Irregular Warfare Podcast - Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Enduring Lessons of Security Force Assistance

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

What is the role of security force assistance in achieving national security objectives? Where did security force assistance work well in the post-9/11 era, and where was it unsuccessful? How did policy considerations differ from tactical implementation? And most importantly, how can research and experience from the past twenty years of war inform ongoing partner-building activities in a decidedly different Indo-Pacific theater? Retired Lieutenant General Larry Nicholson and Dr. Barbara Elias join this episode to tackle these questions and more. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

I think our going in position as we went to Afghanistan was we want to work ourselves out of a job as quickly as we can by getting the Afghan military and police institutions on their feet and able to handle the mission. But did we try to create a military that was in our own image? Was that part of the problem? We often recognize how weak and dependent local allied regimes are, right? They need us. They'll fall apart without the United States, without U.S. forces. But we rarely fully appreciate how dependent the U.S. is on them politically. We can't do it without them because we've tied our own success to their survival. We can't do it without them because we've tied our own success to their survival.

Welcome to Episode 45 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I am Shawna Sinnott, and I will be your host today, along with Andy Milburn. Today's episode considers the legacy of security force assistance operations and what might have utility in today's more complex security environment. Our guests begin by establishing the nature of security force assistance operations in the current security landscape and their importance to achieving the United States national security imperatives. They reflect on the lessons of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq while also identifying how other states have succeeded and failed in this mission set. Our guests then consider whether these findings are applicable to the United States' current focus

in the Indo-PACOM theater, where partner force training and development has taken on a new urgency in light of a growing China, or if the contemporary environment, in fact, has distinct characteristics when it comes to partner compliance. Lieutenant General Larry Nicholson served for almost 40 years in the United States Marine Corps,

during which time he commanded the 1st Marine Division and the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Task Force Leatherneck, Afghanistan. Most recently he served as commanding general of three Marine Expeditionary Force, leading 30,000 Marines and sailors in the Asia Pacific region before retiring in 2018. Dr. Barbara Elias is an associate professor of government at Bowdoin College, specializing in international relations, insurgency warfare, U.S. foreign policy, national security, and Islam and politics. She is the author of the award-winning book, Why Allies Rebel, Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars, and is a senior fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative. with the Irregular Warfare Initiative. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast,

a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Larry and Barbara. General Larry Nicholson, Dr. Barbara Elias, thank you so much for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. We're really thrilled to have you here for this conversation. Shana, thank you so much for the opportunity to participate. It's a great thrill for me to be with you here today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And I'd like to just jump right into it. So Barbara, could you briefly set us up here? Why do security force assistance operations even matter in our conception of war?

Well, security force assistance matters tremendously because at the end of the day, at least in terms of U.S. missions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the creation of a successful allied partner regime was the way that the U.S. defined success in these military operations. So the center of a lot of the political heart of what these military interventions were trying to do were to set up allied regime that could be sustainable on their own, right, without U.S. intervention. Larry, is there a tension then here in terms of what military success looks like in these environments? Well, if the primary function of our nation's military is to defeat our adversary, I think we do that pretty well. I think that was done early in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the second part of that is, OK, now we've got to train a force. We've got to prepare a force to take the fight. I think we've learned a lot over the last 20 years about what

works and what doesn't. I look forward to learned a lot over the last 20 years about what works and what doesn't. And I look forward to discussing that a little more. Well, Larry, were these U.S. shortcomings due to a lack of military training or capability? Or does this kind of all come back to the U.S. understanding of alliance politics and implementation at the local level? I think one of the things, and I've talked about it before, is I think we went into both Iraq and Afghanistan with far less knowledge about the local culture, about the local politics, about the history of the nations that we were going into. The Sunni-Shia divide jumps out at all of us. I think we were ill-equipped, and we really did not understand the depth and the historical nature

of that conflict. And many stories about trying you know, trying to understand while you're in the middle of a fight or in you're in the middle of providing security assistance with a Shia army and a police force in Fallujah, where I was, that was 100% Sunni. And now, you know, the U.S. becomes the interlocutors to try to get those two forces to work together. So I think there's so much to learn about a country before you actually go in and understand the dynamics, the historical impact. I don't think we did that particularly well. And I think we had to learn as we were sort of operating.

And that took a lot of time. Barbara, you look at this at more of a macro level. So if we were to take your recent research on why allies rebel, particularly for how the United States has worked in these wartime contexts, these counterinsurgency environments in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 20 years. Can you explain what your research tells us about how we actually get these partners and allies to meet the strategic objectives that the United States has? Yeah, this is an excellent question. So the research demonstrates lots of things. It demonstrates that local partners are more powerful than we may think.

