Irregular Warfare Podcast - American Decline: Losing the Campaign for Influence

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

A new US administration is eager to reengage with both allies and competitors, reasserting the role of global leader that the United States has claimed since World War II. At the same time, former partners wary of indications of US withdrawal from the global stage no longer look to the United States for leadership and current adversaries emboldened by apparent US apathy toward their breaching of international norms are no longer cowed into restraint. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael K. Nagata and Dr. Anthony Cordesman join this episode to discuss how these conditions developed and what can be done to reverse the apparent decline. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

We face a world which is remarkably vulnerable to outside spoiler operations and pressure from China and Russia, but it's also vulnerable to countries like Iran, you know, where basically you look at Iran and we talk about maximum pressure. Well, we maximum pressured the men to Yemen. We maximum pressured the men to Iraq. We maximum pressured the men to Syria. And we maximum pressured the men to Lebanon. I certainly vote for being better at great power competition. But the idea that we can somehow turn our backs or decrease our efforts against terrorism just strikes me as foolishness. Terrorists will not let you ignore that. I lived through several efforts to, quote, pivot away from a terrorism problem, one in Iraq and one in North Africa.

ISIS and Benghazi caused us to go right back. We have to learn to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. us to go right back. We have to learn to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. Welcome to episode 29 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm Andy Milburn, and I'll be your host today along with Kyle Atwell. Today's episode looks at the global campaign for influence as a critical component of great power competition. Our two guests argue that though the competition for influence should play a central role in US national security strategy, the United States has fallen behind adversaries for multiple reasons. These include a lack of shared vision for what US objectives are in great power competition,

risk aversion for influence activities, and often prioritizing military action and capabilities over civilian activity and information operations. Nonetheless, they argue that if the United States is prepared to make some fundamental changes to how it conducts foreign policy, it can restore the credibility of its claim to be the leader of the free world. General Michael Nogata retired from the US Army in 2019 after 38 years of active duty with 34 years in US Special Operations. During his career, he led multiple joint soft task forces across more than a dozen countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia,

and commanded Special Operations Command Central, the headquarters responsible for all U.S. Special Operations across the Middle East. His final position was Director of Strategy for the National Counterterrorism Center from 2016 to 2019. Dr. Anthony Kortsman is the Arlette A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has written extensively on U.S. national security strategy and has served in multiple roles as a civilian advisor and consultant to the Departments of State and Defense, various elements of the U.S. military, and NATO. Among his current projects, Dr. Kordsman is assessing changes in the nature of modern war, as well as U.S. defense strategy programs and budgets. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton

Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. And here is our conversation with General Nagata and Dr. Cordesman. Mike and Tony, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. It's great to have you on today. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. It's great to be here.

Thanks for the invitation. Mike, I'd like to begin with you. It appears that this administration is eager for the United States to re-engage with the world, perhaps taking on again the mantle of leadership that it has claimed since the Second World War. And yet you have pointed out previously that the world may no longer be ready to recognize this claim. And I'm paraphrasing you, but you describe a seismic shift in the way that other nations view the U.S. It's a change of perception that has had a corresponding effect on the United States' ability to wield soft power or influence to achieve its national objectives. What do you think has brought about this change? Andy, thanks for that question. And first and

foremost, thanks for inviting me and my good friend, Tony Cordesman, for being here today to have such an important conversation. I'm going to start with the characterization you just used about change. A great deal has changed, is still changing. Of course, change is an inevitable part of human life. So to some degree, it's not new. But what is new is, at least in my view, after 38 years in the US military, is that we, the United States, seem to be less capable or less willing, or perhaps both, of effectively dealing with these changes in ways that in too many cases and in too many places is not being matched by an unwillingness or an incapacity of some of our competitors and adversaries. Or in other words, in many ways, in too many ways, they're dealing with change better than we are. And I think what really jumps out at me about the environment is how much confidence has been lost in the United States or in just the Western style or Western form of governance that the United States was in very large measure responsible for propagating around the world after World War II. We're certainly not on the cusp of restoring confidence

