Home Courses
It Was What It Was Grey Zone Ethics The Kids in "The One With the Goldfish"
Contact Podcast appearances

Hi there!

I’m Daniel Pace, and I’m an author, military ethicist, and enthusiastic student of all that is funny and interesting in the world. I enlisted in the Army at 21 and spent two decades doing stuff around the world as a Special Forces guy. I left the Army in 2023, and now I spend my days writing, thinking, hanging out with my wife and five kids, and talking to people.

If you’d like to collaborate on a project or have an interesting discussion, let me know.

It Was What it Was

What would you do if you had to pick up everything in your life to move to and rebuild a neighborhood that had been torn apart by war, gang warfare and terrorism? Once you got there, where would you start?

In 2006, a young lieutenant was assigned to a newly formed “Surge” Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division. Over the next two years, he and his fellow soldiers built the unit from the ground up, deployed to Iraq, and fought a fifteen-month battle to stabilize a small piece of war-torn Baghdad. Through the ups and downs of combat, these soldiers and their families learned difficult lessons in leadership, camaraderie, communication, and hardship, and in the end, they were all impacted significantly by the experience.

It Was What It Was is an engaging and visceral first-hand account of the strange and often contradictory difficulties of small unit leadership and family life in 21st century warfare.

Buy it now on:


Grey Zone Ethics

The special operations community has an ethics problem. While forward, operators frequently encounter lose / lose situations, and the community isn't preparing them properly to pick the best option. In part, the problem stems from the difficulty of the situations themselves, but it also stems from the community's treatment of ethics training as an individual task, when in reality it is not - it's a collective task, and it requires as much training as any other special operations skill set. This book presents analysis on why the community struggles so much with ethical issues and a training plan to remedy that problem.

Buy it now on:

Two young dinosaur siblings get into a squabble and a favorite toy gets flushed down the toilet. How will the kids solve the problem, and how mad will their mom be about the solution? Buy it now on: