Irregular Warfare Podcast - Hindsight and Foresight: A Twenty-Year Retrospective on Irregular Warfare and Counterinsurgency

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative website to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is producing! In what ways do irregular warfare and counterinsurgency overlap? Is China engaged in irregular warfare against its adversaries? What are some of the failures of the wars and conflicts of the last twenty years and why did they occur? What do IW practitioners need to do to avoid the mistakes and to ensure they learn the hard-won lessons of the last twenty years in IW and COIN? This episode explores these deeply important questions and features a conversation with two of the leading experts on the subject: David Kilcullen and John Nagl. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

To succeed in this kind of war you need, as we discussed, an extraordinary array of skills, but it's very hard to find people with those skills who are willing or able to operate inside a combat zone. Counterinsurgency is not a soldier's job, but only a soldier can do the job. The military has repeatedly defeated irregular adversaries in the field, but our nations have struggled to do any kind of effective political follow-through on those military victories so that we have never been able to translate battlefield success into an enduring political outcome. Welcome to episode 85 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Julia McLennan, and today I'll be joined by my co-host, Louis Taberki. Welcome to episode 85 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

I'm your host, Julia McLennan, and today I'll be joined by my co-host, Louis Taberki. Today's episode is a 20-year retrospective on irregular warfare and counterinsurgency with David Kilcullen and John Noggle. Our guests first delve into overlapping issues of defining the terms irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, and then move to discuss some of the struggles in measuring success and failure over the past 20 years. They then discuss how challenges understanding the human domain affected the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They wrap up the episode with their thoughts and suggestions for irregular warfare practitioners and thinkers who don't have significant direct experience in the wars of the last 20 years. John Noggle is a professor in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations

at the Army War College. A West Point graduate and retired armor officer, his dissertation was published as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Noggle served in combat in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was the first Minerva Research Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and is a member of the Board of Advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and at the Center for New American Security, where he previously served as Senior Fellow and President. David Kilcullen is Professor of Practice in the Center on the Future of War in the School of Politics and Global Studies and a Senior Fellow at New America. He served 25 years as an Army officer, diplomat, and policy advisor for the Australian and United States governments.

He served 25 years as an army officer, diplomat, and policy advisor for the Australian and United States governments. In the United States, he was chief strategist in the State Department's Counterterrorism Bureau and senior counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus, before becoming special advisor for counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He is the author of a number of influential books, including The Accidental Guerrilla, Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, small wars in the midst of a big one. 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's our conversation with David Kilcullen and John Noggle. Dave and John, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. We are so delighted to have you today. It's great to be with you. Really happy to be here. So we're going to jump right in to this episode that is meant to be a retrospective on the past 20 years of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. So to get us set up, we'd really like to start actually with definition. So obviously the definition of the term irregular warfare is debated across defense circles in the US, Europe, Australia, and as John Noggle and I saw

most recently at the Irregular Warfare Center's Academics Day. Before we begin kind of getting into the meat of the discussions, can you each tell us, beginning with Dave, can you each tell us what you mean when you are referring to the term irregular warfare and how that overlaps with counterinsurgency? Thanks, Juliet. So I think that John and I were actually both in the meeting in May of 2005 when DOD decided to adopt the term irregular warfare. It was one of the meetings we had with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld periodically during the QDR. And there was a lot of debate about various constructs. And someone in the meeting said, you know, there's an umbrella concept here, and that's irregular warfare. And Rumsfeld said words

to the effect of what the hell is that? And we got into a discussion about it from there. So we were both sort of present at the original scene, if you like, of the introduction of irregular warfare into the lexicon. A definition of irregular warfare needs to do two things, right? It needs to be accurate and it also needs to be useful. An accurate definition of irregular warfare in my book is any form of warfare where one of the major combatants is a non-state actor. So the big description of what happens in irregular warfare flows from the fact that you've got non-state actors participating in combat. The current authoritative definition comes from the 2020 Irregular Warfare Annex to the National Defense strategy, and it's much longer. Bear with me, I'll read it to you. Irregular warfare, this is according to USDOD, is a struggle among state

and non-state actors to influence populations and affect legitimacy. IW favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities in order to erode an adversary's power, influence, and will. And the definition then goes on to say that it's an umbrella term that includes unconventional warfare, stabilization, foreign internal defense, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency. So those sort of five concepts sit underneath the umbrella construct of irregular warfare. But as I say, most of that is description rather than definition. And what makes irregular warfare different from other forms of warfare is that presence of both state and non-state actors as combatants. I'm not sure I agree with Dave on much of that.

