Irregular Warfare Podcast - Connecting the Dots: An Inside Look at the National Defense Strategy

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Subscribe to the IWI monthly newsletter by going to www.irregularwarfare.org! How does the National Defense Strategy distill guidance from the National Security Strategy down to the Pentagon? How does the US military operationalize the document’s guidance in practice? And how does the National Defense Strategy specifically shape the way the US armed services implement irregular warfare? We’re joined by two expert guests to address these questions and more. Dr. Kori Schake is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and has held senior positions across the US defense, national security, and foreign policy enterprise. Retired Brigadier General Chris Burns is a senior advisor to the Irregular Warfare Center who led US special operations units at multiple echelons during his thirty-six-year Army career. They share their insights in a fascinating discussion on this episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Well, the main way they operationalize the strategy is through the budget. I worked in the joint staff in General Powell's time, and I always used to try and talk strategy with him, and he would wave me off and say, show me your budget and I'll tell you your strategy. It's, again, drawing that line between the strategic, the operational, and the tactical. So if we go to an ODA and if we can have them understand the linkage between the actions they're going to take in Colombia or in Saudi Arabia or wherever they happen to be and see how that ties to the operational and then the strategic, they understand

the why. They're going to shape it a little bit more at the tactical level. And in business, that's what we try to do. The tactical level is where the win is. Welcome to Episode 73 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Jebb, and I'm proud to announce that I'll be joined by Julia McLennan, who has recently joined the Irregular Warfare Podcast as a permanent co-host. Today's episode examines the national defense strategy and the way it both leverages and downplays irregular warfare. Our guests begin by describing the importance of the NDS and the way it distills guidance from the national security strategy down to the Pentagon. They then examine how the military operationalizes strategic guidance from

the NDS. Finally, they discuss how the NDS affects irregular warfare efforts and the interagency approach needed to optimize America's ability to defend its interests. Dr. Corey Shockey is a senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Shockey has had a distinguished career in government, working at the highest levels of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council at the White House. Today, she helps us dissect the national defense strategy, which serves as the anchor for today's conversation. Retired Brigadier General Chris Burns is the senior advisor to the Irregular Warfare Center. He has nearly four decades of experience leading organizations in both the

public sector and across private industry. During his 36-year-long tenure in the military, he led special operations units at multiple echelons. conversation with Dr. Corey Shockey and Brigadier General Chris Burns. Corey, Chris, it's great to have you on the show today, and thanks for joining us for Episode 73. It's a great pleasure. Yeah, it's truly an honor, Ben. I look forward to the conversation with Corey today. So a lot of our listeners know that we like to do a deep dive into a specific piece of literature that addresses an aspect of irregular warfare. But today we're broadening the scope and we're discussing the NDS writ large. So Corey, before we dig into the content of the latest NDS, could you just give us a broad overview of the significance of the National Defense Strategy? And more specifically,

what is its relationship to the NSS and other strategy documents, and why is it important? So it's the downstream application of the National Security Strategy into the Department of Defense. So, you know, the National Security Strategy is the president's outline of what the threats to the country are, what our objectives are, and the tools the administration intends to bring to bear. And then the national defense strategy is the defense implementation of that. So it's one level down from the overarching objectives and strategy that any elected president brings. It then continues downstream with the chairman's national military strategy and other implementing documents internal to the department.

Two things that are really important about the national defense strategy. First, it is how all of the political appointees who come into the Pentagon with any administration learn what's actually happening in the Defense Department and try and wrench what's happening into alignment with an elected president's priorities. And the second thing that it does is it helps the White House to understand how the different government departments can be stitched together and make sure there aren't gaping holes in an administration's ability to execute the national security strategy. Chris, we'll turn it over to you. So from a practical perspective, how does the military use the NDS? In other words, does the document essentially just issue guidance and priorities

and then service branches find a way to execute those? Or is it more complex than that? Really what I try to look for is how do we take that strategic vision and guidance that they're looking at and then how do we bring that down to an operational level and then a tactical level and have that alignment so that way what actions are happening at the tactical level, you can look at the operational and strategic level and see

that line drawing to it as opposed to kind of, hey, we just do what we've always done. It doesn't matter who's in office. We try to look at it very closely and especially at SOCOM because of the size and scope and the importance of what we do. It's very important because we operate at the operational strategic level, not just the tactical level. So I think for us, the benefit I've had in my career as I moved out of conventional is I've always looked at the NDS as something that was really important for us to kind of understand and draw those lines. And Corey, I know that you have more than a little bit of experience in the Pentagon and working for the DOD. I guess from your perspective, how does the military take the guidance that's in the NDS or the directives

