Irregular Warfare Podcast - The Kill Chain: Why America Faces the Prospect of Defeat

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

​​A fundamental change in warfare is occurring, one that risks rendering the American way of war obsolete. As China uses technology to enhance the primacy of its kill chain, the United States has pursued a method of war that is platform-centric—and could prove dangerously outdated. Our guests on this episode, General David Berger and Christian Brose, discuss the radically different approach to warfighting the United States needs to avoid finding itself completely outmatched by China militarily—with devastating consequences for America’s place in the world and for the global norms which we now take for granted. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Hi everyone, this is Shauna Sinnott, Executive Director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Our team is pleased to announce that we will be hosting a virtual conference on 24 February 2022 focused on irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific region. We will have a distinguished panel of experts that includes Major General Jamie Girard, Chief of Staff Indo-PACOM. Please visit our website or follow us on social media for details and registration. Thanks and we hope you enjoy this episode. Anti-access, area denial, precision strike warfare, low-cost drones, all of these systems are on the battlefield right now.

As a nation, we're struggling with how to respond to that. You know, if we can't figure out how to, you know, take apart $800 pieces of Chinese plastic and, you know, low cost Houthi, you know, Group 3 UAS and the Central Command AOR, we're really going to struggle against China. We have to link the individual Marine on the ground to special operations forces that are already forward, submarines that are already forward. We have to be the first link in the kill chain, which is, can we sense and make sense of what's in front of us? And the reason that I'm so confident is we put the right leaders in charge of units that are doing all the experimentation and war gaming and learning at high velocity. And they're going to learn much faster than we will learn in Quantico or Washington, D.C. Welcome to Episode 46 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

I'm Andy Milburn, and I'll be your host today, along with Shauna Sinnott. In today's episode, The Kill Chain, we discuss the fundamental change that has occurred in the nature of war and what this means for the United States and its allies. Our guests explain why this change renders the American way of war obsolete and turns all assumptions about U.S. military dominance on their head. They discuss how China, our most capable potential adversary, has used technology to enhance the primacy of its kill chain,

while the United States pursues a method of war that is platform-centric and dangerously outdated. They predict that within a few years, if the United States does not adopt a radically different approach to warfighting, it will find itself completely outmatched by China militarily, with devastating consequences for America's place in the world and for the global norms which we now take for granted. General David Berger is the 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps. An infantry officer by background, he has served in a wide variety of commandant staff over the course of a 41-year career.

In his Commandant's planning guidance, General Berger has set the Marine Corps on a course to divest legacy platforms such as tanks and artillery while pursuing capabilities such as long-range sensing and precision fires that will, he believes, better prepare it for future conflict. Christian Brose is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is the author of The Kill Chain, Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. From 2014 to 2018, he was the staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He led a team of professional staff who supported Chairman John McCain and other majority committee members in overseeing the national defense budget, programs, and policies across the Department of Defense. 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. And here's our conversation with General Berger and Christian Brose. General Berger and Christian, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Andy, thanks for having us on today. Should be a good discussion. Yeah, appreciate being here. So you both discussed, both in writing and in recent interviews, how the nature of war has changed. So I'd like to begin by describing exactly what has changed

and why this change is so significant. And Christian, let's begin with you, if you don't mind. Sure. So, you know, far be it for me to, you know, kind of opine on military tactics, you know, changing nature of war. But I think from where I see it, it's a handful of things. It is the proliferation of sensors, the ability to really generate rapid understanding of what's happening in the operational environment, to network them together, to process that information without enormous amounts of people, to really make it harder to evade detection, you know, to penetrate, to really just kind of increase the sense-making capability of militaries. I think added to that is then the sort of continued proliferation of the precision strike complex, which has been maturing and growing and becoming more precise and more lethal for a very long time. And you marry that together, and you really have, I think, what the Soviets and, you know, U.S. strategists were talking about in the late 1980s, early 1990s, of the sort of reconnaissance strike complex on steroids, all fueled by this kind of proliferation of sensors and weapons, with now the kind of added

impact of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomy that really cuts down the timelines, sensor-to-shooter timelines, the sort of ability to just exponentially increase the number of systems on the battlefield, all sort of gearing toward better understanding, faster decision-making, and sort of larger quantities of more lethal action. And that is an operational environment that I think we've been talking about for a long time, but it's very different than the underlying assumptions on which we've been building much of our military for the past generation.

