Dino Garner

BLUF

Expertise is narrow and deep. Proficiency is wide and shallow, and proficiency wins in any environment that moves. The operator carries a box of about a hundred tools, selects five for the situation in front of him, and becomes proficient in those five for the duration. The expert reaches for the one tool he has mastered and tries to make it solve the whole problem. Sometimes it does. The cost of the times it does not is the mission.

The method is two phrases. Learn the bullet points. Then go fire the bullets. The card of first principles gets you to the door. Contact with reality edits the card. The man who shoots on day one with a half-learned card owns a better card by day thirty than the man still perfecting his at a desk.

Three recommendations follow. First, SOF selection should filter for the hundred-tool man, the one who has switched fields, who is competent at things that do not share a resume, not for the credentialed specialist who is best in the world at one thing and brittle at four others. Second, training should compress every block to its index card, push the student into the field early, and revise the card together on his return. Short classroom, long field, instructors with the smell of recent shooting on their hands. Third, the personnel system should promote the deployment over the credential. The institution that builds this pipeline wins the next twenty years. The rest will keep producing experts, and experts keep losing to operators. We have eighty years of evidence. The paper below is the case.

*****

I am not an expert in anything. Never have been. Don’t even know what the word means. I just know I’m not it.

That sentiment is the most useful thing I know about my own work. It is also what the institutions of American power cannot absorb, because the institutions were built around the expert, and the men who survive contact with the real world are built around something else the experts don’t like to talk about.

I carry a box of about a hundred tricks, and in any given situation I reach for five, and I try to be proficient in those five for the duration of that situation, and when the situation ends the five go back in the box and the box closes, and the next situation pulls a different five from the dark.

Sometimes one or two overlap. Most often the selection is new. Interestingly, some of the same tricks I’ve used in both violent combat and calm literary pursuits.

This is not a confession. It is the description of how operational work actually gets done. Sharing it with you is an obligation, because I’ve seen it done effectively in combat and in peacetime. It works every time. And so I encourage you to consider it.

The Hundred-Tool Box

What is in the box: the shit I know and have used proficiently:

Trauma medicine to the level a real medic two doors down would still beat me on a bad day. 

Demolitions enough that I rewrote the explosives manual for the 1st Ranger Battalion’s Advanced Explosive and Demolitions course (while a student in the course), though I am not the man you put in front of an EOD problem. 

Link analysis enough to map a network across four countries before lunch, though a Palantir engineer would smile politely at my workflow. 

Biophysics and physiology enough that I once cultured shark brain tissue nobody had cultured before, and built my own electronic preamplifiers in a room nobody else wanted, and pulled glass microelectrodes my peers called the sharpest in the world. That hand has not touched an electrophysiology rig in thirty-some years.

Cellebrite dumps. Bayesian pattern-of-life analysis. Heat-transfer first principles. RF discipline. Land navigation by the stars. Counter-tracking. Counter-surveillance. The basics of a dozen languages, working fluency in four. Negotiation under duress. Field interrogation. Knot work. 

Sum: Improvised explosives. Improvised medical. Improvised everything.

A hundred is a round number. The point is that the box is wide and shallow, easy to reach in and grab a tool, not narrow and deep. The expert’s box is narrow and deep. The operator’s is wide and shallow. Both are legitimate. They are not the same job, and the institution that confuses them produces neither one well.

The Five

The five is what changes everything.

The situation lands. You reach into the box. You select.

You do not select all hundred. You cannot. You do not have the time, you do not have the load, and most of the hundred are irrelevant to the room you are standing in. You pick five without even thinking actively. Your superconscious is a hundred steps ahead of you and has laid out your gameplan, including the five tricks you’ll need for this op.

Then you commit. The five becomes your whole world in that moment.

The man at Mote Marine Laboratory, hands steady over the tissue hood, culturing shark brain explants nobody believed would live, was running maybe five of the hundred. Tissue handling. Sterile technique. Buffer chemistry. Patience. The willingness to try a thing because everyone else had quit. None of the five were expert-level by themselves. All of them were proficient enough in that moment, against that problem, and the tissue lived. And that’s how I made history as the first person to culture shark cells, because I did something no one else thought of. Or they dismissed it as “bad science.”

The man in Mozambique or Botswana at three in the morning, crouched in the thornveld with the Milky Way arched across the sky, was running five. Land navigation. Counter-tracking. Trigger discipline. Comms protocol. The willingness to close the loop on armed men who held every advantage of terrain. Different five. Same box. My Code of Deathics: I won, they lost. 

