Irregular Warfare Podcast - Cold War Lessons for a New Era: Connecting IW and Great Power Competition

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Episode 103 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast examines the role that irregular conflicts played during the Cold War to inform today’s era of strategic competition.   Our guests begin by explaining how irregular conflicts and capabilities play a role in strategic competition, despite policy structures in Washington that often silo great power conflict from irregular warfare. They then discuss evidence from the Cold War that suggests small, local wars often become battlegrounds between great powers. Finally, our guests conclude with a discussion of the kinds of irregular warfare interventions policymakers should consider for today’s era of great power competition and make recommendations for removing bureaucratic hurdles that would better integrate policies and practice for IW and strategic competition.

When you look at the history of the Cold War, the vast majority of the fighting happened in the context of what we would think of as a regular conflict. In a regular warfare competencies like training partner forces, counterinsurgency, and conventional warfare, they were critical in many cases. But when I looked at the policy discourse in D.C. last summer, it was laser-focused on setting the stage to prevail in conventional conflict with other great powers. Sometimes these localized conflicts can have important impact on our broader strategic competition. So the Sahel example, we can think about in this light in terms of broader competition for strategic resources. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Alisa Laufer, and my co-host today is Matt Mullering. This episode is the first in a series of podcasts dedicated to a new special project that we're calling Cold War Lessons for a New Era. Today's episode examines

irregular warfare lessons from the Cold War in consideration of today's era of strategic competition. Our discussion today is anchored in Dr. Jake Shapiro's recent article in War on the Rocks titled, Great Power Competition Will Drive Irregular Complex. Our guests begin by explaining how irregular warfare capabilities play a role in strategic competition, despite policy structures in Washington that often silo great power conflicts from irregular warfare. They then discuss evidence from the Cold War that suggests small local wars often become battlegrounds between great powers. Finally, our guests conclude with recommendations for moving bureaucratic hurdles that would better integrate policies and practice for regular warfare and strategic competition.

Dr. Jake Shapiro is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, where he directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, which is one of the sponsors of our podcast. Jake has published dozens of articles in academic journals, and he's the author of the book The Terrorist Dilemma. He's also the co-author of the in academic journals, and he's the author of the book The Terrorist Dilemma. He's also the co-author of the book Small Wars, Big Data, The Information Revolution and Modern Conflict.

Dr. Shapiro is a Navy veteran, and he recently served as a special advisor for foreign malign influence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Dr. Francis Brown is a Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Previously, Brown served as Director for Democracy in Fragile States on the White House National Security Council staff, where she helped manage policy processes

on democracy support and conflict stabilization efforts, serving under both the Obama and Trump administrations. Prior to the NSC, Brown served at the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Transition Initiatives, managing political transition programs in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa, from the field and Washington. You're 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's

our conversation with Dr. Shapiro and Dr. Brown. Jake, Francis, thanks so much for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. You're welcome, Alyssa. Thrilled to be here. Really happy to be here. Thank you. So, Jake, you recently published an article that argues for continued investment in irregular warfare capabilities during today's era of great power competition.

Before we unpack your argument, I wanted to ask both of you, how do you define irregular warfare and how do you see it as distinct from but related to great power conflict? I don't actually think of irregular warfare as something that's distinct from great power conflict. For our purposes today, we can really think of it as all the activities which happen routinely as part of great power competition that don't involve direct fighting or even preparing to fight each other. We can very productively push back against the tendency to view IW and great power competition as distinct competencies. Because when you look at the historical record, a key part of competition is almost always irregular. We saw this in the colonial conflicts before World War I, and we saw it throughout the Cold War. So to think about these as distinct disciplines that are somehow separate seems to me to be a kind of category mistake that we should avoid and that leads us down problematic paths in terms of how we make

policy and how we resource the defense community. And I would say from my standpoint on the civilian side of the House, thinking of civilian departments and agencies, my sense very much echoes what Jake just said from the military side. I'll note that in the civilian sphere, we usually don't talk about waging irregular warfare, but we do talk a lot about the capabilities and tools we need to be effective in irregular warfare environments. Or sometimes we refer to them as fragile states environments or conflict-affected environments. or sometimes we refer to them as fragile states environments or conflict affected environments. And we talk about those tools. We talk about things like stabilization or support to strategic communication, support to locally legitimate political actors. So all of these competencies and tools, I think, are relevant to a regular warfare context, but they are also relevant to the broader strategic competition, great power competition,

