In February 2003, [music] a US Navy SEAL instructor watched an Australian SAS operator bite the head off a live beetle the size of a walnut chew methodically for 17 seconds and swallow without water. The seal, a man who’d survived hell week, who’d operated in Afghanistan and Iraq, [music] who prided himself on being harder than coffin nails, turned away and vomited into the jungle undergrowth.

 The [music] Australian didn’t smile, didn’t acknowledge the reaction, just kept walking, scanning the canopy, chewing. 3 [music] days later, that same seal would be begging the Australian to teach him which insects were edible and which would make his kidneys shut down. Because in the jungle, the difference between those two categories [music] is the difference between walking out alive and being carried out in a bag.

 This is [music] about survival. real survival. Not the TV show version with camera crews and emergency extractions. The kind where you’re 17 kilometers behind enemy lines [music] with no resupply, no radio contact, and the choice between eating what crawls and eating nothing at all. The Australians turned this choice into doctrine, [music] into an operational advantage that made them the most feared jungle operators in modern military history.

 The Americans brought MREs and water purification tablets. The Australians brought appetites. The gap between those two approaches decided missions, saved [music] lives, ended careers, and it started with a simple operational reality that the Americans refused to accept until it was almost too late. In the jungle, you don’t survive by carrying supplies.

 [music] You survive by becoming part of the environment. By eating it, drinking it, [music] sleeping in it, by making the jungle your logistics system instead of your enemy. The Australians [music] figured this out in 1962. The Americans are still learning it. Here’s what happened when those two philosophies collided in the worst [music] jungle on Earth. Stay with me.

This gets worse before it gets better. The training area was in far north Queensland near Tully. If you want to understand why Australian jungle warfare doctrine is what it is, you need to understand [music] Tully. Annual rainfall 4,000 mm. That’s 13 ft of water falling from the sky every year. The jungle there is so dense that GPS signals can’t penetrate the triple canopy.

 So wet that equipment rusts in 48 hours. So hostile that soldiers who spend 3 weeks there come out with fungal infections in places they didn’t know they had places. The Australian army deliberately chose Tully as their jungle warfare training center for one reason. If you can operate in Tully, you can operate anywhere.

 The US military sent Navy Seals to train there in 2003 as part of a broader cooperation agreement. The SEALs came from DEED Gru, the tier 1 unit, the absolute top of the American special operations pyramid. These were not weekend warriors. These were men who’d hunted al-Qaeda in the Hindu Kush who’d operated in the Philippines against Abu Saf, who represented the peak of American combat capability.

 They arrived with 60 lb rucks sacks containing 14 days of freeze-dried rations, water purification systems, Gortex rain gear, and enough backup equipment to open a sporting goods store. The Australians showed up with knives and empty [music] packs. The American team leader, a SEAL commander with 17 years of service, asked the obvious question, “Where was their food?” The Australian instructor, a warrant officer named Collins, who’d done four tours in Borneo and two in [music] East Teeour, smiled for the first time that morning. “We’re standing

on it,” he said. The SEALs thought he was joking. 6 hours later, they realized he wasn’t. The patrol brief was simple. 12-day reconnaissance exercise, [music] no resupply, full tactical conditions. The target area was 60 km north through primary rainforest with terrain so broken that the elevation changed 300 m every 2 km.

 The Americans would move as one team, the Australians as another. Both would reach the same objective. Both would maintain tactical capability [music] throughout. At the end, they’d compare notes on what worked and [music] what didn’t. What the Americans didn’t understand, what they couldn’t understand until they lived it was that they were about to watch a completely different operational philosophy in action.

 The Australians weren’t just going to survive in the jungle. [music] They were going to thrive in it by eating things that made the SEAL’s stomachs turn. by drinking from sources the Americans wouldn’t touch, by sleeping in conditions that violated every principle [music] of American field hygiene, and by doing all of it while maintaining combat effectiveness that made the American approach look wasteful, inefficient, and borderline suicidal.

 The philosophical gap was rooted in history. Australian jungle warfare doctrine was written by men who’d learned from indigenous trackers in Borneo, New Guinea, and the Northern Territory. [music] men who understood that the jungle wasn’t an obstacle to overcome, but a resource to exploit. The doctrine assumed that resupply would fail, that helicopters wouldn’t come, that you’d be living off the land for weeks or months at a time.

