Irregular Warfare Podcast - An Un-American Way of War: Why the United States Fails at Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

The United States and other nations have spent billions of dollars and invested untold effort, not to mention lives, in a global campaign against Islamist terrorism—and yet the threat landscape is arguably worse now than it was on 9/11. Despite the importance for national security of understanding how to wage irregular warfare effectively, something in the American way of war, the fundamental culture of the US military, prevents us from doing so. William Wechsler and retired Colonel Liam Collins join this episode to discuss the question of what needs to be done to reverse this trend and thus ensure that the United States can recover from the mistakes of the past, restore its credibility, and return to its place of prominence on the global stage.

Hi everyone, this is Shauna Sinnott, one of the co-directors of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Thank you for listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, our flagship effort, which seeks to bridge the gap among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to support the community of national security professionals. On behalf of the entire IWI team, I'm thrilled to be able to invite you to our first annual conference, which will take place virtually on 10 September 2021. This event will bring together leading thinkers from across the IW community to reflect on the role of IW in the 20 years since 9-11, to include multiple small group discussions on pressing IW issues, an inter-university academic workshop focused on

IW scholarship, a panel moderated by Dr. Jake Shapiro and featuring Ambassador Douglas Lute, Thank you. To learn how to register, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, or visit our website by searching for the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We look forward to seeing you there. Thanks again, and we hope you find this rather timely podcast episode to be compelling and appropriate given current events in the national security landscape. the number one factor that is affecting the largest number of actions by the widest scope of actors both friends and adversaries you know alike is the deep perception of american withdrawal america is in decline what we've just seen with Afghanistan only reinforces the narrative of our adversaries for this. So it means that the hole that we're in is a little deeper and steeper to get out of. You've got to produce thinkers. It's not a matter of outfighting the enemy, right? We've always outfought the enemy. We just don't outthink the

enemy. And that's a shame, right? And we come from a culture of innovation when it comes to technology and business. Yet we aren't the same way, I think, in the military. The other thing, as I would say, more is not necessarily better, right? Oftentimes it's going to be worse. You know, ask the counterfactual. Would have Afghanistan turned out any worse if we would have remained a small, Ask the counterfactual, would have Afghanistan turned out any worse if we would have remained a small soft-led operation from the onset? It's hard to figure out how it would have been any worse than we are today. And even if it was the same, it would have been done at a fraction of the cost. Welcome to episode 33 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

I'm Andy Milburn, and I'll be your host today along with Shauna Sinnott. Today's episode looks at irregular warfare and counterterrorism, past, present, and future. Our two guests discuss how the United States and its partners have responded and adapted to the various extremist groups that have emerged across the world over the last three decades. The story covers campaigns as diverse as the war against narco-terrorists in Colombia, to the French intervention in Mali, to, inevitably, triumph and tragedy in Afghanistan. They explain the significance of the lessons that the US has learned, or should have learned, and what these lessons mean for national security today. And they describe how adversaries have adapted too, sometimes managing to stay several steps ahead,

as the current situation in Afghanistan bears testament. Finally, they discuss the question of what needs to be done to ensure that the United States doesn't repeat the mistakes of the past, but instead recovers its credibility on the global stage. William Wetzler is director of the Rafiq Hariri Center in Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council. His most recent government position was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism, where he advised several secretaries and helped coordinate interagency policies on a wide range of direct and indirect actions. Previously, William served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counter-Narcotics and Global Threats, where he oversaw military and civilian programs around the globe.

His key areas of focus included integrating law enforcement operations into our military campaigns in Afghanistan and institutionalizing military counter threat finance structures and doctrine. Dr. Liam Collins is the Executive Director of the Viola Foundation, the Executive Director of the Madison Policy Forum, a Senior Fellow with New America, and a permanent member with the Council on Foreign Relations. Liam served in the U.S. Army for 27 years. As a career Special Forces officer, he conducted multiple operational and combat deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, South America, and the Horn of Africa. to Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, South America, and the Horn of Africa. Liam retired from the military in 2019 as the founding director of the Modern War Institute and the director of the Department of Military Instruction at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Previously, he served as General Abizade's executive officer for his Secretary of Defense appointment as a senior defense advisor to Ukraine and as the director of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. He is an editor of the recently released Rutledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations, on which this discussion is based. 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. Here is our conversation with William Wexler and Liam Collins. Will Wexler and Liam Collins, thank you very much for joining us today.

Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you as well. Well, guys, I'm going to begin the questions today with the elephant in the room, the recent fall of Afghanistan. And this question isn't exclusively about that. Liam, I'm going to quote from your book and the conclusion you draw and just ask you both to discuss this. The U.S. and other nations have spent billions of dollars and invested untold effort, not to mention lives in the global campaign against Islamic terrorism. And you're right. And yet the threat landscape is arguably worse now than it was on 9-11. Arguably prescient words. Liam, what caused you to say that?

