Irregular Warfare Podcast - Proxy Wars, Part 1: War Through Local Agents in Africa

Episode Date: July 31, 2020

In this episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast, Kyle Atwell and Shawna Sinnott discuss proxy and partner warfare in Africa with retired Maj. Gen. Marcus Hicks and Dr. Eli Berman. Eli and Mark discuss the objectives of proxy and partner warfare, the tools available to influence local agents, and whether the United States should increase or decrease its military and diplomatic footprint across Africa in an era of renewed great-power competition. The episode is the first in a two-part series on proxies and irregular warfare. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

My experience in Africa was that building partnership capacity or those activities were virtually all wasted. They were free chickens, so to speak, to the host nation where you would go provide training for some unit that was going nowhere near the enemy that we cared about and never was going to. that we cared about and never was going to. Even though we had figured out something that we felt confident recommending as doctrine, the local ally in those fights, and when the U.S. gets in these fights now, it's always with a local ally, and usually most of the fighting is done by the local ally. The local ally wasn't on board with this doctrine. Welcome to Episode 6 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Your hosts today are myself, Kyle Atwell, and my co-host, Shana Sinnott.

Today's episode is the first installment of a two-part discussion on fighting irregular warfare through proxy forces. In today's discussion, our guests consider how the use of local allies can position the United States and others to address security threats across Africa. They discuss the objectives of proxy and partner warfare, the tools that we can use to influence local allies, and whether the U.S. should increase or decrease its military and diplomatic footprint across Africa in an era of renewed great power competition. Retired Major General Mark Hicks served as the commander of Special Operations Command Africa from 2017 to 2019,

where he was responsible for all special operations forces across the continent. Before that, he was the chief of staff and director of operations at SOCOM headquarters and a career AC-130 pilot. Dr. Ellie Berman is a professor at UC San Diego and co-editor of the book Proxy Wars, Suppressing Violence Through Local Agents. Before entering academia, Eli was a member of the Israeli Defense Force, where he participated in the 1982 Lebanon War. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Mark and Ellie. Mark and Ellie, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, and thanks for joining us today. Pleasure to be here.

It's great to be with you. This is a wonderful initiative. I'm very excited about it. Thank you, Eli. So I'd like to start the conversation by asking what motivated you to publish a book on proxy warfare? Well, we'd written this previous book on how to do counterinsurgency correctly and humanely by integrating a development strategy into it.

And we were very proud of it. And we went from place to place and told people that we'd figured this thing out. And usually politely, folks would say, well, if you guys are so smart, why are y'all losing all the time? And we felt as academics and as public policy folks that maybe we should answer that question.

And the answer that we came up with, which I think is very interesting, is that even though we had figured out something that we felt confident recommending as doctrine, the local ally in those fights, and when the U.S. gets in these fights now, it's always with a local ally, and usually most of the fighting is done by the local ally. The local ally wasn't on board with this doctrine. And then the question was, is it possible to incentivize a local ally, the Afghan government, the Iraqi government, the Colombian government, in the case of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the South Lebanese Army, is it possible to incentivize those folks to do the things that

the senior ally in the partnership wants? Or should you just give up and go home? And those questions are especially relevant when we consider the US role in Africa today. So Mark, what's the risk in not having this level of influence? And how do we balance that with all of our other competing defense priorities? You know, all of which suggests a lack of political will for further boots on the ground in places that are poorly understood and far from home with tangential connections to American interests. You know, we're going to have to do things by, with and through local partners. The political will and frankly, the capacity to just to do it with U.S. forces just isn't there. And that's probably fine. I think our role in Africa should be to work with local governments to address areas of mutual interest, of which there are many.

We have tremendous interests across Africa. tremendous interest across Africa. We're the fastest growing continent, the youngest continent, and will be increasingly important in the future, even if only as a safe haven for terrorists, because we've left places like the Sahel as poorly governed space, and where Al-Qaeda is currently seeing great expansion of their franchises across the area. So if we fail to figure out how to work well with partners in the absence of the ability and will to do it ourselves, then those things that are in our interest won't get done.