It was written for a military that couldn’t afford massive logistics chains that operated with smaller units over larger areas that needed every soldier to be self-sufficient in hostile terrain. American doctrine was written by men who assumed air superiority, abundant resources, and supply lines that always functioned.

 It was doctrine for a superpower, for a military that could deliver pizza to troops in the field if they wanted it. The Australians learned to eat beetles because they had to. The Americans carried MREs [music] because they could. The difference would become obvious on day three. Collins, the Australian instructor, was 41 years old.

 He’d grown up in cans, learning to fish and hunt in the rainforest before he could drive. His father had been a sugarcane farmer [music] who supplemented income with professional crocodile hunting. The kind of childhood that either kills you or makes you indestructible. Collins joined the army at 18, made SAS selection on his second attempt, [music] and spent the next 23 years learning every method of staying alive in jungle environments.

 He trained with Malaysian commandos, girkers, Thai rangers, and indigenous trackers from West Papua. He could identify 187 edible plant species on site. He could catch fish with his bare hands. [music] He knew which insects provided the highest protein to calorie ratio and which would make you hallucinate for 6 hours.

 This knowledge wasn’t academic. It was operational. Collins had survived 16 days behind Indonesian lines in East Teour in 1990, eating nothing but what he caught or foraged. He’d operated for 3 weeks in Borneo on a mission so classified that the report was still sealed, living off the jungle the entire time. His body mass index was 19%.

 Lean, hard, adapted to extended periods of minimal food intake and maximum output. He looked at the SEAL’s rucks sacks and saw men who didn’t trust the environment to provide. [music] Men who were already carrying their own defeat on their backs. The American team leader was different. Commander Eric Reigns had grown up in Montana, excelled at University of Wyoming, [music] breezed through bud/s, and risen through Seal Team 3 before selection to deed Argu.

 He was 34, supremely fit, supremely confident in American training methodology. He’d done jungle operations in Colombia and the Philippines. He thought he understood the environment. He didn’t. On day one, both teams moved through the jungle at roughly the same pace. The Americans were heavier. Those 60 lb [music] packs, but they were strong enough to manage.

 They covered 14 km, established a patrol base, ate freeze-dried strogenoff rehydrated with purified water, and slept in Gortex bivvie bags that kept them dry and comfortable. The Australians covered the [music] same distance, carrying 30 lb. They ate grubs harvested from rotting logs, wild yams roasted over smokeless fires, and palm hearts cut from juvenile trees.

 They slept on elevated platforms made from bamboo covered by shelters woven from palm frrons. [music] It rained 4 in that night. The Australians stayed dry. More importantly, they woke up lighter than when they’d gone to sleep. While the Americans woke up carrying exactly the same weight they’d been carrying the day before. The operational mathematics were simple.

 The Americans had 14 days of food. The Australians had infinite [music] days of food as long as they could find it. The Americans were consuming resources. The Australians were acquiring them. On day one, this distinction seemed academic. By day three, it was critical. The terrain turned brutal on the second morning.

 Ridgelines that climbed at 40° angles, then dropped into ravines so steep the soldiers had to rope down. The jungle canopy was so [music] thick that at noon it looked like dusk. The humidity was 97%. Sweat didn’t evaporate. [music] It just soaked into clothing and stayed there, turning rucks sacks into breeding grounds for bacteria and feet into raw meat inside wet boots.

 [music] The Americans were burning 6,000 calories a day moving through that terrain. Their rations provided 3,200. They were already losing weight. The Australians were breaking even because they were eating constantly. Not meals, grazing. A handful of termites here. Some wild ginger root there. [music] tree bark that tasted like cinnamon when chewed.

 They treated the jungle like a continuous buffet, taking small amounts from dozens of sources instead [music] of three large meals from a limited supply. Their digestive systems were constantly processing. Their energy levels stayed stable. Their pack [music] weight kept dropping as they consumed water and the containers got lighter. The Americans noticed.