General Berger, what Christian has described is a fundamental shift in the manner in which we wage war. So what should this mean from the operational to the tactical levels for the Joint Force and for the Marine Corps in particular? I would agree with everything that Chris said to characterize it. I would probably continue to say that we are very comfortable with linear rate of change in the military. We're not comfortable with sort of the Moore's law pace, which is the speed at which both technology and the adversary are changing. A lot of folks have written about the cumbersome process within the Department of Defense for development and field and the capabilities that he mentions. Because if it takes 10 years to do,

it's already OBE two or three times at least. The relative speed in terms of a pacing threat, I would say the relative speed of capability development. Here we have to ask ourselves the really hard questions of what areas must we maintain a margin of advantage in? What areas are we okay with relative parity? And what areas are we okay if the adversary is in front? Or maybe we're not okay with it and we're falling farther and farther behind. That's the hard discussions we have to have. To your point about where does that leave us, right now, I would say a very healthy debate, discussion on the current budgets and capability development on three things, and Christian brought up two of them. What weight do we give to the long-range precision weapons? What weight do we give to the sensor systems that will collect and give us the targeting information? And how much do we need to invest in the network that stitches it all together? And how do we do that over a four, five, six, seven-year period?

When we think about who is enacting these changes, are we talking about a particular adversary? Should we be focused on one adversary? And if not, what's the balance between preparing for that worst case scenario with one enemy versus the multitude of other scenarios that the Marine Corps could encounter? I think we'll see when this next version of the National Defense Strategy comes out, a refinement of the 2018's version. There'll be a description, and I would agree with it, of China as a pacing threat in terms of existential, long-term,

enduring. But there are aspects of warfighting where Russia has capabilities that we need to be very much concerned with. And there are everything from cruise missiles to subsurface warfare. So I think it's too narrow-minded to put one country on top and say, as long as we focus on that, then we're good. You really have to break it down into the elements of warfighting and understand where different nations are. But also, I would say the second part, which Christian comments on a lot, the proliferation of that, who's selling what to whom. Just to add briefly, you know, when you look back historically at times where we've, you know, tried to change the U.S. military, you know, what has really been helpful in the past is when it has been guided by a specificity of threat, an actor, you know, geography, timelines, you know, all of

the sort of operational details around problems that you're going to have to solve that force you to make the difficult choices, you know, programmatically and otherwise to respond. And I think, you know, kind of building on what General Berger is saying, you don't want to over-optimize against one threat, but in forcing to make those choices against that pacing threat, you're building a capability against the most stressing case that will be applicable to all of the other challenges that we're going to find. And those challenges are rapidly catching up. You know, I mean, a few years ago when I was back in government, you know, everyone talked about central commands, AOR as the permissive environment. And over the past few years, it's looking less and less permissive as, you know, anti-access area denial, precision strike warfare, low cost drones. All of these systems are on the battlefield right now in the Middle East. And, you know, these are trends that are happening globally. It's just happening in such a sort of significant and rapid way with China as that pacing threat. If you just look at the last three weeks, the Houthis have fired intermediate range ballistic

missiles three weeks in a row every seventh day. Who would have thought, you know, a rebel country could have the long range precision capability that Christian talks about and shoot it over top of Saudi Arabia towards UAE? Who would have thought that was possible? Chinese plastic and, you know, low-cost Houthi, you know, Group 3 UAS and the Central Command AOR, we're really going to struggle against China. So, you know, again, I think in all of these instances, it's really important to focus on the specific problems we're trying to solve and recognize that these are problems that are moving in sort of different paces in different places. But, you know, the trend is all heading in the same direction, and it's pretty troubling, as General Berger said. Christian, just to take a step back, because not all of our listeners might be familiar with this concept of the kill chain, which was the title of your book. And I quote from it here,

the ability to prevail in war and thereby prevent it comes down to one thing, the kill chain. Would you mind explaining what exactly you mean by that? Sure. When I was writing the book, you know, it became sort of clearer and clearer to me that the idea of the kill chain was a really useful organizing concept because to me, it's sort of like the, you know, the atomic element, you know, it is the thing to which you can reduce much of what the United States or other militaries do. And you can get very tactical with it in terms of, you know, finding, fixing, tracking, targeting, engaging, acting. But what I try to do in the book is kind of break it down into a more general process of

understanding decision-making and action. And also often we get focused on the very end of that, you know, the engaging, the acting, the shooting. And we forget that it is many of the things that happen to the left of that, you know, making sense of the environment, finding threats, keeping custody of threats. That is really important. And it's the ability to connect all of this. If you can do one without the other, you're still lost. And this is sequential. Each of these parts is indispensable. And it applies across the continuum of competition. You know, again, we focus on conflict. We focus on, you know, God forbid, the worst day in the future when we have to fight World War III. But the kill chain applies equally to what we're trying to do below the threshold of conflict, you know, in day-to-day active pushing and shoving military competition with great powers and with others.