I do think he did a terrific job reading the definition. As I recall, Dave, it was Jim Thomas who was running that Irregular Warfare Working Group, who is a terrific young Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense who introduced me to the great Dave Kaukala and incorrectly constricts irregular warfare, because while I agree that if there is a non-state actor involved as a major combatant, that it is irregular warfare, I also believe that states can practice irregular. And so the definition I use, irregular warfare is of course warfare, it's the use of force to achieve political objectives either by irregular forces or through irregular methods. And so China could practice irregular warfare against the United States. And I would argue that China is currently practicing irregular warfare against the United States. And so I think the term is bigger even than Dave suggests. Certainly, insurgency tends to be a form of irregular warfare,

and counterinsurgency, actions taken to defeat or mitigate the effects of insurgency, is then also irregular warfare. But IW is much bigger than insurgency and counterinsurgency, even if counterinsurgency techniques play a role, often play a role, usually perhaps even play a role in countering it? Yeah, I mean, I'm usually opposed to using the term in the definition, right? So I think you can sort of get rapidly to angels dancing on the head of a pin here, but I think the danger of making it too narrow is that you end up focusing on technique. The danger of making it too broad is that it end up focusing on technique. The danger of making it too broad is that it starts to bleed into other concepts, things like hybrid warfare, asymmetric warfare,

gray zone activity, which are more recent in origin than irregular warfare. And of course, there's an entire PhD dissertation or three to be written on those definitional issues. And in fact, I teach a whole theory of special operations master's program that gets into this in great detail. But I think, you know, the authoritative current US government definition is the one that I read. But I think that, you know, from an academic standpoint, we should be open to the idea that it has fuzzy edges like most military concepts.

And in some ways, you do know it when you see it. I agree with that. I really like the term hybrid warfare, created or popularized by my friend, Frank Hoffman. And I think that that term hybrid warfare gets at sort of the point I was trying to make a few minutes ago, because hybrid warfare is war conducted by a state, a great power that includes both conventional and irregular techniques. And that suggests that states and even great powers can conduct irregular warfare against other states, that you don't need to be a non-state actor to practice this particular form of super interesting, very complicated, fun to discuss, less fun to conduct, perhaps.

Shifting a little bit to counterinsurgency specifically. So given that it can be uniquely challenging to assess victory in counterinsurgency campaigns, can you say more about why you, John, specifically, write that the U.S. has so little to show for our wars of the last 20 years? Well, because we keep losing them is sort of the shorthand answer. So the broad story is, I think, reasonably well known at this point. The United States was unprepared for regular warfare or counterinsurgency in Vietnam. I would argue that it got better under time, particularly under Creighton Abrams, but lost the political will to continue the fight, and then sort of literally burned the books in the wake of the Vietnam War, and didn't write

another counterinsurgency manual until the one that Dave and I worked on over the course of 2006, published in December of 2006. And while that doctrine helped prevent absolutely abject crushing helicopters off the roof of the embassy in Baghdad, failure and loss in Iraq, it obviously didn't in Afghanistan. And so my current pitch is one, three, and one, why America's army keeps losing America's wars, looks at Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, all as the army's most abject failures since it became the world's greatest power at the end of the Second World War, and asks why we devote so little attention, including at the Army War College where I teach, to the kind of wars we keep losing. It's as if a football team only watched game films when it won, rather than the games it lost. We're definitely going to get into, a little bit later, a little bit more of that exact problem that you're talking about. a little bit later, a little bit more of that exact problem that you're talking about. I wonder though, Dave, you have anything to add as far as, you know, taking this retro perspective look and how it could be said that we have so little to show for our wars

of the last 20 years? I think John's actually being too generous. I don't think that we have little to show. I think we have less than nothing to show. For example, in Afghanistan, the Taliban are now back in charge as they were before 9-11, but now with billions of dollars worth of our equipment and a better developed state to be in charge of. Iraq is nowhere close to the Western friendly democracy that we'd hoped to create in that war. Somalia is in the grip of insurgency from a group that we created

through ill-judged intervention in 2006. Libya is a mess. We still have a force in Syria, even though that war was won by Bashar al-Assad with backing from Iran and Russia. We've got terrorism spreading across Africa. We've got zero moral credibility now on issues like Ukraine, when we try to lecture others about how it's not acceptable to unilaterally invade other people's countries. Because of our failure to support the Afghans after saying repeatedly that we would, people struggle to believe our assurances of support. And for me, most importantly, the civil liberties that Western democracies more or less took for granted before 9-11 and which made our countries worth living in have been compromised by 20 years of mass surveillance, you know, joining the dots, imposition of techniques

from overseas back into the homeland. What the otherwise thoroughly unpleasant Michel Foucault, I think, accurately described as boomerang effects, right? So it's actually that we're much worse off than we were at the beginning of the war on terrorism. And I think I agree with John's diagnosis and part of why that is. I would add a couple of other things. One is that the military has repeatedly defeated irregular adversaries in the field, but our nations have struggled to do any kind of effective political follow-through on those military victories so that we have never been able to translate battlefield success into an enduring political outcome that suits our war

aims, which is essentially the definition of victory. Second big thing was the attention suck of Iraq, right? We ended up fighting a self-inflicted two-front war in both Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time, which led to, if you like, strategic ADHD, right? We could never get the level of policymaker attention or resourcing for any one of those theaters because we stumbled into both of them. I think it's a subset of a broader set of pathologies in the way that the United States wages war. And I don't think John was implying this, but I wouldn't want anyone to imply that we suck at irregular warfare, but we are dramatically better at conventional because we haven't won a war, conventional or irregular, since 1945.