 They started asking questions. That’s when Collins began the education. At the midday halt on day three, Collins gathered both teams together. The SEALs were exhausted, soaked, dealing with the first signs of foot rot, they sat heavily, gulping water from camelbacks, already worried about their supply. Collins stood in front of them, holding something that looked like [music] a fat white grub the size of a thumb.

 This, he said, is witchy grub, larvi of the Longhorn Beetle. One of these [music] has more protein than a McDonald’s hamburger and more fat than a tablespoon of peanut butter. There are approximately 4,000 of them within [music] 50 m of where we’re sitting. They live in dead wood. You can eat them raw or roasted. Raw tastes like almonds.

Roasted tastes [music] like scrambled eggs. He bit it in half, chewed, swallowed. The seal stared. In this environment, Collins continued, [music] you need protein and fat, lots of both. MREs don’t give you enough. You’ll burn through your glycogen stores in 3 days on this terrain. [music] Then you’ll start cannibalizing muscle mass.

 I can watch it happening to you already. You’re getting weaker. I’m getting stronger. The difference is what we’re eating. [music] He held up the second half of the grub. Who wants to try? Nobody moved. Collins ate himself. Then he spent the next hour teaching them what the Australian Army had codified over 60 years of jungle operations.

 The science of eating the jungle. The foundational principle was simple. The jungle contained more available calories per square meter than any other environment on Earth. Insects, grubs, worms, snails, lizards, [music] frogs, fish, birds, eggs, roots, tubers, fruits, nuts, leaves, bark, sap. The rainforest was a biological engine producing continuous protein and carbohydrates.

 You just needed to know what was edible and what would kill you. The gap between those categories was knowledge. specific technical hard one knowledge that the Australians had systemized into doctrine. They started with insects [music] not because insects were preferred but because they were abundant, easy to catch and calorically dense.

 A single palm weevil lava, the big fat grubs that live in rotting sego palms contained 14 g of protein and 9 g of fat. You could harvest 20 in 10 minutes. That was 280 gram of protein and 180 gram of fat, the equivalent of eating a pound of steak [music] for 10 minutes of work. The Americans had been taught that insects were emergency food, a last resort.

 [music] The Australians had been taught that insects were primary food, a strategic advantage. The difference was doctrinal. American survival training treated the jungle as hostile, [music] something to endure until rescue arrived. Australian training treated it as neutral, something to exploit for operational advantage.

 American soldiers learned survival. Australian soldiers learned subsistence. The gap between those two concepts was the gap between staying alive and staying combat effective. Collins demonstrated beetle collection. He showed them how to identify deadwood that was soft enough to harbor grubs, but not so rotten it had turned to mush.

He used his knife to peel back bark in long strips, exposing the white lavi underneath. They curled and writhed when exposed to light. He collected them in his hat. 17 in 4 minutes. Then he showed them how to cook them. Skewered on green sticks, held over coals until the skin crisped and the insides turned from translucent to opaque.

 The Americans watched, still not eating. The psychological barrier is real. Colin said, “I understand that, but here’s what you need to understand. [music] Your body doesn’t care what something looks like. It cares what it provides. These grubs are clean protein and clean fat. They’re safer than the beef in your MREs because they’re fresh.

 They won’t give you food poisoning. They won’t spoil in the heat and they’re everywhere.” He ate one. Then another, his second in command, a corporal named Harrison, who’d grown up in the Northern Territory, ate three. The other Australians followed suit. [music] They weren’t performing. They were just eating. Like soldiers eating rations.

 No ceremony, no drama, just fuel. One of the seals. A petty officer named Garcia, who’d grown up fishing in the Florida Keys and wasn’t squeamish about seafood, [music] reached out and took one. He examined it, smelled it, put it in his mouth, and chewed quickly [music] like ripping off a band-aid.

 He swallowed, waited for the nausea. It didn’t come. Tastes like chicken fat, [music] he said. Close, Colin said. Tastes like protein and fat, which is what your body is screaming for right now. Your muscles are eating themselves because you’re not giving them enough calories. [music] This fixes that. Garcia ate another.

Then two more seals tried. Then three. By the end of the break, eight of the 12 Americans had eaten at least one grub. It wasn’t enthusiasm. It was calculation. They could feel themselves getting weaker. They could see the Australians maintaining strength. The math was obvious. Commander Reigns didn’t eat any. Not yet.

