In this Commanding Briefing clip with the SGAUS President, the discussion centers on the organization's dynamic evolution over the past few years as it celebrates its 40th anniversary. The conversation begins by revisiting SGAUS’s origins, detailing its initial mission to fill orders for uniform items and support legislative functions. Over time, the organization expanded significantly, relying on a growing number of unpaid volunteers who took on responsibilities such as developing training materials, creating badges, and managing order fulfillment—all of which have been critical to SGAUS’s sustained success despite facing ongoing challenges with the online store operations.The briefing also highlights a transformative phase marked by significant technological upgrades. The website underwent a complete revamp a few years ago, and another major overhaul is scheduled to take place soon, aimed at streamlining the online store for quicker, more efficient processing of orders both domestically and internationally. These technological enhancements underscore SGAUS's commitment to adapting to modern digital demands and ensuring that their services remain reliable and accessible, even as they navigate the complexities of online order fulfillment.A key part of the discussion focused on strategic partnerships with Federal agencies and U.S. military organizations, including collaborations with the National Guard to further State Defense Force (SDF) missions. The briefing outlines efforts to develop new programs and establish relationships with expert resource managers who can help identify and address critical training gaps and shortfalls. Notably, the conversation emphasized that the basic-level programs and badges offered by SGAUS—attainable through home station training drills—are designed to certify State Defense Forces in essential skillsets. This initiative ensures that in the event of an emergency or natural disaster, the State Military will have a well-prepared, readily deployable pool of skilled SDF troops to respond effectively.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode was made possible by Dustin Colgrove and Ben
Perry and other Patreon members. Support us at patreon dot
com Forward slash State Defense Force.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Moving over to Sagas, Uh, when did you join SAGAS?
And I guess the bullying him back on that question.
The last interview we had with Sagas was about a
few years ago. Can you tell me was what sagus
has been up to the last couple of years.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Oh, we've been very, very busy. Well, you're The first
question you asked is when I joined Saugust. I joined
Saugus in I want to say it was two thousand
and seven or two thousand and eight, And of course
it was around at the time I was earning my
Memos badge.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
And in the early years was brought in. Initially, some
enthusiastic folks at Saugust wanted me to take the communications
program we were doing in the New York Guard and
bring it to Saugust. The irony being that here we
are seveneventeen years later, and I think we're ready to
do that. Actually, I've got some people that are smarter
than I am that are now going to run that
(01:06):
communications program for Saugus and it is a badge program.
We've got about a dozen new programs I'm excited to
tell you about, most of them with badges or bisards.
So the other answer to your question with regards to
what's happened in the last few years, SAUGUS has gone
through a I'm not going to call it a painful transition.
(01:31):
I will just call it a transition. You and I
were speaking before, mister Marciniac about this fascinating concept of
change management that anytime you see changes in the State
Defense Force, it doesn't matter if the changes are good
or bad, somebody's going to be really upset about them,
because ultimately, once we get to a comfort zone with
some place or time or thing that we're doing, we
(01:52):
don't like change. Well. SAUGUS is literally turning forty years
old this year. It was founded in nineteen eighty five.
I am the thirty ninth president because there have been
two two year presidents due to the COVID environment and
some other scenarios that just basically stopped SAUGUS from doing
a lot of its executive function, and understandably because everybody,
(02:15):
including me, were deployed. But what SAUGUS began as was
it's not very different than USAA. A bunch of military
officers and NCOs got together in the State Defense Forces
and said, we got to have some kind of association
that at the very least just stocks a few things
in an online store that our people need that nobody
(02:38):
else can seem to stock in an online store. Uniform
items that I mean, how many sdfs have we run
into where you ask about, well, I'm new, I need
a uniform item and people start looking in their pockets
to see if they have an extra to give you
because there's no place to buy it. SAUGUS initially went
to solve that, as well as start a legislative item
(02:59):
and whatnot. But what was still happening with SAUGUS was
it was growing, growing in membership, but leadership was still
being largely run by unpaid volunteers, including the function. And
when I talk about the function, I'm talking about the
store because the store is a critical part of what
SAUGUST does, not only the learning management systems and the training,
(03:22):
but also Sergeant Snuffy not only needs to earn a
MEM's badge, Sarge Snuffing needs to be able to order
one and actually get it in a reasonable amount of
time and understand. And I know, mister Marciniac, you understand
because you actually run a little bit of a store
yourself with certain items that are up for sale. Saugus
(03:43):
is approaching one hundred items in its store, okay, And
up until literally a few years ago, everything was being
managed out of people's homes, okay, by unpaid volunteers. And
on top of that had vendors that would pop up,
send us stuff and then disappear again so that we
(04:06):
couldn't go back. And even you know, say hey, we
loved the last order of badges from three years ago,
we need another, you know, five hundred of them, and
they sit there going we don't have the design anymore,
or we don't know who you are. Do you have
the design? And then we would look and of course
some unpaid volunteer that originally put the order in is
no longer available to us, nor is the design. So
(04:27):
we've all seen this happen at the micro level, at
the individual SDF level, but it was happening also at
Saugus at the highest level. And a few of us
came into the Saugust board about five years ago and
watched some of this stuff reported over and over again
as well as we were tuned into social media like
everybody else and hearing what the soldiers were saying and
(04:52):
going this this is not impossible to fix. It's and
so one of the major changes that we've done, and
I would love to take the credit for it, except
I can't. I was one of the participants and enthusiastic participants,
but there were other people like Lieutenant Colonel Steve Estes, tenant,
Colonel Roger Patrick, our former president. We've got a number
(05:15):
of people that were rolled up sleeves that were helping
this transition through the website got entirely gutted two years
ago out of complete necessity, entirely redone. We are indeed
about to do that again, in that there is literally
a whole new literally watch over the next few days.
