Irregular Warfare Podcast - COIN and Culture: How Important is Cultural Intelligence in Counterinsurgency?

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

It has become axiomatic that cultural intelligence is key to success in counterinsurgency operations. But is it? This episode examines this assumption, exploring whether the cultural training we receive in the military is indeed the linchpin to success—or a red herring, even a harmful distractor, in the absence of coherent strategy. Why does cultural awareness tend to be absent at the strategic level, and does this really matter? Our guests on this episode, Sir Simon Mayall and Dr. Christian Tripodi, discuss these questions and more, including what cultural awareness should mean in the context of counterinsurgency and, looking ahead, in the era of great power competition. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

What it isn't is a debate over whether learning as much about your operating environment is a good thing or not. It obviously is, and it's the duty of any self-aware soldier, military professional, to learn as much about their operating environment as possible and the people that dwell within it and the structures that surround it. The issue that I want to look at is what happens when you try and use that knowledge as an instrument of change. We're frightfully culturally aware, but we don't like your culture. It's why we misinterpreted, dare I say, the Arab Spring as well. I think it's why we didn't quite spot the fall of the Shah coming, because we just kept listening to people who told us what

we wanted to hear, or who spoke like us, who had a vested interest in our presence. And so often, I'm afraid, down on the ground, we were disempowering a load of other people, or challenging their fundamentally held rights. Welcome to the latest episode of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm Andy Milburn, and I'll be your host today along with Kyle Atwell. Today's episode focuses on the role of cultural awareness in successful counterinsurgency operations. It has become axiomatic that cultural awareness is a key to success in counterinsurgency operations. Our guests discuss whether this assumption is true.

in counterinsurgency operations. Our guests discuss whether this assumption is true. Is the cultural training that military and interagency players receive indeed the linchpin to success in counterinsurgency? Or is it a red herring, even a harmful distractor in the absence of a coherent strategy? The answer is not a simple one,

but important for national security policymakers and practitioners to understand. Sir Simon Mayle retired from the British Army after a distinguished 40-year career, much of it spent in the Middle East. His time in uniform culminated in the position of Prime Minister Cameron's security envoy to Iraq

and the Kurdish regional government. Since retirement, he has written and spoken extensively about Western involvement in the Middle East, and has also authored a book, Soldier in the Sand, A Personal History of the Middle East. Dr. Christian Tripodi is head of graduate studies for the Defense Studies Department at King's College. His research focuses primarily on irregular warfare, particularly the approach

of Western militaries to irregular warfare and the forms of knowledge they use to understand the environment. Christian is the author of the book, The Unknown Enemy, Counterinsurgency and the Illusion of Control, which is the basis for today's conversation. 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 Sir Simon Mayall and Christian Tripodi. Sir Simon Mayall, Dr. Christian Tripodi, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast.

We're excited to have you both today and we appreciate you taking the time to join us for this conversation. Thanks very much, Andy. Looking forward to it. Yeah, looking forward to it too. So we're going to discuss today whether cultural awareness on the part of an external intervention forces matters in counterinsurgency operations. So to start, why is this question important? Beginning with you, Sir Simon, if you don't mind. this question important? Beginning with you, Sir Simon, if you don't mind. Way predating the Cold War, many of us were brought up at a time when we simply needed to be tactically and technically proficient. When I was a young troop leader on the Western Front, diplomacy failed, politics failed, the Third Shock Army came across the border,

we engaged them in a ding-dong battle. Who knows? We went nuclear. Russian Soviets went back, et cetera. But that was quite rare in our experience at the time. We were a colonial army for a long time. We were a post-colonial army as we withdrew from empire. And my first experience, really, was when I finished doing what I would call straight armored warfare, great counter-strokes across the northwest plains of Germany, and found myself in Oman working with the Sultan of Oman's armed forces. And I was the inheritor of a hugely successful counter-insurgency operation down in the south, in which the issues of a cultural

understanding, both the strategic, operational, and tactical level, we didn't use the term operational so much then, was very important. But there's no doubt about it. It's no good being culturally aware at the tactical level if your strategy, if your strategic objectives are falsely set. In that case, of course, we were very heavily helped by the Sultan himself, Sultan Qaboos, understanding full cultural awareness of his own country and his own influence on the way that the United Kingdom forces operated in that environment. And in many ways, we had to at that stage because it was hybrid war for us. You know, we provided the technical backbone and the technical expertise, but the bulk of the people who were doing the

fighting were the locals, but they were connected back to the strategic objective of the Sultan and connected them through us to the tactical action. And since then, we've seen it more and more often. But cultural awareness itself is most certainly not enough if it's only at the tactical level. Chris, there's been a lot of clamor over the past 20 years since 9-11 and probably before that, that cultural awareness among countering certain forces is an important element. But your book examines this in detail. Can you dig in a little bit to what your arguments are and your findings are reflecting on Sir Simon's initial opening? So just to provide some context, I teach, you know, I'm a King's College London academic, but I teach at the UK Defence Academy. And so for the past 20 years, I get a lot of speakers and senior military coming to stand