and that has all kinds of ramifications. Michael, what, in your opinion, is the cause or causes of this decline in international prestige? And can you give us some examples? I'll give you two. One is, and this is something I concluded while I was still on active duty, particularly my last three years before retiring as a director of strategy at the National Counterterrorism Center. I don't think we have anything remotely like a consensus or coherent strategic view of what our problem actually is. And here's what I mean by that. I'm pretty confident that if I were to wander back into Washington, D.C., find 12 of my former policy level colleagues, hand each of them a blank sheet of paper,

and ask them a question about a very common term these days, great power competition, but basically ask them, please write down your definition of great power competition. I am very confident that there would be very little consensus or consistency in the responses I get back. And if that's true, then we're a victim of a very classic dilemma that you cannot solve a problem if you don't understand your problem. We are so inconsistent and frankly incoherent about what precisely are we dealing with and what are we trying to do that we're unable to create anything remotely like unity of effort or create a coherent strategy for dealing with because we all think we're trying to solve the same problem, but we really aren't. It's like having an argument with a loved one. Very often,

after it's over, you discover, you know, we thought we were arguing about the same thing, but we had two completely different sets of facts. And I think we're guilty of that. So that's number one. Number two is something I've already alluded to. The digital era has created a degree of freedom of action for everyone on the planet that, in my view, is unprecedented in human history. The United States government, particularly, has become very risk-averse about taking advantage of that. There is no better example than what we style as information operations. Our ability to talk ourselves out of doing anything related to an information or influence operation is astonishing. Tony, you've written about these same points in

terms of the United States adapting too slowly, or not at all, to what you call the changing nature of warfare. Would you mind talking about what you mean by that? I think Mike hit quite correctly on the problems that occur in a digital world. But the problem I think we have is we're talking about a very different structure than I think most of us anticipate. and Iraq clearly as the dominant military power in the world. It was still, when we go back to 9-11, there was optimism about the future of Russia. There was the hope that China was going to evolve in more democratic, more peaceful ways. You go back to words like globalism and the end of history, levels of optimism which never made much sense, but certainly were seriously taken by the National Defense University and a good part of the U.S. government. And 20 years later, we have a very different world. We're directly competing not with the Soviet Union, but with a Russia that still has a great deal of technology, but is a relatively minor manufacturing and economic power. On the other hand, we have seen

China emerge by some measures as having at least a competitive economy, talking about achieving parity in military technology by 2030 to 2040, and competing basically throughout the world, not simply in military terms. I guess often it's white area competition. If you create a port network from Sri Lanka to Djibouti, it's a civil port network, but it changes the strategic perceptions of the world. If you move into the South China Sea, ultimately, it doesn't matter if China ever does anything from the islands it's occupied. All of a sudden, it is a major deployed power in the Pacific. If you look at competition in terms of advanced weapons, we're talking major shifts in nuclear, in hypersonic, and in very low-level systems like tactical UAV. Now, I don't think anyone anticipated that we would spend four years, in many ways, alienating our allies. Mike mentioned the lack of coherence or popularity.

I think what's really interesting, regardless of your politics, take a look at any of the polls on foreign perceptions of the United States and the trends over the last four years. These are not political and they're not party oriented. We saw a tremendous drop in confidence and support for the United States. And you suddenly look at almost all of the indices of what's happening in the developing world. You see massive economic, political, and governance problems in about a third of the world, where we are not really able to address any of these issues. You look at the World Bank ratings by country, which is very different from the summary economic data. You look at the CIA World Factbook trend analysis. You look at things like the Fragile States Index,

which basically attempts to find all of the problems in given governments. And what you see is these problems have been impacted by COVID, population increases, corruption, a lack of jobs. We face a world which is remarkably vulnerable to outside spoiler operations and pressure from China and Russia, but it's also vulnerable to countries like Iran, you know, where basically you look at Iran and we talk about maximum pressure. Well, we maximum pressured the men to Yemen, we maximum pressured the men to Iraq, we maximum pressured the men to Syria, and we maximum pressured the men to Lebanon. You know, we're talking about the changing nature of warfare and competition and how the U.S. can compete. And Mike, you mentioned information operations. Tony, you mentioned perceptions multiple times. Is this a competition for legitimacy and influence as much as a military

