Irregular Warfare Podcast - Russia, China, and Iran: The Face of Competition in the Middle East

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Russia, China, and Iran have all been learning how to conduct irregular warfare from the United States, modeling their approaches to IW on observations of recent US interventions in the world. This episode examines strategic competition with these three states—specifically how it plays out in the Middle East. Our guests, Dr. Seth Jones and Rear Admiral Mitch Bradley, discuss how all three of these US competitors have used irregular warfare to achieve a position of geopolitical advantage over the United States. They go on to propose a solution, one that employs irregular warfare as part of an integrated strategy of deterrence and that requires the United States to look beyond platforms and invest in education, talent management, and human capital. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

You have to be prepared for the full range of contingencies. You need conventional and nuclear capabilities to be prepared. You also need them to deter. But the reality is, and we learned this during the Cold War, that if you're actually successful at deterring adversaries from fighting you using conventional or nuclear weapons, it's not going to stop them from trying to expand power or influence. They're just going to use different methods. If this competition below the threshold, this irregular deterrence is about sustaining our alliance structure, then we need to take into account what those alliance and partners are most worried about.

And in many cases, particularly in the Middle East and in the AFRICOM AOR, there are insurgencies that are principal threats to the stability in that region. And so in that case, counterterrorism is a very important competitive activity. Welcome to episode 47 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. My name is Kyle Atwell and I am your host today along with Andy Milburn. Today's episode examines U.S. strategic competition with Iran, China, and Russia, with specific focus on competition in the Middle East. Our guests discuss how these nations have used irregular warfare to achieve a position of geopolitical advantage of the United States.

They go on to discuss a proposed solution, one that requires the United States to employ irregular warfare as part of an integrated strategy of deterrence. In order to do this successfully, the United States will have to look beyond platforms and invest in education, talent management, and human capital. Dr. Seth Jones is Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He also teaches at John Hopkins University and at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He is the author of multiple books to include Three Dangerous Men, Russia, Iran, China, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare, which serves as the basis for today's conversation. Rear Admiral Mitch Bradley is currently commander of U.S. Special Operations Command Central.

He began his career as a SEAL in 1992 and has commanded at all levels of special operations, to include leading the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy and holds a master's degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School. 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 Seth and Mitch.

Admiral Mitch Bradley and Dr. Seth Jones, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. We're excited to have you both today, and we appreciate you taking the time to join us for this conversation. Kyle, Mitch here. Glad to be here. Kyle, this is Seth. Great to be on. Thanks for having us.

Today, we're going to talk about how U.S. competitors, including Iran, Russia, and China, are operating in the Central Command area of responsibility, which largely comprises the Middle East, and what the U.S. approach is to counter these challenges. Seth, you wrote a book called Three Dangerous Men, Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare. It's not a book exclusively about the Middle East, but it arguably is relevant to the challenges the U.S. and its partners are facing in the region. What motivated you to write this book? And for both of you, why is this topic relevant for national security professionals today? Well, Kyle, what motivated me to write the book was primarily a recognition that the

U.S.'s main adversaries, Chinese who do operate in the Middle East, the Russians who are increasingly operating in the Middle East, and the Iranians who were based in the Middle East, are not just building conventional or nuclear capabilities. They continue to operate in the irregular space, operating, for example, using partners and proxies, information and disinformation campaigns, covert action, including by their intelligence services, and even with the Chinese economic coercion. Yet, at the same time, a lot of our focus in the military is on kind of the high-end warfare, conventional warfare. And so, part of it was to really ask a question about how do these countries view competition with the United States? How do they view it? And how does some of their senior leaders view competition with us. So that was really the motivation is to better understand the picture from their side of the hill. I'll speak from a SoxScent perspective, of course. I'll be somewhat parochial in my view,

you might excuse me for that, from thinking about the Middle East. To say that the Middle East is the ground of competition where the most of that is occurring. It's the crossroads of world trade. It's where most of the world draws most of its energy resources. And importantly, our principal trading partner, Europe, draws about a third of its energy resources from there. It draws about a third from Russia. Russia competes with the Middle East for the energy market. And it's even more

important to China, who draws some regards up to 60% their energy resources from here. And so while we still maintain an asymmetry in military capability, conventional and strategic, China and Russia have been able to make advances in their national interests below the threshold of that conventional and strategic military asymmetry through this competition. And the Middle East is a very important venue for that competition. Seth, you described that competition in your book, and perhaps we should begin with, if you wouldn't mind, just a description of who the three dangerous men are, and what are the key characteristics of irregular warfare as waged by these three dangerous men as we see them playing out in the Middle East AOR? Yeah, so I looked at three influential individuals. Obviously, one could pick a whole range of them

within each of the countries, China, Russia, and Iran. I picked three individuals who sit in or have sat in senior military positions, but also have a role in thinking strategically about what competition looks like intellectually. And so designing strategies. So from the Iranian side, it's really the Quds Force that has been an influential actor in the irregular space. And that was before his death was Qasem Soleimani, and then Ismail Hani, his successor afterwards. So really looking at the Quds Force. On the Russian side, it's primarily focused on Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the army staff. What I found interesting actually is to go back and read the Russian texts, including the Russian theoretical texts that were very influential