and actually operationalize those concepts? Well, the main way they operationalize the strategy is through the budget. I worked in the joint staff in General Powell's time, and I always used to try and talk strategy with him. And he would wave me off and say, show me your budget and I'll tell you your strategy. And part of the reason that the American military is such a trusted institution in American life is because they take their subordination to elected officials and the right elected officials to set whatever crazy course they want for the country that they can persuade my mom to vote for them for. So DOD does take it really seriously,

and they try and take what the president offers in the national security strategy, which of course they have the ability to help shape in the process, you know, the making of the national security strategy is an interagency undertaking. It's not just pushed out from the White House because, of course, every strategy is budget constrained. And so, you know, they can't ask for 40,000 foreign service officers if there aren't 40,000 foreign service officers. And so there are departmental inputs into the national security strategy that help the White House, again, the new people in the government to also understand what's actually going on in the government and where there are potential opportunities for strengthening the performance of the United States in the world.

Corey, you break up a great point because I look at it the same way in terms of budget cycles. And I think sometimes my peers will look at it and go, oh, we're really shifting strategy here. When I look at it as we're building on maybe the work that was done in the past administration. And when I look at this NDS, that's kind of how I feel about it because you can pick it apart and say, okay, irregular warfare is only named three times in this document and there's no annex and all these other things where you pick it apart and say, okay, regular warfare is only named three times in this document and there's no annex and all these other things where you can

look at and say, okay, we've invested in that space with SOCOM and with other aspects of it and kind of built up a robust capability that is frankly unmatched. And now we're shifting to more of a deterrence space where we're looking at this and saying, OK, these are the bigger things. And now we've got to build on some capability from there. And I think sometimes we try to be very finite. And it's OK, this is what it is, as opposed to maybe someone thought about we're building off of last budget, last administration and going forward. I love that point, Chris.

One of my favorite soldiers, Jack Galvin, who came into military service in the Navy in World War II and was the last, took an inter-service transfer to push our European allies not to think about NATO strictly as defense of our collective territory, but to think about it as stabilizing the European neighborhood and shifting towards encompassing out-of-area operations. And we weren't making very much progress on the political front on that. And Jack Galvin gave a genuinely brilliant input, which was he said he wasn't going to fight in the military committee and with national chiefs of to have the ability to defend at NATO borders all of the territory from northern Norway to southern Turkey. Because, as he told General Powell, if you can do that, you can also do any out-of-area mission you're thinking of. You guys answer the political question. I will give you the military means to do what you want to do once guys answer the political question. I will give you the military means to do what you want to do once you get the political agreement.

So, Corey, what exactly is in the NDS? I would imagine that it identifies Washington's security goals, addresses America's main threats, and issues guidance on force planning. But if possible, could you give us kind of a broad summary of your take on the substance of the latest NDS? Sure. So the main point, as Chris already emphasized, is a point of continuity, namely focus on China as the main national security threat to the United States. I like the way the NDS describes it, though, as the pacing challenge, because the prior national defense strategy talked about China as a peer competitor, which actually gives China more credit than they deserve. Per capita GDP in China is in the neighborhood of per capita GDP in Mexico. And we have a lot to worry about,

about their aggressive behavior and about the threats that they pose. Threats of invasion of Taiwan and other neighbors, threats of irregular warfare using fishing fleets to intrude on other countries' territorial waters, subversion in Taiwan and elsewhere. It's a multifaceted threat, but it is not the threat of a country that is our actual peer. And I like the way the NDS frames it as a pacing challenge. Namely, China is doing some things like expanding its nuclear arsenal very fast. And we need to actually keep pace with those threats without overestimating what China is capable of doing. So that's the first thing. It really focuses on the China threat. And that's a strong continuity from Trump administration defense

strategy, or I guess I should say Mattis Defense Department Strategy, because if you go back and read the Trump White House National Security Strategy, China isn't nearly as emphasized as it is in the National Defense Strategy. The National Security Strategy in the Trump administration actually focuses a lot on border control and things like that. And what DOD did, and it was a move worthy of Jack Galvin, was to take the elements from Trump's national security strategy that DOD had a role in and had responsibilities for, and to really focus DOD assets on that aspect of it. I think this national defense strategy, Secretary Austin's strategy, continues with that. It describes Russia as an acute challenge, which feels right given their

invasion of Ukraine and their threats of escalation, both to attack NATO countries and to use nuclear weapons. But I also think it gets right that, you know, Russia's a failing country, sinking pretty fast in a quagmire of its own making, because it has concluded that they cannot be successful on Western terms. That's a different kind of challenge than we face with China at the moment. And I think it's important that the strategy treats it differently. There's a fair amount of nonsense in Secretary Austin's national defense strategy about integrated deterrence.