capability competition that we're looking at? I think basically short of a major war, competition that we're looking at? I think basically short of a major war, it's always a competition for influence, for strategic posture, which is not determined by how many tanks or modern aircraft you have, but what countries you can actually shape and influence. Can I chime in here, Kyle? There's a famous or infamous Sun Tzu quote that goes something along the lines of the acme of skill is to do things and been able to do things that have sown dissension in the NATO alliance, that have at least created friction and division in the United States, regardless of whether or not they actually hampered the electoral process. They've certainly fanned flames of disunity in the United States. How effectively they've been is a debatable point. But the reality is they have been somewhat effective at that.

And this is a weak actor doing it to what some people would argue is the most powerful nation on Earth. And all of these things beg the question, why? And first of all, just to reiterate a point I made earlier, I don't think we've made up our mind as a government, what is it we're actually dealing with here? Are we dealing with a military foe? Are we dealing with a competitor for influence? What is the problem we're dealing with?

And until we finally get to the point we have some sort of general agreement about what is it we are facing and what is it we are actually trying to do, whatever our advantages are strategically, they're in large measure neutralized because we're so internally incoherent. But I'll end by just emphasizing one other thing, because I steadily consume Tony's fact-driven analysis of what actually happens when we apportion money for national security purposes. when we apportion money for national security purposes. And it is inarguable that despite the fact we're more likely to be defeated in the arena of intangible influence and digital information than we are on a military battlefield, not that being ready for a military fight is not important, I vote for that. But if we're more likely to be strategically

defeated in an arena where there are no bombs and no bullets, we still are lavishing most of our resources on being ready for a bombs and bullets fight. So it's a little like a boxer or a martial artist preparing for the wrong opponent. You know, you know, your opponent's going to come at you a certain way, but it's a very inconvenient style, so we'd rather not get ready for that. What we'd rather do is get ready for the kind of opponent we're familiar with, who's going to come at us with military tools and military approaches, because it's what we're familiar with, it's what we're comfortable with, it's what our traditions are. Pivoting strategically so we're

able to be dramatically effective from tactical to strategic levels in things like information, influence operations, economic competition, what have you, these are not our strategic strong suits. These are not things that we think in terms of, are we resourced adequately? Do we have an adequate strategy? Is somebody actually in charge of it? Are weourced adequately? Do we have an adequate strategy? Is somebody actually in charge of it? Are we sufficiently risk tolerant? Are we investing in the kinds of relationships that are going to be necessary for this mostly civilian competition? The answer is no. It's not in our comfort zone. The investment in capabilities should translate to strategic influence, I would think, because it translates to deterrence against

our rivals, credibility with our allies and partners who are hoping we're a reliable ally. And so I guess my question is, our investment in military readiness, is that not translating to influence right now? And if not, is it an organizational problem or is it where we're investing our resources? Well, there is a little question of readiness for what. And to some extent, some of the readiness investment is essentially square bashing. Does it directly impact on deterrence in high-level warfighting? Is it readiness to deal with competition in a world where often our ability to deal with extremism, internal divisions, help partners and other countries unify is critical. I think far too often what we're

talking about is flying hours, making sure that the equipment is sustainable. All of this is mildly useful, but if it's not directed towards a purpose, you run into what we've just done, which is take a whole series of new ships out of service, try to figure out whether the Army will ever have a procurement program again, and look at whether the Air Force can survive the F-35's cost escalation. If that's the definition of readiness, we have a problem, and I think it's pretty critical. I'm going to take a look at this, too. I'll just echo what Tony just said, readiness for what? The fact that there's no real consistent or consensus answer in the same way there's real no coherent consensus answer to what is the problem we're actually trying to solve is just a plague on our ability to be effective

if you subscribe to the notion as i certainly do that a very large perhaps i i might even be able to make the argument it is the decisive part of great power competition or the combination of information activities and influence activities. In many cases, they're the same thing, but they certainly strongly overlap with each other. If you buy the notion that that is a disproportionately important part of prevailing in great power competition, and I certainly subscribe to that notion. I personally think it's decisive, but regardless of whether or not it's decisive, it's very, very important. It begs this question, to what degree, either in the budget, or just in terms of where we see risk tolerance and aggressive efforts and things we've never

