Irregular Warfare Podcast - Pacific Gambit: The Role of Irregular Warfare in Australia’s Great Strategic Shift

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Australia is undergoing the most fundamental strategic realignment since the Second World War, toward a focus on threats closer to home without reliance on the United States. In that context, what role does irregular warfare play in Australian national security strategy? What lessons does the Australian experience hold for the United States as they both transition from the post-9/11 wars to great power competition? David Kilcullen and Andy Maher join this episode to discuss. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Counterinsurgency is not peacekeeping, right? If you're doing counterinsurgency and you're not killing a substantial number of people, you're probably doing it wrong. But, you know, you have to be killing the right people for the right reason, to send the right message to the right population group, you know, but you're not just talking about keeping people safe. talking about keeping people safe. The latest 2020 Defence Strategic Update uses the terminology grey zone 11 times. What the grey zone is, is not so well articulated. There is no reference to any type of proxy

or unconventional action where a state sponsor might be fermenting trouble in order to undermine a third country. That doesn't exist in our policy documents. Welcome to episode 20 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. Your hosts today are myself, Kyle Atwell, and my co-host, Andy Milburn. In today's episode, we discuss and compare the irregular warfare experiences of the United States and Australia with two Australian irregular warfare experts. Australia is undergoing a similar transition as the United States, from a focus on the global war on terror to great power rivalry with China as a particular concern.

Our guests compare the US and Australian military experiences adapting to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. We then discuss the nature of the current threat environment, characterized by hybrid threats from both state actors and non-state actors. Dr. David Kilcullen is a best-selling author and a former soldier in the Australian military. He is president and CEO of Cordillera Applications Group, a research and development firm headquartered in the United States. Dr. Kilcullen has written multiple award-winning books on irregular warfare topics. His most recent book, The Dragons and the Snakes, How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, serves as a foundation for our discussion on the

current global threat environment. Andy Maher is an Australian infantry officer with operational experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is currently serving as a military fellow doctoral candidate and a lecturer with the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where he teaches a postgraduate course on irregular warfare. 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's our conversation with Andy Maher and Dr. David Kilcullen. Dr. David Kilcullen, Andy Maher,

welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast podcast and thank you for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having us. It's great to be here. Same, same. Happy to be on board. So to kick it off, I'd like to ask what role has Irregular Warfare played as a component of Australian national security policy, but also a national security practice for the Australian military? Yeah, look, I think this is going to be very familiar to American listeners. One of the big issues we've had in Australia is that our policy and our strategic documents very rarely have actually reflected reality. From the middle of the 1980s until the end of the 20th century, the official Australian strategic posture was called

the defense of Australia. And it was supposed to be continental defence of the Australian mainland with very limited overseas engagement. And the army in particular was organised and structured for a territorial defence role and funded, right, or underfunded for that. But in that same timeframe, when we had that policy, we deployed overseas 14 times, twice to the Middle East, four times to Africa, and another eight times to Southeast Asia and the Pacific. So we were running irregular warfare operations. We were running expeditionary operations all over the region. But much like the Marine Corps, it was improvised, adapt and overcome, very limited funding and support for that. The big wake-up call for us was East Timor, and we were very, very lucky that that happened a year or so before 9-11. Otherwise,

you would have been caught extraordinarily flat-footed by what happened after 2001. But as it happened, we recognized we really need to get our shit together in terms of things like logistics, strategic intelligence, expeditionary deployment, things that hadn't been part of the mix while we theoretically had this notion of defensive Australia. So we were really going into the war on terror. We were very lucky to get that wake up call of East Timor just beforehand. And what were the lessons learned from how Australia engaged in East Timor? you know, either the special operations forces or general purpose forces that informed how to engage in the subsequent global war on terror? So a couple of things that really came out of the East Timor operation. One was that a lot of things that are done by special forces, that is US special forces,

army green berets in the US system, are done by conventional or general purpose forces in Australia. So we had about a seven year period of running training teams, what we call J-SETs, and working with Indonesian Special Forces and others during the 1990s, which was actually led by general purpose forces, not SF, mainly because Australian SOF at the time had a very demanding mission of domestic counterterrorism that was soaking up a lot of effort there. The SAS in particular came back into that role of overseas training and engagement in the second half of the 1990s. But as we went into the East Timor operation, there was no love lost between conventional