to Gerasimov, as well as to examine his assessments of U.S. operations in the Balkans in the 1990s, Gerasimov's evaluations of U.S. actions in Afghanistan in 2001, 2003 in Iraq, 2011 in Libya. He was and still is a student of the U.S. and its operations. And so it made kind of a really interesting assessment of how Gerasimov views on irregular warfare in competition with the U.S. evolved. And then finally, Zhang Yuzhou, who is the vice chairman of China's most significant military body, the CMC, is one of the only senior PLA officers with any kind of combat experience. PLA is woefully deficient in combat experience. This actually goes back to Zhang's role in the Sino-Vietnamese wars, but he has been instrumental in thinking

about PLA activities from Belt and Road Initiative to readiness to irregular activities in the South China Sea to Taiwan. And I think what's important in looking at all of those actors, and this gets us to the arena of irregular warfare, is to understand that how they view irregular warfare is a little bit different and the terms are a little bit different. So while we often from the U.S. side think of irregular warfare to include components like information, disinformation campaigns, psychological warfare, even public diplomacy on the State Department side, support to state and non-state partners, various aspects of covert action, economic coercion, that these countries have their own terms. So the Russians use active measures or maskarovka, denial and deception.

The Iranians use terms like zhong yi narm, soft war. The Chinese use terms like san zhong zhanfa, or the three warfares to describe various aspects of irregular competition. So I think that's kind of what came out of my interest in looking at these three individuals is also how they and their countries view irregular warfare and competition and what are the terms that they use to describe it. An interesting point that you brought up. It seems like you said the question you wanted to look at is how Iran, Russia, and China view competition. And you just noted that Gerasimov, who's a Russian military leader, learned from the United States.

It seemed like this was a theme from across the book that Russia and other countries may have observed what the United States was doing in the world in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and seeing that as kind of a blueprint to move forward. I think it's exactly what I came out with as a major takeaway that they studied the U.S. quite closely. I mean, the Chinese active in the Middle East, including in Djibouti, their largest newspaper is a translation of U.S. and other Western press into Mandarin. They have spent significant time translating large amounts of U.S. documents. A lot of their senior leadership speaks English. So understanding

how they view the United States is a critical part of it. And it goes back to what George Kennan, one of the State Department quintessential Cold Warriors from the early part of the Cold War, said, which is he encouraged the U.S. to study the Soviet Union, quote, with the same courage, detachment, objectivity, and determination with which a doctor studies an unruly and unreasonable individual. And I think that's what I noted about how much time and effort they spent studying us. It was quite impressive. For Admiral Bradley, following up on what Seth was just talking about, how do you see this play out specifically in the Middle East as far as headquarters priorities? You know, we've got the counter-Iranian threat network

piece, which was always up there as being a priority. But as you mentioned, and Seth has mentioned, Russia has steadily gained influence in the Middle East and China too, though perhaps a ladder below the radar. How are you approaching this in order of priority? CENTCOM's number one priority is based upon threat, and really from the military dimension, violent threat to our national interests, and that's Iran. Iran in the central region is the most violent and aggressive actor counter to our interests, but fully recognize that China's more insidious actions are a longer-term threat as well, and one that has to be counted in

Doc Jones' book on the way that all these other actors see it. And the notion of irregular warfare, I think, figures prominently there. And then I'd characterize Russia as the opportunist, looking for ways to be able to play a bad hand better than they have, but largely without the resources to really be a significant contributor in the Middle East. Interestingly, though, Doc, I was reading the book and just reflecting on your comments. All three of these individuals, particularly though, Garysimov and from China, learned an awful lot about watching our actions in the world.

But I think in some cases, as you cited, they took lessons from things that we didn't contrive or didn't have any design in. They were just the natural flow of evolution of societies trying to attend to their own needs. And it brought me back to remember a quote from Ambassador Huntsman talking about his observations, the difference between Russia and China and the way they interacted and who was really a great power or not, where he said that the thing that America needs to do most importantly to win this competition is play our A game. Everybody wants to come to America and not Russia, go to school in America, not in Russia, and be an American and have our right because of our ideals and because of the way we comport ourselves. So I find it interesting that

they may well be building in vulnerabilities in their approach to competition and irregular warfare by misattributing to us and our design some things that happen in the flow of societies. I think that's exactly right. We see it with Russian assessments, for example, of the color revolutions, as well as the Arab Spring more broadly. If we take the color revolutions, those were examples of countries, including Ukraine, for that matter, that decided, the Ukrainian population deciding that it was in the country's interest to look westward rather than eastward towards a capitalist Europe and U.S., towards a free and prosperous democratic states, towards open systems where individuals could speak freely

and where ideas were kind of open. They weren't run by state-controlled media. run by state-controlled media. And so I think what occurs is that there is a misunderstanding of how populations in many areas of the world actually want what the United States and its allies and partners, democratic allies and partners, have, which is capitalist, democratic, open societies. And so when they see countries like Ukraine that have moved in that direction, they think intelligence or military manipulation of those societies, when all this is, this is to a great extent, a battle of ideas about ideologies. And this is about populations that are choosing, would rather go in one direction than the other. And so this is why you interestingly see Gerasimov arguing in part that the Arab Spring and the

