Irregular Warfare Podcast - David Petraeus on Irregular Warfare and Countering Violent Extremism

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

This episode features a conversation with retired Gen. David Petraeus. He served over thirty-seven years in the US military, including as commander of coalition forces during the surge in Iraq, commander of US Central Command, and commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. He outlines lessons he argues the United States should have learned from two decades of fighting Islamist extremists, explains how US dominance in the particular areas allows it to support partners against violent extremist organizations using small and sustainable footprints, and provides his thoughts on the recently released Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense Strategy and how irregular warfare is situated within the context of rising great power rivalry. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 General David Petraeus served over 37 years in the U.S. military to include as commander of coalition forces during the surge in Iraq, commander of U.S. Central Command, and commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan. Following his service in the military, Gen. Petraeus served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a 1974 graduate of West Point and received his Ph.D. in international relations from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. General Petraeus currently is a Partner at KKR, a global investment firm, and Chairman of the KKR Global Institute.

We have to stop trying to end endless wars because the truth is we don't end endless wars. What we do is we end our involvement in endless wars and inevitably we end up having to go back to it. Iraq was obviously a very prominent example of that. There have been some others as well. I'd come back to the importance for policymakers of not, in a sense, pivoting. In other words, just taking your focus off irregular warfare or off the Middle East completely to the Indo-Pacific. And rather this concept of a rebalance to the Indo-Pacific, to great power rivalries, to the crucial importance of, again, deterrence of great power conflict, but acknowledging that there will be irregular warfare in the global context, and you're actually going to be fighting those wars. Welcome to Episode 13 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Your hosts today are myself,

Kyle Atwell, and my co-host, Shana Sinnott. Our conversation today is with General Retired David Petraeus on the topic of how the United States should address threats from Islamic extremists and other non-state actors in ungoverned spaces globally. General Petraeus outlines five lessons he argues the United States should have learned from the past two decades of fighting Islamic extremists. He also explains how U.S. dominance in the areas of intelligence collection and precision strike, among other enabling capabilities, allow it to support partners against violent extremist organizations using small and sustainable footprints.

He concludes the conversation with his thoughts on the recently released Irregular Warfare Annex and how Irregular Warfare will fit in the context of great power competition. General David Petraeus served over 37 years in the U.S. military to include as Commander of Coalition Forces during the surge in Iraq, Commander of U.S. Central Command, and Commander of Coalition Forces in Afghanistan. Following his service in the military, General Petraeus served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

He is a 1974 graduate of West Point and received his PhD in international relations from the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. General Petraeus currently is a partner at KKR, a global investment firm, and chairman of the KKR Global Institute. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

Here is our conversation with General David Petraeus. General David Petraeus, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast, and thank you for joining us today. Great to be with you, Kyle. Thanks. So I'll jump right in. 19 years after the 9-11 attacks, where do we stand in regards to threats by Islamic and other extremists in the world? Well, I think we should have learned a number of lessons from the past nearly two decades of war against Islamist extremists. the past nearly two decades of war against Islamist extremists. And the first is that they will seek to exploit ungoverned or even inadequately governed spaces in the Muslim world. That's predominantly in the greater Middle East, which would also include North Africa, Central and parts of South Asia. But it extends beyond that as well. From that, we have learned,

I think, as well, sometimes the hard way that we actually have to do something about it. we have learned, I think as well, sometimes the hard way that we actually have to do something about it. Generally, the U.S. is going to have to lead because we have such a preponderance of the kinds of military capabilities that have proved to be so valuable in these efforts as we have been able to transform the way that we provide our assistance to host nation forces. And of course, one of the keys to that has been the establishment, the production and deployment of a constellation of drones that can services as well as the Air Force also have. And you have a very, very potent capability when it comes to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets overhead, and also to strike assets because they have precision munitions on them as well. The fact that we need to do something about them, because if we don't,

