Irregular Warfare Podcast - Insurgents Rarely Win: Adaptation in the Face of Failure

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

This episode explores both the recent history and the future character of insurgency. Our guests are former US Ambassador to Iraq, Turkey, and Albania James Jeffrey and Dr. David Ucko, a professor at the National Defense University and author of the book The Insurgent’s Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail. They begin by arguing that insurgency will play an important role in great power competition, although states’ objectives will change from the transformational nation-building goals of the post-9/11 era to more hard-nosed security and political objectives. They then argue that despite perceived recent failures in counterinsurgency in cases such as the US intervention in Afghanistan, insurgencies rarely win—this has led insurgent groups to adopt new theories of victory. Lastly, our guests discuss policy implications, especially how to balance military and civilian means to counter insurgency. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

DOD has the mechanisms, the tools, the strategic culture and infrastructure to put together coherent campaign plans, blending in other elements of national power. The State Department should be able to, but trust me, can't. So we default to the military. be able to but trust me can't. So we default to the military. You know rather than presume a cookie-cutter approach to state building, I think we need to engage with the difficult questions of political economy, of elite interests, when we try to address insurgency in these countries. And I don't think that we have the political maturity necessarily to go at the problem in that way. Welcome to Episode 60 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I am your host, Kyle Atwell, and my

co-host today is Jeff Vaneff. Today's episode explores both the recent history and future character of insurgencies. Our guests begin by arguing that insurgency will play an important role in great power competition, although state's objectives will change from the transformational nation-building goals of the post-911 era to more hard-nosed security and political objectives. They then explore the observation that despite perceived recent failures in counterinsurgency, insurgencies rarely win. This has led insurgent groups to adopt new theories of victory. Last, our guests discuss policy implications,

especially how to balance military and civilian means to counterinsurgency. Ambassador James Jeffrey has served as the ambassador to Iraq, Turkey, and Albania, as the deputy national security advisor to President George W. Bush, and as the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. Before his distinguished diplomatic career, Ambassador Jeffrey was a U.S. Army infantry officer with service in Germany and Vietnam. Dr. David Ucko is Professor of International Security Studies and Chair of the War and Conflict Studies Department

at the College of International Security Affairs within the National Defense University. His research areas include political violence, irregular warfare, and counterinsurgency. And he is the author of the book, The Insurgents' Dilemma, A Struggle to Prevail, which underpins today's conversation. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Ambassador Jim Jeffrey and Professor David Uko. Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, Professor David Uko, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast.

We're very excited to have you join us today. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Our motivating question today is, what lessons can we derive from the past 20 years of insurgency and counterinsurgency? David, you recently wrote a book called The Insurgents Dilemma, which addresses this topic. What motivated you to write a book on insurgency? And how relevant will insurgencies be in the broader context

of national security strategy moving forward? Well, thanks for the question. I would say that a prime motivation for writing this book was really a clash of ideas between what you rightly characterize as 20 years of US experience with counterinsurgency and the experiences that I was hearing about from some of the students that I have at the National Defense University's College of International Security Affairs. Primarily, it seemed to me that while in the Western sort of doctrinal experience, we emphasize, you know, good governance, addressing the root causes of conflict, and also bemoan the fact that we don't do these things particularly well. What I was hearing from other places around the world was a similar complaint, but also,

despite government missteps and errors and perhaps inadequacy, the insurgents weren't winning exactly, and nor were the governments. So there was more of a stasis than sort of the doom and gloom that one might perhaps have expected given this track record. And so I thought, what explains this? You know, if governments are, on the whole, fairly rubbish at counterinsurgency, and yet the insurgents are not necessarily winning as a result, how can we explain this trend? And what does this mean for the future of insurgency? And I decided to write this, I guess, maybe it's a bit foolhardy, because of course, the US conversation has rather moved on from counterinsurgency.

But it seemed to me that if the problem of insurgency won't go away and if it's likely to evolve in the face of this stasis, well, then we best adapt and try to figure out what comes around the corner. Jim, what role do you see insurgency playing going forward? Thanks. And that's a good pickup from what David said, because I think that insurgency has a bright future. We are focused, as we should, on great power competition. But I'm old enough to have actually spent 20 years in the Cold War, and much of it was involved in one or another form of irregular warfare or insurgencies from the Middle East to Vietnam. one or another form of irregular warfare or insurgencies from the Middle East to Vietnam. That was the normal way that we had conflicts with our enemies during that period. Conventional major war was too dangerous, and certainly nuclear war was basically unthinkable. And so,

the competition was around the world from Greece and Berlin to Vietnam and Korea, internal conflicts, from Greece and Berlin to Vietnam and Korea, internal conflicts, civil wars, insurgencies, and the like. Thus, it is very likely in the future that we will be doing the same. The problem is, as David pointed out, we, the United States, are not very good at it. Now, David has pointed out exactly how to succeed or to at least avoid failing, which is to outlast the insurgents. From my experience, this is a good and valid recipe. It's also one that isn't going to work well with the United States. Our national security system is based upon public support. Public support does not like long-term, unspecific engagements, particularly with American casualties. Our leadership has a hard time articulating and communicating basic national interests at stake

and the political goals of any engagement shot of something really simple like liberate Kuwait and drive out the Iraqi army. Beyond that, we're not good. Finally, both our military and the larger civilian national security infrastructure, it basically is dysfunctional in dealing with long-term insurgencies because of structural foci that both have that make it difficult. And this cannot be fixed by revising a failed manual or providing more money. So we need to be cautious. We need to think why we didn't work well in insurgencies in the past and apply those lessons. And I would say, and we can get into this later, we have done so with the Islamic State from 2014 on. And we need to rely more on allies and partners than on the direct commitment of major American resources.