color revolutions were examples of U.S. irregular warfare. It's a complete misdiagnosis of what is really populations that just wanted more freedom and open societies. So he's essentially saying that the United States funded these rebellions and they weren't really the will of the people toward the West. It was actually like a U.S. intervention that caused that to happen. Yes. And that in part, a major reason, if you read even the translated now, some of the key Russian historical textbooks for how the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. They argue that this was about U.S. irregular activity in Eastern Europe that caused these populations to become pro-Western. Now, the reality is there's a little bit of truth in there. I mean, there was a covert

action program that CIA ran, which provided assistance to solidarity, but the vast majority of the populations simply just wanted democracy and an open capitalist system. So at the end of the day, that was their choice. Yeah, and I think that that vulnerability, that observation and reality, I think is the underpinning of the prescription, which if you think about their actions, and I think the Chinese referred to it as an active defense. I've seen it referred to in several places, and we call it a counter predation campaign, that the Chinese and the Russians in particular are really trying to prey upon our alliance structure and cleave those members off.

And in the Middle East, we have a number of vulnerable partners and allies who are in some cases more prone to autocracy than not, who could be cleaved off of that partnership. But in many cases, in most cases, the peoples of those countries are inclined to want exactly what all people want, which ensconced in our constitution, our founding documents, and I applaud your use and citation of those up front to kind of define the differences, you know, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And so in most cases, all we have to do is illuminate that predatory activity for what it is. And you can do that honestly, and without a lot of deception,

and achieve the effect you want. On that point, and Seth, I think it was in your book, you actually quote former Secretary Gates as saying much the same thing. We should make a concerted effort to penetrate the Chinese firewall and similar network systems in Russia and Iran and just tell the truth, basically, perhaps putting an oversimplistic spin to it. And yet we are arguably behind on that. For Admiral Bradley, I know the challenge is you've got to do things in the military spectrum and the grain zone, but at the same time, combine that with information operations and potentially cyber. How are you approaching that specifically in Soxhain? The phrase I just used, counterpredation, really gets to the essence of our approach.

It's a little bit different with Iran as the principal threat in the region because they're not necessarily trying to convince the populations that their way of life is better. They're trying to create and take a larger piece of the pie and sheify as much of the Middle East as possible and increase their role there. And so for them, it is much more of a, we're helping to build resilience and in an active defense mechanism, a way or approach, try to help our partners and allies in the region defend themselves against the violent outreaches and exportations of the Iranians. And so in that regard, it falls pretty cleanly back into military kind of lanes of theater security cooperation, but a slightly different take on it than you might've thought about it in the past, where previously we would build partner capacity of a military, of a partner's military, to help them with the in-state simply to become a better,

more professional military. Well, that's certainly an outcome of what we hope to achieve, but we're much more tailored and specific about the way we work with our partners now, looking at the specific threats that we know that are coming from the Iranian threat network and helping our partners in the pieces of that security apparatus that have jurisdiction where they're most vulnerable, that would be in a place to act against that Iranian threat network, to help them develop the skills that we've identified or capabilities we've identified are gapped and that are vulnerable to Iranian threat network attack, and then maintain the relationships with those actors so that if through our intel apparatus we come across a threat, we have the

relationship to get it to them quickly and then they can act against it to protect themselves. What are some specific examples of what the Iranians, Chinese, or Russians are doing that are the challenges that we're facing today? I think you've hinted at some of it, but can you just give us some examples to frame what this looks like in implementation phase? Yeah, let me start by providing some examples from several of these countries. If we take the Russians, I think it's been interesting to watch Russian operations since they started direct involvement in Syria in 2015. The Russians began in the fall of 2015 with some operations from the air and from maritime assets, caliber cruise

missile strikes. But the maneuver element on the ground included, interestingly, some Syrian units, but also Lebanese Hezbollah, which played an important role in ground operations, including in cities like Aleppo, and militia forces from Iraq, including some within the Hashar al-Shabi, some Afghan militia forces that had been recruited, Palestinians and others. And so, you know, the Russians use a range of these both conventional but also irregular forces to retake territory for the Syrian regime. In addition, we've seen in the CENTCOM AOR, as well as other AORs, including AFRICOM, a significant increase over the last couple of years in the use of Russian private military companies that have operated with the main intelligence director, GRU,

or SBR in some cases, and have conducted offensive operations, have conducted train, advise, and assist missions, have conducted some intelligence collection. When we look at countries like the Chinese in the Middle East, it's been interesting to watch how the Chinese have used economic activity, including as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, both the Maritime Silk Road as well as the economic belts. So that's providing of infrastructure to countries and then using that investment as political leverage on issues that matter a great deal to China. So Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs. So part of this may be taking positions either at the UN Security Council or the UN more broadly, or even within their own governments that are supportive of major issues that China is dealing

with. So the use of economic investments for political leverage is a useful example. In addition, the Iranians, this is their general modus operandi when we see that the Iranian, particularly the Quds Force, support to Lebanese Hezbollah in Lebanon, a range of the militias in Syria, a range of the various militias in Iraq, including ones that have targeted U.S. forces. And then, you know, even more recently, just the heavy focus of the Houthis using land attack cruise missiles, Delta wing UAVs targeting Saudi critical infrastructure, civilian targets, and then obviously more recently, even civilian targets in cities like Abu Dhabi. Again, this is not the Iranians directly. This is operating in part through the Houthis, all examples,

Chinese, Russian, Iranian, of operating using irregular means. I'll take it and talk about the nexus of two of those together that I think is an important aspect to note that the Iranian-Chinese strategic relationship just recently penned and beginning is certainly one to be concerned about. China, of course, is engaged economically because of their energy needs and demands in the region and sees Iran not only as a source of energy, but as a hedge against our alliance and partnerships with the Saudis, another significant contributor. But also they see Iran as a way to wedge against us in the region to be able to distract us and keep us from focus on the Western Pacific.