 But he was watching, learning, starting to understand that his rucks sack full of food was actually a liability. That carrying 14 days of rations meant [music] carrying 14 days of weight. that the Australians method, finding food as they went, kept them light, mobile, and indefinitely sustainable. The education continued on day four.

 Collins taught them plant identification. The key was specific knowledge, not general rules. Broad principles like berries in clusters are safe. Got people killed because there were always exceptions. Australian doctrine was built on memorizing specific species, specific characteristics, specific preparation methods, wild yams growing along stream beds, [music] starchy tubers the size of footballs that could be roasted and eaten like potatoes, [music] palm hearts from the center of certain palm species, crunchy, slightly sweet,

packed with carbohydrates, tree ferns with edible cores that tasted like artichoke. [music] wild ginger that grew everywhere and could mask the taste of less appetizing foods. Certain bracket fungi growing on dead trees that were safe when cooked and tasted like mushrooms because they were mushrooms. But the most important lesson was about protein.

 The jungle was thick with it if you knew where to look. Freshwater crayfish in streams. You could catch them by hand at night when they came out to feed. Lizards sleeping on branches grab them behind the head. One quick motion. Frogs in standing water after rain, they called to each other, making them easy to locate. Bird eggs in nests take one or two, never the whole clutch.

Fish in pools using improvised traps made from woven vines. The Australians demonstrated [music] all of it, not as classroom instruction, but as operational practice. They caught food while they patrolled. They ate while they moved. By day five, they’d consumed more protein than the Americans while carrying a fraction of the weight.

 The Americans started copying them. Not all the techniques. Rain still wouldn’t eat insects, but enough to understand the system. They started catching crayfish, started harvesting palm hearts, started moving lighter and faster because their packs weren’t full of freeze-dried meals. Bay. But Collins wasn’t done.

 The real lesson, the one that would shock the seals and rewrite their training manuals, was still coming. On day six, they hit the worst terrain [music] yet. A ravine system with near vertical sides, the bottom choked with wait a while vine that had thorns like fish hooks. Wait a while earned it. The Americans struggled through it in their heavy packs, getting caught, getting cut, burning hours on a 100 meter traverse.

 The Australians [music] went through like ghosts, lighter packs, better movement discipline, and something else. They’d eaten Wait a while the day before. Specifically, they’d harvested young vine shoots before the thorns hardened and eaten them like asparagus. The Americans saw them eating something green. Asked what it was, got told, “The thing that’s been ripping you apart all morning.

” That night, in a patrol base on a Ridgeline, Collins laid it out for them. The final lesson. You’re thinking of the jungle as an obstacle. He said, “Something that’s trying to kill you.” And you’re right, it is. But it’s also trying to feed you. The same plant that cuts you open has edible shoots.

 The same stream that gives you dissentry [music] has edible fish. The same rotting log that harbors venomous spiders harbors edible grubs. The jungle is both. Always both. [music] Your job is to take what it offers and avoid what it threatens. And the only way to do that is knowledge. Specific knowledge, [music] not toughness, knowledge.

 He pulled out a small notebook, pages warped from humidity, filled with pencil sketches and handwritten notes. This is every edible species in this area. 73 plants, [music] 26 insects, 14 reptiles and amphibians, eight fish species. It took Australian soldiers 40 years to compile this. We learned from the locals, from indigenous trackers, from trial and error, from soldiers who got it wrong and died.

 This knowledge is written in dissentry, [music] in poisoning, in guys hallucinating from eating the wrong berry. But we learned, and now it’s doctrine. Now every SAS operator going through jungle training learns this, [music] memorizes this, tests on this, because this knowledge is the difference between being a visitor in the jungle and being a resident.

 He looked at Reigns. You came here with 14 days of food. I came here with infinite days of food because I know how to read the environment. [music] On day 15, your team extracts or starves. My team keeps operating. That’s the difference. That’s why we’re better at this than you are. It wasn’t arrogance. It was fact.

 Reigns [music] knew it. His team knew it. They’d been getting weaker while the Australians got stronger. They’d been consuming supplies while the Australians acquired them. The operational implications were massive. In a denied area [music] with no resupply, the Americans had a twoe clock. The Australians had no clock at all.