COMMERCIAL BREAK: What’s the biggest killer of men? Not cancer. Not cardiovascular disease. 

Arrogance. Just a polite reminder.

GAME ON:

The man at the Naval Academy in 2005, running the first passive low-frequency RFID demonstration the U.S. military had ever seen, was running a third five. RF propagation. Antenna shielding. Test protocol design. Failure-mode analysis. The willingness to argue with senior defense-industry and military officers about what the data actually said. I was right. The physics proved it. Only then did they believe me and send me a fat check.

Three projects. Three domains. Fifteen years between them. Same box. Different five each time.

The expert owns fifteen tools, and three of them sing. The operator owns a hundred, and on any given day five of them are called upon to perform. The operator’s selection is the symphony. The expert’s catalog is bubble-gum music for pre-teens.

Bullet Points to Fire the Bullets

Here is the method, all of it, in two phrases.

You learn the bullet points. Then you go out and fire the bullets.

Bullet points are the basics. The compressed Betty Crocker cake mix list. What every field reduces to when you strip away the credentialing. The first principles of trauma medicine fit on an index card. Breaching fits on another. Link analysis on a third. Buffer chemistry on a fourth. RF discipline on a fifth. My standard four-line for anyone who annoys me or gets in my way fits on a card (Fuck that. Fuck you. Fuck yours. Fuck off.) Every field has its card. The expert sits comfortably at his desk and defends the doctoral thesis behind the card. The operator memorizes the card, tucks it into a pocket, and walks outside into the immovable weather.

Shooting the bullets is the empirical loop, and the loop is older than the academy, and older than the doctrine, and older than the credential, and the loop is this. You carry the card outside. Reality does what reality does. You see where the rounds land. You adjust. You shoot again. After enough rounds you have a working sense of where the card was right and where the card was a lie, and you revise the card, and you shoot again, and the card gets better, and so do you. Your card is the evolution of your getting more proficient. The egghead set is back in the rear still trying to explain what I already proved empirically.

Small example, from the range.

I shot a 9-millimeter pistol decently for years. Acceptable groups. Never tight but they always seemed to hit accurately. The day I switched to a .45 the groups closed. Not because I had practiced more. Because the cartridge itself was teaching me something the 9 could not.

Heavier projectile. Different recoil impulse. The pistol commits to its arc later. The shooter who stays in the gun rides the arc to a steadier release. The 9 rewards a fast hand. The .45 rewards a heavier one. I am a heavier man. The .45 fit the operator I already was. The gun taught me that before any instructor could have.

The same range taught me two more things the doctrinal cards do not.

Holding a pistol upright is stupid. It fights my own ligaments. My right hand wants to cant the weapon about forty-five degrees to the left, and when I let it, my groups did not open. They closed. The hand-arm system relaxed into the position it had been built for. The doctrine said upright. The hand said canted. The hand was right, because the hand had been built in a workshop older than the doctrinal manual by some thirty thousand years.

The same hand wanted the pistol close to my face. Not extended at full lockout the way the textbooks teach. Pulled in, as close as the slide would let me come without knocking out some teeth. The reason is conservation of angular momentum and the moment-arm effect, working together. Two physics effects, not one. Doctrine missed both. Gotta love physics.

The first is rotational. A pistol firing is not just a linear problem. The bore axis sits above the wrist. The round leaves the muzzle, and the recoil force pushes back through the bore, and because the bore is above the pivot, that backward force creates a torque around the wrist. Torque equals force multiplied by the perpendicular distance from the pivot to the line of force. That distance is the moment arm. Arms locked out means a long moment arm with a heavy weight at the end. Same recoil impulse, but it acts at the end of a long lever, so the rotation of the system is large. The muzzle flips. The sights leave the target. The second shot makes a wish.

Pull the pistol in toward the face and the lever collapses. The pivot is no longer just the wrist. The gun, the hands, the forearms, the upper arms, the shoulders all become one semi-rigid structure tied into the torso. The effective moment arm shortens dramatically. Same recoil impulse, less leverage to rotate the system. The muzzle barely lifts. The sights stay on target. That’s physics in motion.

The second effect is the mass term in the momentum equation. Recoil is governed by conservation of linear momentum. The momentum of the bullet leaving the muzzle equals the momentum of everything pushing back the other way, and that backward momentum must be absorbed by some mass. Mass times velocity equals momentum. For a fixed momentum, larger absorbing mass means smaller absorbing velocity.