tried before, but we believe they're necessary, we're going to try them now. How much of that do we see in the information and influence activity domain? The answer is very little, very little. And when you compare our energy, our activity, our aggressiveness, our risk tolerance in the information environment with some of our so-called near-peer adversaries, many of which are much weaker than we are, but they're still adversaries, they're running rings around us. I'll close by giving one specific example. I have a good friend who runs her own social media

analytics company. In the wake of the killing of Qasem Soleimani by U.S. Kinetic Action, she sought to compare the differences between U.S. social media activity, government social media activity intended to justify the strike, explain the benefits of it, explain why it was necessary, etc. versus Iranian government social media activity, which obviously was to condemn the strike and, you know, keep scoring on the United States and what have you. But the first run of analysis she did was all languages, social media postings by both the Iranian government and the United States government in all languages. And the Iranians crushed us. So then she said, well, maybe if we parse this down to just the English language, since

that's not their native tongue, but it is the US's native tongue, did we do any better there? The answer was they still crushed us. And as people who use social media knows, many of these platforms is if a lot of postings come in on top of yours, you pretty rapidly get pushed out of view. Nobody's post to justify the strike and thereby either gain or strengthen our influence, because that's why we did it, you know, people didn't see it. Because just the sheer volume of what the Iranians did on the same platforms just obliterated what we were trying to do. So what does that demonstrate? That demonstrates we're not ready for that kind of struggle. That demonstrates we're not ready for that kind of contest. If we were, we would have done a lot better. But instead, we were, I would

argue, at least in the small microcosm of the Soleimani strike, we were strategically defeated. The benefits Iran derived from the aftermath of the death of Soleimani were disproportionate, and they didn't have to be, but we weren't ready for what came after the strike. Now, is it a question of doing things differently in our strategic approach to the world, or is it a matter of communicating what we're doing more effectively? And an example I had is I sat in a conversation with a bunch of representatives from embassies across Africa, and they said, hey, we invest way more in humanitarian aid in Africa than any of our rivals.

We are just terrible at communicating that to the populations of Africa. I'm wondering if it's doing things differently or just communicating more effectively the things that we're already doing. You know, you raise an interesting issue because when you actually look at what's happening in Africa, particularly after COVID, you see that, A, humanitarian aid doesn't buy development, it doesn't buy progress, it doesn't solve problems, it simply buys time, or it allows you to deal with human suffering. Go back to the failed or fragile states, Indus, or to the World Bank reports on what's actually happening. Look at places like Iraq and Syria. Humanitarian aid was critical. It affected people's lives to an immense degree. Did it move either country forward? No, not at all.

Did humanitarian aid or even economic aid affect Afghanistan? Well, according to our own figures, affect Afghanistan? Well, according to our own figures, the poverty rate rose from around 39% to around 70% today. That isn't exactly a measure of progress. And I think this is where the issue really gets to be critical. We have too many measures that warn that we're not doing things well. It isn't a matter of publicizing. Again, where are we now successful in dealing with these challenges? I'll go back to Kyle's question. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. We have problems with both how we approach these things, and we're terrible at capitalizing on those places where we actually manage to succeed. Well, it may be terrible as an exaggeration, but we're at least inconsistent. And I actually find myself a little surprised, even while I was still in uniform, when we actually

did manage to capitalize on a success. I remember thinking several times, I think, well, look at that, we actually did it right for once. I don't want to come across as too cynical here, but let me elaborate a little bit on what I've just said. I'm going to give you two examples that illuminate how our approach is at least inadequate and in many cases just dead wrong for dealing with so many of the things we talked about today. One example is as much as I dislike what the Russians are trying to do, and as much as I, you know, make, and I do agree with those that assert that it's a comparatively very weak actor with enormous internal problems that, you know, eventually are going to come to fruition in ways that they regret.