Ellie, do you think that proxy and partner warfare is going to play an increasing role in the future of U.S. national security policy? Yeah, I think it's inevitable. I think if, take a look at the national defense strategy. I mean, if bluntly it says, we have less resources to work with than we used to, and we have increasing problems in the great power rivalries competitions with China and Russia. And so the special forces are going to have to find a low cost way of solving these relatively small problems in the scope of things. And the only low cost way we know of is to work with proxies and partners. work with proxies and partners. Is that marked? Is that about right? Yeah, I absolutely agree. I hope it's inevitable that we will expand our more enlightened use of partners and proxies,

but it's certainly, in my opinion, the way forward. The term proxy even seems a little bit controversial. Can we define from your perspective what we're talking about? And is that the same thing as working with partner forces? I think ally is a diplomatic term. And it certainly makes people feel better about it. But I think the danger in saying ally is that ally sounds like equal footing and proxy in sounds like more like the agent in what an economist would call a principal agent problem and strictly speaking an agent is somebody who could who can only influence the principal by not doing the job whereas a principal can influence the agents in lots of different ways. And so, but ally is a kind diplomatic term, and it's harmless as long as everybody understands

what's going on. For practical purposes, we should think of partners expansively. And what I mean by that is, if you look at Africa, you know, we would partner not only with African nations and their militaries, but also with other interested parties who are involved in various conflicts, particularly the French in Operation Barkhane, which we support and should support and could probably do more to influence. But also there's a lot of untapped resources in some of the UN missions, and particularly in Minusma and Northern Mali, that has enormous capacity, but very little capability. And with a little bit of thoughtful training and incentivization of certain units from donor nations, we could actually make that a very capable force.

So that's interesting. So you're saying that when you look at the landscape of Africa and different threats we face there, that it's not just the indigenous governments we look at, but there's all kinds of other Western powers, multinational powers, the whole landscape of people. And with each of them, we just can kind of calculate, hey, if we provide some support, will they be able to accomplish our objectives? Well, if we think expansively about what a partner might be, we should partner with NGOs. In much of Africa, I would argue that you should probably use the military to support the security of development programs to get at the root causes of instability. And that chasing bad guys is a, you know,

it's a losing proposition for a variety of reasons. You know, those organizations can, you know, can not only do those things that matter to us for small investment on our part, but, you know, it can be a synergistic relationship with our military activities as well, which I think we've tried very hard to do in South Africa with some success. But back to the proxy issue, there is a bit of a fine point on what constitutes a proxy. And again, there's a very legal specific issue about if you have command and control of a force. you have command and control of a force.

But there's a bit of a continuum in the partners with whom you would coordinate and try to de-conflict as a minimum and try to make sure that you're at least aware of where the NGOs are, the low end of it, to the high-end version of partnering with a proxy force, which you actually assess, select, train, equip, and then command and control and have full incentive authority over those forces by your ability to pay them and fire them if they fail to achieve your mission objectives. So there's more of an inherent power dynamic to that where someone has more influence than the other? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, true proxy forces are ones that we, you know, we assess, select, train, and equip, and then operate as proxies of our force. Yeah. So there's a legal definition of what a proxy is. And I guess what I'm interested in, Ellie, is for the theoretical framework of your book, where would you draw that line on that

spectrum of what a proxy force is? Well, you know, like all academics, we like to simplify to make it a problem that we can actually solve. You know, Mark and you all have to deal with the real world, which is much more complicated. I only now realize the proxy was a very poor choice of describing what we thought of as the agent in a principal-agent relationship. I'm sorry. No, no, it's fine. But because the title of the book is Proxy Wars, but maybe the title of the book should be Local Ally Who We Have a Lot of Influence Over Wars.

That one really rings. For the purposes of this discussion, maybe local ally or without, by which we mean local subordinate ally. Yeah, I should also, this isn't the first time that we realized that it was a mistake. But one of the adventures that one of the authors had was with a former prime minister of a country that we were describing as a proxy. And he took it a little personally. So it's not the most diplomatic of terms, but it's in the title of the book. And we're kind of the U.S.

But, you know, that can very quickly ruin a relationship by suggesting that they should do our bidding. These are autonomous countries that typically want to be treated as sovereign governments as well they should be. And, you know, we have to respect their interests and not treat them as clients or junior partners in a relationship if we can avoid it. And that's a tough challenge. And I think that gets to the internal and external messaging aspect of this. So how do we characterize these relationships? Are these open, acknowledged, superior, subordinate relationships? Or is it important to be more discreet about the nature of the dynamic?

May I take a shot at this? Because I think it gets at the single biggest mistake that we discovered in the research. On the one hand, the senior partner, the United States in this case, On the one hand, the senior partner, the United States in this case, works really hard not to be arrogant in its treatment of the local ally. And so we say things like shoulder to shoulder, shared objectives, be respectful. And arrogance is always a mistake, but falls into the trap of being naive about what the true objectives of the partner are. And that's a lack of discipline and it's a lack of thoughtfulness. And unfortunately, it was enshrined in the doctrine up till very recently. I'd like to switch to the findings of your research, Ellie, which is, can the U.S. influence proxies and partners to do what we want? So the answer is yes. Yes, the partner can be. When incentives are implied, the partners

comply. Now, that's not going to work everywhere and always because some partners aren't even in the scope of being willing to comply in the first place, you might think of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship as one like that, where there is no amount of incentives that will induce the Pakistanis to give up the nuclear weapons. And there may not be enough incentives to induce Pakistan to give up the support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. And nevertheless, within the scope of relationships where it's possible incentives work, incentives plus capacity building work much better. But within the scope of those relationships, what we found in the research is that the ones where the incentives weren't working were U.S.

