answers to complex problems.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: So you have to be willing to do your homework and figure out and work your way through the complexity of the solution to the complex problem.

Jon Becker: I also wonder at times if part of the reason that there aren't a lot of simple solutions is because we are spending too much time on the how, not enough time on the why. Like I use example with my kids, the first time your kid takes something that doesn't belong to them, you have two lessons there.

One is, you know, Billy, don't take that piece of candy. The other is, don't take things that aren't yours. Billy, don't take that piece of candy is the how. Right? You don't take things that aren't yours is the why. If he understands the why, you're not going to then end up saying, and don't take that toy and don't take that other thing.

And don't, you know, you just, you don't take things that aren't yours. And I feel like we've kind of gone away with leaders. We've gone away from really fundamental leadership training and we're more focused on management. We're more focused on what time do your people come in and what time do they leave and not focusing enough on what are they supposed to be doing.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, absolutely. Because leadership and management aren't the same.

Jon Becker: Oh.

Michael Lumpkin: And many people lump them together.

Jon Becker: I always say systems are managed, people are led.

Michael Lumpkin: That's exactly.

Jon Becker: You can manage quality.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah.

Jon Becker: You can manage air conditioning systems, you can manage it. Systems, because they are self governing in a different way. Human beings have to be led.

Michael Lumpkin: They do. And I do think that where the operators can help their leaders, and I'm going to say policymakers, because they kind of have to sometimes put your, put your head in their space to see how they see the world. I think that's really important. And I don't know that that happens enough, whether it's in the military or in law enforcement.

I mean, because at the end of the day, policy needs a forcing function, doesn't change on itself. You will use your dog bite you said it was a result of some nasty dog bites. Something happened, and so it was a forcing function for that policy to change. Sometimes it requires death or suffering to move it in the wrong direction or even to move it in the right direction.

But I think people hunting people say, well, why don't our leaders do this? Because something bad enough hasn't happened to force the policy to change. And that's just. It's an unfortunate reality, but it is. I mean, in the world where everybody's dying from task and information toxicity, the only things that get detention are the most important things that are sitting on somebody's desk. And again, that's usually the forcing function that drives, you know, to change.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think it's very easy for the urgent, in that case, to crowd out the important, too.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah.

Jon Becker: You know, it's like the thing that's on fire becomes the thing that you're paying attention to. You're paying attention to. The teams are constantly on the ground in Iraq, engaged in desert warfare and local urban warfare, diving.

Michael Lumpkin: Right, exactly.

Jon Becker: So why take them out and make them dive?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And again, so it's that balance of worst case versus most likely. Right?

Jon Becker: That's a good way to put it.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So the other things I think that are important is that people have to recognize and really understand and objectively understand what their organizational culture is, because culture will trump strategy. Lead it for lunch every day. You can have the best strategy in the world, but you don't have the culture. Organization, culture, whether it's the ability to be candid with each other, is to train to weaknesses, not strengths. It's not to truth, to power, or, frankly, senior leaders inspecting work that's being done, expecting the tactics and looking at it, then the best strategy isn't going to make any difference. It's not going to work.

Jon Becker: I remember when I first started, AARDVARK inspection was a culture, was a heavy culture in law enforcement, and it was a regular thing that has changed over the course of my career, to the point that I was recently with a team that were doing force on force stuff, sims stuff, and was horrified because everybody cleared their own guns. There was no secondary inspection.

And I remember the team leader saying, you guys are all grown men. Make sure you have an empty gun. And it just struck me as like, secondary inspection exists for a reason.

Michael Lumpkin: It does.

Jon Becker: And it isn't because I don't think you don't care. It's because sometimes you make a mistake.

Michael Lumpkin: That human thing again.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, humans make mistakes. It just takes a second to be thinking of something else and miss a step.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And the thing that you and I have talked about in the past is you're taking people where they are, and sometimes they are at the height of their powers and the peak of their game, and they are sharp and completely focused on their job, and sometimes they're in the middle of a divorce and drinking too much, and their dog just got run over by a car, and you've got 25% of their capability manifest. And so that's where an inspection catches it.

Michael Lumpkin: It does. Because we all have stuff going on in our own personal lives, and some days that it, frankly, it affects us more than others.

Jon Becker: A pilot, and we were talking about checklists, and I'm like, you know, why do you guys use checklists? Like, you're. If you've been flying a long time, like, why do you need a checklist? And he said, you need a checklist because if you make a mistake, people die. And he goes, I said, well, they're like, just, you know, you know, the checklist don't just kind of go through the checklist. He goes, I read the checklist every time, and I read it out loud. And my copilot verifies what I said. And I said, that's very inefficient.

And he said, yes, and so is killing 300 people on an airplane. And he said, your culture has to be focused on preventing any type of mistake, and the only way that happens is to be inefficient to create intentional obstructions because the path of least resistance is downhill and off a cliff.