Yeah, I mean, if you look at, I mean, what the threats were at 9-11, we still had near-peer threats at that time, right? Russia and China, they existed and they remain today. We just changed the terminology now. It's great power competition, but those threats remain. Right around that time, right, was Bush's axis of evil speech, and two of those three threats remain and are more nuclear-armed or closer to being nuclear-armed, depending on where you believe their status is, and they were then. being nuclear armed, depending on where you believe their status is, and they were then. Iraq is the lone exception on that axis of evil, but is that any more stable now than it was, or any less of a threat than it was when Saddam Hussein ran the country? Despite the 9-11 attacks, the threat to the U.S. from foreign terrorist organizations, I think, was relatively low, with the exception of al-Qaeda, and now drug trafficking organizations, criminal cartels in Mexico, South America, Islamic states taken large portions of Syria and Iraq and have since lost it, but they remain a threat to the region.

to have achieved arguably modest or no gains, depending on what argument you take. And we likely could have achieved those gains for a fraction of the cost while our potential adversaries or our competitors didn't have to spend trillions of dollars. So if you look at the threat landscape, I'm not sure we're better off than we were on 9-11. And I think our actions have helped make it that way. Will, why do you think this is? What contributed to this sort of degradation in the security situation despite all of our efforts? Well, first and foremost, it was mistakes made by the United States. In 2003, we made a mistake in going into Iraq, which compounded the counter terrorism problem in the end. 2011, we made another mistake about getting out of Iraq, which then also compounded the terrorism problem. Right now, the way that Afghanistan is ending,

or at least this phase of it is ending, will undoubtedly compound the terrorist problem again. We should be too negative in that I would agree with Liam that the problem in many ways is more difficult. The problem is definitely more diverse than it was before, but in other ways, we're significantly better off. For those of us who worked on counterterrorism policy problems in the 90s, there's no comparison between the tool set that the United States had available to it back then and the tool set that 20 years after 9-11 we have available to us now. And that is not just on the military side, not just on the CIA cohort side, but it involves the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. It involves the reorganization and redirection of the FBI on these issues. So we're in a much safer position because

of that, even as the threats from terrorism to US interests around the world become more diverse and challenging in different places. There's kind of two parts to this, right? So our counterterrorism efforts, as well, you point out, have become exponentially more effective. And so now, arguably, I'm not saying necessarily it's true, arguably, we can conduct remote counterterrorism, which we're kind of in the position of having to do now. But the second part of this overview covered in the book has to do with irregular warfare. And here, perhaps our record is not so impressive. We've had some success stories, El Salvador, our record is not so impressive. We've had some success stories, El Salvador, Colombia,

the Philippines, Syria, and Iraq, at least second time around. But tellingly, perhaps, none of these campaigns saw large troop deployments. And the ones that did have, in the case of, for instance, the counterinsurgency in Iraq, a mixed record, with in that case, some significant blunders along the way. And in Afghanistan, well, it would be hard to call that anything at this point, but an unmitigated disaster. So my question for you, Will, is what lessons should we have learned from these campaigns? And also, and I'll direct this to you, Liam, giving you a little time to think about it. With Afghanistan now in our rearview mirror, why should the lessons that we've learned about irregular warfare even matter going ahead? What I would note is what Winston Churchill famously said about Americans is you can trust

us to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all of the other options. We tried in the Bush administration to do counterterrorism by occupation. That's not the right strategy. We tried in the Obama administration to do counterterrorism by dropping hellfires from drones as the chief line of operation, and that's not the right answer. And ironically, both of those administrations eventually came to what the right answer is, which is indirect action, which is working by, with, and through the locals, through military means, through intelligence means, through law enforcement means, building up their capabilities so that they can deal with the problem instead of us having to

resort to those other options. It's that lesson that is still absolutely critical, not just for counterterrorism, but for the full range of irregular warfare activities. And I fear that it's that lesson that some folks may be forgetting at this time in history, because if you accept that lesson, it requires real choices by policymakers to accept risks that they don't want to accept, to do operations over longer timeframes than they might prefer. And most policymakers that I've encountered, either Republicans or Democrats, inherently recoil from the policy implications of a commitment to indirect action over the long term. Yeah, Andy, to answer your question, I mean, why does it matter? I mean,

it's pretty simple that irregular warfare campaigns, if waged correctly, can be an extremely cost-effective way to achieve national objectives. And it's not just, right, the last 20 years of counterinsurgency, but going back to the, you know, Cold War, which is probably the greatest period of, right, power competition. And so that's why it'll matter going forward. And it always matters. It's really an effective tool if employed correctly to achieve objectives. Is this just the domain exclusively, then the Special Operations Forces going ahead? What you will, especially when you're talking about runs counter to the American way of war,

right? And you see this innate desire to create a heavy footprint and conduct conventional operations to solve unconventional problems. For either of you, what are your thoughts about that? Yeah, Andy, I would say that it's not the exclusivity of special operations forces in terms of military forces or military tools. It's primarily in their domain, not exclusively, but a large part, if they're going to be successful, you want it to be small, you want it to be a limited footprint. But as many have said, it takes the whole of government approach. They're just a piece of it. It's going to be a consolidated interagency effort that usually works pretty effectively at the

