Irregular Warfare Podcast - Secret Wars: Covert Action and Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

In Episode 100 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast, we delve into the world of covert operations. Our guests begin by defining covert and clandestine operations, shedding light on their intricacies and historical significance. They then discuss the complexities of clandestine activities, and address the difficulties associated with translating irregular warfare and covert operations into tangible policies.

And so publicity on the Americans' part, that the Soviets were actually flying those flights despite the fact that they were labeled as Chinese aircraft, they were all speaking Russian, that was the giveaway. Publicizing that information would have made it very difficult for the American government not to respond directly to the Soviets. I'll use what I think is an even more elegant description of this that Sun Tzu wrote about in the art of war. The Acme of skill is to win without fighting. If we can't get our crap together in the irregular warfare arena,

what we are inadvertently consigning ourselves to as a future where the only solution is outright war. Welcome to episode 100 of the Regular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Matthew Mullering, and today my co-host is Frank Straczynski. Today's episode delves into covert operations in a regular warfare from both a historical and policy perspective. Our guests begin by exploring the definition of covert and clandestine operations. They delve into the intricacies of clandestine activities, focusing on the history of modern uses. The conversation then turns to the definition of irregular warfare and the difficulties of

convincing United States policy members and prioritizing both irregular and covert actions and strategy. Lieutenant General Retired Michael Nagata served 38 years in the U.S. Army with 34 years in Army Special Forces. Lieutenant General Nagata served in various command and staff positions, including a special mission unit from 1990 to 2000. He has led multiple joint soft task forces and served in the intelligence community in Washington, D.C. as a military deputy for counterterrorism. He currently works as a strategic advisor and senior vice president for Khaki International Inc. and is the owner of Haneda Bridge LLC.

Dr. Austin Carson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research addresses the role of secrecy and intelligence in international relations theory, international conflict, and global governance. His books and articles have won numerous awards, including the Lepgold Prize for Book of the Year and the Best Book Award from APSA's International Collaboration section. He is the author of two books, Secrets in Global Governance, Disclosure Dilemmas and the Challenges of International Cooperation, and Secret Wars,

Covert Conflicts in International Politics, which serves as the basis of our discussion today. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare podcast, a joint production of the Princeton and international politics, which serves as the basis of our discussion today. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Lieutenant General Nagata and Dr. Austin Carson. Mike, Austin, thank you for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Pleasure to be here.

Great to be with you. Austin, your book, Secret Wars, Covert Operations, and International Politics is extremely fascinating. Can you tell us what motivated you to write this book and focus on covert operations? First of all, thanks for having me on. And thanks to Mike, especially for taking the time to engage with some of this work. In terms of the origins of the book, so a confluence of two things happened. Before I started graduate school, I was working in Washington, D.C., straight out of

college in 2002, bore witness to the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. And one of the things that really intrigued me, invected me in some ways, was seeing how intelligence to the invasion of Iraq. And one of the things that really intrigued me and vexed me in some ways was seeing how intelligence and the politics of intelligence shaped the public conversation about the wisdom of using military force. So I had that experience in my sort of mid-twenties, first job out of college, and took that with me. When I started my PhD a few years later, what I noticed in the academy and in the field of international relations was that there had never really been a lot of engagement or scholarship on both issues of intelligence and the way intelligence is used in policymaking or in public discourse, but also in covert operations and the secret side of what states do in international politics.

It's always been written off as something that we in the academy, without security clearances and government service, couldn't really understand. And so what I decided to do is really see if that was true. So what I started digging around in is a covert side of modern conflict. And a particular episode jumped out to me as I was doing some reading about the Korean War, which became the sort of impetus of the book. And that was learning that basically the North Korean military had no air force or no meaningful air force after the first days of engagement. The Chinese themselves didn't have much of an air force. And so the natural response of the Chinese and the North Koreans

was to ask the Soviets to provide some sort of engagement in the air through Soviet pilots. But they did that covertly. And that was something that wasn't really talked about in the typical histories of that war, but became public information after the end of the Soviet Union and some of the veterans that were still alive would talk about it. So I dug into the archival materials and a lot of declassified materials spoke to two things, one being the reasons and the modalities, the way the Soviets were able to participate in a war secretly, and secondly, how the U.S. reacted to that. And it's a particularly dramatic example

where both sides basically had an interest in not drawing public attention to this facet of the war. And from that, this idea that covert operations and the reaction to them as part of this larger process of managing escalation dynamics in modern war sort of slowly grew into the idea that became a dissertation and then ultimately became the book Secret Wars. Mike, before we dig into the specifics of covert operations, could you offer some definitions for what is meant by covert operations and how they differ from other forms of, say, clandestine versus overt operations? What I discovered over the course of my career, about half of which was spent in what we in the special operations community tend to call

sensitive activities. But regardless of naming convention, what I was always a little surprised by was despite the fact that the definitions which I'm about to give you are pretty clear and pretty well published, they still are the source of enormous confusion in the United States government. It's almost like people never read the available material and just launch into conversations about these things. But to answer your direct question, rather unsurprisingly, when it comes to these kinds of activities, there are two characteristics of these activities that govern whether or not you use words like clandestine or covert.