Michael Lumpkin: Right. So one of the things I used to do is I used to look at what can go poorly, and then I would take the kind of, when my mind, okay, we're at investigation and work backwards. What could I have done to have mitigated, whether it's combat swimmer training operation, is how do I prevent a boat from coming from out of nowhere and running over one of my dive teams? How do you make sure if somebody's jumping out of a plane, that their parachute opens? What can I do to prevent a malfunction?

So, in the training phase, you go through all of that stuff, and you build it in, and it just bleeds over, and it becomes second nature when a real world operation is in progress, because you just have to, and you got to spend the time to do it. I mean, even on my own personal boat, I have checklists. I have checklists when I leave at the end of the day because I don't want my boat sinking to make sure I don't forget the one step that keeps it afloat that night.

Jon Becker: It's funny, I was working on a military contract years ago, and we had a subcontractor that was making explosive device force, and we had a DCMA inspector that had come out and do safety inspections on the subcontractor. And he called me before the meeting and said, hey, I know this is your subcontractor. I have some very strong concerns. I've been to this facility, and I'm very troubled by these things. And he's like, I wonder if you can meet me and we can have a conversation? And so I said, sure. And I flew into, it was a place you had to drive to.

So I flew and met him and rode in with him. And I said, these guys have done this a really long time. They're really good at this, blah, blah. I don't understand where at this point I'm still, this is my subcontractor. I'm going to defend them. And so were having this conversation as were driving as a four hour drive. And so we have a long time to talk. Nice guy. I think he's overly cautious and kind of annoying.

And I'm like, I don't understand your concerns, blah, blah. He kind of expressed some his concern. He goes, do me a favor. He says, my bag is behind my seat. He goes, there's a notebook in the bag. We pull it out. And I said, sure. And I pull it out, and he goes, just look through it. Just flip through the pictures that are in that notebook. And the pictures are literally smoking hole after smoking hole.

These are all ammunition factories that have blown up and explosive factories that have blown up. There were 35 people killed in that accident. There were 20 people who killed in that accident. I said, okay. I said, well, why are you having me do this? And he goes, those people were all much better at their jobs than your subcontractor is.

So we're going to do a really thorough inspiration after that. And it changed my culture about safety, though, because just the words, those people were all much better at their jobs than your subcontractors. And there's this moment of like, oh, yeah, no, that's, and these were, you know, some of those were like big defense contractors who, you know, do this, like, really do this for a living.

Michael Lumpkin: Right.

Jon Becker: And it changed my attitude towards inspection in a way that it's never gone back. And, and I think, I think you make a really valid point.

Michael Lumpkin: But I think professionals understand why you need inspection. I think it is one of those discerning differences between a real professional and somebody who does the job.

Jon Becker: Preston, that's a really good point. Okay, so let's go back in time. So now you're getting towards the end of your military career, right? You're congressional liaison to SOCOM. What makes you decide it's time to retiree?

Michael Lumpkin: There was a series of different things. I think one of the things I've always had the ability to do is to be kind of objective about where I am and what I want to do and what I, frankly, I don't want to do. So I was selected for promotion to captain, and I saw that there was some stuff going on in my neighborhood as far as congressional seats and the way things were going.

And we had a new folks that were coming into the, you know, that were running for the presidency. And at that time was 2008. And it just made sense that I didn't want to spend the rest of my career making PowerPoint slides in a cubicle in the Pentagon.

So it just seemed like kind of, it was time for me to go and do something else, because I think there's many ways to serve, and it's not always in uniform, or there's just many ways to serve the American people. So I chose a different path.

Jon Becker: So you declined promotion and retire.

Michael Lumpkin: I did.

Jon Becker: But they weren't done with you yet?

Michael Lumpkin: No, they weren't. So essentially what happens is that I go into the private sector for a while and that I get asked to come back to government. So I ended up going to be the deputy chief of staff at the Department of Veterans affairs, which started a pathway over to. I was traded like a ball card from Rick Shinseki to Bob Gates over to the Department of Defense. And I went there and served as the principal deputy assistant secretary for special operations at the time was the senior civilian overseeing the entire special operations community. And then I kind of bounced around through the administration.

By the time it was done, I did a stint as the undersecretary of the policy, which at the time was the number three position at the Pentagon, did a stint as a senate confirmed assistant secretary for special operations and low intensity conflict. And in the last year of the administration, I was asked to go over and do the counter ISIS messaging to stem recruiting for ISIS internationally to join their cause.

The assignments themselves were kind of interesting. I mean, they were great. I mean, I got exposed to all kinds of amazing things, but I also got to do some, I'll call them special projects or work different things that I would have never, ever had exposure to. And I think it was that mindset of what I brought from the special operations community, that made me kind of uniquely suited to take on some of these tasks and to have my seniors recognize that I could and would be successful at these tasks.

At VA, it was implementing the 2010 Omnibus Caregivers act. This was a Congress decided that the number of service members that were sick, injured or ill from service, many of them had caregivers, family members that they should get stipends and get healthcare. And so I worked that program to get that fully implemented at VA, worked with some really talented folks at VA to make that happen.