Arms locked out, shoulders relaxed, and the absorbing mass is the pistol plus the hands plus the forearms. Five or six pounds of meaningful mass. That small mass takes the full backward momentum, so it moves fast. The fast movement is what you feel as recoil snap, and the snap stacks on top of the torque to throw the muzzle off target.

Pull the pistol in and lock the structure into the torso, and the absorbing mass becomes the pistol plus the hands plus the forearms plus the upper arms plus the chest plus everything tied to the spine. Eighty pounds. A hundred pounds. The same backward momentum hitting that much larger mass produces a much smaller backward velocity. The system barely moves. You feel a gentle push instead of a snap.

Shorter moment arm, less muzzle flip from torque. Larger absorbing mass, less recoil velocity from linear momentum. Pulling the hands in close does both at once. The doctrinal arm-lockout fights both effects. I was not improvising on the range. I was correcting two textbook physics errors that the doctrine had baked into the card.

There is a name for what the body is doing in plain mechanics terms. Coupling the firearm to the body’s center of mass. Snipers call a version of it loading the bipod. Shotgunners call it mounting the gun into the pocket. Pistol shooters mostly do not have a name for it, because the doctrinal card forbids it. I found it anyway. The bullets told me the truth, and the bullets do not give a shit what the card says.

Physics does not lie. Physics will make you a badazz if you let it, and it will turn you into a man whose second shot lands where the first one did, and it will do so for free, and it does not care about your doctorate or your school or the gold leaf on the cover of your manual, and it asks only that you stop arguing with it long enough to let the rounds teach. Zen physics.

The expert refuses to shoot until he has mastered the card. He never finishes mastering it because the card has no terminus. So he never shoots. So he never finds out where the card was wrong. The operator shoots on day one with a half-learned card and lets the rounds teach him. By day thirty he has a card the expert will never have, because the operator’s card has been edited by contact with reality.

The Perfection Trap

The trap is that perfection is testable only against itself because perfection does not like to be proven wrong. It tends to have a narcissistic bent.

Proficiency is testable in the world because it is humble and unassuming. Did the patient breathe. Did the door blow. Did the network map close. Did the man in the doorway go down. Did the tissue survive in culture. Did the rounds land where you put them. Reality grades the work. The grade is binary. You passed or you did not. In combat, you go home or you die in place.

Perfection is testable only against an internal standard that no real-world problem ever supplies, and the perfectionist asks whether the work was beautiful, and the operator asks whether the work was done, and the perfectionist can spend a career inside the question of beauty and never answer the question of done, and meanwhile the patient stops breathing, and the door fails to blow, and the man in the doorway raises his weapon, and the tissue dies in the culture dish, and the rounds land in the dirt, and the work that needed doing remains undone, and the perfectionist, finishing the last refinement of his card, looks up to find the world has gone on without him. 

That was not a sentence. That was a fire-for-effect mission. Twelve rounds, one breath. Deal with it.

The institutions of American power have spent several decades selecting for the perfectionist over the operator. The credential is the perfectionist’s instrument. The deployment is the operator’s. We built a force structure that promotes the credential and a recruiting system that filters for it. Then we wonder why we cannot field the operator at scale or recruit PhDs to become badazzes.

The Older Tradition

This is not a new idea. It is the older one.

Aristotle drew the line between episteme and phronesis. Episteme is knowledge of things that do not change. Mathematics. Geometry. The eternal forms. Phronesis is practical wisdom, the right thing at the right time in the right amount, knowable only by the man who has done the thing under conditions. Episteme belongs to the expert. Phronesis belongs to the operator. Aristotle ranked phronesis higher because phronesis is what is required when the world is in motion, and the world is always in motion.

Aristotle had no rifle, no patrol cap, no oak leaf on his collar. He had eyes, and a stylus, and the patience to watch men do hard things under conditions. He ranked the doer above the knower, and he was right, and twenty-four centuries of credentialed men have not improved on his answer.

The Stoics ran the same distinction. What is in our power and what is not. The proficient man works on what is in his power and lets the rest go. The perfectionist tries to govern what is not in his power and fails, and then blames the world. Narcissism in motion.

Sun Tzu ran it again. The skillful warrior puts himself in a position where defeat is impossible and then waits for the enemy’s opportunity to be defeated. He does not wait until his swordsmanship is perfect. He waits until his position is sufficient. Sufficient is the proficient man’s word. Perfect is the perfectionist’s. Perfect will get you a published dissertation and a sheepskin diploma. Sufficient will gift you another day breathing.