The first dimension is what is the nature of the activity? The second dimension is to what degree does the practitioner want or need people around the world, including potentially our adversaries, to either know that the activity took place or know who conducted the activity. To try to make this a little more practical, as a general rule, a clandestine activity is an activity where whoever is conducting the activity does not want the target or the adversary or the general public writ large to know it has happened. When it comes to a covert activity, there may or may not be concern over whether or not anybody gets to know that the activity occurred, but what makes something covert is an intent to deny

knowledge of who the practitioner was, who the sponsor was. In other words, the people around a given area where the act occurred, they may know something happened, but they have no idea who did it. Or at least they don't have enough evidence to prove who did it. That's generally been the pretty well understood, pretty commonly agreed upon distinction between clandestine and covert. But as I said earlier, the amount of senior leader confusion that I have seen about the use of these terms my entire career is astonishing. And it has had negative consequences because people

use words that they don't understand very well, that they end up confusing the people around them, including their peers, their subordinates, or even their superiors. To further contextualize the idea of covert operations, Austin, could you discuss some historical case studies of different countries or forces that have employed covert ops and either successfully deployed them or unsuccessfully deployed them, just to give some historical context to our listeners? Absolutely. And one thing to just keep in mind is, I'm approaching these questions from an academic perspective.

When I write a book about covert conflict in international politics, I'm trying to think about not only what does clandestine versus covert mean statutorily, bureaucratically, and within the American context. I'm also thinking, what does it mean for Stalin to intervene or do something covertly? What does it mean for the Chinese to do something covertly in Vietnam? What does it mean for Israel to do something covertly today, 10 years ago, or 30 years ago? And so I'm really glad that Mike defined it in the way that you did, because the sponsorship to me is really the defining characteristic. And it's the intent, as Mike said, to conceal that, or at the very least, if it becomes somewhat pieced together apparent, to not acknowledge or to deny, be able to deny the sponsorship of that activity. It may be visible, it may not be. And it can be all kinds of activities. That's another important sort

of scoping thing to be thinking about here. My book is about, as I say pretty clearly in the beginning, military interventions, which by that, the covert actor is either doing the fighting or is providing assistance to a local either doing the fighting or is providing assistance to a local actor doing the fighting. But there's lots of things you can do in international politics covertly that are not military interventions. So we can talk about assassination, we can talk about political information, influence campaigns, things like that. So I just think it's important for listeners to keep in mind what's covert sort of locally within the US, what., what is the meaning of that, but then what is this like broader historical meaning, what is this defining feature, and then what are the different things you can do covertly.

So in terms of concrete examples, a number of these come from research I did for the book and in a lot of cases wrote about, but take the Vietnam War. The United States engaged in covert military operations in Laos in addition to overt military operations in South Vietnam and into North Vietnam. The Soviet Union, in turn, provided covert assistance to the North Vietnamese inside North Vietnam, actual combat support in certain facets. Iran engaged in covert support for militia within Iraq during the U.S. occupation. Another example is Israel has used deniable military strikes and other kinds of activities against its adversaries, an example being widely attributed, although it has never acknowledged it, strike a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007. The book also covers some really old examples.

And that was one of the fun things as an academic that I get to do versus practitioners who are too busy to do this kind of thing. Dig around and find which countries were doing this before we even had the word covert. And so an early case in the book is the Spanish Civil War, mid-1930s, before World War II, the clash of fascism, communism, and liberalism in a way. And there were covert interventions, basically, in that war. Germany, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy provided covert support to the nationalists, some better hidden than others. But nonetheless, especially German support was both very influential, very decisive, important, and was pretty well deniable. That was really great contextual framework talking about covert operations.

And Mike, like you talked about how sometimes we tend to talk around each other in terms of these terms and what do we actually mean. So this is a great pivot point for us to get into the meat of the book. So Austin, you kind of focus on two intriguing questions. So the first one being why do nations often choose to intervene covertly rather than overtly in military conflicts? And why do their adversaries, after detecting the intervention, often choose to stay silent about it, which you call this concept of collusion? I'll go to you, Mike, first on this. Could you explain why militaries choose covert actions in conflict as opposed to overt military action? In my experience, it's usually not military leaders who choose to do things either clandestinely or covertly. And that's because most militaries, including the U.S. military,