on stage and address the audience, particularly during the era of Iraq and Afghanistan. And you hearing from these speakers and also, you know, the doctrine and the general sort of tone of the conversation around those campaigns was that cultural intelligence was key to the success of effective counterinsurgency or any sort of intervention when you're fighting your sort of wars among the people, as it were. And it's held almost to be like some sort of secret source. You know, you get this understanding, you understand the environment, you understand the people, and then you can exert influence and achieve your objective. And that's almost the sort of simplistic level of the debate that was occurring at the time. So I wanted to test those assumptions, basically. And I wanted to

understand whether, you know, cultural intelligence understanding, or as the military might call it, situational awareness, was as fundamentally important as it was claimed and the extent to which it really makes a difference to campaign outcomes. So I wanted to examine how cultural intelligence, cultural understanding, functioned as part of the exercise of power and influence in these big, ambitious expeditionary coin campaigns. You know, the French, the Americans, and the British had mounted sort of over the past 50 years. And importantly, it's about how military actors use that sort of knowledge as an instrument in the way that it aids their decision making. And it's part of these very ambitious attempts to sort of transform target societies in accordance with, as Simon was saying, sort of often very bloated strategic objectives. So what it isn't is a debate over whether learning as much about your operating environment is a good thing or not. It obviously is. And it's the duty of any self-aware soldier, military professional, to learn as much about their operating environment as possible and the people

that dwell within it and the structures that surround it. The issue that I want to look at is what happens when you try and use that knowledge as an instrument of change. When you try and alter, for example, the politics of a country to try and suit your objectives as a counterinsurgent. So that debate just fitted into a much broader theme about population-centric coin, because that way of war sits upon the need to understand the local environment. That's a central part of it, and the extent to which that enables you to control the operating environment. And the book is subtitled The Illusion of Control. So that gives you some idea of where I'm coming from. So ultimately, the book is about a set of concepts and ideas relating around cultural intelligence and population-centric coin, the beliefs that guide counterinsurgents in their

endeavors, and then the things that distort their efforts and prevent them from succeeding. Chris's point is very well made. I mean, I'm sure many other speakers on your podcast, Colin, and if you use the old, certainly attributed Sun Tzu quote, strategy without tactics is the slowest path to victory. Tactics without strategy is just the drumbeat before defeat. And that's why I think Chris is absolutely right. We'll give you a degree of tactical control and you can add to the effectiveness

of your tactical control, to my mind, if you are situationally aware, which includes cultural awareness in very complex societies. But frankly, if you've got your cultural awareness at the macro level all wrong, you really are in a bad situation for dealing with the macro. I'll take as an example Iraq, absolutely classic. The macro level, people genuinely didn't get the fact that, I'm slightly paraphrasing, Arabs and Persians were different.

versions were different. But where, for instance, the British, and I'm not trying to sell the British side, but no one's aware of it, because we use Malaya very much as a case study of coin, where, of course, you were able to link up the political requirements, the political objectives of the Malaysian people for nationalism, getting the British out, with very good cultural understanding. It's still a hell of a flog, Malek. You then had a political objective in which your tactical actions and your strategy were combining. We had the same, as I say in Eman. Where you were someone like Algeria, and the French had been there forever,

it was metropolitan France. So they really should have understood better. But actually, the macro-strategic objectives were just unobtainable. So however much the French officers, soldiers, when it wasn't really that much because they were a conscripted army, they were going to get, ultimately, they were going to lose unless they were going to sink the whole GDP of France into fighting that operation.

And, of course, you get external threats. So I'll just make that as a general point. I think there's a difference between cultural awareness helping you tactically and cultural awareness actually acting against you. Simon mentions Malaya. It's an interesting one. It's held up to be a sort of paradigm of coin success. I think what differentiates Malaya in an important way in terms of this debate from, say, Iraq or Afghanistan is British and Commonwealth forces in Malaya, they're edging very slightly into ground-level politics, but not much. Broadlyaya, they're edging very slightly into ground level politics, but not much.

