Irregular Warfare Podcast - Learning from the Past, Anticipating the Future: Organizational Change in Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

hroughout history, IW organizations have undergone dramatic changes at all levels to meet the demands of new operating environments and threats. The book The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 explores the difficulties the British Army faced trying to reorganize for irregular warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. Simon Akam, the book's author, is one of our guests on this episode, and he provides listeners with lessons learned and key takeaways from the British experience that can guide ongoing organizational changes. Our other guest is retired General John Allen, who draws on his decades of experience at the highest levels of military leadership and policy, giving his perspective on how IW organizations can successfully meet the needs of strategic competition. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

If we had to fight in six months, if you had to condense everything, right, how would you do it and what would you throw away? I've heard the wailing of our procurement system is too slow and unresponsive to keep us relevant. And I've heard each one of those administrations say, we're going to fix this thing. We're going to speed up the capacity for us to go from concept to field. And we never do. Welcome to episode 41 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. Your hosts today are myself, Laura Jones, and Andy Milburn. In today's episode, we discuss organizational change and how organizations within the irregular warfare space can adapt to emerging threats and technologies. Our guests discuss how and when organizations adapt to a changing environment and what happens if they fail to do so. The conversation continues into a discussion of

how emerging technologies require significant acceleration of change right across the security sector, from modernizing the military procurement system to recruiting and retaining the talent needed for future conflict. They then talk about the difficulties in changing rigid organizational structures and ingrained cultures, and they explore avenues to encourage change from within. General John Allen is currently the president of the Brookings Institution. Prior to his time at Brookings, General Allen served as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense on Middle East security and as special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL.

Allen is a retired U.S. Marine Corps four-star general and former commando of the NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Simon Aitken is the author of The Changing of the Guard, The British Army Since 9-11. He's a Fulbright Scholar. He studied at Columbia University School of Journalism and is a contributing writer for The Economist's 1843 magazine. He has worked for The New York Times, Reuters, and Newsweek, and has contributed to a number of other publications. He co-hosts the podcast, Always Take Notes. You're 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 General John Allen and Simon Aitken. General John Allen, Simon Aitken, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Thank you so much for being with us here today. It's great to be here. It is a great pleasure.

Thank you very much for the invitation, Laura and Andy. With the current shift to strategic competition, what do you think are the challenges that regular warfare leaders face in shifting their organizations and personnel to meet this new environment? And do you think there are any lessons from the past that can help guide them within this change? Andy attended something called the Infantry Officer Corps, United States Marine Corps. And I can remember very well, this goes to the issue of institutional change. I was, took over the school the day that Saddam invaded Kuwait. And I had hoped to pack my pack and be off to the war. But they said, you have to stay there. Not long after I took the job or began the process of trying to understand what fighting

in the desert would be like for us, because Americans had not fought in the desert in a very, very long time. And I did two things. One is to go down into the very dusty archives of the Marine Corps University, where I found RUSI, Royal United Services Institution, after-action reports of the British forces fighting in Iraq in World War I, which were extraordinarily helpful to me to understand what British commanders went through and British forces went through in adapting to that environment. And going back to the issue of the Clausewitzian tension between the character of war and the nature of war, character of war

being the technology and the nature of war being the human dimension, I got a call shortly after I took over the job from a fellow by the name of Jim Mattis. Some of you may have heard of him. And he said something extraordinary to me. And he said, you produce a good lieutenant, but they can't think fast enough. In other words, the infantry that I had grown up in, in the Corps, had been an infantry that was very good operating at four kilometers an hour. In other words, how fast we could march. Jim's point was very clear, which was intellectually, we needed to have officers who were capable of adapting on the fly with great agility and flexibility and adaptability in an environment of high speed maneuver and firepower intensity that we had never seen before. And he basically said to me, your officers, the ones you're producing for this war, because

they were graduating going straight over, need to be able to think faster. They need to be able to decide faster. They need to be able to adapt to a strategic environment where the changes will come so quickly at them. And we changed the curriculum immediately to mount all of the officers. We didn't do anything on foot anymore. We were mounted from that moment on, moving and deciding at much higher speeds, coordinating combined arms operations at much higher speeds. And the entire Corps had to embrace the reality that while the character of war hadn't changed dramatically, we were going to fight with what

