Roman Koshkin is a Marine Raider and MARSOC company commander who spent over two decades in special operations. He immigrated from Moscow to Marin County, California at 11 years old, studied European history at a small liberal arts college in Virginia, then completed graduate work at St. Andrews in Scotland, where he met his wife. In 2003, with a young family and a war underway, he and his wife decided to give the Marine Corps a go. What followed was a 20-year career that took him from the founding days of MARSOC to combat deployments in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Africa, a liaison role in Germany, and a final tour working the Ukraine desk at the Pentagon after the full-scale 2022 invasion.

This episode covers that full arc, but the conversation is as much about what comes after a career like that as it is about the career itself. Roman retired April 1, 2024, skipped the transition period his mentors told him he needed, took a consulting job immediately, and hit a wall within months. The identity crisis that followed, the loss of structure, mission, and the elevation system that the military provides, and the slow process of figuring out what meaning looks like without a uniform, these are the themes that drive the second half of the episode and give it a raw, unfinished quality that distinguishes it from the usual military memoir format.

The MARSOC sections are exceptional for anyone trying to understand what the Marine Raiders actually are and how the organization was built. Roman was on one of the early teams when the force was still finding its identity inside SOCOM, and his answer to the question of what makes MARSOC different from the SEALs and Green Berets is both honest and illuminating. The culture, he says, was doing more with less. Proving themselves by being faster, better, cheaper. That chip-on-the-shoulder orientation was both the energy and the identity of the early Raiders.

Justin and Roman also go deep on military leadership, the mechanics of leading high-performing teams where the men may be more capable than the commander in every tactical dimension, the role of respect over authority, knowing when to take a knee, and why leaders who force their style on people eventually burn out. Roman draws on his command experience in Africa, where he arrived late to a unit already firing on all cylinders and largely stayed out of its way. This episode also covers military divorce rates, the real cost of military life, and why investing in family stability is ultimately a force-readiness issue, not a welfare program.

The conversation closes with an extended discussion of the military to civilian transition: the evolutionary need to feel necessary, the danger of chasing validation in a world without rank or mission, intuition as an underused internal compass, and the simple piece of advice Roman says changed the most for him after retirement. Take the pause. Two to four months of slow and intentional thinking could change years.

Topics Discussed

• Immigrating from Moscow to California at age 11 and growing up in Marin County

• Russian cultural identity, work ethic, and navigating geopolitical tensions as an immigrant

• European history degree, graduate school at St. Andrews, meeting his wife in Scotland

• Joining the Marine Corps in 2003 alongside the Iraq invasion

• How and why MARSOC was founded in 2006 as a Marine slice within SOCOM

• What distinguishes Marine Raiders from SEALs, Green Berets, and Rangers

• First deployment as a Russian speaker in Tajikistan building partner force relationships

• Military divorce rates and the Department of Defense's evolving family support infrastructure

• Twenty years of marriage through repeated deployments, constant moves, and long separations

• Command of a MARSOC company in Africa: leading 126 Marines across North and West Africa

• How to lead alpha males without relying on authority alone

• Why military leaders burn out and need to be rotated out of command

• US strategic interests in Africa: competition with China and Russia, ISIS, and al-Shabaab

• The Ukraine conflict, US special operations relationships in country before 2022

• Putin's geostrategy and what Roman's background lets him see that most Americans miss

• Stranded in Stuttgart during Covid with the family

• Working the Ukraine desk at the Pentagon in the final year of his career

• The identity crisis that follows military retirement and the loss of the elevation system

• Sean Ryan's podcast and recognizing the pattern of skipping the transition

• Intuition as a supercomputer: Amaryllis Fox and the gut-feeling framework

• What it means to feel necessary and why that drive is evolutionary, not optional

• The best piece of advice Roman ever received: do what you think is right

People Mentioned

Brandon "Hacksaw" Fender

Marine Corps veteran, Program Director at Tree House Recovery Nashville, mentioned as a mutual connection.

Amaryllis Fox

CIA case officer, Kennedy family member, known for a TED Talk explaining intuition as an algorithmic supercomputer preceding language.

Sean Ryan

Podcast host whose content on military identity loss Roman found during his transition.

Oliver Stone

Filmmaker, referenced for his four-part documentary series on Vladimir Putin.

Tucker Carlson

Briefly referenced alongside Oliver Stone in the context of Putin interviews.

Christopher McDougall

Author of Born to Run and Natural Born Heroes, discussed in relation to barefoot running and fascia as an energy system.

Concepts Discussed

MARSOC

Marine Forces Special Operations Command, the Marine Corps component of SOCOM, stood up in 2006 from the Force Reconnaissance community.

SOCOM

United States Special Operations Command, the umbrella structure housing SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers, and Marine Raiders.

Diathesis-stress model

Briefly referenced in the context of Roman's rheumatoid arthritis gene activating under stress, used as a framework for how latent traits express.

Military to civilian transition

The structural and psychological challenge of leaving a career that provides mission, rank, community, and elevation all at once.

Military divorce rate

The pattern Roman observes of peers whose marriages ended during or after service, and the institutional response to family instability as a readiness issue.

Force Reconnaissance

The Marine Corps special operations community that predated and gave birth to MARSOC.

Working by, with, and through

The Green Beret-originated doctrine of building partner force capability rather than acting unilaterally, adopted by MARSOC in Africa.

Intuition as computation

Amaryllis Fox's framework for gut feeling as a pre-linguistic supercomputer processing patterns outside the capacity of the frontal lobe.

Feeling necessary

Justin's framing of the evolutionary human need to be required by others, and how losing that triggers system-level failure in the transition.

The foam roller metaphor

Roman's framework for processing what needs addressing: whatever hurts when you roll over it is what needs work.