You know, that broadly speaking, they are conducting military operations against the CTs, the communist forces, and they are sort of shoehorning the locals into the new villages and sort of put them in these spaces and trying to separate the insurgent from the support. The politics, which is hugely important and is the war winning aspect of the whole shebang, is in the hands of the colonial office officials and Gerald Templer as a preeminent official combining military and civilian powers. The military don't really get involved in the politics of it. In Afghanistan and Iraq, what you're asking as part of these big ambitious coin operations and the sort of

trend towards political warfare, which is where the doctrine takes you, is that military actors do become ground-level political actors. And they are thrown into deeply complex political environments, and they are asked to become part of that environment and of themselves with all the problems that accrue from that. And so I think that was where the real issues came. Simon mentioned southern Iraq, a quite frankly paralyzingly complex political environment to operate. And then you become a player as a military commander within that environment. It's a savage undertaking. And the chances and the prospects of being able to, for your writ to count over and above those of your political rivals in the terms of local

political actors, the Iranians, and then central government in the form of Maliki and so forth. Almost impossible, I would say. So that's where the problem comes in. It's not only about militaries understanding their environment, it's when the circumstances, the situation then push them into, because of the absence of any other political authority on the ground, pushes them into having to do this. So ordinarily in southern Iraq, you would have wanted DFID, FCO, your other leaves of government to start doing the politics for you. You didn't get that. Part of the problem is that the policymakers, they have big perspectives and grand aims. They're not interested in granular understanding or detail, particularly if it contradicts the policy

objectives at play. So Montgomery McFate, for example, you know, I have some issues with some of her work, but I find a lot of it very interesting. But, you know, at the very outset of the campaign in Iraq, she said, look, you know, this fundamentally will work as long as you empower the tribal system to work on your behalf. But of course, that fundamentally contradicts the entire rationale and the logic for the war, which is to create a pluralistic democracy. Rumsfeld is not interested in hearing that you should empower the tribal sheikhs and bring them into the picture. And one of the massive problems the US Marine Corps have when they go into their AO in 2003, 2004, one of the first things they want to do is empower the sheikhs and bring the tribes into local politics,

and the CPA prevents them from doing so. The CPA says no. Coalition of British Law Authorities says that is our business. We'll decide who runs the country. And I'll tell you where probably the most egregious example of this is, is Afghanistan 2001, which is the Bon Accords, which decides, right, this is what Afghanistan is going to look like now that we have turfed out the Taliban. And what the Western interveners effectively say is that we are going to give Afghanistan, we're going to hand and concentrate political power into the hands of a single presidential individual, something that has never happened in Afghanistan's history whatsoever to that point. And by doing so, you automatically disenfranchise all the other power holders

in that political system on the periphery. So all the warlords and the religious leaders who traditionally have shared political power in a balancing act with those in Kabul. So you immediately set the seeds for unending violence as those have been delegitimized and disenfranchised seek to regain their power. And that was inflicted from above and nothing you can do as a counterinsurgent from that point forwards is going to be able to rescue that situation because the entire logic of the war is undermining what it is that you're doing in terms of trying to bring peace and stability. So this whole issue of setting militaries up for failure is absolutely critical in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. In France, sorry, with respect to Algeria,

slightly different. The French army lose their collective mind, declare war on their own government. The government does the right thing in responding effectively to the politics of the situation and deciding it'll give up Algeria. The French army has a collective sort of aneurysm and declares war on its own government. And that I find it a remarkable case study still. aneurysm and declares war on its own government. And that I find it a remarkable case study still. Actually, Chris, the other thing is, which I think we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq, is we're frightfully culturally aware, but we don't like your culture. So I've never seen a better snapshot of the expression pride comes before a fall than the American embassy flying the LBGT flag over the American embassy in Kabul

about 10 days before the Taliban took it. And I get it. I know this is back to universal rights. Some idea that we're going to go in, we're just going to be looking at our own security, not interested in women's education, not interested in human rights, anathema to our politicians and our policymakers. I absolutely get it. But by goodness, we underestimate the social conservatism of societies and the religious

piety in a manner that we didn't years ago, because we came from quite socially conservative and religiously pious societies ourselves. But there's been such a divergence. And it's why we misinterpreted, dare I say, the Arab Spring as well. I think it's why we didn't quite spot the fall of the Shah coming, because we just kept listening to people who told us what we wanted to hear, or who spoke like us, who had a vested interest in our presence. And so often, I'm afraid, down on the ground, we were disempowering a load of other people or challenging their fundamentally held rights because we didn't like them. So we were saying, you know, we're absolutely culturally aware and we really understand it.

But sorry, I'm not interested in this patriarchy, not interested in this or your attitudes towards women, gays, whatever. Really, really difficult. And our soldiers on the ground, I think, utterly got it. They think, my God, we've got to do something to move this society on. But we then began, that's where you get this extraordinary mission creep that goes into nation building or nation, I don't know, transforming in a manner that makes actually fighting tactical battles very, very difficult. So when you get pushback, you start killing people. And when you start killing people,

you're back into a culture that supports the vendetta and the blood feud. But is there not a responsibility on those senior leaders in uniform then to, you know, all the things that both you and Sir Simon have mentioned as being obstacles to lasting success in these wars? Are these things that senior military leaders should be bringing to the attention of policymakers? So this is where I probably rile Simon's feathers to some extent. Well, that's why I asked. I think to some extent military is, that's why I asked. I think to some extent, military is complicit in some of what happens. And I'll explain how.