more on allies and partners than on the direct commitment of major American resources. Yeah, if I may just build on that, there is sort of a mutual need for change and adaptation, both on the state side and on the non-state side. And on the state side, I agree exactly with what Jim is saying. I mean, there's much room for improvement. There's an urgent need to learn the lessons. And unfortunately, one of the many destructive side effects, I guess perhaps one of the less severe ones, but nonetheless a critical one of the Ukraine war is that we have, in a sense, swept the Afghanistan endgame and our experience there under the rug. And I think we need to actually have a closer look at what happened there to think more honestly about what the United States can and cannot do when it engages in an expeditionary footing in insurgency and counterinsurgency settings abroad.

So you're saying essentially that we should have had this period of retrospection following Afghanistan to assess lessons learned and implications for the future. But Ukraine is such an important crisis that it's essentially diverted the national security apparatus away from that reflection? Yeah, it's not unlike what happened after Vietnam. There were many very good reasons to focus on the central front after Vietnam, given the numerical superiority that Russians were displaying at that time. The unfortunate side effect of doing so, however, was that what happened in Vietnam was swept up into the rug. And so I see a similar pattern now. And I think given the enduring importance and also the ubiquity of insurgency as a contest of power

within societies, that's not a standing that we can afford to take. We need to actually look far more closely and far more creatively, both of the problem of insurgency and the options that we have in response. But what I was going to come onto is that actually, in a sense, the non-state need for change is all the more urgent. And that's why I wrote this book on the insurgents dilemma. Because Afghanistan, to my mind, stands out as an exception to a broader global trend where insurgents simply are not winning anymore, or at least they're not winning by the standards

that we were used to, I to think of during the Cold War. That is to say, take over the state, claim the regime, and become the new power to be. That simply isn't happening on a global level, absent very strong state support, as in the case of Libya. But in the median case, what you see is a conflict that kind of simmers, sometimes rises to a boil, but it simply never does boil over in that way. And so the insurgents dilemma then, and this I think will prompt some strategic innovation on their part, will be concerned with how to do better in the future. I disagree. Well, I don't disagree with David. I actually disagree with the assumption that we didn't learn the lessons of Vietnam. We eventually learned them

during Iraq when we went back and dug into the histories, particularly under Abrams. The problem is there is a second dilemma, and that is the American statesman's dilemma. David, in his book, contrasts his position with that of Henry Kissinger, who essentially bemoaned the fact that the insurgents can outlast us. Well, the question is, who is us? If us is some government that really doesn't want the insurgents to overthrow them or to change the way they govern, a good example is Turkey, which has been dealing with the Kurdish Marxist movement, the PKK now, for just short of 40 years. movement, the PKK now, for just short of 40 years. That's one thing. If the us is the United States with, again, our impatience with long, messy internal conflicts without absolutely vital interests, with a US military, particularly ground forces, that is prioritized to succeed in rapid,

decisive warfare, and thus we don't have many of those units, but they're extremely good at what they do. An insurgency requires lots of troops, which we don't have unless we pull off most of our bottom of battle from other missions. And it requires long-term commitment to staying the course. And that's hard for people to do who've been psychologically and in many other ways trained, as I was trained, to fight outnumbered and win and damn it, do it quickly. You argue that insurgency and irregular warfare are going to play an important role in the future of great power competition. But do you see that the U.S. approach or its objectives with insurgencies is going to change from the last 20 years to how it will manifest in great power competition? I hope so. Let me put it this way. From 1989 on, our insurgency experience was largely focused on

humanitarian nation building and transformational change in states and populations. In that construct, the military, typically the military action to suppress, defeat, deter those who wanted to block this project was a necessary but not sufficient requirement to achieve the end goal, which was this transformation. In the new great power competition framework, just like in the Cold War, there may be some focus on changing the way the population feels about things or how a state that we're supporting acts, but that will be to the extent necessary to achieve the goal. And the goal will be primarily a political, military, and military goal, to deter, stop,

push back, defeat, or destroy some military or political-military irregular warfare effort by our foes. That gives us much more flexibility. It means we don't have to do the same kind of nation building as an end, but enough nation building as necessary. Yeah, if I may just follow up on that, I think it's absolutely crucial that we understand that the 20-year counterinsurgency era that came to a close, one might say, in Kabul in August 2021, does not define the global experience of insurgency or counterinsurgency. And very much, as Jim says, most of the countries that are plagued by insurgency have not read or have not followed the rather sort of progressive undertones of our doctrine, that is to say, you know, address