it doesn't go away. Las Vegas rules don't apply in these areas. What happens there doesn't stay there. Rather, they tend to extend extremist instability in a tsunami of refugees into not just neighboring countries, but into Western Europe as well. We saw that the geopolitical Chernobyl that was Syria, for example, the meltdown of a country not only displaced half of the people in the country, half of those were displaced outside the country, and millions of them ended up in Europe, causing the biggest domestic political challenges that Europe has seen since the end of the Cold War. So we really had to do something about that. The third lesson we should have learned is that, again, in leading, the U.S. wants to have a coalition. That coalition should certainly include Islamic countries. This is an existential struggle for them. But generally,

again, we're going to have to lead because of the preponderance of the capacity that we have. Fourth lesson we should have learned at this point in time is that you cannot counter terrorists with just counter terrorist force operations. You have to have a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign. All of the elements that we had, say, in the so-called anaconda strategy during the surge in Iraq that Ambassador Crocker and I oversaw need to be present in these campaigns, but, and it's a huge but, we don't want to be doing all of those. What we want to do is as little as we have to do. We want the host nation to be doing the fighting on the ground. We want the host nation to do the political reconciliation, the restoration of local governance, basic services, repair of damage,

and all the rest of that, while we provide training, equ services, repair of damage, and all the rest of that, while we provide training, equipping, advising, assisting, and enabling. And the enabling, again, comes back to the unmanned aerial systems, to the advisors that we can deploy, and to the intelligence fusion that is a critical element of all of this as well. And then the fifth lesson I think we should have learned is that this is a generational struggle. It's not the fight of a decade, much less a few years. I think at some point, and I say this slightly tongue in cheek, we have to stop trying to end endless wars because the truth is we don't end endless wars. What we do is we end our involvement in endless wars and inevitably we end up having to go back

to it. Iraq was obviously a very prominent example of that. There have been some others as well. was obviously a very prominent example of that. There have been some others as well. So instead, what we should be trying to do is figure out how to have a sustainable, measured in terms of blood and treasure, sustained commitment that can help the host nation forces keep extremists at bay, ideally carry out a comprehensive civil military campaign that could truly defeat them or ideally destroy them. But again, noting that we probably have to stay with these for quite some time. Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack. Going back to the very beginning, you said that the U.S. has to get involved. Do you have more examples? You talked about, you know, Syria, refugee outflows from Syria, but do you have

examples of direct threats to U.S. interests that could justify our involvement? Yeah, that's an interesting question, because in fact, there have not been al-Qaeda or Islamic State direct attacks in the U.S. homeland. That's a correct observation and a reasonable question. There certainly have been those kinds of attacks and threats in our European allies countries, and certainly in the countries within regions that we are trying to help achieve stability. But I do think that if you allow, for example, al-Qaeda to have a sanctuary in Afghanistan once again, like the one in which they planned the 9-11 attacks, the chances certainly go up that they would try to do something like that again. And the truth is that the most direct threat is probably how they might carry out activities in the virtual caliphate

and cyberspace that might enable individuals in the U.S. to self-recruit. Now, that doesn't mean that, again, if an Islamic state or al-Qaeda can have a true sanctuary, the way that, in fact, the Islamic state had for a period of time in Iraq and Syria on the ground, plus the very effective virtual caliphate that they established, that that couldn't at some point pose a direct threat to the United States. But generally, it's a threat to the stability of the region. It's a threat to our allies in Europe, and in some cases in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and other locations around the world. I guess one argument that I've heard is that some of these threats are transnational or