tactical level when you're forward, in an embassy or at a lower level. But back in DC, right at the senior levels, they usually get it, but it's often the middle managers where most of the problems occur with trying to achieve that cooperation. And so as some of the authors pointed out in the book, it's kind of ironic that the less people kind of care about the mission, oftentimes the more effective it can be. And once it becomes an issue of national importance or it matters to the military, then that's when you start to see larger footprints or larger forces involved, such as in Afghanistan in 2002, when it shifted really from a special operations force lead to a conventional force lead. And I don't think it ever had to. There was probably no reason for that. But I attribute it to the fear that they were going to miss the fight. So they wanted to get in there,

not realizing that once they got in there, if they got in there, well, it might be 20 plus years. Although, it really pains us to look at our allies and say, yes, maybe we can learn lessons here. But the Operation Saval in Mali was in a sense, a conventional intervention, right? I mean, most of the forces that the French committed there were actually, although they were elite, a lot of them were elite forces, like the Parachute Brigade or Foreign Legion, they were nevertheless conventional. And yet that was a success story. And I get it that they were strongly supported. They couldn't have done it without support from the United States, logistics and intelligence. But can we not draw some lessons from the way that they intervened?

Yeah, I think in Maui, it's a little bit of a different case. Everything's different, but the French only put in, I should know this number off the top of my head, but I think 5,000 to 10,000 forces, maybe as high as 15,000. Will can correct me if he knows, but I think right in that range. And they only wanted to have him in there for six to 12 months, and they had a smaller residual force stay in longer. But they went in with what they saw was the minimal force to accomplish the goal and had limited aims. They weren't trying to recreate governance and everything else. They were really pushing that entity back and giving the Maui government a chance to kind of regain its footing.

And so I think it was definitely conventional. And the lesson to be learned there is really be limited in what we're trying to achieve and realistic about what is achievable instead of having goals that kind of morph or amorphous goals or no one even knows what the goals are as what we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we weren't really sure what the goal was at times. I would say it's even worse than that. For much of our policy in Afghanistan, the goals that were clear were goals that were entirely ahistorical and counterproductive.

Fundamentally, we set ourselves up to define our success in terms of being able to create a system of governance that has never existed in Afghanistan in thousands of years of history, a centralized government in Kabul that has a monopoly on power, legitimate power throughout the entire country. Historically, it's been the folks in Kabul have to have negotiations and compromises with power brokers throughout the region. We didn't set that up, not because we didn't understand the country. We were being told that this was not the right way to think about things by our partners in Afghanistan. But we projected our own desires upon the country. And that's what I meant before about recognizing that if we're going to go through an indirect action route, that we don't have the latitude of deciding every answer. We have to come up with U.S. policies as a matter of negotiation and discussion with the local leaders because they're the ones at the end of the day that we're working by, with, and through.

the local leaders because they're the ones at the end of the day that we're working by, with, and through. Liam, so I'd like to bring back a lot of these contemporary issues to the content of your book. And you and your authors explore 20 years of irregular warfare activity and counterterrorism campaigns. What's the story that ties those together? What are the enduring themes that you think were most apparent as you were constructing that, particularly as we look at where the situation is today? Yeah, Sean, I'll say we actually go back more than 20 years because, you know, as you know from the book, it's late 90s because one of the things I talked to Andy about a little bit before is, you know, organizational entropy. If you want to understand how we employed and what we did post 9-11, you really have to understand how we were organized,

what we did prior to 9-11, because we go with that baggage kind of setting our way, our mindset. And so it's really a longer look than just 20 years because it impacts it. And what I'd say is, there's a lot of things that trends that kind of run through the various chapters, There's a lot of trends that kind of run through the various chapters, looking from Colombia to El Salvador to Yemen to Syria. And again, first, it often requires long-term sustained commitment. And as Will said early, kind of tied with that is we must invest early. If we can't wait until the crisis to invest, it's going to be too late, right? The Colombians never could have executed Operation Jacques in 2008 with a hostage rescue mission, really bold and daring mission where they rescued a number of hostages, including three Americans that had been captured for multiple years, had it not been for investments in them starting in the 1980s. And they ultimately executed that

mission without any assistance from us, but it was because of that training that we put up, right? That's the ultimate success of an irregular warfare campaign. And as Will said before, right, you got to understand the nation and the region and not mirror image it into the U.S. or what we'd like them to be. Understanding what their environment and limitations are, I agree with Will, right? From the onset, we created the conditions of what we have now, right, from a constitution creating a strong central government when it's not right for the region. And then in Iraq, a similar thing, right? I wouldn't say it was a, call it a mistake to go

in there. I think it's probably better to say it was a bad decision. It wasn't one we needed to do. And then once we got in there, because we had, you know, whether it's elected appointed officials and the military is culpable as well. You know, no plan for the so-called phase four and the CPA orders one and two that basically took everybody out of government and having no security force in the country. What do you expect is going to happen? Right. If you wanted to write a recipe of how to create an insurgency, I don't know if we could have scripted better. There was a period in Afghanistan, though, where we seem to be headed in the right direction. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about why we got off track. And I'm talking specifically about, this is covered in your book, Liam, it was, you know, the VSOALP, that's Village Security Operations, Afghan Local Police effort. It was bottom up, it was rural,

but it also understood the importance of connecting to the provincial and then, you know, eventually the civilian leadership. But it understood the fact that the Afghan problem was largely rural. And, you know, in the end, it gained traction. It was successful by any measures. You know, RAND studies show that it was a dramatic reduction of violence in the 92 areas where village stability operations was conducted. And there was top-down support for it, certainly under McChrystal and then under General Petraeus. But somehow we got off track and we let go of the provinces. I know there was some Afghan central government concerns about what was happening.