And I gotta tell you, I'm on the Defense Policy Board. I've had this explained to me about 20 times. I still don't understand what they think they mean beyond whole of government operations, which are a weird thing to make a major focus in the defense strategy, which has no ability to deliver other departments, resources, or assets. So my sense of what integrated deterrence means, there's a paragraph in the final national security strategy about it, but that was clearly DOD pleading,

this is important to us, won't you say something about it? It's not a framing concept for whole of government operations. It's DOD saying, please don't make do everybody's job. I guess the last thing I'll say about this national defense strategy, two last things I'll say. One is an emphasis on operational concepts and the combination of a framing concept of integrated deterrence with a focus on operational concepts rather than either funding or the force you would need to deliver this strategy. Feels to me like a cop-out, like they're saying, if we just use our staff better and more creatively, we don't need more staff. And the sticker price I would put on this national defense strategy is it's a trillion dollar defense strategy. And they asked for a $760 billion a year defense budget. So they've underfunded their strategy by about 25%. And that's the main

problem with the national defense strategy. It's a fine strategy that they're not buying. Corey, you bring up some great points. As I was reflecting on this conversation, I looked at the pacing piece too as well, because as you look at it both militarily as well as economically and look at all the levers they have, a lot of things are starting to come unraveled. So there's a lot of challenges that China over time will have because of the fast growth they've had that they're going to have to pay a price for. So by pacing, we're not trying to overinvest in an area that I think will start to see some challenges. And even last week, I was reading

about their one belt, one road and how some of the quality of construction in these countries is really poor. There's a dam that's about to fall apart in Africa because of the quality of construction. So much like a company, if you grow fast and you don't build a strong foundation underneath you, they can collapse. And I think China may have that thing. I love the pacing concept as opposed to overinvesting, which is easy to think you need to do. the central issue, which is we are gearing up for managing a stampedingly successful China, and that's actually not the China we're looking at. The China we're looking at is the world's largest creditor who made loans that no Western country or Bretton Woods institution would have made because they thought they would never be profitable. And China's now shackled to all these Belt and Road projects, which aren't going to shift global trade patterns and they aren't going to be profitable. And as Chris rightly pointed out,

a lot of the construction wasn't up to standards. And so we could be looking at a China stuck in the middle income trap, incredibly aggressive, trying to recoup money from countries that don't have it to give. And even if the Chinese government attempts to repossess infrastructure, that won't solve their problems. So we could be looking at an awful lot of countries appealing to the United States and its allies to protect them against Chinese depredations that are economic at their core, not security. Your answers, both of you so far, have been fantastic because you do keep bringing up integrated deterrence and we're kind of skirting around the challenges of defining this term, especially when faced with a competitor like China. You know, we noticed that the NDS

identifies three broad concepts, one of which is integrated deterrence. We also see campaigning and the concept of enduring advantage. Could you give our listeners a primer on what those terms actually mean and how they accomplish the national security objectives for the United States? For integrated deterrence, it's really kind of how it's explained in the NDS is weaving together cutting edge capabilities, operational concepts and comparative advantages of our interagency and our partners to seamlessly dissuade aggression in any domain or theater. And as we just discussed, that is an incredibly tall order to actually get there. And kind of a sidebar, I was having a conversation with someone pretty senior at DHS and talking to him about what we're trying to do in the program I'm involved with. And he said, Chris, and he has a military background as well as he's been in the interagency

for 22 years. And he said, you know, the mistake that gets made is you're trying to develop a training program that's defense centric and bring the interagency in. What you need to do is develop an interagency program, bring defense in. Whereas we really need to listen to all the voices in the room and elements of power to be successful for deterrence. And then for our partners, it's the same way. of power to be successful for deterrence. And then for our partners, it's the same way. Sometimes we'll showcase the need for our international partners and then how we treat them sometimes is not in congruence with what we say publicly. So that also leads to a little bit lack of trust in that process. And for a successful team, you need trust, communications, process, and accountability. So shifting away from that DOD mindset to more of a holistic mindset

and say, I'm one person at the table of many instead of I'm the largest elephant in the room with some other people, I think is a process we have to look at. But as Corey talked about, I talked about, we don't have authority beyond defense to kind of do that. It's really how do you collaborate, which was a pet peeve when I was in command and in other pieces, because at our work colleges, we don't teach people the soft skills, how to build rapport, how to collaborate, how to get to a win-win situation. And that was one of the things that used to drive me crazy, because that's how you win in the interagency space. Can I break in there for one quick second to underscore something you just said?