So part of the book was, why do things not work as we think they should be in these sorts of interventions? There's no doubt that the scene setting is hugely problematic. So that the putting of the military into a situation where

success is going to be very hard to achieve is obviously not ideal. But there are additional problems as well. One of those is simply actually the power and agency of those that we engage with on the ground. They have their own power, their own influence in a way that often outweighs ours. And when we engage with them, we find that we have all the guns and the money, but often they have the real influence to make things happen.

We talked about local politics in southern Iraq, and we can talk about the same at the village level or district level in Afghanistan or Vietnam. But other things are problematic as well. So I think doctrine is a real problem. I think it is reductive, and it gets a lot of things wrong, and it gives military actors a false understanding of the problem that they are confronting, and therefore leads them in the wrong direction. So the doctrine writers need to have a little bit of a look at themselves. But more important than that, and one of the sort of central aspects of the book, was understanding how militaries approach COIN in a cognitive sense. You know, how do they interpret the problem?

How do they frame it in their minds? And so I borrowed from Professor Colin Jackson, who you've had on the Irregular Warfare podcast. His basic premise is that Western military professionals respond to counterinsurgency in very particular ways, and that they interpret it initially as a small version of big war. So they devote a primarily military response to addressing that, when they realize that only gets them as far as the stalemate because military primacy only matters to a certain degree in coin. They incorporate some other methods, some additional population-centric methods,

engage with the locals, build some schools, build some hospitals, whatever. But they never divert far from their preferred mode of operation, which is essentially the application of compelling force. So there's a lot of decoration around that and the form of population-centric methods. But the central behavior is military-centric in the sense of we are the state's professional managers of violence. This is what we do best. This is how we operate. I think that's a good point. And earlier when Simon said that we had a decent cultural awareness in Afghanistan, my initial question was, how much did we really embrace it? And I have a few kind of points on this. First, it seems like at least in the United States military, there's very few units who actually are fully dedicated to cultural immersion. I think the U.S. Army Special Forces might be kind of an exception to that. But otherwise, a lot of units who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq may have gone a couple weeks of language training. Maybe were taught a couple things at their pre-mission training, but really deep cultural understanding is difficult. And then

as you said, there might be a focus on kinetic operations and implementation phases, Colin Jackson has kind of argued. But the last thing, I think a point in your book, which is worth expounding on is even if we had units who were fully culturally aware, they spent years immersing in this. And I think maybe Sir Simon's personal experience ended up being this way in his operations in the Middle East. I believe an argument you made in the book is that it's just too complex with local politics for even the best intention, best informed external actor to ever fully understand what they're getting enmeshed in.

Is that kind of an accurate interpretation of your argument? Yeah, I think so. And I think you can know a lot about a society by engaging with locals. You can read academic works and you can talk to anthropologists. But some things are simply too difficult to understand, or they are actively hidden from you by the locals themselves. They will hide from you what they consider important often. There's a very good line in Dr. Mike Martin's book on the civil war in Helmand when he quotes

a Helmandi that he's talking to who says, even I try not to think about the politics in Helmand because it's so strange and complicated. And Mike Martin's point was in a society like that, the disputes at play are so hyper-local and so hyper-historical. What you've got theoretically is an insurgency. What you've actually got is a civil war, a society that's been at war with itself for decades by that point. And a lot of the causes of that violence are what he terms hyper-local, hyper-historical. So they're tied up in feuds that go back 40 or 50 years and personal relationships between key actors that you will never divine. You will never be able to develop a good enough picture of what's going on. And even if you do, you lack the ability to instrumentalize that knowledge to create

the effect that you want out of it. So I genuinely believe, particularly in, and this is the key about Afghanistan, you know, if you go into Afghanistan at the outset thinking, right, it's all about regime change, it's about defeating the Taliban and putting a new government in place, that automatically makes you think about the sort of technocratic dimension of state building. that point and has been tearing itself apart on a consistent basis, and that you're about to fully immerse yourself in those internecine disputes that have been going on for decades, then you might have a very different idea of the amount of good that you can achieve and the amount of things that you can understand. And I think that was one of the mistakes made at the outset. It was seen as quite an anodyne task, you know, remove the Taliban, create a new legitimate political creation in the form of Karzai government, You know, remove the Taliban, create a new legitimate political creation

in the form of Karzai government, you know, get some sort of infrastructure built up and throw some money at the problem, and then you can go. But actually what you're getting engaged with is a conflict so complex that even locals don't quite understand it. And you expand that out on a national level,

and that's where your problems lie. And I'll take the Helmand one. We took over in Helmand. You know, we knew, again, the background of Helmand. It was a huge irrigation project set up in the 1950s, and they brought in tribes from all over Afghanistan, which is great, lovely. But what they did, of course, was they brought in all their own cultural things, be it from Herat or Missouri-Sharif or Jalalabad or Qatar. In many ways, we should have spotted this. Again, this is why I say some of the early mistakes just come back to haunt you.