And I think that goes back to my final point, which would be, we don't hold leaders accountable for failure. Think about all the people that got fired and retired and asked to resign as a result of our major military defeat in 2021 in Afghanistan. And of course, you can't think of any because no one was, right? So the message that we've sent to generations of commanders is that losing wars doesn't really matter. And I think that's fundamental to why we essentially suck at not only irregular warfare, but I would argue that we may have a overly rosy view of our ability to prevail in conventional warfare as well. People usually accuse me of harshing their vibe, but even I am depressed after listening to Dave. I push back a little bit, but I don't think that Dave will disagree. The best description of Desert Storm, my first war, I in both Iraq and Afghanistan or even in Vietnam.

But we certainly struggle to convert military successes into political victories. And then, of course, that is the essence of what we try to teach people here at the Army War College, where I feel compelled to say and where I do not speak on behalf of the Army or the Army War College. So get really mad at me if I don't say that. I'll just say, I think that's essentially what I was saying. You know, Korea was inconclusive. Let's call it a draw. The Gulf War was a battlefield victory that wasn't translated into an enduring political success. So that meets that definition of a partial or operational victory without a strategic outcome. And then, of course, Iraq was a loss. We managed to get it close to success, but then, you know, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by withdrawing too early. And then

Afghanistan, you know, resounding defeat. So we had a few little wins in there, Panama, Grenada, you know, but I don't think they really count. What you're getting at right now is really learning from our lessons, right? And so to ask the question a little bit more directly, John, you write in your article, Why America's Army Can't Win America's War, is that the U.S. Army can learn and has, but that it's better at learning lessons related to conventional war rather than unconventional war. So John, we'll start with you, but why do you think that is? And what systems or processes or other drivers are there that make learning from unconventional war so challenging for the U.S. Army and for the broader defense apparatus? I'm struck by, not for the first time, something I heard Tom Rick's journalist say about

my army. He said that the Old Testament of the United States Army is the Civil War, and the New Testament of the United States Army is World War II. And if you visit army officers' homes, you'll see stiver sprints of either Civil War battles or World War II battles. This is how the United States Army defines itself in conventional tank-on-tank, cavalry-on-cavalry combat against a similarly attired and equipped enemy. And I understand that. And, you know, guilty as charged, right? I had a tank platoon in Desert Storm. It was a brief and glorious war as wars go. I would do it again in a heartbeat if I could still fit inside a tank, which is a continuing

struggle for me at my current non-fighting weight. The war I fought in Al-Anbar from 2003 to 2004 with the 1st Infantry Division was, I thought I understood how hard counterinsurgency was from reading about it. I didn't think it was going to be fun. I stole T.E. Lawrence's phrase, learning to eat soup with a knife, which doesn't sound like fun. And then when I did it, I found out it was way, way less fun than I thought. And so it requires success in these kind of wars, I think, understands understanding of economic systems and governance systems and cultures and languages that are literally foreign to army officers who are not political scientists

or economists or ethnographers, anthropologists. I mean, if they were, that's what they do. They're people who are constitutionally inclined to blow things up. And success in these kind of wars requires enormous discretion in blowing things up and enormous skill sets that are, if not anathema, at least not natural to most army officers. And so I understand why the Army War College devotes all of one day out of its 200 class days, its 200 learning days, to irregular warfare. I just don't think that's what it ought to do. I think the jury's out on whether we can learn lessons on conventional war. We have historically been able to, but we haven't fought a peer adversary since World War II.

We haven't won a war since 1945. In that broader definition of, you know, battlefield success resulting in a better political outcome, our tactics and our weapon systems are exhibiting what I would call decidedly mixed results right now in Ukraine. We periodically run war games against our pacing threat in the Indo-PACOM AOR, and we tend to lose those war games. So I'm not sure that we're better at conventional, but I think there are four reasons why we particularly don't learn from non-conventional or from IW. One reason is we don't like it.

