Irregular Warfare Podcast - Leadership Targeting and Drones: An Effective Counterterrorism Strategy?

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

In the second episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a collaboration between the Modern War Institute and Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, hosts Nick Lopez and Shawna Sinnott speak to Dr. Jenna Jordan and Dr. Asfandyar Mir. They discuss counterterrorism, the use of drones, and whether targeting terrorist groups' leaders is an effective strategy. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The importance of being clear about what it is that you're trying to do is critical, right? So people that are developing counterterrorism policies, you can't just say things like, oh, we want to degrade and defeat an organization, right? That becomes essentially meaningless. You know, single counterterrorism measures alone are unlikely to work. This is a domain in which warfare is likely to be unending. So instead of thinking about a binary of victory or defeat or, you know, total political death of these kinds of adversaries, think about managing them.

Welcome back to the Irregular Warfare podcast. In this episode, we will explore counterterrorism policies and strategies over the past 19 years. We also welcome another teammate to the podcast, Shauna Sitton. Thanks, Nick. So today we tackle the question, how should we be thinking about leadership targeting as a means of counterterrorism effectiveness? And we'll then look to see if there are any lessons we can draw from leadership targeting in the global war on terror to influence and shape future counterterrorism policies. Doctors Jenna Jordan and Asfandi Armir will help us dig into the implications of policies that lead to the strikes such as the 2006 Zarqawi operation. 615 Baghdad time special operation forces acting on tips and intelligence from Iraqis

confirmed Zarqawi's location and delivered justice to the most wanted terrorists in Iraq. Zarqawi was the operational commander of the terrorist movement in Iraq. Dr. Jenna Jordan is an associate professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech and the director of the Program on Emerging Technology and International Security. She is the author of the book Leadership Decapitation, Strategic Targeting of Terrorist Organizations. Jenna's book will serve as a foundation for our conversation today. Dr. Asfandiyar Mir is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His most recent research focuses on counterterrorism policy and drone warfare.

I am Nick Lopez. And I am Shawna Sinnott. And this is the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute of West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals.

Here is our conversation with Jenna and Isfandiar. Dr. Jenna Jordan and Dr. Isfandiar Amir, we appreciate you both joining us today. It'd be great to dive right in and start off with Isfandiar. Can you tell us about your research and what motivated you to study counterterrorism? Nick, Sean, and thanks so much for having me today. Really excited to be here and to be in conversation with Dr. Jenna Jordan. So for the last many years, I've been working on U.S. counterterrorism operations using air power, surveillance technologies, special operators, local allies, or a combination thereof,

in safe havens and weak states. And the main motivation for this research agenda, when I started working in it, was that many analysts, practitioners, scholars were deeply skeptical of this form of warfare, arguing that these kinds of campaigns provide short-term gains at best, or more likely tend to be counterproductive. And indeed, it was a major debate during the Obama years on which even key national security principles clashed openly. For example, the then senior advisor to the president on CT and later CIA director John Brennan came on one side of this issue and one of his national security principal peers, Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, offered a very different perspective.

And then this question came up again during the counter-ISIS campaign, when the efficacy of a hard-charging counterterrorism campaign was put on the table. So when I was starting out grad school, I was very intrigued by this debate, wanted to understand it better and inform it with high fidelity data. So the last five years, my research has tried to empirically and theoretically understand both the causes and consequences of USCT warfare in theaters such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And I also have some ongoing work on U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And across this research agenda, the key outcome or benchmark I try to evaluate is the benchmark that the U.S. government has set out for itself, which is meaningful

disruption and degradation of targeted organizations. And Isfandir, you focus specifically on drones, which many would characterize as very symbolic of counterterrorism initiatives in the post 9-11 era. What drew you to specifically evaluate this tool? Sure. So drones at one point in time was the preferred mode of warfare, given that the United States government was facing threats from various places where it could not deploy forces on the ground. And this form of warfare started in Pakistan, but then was adopted in Somalia and Yemen during the Obama years. And given the salience of these campaigns, given the fact that one of the main reasons the U.S. government

was interested in this kind of campaigning was to mitigate the threat of international terrorism from these places and how drones were seen as an antidote to the problem of deploying forces, I thought this was a really important question, and we needed to sort of understand in what respects drones were unique or not. That's great, Isfandiar. Thanks for that. And we will come back to your findings a little bit later on. If I could transition over to Jenna,

