JCOC 94 (Southeast Edition): 34 Civilians; Five Days; 1,840 Miles; Five Branches of the U.S. Armed Services; One Superb Military Team

“History will show the full folly of Putin’s reckless, cruel, and unprovoked invasion of his peaceful neighbor.”

So said the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, last Tuesday in his opening remarks at the 15th Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. In his speech, Sec. Austin heaped praise on the $76 billion in direct security assistance provided to Ukraine by the United States and 50 other allied and partner nations gathered for the meeting.

“I’m also pleased to announce that the M1 Abrams tanks that the United States had previously committed to will be entering Ukraine soon,” the secretary added, for good measure.

Just 24 hours earlier, I had watched a pair of those 74-ton main battle tanks — the M1A2 SepV3 — in action, pummeling targets a mile away in a show of kinetic force on a proving ground at Fort Moore (formerly Fort Benning) near the Georgia/Alabama line. The tanks were joined by a duo of M2A4 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, M1126 Stryker Combat Vehicles, and an Army scout squad rappelling from a Blackhawk helicopter. Completing the cadre of Army might, a mortar team rained lethality on a simulated enemy occupying a ridgeline at the edge of my eyesight.

The concussions rattled our bleachers. The ground around us shook. Then plumes of smoke billowed downrange, seconds later, as the projectiles impacted on their intended objectives.

Imagining a detachment of Russian — or P.L.A. — troops at the business end of this deadly and dead-on array of firepower recalled words that former Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson told me on an Inside the ICE House podcast recorded five years ago. “We never want to send our teams into a fair fight,” the CNO said. “We want them to have the very best.”

For five days last week, three dozen business executives, educators and entrepreneurs watched how each of America’s armed services — Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard — makes fights unfair for their adversaries. They do it with the very best materiel, like the Abrams, exceeded only by a vast, diverse team of passionate professionals applying unwavering commitment to serve their country and defend its Constitution. They do it, even as the myriad challenges to military families pressure our soldiers and their spouses to the limit.

Our observations were all part of the 94th Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, or JCOC 94. The event was hosted, in absentia, it turned out, by Sec. Austin, whose departure for Ramstein prevented him from offering his customary welcome to the JCOC group at the Pentagon. Leaving Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, our unique tour of DoD installations, and their elite fighting units, took us on a five-day zigzag path across the Southeast United States.?

The group visited Fort Moore in Georgia on Monday. We continued on to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort and Recruit Depot Parris Island in South Carolina on Tuesday. We stopped at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia on Wednesday. Thursday was embedded with the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Florida. And Friday concluded JCOC 94 aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Kathleen Moore (WPC 1109), observing search and rescue and narcotics interdiction operations a few miles off Miami Beach.?

By the end of the trip, the JCOC members, many from East and West Coast enclaves, most with scant exposure to America’s military communities, came away with profound appreciation for the service and sacrifice — and overall excellence — of our men and women in uniform.

MONDAY

On a personal level, my Monday meet-up with the mighty M1A2 resonated in a few important ways. The tank was in the news, of course, soon to be heading into harm’s way in Ukraine. Wearing double ear protection, watching the tank blow massive craters on the far-off tundra with its 120-mm cannon, it almost made me pity harm, if that’s even possible.

It was also a blast from my past, the subject of my obsessive study, begun a decade ago, of the Worst Political Event in History. That’s when the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, Mike Dukakis, under the direction of my old advance buddy Matt Bennett, rode atop the M1A1 model in Sterling Heights, Michigan with the future SecNav, Gordon England, riding shotgun.

I took my turn in the Abrams driver’s seat, a spot usually reserved for a young recruit with a few years of training after enlistment. A consistent theme of the week was the trust and reliance we heave on the shoulders of young soldiers, whether at the wheel of a $24 million tank, or at the helm of a 560-foot Ohio-class ballistic missile sub, our nation’s deadliest weapons system.?

For the newly-uniformed, and our JCOC group, Fort Moore leaves an indelible impression. As the home of the U.S. Army’s Infantry School, Armor School, and the Army’s “Maneuver Center of Excellence,” along with a lengthy roster of storied brigades and regiments, Fort Moore’s 182,000 wooded acres surround 120,000 military, family members, and civilian personnel.?

