So I'm going to do something and I try, I'm trying very hard to focus these videos onto specific concepts. Um One to make them shorter, but also to make them easier to apply in life. And I know that, that people tend to prefer that I know that there are people who don't, who like it, just stream of content
. But um here's one that I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of break that on. Uh I, I made a video where I was talking about this, this publication, I saw that was, that was describing changes that need to happen in the military, the US military in order for them to succeed against problems that they're seeing
emerge in the Ukraine Russian conflict. Well, the paper is written in short sections which I like if you've read my books, you know, I like that format. Um I think it, it gives you the ability to go into much greater detail without sacrificing the longer narrative. It's almost like each section you can
zoom into something and then zoom back out and go to the next thing for the next section. And so they're kind of micro essays within a chapter and this paper is written that way. But anyway, one of these paragraphs I thought was just so rich in the content that II I think it would be useful to a multitude
of context. So I want to share it with you because I'm sure you have not read it. This section is called Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast. In any section that has that kind of a name you you should get excited about because if a writer can twist that up, um The the content itself is probably gonna
be pretty good. This is flies in the face and don't judge a book by its cover, but I guess you can judge AAA section by its title. Uh I'm gonna start reading now, perhaps more important than fielding new command and control systems is the culture shift required to embrace distributed command and control
more commonly known as mission command. When Miley served as chief of staff of the army, he explained mission command through a concept of quote, disciplined disobedience. I'll pause here. I really don't like that phrase, but we'll go with it in which subordinates are empowered to accomplish a mission
to achieve the commander's intended purpose. Even if they must disobey a specific order or task to do. So, I'm gonna reread that last bit. Discipline, disobedience means that you empower subordinates to accomplish a mission to achieve the commander's intended purpose. Even if they must disobey a specific
order or task to do so. Continuing the quote here without perfect communication, a subordinate officer or soldier must be trusted to make the right judgment call during battle unencumbered by the need to seek approval for small adjustments. This is so so profound. OK. Uh It connects to so many things
that matter. Now, we could talk about this in the scope of the military, in the scope of your home, your family, in the scope of your community and in the scope of the Kingdom of God. And that's what I'm gonna do right now. So let's first talk about this in the scope of the military, which is what it
was being written about. The US army has whatever branch doesn't matter. The US military has no help in hell in implementing that just up front. There's no way. And if you've served, you know why everything in the military is designed so that you don't think critically, you don't question, you don't
think of the overarching purpose. You just go out and do what you need to do. And the best descriptive microcosm I know of for, for this is when I went through basic training, I don't know if they do this anymore. Um They had dummies that looked like people and there's this thing called the bayonet assault
. Course, basically, when you did bayonet training, you put a knife at the end of your rifle and they train you to run full speed and stab these lifelike dummies. Now, the reason for that is not to train you in how to defend yourself with a knife at the end of your rifle. The reason is the same reason
they use human silhouettes for the rifle range. It's so that subconsciously you're dulling any hesitation. You would have to do what a normal person would not do to another person to kill without hesitation. When you're commanded to kill that same ethos boils into every single thing you do in the military
. They don't want you thinking, they just want you doing what you're told um, to, to make this culture widespread, what they're calling discipline, disobedience. I would just call it critical thinking or purpose, orientation or something to make that widespread. You'd have to reengineer the entire military
and already they can't field enough soldiers with the low brow way they do things which is basically you need an eighth grade education and we can use you. Um I think the IQ cut off is 82 or something. I don't remember. Right. So to do that, you'd need basically everyone to be special forces qualified
. And there's a reason that most people in the military have no chance in special forces, they're just not smart enough, right? There's a physical fitness component that's enormous, a mental toughness component. But you, you can't be a doofus, right? So, um that's a huge challenge. And if what these
people are saying is true, which is that in order to succeed in more, more uh complex battlefield situations. We need people who are able to operate with a purpose motive instead of just following rules, pres specified specific orders. We're toast, we toast. Ok. So interestingly this is kind of a, a
