Scott Mann
Appearances
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I mean, I would love to hear Legend's take on, you know, the long game that these individuals play with the Caliphate. And I think it starts with that. You know, we have a... This is me looking back on 20 years of war. I think we have a very Western way of thinking about things and a preferred way of war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Look at how we took counterinsurgency and we literally lifted it over from Vietnam and applied it into Afghanistan, into that rural insurgency. So we applied a counterinsurgency model and fought it for 20 years and mixed in with a CT strategy where we were essentially mowing the grass, cutting the heads off, but then new ones grew.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But I do think that when you, we really have to look carefully at how do these individuals think about their end game. They're fighting a, if necessary, a multi-sensory narrative. They're prepared to stay with this thing to the end. And they love, it's often said they love death as much as we love life in order to achieve that. So I just don't think we're even in the same arena.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
in terms of mindset, and we don't fully appreciate the level of persistence that they have to meet their strategic goals, and that they have no intention, they being the small percentage of Islamist radicals who are hijacking this religion, they have no intention of coexisting with the West.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And do another war. I just don't see that level of coherence at our federal government level. And this is this is not administration specific. I just just based on, for example, Sean, what happened with the withdrawal in Afghanistan, you know, that was. I think the National Security Council put out its evacuation memo on 14 August. Right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And, you know, I have it on good authority that that thing was one hell of an afterthought. Like they were scrambling to get that. And this was just this was like who was to prioritize for evacuation. Kabul fell on the 15th. This thing came out on the 14th. So there's nothing at least that I've seen that tells me that there's like a coherent approach to this of keeping it going.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I think from my perspective, it's more of a, just an inability to really, it's hubris. I mean, it's arrogance at an institutional level to think that we really comprehend and appreciate just the persistence, will and capacity of this threat. You know, I mean, even if you just look at like, Where we are today is so reminiscent of pre-9-11.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, I went in, I think I was telling you guys yesterday when we did the briefing, you know, I went into a, I'll just say it, I mean, a Carolina Duke game at Chapel Hill this past weekend. you know, to see a storied basketball rivalry, right? 21,000 seat capacity in the Dean Smith Center, not one metal detector in main primary entry points. The only search that happened was if you had a bag.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Like if you declared a bag. So there were no metal detectors of a twenty one thousand seat venue. And I mean, anyone I would hope watching or hearing this like sits up at that because that's new, you know, and I and I got to believe that's not isolated to Chapel Hill. And and that is what I worry about more than anything else, is that humans are just ridiculously shrewd.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
short memory, you know, and we tend to forget and dismiss. And then we tell ourselves narratives that this isn't going to happen. You tell ourselves that the ocean is going to protect us and we just need to focus on things that are at home. But the reality is this one has followed us home.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And I think it's important to note here too, because a lot of folks, to your question, you know, they're watching this and they're like, okay, well, these are, you know, veterans getting this, like, why aren't we getting this from the intelligence community? Or why aren't we getting this from the formal institutions? And
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
One thing I'll just give as an example, legend won't talk about it, but Mr. Saleh was abandoned, just like a whole bunch of other Afghan assets were abandoned on August 15th. We're talking 98 to 99% of the human intelligence assets in Afghanistan that took 20 years to build were left behind. And this is coming from the former CENTCOM commander.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
What happened was a lot of veterans like Legend who had pre-existing relationships found ways to do humanitarian outreach in those moments to fill the gap because no one else is picking up the phone. And also had the foresight as an intelligence guy to say, well, it's probably not a good idea to leave Mr. Saleh out there on his own.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And so over these last several years, Legend has cultivated a relationship and really done the job. And I just don't know any other way to say it. Right. Done the job of what of what a formal intelligence agency would normally do with a massive asset like that. So now you've got literally the guy who is regarded as the father of Afghanistan intelligence.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Talking primarily to an Afghan American army, U.S. Army NCO. And that's where that primary relationship took place. Now, multiply that, Sean, at scale. You have Sarah Adams doing her version of that, me doing my version of that with Afghan special forces and commandos.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And that's what's evolved over the last four years is by the virtue of abandoning 98 to 99% of our intelligence capability and our commandos and our special ops, the veteran community stepped into the breach and took over those relationships for primarily humanitarian reasons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But here we are four years later, and what you have is high veracity intelligence and reporting coming through these channels instead of formal channels.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And there was, you know, there was a political calculus to the when we left Afghanistan in 2021. And you saw it happen where the former administration made a conscious decision to not engage members of the resistance. You know, and legend can speak very specifically to that. But there were overt decisions.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