I would also like to mention Jenna's book that she released last fall, Leadership Decapitation, Strategic Targeting of Terrorist Organizations. It provides an interesting look at counterterrorism policy by using three different case studies, Hamas, The Shining Path, and Al-Qaeda. So I'll turn it over to you, Jenna. What got you into researching counterterrorism? So I started grad school a long time ago. And actually, I started right after 9-11. So just a couple weeks later. And I took a class on terrorism with Dr. Bob Pate. And it was fascinating. And I found it really interesting because so much of the literature in international relations was focused on states, interstate relationships and all of a sudden

the framework for thinking about the world fundamentally changed because you all of a sudden had a non-state actor that had a huge influence in the foreign policy not just of the U.S. but like of countries. And so I felt at that point that, you know, there was this emerging literature in the field of terrorism, but there was still a lot of space and there was a lot of work that needed to be done. And theoretically, I felt like there was a lot of interesting opportunities for thinking about non-state actors within the context of international politics. So that was how I got into it. I think part of it was timing and part of it was just general interest in non-state actors. So I was really interested in this question of leadership

targeting, right? When thinking about counterterrorism, like Asfandi, I was really interested in counterterrorism policy kind of specifically rather than thinking about motivational factors, right? Why do terrorists do what they do? Which of course is part of that question, but I was really interested in it from a policy perspective. Why do states make the choices that they make about counterterrorism policies and what are the impacts of those policies? Do they work? Do they not work? And why? What explains the resilience of organizations? So what I ended up doing was coming at it from an organizational perspective and

saying, what makes a particular group more or less likely to suffer at the hands of particular counterterrorism policies? So I decided to focus on this one policy of leadership targeting, because at the time, this was seen as like a kind of silver bullet, right? Like if we kill the leader or arrest the leader, the organization is not going to be able to function. And so I wanted to understand whether that was in fact the case. The different cases that you took a look at, what organizations stood out in terms of resilience and why? Yeah. So basically what I did was I started collecting data and I, you know, look, including, you know, going through 2016, I've looked at close to, I don't know, 1400 cases of leadership targeting. And so what I wanted to do was take a look at that

data and say, which groups were more or less likely to fall apart after, or not even fall apart, right? We can talk about the nuance of how you're measuring the efficacy of this particular policy, but whether certain groups saw a decline in activity or an increase in the lethality of attacks or a decline in their overall survival rate. So I sort of looked at these different measures of efficacy and tried to understand why. And so I started with saying, well, what do I think might make a particular group more or less susceptible to targeting? So I started there and I sort of identified like particular features that I thought might make a group more or less resilient. And so I thought groups that might be highly bureaucratized or groups that had a particular ideology or groups that had support. And I'm happy to go into those variables

a little bit more and unpack that. But I sort of started there and thought, okay, let's think about these particular characteristics. So I looked at things like a group's age and a group's size and their organizational type and different features of the instance of decapitation itself. I looked at other variables as well, like the regime type of the country in which the attack occurred, GDP, things like that as kind of control variables to sort of get at it a different way. But what I basically found was that the largest groups, the oldest groups, groups that were separatist, groups that were religious, tended to be harder to destabilize when their leaders were both arrested and killed. And I found actually not much difference between whether, looking at whether

or not a leader is arrested or killed doesn't have that much of a difference, but it's really these organizational variables. So, you know, groups like Al-Qaeda, right, have turned out to be remarkably resilient, right? ISIS is showing itself to be the same way. The PKK, the TTP, al-Shabaab, right? Some of the really big organizations have tended to be really quite resilient. That's just at a broad level what I found. No, that's great. If I could take a step back, because you mentioned organizational resilience and some factors, or I guess, you know, some contributing factors to organizational resilience. Could you unpack those a little bit and then sort of apply them either to Al Qaeda or Shining Path? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So basically, I know, I'll start with bureaucracy. And it's kind of