international in nature, and then some of them are just regional conflicts that the U.S. does not need to get involved in. I think it's a case by case basis. I think you've got to look at each of these. You have to ask what you can actually reasonably accomplish, I think, as well. And in some cases, you're not going to be able to get the kind of partner on the ground you'd like to have. It may be that all you can do is carry out counterterrorist force operations, which can only disrupt. They can't defeat. You know, as JSOC was very forthright about this, General McChrystal used to point out repeatedly that what they could do certainly is put enormous pressure on the irreconcilables. In other words, the leaders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the leaders of the major Sunni insurgent organizations, but that again, they couldn't, they obviously weren't doing clear hold, build and transition. It was interesting that he observed that they'd been banging away, for example, in Ramadi every single night for the better part of a couple of years, and the situation had actually been getting worse. that were not present until we literally went in and did clear hold and build, did reconciliation with the local tribes, which enabled a good bit of that, and then ultimately did the other tasks

that solidify security gains by restoration of basic services, local governance, repair of damage, reopening markets, schools, health clinics, and all the rest of that. And I think that's a great transition into when we think about how the U.S. does play a key role in these conflicts, which you alluded to earlier as well, what should our primary military objectives be? Are we talking about destroying these groups, containing the threats, improving governance, building partner capacity? Is there one objective that's most feasible or are there other nuances to that? Well, at the end of the day, Sean, again, I think a comprehensive civil military campaign is going to include all of the above. But the fact is, of course, that what the military needs to provide

is critical, but it's not enough. The military obviously has to help achieve better security. Without better security, anything you do is building on a shaky foundation. So the focus has to be on achieving security, but there will be situations in which you actually can't do that. There are countries into which we cannot go, but we may be actually able to carry out strikes. There are locations like Somalia, where we're just not going to be able to commit the level of forces. And we're frankly, the host nation partners have at times been, shall we say, uneven in their qualities. And in those cases, I think what you do is you do disrupt.

You carry out strikes, perhaps some limited range. You do do partner capacity building. You're trying to improve the security. But there are generally limits to what it is that you're able to do. And in some cases, you're just going to have to accept that, and that is going to be what you're going to be able to do, and perhaps no more until there's a change in some kind of the political construction with which you're trying to work. So again, every case is going to be different. There will be situations, a situation like Iraq, where there are existing forces, however battered they may have been, and however much in need of reconstitution. pursued highly sectarian campaigns that enraged the Sunni population, made them feel dispossessed

again, cast out without an incentive to support the new Iraq, but actually one to oppose it. And it also allowed the Islamic State to get back off the ground, drift into Syria, gain new recruits, power, weapons, explosives, leaders, vehicles, and all the rest of that and sweep back in. So the military can provide security, but it and all the rest of that and sweep back in. So the military can provide security, but it sounds like the rise of ISIS. Are you attributing that to political breakdown within the Iraqi government? And what role do local politics play in these conflicts? Well, politics can either help or hinder.

And in the case of Iraq in late 2011, right after our final combat forces and last literally within days, the prime minister of the country pursued these highly sectarian policies, first going after the senior Sunni Arab in government, the vice president, Tarak al-Hashemi, and his security detail with legal charges against them, then ultimately against the minister of Finance, the next most senior Sunni Arab, ultimately after a very prominent parliamentarian, a Sunni Arab from Anbar province and so forth. And this undid the whole effort to bring the fabric of society back together, which we pursued during the surge and sustained with his support, at times a little bit strained, but with his support in the ensuing three and a

half years, having driven violence down by 85% during the surge and a bit more in the subsequent years until tragically it was undone for political purposes. There was an election coming and this is how he thought he would solidify the Shia base in advance of those parliamentary elections. For what it's worth, I should note that I was on the ground there two days after our four-star left, after the ambassador had gone off for his Christmas leave. I was in to see the members of the CIA station just before Christmas and ended up in this turmoil that felt as if I was right back in the middle of the beginning of the surge when everyone was at each other's throats and we were constantly playing an adjudication role, almost like we were the umpires between these competing factions.