that we'll talk about more. Oftentimes that competition, the places that are in play in terms of influence for the great powers are the ones that are in this kind of intermediate state where there's some instability. It's not clear where the government's going to go. And assistance from the U.S., either on the civilian side or on the military side, can sometimes move them in a direction that's more favorable to U.S. interests over the long run. And that kind of competition, that's where the margins are. The established states, the ones that are clearly on one side or the other, they're not going to move. It's the ones that are fragile, conflict-affected, where governance is in flux in some way, that there are opportunities on both

sides to move and advance the strategic competition. With that, Jake, is there a reason why you were compelled to write this article, especially at this point in time? Absolutely. So when I was reflecting coming out of a period of government service in May, and I was looking at the current national security discourse, something I mentioned in the very first IW podcast really rung true for me, which is that when you look at the history of the Cold War, the vast majority of the fighting happened in the context of what we would think of as a regular conflict. In a regular warfare competencies like training partner forces, counterinsurgency, and unconventional warfare, plus the associated civilian activities that

Francis knows vastly more about, they were critical in many cases. But when I looked at the policy discourse in D.C. last summer, which finds a very clear articulation in the Biden administration's national defense strategy, it was laser-focused on setting the stage to prevail in conventional conflict with other great powers. The view seems to be that while the president may send forces to fight in small wars or to be partners in them, we're not going to budget against that except through security cooperation missions. Now, look, there are like good reasons for that focus, which we can discuss, but it struck me that there could be a very important corrective in digging back into the last era of great power conflict, which lasted

for almost 50 years, and ask where and how did we actually fight during that era, and what can we learn from that experience? Francis, as someone who has worn both the scholar and practitioner hat, do you agree with Jake's take on Washington? Very much so. And as Jake was describing his observations, it made me realize that there were tremendous parallels during the Obama administration and even the Trump administration. I served on the National Security Council staff in both of those administrations, and I ran a policy process that was about U.S. priorities in fragile states in irregular warfare environments, in other words. One thing

I noted about that policy process is that the people sitting around the table, the sort of functional experts, the decision makers in that process, were in a completely different conversation from those in a parallel policy conversation on strategy. What do we do about China? What do we do to compete with revisionist powers like Russia? These policy processes were running in parallel and largely disconnected. And my sense is much of that pattern continues on, that we see the fragile states process. We can talk about the Global Fragility Act later. Those functional experts oftentimes are not in deep conversation with the broader conversation about strategic competition. Why this is important is to echo Jake.

We need to think about where this competition happens and where the contestation might happen, the real margins. That is oftentimes in Africa. That is oftentimes in Latin America, some parts of Asia. So there is a need to, I think, connect these policy conversations. I'll give you just one illustration that I've thought about, and I know Jake has thought about really deeply too, on sort of why it's problematic that we put some countries into the sort of category of irregular warfare, small wars, fragile states, rather than countries that

are relevant to great power competition. Think about the countries of the Sahel over the last few years. For a long time, we've seen the Sahel as a forum where we, along with Western partners, often supported those governments fighting jihadis, long-term counterterrorism efforts. You look at a place like Mali, that fight against the jihadis supported by the French, to some degree, wasn't going so well. It led to a coup in recent years. The coup leaders have now moved much closer to Russia as a result. So a country that we've thought about in this sort of just ongoing warfare, global war on terror context, is now relevant to strategic competition. So I think in short, we need to better connect these conversations

about countries that might be conflict affected versus countries that are relevant to strategic competition. And I just want to amplify something Frances said there and leads to kind of a question for her, which is that, you know, across Central Africa over the last four or five years, we've seen an increase in the rate of coups. We've seen an increase in government instability. And that has led to openings for Russian influence over governments and for China's acquisition of critical mineral resources, which leads to concerns about the sustainability of supply chains for all kinds of resources, including core IT resources and core resources for the green energy transition.

And so as we look at that, it was not perceived until very recently as an issue of great power competition. As Francis noted, it was perceived as a series of different irregular conflicts, some CT, counterterrorism missions, but it wasn't framed in terms of this decades-long competition that we're moving into. And I'm curious for Francis' thoughts on why that might have been. Was it because there was no structured process on the NSC to think about these cross-cutting been. Was it because there was no structured process on the NSC to think about these cross-cutting concerns? Was it a failure of imagination that people just didn't connect the dots until it became so obvious that Russian influence was on the march? Or is it just that it was hard to anticipate? It could have ended in Mali and didn't necessarily need

to propagate. And the fact that it did is unfortunate, but wasn't obvious beforehand. So I'm not sure which of those we should think about as the reason that we fail to connect the dots and treat this as a strategic great power competition arena from the start, as opposed to just getting to that realization really in the last year. So I think there's two answers I would give to that, Jake. One is logistical, and the second is sort of bureaucratic. Logistically, I'm sympathetic to the fact that it is within the U.S. government. It's a lot of dimensions to coordinate. It is really hard to get the small wars, regular warfare people in the same room with the China strategy people in the same room with all the regional experts. So there's a tendency that this could become a theory of everything, an all-encompassing policy process. I think that's

