Irregular Warfare Podcast - Masters of Irregular Warfare—Past, Present, and Future

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

Irregular warfare practitioners have played a major role in just about every war over the past 250 years. In this episode, Dr. John Arquilla and Maj. Gen. John Brennan explain how the masters of irregular warfare have been able to achieve strategic effects even while losing tactical-level engagements—and offer recommendations for how to prepare and employ irregular warfare capabilities to address the major threats to US national security in the future. SPECIAL NOTE: We recently announced the launch of a new project—the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Along with the podcast episodes we release every two weeks, we are now publishing regular written content—commentary and analysis on a range of topics related to irregular warfare. If you would like to submit an article for consideration, please email [e-mail]. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

We're very linear. If it's not checkers, at best it's chess. We push our pawns and we move in fixed ways. And it seems to me that we really are at a time where unless we have this kind of integrated thinking that the general suggests, we lose the initiative at a grand strategic level to our challengers. suggests, we lose the initiative at a grand strategic level to our challengers. The Chinese employ hundreds of thousands of on-net operators to attack us each and every day, both cognitively and obviously technically, on our machines and our servers. So I think to get more offensive in that space will buy us some time and dissuade others, other countries out there from partnering with China. Welcome to episode 23 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I am Nick Lopez, and I will be your host along with Kyle Atwell. Our conversation today will focus on the importance of irregular warfare capabilities. The conversation starts with a discussion about both the characteristics of

irregular warfare, as well as the characteristics of some of the great leaders of irregular warfare campaigns over the past 250 years. Our guests then discuss how irregular warfare integrates into, and often plays an important supporting role, as part of a broader conventional conflict. The conversation ends with recommendations for how to prepare and employ irregular warfare capabilities to address the major threats to U.S. national security, to include great power rivals, rogue regional powers, and violent non-state actors. Major General John Brennan is the commander of 1st Special Forces Command. Major General Brennan has deployed and commanded units at every echelon between detachment and task force level in support of operations Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, Inherent

Resolve, and Freedom Sentinel over the course of his 31 years of service. Dr. John R. Quilla is Distinguished Professor of Defense Analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. In addition to publishing multiple books and articles on warfare, he also has extensive experience advising military practitioners and policymakers, ranging from special operations teams during field problems to senior Department Thank you. 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 Major General John Brennan and Dr. John Arquilla. Major General John Brennan and Dr. John Arquilla, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast and thank you both for joining us today.

Great to be with you. Great to be here. Thanks, Nick. Great. I'd like to jump right in with a question for Dr. Arquilla that came out of a conversation that Kyle and I had a couple days ago surrounding your book, Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits, How Masters of Irregular Warfare Have Shaped Our World. We'd like to ask you, who's your favorite master of irregular warfare that you've studied putting together this book and why? I think Giuseppe Garibaldi comes from Nizza, which was in Italy, became part of France. Anyway, my ancestors are from that area.

But he's interesting to me because he exemplifies so much of the realm of irregular warfare. He helped to organize an insurgency against Brazil, which was trying to prevent the independence of Uruguay, and did what today we would call unconventional warfare, working by, with, and through locals to help them win their independence. And he became a world-famous figure for that. Later on, he led an insurgency in Italy, which freed it from foreign rule and allowed its unification and rise as a great power. In many ways, Garbaldi represents the real effect that masters of irregular warfare have had on the world. The United States might not have won the revolution without irregulars in the South.

Napoleon might not have been defeated without the guerrillas in Spain and the Russian raiders and Cossacks in 1812. And the story goes on and on and on. Garibaldi, however, is someone who exemplifies virtually all the different things that irregulars do. Appreciate that, Dr. Aquila. General Brennan, do you have a favorite in terms of irregular warfare practitioners? Yeah, I'm kind of torn. I like Robert Rogers for obvious reasons. I'm a ranger. A lot of the things I practiced were based on his legacy. And then Mosby. I grew up in Mosby's woods in Fairfax. So I grew up picking musket balls out of trees. A friend of mine found a musket in a creek,