awkward to think about using the term bureaucracy when you think about a terrorist organization, right? It's sort of we often, we often think of groups as being really highly decentralized. And actually, these aren't mutually exclusive. And I'll go into that in a moment. But basically, we can think of bureaucratization as kind of like an internal mechanism that makes the group that can increase its stability, right? It can facilitate clear succession processes, right? It can be a group that has a clear administrative division of responsibilities, right?

Rules and routines, standard operating procedures, all of these things that characterize what we think of as bureaucracies. Bureaucracies tend to be more efficient. Sometimes they tend to be seen as more legitimate in the communities in which they're operating, because they have these kind of organizational rules, this stability in place. And so that was kind of the first factor. And what I found interestingly is that groups that tended to be sort of bureaucratized at the upper levels of the organization,

right, administratively, and that at an operational level were more decentralized, right, at a lower level, that the combination, this hybrid structure, I thought would make a group much more resilient. And in fact, that is kind of what I found. The second factor has to do with support. And I think this is a hard one to measure statistically. And so I sort of had to get at this by looking in the cases a little bit. But basically, it's the idea that groups you know, groups need support at a really basic level just to operate, right? When we think about terrorists, we think about what they need. They need members. They need money, right? They need resources. They need places to hide. They need to get fake passports, right? They need like all of these things that having support in the communities in which they operate make it

possible for them to be able to do so and so groups that um you know i mean even information right it just i mean at so many basic levels and so groups that are operating in places where they tend to have more support are going to be more likely to uh sort of withstand shocks and external shocks to the organization. And the final variable has to do with ideology, which actually does intersect with communal support in a certain way. And so what I thought here was that certain kinds of groups are going to be more likely to be resilient. And so what I started thinking was that religious groups and separatist groups might be the most, the hardest to weaken. And actually, it's interesting when, you know, when people started thinking about leadership targeting, they went back to these models of charisma.

Right. And there was this kind of standard view that terrorist organizations were headed by charismatic leaders. So think about someone like Shoko Asahara, who was the leader of Aung San Rikyo, right? He was seen as this kind of deity, this sort of godlike figure, right, that was imbued with special qualities. You know, you could think about the classic Weberian definition of charisma, right? It's something extraordinary, something that is... It's motivating. It's motivating, exactly. And what people argue is that it's fragile, right? It's a fragile basis of authority, whereas the other sort of bases of authority tend to be more stable. But then what I

found was that all these religious organizations that were headed by what we would think of as charismatic leaders were actually harder to destabilize. So I thought, okay, we need a different model. So when I think about ideology, what I think about is basically the sort of doctrine upon which the group is based and that groups, religious groups and separatist groups that tend to have grounding in their local communities, right? They're not always representing the entire view, but maybe like a significant number of people on the ground don't depend upon the leadership for that re-articulation of their ideology. The ideology can become very entrenched in the communities. And I think this is particularly true of separatist

groups, right? Groups often represent the views of the, you know, separatist group from which they emerge. Now, of course, there's variation on tactics, right? How you go about achieving those particular goals, but that ideology is there. And, you know, this is something we saw with ISIS, you know, it was really interesting, right. As ISIS started losing more of its ground, you had people like Adnani, who was also a leader who was killed, basically said, well, you could take away our territory, but our ideology is really resilient and that's going to remain. So that's kind of that variable. So those were the three theoretical ideas that I started with when I was thinking of the larger project. Jenna, I appreciate the explanation of the variables.