the root causes. Instead, they have, you know military. And the complaint that comes out in academic and policy-oriented discourse is that it is an overly militarized approach. And yet, these states are finding that they can do well enough by doing just enough, so long as they face an insurgent adversary that is still pursuing a theory of victory very much akin to what we saw during the Cold War, that is to say, mobilize politically to build military power and confront the state that way. And what I would say, if you look into the future, is that some insurgent organizations, if we think of the battlefield as the ultimate laboratory or adaptation, you know, survival of the fittest, they will adapt, adapt to survive and adapt to win. And we'll see then the elaboration of far more crafty and clever

theories of victory that don't seek to attack the state exactly where it is strong, exactly where it likes to act, that is to say, on the military playing field, but rather to inflate and inflame political, economic and informational lines of effort where the state is far less well-equipped to respond. And as this regards great power competition, if any of those innovations actually bloom, if they are effective in this new strategic environment, I think you can bet your bottom dollar, as it were, that states are going to provide them every type of resources to help them on their way and to exploit the vulnerabilities that states now expose, which are not the same as

those that we saw during the Cold War. Before we dig too deeply into this now, I'd like to define some terms. David, your book is titled The Insurgent's Dilemma, A Struggle to Prevail. What is the insurgent's dilemma? So the insurgent's dilemma to me is the choice between either mobilizing militarily and having an effect, but also making yourself a very juicy target for military counterattack by the state, or staying in the shadows, retaining that fluidity, that sort of shadowy nature that insurgents have, and yet then being incapable of actually having an effect, that is to say, succeeding in your political goals. And it's a dilemma that many others have commented on, and people have

called it different things. And the point I make in my book is that because of an evolution in strategic environment, the advantages that insurgents had during the Cold War, and even into the 1990s, simply aren't there anymore. And so whereas it was ambitious, but viable for an insurgent to overcome the dilemma in the Cold War, and to claim the seat of government, that's not something that happens particularly often. I won't say that it never happens, but it doesn't happen particularly often anymore. And then if that's the case, if you accept that premise, what will insurgents do it as they survey the field and want to do better than their peers

who are getting obliterated or bombed to pieces all around the world. That premise was based on some statistics, and we don't need to go into the specific numbers, but essentially you found that insurgents are less likely to defeat states outright in the last 20 to 30 years as compared to the Cold War. Is that correct? Yes. The statistics, I would say, support my premise. But I would add that even though that's the case, I find these quantitative data sets of conflict termination to be hugely suspect. The way they code various conflicts makes them all but unworkable. But I know that many of my peers in academia would not accept a supposition without some

empirical background so I decided to dig through the Uppsala and the correlates of war and other data sets just to kind of see what they had to say and yes the numbers support what I have to say but you know the numbers are only so good. Yeah so why would the states have an advantage in a civil war compared to the insurgents today? So I think most insurgents, whether they realize it or not, pursue a fairly sort of Maoist blueprint for their strategy. And so rural mobilization is a key component of building military prowess and building the large conventional combat capabilities that Mao and Che Guevara and others have said are necessary to actually make a dent against the state. The issue that we've seen in the last few decades and which is continuing apace is one of global

urbanization. It's far more difficult right now to hide out in the rural hinterland and create the divisions or the brigades that would be necessary to in fact meet the states on the battlefield. Secondly, even though Russia and China and others are still active in supporting insurgencies or in supporting subversive actors, it's not at the same level as we saw during the Cold War. And it's not done with the same level of overtness as we saw during the Cold War. And so there are strict limitations on how much state support you're going to get. I mean, in the Cold War, many countries were basically torn apart by a non-state actor fighting a government on fairly equal terms,

whether it's in their equipment or they're in combat formations. That's far less common these days. And then thirdly, and conversely, what we see is, particularly since 9-11, a far lower tolerance for the use of terrorism or for the use of violence by non-state armed groups. So whereas in the Cold War, there was a sort of normative underpinning for national liberation, the notion that these states were sort of rejecting the yoke of empire and becoming a member of international society, that could perhaps excuse to some degree some of the dysfunction and violence that happened on the way. We don't have that normative underpinning anymore. that happened on the way, we don't have that normative underpinning anymore. And instead,

particularly since 9-11, as soon as you see a bomb go off or an AK-47 being raised, you get the label terrorism foist on you, which makes things very complicated, not least because of the financial loopholes that have been closed off by new legislation since 2001. So there's a variety of normative and sort of societal and structural reasons why the Maoist blueprint that insurgents have tended to rely upon simply does not work. I would add that it's a misreading of the Maoist blueprint because Mao overall emphasized the political, whereas what we see in most of the imitators is that they will rush to the military and find themselves, therefore, the victim of a military response. Jim, in this new dynamic that David poses here, in which modern civil wars favor the state, does that apply to U.S. interventions abroad when we

try to fight a counterinsurgency, or do you view that as a separate use case? I'm concerned because I think that insurgents are going to be following David's model, and I fear that some of them are going to buy his book and start connecting the dots. We'll find that we're going to be even less good at this kind of even more political warfare than we were in the past. Again, my spinoff on David's title, The U.S. Statesman's Dilemma, is that the U.S. foreign policy system writ large, population, the Congress, even the executive, does not really like long-term commitments. This is why, frankly, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were so reluctant to declare Iraq an insurgency because