but I think they're just unconventional approach to warfare. It was great to see true innovators that bucked the system and then what they were able to accomplish with very little assets. And I think they also played a great part in the psychological aspect of warfare against their enemies that the conventional folks didn't. They tried to do it with masks and cannons, and these guys did it by being sneaky and moving around at night when people were supposed to be sleeping. So that's kind of my roots, my core as a special operator. Yeah, Mosby was a Confederate partisan leader during the American Civil War who had the nickname the Grey Ghost because he was so difficult for the Union to capture? Mosby was so successful with those slender resources that I think the area he operated in was called Mosby's Confederacy, and it caused

so much trouble. A general in charge of the area had put out a great reward and had patrols all over the place looking for him. So Mosby decided to go after the general and ends up breaking into his bedroom in the middle of the night one night. And as he breaks into the room, the general says, what, do you have news? Do you have Mosby? And Mosby's answer is no, Mosby has you. And he took him captive. So the book is about the history of irregular warfare framed through the experiences of various leaders over time. What was your motivation to write this book? And does the historical concept of irregular warfare apply to future national security challenges? In a funny way, it's interesting that we even call it irregular warfare,

because when you look at the more than two dozen wars going on in the world today, none of them are traditional, conventional sorts of wars. So if irregular warfare is the norm, why should we even call it irregular? That's one reason for writing about the subject, because we want to know who the great captains of this kind of warfare are. I think the other motive is to realize, as the generals pointed out, that the high leverage with small resources, how much can be done and how much of the world has been shaped by irregular warfare. Again, from the American Revolution to the downfall of Napoleon, it seems to me, and of course, irregular warfare stood off the best American efforts in

Vietnam, hard efforts over a decade. And when you look at how the Chechens resisted Russian expansionism in the Caucasus, you see that this is truly a very, very high leverage capability. And it's one that over the past 20 years, we've seen reaffirmed and the world is being shaped and reshaped by this form of conflict. So we have to raise our interest in it because it is certainly interested in us. Absolutely. And I've had irregular warfare used against me in places like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and then waged it against others. Really, I think the initial campaign into Afghanistan, that was unconventional warfare at its best. Similarly, in Syria, we

overthrew an occupying power being ISIS in Syria and much of Iraq. So it's that transition, I think, where we go from being the insurgent to fighting the insurgent. That transition period is probably the most difficult. And if you don't set things up the right way to make that transition smooth and successful, that's where you run into troubles. Dr. Aquila, in your book, you mentioned there's a degree of confusion or there was a degree of confusion when you wrote the book about the definition of irregular warfare and that previous documents at the time may have missed the fact that irregular warfare could be used by standing militaries near peer threats. I think that's a topic that's very salient today. And I'm interested if you think that still applies, if there's a problem with the definition within the Department of Defense or across government? Yes, I think there's too much effort placed on trying to have a precise definition of irregular warfare, that it is somehow operations conducted by a particular kind of force, as opposed to the kinds of operations themselves, or that it is for

a particular purpose, overthrowing a government or separating from a government. We should be thinking of irregular warfare as a big tent. It's really, as the general says, it's about when you have slender resources that can have high leverage. That's really what the story is about. And I think technologically we're in an era where we have weapons now that can be shot at great ranges in support of these small groups that greatly empowers them. And they can be fired with tremendous accuracy through the window of a building to hit a particular van, et cetera. and the growing power of small groups, you really have a laboratory in which irregular warfare should be able to do lots of different things on battlefields in support of indigenous forces. And we're only talking now about the shooting part of the story. We also have a great sensory role

that is played. And so it seems to me if we have this big tent definition, we're in much better shape for being able to operate in the information domain and the physical battle space with friendly allies and others. begin to see the opportunities both for cyber and for things like machine intelligence to make the best use of the oceans of information that our sensory organizations are creating every day. And so that should be part of this story. Yeah, and I think the definition really is in the eyes of the beholder and what the established norm is. And for us, a lot of it, some things that don't necessarily conform to LOAC are considered irregular. So a lot of the IEDs and some of the non-standard tactics, techniques, procedures, and weapons that were used against us while we were executing counterinsurgency campaigns, we considered them irregular