The skill set you just described is also the skill set for effectively building coalitions with allies. Right. And do either of you want to add a note about campaigning and enduring advantage? So to me, campaigning is I'm pretty passionate about it because this is where we take the NDS. it because this is where we take the NDS, we build a couple ideas around it in terms of what we want to see for initiatives, and then look at both qualitative and quantitative metrics to say, okay, here's what I'd like to achieve. Here's some ideas on how I think I can achieve that. And to me, I look at campaigning as almost experimenting as well. Let's try some ideas. Let's see if they actually work. As long as I've got metrics to look against, I can say, okay, I'm investing in the right way. As Corey talked about, there is money involved

and there's lives involved and see what we find. And then we figure out what are those 20% things that'll be responsible for 80% of our success in the strategy and focus our energy in those areas, share best practices and kind of move through there. So I'm very passionate about campaigning because that's where you go from this theory into actually operationalizing those things. But the key thing is, is that as leaders, we have to give our staff and our men and women the opportunity to fail and learn from that failure. And that's how we actually evolve and innovate. And I always looked at exercises and war games as those are learning events for me to find gaps and seams in either process or authorities. I want to find those. I don't want to be perfect. And that's, I think, part of the culture leaders have to set throughout the interagency and globally.

So, Chris, quick follow-up question for you. When I hear campaigning, all I think is deploying soldiers overseas. But do you think in terms of the NDS, it's more of, all right, we need to stay consistently engaged abroad in order to experiment with new technologies and concepts and find a way to work with our partners? Is that kind of the main idea there? I think the main idea is, it's it's again drawing that line between the strategic, the operational, and the tactical and looking at those key elements that you can do actions you can take to refine them to be more successful. So if we go to an ODA and if we can have them understand

the linkage between the actions they're going to take in Colombia or in Saudi Arabia or wherever they happen to be and see how that ties to the operational and then the strategic, they understand the why they're going to shape it a little bit more at the tactical level. And in business, that's what we try to do. The tactical level is where the win is. They're the action arm of what we do. So you have the people who think about the business plan and kind of bring it down. But at the end of the day, it's the men and women on the ground level who drive that in terms of what's going to happen. So you want to make sure you give them that understanding so they don't just kind of keep doing what they've always done for

their 15-year career and they start to shape. And even if it's a couple degrees difference, so you, Ben, as a team leader, talk a little bit about, it could be anything. I used to talk about the Leahy Amendment all the time and why that's important to shape that conversation so they understand if they're under pressure from the president or the prime minister of their country, understanding the ramifications of violating that, weaving those conversations in as opposed to we're just going to do a scuba jay set or a free fall jay set. And our men and women at the tactical level are really gifted and they want to tactical level are really gifted, and they want to get to the why today, especially the younger generation. They don't just want to

be a Green Beret or soldier. They want to understand the why in terms of what they do. And I think our operational strategic leaders, if you can give that to them, that's very empowering for them to be able to kind of shape at the tactical level. for them to be able to kind of shape at the tactical level. I feel like we are seeing the living embodiment of that idea in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, right? Russian soldiers didn't know what they were there for, aren't quite sure it's a great idea, don't know what's going on. Whereas the Ukrainians, they know what they're fighting for. They actually have a whole of government strategy and everybody knows it. And you can see it in the resilience of the two different fighting forces. It's Chris's point made manifest.

That's a great point, Cora. I never even thought about it that way, but absolutely. So I'd like to get a little bit into the irregular warfare aspects of the NDS and how it either does or does not apply. So from what I can recall, the 2018 NDS was memorable because it included an irregular warfare annex for the first time, which provided a strategy for dealing with malign influences short of war. And I guess to better summarize, you know, whereas traditional war emphasizes conventional clashes and pitched battles between large armies, irregular warfare prioritizes legitimacy, credibility, political advantage, and military efforts are really only relevant insofar as it serves these goals.