you know, actions by the State Department and others to to essentially block or impede or just not conduct any kind of outreach with resistance forces, you know. And so a lot of these high veracity assets that you would normally that we cultivated for 20 years, they were talking to veterans, they were talking to intelligence alumni, and there was no formal relationship.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
So, you know, guys like Legend, maintained and cultivated this relationship over four years knowing that at some point you know maybe adults come back in the room we're gonna we're gonna want those relations we're gonna need those relationships we're gonna need those members of the resistance right and so i think that's where we are today we're at like this strategic crossroads
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
where we are looking at a new administration. Our veteran population from the Global War on Terror, in my assessment, has done an amazing job of recognizing an institutional shortfall, and they have kept it going somehow, cashing in their pension funds and their kids' college accounts to keep these individuals alive, but they've done it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But how much more and how much longer are we going to ask that of these veterans to do that?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
So what you're really, you know, if you step back and just look at it, Sean, you think about this, you have, you know, you have a point of view that is an institutional point of view that started to form, I don't know, certainly when Afghanistan collapsed in 2021, this emerging point of view in our government, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
from the previous administration that the Taliban are actually someone we could deal with, someone we could normalize relations with, someone who really offers a better solution, not just in Afghanistan, but global stability, right? And then you see that because you start to see humanitarian aid money going there. CT dollars going there, all the stuff that you all have talked about.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But that's a reflection of an institutional way of thinking, right? Like this is who we're going to deal with now. And then you also saw just the omission of any engagement with any of the commandos and special forces and others that we had trained for 20 years who then went to resist completely on their own, not even tacit political support.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And so I say all that because that is such a divergent point of view from the veteran population who fought this war for 20 years and who has been on the phone nonstop. So, you know, you're talking about individuals who dealt with this threat up close and personal, who understood it, who most of us said never again after 9-11.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And we, you know, we gave away our youth and our life, not life, but our, you know, just everything about our life to fight this. A lot of people did. But, you know, the larger point here is that the people that have been on the phone working this side of it that have that divergent point of view, they're the ones that fought this war.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
They're the ones that know this enemy better than anybody, and they know what's at stake, and they know what's coming. That's the part that just baffles me, is it would be one thing if this were all just a bunch of volunteers who jumped into the fray because they're looking for something to do. But these are people who honestly... really want to put this behind them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
They've moved on with their lives. I know I feel that way, but they're doing this out of a duty to warn because we've dealt with this enemy for a lot of years. We know what they're capable of. We know they followed us home and we feel a duty to warn, but it is a divergent point of view, unfortunately, that we have
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
about what the Taliban are about, Al Qaeda, than the current institutional point of view. And we're hoping that we can bring those together and figure this out, kind of a private public gathering of comparing notes over the last four years and start to sort this out. Sir, do you have any updates?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Yeah, I think the thing that has to be walked back to, and this is the part that really is contentious, and I think we got to do something, is that there is such a difference between what the government says the terror problem looks like
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
and what frankly members of the global war on terror community say it looks like after having been on the phone for four years with these individuals but what i will tell you is like for example and my only thing that i would just add to what they've said on the intel front is you know i've had i have the opportunity to run the seams with these different you know on signal and these different groups and and just listen you know and that's what i try to do i try to just listen i'm not an intel analyst i'm not a targeter but i am pretty good at relationships and just listening and what i am hearing consistently across multiple