You know, it depends on how you define power, not in terms of resources, but in terms of political leverage, I would argue. So Larry was talking about the fact that intervening forces, U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, were learning as they went and were doing, you know, amazing labor trying to figure out local political contexts that are highly complicated and very foreign to Americans. And so that meant that we were really reliant on local political partners to help us navigate, or at least translate, some of the political realities. But that, in addition to the fact that we define success as the success of the local regime, the regimes in Baghdad and regimes in Kabul,

meant that those local forces had some fundamental leverage over the United States. It gave them a lot of power because they became indispensable for mission success. And we often recognize how weak and dependent local allied regimes are, right? They need us, they'll fall apart without the United States, without U.S. forces, But we rarely fully appreciate how dependent the U.S. is on them politically. We can't do it without them because we've tied our own success to their survival. And so that's a blind spot where we don't appreciate how they can leverage political dependencies, our political dependencies and U.S.'s political dependencies on them. So if you undermine the regime, then if we're trying to coerce them to get them to do what we want them to do, for example, our allies in Kabul or Baghdad, Americans would risk undermining their own mission. Local forces have leverage there and they use it. These regimes like Karzai's government, for example, are threatened from every which way, right? Bottom up from an insurgency, laterally with elite threats, and top down from the U.S. pressing for reforms that will create short-term risks and costs for the long-term

institutional reforms like anti-corruption reform. Barbara, you used the word coercion. Can you explain what you mean by that? Because that can sound a lot more nefarious than words like cooperation or other types of partnership terms we might hear? So for me, and then I would also love to hear what Larry has to say too, but for me, I see coercion very much kind of in a shelling, Thomas Shelling type of sense, where it's not, you know, your friends or your enemies. You know, there's a whole spectrum of kind of trying to build cooperation, but leverage certain things here and there.

It's much more like various types of coercion than necessarily just violence or friendship. There's something in between. And I think that alliance politics lies within that. You try to leverage whatever levers that you have, you try to leverage your resources as much as you can. But oftentimes, that does imply implicit threats against a partner. For Barbara, I'd like to follow up on something you said. It's a really interesting comment that you made, and it's in your research, of course, too, that this sense of kind of mutual leverage or competing leverage. And I think that's not commonly understood. And an example being when we pulled out of Afghanistan, there were very authoritative statements being made by both sides that seemed to make sense, that to make sense that, you know, if we do this, they will do that.

And you take a little more nuanced view. But I would like to ask you, what are some of the results of your research? How does one get the upper hand, if that is the right term to use, in influencing a partner at the strategic level? So in the book, I examine the conditions that make local partner regimes like the Karzai administration more or less likely to implement policy from the United States. And it turns out that the data that I've gathered indicates that you have about one third compliance with what the intervening forces ask, about one third partial compliance. It means they do like some of it. And then one they're just non-compliance, they don't implement that. So that means these rates should give us some pause, but no matter how brilliant your counterinsurgency strategy is, and that's a whole nother question, right? But no matter how brilliant your counterinsurgency strategy is, you're only going to get about 40% of that policy implemented if it involves local forces. So some of the things that increase the

likelihood of compliance, they align about certain types of variables. Some analysts are under the impression that it's all about interest, that local forces will comply when it's in their interest to do so, but will otherwise not cooperate. But the data I've gathered shows that it's more complicated. So local allies tend to comply when the U.S. or similar intervening forces had a unilateral capacity to implement the policy being requested. So, for example, in Vietnam, when you have Henry Kissinger approach South Vietnamese allies and say, you must negotiate with the National Liberation Front, with the Viet Cong, or we're going to do it without you. At that point, when the South Vietnamese don't really have a choice, the U.S. is going to do it with or without them, you tend to have higher rates of compliance for that.

Then there are other instances, however, where the U.S. doesn't always have that unilateral ability. So if the U.S., for example, is pressuring Hamid Karzai to implement certain anti-corruption reforms through legislative process in Afghanistan, the U.S. can't do that unilaterally. They need Afghan allies to implement legislative policy. has been taking some of the comments, some of the concepts that Barbara's been talking about, that shaded area on the Venn diagram between our interests and theirs, and making it work, making our guys, our advisors, as you pointed out, often from conventional backgrounds, walk that line, which is the tricky thing to do over the course of the years of doing this.

So what are some of the tricks of the trade? Andy, that's a tough one because I think there was a lot learned early on by a lot of really talented people that were put in positions. And I talked to a lot of the basic school classes, and I tell every lieutenant coming through, we can train you for 10 years, and your first week in combat, you're going to run into 10 situations that you never considered. And I think as we started peeling off leadership from our units to become security force advisors or military team advisors, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think the very best of some of our young men and women, I think they learned very quickly what worked and what didn't. I give you a good example. As we went into Helmand in 2009, I think one of the first

things we ended up doing was dissolving the police force. And we caught hell from Kabul. But we dissolved every policeman in Helmand because we found that they were predatory. They were taking advantage of the people and there was no trust. And if the police are the face of the government, and if you're trying to build some credibility with the government, and the very people that are that face are the most corrupt and evil people that are around, even more predatory than the Taliban, then you got a problem. We worked very hard to ensure that the teams we had, that the police we had, you know, were police that were representative. So we really shut down the police for about six weeks and sent them to school because I think our experience was large numbers of the car carrying, badge carrying policemen had never been trained,

but they were in the right family, they were in the right tribe, and they got a job. And they took full advantage of that job. So little things like that, you know, not taught, but they're learned. And I think the complete elimination of that force and reconstitution of that force at about 40% of the previous strength is an example of sort of the decisions that young leaders were making on the spot there in Holman. Larry, that's a great vignette. And I think it really illustrates the challenges of implementation and the diversity of solutions that may have to come into play here. If we were to take that and zoom out to the state level, I'd ask Barbara, you know, in your research, you look at so many different cases of how not just the United States, but other countries have