because they were unlawful by our standards. But I think to your point, Doc, it's multi-domain operations are going to become the wave of the future. Are they irregular? I don't know. Everybody's going to be competing in multiple domains at the same time. So how do we wrap our head around that? And is it really irregular or am I just using a domain in a new way that has never been used before? So are we using tools that we already have in new ways, or is it the ability to converge combat power, if you will, in multiple domains at the same time, as well as affect people's way of thinking? Yeah, but both your comments touch on an important theme that comes up often in these conversations, which is the global war on terror, which we're, you know, arguably coming out of as a national security focus, has been dominated by insurgency

and terrorism, which are kind of classically irregular warfare constructs. But the national security strategy and the perceived rising threats of China and Russia suggest the future of warfare may have a more significant conventional component to it. And so as we move into that, both your comments suggest that there's an interaction between irregular warfare and conventional warfare. I'm curious to understand from your perspectives, are they distinct things or are they things that are integrated on the battlefield? Well, as the general said, this is a blurry area, whatever you decide to call it. And his insights run very closely to what a couple of senior Chinese officers wrote a couple decades ago,

something called unrestricted warfare. The point is, we're going to be mixing and matching all of these things. I would say in the renewed great power competition, it's not at all clear that our competing great powers are going to want to wage any kind of conventional war. Why would they come up against our main strengths? That's why the Chinese are talking about doing things with enhanced reefs and the Russians are using little green men and such. Sixty years ago, the political scientist Kenneth Waltz wrote a book called Man, the State and War. And he said simply the quote, the mutual fear of big weapons may produce instead of peace, a spate of smaller wars. And I think even in great power competition, we're still going to see a lot of small war.

So hopefully we'll be mining the lessons of the last 20 years, the great success, as the general pointed out. Operation Enduring Freedom in the fall of 2001 was a masterpiece of unconventional warfare. In fact, we're at our best when we're the insurgents. So if it's going to come to great power competition, I want us to be more insurgent than anything else. Yeah, and I totally agree with you, Doc. And you cannot go back and pick out a truly conventional war at any point in our history. I would struggle to do that. World War II, we had Jedbergs running around in Europe wreaking havoc behind the German line. So World War I, you had stormtroopers. I don't think there's ever been a conventional sense of the word applied to a

conflict overall. And I think the only thing that would look somewhat conventional is the exchange of nuclear weapons, which no one wants. So we've been avoiding that. And to Doc's point, smaller insurgent and surrogate wars are going to be the thing of the future. If we're going to keep competing to the level we want to keep it below the nuclear exchange, I think that's going to be more the norm than the exception. General Brennan brought up that Robert Rogers, the leader of the colonial British irregular force during the French and Indian War, is one of his favorite irregular warriors. But Dr. Aquila, you note in your book that Rogers had a tendency of losing military engagements pretty frequently. In fact,

you argue that the great leaders of irregular warfare often lose at the tactical level, but nonetheless enable strategic success. Can you discuss your thoughts on the interaction between what is happening in a tactical irregular fight and how that integrates with strategic success across a conflict? I think this point about integration is extremely important between the conventional and the irregular. And the general mentioned World War I a moment ago. And, you know, look at T.E. Lawrence and what he was able to do with really a handful of tribesmen. He struck at the infrastructure of the Turkish force and the German ASEAN Corps. Before there was an Africa Corps in World War II, there was an ASEAN Corps of smart, tough German soldiers.

And with tiny resources, Lawrence made an 800-mile advance that was closely integrated with General Allenby's conventional forces, took a lot of pressure off Allenby and allowed the conventional offensive to move forward. So I'd say that's one of those textbook cases of skillful integration. To go back to Rogers Day and just a decade or so forward in the American Revolution, I think Nathaniel Green was closely integrated with Daniel Boone and Pickens and Sumter and others, over mountain men and others who were engaging largely in irregular warfare. And this forced the British to deconcentrate their forces chasing after them. As we know from the movie with Mel Gibson, The Patriot, they're chasing after them. As we know from the movie with Mel Gibson, The Patriot, they're chasing after them. And that allowed then Green to move in with a conventional force and fight bloody

battles. And now Green never won any of his conventional battles. And yet the British forces were exhausted by the end of this campaign and the South was freed. It's just like in Vietnam. How many battles did General Giap ever win? I mean, after Dien Bien Phu against the French, he never really won a conventional battle until the fall of Saigon in 1975. And in between all that time, his point was that it was simply irrelevant. This high leverage, irregular approach is that you win by basically exhausting the opponent. And when you're in the insurgent, you actually win by just staying on your feet and fighting