And so, you know, their sourcing of now by last year's count, several billions of dollars of revenue to Iran through illegal oil smuggling allows the Iranian threat network to fuel exactly the kinds of things that Dr. Jones was talking about. So that's interesting. You're saying that the Chinese are trying to essentially create dilemmas in the Middle East to distract the United States and keep it tied down there. You have to consider that an irregular approach to competition with the United States would be foolish not to try to use that relationship against us. And in fact, we know that the Quds Force derive a significant amount of their budget from illicit oil smuggling that goes on to the Chinese, to the other Asian nations, and of course to Syrians. and of course to Syrians. And they use it to do things like Dr. Jones is talking about,

some 400 different ballistic missile launches since 2015 against mainly the Saudis, but now as well the Emiratis. The drone attacks, nearly a thousand of those over that same time frame, and over a hundred unmanned surface vessel kamikaze boats essentially coming up the western coast there in the Red Sea. A significant threat to the region and destabilizing. If I could just add one comment along those lines, which I think highlights what has been a central debate in the U.S.'s focus. I mean, there is a clear focus in the U.S. on actors like China as a growing power. And I think there has been, I would argue, a kind of a mistaken view that the primary region then the United States should focus on is the Indo-Pacific. I think what this discussion really highlights is how this competition is actually global in nature, and that it is not just happening in the Indo-Pacific, because what we've just highlighted is significant activity from the Iranians and the Chinese and the Russians in the Middle East,

in the CENTCOM AOR. And even with Admiral Bradley's recent example, the cooperation from several of these governments together, he illustrated China and Iran. We could have also highlighted the Russians and the Iranians in Syria, who worked actually at the operational and tactical level together to prosecute that campaign against Syrian rebels, with Qasem Soleimani running a joint operations center and the Russians dropping bombs from fixed-wing aircraft. So we have seen a range of these actors in places like the Middle East, which to me really emphasizes that what we are dealing with is a global problem, not one that is just an Indo-Pacific one or a UCOM one, but where the CENTCOM AOR is also a critical area where this competition is daily occurring. where this confrontation is daily occurring.

Seth, I'd like to follow up on that actually with Admiral Bradley, but then come back to you and get your thoughts, because you've both kind of summed up the Middle East in a sense of it is, in a sense, a testing ground for great power competition, in addition to the threat that Admiral Bradley highlighted from the Iranian threat network. But I want to talk specifically about a threat that you both touched on, which is this combination of ballistic missiles and drones. It seems as though we might be on a trajectory.

This is really a question. I mean, we saw the attacks in the Aramco oil facilities a couple of years ago, which, you know, they kind of cut through the Patriot defense. The Saudis had no short-range air defense. And then we see kind of the same thing playing out in UAE, which is troubling, including potentially an attack on an Al Dhafra airbase foiled at the time. But perhaps the most salient lesson there is that, you know, a number of drones did get through and we're seeing our adversaries on an upward trajectory here. So this seems to be an acute problem. For Admiral Bradley, how are you addressing this both militarily and perhaps as recommendations to higher headquarters for policy level decisions? So clearly our arsenal for integrated air and missile defense was designed classically for the large threat actors, the Russians, the Chinese and the like. And so the advent of weaponized drones, though far less destructive than a nuclear missile would be, a ballistic missile, fall below the engagement envelope of most of our classic weapons systems. And so there's

a bit of an arms race going on to be able to figure out how to both adapt existing systems that we have in place to be able to treat these lower, slower, and more difficult to see weapons. But I can say with some confidence that the experimental ground of Iraq is showing American innovation to be up to the task. They're still a threat. And as you see, we have not been able to export that completely. And as any arms race goes, our adversaries are working innovations on top of innovations at a pace close to ours as well. And it doesn't take a lot of money. The shot doctrine that you have to employ to fly an F-16 and shoot an air-to-air missile to shoot down a

$100,000 drone doesn't add up over time. And though we all have deep pockets and some of our partners very deep wells to continue to replenish those pockets, societies will grow intolerant of that. It becomes difficult. So there is a lot of R&D happening across the United States military and out in business world to find ways to treat those problems in a more cost-effective manner. And in the meantime, while we're doing that, we go back to the illumination. You know, the Houthis aren't known for having a very strong R&D department or universities where they develop these things. So it's very clear that the Iranians are supplying them with the critical capability to

make these things happen. And they don't have standard supply lines to be able to do that. It operates mainly across the smuggling lanes and smuggling is endemic in this region. And so trying to pick out the needle in the haystack of all the smuggling DAOs and other mechanisms that go on out there is difficult. But this is a way that we've been partnering with our local, the Emiratis, the Saudis clearly, and the Yemenis from the Yemeni government to help them vector in on the smuggling activity to help find and interdict it. And there's been some good work done recently by the alliance through the combined maritime forces under Vice Admiral Cooper and NavSent to interdict and confiscate a number of these advanced conventional weapons shipments. And we believe that whenever that happens,