In many senses, the same kinds of things that we're seeing playing out right now in and around Ukraine. So for me, the idea is important because there are so many variables right now, and everyone is struggling to figure out how do we change and how do we respond. Technology is changing, the threat is changing, our system is gunked up, and we're being disrupted. We're being disrupted by a threat and by technology. And to me, when all of these variables are at work, it's important to focus on the things that are enduring. when all of these variables are at work, it's important to focus on the things that are enduring. And that process of how we understand, decide, and act, or the process itself, you know, is an enduring element of warfare and military competition where the tools and methods,

technologies, and other things will change. But that is the process that I think we need to focus on as far as how we think through the eaches of transforming the military to meet the challenges of the future. General, what Chris writes about in his book, when he talks about the kill chain, it's apparent it's not a new phenomenon. It's a concept that the Marine Corps is very familiar with, that the military is very familiar with. So why is understanding this concept so important now in terms of how the Marine Corps is approaching the current environment? When I was in Hawaii as the commander, my partner was Admiral Swift. And we were working for, I think at the time, probably Admiral Harris. We went to the Naval War College for a series of war games, which they've run for years. One of the things that struck me that we both learned

was the value of some kind of force that can persistently, as Christians who accurately put it, can not only detect targets, but can persistently hold them at risk. And what that meant to an adversary who was trying to execute us, an A2AD approach. So it began there for me about four or five years ago, an understanding of what that meant in terms of disrupting a threat's operational approach. Discussions with Admiral Swift and Roughead and Admiral Richardson and a bunch of other people. Well, okay, so what does that mean for the Marine Corps? And I think the learning after that was when I got to Quantico, the learning for the Marine Corps was you need a combination of outside and inside forces to build a framework in depth that really causes the adversary challenges. So for the forward force, for us,

our goal will be then to close those kill chains organically and do what we can to disrupt, to counter the adversary's ability to close theirs. We won't do it all ourselves, but the more you can do organically, of course, when that chain starts getting disrupted by each side, the better off you are. So that was the genesis of it for us. to the extent that effective units must be able to shoot, move, and communicate in that domain. But given the centralized control that DOD currently maintains on offensive cyber operations, do you see a role for tactical units to conduct OCO? And I'm talking here below the threshold of armed conflict. And what needs to happen to enable this capability at that level? Yeah, I think we're going to have to make a lot of changes to how we think about and integrate cyber capabilities into the joint force. For a long time when I was in the Senate, we were standing up Cyber Command.

We were standing up the cyber mission teams and others. And a lot of how we've been thinking about cyber capability, as you've said, is very centrally controlled. The authorities are held at very high levels, in some cases presidential, and it's very manpower intensive. The focus is on manning cyber mission teams and supporting them when they're on operations. And I think the real challenge here is, as you said, is how to begin to proliferate that capability down from the strategic level out to more tactical operational units, distribute command and control, and really automate more of this so that this is a system that is happening and sort of sensing and affecting is happening more autonomously without relying upon large amounts of, you know, kind of highly trained operators and the like. That is something that I think, you know, is going to have to be a sea

change for us because that's not how we've set things up to date. And, you know, I think the importance of this as we kind of look into the future here is this kind of non-kinetic capability is going to be central to how we compete. So too, I would add, you know, electronic warfare, things that don't necessarily have, you know, kind of visible effect, kinetic effect. They're things you can do below the threshold of outright conflict across the continuum to compete more effectively as a ways of bolstering deterrence, you know, to show an opponent or an adversary that you can inflict a cost on them, you know, without having to humiliate them in public. We're going to have to figure out how to do this in a more decentralized way and make this more integral to how the joint force is thinking about and operating than we do today. General, are we doing that? The development of capabilities in these non-kinetic domains,

or even ones that kind of bridge with cyber, EW, and with our sensing capabilities? We are. I think the next higher level of thinking, which we have to do, which is happening now, is the linkage between things like an offensive or defensive cyber capability and, in a larger sense, operations in an information environment. In other words, to what end, to what purpose? What is the message we're trying to either send or trying to prevent a threat from sending? Because, especially in an area like cyber, but you could make, I think, the same argument for space.

Now you get into who is accountable for that, who is behind it. So there's now intentional approach, a deliberate approach to either mask or bring out in the open. So it linked together, in other words, a capability that like cyber with an overall umbrella sort of approach to what is it we're trying to accomplish in terms of influence operations or information operations, boy, that's varsity level thinking. That is playing out right now, and you're seeing it at real time in Europe today. Sir, I'd like to follow up on that because, you know, everything, and I'm not just saying this because you're coming on the Marine Corps, but everything you say makes perfect sense to me. And, you know, I've really enjoyed Christian's book. And yet, you know, I think maybe I'm just restating the challenge, but the Marine Corps in many ways looks very similar to the Marine Corps I joined 30 years ago. You know,

so we are talking, we recognize the requirement for longer range sensors and a network of sensors rather than single point platforms. We realize the requirement for long-range precision fires, and yet the Marine Rifle Squad, its lethality arguably is very similar to what it was, you know, 20, 30 years ago. I'd like to hear from you. You've only got a couple of years left as Commandant, but this seems to me a tremendous challenge. I'd be interested to hear how you propose to tackle it. We have to maintain, I believe, our role as a crisis response force for the nation because I believe we can't afford the whole joint force to be ready all the time, just unaffordable. But that said, I think Christian mentioned it, that Vince Stewart

had a great way of capturing that we have to be able to sense and make sense faster than the adversary. In other words, I would translate that into we have to win the C5 ISR and counter C5 ISR, that sort of competition, we must win it. That's going to determine what happens downstream from that. For us, that's everything from the sensing systems that we're acquiring and fielding now, the lethality part, the trading in some towed artillery for long-range precision fires. The F-35, as you described, yes, it does close air support. It is a flying sensor. It's incredibly valuable. It's a quarterback in the air.