And that's because most militaries, including the U.S. military, principally invest in the ability to wage large-scale war. And a large-scale war can be neither covert nor clandestine. Supercarriers and main battle tanks aren't generally considered to be useful tools in covert operations. I jest only a little bit there, but there is this bias. I don't mean that in a negative way, but there's a very strong bias within traditional militaries to invest in the ability to engage in overt war. And in many ways, that's their job. That's their mission. They have to be able to defend their country, their way of life in the event of a major armed conflict. But what very frequently happens is a nation state, it might be the United States, it might be really any government on earth, they have a national security related problem. And it isn't conducive to using the tools, the instruments, or the techniques that are most

appropriate for large scale war. And that can be for a host of reasons. The policymaker that's interested in pursuing whatever this goal is, usually not in the military, doesn't want a lot of news made about it, doesn't want a lot of exposure, doesn't want a lot of casualties. There's a whole long laundry list of things that while the policymaker may have this very important goal he or she wants to pursue, that person also doesn't want all the baggage that comes with using large conventional military capabilities. So they look for something else, which typically takes them to one or two places. Number one, they'll look at their intelligence services to see, is there some component of their intelligence community that could accomplish the goal the policymaker has, but without having to resort to large-scale

warfare. It might be an act of espionage. It might be an act of intelligence collection. It might be an influence operation. Similarly, if that nation has a reasonably mature, reasonably competent special operations community, the way the United States does, they'll also go hunting within that community to say, is this something you could do? And very often it comes down to, I'll use this as the American experience, I've been in many situations where I found myself in the middle of a conversation among policymakers where they are comparing and contrasting the ability of the intelligence community to do something either clandestinely or covertly versus the special operations community. If that sounds like it occasionally becomes a bit of a beauty pageant between the two, it does sometimes. But it's not illogical. It does sometimes, but it's not illogical.

If it's an important goal and the policymaker really believes it has to be accomplished and they know they can't go to the regular Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps for what they need, it's completely predictable they'd go hunting either inside the intel community or the special operations world. Do you want to unpack the second part of that question a little bit, Austin? And that's just to remind you is why would adversaries choose to stay silent on covert ops once they've been detected? On that question in the book, what I argue is that our instincts here are sometimes wrong, I think.

Our instinct is that if you find out another country, a rival, an adversary is doing something covertly towards you, the best thing you can do is make everybody know about it, embarrass the heck out of them, take away the element of surprise, and have a sort of pageantry that you figured it out and you thwarted them. And I think there are situations where that might happen. But I think what I explore in the book is that sometimes the target of covert operations themselves has their own reasons that they don't want a lot of public knowledge or attention to the operation itself. The sort of buzzword throughout the book that I resort to a lot is escalation management and limited war. And so building on what Mike said about how the covert actor ends up looking for covert tools, oftentimes it's because a large overt military operation,

it would be extremely costly for a number of reasons. One of them is escalation problems. If you don't want casualties, you don't want a military operation in the first place. You also don't want a big regional war. There's more to it than that, right? Escalation is not the only issue that can dissuade leaders from overt instruments of military force, but it's a pretty big one. And it's the one that I center in the book. That's how you end up reaching for those tools as a covert actor. But those same considerations, the worry that an incident now, if made public, even by the actor who's being targeted by it, can set off a chain of events which lead to a much larger crisis, which can be a political problem, or a larger clash or military conflict, a widening war,

which can be a problem in terms of casualties, protecting your military forces, some other adversary you're worried about. There are a number of escalation-related reasons that the adversary themselves may stay quiet as well. And I'll just give two quick examples that convinced me I was not crazy about this and inspired the idea. One is, as I mentioned, the entry point to this whole book project was the Korean War, and it was the American side, the American response to Stalin's covert intervention as an air combatant in the Korean War. The American government badly did not want this conflict to be something more than what it had already metastasized into, which was a war between the U.S. and China at that point,

a ground war confined to the Korean Peninsula. And so publicity on the Americans' part, that the Soviets were actually flying those flights, despite the fact that they were labeled as Chinese aircraft and they were wearing uniforms, if they were somehow captured, that were Chinese uniforms. They were all speaking Russian. That was the giveaway. Publicizing that information would have made it very difficult for the American government not to respond directly to the Soviets. And so there was this sort of odd confluence of interest in that case to, okay, as long as this doesn't get too nuts, let's keep it on a sort of covert level or what I call the backstage in the book. The other example I'll just give quickly, as I mentioned Israel and the reporting around Israel's strike on Syria's nuclear reactor,

part of the reason that it was done covertly was to try to minimize the degree to which a Syrian response, a forceful Syrian response, felt like it was politically necessary to Syria. So there was a sort of mutual agreement or what I call sort of collusion to look the other way, not give up or concede to the other side, but rather keep it out of the front pages because that makes the escalation dynamics a little bit more controllable. I'd like to add something to the tremendous response that Austin just gave. What I'm about to say doesn't happen all the time, but I have seen it happen rather frequently where a covert or even just a clandestine operation occurs. And whether it succeeds or fails, I've seen several examples where the targeted actor, whether it's a government or a

terrorist group or pretty much any potential adversary we might have out there, never acknowledges it happened even if it hurt a great deal because it's too embarrassing to acknowledge that it happened. And I've seen a few cases where the United States had no intention of really hiding it. And we started talking about it because we wanted to get the credit for having done something that we thought was very useful. And the damaged party still denies it to this day because it's too embarrassing to admit we got in there and did something to them. Austin, in your book, you use four case studies focusing on the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Soviet War