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
groups is a thousand i'm hearing the number a thousand a lot and it's and it's coming up in different i mean radically different uh uh verticals that there's no there's no way you know and so that really that that really concerns me a lot that that number um is is popping up you know all of the time, you know, conversationally.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And then the other thing that really bothers me is that no one is engaging any elements at all of the resistance just on the intel side. I mean, when they've made clear and overt offerings to help with that and to just, to give a competing perspective, zero. And so that, to corroborate what Sarah's saying in that front, at least, there is no competing threat picture.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
This was the father of suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
When we were in Vienna and we interviewed Massoud, right, one of the things that he said, both on and off camera, was to really, really pay attention to surrogates, to really pay attention to, he said, you know, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have learned a lot. They are not going to allow themselves to be at the forefront. And then he even said, ISIS is more than happy to do that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, he said this back in June. I've had conference. Sally has said the same thing. I mean, very, very well placed individuals who are cautioning us about this role of surrogates and that what you see is not exactly what you get. And this is these warnings are coming from the same people who warned us pre 9-11, you know, and we ignored it.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
We ignored it and we look at the strategic surprise and how our world changed. And I think that's what, at least for me, that's where I'm coming from. I mean, honest to God, I don't even maintain a clearance anymore. I don't. I left the military in 2013. I retired and was happy to do so. Had a good run and pursuing other things. But a whole bunch of veterans have been drawn back into this thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And the stuff that we're talking about is not even on the high side Security style. It's not. It is not even in, as Sarah said, it's not in the IC channels. These are conversations that are happening in real time between veterans and abandoned assets that, for the best I can tell, this has not been consolidated with the intelligence community in a meaningful way since the abandonment.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And so if we don't do that, how in the world are we going to actually have any kind of a responsible threat picture on what's coming our way? And how can we say with certainty that we do? That's my point. Because until that reckoning happens, you've got literally two different worlds here.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I mean, there's members of the administration that have reached out wanting our perspective. And I mean, I find that encouraging. And I think there'll be an opportunity to do that. And then we'll see what happens.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
It's like a duty to warn up and a duty to prepare down.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Well, you know, it started when you and I were talking about, I think, I don't know, you asked a question about, okay, so what do communities do? And that, you know, we, you and I went back and forth on it a little bit, but what it really opened up was a,
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
really broad conversation that's still ongoing where individuals and communities, I know they started hitting you up, they started hitting me up, they started hitting Sarah up. What do we do in our community? How do we defend our synagogue or our church or our place of worship? Is this something we should be thinking about?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
we talked about it and just the way I look at it is we're kind of, I believe we're at a crossroads right now. You know, when we think about everything that we talked about here today, you look at, you look at the threat picture that the government has on terrorism. You look at what the global war on terror veterans are saying, and it's different and we're at a crossroads.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And you either believe at this point that there is a viable threat against the That is complex, local, distributed, looks more like October 7 than it does 9-11. That is very likely in the next year or two, or you don't, you know, and if you don't, okay, like, Godspeed. But if you do where we were, okay, then perhaps in addition to the analysis, we should start
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Until we do bring this together with our government, which we've really got to have that, that private public relationship on an unprecedented scale, what could we, you know, if it's a duty to warn up, you know, maybe it's a duty to prepare down and in. And how could we help that conversation? So we started looking at what if we just self-published.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
uh a book that really just looked at not just the threat analysis but scenarios that have happened in the past of where we get hit or other places get hit where they live work and play And so we put together this small book and, you know, borrowing from Winston Churchill when he tried to warn of the gathering storm in World War II. That's what we named this project, The Gathering Storm.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And we just looked at it. And so from, you know, from my part in it and a couple other contributors, we looked at case studies. So a lot like how U.S. Army Special Ops Command and others do case studies and they'll migrate those practical lessons learned into operators modern times. That's what we did. And we just looked at unclassified. We looked at The D.C. sniper.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