As John has eloquently said, the army doesn't see itself as an irregular force, even though in fact, irregular warfare accounts for probably 80% of the conflicts that the US military has been involved in. Secondly, we have a fantasy that we will never need to do it anymore after this one time. And John wasn't being hyperbolic earlier, during the aftermath of Vietnam, the army literally pulled the after-action reports from thousands of advisors who had worked with the Arvin in South Vietnam into the parking lot of what later became the School of the Americas and burned them all. So there's a tendency to strip out that knowledge because we think, well, hell, that was not enjoyable and thank God we'll never do it again. So we don't need

to learn that lesson. Third one, and again, John alluded to this, is lack of strategic patience. learn that lesson. Third one, and again, John alluded to this, is lack of strategic patience. And there's a saying in our business that you can go big or you can go long, but you can't go both, right? If you want to sustain an irregular warfare effort for a long period of time, you need to ruthlessly trim it down to the smallest possible size. If you are going to go big, you have a very limited amount of time, maybe two to four years to demonstrate significant success, or you're quite likely to lose political support. And that's a symptom of lack of strategic patience. Fourth one is, you know, there's not a lot of money in irregular warfare, right? If you do irregular warfare properly, it doesn't require a lot of

people, doesn't require a lot of equipment, doesn't generate lots of attractive programs of record for the, you know, to coin a phrase, the military industrial complex, from which the US Defense Department draws most of its senior officials, and to which generals and admirals typically go and work for after retirement. So there's not a big institutional incentive to get good at something that doesn't cost a lot of money. And instead, we end up with very expensive projects that generate exquisitely expensive and high-tech capabilities that aren't necessarily particularly effective in this kind of conflict. yeah, long answer to a short question, but I think it's both unconventional and conventional that we struggle to learn from. But those sort of institutional pathologies, I think, explain partly why that is. John, you wrote in your article that the U.S.'s excellence in conventional war has driven our enemies to search for gaps in our armor. What are those gaps in our

armor with counterinsurgency as you've seen them over the past 20 years? And how have you seen our adversaries adapt to them? Yeah, here I disagree with Dave a little bit. I did get to experience, because I'm older than Dave and American, I did get to experience Desert Storm and see the overmatch we had against a Soviet-equipped, admittedly not very good, not very well-trained army in Desert Storm. I do believe CSIS just ran 20 iterations of war games over Taiwan, and every one of them, the U.S. succeeded in defending Taiwan against China. In every case, the CCP

felt all the greater cost in lives and treasure than we would have liked to, but I do think we have pretty extraordinary conventional overmatch against any conceivable enemy, even when we're playing an away game literally as far away from the United States as it's possible to go. So I do think we have some conventional overmatch, and I think that's one of the things that makes this kind of war even more likely in the future, in addition to our history of failure there and our unwillingness to learn lessons from those failures. The challenges we face are extraordinary. To succeed in this kind of war, you need, as we discussed, an extraordinary array of skills, but it's very hard to find people with those skills who are willing or able to operate inside a combat zone. Counterinsurgency

is not a soldier's job, but only a soldier can do the job. And so you're left with almost impossible dilemmas, enormously difficult to solve. I agree completely with Dave that you can either go long or go big. And perhaps the hardest problem we have is understanding what success looks like in these kind of wars among the body politic. And this is what I find perhaps most frustrating about our recent abject crushing defeat in Afghanistan, is that after many, many years of not doing it right there, many, many years of Afghanistan sucking all the oxygen out of the room, by 2021, we had achieved, I believe, a reasonable long-term end state in Afghanistan, in which some 2,500 American boots on the ground, supporting a host nation security force that wasn't great but was improving,

supported by American air power, other American exquisite technologies. It had achieved a reasonable outcome. That's what victory looks like in these kind of wars. I believe that that's what we achieved in Vietnam by 72. It's what we achieved in Afghanistan by 2021. In both cases, domestic American politics caused us to pull those forces out, despite the fact that was a long-term commitment we could afford to make both in risk to blood and in treasure. And as a result, they discussed very well some of the results of our failures in those two wars in terms of lost credibility, in terms of destabilized security situation,

in terms of greater risk to the United States, I believe, long-term in Afghanistan in particular, and also perhaps in emboldening our enemies. So one of the questions I have for future historians is, did Putin make the decision to invade Ukraine again six months after the fall of Afghanistan because he believed that the United States was a paper tiger and wouldn't fight? And so it is above all else, I think, necessary for the American body politic to understand how hard these wars are. That's a gospel I've been preaching for more than two decades now. And what success looks like in them. And don't walk away when you've finally gotten it, because what follows your withdrawal is abject horror for the people who've trusted us

and diminished national security for the American people in the wake of our defeat. Thank you both so much. One of the reasons we were so excited to get the two of you onto the podcast is because you do give frank and sober analyses of these situations. So thank you guys very much. We're going to turn to some specifics now, getting a little bit to some of the content from your book, Blood Year. Could you unpack for the listeners a little bit the failure to understand the human domain and the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan that demanded different approaches? Yeah, so I want to go back actually to 2007. And one of my jobs when I was working for General Petraeus in Baghdad was to try to coach the folks that were already in theater on some of the key concepts