been successful in these attempts. Is it that there are these tried and true textbook methods that do work? Or like Larry's example at the tactical level, are they all pretty different in terms of how the state achieved or didn't achieve its desired end state? Absolutely. So I examined nine different wars in the book and they're all different. I mean, that's the thing. They're all vastly different wars. And I also feel that sometimes like the solutions or some of the coercive levers that we've talked about

in terms of maybe applying unilateral force and implementing policies or threatening to implement policies unilaterally if a partner regime is not willing to do so. That also can get you into trouble in terms of the politics of it. So, for example, the Soviet Union also lost a war in Afghanistan, in part because they did take over unilaterally. The entire Afghan regime, after about a year and a half, they got tired of negotiating with their Afghan political partners, and the KGB just took over the regime in Kabul. That is not a way for success, evidently, either. Another thing that affects compliance, rates of compliance, are obviously capacity. And so you have, for example, Iraqi partners in terms of the Iraqi bureaucracy having much higher capacity than the Afghan bureaucrats did. One interesting thing, too, that I would mention is

that, again, that one-third compliance, one-third partial compliance, one-third non-compliance that I found when I examined all of the policy requests from intervening states in these wars, you know, even though we had consistency in those numbers, which is really shocking as a researcher, knowing how different these wars are to have that consistency across the wars, but for very different reasons and also having different outcomes in those wars. So some of them ending with counterinsurgency success, some of them with insurgency victory, and then some of them, some mix in between. So there are some ways where there is consistency, but for very different reasons and very different

patterns. Larry, kind of following on from what Barbara was saying, she mentioned, you know, nine different kind of case studies. And I want to get your thoughts on kind of the future of the regular warfare in this sense and the approach. And we, you know, when I say we both, you know, conventional, even soft, when we talk about counterinsurgency, we talk about surges, we talk about kind of flooding an area and getting the right ratio between security forces and local population. But going ahead, is that the right approach? I mean, there's a school of thought, and I'd like Barbara to chime in after you on this too, there's a school of thought that

says, hey, we've been most successful, countries have been most successful in security force assistance when they put a very light footprint in. And there hasn't been kind of this perception of taking the lead. Colombia comes to mind. I think Barbara has an unusual example in Cuba and Angola. But on the other hand, once we step up to the fore and conduct counterinsurgency in the lead, then we've lost it. We've lost that sense of compliance, that sense of mutual interest. What are your thoughts on that? I think if you look at nations, you know, Colombia, I think that's very different than Iraq and Afghanistan.

You know, the one thing we had going for us in Iraq is that there was a national institution called an army. And we dissolved that army, but we were able to rebuild something that everybody intrinsically, fundamentally understood, that there was a national army. There was no history of a national army in Afghanistan. So now you're trying to invent an institution that doesn't previously existed. If you look in a Columbia scenario, again, a very different scenario where the local security forces needed assistance against the cartels and some of the other leftward leaning organizations that were operating in Columbia. But again, a very, very different, I agree that a light footprint,

if able, a light footprint is certainly the preferred option with professional security force assistance, you know, forces that are able to go in. But certainly that was not the case in Iraq or Afghanistan, where our security force assistance work was preceded by significant conventional military activity. So a little bit of apples and oranges in that one. I think what's really interesting, Andy, is if we look to the future, if we look to the work that our forces will be doing in the next 10, 20, 30 years in the Indo-PACOM area, and I think that's where it gets very interesting. Is it cooperation? Is it coercion? Or is it an emergency, you know, where, hey, we need help? So how do you counter, you know, sort of the rising influence of the Belt and Road Initiative

and the money as a weapon system that is being used in the Indo-Pacific? But I think as we look at security for assistance, I think what has happened in the past is really interesting. But I think where can we take it in the future fight? And how do we best prepare our forces, both conventional and special operations forces, to do the kind of work that they will need to be doing in the future fight? Barbara, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. So to go with what Larry was saying, too, in terms of we can't really compare apples and oranges, there's a selection bias with the reality that the worst cases of the disaster areas, the regimes that don't exist, get the biggest footprint by necessity.

And so it's easy to look back and say, oh, small footprint works better, light footprint works better. But you're not comparing similar contexts. The Cuban case is an interesting historical moment in terms of large-scale counterinsurgency, so a heavy footprint by the Cubans. And they intervened in Angola from 1975 to 1991. And there's some really interesting dynamics that are very different than the American version of large-scale counterinsurgency here. So, you know, Fidel Castro originally intended to stay in Angola for three years in order to support the newly founded socialist Angolan state, but the war dragged on for 15

years. So that is actually very familiar to most counterinsurgency stories. And it was enormously costly. But the intervention was successful, at least in ultimately suppressing insurgents. And there's two quick contributing reasons why that are relevant to our conversation here. The first is that the political goals of the intervention, that the Cubans did not try to remake the Angolan state, right? They largely worked within the institutions that were already there and did not have designs or confidence that they could create an Angolan proxy. And second, that the Cubans don't have loads of resources, right? They're dependent on the Soviets throughout, and they can't throw money at problems. And so the Cubans, in effect, focus on studying what their partners are doing that's working and asking how they can augment those existing efforts, providing advice, but largely staying out of internal affairs, at least to a certain degree, which simplifies questions about sovereignty, that the Angolans are clearly sovereign.