they knew firsthand the implications of that. They don't want to get involved in those kind of things. But more importantly, the primary operator for all elements of government approach to a highly political form of insurgency, which itself is a more political form of warfare, which for Clausewitz itself is political, so it's a third level of politics, would be the civilian side, probably the State Department, less likely the National Security Council. And from much experience at high levels in both, they are totally incapable of handling that operational strategy level between the tactical actions of combatant commanders and embassies and special envoys and covert actions by the CIA and our grand

national strategy spelled out by tradition alliances and things like the president's national security strategy. That level is missing. The one people who have the capability of taking grand strategy and manipulating it into directives, campaign plans, courses of action that will inform, direct, and shape the actions, again, of the embassies, of the drone pilots, and Langley, and all of that is the military. of the drone pilots and Langley and all of that is the military. The problem is they have the institutional training, the equipment, the mindset. The problem is it only works for the military. Their ability, although believe me, some of our secretaries of defense, they'll try, they really can't co-opt the civilian side. And David is pushing us in a direction where the

civilian side is ever more important. So we will default back to the military, but then the operating levels still are focused on rapid, decisive warfare, and that doesn't work, particularly even more in these future conflicts where the political is geometrically greater than they did in the quasi-political military conflicts we have now. So I'm not quite sure how we're going to deal with these conflicts beyond a just general support of a state that we like or a state that's part of our alliance system that is under stress from one of these insurgent movements, and perhaps keeping third countries, Pakistan in the case of Afghanistan, Turkey in the case of what we were doing in

Asia, keeping those third countries out of the fight and making things worse. There are certain things we can do that don't require sophisticated strategic thinking and institutions and we better leave it at that level. Yeah absolutely I think that that's exactly the way that I try to frame it in the book that is to say that if insurgents are facing this dilemma where when they rise up they make themselves a target for military counter-attack well obviously the solution the the the adaptation would be to seize power without presenting yourself as a target for military counterattack. And if you're able to do that via swift exploitation of politics or information or

narratives or societal schisms or frame alignment, bridge building, then the state needs to be able to respond to those efforts in kind. And as Jim rightly says, I don't think that we've really thought about that despite the exhortations and doctrines. So there's much work to be done. I was going to say, we'll jump into some of the specific innovations, but Jim would be interested in how you perceive this need to adapt as the modern state becomes more effective in David's telling in controlling insurgent efforts? I think that this is very, very valid, but I look at it from two standpoints. The first standpoint, which of course is a

traditional one, generally during the Cold War and almost entirely during the post-Cold War, which is how do we help that state deal with this new threat. But the second thing is, we have to think about this in great power competition, is how do we turn that to our advantage? You know, we launched insurgencies. That's what the Bay of Pigs was all about. That's what various efforts that John Le Carre and others have described in Albania for the better part of a decade were all about. The fact that they didn't work out too well is interesting, but the point is that has to be an arrow in our quiver of using insurgent activities to deny our near-peer competitors military or diplomatic advantage. So we need to, first of all, know in detail how these things work and figure out either to counter them or to

exploit them, what the basic dynamics are. And as we discussed, some of them, they'll all be very specific to the country and groups involved, but there are general patterns. And that's what David lays out in the book. And that's what we try to, again, and looking at it from the policy standpoint, draw some general conclusions from. But this is early work. There's been very little that I've seen in following this literature that is focused on what David has developed. I think he's absolutely correct, but I think that it's going to take us some time to absorb it. Jim, you said something that caught my attention, which is the idea that we need to be comfortable with potentially supporting insurgencies in the context of great power competition. And I wonder if there's

any political viability in the United States for doing this action now. And the reason I think about that is one of our actually very early episodes was a conversation with a scholar and a senior special forces officer about supporting insurgents specifically, because that is the U.S. doctrinal mission that the special forces community has. And we sent a draft of that to some State Department friends that we had before we published it who said, hey, this is really interesting, but you can't say these types of things out loud. We can't talk about supporting insurgents. That's not okay. And that was kind of a wake-up call for me because in special forces, that's what we train to do.

And yet we had some diplomats telling us that was not appropriate to even air publicly. I wonder what your kind of reaction to that is. You picked the wrong diplomats. No, no, I'm not trying to be funny here. There is a real and this is not a podcast about the State Department, although in a way, when I say the dysfunctionalities of the larger civilian side of bureaucracy pushes us to go to the military because they actually know how to do serious planning and disciplined prioritization and other things the State Department doesn't. And one of the many dysfunctionalities of the State Department,

and I've heard this from the joint staff, I've heard this from everybody, is the two plug-in points you have. The Political Military Bureau doesn't do real political military work. That is all done by the Geographic Bureaus, who are kind of weak sisters to the combatant commanders geographically. And the other place that people plug in is the Bureau for Stability Operations. But again, they're more a toolkit provider than they are a thinker. Who are the thinkers? That depends. It's informal in the Department of State. But I'm sure that if you went to one of the three or four top officials of the Department of State and raised this, you would get a hearing. You could cite Kissinger's use of the Kurds against the Iraqi regime in the 1970s. It didn't turn out too well for the Kurds, but it was part of our policy at the time.