So I guess, Chris, my first question for you is, why did the DoD find it important to start publishing IW annexes in the first place? I think to give it some guidance in terms of what we do, the question becomes, well, why isn't there an annex this time? And again, I think it's just building blocks. Every administration doesn't have to rewrite all the books and start over. We're building that capacity and capability. So, you know, the conversations I have in terms of my role now, everybody understands the value of IW and where we need to go. And there's a great book I'm reading called Non-State Warfare by Stephen Biddle that talks about how it's not guerrilla

warfare and it's not set piece battles. It's that middle where we're at, which is where the irregular warfare space is. And really the idea of we all have to be in that space and understand it and being able to be effective in there, I think is critical. But irregular warfare, and you see this with the SFABs, we know we need to do more of it, but we also have this deterrence piece. So you have this little bit of a conflict that I think is harder on the conventional side of, you know, we need you to kind of do both, you know, do that set piece, large battle to create that deterrence and that readiness that projects deterrence, but also understand the irregular warfare space in terms of how we use them. And what I'm really

excited about is I had a chance to go down to JSAO and SOCOM a couple of weeks ago, and JSAO's looking at core IW learning to project into the conventional force so that way we can build those foundational understandings saying, how do we take the best of everything, bring it out into the conventional world and kind of move from there, which frankly we need to do because sometimes the perception is soft is that, you know, we're the people who kick the door in and do that part. But really, as you know, Ben, that's not our bread and butter. Our bread and butter is building capability and strength and confidence for a force in another country so they can create stability in their country. So those approaches are important. And then how we adapt and change is really important

as well. And then the universities, the think tanks and all those people, you know, bringing them into this conversation, because as we move faster and faster, IW keeps evolving as we see in Ukraine. It's different. But the universities, the think tanks, the corporations are doing a lot in the intel space. All that matters here where we can kind of bring it all to bear in a regular warfare and take it away from this concept of it's just a soft world that does IW. It's really the whole world.

Because again, as we collapse to that middle, that's irregular warfare in terms of what we see. And how we build that to be successful to create a safer world is really critically important. Corey, before we ask some more precise questions, is there anything that you want to add, generally speaking, about the addition of the IWM? of the IWM. As Chris mentioned before, it only appears three times in this national defense strategy. And I think that's because the Biden White House has this idea that what we were doing in Afghanistan was somehow insupportable and they don't want to fight endless wars. Another term for that is the irregular warfare, as Chris was just describing it, namely working to help countries' forces that we want to be able to control their own territory, to have the capacity to be able to do it. And I think the Biden administration, in thinking about their strategy, they, as some of the folks, uniform folks in the Pentagon, in particular, I think in the Air Force, they would rather fight a different kind of war than that. They would rather fight the big naval battles of

World War II, rather than think about how do we patiently, persistently help make other countries' forces capable of doing work that we don't want to have to do ourselves. I think it's an unfashionable idea in the Biden administration, and that carries through to the national defense strategy in ways that will raise the challenge for the irregular warfare community, both to make the case that Chris just so nicely did about, you know, irregular warfare is warfare and it's integral even to the big naval battles you think you want to have as your focus, but also to do the Jack Galvin trick, which is to say to maintain the capacities, maybe not for reasons the same as the administration wants them, but because you know that they will be needed in any possible war. And just to build on a little bit too,

one of my friends likes to, you know, I always think of this as kind of the second Cold War we're going to go into here. And he likes to use the word post-industrial warfare, you know, Cold War 2.0. And I think the reality is, to Corey's point, is the administration is going to be dragged into this as well as the rest of the world, because what's going to happen, which is a little bit different than the first Cold War, is because we are accelerating as fast as we are with innovation and adaptation, the lethality of the weapon systems now are incredibly devastating in very small packages with very low barriers to entry. So both states and non-state actors now can buy things that cost very little, but have incredible lethality in terms of what they have. So I think I was in command. I was going up to Washington and meeting with someone at one of the think tanks. And at the time, drones were just coming online and everybody said, oh, they're really expensive. And I walked into the 7-Eleven

across from where I was and they had a drone for 60 bucks that you could just pull off the rack, a little micro drone. So the barriers to entry are scary. And then the experimentation that's going to take place for both non-state actors as well as actors in these spaces become really challenging because we're going to increase our lethality in this space, which then begs the question of, and we see this now with the administration, what do we actually want to introduce to that space? Boy, I sure agree with that. And they're not just available to states. They're not just available to militaries. You know, the Mexican drug cartels flying stuff across the border with drones is our contemporary challenge. stuff across the border with drones is our contemporary challenge. And we need to think as porously as our adversaries are thinking porously about how we defend ourselves and advance our interests. In your opinions, how did this renewed emphasis on irregular warfare