Yemen, U.S. Afghanistan, U.S. Iraq, there were periods in which when incentivized, the local ally did in fact comply. What's surprising about the cases is that the incentives weren't applied in a consistent way. And when, for reasons that are really hard for us to explain, the United States backed off of incentives to the Afghan government, to the Iraqi government, to the Yemeni government, that the proxies cheated. And so in a nutshell, when not incentivized, proxies always cheat. But how do you know they're cheating? Because the outcomes look so bad. It's a fantastic question. But one of the implications of this model, of this approach, are that some of the intelligence gathering has to be aimed

at the local ally rather than at the enemy in order to understand what the local ally is doing. I'll tell you just to jump in, I absolutely agree with your findings regarding the need for incentives to get partners to do what you want. I think it's consistent at the national leadership level all the way down to the small unit that needs to be properly incentivized with either conditional support or whatever other mechanism we can find. But my experience in Africa was that building partnership capacity or those activities, you know, usually through a theater security cooperation event were virtually all wasted, you know, with exceptions I can think of. In one case, you know, they were free chicken, so to speak, to the host nation where you would go provide

training for some unit that was going nowhere near the enemy that we cared about and never was going to. And that unit then broke up and moved on to other places and really achieved nothing as far as building capability, let alone capacity of the host nation, but it made us feel good politically. So to your earlier point that the first mistake, if I understood you correctly, the first mistake that you see as we go into these things naively, absolutely. Not understanding the situation on the ground, not understanding what the partner's real objectives are or what a would-be partner's real objectives are make itage males by pay and training to do what we want than it is, at least in my experience here with getting governments, whether it's regional governments or national governments, to do the right thing, both militarily and development-wise, because they're typically gaining from the situation as it exists,

either the status quo or some variant of it that's not consistent with our desire. Mark, I would really like to know from your perspective as the SOC Africa commander, did you have challenges with interest alignment? Was that something you actively thought about when determining where to allocate resources to partner forces? And what were the other things you thought about when determining where the U.S. should dedicate more or less resources to different governments? So I was always aware of alignment of priorities and interests and, you know, not, hopefully not as naive as we tend to be normally. And, you know, not hopefully not as naive as we tend to be normally. And we worked at the tactical level to incentivize our partner forces to behave in ways that were consistent with our interests as well as their own.

And I think that was the most successful part. The broader question of where to put resources became a larger conversation. to put resources became a larger conversation. And, you know, the idea of who's making these decisions becomes a question because we don't, that may not be done the best way either. You've got, you know, State Department, the Ambassador, you know, AFRICOM, as well as the services. So in conducting operations and providing resources, it's a multiplayer, conducting operations and providing resources. It's a multi-player, multi-stakeholder discussion. And in the absence of a coherent strategy, it was very difficult to get anything done. What happens when those interests, those desired end states of all those different stakeholders are, I don't want to say irreconcilable, but when they're at odds, wins out?

Yeah, well, you know, the divergent interest is not only a phenomenon of our partner forces, right? It's within our own organization. So the services were incentivized not to spend money in Africa on things that weren't their projects, or things about which they weren't interested. And, you know, that made it hard to do new starts on anything. And ironically, it made it hard to stop things because it always also cost money to shut down operations. So, you know, the short answer was when you get into this bureaucratic stalemate, nothing happens. The status quo persists. And I found it sometimes is equally as difficult to close out a mission that I didn't consider productive or that had run its course. out a mission that I didn't consider productive or that had run its course.

You know, it had become a cash cow for the force provider who got to send captains there to, you know, get their combat time. And they didn't want to quit doing that, even though, you know, it was no longer really supporting what we needed. And again, the policy implication, I think, for that is that we, to Ella's point, we need to work very hard and deliberately at not being naive. We have a long way to go in that regard. I think we need to retool the way we understand what's going on, retool the way we educate practitioners, both in State Department and the military, with regard to the part of the possible in dealing with partners who have their own interests that they're going to pursue regardless of what we want them to do.

