Irregular Warfare Podcast - Irregular Warfare in the Next World War

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

What would a conflict with China look like? How will irregular warfare fit into a conflict before and during large-scale combat operations? Retired Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman explore the theme of escalation to large-scale conflict in their New York Times best seller 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, and they join this episode to discuss those questions and more.

Both sides think they can control this ladder of escalation. Certainly the Chinese do. So does the United States. Our partners in a conventional war are going to play a crucial role. It's one of the great advantages that we would have over the Chinese is our string of alliances in the South Pacific and in that region. And obviously, our special operations forces that have built relationships in those militaries will play a critical role. Welcome to episode 27 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm Nick Lopez, and I'll be your host today along with Andy Milburn. In today's episode, we discuss what great power conflict would look like in the context of irregular warfare.

Nick Lopez Our guests recently released 2034, a novel of the next world war, which was an instant New York Times bestseller. They used their professional experience to paint a picture of what a great power conflict with China would look like. Their novel provides an excellent foundation for a discussion on how irregular warfare and special operations forces would play a pivotal role before and during such a conflict. They also provide some key insights into how such an escalation with China might be avoided. Admiral James Steph Redis is a retired four-star

U.S. naval officer. His 37 years of service in the Navy included various commands. He was a Supreme Allied NATO Commander from 2009 to 2013, as well as the Commander of U.S. Southern Command from 2006 to 2009, with responsibility for all military operations in Latin America. After the military, he served as the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Admiral Stavridis earned his PhD in international relations and has published nine acclaimed books and hundreds of articles. Elliot Ackerman is a former Marine who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.

He is a former White House fellow and is author of various best-selling novels, as well as the memoir Places and Names on War, Revolution, and Returning. His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times where he is a contributing opinion writer. A couple quick notes. If you haven't already subscribed to the Irregular Warfare podcast, you can do so on your favorite podcast platform. And if you have a minute,

please leave a review and a rating as this helps us continue to reach more professionals in the Irregular Warfare community. This is a joint production of the 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 Admiral Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman. Admiral Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, and thank you both for joining us today. Thanks for having me on. Thank you. Great. So I'd like to go ahead and jump right in. And a question for you, Admiral. What was the motivation behind writing 2034, a novel of the next world war?

I began thinking about writing a novel about the future by looking at the past. And what I mean by that is I was very keenly aware of the body of Cold War literature back in the 70s and 80s when the U.S. and the Soviet Union faced each other. So these are films like Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach, novels like The Bedford Incident, Red Storm Rising, The Third World War by Sir John Hackett. There was a very large and I think influential body of literature that allowed us to imagine how terrible a war would have been between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And by imagining it, I think we helped avoid it because we could, both sides, I think could consider how detrimental it would have been for the entire world, obviously. So no such body of literature

really exists, despite the fact that the US and China, by pretty much everybody's account, are kind of moving toward a more confrontational position. So I went to my editor at Penguin Press, and he was nice enough to suggest that I work alongside a novelist, a very accomplished novelist, Elliot Ackerman, who not only has the military background, has the policy background, but most importantly, had written four previous novels, finalist for the National Book Award. So we came together to create, if you will, a cautionary tale about how terrible it would be if the. and China managed to sleepwalk into a war. Admiral, what does a future conflict with China look like? And why is it important for

policymakers to understand that now? Andy, a war with China, as we postulate, is going to occur, I think, out of miscalculation, out of tension. One possible place might be the high seas, the South China Sea, particularly, which China claims in its entirety as territorial waters. The US disputes that. The rest of the world disputes that. Could come as a result of Taiwan. That would be another potential flashpoint. But I think at the end of the day, a war would look like a miscalculation on the part of one of the two, US or China. And I think it would be a maritime conflict. For the purposes of this podcast, I'll mention that I think there'll be a pretty significant maritime special operations component to it as well. It'll be fought, I think, largely behind