You can use, obviously, it's another bad example, but the Bay of Pigs. You can use what we're looking at with Ukraine and other places. And of course, it's a mission of, I mean, in working with the 10 special forces during the Cold War, that was their primary mission, was to encourage insurgencies just like the OSS in World War II. But this gets to the fact that it should be mind-boggling, but it's not, that you got that answer from anyone in the State Department who, before they just said that, would say, okay, what is U.S. policy on that? And of course, we have a whole operation, the Special Operations Command,

that has as one of its key missions that. And you in the military know before you make a bold statement like that, you check on the details, you get informed, you reference what you say. You don't get that kind of thinking in the State Department. So you get anything, that person was basically saying, gee, my boss would be upset if I encourage these guys to do it, because who knows what they're going to go off and do. And then I get a screaming cable from my ambassador saying, why did you encourage the fifth group to start sending weapons to a group that is trying to overthrow the country that, while on the Russian side, I'm trying to get to become more neutral? That's the sort of reason that you get this reaction. But it is a kind of

uninformed, unstructured, unhelpful kind of commentary you get from us. You shouldn't get that from us, but you often do. And you're making my case, unfortunately. Jim, to follow up there, what sort of cultural or organizational change would be required at the State Department to operationalize the kinds of things we're speaking about? Get rid of all of the undersecretaries except the undersecretary for policy, which is actually the equivalent of the DOD undersecretary for policy. And all of those people are just doing boutique things like economics, democracy, technical, political, military stuff. They could be assistant secretaries. Make all of the assistant secretaries for the geographic regions under secretaries. Then they would be at the level where they could lead or be the main presence at deputies committees in the NSC. They would be

in a better position to go eye to eye with the combatant commanders. Then the second thing is do all kinds of things to the political military bureau, a set of bureaus, to make them not your interlocutor. The geographic bureaus used to own the political advisors. Now they're all owned by the political military bureau. But once again, the political military bureau doesn't run laws. It doesn't run the State Department's part of the laws. However badly or well we run our civilian part of the wars, believe me, they're run by special envoys closely associated with bureaus, like I was with Syria, Brett McGregor was with the Fight ISIS campaign, or by the assistant secretaries themselves. That's reality. It will never change. These people report directly to the secretary, and they're

the serious players, but the institutional and liaison functions are not aligned. So that's the first thing. Now, there would be many other cultural things that I won't bore you with, but there are a number of institutional things that could be done to make this mesh much smoother and much more efficient. There are people in the Department of State who will understand when you raise, how do we support an insurgency? Believe me, if you talk to the Near Eastern Assistant Secretary, he or she would be very interested in what you've got concerning Iran. We're going to jump into more policy implications in a minute. But before we do that, one more pullout from your book, David. We kind

of danced around that there's different insurgent strategies that they're able to pursue given the insurgent dilemma. Can you real quickly just kind of run around that there's different insurgent strategies that they're able to pursue given the insurgent dilemma. Can you real quickly just kind of run us through what those three strategies are that you identify so we can frame them for the listener? Yeah, absolutely. So in short, the three different methods that I highlight are one, a method of localization, two, a method of infiltration, and three, an ideational approach to insurgency. And again, the aim of all three is really to remove yourself as a military target. And so in the localized approach, what

that means is that you limit your struggle to parts of the country which the state or the government or the elite has anyway sort of abandoned or given up on. And within those enclaves, it is possible, particularly given the forces of globalization, to actually achieve your objectives at a more limited scale, sure, but nonetheless to make a name for yourself, to make large amounts of money, and to actually exercise power and become a brand name. In the infiltrative insurgent method, what I talk about there really is best, I think, encapsulated by the image of a Trojan horse. That is to say, rather than fight the government from outside, you actually create

a political party to exploit the openness of democratic and pseudo-democratic regimes, while at the same time persisting with violence, intimidation, bullying, and terrorism, yet in a way that doesn't tarnish the supposed purity of your democratic credentials. And then thirdly, in the ideational approach, you remove yourself from a target by operating basically only online, only through social media. Leaderless resistance, leaderless insurgency has been something that various theorists have pursued for many years, and it hasn't worked particularly well, but the idea was always to avoid law enforcement by simply having no structure. strategy in a different way. And it's not just about recruiting and even radicalizing or commissioning attacks. It's about creating online spaces where you produce a sense of belonging, which can then change the norms and beliefs of society writ large. So that over time, you have in a sense eroded what Gramsci might have called the cultural hegemony of the status quo and created an opening for new ideas and new ways of being. Yeah, one of the reactions I had

to localized insurgency in line with what you were just saying is that, you know, there's this kind of assumption both in academic research but also in policy that the state actually wants to defeat the insurgents. But what you lay out is there's actually various modes of accommodation between the insurgent groups in the state in some circumstances, where they may be fine if the insurgents do what they're going to do as long as they geographically contain themselves to essentially an area the government determines doesn't really matter that much to them. Jim, based on your experience, both as a repeat offender ambassador and at the National Security Council and focused