Nigeria is a good case study, I think, for both Ellie's model and then also for what you're discussing, which is that arguably Nigeria is an important country as far as demographics go, size of the economy, and there is an insurgent threat there. But it sounds like our interests were not necessarily aligned with them. So how do you balance both theoretically, Eli, and then also from your practical experience, a country that might be an important place for the U.S. to maintain a partnership with interest misalignment? So I think this is one of the, I'm glad you asked, this is one of the kind of sobering points that came out of the research, which is that there are some part, if you take a capacity building approach to everything, then you could win with

any partner. All you have to do is build their capacity. If you take an interest alignment approach to everything, then there's a continuum. There are some potential partners with whom interests are so aligned that you don't have to do anything. Canada, right? There are some for whom interests are so misaligned that it's hopeless. That might be the case with Pakistan in many kind of lines of effort. And so you have to kind of figure out who are in the sweet spot where there's something that you can do which is productive. And if they slip out of that sweet spot, then as Mark's saying, it's time to go home. And if they slip back into the sweet spot, then it's time to engage.

Well, Kyle, I agree with you that Nigeria is a really good example of a country that does not have interest alignment with us. It's an important country. In a given day, it's the largest economy in Africa and largest population in Africa. And it has multiple competing problems. The Nigerian government has shown a lack of will by action to really go in and provide governance and assistance in a reasonable counterinsurgency approach. In fact, they pursued a counterterrorism effort in Borno State that's made the situation worse and arguably really created the conditions for both Iran to develop in the first place.

So I think the approach we took, again, enabled, ironically, by optimization was to terminate the partnership as unworkable. Now, whether that's ever going to provide the incentive for them to behave differently so that we'll come back or whether that's going to drive them in the direction of the Chinese remains to be seen. But this was certainly not just a military decision. The embassy, the ambassador, the country team, you know, and AFRICOM and everybody else needed to, you know, state main needed to be involved in the decisions we're making with regard to removing resources because they're not pursuing the interests that we've asked them to pursue. And I would hope that after we pull out that, you know, the embassy would be empowered to use the hope of returning U.S. military assistance as a way to get them to behave differently.

to behave differently. Yeah. Something that we'd like to also get into is what are the tools that we actually have to leverage when we're talking about incentives with our partners? So we have awesome tools at our disposal. If you look at what the embassy and the military attaches are doing,

you know, it's not just the military assistance that matters. In a capacity building model, it would be, but if you want to leverage, then you've got the military assistance that matters. In a capacity building model, it would be. But if you want to leverage, then you've got the military assistance. You've got the economic assistance, USAID, that's coming directly from the U.S. government. You've got whatever the State Department can give in terms of diplomatic help. You've got the bully pulpit that the United States has, which is just unrivaled anywhere in terms of

expressions of support or expression for individuals within the government. And then you've got our leverage within the international organizations, which are usually very happy to help. Mark was speaking of partners, but the IMF and the World Bank, in extreme cases, the WTO, these are all massive levers of support. Remember, we're talking about countries who, no matter how nefarious you might think the local leadership is in the partner, they all want to grow their economies. And they all think that the way to do that is through modernization and trade with the rest of the world.

And we, with the Europeans, increasingly with the Chinese as well, control the spigots to allow that to happen. Yeah, and I appreciate you alluding to what can be an obscure nuance, at least for me, about who's really responsible for enforcing each lever. Does the state take the bigger role or the military? Who's in charge of making those incentives work? Well, so that's a wonderful question. Because, you know, one of the things that's very frustrating when you ask when does the senior partner fail, it's because they, when they fail to kind of take a whole of government approach to leverage, right? So in principle, the ambassador controls everything. So the ambassador can speak to the military, can speak to the World Bank, can speak to all these things and kind of coordinate it all. The ambassador doesn't always have a whole of government model and the ambassador might not have the influence that's necessary.

Well, that requires a lot of bureaucratic coordination too, I imagine. It requires a ton of bureaucratic coordination because remember a lot of, and technically it's difficult or administratively it's difficult because many of the levers of assistance are treaties and treaties are government to government agreements or are contracts with the USAID's contractor. And those are long-term contracts. They're three, five-year contracts, which if you stop that contract because you think the conditionality is important, you might be in violation of some agreement with an American firm. And so building that whole system in a way that allows spigots to be open to closed is not an easy thing to do.