because your opponent is spending too much. It costs him too much to keep engaged. It's sort of the situation we're seeing in Afghanistan today, right? There's a sense of some kind of at least political exhaustion, but also great material expense we've gone to. And I think had we stayed, had we remained in that insurgent mindset all these years, we wouldn't have built up as heavily as we did, and the time clock would not have run out on us as it has. Yeah, I think you nailed it. Whenever Nathaniel Green and Robert Rogers fought

conventionally, that's when they lost. So when they were busy being the insurgents, that's when they were most successful. That communication between the conventional force and the irregular warfare force, if you will, is absolutely critical. You know, I've been shot at by conventional units because of that lack of communication. We weren't in the right place at the right time and the conventional force mistook us for insurgents. So that is always in the forefront of my mind as a commander, making sure that the conventional force knows exactly where our folks are, what they're doing, how they're dressed, so they don't become unintended victims of consequence. And I think we're getting much better at that. We've got 20 years of that integration and overlap in our mission

spaces throughout 20 years of counterterrorism that we're taking that to the next level in multi-domain operations. You're seeing our unique footprint as SOF forward in 70 different countries become much more attractive to the conventional force. And as they get their head around multi-domain operations, how we can bring those effects to bear before they even get on ships and or planes and head into theater. So shaping the environment, preventing conflict, first of all, and then shaping the environment for a successful joint force entry and or joint force conventional operation is what we're working on with the conventional force, as well as our partners in space and cyber. General Brennan, we've talked about Robert Rogers a bit, and I want to unpack one of the obstacles he faced, which was that he encountered a significant amount of resistance by the British

Army to change the way they fought on the continent, which was based on traditional massing of forces, getting online, basic Napoleonic tactics. Rogers moved them towards more irregular ranger-type tactics, which were more appropriate for the British Army's situation in the environment. As the leader of Special Operations Command, currently adjusting the force to a new security environment, how do you set the conditions for change in a military organization when it's almost counterculture? conditions for change in a military organization when it's almost counterculture? Sure. I can tell you about some of our current efforts. So we're trying to create an ecosystem for innovation so that if someone out there sees a good idea in one of those 70 countries, whether it's a piece of technology, a piece of kit, a new tactic, technique, or procedure,

they can capture that where my G8 can then turn that into a requirements document, get it to SOCOM and to our higher headquarters so it can be sourced. So setting that ecosystem in place is something I think if you don't have that, you've got people bouncing ideas off of each other and then the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing. So we have innovation symposiums every quarter. So you don't want to waste time with innovation because if somebody's already got an app for that, why would I spend my own money, resources, and time developing something that somebody already has? So getting the tech or whatever it is into the hands of the teams so that they can employ it and figure out how to optimize it fast. That's what we're after.

Yeah, may I add a word or two about that? One of the last things I pushed for in my time as Department Head of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School was to push for a curriculum in applied design for innovation. We need to think like designers as well because of this need, as the general puts it, to get things out to the troops as quickly as we can. And so we have a program that really focuses on rapid prototyping and field testing. And we're trying at the academic level to educate for a turn of mind that looks to design and innovation as opposed simply to a sort of continuity of the way things we have done. And that's maybe the greatest challenge with innovation is moving out of a comfortable mindset because where we're going, as they said in the original Back to the Future movie,

where we're going, there aren't any roads, right? We have to think of new ways to operate. And that talent management piece is hugely important. And we are trying to break the old industrial age model of managing people. So true talent management, we're trying to pulse the force to get those innovators to come to the surface so that we can put them in a pipeline that sets them up for success, both academically and then get those experiences where it matters. So this brings up a good broader point. When we're looking at the future of irregular warfare in the context of great power competition, what are some of the capabilities in terms of manning, training, and equipping the irregular force that you are focusing on right now or you think are necessary? It's always a battle because in an age of shrinking budgets, you have to prioritize where you're going to put your assets. And we're doing that, particularly in the cyber domain.