But regardless, they've done something in terms of their national security doctrine that we've not been willing to do. Matter of fact, I don't know of anybody who's seriously contemplating to do something that the Russians have done that has been of enormous benefit to them. In their doctrine, they have subordinated all military activities to be in support of information operations. Now, I'm sure below that rhetoric, they're having all kinds of conflicts and fissures and problems in doing it, but they've actually tried to operationalize this. And to very good effect, their information operations by this comparatively weak actor have been strategically

effective enough that they have so doubt in the NATO alliance, they have so doubt about the reliability of the United States and being part of the NATO alliance. They have so doubt about the reliability of the United States and being part of the NATO alliance and have created opportunities for them that are very effective because they've had the wisdom, in my view, to make an enormous internal cultural change that I'm sure was not easy to do despite the authoritarian nature of the country, which is to publicly declare and to attempt to operationalize this notion that if any military activity is not in the service of information operations, they shouldn't be doing it. That's one example.

The other one's a more mundane example. It's actually a personal story, but it also, it alludes to one of the reasons why we're unable to make the shift that the Russians have made or anything like it. And that's because of something I've already mentioned, our risk aversion. have made or anything like it. And that's because of something I've already mentioned, our risk aversion. This is a story from when I was the commander of special operations forces in the Middle East during the early years of the ISIS campaign. And I was visiting my task force in Jordan. And I was in the Joint Operations Center. And I happened to be about 10 feet away of a conversation I could overhear. And it was several US special operations personnel clustered around

a laptop. And I could tell they were discussing a particularly virulent and effective ISIS social media actor. And they were having, I could tell they were having a debate on whether or not we had the authority to do something electronically or digitally to retard or degrade what this dangerous social media ISIS actor was doing. But I also saw on the other side of the group about the same distance away I was, one of my Jordanian officers was listening to the conversation too. He wasn't participating in it. He was eavesdropping the way I did. But after a few minutes, he walked away. And then a few minutes later, he came back. But this time, he walked right into the middle of the Americans. And he said to all the Americans, he said, gentlemen, I did it. And they all looked at him and they said, you did what? And he said, I did what you are arguing

about. It's clearly needed to be done. So I did it for you. And they were horrified. They said, wait a minute, we were arguing, we were discussing whether or not we had the authority to do something about this. Now, that was years ago. It was ISIS. We're not talking necessarily about great power competition. But I think about that story all the time because that risk aversion still exists. The cumbersome and bureaucratic nature and the withholding of approval levels for any information operations at such high levels that most of it has to come back to policymakers in Washington, D.C. If we're not careful, that's going to be the death of us.

And you're talking about risk aversion as far as even at the tactical level. I've heard the example that we're much more concerned about an errant tweet going out that could potentially offend somebody than an errant bomb that could lead to civilian casualties. Yeah. I wish I could tell you this is a new problem. It's not. I have very vivid memories of General McChrystal when I was one of his task force commanders. So this is many years ago. He'd been in a conversation with his legal advisor

about a particularly troublesome amount of Al-Qaeda-related media activity. And there was a particular actor we were concerned about. But I remember him saying in frustration to the JAG officer, let me get this straight. I can drop a 500 pound bomb on this individual, but I cannot send him an email. And the legal counsel said, yes, sir, that is correct. You can kill him, but you can't communicate with him. I mean, it's just a war story. It doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I think it illumin on a kinetic battlefield? If you believe that, then you have to ask yourselves, is that where our strength lies? And are we risk tolerant? Because if you're not risk tolerant, you'll never be willing or able to do the things necessary to succeed. The answer cannot be yes. This is not our strength. Unfortunately, for several of our adversaries, this is their strength. To this point in the conversation, we've been focusing at the policy

level. But Mike, of course, for most of your career, you've been executing policy rather than making it. And taking into account your extensive experience in special operations, I have a question for you. I think it's fair to say that for many people outside the soft community, maybe most people, when they think of special operations, they think about black helicopters kicking down doors and shooting people between the eyes. And yet, hostage rescue and direct action comprise only two of the 12 soft core activities. Now, assuming, and I realize based on what you've said to this point that this may be a fragile assumption, but assuming that someone listens to this podcast, someone in power and makes a decision that results in a coherent policy and a strategy to match,