But getting off track seemed to really have resulted from from American impetus rather than from our partners. And I bring it up not just to focus on Afghanistan, because what was the lesson here? Yeah, Andy, we all know the saying that all government is local. Well, I would say the corollary is all security is local. And that's one of the challenges we faced in Afghanistan. And later in Iraq, to some extent, when we had the Sunni awakening, right, we were just too slow to develop, right, those local security force, because we as a culture do not like the concept of militias. We think they're, you know, it's warlords are going to use them in some way because, but again, we don't understand

the system and how governance works in Afghanistan. Kind of at the same time, we're trying to create a strong central government. Our focus was really on just a national army, which ultimately proved to be unsuccessful. And I think we saw throughout, it wasn't just in 2021 that we realized that was not effective, right? We had multiple pieces of evidence throughout. You know, one, we were very late with starting the village stability operations in the Afghan local police.. One, we were very late with starting the village stability operations in the Afghan local police. There were fits and starts at the local level before that. And then we just kind of didn't remain committed to it long enough. And so ultimately, it kind of went away just like all the other previous efforts.

Yeah, if I can just jump in. In my experience, the US government, the Department of Defense, when it comes to building partner capacity in general, it does two things exceedingly well, and it does one thing exceedingly poorly. The first thing it does exceedingly well is when another country has decided as a nation to put its political will and its budgets and its organization around building a really good military, we're good at helping them. We're really good at helping them through a variety of mechanisms. The second thing that we do really well is when another country hasn't made that decision.

And frankly, most countries don't make that decision. We're really good at building specialized units that we can isolate from the chaos of a not very functional, corrupt, problematic military. We do that very well. The thing that we don't do well is building another country's conventional military and scale for it in the absence of a national commitment to do so on their own part. We've never had success in that. In fact, I would argue no country has really ever had success in that. And yet, that was the core of the US policy approach in Iraq. It was the core of the US policy approach in Afghanistan. People forget, but immediately after we went into Libya, that was the immediate core of our announced policies there as well. So one of the other lessons learned, I hope, is that we recognize that

we're not going to be successful in this regard. What we could have and should have done in Afghanistan at the times that we were right is we could have built a Kabul-centric capability set, and we could, where invited, work out in constructs like the village stability operations with local authorities as part of that negotiation, continuous negotiation between the center and the regions in order to achieve our counterterrorism capabilities. But that's not how we approach things. And so it'll probably be a long time until we're confronted with the need to consider some of these big picture policy operations. I hope it will be because I hope we don't find ourselves occupying a country or considering doing so. But if we do, I really hope

that these lessons aren't forgotten. And we don't once again, put give ourselves missions that are fundamentally unachievable. So to follow up on that, I think there are a lot of lessons that we've learned about the United States and its approach. But are there particular lessons that we could learn from our adversaries and our competitors of things they did well or didn't do well? I'd start with Will and then ask Liam to follow up on that. Here's one thing at the top line. Our adversaries have leaders that fight the entire war.

We, of course, circle leaders in and out on an annual basis. That's not the way that America traditionally fought wars, if you go back in history, but it's a way that we have done so more recently in our volunteer military. I understand why we do it. I just think net-net, it's a mistake specifically at the general officer level. They should be in for the duration or until they are relieved for cause. And our adversaries certainly don't operate that way. And many of our allies, their personnel systems, promotion systems seem to be more successful than ours do at keeping people in a given fight for a long period of time. So that's one thing. The second thing that I would

also look to both in our laboratories and in our own history, Liam mentioned Columbia, which I think is a great thing to mention. Not very much talked about in Washington, D.C., but I would argue not only the greatest success of U.S. building partnership capacity in the last 25 years, but maybe the greatest success of U.S. foreign policy in the last 25 years, what we've seen in Colombia. I was there in the White House when Plan Colombia was being created in the Clinton administration. I'll tell you a mistake, an error of my own judgment during that time. At the very end of the whole process, when it was trying to get through Congress, at the very last minute, thanks to actually Senator Biden leading the way, there was a new requirement slapped on at the end, which said that there's a troop limit on the number of forces that we were allowed to put in, number of contractors that we were allowed to put in. At the time when that came out, I was a little apoplectic. I said, oh my God, we've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We're going to limit our flexibility. We're not going to be able to adapt quickly. This is terrible. Let me tell you one thing. I was

entirely wrong in this. In the context of the US system, what that immediately did was two things that were critically important and that we did not have in Iraq and Afghanistan. First of all, is it forced an incredible requirement for creativity on the bureaucracy of the Pentagon. The easy buttons to press, let's just send in the 82nd Airborne to solve this problem, weren't available anymore. And it forced us to be efficient and to work with our partners more so than many, again, the bureaucracy would feel comfortable with. And the second thing that it did, which I didn't even really appreciate until much later on, is it immediately took away the inherent conflict in Washington between the military requesting

military requirements and the political folks in the White House and the State Department and elsewhere saying, no, you can't have that because that looks bad or we don't like that for other policy reasons. Instead of that conflict, both of those elements were on the same side. The Congress had already answered that question. And so the White House and the State Department, those who were focused on Colombia, were part of the solutions set. And eventually, part of that solution was going back to Congress and asking for slightly higher ceilings on things. But it's something that nobody really likes to learn as a lesson, because people always like the flexibility. But I think that these top line left right limits in terms of scope, top line limits in terms of number of forces, at least in the case of Columbia, really worked well. And I wonder if we would have been more successful if we had such limits at the outset in places like Afghanistan. if we had such limits at the outset in places like Afghanistan.