It was a very dicey period. And it was very clear that unless we were able to provide more assistance than it appeared to be that was possible, a fear that Al-Qaeda in Iraq could get back up off the canvas that already rebranded as the Islamic State. And indeed, that's what happened. Now, it sounds like there's a lot of complexity in a lot of these approaches. And I think what is interesting, particularly with your experience ever seeing this over a period of decades, is that there are a lot of sub efforts that we can look at of how to achieve these objectives. So if we're trying to characterize how the U.S.

should get involved in contemporary conflicts of this nature, I'd like to first talk about how we can best support partners in suppressing Islamic extremism. How has that changed over the past 19 years? And what does that really look like in today's environment? That's a great question, Sean. And it has changed dramatically because of this advent of this constellation of drones. I think that more than anything else, perhaps then you can make sense out of it and understand where the extremists are, where their bases are, and all the rest of that. But certainly, every situation is going to be different. Again, you don't get the partner you'd like to have in every case. You get the partner that is there. Some partners will have a good bit more capability

than others. Some may be able to put together all of the elements of a comprehensive civil military campaign and even fund it, as in the case of Iraq. One of the distinguishing features of Iraq was always that in a good year, they could generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion of oil revenue. So they could fund a lot of their activities themselves in contrast with Afghanistan, which could generate maybe a billion in a good year. The other big difference, of course, being that in Afghanistan, the enemies, the insurgents, the extremists have sanctuaries outside the country that you can't get to for the most part. Occasionally, there has been some operation, again, to disrupt those sanctuaries.

But by and large, they're beyond our reach, which is enormously frustrating. Many, many other huge differences. It's interesting, in fact, that on the way home from my three-star tour in Iraq, Sector Rumsfeld asked me to divert and go through Afghanistan. So we put a team together to do an assessment for him there. And the first slide in the briefing that I laid out to him when I got back to Washington was titled, Afghanistan does not equal Iraq. And it laid out all the different ways that you could compare and contrast these two countries. And it laid out why Afghanistan is just frankly, in certain respects,

even though it was much less violent, even much less violent at the start of the surge or the mini surge in Afghanistan compared with the horrific violence at the start of the surge or the mini surge in Afghanistan compared with the horrific violence at the start of the surge in Iraq. But there was a reason that I told Congress in the confirmation hearing to be the commander in Afghanistan, that we would not be able to flip Afghanistan the way we had flipped Iraq. That's such a simple concept that two conflicts, you can't just apply the same formula necessarily and expect the same outcome. And yet, as simple as that concept is, you can't just apply the same formula necessarily and expect the same outcome. And yet, as simple as that concept is, it actually requires a lot of knowledge about local terrain, the history of the population and all that. So even the simple things are very

complex when addressing these kinds of threats, it seems like. No, you're exactly right. You have to have a truly nuanced understanding. I used to, again, slightly jokingly say that there were three lessons of the invasion of Iraq. And the first one is that you really ought to understand a country in a very nuanced way before you invade it. And the truth is, we didn't have that kind of nuanced understanding. Certainly none of the commanders that were there in that first year, to my knowledge, including me, had a knowledge of the areas in which we were deployed. We weren't even supposed to go to Nainoa province in Mosul. We were supposed to be down in southwest Baghdad and on down from there. We had some knowledge of that area. We certainly had all the mapping and a variety of other details, but we literally didn't even have maps of Mosul until

about 24 hours before we launched this huge air assault to quell the violence in a city that was literally out of control and in which a small U.S. element had killed 17 civilians a few days earlier in a riot. The other two lessons are that you should always use existing organizations. Don't create one-offs like the ORHA, the Organization for Reconstruction Humanitarian Assistance, or its follow on the coalition provisional authority, just establish an embassy, use the Corps of Engineers, use the defense or army budget agency, again, use existing entities that have authorities, appropriations, policies, SOPs, and chains of command, if you will, and support instead of these one-offs.