what's called the first island chain inside the South China Sea, the East China Sea. And I think it'll be bloody if it comes to that. We need to avoid it. The closest analog in modern military history is probably the Falklands, where you see a British carrier task force attacked by Argentine long-range air. Submarines play a significant role. So take that, dust off that Falklands War scenario, make it 20 times bigger, and park it in the South China Sea. That's what it would look like. Interesting. Appreciate that, Admiral. I'd like to go over to Elliot and a question in the specifics behind a regular warfare. How do you see special operations forces in this type of conflict where a lot of academics and even some practitioners claim that this type of conflict will be mostly focused on

large-scale combat operations. I think it comes down to how you see SOF evolving and, you know, and what are the definitions of these terms? You know, is irregular warfare necessarily directly linked to insurgencies and counterinsurgencies? And I don't necessarily think that in this regard it will. I think U.S. Army Special Forces has a definition of irregular warfare that's very much tied to the idea of working with partisans. But I think we all know that the definition of irregular warfare in other contexts extends well beyond that. But I think, you know, specifically what the Admiral was talking about is, you know, what would this conflict look like? It would have a significant island hopping component to it, which in some regards, at least for the Marine Corps, would be a throw of direct action and coordination between combined arms teams that special operators have really been the ones to auger in the idea that you can have small, extremely lethal groups of troops deployed either autonomously or semi-autonomously

as a way to project power. So I think you would see that type of direct action in a conflict with China. Let me add something to that quickly. Two things. One is take a look at what Commandant Dave Berger of the Marine Corps is talking about in the use of special forces from the sea operating from Navy platforms. Very traditional role going back hundreds of years, of course. And then secondly, islands, meaning not only natural islands, but also these artificial

islands that China has built throughout the South China Sea to use effectively as unsinkable aircraft carriers. Those need to be sunk. And sure, we can do some of that with long range air. They might be pretty well defended against long range air. Hence, in my mind, they would be pretty juicy targets for a bunch of Marine Raiders and Green Berets and SEALs. So I think there's two very practical things. And third, and finally, again, back to the Falklands, look at the role of special forces in that conflict. They came ashore, prepped the landing zones, were critical throughout that battlefield. And operations forces playing in a conflict with China. But what about their role in phase zero, the gray zone, the area of competition below the threshold of armed conflict? I would put them with, this may sound counterintuitive, but I'd put them not only on Navy ships, but on Coast Guard ships. And I think that there's a growing theory of the case that would move our Coast Guard

forward. Here, I'm talking obviously about gray zone peacetime operations. I wouldn't want to put our Coasties forward in the middle of a high-pitched battle. Their ships aren't ready for that, or I shouldn't say not ready for it. They don't have the technology to defend themselves. But during peacetime operations, this is something China does very effectively. in effect, a militia operating on a wide variety of platforms. And they go out with these Chinese fishing fleets. They gather intelligence. They keep things in line. They push away Vietnamese or Filipino fishermen. And so U.S. Coast Guard with special operations in BART could be a counter to Chinese Coast Guard, Chinese maritime militias, I think quite effectively, again, during, quote, peacetime, unquote, in that gray zone of high tension before actual

hostilities break out fully. I would only add that this and then I think there's obviously, you know, the component of our special operations forces will continue to do what they have long done, which is to maintain and build partnerships with our allies in the region, partnerships that, you know, if we were in a more conventional conflict, you would see us engaging in those partnerships and needing to leverage those types of relationships as we brought our allies into, you know, into the fold. Yeah, I'll add to that. We're already doing exactly that, for example, in Latin America, where our special forces are working alongside Coast Guardsmen and Navy, working with their counterparts from a wide variety of nations in and around the Caribbean. And this could be a very good model for the South China Sea, working with

their equivalents in Vietnam and the Philippines. The Australians and New Zealanders could come up and work with us in that regard. We could do it with the Japanese in the East China Sea with the South Koreans as well. So I think that's a rich area to explore for irregular forces. Elliot, I'm going to ask you to pull the green curtain back on that mysterious phrase, operational preparation of the environment. And because Admiral Stavridis referred to General Berger's vision for the role that the U.S. Marine Corps is going to play in the Pacific in the event of conflict. And I know that doctrine is emerging as expeditory advanced base operations. And I know that doctrine is emerging as expeditory advanced base operations.