we had. For the Marines, which had operated largely on the flanks of NATO in very difficult environmental conditions, we now had to fight in that same environment. And so while the character didn't change dramatically, the nature had to change a lot. And that was an example, I think a good example, of when an institution had to really turn within itself and adapt very quickly to a changing strategic environment. Simon, in your book, The Changing of the Guard, you discuss the British military in terms of an organization that has failed to adapt. And there's a theme here that emerges in the book that the British military has become an anachronistic culture far removed from the society that it is intended to protect. Indeed, there are those in this country who have written the same thing with regards to

the US military. And I think there's a sense of ambivalence about how healthy that is. On one hand, maybe this is simply the price of having an all-volunteer force. But at the same time, that gulf between military culture and mainstream society has potentially harmful ramifications. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on this topic? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I mean, to give some context perhaps to listeners

who are less familiar with the British situation, Britain does not have a longstanding conscript tradition. So there was conscription in the First World War. There was conscription in the Second World War that persisted until the early 1960s. But we have had an all-volunteer force since that point. And the British military has also shrunk greatly in terms of size. It's now well under 100,000. You have an organisation that's becoming increasingly small, that is traditionally,

and there's change in this, but historically, the British army draws from the two opposing demographics. So from the gentry, as it were, and from the working class. So that has changed a great deal. But it means that you can have certain families or things like that who will contribute people over generations and over generations, but it does mean that it is an institution, is a part. And I think particularly with the British, and I explored this in my book, a bind that the army is in

is that for us our system military organization and particularly the division between enlisted and officers is historically fundamentally rooted in our class system you know that that is a an indisputable fact now certainly since the 1980s that Britain has determined that being an officer is not about social class, that it's about quantifiable attributes, be they leadership or academic or so forth, but it has not really worked out how to do that. So a lot of what I explore in my book, and you'll be familiar with, is how an army that is facing an increasingly flat and less deferential society, an increasingly diverse institution, does it still try and inculcate these ideas of what it is to be

a British army officer? And I feel that particularly in peacetime, when you cannot judge someone against a very blunt metric of competent or non-competent operations, you can potentially get into the weeds. To Simon's great points, look, the United States has for some period of time lived with the reality that less than 1% of our population at any given time for preponderance of the last 20 years has fought two major theater wars and been involved in a global special operation, if you will, to beat back jihadist terror and the emergence of terrorist networks and to, in many respects, deter the Chinese with presence, forward presence operations by the 7th Fleet, the United States Army, and the Marine Corps in East Asia. All of that borne on the shoulders of young women and men who constituted less than 1% of the population. And so we have, as I'm sure our dear friends in the UK, we have worried about the potential drift within our society of the vast majority of the society

that has no connection with the military whatsoever, yet the vast majority of its security is guaranteed by such a small percent of the population. And for us, as Simon said very well, this may well be the wage of a democratic society, a society where the force is not a conscripted force. We sometimes use the term all-volunteer force. It's really an all-recruited force. And so we have to create an environment that is attractive to the young men and women of our society to want to be part of this. And so, and I won't speak to the other services, although I could probably, but in the Marine Corps, we try to create the ethos that to be a Marine is to be part of something bigger than yourself. And it's not really about the killing, although actually

we're pretty good at that. It's about the willingness to sacrifice and to sacrifice on the part of something bigger than yourself, to sacrifice on the part of the interests of the United States based on the principles of the Constitution, etc. And so this reality that an all-recruited force can, in fact, either have no identification with the regimentation of service, no tradition of service in their families, and then when they join the service, be in many respects isolated from the vast majority of the American population. And we really had to think about that. And I think as we have come to grips with that more and more in the U.S. military, we spend a lot more time in our professional military education and in the reading we expect

our officers to do to understand the civil-military relations that are at work in our society. And the inherent responsibility is, as one becomes more senior, to be able to represent the military dimension to the civil dimension. And it comes to its apex, truly its apex. I experienced it as a four-star general sitting in a sit room in the White House, having a personal conversation with the President of the United States about how an entire theater of war would undertake its operations. You don't arrive there by accident, and you can't arrive there by accident. We have to ensure that our senior leaders are fully connected into senior military leaders are fully connected into the civil military dimension that ultimately bridges this gap between 1% of the population or less, and the vast majority of the American population. say as much in so many words, but another theme of the changing of the guard is that the British military is perhaps no longer very good at fighting wars. This is obviously a controversial stance not widely accepted on either side of the Atlantic, which is why you put so much effort into