And by staying small and relatively ill-equipped, frankly, they are more modest in what they're asking their partners to do and more willing to accept kind of local imperfections as they are, and they don't flood the economy with loads of cash. And so corruption isn't nearly as big of a political problem as it has been for the United States and the entire Iraq audience. Larry, you've commented on this, and I think this is one of the frustrating things for all of us. We saw a lot of really good work being done in Afghanistan, working with our partners, you know, at the tactical level, and yet, you know, obviously it didn't pan out. And in Iraq, it seemed to, you know, yes, the jury's still out, but we seem to

gain a little more long-term traction, I guess is what I'm saying. And then that's no surprise, obviously, as we pull out of Afghanistan. Do you have any comments on that? Yeah, you know, I think our biggest problem in Afghanistan early on, and I can only speak to my experiences, you know, the two years I had there, one as a brigade commander in Helmand, the other in ISAF as the J-3. But, you know, for that year in Helmand, the biggest problem we had was just a paucity, a lack of Afghan troops. And I despised early on the term. I hated it in Iraq and I loathed it in Afghanistan, put an Afghan face on it. I thought it was charismatic. I thought it was disingenuous. I thought it was, frankly, disrespectful. So I wanted an Afghan ass on the line. In fact,

you know, we pushed the point where I didn't want anybody going on a patrol unless we had Afghans with us. And that was a problem early on because there were just so few Afghans in Helmand. And frankly, when folks like Barbara go back and start really looking at the Afghan fight, we waited a long time to start building, you know, that army. We waited too long. We were well behind the power curve. I don't think we found the right leaders. I think, frankly, you know, a lot of the senior generals, not all, but a lot of the senior generals that were in charge were not the right generals. They were not the right people. They were more concerned with other things other than taking care of their forces and winning the fight. I think building that force at the tactical level, there was an incredible effort.

And so without Afghans, you put 19,000 Marines in the Haman province, what do you do? Well, we started recruiting our own and we got permission from Kabul to run our own boot camp. And I think it was the only time in the entire war where a unit the size of a brigade, you know, ran their own recruit training for police and for soldiers. And that was done right there at Camp Leatherneck by Mr. Terry Walker and some great folks. But that demonstrated our sense of urgency in trying to get Afghans with us. I think the sense was if U.S. Marine soldiers walked to an Afghan village, Brits, that's great. Those are foreigners. But if they see those Brits or Americans and they're intermingled with Afghans, that's a lot more great. Those are foreigners. But if they see those Brits are Americans and

they're intermingled with Afghans, that's a lot more interesting. Those are our guys. So how did you get them to work with you then at that human level? I mean, we can have all the incentive alignment and strategic considerations that we want. But if you can't get the people on the ground to see eye to eye on that, then it's not really going to be successful. Yeah. You know what was effective, Shana, was that our FOBs and our small bases, there were Afghans on those bases. We didn't have those segregation. And, you know, frankly, there was a lot of teeth sucking there because there was the, you know, the blue on blue or blue on green. There were those incidents going around and there was a lot of concern that, you know,

bringing Afghans on your base, you're going to bring sleeper cells in there. We did. I know there was an incident later on down in Garmshire, which was a terrible incident, where a young police, Afghan policeman, killed some U.S. Marines. Again, a very regrettable one. But overall, for the tens of thousands of Marines and Afghans that lived together, pretty remarkable the lack of those incidents. But I think it's a forcing function. You've got to get those forces together. If they're going to fight together, they got to live together. They got to be together. And I think where that was done well,

I think there was great success. And where it wasn't done and there was suspicion on both sides about the other, I think things did not go particularly well. Did that work in Iraq as well? So Iraq was a little bit different because you had that history of an institution. You had that history of an army. And I think it was easier, not easy, but easier to begin putting an army back together. And I remember the challenges there of creating units and getting them out. The biggest issue there was the Shia-Sunni divide again, in terms of sending new formations of Shia soldiers into the Sunni heartland and vice versa. And when the Shia-Sunni

violence erupted in Baghdad, that caused a lot of problems for us as advisors and as leaders that had Afghan army units involved with us. You know, every day we solved, we tried to solve problems in the city of Fallujah, where we had that Sunni police force and the Shia army all trying to work together towards keeping the city secure. Tremendous challenges and young corporals and sergeants and lieutenants out there, sometimes between opposing forces of Iraqi security forces. But as tough as that was, it was easier than Afghanistan. Barbara, amidst the well-reheated debate at the policy level about why Afghanistan went the way it did, you've kind of been a cool voice of reason. So I'd like to get your thoughts.

voice of reason. So I'd like to get your thoughts. Larry just covered, you know, kind of what went wrong at the tactical to operational level. And I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts about what went wrong at the policy level. So to build on something that Larry mentioned, he pointed out a tremendously important dynamic between risk and violence and institution building. He was talking about Afghan ass, like being on the line. I found some interesting elements of that too in terms of Vietnam, for example, that immediately following the Tet Offensive, you had a tremendous spike in South Vietnamese compliance with US requests.