commanders and special operations commanders. And there was actually a fistfight at one point between a conventional battalion commander and the commander of one of the special forces units in the field. And it came down to- You mean you don't have perfect, soft and conventional force harmony in Australia? Indeed. Outrageous, isn't it? You guys need to learn from us. It's all peace and light. Yeah. So, I mean, Andy, you probably had a slightly different perspective on that. I was a company commander going into East Timor in a light infantry unit, but I was seconded to work pretty closely with the Timorese irregulars purely through the accident that I spoke local languages

and had run training teams up in the region. SAS at the time were running long-range reconnaissance and strike operations and everybody else was essentially fighting a counter-insurgency campaign or defeating an incipient insurgency at the beginning of the conflict and then got into peacekeeping by the end. One of the key aspects that underpins how Australia approached this topic is by virtue of we don't have an independent special operations command. It exists as part of army. What that means is that culturally there's no human domain in Australian strategic policy. There's limited uniqueness in terms of mission sets, with the exception of counter-terrorism, that are sitting in Australian special operations that don't have

a flow-on overlap within the Australian Army. And so we don't necessarily, up until only a year or two ago, there was no expertise orientated towards Indigenous capacity building, a special warfare mission set. And so you saw people from both backgrounds, conventional army backgrounds, from a special operations background, who would be engaging in those types of missions. I was going to say one of the possibly positive side effects of SOCOM, as it's known in Australia, equivalent of SOCOM, being part of the known in Australia, equivalent of SOCOM being part of the army is that there's things that the Australian army special forces do equate pretty closely to things that Navy SEALs do and in some cases that special tactics squadrons do in AFSOC. It's a

broader view and then perhaps a bit less specialized than what you see in the US. That's good and bad. There's a bit of some benefit to it. The downside, of course, is that you don't have access to a lot of the expertise that you might have if you're in the US system and you could tap into AFSOC or War Command or whatever you might want to look at. I wanted to add to that point you made, Dave, about what are some of the negative sides of that coin? And ultimately, I think it's advocacy. When it comes to someone arguing for resources to be allocated against a irregular warfare threat, those arguments are occurring in the same context as broader capability acquisitions, be it helicopters or tanks or

other such things that help crowd a decision maker's schedule. And so how that manifests in practical sense is Australia doesn't have any type of formalized counterinsurgency training. It does have a little bit of doctrine and it's pretty good doctrine, but advocacy for that doctrine, a owner of that doctrine, that's not entirely apparent within our framework. That's not entirely apparent within our framework. I would say I think that's a common refrain in the US system as well, where it's harder to lobby for developing capabilities relevant to counterinsurgency or other components of irregular warfare because they're not necessarily material in nature where it's easier to quantify things like the number of fighter aircraft or the number of tanks you have. So I would argue that I think there's a similar challenge in the US system where it's just kind of hard to lobby for a budget for irregular warfare when you can't produce easily quantifiable outcomes. Yeah. And one of the side issues is that counterintuitively, one of the reasons why we don't fund irregular warfare capability very much is it's so cheap, right? If it was more expensive, there'd be congressional votes and, you know, manufacturing jobs and

contractor money tied up in it that just isn't there. So yeah, I think that's very true. Having obviously lived in the States for 15 years and, you know, been in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia with the US, I see the contrast, but also the similarity, right, in many ways. And I think one of the big advantages that the US had going into the sort of what you might call the coin revolution in 2006 in Iraq, was that Americans didn't think of themselves as necessarily being experts in counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare. They realized they had stuff to learn and were extraordinarily open to learning that. And, you know, having done seven of these campaigns now, I've never seen an army or a Marine Corps adapt more rapidly than the US did, much more rapidly than the Australians or the

Brits did, in part because we went in with a sort of false consciousness of like, you know, don't tell me boats, I know boats, you know, like I was in, we were in Vietnam, you know, we know how to do this stuff. And we had a very sort of false narrative about ourselves. The Brits came out of Bosnia and Northern Ireland and thought, hey, we know how to do this counterinsurgency stuff. What we all actually knew how to do was peacekeeping, right? And of course, counterinsurgency is not peacekeeping, right? If you're doing counterinsurgency, and you're not killing a substantial number of people, you're probably doing it wrong. But you have to be killing the right people for the right reason to send the right message to the right population group,

but you're not just talking about keeping people safe. And I think that was one big advantage of US forces is being very open to learn and adapt and having less to unlearn in their sort of self-image about themselves before they could start that learning process. I'm not too sure how this narrative of Australians viewing themselves as experts in this space came in, but it's certainly something that's tangibly out there. All I can think of as one of the reasons why is because this is our backyard. as one of the reasons why is because this is our backyard. Since World War II, every country in Southeast Asia has had an insurgency, and some countries have had multiple insurgencies. Some of them are still ongoing. When we start talking about the Pacific Islands just to our north, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Solomon Islands, over the last 20 years,