Over at DOD, in addition to doing my counterterrorism special operations oversight, I also was asked to reorganize the POW MIA effort in the Department of Defense. This is bringing home our missing in action and looking for, continue to look for pows from prior conflicts all the way back to World War 2.

I was tasked with negotiating and executing the recovery of Sergeant Bo Bergdahl from Taliban custody. He'd been in custody for five years, almost five years by the time that I was given the mission. And we got him home in a matter of months by being able to channel the resources and then the other project of size and magnitude that I was able to lead was running the Dods task force to eradicate Ebola from West Africa.

Jon Becker: I remember that. Well, let's go back first to when you get to ASD SO/LIC with what at the time, I think I called the most fortuitous timing in history. I think you started on a Monday and Osama bin Laden was killed like the following Friday or something.

Michael Lumpkin: I think I started on the 22 April and you're talking 1 May, so it was literally a week. Yeah.

Jon Becker: I remember calling you and saying, you are either the most ruthlessly efficient person on planet Earth or the luckiest guy I know.

Michael Lumpkin: I wish it was the former, but let's be honest, it was the latter.

Jon Becker: Here's your new business card. Here's your parking spot. By the way, we know where bin Laden is. Are you cool if we go get him? What was that? I mean, what was that like walking into that? Cause that's obviously, you have to realize at the time that is going to be probably the most historic event you'll ever participate in.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. You know, it's interesting as, I mean, it just made me respect the team that did all the heavy lifting on that. And it truly was an effort between the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, as well as a myriad of state department, a myriad of other government agencies who worked together, people that were focused, so singularly focused on a single task.

Jon Becker: Just grinding for years.

Michael Lumpkin: Grinding for years, and obstacle after obstacle put in front of them and them either going over the obstacle or going around it. But it was key. They didn't let anything stop.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think one of the things that I, I think is very, you know, I don't know, it's one of the things you have to admire with the US government, and it's true of other governments, the Israelis, certainly. But like, there is a point where you've pushed the button with us and there's going to be somebody who it is their entire life to just solve you as a problem. And bin lad was such an example of that where it took so long and they had to be so patient to do it, that it's, you know, it's really impressive.

Michael Lumpkin: Again, just phenomenal. People who committed, just committed to the mission.

Jon Becker: Yeah. At the time you have to realize that's significant.

Michael Lumpkin: Oh, absolutely. Actually coming into the DOD at that level, at that time, it basically showed me what is possible. So sometimes we forget what is possible. And when you see it so quickly upon arrival, it kind of focuses you on, I think even in this talk here, I've used the term outcomes a lot of, to me it's about the outcomes. And so if you truly understand the outcome and you're really, truly committed it and you have the passion, you'll do whatever it takes to make it happen.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: And I use that to kind of approach those other things that I talked about that I was able to work on and projects that all were successful about putting a team together, creating the right culture, focus on the outcomes channel and manage the resources and just get it done well.

Jon Becker: And while your ASD SO/LIC extortion happens. Right?

Michael Lumpkin: It did, yeah. So we had that unfortunate shoot down of extortion 17, the helicopter carrying members of the army air crew as well as the Navy SEALs and support folks. Yeah. So it was a, that was terrific.

Jon Becker: How did, from your, from your advantage, how did that play out? Like, walk me through that.

Michael Lumpkin: Well, I mean, first there was the notification that it happened and the one with, the one thing I've learned over the years, information that you get is the first bit of information is never accurate. So I'd heard a helicopter was shot down. I was going, okay, I might have some casualties, which is a bad day unto itself, but when I heard that it was the worst possible scenario, it just was like a throat punch, especially when you, I mean, there was guys that I went to buds with that were on that Hilo. Really yeah. So, I mean, so there was the, you know, the professional thing, but there was also the personal.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: Of knowing them and knowing them well. And then it was just the. Having patience. I had to have a certain amount of operational patience because it takes time for the information to get through the food chain to get up to me so I know what's going on, so I can report to my seniors, so I can do my oversight mission that I'm supposed to do and not just pick up the phone and call down and start.

Jon Becker: I need it now because I'm dropping things on people.

Michael Lumpkin: Well, that actually slows the process. And sometimes you don't want to be that person. And so that was a really tough thing for me to do, is just operational patience as the senior leader who wasn't there when it happened, wasn't in country when it happened, and then after that, it turned into kind of picking up the pieces.

And I think it's the first time that I ever really saw firsthand the impact of, I'll call it disinformation or mistruths on the Internet or the conspiracy theories about what happened, why it happened. Because when you have a special operation Hilo with a premier special operation team, you know, shot down, somebody clearly screwed up. I mean, so that was the narrative, right? That was out there floating around, because again, people forget the enemy gets a vote, too.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: So the immediate thing was is that I heard everything from. We made a trade with the Taliban and for getting bin Laden back, we sacrificed these great Americans. I heard just all kinds of nonsense. And frankly, the Department of Defense spent a lot of effort trying to dispel those that disinformation that was going on with family and just across the board. But I was really – This sounds trite, and I don't mean it to, but I was so disappointed in, frankly, the lack of faith that some people in this country had that somebody would actually do that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's a reprehensible idea.