on the counter-ISIL fight. Did any of these three insurgent strategies resonate with what you had observed on the ground? Certainly at various points. For example, both in Bosnia and in northern Iraq, we see localized insurgencies morph into political processes where they were neither defeated, we never really defeated the Republika Srpska, ethnic Serbs in Bosnia. We found a way to browbeat and bomb them into a joint government, which is still kind of holding together, likewise, together. Likewise, the situation in northern Iraq. And so localized insurgencies can be both tamed if we're trying to support the larger state, as we were clearly in the case of Bosnia, it's more complicated with Iraq, or we can use them to exploit a situation, which certainly wasn't what we're trying to do with the Serbs in Bosnia, but was a little bit what we're trying to do with the Kurds in northern Iraq. So I think that at times

we have been able to be quite sophisticated in doing this, but there was a prerequisite to both. At the times we were doing this, Bosnia was sort of like Vince Lombardi, not the most important foreign policy objective for Bill Clinton. It was the only one he was focused on. So therefore, we had tremendous freedom of action, particularly, as I observed, Dick Holbrooke had freedom of action. And dealing with Iraq in general and the Kurds in particular was certainly one of the very shortlist number of top priorities in a number of administrations. And that means you can cut through the bureaucracy. It means that the guys who will say, oh, we don't do insurgency here, get blown away very quickly because you're dealing with their

bosses' bosses. And in a pinch, you go to the president of the National Security Advisor. I mean, it's an informal and messy process, but it works. But my point is, it only works if it's really, really important to our national leadership. Normally, they're not perfect, but normally our national leadership only identifies those things that are really important that do meet objective vital interests. And that's tough because there are only a certain number of them and there's only so much bandwidth to embrace things as vital. Many of the things we're going to be dealing with are going to be important, particularly important not to lose, but they're not going to be vital. And that's where the bureaucracy raises its ugly head. That's where other priorities come in.

And that's where it's going to be hard to come up with a sophisticated across government program to assist a state that is trying to deal with one of these complicated, largely political challenges that David has laid out. This is quite common, particularly in the developing world, and it really challenges the normative notion of a state as a barbarian construct that exercises control over its territory and population. I don't think that's actually a very fair description of your median state. We need to be cognizant of that, not just the fact that states are not what we think they are, but also that the elites in those states probably don't have a great interest in making it that. And so when we try to provide counterinsurgency support to, say, Abuja or Nigeria or to Mali for that matter, what is the local interest in actually consolidating what we consider to be the de jure responsibilities of a state. I think it's very telling that in Mali, the north of the country is colloquially referred to as the Mali inutile or the useless Mali. I think it's quite interesting that in Nigeria, there is

a political economy that suggests the northeast and the northwest, both now wrecked by instability, are not that important next to the oil producing sections in the South. And so, you know, rather than presume a cookie cutter approach to state building, I think we need to engage with the difficult questions of political economy, of elite interests, when we try to address insurgency in these countries. And I don't think that we have the political maturity necessarily, or the political realism to go at the problem in that way. And so we hit up against contradictions that are going to continue to haunt us until we find perhaps a more creative way of lashing together different parts of a country that in fact were never really a country to begin with.

What are the implications for policymakers and practitioners from this conversation? Well, I would say that on the localization of insurgency in particular, you need to look into more decentralized forms of statehood that maintain the state as an actor in international society, but that allow for variegated approaches to governance within that state. The notion of creating a strong centralized government in these areas as a recipe against instability, I think will run up against too much local resistance. And I think we see that in Afghanistan, I think we've seen in Somalia, and I think we see it across the Sahel. And so what then does that mean for the nature of the nation state? And of

course, I don't expect perhaps policymakers to become, you know, political theorists and to rethink barbarian norms. But ultimately, there should be a clear policy, there should be a clear political idea of what we're striving towards, rather than assuming that the same military tactical toolkit can achieve our strategic objectives. I think that, A, we have to deal with this, but B, it's going to be even harder than dealing with insurgencies over the past 20 years. In many cases, thinking if we're going to support a state against such a challenge, it means either supporting the state's response, which we might find abhorrent to all of our values, or it means

pressing the state on major internal reforms and changes and sharing of power and other things, which of course was where we got in trouble over the past 30 years of trying to deep dive into other countries and tell them what to do to move in different directions. We're, A, not good at diagnosis, and we're even worse at operating to deal with the, to cut out the tumors because we can't even find the tumors and we can't persuade the owner of the tomb is to let us do what we think we should do. The secret sauce that gets us beyond these many problems, and I sound like a real pessimist here, but the secret sauce is if it is vital to us. If we really, really need Turkey, as we did in 2007, we took actions to help them on the PKK, we'll find a way to overcome these things and provide support. But if it's not at the top of the list, it's going to be very hard to do the kind of heavy lifting within our own bureaucracy, our own societies, and among our

allies to deal with these sorts of insurgencies, even more to support these kinds of insurgencies, insurgencies, even more to support these kinds of insurgencies. Unless the state we're trying to bring down or weaken or change is seen in Washington and among our allies as both really important to take down a change and the possibilities of doing so are real, we're not going to find much of an echo where we need political and diplomatic support, alas. As insurgencies begin to innovate based on the needs presented to them by the insurgents dilemma, what is the proper balance of civilian and military responses in order to counter that and continue to innovate in counterinsurgency? Well, I mean, I'll kick this off just by making one key point, which is an area that causes some confusion. When I speak about insurgency and I'm trying to recontextualize or even redefine it,