in Afghanistan. Could you explain why these four are specifically good for understanding covert operations? And which case did you find the most insightful? Sure. So those are the four main chapters of the book. And one of the reasons that I focused on these four, one is that they're just very important conflicts in the 20th century. It's hard to argue with that, especially with something like Vietnam, which had a huge impact on the region, on those who lived in Vietnam, and of course, in the United States. But it was another important goal of the book was to try to draw a through line. Basically, each of these cases takes place every two decades. And what I thought was it would be very powerful to show to readers, not only that this covert

stuff happens, it's an important part of conflict. There's some interesting similarities, a tool of statecraft, covert intervention or covert action that different leaders in different situations keep reaching for. So that's why I included all of them is to be able to tell a story about sort of modern war, 20th century war, when we have both conventional weapons and nuclear weapons, which make large scale military confrontations transformably more damaging and dangerous economically, politically, and of course, to human life. That's what I think has shifted and essentially scared leaders into oftentimes reaching for covert tools, and in many cases, reacting to seeing those covert tools in a very cagey, careful way. The second part of your question, which is what case I found most insightful, I've talked about

two of them in terms of the Korean War and the Soviets, in terms of Iran acting in Iraq. To continue to stimulate our thinking about this, I'll just point to one other one. One of the more interesting cases to look at was U.S. covert operations, both in Afghanistan, but really in Vietnam. I wasn't an expert at all before I started the research, but aside of the war, I just heard very little about. I'm sure, Mike, in the special operations community, there's lots of stories and common knowledge about what the US was doing in Laos that's been passed down and that you knew about yourself. But to me, as an academic, a political science historian type, it was new to me and it was very revealing

why the US intervened covertly, chose to do things covertly in Laos versus overt alternatives. How did they manage that program? How did the Soviets and the Chinese react to it? How effective was it or not? There was a lot of tension. This gets back to something that Mike talked about. Military leaders aren't suggesting it be in this form, right? One of the things that happens in Vietnam is there's a real tension between what military leaders were actually making decisions about these operations, say, we need to do to win this war, or we need to do to interdict the supply. Just so everybody remembers, this is why you're intervening in Laos.

There's a huge supply route through Laos into South Vietnam, from North Vietnam. Here's what we need to do. Oh, no, you can't do that. That's too overt. That's too in your face. The Soviets will react. So I'd find these cables, these declassified cables that are written by Ambassador Sullivan in Laos back to Washington. You need to loosen the reins here. We need to be able to do more. But if we do more than the Soviets might themselves come into Laos. And now

we've got a bigger war. We're already losing what we're fighting within Vietnam. And so you saw, I think, something very interesting and very American, I suppose we could say, a sort of conflict and tension between civilian or diplomatic voices and military voices in implementing that particular COVID operation. Another thing I'd like to add here is that, unfortunately, I've seen far too often, not just U.S. leaders do this, I've seen far too often, not just US leaders do this, I've seen other countries fall into this trap too, where they think that using traditional forms of warfare, using traditional capabilities versus using these abilities to operate either covertly or clandestinely are somehow in tension with each other or antagonistic to each other, or if we do more of one, we have to do less of the other, or they're going to end up getting

cross-threaded with each other. Instead of what I consider to be a far more functional, far more useful way of approaching this, these are both useful instruments for different situations, both useful instruments for different situations, for different requirements. And the right approach is to find a way to make your overt and your covert and clandestine activities mutually supportive, where they play off each other, they assist each other, they create opportunities for each other. But that requires a degree of collaboration and integration across multiple agencies of a government. And as I suspect everybody on this call knows very well, in large, complex bureaucratic governments, integration and collaboration are always unnatural acts. Nobody wants to do it, even though it would make them better. I found one of the strongest points in your book, Austin, was the logical flow through these case

studies and what you point out some of the commonalities in terms of how states pick up. They see what another state does and they see what works, what doesn't work, this probing, rocking the boat, and this space of sensitive activities. Mike, you have a lot of experience as a practitioner in this field. So looking at the contemporary security problem sets of strategic competition, could you provide some insights into how we can more effectively apply a holistic or regular warfare approach to campaigning in some of these AORs? It's a great question. And I think my first stab at this is going to probably sound like I'm being intentionally sarcastic, but I actually consider this a bit of a lament. First, we have to have a holistic irregular warfare campaign approach. And I

would argue we do not. It's not that we're not doing any irregular warfare at all. There's actually a fair amount of what I would personally call irregular warfare being done by the United States government and not just by the U.S. military. There are things that the intelligence community or the Foreign Service, other arms of the U.S. government do that I personally think fall very nicely into the very broad definition of irregular warfare. But if someone were to ask me, are we applying all of those capabilities as robustly and as well-coordinated and integrated as they should be, my answer is absolutely not. We still have too many cases where one part of the irregular warfare spectrum is offended

