Security Confidential S10 E3 Mike Rice

Rory Meikle: Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Dark Rhiino Security’s Security Confidential. I’m your host today, Rory Meikle, and today’s guest is Mike Rice. Mike is a retired Navy SEAL officer who started out his military career as an enlisted Marine Corps infantryman. Mike, thanks for joining us.

Mike Rice: Hey Rory, thanks for having me, man.

Rory Meikle: Absolutely. So your background in the military, your time in, is definitely unique and interesting. Can you shed some light on that for us?

Mike Rice: Yeah, thanks. I definitely had, I think, a slightly different career path than most.

I did start, as you mentioned, I started off in the Marine Corps. I enlisted back in 1991 right after I graduated from high school and went to the Marine Corps infantry. I was there for about four years, and then I took a selection course, passed the selection course, and went over to First Force Recon Company. So First Force Recon back in the mid-90s was the Marine Corps Special Operations unit, and I was with them for about another four years.

Then the Marine Corps decided to send me to college to become an officer.

I went to college. I was in Washington, DC on 9/11. I was there going to George Washington University in DC. So again, I was in DC on 9/11 and, for a variety of reasons, I applied for and was accepted into the SEAL program as a commissioned officer.

So I went from being a Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps to an Ensign in the Navy. It felt like a demotion. I became an Ensign in the Navy and I went to BUD/S. I went to BUD/S as an officer and graduated with class 244 and went to SEAL Team One.

So that was my first SEAL Team, and I spent all of my career on the West Coast: SEAL Team One for multiple deployments, and then SEAL Team Three.

For my last duty station, I got shifted out to Bahrain and I was working at Fifth Fleet as an advisor to the command there, the Fifth Fleet command in Bahrain.

I finished out my time in the military there. I retired from active duty in 2015, and then I took a job down in Abu Dhabi and worked for UAE Special Operations. We’ll talk about them for some time here in this talk today.

Interesting group there; they’re trying to build up a really amazing Special Operations capability. So I worked for them for about three years and advised and assisted some of their military operations in the MENA region—Middle East, North Africa region—and mentored some of their O-5 and below officers on Special Operations officer kind of stuff.

Then I left there in 2018, came back to the States, and have been in the private sector ever since.

Rory Meikle: Wow, yeah, that’s an awesome story. I mean, for any person in the military, let alone Special Forces, not to be doing just one but two highly selective, highly competitive branches.

Mike Rice: Yeah, I guess I was too dumb to quit.

You know what it really did, Rory, and I always say this because for me it’s really true: I was always surrounded by guys who were better than me, and it made me the best version of me that I could be. It was very humbling.

I was definitely surrounded by some very heroic and incredible guys, and I was very, very blessed in my career.

Rory Meikle: Right. So what motivated you or made you want to change from being in the Marine Recon community to then shifting to the SEAL Teams?

Mike Rice: Right. So it basically came down to this: when I made the decision, this was, like I said, right after 9/11. MARSOC had not been stood up at the time.

So my experience at First Force Recon, while I was working with fantastic guys—some of my best friends in my life are still from that period of time that I was at First Force Recon Company. I love those guys, tons of respect for Marines, the Marine Corps, and the Marine Recon community. It definitely had a huge impact on my life, but at the time, they were not part of SOCOM.

So I looked at my career path as having to go through the Marine Corps officer commissioning process. I went through Marine Corps OCS, Officer Candidates School, and then I came back and I realized the rest of it, like going to the Marine Corps officer—they call it The Basic School, and it’s like the initial pipeline for all officers—you go through this process where it’s not certain what your MOS will be, outside of a couple of unique differences like pilots and lawyers and things like that, JAGs.

Everybody else goes in this kind of general pool and you kind of fight your way to get the MOS you want. Now, I probably had a pretty good chance of becoming a Marine infantry officer, which is the only thing I wanted to be, but there was a bit of a crapshoot.

If I had a couple of bad events or I made a mistake or something like that, then I could have dropped down and not gotten what I wanted, and then I’d end up being something in the Marine Corps that I really just didn’t personally want to do. There’s great people that do all kinds of different jobs in the Marine Corps, but I had a very specific want that I wanted.

So I looked at that versus if I went to BUD/S: it was all on me whether or not I could pass that, and I was confident that I could pass.