Yeah, Ellie, I tell you, the notion that programs need to be architected from the beginning to be adjustable and conditional, I think is an absolutely critical point. One of the most frustrating aspects for me was the lack of a whole government approach to almost anything in Africa. We as a government are challenged to take a long-term view of strategy, in part because of the nature of our electoral cycle. You've dealt primarily with Afghanistan and Iraq,

areas with massive resourcing, particularly in human capital and oversight, and all the way from the field through Congress, whereas the dearth of those resources is part of the plague of Africa. And what I mean by that is you might have an OSC chief in an embassy who is a newly turned foreign area officer from some other career field who parachutes into an embassy that has had that position gapped for the last 18 months. You know, only to find that she's completely occupied by figuring out the paperwork of whatever ambassadors two ago signed up for, and they just lack the capacity to come up with a coherent plan for what they might do, as well as the experience and capability of understanding what's possible in those countries.

We're getting better, I think, at having AFRICOM assume the role of helping manage those processes, but the lack of diplomatic footprint on the ground makes it really hard to take a long-term view of how we might do things and to monitor the progress of the countries in such a way that we could move the levers of conditionality to ensure that our partners or proxies are doing what we want them to do at the national and regional level. Yeah, if I could add, the local ally does what makes sense for them, which is to take their most talented people and put them at the interface with the senior ally. And so they've got someone whose career is being built on figuring out what the senior ally is capable of, which parts of the US government to go to for what, what the restrictions are on the contracts, and where the State Department and maybe AFRICOM aren't communicating so well to exploit those cracks in order to get the best possible deal for their government. And they're not rotating out of that job. They can stick with it for quite a long time. And so you tend to see very talented

people locally who are managing this relationship, bearing in mind the great resources that the United States brings to bear and kind of the flaws and the lack of a whole government approach from the point of view of the principal. This leads to a broader question I have for both of you, which is, what are our objectives when trying to work through proxy or partner forces in these regions? And I can frame that by stating that I feel some people believe our objectives with a group like Boko Haram or with al-Shabaab in Somalia is complete victory over the group. And other people have argued it's more limited objectives. I tell you that, you know, kind of back to Ellie's observation about don't be naive.

We need to figure out what we're trying to do. And my experience is that we've not had a consistent understanding of simply what's in the art of the possible. In the case of Boca Verde, we've waffled back and forth between containment and serious degrading or potentially a defeat mechanism that would include a more expansive counterinsurgency program and demobilization efforts and things like that. mobilization efforts and things like that. We have to understand what the partners are willing to do and be clear-eyed about what aid we're going to provide and what incentives we're going to use to pursue goals that are U.S. interests, but not necessarily the primary interests of the host nation. Let me try to give a more general answer. I think that the political leadership is faced with a challenge that we have to recognize, which is that the public doesn't want to see long, drawn-out interventions. And so there's

an incentive to kind of misrepresent things as black and white. They're bad guys. We can go get them. It's going to take a little while, and then the troops are going to come home. Where, in fact, and then the troops are going to come home. Where, in fact, we tend to get involved in these relationships when there's a local ally whose governance is flawed in such a way that the root causes of insurrection are going to be there for a while. The Islamists aren't there just because they've got a good story. They're there because the government's not providing the needs of the local population in kind of a hearts and minds coincidence. And that's not going to change anytime soon. And so

that would lead you to believe that US forces are there in order to prevent an outbreak of terrorism or of insurgency that might spill over and destabilize other allies. So it's like a containment objective then, is we want to contain the threat. Exactly. But containment is by its nature almost surely a very long-term deployment with an uncertain duration.

And that's very difficult for the politicians to sell to the electorate. And so they've told this other story often. And that other story is, while maybe compelling, often gets us in trouble when we fail to obtain objectives that were so black and white and so easy.

Because you're right, it used to be a bit of a running joke with us that we wouldn't be in the countries if they were well-governed and in good shape. So yes, by definition, almost every place we are has flawed partners. And one other objective I wonder about is there's our effect on the enemy, which is they're destroyed or they're contained. But when we send small teams to some of these countries, you know, it could be 10 to 20 people. Are there other objectives that we're trying to pursue or is it almost always enemy based?

That's a great question, Kyle. And worth noting that when we send U.S. forces to a country, whether it's a, you know, theater security cooperation event, which is kind of the classic peacetime engagement activity, you activity, there is a political piece of that. But from the special ops world, when we send a force to a country, there are multiple reasons why we might choose to do that. And in the case of Africa, if we're looking at great power competition, one of the places that that competition is going to play out as it did during the Cold War is the developing world.