of the new counterinsurgency approach. And one of the things we used as a tool for that was a document written in 1972 by Robert Comer, who headed the CORDS program in Vietnam, a book called Bureaucracy Does Its Thing. And I gave this as a sort of training document to guys that we were working with and said, let's look at all the dozen or so pathologies that Bob Comer identifies in 1972 and see which ones still apply to how we're trying to operate in Iraq in 2007. And unsurprisingly, not only did they all still apply, but the guys we were working with found another half dozen that weren't even present in Comer's account of what happened in Vietnam. One of the counterintuitive lessons out of it was how much

better the war in Vietnam was run at that time than the war in Iraq and later the war in Afghanistan had been run. So I think there's a number of reasons or a number of features that we've already covered, but let me just dial in on two things that one of them John said, and another one as an echo of something I said earlier. So John said that we had gotten to what victory looks like in a counterinsurgency environment, and then decided to leave anyway. I think that's an extremely accurate description of what happened in Iraq, not 100% accurate for Afghanistan. I'll come back to that in a second. But you know, the way that victory works in a counterinsurgency environment is that you damage the enemy's capability.

You separate the enemy from the population. You build up the capability of your own ally in country to the point where they are capable of handling that diminished threat from the adversary. And then they just handle it. They might handle it for 30 years or 50 years, but if the existence of the state that you're supporting is no longer at risk, and if your local partner is capable of sustaining the effort with relatively limited input from your own forces, that's basically as good as it gets. And we had gotten to that point after the surge in Iraq,

but then decided to pull out our remaining element by the end of 2010. And from that period on until really the outbreak of ISIS in June of 2014, really was coming at least a couple of years before that. But the Iraqis were continually asking us for assistance and saying, look, things are getting worse and we need you to come back or we need you to provide additional assistance. And we were ignoring them. We sort of acted like once we left Iraq, the country ceased to exist and it wasn't our problem anymore. And so that's why I think you can say that we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. But another point that's really, really important is that we misinterpreted the source of our success in 2007 to 2009 in Iraq. We ascribed a lot of it to the new counterinsurgency doctrine, when at best that was one of four factors that led to the success

and not the most important one. And we then said, all right, well, we just won using this coin doctrine in Iraq. Let's go template that and go do the same thing in Afghanistan. And that was always doomed to fail because Afghanistan is not Iraq, but also because the reason that we had our success in Iraq in that middle period of the war wasn't because of the counterinsurgency doctrine. And it wasn't because of the inspired leadership of General Petraeus, and it wasn't because we had a surge of 30,000 troops. All of those things were critical enablers that had to be there. But what really turned the tide in Iraq was the Sahawa, the awakening, where the Sunni tribes in Iraq turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and we got a 96% reduction in violence

in less than six months. Now, you can scour any counterinsurgency manual in the world, but certainly the one that we had as our doctrine in 2006, 2007, and it's not going to tell you that you can achieve a 96% reduction in violence in half of a year by suddenly enlisting people that were fighting you to fight the adversary. This is not in our doctrine. The doctrine actually says it's going to take 12 to 15 years. It's going to be a slow grind. It's going to involve all those things that we've been talking about. That's not what happened during the surge in Iraq. And so because of that, there was a lot of hubris in our approach after that to places like Afghanistan. And we tried to impose on Afghanistan a template which we ourselves misunderstood and which in any case

didn't explain why we'd had that temporary success in Iraq. So I think part of it gets back to the pathologies we've been talking about. We don't like doing irregular warfare. We wanted a shortcut, you know, sort of one easy trick to avoid having to do it again. So we decided that we would try to just repeat our success in Iraq. And I'll say that this is not unique to the United States, right? This is the Egyptians did it in the 70s. The Brits did it in a couple of different campaigns in Kenya and Malaya. It's extraordinarily common. The Indonesians did it in multiple campaigns between the 50s and the 1990s.

You hit on a technique that works. So you try to repeat that success by templating the technique. And it doesn't work like that. So I think that really was the source of our unraveling. And then of course, compounded by the Arab Spring, Libya, Syria, the massive destabilizing effect across Africa and all the effects that we've been talking about already. But I think the sort of master error was those two things, misunderstanding the source of our success, and then trying to wrongly template it to different theaters. Fundamentally, Iraq was an urban insurgency, and Afghanistan was a rural insurgency.