We looked at the Bedland school siege with the with the Chechens, where they they moved children over a thousand into a gymnasium and threw explosives up on the basketball goals and held terrain and held the Russian special ops at bay. We looked at Mumbai, which is a very compelling place.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Version of what Sarah and others have warned about in 2008, where roughly 10 terrorists locked down a city of 19 million, doing complex attacks, holding terrain, killing well over 100 people. And it was almost a foreshadowing. of what we think we could expect here in the homeland. And we just, and we'd October 7, New Orleans.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
So we looked at all these and what we did was we started to pull out a lot of the commonalities that individuals and communities should be thinking about. And I'll kind of throw it back to you there and we can, you know, we can go deeper on any of those things that you want because there were a lot of lessons learned, I think that are super helpful.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But one of the things that we came out of it with Sean that surprised me was one, you The relative ease of finding people who were on the ground or who responded to those events. I mean, even Mumbai, October 7, just doing peer-to-peer discussions on lessons learned was super eye-opening. And I think something that's available to law enforcement, emergency operations centers across the country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
That's number one. And number two, I think the thing that surprised me was we came up with a lot more questions than we did answers. And just like yesterday when we were talking to the sheriff's department in your county, it's different in every county. It's different in every municipality because context is everything.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But if these attacks are going to be locally manifested, then that's where the conversations need to start because that's going to be the real resilience in that. So we came away with a lot of questions and where we didn't have the answers, we just put the questions in there. you know, here's what communities should be asking themselves.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And hopefully more books will be written that are, you know, technically specific on those questions and we just keep it going. So that's the project and happy to jump into any parts about it. Cause like I said, between the Intel contributors and the operators that a lot of good stuff came out of it, a lot of lessons.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, I would say probably at an individual level, the first thing is, you know, to do your own research, to not let fear dominate, but to question things, you know, to question what we're saying, you know, to look at a lot of these case studies, to look at a lot of the examples on your own. I think that for you and your family to
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
this is not just terrorism this is any crisis but for certainly for terrorism i think you should look at you should look at the threat itself and then you should look at scenarios that have been similar to that and between those two things you can derive a lot of insights on kind of what you should be doing um you know a lot some of the preparation things that came out of it were thinking about how would these scenarios unfold like look at your daily pattern of life
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, what are the local cafes that you go to? Where is your local movie theater? Where's your daycare? Where do your kids go to school? What are the gatherings that you typically go to throughout the year? Do you go to a lot of concerts? Do you go to ball games? And I think starting to just look at those with intention.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
and starting to ask yourself hard questions about, okay, if I looked at, for example, the Nova Music Festival, I look at the Crocus City Music Hall where ISIS hit, what are things that I can derive from that, that I could look at the places that I go to in my, is there actually a security plan here? If not, who should I be talking to about this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Can we get the community together to talk about this? Should I go engage local law enforcement and call a community meeting? So I think my big takeaway for individuals is look at the scenarios that have already happened. You know, because that takes the fear away, I think, and really puts agency back in ourselves to just look pragmatically at things that have happened in the past.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Yeah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Right. So here's a couple. And again, what I found to be extremely useful was bringing in special forces, and I know you guys did this in the teams as well, So before you go downrange, and this is... both post and pre 9-11. But before you go down range, you would usually go over and meet with, you know, the team or the platoon that just got back. You'd sit down with them.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, our engineer sergeant would sit with the engineer sergeant. I would sit with the detachment commander. The intel guys would sit together. They would do, you know, one-on-one debriefs of what they saw and the incoming guys would take that, take notes. And then we'd do kind of a collective thing. And it just was what you did. But I think you can migrate that same thing.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You can bring in, for example, uh, Doron Kedar, an Israeli special forces NCO from the IDF is traveling around the US right now talking to churches about his lessons learned from responding October 7. He was at the Nova Music Festival. He went into those neighborhoods that were slaughtered.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And so he can give you really, really insights into if you subscribe to the notion that that could happen here, and is somewhat imminent, then he can tell you the things that he saw. Then you derive questions such as, how would we handle in this county an incident where groups of eight to 10 well-trained terror operatives donned first responder uniforms?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