The idea of tracking organizational resilience is definitely interesting. I want to turn to Esfandiar to talk about the findings with some of his work, one in particular that he co-authored with Dylan Moore that focuses on the use of drones. Sure. So let me first sort of highlight the broad set of takeaways from that particular paper that I authored with my University of Michigan colleague, Dylan Moore, as well as a separate paper which is related to the stream of work on the US drone war in Pakistan. And what I find across these two papers is that contrary to widespread skepticism spanning over multiple years, the US counterterrorism operation in Pakistan was very effective in degrading the

targeted groups as well as preventing their recovery for a long period of time. Certainly not permanently, but it was sufficiently long. And troublingly, these battlefield effects were attained, you know, despite the fact that the drone warfare in that region of the world harmed civilians. And three sort of sub findings of this campaign informed this broader view. The first one was that I found evidence of dented organizational trajectories of the two main targets of this campaign, al-Qaeda and its Pakistani ally, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. These groups suffered starting 2008 after the United States government surged surveillance and target capabilities in this region. government surged surveillance and targeted capabilities in this region. These groups lost bases, their operational capital, similar to some of the things that Jenna was just mentioning,

their core organizational capital was reduced, their ranks were checked by a growing number of desertions. And finally, and I think this was a very important effect, these organizations fractured politically. Their alliances, important alliances began to do with it. A second key finding which informs the broader view is that while killing of both leaders and rank and file, which took place at an enormous scale, was an important mechanism, but it was not the only mechanism which really debilitated these organizations. Instead, another mechanism which, you know, for the last few years, I think scholars downplayed or didn't understand that well was this heightened sense of fear of

being targeted. Across a variety of empirical materials, I found that both the targets of this campaign were so constrained by this the sense of anticipation, this fear of drone strikes, which ended up crippling their routine movement and internal communication, organization communication. In addition, over a period of time, both leaders and rank and file Over a period of time, both leaders and rank and file jihadis came to view each other with the suspicion of being spies for the U.S. drone program, which contributed to their political fragmentation. And a final major finding from this work was contrary to concerns of many, many skeptics and critics of drone warfare. and critics of drone warfare, I did not find much evidence of any tangible increase in recruitment in favor of these targeted groups, especially due to civilian harm. That's not to dismiss that anger and passion due to civilian harm or losses in U.S. strikes. It didn't exist or anything of that sort. Certainly, that was very real. I think local communities were deeply aggrieved.

However, my findings negated the impression that the groups benefited from a stream of angry recruits. Instead, a more recurring theme for the later years of the campaign was that these groups experienced desertion and shortages because of the stress of operating under drones. And I also found that these groups struggled to integrate some of their available partners in their organizations because of the fear that they may be spies for the drone program. So these are sort of the broad set of findings. I can pause here before getting into the implications, but I first wanted to put these findings on the table. Before we go any further, Esfandiar, you mentioned in your work a system to measure counterterrorism effectiveness. You called it the legibility and speed of exploitation system. We actually emailed back and forth on this. It seemed very similar to the targeting cycle F3 EAD. So find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate the acronym used in doctrine. Can you explain this two-part system, legibility and speed of exploitation?

Right, right. No, that's an important question. So as I looked at these findings, I was trying to make sense of what happened. This is a lot of damage done to some very important organizations, which the United States government or the international community at large cared deeply about. How might we understand these battlefield effects? And I ended up identifying two major factors. The first factor that I identified was that the United States government here came to develop very deep and extensive knowledge of the civilian population where the

armed group is based. But the word I use for this kind of knowledge, depth of knowledge, is legibility. And what I found was that the United States government developed and ended up drawing on large-scale metadata collection or legibility infrastructures of the civilian populations of this very remote region of the world. And mind you, this kind of knowledge is distinct from intelligence. You know, it comes a step before intelligence. And this kind of knowledge is used to generate intelligence leads. And it comes from, say, population data that the United States government was able to gather on its own, as well as through data sharing by a local partner, large-scale communication interceptions, and then some really cutting-edge techniques like patterns of life analysis, detailed pattern of life analysis