 On day seven, Reigns ate his first beetle. Not because he wanted to, because he [music] needed to. His rations were running low. His body was cannibalizing itself. The choice was simple. Eat the environment or fail the mission. He chose the mission. [music] Collins watched him do it. Didn’t smile. Didn’t gloat.

 Just nodded once and moved on. That night, around a smokeless fire, Collins taught them the final piece, water. The Americans had been purifying everything, pumping stream water through filters, treating it with iodine tablets, boiling it when possible, all of which was slow, fuelintensive, and required carrying purification equipment.

 The Australians were drinking straight from vines, specifically from water vines. Thick jungle vines that stored clean, drinkable water in their hollow centers. [music] You cut a section, held it up, and drank what poured out. The water was slightly sweet, perfectly clean, [music] and required no treatment. The Australians could source a liter of water in 90 seconds.

 The Americans needed 15 minutes to pump [music] and treat the same amount. But the critical part was knowing which vines were safe. There were dozens of vine species in that jungle. Some held clean water, some held toxic sap, some held nothing. The difference was visible if you knew what to look for.

 Bark texture, [music] leaf shape, branch pattern, sap color when cut. The Australians knew, the Americans didn’t. Collins taught them. Three safe species in that area. Specific characteristics for [music] each. Cut here, not there. Drink immediately. Don’t store it. Don’t drink if the water is cloudy or smells wrong. Basic rules that could mean the difference [music] between hydration and poisoning.

 By day eight, half the American team was drinking [music] from vines. By day 9, all of them were because it worked, because it was faster, because it let them move lighter and operate longer. The mission ended on day 12. Both teams reached the objective, a simulated enemy position on a plateau overlooking the Tully River. The Americans arrived exhausted, running on fumes with their rations completely gone. They’d lost an average of 11 each.

Several were showing signs of hyponetreia from inadequate salt intake. Their feet were destroyed. Their morale was low. [music] The Australians arrived strong. They’d lost an average of 4 lb. normal weight loss for extended field operations. Their energy levels were stable. Their tactical effectiveness was unddeinished.

 [music] They could have kept operating for another month without degradation. The comparison was brutal. The Americans had planned [music] for 2 weeks and barely survived 12 days. The Australians had planned for infinity and could have kept going. [music] Reigns wrote a 17page afteraction report. The first line was simple.

 We have been doing this wrong. >> [music] >> The report detailed every aspect of Australian survival doctrine that the Americans lacked. Specific species knowledge, continuous grazing versus periodic meals, eating insects as primary [music] protein, sourcing water from vines, moving light and resupplying from the environment.

 It recommended a complete overhaul of American jungle survival training. It recommended embedding Australian instructors in American special operations courses. It recommended teaching specific species identification instead of general survival principles. The report went to Naval Special Warfare Command, then to SOCOM, then to the Pentagon.

 Within 6 months, Collins was teaching at Fort Bragg. [music] Within a year, the Army Ranger School Jungle Phase had incorporated Australian doctrine. Within 2 years, every American special operations course included modules on eating insects, identifying edible plants, and sourcing water from vines. The SEALs who’ trained at Tully became evangelists.

They taught other teams. They brought samples back, preserved grubs, pressed plants, photographs of edible species. They ran their own training courses in swamps and [music] forests across the American South, teaching seal candidates to eat crickets and drink from wild grape vines.

 Garcia, the seal who’d been first to eat [music] a grub, later operated in the Philippines for 18 days with no resupply, living off the jungle the entire time. He credited the Tully training with mission success. Without that, he said in a 2007 interview, we would have extracted on day [music] 10. The Australians taught us that you can live indefinitely in that environment if you know how.

 It’s not [music] survival, it’s living. The cultural shift was profound. American special operations had always prided itself on being the best in the [music] world. In jungle environments, they weren’t. The Australians were. And the gap wasn’t about toughness or equipment. It was about knowledge. specific [music] technical knowledge built over decades of operations in the worst jungles on Earth.