backing your claim with reams of evidence. It's an opinion that cuts to the core of the British military's view of itself, and for that matter, how the UK military is viewed here in the United States. Why do you make such a claim? And what, in your opinion, are the underlying causes for this decline? It's a fascinating question. Firstly, it's worth looking at where the British military in particular was at the time of 9-11 20 years ago. So as I say in my book, 2001 marked the end of two decades of success. And I think it was often genuine success. The Falklands in 1982, the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, the Balkan peacekeeping tours, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and then Northern Ireland,

which was into its third decade by that point. The army thought it had done really well. I would say it had done well, but it had created a sense of itself and of what it was at that time, which is summarised by this phrase, the best little army in the world, which was in wide circulation in the British military 20 years ago. And I think what is also worth pointing out, and again, I'm fascinated to see how this is perceived from an American perspective, is that that way the British military looked at itself two decades ago was a lot about not being American. It was not without some basis, in fact, certainly Northern Ireland, which was formative for the army, was very

different than what United States forces went through, but it was a myth. What is fascinating, and again, as a writer, it's very striking, in that the British army arrived in Iraq in 2003 in partnership with much larger United States forces. And this notion of not being American was shot through the identity of the institution. And I think it caused a great deal of, firstly, resentment, and I think it caused trouble in the end. And as I trace in the book, this extraordinary series of events where British forces moved from ostensibly or ostentatiously patrolling in berets and helmets and soft hats and claiming an understanding of the situation to eventually five years later in 2008, effectively having to be rescued by United States forces. And I think that was a, it was partially repeated in Afghanistan. and that was a very difficult thing for

the British military to take on. But I think to kind of summarise this point, what I think is fascinating in how we perceive this in our society in the United Kingdom is that there is still a very high regard for the military in Britain, a sense in some quarters that it is the only, in an era of state and political failure, it is an organisation that holds a unique claim to competence. And I actually think this is connected to the idea of stake, of how much it matters. I think, as we've said, these wars were fought far away and by professional militaries. It's true that they were huge geopolitical ballets, but it's also true in both the United States and the United Kingdom. These were not existential matters. And I think the way that we kind of revere our army and regard it as untouchable is a fact that we have not really had to rely on it.

And I think that is a function of where it sits in our culture. And I think that is a function of where it sits in our culture. John, to follow up on something you said earlier as well, when you had to shift the infantry officer course to now thinking past the speed at which you could walk, do you see that now a similar inflection point, kind of what Andy was alluding to, to where we've got emerging technologies and we've got human-centric organizations,

but we have emerging technology that are inherently not human-centric with automation, machine learning, and AI. How do you think that's going to affect how our organizations will have to think or the speed at which they're going to have to think and the issues that they're going to grapple with with some control being taken away? Well, I've written pretty extensively

about this concept called hyperwar. It's in the book I just put out on future war and the defense of NATO, and the other book at Brookings here called Turning Point, Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. What the automation of warfare will do ultimately is once again to accelerate the realities of warfare. And just as we had to adapt to be relevant in speed and relevant in time in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, as technology accelerates virtually every dimension of warfighting, from intelligence collection and analysis and dissemination, to command and control systems that support commanders or assist commanders decision making to the dispatch of systems that could theoretically completely automate the kill chain. And the challenge that we face right now is how coming off of 20 years of warfare that was fought at relatively slow speeds in many respects,

is fought at relatively slow speeds in many respects. How do we cage our education system and the intellectual processes that emerge from it? How can we do that as the technology is changing so dramatically? And you used some of the terms. It's machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. But the machine learning and the algorithms that we're developing will give us enormous capacity to operate at speeds faster than we have in the past. The challenge for us is first recognizing it. Second, working in a system, since much of it is developed commercially, working in a system where we can bring the private sector into closer proximity, into a tighter orbit with military requirement systems so that we're no longer in a world of hyperwar. We can't even survive in an environment where from concept to acquisition and fielding,

we're taking a decade. So we're just beginning to really grasp this issue. I've been pleased to see that we are. We're putting some serious money now into artificial intelligence and how those capabilities can be assimilated into certain requirements as we move forward. But as with all things, this takes time. And it's a matter of how quickly we can move to recognize that there are dramatic changes in the character of war moving forward and a dramatic obligation for us to deal with the nature of war to ensure that the human component is properly characterized and in equilibrium the technical component. If we don't embrace it in a