And they are talking about the Tet Offensive as something that truly sunk in as a terrifying moment where they were at risk. I think that there is a pressure in terms of growing more complicit when you have a superpower kind of at your disposal, essentially guaranteeing your security. And even though the United States, you know, has promises of temporary commitment, that commitment still was something that the Afghans could hide behind and frankly, not necessarily have that risk of the insurgency being as immediate to them. So I think there are

many things that are contributing or contributed to the collapse of the Afghan government. I think at its very heart, it wasn't set up for success. It wasn't sustainable. It was expensive. A lot of other analysts have pointed to how this very federal oriented system in a very decentralized, historically, politically very decentralized place. which is the fact that the United States had at the heart of its political mission, the idea of promoting Afghan sovereignty by denying Afghan sovereignty. So just follow my logic here a little bit. This idea that you can build a state and we can call it what we want to call it, like Operation Iraqi Freedom is a great example of this, this idea that you're promoting the sovereignty of another state. But the political process of doing that, the military process of doing that inherently necessitates violating that very sovereignty. So although the United States doesn't have colonial designs on any of this, it still, though, is this idea of there's an inherent irony and a political

contradiction within this process of state building and promoting sovereignty while simultaneously denying it. And unfortunately, the insurgents are also in this game of denying sovereignty to that other state, to the state that the United States is allied with. So you have both insurgents and the United States unintentionally violating the sovereignty of the regime that the U.S. is ostensibly supporting. And so in that, you have an inherent problem, political problem, from the very beginning that I think is really hard in a lot of ways to recover from. Maybe this comes down to a power dynamic, but I'm interested in Larry's thoughts on what is kind of specific to these wartime situations where there's this environment of violence, there's threat, there's a dependency. What are some of the things that

you draw on that are really unique to getting partners and allies to cooperate in these environments? You know, Sean, I think it's a sense of their survival. You know, the U.S., right or wrong, early on in the Afghan campaign indicated that we were leaving. You know, the U.S., right or wrong, early on in the Afghan campaign indicated that we were leaving. You know, how many presidents talked about, okay, I'm going to approve this surge, but we're leaving. We're going to send more troops, but we're leaving. The clock, the countdown, you know, had been announced by multiple administrations from both parties. And so, by multiple administrations from both parties. And so I think perhaps was that meant to encourage the Afghans and the Iraqis to work harder, work faster, get better, get smarter, get more resilient, be prepared to take over the mission. I think our going in position as we went to

Afghanistan, my understanding was we are trying to work ourself out of a job. And that was it. We want to work ourselves out of a job as quickly as we can by getting the Afghan military and police institutions on their feet and able to handle the mission. And I think, you know, a lot of discussion is ongoing still and will be going on for many, many years. But, you know, did we try to create a military that was in our own image? Was that part of the problem? Did we try to build the U.S. Army, the U.S. Marine Corps, instead of building something that was lighter, less logistic dependent, less centralized, more regional, that would have been a better peer competitor with their adversary, which was the Taliban? a little bit from Afghanistan, but bearing in mind everything that you two have sent to this point,

what approach would you like to see the U.S. take to security forces assistance, but at strategic level, building alliances in the Pacific going ahead? I do think that a lot of work needs to be done in terms of building and partnering with various security forces. I think that there has to be kind of recalibration about power dynamics within those relationships. You know, the U.S. is coming in with these enormous resources, with this outstanding military capacity and force, and with this reputation as a global player, as a global player or the global player, right? But at the same time, I think a bit more of an acknowledgement that within that given partnership, more of, and as well as kind of accepting, instead of just rejecting, but accepting that the United States is going to have to make a lot of compromises along the way in order to just kind of build and maintain those partnerships. So I think that there's a lot of work to be done,

but a lot more acknowledgement that resources are not going, you can't buy your way into leverage in a lot of these partnerships. You have to invest in them and also work within those partnerships because those partners or smaller partners also are very smart political actors oftentimes. And they know how to use their own leverage to get a lot out of us. Pakistan is a devastating example of this. Larry, from your perspective of Indo-Pakistan, and of course, we're talking primarily mil-to-mil type relationships. Do you see the best approach here being perhaps building maybe on the basis of something like the Quad, or even, you know, I'm not trying to replicate NATO, but a multilateral mil-to-mil organization based on security? Or do you know, not trying to replicate NATO, but a multilateral, mil-to-mil organization based on security? Or do you think this is going to be a series of bilateral engagements, just, again, building and sustaining?

Great question. Multifaceted answer here. Look, for one, I'm excited about the opportunities that are in the Pacific for our forces. But I mean, this is a whole of government approach. This is not just security assistance. It's a whole of government event here. And you're right, there is no NATO. It is a little bit of a bastard organization, but it's the most effective defense alliance in the history of the world. And there is no parallel in Asia. There was a CETO, Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, from I think 1955 to about 77.

But after Vietnam, that waned and fell apart. So today there's ASEAN. And I'm really excited about the work that I know the U.S. is doing cross-functionally in all areas with ASEAN. But boy, there's a lot of opportunities and there's some impediments out there as well. And I'll give you just one example. You know, as a commander in my previous job at 3MF, I had to do in-calls in about 14 nations and I had to do out-calls on the way out three years into my job. And I'm sitting in the Capitol, and the defense minister leans over and says, hey, you know, why are your Marines training with this country's forces, but you're not training with mine? And I leaned in.