change the way that the Pentagon trains and prepares for conflicts moving forward? So, you know, as I touched a little bit about with JSAO building a core IW set of classes to be able to get out and give to the conventional forces so they have that, you know, the IWC, which I'm involved with, is again about the whole of the military interagency corporations and other countries, a very large mandate, as we did talk about. But the idea of the military interagency corporations and other countries, a very large mandate, as we did talk about. But the idea of we're trying to broaden that aperture. And for me, as a senior advisor, my test I always talk to with Dennis is that this is about us reaching out to other than soft people. You know, that's what we want to be doing. We want to be able to

build IW, IW understanding understanding capabilities and also just get that creative innovation that comes from them. So the world we live in, we get selected, we get picked. We have a very unique set of skill sets, and we can be a little bit homogenized in terms of who we are and how we think. Whereas what I'm excited about is as we broaden out a regular warfare to the interagency and the conventional force, and they start to play with it and experiment and campaign around these different things, we're going to see and get different perspectives that we haven't seen in the past that will

innovate and grow our adaptation and our ability to work with it. And then hopefully from that, the physical, actual being of doing it will then lock in some skill sets and some key tasks that then get baked into the process for conventional forces as they go forward, as opposed to having soft be that enabler in that space, but they can start doing some of those things as well. Chris, can I ask you, what would you want it to be? What does irregular warfare with interagency participation, what's success look like? I guess that's what I'm trying to ask. So success to me looks like where we are able to stop an adversary using the various arms

that are available in the interagency in a almost like a symphony-like way. So it's not kind of blunt where we do a treasury function against a particular threat, or we do a law enforcement one, or we do a DOD one. It's harmonized together with the idea being that each one of them by themselves will not be decisive, but when you bring them together, they are decisive to limit our adversaries' ability to do the things and say, this isn't worth the price it's going to cost me to do this. But it reaches into various aspects of their country and not just one particular area. updating Makers of Modern Strategy, the big Princeton University Press doorstop that all of us have to read in defense policy in graduate school. And I wrote a chapter about the last time I can think of that Americans had a successful whole-of-society strategy, right? We always say existential threats require whole-of-society strategies, and we almost never think we are capable of it. But there was a time when Americans

were so concerned about an encroaching national security threat that they had an economic line of operations, a religious line of operations, a domestic political line of operations, a religious line of operations, a domestic political line of operations, a foreign policy line of operations, a military line of operations. And they all wove together and reinforced each other. And those Americans were Tecumseh and the Shani Confederacy fighting the United States government. So I'd love it if you can give me a more recent example than 1813. Yeah, I wish I had one. So, you know, when I was in command at SOC North, we were able to bring together a couple pieces, which was very exciting and synchronized around some things.

But it's hard and it's hard for a lot of reasons. One, you know, great organizations take self-interest out of it and think about the greater good. But the problem is we're all bound by our authorities and bringing in whatever it is based on that authority, as opposed to saying, I don't have to win all the time. So my philosophy always was for DOD, and I would say this to my interagency partners, it's like, I don't need any credit. The men and women under my command do great work every day. Like, I don't need any credit.

The men and women under my command do great work every day. I will do everything in my power to illuminate you and make you look as best I can with your interagency partners and within your department so that way you have that. But that's a hard thing for interagencies outside of DOD to do because they're fighting for the budget, as you highlighted, and they get a very small piece with some inflation in it, and they just don't want to go backwards. And they get a very small piece with some inflation in it, and they just don't want to go backwards. So I would add one more complication, which is we have a government designed by people who were fearful of government. Like, it doesn't work efficiently. It's not supposed to work efficiently. It was designed by folks who thought their lives were just fine without government involvement in most areas of them. And so orchestrating the American government is even more difficult than orchestrating most other governments, especially parliamentary or authoritarian governments, where you have unity of purpose at the top. We Americans tend to like it, which is Congress in the opposite hands of whoever we voted into the presidency.