we've been involved with peacekeeping and peace enforcement in those islands, the small wars that are appropriate to an Australian context. And so perhaps it's this broader threat environment that has us orientated to thinking, yeah, we've got this, we know what we're talking about, when perhaps there are other aspects of capability that need to be rounded out. Dave, you brought up an intriguing point and actually preempted my next question, was going to be, based on your experiences in Iraq, to talk a little bit about the US Army and Marine Corps as learning organisations in comparison with the Australians, and the fact that the Australian military had a time to relearn some lessons in a relatively,

you know, notice I say relatively benign environment, East Timor and peacekeeping environments before rolling in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fast forward, okay, 2006, you commented about kind of the great quaint learning revolution, as it were, but I think probably you would agree it had been going on incrementally for months from 2003. It just took the US a long time. But the point of my question here is, what does make a unit or indeed an organization, an army, good at coining? Great question. Let me comment briefly on the Marines and the Army before I get into that. One of the things that I noticed working closely with both Marine and Army units in both Afghanistan and Iraq is just how very, very different the cultures are. And I'm going to shorthand it,

and I hope this doesn't come across as offensive, but... As long as you're saying good things about the Marine Corps and bad about the Army marine yeah you gotta be really careful here the way i'm gonna put it is is um army are campers marines are hikers right so you go into a an area in sort of icy east and an army unit doesn't consider that area to be secure until there are fobs and combat outposts that are permanently occupying that space that can call in fires as needed and can interlace that area with patrols as required. A marine unit doesn't regard the area as secure until it's passed a foot patrol over every square yard of that area, right? So marines like to be mobile. They get into lots of running fights. They don't tend to

think about things positionally. And as a result, when a Marine unit goes into an area, it often finds itself getting into lots of encounter battles and, you know, for good and ill, right? In an Army environment, you will find a desire to kind of shape the structure of the terrain to enable that Army unit to fight the way that it wants to fight. And if they need to do the kinds of things that a marine unit would do, they'll bring in specialists to do it, right? To your actual question about what makes a unit good, adaptivity is one of those things. Another is having strong junior and senior NCOs and not putting too much emphasis on officers.

Most engagements in a counterinsurgency environment are initiated and are won and lost by NCOs. And it's that level at which you dominate the battlefield or not. And then I think the other thing that really makes a difference is having a schoolhouse that can rapidly update the training materials and can send forward observers to validate what they're teaching. So as far as lessons that the Australian military has learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, have these been captured? Are they being inculcated into training, particularly leadership training? I think we in Australia have a lot to unlearn, as I said, about what we think we're good at. I think the US has had the

benefit of that much more open willingness to think about how to improve. Overwhelmingly now, we're operating in complex terrain, right? Could be mountain terrain, could be jungle. Increasingly, it's urban terrain. That breaks a battle up into lots of small battles. We talked about Fallujah earlier, you know, 40 odd days of combat, 27,000 combatants involved. It wasn't one big battle of 27,000 people. It was thousands of little fleeting engagements of a few guys here, a few guys there, a platoon, a half platoon. And so we need the ability to break down into small modular teams and to fight through in sort of a cloud of mutually cooperating small units. And what that means is that your sergeants and corporals, your lieutenants and captains need

to be almost interchangeable with each other, right? They're all just small unit commanders who work together, probably enabled by a combat cloud. And the higher level headquarters is essentially feeding resources to those guys to allow them to sustain the battle. It's a very different model from your sort of traditional conventional fight where you have your orders group, you lay out your scheme of maneuver, and then you sort of roll that from the top down. We've been there before. We've learned to trust our people in conflict.