 The Australian approach [music] worked because it was born from necessity. The Australian military couldn’t afford massive logistics chains, couldn’t afford [music] helicopter resupply on demand, couldn’t afford to assume that supplies would always arrive. They needed soldiers who could operate independently for weeks or months, living off the land, maintaining combat effectiveness without external support.

 So they built doctrine around that requirement. They studied indigenous techniques. They cataloged edible species. They tested everything until they knew exactly what worked and what killed you. The Americans had built doctrine around abundance, around the assumption that supplies would always be available. That assumption worked in Kuwait and Iraq where the logistics infrastructure was massive.

 It failed in [music] the jungle where helicopters couldn’t fly through triple canopy and resupply meant hiking 3 days to a drop zone. The Tully training [music] exposed that gap. It showed American special operations that their doctrine had a blind spot. That they’d optimized for environments where they had logistical superiority and neglected environments where [music] they didn’t.

 But the lesson went deeper. It wasn’t just about food. It was about philosophy. The Australians had built a military culture that embraced [music] self-sufficiency, that valued knowledge over equipment, that taught soldiers to see the environment as a resource instead of an obstacle. That philosophy produced operators who were comfortable in hostile terrain, who could live in conditions that would break soldiers trained on American doctrine.

 The cultural difference was visible in how the two forces approached patrol bases. The Americans brought tents, sleeping pads, elaborate field hygiene systems. The Australians brought knives and built everything from jungle materials. The Americans tried to recreate base comfort in the field.

 The Australians accepted field discomfort as normal and adapted to it. The American approach required logistics. The Australian approach required only knowledge. Which method was better? [music] In environments with reliable logistics, the American approach provided superior comfort and morale. But in denied areas, behind enemy lines, in jungles where resupply failed, the Australian approach was the only approach that worked.

 And modern special operations increasingly happened in exactly those environments. The doctrinal shift happened slowly. The US military is not built for rapid cultural change. But by 2010, [music] American special operations forces operating in jungle environments were expected to know basic species identification, to carry less food and source more, to treat insects as food instead of annoyance.

 The change wasn’t universal. Plenty of conventional forces still carried two weeks of MREs and purified all water. But among the elite units, Australian doctrine became standard. [music] Collins retired in 2009 with the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to military training. His [music] final posting was as chief instructor at the Jungle Training Wing at Tully where he taught Australian methods to soldiers from 17 countries.

 He died [music] in 2019. His obituary in the Army newspaper was three paragraphs. It didn’t mention that he’d changed how the most powerful military on Earth thought about jungle warfare. Harrison, his second in command at the Tully training, later became the regimental sergeant major of the SAS. He continued teaching the doctrine that Collins had codified, that knowledge of the environment was more valuable than equipment, that soldiers who could eat the jungle could operate indefinitely, that the difference between survival and

subsistence was the difference between two weeks and [music] forever. The doctrine lives on. Modern Australian SAS [music] selection includes a jungle survival phase where candidates are given knives and empty packs and told to live for 10 days. No food provided, no resupply, just knowledge and the requirement to use it. Pass rate is 40%.

The men who pass aren’t tougher than the men who fail. They’re better educated. They know their plants. They know their insects. They know which vines hold water and which hold poison. That knowledge is still written down, still taught, still tested. [music] The notebook that Collins showed the SEALs in 2003 has been digitized, expanded, and integrated into the Australian Army’s jungle warfare manual.

 It’s now 247 pages. It covers 312 edible [music] species across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It includes fullcolor photographs, preparation methods, caloric values, and warning [music] signs for toxic lookalikes. Every SAS operator carries a waterproof copy on deployment. The Americans adopted portions of it. Not all.

American doctrine still assumes more robust logistics, [music] but enough to improve performance in denied environments. The Army’s jungle operations school in Hawaii now teaches [music] insect consumption as standard. A Marine Corps’s jungle warfare training center in Okinawa includes modules on plant identification.

 Navy Seal candidates learn [music] to source water from vines and catch protein from streams, but the cultural gap remains. American soldiers still [music] see jungle food as emergency rations. Australian soldiers see it as operational capability. [music] That difference is subtle but critical. It’s the difference between I can survive if I have to and I can thrive because I choose to.