would we handle that as a community how would we communicate that to a community how would first responders actually talk to themselves on the fact that that was happening and is there a way that they could overcome that with a different uniform or something like i don't know the answer but that is a legitimate question right um another question that came up a lot that i think is really powerful is how would um how would our community to respond
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
if the terror attack happened in such a way that there was complete paralysis across all first responders. If you had systemic paralysis for, in all of my case study interviews, you had systemic paralysis for at least 24 to 48 hours. where there was no real response. So how- Why was that? Well, because they were just overwhelmed. You know, in some cases they were targeted.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
In October 7, first responders, they ran right at them and they took them out. And so they were not, and then you had reinforcements coming. There was so much confusion. Plus you had the terror groups actually in first responder uniforms, right? So it was just complete chaos. And so it, and then some areas were cut off where they held terrain. You know, like in Mumbai, they held terrain.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
In Bedlam School, they put basketball goals with explosives on them and the children in the middle. How are you going to assault that? So these are the things that just by looking at the scenarios, it's just, you know what it is? It's so hard to look at.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
In my assessment, I mean, I was sitting across from this special forces soldier who responded to October 7, and he could barely form a coherent sentence. He was so upset. And this is a guy that's been operating for decades, you know, and he couldn't even speak because of what he'd seen. It's so hard to look at. But honestly, I don't know how we can avoid that, you know.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But if we can, we can start to derive some really, really poignant questions. And we put a ton of them in the book. But those are some of the ones that came up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And I interviewed several intelligence analysts from the IDF. And I just asked him, you know, at the end, I said, what would you say to American analysts, law enforcement? And four separate ones that I interviewed, they all first of all, they sat there for like an uncomfortable period of time. Like you could tell they were wanting to say something.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And then finally, they were just like, fuck it, I'm gonna say it. And what they said was, essentially. We live this every day. We live this in our communities. We're always facing this imminent threat. It's something that we've kind of come to terms with. And we were completely caught off guard. We were not ready for this. We were not ready for what came our way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And they came across the border, and then they went back. They said to me, you all have not even allowed yourself to even think about this. They have been among you for four years. It is going to be 10x what they did to us on October 7th. To the man and the woman, they said that. And they all were separate interviews. Wow.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And again, I mean, I hope I'm wrong. I really do. But it's just all of the different points. It's the different points of interviews that I've conducted, including with these case studies. And if you even just consider the fact that one law enforcement officer that does a lot of tactical training around the country,
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
he watches your show diligently and he contacted me and he said, Scott, I train all over the country. I train SWAT teams, you know, advanced tactics. He said, I'm telling you right now, we're not ready for this in terms of response, you know, primarily because the typical scenario that we deal with are single shooters.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
We do not deal with teams of eight to 10 that are prepared to fight to the death. In Mumbai, for example, in 2008, There were 35 candidates that tried out that were initially groomed for the role. 10 were selected. Nine of the 10 fought to the death. they knew that they were not coming out, right? And so we've just never faced anything with that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And then if you look at, for example, the Crocus City Music Hall or the Crocus Music Hall just recently where ISIS hit in Russia, that was a complex attack where they had incendiary devices. They set the place ablaze. They were extremely well armed with long guns and short guns, grenades, and they were taking the time to cut throats as they went and making sure that it was covered and amplified.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, so you're talking about extremely well-trained individuals who are prepared to die and who frankly know what they're doing. And we just we don't think about that. We don't train that way. And again, I'm not saying that to create panic.