And an interagency process that requires, as you so nicely put it, high-level orchestration and harmony to be able to be brought into alignment. It's very hard to do. You brought up a great point around authoritarian governments that they will use against us, which is I can make decisions quickly. I can be more agile than you can because I'm an authoritarian government. And that is true. But the other part of it is that they have a system of design that does not promote innovation and adaptability. It's very much top-down and driven. So as much as they can make the decision, the problem is, as we're seeing with China, they can't innovate. As we've reshored a lot of our technology, they will stall out their ability to execute things. And that's what we're starting to see because the talent is not with them. It's with other people who they've kind of brought in that expertise, either through taking it or stealing it or however they go about doing and buying a

company. So that was kind of interesting when I looked at that, because that's always the argument that's used. Well, we're a third team, we can be faster. And I used to say, well, that makes sense. But then I realized, but by the very nature of your structure, you're not innovative or adaptive because it's a top-down process. So Chris Miller, the professor and AEI fellow, has a fabulous book called Chip Wars about how silicon chips come to be essential to everything in modern economies. is stealing technology in the high-tech space. But because they are always one iteration or more behind the innovations that are going on in the Netherlands, in Japan, in South Korea, in Australia, the U.S., they fall further and further behind. The other advantage free societies have that we very often underestimate, and it matters particularly, I think, in aspects of irregular war. You actually have to win the political argument in free societies before

something can be done. And so we very often worry that democracies won't, you know, stick to their guns or they'll get bored and restless. But in fact, the data on endurance in support of policies, particularly in warfare, is actually that free societies are better at it because you have to win the political argument. It gives you greater societal resilience in support of your efforts. So, Corey and Chris, I'd like to move on and discuss some of the operating concepts or models outlined in the NDS. From what I understand, past national defense strategies have identified a global operating model divided into four layers, contact layer, blunt layer, surge, and homeland defense.

We noticed this model was conspicuously absent from the current NDS, and we are wondering if there is any significance to that omission or not. I take a little bit more of an altruistic perspective on this because I look at what we do at SOCOM and what we do, frankly, with all of our initiatives from the interagency that project out into space and time and help our partners that we have a global operating model no matter what because of the way we do business. So, you know, you see DHS and other countries doing work on law enforcement. You see us doing military work. You see the SFABs going out and do work. So, you know, the thing I always love about what we do at SOCOM is we are the global scouts to look for the thing. So even though you

may not be worried right now, my job is to worry. As a TSOC commander to that combatant commander, the way I used to explain it to the GCC commander was that, you know, my job is to worry about something before you worry about it. And then when it raises to a level that it's important for you, I've done all the homework and built the networks and done those things that we do so well in soft to then bring it up to that four-star level for it to be a concern. So to me, when I think about the global operating model,

it's always there. It's what we do best. So I have a slightly different answer than Chris, which is I think they eliminated it from the national defense strategy because they didn't want to acknowledge that they don't have the forces to carry out the strategy. You'll remember that they did a global posture review in the first couple of months of the administration, which is bad planning, right? You should have your strategy before you decide where your forces are going to be in the world. So it's a genuine mystery to me why they released a global posture review that then tied their hands and got a welter of criticism for the fact that the global distribution of stationed forces and even

rotational forces does not match their strategy. It does not prioritize the Pacific theater. It does not have the fluidity for the overall force that Chris was talking about for irregular warfare, and it should. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree, Corey. I think some of the stopgaps, at least what I've seen in our community, though, is we've, over the last few years, we're putting in commanders who have that experience. So like General Fenton, he spent a lot of time in the Pacific. So we may not have the force, but at least we're bringing the expertise back into SOCOM for him to kind of think about that. And with limited resources, and as you so eloquently put it, and I always tell people this, at the strategic and operational level, it's about resources, authority, and manning.

And I only have so much, and everybody wants more than what I have. So I think what you said is absolutely true. But I think the good thing, though, is we're taking leaders, at least with experience, so that way we can get down on the curve if something happens. Because as we know, when something happens, we seem to find the money and the resources to kind of apply to it. So I guess my next question is, does conceptualizing a global operating model, you know, that emphasizes a contact and blunt layer still make sense given the forces we have? An open-ended

question, but I guess I'll direct it to Corey first. So I honestly don't know the answer to that. I think the administration's budget is wholly inadequate to produce the force to do that. As I said, I think they've underfunded it by about 25% or about $250 billion to produce the forces to be able to carry out the strategy. And so I think they left out some pieces like global force management in order to make it harder for Congress to hold them accountable for their ability to carry out the strategy that they wanted a lot of credit for as a continuation and tough-minded and, you know, we can abandon Afghanistan and that's going to be a great strategic choice because, after all, it shows we're focused on China. So I'm just a lot