by something that somebody else on some other part of the irregular warfare spectrum is offended by something that somebody else on some other part of the irregular warfare spectrum is doing. And so now they're waging bureaucratic warfare against each other instead of fighting the adversary. This is an old problem of government collaboration and integration. It's really nothing new. But the fact that it's hampering the ability to have what was contained in your question, a holistic irregular warfare campaign approach, is incredibly dangerous. Because if we cannot get our act together in what I will argue, instead of using the irregular warfare term, I'll use what I think is an even more elegant description of this that Sun Tzu wrote about in The Art of War,

the acme of skill is to win without fighting. If we can't get our crap together in the irregular warfare arena, what we are inadvertently consigning ourselves to is a future where the only solution is outright war, which everybody says they don't want. But if we can't get our act together in irregular warfare, there is no alternative to major armed conflict. Yeah, so this question of how do we think about all of this in today's kind of security or strategic environment? First of all, I regularly am struck by how there's nothing new under the sun in the sense that we think, for example, if China were to use covert tools in some way, my instinct is to look at the connections and the similarities and the lessons one can learn from historical uses of that by China or other governments in similar strategic

situations influenced by similar considerations or goals. And that I am very acutely aware is not something, a sort of sense of historical context and continuity that is very easy to keep in mind and to bring into high-level meetings with policymakers or even just within the Pentagon. And hopefully, if we do look at these historical throughlines and adapt them appropriately to the current environment, we can actually learn something or think about something a little bit differently. So that's one thing I'm thinking about. The second thing I'm thinking about is as much as there is continuity over time, there is truly new stuff going on. I'm just thinking about cyber right now,

cyber operations. On the one hand, there was no cyber, meaningful cyber in a lot of the historical comparisons one can look at. And there are covert aspects in that domain that are both new, but also not new. And holding those two things in your mind at the same time, this is new, but not new. It's hard for one person to do, let alone a busy putting out fires, large bureaucracy to do. So that's another thing to think about. I think inarguably, the United States should be the most effective practitioner around the world when it comes to irregular warfare, however you define it. We have more money, we could have more capability, and we have more reach than anybody else. But we're not. And there are several reasons for that. One is our own internal confusion about what the hell irregular

warfare actually is. My last assignment before I retired, I spent three years as the Director of Strategy at the National Counterterrorism Center. And I was frequently involved in conversations about irregular warfare and the growing desirability or need or willingness, supposedly, to conduct irregular warfare because we didn't want a major war with these so-called great powers, but we still need to prevail. So how do we prevail without a major kinetic conflict that automatically tends to push you towards the concept of irregular warfare until you realize that even though there are written definitions of what irregular warfare is, there are too many of them and they're not all

the same. I've watched some pretty ridiculous arguments emerge at very senior levels of the U.S. government where people are arguing about irregular warfare, but the two belligerents on either side of the argument don't realize they're talking about two completely different things. I'll give you a very quick example of this. In the DOD dictionary, for those of you on the podcast that didn't know, the Pentagon has a dictionary. It does. It's online. You can look it up. Here's the most recent definition of irregular warfare, a violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population. However, there is also a publication in the Department of Defense called the Irregular Warfare Annex, which states,

irregular warfare is a struggle among state and non-state actors to influence populations and affect legitimacy. Please notice the word violent appears in the DOD dictionary. There is no mention of the use of violence in the second definition. So which is it? The answer is nobody knows. So the amount of energy that I have seen wasted inside the United States government arguing over what is irregular warfare is energy denied to actually doing it. energy denied to actually doing it. Finally, irregular warfare is seen by most policymakers as incredibly risky, even if there is absolutely no intent that someone will be killed. It is harder to get an irregular warfare proposal approved in our government than a kinetic strike. It's not even close. I had dozens of experiences where

I could get approval for a lethal operation in hours. I don't ever remember getting an irregular warfare operation, an influence activity, an information campaign, whatever, that did not take months to get approved. And that means, whether we intend it or not, we're not serious about irregular warfare. From an academic perspective, I have no idea what irregular warfare means. I didn't want to really say that. Mike said it for me. So you all may have conflicting definitions on various Pentagon documents. Obviously, covert stuff is part of it. And so I think it's obviously relevant to our conversation and relevant to why we're here. I'll ask Mike this, actually. When I was thinking about how much support, investment, and capability the U.S. develops

in irregular warfare or covert operations of various kinds, I thought of two things that I'd love to hear your reaction. One is, how much of this is just a feeling that it's underhanded? It's not the proper way of fighting. It's like a connotation that you do irregular, you do covert, but it's not quite the sort of valiant, dignity-filled form of statecraft. And secondly, what about you fund things for which there are loud advocates, powerful advocates? So how much is this, as Mike is saying, an absence of capability, an absence of seriousness? Is that people who just think this is underhanded. We shouldn't be stooping this low. I haven't encountered a lot of those people, but I have