The base is one of nine Army installations assigned new names this year by a DoD commission that excised the legacy of Confederate generals whose century of enshrinement atop the gates of America’s biggest outposts finally expired. This was a topic I explored in my 2021 podcast with Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Ty Seidule , author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. When I asked the base commander, Maj. Gen. Curtis Buzzard , how the Army stuck the landing on the re-naming, he told me to Google the name of Henry Benning, the fort’s former namesake. For those who haven’t, it isn’t pretty.

Naming the fort for Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and his wife, Julie Compton Moore, both buried on the post, sends a strong message to today’s troops. For one, it ennobles the beloved Vietnam-era hero of the Battle of Ia Drang in 1965, long overdue. For another, it uniquely shares billing with an Army spouse, equally committed to the nation’s cause, albeit not in uniform. This is sure to sit well with my friend Kathy Roth-Douquet , CEO of Blue Star Families , and many others. Honoring those who served in Vietnam, and the partnership that makes military life possible, is a just cause.

TUESDAY

“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”

The novelist Pat Conroy, who died in his adopted hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina in 2016, wrote that in The Prince of Tides. He also wrote The Lords of Discipline and The Great Santini, all autobiographical tales, the latter on his fraught relationship with his Marine F-4 aviator father as portrayed by Robert Duvall in the 1979 movie about family life in Beaufort.

I thought about the film, and “wound is geography,” as our JCOC plane descended over the sea islands of the Carolina Lowcountry on approach to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. This stop had also earned recent headlines, unwelcome ones, before our visit when one of the Marines’ newest fighters, the F-35B Lightning II, “went missing” after its pilot ejected during training.

As the investigation into the mishap began, our hosts quickly adapted, using the Marines’ alternative motto “Semper Gumby,” or “always flexible.” Like a bunch of raw “poolees,” our bus took us to Recruit Depot Parris Island, where we were met by a stiff-jawed female drill instructor and marshaled onto the “Yellow Footprints,” where all recruits begin their journey in the Corps.

We found ourselves on the inbound end of a verbal fusillade aimed at all 18-year-olds who show up at Parris Island. Barks bellowed from a series of squared-away D.I.’s, each wearing the four-dent felt campaign cover made famous by R. Lee Ermey as Gunny Hartman in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and Warren Oates as Army D.I. Sgt. Hulka in the Bill Murray classic Stripes.?

The impression we formed of our drill instructors diverted quickly from the Hollywood caricature. One by one, they removed their covers and outlined their mission to “Make Marines.” Each year, with surprising doses of compassion and empathy, they must mold more than 28,000 men and women, many from challenging adolescent backgrounds, into “the world’s finest fighting force.”

We watched the finale of their grueling 13-week indoctrination conclude with “The Crucible,” an epic 54-hour test for recruits amid the mosquito-infested marshes of Parris Island, a last task before graduation. Witnessing the teamwork of these kids, caked in mud and sweat, overcoming obstacles with the goal of selflessly serving their country, was nothing short of inspiring.

Still sweating from our shift on the “Reaction Course” and “Unknown Distance Firing Course,” where we each unloaded two 20-round mags from the M27 Infantry Rifle against pop-up targets, we were welcomed at “Quarters One” by its current caretakers, Brig. Gen. Walker M. Field, the commanding general of the Marines’ Eastern Recruiting Region and his wife, Tonya.

Over Old Fashioneds, Tonya toured us through her home and its history as one of the oldest structures on Parris Island, constructed along the Beaufort River in Port Royal Sound in 1884. The area is blessed as the deepest natural harbor south of New York and served as a base for Navy shipbuilding and repair until the Marines took it over to train recruits starting in 1915.

The work of “Making Marines,” painted on the depot’s water tower, continues 108 years later. Our one day at Parris Island pales against the 90-day test imposed by Gen. Field his team of drill instructors. We left the depot believing to the bone that young men and women who take their oath as Marines are exceptionally well prepared by their D.I.’s for what comes next.

WEDNESDAY

“In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.”?