very real way, we're going to be too slow. John, you've hit on a couple points as to how the United States can better procure and adapt to emerging threats. Can you talk a little bit to how our adversaries and also how our allies are meeting this threat as well? We just had our principal adversary on the planet, the Chinese, successfully demonstrate a fractional orbital bombardment system. This ought to be keeping a lot of people up at night, and you barely hear anything about it in Washington. The Soviets actually perfected this as a very effective system back in the 60s. And it was one of the things that we were deeply, deeply concerned about with respect to our ballistic missile defense capability. Well, the Chinese have just done it,

and they did it without us understanding that they could. We ought to be deeply concerned about this. So I said, we in the US, we've got some very serious soul searching that we have to undertake in the aftermath of 20 years of war in a certain and strategic environment. But the other challenge that we face is, as the United States does embrace it, as we do put in excess of $700 billion continuous spending into our defense program, as our commercial sector continues to work on perfecting these capabilities ultimately and hand-in-hand with the military, we have to be deeply concerned as well that the United States pulls out ahead of its allies, because there are very few of our allies that, first of all, have a military that is either in the intellectual capacity or in the technological capacity, can embrace these technologies that are

going to dominate the battlefield. Very few of our allies, the UK, the French, the Germans, to some extent, and then we pretty much run out of juice. So one of my worries is that we see a gap begin to develop between the United States and our NATO partners. We're a long way before we can see the alliance adopting these kinds of technological capabilities and the warfighting results that we should imagine. The question becomes, what is the gap that opens up that creates, in essence, a vulnerability between the United States' capacity to operate in this environment and basically all the rest of our allies? How do we then make that pivot when we're talking about some failures within the last 20 years and some failures to adapt that Simon was alluding to?

How do we take those lessons learned and truly internalize any failures that we had and bring them forward to threats that we don't really have a good handle on yet? Yeah, Laura, I don't have a good answer for you on that. I'll tell you why, because I'm older than all of you. And I've seen this crankailing of our procurement system is too slow and unresponsive to keep us relevant in the battle space. And I've heard each one of those administrations say, we're going to fix this thing. We're going to speed up the capacity for us to go from concept to fielding. And we never do. Now, what we've accomplished is that we have absolutely exquisite laws governing procurement and absolutely exquisite capacity to apply ethical standards to the procurement.

I mean, we're absolutely perfect in that regard, but it has so slowed us down. We're unwilling to take any risk because risk somehow equates in the public sector with corruption. We have to make the decision about what aspects of the procurement system have to be changed in order for us to remain relevant in a hyperwar environment, because the technology is changing so dramatically, so quickly, that pretty quickly you find yourself at a disadvantage just in timing alone in the fielding of these systems. I think following on from John's point, I thought I'd come in on is on equipment and procurement. And again, I'm not really familiar with this in the United

States, but it's a huge issue in the UK at the moment, particularly given a debacle that's happened with a vehicle called Ajax, which has been an attempt by the British military to bring in a new infantry fighting vehicle. And it's run grievously over time. £3.5 billion has been spent and the only prototypes that work cause injuries, hearing difficulties and vibration difficulties to soldiers. And a point that I find fascinating in the UK is that no one has ownership because everyone rolls through these jobs, what you call SROs, Senior Responsible Officer jobs. They're rotated every two years and they're often regarded as a kind of tedious box ticking exercise you have to do before you go to a command

role. So no one owns the project. And there's a couple of examples of how that was done very differently in the past. So the BV, I forget the exact terminology, is that when that was procured in the 1980s, they gave the job to one guy and he just stayed with it. And he held that responsibility from commissioning through to when the vehicle came in the field. And so you have ownership and you have accountability. Another example, this is from the United States that I find fascinating, is the development of the B-29 Superfortress in the Second World War. So what is not well known is that the B-29 cost more than the Manhattan Project, right? Like it was the most expensive single weapons program of the Second World War. But it was also an incredibly

difficult technical project because it was orders of magnitude ahead of where things were. So it had cabin pressurization, it had automated gun turrets, technology that was incredibly advanced for that period. And also critically, what they tried to do was to do development and production at the same time. And my sense is that every time that you have this major move forward with a form of technology, you have to bring managerial structures. And the way that you run your people has to advance as well in parallel. Otherwise, it just doesn't work. Simon and John, too, both of you have commented about current military practices, specifically acquisitions, a great example, that prevent the organization from adapting to emerging technology. What I'd like to hear from both of you is your thoughts about how current organizational applies in some respects to all of our services, and that is the inherent tension between recognizing that we have to fight at a higher speed and momentum, making sure that the human dimension, the nature of war, is properly prepared intellectually to be able to use the systems, but also at the same time having service capabilities that can adapt quickly enough to deliver those capabilities, the character of war, to deliver those capabilities in a timely enough manner