And the two keys to success in Iraq, I think, Al-Anbar province, where I fought, which was overwhelmingly Sunni, as they suggest. The addition of radical Islamic extremists and the decision by the Sunni tribes to stop fighting with them on the same side as them and to start fighting against them because of their extremely overbearing nature was decisive in that fight, as was the very classic counterinsurgency technique of separating the population from the insurgents. Last walls, T-walls, played a huge role in defeating the insurgency inside Baghdad as it's pushing both the American troops and Iraqi troops outside of their bases

and getting them out to places where they could provide protection for the people. Afghanistan was always going to be a harder war than that. Rural insurgencies are hard. The mountains are hard. And the split in Afghan society was enormously difficult. Pakistan in the Afghan war was enormously difficult. And so the critical mistake we made, I think, in Afghanistan, Greg Jaffe, who's a super smart journalist, when President Biden reaffirmed that he was going to follow former President Trump's Afghan pullout plan, Greg

Jaffe realized immediately that we're going to lose the war in Afghanistan. And he called a couple of folks, me, Carter Malkash, and a couple other sort of Afghan watchers and asked, when did we lose the war in Afghanistan? And my answer was, we lost the war in Afghanistan in March of 2003 when we invaded Iraq. So Afghanistan could have been doable, I think, if it had been the only war we decided to fight as part of the broader war against al-Qaeda and affiliated radical Islamic extremists. By taking our eye off the ball, by pouring all of our resources into Iraq, Afghanistan was shorn of resources, deprived of resources. And by the time we got Iraq to a point that we could begin to pay some attention to Afghanistan, I think it was actually almost too late. Despite all that, we still, against all the odds, got it to a decent point when we decided to pull out too early. But it was, I think, always going to be a harder war than

Iraq. Dave, do you agree with that? Not entirely, mate. I'll just say for the record, John knows Iraq much better than I do. I only served there for that year of the surge, but I spent some portion of every year between 2005 and 2015 in Afghanistan, and I watched the war unravel. I think that at the end of, when we turned our attention to Afghanistan at the beginning of President Obama's surge, actually a few months before that, the war was still winnable. But we made a couple of critical errors. Firstly, in the very speech that announced the surge into Afghanistan, President Obama also announced the end date for that surge.

And I happened to be in Kabul at the time talking to some pro-Taliban businessmen and they started to laugh when they heard the speech and they said, are you guys trying to lose? Your president just said we're're surging, but don't worry, we're leaving in July. I was in the White House when he made that announcement and I said the exact same thing those businessmen did. You didn't need to be super smart to call that one. It's just an unbelievable unforced error. Yeah. And they said, you know, tomorrow the Taliban will go out in the street and say, what are you guys doing in August when the Americans leave? And of course, we then

ended up with this during the surge period where General McChrystal went in and did an assessment and said, I need about 60,000 troops because I need to be able to do the south and the east of the country simultaneously. He was told by the joint staff, don't even bother asking for that. So he asked for about $40,000, got $30,000, and then came up with a manoeuvre scheme that made sense given the lack of resources, which was to do the south first and then the east. And actually during the surge there was significant success

in the south, but when that success began to register in Washington, the legs were cut out from under the surge, there was significant success in the south. But when that success began to register in Washington, the legs were cut out from under the surge and it was ended before the commanders had a chance to swing to the east. So the job was only partially done. More importantly, we basically had a timetable-based drawdown where we decided that we were going to draw down and the adversary was going to essentially just stop fighting as we left. And in fact, what the Taliban did was to take a knee, keep the bulk of their forces out of combat in Pakistan and just do enough to maintain pressure. And once we left, they came roaring back. I mean, the ISAF ended in the end of 2014. By eight and a half months later, the Taliban had captured the major city of Kunduz

and held it for several weeks in October of 2015. So already we were shooting ourselves in the foot during the surge. One other point where I would slightly disagree is I think that we were in a position in 2021 where we could have kept doing it forever, right? We weren't spending enough money to even be a rounding error on what we spend on other things. We were losing about eight to 10 people killed a year, which is obviously tragic for those individuals and for their families, but it's not a meaningful loss rate in a major war. We could have essentially kept doing that forever, but the Afghans could not because we had progressively cut the support. And under the deal that President Trump did, and on the urging of Zarmakalilzad at the time, the deal we had done

with the Taliban in Doha meant that US advisors and Afghan forces in the field had to run targeting decisions past the Taliban before they would get approval to strike a target. And in that last period of the war, we could see the Taliban massing around district centers and around the ring road and close to Afghan forces. And we were being blocked from engaging them by Washington and people insisting that we should focus only on Islamic State. So by the end of 2020, beginning of 2021, the Afghan military was losing 5,000 people killed or wounded every month, which is twice what we lost killed in the entire 20 years of the war. So it was sustainable for us, but we whittled our support down to the point where

actually they were really struggling to stay afloat. So that anybody that wasn't either senile or not paying attention should have been able to figure out with a moment's thought that the moment we pulled out there would be a catastrophic collapse and it still astounds me that no one's willing to take responsibility or hold themselves or anybody else to account for that. There are now many soldiers and officers serving in the U.S. military who were born after 9-11 and a growing cohort of field grade officers and senior NCOs who were never deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. How do you recommend that this group learn the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, given that they did not experience these conflicts up close? Oh, my goodness.