The whole older tradition of practical wisdom, East and West, treated proficiency as the higher virtue and expertise as the auxiliary one, and the modern university inverted the ranking, and the credential outranks the deployment, and we have been living inside that inversion for many generations, and it has not served us, and the older tradition stands waiting, patient and uninterested in the noise we are making, for us to remember that it was the better answer all along.

Selection

The implications the conventional force has been slow to absorb.

SOF selection should not be optimized for the man who is best in the world at any one thing. The man who is best in the world at any one thing is usually a perfectionist by temperament, because that is what it took to become best in the world at that one thing. He will not select five tools cleanly under pressure. He will reach for the one tool he is best at and try to make it solve the whole problem. Sometimes it will. Most of the time it will not. The cost of the times it does not is the mission.

Selection should be optimized for the man who has already lived inside the hundred-tool box, before he ever walked into the recruiter’s office. The profile is recognizable. He has switched fields several times. He is competent at things that do not normally appear on the same resume. He shoots well, codes well, lifts heavy, reads philosophy, reads books other than comics, fixes his own truck, and he is bored half the time because the world he was built for is not the world he was given. The conventional employer treats him as a generalist, which is a soft word for unfocused. The SOF recruiter should treat him as the target profile. And if he’s 40 years old, he will kick the shit outta any 20-something with a Master’s degree.

The institution that builds the pipeline for this man wins the next twenty years. The institutions that keep filtering for credentialed depth will keep producing operators who are excellent at one thing and brittle at four others. Brittle is fatal in any environment that punishes brittleness, which is to say, in all of them.

Training

Training should follow the method. Bullet points to fire the bullets.

Compress every block to its index card. Teach the card. Then send the student outside to find out where the card was a lie. Bring him back. Revise the card together. Send him out again. Inside one rotation the student has a working card the credentialed instructor cannot produce, because the credentialed instructor’s card has not been edited by contact in years.

This is how SAS/SBS dudes, OSS operators, Rangers and SEALs, Green Berets and Raiders, and PJs and all other specops warriors were trained when the training was at its best, and the classroom was as short as it could be, and the field was as long as it needed to be, and the instructors were operators who had shot the bullets recently and carried the smell of the shooting on their hands, and somewhere along the line the classroom got longer and the field got shorter and the instructors got replaced by men whose credentials outranked their deployments. Most of the men who read this know exactly what I am describing. And they’re as pissed as I am that we aren’t back in 1942 mixing it the Germans and Japanese.

The fix is unfashionable because it requires admitting the older method was the better one. I learned to become strictly OSS (Old School Slaughter). 

Closing

I am not an expert in anything. I never tried to be. I have a box of about a hundred tricks. In any given situation I use five. I try to be proficient in those five for the time the situation lasts.

The work has not asked me for anything more than that. When I have tried to give it more, by reaching for perfection in any single tool, I have lost time the work did not have. When I have given it less, by being stupid with the five I had selected, I have paid for it with consequences I am embarrassed to list.

Proficiency in the selected five, for the duration. That is the operator’s epistemology. The bullet points are the start. Firing the bullets is the work. The card gets revised by contact with the real world. The box gets larger by one or two tools every year, the way a good craftsman’s bench gets a new chisel now and then. The boast about mastery never enters the room, because mastery was never the point.

Those who read SOFX know this in their bones, or in the case of young people, in their superconscious. Most of the institution that pays them does not. The institution that figures out how to recruit and train for the box, rather than the credential, wins what comes next. The rest will keep producing experts. Experts will keep losing to operators, and the experts will be the ones who get promoted and get Bronze Stars just for being in theater. We have eighty years of evidence for that, and we still have not built the personnel system that takes the evidence seriously.

The bullet points are the start.

Then you go fire the bullets.

The rest is just whether you keep showing up. Half the room is already out the door.

Dino Garner served in the 1st Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, after more than 15 years in biophysics research at Duke Medical Center, USC, and Scripps on NSF and NIH graduate fellowships. He founded two international private security firms and ran 220+ missions across three continents, including 30+ counter-poaching operations against industrial wildlife trafficking networks in southern Africa. He is the founder and principal of CRUCIBEL LLC in Bozeman, Montana, mentors at the Three Rangers Foundation, and writes on COSINT, defense and irregular-warfare policy at CrucibelJournal.com, Irregular Warfare Initiative (IrregularWarfare.org) and SOFX.com.