Beyond that, of course, constantly asked that question that was always on the wall in the 101st Airborne Division command post and every other one where I was privileged to command, which asked, will this operation take more bad guys off the street than it creates by its conduct? And the same question should be asked of policies. And of course, the firing of the Iraqi army without telling them what its future was, and the firing of the Ba'ath Party all the way down to a bureaucratic level, created hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had an

incentive to oppose the new Iraq rather than to support it. And it was the deba'athification without reconciliation that was the real key here. So one of the points you made earlier is that the United States has a preponderant capability in things like ISR and precision strike. Have the presence of these enabling technologies changed how we work with partner forces? Oh, they have very much so. There's a wonderful, I forget if it's, I think it's a Netflix video that shows how the Battle of Mosul was conducted, or at least a portion of it. And it's essentially a U.S. Army captain from the 101st Airborne Division sitting in a command post with an Iraqi colonel or a brigadier, and basically looking at a feed of an ISR platform, I'm not sure whether it was a Predator,

Reaper, or one of the army systems at that time. I'm basically saying, okay, Colonel, there they are. Do I have clearance to strike? And they would strike. Now, I'm not saying there wasn't fierce fighting on the front lines, because there was. And over time, of course, the Islamic State, which again, at that time, resembled more of an army trying to defend a built-up area than an insurgent group. But they were dug in. They were using tunnels. They knew that if they were on

roofs of buildings that they might be vulnerable. They knew that if they could be seen from above, they could be targeted and all the rest of that. But it still helped enormously because again, at some point they did have to move. And when they moved, they were very vulnerable to what it was that we had over top of them. Now that's not going to obtain in some other scenarios. Again, as we mentioned earlier, every scenario is indeed unique. So that's interesting though. I guess if you compare, so the U.S. supported the Iraqi with a lot of enabling assets in that version of Mosul, but in earlier versions, the U.S. essentially had to have a large ground footprint to be able to have the same type of effect. I guess what I'm wondering is, with the rise of these technologies, does it remove some

of the requirements for U.S. soldiers to be on the ground? Oh, absolutely. Sure. If you compare the surge in Iraq, where I was privileged to have 165,000 American men and women in uniform, about a like number of contractors, by the way, to enable all of our folks who were. But in that circumstance, we had nowhere near the density of enablers that we have now. There was one situation, the Battle of Sadr City, which has been written up beautifully by Rand, that shows how we concentrated all the assets and put them at the disposal of one U.S. Army brigade commander. And that was quite dramatic. But now we're able to do that not just for one area, but for many different areas simultaneously. Again, there are limits. As I mentioned, the numbers are not by any means infinite. I'd like to have seen actually more orbits established. But they have been transformative

and they have allowed a very small footprint to enable host nation forces in ways that just was not possible before. And when that wasn't possible, then we had to have our forces on the front lines. Well, it seems like the capability for this type of smaller footprint is one thing, but being effective at it and constructing it in the right way to achieve our objectives is another. So do you think that the current approaches in Iraq and Afghanistan do this effectively? And how does that compare? I mean, does that change the nature of what objectives we have as compared to when you initiated the surge? Well, I think the objectives of our forces are different. They

are more circumscribed. Again, our objective was truly to conduct a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign to achieve security and all the other efforts that we sought to pursue. And here, what we are strictly trying to do is to train, equip, advise, assist, and enable. Certainly, there are other elements as well, assist, and enable. Certainly, there are other elements as well, and those are coordinated, the civil component side of this. But again, on a much, much smaller scale, again, the sheer amount of troops, money, casualties, etc., during the surge was just so vastly greater than what was necessary during the effort to support the Iraqis to defeat the Islamic State. And it's necessary now to enable them to try to achieve the enduring defeat of the Islamic State,

which is what the objective laid out originally by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. I would underscore that word enduring because you cannot just defeat them and, you know, give yourself high fives and go home. This is, again, something that will take a good bit of time and, again, a lot of other activities to ensure that there is not an attraction in a host nation population to the kinds of extremist ideology and so forth propagated by groups like the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, and their affiliates. My concern is that the quest, as admirable as it is, and I mean, no one wants to end endless wars more than those who have actually fought in them and understand the costs of these wars. But I think we also understand the cost of premature withdrawal. And we have seen this. I used to raise my hand and when people would say we have ended the war