of targeted regions to separate the armed group from the civilian population. But that's only just, you know, one piece, one side, one dimension of the story. Another dimension that I think the United States government exerted a lot of effort on was its ability to exploit available leads gleaned from this kind of knowledge of the civilian population in a timely manner. So I think this is where the F3 EAD part comes in. You know, I think all CT practitioners know, understand that members of targeted armed groups, you know, when being chased in CT operations, they're consistently trying to escape detection. Most intelligence has a very limited shelf life. It tends to change fairly quickly. As a result, the capability to act quickly becomes really important. And this

requires some really unique bureaucratic capacity to process intelligence. You require a very sophisticated form of analysis. You know, decentralized decision-making for targeting becomes really important as well. And then the final piece, which is where the armed drones come into play, you know, rapid striking capabilities are absolutely essential. So that's the exploitation piece. And together, you know, when you piece this legibility and speed piece together, I think they come to constitute a very powerful set of capabilities, a system almost. A system almost. So in terms of applicability, does your model make sense both in situations where drones are being used unilaterally and where they're used in conjunction with forces on the ground and other counterterrorism tools? So the United States government certainly has developed the capability to or has acquired modes of deploying this capability in a unilateral fashion, as in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia. Over a period of

time, there's been a surge in these kinds of capabilities. You see a deployment in parts of the Middle East, Africa, which are geared towards unilateral deployments. But then if you look at surge at Iraq, again, you see strong shades of this particular system. And there, the way the system is deployed or the kind of resources that are mobilized or some of the tactics that are adopted, those tend to be systematically different. However, at a conceptual level, you again see an effort to really deeply understand the civilian population and then act upon information that's generated from this kind of knowledge of the civilian population fairly quickly. So again, the U.S. government's become very powerful at implementing this system in different ways, in different kinds of

operational environments. Right. And I wonder when you start dissecting many of those nuances, if this may in fact actually reinforce some of Jenna's findings. Do you mind if I ask a quick question, Esfandira? Your research is so interesting, and I love the nuance of your findings. And I love you thinking about this idea of like information collection and the sort of the ability to capitalize on this. I think that is just a really fantastic way of thinking about it. But I wonder if there's a distinction between, which is I'm thinking about, you know, sort of how our two works can fit together, right? And that my work tends to focus at the leadership level. I'm not looking at the targeting of operatives at, you know, sort of, you know, not just top leader, but, you know, members of the upper echelon, but I'm not looking

at targeting of like the sort of operational level, the lower level, even lower level commanders. And so I'm wondering if you found in your research a distinction there. And so thinking about things like the sort of fear of targeting or the lack of increases in recruitment or the desertions and shortages of resources and things like that, if that primarily came from that repeated targeting at that lower level, right, where lots of you think about too, like lots of information and things would be coming from maybe that level and not from, so I'm just kind of wondering if you found a distinction between that and in your research at all. Totally. I think there is, you know, I think of our works as more complementary as opposed to, you know, sort of debating about the same point.

And the complementarity comes from the fact that I think, as I read it, the key outcome variable that your work is focused on is kind of political depth. I think leadership targeting is premised on this idea that it can bring about a political collapse of these target organizations. And on the other hand, when you look at some of these USCT strategies at the level of specific theaters, they tend to move away from this notion of political death and focus on something a little bit more immediate, which is just organizational destruction. Maybe there's a theory there that, you know, sufficient levels of organizational destruction or degradation will lead to political death. But that assumption really varies. You know, for instance, I don't think policymakers held that view regarding the campaign in Pakistan.