Doctrinally, though, that ability and confidence to break down organizations to such a low level, then empower them is just that extra step that our militaries, I think, need to take in peacetime to codify these conflict lessons. We all have the image, I think, of the battalion commander hovering in a helicopter over the battalion in Vietnam as it's doing a sweep, right? And issuing directives every minute or two. And I think part of the issue here is discipline and self-discipline on the part of commanders to understand that there's a difference between observing and monitoring what guys are doing and seeking to influence it every minute. And that's a matter of trust. You have to trust your people. And that's a matter of them knowing your intent and you knowing their capabilities

and the two being aligned in such a way that they're able to operate in that way. Of course, the fly in the ointment here is and always has been politicians who just are not comfortable, particularly in the Australian context, with that level of autonomy on the part of combat units. And they want to control everything. And I think similarly between Australia and the US, there's very few people in positions of political authority that actually have combat experience and have a sense for what is required. So you get highly unrealistic settings in both directions, right? One, thinking that people are super soldiers just because of a long tab or a badge they have. They can just be Superman. And then people getting

disappointed when they ask for something that's literally impossible and say, oh, you guys aren't worth anything. On the other side, it's that can-do attitude because you're continually being given unrealistic tasks that actually can't be achieved. And you're achieving them, but you're continually being given unrealistic tasks that actually can't be achieved and you're achieving them but you're running down the cohesion and the resources and all the other things that are available to your unit till eventually you get a situation like for example the um the togo togo ambush in in the sahel in 2017 where you've got a unit that's operating you know balls out 3 000 miles from its headquarters with limited support, and it gets into a firefight that it can't handle. And then we blame a couple of majors and a captain when actually it was a mistake made 12 steps earlier in the process. And by the time they got to that point,

there's literally nothing they could do about it. For somebody who studied counterinsurgency the way you have, and now that you've lived through Iraq and Afghanistan, and we've seen the outcomes of Iraq, and we've seen kind of Afghanistan progress, how has that changed your understanding or perspective on how a state like the United States or Australia should get involved in counterinsurgency, conduct foreign counterinsurgency interventions? So I really think we need to bring a lot more UW into our coin, right? That'd be my big lesson. If you look at our successes in the war on terrorism, the first really major success was crushing the Taliban in seven weeks in 2001,

right? Now, when Kandahar, which was the last Taliban stronghold, fell on the 7th of December, there was 110 CIA, about 300 Army SF, and about one Marine Battalion in Afghanistan. But we had 50,000 Afghans fighting for us against the Taliban. That model quickly became industrialized and we went to a reconstruction model. It didn't work very well. In Afghanistan, we went in unconventional warfare and transitioned to coin. And it was only later that we sort of rediscovered the goodness of that UW piece. In Iraq, our only really period of signal success was the second half of 2007 to the end of 2009. And again, we had 110,000 Iraqi sons of Iraq

fighting with us against Al-Qaeda. And you can read the coin manual. You're not going to find anything in there about, hey, you should raise 110,000 guys by recruiting from the enemy, right? And turn them into a force that's going to fight the, you know, that's anything in there about, hey, you should raise 110,000 guys by recruiting from the enemy, right? And turn them into a force that's going to fight the, you know, that's not in there. Now, Apache Scouts, you know, the way that the US Army operated in the Indian Wars, the way the Banana Wars went down in the Caribbean, it's all there in our history, but it wasn't in our doctrine, right? We had a doctrine that was very much about protect the population it's going to take 10 years suck it up you know that was our attitude you know we got it done in nine months

primarily by the fact that a lot of iraqis wanted to fight with us and we were agile enough to do stuff that wasn't in the doctrine and i think we've got to understand how to do coin as in heavy lifting you know population centric 150000 guys on the ground coin when we need to, but it's very much a choice of last resort. Yeah. I mean, many have attributed the, you know, the reduction of the insurgency in Iraq in 2006, 2007, you know, as a result of the surge of US troops. Do you think that that is the case? You know, we got into a very heated debate in the US military about coin in 2006, 2007. And there were literal coin zealots out there pushing counterinsurgency as the ultimate solution to every problem.

And then you had other people who were saying, we were already doing this. And by the way, you know, what you're talking about is not how you actually won the war in Iraq. And I think that's absolutely true. And as we look back on a distance of more than a decade, we need to realize that our successes in Iraq came, I would say, 80% from the Sahara, the awakening, 20% from the willingness because of the coin doctrine to actually do that. It wasn't the coin doctrine itself. It was the mindset that we had going into that surge and partly the recognition that it was a Hail Mary. And then we were at our last gasp. And if we didn't act innovatively,

we were going to lose the thing. And I think that that opened us to being willing to work with the Iraqis in a way that we perhaps otherwise wouldn't have been. We have been discussing some of the challenges and lessons learned from how the United States and Australia engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last 20 years. I would like to zoom out and ask, you know, what have been the big implications from the global war on terror for Australian national security policy as we carry forward over the coming decade? Kyle, the response to coming out of Afghanistan is, in my mind, one of history repeating. There's been