one reason why this issue of smaller wars being relevant to the big war, the big competition, didn't work out. I think the second reason, Jake, is bureaucratic in the following way. In the U.S. government, as you know well, and certainly in civilian departments and agencies, the regional bureaus, the regional directors, the regional people, they still tend to have primacy. And so the regional China people or the regional Asia people have their policy process focused primarily on China. And it sort of unfolds in disconnect from the people making the Africa strategy, the people with the Africa policy process. It's very hard to bring those strains

into dialogue. It just jumped out to me as you were talking. It was kind of interesting to ponder why. And it really strikes me, given my experience in other policy domains, as likely that it's just very hard to get the people in the room and to structure the right policy coordinating committee process to adjudicate across these different constituencies, these different interest groups. And so unless there is a very senior, very high level push to treat these things in a synchronized and coordinated manner, it's not going to happen. Not because people aren't aware of the implications or don't see them, but structuring a process around them is just not front and center in people's minds. One thing I've noticed throughout my policy career is that it is always hard to

have the important take precedence when you have the urgent. There's always this tension between the urgent versus the important. At the level that you would need to be coordinating this policy process, which is probably the NSC because it has so many departments involved, at that level, the urgent always crowds out the important. So to have a long-term policy process that really gets at that and gets at the drivers and then gets to solutions, that is really challenging to do when you any day of the week have the urgent crowding it out. to do when you any day of the week have the urgent crowding it out. So I think that, you know, it comes back to this theme that you've referenced of just getting these comparative functional experts in the room with the regional experts with the right timeframe is just very hard to do bureaucratically. Thanks to you both for those thoughtful responses. I think that framing on

Washington is actually really helpful to have as we continue with this conversation. And I encourage you both to continue to share that. I want to move forward to talk a little bit more about the specifics of your article, Jake. In the article, you suggest that the United States would be wise to diversify its investments across both conventional and irregular capabilities as it prepares for competition with its great power adversaries. And in making this argument, you point to the Cold War as evidence that small, local wars often become battlegrounds between great powers. To provide our listeners with some context, can you explain what you found by examining the role that small wars and irregular conflict played during the Cold War?

Absolutely. I think it's always useful to start with some statistics. And it's a little bit tricky here because there are many different ways to count conflicts. But the best for our purposes, I think, is the Uppsala Conflict Data Programs, records of all external support and armed conflicts around the world after 1975. So if we look at those data from 1975 to 1991, there were 118 conflicts around the world that hit their criteria for including in the data. Of those, 61 had one or more great powers involved, so it was most but not all. But when you look at what kinds of fights those were, two things stand out. First, 85% of them clearly involve things that we would think of as IW, civil war, insurgency, extensive terrorist campaigns, and so on. Second, the conflicts with

great power involvement accounted for 97% of all battle deaths around the world during that period. In part, that's because they just lasted a lot longer. There's a huge body of scholarship in political science and some in economics, which shows that engagement by outside powers makes it harder for the parties to civil wars to reach a settlement, introduces uncertainty in how long they can go on fighting, it creates resources to sustain a fight that would otherwise be militarily lost. And so a big part of why the Cold War civil wars lasted so long on average and were so hard to settle is that you had external powers getting involved in many of them. Now, we can extend this analysis even further back with a different data set that looks only at external support to non-state armed groups.

In that data from 1946 to 1991, one or more great powers supported non-state armed groups in roughly 27% of the armed conflicts. So that doesn't seem too bad, except that those conflicts accounted for approximately 70% of all battle deaths during the period. So the upshot of all of this is that during the last era of great power conflict, most of the fighting was in IW context with great powers involved. And the lesson I take from that is that it's critical that we continue to prepare for such conflicts because nothing huge has changed, which should lead us to expect the great power involvement in conflicts in this era is going to be lower than it was during the Cold War. So you mentioned the support that great powers provide. Can you give some examples of what kind

of support great powers typically provide that proxies during the Cold War? Do you expect the same type of interventions and capabilities today? And how do you think this might have evolved? It's a great question. And again, like the data sources vary, counting as hard, et cetera. But when we use the data that I like best on this from the folks at Uppsala, we see some clear patterns. So from 75 to 91, again, 84% of the conflicts Russia was involved in were civil wars, 89% for the U.S., 94% for China. So most of the involvement is in actually the wars that involve irregular conflict. In those, the U.S. provided weapons in 70% of them, material and logistical support in 61, and training in 54%. Intelligence was a key factor of U.S. support in 70% of the conflicts