I said, minister, we are absolutely ready to train with your forces today in the same manner in which we trained with the other country. And then he kind of leaned even forward more and kind of smiled and goes, we just can't let the Chinese find out about it. You know, it hit me in the head like a two by four because I grew up in a Marine Corps where wherever we train, whether it was in Europe, whether it was in Asia, whether it was in Africa, wherever we train, it was front page news. Hey, look at us. We're training with U.S. Marines. Look at us. We're training with the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force. I mean, that was a badge of honor to be able to train with the Americans. And now we have partner nations in the region wanting to train with us, wanting to stay close, but wanting to do it on the down low. And I just, I remember leaving that capital and the term hedging states, you know, comes to mind because there's a lot of countries out there that are caught between what they see as a rising

hegemon with the PRC and, but the traditional strong relationship with the US and of course, all the nations in the West. So I think there's tremendous challenges there as China is outspending, I mean, the Marshall Plan and current dollars. BRI is 10 times the Marshall Plan. So, you know, how do you counter that sort of influence? And for a lot of those countries, how do you say no to that kind of money to help, you know, rebuild your infrastructure, to rebuild your ports and your wastewater and your electrical grid, your highways? You know, these are things that the U.S. just is not capable of offering that kind of money to rebuild those economies. But I think it does provide great opportunities for our military to work not in a coercive way and not in a demanding way.

But I think in the manner of, hey, how can we help? What do you need help on? Where are those areas? And I think that was our attitude in the Pacific was working with nations. What are you interested in? Vietnam was a great example. I remember sitting in Hanoi with Vietnamese leaders, like, what are the things that we could do to help? Where do you want help? Where do you need help? How can we train more together and get to know one another, building professional and personal relationships? Those are the opportunities that are out there in every one of these ASEAN countries out there waiting for us to further explore.

Barbara, what does this tell us about how incentives may be different in this context as opposed to the environments that we had over the past 20 years, the incentive to cooperate, the incentive to choose a partner, which might not have existed before. Is that different? Yeah, enormously different. Like if we're talking about comparing kind of like the large scale counterinsurgency intervention style that we experienced in Iraq and in Vietnam, as opposed to the Pacific partnerships that Larry is talking about. Tremendously different because of this, you know, Sean, I'm talking about like the commitment is different in that the partner state is going to have significantly less leverage over the

United States and the tone is completely different. It's not nearly as desperate, it's not nearly as an emergency. And also that they're going to have the U.S. is approaching this much more in terms of a partnership as opposed to you're my proxy. And so that tone very much changes bargaining dynamics between the two partners. There's perhaps competition with China to have more of that influence. Do we have a precedent for that where we have competing states looking for influence on the same partner? Sure. I mean, you had that in the Cold War context with India. For example, you had both the Soviets and the United States trying to kind of woo India and India doing a very good job of playing both sides, you know, telling the United States, we are the world's largest democracy, we're with you. But actually, they're really quite tense relationships with the US and India, and also was leaning towards the Soviets, too. So you have that competition between superpowers that can then provide, you know, again, that smaller

state that they're competing for to have leverage and to kind of play both sides of it. Is that something we're seeing in the Pacific, Larry? I mean, do states need to do that or choose to do that to try to get what they can from both the United States and China? Yeah, I don't know actively they're playing both sides, but they're having to address both sides. And I don't know if they're, you know, playing one against another. I didn't get that sense in a lot of countries. I think the sense I got was that there was certainly a growing threat and their concern was our ability, the West's ability, the U.S. ability, are we going to be there? And I think this is where

the Afghan incident and how Afghan ended, I think hurts us in a lot of ways, because I think it goes to the heart of questioning U.S. resolve. And, you know, if you look at a Taiwan scenario, again, is strategic ambiguity really the best national policy? That has been our national policy for a long time and that continues to be our policy. How does that work and what is the impact of that on a lot of the allies and partners that we have in the region? There's security force assistance in the Pacific that are focused on influence. And you made the point that it is focused on influence, but it's much more nuanced than we have known previously. There are cases where we do want to signal what we're doing for strategic messaging. And there are places where perhaps we do not out of sensitivities to our partners. And then we have this responsibility

to prepare for war, you know, worst case scenario. This type of security force assistance, do you see it as being the same? For instance, should we be working with partner nation forces on one hand, and maybe building partner nation forces or doing other things that are imperceptible to our adversaries to prepare for war? Or is it all one and the same? That's a very challenging question. I think the role that we've taken on is that we will continue to work with not just our allies.

Those are easily identifiable and we do a lot of work there. But with the partner nations, and I think the partner nations all have, you know, needs, military needs, they all have strengths and weaknesses, but I think we are on a daily basis, Andy, I think we were in between eight and 12 countries every day. And that expanded up to about 17 nations that we worked in. A lot of it were intermittent. We'd go in for 30, 45, 60 day training exercise. And we're not talking battalions. Sometimes we're talking 10, 15, 20 people. And sometimes it was engineers. Sometimes it was dog trainers. Sometimes it was military police. But I think the benefit of that is you're building

those personal and professional contacts. You're building that trust and confidence. And, you know, as we used to say, you can surge troops, you can surge equipment, but you can't surge trust. You got to earn it day by day, you know, event by event, you earn that trust from your hosts and from your partners. And it's much like, you know, our schools and universities, our military schools and universities in the United States. The flow of students from ASEAN countries and students from all over the world, but certainly ASEAN countries, you know, probably has never been more important for us. I think these are important investments.