We have to link the individual Marine on the ground to special operations forces that are already forward, submarines that are already forward. We have to be the first link in the kill chain, which is, can we sense and make sense of what's in front of us? The balance, of course, is every day, like you highlight, every day there's requirements that are right in front of our face and everybody's worried about the here and now. My focus is making sure, I think all service chiefs have to, making sure, are we going to stay in front? Because you opened it up with this podcast, the type of warfare that's in front of us

is changing pretty rapidly. I'm confident we're headed in the right direction. And the reason that I'm so confident is we put the right leaders in charge of units that are doing all the experimentation and wargaming and learning at high velocity. And they're going to learn much faster than we will learn in Quantico or Washington, D.C. Andy, just to add a point, you know, maybe with a more sort of political lens on it. You know, what we're talking about here is really trying to change an institution and its program. You know, it's applicable to the Marine Corps, it's applicable to the other services, and we have to do it because much of our program is not survivable and it's not going to be effective against the challenges that we're facing.

You know, even the challenges as we face them now and certainly where they're going to be in the coming years, not coming decades, but coming years ahead. And I think the important point, which, you know, which I would highlight, especially kind of from my prior experience over on Capitol Hill, is, you know, what you have in the Commandant and his team is an attempt to really think differently about how the Marine Corps is going to have to operate and what it's going to need to be effective. And the willingness to make the hard choices about divesting from certain things that are not going to cut it in the future in order to drive internal investments into capability that is going to be survivable and effective and relevant in the near future. And I think it's incumbent upon our political system to recognize the choices that are being made here and recognize that, you know, for years now,

we've had political leaders, we've had DOD leaders, uniformed and civilian saying, we have to make the hard choices. You know, we have to make the hard trade-offs. We have to divest and invest. Well, here we have an individual who's actually doing it. And I think we have to sort of stop and realize that there's a moral imperative to make sure that this is successful. we have to sort of stop and realize that there's a moral imperative to make sure that this is successful. Because if it's not, you know, if good behavior, you know, is punished or investments are shorted either in the DOD or in the Congress, you know, if things are delayed or kicked out, then I don't think that it sends a very powerful signal to, you know, others who are thinking the same things. And there are many of them, you them. I talk to them regularly and wanting to do the same things.

I think this is an instance where we really have to kind of respond collectively to try to support the changes that the commandant is making to make sure that good behavior is rewarded and make sure that bad behavior is not. Because if the opposite happens, I think we're going to set ourselves back for a very long time to come. And there are not going to be many people standing up and saying, you know, I'd like to go try to make the types of changes that are necessary for the future. I mean, it seems to me both from your book, Christian, and also from reading some of the healthy arguments within the Marine Corps going back and forth about divestiture of tank battalions. That was, you know, some would think that we had thrown away the Holy Grail when it came to that. And so I recognize, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's kind of a cultural entrenchment that mitigates, militates against this kind of change, right? And sir, for you, I'd like to just get your thoughts. I mean, I've read the concept of stand-in forces recently released. It's very clear about the requirements for that stand-in force, you know, a lighter, faster, more self-sufficient, agile force, skilled in the employment of long range precision weapons,

and most of all sensors, a force that depends on teaming between Marines and unmanned platforms. I know Christian doesn't like that term, with each Marine able to control multiple such platforms at once. You know, as we talked about, that's a long way to go from the Marine Rifle Platoon right now. And in the meantime, you know, we're looking at the Marine Corps still procuring platforms like the amphibious combat vehicle. You know, it seems to me a behemoth, it's manned, it's logistically intensive platform armed with short range weapons and not much more armor than the LAV-25. Is this a step backwards, or do you see that there has to be an element of compromise here going ahead? I would not characterize it as compromise, but balance, yes. I think many folks, including some who recently perhaps retired from the Marine Corps,

if they were to look at, as you point out, the rifle company or an infantry battalion today, I think they'd be surprised. We have three infantry battalions, one in each of our three divisions that's organized differently and set up as an experimental infantry battalion for two years. Second light armored reconnaissance battalion, which both of you all are familiar with, they have their own organic vertical takeoff and land in UAS. They're using the hunter-killer team approach you're talking about in order to link the UASs with organic precision fires, which are loitering munitions, which we have never had before. In the infantry side, we're taking advantage of what Secretary Matt has started in terms of equipping the

individual Marine with everything from the weapons to the optics, organic precision fires, like I mentioned, all in their grasp and software programmable radios. The ACV, great point. It is a great new capability. I've seen it, written in it. Its fuel consumption and its logistics are a big concern. We have to work our way through that. Expeditionary energy considerations,

in my view, they have to be pre-baked into everything that we do in the future. That reconnaissance vehicle that you spoke of, I don't know what that program will look like pushing forward. We don't need just a better version of an LAV, a light armored vehicle 25. That's what we don't need. It was a great vehicle. We don't need the next best version of it. Could it be optionally crewed? Could it be a quarterback for a swarm of other sensors? And this is something that I've also talked about using amphibious ships in the same way. Could they launch recover swarms of sensors and be sort of a quarterback in the air or in the water or for an ARV on the ground. All this, I think we have to push through.