But there hasn't been a lot of talk about phase zero gray zone specifics, specific type missions for special operations forces. So I'd be very interested to hear your views about some of the things that special operations would do specifically? And I'm thinking use of proxies or operations in the information environment as examples. Well, I think all of the above. I mean, listen, it also kind of gets to, you know, what is a special operation at this point, right? Is our use of cyber, is our use of information warfare, is our, you know, controlling narratives

through social media, you know, is that, does that now fall under the rubric exclusively of special operations? And I think it's probably high time, you know, we start looking at those capabilities and how they kind of fit into our organizational structures. a crucial role. It's one of the great advantages that we would have over the Chinese is our string of alliances in the South Pacific and in that region. And obviously, our special operations forces that have built relationships in those militaries will play a critical role. You know, and lastly, I would say, we already touched on, which is this idea of direct action, you would have, and I think General Berger is orienting the Marine Corps this way, you would have a conventional military operation, sort of a conventional island hopping style campaign, although it would not look like the island hopping campaign of the Second World War.

I mean, you would be dealing with far fewer numbers of actual boots on the ground. Those individuals would be trained to a much higher caliber. And I think you would almost sort of see kind of a reiteration of what we started to see in Iraq and Afghanistan towards the end of those wars, particularly in Afghanistan, where you saw conventional troops augmenting special operations units to sort of form into these more lethal and smaller teams that could operate independently and, you know, and employ all of the advantages like close air support that, you know, that we've been able to, that we would be able to bring to bear. So I think, you know, that's sort of what you would, you would be witnessing is more of a,

and I think what we're pivoting towards more of a hybrid model. You know, the last point I will make though, which I don't think people are talking about as much as, you know, it certainly seems as though the U.S. is playing a lot of counterinsurgency warfare. And the fact that, you know, we are trying to do a very swift and quick intellectual pivot away from those wars to something that is more conventional in nature, which the U.S. military hasn't been thinking about for decades now. So some researchers and academics point to nuclear powers resorting to activities below the threshold of open conflict. The book has this arc of describing the escalation of conflict and managing that escalation throughout. Admiral, a question for you. Do you think that irregular warfare activities like those from the Cold War will increase as great powers tend to

compete and manage this theme of escalation? I do. I have two thoughts on this. One is we've already seen this, right? That movie is playing right now in a theater near you called Eastern Ukraine. This is where Russia is flooding the zone with Spetsnaz who are not wearing any designators, the so-called little green men. And they're being very effective. They're disrupting the Ukrainians, both their conventional military and their society generally. And frankly, Vladimir Putin, I think, is reckless enough to think about doing something like that in the Baltic states. So we're already seeing great powers, in this case, Russia, using special forces in precisely that role. I think China is observing all that closely and is going to take a

page from that book, probably using these maritime militias to disrupt frenemies around the periphery of the South China Sea. So absolutely, this will be part of the lower level of this ladder of escalation. Here's the fundamental point I want to make, is that in the book, both sides think they can control this ladder of escalation. Certainly the Chinese do. So does the United States. The United States is provoking China, operating in the South China Sea, which the Chinese claim. The Chinese come up with a very clever plan to push back on that. And neither side wants or expects nuclear weapons to be used. And yet, as I always tell junior officers on ships that I commanded, everything changes when you

release ordnance. Everything changes. And that can be as simple as a gunshot, as big as a cruise missile. Once you start releasing ordnance, batteries released, it is very hard to put the genie back in the bottle because each side feels the need to dominate the other. That's the nature of warfare. And pretty quickly, I don't think we're giving anything away here, that ladder of escalation leads you to tactical nuclear weapons use. And I am deeply concerned that we could see something like that proceed from the South China Sea. I'll close by saying, if you don't believe me, take a look at how the world stumbled into the First World War.