in Iraq and I would say, excuse me, we actually haven't ended the war in Iraq. We have ended our involvement in the war in Iraq. And I fear that we may end up having to go back because we haven't maintained an involvement there. And of course- Yeah, that seems to be an enduring conversation, right? So how do we manage what those implications are of withdrawal when we have these competing philosophies on whether we should be in these locations or not? of course, that this idea of ending endless wars is just so obviously attractive to anyone. Obviously, we should try to end endless wars, but there should probably be a footnote that then down at the bottom says, but not before they can truly be ended on an enduring basis, something like that. And again, it's very hard to go out as a political slogan and say, let's continue endless wars. Let's stop trying to end endless wars and figure out how to have a sustained commitment that is sustainable because we can't end endless wars.

But again, it's a difficult issue for policymakers without question. I think the real key is, frankly, if you keep the cost in blood and treasure down, I don't think anybody really cares that we have troops deployed around. Look, we've had between 30,000 and 45,000 troops in Korea for nearly seven decades, I believe. We still have 30,000 plus troops in Japan. So, again, the American public is apparently willing to allow us to have troops deployed all around the world, tens of thousands of troops still in Europe, many other places. The key is, again, just avoiding the kinds of significant costs, unacceptable costs in terms of blood and treasure. So if I understand correctly, you're linking our ability to do smaller footprint approaches,

understand correctly, you're linking our ability to do smaller footprint approaches, essentially enabled by technology, which is a more recent development, with sustainability of the campaign. And part of that is just because the domestic population is not going to call for withdrawal when you have these small footprint. Is that kind of a fair characterization of the state of current war? I think that's a reasonable characterization. Again, I would also just say that I think that that is the, it's sort of the appropriate way to go forward as well. It should be the host nation that is fighting on the front lines. It should be the host nation that is carrying out the bulk of the tasks of a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign or whatever it is you want to call it, but that construct does work. The intellectual construct, the elements that were on that anaconda slide that I used to explain to Congress that you couldn't defeat insurgent groups in Iraq with just JSOC forces or JSOC operations, which is what some of them wanted to default to. The same in Afghanistan, frankly. So again, I think it's just the appropriate way to go forward in these campaigns to achieve our interests, but to do so essentially at minimal cost. And that is obviously always the

key, especially, of course, if you recall the context in which this is continuing to play out, which is one in which we are shifting focus very decisively and determinedly to a resurgence of great power rivalries, and in particular, the rebalance or the pivot to the Asia-Pacific or Indo-Pacific region, which is clearly the focus of the Department of Defense, while still recognizing, I think, as shown by the release of the Department of Defense irregular warfare annex to its national defense strategy, which was very heartening to see, still a recognition that you do have to continue to carry out these campaigns. And then I think the question is, particularly for the U.S. Army, how do you structure your forces? What changes should you make? You're going to have these

campaigns still going on, and this is where I salute the effort to establish the security force assistance brigades, as opposed to repeatedly taking apart a combat brigade combat team and leaving, you know, half of its forces home while many of the leaders deploy to provide the advise and assist and enable missions in the theaters like Afghanistan, Iraq, and so forth. And certainly special operations forces are still going to be very heavily in demand for these kinds of efforts, even as they will also shift a lot of their partner activities and other areas of emphasis to the Indo-Pacific. Well, and to go back on your reference to GPC and Pentagon priorities, it's interesting because

sometimes it seems like these types of conflicts in Middle East and Afghanistan are characterized as being in opposition to great power competition, whereas removing ourselves from those fights actually creates more of an opportunity for China, Russia, our competitors. Can you speak to that of some of the implications of those risks when it comes to these engagements versus how that allows China or Russia to succeed? Well, I think that one of the questions that intelligence analysts and strategists and commanders should be asking is what you just raised, and that is, will there be proxy activity as a feature of some of these conflicts, these irregular wars. You certainly do see that in