And to me, that's all security forces system. It's a larger window to look at it. But I think everywhere we have the opportunity to have touch points with our allies and our partners is a win for us, and especially in this really challenging current environment. Barbara, does trust transcend this to the policy level, or does this come down to a commitment conversation when we consider how partners might be convinced that the United States is that good partner? Yeah. So, I mean, the work that I've done primarily focuses on those large scale interventions. And as Larry was saying, the message in a lot of those large scale interventions are

we're leaving, like we're leaving as fast as we can. So to get back to Larry's point about like, well, then what, what kinds of incentives or what kinds of trust building does that then mean in terms of the U.S. trying to build meaningful partnerships? And also the incentives for trying to pressure those allies to have long term meaningful political reform when they feel like or potentially they feel like, I know you're going to leave, so I can't trust that you're going to support me for as long as this reform might take. going to support me for as long as this reform might take. And I have a lot of risk in terms of insurgents and in terms of others that are vying for power within this very complex political and military environment that they find themselves in. So I think that absolutely trust building and kind of this more like gardening approach to SFA is really important in more like peacetime environment. But when we're talking about large

scale intervention, I think that that eminent at some point withdrawal does kind of hover over and undermine those trust building exercises. For both of you, and this is really, you know, taking a step back, not just from Indo-PACistan, but across the board. And Barbara, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts from a historical perspective and Larry, yours from more of a contemporary perspective. But amongst the great powers, and we'll throw Iran in there too, who do you think approaches security force assistance from perhaps a more effective standpoint as far as using security forces system engagement with other nations to achieve their interests? I do think we have to look at cases like Iran and

cases like Pakistan, where they have been very successful in terms of partnering with states, but also non-state actors that they can then deploy, you know, as extensions of their own forces, which means that they can deny some of the risk that it takes in deploying their own forces, obviously, but then clearly have institutional capacity on the ground in states that they're interested in operating in. And, you know, they don't control those proxies perfectly. Iran has a lot of difficulties and Pakistan has a lot of difficulties, but they also have multiple different militias that work for them operating kind of within their larger umbrella. So I think that

they can kind of use those. It's a very complex game, but they do use a variety of different non-state groups in order to kind of play them off of each other and also in order to push for their own gains. So in the case of Pakistan, for example, in Afghanistan, before the rise of the Taliban, Pakistan supported seven different groups. The Taliban was just the most successful one. But they had at least seven different operating groups. Hekmatyar was probably the second most, you know, sometimes he was more favored. But his group really was favored by

Islamabad at various times, but he didn't prove to be as politically viable as the Taliban was. And so, you know, Pakistan can use multiple groups in order to push for their interests in the foreign state. Who does it best in terms of superpowers or non-superpowers who are trying to get that compliance from their partners? I tell you, I think we do it pretty well. I think the U.S. Marine Corps historically in Vietnam did pretty well. I think our female engagement teams, frankly, in the Hohman province were a great success. And I think, you know, as we went into Hohman, I've written about this a little bit, but as we put four infantry battalions into H helmet in rapid fire in the summer of 09, the instructions to every company was we will

not fob up for the first 10 days. We'll be on the move. We're going to get to know our area. We're going to get to know every leader, not just the military leaders, but the tribal leaders, the religious leaders, the Mullah. We want you to know everybody. And then based on that, you're going to pick a fob near a population center. And that's where you're going to work out of, not in hiding, but in proximity to local leaders where they can come and see. And so I think we do it. I'm really proud of

what we do. We learned a lot along the way. We've learned a lot from the Brits. Frankly, the Brits have done this effectively for many, many years. If you go back to the Malaysian emergency and one of the few real great success stories in a counterinsurgency. But I'm really proud of our Marines and soldiers and sort of the efforts that we gave. It didn't end the way we wanted, but I think the effort was there and there were tremendous strides made based on what we were able to accomplish in those years before the political decisions decided that it was time to go. So, Barbara, from your perspective and the research you've done, what are the overall policy implications for how the United States specifically engages in

security force assistance? Yeah, I think that there are several implications. First and foremost, I think that local allies in SFA are more politically powerful than we might think. Large or small footprints, that their influence doesn't necessarily come from resources or reputation on a global stage, but through the specific context of security threats that we're facing together. So this implies there's a bit more symmetry and bargaining than some of the patron client type of modeling that might suggest. Like in the case of large-scale interventions like Iraq and Afghanistan, in particular, the regimes in Baghdad and Kabul needed the U.S. to survive, but the U.S. needed them in order to win. So there is that mutual dependency. And so this suggests that more modest political goals, more of an open dialogue with partners about divergent interests and working within existing political frameworks might be a better approach as opposed to recreating entire political systems. And I think local allies then end up managing the United States as much as,