Yeah, Andy, if the question is what have we learned from our adversaries, in a lot of cases, I would say not that much. We'd be in Iraq, and I remember some senior leaders saying they needed to get home because the war was degrading their warfighting skills, which is kind of ironic to me. I couldn't understand because I'm like, we're at war, right? You can't choose your war. I would like to fight an open war, right? You can't choose your war. I would like to fight an open tank battle in the desert without civilians where our superior technology

can just lay waste to anybody. But after 1991, I doubt anybody's going to be dumb enough to do that. A second place where we could learn from our adversaries or learn, and we don't, we don't use observers anymore like we used to. Did we have observers with Armenian Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh? Not like we used to. Same thing. Did we have them in Georgia in 2008? There's inherent risk with putting observers there, but that's what the military is about. And typically, I think our military and our nation really has a short-term risk aversion, but in the long-term, that means we're unintentionally long-term risk-seeking. And I don't think we make a decision when we do that, right? When we went into Afghanistan in 2001, right? We seized an airfield in October of 2001,

and we immediately pull out, right? It doesn't make any sense. Just go in and push to the border, and I'm pretty sure we would have had bin Laden in 2001 before he could kind of grow, you know, and that's kind of at the operational to tactical level, right? When a platoon is in contact, their first instinct is to break contact, right? But in an insurgency, hey, the hardest thing is to find the enemy. Once they expose themselves, they've identified themselves. You've got to finish them off right there, even if you're going to lose one or two people in the process, because otherwise you're letting them pick when they want to attack again. And every time you're giving them the opportunity to pick when and where they choose that battle.

But again, we think short-term risk adverse for this immediate firefight, what's less risky versus thinking longer term, what's less risky for their mission. And then looking at 2008, again, with Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, what did we learn there? This is kind of at the height of the surge, so it's understandable maybe our attention was directed elsewhere, but we never really studied it after the fact. I would argue we shouldn't have been so surprised about its seizure of Crimea and support to separatists in 2014 if we really had studied 2008 a little more. So to follow up on that for both of you, you both bring up, I mean, it's a really interesting point. What I see coming out of this is we are not, and when I say we, I'm talking collectively US military, we are not the adaptive

organization we like to think of ourselves as being. And again, that's open to argument, a welcome counter argument. But to follow on from that is a question. Liam, in the last chapter of your book, High Rothstein writes about what qualities make a leader good at irregular warfare. And I'm going to turn that around a little bit and say, you know, what qualities have made our leaders militarily not good at irregular warfare? And is that the case? It's, you know, watching the welter of commentary about in the aftermath of Afghanistan, there's been no criticism of military leadership. There's been no criticism of the generals involved. I can't remember the last time a general was fired for incompetence. And it may have happened behind the scenes,

but I haven't seen a lot of best military advice going back and forth to the point where people, generals are willing to sacrifice their careers and say, by resigning, unless their advice is followed, which is perfectly within the mold of our civil military model. But that doesn't happen. So the question is, is this a fault of leadership, this failure to adapt and to learn? I would argue that in a large part it is, right? Any war, any conflict, any campaign we get to, it's never going to be the one we expect it to be. And so we're always going to have to innovate and adapt when we get there. And you think about how do you learn, right? There's really three primary methods through which, right, whether it's a military leader or anybody else learns, right? Education, training, and experience. Okay, most

of these things, you don't have experience doing that specific thing because it's the first time you're there, right? That's why we saw some people learn in Afghanistan and Iraq over time and perform better on second and third rotations. Training, right? Are we able to reinforce these things in training? And when you're talking irregular warfare, right? These are inherently hard things to train. You can't put it in a simulator. And we like to be able to do something that you can do in a simulator or training. It doesn't fit our organizational culture, right? If you can train and each day of training is one week or one month in this scenario,

it just doesn't work well. People don't like to train that way. It doesn't fit our culture. And then if you look at kind of the leaders, as you mentioned, right, Rick's book kind of talked about, hey, no general being fired, as you mentioned, Andy. And then I go back to a paper that Dr. Lenny Long wrote in 2009-ish, maybe, right, where he's looking at our leaders and talking about the trait that we lack within many of our general officers is a trait of openness, which is critical to innovation and coming up with solutions like that. And it shouldn't be a surprise, right? Because if you look at our, you know, the mainstream, right, general officers, right, they're all battalion commanders, then brigade commanders. They're very good at that tactical fight, but they have little understanding outside of that. So when they're put into a situation, that's all they understand. And they've been really good at it. But when we