Pakistan. But one of the key groups and campaigns that I've thought about to sort of think through these dynamics is the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan. I think the United States government has brought to bear some of these same kinds of capabilities at a fairly large scale in that country over a long period of time. You see an effort to cause attrition of the rank and file of the lower echelons, similar to Pakistan, as well as sporadic leadership targeting, you know, whenever the US government has had the opportunity. And yet you don't see the same kind of degradation or disruption, either at the peak of the surge era, you know, from 2010 to 2013, or more recently, you know, under President Trump when he once again surged the CT efforts starting 2017. And so why is that? I think that's, you know, I still don't have a good answer, but I think the best answer appears to be that there is,

that some of the variables that you highlight in your work, communal support, bureaucratization, perhaps for a group like Afghan Taliban, that is systematically different from some of its peers, like Al-Qaeda or the TTP. So I wonder if like a lot of this has to do with how we're thinking about what it is that we're trying, like what it is that we're actually trying to explain. So, you know, like thinking about like organizational, like group capacity, right? So that has to do with information collection, or that has to do with the impact of desertions and shortages and things like that has an impact on the capacity of an organization. And in my work, right, I mean, I'm not just looking at political death, I'm looking at changes in the frequency with which groups are able to carry out attacks,

or in their kind of survival rate over time, which are different ways of getting at capacity. And so it makes me even think about for people, you know, for practitioners or people who are thinking about it from a policy perspective, right, thinking about how do we measure the efficacy? So, you know, there was that recent report that came out. It was like a joint report, DIA and CENTCOM on ISIS. And basically, you know, they were kind of saying, well, ISIS is still active, right? ISIS is still operating. They're still a strong organization, right? They have money. They have recruits. is still operating. They're still a strong organization, right? They have money, they have recruits, they have resources, they're active. But it's

interesting because if you're thinking about it in terms of them losing territory, right? Like, okay, great. That's a win. They've lost lots of territory, but it's getting at this. And I think you're right, Asfandir, you talked about this idea of like, and I agree. I actually think that your work has much more nuance in terms of that kind of like, and I agree, I actually think that your work has much more nuance in terms of that kind of like understanding that operational capacity than mine. I think I'm looking at like a more macro level, but getting at that nuance of what efficacy means is so critical because that's how you're going to determine the efficacy of different policies and how you can compare different counterterrorism policies, which is

something that I actually want to do down the line is be able to compare whether drone strikes or whether more conciliatory measures or amnesty or bringing groups into political processes or all of these different range of policies on sort of a continuum of how coercive they are, like how that affects that measure of what we're looking at. So I think that's, that's part of the question. I'm sorry if I took us off course a little bit, but it's actually really helpful, especially as we start looking at what the policy implications are, because, you know, we just discussed what efficacy looks like, but your research looks more at what the consequences could be, what the adverse effects are of leadership targeting. Yeah. So, you know, one thing I actually wanted to go back to, as Fondue was saying at the very beginning of our discussion,

people often talk about is like the adverse, you know, outcomes of drone strikes, right? People talk about, oh, they're more likely to cause recruitment or, you know, increase kind of maybe sympathy or, you know, for the movement, things like that. And I, it's really interesting that you don't find that to be the case. And I think that's really instructive because that was a big debate, right? There were people that were just sort of like looking at it very anecdotally and kind of trying to understand whether that was something there. So that actually is something that I've thought about in this work is, does leadership targeting have that kind of effect, right? Does it cause groups to get more recruits or have more

sympathy for the organization? And I think there is something different when you're looking at the targeting of leaders versus thinking about, you know, sort of drone strikes more broadly, which can impact all levels of the organization. You know, when you target the leader of an organization, it's something incredibly visible and incredibly powerful. And so even though I'm, you know, challenging this idea that the charisma of the leader really matters, right? And that's something really important because I don't actually think that is the big factor, right? I think it's more of an organizational factor, you know, that predicts or that we can use to understand whether or not groups are more or less resilient. But that said, there's something about the leader

and the visibility of that, that does, I think, have an effect, right? And we've seen, and part of that relates to communal support. And so that when you have cases of organizations where they do have a lot of support on the ground, you know, the very visible death and even arrest of a leader is very powerful, right? So for instance, actually in the case of Sinero Luminoso of Shining Path that I have in my book, when, you know, Guzman was arrested, they basically, like, put him in a striped, like, you know, prison outfit, not outfit, you know, attire or whatever, in a tiger cage and, like, widely broadcasted this. And this was actually, like, a very powerful thing. And like widely broadcasted this. And this was actually like a very powerful thing. Now, he called upon his followers to like lay down their arms and stop their, you know,