Syria, where you have Russia on the side of Bashar al-Assad and the U.S. on the side of the Syrian Democratic Forces. You certainly see proxy forces engaged in Libya, a place where we are not actually heavily engaged. And that's, of course, more of a civil war power struggle between contending factions. And I think one of the questions is, will China actually get involved in these kinds of proxy activities? And again, it wouldn't just be where there are Islamist extremists. They're not certainly going to come in on the side of extremists, but they might get engaged in some of the other irregular conflicts around the world. Yeah, so that's interesting. So when we enable our partners to counter internal threats or extremists, you know, there's clearly some military objective, we want to reduce the violence, but

it sounds like by providing that technology, we're almost able to secure influence or access to the partner, essentially. And that in itself is a contribution to great power competition. Well, yes, that's not to be overlooked, certainly. And again, if you can do this in a way that is as economical as possible, committing the least number of forces, the least number of dollars and least number of high demand, low density assets, then obviously this becomes much more sustainable. So I think the way we need to think about these is that we are going to be engaged in irregular warfare. We will also be very heavily invested in and engaged in deterring great power conflict and will pursue ideally a coherent and comprehensive whole of governments, an S on the end, to denote the contributions and the

involvement of allies and partners focusing on, say, China, which, of course, is both our biggest trading partner, at least prior to the trade tariffs, and arguably our biggest potential adversary as well. So using the Cold War as an analogy, I find very flawed. Needless to say, during the Cold War, the U.S. did very little in terms of trade or economic exchange with the Soviet Union. That is not the case, clearly, in the case of the U.S. and China, which were each other's biggest markets, again, prior to the imposition of the tariffs. Yeah. And in the Cold War, we've had a lot of guests cite that, well, the Cold War is a good example of great power competition and the U.S. and Russia engage in a lot of proxy conflict. But that is an interesting characterization. So the U.S. and China have a very different relationship. I guess the

next question, which you already touched on, is should we anticipate a rise in proxy conflict between the U.S. and China? I think that question is just not answerable yet. I don't think the answer is obvious. I would hope not, actually. I think we have enough on our hands with the threat of Islamist extremists and some of these other situations which involve, again, quasi-civil wars and struggles for power. And I would hope, again, that there is not the kind of proxy conflict that we saw a fair amount of at various times during the duration of the Cold War, which, of course, is a number of decades long, but saw competition in Africa, saw competition in Latin America, saw competition in Asia. And it seems like the immediate security risks of not engaging

in these areas are apparent. From an institutional knowledge perspective, and you certainly have experience with this, what are the risks for us if we disengage from this type of conflict and then we find ourselves involved in 10, 15, 20 years down the line? Are we going to be prepared to be able to engage? Well, the reason that I found the release of the irregular warfare annex to the national defense strategy as heartening was that it seems to be a recognition that we cannot lose sight of what it is that we have learned or sought to learn during the course of the past nearly two decades of war with Islamist extremists, and in some cases, some other involvements around the world. And it seemed to underscore recognition by those in the Pentagon and around the world

that these conflicts are going to be a feature of the landscape, even as the overarching context is one in which the focus far and away is going to be on deterrence of great power conflict, primarily, of course, with China, but also to some degree with Russia. And so that's where I think then you have to start asking, okay, what forces would be involved in this? How can the force structure be adjusted? And this is where, of course, I think, again, the Army deserves credit for the establishment of the Security Force Assistance Brigades, even as it is refocusing some of the other brigade combat teams on the more potential height conflict scenarios that could result from a breakdown of deterrence in the case of a great