We have to learn fast. Chris, these decisions are really hard, right? There are a multitude of priorities. The problem set is not easy. And you've written extensively about some of these changes to adaptation. So what do you think is really key to the obstacles that we're seeing with ability to adapt? What are the reasons why the DOD historically and through what you've seen today have struggled to adapt with the speed necessary to encompass all these threats? It is this, you know, wonderful military enterprise that we have that encompasses executive and legislative branches, civilian and military. And, you know, it is an enterprise.

I've spent most of my professional career in it in one form or another. And, you know, I take away a lot of sympathy for the people who are trying to make these changes, obviously at General Berger's level, but, you know, many, many, many decks down as well. You know, these folks are smart. They know what the problem is. You know, they know the challenges that they're facing. They know that many of the things that they're using today are not adequate for today, let alone for tomorrow. I think to put a fine point on it, the challenge is how do you actually get accountability out of a system that over time has been really kind of fractured in its accountability. You know, when we kind of look at the question of how do we think through what technology we're going to need and how do we

deliver it? Well, that process starts with the community of people who think about the requirements for that technology, often on timelines that are wildly unrealistic. You'd ask me 10 years ago, you know, how was I going to consume information and move around town? I would not have predicted Spotify and Uber and I would have gotten it wildly wrong. But we've got people predicting, you know, the requirements and writing requirements for what we're going to need in 2030 and 2035. And I'm a little skeptical that that closes. You've got communities of people doing programming and budgeting and acquiring. They're all different. To say nothing of the people doing the authorizing and the appropriating, and then they're different from the people who are actually using this technology. And we've built this system,

you know, somewhat intentionally to sort of spread that accountability apart. And the challenge is that the only place where it really comes together is at the level of someone like the commandant, who is accountable for all of these different kind of communities, all the different elements of this problem, and really is ultimately going to be accountable for disruption. Because I think that's really the problem. You know, we talk a lot about innovation. Innovation, you know, too often is just kind of doing better versions of the same thing with better versions of the things we've always used to do them. Disruption is really thinking about how we completely change the problem, you know, how we change our approach,

how we actually offset what our competitors are doing to us. And we have a system that has become over time almost impervious to disruption. And I think that's the thing that we need to change. And it, to me, comes down to there's lots of different things that we could talk about, the different pieces of the margins of this problem. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the accountability for generating disruption. And, you know, I think that's why senior leadership is so important. And the right kind of senior leadership is really just indispensable. Because without it, you know, we have a process that's so fractured that it only works if all of the pieces are perfectly in alignment, which happens sometimes,

but oftentimes it just doesn't. And, you know, one piece out of line and the whole thing slows down or breaks altogether. So I think that's something that at a systemic level, we really have to think through how we do this differently in terms of experimentation, alternative pathways, and really just kind of creating disruption to this entire enterprise. I imagine one of the arguments that might slow down some of this progress are the risks that could come from relying too much on technology when it comes to security vulnerabilities. Is that a valid concern or where do you see that falling in terms of impacting the decision-making process about how heavily we should be relying on these technologies?

What about when they're exploited by an adversary? You know, I kind of laugh a little bit about security vulnerabilities. Like, I'm pretty sure all of my security clearance forms are over in Beijing, and all of my information has gotten out. And I just think that it's something that we're just going to have to recognize is baked into the cake now. Everything is cyber, and cyber is everything. Everything is digital, and these are just challenges that we're going to have to confront. We're not going to build moats and put sharks in the moats and walls

around the moats. We're going to have vulnerabilities. We're going to have breaches. Things are going to get exploited and exfiltrated. The real challenge, I think, is building a system that is resilient, that can identify when it happens, can respond quickly, and can limit the sort of blast radius of these kinds of challenges when they do happen. The final thing I'll say is similar to this question, you know, gets to this question of, you know, just a concern about technology. And generally, I think a concern that, you know, these technologies aren't ready yet. And I hear this a lot in the Department of Defense and the Congress. You're not talking about photon torpedoes and cloaking devices here. We're talking about things that we've almost come to take for granted in our day-to-day lives. There are cars in the parking lot with orders of magnitude larger amounts of autonomy than anything in the DOD

inventory right now. This is technology that's here, to say nothing of the technology that's coming. And we have got to figure out how to make better use of it, because our competitors, first and foremost, China, sure as heck are. On that note, I mean, is it fair to say that necessarily this isn't all about finding more and more advanced technological means to fight wars? It's about the correct employment of the technology that's already been available. And it's about kind of democratization of that, for want of a better word, that technology. And we tend to focus on the purchase of a few Gucci platforms when we