encountered a few. What is far more prevalent is a equally counterproductive attitude. It's just different. What gets you promoted? I'll just restrict my commentary to the U.S. military, but I think you could find a parallel to what I'm about to say in all the national security agencies of the federal government, not just the military. But in the military, the people that get promoted, the people that get incentivized are the people that invest in kinetic war. It's like the old saw of, it's easy to predict who the next Air Force chief of staff is going to be. He's going to be a fighter pilot. It's easy to predict who the next Army chief of staff is going to be. He's going to be a fighter pilot. It's easy to predict who the next army chief of staff is going to be. He's either going to be an infantryman, or he's going to be a tank driver, or he's going to be an artilleryman. Why? Because culturally, those organizations are

so emotionally tied. I don't really mean this as a criticism. I understand why these things are, but they've become rather rigid in this undying loyalty to worship at the altar of kinetic warfare. And what are the consequences thereby on the people that want to learn how to do irregular warfare, which may or may not involve blowing anybody up, which certainly does not involve major tank battles, probably never going to require a supercarrier. Are those people going to get promoted, incentivized, rewarded, and praised the way the people that invest their entire careers in kinetic warfare? No, they're not. So where are the talented people going to drift towards? As people come into the military,

over here is where people get praised, rewarded, and promoted. And over here, nobody knows what they do, and they don't tend to get promoted, and they don't tend to get praised. They don't tend to get resources. I'm not going over there. I'm going to go over here. That's answer number one. Number two, are there advocates for this? Are there people that understand the need to invest in irregular warfare? Yes, there are. But their number, and frankly, their political throw weight is inadequate. There are good people trying. There are people on the Hill. There are people in US SOCOM. There are people all over the place who are trying to make policymakers understand, get them to understand. I've even been in conversations myself where I've told

a policymaker, so let me make sure I understand. You do not want a major regional armed conflict with China. Oh, my God, General N occasions is, what's irregular warfare? Is there a problem in terms of advocacy, resources, and just plain old enthusiasm for winning without fighting? Yeah, it's a huge deficit. conflagration, a costly regional war. How do we think a word that has not been mentioned yet in our conversation is deterrence? And I think the other way to win without fighting is not to wage irregular warfare, but to simply deter warfare altogether. And so there's a relationship between deterrence and irregular warfare and covert operations, all in the shadow of this shared desire not to have an enormously costly conflict is something that I also think is part of the dynamic here. There is absolutely a deterrence component to this. Unfortunately, it is changing very rapidly. And again, unfortunately, in too many cases and in too many places, the U.S. government or the U.S. military is not being particularly agile or

quick in adapting to this new reality when it comes to deterrence. And I don't want to go on endlessly here, so I'm going to give you hopefully a compelling example of what I'm talking about. The Houthis in Yemen. A few years ago, a remote Shia tribe in northern Yemen that nobody knew about and nobody cared about. Today, that nobody knew about and nobody cared about. Today, they are holding the entire Red Sea at risk. How? Through high technology weaponry, obviously provided by Iran.

But here's the reality we're in. I'm sure all of you are tracking that the U.S. Navy and several of our allies in the Red Sea, they're doing a pretty capable job of defending against these drone and missile attacks coming from the Houthis. But here's the problem. One of the missiles that we use to shoot down one of these drones or one of these anti-ship cruise missiles can easily cost north of a million dollars. The drone may only cost $100,000. That is unsustainable. may only cost $100,000. That is unsustainable. But it begs the question, do we currently have an alternative to just trying to shoot down these essentially flying robots that are becoming ever more capable with every succeeding iteration of hardware, firmware, and software? Or can we find a way to prevent the Houthis from ever having a drone in

the first place? And for those of you on this call that may be thinking of that sounds a little like the journey we went through in dealing with improvised explosive devices in Iraq. Anybody who ever served in combat there knows that we killed bomb implanters and the guys making the bombs in their basements in Iraq like there was no tomorrow and it wasn't solving the problem. And it wasn't until the United States decided, mostly out of desperation it seemed to me, to try to create an international coalition to go after the supply chains that provided the ammonium nitrate, the ball bearings as a fragmentary device, the garage door openers with which they were initiating these bombs. It wasn't until we

created a global network to deny the supply chains without which there could be no IED in Iraq. Is there any effort to do that regarding Houthi drones? If it exists, it's got to be in its very early stages because I can't tell. But more importantly, this reality of increasingly powerful capabilities at increasingly affordable prices is literally changing the face of war. And it begs the question, whether you believe in irregular warfare or anything else, are we adapting to it? Are we adapting to it sufficiently? And I think there's too much evidence that suggests probably not. There's this weird dichotomy in modern conflict, especially when you're talking about covert operations, where you have these modern

information technologies, whether it be social media, whether it be cyber attacks, whether it be hacktivist groups like Bellingcat, where in some ways, it's harder to do something covertly, you're going to get tweeted about, it's going to go on Telegram. But at the same time, there's technologies like cyber that might actually make other capabilities better at covert operations. And I think Australian war theorist Dave Kilcullen, who we've had on the show a few times, talks about like liminal warfare, where the Russians pretty much would go up to the line of active measures, pretty much from 14 all the way up to the invasion of 21, but never quite fully cross it. So with that, do you guys believe that covert operations are harder to conduct now than

the Cold War? Or if anything, it's just become covert action-like? And is straight covert action still a viable option? Great question. This is one I've thought about a lot, in part for selfish reasons, because one of the critiques I used to get when I would present my book when it first was coming out is, hey, nice history. None of this matters. Can't do anything covertly now. So if I wanted anybody to read this thing who wasn't already interested in history, I needed to have a good answer to that.