we should illuminate that and highlight the nefarious hand of the Iranians or whomever is involved in it because it's counter to stabilization in the region. What's interesting is, and this is why the irregular approach that the Iranians have adopted, it's an interesting one. It's also a cost-efficient one because the cost for the Iranians of some of these UAVs is relatively cheap. And in a few cases, we've seen the Saudis use Patriot missile batteries in response, which is not an ideal use of Patriots for UAVs. I mean, the cost disparity is staggering. You know, there have been the introduction, thanks to some on the commercial side of better counter UAV technology,

the Coyote UAVs that have been used to counter some of the Iranian-backed Houthi UAVs, some looks at phaser high-powered microwave systems that can be used against UAVs or high-energy laser systems to counter standoff weapons more broadly. But I think we have seen a proliferation from both state actors operating in the irregular field and non-state actors using relatively cheap, commercially available UAVs and other cheap standoff weapons to conduct some intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and potentially some strike. In some cases, more sophisticated attacks from missiles. In some cases, basically either using the drone itself to strike targets laden with explosives or dropping even crude explosives on targets. It's a whole different

world from where we were just a few years ago that's going to require capabilities that aren't at the Patriot missile level. Those are just too expensive against these kinds of cheap weapons. So, I mean, I think in that sense, it's going to require us to continue to work the technology along these lines. But I mean, there's been even progress over the past couple of weeks in the shoot down of a number of standoff weapons coming at both Saudi Arabia and at the United Arab Emirates. Yeah, one of the arguments in your book is that when we talk about capabilities, there needs to be a balance between preparing for conventional war or high-end war, as I think you called it before, and irregular

strategies. But some have argued, I think even in our last episode, the argument was made that if you prepare for the most dangerous scenario, then you should be prepared for all scenarios because they're going to go down the scale. What Admiral Bradley's comments made me think is that just with the missile capabilities, that our high-end capabilities are not the right answer. They can't even defend against some of these low-end. So you can't just say if you prepare for the most dangerous with the most high-end investments, you're ready for any kind of contingency. It sounds like, if I understood correctly, that's not always the case. Yeah, I'll jump in. I'll say that I think you're right, but I'd take it a step further than just the equipment modernization. So it's true that we need to develop measures to defend against

this arms race of capability that is potentially below the historic conventional military approach. I also think, though, that even more irregular approaches are required. So yes, we need to be prepared to fight and win our nation's wars. It's the singular thing that the United States military does in a large military conventional conflict. But we also have to be prepared to work below that threshold. And you might think about it as a new way of thinking about deterrence. And in fact, the National Defense Strategy and other key documents being crafted, and you've heard the SECDEF talk about integrated deterrence. The notion there is that there's something else beyond strategic deterrence and conventional deterrence. And you might call that irregular warfare. You might call it irregular deterrence. You might call it work within the gray zone. All of those would

be correct, I think. And they really get to the point of being able to find ways to either, using the same deterrence theory, deny benefit of our actors from trying to do these things through these irregular means or exact punishment against them for when they do that, and to do it below the threshold that brings us to a major theater of war. So those are the kinds of things, when you talk about modernization, that I believe all of our services need to be thinking about. Irregular warfare in particular is not just a soft activity. It is an activity, and if you go back to the example just previous about NavSense work in the Gulf of Oman and Gulf of Aden to be able to interdict smuggling,

that is an inherently partnered, allied, interagency, and soft naval activity. Those are the kinds of things that I think we need to modernize as well, using regular means in irregular ways. Yeah, just to build on what Admiral Bradley said, I think what was interesting in one of my conversations on the record with Secretary Gates, who said, look, I mean, you have to be prepared for the full range of contingencies, who said, look, I mean, you have to be prepared for the full range of contingencies. And you need conventional and nuclear capabilities to be prepared. You also need them to deter.

But the reality is, and we learned this during the Cold War, that if you're actually successful at deterring adversaries from fighting you using conventional or nuclear weapons, it's not going to stop them from trying to expand power or influence. They're just going to use different methods. So the introduction of nuclear weapons in both Pakistan and India did not stop those countries from competing with each other. They just moved to organizations like Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and India's RAW, its intelligence organization. So competition became largely irregular using partners. These kinds of capabilities are interlinked in the sense that if the U.S. continues to be successful at building conventional capabilities as well, and it successfully deters

its enemies from using those conventional or nuclear capabilities against us, then they will, as we've seen them do, resort to irregular capabilities against us. And to speak frankly, you know, the U.S. has struggled. I mean, I lived this personally. Afghanistan was definitely a struggle against a pretty poorly armed Taliban regime that fought a guerrilla war against the U.S. and the Afghan government. It was an irregular war, an insurgency against both the U.S. and the Afghan government and those NATO forces. So I think, you know, in general, there needs to be a building of all of these capabilities. But I think as the Cold War showed us by the 1970s and 1980s, that competition, when it was clear that the costs of conventional or nuclear war were just