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I'm saying that that that's just a pragmatic responsibility that in this day and age that we live in, particularly considering our borders been open for four years. How could we assume that has not happened? I mean, even if you didn't have the GWAT veteran reporting that you have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And I think you have to think about, sorry, I'll just say this real quick. We have to assume, I think another thing is strategic surprise. If you look at, if you just study these groups, they are very good at not just tactical surprise, but strategic surprise, where they surprise the nation. They surprise the larger body at scale.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And when that happens, what follows is a level of institutional paralysis, right? Everything's locked. Everything's paralyzed. And so when that happens, you've got these groups that are capable of what my buddy Dave at the agency calls not terrorism, but horrorism. They're able to bring a level of just unmitigated horror at an interpersonal level, and then they'll even amplify it with body cams.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, so you're not a strategic surprise, strategic paralysis, hold ground, mass casualties, that kind of event. We've just never dealt with that here, you know, and and I think we're due. I just do. I don't think that you're going to see one law enforcement officer that I interviewed told me he said I was in. DC for the 9-11 attack. He said I was like two blocks from the Pentagon, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And he said, you know, that attack happened, explosion, F-16s flying supersonic just above the treetops. And right over here, the McDonald's was still open. People are still getting food, you know, but yet when the DC sniper, two dudes in the back of a car for three weeks, he was there for that too. The entire city was paralyzed in lockdown.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
People on a knee getting gas, you know, kids not going outside to play. And he said, that's the difference. You know, that's the difference is when there's the spectacular thing that's over there, but then there's where you live and you work and you play. And they have figured that out. If you look at their attacks over the last, what, 10 years?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Every time, every single time, it's local, complex attacks, right where we live, work, and play.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Yeah, you can even look at, so for example, some of the things that we looked at were like Western North Carolina hurricane, the chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. Those are not terror events, but what they were were situations where a crisis happened Expended the capability of the organic response force in minutes like that. You know, you couldn't they couldn't respond. They could not.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
They were not effective. And so what you saw were individuals and communities that were on their own. And then you also saw and this is what I call the GWAT X factor. You saw these global war on terror individuals responding, you know, either from the local area or even trucking in and responding. And it started with the Afghanistan collapse, but it's been happening.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
The fires in West Maui, the Western North Carolina hurricanes. So there's some there's kind of some new stuff that's happening. And I guess where I'm going with that, Sean, is that I think. We have to look at this level of threat. And it's kind of like I said, you either believe it's real or you don't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
If you do, then you have to give it its credit and give the enemy a vote that this thing will massively exceed our organic capabilities within minutes. And if that's the case, then I think we have to have...
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
a paradigm shift in our private public partnership, the government and the communities, the government at all levels and the communities have to work together on a scale we've never done before. And that we usually only do after bang. I'm saying, and this is why I think Sarah's sense of urgency is so compelling. There's just not a lot of time.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I think we have to assume that the four years of an open border eye off the ball, like there's, There's such an advance to us of where we are. So a lot of this is how do we plan together? How do we work together? How do we look at global war on terror veterans being a part of this?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You talked about the Florida piece, and I don't think you'll mind me saying this, like, you know, Sheriff Naco is in Pasco County is really good at engaging local veterans. veterans and not just for their analytical skills on the intel side, but also their operational skills. Like Sarah said, they fought in Ramadi. They fought in Fallujah.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
They know how to do a threat vulnerability assessment of schools. So I just think it's kind of all hands on deck, man, honestly. And but the asset that we have that we are not properly utilizing our communities. Our communities have a lot of potential. The top-down government has got to figure that out. They've got to include them in the discussion. And I think it's the best last chance we have.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You have open comms. And this is why we did the gathering storm book. The way we did is because like exactly what you're doing is the way we present it. So we like pose these questions and like, how can your community come together and start addressing these? I mean, look at how you arrived at that solution based on tactical experience where in Athens, but That's all over the country.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I mean, look again, look at what the GWAT guys and girls did in the response to Western North Carolina. I was just up there interviewing a lady named Pastor Glenda, and she ministers to two congregations way up in the mountains where my family's from. And we went up there and we're going around. And I asked her, I said, what was support like in the first two weeks? And it was devastating.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