 The first mindset tolerates [music] the jungle. The second exploits it. The exploitation is scientific. Australian military nutritionists have calculated the exact caloric value of jungle food sources. They know that 100 g of palm [music] grubs provides 190 calories, 14 g of fat. They know that certain termite species are [music] 38% protein by dry weight, higher than chicken.

 They know that a single seo palm can yield 200 [music] kg of starch from its core. They’ve quantified everything, turned folk knowledge into hard data, proven that jungle subsistence [music] isn’t just possible, but superior to resupply in certain scenarios. The scenarios are specific. long range [music] patrols in denied areas, reconnaissance missions without helicopter support, escape [music] and evasion situations, operations where resupply would compromise stealth.

 In those cases, [music] which represent a significant portion of special operations missions, the Australian method provides tactical advantage. Teams can operate longer. [music] They move lighter. They’re invisible to enemy logistics detection because they don’t need logistics. They’ve become part of the environment instead [music] of visitors to it. The enemy notices.

 In Afghanistan, Taliban fighters reported that Australian patrols could operate for weeks without resupply in mountain regions where even goat herders struggled to find food. In East Teeour, Indonesian intelligence assessed that Australian special forces could sustain operations indefinitely because they weren’t dependent on supply lines.

 The operational impact was psychological. If the Australians could operate forever, then clearing them from an area wasn’t a matter of cutting supply and waiting them out. You had to kill them, which was [music] harder. Modern training reflects this advantage. The Tully Jungle Training Wing [music] runs four courses annually for Australian forces and two for Allied nations.

 The syllabus is [music] 12 weeks. Week one covers basic species identification. Weeks 2 through 4 cover advanced foraging, [music] hunting, and trapping techniques. Weeks five and six focus on preparation methods and food [music] safety. Weeks 7 through 10 are extended field exercises with no food provided. [music] Weeks 11 and 12 are tactical applications, integrating jungle subsistence into patrol and reconnaissance operations.

 Graduation requires perfect scores on species identification tests. demonstrated ability to source 2,000 calories daily from the environment and completion of a solo 7-day survival exercise. Candidates who fail any component repeat that [music] section. The course has a 58% firsttime graduation rate. The soldiers who graduate aren’t just survival qualified.

 They’re jungle experts who can teach others. And they do. Graduates become instructors, spreading the doctrine through the Australian military and allied forces. The knowledge multiplies, gets refined, gets tested in actual operations and adjusted [music] based on results. Modern Australian jungle doctrine is version 7.0 of a system that started in 1962 with soldiers learning from indigenous [music] trackers in Borneo.

 Each version improved on the last. Each incorporated lessons from operations, from training failures, from new species discoveries and preparation techniques. The American adoption accelerated after 2010 when operations in the Philippines, Colombia, and West Africa required extended jungle presence.

 SOCOM established a formal exchange program with the Australian SAS, sending four-man teams annually for 12-week training at Tully. Those teams returned as subject matter experts, teaching American soldiers Australian methods. The knowledge spread through the special operations community, then into conventional forces that might operate in jungle environments.

 The impact shows in weight data. In 2000, American soldiers deploying to jungle environments carried an average of 78 lb of equipment, including food and water. By 2015, that average dropped to 52 for soldiers trained in Australian methods. The 26B reduction came entirely from reduced food and water carriage, offset by increased knowledge of environmental sourcing.

 Those soldiers moved faster, fought longer, and operated more effectively because they’d adopted the Australian philosophy. The jungle provides, if you know how to ask, but knowledge alone isn’t enough. The psychological barrier remains real. Most American soldiers struggle to eat insects on first exposure. The training addresses this systematically using the same method Collins used in 2003.

[music] Demonstrate that it’s safe. Prove that it works. Show the tactical advantage and let soldiers make the choice themselves. Nobody is forced to eat grubs. But soldiers who don’t can watch their teammates moving lighter and operating longer. And that comparison usually [music] breaks resistance faster than any lecture.

 The SEALs who trained at Tully in 2003 are mostly retired now. Reigns left the Navy in 2008 [music] and works as a security consultant. Garcia stayed in until 2016 and now runs survival courses in Florida, teaching civilians the techniques he learned from Collins. Several others became instructors at American special operations schools, embedding Australian doctrine into [music] the next generation of operators.