call back to World War Two where, um, you know, and take all these musings with a grain of salt. I'm not a military historian, but in World War Two, when they drafted people, they would do aptitude tests where they would, uh, take someone and look at what their civilian occupations and experiences were
and what their assessment of the individual was on the spot and they put them into rank based on that and say, ok, well, you're gonna be in, uh, an E six, you know, staff sergeant, you're gonna be a captain, you're gonna be a colonel, whatever. You're definitely gonna be a private, you know, whatever
the case was. And, um, it worked, it worked really well. But the, the volunteer army since the, the seventies, uh, it, it, everybody starts at the bottom and it's mostly time and grade. I mean, they are performance metrics but they're pretty check the box kind of things. So it's more like boy scouts
. Like here's the list of things you need to do to get the badges and then you get the rank. So that's a huge problem. The entire infrastructure of the military is based on something other than what they're defining. Here as meritorious. Now, let's transition out of that. Um And into so, so if I have
to boil down everything I've just said on the military front, uh no pun intended to one thing. It's, this is yet another reason to expect us to be terrible in any kind of conflict in the modern era. Ok. Rotating into families, I've said a lot and I'll say a lot more about how family leadership is meant
to be. It's, it's meant to be a microcosm of the Kingdom of God, which we're going to in two more steps in this video. So if your family does not have a family purpose and it's not defined and understood by every member of your family, you can't do what this paragraph describes. You can't, I'll just
reread it to really drive it home. Subordinates are empowered to accomplish a mission to achieve the commander's intended purpose, even if they must disobey a specific order or task to do so. So if I ask my son to take care of our chickens, I'm gonna give him parameters to operate within and he's going
to need to understand. I'm quoting from a later part of the, the section. Um Well, I'll just read the whole sentence. Um No, I won't. I won't be, they need to understand the commander's intent and states constraints and restraints. Now, that probably sounds like a bunch of verbiage. Uh jargony, Mumbo
, Jumbo to a lot of people watching this. Let's be honest, there aren't a lot of people watching this but a significant percent of the people watching this probably like, oh, here come the professor words, those are very precise terms for what we're talking about. Commander's intent and states constraints
and restraints. I'd probably collapse restraints into constraints. I don't think you need both of those words, but you've probably heard me talk on and on about constraints and I'm not done yet. Uh It's, it's in a lot of the books that are coming and states, what's your goal? What, how do you describe
success? What's the outcome that you desire? Commander's intent? Why you're doing what you're doing? Right? So you could boil this down and, and toss out the academic words just by saying, what do you want to accomplish? Why do you want to accomplish it? What is allowable and what's not allowable and
what this does is it helps sketch out um a structure of the possible decisions that you could make. It's like sketching out the menu of actions you could take and the prices, right? So you, you're getting towards cost benefit. When you look at a restaurant menu, the price is a cost and if it's spicy
, you have to count that on the tail end pun intended. Um And the the benefit is the description of the meal, you're like, wow, six ounce medallions that sounds delicious. And so you compare it to the cost and you go to the next option on the menu. Looking at a menu is an optimization problem with constraints
with end states with intent, right? If I go into a restaurant, my number one intent is to not leave hungry. My number two intent is to get a good value. That's me. You might be different, right? So how does this work at a family on a family level? You have to have the purpose defined and understood and
accepted by all people. You need to know what's allowable and what's not allowable. And everybody needs to know their piece in the bigger picture, even if they don't have the full big picture, fully um comprehended by them. So my family, for instance, uh we have people who have delegated roles, one of
my sons in charge of our chickens, he knows what the intent is, what the end state is, what's allowable, what's not allowable. He knows how it fits into the greater family plan. He knows what the consequences will be if he, if he doesn't measure up. And so that's his piece of the, one of his pieces of
the family purpose. And I just can't say enough about this. The reason the military will fail, I think it's already failed. It just hasn't been proven yet. But the reason that's going to happen is because the way that we've done it so far is insufficient for current complexity. If you're doing your family