That’s a loaded statement, delivered by Denzel Washington as “Lt. Cdr. Ron Hunter,” XO of the USS Alabama in Tony Scott’s 1995 thriller Crimson Tide. The Alabama, of course, doesn’t exist, but the USS Wyoming (SSBN-742) very much does, now undergoing scheduled maintenance at NSB Kings Bay, nestled along Georgia’s coastal East River. We spent our next JCOC day there under strict Navy security, surrendering our iPhones before entering the base’s classified areas.?

Our host aboard the Wyoming was its very real XO, Lt. Cmdr. Alex Sayers , who might share Denzel’s sentiments while single-mindedly training his sailors in procedures to execute an order from President Biden to do the opposite. In our two hours on his ship, Sayers guided us through its two rows of 12 Trident II D5 missiles (known affectionately among submariners as "Sherwood Forest"), sonar room, command bridge, weapons control center, mess, and crew living spaces, including the nine enlisted berths that surround each launch tube.

In contrast to Parris Island, where the new recruits drill to uphold the Marines’ tradition of “First to Fight,” the young men and women of the Wyoming will likely, hopefully, pass their entire Navy careers without ever discharging its singularly destructive weapon, unless doomsday cometh. It takes a distinctive makeup to serve as submariner, an idea echoed in our briefings with Capt. Christopher Bohner , Kings Bay Commanding Officer, and Capt. Robert Peters, Chief of Staff of Submarine Group 10, of which the Wyoming is one of eight SSBNs homeported there.

Bohner and Peters, who each commanded Ohio-class subs, are an entertaining act onstage. Taking any and all questions (except those they won’t), they blend a mix of technical mastery, geopolitical practicality, career tenacity, and a touch of gallows humor. Each trait is necessary, I suppose, to spend months submerged, undetected beneath the waves within lethal striking distance of our adversaries. America’s top deterrent to armageddon is a long, stealthy snake.

While the Navy’s 14 Ohio-class subs, each with two crews of 13 officers and 121 young sailors, stoically do their jobs in “the Silent Service,” Bohner and Peters un-silently do theirs ashore. They revel in roles as de facto mayors, fighting for those under their command, and their loved ones, to have adequate health care, education facilities and places of worship. It’s all part of the welfare and morale of a broader community tied inextricably, and economically, to their mission.

Kings Bay, with its workforce of 15,000 military and civilians, flies further under the radar than better-known Navy bases like Norfolk and San Diego, where many of the Navy’s surface combatant, special warfare, and aviation communities call home. First built as an Army shipping terminal in 1958, the Navy took it over in 1975. Since then, no spit of land has been more anchored to the Navy’s role in deterring superpower conflict. In the future, that sensitive assignment will only magnify.

As the Navy Secretary, Carlos Del Toro , told me on an episode of my podcast last year, “part of our greatest investment is in our submarine force, in our advanced Virginia-class attack submarines and in our Columbia-class nuclear ballistic submarines as well too, that replace the Ohio class. Those investments need to continue.” The secretary's message, in other words: ‘we’re gonna need a bigger boat.’

In a few years, the first Columbia-class subs, USS District of Columbia (SSBN-826) and USS Wisconsin (SSBN-827), will start arriving from General Dynamics Electric Boat , the $347 billion successor program for the aging Ohio-class subs, which first set sail in 1981. As far as I can tell, none of the 12 planned hulls will be named Alabama, and that’s probably just as well.

THURSDAY

In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold, the godfather of America’s air commandos, ordered aviation pioneer Lt. Col. James Doolittle to undertake an audacious mission. It was called “Special Aviation Project No. 1.” Japan was his target.

Launching 15 fully loaded B-25 Mitchell bombers on a 500-foot takeoff roll from the deck of the USS Hornet is a commando feat if ever there was one. I last dove into the harrowing details of the mission recording an episode of my podcast with Michel Paradis, author of LAST MISSION TO TOKYO: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice.

Tactics for intruding on enemy airspace - with overwhelming firepower - enveloped our stop with Doolittle’s successors at the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field. Hurlburt sits midway between Panama City and Pensacola on Florida’s panhandle, an idyllic patch of Jimmy Buffett-quality paradise. During our Thursday visit, paradise paused for the whup whup of Army MH-47G Chinooks stealthily slipping SOF operators into the waters of Santa Rosa Sound.