 They tell similar stories about watching Australians eat things that seemed inedible and realizing it wasn’t about toughness. [music] It was about knowledge, about struggling through jungle terrain with heavy packs while Australians glided through with light ones. About the moment when theory became practice, when eating a grub stopped being an act of desperation and became tactical common sense.

 That shift from theory to practice is where doctrine changes. Reading about jungle subsistence in a manual is academic. actually doing it, actually living off palm grubs and vine water for 12 days while maintaining [music] combat effectiveness is transformative. It rewrites assumptions. It proves that the environment can be your logistic system [music] if you understand it well enough.

 The Australians understood they’d been forced to understand by geography, by budget, by operational requirements that didn’t allow for failure. They built doctrine from necessity and refined it through decades of jungle operations. The result was a military culture where eating the jungle wasn’t extraordinary. It was expected where soldiers graduated from basic training knowing 10 edible plant species and learned a hundred more in specialized courses.

 That culture produced operators who were comfortable in terrain that broke other soldiers. Who saw a jungle stream and thought protein source instead of [music] obstacle? Who looked at a rotting log and calculated the calories inside. who moved through hostile environments like predators instead of prey because they’d learned to hunt, to gather, to exploit every resource the jungle offered.

 The Americans learned this the hard way. by watching, by asking, by finally accepting that bigger budgets [music] and better equipment didn’t make them the best at everything, that some environments favored knowledge over resources, that the Australians, from a country most Americans can’t find on a map, had built jungle warfare doctrine that was simply superior to American methods.

 That acceptance is worth noting. The US military doesn’t easily admit that anyone does something better. But in jungle environments, the evidence was too clear to ignore. The Australians were lighter, faster, and indefinitely sustainable. The Americans were heavy, slow, and limited by resupply. The gap was doctrine, and doctrine can be learned.

 So they learned, not perfectly, not completely, but enough to improve. enough to recognize that the jungle favored those who understood it. That understanding came from study, from training, from actually eating beetles and drinking from vines until it became normal instead of extraordinary. Collins’s legacy is visible in every American special operator who deploys to jungle environments.

 Now [music] they carry less food. They know their plants. They treat insects as resources. They move like the Australians moved. light, fast, exploiting the environment instead of fighting it. The cultural gap has narrowed, not closed, but narrowed. The Australian advantage remains. Built on 60 years of refinement, built on operational necessity, built on a fundamental philosophy that you don’t conquer the jungle. You join [music] it.

You eat what it offers. You drink what it provides. You sleep where it shelters you. And in return, it lets you operate indefinitely, invisible to enemy detection, sustained by knowledge instead of logistics. That philosophy, changed modern jungle warfare, rewrote American doctrine, proved that the most powerful military on Earth had something to learn from a smaller ally who’d [music] been forced to innovate through limitation. The lesson is simple.

 In the jungle, knowledge weighs nothing and provides everything. The Australians knew this. [music] The Americans learned it. And soldiers from both countries are more effective because of what happened when a seal watched an Australian eat a beetle and realized he didn’t understand the environment as well as he thought.

 3 days later, [music] that same seal was eating beetles himself. Not because he wanted to, because the mission required it. [music] Because staying combat effective mattered more than comfort. Because the Australians had proven that what seemed disgusting was actually tactical advantage. That shift from disgust to tactics [music] is where doctrine evolves.

 Where cultural assumptions break down and get replaced by operational reality. Where soldiers stop thinking I would [music] never eat that and start thinking I need to learn which ones are safe. The Australians taught that shift. They’re still teaching it at Tully, at exchange programs, at joint training exercises where American soldiers show up with MREs [music] and leave knowing how to harvest grubs.

 The knowledge spreads, gets tested, gets proven in actual operations where resupply fails and soldiers survive because they remember which vine holds water, where missions succeed [music] because teams moved light enough to reach the objective while enemies expected them to fail. This is what Collins meant when he said, “The jungle provides if you know how to ask. The asking is knowledge.

 The providing is survival.” [music] The gap between those two things is training, doctrine, and the willingness to eat what makes your stomach turn until it becomes normal. The Australians made it normal. The Americans are still learning. But the gap is closing. [music]