One bullet from an assassin killed a Grand Duke in Sarajevo, a relatively obscure place on a corner, a dusty corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How'd that turn out? World War I, Great Depression, rise of fascism, World War II, about 80 million dead in the 20th century. You can trace it back to a single bullet. So it's hard to control that ladder of escalation. Admiral, I want to jump in there for a moment because although you didn't refer to this explicitly, but your reference to this ladder of escalation

is a reminder of the book, The Guns of August. And once mobilization got underway, or at least escalation got underway, the forces were so strong, they were almost unstoppable. So my question for you is, how does the United States compete effectively in this area, in the gray zone, without climbing the ladder of escalation? By controlling our troops our sailors our soldiers our airmen by training them and this is of course the deepest concern of all is that an incident could occur because a young man or woman who's scrapped on a hornet and is flying a mission or a JSF in our novel, you know, they're young. They're not deeply experienced necessarily. The officers on the bridge of a ship,

special forces advisors who are maybe working with the Vietnamese Coast Guard, you have to ensure that they go into these kinds of conflicts understanding that there really is such a thing as a strategic corporal, if you will, in the negative sense, that even a very junior enlisted person can spark a conflict. So it's training, it's command and control is critical, not losing contact with individuals. This, of course, is another theme in 2034, a novel in the next world war is the breakdown of communications, which the Chinese are able to affect using their ability to control spectrum, control cyber. So it's training, it's communications, and it's also finally being clear about where red lines are. And red lines sometimes get a

bad rap, especially in gray zone operations. But I would say making clear to your opponents what is fundamentally unacceptable, curiously, can have a deterrent effect on the other side jumping on that ladder of escalation. training, education of the military, and a lot of those measures are to prevent escalation. But what about the requirement to continue to compete with China without risking a flashpoint? How does the United States best do that? And what right now are we not doing? And I'm thinking particularly about in the areas of legitimacy and influence operations in what we're calling the information environment balance? Yeah, I think that's only one part of it, Andy. I would say there are five key things that we need to do to compete effectively with China. And the first is to have a strong, capable military that can operate conventionally and operate on that ladder of escalation. A second thing is economic. We can't let China become an unstoppable economic juggernaut, particularly using unfair trade, ridiculous tariff structures, dominating the rise of

cryptocurrency. There are many economic tools that are important here. Third is technology, and that is chips, supply chains, rare earths, innovation, STEM education. That's a significant standalone tranche of effort. Fourth is working with allies, partners, and friends, strengthening NATO, strengthening our bilateral relationships, building this idea of a quad, the United States, India, Australia, Japan. So allies, partners, and friends. And fifth, and finally, these are not in priority order. You need to integrate them. It's what you mentioned. It's legitimacy. It's leadership on the world stage. It is confronting China about what appears to be a genocide in the Xinjiang province

directed against a Muslim minority. It's using international organizations effectively. And it's strategic communications. It's telling all those stories in a way that doesn't make the United States the policemen of the world or the arbiter of norms, but rather allows us to orchestrate the band of international goodness as it plays a tune to confront China's rise. I think it's really all of those things together in a coherent plan that will enable us to face China in this century. So I want to pull on another theme from your book, and that's that low-tech capabilities tend to atrophy when practitioners become accustomed to high-tech tools or capabilities. So looking at the past two decades of the global war on terror and having access, practitioners basically having access to these high tech capabilities.

