“They live to taste blood”: Delta Force commander’s secret mission to train the deadliest dogs on the planet

On Shawn Ryan’s podcast, retired Delta Force commander Pete Blaber told a story that sounds almost unreal at first: a quiet effort inside the unit to build a new military dog program from scratch, starting with a trip to Belgium and ending with dogs being used on some of the most dangerous missions of the Iraq War.

The clip is not really about dogs in the everyday sense.

It is about innovation under pressure, and about what happens when a special operations unit decides an old battlefield tool still has untapped value. According to Blaber, these were the first operational dogs in that corner of the military world since Vietnam, and getting them there took money, trust, experimentation, and a willingness to ignore the skeptics.

What makes the account so striking is that it was not pitched as some polished Pentagon rollout.

It sounded more like a field-driven project built by people who saw a gap, found a solution, and then proved it worked. Ryan mostly guided the conversation, but Blaber did the heavy lifting, walking through how the dogs were chosen, how they were trained, and how they eventually changed missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even with some of the more sensitive details left aside, the picture he painted was clear: these were not mascots, and they were not side assets. They became serious operational tools.

Why They Went To Belgium

Pete Blaber said the effort started with a simple directive: go find the best dogs possible.

According to him, two men from the unit flew to Belgium within days, with broad approval to spend what they thought made sense. At the time, Blaber told Shawn Ryan, a top-quality dog from the best breeders and bloodlines could cost between $10,000 and $15,000.

So that is what they did.

They bought the two best dogs they could find in Belgium and brought them back to launch what Blaber called a pilot program. Those dogs became the first operational animals in that effort.

Ryan asked why they settled on the Belgian Malinois.

Blaber said all of their research, along with advice from a subject matter expert, pointed in the same direction: the Malinois was the best working dog for what they needed. He described the breed as being built for work, with a drive level different from the average dog most people know.

That part of the conversation was intense, and Blaber used vivid language to make the point. Stripped down, what he meant was simple: these dogs had an unusually high prey and work drive, and the breeders believed that once they had real operational experience, their focus and effectiveness would jump to another level.

That is a chilling idea in one sense, but in military terms, it was exactly what the program wanted.

Building More Than A Dog Program

Blaber said his commander gave him one year to prove the concept.

What happened next, in his telling, says a lot about how elite units work when they are at their best. He praised the commander for not micromanaging the project and instead letting the team innovate, test, and adapt on its own.

That leadership point mattered to him.

Blaber said they leaned on experts in Belgium, longtime trainers in San Antonio, and anyone else who could help them get smarter as they moved along. He described the process as one of gradual learning, not instant mastery.

The first step was not throwing dogs into high-risk missions.

It was conditioning them to live around the rest of the unit and making sure the men understood how to behave around them. Blaber said they were careful not to treat the dogs like house pets. In his view, that would have undermined their discipline and role.

He specifically said he never babied the lead dog, Arco.

The idea, he explained, was to teach the dogs that their handler was the alpha, but also that the rest of the squadron sat above them in the pack structure. That way, they could function inside a larger team environment instead of bonding to only one person in a way that limited their usefulness.

That kind of detail is fascinating because it shows the program was not only about aggression or attack work.

It was about integration. The dogs had to fit into helicopters, tunnels, safe houses, common rooms, and the everyday rhythm of a special operations unit. According to Blaber, they were gradually exposed to all of it.

A One-Year Test Became A Green Light

Blaber said that one year later, in March 2000, they ran another demonstration.

This time, the dogs were doing things that clearly got attention. He told Ryan they had the dogs jumping from helicopters about ten feet off the ground and taking off immediately. They were also demonstrating search and detection capabilities, control under stress, and the sort of responsiveness the unit needed to trust them in serious operations.

The commander, Blaber said, was impressed.

That was the moment the dogs passed the proof-of-concept stage and became real.

Still, not everybody was convinced. Blaber said there were plenty of guys who thought the whole thing was a waste of time, that energy would be better spent shooting more rounds or focusing on traditional skills.

That part probably happens in every organization.

Something new arrives, even something useful, and a chunk of the culture resists it because it looks strange or soft or distracting. Blaber framed it as part of a bigger lesson about change: even in high-performing institutions, change usually comes slowly.

But then the dogs went to war.

Afghanistan Proved They Had Value

According to Pete Blaber, the dogs were very helpful in Afghanistan.

He said they were used like sentries at patrol bases and also as a deterrent when fighters were captured. That alone tells you something important: the dogs were not just about bite work. Their mere presence changed human behavior.

That is one of the underappreciated things about military dogs.

A weapon changes what happens once violence starts. A dog can change what happens before that. Fear, hesitation, uncertainty – those are all battlefield effects too.

Blaber said people have a natural fear of dogs, and in a detention or perimeter role, that fear could be useful.

Still, in his account, the turning point for the dogs came later in Iraq. That is where they got what he described as their first real operational bites, and where he believed they changed in a visible way afterward.

Without going into the most graphic pieces, Blaber’s larger point was that after those early real-world encounters, the dogs became more focused, more committed, and more obviously effective under pressure.

That is the sort of transformation trainers often talk about in working animals, but hearing it from a Delta Force commander gave it a different weight.

Iraq Turned Them Into A Battlefield Tool

Blaber’s best-known example involved a mission during the Iraq War when his team came under fire from a hidden shooter.

Pinned down and needing to break the stalemate, a handler sent the dog toward the suspected firing point. In Blaber’s telling, the dog solved the problem in seconds and did it faster than the humans probably could have under the same conditions.

That was the moment, he suggested, when everyone fully understood what the dogs could do.

Not because they were dramatic. Because they were efficient.

They could move fast, work through confusion, and force a response from an enemy who might otherwise stay hidden and deadly. That made them valuable in exactly the kinds of close, high-risk situations where time and surprise matter most.

Blaber said the dogs then became central to missions the unit would have struggled to complete as quickly or as safely without them.

That is a strong claim, but it never sounded like bragging. It sounded more like a field commander describing a capability that had earned its place.

The Mission Most People Remember

The highest-profile example Blaber mentioned was the raid involving Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay.

He said the dogs were used when operators hit a point in the clearing process where gunfire from above made a direct assault more dangerous. The dogs were released up the stairs, entered the fight first, and created the opening the team needed to act.

Blaber’s account made clear that the dogs paid a terrible price in that mission. He said both were killed.

That part of the story lands hard even without dwelling on it. It underlines that these animals were not accessories to the fight. They were in it, and sometimes they died in it.

Blaber’s larger point was that their use on missions like that proved beyond argument that the concept worked. Once the rest of the military saw what these dogs were doing in Iraq, he said, the response became a flood of interest.

Everybody wanted dogs.

That was the tidal shift.

Blaber Says The Real Story Is Innovation

By the end of the clip, Pete Blaber had turned the dog story into something bigger.

He told Shawn Ryan that this was really a story about innovation and adaptation. In his view, every strong organization should encourage people to experiment, test ideas, and keep improving instead of settling for what already exists.

That was his real lesson.

The dogs mattered, of course. But the reason he was telling the story was to show what happens when an institution gives smart people room to solve problems creatively. He even compared the environment to a kind of research culture, where no idea is automatically out of bounds and people are expected to keep tinkering until they find something better.

That mindset, in his telling, is what produced the war dogs.

Not a memo. Not a trend. Not a PR idea. A problem, a few people willing to chase a solution, and a commander willing to let them prove it.

And if Blaber is right, the result was not just a successful experiment. It was a battlefield advantage that saved lives and changed how special operations thought about dogs for years after.