we were involved in. Interestingly, fungible financial support, direct budget support to governments was only a factor in 11%. So mostly intelligence, direct military support, material and logistics and training. The numbers are a little bit different for other countries. Russia almost always provided weapons when it got involved, offered training in 84% of the conflicts it was involved in, and material or logistic support in 72%. China also provided weapons in a huge number, 90% training in 55% and intelligence in 55%. So there was no one-size-fits-all support. There were some differences between the different countries, but the big factors were often

intelligence, training, and weapons. From the perspective of learning, this is a real opportunity for us because it means that as we dig into the cases, we're likely to find interesting patterns that can help us think through what kinds of approaches were associated with success or failure in different missions. of approaches were associated with success or failure in different missions. Now, the last piece of good news here is that in most of these cases, the interventions did not involve troops directly in combat. So only 20% of the cases where the U.S. was involved, 30% for Russia and 25% for China. So what those troop deployments mostly were, were training and assistance missions.

So to the extent that that and the lessons from the recent conflict in Ukraine are a guide, making sure that that capacity to train, assist, equip, and help partner forces without necessarily direct involvement in the battlefield is clearly a major part of what we should expect in the future. So Jake and Francis, do you think that the United States is less likely to intervene in smaller conflicts across the globe now, given its aversion to these kinds of interventions after 20 years of the war on terror? And do you think this aversion is a mistake? And I guess if so, how do you think these interventions can or should be handled

differently than their war on terror predecessors? So I can jump in first here. I think that there's a tendency to associate the idea of engagement in small wars or support to counterinsurgency, support to stabilization. I think there's a tendency to associate those ideas with the era of peak surge Afghanistan or peak surge Iraq. These were times when the U.S. had immense expenditures of money and blood and resources and attention on these, quote, smaller conflicts. In my assessment, there's no appetite for that level of intervention now, and in my mind, that's a good thing. I don't want to see a repeat of sort of peak stabilization Iraq or Afghanistan. But I also think it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms

of the lessons we learned from these interventions and in terms of the capabilities we honed during these interventions. Stabilization can occur at a much smaller scale, and indeed some of Jake's and his colleagues' work has shown that it's often much more effective when it is modest and informed. So when we talk about stabilization, we do not need to think of sort of industrial strength, Iraq and Afghanistan type stabilization. In recent years, the U.S. has made progress on thinking about this. There was something called the Stabilization Assistance Review, which came out a few years ago, it has a definition of stabilization that I think is quite useful for this conversation. It's stabilization is a political endeavor involving an integrated civilian military process to create conditions where locally

legitimate authorities and systems can peaceably manage conflict and prevent a resurgence of violence. This is very consistent with what Jake is saying on sort of thinking in the long term of where the politics in a place are headed. So I'd add that the Stabilization Assistance Review was a really fantastic process, which brought together people from across the interagency and the academy and other parts of government and international organizations to take a really hard look at the searing experience of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places the international community tried to intervene and ask what we learned. And as Francis highlighted, the upshot of that review was that

the key to helping resolve conflict and stabilize fragile places, which if done well by the U.S. partners will naturally move those countries in our direction in great power competition, was not getting in and fixing the problem, but was setting the conditions for local political resolution of the problem in a favorable manner. And that involves often smaller scale, longer term investments. So if we look at the Cold War, some of the successes in that are things that involved identifying very targeted failures on the part of partners and allies that we wanted to support in getting in and solving those. My favorite example of this actually comes from the post-Cold War era, so it's a little bit

out of scope, but is Plan Colombia, where part of the story is that the U.S. government came in and overcame a logistics constraint for the Colombian military in terms of air mobility by funding something that their government was unwilling to fund, basically Black Hawk helicopters and the maintenance of them for a number of years, which enabled the Colombian military to push the FARC back away from the population centers and out into the hinterlands. But it was nowhere near what it would have taken to completely suppress the FARC. What happened then is that Colombia achieved a level of stability and froze the conflict for almost a decade. And during that time, the FARC leadership got old and they got tired of living in the jungle and realized they weren't going to achieve anything like their political goals through violence. And the Colombian electorate came to process and understand and get over, in some sense, the intense violence of the 1990s to the point where they were willing to tolerate in 2016 a political resolution that would have been completely unacceptable a decade before.