And constantly in Helmand, we would find a tribe would take us on. I say us, in this case, the Brits. You know, the Americans came down, as Chris has referred to their surge. And they'd take us on. And then they suddenly realized we were winning tactically because, you know, we win every firefight. But, you know, that doesn't ever mean you get your strategy right. And then their relative strength relative to another tribe next door would begin to wane.

So suddenly they'd put a truce in with NATO, build back their strength, because actually what they wanted to do was get this. And a lot of the intelligence we were getting was all that chap, Chris Tripodi. He's, oh, bloody hell, I know he's in the Taliban. So we go in and get Chris Tripodi. we find it's just a straight finder. You three as military professionals you know you know what it's like to be put in stressful environments and have to absorb information very quickly to make sense of it it's different for me as an academic and I have the luxury of time and I sit in a cozy office and read books but But I have to admit, writing particularly on the politics of southern Iraq, it was extremely difficult to get a very basic understanding, just reading,

you know, reading these articles to get a basic understanding of political structures in southern Iraq. I remember speaking to, he was, he went out in 2007 as chief of staff to Jonathan Shaw. So I won't mention his name, he's a very good friend. But he said, you know, a very bright guy, as Jonathan Shaw was an Oxford graduate, you know, an intellectual. And he said, nothing I've ever trained for or studied for could ever have prepared me for what I encountered in southern Iraq and trying to understand what was happening around us. And he found it so difficult to treat clarity of thought and understanding. Just a sense of what was happening was beyond them almost at that point. And then you're into emergency measures. And as Simon says, you're into, you know, trying to massively simplify the problem, you know, cut deals from

position of weakness, because that's the position you're in. You cannot manipulate the local environment. You can barely understand it. You have no real power. You've been hobbled by not only local actors, but your own government in terms of the force structures that have been provided to you and the level of resources. And it must be an awfully stressful situation. That's all I can say. Yes. So to that point, and because that seems to be a trend now, from the perspective of the military, what is the fix? Is it that we're doing the wrong things on the ground in any case?

the wrong things on the ground in any case? Or is it that, as I think was your argument, Christian, we may be doing the right things on the ground that's totally irrelevant if it doesn't match a coherent policy? So does the military need to change its outlook? Or does there need to be just more pushback when the objectives and goals are not met? The military obviously is constrained in the extent to which it can push back or say no to the situations it's put in. But I think it's odd in a way, Afghanistan does provide a glimpse, you know, I mentioned it before, the surge. I think if one looks at the period 2009-2011, you know, arguably the Taliban is explicitly defeated on the field of battle in Helmand and Kandahar where the surge takes place. Political progress is made, you know,

the quality of life for millions of Afghans does improve, there's a degree of political stability. Now, problematically, it's all underpinned by the presence of Western forces. But what you see there is the military component simplifying its understanding of what it's all about, which is to take ground off the Taliban and to suppress them physically and to destroy their will to fight, ground of the Taliban and to suppress them physically and to destroy their will to fight and to take care of business in a kinetic sense and to allow Karzai to work his magic, you know, with his tribal sort of allies and his functionaries in both Helmand and Kandahar. And you see some sort of rough success begin to emerge from that. The problem is just the financial resources required to make that work. And I think Carter Markezian's recent book on the war in Afghanistan, a brilliant piece of work,

but as he points out, you're spending just in aid money alone, close to three quarters of a billion over two years to bring security to 2 million people. And if you take the surge as a whole, the war in Afghanistan in 2010 is costing double the federal budget for education. And so you have COIN effectively dictating US strategy in relation to Afghanistan rather than the other way around. So you have a glimpse of actually what can be done, which is the military just saying, military actors saying, right, we know to some extent we get this sort of sophisticated environment that we're in.

We know it's complex. we know it's difficult, but we are going to effectively take care of, you know, those aspects of the problem that we can deal with best, which is the military component of it. And we will try and enable enough space to be created so that the politics can occur around that. But that's not our business, that's someone else's business. Well, we haven't discussed much, Andy, it's of course the use of local proxies and you know as i said we talked about iraq where we to my mind fatally undermined our security you know just providing basic security because fundamentally the civil war in iraq broke out almost as soon as we'd removed saddam everybody was fighting for their bits of

whatever and there was a religious cleansing rather than ethnic cleansing very early on. And we simply then lost prestige and reputation by not being able to sit on that and not having co-opted the then Iraqi scudi forces. And that, oh, crap, we're trying to build the aircraft while we're flying it, as we try to build up the ISF. We did the same in Afghanistan. Cries, far better to let them do it themselves than us do it even if we think we're going to do it better. We'll probably do it better tactically,