So between the two of those, I felt like I had more control. Plus, I was going to go into a unit that was a part of SOCOM, so they’re a little bit higher up on the food chain when it came to things that matter to me. So that’s really why.

Again, no disrespect to the Marine Corps at all; it was a very selfish decision. It’s what I wanted for me and my career.

Rory Meikle: Okay, so that makes sense. So with switching and going the SEAL Team route, you were as guaranteed as your will was strong to be in the Special Forces, to be in that arena.

Mike Rice: Yeah, so it was up to me whether or not I could make it through. And again, I felt confident. I knew it was going to be a challenge, and it absolutely was. It met all of those expectations. It was a very, very long, nine-month long, roughly, process.

But it was something that I had more control over, I felt. So I went to BUD/S and I was respectful; I played the game, so to speak.

It was interesting because when I went to BUD/S, every phase of BUD/S had a SEAL that I’d worked with before when I was in Force Recon. But even then, I never tried to use that to my advantage.

I was as good a BUD/S student as I could be. I didn’t set any land speed records or course records or anything, but I was definitely putting out. I tried to do my best throughout the whole process and respected the process. I think the instructors that I worked with respected that.

So I think that’s important. If you’re going into something like that, you can’t go in there thinking you’re going to game it because you know somebody or because you’ve been around for a little bit. I’d been in the military for 12 years when I went to BUD/S, which is a little bit unusual.

Rory Meikle: No, that makes total sense. What was the atmosphere like in BUD/S? Because I’m imagining that was right after 9/11, like you said. So I’d be curious to know the mindset and the attitude of the instructors who were there.

Mike Rice: I would say, in general, even when I was in school and I was talking to my buddies that were at First Force Recon and then going to BUD/S, everyone’s attitude changed. All the BS kind of dropped away. There was less emphasis on things that didn’t matter, and it was really front-side focused on what we need to do to get ready to go to war.

We all knew we were going to war, and our instructor cadre—I think rightly so—looked at it even—not that there was any slack before, but whatever slack there was was gone because it was like, “Okay, I might be in a platoon with this guy a year from now.”

That’s how they looked at us, rightly so. So it really stripped away any other sort of fluff. It doesn’t matter if the guy’s going to be the triathlon god of the SEAL Team. Does he have the character traits that we’re looking for? All the things that are the intangibles: Is he strong? Does he have integrity? Does he have the things that make him a good teammate?

Those kinds of criteria, I think, really were sharpened because we’re looking at, “I might be in a platoon in Iraq with this guy in a short period of time, and do I want him next to me?” Those are the kind of attitudes that shifted. There wasn’t any doubt if we were going to go to war or not; we all knew we were. It’s just who was going to make it.

Rory Meikle: Right, that makes total sense. It definitely became more of a real conversation with the people who were there: that you were going to be in combat, you were going to be doing all the things that some of the guys probably signed up to do, but at that time wasn’t really going on, and now you were facing that reality head-on.

Mike Rice: Yeah. So in the 90s, when I was in the Marine Corps, look, we just beat the crap out of each other in training. I mean, we trained really, really, really hard. But there was also a lot of stuff that just didn’t seem that important to me.

But when you’re not at war, there’s a garrison kind of attitude that creeps in. Haircuts and uniforms and some of the parts of the Marine Corps that used to chafe me a little bit were a big part of life in the 90s.

Again, we trained very, very hard, but I know that stuff kind of dropped off after 9/11. So it was a definitely an attitude that sharpened; everyone’s attitude got a little sharper.

Rory Meikle: Yeah, certain things started to become more important than others.

Mike Rice: Correct.

Rory Meikle: That makes total sense. After 9/11, when Afghanistan first kicked off, where was the technology, as far as Special Forces in the SEAL Teams was concerned? Where was your level of technology at?

Mike Rice: Right. So I would say it was pretty rudimentary overall. There were operations centers; UAVs were starting to be integrated; there were satellite communications; but night vision was still being worked on.

It was okay, but it wasn’t like when I was at Force Recon. I don’t think we wore night vision very much back in the mid-90s because it just wasn’t that good, and you actually had better situational awareness if you just let your eyes adjust.

It was definitely one of those things that sharpened everyone’s attitudes. Technology was looked at as a way we could leverage an advantage over the enemy because they were not very technologically sophisticated.