And so the path to resolution there was not a massive intervention that fundamentally let the government win the conflict in some sense. It was an intervention that created over almost a decade the political of time towards a favorable resolution as opposed to getting in now and solving the problem, that opens up the aperture for thinking about how we can leverage irregular warfare competencies and the associated civilian skills to advance our interest in great power competition. So I want to take a minute to actually zoom out a little bit in the conversation and ask the question that I think we've touched on a little bit, but is really, I think, at the heart of this debate, definitely in Washington, and I imagine academia too. That has to do with actually the realist perspective on this issue, which would say that we should stay focused on the great power threats rather than the small

localized wars, even if great powers are intervening there because the smaller, less resourced nature of those states don't pose nearly as much of a threat to the U.S.'s national security interests. You both seem to disagree. So I'll just ask you, why do you think it is important for a great power to stay focused on fragile states at times when we are faced, especially now, with larger and more existential threats from great powers directly. So from my perspective, I actually don't think it's advisable or feasible for the U.S. to stay focused on every fragile state around the world to a high degree. We're in a resource-constrained

environment. The resource constraint begins with senior policymakers' attention. When you think about what currently the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State have been doing the last few weeks, they do not have the bandwidth to focus on every fragile state around the world. But a lesson that I take from sort of the peak global war on terrorism era is that actually trying to stamp out terrorism or ills everywhere around the world leads to a massive expenditure of resources and blood and treasure that's not strategic for the U.S. So I don't think we should be focused everywhere. But what I do think is that we need to prioritize those fragile states that could be of

greatest relevance to U.S. strategic interests or as a separate issue of of greatest relevance to U.S. strategic interests or as a separate issue of the greatest concern to U.S. values as well. And we need to be clear-eyed that sometimes these localized conflicts can have important impact on our broader strategic competition. So the Sahel example that we discussed earlier, we can think about this light in terms of its impacts on broader competition for strategic resources. So we need to think about how these localized conflicts can have relevance for our strategic competition goals and also recognize that the converse is sometimes true, that strategic competition can exacerbate local conflicts. So my view is that not that we need to stay focused on every fragile state, but we do need to have a policy conversation that goes in both directions and connecting

the conversation about irregular warfare environments to the conversation and deliberations on great power competition. I couldn't agree more with Frances on this. There's a critical need to prioritize when you're thinking about these environments, where to engage and to have some foresight in that. But there's also an important role here in developing competencies that can be distributed throughout the bureaucracy so that we're less likely to make the kinds of mistakes or miss the kinds of opportunities that could prevent places from becoming challenges in the future before they require significant investment. And the story

of Afghanistan during the Cold War is a really fascinating one that comes bound in some ways to handling diplomatic engagement poorly on our side and irregular warfare environments badly on the Soviet side. So there's a fantastic new book out there by Robert Rakoff at Stanford that tells the story of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan throughout the Cold War. And if you read that with Rajiv Sandra Sekharan's fantastic book, Little America, you can really see how dysfunctional U.S. engagement set the stage for the emergence of conflict in Afghanistan in the 1970s that led to the Soviet intervention. And then once the Soviets intervened, they executed poorly from

the early stages of invasion, as Greg Pfeiffer describes in The Great Gamble, to a terribly handled disengagement that Lieutenant General Mike Fenzel talks about, no miracles. A quick version of that story is that the Soviet Union was able to occupy much of Afghanistan after its 79 invasion, but it sparked a national resistance movement. It completely failed to manage the behavior of the government it was supporting before the invasion. And as their brutal tactics failed to quell the Islamist insurgent groups known as the Mujahideen, their safe havens in Pakistan and supplies from the United States and others meant they could stay in the fight against the Soviets for almost a decade, imposing huge costs on the Soviet economy. Now, if you subscribe to the widely held belief that the Soviet debacle

in Afghanistan was one of the major contributors to their ultimate failure in the struggle against the U.S. for global predominance, then you have to also accept that competence in fragile states and competence in irregular warfare are key to strategic competition. You can't kind of hold the two ideas in your head at once that Afghanistan was a key part of how the Cold War ended and that today we should focus like a laser on preparing to fight the great powers. Those are mutually inconsistent things to believe. I think that's a really great example tying us to our next question. When we talk about these engagements, what kind of engagements with fragile states tend

to be more meaningful and impactful in terms of promoting stability and building a long-term partnership for the great powers? So from my perspective, the most important thing is don't try to resource states to win right away. It's not sustainable. It's massively distortionary to the domestic economy, their domestic politics, their security institutions. The big lesson that I take from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that targeted support, which helps countries overcome specific deficiencies on either the military or the government side, is the right approach in these kinds of places. And there are a number of Cold War examples which really support that. But here I'm really curious to hear what Frances thinks because she is the