what role do you see soft playing beneath that strategy? It's a great question. It's one I talk about as often as I can when I'm given an opportunity like this. I'll have two answers. First of all, one of the most common rifts in this town is we have to pivot away from counterterrorism because great power competition is so important. Do I believe we have to be better at great power competition? You betcha. It is an existential issue if we intend to remain the leader of the free world. So I certainly vote for being better at great power competition. But the idea that we can somehow turn our backs or decrease our efforts against terrorism just strikes me as foolishness. Terrorists will not let you ignore

them. I lived through several efforts to quote, pivot away from a terrorism problem, one in Iraq and one in North Africa. ISIS and Benghazi caused us to go right back. We have to learn to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. And SOF, I believe, will be integrally involved in all of them. I know there is worry that we're going to be consigned to irrelevancy when it comes to great power competition. I seriously doubt that's the case, although I do believe that the soft community has some work to do in this regard, but it's not in the arena of tangible capability. Again, I want to be careful here. I'm not suggesting that if there is a capability shortfall somewhere in the soft arena, that we shouldn't exert ourselves and spend money to address that.

But I don't think that's our biggest challenge, nor do I think that is the arena where we provide our greatest value, where we will provide our greatest value. And what we should be asking ourselves is, are we improving our readiness? Because it's all about readiness these days. And I do agree, readiness is an important question, but are we improving our readiness to be something that we actually have claimed to be? Certainly, my entire career, in fact, this is something that I used to tell Q course classes when I used to run the Special Forces Qualification course. It's something that in other assessment selection processes that I was responsible for, I would emphasize to my cadre that what we're looking for and what we are seeking to develop is the world's best problem

solvers. That you can hand us a wicked, dangerous, complex problem in a foreign environment that Americans generally do not understand very well, we will improvise, we will adapt, we will overcome, and inevitably we will solve the problem that probably nobody else can solve because we just won't quit. We will not stop until we solve the problem. That's supposed to be our greatest strength. But it's something I used to ask my colleagues in the soft world before I retired. I said, listen, I see we're having readiness conferences about fixed wing and rotary wing and long range precision fires and everything else. When are we going to have our conversation about improving our readiness to be the world's best

problem solvers in this kind of problem. We don't seem to be having much of that conversation. And I think that's to our own detriment. But we'll do it anyways, because it's in our nature. I think there's not enough intellectual energy, or at least there wasn't in my view. And I probably was guilty of it too, because I was still serving in SOF at the time. But I think we would profit from a larger amount of sustained exertion on this question. We say we are the world's best problem solvers. How does that pertain to great power competition, however it is we define it? So Mike, yeah, that's a very interesting proposal, and certainly within the soft community or for the military, and their civilian counterparts as practitioners to make a determined effort

to recruit, educate, and promote determined, complex problem solvers, and I would argue, judicious risk-takers. Tony, do you have anything to add to that? What are your views about the implications here for practitioners? I think that special forces are going to be critical because we are going to face a world where all of the indicators show the problem is not simply going to be terrorism. It's going to be deep internal divisions and given powers, some of which are only important to us if something really goes wrong and you end up with a civil war, others of which are only important to us if something really goes wrong and you end up with a civil war,

others of which are probably going to survive their current difficulties but may not, and where being able to send in immediate support without waiting that's effective is going to be critical. effective is going to be critical. And I think I can remember over the years how often I've talked to people and been assured at the command level that this time we're not going to simply throw our foreign area officers away. If you are wearing a uniform and you don't realize that's a lie, I'm willing to take up a fairly wide range of bets as to how well the command structure deals in the future with your fate. I think we also, we talk about special forces, but what happened to the Afghan hands program? What happened to the security assistance brigades? What happened to the people who actually volunteered, some of them former

ambassadors, to serve in the provincial reconstruction teams and be the cutting civil edge in Afghanistan and Iraq? There is a matching component to SAF on the civil side. But if we are successful in deterring major conflicts, the only way we can deal with gray area or white area black operations is going to be to have the ability to use civil and military forces like SOF and civilians that can operate in the field and deal with the crises and civil conflicts that can divide so many nations. As we draw near to an end of this discussion, which has not always been very upbeat and for the sake of our listeners' morale, this is for either of you. Can you see any glimmer of silver lining? Are there actions being taken now at the policy level that might allow type of conditions that Tony just described? Well, I think one has to be fair that there is an awful lot of analysis and planning right now that's going on that does attempt to