, the way you've seen families be done in the last two decades. Your family is insufficient for the complexity of today and the distance between where it is and where it needs to be is going to continue to grow with every passing day because the world is becoming more complex. And so if your family is
not growing, you're falling behind and those consequences are growing, even if you don't see them. And that's something you should really, really work on. OK. How does this work in a community? I think we'll actually, we'll skip over that just for the sake of time and because the family thing gives you
enough to work on, but eventually it will factor into the Kingdom of God and all of these same things apply in the Kingdom of God. Now it's kind of goofy lately on Twitter. I guess there's a bunch of people in the Southern Baptist Conference. It's a huge, huge organization and there's a lot of rigmarole
about some things that they're adopting or deciding to disavow or whatever. But it's so interesting to me that uh such a large organization whose central tenet is basically anyone can know God just by reading the Bible. Um They think that voting, what their opinion of certain things is that the majority
opinion is what dictates the truth. And I mean, the truth with a capital t the way the truth and the life Jesus Christ himself is defined by the majority vote of the Southern Baptist convention or Conference, whatever the heck it is S BC. That's crazy. In a religion where you're saying everyone can just
read the Bible and know God through that. But we're all gonna vote and argue and vote about it. And then everyone is compelled to do what the majority says. OK. So in the actual kingdom of God, which is not the S PC. But, but I will say that the, the fraction is fractionation of the S PC is a fulfillment
of what I told you would happen, which is that you're going to see splits in every institution as subsets of those groups, focus on the actual truth and improvement. And the, the, the larger body of those groups will not, they will dig their, their uh their feet in on the status quo, the way things used
to be or the way that everyone wants things to be instead of actually searching for the truth. Anyway, um the actual kingdom of God is a meritocracy and um it's unified in purpose. This is, this is the act, this is a huge thing. I'm just tucking it into this random video, but I'll talk about it at some
other point if I haven't already. But the actual definition of seeing eye to eye when the Lord brings iron it, it's not a statement of interchangeability. That's a huge mistake to make what it means is that all people are united in purpose. Now, if you're living this in your family. It's not hard to
imagine this in a, in a kingdom, but it's very hard to imagine it in a kingdom if you're not living it in your family. And so what people tend to think is that their family members are interchangeable and therefore the Kingdom of God must be made of interchangeable people, but a kingdom is not made of
interchangeable people. And you can't read the scriptures without seeing hierarchies. They're inescapable, but people have to learn how to exercise autonomy within that hierarchy. And this paragraph succinctly describes it is amazing. And this is what I found that truth is all over the place. It's just
surrounded by nonsense and it takes quite a bit of, of what most people don't have to look through the mountain of garbage and recognize the value of the, the gems buried in that mountain and then to take them out and apply it uh to life or share it with others. That's something that very, very few people
can do and those that can do it, there's still a huge differentiation on how well they can do it compared to others. Everything is Pareto in, in everything I've just described. So, um anyway, we have to wrap our heads around this because that's what it's going to be. And whose purpose are we adopting
God's? How do we know the Father's purpose through the Son? How do you know the Sun's purpose? That's a very important question and the answer that comes to mind is probably wrong. So the way that you can build towards understanding that is to first live it in your family. Now, of course, before all
of that, before all of that is the need to live it yourself. And and maybe this is a nice circle, right in the kingdom, everyone will be aligned with God's purpose on their individual level of understanding at the individual level. Before you even start down this path, you have to align with God's purpose
. As far as you understand it, we call that repentance. I wrote a book called Repentance Making Straight The Way of God. And this is what it's all about. Once you do that, you are now ready to worry about that in your family and to orient your family towards God's purpose as far as you see it. If you're
the father, now there are intricacies here. If you're the, the, the mother, the wife and your husband is not on board, there is an approach for that. I've talked about that elsewhere. If you're the child and your parents aren't on board, there's an approach for that. I've talked about that elsewhere
. Once you get your family aligned with the purpose of God, then you can start worrying about the community and then eventually you will become part of the Kingdom of God where this is done at scale. All right. So that's 20 minutes. I hope this is worth sharing. These are very, very, very important ideas