should be looking at just a broad swathe of kind of blue-collar drones, blue-collar unmanned, expendable, but fairly sophisticated platforms. It's a bit of that. I mean, I'm not suggesting here that everything that we need is available on the commercial economy without any changes or modifications. I mean, we're going to have to build real defense-unique systems around these technologies. My point is just that that is absolutely doable. It is doable now, and it's only going to become more doable over time. And I think integral to that is the trust that comes, and that trust is only built through the actual use of these technologies, the kinds of things that the Commandant was talking about, you know, actually having operators and experimental units getting their hands on these technologies and thinking

differently about how they are going to compete and fight with them, what kinds of con ops they want to develop around them to change the way they operate, not to just do the old things slightly better and faster. Would love to hear what General Berger has to say about it. One thing's for sure, the old way of the whole process Christian describes of coming up with the notion we might need this piece of gear and then going through the whole operational test and evaluation process and then sending out the whole operational test and evaluation process and then sending out a new equipment training team. In like the first 30 minutes, the new equipment training team knows less about the gear than the Lance Corporals.

Like, give me that thing. Where's the batteries? I got it. 30 minutes later, they have found like six new ways, better ways to use it. But our framework doesn't like that very much. We have to get the feedback from each user and send it back through the process. And then we'll tell the manufacturer what the improvements will be. I think the speed here and trusting that the operators are going to see ways of using this gear that the developers never even thought of. And that's probably, we should be fine with that. You know, sir of the way you

describe that is, aspirationally at least, is what, you know, SOCOM prides itself on, right? A faster, more reactive acquisition process. You know, how effective it actually is, you know, is a topic for debate. But that brings me to, you know, a topic I know is close to your heart, which is soft integration. And talking about innovation, from bottom up, Mossack has developed a concept for its role in great power competition. You know, it's an emergent doctrine, as you know, known as strategic shaping and reconnaissance. And then, you know, reading through the kind of nascent doctrinal publications,

the concept just seems very similar to capabilities that you've been espousing for the conventional Marine Corps. Do you see this as a natural area of collaboration going ahead? And how would you like to see this work as far as division of labor between MARSOC and conventional Marine units during phases zero and one? I am in the same place. It is an area of collaboration we have to quickly unpack. We're meeting with them in a month on purpose to talk about where

General Clark and SOCOM is headed with a shift in their focus and where we are headed and how we might meet in the same place. We both recognize some duplication, some overlap is natural and probably healthy, but how can we complement each other without competing against each other? Since we're both going to be in that sort of forward element of the operating environment, how do we complement each other? I think we take advantage of the long duration, enduring sort of understanding of the culture and people and the tie-ins that SOF has in most parts of the world, we should bring what we're strong in and marry it up and not be in any kind of competition at all. I'm not worried that we're laying on top of each other at all. And I think the discussions we'll have in a month will lay out, you know, all on a

table. Where do they think they're going and what are they strong in now? And how can the Marine Corps and SOF writ large complement each other to get like one plus one equals much more than two. Yeah, that's obviously very encouraging. And I know we've seen MARSOC start to participate in MWXs. And the kind of one thing I guess is more a statement than a question, and it's not new to you. But one thing that occurs to me, a lot of things that MARSOC does out there during MWX are things absolutely within the capability of conventional marine units. You know, we're talking just the use of sensors. I mean, even very basic ones like Puma, use of long-range precision fires, the understanding and employment of actions in the electronic magnetic spectrum.

We're not talking freefall parachuting or diving or anything like that. We're talking skills that should be perhaps rudimentary across the Marine Corps. On that line, do you see what the Marine Corps' most likely actions to be in the next 10, 20 years to be characterized as more focused on irregular warfare or conventional warfare? Or is that distinction not helpful to understanding the role that the Marine Corps, you envision the Marine Corps will play? You know, I haven't really thought about a clean line distinction between the two. Or we can go with competition and conflict. No, no, no, that's okay. At this point, I'm not at all thinking about or considering a competition or a clean line between, are you on the left or the right side of the line. In fact,

I think the more we can blur it, the better. Because if you look at what the PLAN with the PRC is doing, they're doing exactly that. There is no line between conventional and unconventional, and we're struggling to figure out how to handle that because we're built with a line. They know how to play that right down the middle and make what some people call gray zone competition. They make it difficult for us because we have silos. We have, well, I stay in my lane and you're in that lane and it doesn't marry up against the adversary. We have to intentionally blur the lines. So Christian, just for the sake of alternation, I'll begin with you. What you're describing and certainly what you described in your book, you're quite careful to say, hey, you know, the problem with the way that