And Africa is a huge stage for that right now where the barrier to entry is very low. China in particular is active across the continent. And the good news is they've made ugly American no longer a pejorative term. But, you know, we're not competing effectively in the ways that the Chinese are in many parts of Africa. And we've also seen a great deal of Russian adventurism in various places, Central African Republic and, of course, Libya in particular. So we may choose as a government to send training or advisory forces simply to be there and to be part of

the partnership that competes with the Chinese. I don't know how many times I heard that you guys are the partners of choice. We want to work with you, but you're not here. Oh, you heard that from the partner forces saying, we want you here. Yes, from countries all across Africa. And it was a constant refrain, not only to myself, but to our diplomatic force as well. Is that an appropriate strategic objective? I mean, to explicitly say we're there to displace our competitors, to provide an alternative to countries relying on China? Depending on the cost, the size of the force and what we're trying to achieve, I think being a partner of choice is a legitimate strategic objective. And that's certainly debatable, but I would prefer it to be a tangential objective. Militarily, we would want to be somewhere because we have military objectives that are aligned, at least somewhat. And for the same reason we partner with our European partners, we should partner with our African military partners because we have security

objectives of mutual interest. We're all seeking to reduce the influence of Islamist extremism across the continent. So why wouldn't we help those countries that need it? And oh, by the way, by being there, we can help monitor what they're up to, what's happening on the ground in those countries, which is extremely difficult to know and partnership that may be valuable someday and to displace other powers that may seek to exploit the vacuum that we tend to leave across Africa. Displace might be a strong word. China feels that it has interests in Africa. China now feels that it has interests just about everywhere. And it's a rising power. Its share of world GDP has just passed that of the United States, and it's going to keep rising.

So I think a failing of the research we've done so far that we've noticed is that to think about one principle and one proxy is very narrow. Often we're in multiple principle, single proxy relationships, and the proxy does the rational thing, or the local ally does the rational thing, which is to play off the big powers against each other. And if, you know, Mark wants to teach folks to shoot straight and put bandages on right, but that's conditional on some kind of human rights rules that come with his legal mandate. But somebody else is willing to give the same instruction without the

conditionality, then they might go to the other, at least for that part of the trading. And we've seen that repeatedly. Yeah, we have this image that if we provide a train and equip package that China or Russia or anybody else is not going to do it. But I can't imagine that a state in Africa feels like they have to exclusively go with one, you know, principle, I think in your terms, Ellie or donor, you know, they can essentially take everything that everybody wants to offer. And I think that almost puts us as donors at a disadvantage in these types of relationships, if we're doing it from a great power competition lens? Well, it certainly makes it harder. My experience is that our partners in

Africa do accept support from multiple fronts, and that that's not always a bad thing. I recall our artillery captain in Niger had been trained by the Chinese, and I was just happy that he'd been trained. So, you know, there are opportunities where we make contact, either directly or indirectly with, you know, the Chinese and Africa, where we could actually cooperate and let some of the, you know, let some of the air out of the relationship too. It doesn't have to be straight competition. Has any sort of lateral alignment like that happened yet? Or is there a way you envision that could actually look in the future? It is.

To the extent that it's happened, I think probably the counter-piracy operations off the east coast of Africa are probably the best example. I'll be the imperfect. And I think policy-wise, we've been constrained from looking for good ways to cooperate with the Chinese. But I could certainly envision a way that we could, if we could influence the way the Chinese provide aid or conduct business and actually help them do things better, I don't think that would be a bad thing. You know, incentivizing and rewarding the Chinese for behaving well doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. That might be a good idea.

So that's an interesting insight, Mark, because, you know, in the NDS, there's this contrast between the great power rivalry part of the business and the suppressing coin part of the business. But now you're talking about cooperating with the Chinese on shared objectives in Africa. Yeah, and Eli, from a theoretical standpoint, what is the typical life cycle of a proxy relationship? How do we know we've reached the culminating point

of what we can do with that proxy and when we should terminate the relationship or maintain the relationship? How do we know what right looks like there? The relationship with South Korea is in some sense ongoing, right? U.S. troops are still stationed there because of a strategic interest in the model, even in a capacity building model, but in this embellished model that has agency and capacity, then the idea is the local ally wins and is now so secure that they stop misbehaving. When they stop

misbehaving, the potential for rebellion or terrorism that might spill over into other places is finished with, and the principal can go home. That's the hope. And there are cases in which this ended really well, but not all the cases go well. Yeah. And I guess the same question for Mark then, which is when you looked at a partnership with a country in Africa, was there was it desire that there would be an end state to it or was kind of the goal to maintain continuous engagement? engagement? It depends on the viewpoint, you know, as to whether it's desirable to have an end state or maintain a relationship. And, you know, there's a minor challenge we had with tactical forces who always fell in love with the missions they had, and it was hard to get them to, you know, want to give up a relationship with the ground force because it had developed so well. And strategically, we have to look at what the future looks like.