I'm interested in your thoughts with what happens when a military becomes dependent on these high tech capabilities and those basics tend to atrophy. Yeah, well, I mean, listen, it's sort of a story that's like as old as warfare itself, right? I mean, I'm sure you guys have heard the famous phrase from the Afghan or saying from the Afghan wars, which is, you know, you all might have the watches, but we have the time, you know, meaning all the technology in the world didn't give us some of the necessary advantages that we have needed in Afghanistan, or to go even further back, because I'm kind of, you know, I enjoy my history. The example I like to think about is in 1415, the Battle of Agincourt, right, where the French and the English fought. The French army lined up in the most state-of-the-art plate armor that existed at that time. They were outmatched the English, and they, you know, went and marched across a muddy field with, you know, the best technology that existed in the early 15th century. Problem was it was the

wrong technology. The English had something that I think you would argue was sort of simpler, lower tech, a long bow and just slaughtered the French. So it's not enough just to have the, the most state of the art technology. You also have to have the right technology. And I think that one of the things, again, we talk opportunity costs from Iraq and Afghanistan, is in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was never a question that, you know, suddenly the GPS system would stop working, or our smart weapons would become dumb all of a sudden. But I think, you know, if we are engaged in war with a peer-level competitor, we absolutely have to assume that those technologies will be attacked at their very source, and we may no longer be able to rely upon them. And victory might not belong to the side that has the best technology, but the side that is able to adapt the most quickly with the technology that it has left over. So I'll only say like, you know, in 2034, the novel, it's absolutely no accident that the first

aircraft you see is a state-of-the-art F-35E Lightning. And the last aircraft that you see is like a Gen 1 F-18 circa 1999, because that's the only thing left that we've been able to make work for this mission. So I think that the technology conversation has to be held hand in hand with an adaptability conversation, because our adversaries are certainly going to try to undermine our technology. Elliot, on that point, how do we get there from where we are now in terms of doctrine, in terms of training, in terms of culture? I'm thinking specifically within the military. I think you've described. Yeah, I mean, culture. I think it's a culture that, you know, the idea of training, you know, training, we're okay, we're going to do this one with all of our,

you know, with all of our GPS and all all of our gear and on this next one we're going to do it without that gear it's sort of like how um you know you train at night like sometimes you train during the day but you also train during night you train under different conditions i think it's important for the military to begin to adapt a culture of we're going to be training not only under different atmospheric conditions but under different technological conditions so like we're going to be training not only under different atmospheric conditions, but under different technological conditions. So like we're going to do this one with all of our GPS turned on, and then we're going to do the same mission again, and we're going to turn it off and we're all going to be fluent in how to do it

both ways. So there's a, there's a saying in special operations that I'm, I'm sure you're familiar with that humans are more important than hardware. And the novel focuses in on characters specifically in their relationships, and it really doesn't track events per se. Can you talk a little bit about the dynamic between the characters and their relationship with technology? Absolutely. You know, like when Jim and I came together on this book, we sort of had this history of talking about books and kind of through that understood one another's sensibilities.

And part of that was, you know, with this novel, 2034, was a very clear sense of like, this is going to be a character driven book. And that's not just, you know, that's not just an aesthetic choice. It's a choice because, you know, the Marine Corps teaches that, you know, war is the contest, is a contest between two human wills. So if you want to tell a war story, you obviously have to focus on the human element. And we wanted that to be front and center, particularly in a novel that would be cast in the near future that would have lots of technology involved. We always were aligned in this idea that the human needs to be at the center of this, because ultimately you can't tell a war story unless you're telling a human story and the reader needs to know who each of these characters are.