so that the nature and the character are in equilibrium. We have robust service experimentation efforts that attempt to prove that in an experimental environment, artificially intelligent, network-centric or network-capable warfighting capabilities will in fact work. And we prove that in those warfighting capabilities. The problem is the procurement system that then would deliver those capabilities to those troops that are now proving that they're intellectually capable. It's not there. It's not happening. John, you've commented about how current military practices in the area of procurement, acquisition, for example, prevent the institution from adapting to emerging technology. What I'd like to hear from both of you is your thoughts about how current

organizational culture is standing in the way of our ability to adapt to the pace of modern war that has now been set by our potential adversaries, most notably China. And as you point out, this failure is not about technology as much as our methods and procedures for employing that technology. The realization that although the nature of war has not changed, the character most certainly has, and that we in the West have failed to acknowledge or keep pace with that change. I think the broader point here is that this is about a second bind that militaries find themselves in through no fault of their own. So I think the first bind that I referred to at the beginning is the fact that war doesn't happen

all the time. So how do you know what to prepare for? How do you keep the organisation real and focused? The second is this bind of rigidity or of hierarchy, right? So there are sound and sensible reasons for hierarchy in the military. Ultimately, you have to create social organizations that can function under enormous stress when people are tired, scared, when they're very afraid, when things are difficult. But there's also the problem that that same rigidity makes change very difficult. So if you look at how the leading-edge high-tech civilian organizations run now, they are flat, right? They're really flat. And they do not have rank structure. They have this idea that people can bring things to the table. And they also don't have to deal with combat, right? So that's difficult.

How do you trade rigidity for adaptability? And also the fact, this is relevant in the piece I'm writing, but if you have a rank structure in parallel to a job structure you create this lattice from a human resource perspective where you need someone to do this job whether it's a cyber job or something like that but often the qualification is it needs to be a an of5 or you know a major or someone needs to fill that and i think i think freeing that up more is a way you can do it but again i think it's helpful to think about this as a bind that there is no easy way around that you have to accept that it's there and you have to work out a navigator, but it's going to exist and always going to exist. We've gone the last 20 years, and this is particularly related to Britain, but I'm sure it's generally the US,

that there needs to be an acceptance that it didn't all work particularly well and that there were problems. And I think the situation that we have in the UK at the moment and again for those who aren't familiar that the secretary of state here has just summoned the senior leadership of the army for an extraordinary general meeting of the army board which reflects a series of scandals and the cover-up of a murder in kenya but also procurement a kind of drumbeat of stuff that has been going on and there is a sense here of an institution in crisis in some ways and i think that crisis is in many ways one about not admitting that there's been a problem. You know, in any human endeavor, be it an individual with a drinking problem or a company turning around, the first way to deal with an issue is to admit that the issue is there. And I

think what we see in Britain often is an extent now, because things were difficult and experiences were hard, to kind of rush forward and embrace often a fairly superficial buzzwordy level, these ideas of tech or cyber or whatever. And using that as a way to avoid having some harder questions about what our army is for and how we should put it together. for and how we should put it together. But I also think on the other side, I find it helpful to think about these binds that military organizations find themselves in that are not fundamentally their fault, that they are structural issues that they have to learn how to navigate. Let me make one quick comment. I want to be very fair to our services in the United States, and that is when you're attempting to budget for aircraft carriers, or a new ballistic missile submarine, or a new successor to the B-2 bomber, or a new MV-22, the long lead on that, in many respects, is just simply the metal bending, as opposed to necessarily the legal process. So it's a wicked problem between the realities associated with

big-ticket, big big dollar acquisition programs and what we've been talking about, what Simon and I have been talking about throughout, which is the inherent requirement for the intellectual flexibility and adaptability necessary for the new environment in which we find ourselves, which in many respects is driven by network-centric, artificially intelligent or cognitive systems. And the two of those are in massive tension. And until we're able to reconcile that in one way or the other, we're going to be dealing a lot with legacy systems that are smart, but we're not going to be creating the smart systems that we need for the future. John, on that point, I'm just going to follow up with a question. The hardest part

about implementing change may be figuring out where to start. So with that in mind, what advice do you have for practitioners, both senior officers and policymakers, to implement the change that is necessary that you've outlined? Well, first, you have to understand the strategic environment in which you're going to be operating. And that's one of the things that is where we often fail. What is the strategic environment today? What's it going to look like in the future? And from my perspective, the nearly breathtaking speed with which technology is changing is going to define geopolitics. You know, we're talking virtually right now.