more than enough analogies occurring between comparing Vietnam and Afghanistan. And in terms of forgetting the lessons, moving on to new things, I argue that history is looking pretty close here. For all of the discussion in Canberra, major power competition is it. This is a new version of air-land battle 1980s as being the hot discussion item. Now, that's being matched by a fairly significant amount of investment in Australian capability that are orientated against that conventional force threat. The language of how major power competition actually plays out based around our lessons isn't really well assimilated. So it's just like how the US is kind of pivoting right now from its global war on terror to this

great power competition focus. Australia is undergoing the same type of transition, if I understand correctly. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, Kyle. And we've seen that with the latest 2020 Defence Strategic Update, uses the terminology grey zone 11 times. How well it articulates what the grey zone is and how actors compete in it is not so well articulated. There is no reference to any type of proxy or unconventional action where a state sponsor might be fermenting trouble in order to undermine a third country. That doesn't exist in our policy documents. So this is quite a strategic

shift. Linda Reynolds, the Minister of Defence, calls it the most consequential strategic alignment since the Second World War. Australia now focused on its neighbourhood and China as a near adversary. So how is the Australian military adjusting to this shift in mindset? So the short answer to the first bit is yes, the Australian military has taken note, but it's at the beginning of a process of kind of shedding what it learned in the war on terror, while still trying to hold on to that important knowledge, and then reorienting to a different, a state-based adversary, a power that's much larger than Australia, that's already penetrated Australian society in many

ways part of what the Aussies are doing is focused on hardware things like missile defense much expanded submarine capability amphibious assault that kind of stuff but then there's a lot that really looks a bit more like what the Baltic states in Scandinavia have been doing with respect to Russia about kind of deterrence through resilience and focusing on cyber defense and better national resistance. And I think the other one, and this is an unpleasant point to bring up, but I think it's worth mentioning. Australians, I think, particularly in the planning part of the Australian Defense Department, have been looking at America since the late Obama period, but particularly under President Trump, and have seen an ally that's not necessarily as reliable as we

would have liked to think in the past. And the way that Australians have reacted to that, I think, is actually a positive. It's to say Australia's got to become much more self-reliant, much more willing to contribute and to set the direction for operations in its region, much less dependent on the United States for logistics, and much less dependent for strategic strike on the United States. And I think the outcome ultimately will be a much more capable and an alliance that's able to do more, where Australia is playing a much bigger role in its own region than perhaps it has in the past 20 years or so. But that comes on the background of a bit of uncertainty, right, in Canberra about, can we really trust Washington to care about the China threat to be there when we need the

United States? And I think, you know, frankly, I think that's a political blip, but I think what will come out of it will be a stronger alliance in terms of capabilities. And I think that's something we should all be pushing for. I wanted to take another step back. So how would you characterize the current threat environment that the United States and Australia is facing? What are the types of adversaries we're facing? And what are the types of tools that we need to address them? So let me summarize the argument of my recent book, which is arguing that we're dealing with an environment where states have copied the techniques of non-states and vice versa. At the same time, non-state actors through the connectivity explosion and the democratization of technology

now have access to levels of lethality that you used to have to be a nation state to acquire. They don't operate at the same mass as a nation state, but they sometimes operate at a very similar level of lethality. And we're dealing with both state and non-state adversaries at the same time and in many of the same places. Take AFRICOM for example, we are out there dealing with one of the fastest growing, most dangerous elements of violent extremism in the world in terms of the Islamic State, West Africa, and a number of other groups in the greater Sahel.

But at the same time, there's two and a half thousand Chinese troops deployed in Africa. You're under the bubble of a space warfare capability that the Chinese have built in the last five years and you've got multiple Russian private military companies operating in the same space. So it's kind of a blended threat right where you're dealing with both states and non-states at the same time in many of the same places and those places tend to be very cluttered, heavily populated,

mostly urbanized, electronically connected, and often on coastlines just because of the nature of where cities grow. Oh, that's interesting. So how can Australia, how can the West respond to these hybrid threats? As we policy-wise adopt the terminology of being in a major power competition environment, I think there's recognition that this isn't our first Rodeo. There's plenty of lessons from the Cold War that can serve as the mental models that we carry forward to today. And that Cold War environment posits a number of key issues for us. Nuclear weapons have not gone away. There are caps as a result on how far major powers will be willing to vertically escalate a issue. And so as a result, how else will they operate? Well, through horizontal escalation. And this is where we see