It needs to see their worldview cast in a sympathetic light whether they are Iranian, Chinese, Russian or American. So the technology is present but I think the real driver of this story this is not just the technology. I would say that's a secondary concern. The real concern is to show patterns of how people behave and how events can quickly escalate out of control. You referred to earlier that the U.S. military and specifically SOF had kind of got used to conducting counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, but that, of course, this is going to be a completely different environment. Let's talk about use of proxies, because both you and the Admiral referred to the Chinese use of proxies,

the so-called cabbage fleet. Aside from working with state partners, do you see a role for the U.S. military, and specifically Special Operations Forces, in working with proxy forces or raising proxy forces in this gray zone competition? It's not something that we dialed in on in the situation in the novel that we laid out. I mean, you don't really see in the u.s or the chinese trying to foment uh the types of insurgent campaigns that you know are kind of classic special forces or regular warfare missions behind enemy lines um that being said i could certainly imagine conditions but you know particularly as a war war war it to drag on into a second third years,

and where the battlefield, particularly the lines on a battlefield starts to stagnate, that you would see the employment of proxy forces to disrupt activities behind the enemy's lines. So I think that that's going to become relevant as ever. But my intuition in looking at this is also you're going to see, you know, you are going to see an evolution of how special operations troops are employed. And I think you're going to see a lot of bleed over that it's not going to be the distinction between irregular warfare, special operations, the role of use at U.S. SOCOM. It's not going to be quite as clearly delineated as it has been probably in the past 30 or 40 years. In the novel, there's this underlying theme of preparatory activities and basically gaining advantage before the first shot is even fired. I'm interested in how you see

the United States vulnerabilities and how adversaries are working towards exploiting them, especially in the realm of irregular warfare? Yeah, listen, I don't have something that I can specifically substantiate. However, to me, it would seem preposterous not to imagine that our adversaries right now are very much aware of our internal political dynamics, are at every corner trying to take advantage of and exasperate the divisions that exist within American society, and are paying close attention. Reuters had a poll that came out,

I think it was about two weeks ago, maybe it was three weeks ago, that 75% of Americans would not support an intervention if China were to unilaterally invade Taiwan. I'm certain that the Chinese government is paying attention to those polling numbers and wanting to, you know, and wanting to gen them up as high as they can against, you know, against us and to their favor. And I would certainly hope that, you know, we are doing the same type of conducting the same type of operations aggressively to prepare the battlefield in the event that we ever were to have a conflict with China, which is, again, is something that should be avoided. I think, listen, you say this,

you know, and you've seen the same thing happening with Russia. But one of the themes that does certainly exist in the book is regardless of the causation is how do the fractures that exist in American society come to harm us in the event that we have to engage with a peer level competitor? You know, do we still have the ability as a nation when facing an external threat to basically come together and form a fist? You know, or are we just incapable of doing that right now? And I think that is a very real question. In the last sort of five, six, seven years, however long back you want to go,

I've certainly kind of sat around with friends casually saying, you know, I wonder if something really horrible were to happen in the United States, a real crisis, you know, would we be able, as divided as we are right now, to come together kind of like, you know, like we did right after 9-11, say, okay, you know, we might have our divisions, but we're all Americans, and we're going to, you know, we're going to do our best to do the right thing here, and sort of wondering about that. You know, and then the pandemic hit, and I would argue the

pandemic has hit. That is a threat that has been a threat as existential as anything the United States has faced in this century, and 2020 was one of the most divisive years I think this country has ever seen. So if I am our adversary, I'm watching all of that very, very closely. I am looking for any and all opportunities to keep the United States divided, to erode its capacity to make a fist when confronted with an external threat, because that gives me more really operational opportunity, the ability to act unilaterally, the ability to send more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border and kind of snub my nose at the international powers that be without consequence and to basically act with impunity. And so I see that as something that, you know,

again, I can't speak to the particulars of exactly what is being done, but it would just sort of shock me if our adversaries didn't know that fomenting that dissent with the United States works to their advantage. So we've covered a lot of ground in this conversation, from the role of special operations in irregular warfare more broadly, in great power conflict, to the nature of the escalation to that conflict and the preparatory activities behind it. I'd like to move on to the implications based on this conversation. Admiral Stavridis, what should policymakers and academics be focused on moving forward? This is an interesting question, which sometimes