Michael Lumpkin: And I was in some dark days for a while after that. I mean, first of all, there was the event that happened again that was so horrific. But then it was all that aftermath, and for months there was. And I can understand why families were distraught, losing loved ones, some of them on their 7th, 8th deployment or more, and to turn around and have this happen. Yeah. So those were some dark days for me.

Jon Becker: What did you learn from it?

Michael Lumpkin: I think I actually learned several things. First of all, I think it not so much I learned, but it highlighted sometimes as a leader, you have to have operational patience. You truly have to sit on your hands and let things play out just to find out the truth and make the system work. I think that's thing one. Thing two, I learned the information component of every operation is not an afterthought. It has to be baked in. In the military, they call it information operations.

But also, I would say, whether it's a police department or any agency, you have to make sure you understand how you're going to react if something doesn't go right. And what are you going to do if it does go right? What is going to be response to the media? This should be prior to the operation, not afterwards. Had we, had the Department of Defense been better prepared from a public affairs stance and an information operations, I think we wouldn't have had. The event was going to happen. It happened, but it would also be we wouldn't have had the significance of the conspiracy theories and everything else that went with it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think it's interesting. We see a lot of failure of that, especially in law enforcement right now. There are so many cases where something happens to and the conspiracy theorists take off, or just the media. We've kind of developed a media that hijacks our environmental or evolutionary biology, and we like to be fed bad news, and they're great at feeding us bad news. And so they take that initial inaccurate information and they run with it.

And Breonna Taylor's a perfect example of that, where when you understand what actually happened in the case, I mean, you had the future vice president of the United States go on tv and say that they were at the wrong house, that they served a warrant on the wrong house and killed a poor, innocent woman who was in the house.

And then you realize, no, actually, she was a target of the investigation. It was her house. They were supposed to be there. But here's the vice president, United States, LeBron James, Beyonce, you know, Alicia Keys, all with giant loud microphones, and the news media saying that they hit the wrong house. And that becomes the narrative for a long time.

And what we didn't see was the Louisville police Department coming out and saying, no, no, no, hold on. Here's a search warrant. Here's what happened. Here's the information. I think sometimes it's easy to kind of hunker down and think, oh, the storm's going to pass. And I don't know that it always is going to. And sometimes you have to be ready to respond aggressively with the media well.

Michael Lumpkin: And if you don't control the narrative, somebody else will.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: Or at least you're leaving it open for them to control the narrative. And once you surrender it, it is so hard to get back. It is so hard. And this kind of led me, you know, ultimately over to the State department to do the counter ISIS messaging where, you know, for there, you know, my takeaway is that how people.

How vulnerable people are to what's on the Internet and how they listen to things that frequently, the more outlandish, the more they lap it up. I think it goes back to that human nature thing you were talking about to try to believe the unbelievable or the thing that's the negative of why somebody else is working against their best interest.

Jon Becker: So let's talk about that. The State Department job, because it was you. You stood it up, right? It was kind of. You were tasked with standing that thing up.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. I mean, something existed previously, but it was deemed not by me but by others, to be ineffective. So they. They created this new entity called the Global Engagement Center, which was designed to engage globally, you know, those people that were potential recruits for ISIS and other extremist organizations.

Jon Becker: And by engage, you mean counter messaging. On the one hand, you could say marketing. On the other hand, you could say propaganda.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, you can. It depends on your perspective, right? Yeah.

Jon Becker: Terrorist freedom fighters.

Michael Lumpkin: Exactly. So, I mean, and the way government largely does things, you know, they do things on scale. They think about, you know, let's do some information operations, let's drop flyers from an airplane or let's put something on tv or. So you end up with this big message trying to hit a bunch of people in a generic kind of way, hoping it lands on those one or two or three people that are potential recruits. Historically, that's the way it's happened, you know, with social media, what it is today.

Like, I can buy audiences, which means I can go and figure out who all 18 to 35 year old military age males in Morocco subscribe to AK-47 blogs and have looked at x number of videos of Abu, you know, Abakar. So Baghdadi. I mean, you can buy that audience. And you know what I'm. I can influence what they see on their social media feeds. I can buy ads and send them to them. I can literally micro target what people look at on their computer, what they see. And I tell you what, if you have Alexa at home or something else, let's make it just that much easier. Right?

Jon Becker: So now that if you have Alexa at home, turn her off.

Michael Lumpkin: So, I mean, if people understood how much they give away about who they are as a person based on their Internet searches and their Facebook or any other thing and how vulnerable they make themselves. Not just to, you know, I mean, to foreign adversaries, but also to just to bad people. If people they understood. I think they do a heck of a lot less of the social media.