deterrence being affected by Iran, for example, by its proxy relationships across the Middle East and also a number of A2AD capabilities in the Persian Gulf. It's where we see economic coercion. An example of that, which has benefits for all of your listeners, is the ability to go out and buy cheap Australian wine at the moment. Come on, mate. Come on. Hey, hey. And so as a result, I think this kind of framework of thinking back to lessons from the Cold War is a good mental model to carry forward. Let me finish my statement with a quote. It remains true that external powers have ample resources to directly support insurgent groups when they choose to adopt such a policy and continuing political tensions in the

region, i.e. Southeast Asia, could provide them with opportunity. Bad times or weak government could produce serious instabilities. Now that's a quote from out of the Australian Defence white paper titled Australian Defence of 1976 incorporating all the lessons of how the Chinese were supporting a number of insurgencies throughout Southeast Asia. Well that's the last policy recognition that I can see from an Australian perspective about how this competition may play out in what we would today be calling the grey zone. And I think carrying forward some of those ideas is where we need to go forward. The most important thing we need to do is get out of our defensive crouch and not think that we have to defend everywhere, which then allows the

enemy to attack anywhere, right? We have to flip it around so that we hold the initiative. And I think that means that there's a lot of learning to do by looking at what the adversaries have been doing in the last couple of decades. And I actually run a training activity with Army SF and others where we go through about a 100 techniques that our adversaries have used against us in the last 20 years. And we say, let's rule out anything in that list that we would absolutely never do for ethical reasons or because it's immoral or because it's absolutely illegal. And you go through and you rule that out and you find that actually it's a pretty short list, right? Out of every 100 things that the adversary has done, there's maybe three or four that we couldn't do. The others,

you know, we'd do them in a slightly different way, but there's a lot of things we could do to reverse the polarity and give the adversary the same kinds of problems that we've been used to dealing with in the last 20 years. So to bring some specificity to the idea that states are using some of the tools of essentially non-state actors, specifically with China and how Australia views China, how do you view the primary threats from China, the things that the Australian government and military would specifically have to respond to that aren't exactly great power conflict, they're kind of on the other ends of the spectrum of conflict. So there was a very influential book a couple of years ago 2019 by an Australian strategist called

Hugh White which is about it's called how to defend Australia and he goes through a vision of what a future conflict against a great power potentially China might look like. I wrote a review and I'm a fan of his work. I think he's one of the clearest thinkers in Australian strategic policy. But I did actually suggest in my review that it's a too conventional view of what an adversary might do. And his idea is a Chinese amphibious task group turns off up off the coast of Australia and we need to, you know, refight the battle of the battle of the Coral Sea and, you know, throw them back and regain control of physical territory. Chinese don't need to do that in order to knock Australia out. They can intercept

our fibre optic cables underwater. We've got 94,000 miles of underwater fibre optics that make the Australian economy function. They can do that without ever coming near the Australian coastline with an amphibious task group. They can disrupt Australia's trading relationships and our dependence on foreign oil. They can attack our ability to deploy in the region or Australian companies' ability to, you know, some of the biggest mining companies in the world are Australian. They have assets all over the world that are vulnerable to being targeted. So an adversary doesn't need to invade our territory in order to shut a globalised country like Australia down. And I think we've got to think about that in a much different way, right?

Cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. Chinese have actually done that to Australia in the last 12 months. There's an ongoing economic warfare right now, which is mostly China targeting Australia as punishment for daring to ask for an independent investigation on the origins of the coronavirus back in March. That's the Chinese trying to treat Australia like a vassal state rather than an independent country. And the big change in the last 12 months is Australians have woken up to the threat and are very much pushing back but I think as we start to push back it's rather similar to what the US sees we realize just how intertwined we are economically with and in a resource sense

with China and how much of Australia's real estate China owns and how much the Chinese have penetrated Australian business. Now, none of these things are considered to be war fighting elements in a traditional way of thinking about warfare, but they're absolutely part of a Chinese unrestricted warfare model or of the Chinese three warfares doctrine, which is part of their military civil fusion doctrine that they put forward. I'm wondering what shift in mindset this is causing within the Australian military.