We're trying to influence more between the ears because hypersonic weapons are pretty darn expensive. And then, like I said before, working with partners to derive those unique tools and or weapon systems that we can provide to them at low cost and still have effects against a near-peer competitor. and still have effects against a near-peer competitor. So we are feeding our own innovation engine and then trying to proliferate that across a partner network at scale across the globe. And we're also investing in things like space-based capabilities. How do we leverage some unique things that are out there that can help us while we are deployed in those 70 countries? And if a crisis turns into a conflict, how do we diffuse it quickly, change the enemy's decision-making calculus so that they may not want to go after a second island chain, if you will? So you mentioned the current environment of shrinking

resources, and I can't help but think about policy when that comment comes up. So I'd like to shift over to Dr. Aquila. So you've mentioned that there's been a supporting cast or a recurring supporting cast to the masters of irregular warfare. Specifically, an example you brought up was Winston Churchill. It's interesting because you weave history, defense, and policy analysis all together in your book. So understanding that irregular warfare can be polemic, especially for policymakers, because it's giving small units resources and authorities to act independently and networked. Can you talk about what type of policy level action supports successful irregular warfare campaigns in your studies?

Yeah, I think, well, in the studies, as you know, Winston Churchill was a great fan of using irregular warfare techniques. His special operations executive was charged very simply with him saying, set Europe ablaze, and they did. And when this mystic Ord Wingate came along and said, I can do deep penetration operations to upset the entire logistics of the Japanese in the Burma theater, Churchill got very enthusiastic and gave him the top cover to do something. Well, personally, I think this non-linearity of operations is something that Wingate pioneered. And we need to look at that in the context of this era of great power competition. But at a policy level, aside from having a champion, and I think, by the way, President Trump, in his own way, was very much a champion of the irregular warfare paradigm. He really gave a much greater freedom of action to the forces operating in inherent resolve, much greater freedom of action to the forces operating in inherent resolve the campaign against ISIS. And I think that in part had to do with the signal success and the very rapid success

in turning a terrible situation around. And certainly President Obama was a supporter of this small footprint approach as well, each for their own reasons. But I think there is that kind of top cover. But the larger policy question is, we talk about scant resources, and that's absolutely true when it comes to the special operations community and those who conduct irregular warfare. But they do so in an overall budgetary climate in which the new National Defense Authorization Act allows $740 billion. That's $2 billion every single day. And we're talking about a force that is engaging in really at the tip of the tip of the spear for the last two decades, and yet hardly accounts for more than a nickel on each dollar.

So when you ask a question about policy, I think there is this larger question about, as the general put it, there's an industrial policy that sort of runs the way we do things. We have to break that paradigm and so open up the possibility of readdressing our budgetary priorities. who conduct irregular warfare should be getting a more significant slice. And I think also we may want to look at ourselves again, if we really believe in this irregular paradigm and the empowerment of smaller groups and the value of highly accurate, long ranging weapons, maybe we don't need as large an active force as we have. And that will give us freedom, budgetary freedom to begin to invest in these other things that we know are highly effective in nature. So there's a big policy discourse that I hope is engaged in the coming years. to AD layered in over top of it, the anti-access area denial platforms that our foes have, we're not going to be able to communicate 24-7, 365 like we did during the GWAT. So we're going to have to have trust surge down to the lowest level along with those authorities to seize opportunities that they see, whether it's cognitively, physically,

or in the information space, they have to be able to seize those opportunities rapidly in order to outmaneuver our threats. So in addition to the budget, as you talked about, Dr. Aquila, I think that the authorities piece needs to get looked at as well. Because the more we centralize control in a A2AD environment, the less you're going to be successful. Because you're not going to be able to talk to your people and tell them what to do. They have to know what their left and right limit is from the outset and then give them the assets and the capabilities that they need to be successful. So you're not just talking about in kind of our shaping operations going on now, but in a major conflict, we can expect to kind

of lose communications platforms. And it seems like it's not just a special operations thing. That's going to be a whole of force thing where you might need to decentralize decision-making. Is that a fair assessment? Absolutely. And we're testing it obviously on the combat battlefield right now, places like Syria, where we're in close proximity to some of those near peer threats and they're testing equipment on us. So we know that it's going to be a comms black environment in the future if we do go to large-scale combat operations. But even in competition, they're going to test us as well. I think that's a really important point, especially when I think about the increasing

dependence of all forces on orbital assets for communications, information, surveillance, reconnaissance. But what happens if a major conflict erupts and the first targets are orbital assets, which are hard to put up and easy to knock out and to create debris fields up there that'll be going around for decades. And the Chinese and the Russians have increased anti-satellite capabilities and they even have something that can capture satellites, like in the old James Bond movie, Moonraker.