too high for Moscow and Washington, where did that Cold War go? It was fought through irregular means in Latin America, you know, Salvador, Guatemala, it was fought in Asia, it was fought in Africa. That's the way that Cold War competition, that speaks to where competition is likely to go if conventional and nuclear deterrence hold again in this new era. I might even add on that and say, I think we've got to be very careful that we don't get caught in an elaborate ruse, a deception campaign, potentially and probably principally by the Chinese, where we are drawn to match in a conventional deterrence escalation. All the while, the Chinese are working below that

threshold to, as Sun Tzu said, win without fighting, and to turn the tables on us below that so that as our alliance is picked apart and pulled to their side through the coercive and predatory economic and other diplomatic practices. And in every case, I think the vulnerability that they provide us goes back to the observation that Grishamoff wrongly made. They believe that their approach will win and will have the support of the people. And in fact, it won't if it's known to be what it is. And so there is a significant bit of that illumination and of transmission of that amplification that we need to do. I'd like to follow up with both of you on that. Admiral Bradley, if I'm hearing you correctly,

you commented earlier, you know, basically we're're doing deterrence by denial, as well as deterrence by threat of punishment, right, but that we need to shift the scope of what we're doing more into the irregular warfare realm. I'm really looking for kind of here examples, both for actions, and then following up in the information environment, Seth, you comment, and you both did, you know, attribution. Attribution is one of our biggest weapons, but we're not always good at using that. So from my point of view, and both, I'd like to hear what your thoughts are going ahead, how to really integrate this, make a deterrence. Yeah, let me take a stab at a couple of options here. Under the ideas of denial of benefit deterrence by denial of benefit in a regular approach, you might think of cognitive denial.

Cognitive denial is that notion of illumination of predatory activity. The number of deals that China has tried to culminate with countries that were then set aside because of a timely ambassador's demarche to explain the backdoor dealings of the state-owned enterprise to that country and the debt trap that they were about to be led into, and without talking about specifics, is, I think, worthy of note. And in many cases, these countries come to their own conclusions about what's good for their interests. In some cases, particularly those that are tempted towards autocratic tendencies anyway, illuminating the nature of that deal and who are the true beneficiaries to the public can be a very powerful tool. That is a denial, a cognitive denial, a denial of benefit by illumination and by affecting the cognitive space.

I think you could also think about building the resilience of the populations and the nations that are being targeted by this way as a denial of benefit. In many ways, the results on 10 October in Iraq are a great example of that. The election showed through that the Iraqi people were not interested in what the Iranian-aligned militias and the Iranian influence inside Iraq was trying to drive towards. In a lot of ways, that was brought about by both Iraqi influence and messaging to get the information out, but our advice and assistance to the Iraqi enterprise, the security apparatus, to help them tell the story about what the Iranian aligned militia groups are doing. There's a financial denial mechanism that you could think

of as counter-threat finance. The Iranian smuggling oil to sell to whomever will take it is a clear violation of UN sanction. And there's plenty of opportunity to be able to demarche to identify that, demarche the nations or the countries who are flagging the vessels that are involved to deny them the ability to generate that revenue. And so that's a means that I think we should continue to drive at and the interagency, it's inherently an interagency process, of course. Then finally, I'd go to the physical support to resistance. And that really goes back to the things that I talked about earlier on in the threat in the theater security cooperation, where you take the general practice

of building partner capacity, but you orient it and tailor it specifically to the threats that you know that the greatest actors are perpetrating. So just to provide a few other examples of deterrence by punishment as well as deterrence by denial, and to link that with our focus on irregular warfare. If we think about some of the concerns over the last decade of a Russian conventional invasion of the Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, there certainly is an important component of both conventional and nuclear capabilities. There is a nuclear deterrent as NATO members and with Article 5 that the U.S. is committed to protect those countries. There is an implicit threat from the use of nuclear weapons. There are also conventional

capabilities that can be deployed to any of those or all of those three Baltic states, including U.S. Army forces that can be deployed. But in addition, where the irregular component is to provide training, advice, and assistance to both elements of those militaries in the case of an invasion to actually conduct resistance, but also to those populations that can help. So that includes things like command and control networks, communications, pre-positioned storage depots, control networks, communications, pre-positioned storage depots, training to conduct guerrilla operations. And so there may be an element of deterrence by denial in building those capabilities, which will make it difficult for the Russians to advance. But even if they were in any of those war games, there is a potential for deterrence by punishment, which just becomes

too costly to try to not just take but hold territory if you're facing a well-armed guerrilla resistance that has javelins that it can strike your tanks, or it's got stingers that can shoot down aircraft, including helicopters. Then it's just the cost, the costs of holding territory in the Baltics, just to use this example, become too high. So there's a deterrence then by punishment. And actually, the more interesting recent case, too, is are there steps, particularly for deterrence by punishment, that one could take, say, in the Ukraine area by providing assistance that would make it difficult for the Russians to hold territory. That would be an irregular

component to what would be a major war, is providing assistance that would allow a country or resistance elements to fight an adversary. And I think in that sense, we can see how if there is a decision not to go in, that there is a deterrence by punishment component because it just becomes too costly to do that. Let me also just throw in that one of the inherent vulnerabilities in these actors' approach and their misreading of their approach to try to make the world safe for autocracy, is that they eventually end up engaging in illegal activity that the society writ large finds anathema. And so take the Lebanese Hezbollah, for instance. They generate a significant amount of revenue from smuggling drugs and moving drugs from the tri-border region in South America up through the Middle East and into Europe, a captagon that's produced inside Syria down and through the Middle East and into Europe, a captagon that's produced inside Syria,