You're going to start seeing different stuff up, new stuff,
(05:38):
new announcements and things like that. Because the basic function
of these things, Saugus got too big for part time,
unpaid volunteers to run. Is the best way I could
explain it to this audience in that at the point
that you're running a store that has over over ninety
(05:59):
individual visual items in it that are ordered in combinations
and quantities all across the board, okay, as well as
different formats of shipping and even shipping internationally because Saugust
now has members overseas as that is all happening. It
just understandably implodes if people are doing this out of
(06:22):
the goodness of their heart with a few extra hours
of availability on the weekends or after work, as opposed
to we moved it all last year to a warehouse.
This is just just six or eight months ago, okay,
where it's a warehouse with a professional team that it
looks just like what you've seen in all these videos
(06:43):
of these Amazon warehouses, just not the sexy robots. And
now Sergeant Snuffy orders something and as long as we
have it an inventory, somebody literally within one business day
of the order, pulls it out of a bin, puts
it into an envelope, has a pre done label and whatnot,
and it goes off to the loading dock and out
(07:05):
it goes and returns will go back and process through
that too. We also now have a professional manager in place,
and what she is doing is managing, not just making
sure that every individual order, and she's actually done a
full year look back, so we've had some very startled
soldiers getting calls months later from somebody from Member Services
(07:28):
out of the blue, going hi, I just wanted to
make sure you got this, and if you didn't, we're
going to have one sent to you instantly, okay, And
making sure that our members are taken care of. But
then the other aspect of this that I mentioned is
the vendors, and that what she is also doing is
establishing a library of all of the old and new
(07:50):
badges and artwork and things like that, and establishing a
bench of vendors, some extraordinary ones, including one new one
out of New York that's just been doing a phenomenal
job and reinventing how our product looks, how it feels,
the quality of it. And the one other thing that
(08:10):
we would like to do in the future that we
were working on very very hard is to bring it
all in country. And that is, oddly enough, particularly on
the metal stuff, harder than it sounds, because, again, very
similar to what we were facing going into the COVID pandemic,
there is not a lot of domestic production on things
(08:31):
like badges and stuff like that that you need created
challenge coins things like that that need to be basically stamped,
minted and things like that from a factory, and so
we're working on that with some vendors, keeping in mind that,
of course, the big issue there is cost that ultimately
this has all got to be affordable. Saugus has got
to be able to make enough money to maintain the operation.
(08:53):
We're not We're a nonprofit, so we don't need to
make a profit, but we do need to maintain the
operation because if we give it all the way and
it dies the next month, we haven't done anybody a favor.
But at the same time, we need we need Sergeant
Snuffie to you know, recognize the fact that we're keeping
it cost effective, we're getting the vendor stuff squared away,
(09:14):
and we now have somebody that literally it is her
full time job to anytime there is a question and
whatnot and new information coming in on our contacts forms,
her job is to respond and get a response very
very quickly from our organization. So that's one aspect of change,
I would tell you. The other changes are some of
(09:37):
besides these phenomenal new badge and training programs, around a
whole new slew of SDF missions, some of which nobody
has ever even thought of for an SDF. What we
have also accomplished is unprecedented cooperation and I will say
direct participation from federal agencies and state agency partners. They
(10:00):
have just been stepping up and doing a phenomenal job.