So this whole point about decontrolling, not command and control, but command and decontrol, giving people a sense of what it is we're trying to do, and then giving them a lot of free reign, is going to become absolutely essential to all of our military operations in the future. Back in the 1960s, the Israelis had a version of this that they simply called, Moshe Dayan called it optional control. He briefed everybody on what he wanted to do. And then he said, okay, you know, just follow the plan, exploit it as you see fit. And of course, they won a remarkable victory in six days. So I'm all for this notion of optional control returning. Yeah, but back in the 1960s, the technology of email didn't make it so you could send a report every single day on your SITREP. So I almost feel like the technology has made it really easy to put your thumb on your subordinates in a way that has made us maybe even more dependent

on daily communications and micromanagement than ever in the past before. Every technology creates its own sociology, right? And so what happens when high levels of command now have the technology to allow them to be more intrusive? They will tend to be more intrusive, but the true potential of the technology is actually in networking the force, in allowing more people to communicate laterally, not to have the dynamics so hierarchical. And that's where, you know, the Israelis had plenty of ability to communicate. Everybody had radios. They made a decision not to over control. And by the way, I talk about the 1960s. In the 1860s, General Moltke, head of the German general staff, had this remarkable new information technology,

the telegraph, and he could have spent all day every day in the Seven Weeks War and the Franco-Prussian War sending orders to people, but he created a system called Weizungen, roughly mission orders, in which the basic plan was given to his subordinate commanders. And he sent, I think, only six telegrams in the whole Franco-Prussian war to his people because they got the plan and he was happy with what they were doing. So yeah, technology is a great attractor of mischief, but good generalship can lead to high demands taking a kind of communications appetite suppressant, if you will. I hope that over-control does not win out and that networking, bison and optional control does win out. We'll see.

Absolutely. And I've seen intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft used as like combat voyeur tools to make sure formations are doing the right thing. And I remember as a young major, but you don't want that stuff piped into a tactical operations center ever. And I remember as a captain not communicating or seeing my company commander for, you know, months and months on end. The weekly sit rep was all he got. And that was coming over HF when we were usually in two different countries. So I think we have to get comfortable going back to that. And to me, that's true mission command when you can give broad orders. I mean, Overlord was on what, four pieces of paper? The entire concept of the operation was a few pieces of paper. And now we create giant, you know, O-plans that are 100, 200 pages thick that no one will

ever read or has the time to read. It's more like a reference document than it is a set of mission command orders. You mentioned earlier, General Brennan, working with partner forces. So we're talking about satellite technology, you're talking about cyber technologies working in space. My question for you is, how do these technologies tie in with our effort with partner forces, which has kind of been a hallmark of working in irregular warfare. We always have some partner force on the ground that we're trying to improve their capability to essentially pursue our common objectives. Does that still play a role when you're talking about a technology like cyber or working in space? Absolutely. I think it's more important in those domains.

So cyber in particular, we try to bake in the exportability of the technology as we're developing it, or at least provide a cross-domain solution so that our partners can benefit. And we benefit from each other's technology and our own national level assets in places like Operation Gallant Phoenix in Jordan, where we have 29 partner nations crashing on the same problem, employing their own nationally specific tech and their authorities in ways that we can't do it alone. So absolutely, we want to bake in that exportability and permeability into everything we create. So it's essentially like if we have an ISR platform, we can share the information with a partner. You're saying with these new technologies, we can essentially develop it

and then share those capabilities with partners in kind of an enabling way? Yes, at the development level, not just the employment level. So the more we can do that, you know, we've done it with fighter aircraft, developed the, you know, the Eurofighter, the F-35 is exportable. So, I mean, I think it has multiple adaptabilities and modalities for irregular warfare as well. There's a lot of exquisite things we can do with some pretty low-tech devices, as long as it's not a national treasure that we're not willing to share. So we've covered a lot of ground. We've talked about the salience of irregular warfare. Today, the importance of partner forces, innovation, technology, and then the trade-offs of taking on new technology. So based off of the conversation that we have just had, what are the implications for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars?