Jon Becker: Yeah, no, it's funny because I remember when you first went there, we had a conversation about it and it's. You don't like as a business, you do that all the time. That is Google stock and trade. Google says, here's a free search engine, because now I know everything you search. So then when somebody wants to sell you something, I know exactly how to target you.

And there's a limited amount of privacy. That kind of makes it impossible for me to find Michael Lumpkin through Google as a business, but it doesn't make it impossible for me to find somebody in this age group who belongs to a SEAL group, who also belongs to a policy wonk reading group. And, oh, wow, look at that there we found Michael. I do think it is terrifying. The further I dug into it, the more terrifying it was. It's hard to believe that the US government wasn't doing that. Yeah, effectively.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. That they weren't buying. I call it buying audiences because those are services you buy. Right. So. But, yeah. That they weren't doing that in this kind of – For us. So we ended up changing that. We built something that I think really did have a significant impact on recruiting efforts for ISIS. I mean, ISIS isn't dead yet and they're still out recruiting. I mean, and they've got a – And the global engagement center, the State Department, all the agencies need to continue to adapt to the new social media trends and stay ahead of them.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, it's funny because it has become information warfare.

Michael Lumpkin: Without a doubt. It truly is.

Jon Becker: And it's almost like the kinetic warfare now is trailing the information and the effective use of the information leads to the kinetic.

Michael Lumpkin: Well, I mean, frankly, kinetic is. The problem with kinetic is that if we drop a bomb on somewhere, we're going to rebuild it, likely as a nation, information. I can get people to change their behavior to, if I don't want them to go into a building instead of destroying it, I can probably do an information campaign to tell somebody there's a bomb in there and they don't want to go in the building.

I mean, there's all things, kinds of things you can do with the message to influence behavior both positively and negatively, if you understand the audience and you understand the tools that are. That are in front of you.

Jon Becker: Well, and our world adversaries are all using it negatively against us.

Michael Lumpkin: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I mean, if you go to, you know, Vladimir Putin, he basically ran the information operations program when he was, you know, in uniform. The point is, this is like, in his DNA.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: And for us, it's, historically, it's been an afterthought. I think we're doing much better than we used to. But when I got to the start, the State Department, they were only spending $5 million on counter messaging.

Jon Becker: $5 million?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And frankly, that's salaries. That's for people. Wasn't a lot of money.

Jon Becker: So. Yeah, so, I mean, they're spending less on Google AdWords than probably a small betting company or shoe company is.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, the budget's higher now. We work to raise the budget, but I mean, and frequently people, if they don't understand information warfare or information operations, is usually the first thing to get cut when you're looking to save money.

Jon Becker: Kind of like training, kinda kind of like, I mean, it's interesting because you see it in law enforcement all the time. You know, what gets cut are proactive programs. You know, what gets cut is kind of the community oriented policing. And the departments, especially when they get the kind of funding cuts that Portland and Seattle and San Francisco have, is the department becomes reactive. Neighborhood crime task forces go away, proactive organized crime task forces go away. And what ends up happening is the law enforcement is less able to prevent crime from occurring and as a result, has a bigger responsibility to react to it.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And again, this is, I don't, here's what I want to believe, and maybe I'm naive. I don't think, you know, your city leaders want that to be the outcome. I just don't think they understand the second and third order consequences. So I do think that this goes back to my comment earlier about having to educate them what the impacts are going to be of those decisions, because at the end of the day, they get to make the decision. Right. Just like at the end of the day, the Congress and the United States get to make decisions. But I think it's important for whether you're wearing a uniform or you're a policymaker and you have a view on it to make sure that they know what the consequences of those decisions are going to be. So at least they're sober when they're making the decisions.

Jon Becker: So, Michael, I'd like to go back and just pick up a couple of things that we touched on, but I want to just probe a little deeper at the point that you are ASD SO/LIC. I guess we should probably explain what that is because we're assuming it and the entire audience understands it. So let's start there. Tell me what ASD selects.

Michael Lumpkin: ASD SO/LIC is the assistant secretary of defense, hence the ASD for special operations low intensity conflict. It basically oversees us special operations command in policy as well as special missionaries like counterterrorism, counternarcotics, all the cats and dogs that don't fall anywhere cleanly. Stability operations, I called it always kind of the kitchen junk drawer of policy stuff within the Pentagon.

Jon Becker: And just so people understand the relationship between. I don't think the average American understands the relationship between the civilian side of our government and the DOD side of our government. Maybe give us a little civics lesson.

Michael Lumpkin: I mean, so our country's kind of founded on civilian oversight of the military. And so us special operations command doesn't work for a service. I mean, it's kind of its own combatant command that's kind of sitting out there and it has members of each of the services. Operationally, it kind of reports up to the secretary of defense.

But from an administrative point of view today, not originally envisioned this way, but today US special operations command is under the administrative oversight of ASD SO/LIC. So administratively. So we're talking about budgeting, man train and equipment as well as policy oversight of our special operations capability in this country.

Jon Becker: So it's all of our military reports into civilian leadership?