select everybody for the same attributes, it doesn't do the force a service. And just to give one example. So in Afghanistan in 2002, when I was there, a division that was there, the brigade was going to do an operation and they're going to get all these targets. And so their intel officer came over to me and said, Hey, do you got any intelligence for us so we can hit some targets? And I, so I gave him like four or five that I had leads that I had. Then when I asked him the next day, I said, Hey, are you going to go after these targets? And he, he said, uh, I wanted to, but the brigade commander turned them down because it was too late in the planning. Instead, we're going to hit the pre-planned targets. And I said, well, what are those targets? I've been here for like months. I don't even,

what do you have that I don't have? And he showed me one of the targets and off some imagery. And it was like three symmetric buildings down in the South. And he said, well, we're going to hit this. I go, the school, the agency is building. And he said, what? That's a school. I'm like, okay. He's like, we'll scratch that. But these guys were executing, right? Doing this brigade level operation, executing it perfectly of what I've seen them execute when I was in the 82nd as Lieutenant years ago. But they were just executing the same thing. Just the enemy was different and they weren't changing the plan at all, right? They were going to do a deliberate raid, air assault,

go hit multiple targets, even though they didn't have any targets, right? They were executing what they knew because those were the leaders we had produced and we had selected for promotion. And I don't think that's really changing that much, right? If somebody wants to be a general, they know they have to be a brigade commander. They know they have to be a successful battalion commander. And if you start taking time out of the operational force for education or for other assignments that are good broadening, there's bad broadening assignments too, but good ones that give us that diversity of thought that we need, then we're not fixing

that problem. There's a paper to be written about how personnel systems lose wars. And I think Liam has just touched on a lot of that. I'll say another point that I remember at the time, Brigadier General H.R. McMaster pointed out, he was the first one to point out to me, which was in American history of times of war, prolonged war, what you typically see is promotion rates going up significantly as people are identified that have particular skill sets that are working very well in the environment that they find themselves. And other people who have been promoted to a certain level for skills that might not be appropriate for that environment are weeded out of the system. In the last 20 years, I remember HR told me that the promotion rate got slower during this period. So it's a major divergence from previous history. And as the old axiom goes, your boss is not the person who's currently giving you direction. Your boss is the person who's in charge of your next job.

And the people that were in charge of their next jobs didn't have a lot of interest in winning the actual war in many cases. It's a problem that we saw again and again. And just one other thing. I remember when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president's top military advisor, of course, says he has the one most important personnel initiative across the entire military, and that's the Afghan Hands Program. And the bureaucracy ate it alive, absolutely ate it alive. And that's the chairman saying that this is the top priority. And it frankly wasn't even that big of an initiative.

It wasn't that incredibly strange. But for the first number of years, it was completely unsuccessful. And then arguably only it started to get better over time. But that's what the bureaucracy did for that situation. Imagine what it does just for routine promotion processes. It's a serious problem we have. Yeah, Will made me think of something about the concept of time horizon. And the longer time horizon, the more effective a force is likely to be.

And the longer time horizon, the more effective a force is likely to be. So I think one of the reasons McChrystal's task force was so effective is it had a long time horizon, right? They weren't looking for a solution to a problem. You know, if they couldn't accomplish it in their 12 month rotation, they wouldn't pursue it. Right. That's not how they thought. And a lot of his people, when they went home, they studied the same problem, came right back to Afghanistan, Iraq, somewhere else around the region. And that's what they did. So they viewed it as they were fighting this war until it ended, right? Whether they were forward or back. And a lot of times they would go port and starboard on the same rotations, flipping out with someone. Similar, right, the successful irregular warfare operations, right? In El Salvador, a lot of times it was the same people

going back and forth, right? So they have a long time horizon. One, it's necessary for building those relationships. But two, they could really take a long-term look at that problem as opposed to the one-year troop rotations. And they're just looking, hey, let's make it through our 12 months, go home and wash our hands of it. We've talked a lot about personalities and the human dimension of this. But if we're looking at the organization,

how do we make sure that going ahead, the U.S. military avoids organizational entropy? And then more specifically, and I'll give it to Will first, just from your former policy positions, do you think that it's time to rethink and re-scope special operations forces core activities? So unconventional warfare, for example, is this a time to modify how we conceptualize that when we're looking at how we interact with proxy forces and non-state forces against state actors? Well, it's definitely a time to learn all the lessons that we can from our experiences, good and bad,

and to train them throughout the special operations community. I think at the end of the day, the mission sets that the special operations forces have are going to be the same mission sets going forward. Some are going to be more important than others at any given point in time. I think that there was, for a long time, perhaps an overemphasis on the direct action capabilities and less emphasis than necessary on the indirect action and the language skills and cultural awarenesses. And I remember having a senior person tell me that at the end of the day, you know, some of these soft guys don't really don't need language skills,

they can just work through an interpreter, and thinking that they were really missing something very important, especially in the context of the kind of long-term commitment that Liam was talking about being required for all of this. I do think that what we're having right now is the Pentagon as a whole, the military establishment as a whole, which of course is dominated by the conventional forces, being exceedingly happy that we can go back towards great power competition, things that are much more comfortable, things that support the big ticket platforms that drive so much of the Pentagon. And frankly, and I've heard this