I think the biggest challenge at the highest levels of policy is to realize that we've got to play tri-level chess today. Yes, there's an emerging new era of great power competition. We have to realize there that the likelihood of a major conventional conflict is low, even if the consequences would be high a few others, but those two in particular, that pose significant challenges themselves. very limited conventional aggression with the North Koreans then holding in place whatever they'd taken and saying, if you try to push us out of these, let's say they go south from the DMZ 100 kilometers, if you try to push us out, we'll use a nuclear weapon. That's a thorny problem. And so it suggests to me the need to think about irregular approaches to defeating even an initial invasion using our small, smart forces and our air and naval power to decimate an attacking force. But also there would be, I think, a challenge to dealing with, particularly in the area of subterranean operations, but also dealing with

their nuclear capability. So in that middle range, and of course, the nuclear problem surfaces again in the case of Iran. But both of those mid-range powers pose unique challenges that we will have to differentiate and prepare for in ways different from dealing with the great powers. And then that third level of tri-level chess is, guess what? Non-state violent extremists haven't gone away. They're still out there. And what we called our war on terror has actually become terror's war on the world. There's five times as much terror per our own data sets as there was in 2001. And so much of it inflicted on our friends and allies, but it's a problem that's still out there.

And those networks continue to evolve and remain potent. So the biggest policy challenge is what do you have and how do you invest that will allow you to engage effectively at each of these levels? And as the general said earlier, to engage early in a way that deters or persuades or influences and maybe prevents the outbreak of violence. I think these influence operations are incredibly important. And so, you know, my advice to high policy is that it's in the special operations community that you see capabilities for engaging now and extremely usefully at each of those three levels. Yeah, that's a great answer. And I think at the macro level, we have to use every tool in our toolkit to prevent China, Russia, North Korea, Iran from colluding and working together,

because that's really the sum of all fears. If you take each of those threats individually, we'll do fine, I think. But if they all collude against us, it will be a rough, rough time. So I think keeping them competing with each other and then sowing seeds of distrust amongst them and really having the world focus on the goodness that America brings across the world and our partners bring, as opposed to what the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party, what Russia's doing in Europe and across the world, predatory lending practices, you pick it. And China's playing go while we're playing checkers right now. And we have to get in the same game as them because right now I think we're playing slightly different games. But holistically, I think we have to do that. And that's going to force us to make some hard

decisions. I think you've seen the Marine Corps massively transform their formations. They've pretty much gotten rid of all their tanks or pushed them into their reserve component. And they are focusing on that irregular warfare capability as well as hyper-enabling smaller teams to do more with less and or a larger backend from CONUS that supports them forward. And that's what we're doing at First Special Forces Command. Deployments are expensive, so we have to be very focused and targeted in how we do that. And General Clark's deploy for purpose has been his mantra since he took command. And we are trying to do that

and then hyper-enable that team forward with as big of a tail for everything from information warfare, logistics, intelligence, all the warfighting functions we can project forward over the horizon, as well as caching that in theater so that that team can do more with a smaller footprint. Dr. Arcula has highlighted that there's a persistent kind of threat from non-state actors such as terrorist groups.

And a lot of our conversation has been that, you know, in the context of great power competition or even a conventional war, there's going to be an irregular warfare component. I guess my question is, are we getting that balance right with the national security strategy that has pivoted us toward great power competition? Are we still, are we over-correcting in some ways away from the terror threat or are we, or how do we kind of balance between those two different strains of your trilateral, I guess, three different strains of your trilateral chessboard? Yeah. First, I think the general's point about our adversaries trying to play on all three levels is perhaps the greatest challenge there. And my fear is that while they are integrated thinkers about engaging at all those levels, we tend to think of one at a time.