And I'm pointedly not saying end state here because I think that's a frankly naive concept. The evolution of a partner relationship, in my mind, the perfect version is that you go in and militarily you provide the security necessary to contain and then defeat whatever insurgent activities you're dealing with and then that you continue that relationship with the host government until they can become a net exporter of security. So can I ask a follow-up here, Mark? In the 1990s world where the NATO allies were the great power and we thought that if we just helped countries out, they would eventually become liberal democracies and join the team, then that we're going to fix it and go home attitude kind of makes sense. rivalries, the current. If you thought that the Chinese were going to maintain a presence in an African country, is it really credible that we and the Europeans would both go home ever? I don't know why we would want to. We haven't left Europe or Asia since World War II. So, you know, my sense, again, I kind of reject the concept of end states. It's naive and short-sighted.

Our evolution of cooperative military relationships with Africa should look more like what we're seeing in Europe. In fact, I would argue that AFRICOM should sort of drop the notion that it's an engagement command and act like a combatant command like any other that has military cooperative activities with the regional countries. And we should seek to partner with them to provide stability not only across Africa, but ultimately exporting it off of the African continent to other areas, likely the Middle East, which is not showing signs of stability anytime soon. signs of stability anytime soon. I think we should seek to expand those relationships strategically and not look at them as transactional activities where we go and try to defeat somebody

with a proxy force and then have to worry about how to demobilize that force. That force should become the small units we train today should become the cadre of the professional military that stays behind tomorrow. So that's the way the Pacific commenced. It's more like the way the Pacific commenced. He's their role. Yeah, I think that's very consistent. I had some time in PECOM as well, and the relationships there were very clearly in part to maintain a connectivity between the host nation and the United States to provide real capability to developing

countries that typically had some pretty good capability with a very clear intent to keep them on our team and to reassure them that we're not going to abandon them in an Indo-Asia Pacific where China would choose to deal bilaterally with each country, but we're trying to keep more coalitions together. An interesting perspective you have is that you were working as the SOC Africa commander at a period when we were transferring or transitioning from counterterrorism to great power competition. The NDS had kind of come out, I think, in that period. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on how that transition from counterterrorism focus to great power competition went,

and what the kind of day-to-day looked like during that. You know, it was certainly an interesting time. You know, the shift to great power competition, from my perspective at SOC Africa looked like suddenly everybody lost interest in something they weren't paying attention to to begin with. But ultimately we ended up with the optimization drill of reducing force structure, particularly of soft forces, which was an interesting exercise for a variety of reasons. Can you just provide us a little more background on what optimization is and what the debate is? Sure. Optimization in Africa was an effort directed by the chairman to reduce our force

structure by 25 and 50% over 18 and 36 months, respectively. I was successful, at least on the SOC-AFF side, of reducing some areas that were either nearing completion, that is, they had achieved the goals that they were in place for, the partner was sufficiently capable that we could leave a little bit ahead of schedule and it was going to be okay. Or in some cases, it allowed me to pull forces out of non-productive missions that the force provider was not interested in quitting. And that actually turned out to be beneficial.

So what you're saying is that you had missions where a service wanted to pursue it because they had their own interests, but from your kind of strategic perspective, you saw it wasn't the best investment for US resourcesS. resources in Africa. That's very accurate, yes. And, you know, because all the decision making involves SOCOM as the force provider and, you know, AFRICOM and the services as providers of services, it's not as easy to get anything done as one might think. So even on pulling forces out, it was often difficult if the force provider had a mission that was lucrative for their career development or for whatever reason.

So optimization, oddly enough, provided an opportunity to close out a couple of those missions and to reduce some force structure in places where it would hurt the least. And then we ended up really drawing down heavily around Lake Chad, which was consistent with what we needed to do at the time because the Nigerians were not being cooperative partners at that point. So pulling out of that relationship, I think consistent with Ellie's notion of conditionality, made sense at the time. And I don't think we would have been able to do it absent the enforcing function of optimization because the force provider was not going to want to leave the mission

that they were trying to pursue. Well, should we increase or decrease our presence in Africa or maintain what we have now to achieve those objectives? Well, I was never a fan of decreasing our presence in Africa or maintain what we have now to achieve those objectives? Well, I was never a fan of decreasing our presence in Africa. I thought that was ill-conceived because, as I mentioned earlier, that you were never going to get enough resources out of Africa to make a difference, you know, in resetting the force for some global competition that's ultimately statecraft anyway. know, resetting the force for some global competition that's ultimately statecraft anyway.