Notwithstanding the formidable demonstration of weaponry and warcraft, the takeaway from our time with Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind’s AFSOC command was highlighted on the first bullet of the first slide of his brief, under “SOF Truths.” It read: “Humans are More Important than Hardware.”?

Among many impressive humans I met at AFSOC was Col. Allison Black, a super-genial, seemingly-unimposing officer commanding the 1st Special Operations Wing, 80 aircraft that rain hell from above. Over two decades ago, 90 days after 9/11, then-Capt. Black was at the trigger of an AC-130H gunship providing fire support to horse-mounted American operators making early inroads in Northern Afghanistan. To the Taliban she was known as “the Angel of Death.”

“Putting warheads onto foreheads,” as AFSOC says of itself, wasn’t lost on us JCOC observers. To underscore that, we watched an AC-130J Ghostrider, the newest variant of the line, pinpoint dead-on fire from its 105mm airborne cannon on targets a thousand or so feet from our position.?

The parallels between Col. Doolittle and Col. Black, separated by the span of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, are obvious. Two fearless warriors ready to fly in early and hot. There was an obvious difference, too. For her actions aboard the AC-130H, Black became the first Air Force woman to receive an air combat medal, ending Operation Enduring Freedom logging 540 combat hours.

As if to pass the baton to a new generation of women taking on key Air Force roles, Col. Black introduced a simulated mission briefing for the JCOC by Airman Crystal Carrera, who has all of three years in uniform. I’ve witnessed military briefs for President Clinton, and rest assured that Airman Carrera would have captured his attention. Amazed by her presentation skills, as we all were, Col. Black went off-script and pressed a challenge coin into Airman Carrera’s palm.

As the JCOC team took off from Hurlburt for points south, another thought resonated from all we’d witnessed - from pilots to operators to briefers - at Lt. Gen. Bauernfeind’s command. It was the second of his “SOF Truths” on the wall of his headquarters. Recruiting great men and women like Airman Carrera is tough, and getting tougher, but “Quality is Better than Quantity.”

FRIDAY

We began our final JCOC day waking up in Coral Gables, Florida in the heart of Miami-Dade County, which unfolds across 2,431 sprawling square miles populated by 2,701,762 people.?

Compare that to our four prior stops in Chattahoochee County, GA (pop. 9,048), Beaufort County, SC (pop. 181,748), Camden County, GA (pop. 55,664), and Okaloosa County, FL (pop. 213,255). Beyond its residents, PortMiami embarks another 4,022,544 cruise ship passengers each year and moves 11,149,227 tons of cargo commercially valued at more than $75 billion.

The concentration of people, wealth and commerce stirs tons of trade and economic uplift. It also creates flotillas of waterborne transportation and recreation and, swirling among the waves, an underside of narcotics trafficking and human smuggling and assorted other malign actors.?

Regulating, safeguarding, policing and interdicting all that activity, not only in Miami-Dade but across all 12,838 miles of U.S. coastline and inland waterways, is among the 11 missions of the 41,700 men and women of the United States Coast Guard. We saw a sliver of that action in a day at USCG Base Miami Beach and aboard its 154-foot Sentinel-class cutter Kathleen Moore.

In 1817, around the time that the safe shipment of seaborne commerce was establishing America’s real power, Kathleen Moore became light keeper of Black Rock Harbor Light on Long Island Sound. She was all of 12 years old. Her father, the appointed keeper, had been injured on the job, and Kate stepped in. She performed her duties for the next 72 years and was credited with saving 21 lives spanning her tenure at the light. The Coast Guard, overseeing America’s lighthouses since 1910, saw fit to put her name on one of their newest cutters.

Commissioned in 2104, Kathleen Moore is a formidable boat, a floating platform for enforcing America’s laws and protecting her people, often in dire ocean conditions. While the official motto of the Coast Guard is Semper Paratus, or “always ready,” the unofficial one, practiced every day by those we watched from the Moore, is “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.”