down and through the Middle East. And in all those instances, they generated an amount of revenue that they used for other nefarious purposes. But all of the local security elements in the country surrounding them and in Lebanon proper are actively working against them. And so just like terrorists, everybody hates drug smugglers, and there's plenty of work that you can do to help punish them for that by arresting them, putting them in jail, and then highlighting that to show them to be the bad actors that they are. Admiral Bradley, you've mentioned that irregular warfare is not just a special operations activity. It requires a lot of tasks like illumination, counterpredation, building resilience among populations. illumination, counter predation, building resilience among populations. What are the skill sets and capabilities needed to implement integrated deterrence in the CENTCOM area of responsibility given the character of these threats? I think there is a skill set that is

important here that's important everywhere. And Dr. Jones cites in his book, it's education, it's awareness of the society in which both your adversary and you are competing for influence with. If you don't understand the language of the people that you're dealing with, you don't understand their culture, then you're going to have a really hard time appreciating how a particular action plays out in that culture or doesn't play. And so inside SOCOM, we talk about forced modernization. The most important thing that we can modernize in our force is our human capital. And so we believe one of the number one soft truth is that people are more important than machinery.

And if you're going to modernize your most important capital, then that's education. You can train for different scenarios and different things that you might encounter, but you need to educate for the uncertainties of the future. And you need to educate to develop a bias for understanding that allows you to appreciate the nature and the unintended and second order effects of the actions that you'll take. So I believe that the first thing that each of our services needs to do is go to school on China. We need to sponsor more PhDs in Chinese anthropology than we are in maybe defense analysis, or at least maybe a small number more. I don't want to get in trouble with my big service colleagues who rightfully have to spend 700 and something

billion dollars a year in good faith with the American public. But we need to also understand the adversaries and the cultures that we're going against. And so that education and that development of an informed intuition about what our adversaries are thinking and doing, I think is the most important thing that we need to do with our force. In the broader arena of the joint force in our relations, I think it's about helping everybody to understand that there is this extra set of deterrent action between conventional and strategic. In the last NDS, there was much discussion in all of the academic and policy and uniform military circles about what did it really mean to compete below the threshold of armed conflict. And there seemed to be a lot of confusion about what the definition of competition

was. And so I think framing it in these more doctrinally and academically founded theories of deterrence potentially gives us a way to be able to converse between the conventional force structure and those that act irregularly, because it is a very significantly partnered activity when we do it right. You know, Kyle, just to build on Admiral Bradley, during the Cold War, the Long Telegram, which was one of the most influential U.S. government documents, was written by George Kennan, who we have discussed, Russian speaker, expert on the Soviet Union. Some of the most influential U.S. Cold War thinkers, including Kennan,

but also Charles Bolin, Richard Pipes, were true experts with a deep knowledge of Soviet politics, culture, history. They spoke the language. There was a significant focus on translating Soviet and Warsaw Pact documents into English and actually making them publicly available through the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, or FIBIS, which monitored, translated, disseminated massive amounts of information and made it easy for, even until people could really speak the language, could make it easy for people just to read in English, translated versions. And we just don't have any of that built yet. I'm confident

we'll do that. We don't have it yet. Our open source enterprise is actually shut down to the public at this point. That's the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. So there is that importance of translating large numbers of documents so that our soldiers, our sailors, our diplomats can read them. What's interesting is we started a major translation service in Mandarin at the Center for Strategic International Studies. They also highlight weaknesses, vulnerabilities, concerns, challenges that they have. It's not just propaganda. There's also some interesting debates within their military journals, within newspapers. And so I think part of it is really understanding the nuances of

their culture that make it important. There's the language component, which Admiral Bradley mentioned. There's the history, politics, cultural components that is an important part of education. But this gets us back to this real serious need to understand our adversaries, really understand how they think and act, why they act the way they do, why they think the way they do, what do they read, what are their sources of influence, so that we're not projecting our own values on them. And then so when it comes to understanding how they're likely to make moves in the future, that we have an appreciation for how they operate. And I think that just going back to at least my reading of Gerasimov and Jang and Qasem Soleimani and Ismail Hani. That is what has made some of the better adversary general officers. Interesting to look at is many of them have closely examined the United States

and have translated large amounts of English documents and have studied our military operation and have studied how we've conducted information operations. Not always accurately, but have studied it nonetheless. That's where I'm confident we'll go, but that's where we need to go a little more than we have. I might also take a moment to reinforce the notion that it's very important that we empathize with those who are being competed for, and we understand what it is that they think is important. I'll use an instance in my own personal history of thinking deeply and engaging in the Shabwa government of Yemen. And we found at one point in trying to protect Shabwa from becoming a safe haven from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was that the Shabwanis actually shared a number of common views and

objectives and values with us in the United States, except that when those values were attributed to the United States, they became almost caustic. And so you have to understand that the messenger is as important as the message. And that is very local. That is a very colloquial sort of approach that you have to understand and study. As Admiral Olson said, I think in one of the previous discussions, he talked about needing not only a Lawrence of Arabia, but a Lawrence of Africa and of Egypt. And I would say a Lawrence of Southern Arabia and all these other places where the Chinese and the Iranians and the Russians are trying to compete for our ultimate influence.