And here's why we mentioned before in our informal talk
about resource management and that any general or admiral or
command sergeant major or chief master sergeant or master chief
or at any highest level has got to be an
(10:21):
expert resource manager because, oh boy, when the balloon goes up,
you got to know what your resources are and you
got to manage them quickly to solve problems. Well, as
they are stepping up as resource managers and seeing this
developing as a resource, what they're seeing is that SAUGUS
is doing something that's called when National Guard or any
(10:44):
of the agencies do their own inward look of benign
audit of their capabilities, what often comes in on the
reports or what's called gaps and shortfalls, And gaps and
shortfalls aren't necessarily that anybody's doing anything wrong. It's just
during this benign exercise, what we have determined is these
are our weakest points. What we're concentrating on at SAUGUS
(11:07):
now is plugging those gaps and shortfalls. Not every state,
not every SDF is going to adopt these programs, all
of them, some of them doesn't matter to us. We
have sdfs that might that might take one, and we're
fine with that. We have other sdfs that are going
to turn around and use all of our badge program
and that's fine too, because it saves them the resource
(11:29):
of having to try to spin up their own training programs.
So there's that. The other key piece that I will
tell you about all of our new training programs is
the basic level badges will be available for home station training,
and that's picking up on where the MEM's badge and
the cyber badge already were and some of the others.
(11:50):
But we're doing that across the board too. In saying
that the real goal that SAUGAS has is to project
this out so that state defense forces can do meaning
home station training through our badge programs and have something
for Sergeant Snuffy to do during those those critical drills
is they're not only working towards earning a badge, but
(12:12):
they're learning real important skills that their governor or their
tag has said, we need those we need those skill sets,
and I want everybody to keep in mind that when
we think military, we think in terms of platoons and
regiments and so on. I'm going to tell you no,
you might be talking about three people in a whole
(12:32):
SDF that are qualified for one skill, keeping in mind
that when the balloon goes up, only one of them
may be activated and available. But that might be all
that the command needed was one person that knew that
one specific skill set for that one function. One of
the beauties of State defense forces is that we really
don't need to stand up battalions and regiments of an
(12:55):
MOS if you want to look at it a military
skill or a state defense force skill or what not,
especially if the number of people necessary on the ground
to do that job are not at that level. The
only thing you have to make sure of in the
SDF is that you've trained up enough people that are
ready to respond that when the balloon goes up, that
(13:16):
enough out of that cohort of trained individuals are available
to then say yes, I can activate. Because, as I
mentioned before, I found that to be about a seven
to one ratio in my G six days in that
if I needed fifteen live people. I needed to train
one hundred because that was where I was going to
(13:38):
get fifteen available people for an activation. And that's where
sdfs have to do similar planning and training too. But
also why sdfs tend to cross train more than the
conventional military because it is all but likely that an
SDF member that lasts more than five or ten years
in an SDF or more than one SDF is going
(14:00):
to pick up multiple skill lanes, and oddly enough, that
makes them all the more valuable to their chain of
command because they are basically a chameleon, almost like a
typo negative blood donor that can effectively be plugged in
anywhere and can make the command look good as well
as just most importantly, solve a problem
This episode was made possible by Dustin Colgrove and Ben
Perry and other Patreon members. Support us at patreon dot
com Forward slash State Defense Force.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Moving over to Sagas, Uh, when did you join SAGAS?
And I guess the bullying him back on that question.
The last interview we had with Sagas was about a
few years ago. Can you tell me was what sagus
has been up to the last couple of years.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Oh, we've been very, very busy. Well, you're The first
question you asked is when I joined Saugust. I joined
Saugus in I want to say it was two thousand
and seven or two thousand and eight, And of course
it was around at the time I was earning my
Memos badge.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
And in the early years was brought in. Initially, some
enthusiastic folks at Saugust wanted me to take the communications
program we were doing in the New York Guard and
bring it to Saugust. The irony being that here we
are seveneventeen years later, and I think we're ready to
do that. Actually, I've got some people that are smarter
than I am that are now going to run that
(01:06):
communications program for Saugus and it is a badge program.
We've got about a dozen new programs I'm excited to
tell you about, most of them with badges or bisards.
So the other answer to your question with regards to
what's happened in the last few years, SAUGUS has gone
through a I'm not going to call it a painful transition.
(01:31):
I will just call it a transition. You and I
were speaking before, mister Marciniac about this fascinating concept of
change management that anytime you see changes in the State
Defense Force, it doesn't matter if the changes are good
or bad, somebody's going to be really upset about them,
because ultimately, once we get to a comfort zone with
some place or time or thing that we're doing, we
(01:52):
don't like change. Well. SAUGUS is literally turning forty years
old this year. It was founded in nineteen eighty five.