And I think the return on investment for small unit deployments to Africa, and I don't mean theater security cooperation events, because as Ellie points out, training, you know, building capacity to increase your scorecard is having built capacity doesn't do anything meaningful. But meaningful, well thoughtout, pointed missions across Africa can have an outsized impact by allowing the small units to provide their own security. You look at places like Niger and Burkina Faso now that are at great risk of what's happened to Mali. We have an opportunity to help stabilize Africa, which I think would be an unambiguous good for the world, and also to maintain and develop relationships, which in the future may pay off great. So I think it would be a fool's errand to depart Africa at this point.

In fact, I would consider targeted investments as part of a coherent strategy to build partners where it makes sense. And I think to Ellie's point with conditionality baked into that equation. So I'm so glad you came back to this because we spoke earlier about containment. Containment is a really big deal, right? So preventing some country from going bad like Mali is, yes, is unambiguously good for Africa and good for American interests, right? Because we know that international terrorism can spill over. So I guess the question to you, Mark, is which arguments have traction when you argue for resources? That depends who you're arguing with, right? This administration is pretty set on short-term economic return on investment, which I think is a very poor model when you look at Africa.

There has been a lot of discussion about what economic activities do we have in Africa. And what I found to be fairly consistent is there is a lot of potential economic activity that is not occurring because of the poor security and poor infrastructure situation. So, you know, if we took a enlightened self-interest long-term view of this, I think it would make sense to invest in Africa, you know, frankly, not unlike the Chinese are, to help them develop the markets that we would need to have the economic activity that we see. That was my next question. So do you see the Chinese taking a longer view? Is that explicitly the strategy? Oh, absolutely. To build infrastructure in order to create a market that we're going to trade with. While their execution may be wanting,

they're doing a very good job of taking a long-term view of securing partnerships and relationships that will benefit them in the future. Primarily now they're in the extractive business of getting rare earth metals and other things out of Africa, but everybody's going to want the market that Africa will provide in the future. I wanted to ask both of you, we're talking about sending investments to Africa, which is kind of a peripheral concern, I think, in modern national security. Do you think that the American public is willing to tolerate the risks when they bubble up of investing greater in Africa versus the rewards we get? Kyle, that's a great question. I'm glad you brought it up. You know, we had a tragic loss

of life of four soldiers in Niger that was very poorly handled politically, in part because the American people were not fully informed and invested in what they were doing there. And you juxtapose that with the loss in Somalia, which really caused not even a ripple in the political fabric, because both Congress and the American people are generally aware of what we're doing in Somalia. I think it kind of helps answer that question for me, is that the American people need to be informed and have to have buy-in to what we're doing. I think the story to tell about what's happening in the Sahel and why we're in Niger and why we should be in Burkina Faso more than we are is a very easy and compelling narrative. It's just not being told. So that's a great question. I'm really glad Mark went first.

I agree with all that. I might say it a little differently. I'd say that if this is presented the way that Jim Mattis would present it to the American people, there would be a lot of understanding. If it's presented as the old story about, oh, we're the artified terrorists who might come, who might show up in Florida, then it's not going to land. Can you elaborate on that difference? What does that particular communication strategy look like? Exactly. So if one were to say, listen, we're engaged in a great power rivalry, that's going to be the story of the world for the next generation. Those of us who are old enough and just remember the Cold War, well, this is something like that, but it's a rivalry. The Chinese are in Africa. They've got their values and they're clear about

what they're going to do there. We should be there too. We should be expanding the influence of our values and our markets by pursuing alliances with people who share values, including humanitarian values. Suppressing violent jihad is one of those, but it's not the only one. We believe in open markets. We believe in democracy. We believe in human rights. We would like those things to spread to parts of the world where there's just not enough of that already. And it's going to be good for us because we, the American economy, thrive in that environment. The more trade, the better. That was kind of the story that we were telling during the Cold War, because the

Soviets were telling the opposite. But I think we'd want to go back to defining what the national interest is in Africa along those lines. We're pursuing alliances with people that share our values. And at the same time, we're pursuing markets for our economy. And that's a long-term strategy. And I think if it were explained in those terms, which is really what the NDS says, at least to an economist, that would land well. But neither of the major political parties is doing that right now. So I'm going to stop the conversation here, but I want to thank both of you for joining us today. This has been a great conversation on irregular warfare. Thank you, Kyle and Shauna, for delivering so many years to us. It's really a pleasure.

Thanks, Kyle. Thanks, Shauna. And Ellie, really appreciate the discussion. It's great to be here. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to Episode 6 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Dr. Ellie Berman will join us again to continue the conversation on proxy warfare, this time focused on the Middle East. Our second guest for the episode will be Ambassador Ryan Crocker. After that, Nick and I will have a conversation with August Cole and Peter Singer, authors of the books Ghost Fleet and Burn In, about the future of irregular warfare.

Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and don't represent those of West Point, the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again for listening, and we will see you next time.