So Matt, you covered some of the territory I oftentimes cover, which is that technology giveth and technology taketh away. It taketh away, I think, in a real meaningful sense, the ability to do things as a state actor without having evidence widely circulated in the days, weeks, and months after doing it. I think that is qualitatively harder to do now. I don't really know how you could argue with that. I think average people are empowered with high-definition cameras. Every one of them have them in their pockets, and then they're given a platform to circulate it basically to everyone in the world. That's crazy, and nothing like that existed in Korea. And another way of asking this question, how did you do things covertly before the digital age? How would that work now? Could the Soviets fly planes or the Russians now

fly planes in a regional conflict without anybody knowing? Maybe in the sense that who is in the cockpit is actually not really something you could tell with an iPhone, but there's perhaps other ways that it could be sorted out, like all of the Bellingcat types who track which flights are going where and have really nailed down the airspace and what's in the airspace. That certainly wasn't around. So I think there's a qualitative increase in the probability of having covert or clandestine operations exposed. But technology, take it away, it also give it in the sense that cyber as a whole domain, if we want to call it a domain, is a new place to do things covertly that you could not do

them before cyber existed. So in that sense, it's the golden age to draw, actually, on a colleague or a friend of mine in the field, John Lindsay, has been talking about. This is the era of deception and covert activity because of cyber in some ways. And building on those ideas, I think that there's a real truth to that. And whether we're talking about cyber or other things that Russia does, I think Russian statecraft prior to the catastrophic invasion, overt invasion in February 2022, was really using a lot of those tools that go up to the line, that use new technologies that keep things at least implausibly deniable. In that sense, there is still quite a lot of ways to do things covertly.

I think technology, we can admit, qualitatively makes it harder to do things covertly or clandestinely, yet there are still pockets where you can, and there are new opportunities to do things by way of that same technological change. Oh, at the race of stating the obvious, but I've certainly heard it from many of my Intel community colleagues, particularly in the last decade, that I guess what one might call classic approaches to either just general purpose intelligence gathering or specifically things like clandestine or covert operations, they're much harder now. And in many cases, they become impossible because we literally live in an era of universal mass surveillance. It would be crazy for any

practitioner to assume he's not under some things or someone's surveillance 24 hours a day, no matter where they are in the world. You'd be crazy not to assume that. And that has fundamentally changed how people in these communities approach what does tradecraft mean anymore? What do clandestine communications require now? We still have to do these things, but we can't do them the way we've always done them. And I think that reinventing of espionage and intelligence collection and things like that, I think that's going to have to go on for a long time. It's going to require an enormous amount of experimentation. I don't think it's impossible. It's just going to be a lot harder. And obviously, as Austin's already suggested, the cyber as a new and continually expanding universe for everything from intelligence gathering to covert or clandestine operations to something which we haven't talked about much here, but I think maybe the single most important growth industry in this arena, and that is effective

information operations. Get people to believe things they didn't previously believe. Get the people to value things they previously did not value. And if you watch what happens in social media, these two things, what people believe and what they value, they are the principal targets in cyber these days, as far as I am concerned. It's what every YouTuber is trying to do. It's what everybody's trying to do. Change what people believe and change what they value. And finally, when you add the fact that there is literally no end in sight to how effective things that live on the internet are going to become. Just one example, fake videos. When your mother calls you and asks to borrow the car, or your banker calls you and says, hey, you owe us some money, how are you going to

know they're the actual human beings they purport to be? There's no good answer for this right now, because frankly, the ability to fake these things is growing much faster than the ability to detect these things. In addition to computer stuff, let's say, whether it's hacking, cyber, social media, AI, deepfakes, that kind of thing. The other thing, and this connects to something Mike was talking about earlier, that's a transformation in warfare right now, the Houthis are showing us, is drones. And this is obviously also being showcased in Ukraine. And I think it's interesting to think about what drones are going to do for the capacity to act covertly or clandestinely.

Because one of the things I noticed thinking about classic covert operations and looking at history is that human bodies and human beings and ethnicity and language and literal racial appearance is part of what conventional classical historical covert operations had to manage. Because when they are manned operations, there is a risk that the sponsor's identity is given away by the human. And what's interesting with drones is getting a bit philosophical or abstract, but it's something I have been thinking about. If drones become ubiquitous and the function of drones expands, then if you see a drone connect and make a strike or do something kinetically, you don't have that way of tracing back who the sponsor

was. Both of you have highlighted some really great policy implications for the use of covert action and really within this meaningful discussion about what is the framework for regular warfare. So what concerns should U.S. national security decision makers consider when thinking about applying covert action? So I'll focus on things that we haven't already covered. And I think the first thing I thought about this actually very nicely connects to something Mike talked about way at the beginning. If you remember, Mike said the military officials, leaders are not usually the ones suggesting covert operations. And I think that's so true. And it's what I see