power rivalry. Yeah, I think your mention of the irregular warfare annex is a good pivot to our final question, which is, what are the implications of your experience and your career and the arguments you've made today for both policymakers and practitioners? Well, I think that I'd come back to the importance for policymakers of not, in a sense, pivoting. In other words, just taking your focus off irregular warfare or off the Middle East completely to the Indo-Pacific. to the Indo-Pacific, and rather this concept of a rebalance to the Indo-Pacific, to great power rivalries, to the crucial importance of, again, deterrence of great power conflict, but acknowledging that there will be irregular warfare in the global context, and you're actually going to be fighting those wars even as you are trying to deter the potential great power war. So it's going to require us as a superpower to do what superpowers uniquely can do. And that is to keep many plates

spinning, to use the analogy of the guy in the circus that gets a plate up on a stick and gets it spinning and then gets over and puts another one on the stick. And of course, some of those plates, one of those plates will be vastly bigger, arguably, than all of the others together. That would be the plate for the U.S.-China relationship, which is crucial not just to the U.S. and China, but to the entire world. Far and away the most important relationship in the global context as we go forward. But then other smaller plates that will represent some of these irregular conflicts in which we're engaged, a number of them against Islamist extremists, but keeping them spinning while never, ever risking that the largest plate could fall on the ground. And I think that's the way to look at this. Now,

the truth is for smaller countries, they'll be hard pressed to have forces that can be committed to all of these, and they're going to have to make very hard China. And then some certainly continuing to contribute in the irregular warfare efforts in which some of them may actually lead, but in which the US is almost always going to have to be heavily involved, given that predominance of capability that I mentioned earlier. And I'd like to, before we close out, go back to the previous question and flip that a little bit. Your experience lends you to some really interesting perspectives. So if you were to put on your academic hat, what would you recommend academics focus on in research in terms of the subject area? Again, I think probably for the academics, a large number rightly should focus on the resurgence of great power rivalries. At the end of the day, that would be the most catastrophic imaginable scenario in a nuclear

age. I mean, Graham Allison's concept of the Thucydides trap, where you have an established power and a rising power in Thucydides' rights of Sparta and Athens, inevitably they went to war. We inevitably cannot go to war. The U.S. is the established and China is the rising power. That can't happen. So certainly, I think it's appropriate to focus a great deal of academic and intellectual attention on that and on how to ensure that deterrence is functioning. But there is going to be this other subset of activities that is going

to continue to go on and from which we need to continue to learn lessons, as we have, I would argue, over the course of the last two decades. I think we have changed how we engage very dramatically as the means at our disposal have changed very dramatically. And that will continue. I mean, we are just really beginning to see the advent of unmanned systems on the ground as we have in the air, or perhaps at sea. And then they will be increasingly enabled by machine learning and AI. So again, all of this is going to play out also. And ideally, you would have some academics who have some sense of all of this. Because at the end of the day, the folks at the very top, the policymakers at the top, those who are their designated thinkers and hired pens and

strategists and all the rest of that are going to have to understand all of this landscape because they are going to be crafting policies that are applicable to all of it. Again, I think those at the top of their intellectual game perhaps might try to take all of that on because indeed, again, the policymakers are going to have to do just that. This is a good place to stop. General David Petraeus, thank you for joining us today. This was a great conversation on Irregular Warfare. Great to be with you, Kyle and Shauna. Thank you for joining us for episode 13 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks.

In our next episode, Nick and Kyle have a conversation on security force assistance with Dr. Mara Carlin of Johns Hopkins University and Brigadier General Scott Jackson from the U.S. Army's Security Force Assistance Command. After that, Kyle and a new member of the team, Daphne McCurdy, will discuss Russia's use of private military companies such as Wagner Group with Dr. Robert Hamilton of Foreign Policy Research Institute and Candace Rondeau from the Center on the Future of War, a joint initiative of Arizona State University and New America.

Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and don't represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we will see you next time.