I am the thirty ninth president because there have been
two two year presidents due to the COVID environment and
some other scenarios that just basically stopped SAUGUS from doing
a lot of its executive function, and understandably because everybody,
(02:15):
including me, were deployed. But what SAUGUS began as was
it's not very different than USAA. A bunch of military
officers and NCOs got together in the State Defense Forces
and said, we got to have some kind of association
that at the very least just stocks a few things
in an online store that our people need that nobody
(02:38):
else can seem to stock in an online store. Uniform
items that I mean, how many sdfs have we run
into where you ask about, well, I'm new, I need
a uniform item and people start looking in their pockets
to see if they have an extra to give you
because there's no place to buy it. SAUGUS initially went
to solve that, as well as start a legislative item
(02:59):
and whatnot. But what was still happening with SAUGUS was
it was growing, growing in membership, but leadership was still
being largely run by unpaid volunteers, including the function. And
when I talk about the function, I'm talking about the
store because the store is a critical part of what
SAUGUST does, not only the learning management systems and the training,
(03:22):
but also Sergeant Snuffy not only needs to earn a
MEM's badge, Sarge Snuffing needs to be able to order
one and actually get it in a reasonable amount of
time and understand. And I know, mister Marciniac, you understand
because you actually run a little bit of a store
yourself with certain items that are up for sale. Saugus
(03:43):
is approaching one hundred items in its store, okay, And
up until literally a few years ago, everything was being
managed out of people's homes, okay, by unpaid volunteers. And
on top of that had vendors that would pop up,
send us stuff and then disappear again so that we
(04:06):
couldn't go back. And even you know, say hey, we
loved the last order of badges from three years ago,
we need another, you know, five hundred of them, and
they sit there going we don't have the design anymore,
or we don't know who you are. Do you have
the design? And then we would look and of course
some unpaid volunteer that originally put the order in is
no longer available to us, nor is the design. So
(04:27):
we've all seen this happen at the micro level, at
the individual SDF level, but it was happening also at
Saugus at the highest level. And a few of us
came into the Saugust board about five years ago and
watched some of this stuff reported over and over again
as well as we were tuned into social media like
everybody else and hearing what the soldiers were saying and
(04:52):
going this this is not impossible to fix. It's and
so one of the major changes that we've done, and
I would love to take the credit for it, except
I can't. I was one of the participants and enthusiastic participants,
but there were other people like Lieutenant Colonel Steve Estes, tenant,
Colonel Roger Patrick, our former president. We've got a number
(05:15):
of people that were rolled up sleeves that were helping
this transition through the website got entirely gutted two years
ago out of complete necessity, entirely redone. We are indeed
about to do that again, in that there is literally
a whole new literally watch over the next few days.
You're going to start seeing different stuff up, new stuff,
(05:38):
new announcements and things like that. Because the basic function
of these things, Saugus got too big for part time,
unpaid volunteers to run. Is the best way I could
explain it to this audience in that at the point
that you're running a store that has over over ninety
(05:59):
individual visual items in it that are ordered in combinations
and quantities all across the board, okay, as well as
different formats of shipping and even shipping internationally because Saugust
now has members overseas as that is all happening. It
just understandably implodes if people are doing this out of
(06:22):
the goodness of their heart with a few extra hours
of availability on the weekends or after work, as opposed
to we moved it all last year to a warehouse.
This is just just six or eight months ago, okay,
where it's a warehouse with a professional team that it
looks just like what you've seen in all these videos
(06:43):
of these Amazon warehouses, just not the sexy robots. And
now Sergeant Snuffy orders something and as long as we
have it an inventory, somebody literally within one business day
of the order, pulls it out of a bin, puts
it into an envelope, has a pre done label and whatnot,
and it goes off to the loading dock and out
(07:05):
it goes and returns will go back and process through
that too. We also now have a professional manager in place,
and what she is doing is managing, not just making
sure that every individual order, and she's actually done a
full year look back, so we've had some very startled
soldiers getting calls months later from somebody from Member Services
(07:28):
out of the blue, going hi, I just wanted to
make sure you got this, and if you didn't, we're
going to have one sent to you instantly, okay, And
making sure that our members are taken care of. But
then the other aspect of this that I mentioned is
the vendors, and that what she is also doing is
establishing a library of all of the old and new
(07:50):
badges and artwork and things like that, and establishing a
bench of vendors, some extraordinary ones, including one new one
out of New York that's just been doing a phenomenal
job and reinventing how our product looks, how it feels,
the quality of it. And the one other thing that
(08:10):
we would like to do in the future that we
were working on very very hard is to bring it
all in country. And that is, oddly enough, particularly on
the metal stuff, harder than it sounds, because, again, very
similar to what we were facing going into the COVID pandemic,
there is not a lot of domestic production on things
(08:31):
like badges and stuff like that that you need created
challenge coins things like that that need to be basically stamped,
minted and things like that from a factory, and so
we're working on that with some vendors, keeping in mind that,
of course, the big issue there is cost that ultimately
this has all got to be affordable. Saugus has got
to be able to make enough money to maintain the operation.