directly from some people, put some of those special operations forces in their place who got way too much attention for way too long. Liam, do you have any thoughts on that, particularly with organizational core functions, core activities, and the direction forward? I mean, when you're thinking about employing SOF, right, I think sometimes SOCOM and others are worried, like, what's the SOF? How does SOF fit into great power competition? And kind of like Will said, right, SOF has always been involved, right? SOF has an extremely important role to play because ideally great power competition never gets to be lethal, right? Because the risk of going lethal is so high. How do you go to large scale combat operations and have somebody not risk going nuclear when they're losing? And so

because of that, they're less likely to get to that stage. And it's going to be at the hybrid gray zone, other things where soft has an extremely important role to play, just like it did during the Cold War, right? Extremely important role to play there, right? Conventional forces role was primarily or more of a deterrent role at that time, but soft was employed El Salvador, Colombia, other, well, Columbia kind of primarily tail end of the Cold War, but other places. And so it has an important role to play there. And kind of going back, Andy was talking a little bit about the, you know, SOF missions and conventional forces. I mean, right, these missions are hard, right? I hated the, you know, the whole term special operations, low intensity conflict. I've been in combat. I don't know what low

intensity is, right? If somebody's shooting at you, it's not very low intense, but it's really just a name. And there's been many names given to it, but everything that conventional forces don't want to do, they give to soft. And those are really hard missions. And that's why the conventional forces, right? They train and they want to go for other missions, but don't forget how much time is invested in each operator, right operator to be capable of thinking and adapting when they get into a different environment. So a huge investment that just can't be mass produced. I mean, of course, our adversaries and chiefly Russia, this whole element is the primary means right now that they are conducting great power competition.

They are extremely active in the gray zone, whether or not it's Ukraine or whether it's through barely deniable contractors in Syria or in Libya. Our adversaries are fighting in this space. Adversaries are fighting in this space. So I don't know how the United States conducts great power competition and thinks that special operations forces aren't going to be critical to it when that's the battlefield on which our adversary has chosen to compete. But if we're talking about the role of soft going ahead and great power competition as simply executing the same core tasks that we are used to doing, then aren't we falling into the trap of organizational entropy? Have we learned nothing for the last two to three decades? Should we perhaps not be learning from our adversaries? I think we've got to shift as the external environment changes. I think we're underinvested in terms of whether it's soft or something else, right? Information operations, cyber warfare, electronic warfare, those kind of things. We're underinvested in that. We're looking at great power competition, and we're using it to justify the massive defense budgets on expensive weapon systems and platforms and training for a war that may never be fought.

a war that may never be fought, and yet we're not investing as much in the war that is being fought, right? The hybrid war, right? The information operations war, where the war is actively being fought or where the competition is being conducted, depending on what you want to call it. And so we got to think, what does soft cyber look like? What does soft information operations look like? And part of the reason we won the Cold War, I think, is the battle of ideas that won out, right? That liberal democracy and capitalism is a superior economic and political system to communism. And I think we kind of forgot that as we kind of cut all those apparatuses down and cashed in our peace dividend. All I can do is agree with Liam on all of this. As I said, Russia has decided it's the little green men and it's the Wagner

group. And China has decided right now at this point, it's information operations, it's cyber operations. Both of them are doing cyber operations. This is where the battle is right now. And it won't always be that way. Undoubtedly, China over time will develop more conventional capabilities that will really have to occur with. But these other special operations or regular warfare capabilities are always going to be part of the mix. They have to be because our adversaries have chosen that. It's very hard to understand an argument otherwise. As we wind this down, I really just thought either of you would be interested in any thoughts you have about implications of everything that

we've talked about to this point for policymakers and or practitioners. I think one I've kind of talked about a little bit is investing in intellectual capital, right? Because no matter, you got to produce thinkers. It's not a matter of outfighting the enemy, right? We've always outfought the enemy. We just don't outthink the enemy. And that's a shame. Right. And we come from a culture of innovation when it comes to technology and business. Yet we aren't the same way, I think, in the military, despite some definite successes in terms of innovation. and the solution set comes from what's inside your head. And so, right, the more you can broaden that solution set, the more options you have, right? And so learn through that education,

training and experience. You know, I'll second what Will said before about, right, fixing, you know, the promotion system, personnel system, right, to get the leaders that you need and the right leaders there. I think another thing, policy implication is, is again, when you have an interagency approach, people have said an interagency Goldwater-Nichols Act, that will

probably never happen. But when there is cooperation, you're more likely to have success. And the other thing, as I would say, just to keep it relatively short, is more is not necessarily better, right? Oftentimes, it's going to be worse. You know, ask the counterfactual, would have Afghanistan turned out any worse if we would have remained a small, soft-led operation from the onset? It's hard to figure out how it would have been any worse than we are today. And even if it was the same, it would have been done at a fraction of the cost. And if you look at, right, what we did in Syria, we had a very small number of forces in Syria, really out of necessity, because no one had an appetite to send anything larger. But if we had sent in brigades

or divisions, would the outcome have been any better? It's doubtful that they would have. And so again, more is not necessarily better. And then kind of going back to some of those lessons we said kind of throughout, right? Invest early, right? And have a long-term sustained investment when you're doing it. Again, in addition to agreeing with everything Liam said, let me raise a few other points from the policymaking community. Right now, in the parts of the world where special operations forces have been most commonly deployed, but I would also argue more generally, globally, there's a lot of factors that are affecting actions.