expert on this panel on this topic. A couple thoughts from my perspective, and we mentioned the Stabilization Assistance Review earlier. I think that is a real goldmine of real hard lessons learned that the U.S. government has taken from previous engagements. One is that I think on the U.S. government side, there's now a consensus that we need to think about a meaningful rate of change, a reasonable rate of change, and not assume that we can help partner fragile states transition overnight. This directly relates to Jake's Colombia example of sort of slowly moving the ball forward over a matter of years. I do think current U.S. government thinking has much more transition

to this idea of a reasonable pace of change. It is just also hard to keep the ball moving forward over multiple administrations on the U.S. side. So that's one. The second thing is that I think we need to think hard about how we monitor progress, how we assess progress, and how we assess success. Oftentimes in our engagements with fragile states, we think about really transient indicators of success or not, how much traffic is on a road, how many people are going to a district center. These tell us something, but this doesn't tell us about the sort of long-term progress,

how have the incentives changed on the ground, how have the authorities changed on the ground. And I think when we think about successful examples of engagement with fragile states, we need to move much more to sort of measuring durable indicators of success. One related point that I'd be curious Jake's thoughts on as well is, as we think about this question of measuring success in our engagements with fragile states, it strikes me that a lot of the effectiveness comes down to is building relationships and measuring how we build relationships, which is really hard. When we think about some of these Cold War successes and onwards, a lot of it came down

to U.S. engagement in a lot of sort of soft ways and hard ways. And I think this is still a parallel now. Sometimes tools that we don't think about as sort of irregular warfare capabilities or even stabilization capabilities, things like educational exchanges, sometimes these are really effective in building relationships between the U.S. and other partner populations that then can translate into influence down the line. So, Jake, I don't know what you think, but maybe we do need to think more deeply about how we measure this issue of relationship building. Francis, I think this is a place where the U.S. government could learn a great deal from the private sector. You know, any firm that is engaged in complex long-term business-to-business sales has extensive systems for tracking and monitoring how they're doing in relationships

with key decision makers and their partners over years and decades. And those kinds of systems and approaches and techniques could be profitably brought into the U.S. government as it thinks about how to track, monitor its relationships with partners overseas, with elites in different countries, and how to prepare people who go out to manage those relationships. You know, we ask a really challenging thing of our diplomats and military attaches, which is to jump in on a one to two year rotation into a decades long relationship with elites and other governments and to faithfully represent for them a continuous U.S. government engagement with them and their

polity. That's a brutally hard job in some ways. And the briefing and preparation and histories that people get when they come in to do those jobs are extremely uneven and heterogeneous. Sometimes people are briefed really well and get the long history, but often they do not. And there are many organizations in our society that have solved the problem of maintaining long-run inter-organizational relationships when you have frequent personnel turnover. It would be great if the U.S. government could incorporate and learn from some of those skills. That's a real place for growth. A second thing just to keep in mind as we think about the potential to do well here and how to think about engagements is there's a massive cadre across

the State Department, USAID, DOD, and the intelligence community that have had over the last 20 years the searing experience of going into very difficult environments, devoting massive amounts of blood and treasure and time and losing peers and partners and friends and not getting a good strategic outcome. And that is a community that is extremely well equipped to feed policy processes that will think more carefully, more smartly, and in a more circumspect manner about what can be achieved. And so I think there's also a strong need as political appointees move in with less experience who haven't had those experiences over the last 20 years to lean

heavily on the civil service for thinking about these environments, which has compared to a decade ago, much less 20 years ago, vastly more experience that can bear on what the policy should be, what's likely to work, and what's realistic in fragile and conflict-affected environments. I think that's a really important discussion about relationship building in the long term. And also, Francis, the point you made about maybe thinking a little bit differently about how we measure success when we're dealing with these kinds of threats and challenges. And I want to dig into that a little bit more. And Jake's article talks about this pretty explicitly in making the case that the U.S. should diversify its investments between

conventional capabilities, also with investments in diplomacy and programs that support economic development, good governance, peace building, and stabilization. Jake provides the hypothetical example in his article of foregoing a $300 million investment in a C-17 to instead train hundreds of foreign service officers in various African languages or over a of foreign service officers in various African languages or over a thousand foreign service officers in Russian. What do you think can actually be achieved that we're not achieving right now by blending these multiple tools of statecraft and doing so well and thoughtfully instead of relying mainly and first and foremost on conventional military power when thinking about our great power adversaries.