Michael Lumpkin: It does, yeah. And kind of is what's so unique to our democracy. I mean, our founding fathers were, I mean, their foresight is just amazing, but it keeps, you know, it's part of the, you know, checks and balances system. So we don't have a military that kind of runs amok.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I always tell people you don't understand till you read the constitution and read the federalist papers that they were not trying to build an efficient government. They were trying to prevent an efficient government. They were trying to balance powers and they were trying to prevent the evils that they saw, that they fled in the form of England in centralized control, broad governmental power and strong military being directly related to the king and all of these things.

To me, that was the greatest foresight of those guys is they saw way beyond their own capabilities to do something like this and create this civilian oversight to prevent DOD from staging a coup. Like, let's just call it what it is.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, absolutely. And it works. I mean, is it bumpy? Are there challenges? Are there issues? Sure. And some of them are structural, and some of them sometimes are just personality based on folks who happen to be in the seat at the time. I had the good fortune to work when I was ASD SO/LIC with some great special operations command commanders, guys the likes of Bill McRaven and Tony Thomas. And so I was very blessed with the relationship that I was able to have as I walked the line between being an advocate for our special operations community and providing oversight.

And it's a line, and you have to keep focused on making sure that they're doing the right thing. But when it made sense to advocate from a budget perspective to the Congress or within the department to get into the bureaucratic battles that are necessary to effectively resource our special operations capability in this country. Yeah, it's a line that has to be walked.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Historically, though, has that position been filled by a straight up civilian?

Michael Lumpkin: I mean, yes, it's always because it's a political appointee, the Senate confirmed.

Jon Becker: So it's not, I mean, from, not from. Not from an appointment position, but from an experienced standpoint, who has historically been in that role? Is it former military or is it.

Michael Lumpkin: We've had it where it hasn't been former military, but historically, I would say more times than not, it's somebody who came from the special operations community, I mean, myself. And then there was also Mike Sheehan, who had the job, who was a special forces guy. We had Mike Vickers, who was a special forces guy. So we had a litany of guys of both political parties, depending on which administration was in office, what party that came from the community.

Jon Becker: But it is a political appointee. So obviously it is subject to the administration, but it's kind of historically, aren't you more politically agnostic than potentially other parts of the government are?

Michael Lumpkin: It's a great question, and the answer is, it really depends. I say that because there's kind of, I'll call it three kinds of folks who work in, maybe four, actually, that work in, like, Department of Defense, for example. You have the uniform military, you have GS government service and GS civilians. You have contractors, and then you have political appointees, and each one has a completely different role and mission. A political appointee. They existed. They're nominated by the president to the Senate.

The Senate either confirms or does not confirm after a series of hearings of that person for the job. The reason political appointees exist is to drive the president's agenda. And so it is generally somebody who's affiliated with one political party or not, or somebody becomes affiliated with a political party through the process.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And I guess that's one of the things that we've seen in the last decade probably is kind of the destruction and politicization of a lot of the GS positions. One of the things that I've told people the last couple administrations, what's bothered me is kind of the undermining of the bureaucracy because to some degree, the bureaucracy is the continuity. It is the stability.

Michael Lumpkin: It is very much so. So when I was, I mentioned earlier my last job in the administration was over the Department of State. Well, I got fired on January 20th, 2017 when the day that President Obama left office. The standard business rules in DC are, except for a handful of folks that are carried over from one party administration to the next party, is that business rules are you resigned and there's an expectation you're going to resign and the next president gets to appoint his, who he wants to drive. He or she wants to drive their agenda. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Because they want somebody who is aligned with them to accomplish what they want to get done.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. Because the Department of Defense is a large bureaucratic organization. Right. I mean, it's just massive $860 billion and just behemoth thing, bureaucracy. I mean, I applaud what it is, but you have to recognize what it is and what it isn't. It standard tries to standardize routine tasks. That's what a bureaucracy does. It fights change every step of the way, and that's the culture of what it is, and you have to know that.

So if you want to walk in there and say, I'm going to do wholesale change to this organization, okay, you're delusional. You're not going in. It doesn't matter if you're the secretary of defense or you're just a GS 13 rolling in as a political party. It doesn't matter. You're not going to do wholesale change to the organization. They will fight you every step of the way.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So it's all governmental change is incremental.

Michael Lumpkin: It is. And it's generally done by consensus as well. So if it's a large national policy, it's done by, what does state think, what does Dod think, what is, you know, USAID think? And it's done by consensus. It's incremental. So it's baby step. So you really have to map out what you want to accomplish and the roadmap on how you're going to do IT.

Jon Becker: Which I guess the upside to the system resisting change is it prevents tyranny.

Michael Lumpkin: It does.

Jon Becker: It prevents somebody coming in and losing their mind and trying to undermine all the institutions. But it's almost like a. A big boat. Right. Like it. It doesn't turn quickly, but it also doesn't turn quickly.

Michael Lumpkin: Right, right. Yeah. And saying is, you know, it takes four, 4 miles from an aircraft carrier to turn.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: So you got to know where you want to go before you start, you know, messing with the helm at least.