we do things isn't because we have bad actors or people who are lazy or greedy or mean harm. It's just, it's a cultural problem, right? And sir, I know you haven't said as much, but I have seen perhaps there's some cultural entrenchment in our own service. So Christian, beginning with you, how do you overcome a problem that's as deeply seated as this? How do you change minds? It's a big and hard question. I guess my simple answer to it is you only change minds by actually showing people that there's a better alternative. And the only way I think that we get a better alternative is creating alternative pathways around our system. So when you go back to the conversation we were just having, you know, we've built up this system really since the McNamara era, and then we've basically been

sort of like optimizing it for futility ever since, that has just fractured accountability, elongated timelines, and essentially kind of gotten us, you know, farther and farther away from how technology is actually developed, fielded, iterated on and improved upon. I don't think that we're going to kind of like, you know, modestly reform our way out of that. You know, I think there's this hope that we're going to kind of tweak the PPBE process. You know, we're going to do yet another round of acquisition reform and somehow things are going to be better. I tend to believe that bureaucracies are not bad. Again, I've spent most of my career in bureaucracy. We have bureaucracy for a reason. Things need to happen

routinely, but there are other things that need to happen disruptively. And I think the only way you're going to get disruption is by working kind of outside and around the system that we have. That's how we've done it in the past. I mean, that's how past military transformation, That's how we've done it in the past. I mean, that's how past military transformation, military revolutions have largely occurred. It's been with visionary leadership, clear definition of operational problems, and sort of rapid iteration of capability development and fielding. And, you know, again, I'm a believer that you don't kind of like try to overturn the entire apple cart. You start with a handful of things and prove that those use cases work. And I guess the final thing that I would say on it is, you know, we focus a lot on the sort of impediments to progress. And there are many of them, you know, in the DOD alone, to say nothing of the Congress. And I think so often the problem is that the future never shows up. You know, we focus on all of the kind of constituencies and stakeholders that want to keep us vested in the past and the present. But so often the problem is that, you know, the future remains in the future.

And, you know, without something that is tangible, that is fieldable, that people who are, you know, in many cases, kind of understandably skeptical, right? They need to see it to believe it. Well, if they never see it, they never believe it. So we've got to find, you know, kind of mechanisms for getting these kinds of game-changing ideas and capabilities, these kinds of disruptive effects out into the real world so that people can actually see, look, there's a better solution and it is available to me now. Because I think unless and until we do that, our system will do what our system does, which is says, you know, look, let's manage risk. Let's push the timelines out.

Let's hang on to the things we have. And in some point in the future, when something better comes along, I'll divest of the things that I have today. And lo and behold, we never actually get to that future state. So it's a complicated question. I don't know if this is a good answer or not.

I tend to believe that we're going to have to do this more or less, you know, kind of as an alternative pathway to generate disruption around the system that we've put in place to generate the program that we have. For General Berger, how much of a challenge is this for you? And I know it seems like a very strange question to ask Commandant Morinkel how you change minds within the organization. But, you know, two parts to this question. First, is this a problem? Do you see there just being kind of a culturally seated pushback, number one? And number two, how do you convince people? How do you make them really understand want to do this? I think the discussion and debate is healthy. That's why I probably write

and speak more than some would appreciate, but I'm trying to put a discussion out in the open. There's a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm among the younger, more junior Marines. I think among some of the retired Marines and some of the more senior Marines that are serving right now, there's a genuine concern of getting it wrong. I don't think they fear change. I think they fear that we might get it wrong. Because when you get it wrong, as you highlighted earlier, Andy, if you get it wrong in the military, I mean, there's severe consequences. So I have to listen. I have to understand their concerns, lay out the logic behind where we're going and why. And I'm not looking for consensus. Part two, how do you go about it? Christian said you have to show them. I don't know a better way to state it.

You have to show them. PowerPoint only goes so far. They have to see it with their own eyes, as Chris said. For example, people know when you say a Marine Expeditionary Unit, a MUTE, they know what you mean. Okay, that's proven. And then I'll say, and we need to change it for the future. In fact, it needs to become a mothership for unmanned systems. They have a hard time visualizing that because they know what a mu looks like.

You talk about artificial intelligence. Some people don't understand it. They see a single sort of counter UAS or counter intrusion system. And the artificial intelligence is laid over on top of it. And it's seeing thousands of inputs to it simultaneously. It's making sense of all that. It'd take a hundred people to do that manually to a hundred human beings. Okay, now they saw it. Now I get it. One, I think you got to show them. And number two, I think you got to use the right language, like a common language. I talk about winning the reconnaissance, counter reconnaissance competition. I think it's essential. Some people think back immediately to, oh, you're

talking about little recon teams. With your ranger recon background, you're talking about hundreds of little reconnaissance patrols, like we did in OIF or Afghanistan or even back in Vietnam. They know that Marines do this, but when I say we're going to do it using a combination of man and unmanned systems, it starts to get confusing for them and leads some to conclude that there's less of a role for humans, I guess, in the future. Our challenge, again, is to show it to them and use plain language, a common language that they can understand. Christian, I have one more substantive question for you, and then we just have an implications question for both of you. I know we're running short on time, so this will be