but actually the strategic objectives are less likely to be met if it's an invading occupying army. Where we've managed to train partner, train assist and accompany, I think we've seen where there might be more successful models. And that was the tragedy, to my mind, in Afghanistan, going back to the question about 20 years, we'll hang about, because very small numbers at that stage, given the investment we'd already put in, blood and treasure, was holding a reasonably big NSF in the field. Now, it wasn't likely, it was corrupt, there were all sorts of other things. But walking away was absolutely, to my mind, the wrong answer, where staying there with contractors, numbers of American servicemen, and then providing that where NATO could build,

actually was, from a straight security point of view, providing enough security that we weren't going to get these great migration flows, which we are going to get now. If we'd gone into Iraq saying, the last thing we're going to do is get rid of the Iraqi security forces, we'll decapitate the top Ba'athists, again, I think we'd have had a totally different outcome. When we went into Oman, as I say, largely because I think politics and tactics were well aligned, the cultural awareness was dovetailed. And we found actually communism was not popular, of course, with a tribal religious organization. So we could turn that back on. But what it was, again, was very small numbers of technically proficient Westerners with

access via radios to firepower, very important for keeping infantry confident on the ground. And that sort of model, I do think, works in COIN, and again, requires cultural awareness and the preparedness to accompany those you train, because these are sort of shame-based cultures, and where commanders step up, which is why they often collapse when they're all indigenous, but a backbone of American-British expertise with connectivity back to medical, logistics, with connectivity back to medical, logistics, surveillance, of course, target acquisition, air and aviation, actually reduces the number you've got. But it's quite difficult to build up that capability from scratch while you're right in the middle of both an insurgency and a civil war. Although this discussion has been about cultural assimilation or cultural awareness,

it seems to me from what you both have just said, it's really about political will, because arguably the difference between, you know, those on the edge of the empire and kind of the modern day version within, for instance, UK or US military, the main difference is longevity in their position. It's not necessarily a difference in keenness to learn the culture, it's just the ability to do so in such a short period of time. I totally agree with that, Andy. The anecdote that, again, is in my book, and it's quite well known, is people going into Tony Blair, who was a pretty mediocre historian at Oxford, frankly, and spending about two hours getting the maps out, talking about, you know,

Kabul are here, and this is holy ground, and pilgrims come from Iraq, and watch out for the Syrians, because they'll do a takfiri deal, and da-da-da-da-da. And the Sunni, Shia, and watch out for the Kurds, and this, da-da-da-da. Two hours into it, at the end of it, they walked out. And that would be helpful to take over to Washington, your political understanding of what you might do at the political level to make sure the military are set up for what they're going to do. His guy was, yes, but Sudan is a nasty map. Ah, yes, no, no, we're all agreed on that. They don't have a problem with that.

But trust me, there may be worse things for our own long-term objectives than getting rid of them, the sunni cork in the bottle, which we've now seen by removing them, we've allowed the Iranians to go all the way to the bloody Mediterranean coast. It's almost worse than that. I think prior to General Johnston Shaw going out to Iraq in 2007 to assume command of MND Southeast, he and his command team went to number 10 to receive political instructions as to what British policy and objectives were. And I've heard this from more than one individual who was in that room at the time separately. And the instruction given was, Tony would like things to be better than they are now. That was it. It was that classic sketch in Blackadder where he's told to circumnavigate the globe, asked for a map, and is given a blank piece of paper to fill out on his way around. So you can then, of course, Jonathan Shaw is the individual who creates the

accommodation with Al-Fartusi and the jam, because he is having to effectively act on his own initiative, because he's getting no political guidance from above. He doesn't know what is acceptable, what is not. All he knows is he doesn't have the resources to do anything other than come to an accommodation with his enemy. So part of the problem, going back to what Simon said about not disbanding the army and the bathhouse, I absolutely get that. I do align with that reasoning to an extent. The problem is, number one, you have a values-based foreign policy and you are going into Iraq to overturn a regime. And those have been the instruments of the regime to oppress and suppress the population of Iraq for decades now. So to allow those to remain in place, extremely, extremely difficult.