that as well in a number of, not just the US, a number of contexts. And what ends up happening then is you have a tendency to reach for covert clandestine tools when there's nothing better you can do. And that means that what you end up doing is giving these operations essentially goals that are completely infeasible, that are very unlikely to be fulfilled. And so when I think what concerns do I want natural security decision makers, other than sitting down and of course reading my book, what do I want them to do when thinking about covert actions, is think about what are we trying to achieve here? Is this just, we can't do this other stuff, so we'll try this covert thing or this clandestine thing? To me, that's what leads to some of these really awful, sustained, and ultimately fruitless covert operations.

and ultimately fruitless covert operations. And instead thinking strategically, okay, here's what we're trying to do. Here's what we could do covertly, plausibly with partners, by ourselves, whatever. Here's the timeline we're looking at. Here's how it works with other stuff we're doing. And that's how we're going to do it. Not we're back into a corner. It's a bunch of bad options.

This is the best of all the bad options. Let's cross our fingers and hope something happens that we want, that we're aiming for. So I think that sort of feasibility piece and the way we back ourselves into these is my kind of outside perspective on this. It leads to a tendency to not have clearly specified goals and really thinking carefully about should we shut this down? Should we try it in the first place? That kind of thing. And I know Mike has a lot to say on that.

So I'll stop there and let you jump in if you want. Thank you. I agree with everything you just said. I've seen so many instances where, okay, we've tried everything else. Nothing's working. So can we try a little covert action here? And I've seen practitioners say, hold on a second. I feel like you're coming to me out of it as an act of desperation, as opposed to an act of strategic thought. And I remember being in some of these conversations because that's exactly what this is. It's an act of strategic thought. And I remember being in some of these conversations because that's exactly what this is. It's an act of strategic desperation. But I think getting back to the question, hopefully this doesn't sound like I'm trying

to change the subject. I promise you I'll get back to the point here. If someone were to ask me, what is the nature of the struggle the United States is in these days? The word we're using these days, I think, is strategic competition, which is the successor to great power competition, which has succeeded Gray Zone or something. We change these names so often. But here's my answer to the question. What is the nature of the struggle the United States is in these days around the world? In my opinion, the nature of the struggle is that the United States finds itself embroiled in a struggle over its own global influence.

At the end of World War II, the United States became the single most influential nation on Earth, in large measure because we decided to rebuild much of the world, obviously with our own interests in mind. But we did try to create a new world order, for lack of a better term, that would not just be beneficial for the United States, but it would also be beneficial for our friends and allies around the world. It was imperfect. It took a long time, but it generally worked. And America found itself, after a few decades, being the single most influential nation on earth. When it came to setting scientific standards, industrial standards, medical standards, financial standards, America always spoke with the loudest voice because we had the greatest amount of influence around the world.

But in the last few decades, actors like Russia, China, Iran, et cetera, have been eating away at this influence, and we let them get away with it. Until now, we've got large holes in our influence around the world. There are so many examples of this, but the one that keeps coming to my mind was that ridiculous moment last year when the Navy and the Marine Corps wanted to celebrate the annual commemoration of the Battle of Guadalcanal, but because the Solomon Islands had just signed a recent agreement with the Chinese, they wouldn't let the Navy and Marine Corps enter the island to celebrate the freaking battle. That is a tremendous loss of influence. Unfortunately, it's not the only example. Now, why am I going on this rant about this is a war over American influence? Because if

it is a war over our own influence, that it is unlikely to be solved with aircraft carriers. It is unlikely to be solved with major tank battles. Maybe supercarriers and tank battles will play some role along the way, but if you want to regain your influence, what do you have to be? As a general rule, I would argue this is an iron facet of human nature, if you want to gain more influence, you have to be more generous than your competitors. Because human beings are hardwired to remember and develop affection, confidence, and trust in the person, the actor, or the country that was most generous to them. Gratitude is a natural human instinct. But as I think everybody on this podcast can recall, starting about maybe 10 years ago, I started hearing American leaders, military leaders, political leaders, thought leaders, starting to use language

as follows. You know what? We really need to stop wasting our time and money on stupid people in stupid countries who are too lazy to solve their own problems. And what that convinced a very large chunk of the world is that we had decided to stop being generous. And I think our loss of influence globally in Africa, in our own hemisphere, in the Asia-Pacific region, even in Europe, is in large measure related to the fact we decided to be just another transactional actor. We will only give something if we get something of equivalent value in return. Don't expect me to go out of my way to help you.

I'm not in that business anymore. And that explains the great power competition conundrum we are now in, in my view. Austin, Mike, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation here. Thank you. This was great. Really appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks.

Next episode, Matt and Alyssa will discuss the concept of DDR with Sarah McPhee and Daniello Montemarano. Thank you. leave a comment and positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Irregular Warfare podcast. It really helps expose the show to new listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the United States government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.