If I were to stop talking, somebody's phone would come up in a couple of seconds. And one of the reasons for that is while we exist in the physical environment, where we find our relevance is in the cyber environment. And that is going to only increase as time goes on. So what we have to do is have our senior leaders understand that the environment is going to change so dramatically at the strategic horizon, which is from now to a generation, now 30 years or more. That's going to change so much that we have to understand that the systems and the organizations

that can deliver us to success in the envisaged strategic environment have to understand that the systems and the organizations that can deliver us to success in the envisaged strategic environment have to be in an equilibrium of some form or another. And the United States has been surprised a number of times. And we have got to understand that the human piece of this thing is dramatic. It's important. There are recruiting aspects of it, different kinds of people, how we train them, what we expect of them, how we educate them. All of those things have to fit into ultimately the nature of the character of war, which is a highly dynamic, technologically advanced environment. And the fundamental difference, Andy, when Jim Mattis' note arrived that caused us to

change throughout the entire Marine Corps was we stopped being an organization that was top-down driven in the context of decision-making to one where decision-making was instilled in the most junior officers in a flat way so that we gave the mission orders. This is where maneuver warfare really took over. We gave the mission orders. They made decisions. They moved out, and they fought with the technology they had. The nature of war leapt ahead of the character of war because we consciously chose to get the decision at the very heart of what we were doing. And I don't think that's changed to this day. The problem is, can we ensure that the officers we recruit

and the way we prepare them for the decision-making environment in a hyper war is consistent in the equilibrium standpoint with the environment that we're going to face at the strategic horizon. Do you think if we implement change and we try to revolutionize our organizations, both structure and culture, how do we measure success of that? Can we measure it ex ante, or do we have to wait until it's truly tested or there's a crisis to see if our changes have actually worked? We don't need to be eye deep in a bloody conflict to determine whether we got it right or not. You know, to some extent,

even though it sounds like it's a contradiction, when Jim Mattis called me and said, we got to be thinking at 15 to 20 kilometers per hour instead of four kilometers per hour, I immediately packed up the infantry officer course. We flew to 29 Palms and I mounted them all in armored vehicles and we just barreled down the desert, firing and moving as fast as we could and

communicating. And that changed everything for us. And this goes to your point, Laura. We have got to test our systems constantly with maximum capacity to stress them until they fail. So we've got to put our own forces in an environment where they are stress tested to the point of failure so that we know whether we'll be up to the standard when the time comes. But we have to really think hard about what warfare in the cyber environment and cross-domain environment really is going to look like. And I think we're really just beginning to try to figure that out. One thing that I find another helpful concept to think about some of these ideas of how militaries change is what

aspects of activities the militaries have a monopoly on and what aspects do other organizations have so if you look at the core business of a of a military which is organizing violence no one else does that right in our society i mean maybe the police to to an extent and ultimately killing that is the prerogative of the armed forces but there's a whole set of other things that actually lots of other people do so lots of organizations run large vehicle fleets or lots of organizations have to devise human resources policies or lots of organizations have to develop technology and i think trimming that idea of like we're the only people who know about this thing down to the the most narrow way possible is helpful because i think if you can they can particularly as an army or a military becomes increasingly insular from

its society it can erect walls and often say you know you have nothing to tell us because we don't you don't adhere to our social values about how we dress or how we behave or talk. And I think having that openness to the outside is really important. And that is key with procurement because, you know, not everyone, only militaries buy nuclear submarines, right? But lots of organizations build and develop hyper-technical products and that there are things to learn. And I think the other point that is worth thinking about in these situations, and this was alluded to by John, it's like if we had to fight in six months,

if you had to condense everything, right? How would you do it? And what would you throw away? It's kind of an elaboration of this. I think it's a Peter Thiel point, but it's like you may have a 10 year plan, right? But if someone had a gun to your head and said like,