So I think one of the biggest things to note is that for a fairly marginal reduction in our ability to fight a conventional war, we can afford a huge increase in our ability to engage in local level diplomacy, develop ties across societies, and enrich our understanding of local politics. diplomacy, develop ties across societies, and enrich our understanding of local politics. So one of the areas that we've made the most progress on looking at is conflicts in Latin America during the Cold War. And when you look there, a lot of the situations where our strategic competitors gained an edge on the U.S. could have been avoided if the U.S. had been able to get our allies to make reforms that would have stayed off conflict. I think the best example of this is Nicaragua, where the abuses of the Somoza government and failure to address demands for reform throughout the 1970s played a key role in driving the support for the Sandinistas and the

successful rebellion that brought in Soviet influence to Nicaragua in the late 1970s. In that situation, one can imagine that had there been a broader cadre of folks engaged in the country who had a savvy understanding of local politics, an ability to get out and understand from local business elites just how much they were moving against the Somoza regime, it's possible that the U.S. could have had a successful engagement that staved off that revolution and pushed our ally to make the necessary reforms that they didn't make. So from that perspective, those marginal investments pay off, ideally, through avoiding the conflicts that create openings for our competitors in the first place.

How well integrated are U.S. stabilization efforts across the Pentagon, State Department, and USAID? Frances, what needs to be done to better synchronize them? So I think the point that Jake makes in his article about the trade-offs in hypothetically forgoing a $300 million investment in a major conventional acquisition versus investing in training foreign service officers in African languages, I think that's a really revealing and important illustration. And then I think it's also important to note to your question that in real life, unfortunately, there's not much of a venue to surface these trade-offs in terms of budget. The budgeting process for the Pentagon versus the State Department versus USAID sort of

unfold in parallel. There's different congressional committees involved. So there's very little opportunity to really surface these trade-offs except for at the very highest level, you know, at the NSC and at the president, which, you know, isn't feasible for this level of detail to be surfacing. So there are some initiatives that are trying to better synchronize the three,-called 3Ds on stabilization in particular. We talked about the Stabilization Assistance Review earlier. Additionally, there's legislation known as the Global Fragility Act, which was passed on a bipartisan basis in 2019, that attempts to better synchronize the three arms of government. The Global Fragility Act, the GFA, has been moving out on terms of implementation because it straddled two administrations. Most would say it got off to a pretty slow start,

but has sort of zoned in on five areas of key interest and is moving forward. So the Global Fragility Act is really an effort to be a test case to better synchronize. So maybe the answer here is stay tuned in terms of how this will do and what lessons we will learn in terms of better synchronization. The further downrange you get, the more integrated it is because people are looking at the same problem set. And there are some issues there. On the civilian side, there are more tables to sit at than people.

But in general, the synchronization that needs to happen is at the DC level, at the policy level. Once you get downrange, people are generally working in a very coordinated manner with the assets that they have and the resources that they have, which on many critical languages and in many countries are not sufficient to really address the problem and succeed in the local competition for influence against our peer adversaries. And you hear this a lot about the extensive resources that China is putting in, particularly across Latin America and Africa, where they're able to, from some perspectives, overwhelm the U.S. diplomatic effort because their missions are very well staffed

and do have significant numbers of people with local language skills. So they're just able to get out and do more engagements than the U.S. is. Still an open question whether they're winning influence with that, but there is a perception that on that side they're getting ahead. I would really echo what Jake said about the further downrange you get, the easier the coordination is and the more seamless. Having been a civilian who's served at the FOB level, at the forward operating base level, so very far down range and then successive places up the chain. Yeah, the coordination is a lot easier at that sort of more forward deployed level. The problem is, as Jake rightly notes, the resourcing you've gotten is from a higher level. And so that's where

these trade-offs and strategic decisions need to be adjudicated. So as policymakers shape the regular warfare toolkit for today's threats, is there any data from the Cold War that they should be looking at that indicates the return of investment for past approaches and activities? Matt, this is a very interesting challenge because IW as a concept didn't really exist in U.S. doctrine before 2001. You know, we've had the various soft competencies for decades. Low-intensity conflict as a phase was there from mid-Cold War on. And while interest in the topic waned after Vietnam in the 1980s, starting with the small deployment of special operations forces to

El Salvador, the U.S. re-engaged in this kind of conflict, and there was a steady flow of doctrinal interventions. We went from low-intensity conflict to military operations other than war to complex contingency operations and so on. That challenge that creates is that there wasn't a lot written during the Cold War that matches up with our current conception of IW, the kind of one that we're talking about today, which involves coordinated action across, as Francis laid out, the three Ds. So what we're going to be doing over the next year and what I'm working with the team to do is systematically compare the successes and failures from a U.S. perspective during the Cold War region by region.