She said, had it not been for the veterans, we wouldn't even have had food resupply in the first two weeks. It was the only people we saw from the outside were veterans. And somehow they got to us. And my point is, that is going to happen no matter what. These GWAT veterans, they have spent 20 years of their life doing this kind of work in a distributed, connected kind of way.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And they're going to do it no matter what. If there's institutional paralysis, if there's a gap, they're going to fill it. So why not on your table exercises at a community level in the EOC, invite them in, huddle around the table and make it a true private public conversation around a community problem. And I just think that nothing but goodness is going to come out of that.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Like what you facilitated yesterday in my assessment is exactly the model of what we need.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Yeah, absolutely. And it's not that hard to do because you can actually have these conversations. And I've sat in and participated in quite a few of them. And you don't see people in there panicking or wringing their hands. You see empowered neighbors. just having a pragmatic conversation about a potential threat. But guess what?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
The worst thing that's going to happen probably, if you go through that exercise, is A, you're going to be connected more to your neighbor. And B, you're probably going to be ready for other contingencies that might happen. And I'll give you case in point. I was interviewing some EOC representatives who responded to a flood in Ohio. They never saw it coming.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
It crested over its banks more than it had ever flooded. Little bitty town, like... 20,000 people. And one of the EOC, the Emergency Operations Center members, was telling me that it was flooding so bad that they brought in firefighters from all over the surrounding counties, right, to come help. Well, they were doing boat rescue.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
So they all brought their boats, but none of their radios communicated to each other. So they had to put one fire department guy from the town in each boat so that they had a radio that worked. And it took them a long time to figure that out. But that was the solution that came up.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
The point was, had you just done an exercise ahead of time where you brought those folks together, you would have already sorted that out. Right. And those are the kinds of things that when you add to the paralysis, just the horrorism. That could be brought by this. Trying to solve a problem like that could take you days because of the trauma and just the inability to function and move.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
So I just think that the more that a lot of it is the communities coming together, again, private, public. It's got to be private sector, too. It's got to be those GWAT veterans. It's got to be members of the community that normally maybe wouldn't be in there and finding ways to talk left of bang.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
That's the critical part, because right of bang, everybody's gonna be well-intended and coming together, but zero capability. You build trust when risk is low, you leverage it when the stakes are high.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And again, to that, just a couple other lessons learned from that same event, right? Yeah. A concert, the Route 19 Harvest Festival or Route 91 Harvest Festival, tens of thousands of people, single shooter from the Mandalay Hotel, right? I forget however many weapons he had. It was more than 10 with bump stocks.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But while he was doing that, it took police over an hour to get into his room, and he was already dead. An hour, single shooter. Yeah. So again, if you just look at the level of paralysis that happens from that, you know, I mean, you add to that seven to eight, 10 well-trained operatives, like you saw in that video, right?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Who then hit multiple nodes at one time, and you have a pre-existing mandate to hold terrain with explosives and children at a school. But if you're not tabletopping that, You know, if we're not laying that on a tabletop exercise and SWAT teams talking through that with, you know, others and what would we do if there were two locations that were locked down with hostages?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I mean, you've exceeded scope and capacity immediately. So, you know, how are you calling for – what does that look like? So, I just think that – and these are just – you need – the other thing that came out of this, Sean, we talked about yesterday. I believe every emergency operations center county sheriff should have a red cell.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
They should have a red cell that looks at threat-based scenario work because both exist. And start looking at that and unpacking these different scenarios. Unpack October 7. Bring someone over from the IDF and let them give you a leadership professional development on what happened that day. And then ask yourself, what should our red cell be looking at?