one thing that I keep hold of is the requirement for some form of violence. The violence always has to be part of insurgency or else you're talking about a social movement organization or you're talking about something else, and that will require a different toolkit altogether. If we assume as a definitional matter that violence is a part of it, of course the military will have a role to play. And I think that the military then will also be required to plus up on some of the capabilities that we've seen called for in the last 20 years, whether that's, you know, political awareness or language skills or the ability to partner with local security forces and to build local capacity in a meaningful way. But I think as we've intimated already in this conversation,

the real onus is on the non-military instruments of national power to become fruitful members of this discussion and fruitful members of the response. And I just haven't seen that happen to date. Again, I think part of the reason is that most states, and perhaps the US included, feels that it has been able to do well enough by doing just enough, by relying predominantly on the military. But again, if the art of insurgency develops in the way that I predict it will, then we won't get away with that approach for much longer. Yeah, I would agree with David. And the question has two sets of answers. One is, how should state X deal with these kinds of new challenges? Secondly, what is the value added of an American engagement to support that state? What are our added value things that we can bring?

It may be different than the states. These things become more political. And even a state that wants to use blunt military force is going to find, I think, limitations to that. Now, governments are going to have to use a mix of political as well as military. While I think David is right that to the extent they can get away with it, the military will get the nod and they'll just try to outlast these guys. But I think that they will find various ways to deal with them because just ignoring them, splitting the difference is a political decision that has to be carried out by political ways, reinforced and augmented by the military. Now, the U.S. contribution, again, may be different and it may be different in two ways. First of all, there are certain kinds of especially military skills that we can provide, particularly enablers, to almost any type of internal conflict. That doesn't mean they will be decisive, but they can tip the balance often, be it air power, be it intelligence, be it the kind of training I've seen special forces give

government forces. And again, there are various things we can do on the civilian side as well. The problem, once again, though, is the default is to turn to the U.S. military because if any part of a problem has a military side to it. Two things kick in. One, DOD, even before it has been tapped, just in preparing to be tapped, DOD prepares for everything, including war in Antarctica, it will immediately, as part of its preparations, figure out how to keep the State Department and everybody else out of what it does. That simply is how the animal reacts. And the second thing is DOD has the mechanisms, the tools, the strategic culture and infrastructure to put together coherent campaign

plans, blending in other elements of national power. The State Department should be able to, but trust me, can't. So we default to the military in part because the military says the moment you cross the line and make it even if we have to have forces on standby we want to be independent if not dominant that's a pull and the push is we don't want to give this to the state department because they don't know how to do a five paragraph bill about it which they don't yeah if i can build on that again, just highlighting the types of civilian capabilities that will be needed, if you just take the infiltrative approach that I spoke of earlier, so what if, for example, you have in a certain country a political party that is

recognized, but that at the same time is engaged in terrorism and intimidation, that is perhaps sponsored by an outside state power that wants to compete democratically within that country's election. Well, what footing do we have? What right do we have to, in a sense, go in and meddle within the constitutional setup of their democracy? It gets into the institutions of judicial review. It gets into the institutions of counter-corruption or law enforcement, and a whole range of really civilian or non-kinetic resources that have to then withstand the test. And, you know, we can see already now where Iran, for example, sponsors various political forces across the Middle East in precisely those types of democratic elections. Well, how do you engage

with that? How do you block their path to power without creating a sort of quick route to authoritarianism or one party states? Exactly. And I'll give a classic example of this, although it's much forgotten in Washington. It involves a future Secretary of the French, Frank Colucci, who was a foreign service officer, had much experience in the Congo and elsewhere with these kinds of internal warfare situations. He was our ambassador in Portugal. When the communists basically overthrew the Portuguese government, they were doing both. They were using street violence as well as working in the political system to try to

gain control of the government through elections. And of course they had a significant amount of external support of various types from the Soviet Union. Colucci, because he had the confidence of President Ford and could take on Henry Kissinger, who respected him, Colucci could shape the U.S. response. That's the one place where the State Department actually functions effectively. I'm biased, of course, having served in the position, is the ambassador. If you have the right ambassador who has the right connections in Washington and can figure out the right policy, which was to make it clear that we wouldn't smash these guys, but that they had to adhere to the rules beginning with they had to stay democratic. They had to stay democratic. As you said, David, many of these movements, once they come to power by the ballot box, decide that that's the end of ballot boxes. He persuaded the socialists not to. They had to remain in NATO. They had to let us keep our base in the Azores.