What's changed, I think in the environment of a much enhanced A2AD and hypersonics and space warfare type of a threat is moving to smaller scale, more stealthy deployments, right? So I think there's a realization that you've got to blend, you've got to operate in small teams, modular, you know, and I think we're going to find that special forces ways of operating that existed 20 years ago are going to become increasingly conventional force ways of operating just through mere survivability. And meantime, you're going to find the special forces organizations themselves moving out

into the black, if you know what I mean, right? Moving into cyber kinetic, perhaps AI enabled individual operations, possibly with human performance enhancements, ethnically appropriate SOF in a way that we haven't traditionally had much more of a, we'll do the lurking in the future jungle rather than be running and scared of somebody else. I think the biggest mental issue of the war on terror has been that we got into a defensive crouch, right? And we thought about these threats that were lurking out there and how do we counter those threats? Now we have to flip the lens, right? We have to be the threat that the other guy has to prepare for. And that applies not only to soft, but to, to GPF, but it obviously it translates into different capability sets, I think.

So in the context of dragons and snakes, your book, you know, the dragons being the near peers or other States that the U S and Australia need to compete with, and the snakes being the non-state actors all posing similar threats. What are some of the approaches the U.S. can take to address these various threats? I know in the book you propose a sort of middle ground answer, which you call the Byzantine approach, which is between isolationism and doubling down activities around the world. Yeah. So I think it's, and I should say I didn't love that particular option. It was sort of the least bad of the three options that I canvassed at the end of the book, right? Option one being,

you know, double down, just keep doing what we're doing. If your adversary is already adapted to the point where it's not working anymore, doing it harder isn't going to help. The other one was, as I described it in the book, you know, just embrace the suck, you know, just recognize we're going to decline. Everybody declines, just start learning Chinese, basically. And I said, you know, that's not an acceptable outcome. So I came up with this other idea, which is that we need to play for time, we need to focus on sustaining where we are, and maintaining the keeping our options open. And what I look at is, is really three things. One is a light footprint, footprint focus forward, right? So not disengaging from the world, but really focusing very much on mobile, light footprint, indigenously enabled engagement with allies forward,

not being the big sugar daddy, not working out of gigantic bases necessarily, but operating on a basis of, we can help you with certain niche capabilities. We want to work together on these issues. And I think it comes down to, you know, a few forward MAGTFs in the fleet, some deployed soft elements, a slightly different way of using our intelligence community assets, and then a focus on certain kind of niche technologies around nukes, but around space warfare, a number of other things as well to preserve a relative advantage. And then the other big theme is resilience at home. And I wrote the book in 2018, 2019, before Black Lives Matter and Antifa and the Proud Boys and the Capitol riot and all that. But I think what's happened in the last 12 months only reinforces something that

I said in the book, which is, you know, resilience or deterrence through resilience starts at home. And we really have to focus on rebuilding a sense of unity and cohesion nationally. Otherwise, you can have the best special forces in the world. It's not going to help you because the adversary can always reach into your society and find those pain points and press on them in order to achieve what they're looking for. And I think the other final point that I make in the book that's worth mentioning is we need a civilian capability that understands the military better. And we need military leaders who understand the parameters within which politicians operate better. I think we're doing better on the military, frankly, than on the civilian side. I think military officers, by the time they get to a certain level, pretty much understand

how civilian leaders make decisions. I think that the level of knowledge of what is war, how does it work, what does it mean among elected leaders in both Australia and the US is just shockingly abysmal. In fact, it's a national scandal, in my view. We've been at war for 20 years and less, and yet we still have elected leaders who don't know and frankly don't care very much about what goes on out on the front line. And I think we've got to remedy that. And that's not just about strategic. It's about tactical understanding. Reality is tactical. And often strategic is just

the term we use when we don't know the detail right and we have you know a big hand and a small map and we wave our magic wand over the map and we say you know make it so and that's how stuff like the invasion of Iraq with too few troops or the failure to sustain the effort in Afghanistan happens because people don't really know what they're actually talking about and I think that that's where, you know, that reality, that tactical reality has got to bubble up to an understanding that's granular enough for civilian leaders to be able to work closely with the reality of what we deal with. So looking at Australia and the United States, you know, experience with the regular warfare at the arguments of the book, what are the implications for policymakers and practitioners moving forward? I think a starting point is a doctor's analogy.