I am astounded, as we were discussing before the program, how young colonels are these days. When I was a young officer, colonels were really, really old. And these days, they've got to be like 17 years old, for goodness sakes. So the truth, of course, is that the colonels of today have multiple combat tours. Jim Rainey, the commander of Futures Command, spoke at our graduation, the Army War College graduation this past week, and his combat hash marks went past his elbow on his dress uniform. So we have an extremely battle-hardened military, although not necessarily the kind of skills in the past 20 years of fighting that the current war in Ukraine, for instance, is demonstrating are necessary. All that said,

one of the things that interests me about the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan that we've been talking about today is how good the literature on them already is. As a student of Vietnam, many of the best books on Vietnam came out 10 years, 15 years later. Halberstam's A Bright Shining Life, for instance, I think was published in 1988, 13 years after the war on Matterhorn. Karl Melantis' book was published just in the last decade, 30 years, 40 years after the war. The books we already have on Iraq are so good. I mentioned Tom Ricks' book, Fiasco. George Packer's book, The Assassin's Gate, very early, terrific analysis.

Big fan of Carter Malkasian's new book, The American War in Afghanistan, a history. fan of Carter Malkasian's new book, The American War in Afghanistan, A History. So there is no excuse for not reading these books and learning about the mistakes we made, but also some of the learning that we did along the way. And thinking hard about the profession of arms, thinking about how we should prepare our army, our government, and our nation for the next irregular war, because it's going to happen. There's no excuse for not doing that intellectual work. And the work of a soldier in peacetime is training, but a whole lot of the training, in my eyes, should happen above the neck. And that's why I'm happy to be teaching at the Army War College, to be thinking about these subjects, why I'm trying to write about these subjects that the American Army doesn't we turned to conventional war against the Soviet Union and made terrific progress, created the same weapon systems that the army still counts on today in an extraordinary renaissance. The book Prodigal Soldiers is an interesting historical

analog to James Getfield's book. But now after 20 years of irregular war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the army is turning again to preparing for conventional war, this time against China. And the work of the rest of my life, I assume, is going to be trying really, really hard to be the skunk at the garden party who says, hey, let's spend 5% of our time thinking about the wars we're actually going to fight. And the wars, if we don't think really hard about this, we're going to lose again these irregular wars, these slow, grinding, horrible counterinsurgency campaigns that have scarred the force of today and, God willing, will not scar their children 20 years from now. scar their children 20 years from now. Dave, over to you. Any thoughts for folks who haven't deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, who were born after 9-11, who don't have those firsthand

experiences? Do you have any recommendations for takeaways, either how to learn those lessons or what those specific lessons should be from Iraq and Afghanistan? So I have a slightly different experience than John because I spent a lot of time with junior NCOs, soldiers, and junior officers in the field across Australia, UK, US, and I have enormous confidence in the current generation. I think they are learning those lessons and they are very plugged into their like senior peers, you know, folks that are slightly more senior than them that had that lived experience. And I do think people are hungry to learn. I think the problem is institutional. The institution is not interested in helping them

find that material. And there's a lot of informal learning and development of a set of how-to ideas, that sort of law of how to do this stuff. But we're talking about irregular warfare, and the conversation is very much focused on COIN. But as I said at the beginning, COIN is just one of the five subsets of irregular warfare that's recognized in our doctrine, foreign internal defense, stabilization, unconventional warfare. There are counterterrorism elements. There's all

these different elements to it. And COIN, I would argue, is the area of irregular warfare where we did worse in the last 20 years. In unconventional warfare, we actually did rather well. Things like the awakening, but also the initial phase in Afghanistan, the partnering with the Syrian democratic forces in Syria, the way that coalition forces contributed to the defeat of ISIS in Iraq without committing major combat forces. These are all very positive lessons that can be built on. They're not negative lessons like many of the COIN lessons are. We also did fairly well in stabilization in various places during that same time frame. It's not an unrelieved set of negative ideas,

coin pretty much is, but the other elements of irregular warfare are ongoing. They're really important elements of great power competition that we find ourselves in now. And people know more about them than they might think they do, even if they didn't deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. I guess my final thing would be, you know, to paraphrase Trotsky, you might not be interested in irregular warfare, but irregular warfare is interested in you. So it's not something that any professional gets to ignore. It's something we have to study. We have to pay attention to it, along with all the other things that we need to be focusing on. So not to the exclusion of conventional or traditional warfare, certainly not to the exclusion of multi-domain combined arms maneuver,

but as a lesser included or an equally included, as our current doctrine says, contingency as part of what we have to do to do that full spectrum set of tasks that are expected of us as professionals. So I think today's generation fill me with confidence actually in terms of their ability to absorb this stuff, but the institutions don't. And I don't want to come off as saying that it was all somebody else's fault. I'm sure John wouldn't disagree with this, but I was at fault in the last 20 years. A lot of the ideas that I came up with were frankly bullshit. And many of the things that we tried to do in the field failed. And we failed to be harsh enough in communicating that back to political leaders. And we failed to hold our partners or ourselves firmly enough to account.