(08:53):
We're not We're a nonprofit, so we don't need to
make a profit, but we do need to maintain the
operation because if we give it all the way and
it dies the next month, we haven't done anybody a favor.
But at the same time, we need we need Sergeant
Snuffie to you know, recognize the fact that we're keeping
it cost effective, we're getting the vendor stuff squared away,
(09:14):
and we now have somebody that literally it is her
full time job to anytime there is a question and
whatnot and new information coming in on our contacts forms,
her job is to respond and get a response very
very quickly from our organization. So that's one aspect of change,
I would tell you. The other changes are some of
(09:37):
besides these phenomenal new badge and training programs, around a
whole new slew of SDF missions, some of which nobody
has ever even thought of for an SDF. What we
have also accomplished is unprecedented cooperation and I will say
direct participation from federal agencies and state agency partners. They
(10:00):
have just been stepping up and doing a phenomenal job.
And here's why we mentioned before in our informal talk
about resource management and that any general or admiral or
command sergeant major or chief master sergeant or master chief
or at any highest level has got to be an
(10:21):
expert resource manager because, oh boy, when the balloon goes up,
you got to know what your resources are and you
got to manage them quickly to solve problems. Well, as
they are stepping up as resource managers and seeing this
developing as a resource, what they're seeing is that SAUGUS
is doing something that's called when National Guard or any
(10:44):
of the agencies do their own inward look of benign
audit of their capabilities, what often comes in on the
reports or what's called gaps and shortfalls, And gaps and
shortfalls aren't necessarily that anybody's doing anything wrong. It's just
during this benign exercise, what we have determined is these
are our weakest points. What we're concentrating on at SAUGUS
(11:07):
now is plugging those gaps and shortfalls. Not every state,
not every SDF is going to adopt these programs, all
of them, some of them doesn't matter to us. We
have sdfs that might that might take one, and we're
fine with that. We have other sdfs that are going
to turn around and use all of our badge program
and that's fine too, because it saves them the resource
(11:29):
of having to try to spin up their own training programs.
So there's that. The other key piece that I will
tell you about all of our new training programs is
the basic level badges will be available for home station training,
and that's picking up on where the MEM's badge and
the cyber badge already were and some of the others.
(11:50):
But we're doing that across the board too. In saying
that the real goal that SAUGAS has is to project
this out so that state defense forces can do meaning
home station training through our badge programs and have something
for Sergeant Snuffy to do during those those critical drills
is they're not only working towards earning a badge, but
(12:12):
they're learning real important skills that their governor or their
tag has said, we need those we need those skill sets,
and I want everybody to keep in mind that when
we think military, we think in terms of platoons and
regiments and so on. I'm going to tell you no,
you might be talking about three people in a whole
(12:32):
SDF that are qualified for one skill, keeping in mind
that when the balloon goes up, only one of them
may be activated and available. But that might be all
that the command needed was one person that knew that
one specific skill set for that one function. One of
the beauties of State defense forces is that we really
don't need to stand up battalions and regiments of an
(12:55):
MOS if you want to look at it a military
skill or a state defense force skill or what not,
especially if the number of people necessary on the ground
to do that job are not at that level. The
only thing you have to make sure of in the
SDF is that you've trained up enough people that are
ready to respond that when the balloon goes up, that
(13:16):
enough out of that cohort of trained individuals are available
to then say yes, I can activate. Because, as I
mentioned before, I found that to be about a seven
to one ratio in my G six days in that
if I needed fifteen live people. I needed to train
one hundred because that was where I was going to
(13:38):
get fifteen available people for an activation. And that's where
sdfs have to do similar planning and training too. But
also why sdfs tend to cross train more than the
conventional military because it is all but likely that an
SDF member that lasts more than five or ten years
in an SDF or more than one SDF is going
(14:00):
to pick up multiple skill lanes, and oddly enough, that
makes them all the more valuable to their chain of
command because they are basically a chameleon, almost like a
typo negative blood donor that can effectively be plugged in
anywhere and can make the command look good as well
as just most importantly, solve a problem
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