Jon Becker: 4 miles in advance.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So let's go back and just pick up a couple of things. One of things you mentioned was the rescue of Bo Bergdahl.

Michael Lumpkin: Yes.

Jon Becker: So how does that first pop on your radar and kind of walk me through that event?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So I had been recently confirmed as the assistant secretary of defense, and at the same time, my boss announced he was leaving the department, so there was going to be a gap. So I was elevated to not only my day job as ASD SO/LIC, but I was also sitting in the desk of undersecretary of defense for policy.

So, which I mentioned earlier is, I think at the time, was the number three position at the Pentagon, and so I was put in charge of overseeing all of policy within the department. So I kind of dual hatted at the time. And I think it was in December of 2013, a video was released of Sergeant Bergdahl that showed him in a. He wasn't in a good state. He'd been in captivity for somewhere in the neighborhood of almost five years at that point. And so there was real concern. The decision was made to go, we need to up the ante in our effort to get him home sooner, just based on his physical state.

So I was tasked by then secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to kind of oversee, from the department's perspective, I understand there's going to be many players, but from the department's perspective, on how to get him home. So there was a quick mission analysis on how to do it. We knew it was going to, discussions had happened on how to do it previously, so we dusted them off. We looked at new alternatives, and it came down to, like, listen, this is going to have to be a prisoner exchange. This is the way it's going to have to go.

And so then it just got into the negotiating via a third party because we weren't going to talk and negotiate directly with the Taliban. So negotiating with an intermediary nation in order to get him home. And we finally settled. To be clear, there's a lot of people who were called mixed views on whether we should spend any effort getting him home. I was always of the opinion that, listen, we have a uniform code of military justice, a legal system. If he is guilty of some illegal infraction, let the system work when he gets home.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because just to set the stage, he was – He walked away from his post and was kidnapped.

Michael Lumpkin: That's correct. So he was kidnapped by the Taliban after abandoning his posture. After abandoning. So he left his base and was apprehended and held. So then in my mind, it was just like, you do what you have to do to get somebody home. No one's left behind. That's kind of the mantra of the military, and I believe it to my core.

So this is one of those things after mission analysis, you put the team together and you start figuring it out how it's going to work. I had a great deputy, and we worked it. And in order to ultimately ended up exchanging five folks out of detainees out of Guantanamo Bay for Sergeant Bergdahl to get him home, frankly, I would have emptied the entire place, entire Gitmo, to get him home if that's what it took. Because in my mind, one american soldier, it's worth that. And let's just keep in mind also, to date, we still haven't charged anybody Guantanamo Bay.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Michael Lumpkin: So. And that's probably a different story for a different time. But the reality is, you know, that nothing. There was no cases pending as far as somebody about to be prosecuted for something. So they were just kind of sitting there languishing in my mind. I also looked at it as that this is why we have hellfire missiles and the US inventory. If they return to the battlefield, well, deal with that.

Jon Becker: We have other ways to solve that problem. We do.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, we do. So it was a great effort on teamwork at the interagency level between the State Department, US Southern Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the folks in Afghanistan. It was just a phenomenal team effort. Everybody came together, but it was a strategic objective with operational staging, with real tactical outcomes that fed every step of the way. So in my mind, it's exactly how military operations should go.

Jon Becker: Interesting! What about Ebola? I know you know, at one point, you got tasked with when Ebola was outbreaking in Africa with the US response to that. Talk to me about that.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, it was kind of interesting. You know, I was passed by Secretary Hagel again, because, let's face it, no good deed goes unpunished. So I got another one. This is to help eradicate the Ebola epidemic, an outbreak in West Africa, in particular Liberia. And this started off with a phone call from the CDC director, this is where I really learned about how to kind of focus the mission and work at the interagency was that he called me and he says, hey, yeah, I understand you're the guy at the Department of Defense. What can you do to support us? And it's like, I don't know. I can send tanks.

Jon Becker: What do you want me to bomb?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, yeah. What kind of aircraft carrier? What do you want? And he goes, well, what can you do? And it's like, well, we don't really work that way. What's the mission you want us to do? And it really helped educate the interagency as well as the department on doing real mission analysis and focusing the department on what it can do.

We ended up landing at the place where we did those things that were uniquely military. We could do the logistics. We could fly all the support equipment in and out of the country. We could build the Ebola treatment units because we've got CB's, we've got red horse, we got people that can build.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. And it was so we had, it was doing training. We know how to train on scale. So we were training healthcare workers because we had healthcare workers coming from all over the world that were migrating to help solve selflessly to solve this problem. And then ultimately it was providing command and control. This is where the 101st airborne, after, after a while, came in and basically ran the operation from bringing their military acumen in to effectively move the logistics, get the people where they need to do to ultimately stem Ebola in Liberia.

Jon Becker: Interesting! So, okay, so when you're done there, you again retire from service again. You go into public. Well, you go into private sector.

Michael Lumpkin: I do.