And he pounded that into them and pounded Washington not to pull the plug on our military support, not to pull the plug on our economic assistance. And it all worked out with Portugal today. Another former Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, once stated that if you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition. As it relates to counterinsurgency, does that encapsulate the problem between the relationship between the civilian and the military, or is there more to that that you see? Much as I admire Jim Mattis, I don't like that. I would change the quote. If you don't give the State Department better guidance on national interests and more freedom of maneuver to find political solutions to problems, then you better give the military more ammunition. The State Department is not a big, fat, menace sans frontier whose mission is

to go into the countryside and dig wells and patch up sick people and inoculate folks and help village councils learn Robert's rules of order. Now, I know that our military has been out there watching State Department officers running around with ill-fitting body armor trying to do that. And that's good, and it served its purposes, but it's not the real purpose of the State Department in any state, and certainly not even in a regular warfare scenario. It is to ensure the right policies. What we did in Baghdad in 2004 was focus on just a few things while we were being bombarded by every kind of crazy Peace Corps on steroids idea to reform every little bit of Iraqi society. We focused on the central bank so it would have a solid currency, getting oil up and running so it could fund the state and eventually, as I said today, 5 million barrels a day, second only to Saudi Arabia and the whole region. Thirdly, work out some kind of modus operandi between the Kurds and the central government. And fourthly, ensure the stand-up of halfway competent elite forces, in particular, what became the counterterrorism service and the intelligence services. All four things succeeded.

All four things are still in place today. And I would say they made much of the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. They were all done by a small group of people at the embassy, sometimes with, sometimes without Washington's concurrence or even knowledge, because we're the people on the ground and we know what to do. I'm going to ask one more question to close us out. Jim, you mentioned earlier that you might be kind of a pessimist on counterinsurgency at large, but I think there's a general sense of pessimism in the United States with counterinsurgency coming out of especially Afghanistan, but even Iraq before that with the resurgence of ISIS after the 2011 withdrawal. Given the inconsistent and sometimes failed US track

record in counterinsurgency, do we understand how to defeat insurgencies based on our traditional doctrine and thinking, or do we need to kind of relook the coin playbook and our underlying assumptions about coin as a whole? And I'll go to David first and then pass it to Jim for closing comments on that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important not to let Iraq and Afghanistan monopolize our understanding of counterinsurgency. And perhaps for understandable reasons, that's been the tendency in the last 20 years. And now when you think about countering a problem of insurgency, you default to heavy US military footprint, you default to states that experienced regime change

prior to that counterinsurgency kicking off. But that's, of course, not at all the median experience. So one of the things that I think would be very helpful is to establish long lasting and enduring relationships with the states that are currently experiencing insurgency and do far more indirectly rather than directly. That's not a revolutionary thought by any means, but it's amazing to me, working on these issues for the last decade, how little attention it gets. The value of human relationships, the value of partnerships, the value of working together, it doesn't seem like a priority in most of the Department of Defense. And then, of course, on the civilian side,

exactly as Jim says, I think there needs to be a different type of conversation, a more hard-nosed and a more strategic conversation about what our policy actually is in these various countries that are threatened, how that meshes with local elite interests in those places, and how we sort of split the difference in a way that is actually likely to build to sustainable results. I don't think that we, strictly speaking, need another counterinsurgency field manual. I think the doctrine is good enough. It's never going to be perfect, but by its very nature, doctrine is always reductive. I mean, it's not supposed to be a PhD thesis. So I would say that's an area where we can probably decelerate somewhat. And I think perhaps a more fruitful area of investment is, again, to think about how do we partner with local states politically, but also militarily, and not just in a way that is tactical, but in a way that actually is built around a certain strategic congruence. David's right, particularly focusing on long-term understandings, and that requires both military officers and diplomats who spend a lot of time in the country. But that means they have to be rewarded for that time, or you won't get any of

the fast movies doing that kind of thing. But the other thing is, in terms of the doctrine, the doctrine today, with its focus on the political and protecting the population is absolutely on target. To the extent it moves into the realm of transformation of the society, nation building, stabilization on steroids, it is too ambitious and it's counterproductive. It pushes us to have too big a footprint. And I would say Afghanistan is the bad example. We have two good examples in different ways. I won't go into the Islamic State fight. I mentioned that, and I think it's pretty well known as how to do a counterinsurgency effort correctly under pretty daunting circumstances, including two outside powers, Iran and Turkey, at times being difficult. The other thing is

Iraq from 2006 on. It wasn't just the surge, although the surge was absolutely necessary because of its focus on protecting the population. The other element of it was we gave up the nation building. President Bush deliberately tore up his second inaugural address of 2005. By the end of 2006, he knew it wasn't going to work. He had lost both houses of Congress. He knew we couldn't stay. So the surge was coupled with a commitment that Iraq would have its total sovereignty and we would be out of the place by 2011. That was the other not so often noted, but equally important component of our success in relative terms in Iraq. And while it may not be perfect, like I said, compare it to Afghanistan. Anything better than Afghanistan is a victory in

the struggle. Unfortunately, gentlemen, we have run out of time. Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, Professor David Ucko, thank you for joining us today to discuss the future of counterinsurgency. We truly appreciate you sharing your time. This has been an excellent discussion on irregular warfare. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks. We wound up, I think, really engaging with each other and tried our best to answer your question. So I was really happy. and tried our best to answer your questions. So I was really happy. Thank you again for joining us for episode 60 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks.

In two weeks, Kyle and I discuss the anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with James Cunningham from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, alongside the author and former military advisor Carter Malkasian. Following that, Laura and Kyle will discuss France's Task Force Barkhan mission in West Africa with French Brigadier General François-Marie Goujon. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you do not miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare podcast so you do not miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

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