look at these issues. You have opened up, and you did actually towards the third year of the previous administration, when you opened up ideas like joint all-domain warfare and similar. It's not as if we were static or we don't have the capacity to look at the future. But I'm not sure where we are going to be, frankly, when we actually have to deal with having left Afghanistan, when we have to deal with what seems to be an almost matching withdrawal from Iraq. I'm not sure what the reaction is going to be because that will probably occur when we are in the middle of one of the most serious civil budget crises in our modern history. We will have either supported a vast increase of trillions of dollars in civil spending on new civil programs, or we won't have addressed the problems in the legacy of COVID. So you've asked a good question,

but I don't think any of us can today predict where we are going to be this time next year in looking at the balance of national security and domestic issues. And I can almost promise you that in November of next year, we will have reverted to partisanship bordering on the sort of level of the average angry 12-year-old. And does anyone out in your audience really believe we're going to go into the next congressional campaign with anything approaching a mature democratic challenge in terms of national necessity and key policy issues? I think these are things we don't like to talk about, but we certainly have to live with it. Sorry, I'll just extend a little bit on a term I used earlier, so I just don't leave it hanging. I think if I were to, as I suggested earlier, you know, take a poll of my former

policymaker colleagues. If I asked all of them, do we still aspire to be the leader of the free world? I'm pretty confident all of them would say yes. But here's my view. There is considerable doubt globally about whether or not that's true. Now, there's always been some doubt because, you know, as everybody knows, those words, leader of the free world, they were not inscribed by the finger of God on a stone tablet and brought down from a mountaintop somewhere. We self-proclaimed that mantle. We took on that mantle ourselves of our own volition after World War II, you know, in the wake of a shattered world. But for decades, however imperfectly, the United States did try to make it credible. And for much of the world, it was credible.

That, okay, well, you know, we've got a terrible problem or we've got a horrible issue on our hands. What's America going to do? Whatever they're going to do, we've got a terrible problem or we've got a horrible issue on our hands. What's America going to do? Whatever they're going to do, we'll probably just follow them. We made it credible imperfectly, but we made it credible nonetheless for a very large portion of the world's population. It is now in serious doubt. It is in serious doubt. Now that does not, I mean, it's doomed. There still is time and opportunity to rectify it. It is in serious doubt. Now, that does not mean it's doomed. There still is time and opportunity to rectify it. It's just that the approaches we're going to need are not the approaches we needed to take in the 1950s. We have to figure out what will it take to restore

our credibility as the leader of the free world. Because if we do not, then all the benefits, Because if we do not, then all the benefits, economic, political, societal, industrial, you name it, financial advantages that accrue to being credible in asserting we're the leader of the free world, they're gone forever. And that means a very, very different lifestyle for American families and American citizens into the foreseeable future. I don't think anybody wants that. I don't think most American citizens into the foreseeable future. I don't think anybody wants that. I don't think most American citizens are even thinking about this. But for me, it's quite real. And those are terrific words to bring to a close this episode. General Michael

Nagata and Dr. Tony Kordesman, thank you very much for coming along today. It's been a great pleasure talking to you both. And thanks very much for the opportunity. Well, thanks for inviting me. I really enjoyed the discussion. I hope you and your audience got some benefit from it. Thanks again for listening to Episode 29 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, both myself and our newest co-host, Abigail Gage, discuss the future

of Special Operations Forces with Michelle Flournoy and retired Admiral Eric Olson, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command. After that, Abigail and Shauna will speak with Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Donati about the final years of the war in Afghanistan based on her recent book, Eagle Down, the last Special Forces fighting the forever war. Also, we have a lot of exciting written commentaries from practitioners and researchers coming out, which you can find on the Irregular Warfare Initiative website. If you have an argument you would like to push out to the Irregular Warfare community, send us a note to submissions at irregularwarfare.org or reach out on any of our social media platforms. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast

so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. One last note. What you heard in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.