And so I think you're trapped by your own rhetoric. The rhetoric you need to deploy in order to gain public approval for the thing that you're about to do is a rhetoric that then traps you from making the strategy that you need to make in order for things to work. And that was where you find yourself in 2003 and also in Afghanistan. The British found, the British found and Americans found that it's, you find actually the person that is most likely to bring security to your local area is the chief of police who is a murderous pedophile and is making $3 million a

month from the drug trade. But he will actually bring you what you need. But of course, your political masters can't tolerate that whatsoever. So is the problem and this is actually mike martin you know he said this and i mentioned in the book one of the fundamental problems you have with this sort of cultural intelligence understanding situational awareness whatever you want is that sometimes when you get it you realize that your objectives are unfeasible because now you understand the fine detail of the problem that you're up against. And then that's when you begin to realize that things are unachievable. So it actually erodes your ability to do things. If you can see things in black and white, fine, but once you start seeing shades of gray, it's a problem. On that note, which is a great move into

the third part of this discussion, we talk about implications. And for Christian, what do you see as being the implications for policymakers from this discussion? So there is, first of all, I suppose the ultimate requirement of policymakers is to always differentiate between the desirable and the feasible. I mean, it was desirable that Muammar Gaddafi was not in power and that Libya be a nice, functioning, pluralistic democracy on the back of that. It was never feasible that that ever be the case after he was removed from power. And in the same way, it's desirable for Iraq to be a free market, pluralistic democracy, same for Afghanistan. None of those things are feasible. So fundamentally, for policymakers, it's a fine understanding of the difference between the two, realistically, to sort of trim the ambition and to understand, ultimately, the limits of our power, I think, the limits of our ability. So the key point of the book was to illustrate that actually, although the actors at play in the form of, know the us the uk the french in particular you know immensely powerful in their own right the ability to make that power and influence count

on the ground is actually very limited because other things matter more so depending on your objectives if for example you are talking about regime change and turning one country's political tradition into something else then i would say say forget about that. Unless you back that up with, as Simon was saying, a willingness to spend 40 or 50 years there and devote hundreds and hundreds of billions probably into the bargain, then forget about it. Far more limited aims and ambitions about blocking an adversary or creating a more advantageous state of affairs than might exist at present, okay, then that's probably the business that you're always going to be in going forwards. And saying that we're never going to do counterinsurgency again or other forms of regular warfare is a fool's errand.

The United States famously comes out of Vietnam, says, right, never again. It makes an active decision, get rid of all its counterinsurgency manuals, sort of figuratively sort of burn them and say, right, you know, it's back to the West German, East German plane and wait for Boris to come rumbling towards us in his armoured divisions. And what you get instead is three decades of small wars, you know, interventions, regime change and counterinsurgency campaigns ultimately in Iraq and Afghanistan on the back of that. And I think Ukraine actually is illicit of this, what's happening at the moment. You have to acknowledge that the unthinkable is probably going to happen at some point, the unthinkable and the horrific and the undesirable. And to my mind, the world is

an unstable and competitive environment. The adversaries are out there in a variety of locations. And it probably means that for a variety of reasons to take care of our own security interests, that engagement in hot, dusty, distant, complex lands is probably still on the horizon in the next 10, sort of 15 years. So I just think that policymakers have to be very clear in their objectives and very limited in their ambitions. And then understand the military is good at certain things. The military is an expert in certain aspects of managing outcomes,

but you have to allow its skills to come to the fore and not force the military to effectively take responsibility for other lines of operation that should be the responsibility of either local actors or other government departments. That's an interesting observation on Ukraine, because there's definitely been a feeling the last year or two that there's exhaustion with counterinsurgency and irregular warfare in certain sectors of at least the United States national security establishment. And yet with a very conventional sort of invasion of Ukraine, we're immediately talking about whether the Ukrainians are going to stage an insurgency and how that would be supported through various means. Absolutely. I think it's never going to be off the table. Obviously, none of us can say with any certainty what will happen in Ukraine

going forwards. But obviously, we have to accommodate the notion that there may well be a prolonged insurgency occurring there and resistance to whatever presence the Russians have. So, you know, counterinsurgency is on the table. It'll be a Russian form of coin and the Russian way of war, but it's there and it's not going away. As we went into Iraq, largely hoping for a conventional war, we fought it actually with considerable restraint compared to how we've seen the Russians in Ukraine. And then, of course, we went into a counterinsurgency, which is not really on our plans. We weren't configured for it. The doctrine was out of date by that stage. The Russians may find they're doing something similar. They've gone in, you know, with a certain force level attempting to, not really a shock and awe as the likes of the American ideology of shock and

awe was different. It was about actually, say, paralyze. You had objective. They'll use shock and awe the Russian way, which is just mass artillery. But they may well find that it does morph into a counterinsurgency campaign. Armies don't like that. But a quote, again, I used, and I think it does link to this, is we talked about it last night, which was the Clausewitz, you know, war is politics by other means. But in counterinsurgency, politics is war by other means. And where you get your politics right, how you conduct your military operations doesn't

necessarily need to take you into war. And that was the answer in Dover. Funnily enough, it was the answer eventually in Northern Ireland, a mixture of economic advance and meeting in some way the political objectives of the nationalist community, what eventually drove out the poison from the counterterrorism, counterinsurgency campaign. So I do think, as I say, going back to my sort of initial thing, get the politics right, then you can get the insurgency right. As a kind of final question before we close out, the theme of this conversation was, does cultural awareness help in counterinsurgency? I'd just like to close out for policymakers and practitioners.