more condemnatory of the fact that the strategy doesn't match the force and it doesn't match the budget. So, Chris and Corey, based on today's conversation about the national defense strategy and the role of irregular warfare in it, what implications or recommendations do you have for communities of policymakers, practitioners, and academics who are in the national security space. We are moving faster. And the thing I see I'm concerned about a lot is we need to figure out how to build subject matter expertise inside the policy world for people that they can easily understand and digest and use to make informed decisions in a much faster way. So in a lot of ways, this would manifest itself when I was in command of, I needed an authority, and it would then go into the gunkulator from the TSOC up to the GCC, the GCC up into the NSC, and it would spin around in there for a long time. The threat got worse, and then it might show up nine months later that,

okay, we'll let you do that. Or politically, it just never came back. So we have to figure out how to help the policymakers understand the importance and be able to kind of work through that faster and faster because as innovation accelerates, we need to be able to do that. And that is really hard. Tom Friedman wrote a book, Thanks for Being Late. And I remember sitting in the meeting and he was talking about how innovation keeps doubling. And there was another article I read the other day that said, and this is why I think about this quite a bit, this exact moment in time right now is the slowest rate of change you will experience ever again. And it's exponential growth, not linear. So our ability

for our minds to adapt, and this is what I talked to Dr. Friedman about, he said, well, we can only absorb 7% a year. I'm like, well, you're talking about exponential growth. So two becomes four, four becomes eight. It's impossible to comprehend how we can accelerate and move that fast. So we have to rebuild our systems on the policy side because they're designed around a linear system, not an exponential system. So that's what I look at from that side. From the practitioner side, we frankly just have to support our mavericks and our young people who are looking at innovative ideas and solutions and give them oxygen to kind of play with those things. Just like in corporations, innovation comes from small companies, not from the big ones. The big ones buy the small ones to get the innovation. But we need to be able to support that dynamic creativity that's coming out of there. And we see that when I go to meetings where you see these young captains and young

E7s coming up with these amazing ideas, and they just need some runway to be able to build off of that. And then academics, this is the fun part. You know, for think tanks and academics, they can synthesize all this stuff and create it in a way that's digestible for the policymakers and the practitioners to understand the why on this stuff and be able to go out and apply it in action from that side and help kind of spark that next level of thinking and innovation. So those would be the three areas I'd look at. I guess my first piece of advice would be to remember that strategy is not a noun, it's a verb. It's not a piece of paper,

it's the process by which you are constantly recalibrating. What am I trying to do? What are my resources to do it? How do I optimize to achieve it? And how do I shield myself against my adversary's potential moves? I think that every good strategist is a desperate paranoiac because if you're not worried a trap door is about to open under your chair and you're going to get dumped into the sewer underneath the building, you are not a practicing strategist. So we tend to read too much military strategy and too much just good old strategy. If you have ever read the first Western novel, Owen Wister's The Virginian, there's a wonderful scene in which the Virginian says he wishes he could watch Shakespeare's Henry V play poker because that guy knew something

about strategy. And if you think about the great baseball owner Bill Veck, he was the best strategist the United States ever produced because he never had the money to buy a baseball team. He bought three or four. He thought creatively about how do I make fans loyal to a losing team? And that's a great strategy challenge. So I would encourage academics, practitioners, and folks in military service to think and explore, as Chris said, the creative art of strategy. Don't just read Mahan. don't just read Von Moltke, read Bill Vack's Hustler's Handbook. You'll learn a ton about how limited resources and tons of creativity produce success. That's a great point, Corey. I

love that because that kind of goes to that strategy is a verb in the world's innovating and adapting faster and faster. You have to keep constantly re-evaluating where you are and looking at both those qualitative and quantitative metrics to see if you're getting there and changing because it just changes so fast. And that's the scary part. Corey, just one more question for you then, right? Because this is not the last NDS that's going to be published. There'll be future iterations. What advice do you have for, you know, future writers or teams that are pulling their collective minds to write the NDS? What would you say to them? You know, I go back to General Powell. Your strategy is your budget.

And so make sure that your budget can execute your strategy, because otherwise you are doing a disservice to the country by creating a gap between expectations and capacity to do what you say needs doing. Well, Dr. Corey Shockey, General Chris Burns, that was a fascinating conversation on the MDS. And thanks for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. I love the conversation, Corey. Thank you very much. Oh, it was such a joy. Thank you, Chris and Julia and Ben.

Thank you again for joining us for Episode 73 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Next episode, Ben and Adam discuss the impact of emerging technologies on modern battlefields with Lieutenant General Xavier Brunson and McRyan. Following that, we will discuss the role of irregular warfare and civil resistance in Taiwan with Michael Brown and Professor Larry Diamond. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative.

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It really helps expose the show to new listeners. And one last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants only and do not represent those at Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.