You know, we in the wake of 9-11, it was, you know, going after the global war on terror. Now it's the great power competition. My fear is that we over focus on one to the detriment of others. You know, we're going to be focused on preparing to fight a great power when the great powers we're up against are going to be putting out, planting the seeds of irregular warfare themselves with little green men and the various things the Chinese are doing in violation of international law in the South and East China Seas every day. And so, you know, he's absolutely right about the paradigm. They play Wei, Qi or Go.

You know, they plant a stone here, there, and everywhere. We really are at a time where unless we have this kind of integrated thinking that the general suggests, we lose the initiative at a grand strategic level to our challenger. Absolutely. And that goes, I think, for the information domain as well, where we, part of my point with the restrictions, I think we're a little over self-regulated in that area. To get more offensive in that space will buy us some time and dissuade other countries out there from partnering with China. But irregular warfare fits absolutely perfectly into what we're trying to do. A lot of our friends out there have terrorist problems that we help them with. And then that shows when we push assets and people

and trainers to accompany and assist them, they see how good the product is from our side compared to Chinese products, whether it's an equipment piece or a training piece. We just do it much better. And then getting that message out into the're doing in the same space out in the theater and then pushing it out in the information environment for, I think, outsized effects. General Brennan, I have a question right back to you, more so on the practitioner side of the house. So Dr. Arquilla talks about the different masters of a regular warfare. You have the operator, you have the planner, and you have the hybrid leader. Of course, and Dr. Arcula, correct me if I'm wrong, on those three, the most rare would be the hybrid leader. So what do we need to do moving forward to produce hybrid leaders in a regular warfare? And what types of characteristics does he or she have?

Well, I think that starts with the recruiting. So recruiting from the right talent pools and part of recruiting the right people is providing the right message about what we do. So a lot of people, especially when you talk to some staffers and congressmen and senators, they think you say soft and they think door kicking,

they think zero dark 30. That's just a very small aspect of what SOF does. So we are trying to help recruit the right people by showing what SOF does in a much more holistic spectrum from not just DA, but we do coin, we do FID, we do information warfare, we do civil affairs, civil reconnaissance. We work with hundreds of different partners.

We typically recruit people that are adventurous, they're problem solvers. And then we want to, as part of their training, make sure we're enhancing that and that we're recognizing it and then making it flourish, if you will. So giving them the right tools to become both practitioners of their art as well as innovators so that they can see the environment changing and they can adapt quicker than their competitors. I think also the experiences of the last 20 years, remember the special operations community has been at the tip of the tip of that spear for two decades. I think per force, our officers in this community have become hybrid thinkers in many ways. And they've often had to think in truly significant strategic ways, as well as being good tactical operators. Today, the three

and four star community of the U.S. military is people whose formative experiences were largely Desert Storm and the aftermath, maybe the Balkans as well. The next generation, I think, of three and four stars have had absolutely gone through the crucible of experience of the last two decades and are going to come in with, I think, a greater breadth of types of experiences and an openness of mind to the things that work. and an openness of mind to the things that work. So I have a great deal of hope about this ability to have a much higher proportion of those hybrid leaders. And yes, Nick, you had it absolutely right from the book. And the message there, of course,

is that of the three types, that hybrid is the one that's likely to be the most effective. Dr. Arquilla and Major General Brennan, we definitely appreciate you both coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. It's been a fascinating conversation. Yeah, Nick and Kyle really enjoyed it.

Doctor, always great to see you and hopefully I can get out to California and see you in the flesh. Well, it's a privilege, General. I hope we have you out soon. Once we get past this plague, we can spend a little more time rolling up our sleeves looking at some of these field exercises too. Thanks for joining us for episode 23 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Andy and Shana discuss air power in irregular warfare with retired Air Force Lieutenant General Tom Trask and Dr. James Kyrus from the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. After that, Daphne and Nick will have a conversation on partner forces in the counter-ISIS fight with General Joseph Vettel, a former commander of both U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, and Gail Lamone, author of the best-selling book Daughters of Kabbani. If you are a practitioner, researcher, or policymaker with an idea for a short commentary

on an irregular warfare topic, please send a note to kyle.atwell at irregularwarfare.org or reach out on our social media platforms. You can also find the email address

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You can also 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 don't represent those of West Point, the Naval Postgraduate School, or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.