What's your kind of bottom line? Is this something that we do need to continue investing in in the future, given that counterinsurgencies are going to be inevitable, even if it's not an ideal kind of approach? Or should we be focusing our efforts in other places? So I suppose the simple answer is yes. So to my mind, what Ukraine represents is a sort of, it won't be long in saying this, you know, a recrudescence of great power rivalry, a new Cold War. And as it probably undoubtedly will, if it mimics the previous iteration, you know, the first

Cold War, as it were, then that rivalry and that competition will play out in a variety of locations in a global sense. And if you look at a map of Russian and Chinese interests, Russian in particular, but also Africa is front and center in terms of not only extracting mineral resources, the supply of weaponry and the sponsoring of political elites. Russia is relatively well embedded in Africa and probably will only be more so over the next decade or so. And a crucial aspect of this, which I think is going to come to the fore over the next few years, is the way in which the Russians are going to position themselves to manipulate migrant flows into Europe. This is a neuralgic issue politically for Europe, for the European Union.

You have a significant population growth. When I say significant, that's an understatement. So the figures are quite startling. So if you look at the UN forecast, you're looking at about population increase of about a billion before 2050 in Africa alone, and a succession of sort of political entities there that cannot cope with that level of growth. And so what you're going to see potentially is vast, vast migration routes northwards. Some estimates of up to 200 million Africans moving into Europe over the next sort of three decades. So the issue is, you know, at a broader level, well,

what do you do about that bigger problem? You know, how do you frame that issue of migration and the effects that that may have on European politics? But more importantly, as well as part of that is, you know, how do you deal with an adversary who may be seeking to capitalize on that instability, you know, as a bad actor fundamentally within the international system who will weaponize those sorts of issues. And so I think the ability for Western forces to look at sub-Saharan Africa and to feel comfortable with the notion of operating there in defense of national security interests going forward is important. And as on the basis of that, then, you know, the ability

to know and understand enough of the local environment to sort of operate relatively effectively without making problems worse than they already are is absolutely critical. You can't go in blind. So from a purely practical point of view, with my sort of alarmist's hat on, saying the world can always get worse, I would say the example of competition between the West primarily, so France, Britain, and the US, and Russia in Africa, in and of itself is enough to suggest that the sorts of capabilities and issues that we're talking about still be a priority to a certain extent. And we've seen with the British, the Croatian Now, the Special Operation Brigade, you know, the Ranger Regiment, Security Force Assistance Brigades, and they will be modelled fairly explicitly. I know the Rangers will be modelled fairly explicitly on the Green Berets

in terms of their training and their role. There seems to be, I would hope, an understanding that these sorts of skills and capabilities are still genuinely important. Let's not get overly distracted by what we've seen occur in Ukraine. That's massively important, but that issue will metastasize. It won't just stay there in that form. It'll grow into other regions in other ways. Yeah, I'd agree very much with what Chris says. These are skills we should not be parking.

You never know when you need them and trying to develop them at short notice in the middle of a fight when the politics is all up in the air. You know, we military, I think, need to continue to be the guardian of cultural awareness or the idea of it. Defence engagement, prevention better than cure, you know, a really big intelligence network manned by people, machines, you name it, that genuinely can lean into cultural awareness. Personal relationships that defence engagement gives you, people who know each other, people who can say, tell me what I'm looking at and hopefully get an honest answer.

Real familiarity, starting early, those flashpoints that Chris identifies. I think I'll be interested when i talk to my own regiment queen's screen guards coming back from mali french are pulling out after nine years wagner group some people are saying that wagner group are there specifically to generate what that sort of doomsday scenario chris is about conditions under which migrant populations go and so our capacity to do it, to my mind, whether you're in a counterinsurgency or about to go into one

or something's morphed into it or you're trying to prevent it, to my mind says, just continue to invest in these sort of cultural skills that make people much more comfortable dealing in tricky, very complex parts of the world where religion, tribalism, family, history with neighbors, borders, pretty artificial, are important that people understand them.

Simon and Chris, thanks very much for coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. That was a great discussion. Thanks for having us. Brilliant. Thanks very much indeed. Greatly enjoyed it. Thanks again for listening to the latest episode of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, we discuss how open technological innovation is arming tomorrow's terrorists with Dr. Audrey Cronin of American University and Major General Patrick Roberson, the commander of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. After that, Shauna and a guest host from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Audrey Alexander, will discuss countering online extremism with Dr. Dan Byman of Georgetown University and Nick Rasmussen, the former director of the National

Counterterrorism Center. 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. One last note. What you hear 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.