And the outcome is what we see now, right? So if I were a youngster now, I would be saying to them, don't listen to what I have to say. I had my 20 years and we screwed it up. But you should read those books that John was talking about. Talk to people that are older in the organization. Think critically about what you're being told by the institution. Ask yourself, what are they not telling me that one day I'm going to wish that I knew? And keep your eyes open and learn as you go. General, thank you so much for your time and insight so far. And this is going to be our last question as we wrap up. So first to John and then to Dave, is there one key takeaway from the last

20 years of irregular warfare that you recommend that policymakers and practitioners take with them as they move forward? So Dave was just pretty hard on himself, which it's usually my job to be hard on Dave. So I'm a little hurt that he took that away from me. I think it's really important to point out that Dave and I opposed the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. We were joined in that by an extraordinary collection of thinkers on international relations and national security studies who almost universally said this is going to be a disaster. And one of the ironies of the past 20 years has been that many of the people who didn't fix it but helped it not come out as badly as it could have, certainly, particularly in Iraq, were people who opposed the invasion

of Iraq in the first place. And that is my overwhelming lesson to policymakers, is that Iraq was an unnecessary war. Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with the attacks of September 11th with al-Qaeda. There was no al-Qaeda inside Iraq before we invaded that country in March of 2003. They came there afterwards. And so the decision to invade a country and topple its government is a decision that is going to result in horrific costs and damages, likely for decades, and costs measured in the trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. The decision to invade Afghanistan in 2001 was, I believe, absolutely necessary. The decision to stay there after the Taliban was toppled, I believe, was correct. And I don't think any president could have left until at the earliest, Osama bin Laden had met his demise. But the decision to invade

Iraq was perhaps the worst decision in the full history of American foreign policy. And while the military bears a share of responsibility for what happened. But that decision was made by civilian policymakers who rejected the advice of general officers like Eric Shinseki, who opposed that as strongly as he possibly could have. Greg Newbold fought against the decision while in uniform and failed to convince the political decision makers. And so for God's sake, pay attention to the people we elect to these offices, pay attention to these life and death decisions, not just for individuals, but for entire societies and governments, and pay attention to the lessons from these past 20 years, which are going to resound for decades to come. That's what I would

ask of decision makers. My one key point that I would make to, it's actually two points to decision makers, is firstly, do not lightly get involved in irregular warfare. Because as we've been saying, it's horrible. It's extremely difficult. Nobody comes out clean. It's very, very difficult to come up with a clear outcome. It's just very messy and difficult and horrible. So don't lightly engage in it. Don't rush into it. Don't go in there thinking that it's going to be easier than it will be.

It will be nothing but horrible. But at the same time, the flip side of that, the paradox, if you like, is you can't pretend it doesn't exist. You can't ignore it, right? It's like some kind of horrific surgery where you don't want to lightly rush into it, but you want to have people on your team that know how to do it when the time comes. And if it were up to me, I would be focusing very heavily on the other elements of the irregular warfare task list. And on COIN itself right now, I would be saying, let's lock in the lessons and let's build a cadre that will fully internalize and understand those critical lessons so that when the next time inevitably comes around,

we are not caught flat footed in the same way that we were after 9-11. So in the nearer of great power competition and a spectrum from competition through crisis and coercion through conflict, there's all sorts of areas for application of irregular warfare. And we are doing them every day around the world. But as to large-scale, long-duration, US-led, US led coalition supported coin in other people's countries. I have no confidence that we won't do it again because we do these things regularly on about a 25 year cycle. But we need to lock in those lessons, avoid if at all possible getting sucked into another one. But when we do, we need to have that expert cadre ready to roll to provide that understanding of exactly how this

stuff works. Dave, John, thank you so much for joining the Irregular Warfare podcast. It's been a pleasure to have you. Thank you. Thanks for the important work you guys are doing. We're grateful. Thank you again for joining us for episode 85 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In the next episode, Matt and Laura talk to Dr. Una Hathaway and Congressman Tom Campbell about congressional oversight of modern warfare. After that, Ben and Julia talk to Ambassador Roger Carstens and Dr. Danny Gilbert about hostage diplomacy.

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