Fort Irwin National Training Center

And then I don't know about the staff.

Where were you at, where were you? You were at Fort Irwin, which is NTC, which is out in like fucking, what is that? Like Barstow or-

Yeah, it's near Barstow

It's like in the middle of fucking nowhere

'Cause I, it's, well, I, I take that back.

I've, I have won in the past, but dude, this year it seems like I can't fucking pick a lineup to save my fucking life.

But the, the weird thing, the, the Fort Irwins, Irwin story is pretty funny 'cause that, the platoon that got disbanded-

Mm-hmm

And they no longer exist, Seth, because people were hidebound, and they didn't listen with the intent to understand, and they had a, a view of the world that was based on my way or the highway.

And I saw that in the business world, and, uh, with very, with very damaging effects when people were stubborn to the point of being like I was in that first battle at the National Training Center in 1991.

On the other hand, what did business teach you that the military hadn't?

Well, business taught me a lot, and, and one of the lessons I have learned is that, you know, there's always a meeting after the meeting.

Uh, well, m- maybe it's being pushed somewhere now, but I, when I left a couple months ago, um, I, I didn't, I didn't see much, much being used of it.

Is any of this stuff making it to, you know, the National Training Center or the Joint Readiness Training Center?

Yeah.

Um, so, uh, we do partner with Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Force.

Absolutely

... innovation unit that you deploy with.

And so, like, if you're going to National Training Center, you have like your own drone construction, your own coders, your own everything, and the brigade commander just like, "Just churn shit.

Just churn shit.

There's, there's a couple places in the Army.

One is called the Joint Readiness Training Center, JRTC, located in Fort Polk, Louisiana, and then the National Training Center, NTC, located in Fort Irwin, California.

It's the middle of nowhere, California.

Those two bases, Army bases, are staffed by a truckload, meaning, I don't know, 100, couple hundred, few hundred soldiers that are called OPFOR, which is like, uh, opposing force is what that stands for, OPFOR, the opposing force.

And so here's what's happening.

The US Army held Project Convergence Capstone Six at Fort Irwin in July to test emerging technologies and battlefield networks with allied forces.

And according to The Wall Street Journal, servers overheated, batteries struggled, and soldiers cooled malfunctioning antennas with ice-soaked T-shirts.

So apparently, the cutting edge of military cooling technology now includes our laundry.

We then changed how we trained.

I went out to the National Training Center very early on in that three-star tour.

And for the pre-deployment exercise of what was a tank brigade, they were still doing tank on tank, even though we weren't even deploying tanks to Iraq or to Afghanistan at that time.

So we obviously completely scrapped what the current training scenario was, replaced it with one that would actually prepare them for what they were going to do and how they were going to do it in Iraq and or Afghanistan.

Yeah.

So I was there for a couple months and, well, actually I was there for a couple weeks and then went to, uh, NTC, the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, out in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Fun place.

Yeah.