you need to do this in six months, what would you do? It's quite a useful thought experiment to think about that but i think it's like who outside has expertise on this and you know they may be young or they may not shave or they may do a whole lot of things that at some level offend the sense of decorum that your organization has but that doesn't mean they can't bring something to the table that would be my view and i think that other point of like if we had to get people off the street and train them how to do this in the shortest time possible how would you do it yeah it's great tension between the in extremist requirement to get everyone up to speed right and then so it all extraneousaneous training is shown but at the same

time there's an inherent requirement to get kind of a different type of individual some would say more intellectually adept less focused on the physical i mean that's what we are we're seeing it's almost blasphemic for marine core culture and that's right word, like blasphemic or heretical, right? Like it is going against the culture. And I think picking up on a point that John had earlier, and again, this is from the British experience, but about 1990, about the Gulf War.

I didn't write about this in detail in my book, but what I do know is that Britain in the 1980s, in theory, had four armored divisions in Germany. That was their contribution to NATO that the major strategic point They sent one to the Gulf in in 1990 So a quarter the force but in order to send that force like there were 17 tanks left in Germany British tanks and everything was sitting on breeze blocks because they took the spare parts off like what it revealed was how hollowed out

The whole thing was you know because it was all about a shop what was in the shop window what looked like capacity was and i think what is striking in some ways about about that period is that suddenly when they had to actually deploy these units like they had 25 of the capacity that that was there so i think i bang on this stuff a lot but stuff like how people are assessed how they're reported on this like if you have a zero defect reporting culture where if anything is wrong you know you've been a battalion commander and like you know if if one of your soldiers loses a rifle or whatever if the idea is that any step that you make is wrong it's going to torpedo your promotional chances you know then the temptation to like juke the stats about how many of your vehicles are working, about how all

of that, I just bang this drum. It's the incentives, the incentives, the incentives. Well, a lot of it would come down to institutional inertia, right? Once that culture is in place, it takes a very strong force to then get rid of it, or to replace it or to change it.

From the list that we had before the discussion, I think it's interesting talking about special operations forces and this idea that the benefits are flatter structures. I do think we have an issue in the UK that our special operations forces are too secret. I think we cover them in a level of secrecy that is ultimately counterproductive. And it's clear that there needs to be levels of confidentiality about what they do and potentially about people who sit in them but

what what happened in the uk and we mythologized our special forces community you know we we had this idea almost that they were kind of supermen and and things like that and it just creates this culture which actually makes it very difficult for them and i once had another conversation with a a senior enlisted guy from the sas who said like look we have this tremendous problem that we have a culture where like if you're not badged you bring nothing to the table but we need loads of people who are not badged to do what we do because we need medics and we need radio operators and stuff like that who cannot pass our selection procedures but we have a culture that kind of looks down them and i think the think the fact that we wrap these organizations in such a layer of secrecy in the UK, A, it's slightly ridiculous,

because we also have a whole cohort of people who've been in them who then make media careers going, you know, trading on the back of what they've done. And they, you know, so it's sort of really like, how secret is it? But I think actually, it's insularity where there is not a need for insularity. General John Allen, Simon Aitken, thank you so much for being here with us today. Look, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you to General Allen and also to Laura and to Andy for hosting such an interesting conversation. My book, for those who aren't familiar with it, is called The Changing of the Guard, The British Army Since 9-11,

and it's available at all good bookstores. Many thanks. It was great to be with you all today. Questions were terrific. I learned a lot from Simon. I have to admit, I don't have your book. I'm going to go out and get it right now. It sounds like it's going to be something

from which I'll also learn a lot. So I want to thank Laura and thank Andy for this opportunity and Simon for the great work you're doing. And I wish to thank Laura and thank Andy for this opportunity and Simon for the great work you're doing. And I wish you all the best and please stay well. Thanks again for listening to episode 41 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Carly and I discuss coalitions through the American-Australian lens with Ambassador

Douglas Lute and Ambassador Duncan Lewis. After that, Abigail and Kyle explore the book Bullets, Not Ballots, Success in Counterinsurgency with its author, Dr. Jacqueline Hazelton and Dr. Anne-Marie Smalter. Please be sure to subscribe to the Regular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The Regular Warfare podcast is a product of the Regular Warfare Initiative. We generate written and audio content, coordinate events for the community,

and host critical thinkers in the field of regular warfare as fellows. You can follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.