Jon Becker: And are doing some kind of policy stuff. And when then you end up at a software company. Right? You end up doing some computer stuff, like, how do you think everything from your prior life helped you when you got into the private sector?

Michael Lumpkin: It's interesting. So, yeah, I was the president of an it company, and I'll tell you what, I really, on day one, really couldn't spell it. You know, I couldn't, I didn't know about, you know, it wasn't, was it modernization? So it's data migration, data syndication. It was about getting disparate things, you know, sources of information, kind of collusion together, ultimately resulting in, you know, usable data that leaders could use to manage in the healthcare sector, you know, but the principles are about the same in leadership. They are. It's about getting a workforce, getting them committed and focused.

It's about creating processes. It's about focusing on outcomes, whether it's just a happy customer or it's to do something with data to get some unique. Something unique that you never had or saw before. Because the one thing I have learned over the years is you can't solve a problem you can't see.

So you have to be able to see the problem. And data, 90% of the time, can help with that. So it was about taking all that great stuff that the taxpayers paid lots of money to teach me and kind of put it to work.

Jon Becker: Interesting! So you were recently tasked to be on the Afghan War commission?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. So I think it was the. I can't remember what year the National Defense Authorization act created the Afghanistan War Commission. Essentially, it's to unpack 20 years of war and come up with the lessons learned of what did we do well? What did we not do so well? So they – There's 16 members of the commission nominated by different members on the Hill. House, Senate, different committees. I happen to be the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed's nominee for the commission. It's 16 people who are just wicked smart. Some of them have been on the ground, some of them are policy folks. And we're coming together to do a kind of a holistic view of us efforts in Afghanistan.

One thing that's most impressive about this organization is it's not a whitewash and nor is it a, you know, I gotcha kind of thing. It's about coming up with lessons and viewpoints of how we can learn from what happened to help and aid decision making in the future. So I align it more along the 911 commission than anything else.

Jon Becker: Interesting! Yeah, I think that. And obviously, coming from where you come from, that's a culture that you've embraced most of your life of kind of hot washing things and really looking at them, and how do we not do this? The stuff that we did right. How do we continue to do that? And the stuff we screwed up, which I think in Afghanistan, there's probably going to be quite a few. Few lessons learned. How do we not do this again?

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah, I think we need to go back and take a look at every step of the way, everything from the equipping of our force to how we made the decisions. Decisions that were made are interesting, but how did we make them?

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. I think that time has not been overwhelmingly kind to our effort in Afghanistan, not only in how long it lasted, but the fallout from it and how we burned through special operations personnel and how we burned through our DOD personnel, I think, is something we probably need to take a look.

Michael Lumpkin: I agree. So I'm just excited and proud to be, first of all, nominated for the effort, but also to be a participant.

Jon Becker: That's fantastic! You're a perfect guy for the job. Why don't we finish with kind of some rapid fire questions?

Michael Lumpkin: Okay. Let them rip.

Jon Becker: Let's see. What do you think your most important habit is?

Michael Lumpkin: Every night when I shower, I think about my day, of what I would have done differently and done better. Sometimes it's a 30 minutes shower, but I'm pretty hypercritical of myself. But I kind of take my entire day and reevaluate it and just kind of grade myself. I think that helped shape my the next day.

Jon Becker: What was the most profound moment or memory of your career?

Michael Lumpkin: I can remember when I was a junior officer, I was the assistant officer in charge of a SEAL platoon, and we had a training accident that had profound impact on two members of the team. And it was what affected me was seeing the team coming together to treat life threatening wounds and seeing training really pay off.

Jon Becker: Interesting! Which probably then, I mean, at that point, you're a junior officer, so everything you do from then on is inflected by that moment.

Michael Lumpkin: And at the end of the day, it was about the basics.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it always is.

Michael Lumpkin: Yeah. Generally.

Jon Becker: That's the expression. In the end, it's all about driving and putting and everything else is kind of noise. What do you think the most important characteristic of an effective leader is?

Michael Lumpkin: Humility.

Jon Becker: Why?

Michael Lumpkin: Because some, I would say ineffective leaders put their ego too close to their position. They think they are that position. They are not. They just happen to be the incumbent and they are the keeper of the standards.

Jon Becker: I can't touch that any better than you just said it. What keeps you awake at night?

Michael Lumpkin: I am concerned. It's hard to come up with just the one thing. What's happening in the information environment right now and the way how vulnerable the average American is making themselves and subsequently making our country. I have real concerns with what the future holds.

Jon Becker: What do you think we can do to assuage that?

Michael Lumpkin: I don't have an answer. I think one of the best things that's ever happened to our society is the Internet. I think one of the worst things that's ever happened to our society is the Internet. It's, again, it's truly a double edged sword. Yeah, I just. If I had an answer, you know, frankly, I wouldn't be up at night.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's well said. Well said, Michael, thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate your time! This has been fantastic!

Michael Lumpkin: It's been a pleasure! Thank you, Jon!