We watched one Coast Guard rescue swimmer go out the door of an MH-65 Dolphin, plunging into the rotor-whipped Atlantic surf to secure a drowning dummy and safely hoist it onto the helicopter. A few minutes later, we witnessed a team of armed Guardsmen pursue a non-compliment vessel at full speed in a 33-foot Response Boat, firing shots across its bow until it came to heel.

The drills were simulated, of course, but what distinguishes the Coast Guard among its sister services is that its real-life missions unfold, often under awful conditions, every day. Hurricanes don’t follow a set schedule, nor do stranded sailors, and migrants and smugglers attempt to infiltrate our waters 24/7. The vast variety of risk is what makes the work most challenging.

We could see that in the pride that Capt. Chris Cederholm , who runs Coast Guard Sector Miami, had in the 900 active duty, reserve and civilian personnel under his command. I saw it personally on the hard, weathered face of Lt. Cdr. Marty McKenna, who grew up diving in the Florida Keys. A comrade-in-mourning for the late Jimmy Buffett, we talked about his long career over beers and barbecue beneath a tiki hut, a fitting wrap-up to our day patrolling Biscayne Bay.

McKenna enlisted in the Coast Guard 31 years ago and was commissioned along the way. He could retire with a good pension at any time, but he loves the work, and loves passing his unique skill set to young Guardsmen in his wake. He’s worried, though, that the next generation is being tempted by better pay and easier jobs ashore, and turned off by a splintering society.

“We gotta get everyone on the same page again, loving their country,” he told me. “We have to appreciate what we have. It isn’t free.” As I sat with Marty at the tiki hut, I could drink to that.

HEADING TO HOMEPORT

As I returned to New York from Miami on Saturday, Lt. Cdr. McKenna’s words summed up, for me, the week with our armed forces that we were extraordinarily privileged to witness.

The appreciation starts at the Pentagon, where our trip began on Sunday. My heartfelt thanks to everyone in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for making JCOC 94 possible, including Melanie Fonder Kaye , Maj. Gen. Darrin Slaten , Laura Ochoa, Alán Ortiz, Jacqueline Langs , and E.J. Hersom, our photographer, who captured every moment shared here with his exquisite images.?

My highest praise to our armed services team leaders, Army Maj. Heba Bullock , Marine Corps Maj. Tyler Miller , Navy Lt. Cmdr. Egdanis Torres-Sierra, Air Force/Space Force Tech. Sgt. Andrew Davis , and Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Laura Gilbert . They awakened us with reveille, shepherded us from base to base, and enlightened us with answers to our nonstop questions. And when not doing that, these humble officers are ready to put their lives on the line for the American Experiment. Each are selfless soldiers who, Semper Gumby, go above and beyond the call of duty.

On the plane, trying to contextualize all that I had seen, from Fort Moore to Kathleen Moore, I read The Atlantic’s just-published profile by Jeffrey Goldberg of retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley. In most of the article, Milley is at pains to avoid criticizing America’s civilian leaders (the courtesy wasn't reciprocated), saving his energy and enthusiasm to salute our troops and their fealty to the Constitution.

“Here’s what your military’s doing,” Gen. Milley recited to Goldberg near the end of the roughly 13,000-word piece. “There are 5,000 sorties a day, including combat patrols protecting the U.S.A. and our interests around the world. At least 60 to 100 Navy warships are patrolling the seven seas, keeping the world free for ocean transport. We have 250,000 troops overseas, in 140 countries, defending the rules-based international order. We’ve got kids training constantly. This military is trained, well equipped, well led, and focused on readiness. Our readiness statuses are at the highest levels they’ve been in 20 years.”

The readiness of which Gen. Milley speaks was on full display with the M1A2 tank crews during our day with the Army, the drill sergeants during our day with the Marines, the USS Wyoming sailors during our day with the Navy, the AC-130J and MH-47G pilots during our day with the Air Force, and the search and rescue teams during our day with the Coast Guard.?

The reality is that only 34 of us were fortunate enough to see all of this in action during JCOC 94. Every American should. If only Sec. Lloyd Austin and his team could scale the experience, exposing more citizens to the work done every day on their behalf. They would be enormously proud of the young men and women who take the oath to serve. And in the end, perhaps more of those young people would follow, at least for a few formative years, in their yellow footprints.?