if not more than, we manage them. So then that fits in with that bargaining model that we get a fair amount of dishonesty and a fair amount of kind of working us over, as opposed to us really kind of having an open dialogue with bottom lines on the line and saying, this is what we need, this is who you are, where can we meet? Larry, what advice would you have for practitioners going ahead? I'm thinking those in our profession preparing for the security assistance going ahead. Yeah, Andy, I think if you look at the role for ground forces in an expeditionary advanced space operation sort of environment, you're going to be working with local people. You're going to be, if you think about John Berger's EABO concept of being able to go in and get an airfield up and running in a couple of days and working with the local forces there to help provide some security, to have an investment in that, and then be able to move on. I think the necessity to be able to work with people, whether it's small groups, whether it's tribal,

you think about 7,000, 10,000 islands of some of those nations that we're looking at where we might have to perform EABO type operations. Again, it's not just tie-in combat. It's the ability to go in and to work with locals, whether it's civilians or security forces. That never goes out of style. That is never unimportant. And I think it's that person-to-person relationship that will define success in the future fight. I told Shana that when I was a student at the basic school, we were discouraged from reading any books about Vietnam because one of the leaders there said, hey, we're never doing that again. We're never going to go back to that counterinsurgency stuff. It's all about the Soviet threat and all about being ready for that fight. And very quickly,

my career turned as soon as the Balkans started to fall apart. And then, of course, after 9-11, and that's pretty much exclusively what we did the last 10, 15, 20 years of my career. And so I don't think it's ever too far beneath the surface that even in high end, you know, conventional warfare, there is always going to be a role for that security force and assistance mission. And at our own peril, do we distance ourselves from it? Yeah, I would just fully echo what Larry said about, I know we're preaching to the choir, this is the regular warfare podcast, and we're preaching to the choir. This is the regular warfare podcast and we're preaching to the regular warfare community, but I fully support that. It's

such a fixation sometimes on the great power competition without realizing that the IW is clearly part of great power competition and you best be ready for that, unfortunately, whether you like it or not. And so I do appreciate Larry's perspective there. And then in terms of recommendations for practitioners, I would recommend expecting divergent interests between yourselves and local forces. And it's not disloyalty. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be problematic if we're ready for it. You can seek out understanding those differences, understanding divergent priorities, understanding differences and independencies, kind of having more of a curiosity, how can we make the best of what we have here and leverage

them towards at least a mutual agreement where we can, you know, at least promote U.S. national security within this given framework. Larry, you made a great comment about the dangers of focusing exclusively in one area in academics. But going ahead, if there is a, you know, understanding we have to cast on net wide, I'm talking both practitioners, but also the research level, what areas in particular would you like to see people focus on? Yeah, I think this is not something that can be dropped from our curriculum. I think, you know, despite the fact that we're moving more to a force on force type scenario, I think we've got to keep some of the lessons, the hard fought lessons learned of irregular warfare and security force assistance. That's

still very, very important. It's being done today, I would guess, in probably 12 to 14 countries in the Indo-Pacific today by U.S. forces from all branches. So I think this is something that is still relevant and will remain relevant going forward. So we started this conversation by asking Barbara why SFA operations matter, why we need to think of them as important within our understanding of national security. And I'd actually like to now end by asking that same question to you, Larry. Why do security force assistance operations matter from where you sit? You know, it occurs to me, I've been involved in some of the Afghan evacuation efforts in support

of some incredible groups of people that are over there. And it occurs to me that the hundreds and hundreds of Afghans on that list and the hundreds and hundreds of American veterans that are working feverishly nonstop to help get those folks out, you know, where did they connect? They connected through security force assistance. I mean, frankly, these are advisors. These were friends that became strong friends. And I know how personal, and it gets personal, I know how personal those relationships

can become because I'm involved still in trying to get some of my Afghan leaders out that even though I was never formally assigned to be an SFA, I spent a lot of time as a leader, a lot of time as a leader, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing precisely security force assistance type work. And so your MOS, it transcends your service, it transcends your specialty and what you do. And I think what we're seeing today, again, hundreds and hundreds of U.S. veterans doing everything they can to get those teammates out, I think, speeds volumes to the impact of security force assistance and how those relationships are built.

Lieutenant General Larry Nicholson, Dr. Barbara Elias, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we covered a lot of ground on a pretty dense topic. So thank you for sharing your insights. And this is a great conversation. Barbara, it was great to meet you. And Shauna and Andy, thank you again for an incredible opportunity to participate in this highly regarded series. We sure enjoyed our opportunity to talk a little bit about something

that we're both very, very personally involved in. So thanks. And I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Just want to say thank you for having me and thank you to Larry. I learned a ton. And I just want to say thank you for having me and thank you to Larry. I learned a ton and I just want to thank you guys

for running this incredible series. As my students say, this is a goat. This is the greatest of all time. So there you go. Thank you so much, guys.

That was a terrific conversation. Thanks again for listening to episode 45 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, we will discuss the U.S. Marine Corps' approach to strategic competition in the Asia-Pacific region with General David Berger, Commandant of the Marine Corps, and author Christian Brose. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn,

or subscribe to our newsletter for access to our written content and events. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views and positions of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we will see you next time.