And because the historical record on these conflicts is so good, even for Title 50 activities now, covert action, intelligence operations, because we've hit the mandatory declassification dates, we can begin looking for patterns that are associated with the successes and ones that are associated with the failures. And the idea of looking at that history is to see if there are certain things that are systematically associated with the good outcomes. And we haven't gotten to the end of that process yet, so I can't tell you what the results are. But that history, because of all the different outcomes and because there were so many conflicts, will surely lead some consistent findings. That's what we hope to bring out with the remainder of the effort here. You both have touched a little bit already on some of the bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of achieving this diversified portfolio that Jake refers to with respect to capabilities. I guess I would just close by asking you if there are any other bureaucratic hurdles that come to mind,

but also if you were in Washington today and you could make any change that you wanted to move the ball forward on better balancing this investment between conventional arms and irregular capabilities, given the bureaucratic hurdles that we do face, what would you do? I'll mention one bureaucratic hurdle, and then we'll turn over to my colleague for at least initial thoughts on the first thing we should do. But one big bureaucratic hurdle that I think goes underappreciated is how hard it is to account for the costs of engaging in IW. So let's take the example of the counter-ISIS mission. As Daniel Eagle at RAND pointed out to me, a huge part of our contribution to the counter-ISIS mission was aviation support and

intelligence through technical systems. Now, we can account for the cost of the planes and the satellites and the maintenance on them, but what share of those costs do we attribute to IW? They were doing lots of other things at the same time as well. And it's not obvious, but without that number, how do we calculate an ROI? If we could put some value on the more rapid degradation of ISIS that happened because of the U.S. investment, how much of the cost of the systems that were involved and of the base maintenance and the fuel and the training of the pilots do we attribute to that IW mission as opposed to all the other things they were said to do? And then without that ROI metric, what hard metrics do we have to make the case?

So because of the way we mix capabilities and we use systems across different kinds of conflict and across different war permissions, it becomes very hard to give the kind of hard ROI numbers that one would like to have. And so if you go back historically and you try to ask in any given year, how much was the U.S. investing in IW capabilities, it's really impossible to do because that's not a way we've ever thought of breaking down the budget. And so in making the case, we have to think about something that's not a clear ROI metric, but is something else. And exactly what that should be, I'm not sure. From my side, I would say that we need a policy process that considers strategic competition

in terms of where that strategic competition takes place in the globe and that's oftentimes as we've noted in fragile states environments or regular warfare contexts so in my magic wand world i would probably say we would need very senior level policymakers not those who come from the specialist IW community or stabilization communities, but at the very top of the organizations to put out a demand signal that maybe every quarter we need a deputies committee that scans the globe and looks at irregular warfare environments globally that might be relevant to our strategic competition priorities that maybe are underappreciated otherwise. This gets back to this theme of the urgent always crowding out the important. We need a quarterly deputies committee that looks at the importance, where perhaps a relatively marginal amount of U.S. government attention or resources or sort of partnership with other stakeholders in investing their attention or resources, where a relatively modest amount might have outsized effects in the long run. After that sort of quarterly

deputies committee, I could envision if there's, you know, two or three priorities that are identified, then the high-level demand signal is for a partnership between the regional bureaus and the functional bureaus, so the stabilization people, the SOLIC people, the state CSO people, state conflict stabilization operations people, a partnered process to actually develop a strategy for that place and to circle back regularly in terms of what are we doing to, as Jake pointed out earlier, move the ball forward over the long run. I think just having that dedicated policy process and focus every quarter could actually yield outsized impacts in terms of some of these areas that we would hope to influence in a favorable direction for us going forward. that forces the bureaucracy to consider and think about the places that are emerging as loci of strategic competition and fragility that might become places where there's going to be strategic

competition and opportunities for us or our adversaries is just a fantastic one. And there are long-term trends going on in terms of climate change, migration, shifts in the workforce that are going to be kicked off by AI, that are going to create new kinds of instability in new areas. And so having that forcing function to regularly relook and think about the places we need to be engaging and where we should be focused is just a wonderful idea. It's extremely practical, very actionable, and could be done with basically a wave of the wand by the right people today. The second thing I would just add to that is language, language, language. The cost of improving the U.S. government's ability to engage in local languages in the places where strategic competition is taking place is absolutely de minimis compared to what we're investing in

the ability to fight conventional conflicts and could pay huge dividends in terms of preventing adversaries and competitors from gaining influence and staving off the kinds of conflicts that would be wildly more costly. Well, Jake and Francis, that's unfortunately all we have time for today, but I really appreciate this discussion. You guys did an incredible job of connecting the academic findings that are just emerging from your research now, Jake, with a very pressing and important debate that's being held in Washington. So thank you so much again for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure speaking with all of you. Thank you for the opportunity. This was fantastic. Really appreciate the chance to share our views.

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