and, you know, at some point. But that was a very powerful image. And so, and I think that can have this kind of effect that it can generate sympathy for a particular group. We saw this a lot in the Israeli case, right? When there's high level leaders that are killed, you often see like really dramatic instances of suicide attacks just in the aftermath. And they'll say, you know, this attack is to avenge the death of a particular leader. So I think those counterproductive consequences are really important. So just a note for policymakers, what should they be thinking about

when they're looking at CT policy moving forward? Looking at just organizational activity is like a really important variable, right? And if you see an increase in activity in the aftermath of leaders being killed, to me that signals maybe this isn't the best strategy, right? Maybe something that increases a group's activity, that increases a group's sympathy, that increases sympathy for an organization, perhaps this isn't the best. And so that's why I really want to start looking at different counterterrorism policies in a comparative framework to see maybe more conciliatory measures are more effective, right? Maybe things that are less kinetic, you know, for lack of a better word here, are more effective. And so, you know, there haven't been a lot of studies that have compared the efficacy of these different measures.

And so I think that's a really important next step for people as you start thinking about how to formulate policy. I just wanted to sort of second the importance of that point by Jenna. It's a really great point, specifically because I think if you look at the campaigns of the past, especially the ones that I've looked at, where the U.S. government is going after all identifiable leaders and then all other identifiable members of the organization at a large scale, at an industrial scale. These campaigns took place in a certain political environment when counterterrorism was extremely salient, when the United States government was ready to push all kinds of resources towards these campaigns. And I think going forward, you're going to not have these kinds of resources available,

think going forward, you're going to not have these kinds of resources available, at least at that scale, which limits the U.S. government's ability to manage the fallout of these, you know, these kinds of counterproductive effects of, say, leadership targeting, as might have been managed in the case of Al-Qaeda Central's leadership targeting. So paying a lot more attention to these counterproductive effects on the battle street, I think is going to be even more important in trying to tailor strategies in the face of resource constraints. And when you're trying to not destabilize a local partner state in some of these regions, as well as ensure your own security, I think that's going to be both hard and important. Especially in an era of great power competition, right? Research is moving forward, it's going to be tough, there's competing requirements. So if you've picked something up from your research that you would want to share with practitioners, what would it be? Right. So if I could provide some advice.

And mind you, I'm firmly of the view that in this domain, the tactical and strategic level really bleed into each other. And this is sort of unlike conventional warfare or even more latest versions of hybrid warfare that are now being, say, taught at NTC. I think that in this domain, the two really come together. And what I see, you know, operators struggling with is the fact that they, despite two decades of this kind of warfare, they're still not reconciling with the fact that victory is not sort of possible, or perhaps even the goal, right? I think, given the kind of effort many have made, they wonder, like, why is this war, this kind of warfare still ongoing? And my point to them would be that this is the kind of, this is a domain in which warfare is likely to be unending. So instead of thinking about a binary of victory or defeat or, you know, total political

death of these kinds of adversaries, think about managing them. Your role in this enterprise of counterterrorism is to actually help manage the threat that these actors pose to local partners as well as to the security of the country at large. That's about all we have time for today. I would like to thank both of you for joining us. This has been a fascinating conversation on counterterrorism and irregular warfare. So really appreciate the opportunity to be in conversation with both of you and Jenna. Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed talking

with you all. This is great. It's a great dialogue and hopefully we can continue the conversation. Yes, this is definitely a lot of fun. We will have episodes coming out every other week. Up next, Kyle and I will have a conversation about the effectiveness of training partner forces with Matt Kansian of MIT

and Stephen Biddle of Columbia University. After that, Nick will come back with Kyle to talk to former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Mark Mitchell, and former congressional staff member Pete Milano, where they will discuss irregular warfare oversight in D.C. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to start a conversation about past or future episodes we have lined up. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and don't represent those of West Point, the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government.