is categorized as what is the role for track two diplomacy, which means coming together from the two nations on projects that we have mutual interest in, often but not always academic institution to academic institution, and allowing conversations that are not track one, which is formal diplomatic communication. So track two would be Princeton and West Point set up a program where they are exchanging students and professors with their counterpart universities. Track two would be working together from influential biological laboratories to look at how we can prevent the next pandemic. How we can prevent the next pandemic. Track two would be climate institutes in both the US and China having discussions, which would then seek to influence track one government policies, but involved with over the years, retired senior military coming together with counterparts to try and build confidence, to have conversations, to

then go back to track one actors, the people who are actually in the seats at the moment, and share ideas and information about how we can defuse tensions, how we can set up a hotline between the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his counterpart. How can we structure what we had in the Cold War with the Soviet Navy, the incidents at sea protocols, which defined how closely our warships could come to each other, how close an aircraft could fly over a ship when you could and could not use a fire control radar. That came out of track two conversations between retired military. So I think there's scope for a lot of creative use of that kind of work to then influence policymakers. Interesting. So it's that cooperation via the academic policymaker

bridge that you're talking about? That's exactly right. And what we want to do, another metaphor I've used is we want to bend the relationship with China. We have to convince China to modify some aspects of their behavior. We're not going to simply allow them sovereignty over the South China Sea, which is a body of water half the size of the continental United States of America. It would be the biggest land grab in modern history. do that. We've got to bend their behavior. But boy, we want to avoid just breaking the relationship and ending up in a war. So it requires a plan. It requires nuance. It also requires strength at times. So the other phrase I've used is confront where we must, but cooperate wherever we can. And the examples I gave you a moment ago of track two are some ideas. The examples I gave you a moment ago of track two are some ideas. Elliot, I'm interested in what you think irregular warfare practitioners should be focusing on moving forward. Were I still a practitioner of irregular warfare, I would be thinking about the new ways that irregular warfare and special operators are going to be integrating into probably, I would say, a more direct action role

arrayed alongside conventional forces in the types of conflicts that are being imagined right now in places like the South China Sea. And also trying to think about the different scenarios, frankly, potentially both high-tech and very, very low-tech scenarios that might be facing the force, you know, in such a confrontation, because the need to pivot very, very quickly from, you know, using a laser-guided munition based off of a GPS to, you know, calling in mortars the analog way with a lensatic compass, I mean, you might need to go through that within, you know, 36 hours to make sure that you and, you know, any individuals under your command are ready to do that. Unfortunately, we're about out of time. We definitely appreciate you both

talking about your new novel, but also sharing your thoughts based on your professional experiences and careers. Let me just close by saying throughout my career, I've admired deeply the work of special operations, irregular warfare. And I think it's a fundamental component of 21st century operations and conflict. And I think back in my days as a combatant commander reaching to Special Operations Command South for Southern Command, Latin America and the Caribbean, Special Operations Command Europe, and also NATO, which now has a Special Operations Headquarters. It is such a critical component. And as we've talked about on the podcast today, it is crucial that we nurture these forces because they are going to be essential to us in 21st century security. Admiral Jim Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman, this has been a fascinating

conversation. Really appreciate you both coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Thanks for having me on. Hey guys, lots of fun talking Warfare podcast. Thanks for having me on. Hey guys, lots of fun talking with you. And thanks for having me on. Thank you for listening to episode 27 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Shauna and Laura sit down with retired General Joseph Votel and award-winning author

Gail Limon. After that, Kyle and I will discuss influence operations with General Michael Nagata and National Security Analyst Antony Cordesman. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irrigal Warfare podcast so you do not miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. If you're interested in submitting a commentary or analysis on irregular warfare, please don't hesitate to reach out to our editorial team. We've dropped the email in the description of this podcast.

One last note. What you hear on this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time. you you you you you you