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And then the last thing I'll say on this, state and local leaders. We don't have to wait on the federal government to authorize resources. Yes, you need it for reporting and things like that for agents to look at.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But in terms of resources and just training allocation, after I was on with you and we talked about this, there was a law enforcement officer from the greater New Orleans area who reached out and petitioned his leadership for immediate counter-terror training. It was denied. This was one month before the January 1 attack.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But if you're waiting for something from the top down, I don't think thwarting is an option. I think thwarting, just like throughout our history, it is usually community solutions that deal with a crisis. And certainly, you know, getting left of bang, I think, has got to start at a grassroots level. And we're capable of it. I mean, it's already happening.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
I think now it's just a matter of kind of, you know, sharing, you know, just kind of sharing the news on it. And one other thing that we're doing that seems to be working pretty well is we're putting people in the task force pineapple signal room.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
um on signal that started with the afghanistan withdrawal but now you know you got sheriff deputies from williamson county and pasco county and eoc responders from chicago and they're networked on this this signal app and they can talk and get to know each other now. We can broadcast training opportunities that are out there, things that are coming out. It's pretty cool.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And again, a lot of it started from these Global War on Terror veterans that just, they know how to stay connected and they move fast.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And model what right looks like. That's doing the right thing. I think that models what right looks like to the federal government and to decision makers at the higher levels, right? I mean, we have a history of doing that in this country. So, and this is no different.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
One thing I'd like to just close with is You know, you see what went on today with this discussion and what we did yesterday. And most of the people that are taking this discussion on are veterans or intelligence alumni who served in the global war on terror, 20 year war. Right.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And, you know, a lot of them, I know a lot of them, we lost a lot of friends over there, but it was less than what, 1% of the American population that fought that war. deployed multiple times, lots of wounded, lots of killed.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
And then even those of us that didn't, you know, necessarily sustain wounds or whatever, you know, you gave up a lot to fight that war and to do what our country asked us to do.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
Most of us came back from the war and made a concerted effort to put the war behind us and move on, you know, and then it was just a few years later that we were sucked back in because our buddy who was a commando was being targeted or As the country fell, like the people we cared about, many of us are alive because of some of these guys and girls. Like we stepped in when the government didn't.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
But one of the things I just want to leave with is I get a sense sometimes that like the people, the veterans that are talking about this, actually even want to be doing this. I mean, there's a way that we were brought into this that I think most people, even supporters, don't understand.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
You know, you had Ben Owen on your show, right, and him, Jess, and they helped a young girl named Arizo get to the United States, one among many. She's the daughter of a commando who'd been a commando from the very beginning. Right. And so they made a decision. Ben and Jess have expended their kids college funds like so many other folks to help. But this is what
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
jess heard that made her decide to do this action and and what i just want to i just want people to understand this is what was impacting veterans on from 2021 and what they've been listening to and watching for the last four years after all that they did in combat after all that we've asked of them this is what they're inundated with even now every day
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
That's Arizo's mom as her dad is being tortured out in the alley. And put our veterans through that for four straight years. They did what we asked them to do. They answered the call and... You know, it's time, man.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
It's time that we bring the government and the veteran population together on this and that we reconcile this and we get this into the hands of the government the way it's supposed to be and it gets handled. But it's not right now. And we've got this is hurting a lot of people. It is hurting a lot of veterans. They don't know how to hang up the phone.
Shawn Ryan Show
#184 Growing Threat - Christian Persecution in Syria, Homeland Attacks and How to Prepare
They don't know how to stop doing this and they won't. And it's killing them. You know, it's killing them. And it's not a fair thing to put at their feet. They've done enough. We need to find a way, bring the two worlds together, and let's fix it. But right now, you're the only voice that's even putting it out there. And that's got to change.