And back to Ambassador Huntsman, we've got to remember that playing our A game is our best strategy. We bring our values to the battlefield and to the negotiation table every time. But we have to appreciate what the person on the other side of that negotiation table values as well. That's education and it's understanding. Kyle, the wonderful thing about the United States and its values and principles is that even in the arena of information, we don't have to make things up. The Chinese, Russians, Iranians, to use those examples, have been involved in human rights

abuses, the arrest, torture, assassination of defectors. They've had problems with economic campaigns like China's Belt and Road Initiative, including debt trap diplomacy and the heavy use, including in the CENTCOM AOR, of Chinese labor that has angered locals. Corruption and cheating scandals, including at the Olympics. Economic problems, high unemployment, low growth rates, massive income disparity, economic coercion against foreign companies. We've seen it with U.S. ones. Attempts to control their own populations through China's Great Firewall or Iran's halal internet or Russia's Runnet or instances of intelligence collection overseas, including 5G from the African Union headquarters in Ethiopia, which the Chinese

had built, or the Confucius Institutes and the Thousand Talents programs. These are all issues that have brought to the surface, I think, increasingly brought to the surface, will actually show that all of our competitors are involved in activities that really aren't in the interest of local populations where they're operating. And again, we don't have to get involved in disinformation. This is just what we did during the Cold War with our Radio Free Europe, which is just highlighting what is going on in countries that suppress media to their local populations. That, I think, is a very important contribution that we can play. And frankly, it's one that is about truth, not of deception. Unfortunately, we're bumping up on time. We've covered some implications for policymakers and practitioners in this conversation. But for closing comments, do you have any other implications for policymakers or practitioners from the strategic all the way down to the tactical level that we should be considering moving forward? I think there are a number of policy implications

that are important in understanding the role of irregular warfare and irregular activities. And if we take, for example, even outside of the CENTCOM AOR, there is a focus on our operational plans or O-plans on war games to look at how U.S. adversaries are going to or may very well conduct conventional campaigns in and around the Taiwan Straits, in and around the Baltics, even in and around Ukraine. But I think the reality is that there is a growing need to also better prepare for irregular operations. So below the threshold of war, because the reality, even in looking at Russian and Iranian and even Chinese activity is most of their warfare has actually been below that threshold. So to what degree are we prepared for subversion and sabotage in Taiwan, Chinese irregular activity? How are we preparing Taiwan for resistance in case of a Chinese invasion that is not just about the use of F-35s or aircraft carriers, but is supporting Taiwan

in building an indigenous resistance capacity? There has been some of this activity, but I think this is a very important component that we're also wargaming, developing operational plans, and building the capabilities in the CENTCOM AOR in the Indo-Pacific, in Europe, and in Africa, and even in the SOUTH Com AOR is preparing and building partner capacity in countries for irregular, not just conventional and nuclear, because it's really easy for us to want to fight the wars where we're most comfortable, to go back to World War II, to fight the Battle of Midway again, Blue Water fight, the Chinese Navy in the Pacific, or to fight something that looks like the Fulda Gap in Germany

against the Soviet Union, but this time in the Baltics. That's what we're comfortable with. That's what many of the services would frankly prefer. But I think the reality is we've got to be prepared for the gray zone, the irregular competition as well. If this competition below the threshold, this irregular deterrence, is about sustaining our alliance structure, which we believe is our center of gravity, the source from which we as a military can force project, draw our strength, then we need to take into account what those alliance and partners are most worried about. And in many cases, particularly in the Middle East and in the

AFRICOM AOR, in the African continent in the Middle East, there are incipient, latent, or active insurgencies that are principal threats to the stability in that region. And so in that case, counterterrorism is a very important competitive activity, helping those nations and those societies to keep the threat of those insurgencies and those terrorist activities to below a threshold that they can be kept locally under police force is a very important activity. Understanding where that's true and where they need help, again, comes back to the education. And so finally, I'll close with the most important modernization we can do across all of the military is the modernization of our humans, of our human capital, and the education that we need to invest

in to make us able to understand the Chinese cyber threat from a Chinese perspective so that we can better play the game of jujitsu and turn their strength into a weakness. I have many, many more questions I could push on in this conversation, but unfortunately we're out of time. Admiral Mitch Bradley, Dr. Seth Jones, thank you for joining us today. This has been a great conversation on Irregular Warfare. Kyle, Andy, thank you very much. Great to be here.

And Dr. Jones, as always, I learned a lot from you and appreciate the time with you. Well, thank you very much, Admiral Bradley. It was great to be on with you. And thank you to Kyle and Andy for your great work and for putting this on. Really appreciate it. Adam Bradley Thanks again for listening to Episode 47 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Kyle Cramer We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, we will discuss Russia and hybrid warfare with Shashank Joshi, the defense editor of The Economist, and Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Transatlantic Security

Program Director for the Center of New American Security. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you do not miss an episode. The Irregular Warfare podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter for access to our written content upcoming community events and other resources

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