The number one factor that is affecting the largest number of actions by the widest scope of actors, both friends and adversaries alike, is the deep perception of American withdrawal. People are hedging. People are entering vacuums. It is the number one talking point that our great power competitors in China and Russia are saying in every single bilateral meeting that they have, that America is in decline, that America is in the processes of withdrawal, and everyone else has to adjust to this new reality. This is hugely problematic for the United States and needs to be reversed. It won't be reversed by just one decision or one action. This isn't going to be, we call it out of the Reagan administration, getting out of Lebanon and then beating up on Grenada. This is going to be reversed over a

longer period of time of a consistency of action. What we've just seen with Afghanistan only reinforces the narrative of our adversaries for this. So it means that the hole that we're in is a little deeper and steeper to get out of. One of the ways that you get out of this hole in a cost-effective manner is by working through these irregular warfare capabilities. Again, that's how Russia did it. Russia's approach to reentering the Middle East, the greater Middle East, has been incredibly cost-effective, incredibly limited resources. And now they are totally regained what they lost since the 1970s, which is a seat at the table, and in some cases, a leading seat at the table for discussions about

the future of the region. The United States can learn from those lessons and can apply those lessons going forward. One of the missions of the Regular Warfare podcast is to bridge the gap between scholars and practitioners and try to make sure that practical experience and academic research talk to each other. So if you were to think about some of the enduring questions that remain with counterterrorism today, what do you think academic research could contribute towards better understanding those enduring questions? And I'll start with Liam and then go to Will. Yeah, I think in terms of terrorism and counterterrorism, I think a lot of research has gone into understanding terrorist organizations, right? How do they organize? Why do they conduct the violence? Why do some conduct suicide attack,

others don't? I think we're still way behind in terms of counterterrorism efforts and understanding what is effective and what isn't effective. So things that go along those kind of lines, we don't get at that as much in this edited volume as I would have liked. We get there a little bit with some of the irregular warfare, getting some lessons out of that. But those are typically understudied. And why are they understudied? Because it's hard, right? It's hard to draw conclusions. But that's where I think we'd want to get more work and more cooperation. Yeah, I think that's right. And I would also suggest a sort of bigger picture item that we encounter regularly in counterterrorism.

The distinctions between different kinds of terrorist organizations, different kinds of terrorist threats, not all terrorism, not all Islamic terrorism, not all Sunni-based terrorism, but there's a specific kind of Salafi jihadist terrorist group that every time it emerges in whatever place it emerges, in whatever name it's under, in whatever command and control name it's under and whatever command and control structure it's under, there's a debate in Washington every time. And that debate is, does this group only care about local issues or does this group interested in conducting external attacks, which could include attacks against Americans and American partners. And the debate inside of Washington is usually skewed towards those who say, I'll only believe the latter,

that this group does external attacks when I have a specific piece of intelligence in my hand that says that I listened to someone's phone and they talked about an external attack. And yet what we found for that particular type of terrorist group, the Salafi jihadist groups, they have a near perfect track record of every single time they get a physical sanctuary in a country from which they believe they can act with impunity, the internal incentives and

the incentives amongst like-minded people around the world drive them to do external attacks. But because we have that debate every single time, we are slow in responding to those challenges. We don't do what Liam talked about and going in early to all of this. As we've exited Afghanistan, as we're talking about over the horizon counterterrorism capabilities, as we're imagining doing them without the benefit of an embassy and local partners that we can work with very, very clearly. The policy question that comes up is exactly the same one. How quickly will Al-Qaeda, or again, whatever we want to call it in the future, reconstitute? And will it fundamentally change its approach that it's had in the past and only focus on local issues this time.

This time, those people are going to be right. I, as you can tell, am skeptical that they will have changed its stripes, but I am anticipating this argument being done again. This is not something that is necessarily solved by what I call capital I intelligence. So this is an argument that is ended by by what I call, you know, capital I intelligence. So this is something that this is an argument that is ended by lowercase I intelligence. And academics can play a huge role in understanding these groups, understanding the motivation, and making predictions on that basis. And so hopefully this time we can avoid losing a couple of years before

we do what's necessary. Will Wexler and Liam Collins, thank you very much for coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. It's been a great pleasure having you both. Thank you very much. Andy, Sean, it was great to be part of this. Yeah, this was really great. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again for listening to episode 33 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks.

In our next episode, Laura and I will discuss competition with China in the gray zone with Ambassador David Scheer and Dr. Zach Cooper. The following week, Kyle and Andy will host General John Allen and Wesley Morgan to discuss Afghanistan. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. And staying engaged with us on social media and through our website will help you keep up to date with our upcoming inaugural conference, which will take place in a virtual format on September 10th, 2021. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views and positions of the participants and don't represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government.

Thanks again. We'll see you next time.