So those things very, very quickly, I think, took off. Like the 7 Bravo night vision when they came out; they were a big increase in the capability versus the previous iterations that I remember seeing back in the early 90s. They were pretty much garbage back then; NVGs were. I had these goggles.

Then communications got a little bit better, I would say, but there wasn’t a whole lot. Compared to what I saw towards the end of the war, it was a really dramatic improvement in our ability to incorporate effective technology that enhanced our warfighting capability.

I think that was one thing that got much, much better over the 20-odd years of the wars over there.

Rory Meikle: That makes sense. Do you feel like, when we first got involved, you guys were kind of on par with the enemy, or maybe slightly above, and then towards the end you had a dramatic increase over the enemy’s capability from a technology standpoint versus your own?

Mike Rice: Yeah, I think that’s probably fair to say. I would say our ability to leverage technology in surveillance and in targeting got much, much more sophisticated over time, and it became really a dramatic increase in our capability.

It also allowed us to lower risk profiles as well. We also adjusted tactics. Over the beginning of the first few years of the war, we were taking more casualties, for sure, than we did at the end. Some of that was directly related to our ability to leverage effective battlefield technology.

I’ll talk about something here; this is regarding my UAE SOC buddies. UAE Special Operations Command guys, they’re trying to build up their technological capability and they’re working on their targeting, trying to basically mirror our F3EA cycle: Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, and Analyze.

So the F3EA cycle was how we ran our operations; that was kind of the construct that everything fell underneath.

But let me talk about something where the enemy was also able to leverage some of this capability against us.

When I first went to work for the SOC guys in mid-2015, shortly after that, a few months after, they suffered the largest single loss of life in their history as a nation. Their military suffered, and I think it was a little over 50—they stopped publishing numbers when they hit 50.

Fifty men were killed in September of ’15. They were killed in a rocket attack on a munitions depot. Now, the ammunition was in an air-conditioned bunker. There were some lax procedures. There was a big group of UAE, Bahraini, and Yemeni troops inside this kind of air-conditioned bunker, and they were hit.

The bunker was hit by some rockets; it detonated the munitions and killed a lot of guys, injured dozens more. It was a big tragedy, but we ended up finding out the way that the Iranian-backed Yemeni militia were able to target them was through social media posts.

The soldiers there—both the Bahrainis and the Emiratis—were sending pictures back home and had locational metadata embedded in the pictures. That’s how they were able to figure out exactly where they were, and they targeted them.

So the Emiratis got a lot more serious about device security after this happened. But you can imagine—this is an example of how there are some players out there that got very sophisticated as well in using locational data.

They were also able to, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, figure out—they were mapping some of our bases using fitness applications and wearable devices that some troops were using. They had locational data that they were broadcasting unwittingly, and there were some Iranians that were able to—Iranian units were able to track that and start to map out where our bases were. So the Strava app and Fitbit, those kind of wearable devices.

And so that became illegal to use over there as a result of that. So it goes both ways. The enemy also has a vested interest in evolving themselves, and it’s not just us that got better; they also got a little bit better as well.

Rory Meikle: Yeah, and I’d argue definitely a little bit more creative there, maybe thinking outside the box more so than we were as far as the repercussions of these technologies.

So here’s another question for you then: Where did you see technology affect the teams the most? Was it more so the information technology, what you guys were receiving on the screens, or was it more so improvements to your weapons, to assets that you had at your disposal—may that be airstrikes or that sort of thing?

Mike Rice: Yeah, so I think our weapons—at least for the ground troops like myself—there weren’t any massive improvements there. They got a little bit better for sure, but not an exponential improvement.

I would say the exponential improvements came in command and control systems: our ability to communicate cross-functionally, the ability to communicate between different branches of the service, because there were some siloed communication avenues before where we broke a lot of those down.

Our operation centers became much more joint, and the use of UAVs in particular was really a game changer, because we could fly Predators overhead for 12-plus hours at a time, depending on weather, and we could run multiple lines of ISR.

We could run basically 24/7 surveillance on targets and we were able to also start to leverage different technology to gather information about the enemy in ways that we never could before.

So our ability to become more accurate in our targeting—instead of having to go out there and just stomp around the woods or stomp around the dirt for days at a time—we could in some instances know exactly what house inside of a village, even sometimes the side of the house. We could figure out the room that the person we were going after was at.