quick answers, but Christian, do you see a correlation between the arguments that you've made in Kill Chain and the current standoff between Russia over Ukraine? And is there anything the United States can learn from these types of confrontations? It's a good question. I'm not sort of close enough to it the way that I might have been back in government to really be kind of under the hood and seeing, you know, how are we responding? How is this all coming together or not coming together? What I would say is if we actually look at this process the way we've been talking about

is, you know, not just one focused on, you know, the pointy end of the spear, the delivery of kinetic effects, but how we actually kind of marshal all of our different kind of tools of national power to achieve an end state that is not necessarily military, right, but is diplomatic, it's political, it's statecraft, I think we're just getting outmaneuvered. You have in President Putin someone who is playing a bad hand, you know, pretty well. And, you know, we'll see how this all plays out. Maybe it won't end well for him. But as far as thinking about how we kind of bring together the military tool of national power together with diplomacy, statecraft, you know, economic and, you know,

kind of informational aspects of what we're trying to do to actually achieve results. Candidly, I think there's a thing or two that we can learn from watching our competitors operate here. And I'm worried about the position that we're in, you know, as a result. For General Berger, sir, as we're wrapping up here, we typically ask about implications for policymakers and practitioners. And Christian, give you a heads up, you'll get the policymaker question. But for the practitioners in here, you know, really, we're talking about within the Marine Corps, through you've outlined, essentially, it's a campaign, right? It's a campaign to bring about the necessary organizational change within the Marine Corps

from force development, talent management, PME. I hate to get back and use the term cultural again, but it is a cultural change in a sense to what are your top priorities, like your action items right now? Maintain momentum, number one. And that means the onus is on me to convince Congress, to convince the leadership in this building that the Marine Corps has an endpoint that makes sense and needs to retain the resources to do it. Our approach has been unique for two years in not asking for any plus up of any resources. To continue on that path, you got to be, as Christian points out, you need a backstop. continued on that path, you got to be, as Christian points out, you need a backstop.

So top priority, make sure I can convince people who write the checks and the people who develop and execute the spending plans in this building that the Marine Corps has a logic behind what they're doing and it needs to be resourced. I think removing as many obstacles as I can in front of junior Marines who are learning quickly and that the top reacts to the bottom as fast as we can. I think we have to maintain the dialogue with the industry that puts us on the margins, which some people would say of how fast you can go, but the closer we're talking with industry directly. And that means operator to engineer kind of without as few barriers in between, we'll move at speed. Lastly, I would say not the least important, we have to modernize the people part of our business and we have to

modernize the training, the education part, or the rest won't work. The general brings up a great point. Christian, what are the implications not just for policymakers, but for industry and where does that exchange happen moving forward? On the industry side, I think the desire is to see more and clearer framing of the operational problems from the Department of Defense. And, you know, I think what the DOD loves to do, and, you know, frankly, Congress indulges in this too, is really swing into trying to define the actual solutions. And I think what industry would really appreciate is a clearer and better and sharper and more consistent discussion of the problems with more space then to sort of innovate, disrupt, think and operate differently to actually put forward

solutions. I think on the policy side, there's a lot of different things that we need to do on policy and, you know, a commandant hit one with respect to personnel. I guess the one that I would mention really has to do more with strategy. You know, we spend a lot of time talking about how we meet these challenges of the future. And that discussion often gets focused on ways and means. And there's a conversation about ends that I think policymakers need to be engaging in, you know, much more fulsomely and realistically, frankly. When we're talking about China, we're talking about, you know, kind of a world history altering event, the likes of which we haven't seen for a century or two. And somehow we're sort of operating as if, you know, the ends of United States strategy can just kind of go on the way that they were in the early 1990s. What are the things that we actually want our military to do? What are the things we're prepared to fight for? What are the actual ends of strategy? What are we trying to accomplish? You know, competition is interesting, but it's not an end in itself. What are we competing to do? How does China fit into this world system? These are the things that policymakers are going to

have to define and hopefully will define in the upcoming national security and national defense strategies. You know, the military can inform that, should inform that. But, you know, this is really the thing that I think policymakers need to earn their salaries on as far as figuring out how we respond strategically to a significant event the likes of which the United States of America hasn't confronted since the 19th century. General Berger and Christian Brose, thank you very much for coming on this episode of the Irregular Warfare podcast. Hey, Andy, thanks so much for the time this afternoon.

I'm not sure how our hour flies by that fast, but the spectrum, the scope of things that you covered, phenomenal. So thanks so much for having me on. It's great. Yeah, and Andy, likewise, thank you so much to you and Deshauna for a fantastic podcast

and just honored and humbled, frankly, to get the opportunity to spend some time with General Berger and really admire everything he's trying to do. Thanks again for listening to Episode 46 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Kyle and Andy will host Rear Admiral Frank Bradley and Dr. Seth Jones to discuss three dangerous men. The following week, Abigail and I sit down with two experts to discuss Russia, hybrid warfare, and resistance. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. One last note, what you hear in this episode are the views and positions of the participants

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