First, do no harm. We've got a rich pool of experienced people who have been engaged in counterinsurgency, engaged in learning these lessons learned in blood, first thing I think is not to lose that. Now, that's a real tension by virtue of within the Australian Army. That aspect of turnover of people means that we're already bleeding our Afghan veterans who experience conflict in Uruzgan. We're already seeing conditions where senior officers who are exposed to the decision-making processes are starting to leave or very soon to leave. And now we're losing that commanding officer level experienced in this type of conflict. So for me, do no harm,

capture the lessons that we currently know. And I think if I was going to make one point, it would be that principles translate from campaign to campaign. TTPs almost never do, right? So what we have to do is understand at a level of principle, right? What worked, what didn't work? Why did it work? Why did it fail? Capture that principle and then have a sort of a mental

map that commanders and planners can use to think about, okay, how am I going to understand the environment? And then think about how this principle translates to that environment. Just to use one example, we know that making the population feel safe is a fundamental element of successful counterinsurgency. In Iraq, in the specific circumstances of the period when we were there, Andy, that meant getting alongside the population, right? Living with them, creating joint security stations, having almost like a local squad that lived in the district and partnering with their own community self-defense organizations to make them feel safe. We then went to Afghanistan, same principle, got to make the population feel safe. We then went to Afghanistan, same principle,

got to make the population feel safe. We tried to do the same technique and it scared the crap out of Afghans, right? Who just didn't want us drawing the crabs living in their village because they knew what was going to happen to them when we moved, right? So we made that mistake multiple times over the last 20 years. And it would be great if we could make new mistakes next time around, right? Instead of making the same old mistakes. So I think that figuring out what at the level of principle is the essential

element of what we learned here, holding onto that, like Andy said, and then being ready to apply it in perhaps radically different manifestations in a different theatre. So that would be my sort of big macro point that I would suggest. stations in a different theater so that would be my sort of big macro point that i would suggest so the the last the final question for you guys is what are the implications for academics now that could be academics within the military in terms of pme or it could be civilian academics in terms of research in an australian context the academic space is likewise a little vacant compared to what I would argue it should be in the context of our earlier policy conversations.

The irregular warfare course that Dave and I run is unique in Australia. There's one other university that runs a counterinsurgency course. There's under half a dozen that talk in detail about the lessons from terrorism studies. This is an underrepresented aspect of the education sector in Australia and I imagine elsewhere around the region. And we can contribute to that. In fact, we are. The aspects of talking about proxy

warfare unconventional warfare in a new sense is effectively a value proposition that academics can offer yeah so a british book by a guy called spencer fitzgibbon it's called not mentioned in dispatches and it's about the battle of goose green Green. Spencer Fitzgibbon pissed off a lot of people in the British Army when he wrote that book, because what he did was poked holes in the clay feet of an idol that people had stood up, this battalion commander who won the Victoria Cross through an act of amazing gallantry during the Battle of Goose Green and the Falklands. And he unpacked that battle by saying, let's look at what actually happened and what people thought was happening at the time and what decisions they made, rather than the neatened up, sanitized version that eventually made it into the history books. And, you know, you can sort of distinguish between a mythical bronze Danzac

version of Australian history or a sort of stars and stripes forever version of American military history and then a sort of gritty you know what really fucking happened on the ground who shot who when did they shoot them what was in their head when that happened what was the impact of that and I think the role that academics can play there is to really try as best as anyone can to get to that reality so that those of us that have to base decisions and lessons learned off of that have something concrete to work with. So sort of getting back to an objective understanding of what is battle really like, what really does happen and what are the implications of that and all too few academics want to do that.

Most of them have some grievance to push or some politically correct, you know, woke agenda these days that they want to go through. I think we owe it to ourselves as people that have both an academic background and a professional military background to give it to our colleagues that are coming up behind us

in as straight as we can, as objective as we can, noting that, you know, it's the psychology of a car crash when you're in a conflict environment. So it's always going to be somewhat subjective, but to the greatest extent possible, help people understand what is battle really like and what are the real implications of capabilities and policies and personnel decisions that we make. Because, you. Because at the end of the day, as I said earlier, reality is tactical. And if you get it wrong, the consequences can be dramatic.

This is a good place to stop for today. But Andy and Dave, thank you for coming on to the podcast. This has been a great conversation on Irregular Warfare. Thanks for having us. And there's so much more we could have talked about. So maybe we'll have to do it again sometime. Thanks for having me, mate. And I really appreciate the work that you're doing with IW Podcast. Cheers. Thank you for listening to Episode 20 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. On our next episode, Kyle and Shauna speak with Dr. Gary Schiffman

of Georgetown University on the economics of insurgency and terrorism. Following that, Daphne and Shauna have a conversation with Senator Joni Ernest about the work of the Senate Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities and how it impacts regular warfare policy formulation. Please be sure to subscribe to the Regular Warfare Podcast so you do not miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note,

what you hear on this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point or any other agency of the US or Australian governments. Thank you again. We'll see you next time!