We became more accurate. Interestingly enough, I think that saved lives on both sides. We were able to save a lot of American lives and Coalition lives, and we also were able to save a lot of innocent people from being hurt over there by becoming more accurate in our targeting.

And that was the UAV technology; I think was one of the biggest. We had the capability to broadcast signals where our commanders back in the operations centers could see what was going on as well. So that sort of situational awareness—the good commanders were able to really leverage that to support troops on the ground and have a better understanding of what was going on.

It’s not perfect though; I will add this as well. So the UAV, the whole ISR—some of the manned platforms as well experience this because I actually flew in a couple of them just to see what it was like.

With the manned platforms, you’re looking through—it’s not this bad, but it’s essentially like a soda straw. You’re looking down and you’re looking at things from a different, like a straight-down angle, or from the side angle.

So it’s not perfect and there’s going to be much better technology in the future coming up, I’m sure. There’s stuff even in the pipeline right now.

I came off active duty in 2015; I left the Emirates in 2018. So even since I’ve left, there’s been improvements in this technology when it comes to visualizing things on the battlefield.

But again, with the manned platforms, you’re up there, you’ve got some weather, you’re bouncing around, you’re looking through a soda straw at one part of a target. Usually that’s at night; pretty much all the time it’s going to be in that green-black kind of shading.

Things were not super clear and there were definitely some mistakes made. I’ll give you an example of one that I personally witnessed that almost was a catastrophe, because you can’t always—despite our best efforts—tell exactly what’s going on.

We were in an operations center in Afghanistan and we were doing surveillance over a target area. We started to notice a group of what appeared to be military-age males that were gathering in a location just outside of the village. We watched them for several hours and they appeared to be digging some sort of a trench or something next to the road. This is a road that Coalition forces would go up and down sometimes.

So we were concerned and we started really focusing in on them. Again, we watched them for hours and we thought for sure that this was probably a good strike. So there were preparations.

Rory Meikle: You’re watching with a drone flying overhead?

Mike Rice: Yes, we’re watching with a drone. So we’re watching the target through the drone back in the operation center, so it’s bouncing off of the drone coming back to us.

We watched for a couple of hours total and again, thought we had an idea of what was going on, so we started to spin up an airstrike. Then, at almost the last minute, the senior enlisted—the Master Chief there—something about it just didn’t sit right with him.

So we took another look at it. We were like, “All right, you know what? Let’s go in on the ground. We’re going to take a bit of a risk here.” So I’m risking U.S. troops to do this, but we decided that was the right call because it wasn’t a slam dunk.

There weren’t a lot of indications of weapons and so we went a little bit—again, a little bit more cautious on this one. We mounted up, went out there, and conducted a ground assault. Thank God we did, because it turned out to be just a bunch of young boys, kids essentially, out there playing soccer.

They were digging this goal post to try to get their soccer goal posts installed so they could play soccer on this big field. Again, that was not what we saw on the other end.

That’s somewhat of an extreme example. You usually have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the battlefield, what’s going on on the other end, but if you look at the history of the last 15-20 years that we’ve been using this drone technology and remote strikes and this kind of targeting system, it’s not perfect.

So it’s still got a long way to go, I think. I know there are companies and our defense industry is working very hard on this because at the end of the day, it saves lives on our end. It also saves innocent lives which is—interestingly, despite all the criticism, we put a lot of effort into not hurting good people over there.

There’s a lot of good folks over there that just live there, and we certainly didn’t want to hurt them. We were trying to target the criminal groups, the terrorist organizations, the ones that were actually hurting those good people as well.

So it’s a win-win for everybody when we become more accurate and more sophisticated in our targeting.

Rory Meikle: All right, well on that note I think we’ll call it a session, call it a wrap.

Mike Rice: It’s not perfect, so it’s still got a long way to go, I think. And I know there are companies and our defense industry is working very hard on this because at the end of the day it saves lives on our end. It also saves innocent lives, which is interestingly, despite all the criticism, we put a lot of effort into not hurting good people over there.

And there’s a lot of good folks over there that just, you know, that’s where they live, and we certainly didn’t want to hurt them. We were trying to target the criminal groups, the terrorist organizations, the ones that were actually also hurting those good people as well.

So it’s a win-win for everybody when we become more accurate and more sophisticated in our targeting.

Rory Meikle: All right, well on that note I think we’ll call it a session, call it a wrap and Continue in part 2